I sometimes wonder about people like Babbage, who feature heavily in alternate-history novels.
Does living all those possible lives wear them out? A sort of fatigue of the soul?
@eviladrian: Oh wow, what a cool concept! Imagine what would happen to Hitler's shriveled black little soul. Or any number of American Civil War figures.
"All the Myriad Ways" by Niven sort of touches on this but not in a metaphysical manner. You should write something up with this.
@Grey_Area: I don't know that I have the vocabulary to properly express what I see in my head-movies, but when you're dead, how do you know who you are except as people remember you?
And if everyone remembers you differently, might you not get stretched out like a sunbeam through a prism, all the colours going separate?
@eviladrian: Homes, you are not convincing me on the lack of vocab with that last comment.
Work it out. You got the words, you got the ideas. Grab a style manual to get the grammar and shit down and go to town...
Great art! I like the expressions and loose brushstrokes that convey all the action and emotion so economically. The glimpse of Ms. Padua's creative process with accompanying chart on the Salamander page is priceless.
For some sentient being to have empathy they have to have the capacity to "emulate" what they think someone else's point of view will be.
This requires both recognition AND the ability to expirence what is being recognised.
I'm sure emotion-detection has some use's, but its not empathy in itself.
Personaly, I'm highly skeptical of all forms of top-down AI development.
I think our best bet for true self-aware bits of software, is to set up a suitable enviroment, and evolve nural-nets based on selective critera.
(we can be a lot more focused then real evolution, and we can also overclock the speed of the simulated environment....we dont need to wait billions of years to get a result :p).
A good start would be to train nural-net bots to navigate maze's, and allow the bots to communicate at a simerla datarate to us, to exchange data about the maze to eachother.
Put selective critera so that the bots can get the most "food" (aka, most change of reproduction) if they work together.
This does a double-wammy of helping to evolve creatures able to communicate AND teaching them to the very core that co-operation is a good thing.
But isn't the reason that humans "pass" the Voight-Kampf test is that they fail it?
So Leon is distressed because he's not helping the tortoise, but Rachel can unflinchingly kill a wasp. Humans are the ones without empathy, and that's how you can tell them from the machines?
I'd be worried if my Sims developed emotional responses. I'm not sure how I would react if someone made me sleep in the yard a in a puddle of my own urine, but I doubt it'd be good.
07/20/09
Does living all those possible lives wear them out? A sort of fatigue of the soul?
07/20/09
"All the Myriad Ways" by Niven sort of touches on this but not in a metaphysical manner. You should write something up with this.
07/20/09
And if everyone remembers you differently, might you not get stretched out like a sunbeam through a prism, all the colours going separate?
07/20/09
Work it out. You got the words, you got the ideas. Grab a style manual to get the grammar and shit down and go to town...
07/21/09
There you go - you've started to write the pitch for the novel already!
07/20/09
07/20/09
07/20/09
07/20/09
07/20/09
12/08/08
For some sentient being to have empathy they have to have the capacity to "emulate" what they think someone else's point of view will be.
This requires both recognition AND the ability to expirence what is being recognised.
I'm sure emotion-detection has some use's, but its not empathy in itself.
Personaly, I'm highly skeptical of all forms of top-down AI development.
I think our best bet for true self-aware bits of software, is to set up a suitable enviroment, and evolve nural-nets based on selective critera.
(we can be a lot more focused then real evolution, and we can also overclock the speed of the simulated environment....we dont need to wait billions of years to get a result :p).
A good start would be to train nural-net bots to navigate maze's, and allow the bots to communicate at a simerla datarate to us, to exchange data about the maze to eachother.
Put selective critera so that the bots can get the most "food" (aka, most change of reproduction) if they work together.
This does a double-wammy of helping to evolve creatures able to communicate AND teaching them to the very core that co-operation is a good thing.
12/08/08
12/08/08
So Leon is distressed because he's not helping the tortoise, but Rachel can unflinchingly kill a wasp. Humans are the ones without empathy, and that's how you can tell them from the machines?
I'd be worried if my Sims developed emotional responses. I'm not sure how I would react if someone made me sleep in the yard a in a puddle of my own urine, but I doubt it'd be good.
12/08/08
12/08/08
12/08/08
/wrists
12/08/08
12/08/08
12/08/08