The Robot Birds And The Virtual Bees
Comments (18)
I don’t know, Evie, I’m pretty sure Pintsize would just repeat the process you described over and over again for all eternity if he could. Especially if it involved a tugboat.
I was chewing this over a little bit and it occurs to me a female robot and a human of any gender could have children, in a way. If we assume that forming an AI takes two semi randomised strings from parent AIs, like how human children take two sets of DNA from each parent, then you could read a human's DNA sequence, convert it into a numerical code, match it to their AI partner's code and the result would be a child AI with traits from both parents. Just a thought.
That's a nice thought, but obviously the devil is in the details. Although development of the external womb has made a lot of progress, I'm not sure if they got the right mix of nutrients down you'd have to provide, nevermind the fact that although we've made huge leaps understanding DNA, it's still complicated enough to be unable to predict how to generate a fully viable genome.
Whoa, cutlery on the wall?!? . . . Oh, hi Mark!
I feel like we have seen parts of this before <a href="http://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=2133" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=2133</a> <a href="http://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3071" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3071</a>
Meanwhile Roko is still learning to master the skill: <a href="http://jephjacques.com/post/153991088855/roko-unwinds" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://jephjacques.com/post/153991088855/roko-unwinds</a>
And exactly how much are you getting done now, Amanda?
Right this minute? Hmm, hands above the table please Mandy.
ROBOGASMS! Winslow?
is that an A&W? something about those burgers...
So good.
This is actually a much deeper question than it seems. Sure, ecstasy can get old, but what if joy is your baseline? Do you need to experience misery to appreciate the joy, or is it better to just experience joy all the time. For an AI to be meaningfully sentient, it has to be the case that there's a way that it's like to _be_ an AI. If there is such a way, then it's not just bool: ecstasy. Ecstasy is experiential; how experience arises for an AI is a very interesting question.
At least for biological intelligence, that experience appears to grown out of sensory perception in a physical body. Chemistry, vibration, patterns of light. You could think of reasoning and introspection and conscious memory as a kind of proprioception, a brain processing it's own states as another sense. If AIs are sentient in a recognizeable way, it's probably similar. A system watching and tasting itself
This is a really fascinating take on how a human-like ai would approximate and experience "endocrine" phenomena. Awesome as always, Jeph!
Wait, so you're saying Pintsize has...self control?
I think I see it more as being classically trainable. An action resulting in an undesirable outcome will naturally be avoided.
I wanna see Bubbles stop dragging this out!!!!! 😭
Now now, this is some important stuff here, namely that science (as it is in the post-singularity QC-verse) seems to support the idea of Faybles smooches actually being feasible. :P