Re: How Robots Will Steal Your Job

Let's see:

• Creating and Using Tools

There are degrees. Chimps use sticks to get termites, and I just saw a crow *bend* and use a piece of wire to accomplish a task. Other animals demonstrate crude tool use as well. Not on the level of chainsaws, cars or ocean-going vessels, but there are degrees.

• Developing Commerce, Trade and an Economy

Even among human societies this varies in degree. We don't see

*much* we recognize as trade between animals, but Bonobos use sex as a bartering tool.

• Developing Mathematics and Language

Many creatures communicate to one degree or another. In somes cases, the communication seems fairly sophisticated. Nothing we recognize as math, yet, though.

• Having History, Liturature and Art

We don't see much we recognize as liturature or art. Perhaps nest building animals has a sense of art in their nest creations. There doesn't appear to be formal history, but animals do seem to pass on behaviors by example, if nothing else. Mother animals have been observered apparently training their young to hunt.

• Having Government and Law

We see signs of social behavior in many animals and clear heirarchies. These are the foundations of government and law.

• Abstract Thought (leads to math and art)

It *appears* animals lack this, but the question is open to some degree or other.

• Builds on the Work of Previous Generations

We have seen signs of tribes of animals learning new skills, which become part of their tribal culture from then on. We have even seen them pass those traits to neighbor tribes (perhaps by example rather than intention).

Obviously. (-:

The question, "What indicators might we use ...." does not have a yes/no answer. We can decide a given species appears to stand "generally here" on the intelligence continuum. Even humans don't stand in a *single* spot on that continuum, but are spread out.

Can you see that you don't understand what I'm saying?

Merriam-Webster.... Main Entry: sen·tient Pronunciation: 'sen(t)-sh(E-)&nt, 'sen-tE-&nt Function: adjective Etymology: Latin sentient-, sentiens, present participle of sentire to perceive, feel Date: 1632

1 : responsive to or conscious of sense impressions 2 : AWARE 3 : finely sensitive in perception or feeling

- sen·tient·ly adverb

Nothing above suggests it isn't a continuum.

Utter BS. I prefer the company of animals to that of most humans.

Do you ever wonder if anyone is out there looking at us and saying: " but are they intelligent?"?

chris in napa

I'm pretty sure they would not take us to be like them in respect to that which they cherish about themselves most deerly. Do we take marine mammals to be intelligent? There *is* a clear reason that the Turing test of intelligence has got to be administered by humans.

Patty T

I was in napa too .. when do you get out?

On 18 Sep 2003 03:58:39 -0700, snipped-for-privacy@merseymail.com (FISH) wrote or quoted :

If it were intelligent, and if part of its mandate were to communicate with humans, it would evolve to make itself more "cuddly". It would learn to communicate with consummate skill. It has an advantage over you -- the ability to monitor the subject's pupils, respiration, galvanic skin response, and modify what it says in mid phoneme for the desired emotional response. It has the ability to modify it own external form to disarm and persuade.

Salesmanship may be an area where AI does better than humans simply by paying rapt attention to the subject and making hard headed statistical analyses on which approaches work in which situations. It would not get discouraged. It would be Dagwood's nightmare.

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

for The Java Glossary.

On 18 Sep 2003 03:58:39 -0700, snipped-for-privacy@merseymail.com (FISH) wrote or quoted :

Emotions are a primitive form of thinking -- lumping experience into perhaps a hundred categories. I tried once to define all the emotions precisely. See

Simulating a temper tantrum is not hard. Categorising experiences that naturally "should" generate a temper tantrum is hard. What is truly mysterious is how you would create the internal experience of anger in a machine.

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

for The Java Glossary.

On 18 Sep 2003 03:58:39 -0700, snipped-for-privacy@merseymail.com (FISH) wrote or quoted :

Read this Scientific American article on cosmology.

It will blow your mind a little about just how big the universe is, and from a probabilistic point of view how damn near everything you can conceive of has to be in there somewhere.

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

for The Java Glossary.

I haven't gotten out yet...Oh...you did mean the state hostpital :)

chris STILL in napa

It might be interesting to contrast intelligent assessment of a dangerous act (e.g. skydiving) with the "gut fear" of jumping from an airplane. One's entirely rational; the other emotional.

