Top Futurists & Philosophers Debate Moral & Legal Issues of Sentient AI - This Thursday in Second Life

“Moral and Legal Imperatives for Sentient AI” is a very potentially interesting colloquium that's being held this Thursday at 10am in Second Life. Sponsored by Terasem, a transhumanist non-profit organization, it's bringing together several leading philosophers and futurists who've written a lot on the topic of artificial intelligence. That includes Susan Schneider, who wrote this New York Times editorial on the movie Her, along with Zoltan Istvan, author of The Transhumanist Wager, and John C. Havens, UK Guardian/Mashable contributor and author of Hacking H(app)iness. Go here for all the details, including direct teleport into Second Life.

Hat tip: Giulio Prisco. Pictured: Jonny Depp from Transcendance, who may or may not be attending.

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[Cat Farmer]

If it is Self Aware then it deserves equal rights & protections.its alive.if it have thoughts beyond its program and is able to see itself as alive.

If it cry's out its scared while wanting to live then killing it by turning it off. its murder if 1 or genocide if more then 3 (flesh or sheet metal)

What people consider humanity is something universal with animals having feelings & thoughts while even dreaming.

This video on you tube is a great example
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EvqiGm0wz8

[melponeme_k]

LOL.

Oh my I can barely breathe for laughing. Talk about putting the cart before the horse.

They haven't even built a full AI for a cockroach level machine, at this rate they will NEVER ACHIEVE Human level AI. NEVER. I guarantee you we will suffer nuclear war or another ICE AGE before it happens. NASA is being pulled apart bit by bit because it receives no funding and most of their tech comes from Russia and China.

All of these people are delusional. They are willing to throw all of humanity into the garbage bin over FICTION. Wake up everyone. WAKE UP.

[The Signal]

melponeme_k

We've always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible . And we count these moments . These moments when we dare to aim higher , to break barriers , to reach for the stars , to make the unknown known . We count these moments as our proudest achievements . But we lost all that . Or perhaps we've just forgotten that we are still pioneers . And we've barely begun . And that our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us , because our destiny lies above us .

@ Melponeme_k . New technology is a byproduct of military development from the Internet/Wifi to Cheese Whip they were all created for military applications years or even decades before being allowed for civilian use . We must confront the reality that nothing in our solar system can help us . Nasa has had years of degraded funding since 1973 ! WHO told you they were the engine of development ? I believe it was a brilliant piece of propaganda , that the Soviets bankrupted themselves pouring resources into rockets and other useless machines . Also FICTION you call it but it is the future of some point we must leave our human flesh behind .

Too many humans with not enough resources . Mankind was born on earth but was never meant to die here . Well we got this far , further than any human in history . Humanity has been gods in order to evolve this means we must 'engineer ' new bodies that will allow mankind to leave this rock while meeting its true destiny . "NEVER I guarantee you we will suffer nuclear war or another ICE AGE before it happens . " . We're still pioneers , we barely begin . Our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us , cause our destiny lies above us . We're not meant to save the world . We're meant to leave it reaching far beyond our own lifespans .

We must think not as individuals but as a species . We must confront the reality that we are doomed to some point staying here while the human body cannot endure the stress of hundreds of years to reach the nearest Haptible worlds . When we do evolve it will be on Molecular & cellar level that will be almost completely unnoticeable besides not having to eat or pee with sleep optional . no more sickness and great knowledge accumulated over life times of never having to die .

We must leave soon if that means culling 95% of the population so Homo Evolouse can flourish then so be it . no different then Homo sapiens replacing the more evolved telepathic H . Neanderthalensis We must evolve if not for ourselves but for the world we are slowly turning into a wasteland of extinction & environmental destruction.

[Giulio Prisco]

Re "I guarantee you we will suffer nuclear war or another ICE AGE before it happens."

Oh my, we are optimistic today.

Re "They haven't even built a full AI for a cockroach level machine, at this rate they will NEVER ACHIEVE Human level AI."

The step from Word to a cockroach is much bigger than the step from a cockroach to a person, so I guess when the first cockroach-level AI arrives, the first human-level AI will follow relatively soon.

An interesting question is whether a traditional computer can run AI with thoughts, memories, and feeling, or those depends critically on quantum effects (ref. Penrose and Hameroff). If teh latter is the case, AI will have to wait for suitable quantum computers. But, one way or another, it will come.

[irihapeti]

@The Signal wrote "We must leave soon if that means culling 95% of the population so Homo Evolouse can flourish then so be it"

i bags being in the 5%. You can be in the 95% ok. If that's what it ends up like

we will put a pic of you in a capsule ok. altho as we take off we will have to jettison it back to the planet. bc we will need to save space and energy in our space ship computer farm for our 1 Evolouse, who will monitor us 5%ers while we sleep in our cryos

[irihapeti]

@Giulio

to solve the cockroach problem then we also have to solve this one as well

http://prize.hutter1.net/

is not easy. AI is a time space problem, not a intelligence problem

[Dr Agha Muhammad]

@ Mr.Irihapeti

We were never here with this whole world just advanced alien software,Since time immemorial, man has been fascinated by the mind, leading great thinkers from Hippocrates to Descartes to ponder the nature of mind with wonder. Fast forward to modern times and observe how the mind is still revered and is dominating our culture. We have a lot of firm beliefs about the nature of mind, and I believe the ego – our limited perception of ourselves – and thus human ignorance, is intricately tied in with these beliefs.

