Todayâs leading minds talk AI with host Byron Reese About this EpisodeEpisode 76 of Voices in AI features host Byron Reese and Rudy Rucker discuss the future of AGI, the metaphysics involved in AGI, and delve into whether the future will be for humanityâs good or ill. Rudy Rucker is a mathematician, a computer scientist, as well as being a writer of fiction and nonfiction, with awards for the first two of the books in his Ware Tetralogy series. Visit www.VoicesinAI.com to listen to this one-hour podcast or read the full transcript. Transcript ExcerptByron Reese: This is Voices in AI brought to you by GigaOm, Iâm Byron Reese. Today my guest is Rudy Rucker. He is a mathematician, a computer scientist and a science fiction author. He has written books of fiction and nonfiction, and heâs probably best known for his novels in the Ware Tetralogy, which consists of software, wetware, freeware and realware. The first two of those won Philip K. Dick awards. Welcome to the show, Rudy. Rudy Rucker: Itâs nice to be here Byron. This seems like a very interesting series you have and Iâm glad to hold forth on my thoughts about AI. Wonderful. I always like to start with my Rorschach question which is: What is artificial intelligence? And why is it artificial? Well a good working definition has always been the Turing test. If you have a device or program that can convince you that itâs a person, then thatâs pretty close to being intelligent. So it has to master conversation? It can do everything else, it can paint the Mona Lisa, it could do a million other things, but if it canât converse, itâs not AI? No those other things are also a big part of if. Youâd want it to be able to write a novel, ideally, or to develop scientific theoriesâto do the kinds of things that we do, in an interesting way. Well, let me try a different tack, what do you think intelligence is? I think intelligence is to have a sort of complex interplay with whatâs happening around you. You donât want the old cliche that the robotic voice or the screen with capital letters on it, just not even able to use contractions, âdo not help me.â You want something thatâs flexible and playful in intelligence. I mean even in movies when you look at the actors, you often will get a sense that this person is deeply unintelligent or this person has an interesting mind. Itâs a richness of behavior, a sort of complexity that engages your imagination. And do you think itâs artificial? Is artificial intelligence actual intelligence or is it something that can mimic intelligence and look like intelligence, but it doesnât actually have any, thereâs no one actually home? Right, well I think the word artificial is misleading. I think as you asked me before the interview about my being friends with Stephen Wolfram, and one of Wolframâs points has been that any natural process can embody universal computation. Once you have universal computation, it seems like in principle, you might be able to get intelligent behavior emerging even if itâs not programmed. So then, itâs not clear that thereâs some bright line that separates human intelligence from the rest of the intelligence. I think when we say âartificial intelligence,â what weâre getting at is the idea that it would be something that we could bring into being, either by designing or probably more likely by evolving it in a laboratory setting. So, on the Stephen Wolfram thread, his view is everythingâs computation and that you canât really say thereâs much difference between a human brain and a hurricane, because whatâs going on in there is essentially a giant clockwork running its program, and itâs all really computational equivalence, itâs all kind of the same in the end, do you ascribe to that? Yeah Iâm a convert. I wouldnât use the word âclockworkâ that you use because that already slips in an assumption that a computation is in some way clunky and with gears and teeth, because we can have thingsâ But itâs deterministic, isnât it? Itâs deterministic, yes, so I guess in that sense itâs like clockwork. So Stephen believes, and you hate to paraphrase something as big as like his view on science, but he believes that everything isânot a clockwork, I wonât use that wordâbut everything is deterministic. But, even the most deterministic things, when you iterate them, become unpredictable, and theyâre not unpredictable inherently, like from a universal standpoint. But theyâre unpredictable from how finite our minds are. Theyâre in practice unpredictable? Correct. So, a lot of natural processes, like well thereâs like when you take Physics I, you say oh, I can predict where, if I fire an artillery shot where itâs going to land, because itâs going to travel along a perfect parabola and then I can just work it out on the back of an envelope in a few seconds. And then when you get into reality, well they donât actually travel on perfect parabolas, they have this odd shaped curve due to air friction, thatâs not linear, it depends how fast theyâre going. And then, you skip into saying âWell, I really would have to simulate this click.â And then when you get into saying you have to predict something by simulating the process, then the event itself is simulating itself already, and in practice, the simulation is not going to run appreciably faster than just waiting for the event to unfold, and thatâs the catch. We can take a natural process and itâs computational in the sense that itâs deterministic, so you think well, cool, Iâll just find out the rule itâs using and then Iâll use some math tricks and Iâll predict what itâs going to do. For most processes, it turns out there arenât any quick shortcuts, thatâs actually all. It was worked on by Alan Turing way back when he proved that you canât effectively get extreme speed ups of universal processes. So then weâre stuck with saying, maybe itâs deterministic, but we canât predict it, and going slightly off on a side thread here, this question of free will always comes up, because we say well, âweâre not like deterministic processes, because nobody can predict what we do.â And the thing is if you get a really good AI program thatâs running at its top level, then youâre not going to be able to predict that either. So, we kind of confuse free will with unpredictability, but actually unpredictabilityâs enough. Listen to this one-hour episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed { font-size: 1.4rem; background: url(https://voicesinai.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/cropped-voices-background.jpg) black; background-position: center; background-size: cover; color: white; padding: 1rem 1.5rem; font-weight: 200; text-transform: uppercase; margin-bottom: 1.5rem; } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed:last-of-type { margin-bottom: 0; } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed .logo { margin-top: .25rem; display: block; background: url(https://voicesinai.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/voices-in-ai-logo-light-768x264.png) center left no-repeat; background-size: contain; width: 100%; padding-bottom: 30%; text-indent: -9999rem; margin-bottom: 1.5rem } @media (min-width: 960px) { .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed .logo { width: 262px; height: 90px; float: left; margin-right: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0; padding-bottom: 0; } } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed a:link, .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed a:visited { color: #FF6B00; } .voice-in-ai-link-back a:hover { color: #ff4f00; } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed ul.go-alexa-briefing-subscribe-links { margin-left: 0 !important; margin-right: 0 !important; margin-bottom: 0.25rem; } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed ul.go-alexa-briefing-subscribe-links a:link, .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed ul.go-alexa-briefing-subscribe-links a:visited { background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.77); } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed ul.go-alexa-briefing-subscribe-links a:hover { background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.63); } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed ul.go-alexa-briefing-subscribe-links .stitcher .stitcher-logo { display: inline; width: auto; fill: currentColor; height: 1em; margin-bottom: -.15em; }Byron explores issues around artificial intelligence and conscious computers in his new book The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity. via Tumblr Voices in AI â Episode 76: A Conversation with Rudy Rucker
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