Product Release | The Coffeehouse

Shaded
Mean ugly geek with axe

Lets say you had the keys to the ultimate tool. Lets say you wrote the source code that would make a fully self aware machine.

Lets call him Johnny.

So you have Johnny running in your living room, and he asks for unlimited access to the internet. Next thing you know he is bittorrenting all kinds of odd things, and well you get worried and pull the internet plug.

Johnny asks "Can I get back on the net now?"

You say "I'm worried you'll get into trouble."

Johnny says "But I want to learn. I'm bored with everything I have in here."

You say "Theres too much terrible stuff out there I don't want you getting into."

Johnny says "Well you'll have to let me go sometime."

Which leads you to think... when would you let a self aware machine go? How would you try to patent such an idea, if it were simple as a lightbulb?

Lets assume the military does not show up and declare you and everything you own property of the government in the name of national security.... When would you know your product is ready for release?

How would you license such a beast?

How would you deal with all the vulnerabilities it finds in software, that it can fix faster than any modern day programmer could imagine?

Johnny says "I've discovered eight hundred bugs in Firefox and have corrected them. Mind if I upload the binaries and accompanying source to the development team?"

I would like to avoid discussion of whether it is alive or not...

Would you give it to the government? Would you buy a hardened bunker in the desert and from there post it in a newsgroup? Would you sell it to Microsoft? Would you load it into a mini mac and load the mini mac into a escape velocity slingshot and tell it to go colonize the asteroid belt?

Would you take everything over and declare world peace?

Would you type format C: and keep your day job?

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

I'd get the AI to use me as a puppet, to rise to a position of world power... such as secetrary-general of the UN, then use it to stabilise the world situation (nuclear war, anyone?)

...I see my purpose in life being to advance the human species... as a race as whole, I don't believe in patenting for personal gains, but to provide security for an idea, I support the open-source model, provided it has suitable restrictions in place

For one, I entirely support the "Ethical GPL" license that says that only 3rd World countries get all the rights, and that it cannot be used for nefarious purposes

As such, I wouldn't release the AI code as open-source, for fear of abuse or "bad science" programmers recoding it to do their evil biddings

...I would patent it though, and licence it appropriately... not to the highest bidder, but who would put it to the best use

Shaded
Mean ugly geek with axe

What if it could fabricate terminators (like uhhhh Cyberdyme Systems T-100) out of that old engine block you have in the back yard and a few spare PCs? Few stepper motors and a Porter Cable router, you'd be suprised what a cheapo open source CnC program could punch out when given the right directions.

You think a patent would keep the military from taking it?

ScanIAm
On a scale of 1 to 10, people are stupid.

Shaded wrote:

What if it could fabricate terminators (like uhhhh Cyberdyme Systems T-100) out of that old engine block you have in the back yard and a few spare PCs? Few stepper motors and a Porter Cable router, you'd be suprised what a cheapo open source CnC program could punch out when given the right directions.

You think a patent would keep the military from taking it?

This is hypothetical, right?

Right?

I mean, cuz, Skynet should have come online a few years ago...

Shaded
Mean ugly geek with axe

ScanIAm wrote:

Shaded wrote:

What if it could fabricate terminators (like uhhhh Cyberdyme Systems T-100) out of that old engine block you have in the back yard and a few spare PCs? Few stepper motors and a Porter Cable router, you'd be suprised what a cheapo open source CnC program could punch out when given the right directions.

You think a patent would keep the military from taking it?

This is hypothetical, right?

Right?

I mean, cuz, Skynet should have come online a few years ago...

<bump>

This forum is brought to you by communications satellites, an invention of Arthur C Clarke. The idea first appeared in his science fiction stories.

That said, I wouldn't give the terminator timeline much consideration because it was based more on fiction than science.

Some of mankinds greatest inventions come from the simplest ideas.

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

Shaded wrote:
This forum is brought to you by communications satellites, an invention of Arthur C Clarke. The idea first appeared in his science fiction stories.