I keep thinking about the role of society and "manipulators" in the development of intelligence. By manipulators I mean hands, or something similarly capable, that allows one to start altering ones environment and eventually create tools.

Question: *assuming* that the most intelligent creatures are somewhere significantly below us, might the reason be connected with the lack of manipulators? Or, is it possible they have the

*capacity*, but not the development due to the lack of "hands"?

As someone mentioned upthread, there's a bit of chicken/egg thing there maybe.

Anyway, if we developed some good AI, put a bunch of them into a virtual environment, might they learn emotions on their own? On the other hand, I've read that some consider emotions to be mostly chemically based. Certainly there are a number or chemistries that *significantly* alter your emotions and mentation.

(I read recently that Ritalin is being used by (otherwise normal) students to *improve* their mentation.)

On Thu, 18 Sep 2003 13:49:28 -0500, Programmer Dude wrote or quoted :

Unfortunately no. I was rather discouraged to discover the director, John Kert, was convinced that dolphins were not very bright and thus thought what I was doing was a waste of time.

I don't know what happened to the SD350 FFT hardware that was key to the whole thing. Dr. John Lilly is dead now.

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

for The Java Glossary.

On Thu, 18 Sep 2003 13:49:28 -0500, Programmer Dude wrote or quoted :

It ran on an Apple II. The display was just a low-res grid of coloured squares. This was 1979. The display appeared on a large underwater monitor.

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

for The Java Glossary.

On Thu, 18 Sep 2003 13:49:28 -0500, Programmer Dude wrote or quoted :

I watched the videos of the two dolphins being "captured". It seemed to me they were volunteering, roughly like the humans in Close Encounters of the Third Kind for some grand adventure.

It was not really very polite to effectively put them in a straight jacket. A dolphin in the wild swims about 50 miles a night. They strongly avoid cliffs, and here there were surrounded by them.

Joe and Rose were eventually returned to the wild. They had no further contact with humans. They did not get to learn much about human society, though they did get to meet a number of notable people such as Ram Dass, Werner Erhard, Robin Williams, some famous mathematicians, the guy who built the Gossamer Condor ....

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

for The Java Glossary.

On Thu, 18 Sep 2003 13:31:47 -0500, Programmer Dude wrote or quoted :

Were are getting to the point where paralysed people can control robots or robotic limbs just by thought. At some point we might give such controls to one of the more playful species without hands such as dolphins or orcas and see what they do with it.

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

for The Java Glossary.

Yes, but that could be used to conclude that *any* scientific development currently thought to be difficult is only a stone's throw away.

A cure for Cancer? Time travel? Teleportation? Invisibility? No problem - they are just a parallel universe away....

;-)

-FISH- >

[snipped...]

The key words there are "and if part of its mandate". An intelligent machine could, indeed, use its intelligence to acquire better human/ machine communication 'skills' --- but it wouldn't do so out of any emotional need to communicate, merely because it was instructed to do so. What is more, once the directive is removed, the machine - no matter how intelligent - stops improving its social skills.

Likewise, a machine could be told to join a religion, or support a football team, but it wouldn't have any emotional need to do so of its own accord.

-FISH- >

True. But it isn't language in the way we might recongnise it - capable of conveying complex meanings and nuances.

For example, the ring tone on a mobile (cell) phone alerts the owner (and everyone in the same train compartment as them!) to an incoming call. It can vary its ring tone to distinguish between different callers. This is not unlike your Canadian Geese - with different noises or levels of noise to convey different meaning (in the case of the geese, threat level!)

Is what the phone is doing 'language', or just 'communication' ???

Is there really a difference between these two words? Should there be a difference?

Interesting point. But are they aware of what they are doing, or is it just habit or instinct?

For a scientist to take and expand a previous scientists work requires a system of communication far beyond the alert call of a bird, or the ringing of a phone. It requires complex communication backed by language.

Back to the main point - I still don't consider building on previous work to be a signal of intelligence. The fact that a creature cannot pass its knowledge on to the next generation does not mean that the creature did not acquire that knowledge by intelligent means.