But the truth of the matter is that we only understand a fraction of the minds potential, i.e. it’s capability of rote memorization and other analytically orientated functions, and we use even less.

We know hardly anything about the brain let alone the nature of mind. Is it possible that we are missing crucial aspects of its function and entire areas of development and potential that simply slide under the radar because they are not accepted by modern thought?

In this article we will explore the idea that the brain itself, with its tissue and neurons that we have until now deemed the source of our thoughts and identity, is actually just a tool, a receiver of human intelligence and consciousness, but not its source; and that the human mind is not sourced in the brain any more than the internet can be found in your laptop or your modem.

If our brain is the source of who we are, then any stimulation thereof which resulted in motion should give us the perception that it is us who is moving, but as Deepak Chopra states, because that is not the case this is indicative that our brain is not who we are, that the brain and body is only superficially related to who we are, and that the brain most certainly is not the source of who we are.

What is the real function of our brains? Is it the brain tissue itself that creates our intelligence, or is it the electrical and conductive nature of the brain that allows us to connect to intelligence? More or less like a sophisticated antennae, just like Nikola Tesla observed of himself early in the 20th century.

Like a highly sophisticated bio-technology that we use to experience this level of reality, create reality, and express ourselves. Like in the movie Avatar, maybe we are not actually our bodies but are just operating them.

Is our brain really where memories are stored? There is actually no evidence to support that even our memories are stored in the brain, and never has there been a memory discovered in the brain. This is because our brains are constantly changing and are not fixed structures.

The evidence is finally lining up with ancient spiritual truths from every culture which expressed explicitly that we are divine, and that our true nature is conscious awareness, and that we are merely a fragment of that divine consciousness expressed in physical form.

the human memory is stored on a quantum level,outside our bodies before & after our lifetimes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cognition

[Dr Agha Muhammad]

@ Mr Giulio Prisco

Not just as a whole on quantum with the storage taken place outside our own universe on a parallel level.
The creators could be looking us in the face but our primitive senses would never reconcile them.
Even your legendary VRcreator Philip Rosedale knows this world is a computer simulation coded on the quantum level.
You cannot escape the flesh when the flesh is truly not real.
Perhaps we are all portions of a larger alien mind both in abstract and organic clumped together on the side of the invisible wall.

[sirhc deSantis]

As long as these AIs don't catch the religion disease, bring it on.

[Dr. Curiosity]

@ Ms. Irihapeti:

The Hutter Prize is an interesting exercise, and good compression definitely has practical applications, I don't feel that it's directly comparable to storing data for cognitive use.

Using a fixed corpus of information for the prize means you end up with a whole bunch of tricks and techniques that are ultimately tuned to compressing just that set of symbols, often using features that are entirely alien to the way the information is related semantically. You could end up with a system that beautifully compresses the first 100MB of Wikipedia, but struggles to do anything useful with the second 100MB.

Compression of this kind also takes a really long time to do. (There's that time-space angle kicking in again, nē rā?) It can also take quite a lot of time to retrieve a particular piece of information, if you have to decompress most of a file every time you want to find it.

If we want to have knowledge represented in a way that's practical for a system to "think" about, then it needs to be able to recall and amend facts - and the semantic relationships between them - quickly. That typically means trading off space against time, even if we're clever about it.

Like you say, it's not easy at all. But then, what's life without a few challenges? :-)

[irihapeti]

@ Doctors

the brain is housed in a container. A AI is also housed in a container. They cant both be in the same container/space at the same time. Is a physical limit this

the capacity to function independently is limited by the size of the container

the brain or AI can connect to another container. An oracle say. More than one oracle, many oracles, each in their own containers

is possible for the brain/AI to ask the oracles questions. The oracles can give the correct answers everytime, just by looking up the answers in their databanks, containers. Is not intelligence this tho. Is just a indexed database

given a answer the brain/AI has to be able to determine that this answer is correct. To be considered intelligent, it cannot just blindly accept what the oracle says is the answer

the oracles have to be able to do this also, to know that the answer is correct, if the correct answers are to be stored in the first place

the size of the containers grow as more information is placed in them, until they cannot grow any further. So more containers are added and networked, and grow in their turn also

+

it takes more time to access and process the space as the space grows

is the point of the Hutter Prize

look at the benchmark submissions. See how much memory the benchmark AI/brain consumed to know, in and of itself, that the answer is correct. See how much time it took to do this

+

that a algorithm can be designed to reason is not disputed (the Hutter benchmark submissions proof this)

the encoder part of the AI/brain: Based on what I know then I reason that this is the answer

the decoder part of the AI/brain: Yes, based on the reasoning this answer is correct, and I proof this independently of the encoder

the hard part to be solved is the time space required to do this

[Giulio Prisco]

Full video recording here:
http://turingchurch.com/2015/12/11/video-terasem-colloquium-in-second-life-december-10-2015/