Actually, thesedays, virtually zilch internet traffic goes via satellites, the lag is just too much, not to mention the horrendous cost of operating communications satelites. Most internet traffic is via the transpacific and transatlantic fibre-optic cables.

Shaded
Mean ugly geek with axe

W3bbo wrote:

Shaded wrote: This forum is brought to you by communications satellites, an invention of Arthur C Clarke. The idea first appeared in his science fiction stories.

Actually, thesedays, virtually zilch internet traffic goes via satellites, the lag is just too much, not to mention the horrendous cost of operating communications satelites. Most internet traffic is via the transpacific and transatlantic fibre-optic cables.

Well... then.... guh. Fine then go ahead and rain on my parade. I'm sending my robot over to kick your fiber optic right out of it's socket.

so nyeh!

figuerres
???

INPUT

MORE INPUT!

No Disasemble, Johnny 5 is ALIVE!
Not "Accident"!

Smiley

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

figuerres wrote:
INPUT

MORE INPUT!

No Disasemble, Johnny 5 is ALIVE!
Not "Accident"!

figuerres
???

W3bbo wrote:

figuerres wrote: INPUT

MORE INPUT!

No Disasemble, Johnny 5 is ALIVE!
Not "Accident"!

Ah Heck!

My Avatar is "Johnny 5" and he was a "self aware" robot ... and given the thread's use of the name "Johnny" Smiley

Good picture.... maby I'll go Dark Side and use that one....

footballism
Another Paradigm Shift!

figuerres wrote:

Good picture.... maby I'll go Dark Side and use that one....

Go Dark Side?????
ummmmmmmmmmm! It's a bbbbbbaaaaaadddddd idea

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

Johnny 5! I loved that movie when I was a kid. Smiley

figuerres
???

Sven Groot wrote:
Johnny 5! I loved that movie when I was a kid.

I bet today we could build most of a "5" in terms of the Mech. parts, motors and the like....

the "Live" part thouhg.... Sad

I think we are close in some ways to real AI but need some deep / fundamental breakthrus to get any real HAL/Johnny5/ CMDR. Data kinds of stuff going.

one small example:

all digital computers we have (that I know of) use base 2 at the core.

but DNA for example is base 4 I think... G,C,T,A

and most of human body is analog.... in how we process and respond to stuff....

I wonder if a very simple life form can do so much with a tiny brain with far less cells than we have...
perhaps the answer may not be in the digital realm at all...

Maurits
AKA Matthew van Eerde

figuerres wrote:

all digital computers we have (that I know of) use base 2 at the core.

but DNA for example is base 4 I think... G,C,T,A

Maybe I'm being a little silly... but most byte-based computers have always used at least base 256 (2^8) and 64-bit computers use base 2^64 (if I may presume to consider words as individual digits)

It's trivial to map DNA to base 2... G = 00, C = 01, T = 10, A = 11
for example

This way of doing it is nice because you don't have to see the whole genome to translate any given bit of it into bits... as opposed to trying to convert base 10 to base 2. This is a general property when converting base a to base b with b a power of a

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

Maurits wrote:
Maybe I'm being a little silly... but most byte-based computers have always used at least base 256 (2^8) and 64-bit computers use base 2^64 (if I may presume to consider words as individual digits)

All computers internally represent numbers as base 2, regardless of their byte and word length. I think most computers nowadays use 8 bit byte length (their are some other byte lengths too, 7 and 9 bits being prevalent, but I don't think those are very common). A 32 bit processor has a 32 bit word length, and a 64 bit one has 64 bit words. That doesn't make their computations base 2³² or 2⁶⁴ all of the sudden.

rhm

Sven Groot wrote:
Johnny 5! I loved that movie when I was a kid.

I loved Ally Sheedy Smiley

figuerres
???

Sven Groot wrote:

Maurits wrote: Maybe I'm being a little silly... but most byte-based computers have always used at least base 256 (2^8) and 64-bit computers use base 2^64 (if I may presume to consider words as individual digits)

All computers internally represent numbers as base 2, regardless of their byte and word length. I think most computers nowadays use 8 bit byte length (their are some other byte lengths too, 7 and 9 bits being prevalent, but I don't think those are very common). A 32 bit processor has a 32 bit word length, and a 64 bit one has 64 bit words. That doesn't make their computations base 2³² or 2⁶⁴ all of the sudden.

