Posted inArtificial intelligence Consciousness

If AIs are conscious, how would we ever know this?

Consciousness is a great mystery. Maybe. I could be wrong about this (I'm wrong about lots of stuff), but there's a distinct possibility that how we currently view consciousness will end up being overturned by wiser minds in the not-too-distant future. And those minds may not be human. For AIs, artificial intelligences, are rapidly gaining power. Not only may AIs be able to explain the nature of consciousness at some point, they may also become conscious and so be able to describe consciousness as a subjective phenomenon, just as we humans do. Yesterday my wife clued me in to a…
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Posted inArtificial intelligence Radha Soami Satsang Beas

AI points us toward an obvious fact: super-intelligence is useless if it can’t do things in the world

I first heard about David Chapman in 2011, when I wrote "David Chapman's dizzying writings on Meaningness and Buddhism." That post starts with: I don't often use the word "dizzying." Especially in the title of a blog post. Here, I mean it as a compliment, in the sense of… giddy, bewildering. Those are good things when it comes to writings that attempt to get at What Life is All About. Because if we think we understand what life is all about, we don't. Today someone sent me an email. "Wanted to make sure you've seen this one: http://meaningness.wordpress.com as he…
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Posted inArtificial intelligence Science

What if an alien civilization, or AI we created, knows the secret of the universe but we can’t understand it?

In my religious-believing days, Eastern religion variety, I loved the term, ultimate reality. I used it in talks I gave to members of the religious organization. I used it in books that I wrote which were based on the spiritual teachings I once embraced. My assumption was that whatever ultimate reality was -- my guess was All-Pervading Conscious Energy -- the problem lay in learning its nature, not in understanding what that nature was, once it had been revealed. Meaning, we humans had the ability to grasp what ultimate reality is all about. While it wasn't an open book, the…
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Posted inArtificial intelligence

Yuval Noah Harari video a must-watch for anyone concerned about the future of AI

Over on my Salem Political Snark blog yesterday, I wrote "If you care about the future of AI, watch this astonishing video of a Yuval Noah Harari interview." I began that post with: Today a friend emailed me a link to a You Tube video where Yuval Noah Harari talks about AI in an amazing fashion that only a historian with his breadth of knowledge about how the past of humanity intersects with the future of artificial intelligence could pull off. This graphic provides an overview. The video is well worth watching. I found Harari mesmerizing. He's one of the…
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Posted inArtificial intelligence Consciousness

AI is acting more like an organism and less like a machine. So what’s special about us humans?

I'm fascinated by AI. It seems increasingly clear that the distinction between artificial intelligence and natural intelligence is becoming increasingly blurry. As the two kinds of intelligence become more similar, the supposedly unique human mind is going to appear much less special. In their book,  The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience, Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson speak about the difference between an organism and a machine. In general terms, a machine is a device consisting of an assembly of components that operate in a coordinated way, according to a prescribed sequence so as to produce…
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Posted inArtificial intelligence

The philosophy behind Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised)

I'll begin with a confession. A practical confession. Because if you read on in this blog post, you're going to realize that I came up with a great title for it, but I'm not going to be able to deliver much on the philosophical content. At least, not in anything more than my limited perspective. Last Wednesday, two days ago, my wife and I picked up the Tesla Model Y Juniper that we're leasing. Last night I wrote about the car in "Meet my end-of-life crisis car: a 2026 Model Y Premium." The photo above shows me standing next to…
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Posted inArtificial intelligence Consciousness

AI models threaten the view of human consciousness as something special

Often when  science presents us with a markedly improved understanding of reality, the place we humans occupy in the universe diminishes in importance. This happened when the Copernican Revolution displaced Earth as the center of the known universe in favor of the Sun. It happened when Darwin demonstrated that our species didn't appear fully formed at the behest of God but evolved over an immense span of time, as did all life on our planet. And recently I've argued that "We need a philosophical and spiritual Copernican Revolution." Which is why I believe we need a philosophical and spiritual Copernican…
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Posted inArtificial intelligence Neuroscience

The real danger of A.I. isn’t that it becomes like a human mind, but that the human mind already is like A.I.

Artificial Intelligence, A.I., is a big deal nowadays. I just heard a financial expert say that if the burgeoning investments in A.I. are subtracted from growth in the United States, that growth would be flat. Meaning, A.I. is driving the upturn in the stock market, as well as capturing the public's imagination. Much of that imagining involves fears that before too long, A.I. will surpass the human mind in general intelligence. And not by a little. By a lot. Then, who knows how super-intelligent A.I. systems will behave? Will they turn on their human creators once they attain a mind…
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