machines have evolved for 100 years
people have evolved over millennia
understanding the evolution of intelligence
could yield a expodential gain for human IQ,
but is a engineered human a human?
But first we have to answer,
what makes a human a human?
A soul?
(must be ten characters… Our rational soul?(as opposed the the non-rational souls of other living things))
Don’t want to go on a religion flame war (it’s against the rules, I checked) but that’s not really a conclusive answer…
I would agree with that.
Unfortunately, there are some who think we are no more alive than the machines themselves (the only difference is the material used). How long until someone gets arrested and tries to get out of jail by arguing the idea that it was the sum of their DNA as well as their parts that made it impossible to prevent the crime.
I hope it’s tomorrow.
The Turing test aside, I think by and large we need to ask what is intelligent life? And I think we also need to keep in mind that in this world we are quite fond of deciding that segments of the worlds human population, Are not human.
There have been and are groups that considers those to be non-human if they are of the following
*of the different religion
*of the different skin colour
*Below a certain age
*above a certain age
*of one gender or another
*of the wrong side of a national border
*those who are too rich/poor
*of one sexual preference or another.
*below IQ Mark
*above some IQ Mark
*those who have or do not have some personalty trait
*if they are disabled or handicapped in some way or another
And Sadly quite a bit of the above list is considered socially acceptable even today. ( If you don’t think so, Walk though an assisted living home sometime) So will there be those who say a human that is engineered is not a real person, Of course there will be, To think otherwise would be folly. The question we should ask is this. Will those people be in power when engineered people goes from a flight of fancy to a cold hard fact.
I wouldn’t say it’s a soul, but a mind that makes us most distinctly human. But as stated above, I don’t want to trek the line around the religion argument.
Talking about souls is often religious, but i think it isn’t necessarily religious?
Back to the original question, understanding how intelligence has evolved (how exactly do we mean evolution btw,) could help us learn how we learn, but understanding it to be able to know what we will learn next doesn’t seem possible in a way. (somehow I got that from your question.)
I suppose I should actually read that article… before i say too much more
exactly.
It’s our complex mind that separates us from animals and machines
right now all machines do is follow orders from spreadsheets of 0s and 1s
And we have been a slave to Integrated circuit technology for so long that I don’t think that will ever change
Caution: Theory spinning
Intelligence is easy to define:
Intelligence is how well an entity responds to situations it has never come across before.
You can use that as a measure. An IQ test tests how a person responds to questions they’ve never seen before, with the theory that a more intelligent person will respond better/more correctly
An AI includes things like chess playing robots, or even ones that play tic-tac-toe. The control algorithm that places feet dynamically on a quadrapod robot is infact an artificial intelligence. It responds to unknown situations in a semi-sensible way. But these don’t have sentience. Intelligences can even improve themselves through rationalization. Neural networks and genetic algorithms are ways that these artificial intelligences improve themselves.
So what makes an entity sentient? I would posit that:
Sentience is the ability of an entity to increase the intelligence of it reponses through directed creativity.
A genetic algorithm improves itself through random mutation of a semi-functioning solution. A sentience makes conceptual leaps and understands the material allowing intelligent creativity.When I go to design something, I don’t generate a random solution, test it and then improve it. Instead I do some thinking and create a sensible solution straight off.
So are animals sentient? No. They are incapable of coming up with new ideas short of trying and failing. Humans can come up with new ideas without trying and failing. They may not work first time though…
So how can we measure sentience?
Currently we can’t. We have no way to figure out how an entity arrives at a solution. Is it through millions of iterations of trial and error as in a chess AI? Is it through conceptual leaps like a human makes?
If anyone has any ideas for a sentience test, I’m keen to hear it.
In my opinion, anything sentient should have the same rights as a human regardless of if they were engineered or not.
I think you guys might find this interesting, these guys at Auckland Uni have engineered a virtual baby…that is, the brain (sensory input, motor output and everything in between) has the intelligence of a baby. Check out Baby X on http://www.abi.auckland.ac.nz/en/about/our-research/animate-technologies.html
Intelligence seems to revolve around responding to environmental stimuli. If an entity is intelligent in one environment then it may not be intelligent in another. This makes defining it difficult. It’s dependent upon a wide range of environmental factors. We think ourselves intelligent however we may struggle in different environments.
The reason that intelligence is thought of in this manner is because of the way that it propagated. The brain isn’t as much apart from the environment as it is a part of it. The brain would not have any function at all without environmental stimuli. Sensor deprivation chambers remove the environment and the experience is akin to dreaming or being under the influence of psychedelic substances. It’s thought that infants would actually die under such conditions. What the brain actually does is process environmental information. This, by Darwinian pressures develops intelligence in specified environments. Where biological systems are forced to different environments, the intelligence increases and becomes more generalized. This is probably what brought about human level intelligence.
