Re: [sl4] Long-term goals

From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Fri Jul 04 2008 - 09:51:39 MDT


On Thursday 03 July 2008 08:49:18 pm Lee Corbin wrote:
> Charles writes
>
> ...
> > Derived goals all refer back to either primary or secondary goals for
> > their significance.
> >
> > OTOH, almost all conversation about goals presumes extensive knowledge of
> > the external world. I don't see how this could be possible for either
> > the primary or the secondary goals. E.g., how are you going to define
> > "human" to an entity that has never interacted with one, either directly
> > or indirectly, that that probably only has a vague idea of object
> > persistence?
>
> The thing hardly qualifies as an AI if it doesn't have the ontology
> of a three year old. And if an AI can understand what trees, cars,
> tablespoons, and about twenty thousand other items are---that is,
> can reliably classify them from either sight (pictures) or feel---then
> it's going to know what a human being is, though (just as with
> any of us) it will be undecided about some borderline cases.
>
> Lee
>...

One doesn't start out knowing about the world. One learns about it. A three
year old may have ontologies and know about object persistence, but a new
born doesn't, and presumably you aren't doing basic restructuring after it
becomes intelligent (i.e., when you're through writing it), only before hand.

So that nascent AI has the capability to learn about cars, trees, people,
etc., but that knowledge isn't built in. Therefore the goals that are
built-in need to be created without reference to such things...except to the
extend that you rely on "imprinting" (which can produce results that are a
bit iffy). This makes creating a set of goals that will result in an AI
that's both friendly and useful a bit tricky...and I say this without even
having tried it once. (Partially because the exact form that such goals
would take are highly dependent upon the exact internal structure of the mind
of the nascent AI.)



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