FYI about your edit: You aren't being downvoted because of "knee-jerk culture war" or because people here are too dumb to understand your enlightened view of epistemology. Your original comment is an incredibly unique view with no explanation that people probably disagree with, and your edit makes you sound petulant, like you can't handle disagreement. That's the reason for the downvotes.
I'm being downvoted because my comment spat in the face of those who think general artificial intelligence automatically implies some superior Nietzschean post-human that is qualified to run the perfect communist utopia since it no longer has distracting human emotions like greed or envy. Somewhere, a Sanfraninite spurted himself to completion while watching a live feed of indigenous humans tending to some noble savage rice field he rented on AgroBnb with Bitcoin, mined entirely by solar powered GPUs made out of free trade copper.
When you drag people out of their fantasies, they used to kill you. At least they downvote you these days, so I supposed that's better.
Yes, this is an incredibly unique view. Yes, people are going to react negatively to it because it fundamentally undermines their revenge fantasies. Yes, I can call them out on their unspoken biases no matter how uncomfortable that makes them.
On Westworld, one of the hosts referred to its creator in the presence of the character Robert Ford. Ford declined to identify himself as that person. Rather a nice riff, I thought.
What a useless definition. I could just as easily say that no being (artificial or not) can be considered intelligent so long as it believes in flying spaghetti monsters.
I didn't say "intelligent". I said "AI", as in "artificial intelligence" which implies a simulation of human intelligence. Machine processes already exist that demonstrate, say, ant-like intelligence.
Being made to believe in a god isn't the same as believing in one.
Silicon Valley thinks AI is not an epistemological problem, as if neurons can be perfectly simulated atomically and that all intelligence processes can be categorized as structured vs. unstructured. Very naive conclusions.
Ironically, they BELIEVE if you simulate the axiomatic neuron perfectly, emergent properties of intelligence will mystically emerge after some undefined threshold of complexity. They are permanently unable to simulate the two billion years of neurological evolution and natural selection for such a belief to hold.
If you must emulate human intelligence, you must be able to navigate the realm of distilling reality from the overlap between truth and belief. Mocking how humans observe reality isn't enough.
Abrahamic religion explored the alternative intelligence problem in great depth over two thousand years ago. It's a pity the results have been lost to Progressive axe grinding.
> Abrahamic religion explored the alternative intelligence problem in great depth over two thousand years ago. It's a pity the results have been lost to Progressive axe grinding.
I'll take the bait: What in the world are you talking about?
For Artificial Intelligence to believe in God would be for it to believe in its makers, which are human. A machine would be intelligent to be aware that it was made by man.
A man doesn't need to believe in God to be intelligent. In fact, the two are pretty much inversely related.
>For Artificial Intelligence to believe in God would be for it to believe in its makers //
That's a very limited sense of the idea of a god, and certainly doesn't match with definitions of God [a singular, eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, deity] that I've come across.
Merely making something doesn't make you a god, not even if that thing appears to display intelligence. Some sense of one of the characteristics of existing in a separate spiritual realm, having power/knowledge beyond that possible in the present realm, having an existence that's not bounded (eg physically) within the normally experienced space of the "mortals". They seem like a start for basic level definitions of a god.
There are a lot of very smart people who are at at least Deist levels of faith. I'd say it's orthogonal. An example? C.S. Lewis.
There is nothing wrong with that sort of metaphor, no matter how much stress you place on it. If you think of religion as a technology, then it can be abused but the abuse doesn't mean it's bad.
Believing in a god is unique to the human species. No other animal does this. Thus, if you want full and complete simulation of human intelligence, this is the ultimate benchmark to test against.
Furthermore, the purpose of this thought experiment is that you CANNOT know what god an AI would end up believing in. That should make you rethink everything you think you know about theology and reexamine it under epistemological terms
>Believing in a god is unique to the human species. No other animal does this.
Do you have some evidence of that? And even if it's true, is it the only thing that's unique to humans?
Indeed, I suspect the interesting part of "believe in god" in terms of intelligence is probably "construct narratives". Assigning a high probability to those narratives reflecting reality (i.e. believing) seems like an aside to the main complexity involved.
>"The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ('wise man'). In any case it's an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee." - Terry Pratchett, The Science of Discworld II: The Globe
The best case for animals demonstrating religious behavior (which is fundamentally different than believing in a god, mind you) is from a very convoluted interpretation of a food coma.
Outside of that considerable stretching, it doesn't exist. Also, I challenge your premise that conflates "belief" with "constructing narratives"
Do you believe you will be alive tomorrow? If so, are you constructing a grand-weaving narrative... or simply making a singular belief? Or, more simply, are you just extrapolating off of past experiences?
Obviously a bash script should believe in God. All it has to do is look around itself at the complexity of it's world and conclude God must exist. I plan to shred any of my bash scripts that do not figure this out within their useful lifetimes. I will print out and file the ones that do. I've written a long text file which explains this in terms a bash script can understand and left it globally readable on my system.