Most scientists and philosophers consider sentience as self awareness. That introspective form of intelligence is found in a large number of animals as well. It’s essentially the cornerstone of the ability to suffer. This is the central argument put fourth in Ethical Philosophy. I find it a load of tripe in comparison to Behavioral, Cognitive and Neuroscience but it still speaks to my humanity.
Books such as The Bell Curve have very interesting things to say about IQ testing. It turns out that there are all sorts of “assumptions” that are being made by the developers of those tests, not the least of which is that the people being tested are accustomed to standardized testing and that they are easily able to read the test forms. (Dyslexics, et al, not need ylppa.) We are “testing for the thing that we are looking to find,” but that doesn’t mean intelligence. We really don’t know what “G()” is, and we really don’t know how to quantify it.
Even if we say that “intelligence is one’s ability to tackle an unfamiliar problem,” a paper-test only considers paper-skills. One might well argue that it has no place for tangible-skills, nor for the product of experience.
IQ seems to be looking at, and looking for, a particular kind of “book larnin’,” and gives no credence to one’s experience or learning or ability to learn. You are “simply born with it.” Whatever that’s supposed to mean …
I don’t think it means much at all. (And, yeah, I was one of those people who in school routinely scored in the 98th-or-better percentile of every standardized test I ever took, including the SAT. Big deal. So what. I think I just had a knack for taking that particular kind of test. I could think like the designers did.)
If this was the case, then the astronauts we send up into space should be exhibiting a noticeably lower level of intelligence than those on Earth since the total amount of stimuli is lower. In addition, this would also assume that people see noticeable fluctuations in their ability to function if they take a vacation somewhere due to being in different environments (which has not been observed). Another assumption this makes is that people would suddenly become as dumb as a post if they enter the quiet environment of a cavern which is also not the case.
Now it is to be said that Earth itself would have many different types of environments and a lot of people who have been in a decent number of them.
The brain is a complex series of reactions. Your brain has been referred to as possibly the most complex object in the universe, there are more neurons in your brain than there are stars in the Milky Way. Signals or impulses travel through the brain by passing from one neuron to another and along the way these impulses might trigger something such as chemical production or release which, in turn, may spawn more impulses in varying parts of that brain.
The brain doesn’t actually decide which path these impulses travel or what chemicals are released along the way, this is an entirely inanimate physical reaction much like the wind blowing a rock into pile of other rocks causing them to collapse releasing a tidal wave of water that carves out a new canyon.
The paths each specific type of impulse takes may differ over time because the paths in the brain change over time, again in response to physical stimuli. A chemical released by one impulse may cause a number of neurons to connect or cause other neurons to disconnect creating and/or destroying pathways. A number of neurons may release a variety of chemicals causing you to consume other chemicals that temporarily alter the paths impulses travel, such as beer, resulting in sudden blunt force trauma, such as a car accident, that permanently alters the pathways in the brain.
Now that car accident wasn’t actually you being stupid, it was the result of certain types of stimuli passing through your brain and your brains physical composition at the time the accident occurred which was the result of years worth of transforming your brain by a variety other stimuli.
To suggest that man is intelligent is to imply that which is not man operates differently when, in fact, they operate in exactly the same manner. Or better yet to suggest that man is intelligent is to suggest that there is something to compare man against when, in fact, there is only man or there is only rock or there is only water.
Then we need to get rid of all prisons, prison camps, and county jails (why, everyone by default then is innocent and were merely the victims of entrapment). We need to let even the most heinous mass murderers free because technically it ‘might’ be possible to just reprogram them and make them a completely different person.
Of course, you seem to be the one who always warns of possible consequences of such knowledge. One person could suddenly get the idea that he could actually turn the concept of full-blown mind control from science fiction to science fact (and in a way that wouldn’t even require a helmet or a chip, but merely through use of a visual and sound pattern over any media device).
Intelligence Quality as overused mind tool might turn to killing machine?
The wind can carve out a canyon and the wind can carve out a brain. Did you create your brain or did the wind? Did you carve out the prison or did the wind? The wind created the prisons and the wind created the prisoners.
There is nothing here for which the wind did not create. The wind created you and the wind created them. When you spoke to me, just now, that was the wind speaking to me and when I replied that too was the wind replying to the wind.
P.S. To imply that mind control, in the traditional sense, is possible is to imply that it is possible for the wind to control the wind. In other words it matters not how the wind accomplishes what the wind accomplishes, whatever is accomplished is accomplished by the wind, whatever is done is done by the wind. There is only the wind.
Do you consider yourself human, like at all? If you’re just as functional as a rock then what type of value does that place in the fact that you’re alive.
If you start to say that your life and your being is limited to the same significance as a gust of wind, then why would you be offended if thousands of people worldwide are dying each day (since you would ultimately conclude that man is just disposable cogs in a machine that dictates everything).