Re: Things I never thought would appear

On 10/12/24 8:34 AM, Keith F. Lynch wrote:

Gary McGath <garym@mcgath.com>  wrote:

You left out the part of my post where I said that carrying out
tasks isn't the point.  Human (and animal) intelligence is a faculty
for maintaining and enhancing the life of which it is a part.
We might be able to create machines whose prime directive is to
survive, reproduce, and maximize their satisfaction (though I don't
know what that would mean in a machine designed and created by
humans), but it would be a bad idea.

 What would it be like to be an AI is a different question from what
would it be like to share the world with AIs.
 Also, not everyone chooses to use their intelligence to maintain or
enhance their life.

Some do it badly, but if they didn't do it at all, they wouldn't live long.

You're overlooking the principle of comparative advantage.  People
in such a world wouldn't sit around and wait for the machines to
feed them.  They'd do the things at which they're relatively best,
while machines would do the tasks which they're relatively best at.

 Comparative advantage means it makes sense for a doctor to hire a
receptionist even if he'd be better receptionist than the person he
hires.  But that's only because his high income suffices to pay for
the receptionist.
 Today, nobody wonders whether it would pay better to compete with a
hydroelectric dam by turning a hand-cranked generator or to compete
with a computer by doing arithmetic by hand.  Obviously neither one
would give anything close to a living wage.
 I'm suggesting that, given true AI, people would be hopelessly
outcompeted by AIs in literally *every* field.  Ten years after that
doctor saves money by replacing his human receptionist with a robot
receptionist, his patients save money by replacing him with a robot
doctor.

What money? People have to earn it somehow. Comparative advantage still applies, or else people simply wouldn't be part of the economy and hence couldn't pay for the services of machines.
Unless, perhaps, the humans became the pets of the machines, maintained because the machines are programmed to. This would be like the final page of "With Folded Hands."

 

The key word there is "emulate."  They wouldn't be people.  At a
minimum, they'd need to have human-equivalent bodies to keep the
same personalities; otherwise they'd have different needs and
different ways of interacting with the world, and so would diverge
from human attitudes.

 To a degree, that has already happened.  The personality of a person
with a car differs from that of a person without one.  The personality
of a person with a cell phone differs from that of a person without
one.  The personality of a person with a disability differs from that
of a person without one.  But they're still people.

This demonstrates a different point from the one you intended. A computer with a human voice generator differs from a computer without one, but it's still a computer.

There are already people with artificial hearts and artificial
kidneys.  To the extent that those work as well as the original, their
life should be unchanged.  If those work better than the original,
their life should be improved.  The same should be true of artificial
bodies or artificial brains.

An artificial brain, if we're talking about replacing rather than supplementing the original, is different in kind from an artificial heart. Consciousness resides in the brain. Stephen Hawking was still Stephen Hawking even when almost nothing else in his body functioned without the aid of machines. Once his brain stopped, he ceased to be Stephen Hawking. A computer that emulated him, no matter how convincing it was, wouldn't resurrect him as far as he was concerned.
--
Gary McGath    http://www.mcgath.com