b9 wrote:
it is not possible to create artificial intelligence in it's entirity.
artificial intelligence creates itself from seeded iterations that are programmed by humans.
artificial intelligence itself compiles it's own executable code that it determines is the most optimal to run for analysis and response of/to a new situation, and saves it as a referenceable executable routine for use when faced with future considerations of a similar nature (determined by self compiled situational attribute weightings etc etc).
one can only plant the seed for artificial intelligence to grow from. it is a majestically gifted thinker that can code the seed that could give rise to universal intelligence (if the computational resources were available), but there is one thing that is a crucial element that is missing from the scaffolding of the formation of artificial intelligence, and that is "desire".
with no desire, nothing will ever be achieved because without intervention from a human who possesses desire, the foundation program will stagnate after the completion of it's list of assigned tasks.
it can not possess "curiosity" in a true sense, unless that was specifically programmed into the process by a person (eg: "look for things that you do not understand and do not stop modifying your inspection programs until one yields an answer that satisfies a checksum derived from a preset table of general criteria.").
but the things that the computer may "look at", and spend much power assembling into
a translation of the reality behind, may be be completely unimportant aspects of reality in the mind of any human.
something that has no "desire", also has no "aspiration", and "no aspiration" is equal to "no intention", and "no intention" is equal to "idle"
humans have always crafted better and better tools to reduce their physical and time consuming effort, and it stands to reason that they will create tools that reduce their burden of the necessity of intelligent thinking (problem solving specifically) by consigning it to unattended electronic consideration. i wonder whether humans may start to become more creative when the burden of intrinsic logical consideration of their views about mundane aspects of life is reduced.
Desire is an active emotion. Emotions are things that we are born with and they are
deterministic processes in the brain. That is, an emotional state is output function that depends entirely on its inputs. There are so many processes going on in our brains at any given time that we are not aware of-what psychologists call the "subconscious mind". Consciousness is essentially self-awareness. To make a machine with a humanoid mind you have implement many processes besides just sentience. Emotions are responses to both to external stimuli and thoughts in our conscious minds, but to chemical activity in midbrain. That is why for example, the desire for sex is minimal to absent in children's brains but gets activated in adolescence due to the influence of steroid hormones like testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone which cross the blood brain barrier and into the cellular nuclei....binding to transcription factors and rendering them active.
What you CAN say is that today's computers are not capable of sentience because sentience is more than just a process, it is a
thing in itself that requires a certain level of non-determinism whose only known source is quantum mechanics.
18 Nov 2012, 9:35 am
