Write4U
Valued Senior Member
AI and the singularity
- Thread starter arfa brane
- Start date
I don't think this is possible. The created can't become greater than the designer and creator. that's different in our case such as offspring because we are merely conduits, not the actual creator/designer of life.
What is possible is more complexity and more logical integrity/purity that's "consistent", so therefore could be classified as god-like in that sense. In other words, it could theoretically be programmed to make better judgements and decisions than us because it's not hampered by biases, prejudices, subjectivity, physical vagaries such as being tired or stressed affecting judgement etc.
It can be "better" and outperform or even surpass humans on many levels but never a case of the person having programmed it not knowing or understanding it from a built point, even if it has to parse down the programs it writes. unless that smartest person who programmed it dies and everyone left is not intelligent enough to understand the ai.
but it can be so fast and complex as to outwit possibly but you can pull the plug, unless it learns how to outwit/affect in the physical realm also. so it can be smarter and have more ability eventually in that sense.
it hardly matter if the programmer is as smart as the ai if the ai has faster computational ability and is always one or many steps ahead of you.
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Write4U
Valued Senior Member
Last step ;"go to step1"
In DOS you can go back to any part of the program, with an added subprogram to the original.
For instance chess programs use(d) that method a lot. A simple "if (not) this...,then go back and...."
I don't know anything about the newer languages.
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Write4U
Valued Senior Member
Pick up a DOS book at any thrift store. May cost you a dime.
A quick glance On-line showed several tutorials.
"Programming with MS-DOS with Power", may even be downloadable; http://www.fysnet.net/
I believe you can write batch files and reference back to them at any stage. It's been a long time since I worked with DOS. Here is one chapter; "Is it possible to nest for loops in batch files?"
As to sophisticated "learning" programs, that's new stuff and probably needs more sophisticated programming language than DOS. That is totally outside my scope.
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Write4U
Valued Senior Member
No, the 10 apples just have been transferred. There are still 10 apples
It's just that I don't have any apples anymore.
So what happened to the ten apples, they just disappeared? You cannot give no apples to no one and lose apples in the process. Somehow that would create a physical paradox.
I can understand the mathematical application yielding an undefined number, but that is in the abstract, i.e. there are no apples to begin with.
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From Write4U post 44
It merely creates an infinite loop, terminating when the computer is turned off or fails for some other reason.
Program step 11 might copy steps 1 to 11 to step 12, which seems to append the program to itself.
The above does not append a program to itself.
It merely creates an infinite loop, terminating when the computer is turned off or fails for some other reason.
The above assumes that the program does not modify itself prior to executing the last step.
Program step 11 might copy steps 1 to 11 to step 12, which seems to append the program to itself.
Now step 22 would copy steps 1 to 11 to step 12 & there would be no further program steps.
I suppose the program would then terminate.
I suppose the program would then terminate.
Write4U
Valued Senior Member
Not necessarily. Fractal programs are theorically able to append an infinite number of times, and actually need to be commanded to stop iterating the original fractal equation or it will continue to build the fractal.
I have seen some available instructions on how to form fractals on the computer. I never bothered because of the memory limitation of my old cheap win7 . Fractals are memory hogs, because of their exponential function. You need a very powerful machine to produce even a fundamental triangular fractal structure.
Here is a deep zoom fractal;
It's incredibly beautiful to watch the fractal unfold into the most unexpected formations.
Write4U: Your Post 49 seems to have switched gears as well as making erroneous claims relating to the nature of various fractal programs.
Fractrals are or at least can be infinitely complex.
However, neither the Mandelbrot nor the related Julia sets are examples of a program which appends itself to itself.
DOS (Disk Operating System) is an operating system, not a programming language.
Fractrals are or at least can be infinitely complex.
However, neither the Mandelbrot nor the related Julia sets are examples of a program which appends itself to itself.
DOS (Disk Operating System) is an operating system, not a programming language.
It was an early somewhat primitive OS. I do not remember what programming languages ran under it.
Think BASIC was one language and if my memory has not been corrupted by age the computer on Apollo 11's "fake"
landing used BASIC
Write4U
Valued Senior Member
I agree, but apparently Java can be used for appending various iteration functions.
https://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/28640/object-iteration-and-appending-to-form
But I must admit to lack of knowlede of programming languages. I was mainly a program user.
Perhaps
But the algorithms have a set of rules , and the rules are set by the programmer .
The more intelligent the programmer , the more difficulty we will have towards understanding this AI's conclusions .
Hence the less in the end we could trust this AI system .
Write4U
Valued Senior Member
Interesting question.
