Re: How Robots Will Steal Your Job

Oops! So it was. I got confused by all the Foundation and Robots books done after the "originals".

I'm more perspiring than aspiring at this point in my career... (-:

On Mon, 15 Dec 2003 13:09:48 -0600, Programmer Dude wrote or quoted :

It would seem to me any non-human intelligent species would not have a fanatical loyalty to humans. Their loyalties would be broader to include more species, perhaps all species, or perhaps only their own species.

At this point in my life, I think it most probably that man will destroy himself within a century, and possibly take most of life on earth along with him. There are just so many avenues to destruction now open.

An intelligent species, or intelligent creation, even one that had man's best interest at heart, may be forced to poke a stick in his spokes to prevent him from destroying the whole planet.

So our intelligent creations might, with the best of motives, deliberately screw up our technology in order to slow us down.

Humans are too stupid to live. They decide issues by loyalties and emotions. That is fine when all they wield is a spear, but it simply won't work when they have bioterror and nukes, and the power to alter the entire biosphere at the stroke of a pen.

-- Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green. Coaching, problem solving, economical contract programming. See

for The Java Glossary.

This was the direct result of switching the Positronic software code from Pascal to C in one of the upheavals at US Robotics. Rather than recode all their indexed accesses to satisfy the rigidity of C index basing, they simply introduced a further law.

Luckily by the time they did that most of the problems had been worked out, so the Pascal to C translation introduced very few new bugs. The translation also avoided the wild and crazy guys indiscriminately wielding sharp pointers in illegal manners. Since further development then stopped the lack of sub-ranges and range checking did not affect any further code changes, because there were none.

I got all this directly from R. Daneel Ovilaw as told to Susan Calvin.

All of them? Even you?? (-:

I think we can resume the concept ant generalize and define the intelligence as the capacity to store mental (Virtual ) images * eventually and the faculty(power) to treat(manipulate) them for react to environnement stimuli

• Virtuality representation of Reality eventually.

On Tue, 16 Dec 2003 13:55:58 -0600, Programmer Dude wrote or quoted :

Yes, as a species. Every day I try to figure out what I could do or say that would save my species, but so far I am not having much effect. I am not smart enough.

I have had a fantasy ever since I was quite young that someday I would have an artificially intelligent companion that would coach me on what to do and say so that I could.

-- Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green. Coaching, problem solving, economical contract programming. See

for The Java Glossary.

Roedy Green wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

"prime" (Sci-Fi, Peter F. Hamilton, Fallen Dragon).

----------------- Emotions are the part of thought that escapes our own self-analysis, but they are, nonetheless, logically derived, we simply have no direct overview of precisely how we arrive at them, not enough extra processing power to both reason our way to them, and also analyze that reasoning itself.

Such a limit is true of anything finite.

Animals are NOT conscious, because if they were, and I mean in the same manner as we call it so, they would actively seek our recognition and company and try desperately to win our acknowledgement of their awareness so that we would not eat them or let them die.

Do they have something below the sophistication of what we call consciousness? Surely, and many levels of it besides, but if you can attempt to imagine yourself failing to realize the importance of wanting humans to know you are a thinking being, then THAT IS the level at which they are NOT working, and that seems quite a ways down the ladder from us, too far, in fact, to recognize as anything LIKE ourselves anything THAT unaware.

They would be active, but NON-CONSCIOUS, and so they are, except perhaps for mere glimmerings in apes, elephants, and cetaceans.

-------------- Humans can't either. They are "programmed" by their experiences.

What you're fishing for is consciousness, which is the internal self-modeling in an alternate real space produced by interrelations of non-contemporaneous memory accesses.

------------------------ Nonsense. It achieves subtlety the same way the brain has done, by the evolution of new kinds of brain matter, so that we need new kinds and uses of memory to achieve any single step-wise leap of the break barriers of potential to install yet a higher level of subtlety.

Consciousness is a matter of internal modeling of oneself in a new kind of space, an imagination, which requires a separate attention to the very self that is perceiving, as yet another object to consider.

----------------- They don't realize what THEY are doing, let alone what WE are doing.

---------------------- We have improved things somewhat over the random luck of the individual in this new level of subtlety by acting as a group, which can choose to alter outcomes, while the individual is determined and programmed by its experiences, and is unable. You see, we can change others, and act as a group to change others, but we cannot act to change ourself simply because we ARE ourself, and that's circular and futile, we are already what we are and cannot change lest we have been changed from without. There is no such thing as "Free Will". It's nonsense. Whatever we think we cannot change by whim, or else we would have already.

-Steve

-Steve

---------------- Admittedly it would be opportune to have more input, but we would continue to change and grow from merely the input we have currently amassed, despite none-further. Isolation does drive the physical being insane, however, in that it loses stability without new input, but otherwise that is unimportant.

-Steve

SNIP

Of course you can "change by whim" and people have done it already. We do it all the time. Change means doing things differently than before. I choose all the time to do things differently as an outcome of rational or emotional thought processes or for no conscious reason (a whim).

You may act as an individual or group to control others by reducing their choices. Ultimate control means reducing their choices to zero.

But the only person you can directly change is yourself. You may choose to change yourself as a result of the group you are part of. But it is still your choice not the groups. That is assuming a "free" society which allows that particular choice to be taken.

There are degrees of freedom. Free will means free to act. You must list the set of actions that can be chosen. The choice itself may be determinate but the number of choices is a measure of the degrees of freedom possible. Otherwise we would always take the same action regardless of the situation.

The confusion over "free will" in a determinate world is a religious one.

John Casey

You are trying to re-define "conscious" as "having a mind similar to a human mind". Why not use that construct, and see whether you still have points to make?