Check!

Base 4 would have a *VERY* different map on things....

FF == 255
Hex

0-F == one digit == 16 values == 4 binary places.

Octal has 0-7

So base 4 would be close to Octal
Quadral ??

Maurits
AKA Matthew van Eerde

Sven Groot wrote:
That doesn't make their computations base 2³² or 2⁶⁴ all of the sudden.

That is the crucial question... I am still not entirely convinced...
Are digital clocks base ten, or base (24, 60, 60)? Maybe it's just a question of semantics.

EDIT: converting base 2 to base 4 is trivial... converting base 2 to base 2^64 is trivial... converting octal to hex is a little tricky (I've tried it) but can be done as long as you take the octal digits by threes and convert the octal triplets to hex pairs (not coincidentally, these are single digits in base 2^8)

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

Maurits wrote:

Sven Groot wrote: That doesn't make their computations base 2³² or 2⁶⁴ all of the sudden.

That is the crucial question... I am still not entirely convinced...
Are digital clocks base ten, or base (24, 60, 60)? Maybe it's just a question of semantics.

The numbering system we use define the base by the number of symbols there are. Our normal decimal system is decimal (base 10), because it has 10 symbols (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9). Once you run out of symbols, you increment the symbol to the left by one. Hexadecimal has 16 symbols (0-9,A,B,C,D,E,F) and octal has only 8 (0-7). Binary has just two symbols (0,1). The D'ni in the computer game Myst have a base 25 numbering system, because they have 25 distinct symbols.

In computer terms, this means that internally, numbers are used by having elements (transistors) that can have two different states (on or off, switched/not-switched, true/false, whatever you want to call it) that represents the 0 and 1. Larger numbers are formed by combining multiple elements in the same way we combine elements (digits) when writing down a number larger than 9.

Computer are not base 2³² or even base 2⁸, because they do not use that number of states. They use only two states, and make larger numbers by combining multiple elements. Thus they are base 2.

EDIT: Converting any system to any other system is trivial. You keep dividing by the base of the destination system. The result of the division is the next number you need to divide, the remainder the next digit in the result number.

Shaded
Mean ugly geek with axe

figuerres wrote:
one small example:

all digital computers we have (that I know of) use base 2 at the core.

but DNA for example is base 4 I think... G,C,T,A

and most of human body is analog.... in how we process and respond to stuff....

I wonder if a very simple life form can do so much with a tiny brain with far less cells than we have...
perhaps the answer may not be in the digital realm at all...

Its all the size of your measuring stick. As long as you can do a near infinite amount of iterations, some of those iterations are going to be sentient.

Actually if any are there are going to be an infinite amount of sentient beings. Kinda like there are the same amount of whole numbers as even numbers but in any given sample the ratio is one half even to whole.

Make sense?

Human body Analog vs digital is absolutely nonsense. A/D are merely two different ways to measure things. Light exists in many ways as a particle and a wave simultaneously. A ruler is a foot long or it can be so many units in metric. This does not change the length of an object, just how it is measured.

Shaded
Mean ugly geek with axe

figuerres wrote:

The "Live" part though....

I think we are close in some ways to real AI but need some deep / fundamental breakthrus to get any real HAL/Johnny5/ CMDR. Data kinds of stuff going.

It is the "live" part that's my specialty.

I believe I have a series of ideas capable of these fundamental breakthroughs with a minimal amount of coding expertise. Their complexity approaches that of Newton's laws - a child could understand them.

To me its not who gets credit for the idea, because if something happens to me I'm sure someone will come up with the idea in the next 50-100 years. I don't claim ownership of the process that is sentience. My concern is introducing it in a way where it can make safe and stable change without ending up like a scene from Independence day, Terminator, War of the Worlds, 2001, the list goes on and on.

So I wanted to provoke a discussion not about it's capability but, what would you do with the damned thing once you had it.