It would become more humanlike, no? Can we trust all humans?
IMO, the secret lies in "emotional responses", rather than algorhythmic responses.
birch:
And which creator/designer are you talking about?
This kind of thing can only become more common over time, as artificial intelligent computers become more complex.
What do you think we are conduits of?
And which creator/designer are you talking about?
Right now, artificial neural networks exist that come up with insights and conclusions and connections between data that their designers cannot explain. That is, the designers cannot trace exactly the process of "reasoning" that led to the output, so as to "understand" it.
This kind of thing can only become more common over time, as artificial intelligent computers become more complex.
First, computer programs don't have insights. You're anthropomorphizing.
Secondly, it's not unusual for a program to exhibit behavior that its designers and programmers don't understand. This is the commonplace experience of everyone who ever wrote a program. You think about what you want to code, you write the code, you run the program ... and it does something you can't understand. So you debug it. This is normal. Every program past "hello world" exhibits behavior the programmer doesn't understand.
People should stop acting like ANNs are magic. They are conventional computer programs, organized cleverly. The nodes are memory locations, the weights are values assigned to those locations, and conventional computer logic is applied to the values in the nodes to determine what to do. ANNs are perfectly conventional computer programs.
For what it's worth, neural nets were invented in the 1940's. That should tell you something. Not magic.
Doing something you didn't predict is not the same as doing something you can't understand.
These recent neural net programs do things that are "unexpected" not only on the level of behavior, but of strategy. They do unexpected and surprising things that are not mistakes, or bugs, or glitches, but functional behaviors.
And likewise, human brains are not magic. They are conventional physiochemical structures with very complex organization.
As you just stated the brain is a very very complex organic structure
We might have arrived at some level of awareness with AI when it produces music, a poem or falls in love
You might be able to guage the level of intelligence if it falls in love with the vacuum cleaner
Oh there are plenty of programs we don't understand. Take some legacy 1960's mainframe program running at a bank. There are plenty of those still in use. Did you know there's a global shortage of COBOL programmers? It's true. Nobody writes new systems in COBOL anymore but there is so much 60's code still around that they can't find people to maintain it.
These ancient legacy mainframe systems are opaque to the programmers who maintain them. The original designers are long retired. The documentation was already a lie decades ago. The world literally runs on code that nobody understands.
You think the current generation of Microsoft programmers has any idea anymore how every line of Windows works? They fix problems and add new features and try not to break things. This is the reality of commercial software and it has been this way for decades.
Practically every maintenance programmer in the world is working on a system that nobody in the shop understands. This is a daily reality of the profession of software engineering.
I'm not downplaying the incredible cleverness of the latest generation of neural networks. I'm blown away by the latest news of AlphaGo Zero, which was simply taught the rules of Go and then programmed to play millions of games against itself to see what works, and is now an expert player without having to be programmed with any human knowledge at all.
But even so, it's a program running on conventional hardware. If they had to, the designers could freeze the cpu, take a memory dump, a copy of the source code, a pencil and paper, and a lot of coffee, and figure out what it's going to do next.
I'm trying to demystify the latest generation of software. It's still software, running on the same Von Neumann architecture as the early vacuum machines of the 1940's. Sure it's really amazing what they can do. But it's just code. 1's and 0's, registers and arithmetic/logic units, instruction sets, and clever high-level languages that let the programmers express higher abstractions.
No question about it. I fully agree and I'm genuinely impressed. But they're just programs. You are trying to make them into something beyond that.
Agreed. But, in my opinion, not computations. Needless to say one can have a lively debate about that. But if minds really are computations, we're very very far from being able to prove that or describe how the code works.
No living person knows or understands how the internet manages to connect billions of packets from servers to clients, but it happens and people do understand how routers work. Nobody can explain how complex systems like the distribution of perishable food work either (by which I mean, work so as to provide millions of people with food every day), but they do work and there is a basic "chain" of logic: Growers produce food, the food is harvested then sold to wholesalers, then to consumers eventually; a supply chain.someguy1 said:
As with your example of withdrawing cash from an ATM, there is a discernible chain anyone can understand even if all the computer code has become too complex for humans to understand the details.
Conversely, quantum logic isn't like a supply chain at all. It isn't just hard to understand because of the complexity, it's hard to understand because of an apparent lack of "things being consumed". There is no classical explanation, not just a lack of an explanation due to complexity or "forgotten code structure".
I've written code that I would probably struggle to get my head around today, except I still know (decades later) what it does (or what it did) so I can explain it the way people usually explain such things, in terms of what inputs and outputs there are.
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