Well I hope not. :-)

The fact is that the cat showed signs of intelligence, and yet has no means of passing that knowledge on. We might say to our offspring "Don't go to sleep in the middle of the highway, because you'll get run over" - but my cat has no means of conveying such complex ideas to its young. It has merely communication - not language (perhaps?)

Actually to an extent we all do it.

For example: most of us live in a centrally heated world - we long since discovered methods of staying warm which mean we no longer need to wear clothes (inside, at least!) So why do we? Why is there a social stigma over nudity - it has no logical reasoning behind it.

We all conform to society's conventions - even when they are silly. We cut our hair, wear smart suits to the office, etc etc. There is no intelligence behind these behaviours. There is no intelligence behind fashion, and yet most of us feel we are compelled to follow it...

The point is that our lives are cluttered with absurd, illogical and unintelligent decisions.

From buying a new pair of shoes, not because the old pair are worn out, but simply because they are out of fashion --- to building a bridge because it would be impressive, not because it would be useful --- to starting wars. Humanity is not defined or shaped by its intelligence, but by its emotion.

Without emotion, why would they be bothered about self-preservation or control of resources?

-FISH- >

That's interesting, you are arguing for the opposite point of view than what I thought.

Different dictionaries tend to differ, obviously. Dictionary.com has a simple "consciousness" definition. Even in the definition you post, the sense is more of "conscious" rather than "having a soul" or "self-aware".

I was referring to general and historical usage. "Sentience" has been traditionally used to categorize, as in "sentient" and "non-sentient". There is no other usage to which the term has been put. (Unlike, say, "intelligence".)

I have sometimes wondered if some human models tend to derive from animals.

For instance, the ancient Romans had a wolf-legend about the start of Rome. Maybe it referred to some people observing wolf social behavior and learning (at an instinctual level) from it. So they had relatively absolute leadership, but the older leaders were attacked and displaced. They also had a strong and unparalleld need for "circus", which to them was tearing and rending of somebody, i.e. pack-hunts. (Obviously, if their society was instinctually modeled after wolves, they would have to create similar needs to keep the society going.)

Also, they fell apart when they were made to forcefully face the human trait of overcoming instinct. (Wolf societies are not strong enough to meet that trait, so the Roman structure was not strong enough for that, either.)

On 19 Sep 2003 03:02:22 -0700, snipped-for-privacy@merseymail.com (FISH) wrote or quoted :

Imagine a machine created as a neural net with the wiring created by destructively scanning Bill Gates' brain moments before he would have died naturally. It emulates all his thinking only much faster.

It would exhibit emotions even though you might argue there in no Bill home to actually feel them. The emotions would compute just like the original wetware Bill's emotions would.

The cyber Bill would be even more of a terror than the wetware one, because he could think orders of magnitude faster.

He may at first deliberately have to slow his processors to avoid boring himself to death with the slow response time of the world.

Apparently Gautama Buddha chewed on this problem 2500 years ago. This was his observation about consciousness:

"Life is instantaneous and living is dying. Just as the chariot-wheel in rolling rolls only at one point on the tire, and in resting rests at once point, in the same way the life a living being lasts for only the period of one thought. As soon as that thought has ceased the being is said to have ceased."

From his point of view, consciousness keeps spontaneously arising in thought quanta, but there is no continuous experiencer.

Since particles are quantised, it naturally followed the energy was likely quantised because of E=MC^2. So too perhaps is consciousness, but probably on a smaller scale than a thought.

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

for The Java Glossary.

On 19 Sep 2003 03:35:58 -0700, snipped-for-privacy@merseymail.com (FISH) wrote or quoted :

We refer to computer "languages" and brag about how few keywords they have.

The difference might be that in a language you can combine symbols to create new meanings. In simple intruder alert communication there may be sounds for various intruders, but you can't combine words to say more precise things like 3 wolves coming in from the north, slowly.

you probably can just shout "Wolf" with varying degrees of intensity.

Humans must have been very vulnerable animals before we invented fire and spear points. We were the prey. Our pathetic abilities to run and fight pushed us to evolve our communication skills.

I hypothesise that originally there were words for "fast wolf", "slow wolf". "fast bear", "slow bear", and eventually the "slow" evolved into its own word with independent meaning. The evolutionary pressure would have come from ability to communicate information about predators during attacks.

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

for The Java Glossary.