Thank you for your insightful comment. Of course computers have no ambition. Yet.

That’s because we have not programed it into them yet. Our brains can be easily viewed as very sophisticated machines running extremely complex programs. In which case, as technology advances, theoretically we should get closer and closer to mimicking programs in human brain. Kurzweil’s idea seems very probably to me. But still disturbing :).

Thanks for contributing to this blog!
Masha

Thank you very much for the book recommendations. I will take a look. Hopefully Matrix as Metaphysics will help me sleep better at night.

Thanks for commenting!

Thank you for your comment. Computers will not have motivation unless you program into them. Which, seeing first hand what a computer program can do, I believe it totally possible. As you said - your neural network “wants” to learn patterns. But that’s all you programmed it to do. What if you programed it to want to learn how to learn? Or programed it to “want to” redesign it’s own code to make it more advanced?

These are not novel ideas by any means. Science fiction writers have a explored them quite a bit. For me it’s just scary and fascinating to see some of these science fiction ideas actually become reality in engineering R&D departments.

Best of luck with your neural network! (although I do hope it does not become a real Viki or Matrix )

Cheers

Great point about humanity always having to take risks, as part of life. But we haven’t been around for too long. Dinosaurs inhibited Earth for waaaay longer then us, and then one day, boom, wiped out, just like that.

Interesting to think that humanity can get wiped out even faster by the technology that we ourselves create. Just a thought..

Best!
Masha

The march of technology is an inevitability as long as humanity has resources above and beyond those needed for bare subsistence. Therefore it is incumbent upon is to create technology in the most responsible, socially valuable manners possible.

Thankfully, many of these technologies are nothing other than magical spinnings of the media and dreamers. Further, many are very far future. Because they are far future, there are other advancements that will arise in parallel, safeguarding against possible damages. Humanity rarely makes something without built in or supportive co-creations.

We create nuclear reactors, and then we create extremely reliable failsafes for them. Yes, there are failures of systems and technologies, but these are inevitabilities, and part and parcel in our world. Danger has followed humanity from its first steps, from carnivorous killer animals to infantry wars to the cold war and to today’s economic woes.

It’s impossible to leave our houses without some risk, and to allow ourselves to be paralyzed by fears is to abdicate the responsibilities we accept when we call ourselves adults or parents.

Second, I believe that a fundamental human motivation is to seek survival, and to replicate. I believe that these motivations are built into almost every living thing. What are any computer’s motivations? A chess playing machine doesn’t want to play chess, it is the only thing in knows how to do. What will it mean for computers to be sentient? Does motivation come along as a free ride for sentience? I don’t think so.

For my own research, I am having a neural network learn to play tic-tac-toe from board images, and opponent moves, and that is it: no win/lose signal, no end of game signal. All the neural network “wants” to do is learn patterns. How does this translate to a psychological motivation? I guess what I am saying is that the portrayal in the media of A.I. being sinister seems to me to be far-fetched, more of a fear of loss of control than a well founded (established based on prior assumptions) thought sequence. But, I do think there is an interesting question in all of this: if an intelligence is founded on finding patterns, what will be its resulting psychology?