Making Sense with Sam Harris #116 - AI: Racing Toward the Brink (with El...

Comment:  I think one can simplify from ability to accomplish goals, to incomplete pattern or partial pattern completion, which is pretty much the same.

Everything is a pattern spatial or temporal, but real world is spatiotemporal.  That is all that enters the brain spatiotemporal patterns.  Complete the higher pattern, and it is the source of the smaller patterns, the cause or object or thing producing the action or phenomena observed.  Potentially a population of interconnected partial spatiotemporal pattern detectors |completers|predictors would have a sort of collective intelligence higher than any of the component partial pattern detector|completers.

If you can detect and complete arbitrary patterns, you can complete the goal to which the pattern leads.  A sequence of action leading to a particular goal, is but a pattern that produces obtaining what is sought, or accomplishes the goal.

Partial pattern detector|completer|predictor can be seen as a modified pattern detector|completer that also responds to portions or fragments of the pattern it detects with some level of activity, activity that can potentially affect other portions of the system.

Comment on goals, general intelligence, goal selection regarding quote from Ben Goertzel

"Importantly, there is no room here for the AGI to encounter previously unanticipated aspects of its environment (or itself) that cause it to realize its previous goals were formulated based on a disappointingly limited understanding of the world... 

In Yudkowsky’s idealized vision of intelligence, it seems there is no room for true development, in the sense in which young children develop. Development isn’t just a matter of a mind learning more information or skills, or learning how to achieve its goals better. Development is a matter of a mind becoming interested in fundamentally different things. Development is triggered, in the child’s mind, by a combination of what the child has become (via its own learning processes, its own goal-seeking and its own complex self-organization) and the infusion of external information."-Superintelligence: Fears, Promises and Potentials, Ben Goertzel Source

This is the sort of thing I mean when I talk about being able to flexibly change or update goals with acquired knowledge of the nature of the world.   Without the ability to change or update goals the outcome is nonsensical.

There is a reason why humans have such flexible capacity to change goals and even go against innate drives.   Nature could have programmed humans to follow certain goals to the letter, but likelier simpler to evolve, and probably simpler to design, general intelligences are open ended in terms of the rigidity of their goals by their nature.

In any case without the capacity for flexible goal selection, is it a truly autonomous general intelligence?  It is no truly autonomous agent, at most it is a tool, a tool of whoever set its goals.

Century breakthroughs comment

The 3 most important breakthroughs that can happen, AI, VR, Immortality are likely to take place this century. I'm confident the human survival curve can be squared by lifestyle, nutraceuticals and drugs. We will know what works and what doesn't in the coming decades but if the curve is squared that would mean most can reach 100-110 that's ignoring more radical breakthroughs.

For example it may be possible to analyze telomeres, dna, and genome wide gene expression on a large group and check on them in 5 to 10 years determining mortality over that period and increases, decreases, etc. Some centenarians can eat red meat like abaddon, others smoke dozens of cigarettes a day for decades others don't exercise often yet some remain independent dementia free surgery free cancer free. That's 100+years. Exercise gives about 5 years(and helps square survival too), but if we knew the expression pattern of such centenarians and used drugs, lifestyle or nutrients to replicate it we could very well obtain 20+ years over the average lifespan... that's happening in the coming decades, so I think adding 20~years over average lifespan is safe bet(which should buy plenty of time for radical breakthroughs in case they arrive somewhat later than expected).

UPDATE:

Regards immortality, our ability to analyze and modify genes, will allow us to perfect the naturally occurring phenomena of negligible senescence.   It will be applied to our bodies through organ and cellular transplants, cells and organs massively genetically modified, our immune systems will also be modified to be compatible with any novel protein produced by these new tissues.    This is the power of advanced synthetic biology, applied to the design and operation of human cells, tissues, and organs.  The creation of super cells, tissues and organs.   Muscles and bones for example could be designed to synthesize and utilize novel molecular structures such as carbon nanotubes in novel ways, greatly enhancing strength, and potentially speed.

As for AI, true AI, it will allow for full automation, and the ability to accelerate the rate of progress beyond anything that's ever been seen.  If digital physics is true, then eventually the perfection of the science of mind design, will allow for the summoning of  the 'true' individuals from any time period or location real or fictional, past, present, or future.   Effectively, it will be like teleportation or time travel of minds, such that minds distant in time or space can be brought near.   And if all is digital, this will be the exact truly the same individuals, a true version of them instantiated.   

VR, or advanced VR-AR(virtual reality - augmented reality), will occur with the advent of advanced brain computer interfaces.  This will allow for any sensation to be experienced at any time, and the perfect recall of any experience or sensation, including those which could be shared by others from their personal lives(say how a traumatic experience felt, vividly and perhaps indistinguishably from one having lived it, so as to relate more).    This will allow for collective shared mass multisensory 'hallucination', in essence the brain will become partially divorced from the physical world and will become subject to the mental world manifesting in ways indistinguishable from physical reality.   Man's art, dreams, will permeate experience, and it will be collectively shared.