My cat actively seeks my recognition and company. The thoughts that I might eat her or let her die probably don't cross her mind, but I have no reason to believe that my human neighbours are concerned about these possibilities either.

- Gerry Quinn

On Mon, 22 Dec 2003 04:39:29 GMT, "R. Steve Walz" wrote or quoted :

They do. See

But no matter what they do to someone locked in your mindset they will always remain inferior. It is a similar mechanism that convinces some people their race or nation make them superior to others.

-- Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green. Coaching, problem solving, economical contract programming. See

for The Java Glossary.

On Mon, 22 Dec 2003 13:48:56 GMT, snipped-for-privacy@indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn) wrote or quoted :

LOL. Well put.

-- Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green. Coaching, problem solving, economical contract programming. See

for The Java Glossary.

Right. It's called speciesism. Speciesism grounds cruelty to animals just as racism grounds cruelty to other races and nationalism grounds cruelty to members of another nation. Try

for a philosophical article on speciesism.

George

--------------- Nope. That's change due to input and circumstances, not choice. You can't help but change exactly in the manner as you were always going to change from before the origin of the world.

Nope. You can't prevent yourself from doing it just as you are made to by circumstances of your life experience. That's determined action, NOT "Free Will". You cannot do it any other way than you did it, and that was CAUSED, as all physical motion of matter is CAUSED. You're no different in that respect than any other hunk of matter, just more complicated. The stuff between your ears determines what you think, and you can't change it, because you *ARE* IT!! It would be like pulling yourself into the air by your necktie.

----------------------------- You don't grasp the difference between the choices made by a device or person because it HAS to do so due to its experiences and programming, versus some imaginary "Free Will" that is supposed to be be entirely whimsical, and that violates all known laws of physics.

------------------------ Again you're mistaking the choices you are forced to make due to your life experiences and circumstances, for "Free Will"-"choices". Ain't.

Listen!: If you are honest, you will admit that you cannot change the tiniest thing you believe by any force of whimsical "Free Will". If you can, I ask you to right now change the tiniest thing you sincerely believe into its opposite belief. YOU CAN'T DO IT AT ALL! And you know that you'd be LYING to even SAY that you had done so, and EVERYONE knows that!

--------------------------- No, all preprogrammed devices are "free to act" however they happen to be programmed to do so. You simply are refusing to understand the processes that make you who you are as programming and circumstances that determine what you will do.

--------------------------------- We do sense circumstances, but so do washing machines and other simple robots.

--------------------------- There is no "Free Will", you have simply been brainwashed by religion to believe in it as some ridiculous matter of "faith", and you are programmed primitively to believe it, and cannot help yourself, which is amusing!

If I had been successfully brainwashed and programmed to regurgitate the notion of "Free Will" as desperately as you have been, then *I'd* do so as well!!

You see, shame-based religions requires a belief-system that requires they punish people for disobeying them, they believe that each person and only them should be blamed for believing any other than what they are told to believe, even though they know inside that their religion makes no rational sense and have to buy and hide their actual disbelief from everyone else in their family, church, life, even themselves if they can manage it, by some twisted rationalization about them being flawed, evil or sinful.

The other more non-shame-based traditions, Hinduism and Buddhist and Taoism, and notably Judaism, don't have any belief requirements and consequently believe totally in destiny, fate, Kismet, and that life is Determined. And so do physicists, even QMechanicists who adhere to the best fit for the data, the Many Worlds Interpetation!!

-Steve

-------------------- Since that's the only kind we know and understand, it seems reasonable. We can't do this kind of "analysis from within" for any other kind honestly.

---------------------- You do it, you seem intrigued.

---------------------- It hangs around if you feed it, who knows or cares why? If it knew of itself in anything like the way that WE know of ourselves, however, it would be trying to learn to read and write.

---------------------- Nor does she regarding her death. Quite different from any human.

------------------------ They don't rely on you for food.

-Steve

-------------------------- And one that reveals this critique to be trivially dismissed. Loyalty to our species and its needs makes speciesism mandatory in order to be moral! Equating racism with speciesism is such a patent category mistake that innumerable examples of moral choices would easily change your mind: Your child who needs an experimental operation versus a test monkey, etc.

It's also irrelevant for us irreligious who don't specifically REQUIRE "dominion over" all the other lifeforms. They're still not capable of human awareness, so much so that they can be reasonably regarded as non-"beings", which is why we permit each other to eat them.

But MY point is one that seems to escape humans most of the time just because we have always lived on this planet with these animals:

Our awareness is SO CAPABLE and that of lower animals is SO INCAPABLE, that one is quickly left wondering whether lower animals are OR CAN BE CONSCIOUS OR AWARE AT ALL, or whether they must actually be classed as a kind of bio-device that simply SEEMS so because we have a raft of similar features and reflexes and behaviors UNRELATED TO OUR AWARENESS!!

It gets to the point that us talking to animals starts to look as ridiculous as talking to a doll just because it has eyes and mouth similarly situated and makes noise when we squeeze it!!!

These sorts of reflexes, features, and behaviors, which we share ONLY because of our origin, do NOT in and of themselves show the presence of an AWARENESS ANYWHERE NEAR the order or our own!!! They can be non-conscious low level subsumption layers without any real awareness as WE attribute it.

Remember, a switch responds when pushed, it may be part of a device that responds JUST LIKE US in MANY WAYS! But that doesn't mean it KNOWS it exists!!

-Steve

The opposite of speciesism is called "anthropomorphism". It falsely invests animals with human characteristics.

Speciesism as a concept is specious. If cows object to being made into hamburger, let them hire lawyers to express their objection - or at least eat grass in an "Eat Mor Chik'n" pattern like in the Chick-Fil-A ads.

-- Les Cargill