Before it was called Kinect, there was project Natal... and Milo, a fully AI character, learning about its world and ours
Milo believes he is, therefore.... someone made him. That's quite a big leap! We know some team of programers created this character.... but how would Milo get to know about it?
How would Milo describe how his thought process works? How would Milo associate his emotions with something tangible?
And now... from just measuring the electrical impulses in a microprocessor, the flow of data from that processor to memory and also inputs and outputs from the kinect... how can we discern Milo's emotions?
We know they are there, we know someone created the program. But how and where do they come from, if all you can measure are the physical quantities?
It's the same with any computer program that has a bit of extra complexity.... How can you discern, just from measuring the microprocessor's activity, the connections to RAM and I/O ports, how can you tell that the program is playing a movie file? or taking you to your "second life"? or showing a series of calculation from Wolfram Alpha? heck, even the simple act of drawing a window!?
Now take the human brain. We can measure some electrical activity in it... in a very coarse way... We can measure some activity between the brain and the sensory inputs.... we can measure the outputs...
How would we make the jump to the high-level reasoning that goes on in the brain, if we can't do it for something we actually know is man-made??
You chose to jump in a parallel way: If Milo has all these abilities and is created, then we are too.
I prefer to think that even knowing that Milo is created, we cannot know how his reasoning works. We cannot know how our reasoning works, we also don't know anything about us being created, so it's better to withhold judgement until we can... if ever.
Milo believes he is, therefore.... someone made him. That's quite a big leap! We know some team of programers created this character.... but how would Milo get to know about it?
How would Milo describe how his thought process works? How would Milo associate his emotions with something tangible?
And now... from just measuring the electrical impulses in a microprocessor, the flow of data from that processor to memory and also inputs and outputs from the kinect... how can we discern Milo's emotions?
We know they are there, we know someone created the program. But how and where do they come from, if all you can measure are the physical quantities?
It's the same with any computer program that has a bit of extra complexity.... How can you discern, just from measuring the microprocessor's activity, the connections to RAM and I/O ports, how can you tell that the program is playing a movie file? or taking you to your "second life"? or showing a series of calculation from Wolfram Alpha? heck, even the simple act of drawing a window!?
Now take the human brain. We can measure some electrical activity in it... in a very coarse way... We can measure some activity between the brain and the sensory inputs.... we can measure the outputs...
How would we make the jump to the high-level reasoning that goes on in the brain, if we can't do it for something we actually know is man-made??
You chose to jump in a parallel way: If Milo has all these abilities and is created, then we are too.
I prefer to think that even knowing that Milo is created, we cannot know how his reasoning works. We cannot know how our reasoning works, we also don't know anything about us being created, so it's better to withhold judgement until we can... if ever.
