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by kowdermeister 3244 days ago
Star Trek gadgets become real for example. I don't see any impossible thing about building an IRL terminator. Maybe not with today's technology, but conceptually we already have most of the things, they are just slow, power hungry and inefficient now. You don't need a CS degree to guess that speed, power consumption and efficiency will improve over time.
2 comments
CivilianZero 3244 days ago
The difference is, imagining that we can turn an existing technology into a smaller, portable, more effective version of itself is not far out of the realm of reality. In fact it would be incredibly naive to believe that won't happen.

AI, on the other hand, is not so simple, and to try to simplify it to that point is not going to create any productive discussion on the reality of AI.

The movies about these kinds of things are made to entertain, not to teach us about AI.

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kowdermeister 3244 days ago
> AI, on the other hand, is not so simple, and to try to simplify it to that point is not going to create any productive discussion on the reality of AI.

I agree with you, however it's not impossible. Simplification is needed on the carrier level that houses such AI.

Movies are a great way to let our minds wander and dream to forget about the gaps in technology. Then some breakthrough happens and in a few years the yesterdays impossible sci-fi dream becomes a boring shiny toy.

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sgt101 3244 days ago
The creation of goals - determining what things to do in pursuit of a higher goal - for example "kill John Conner" does not exist in AI now. You can do things in toy systems like mazes and atari, chess and go, but parsing the real world and deriving intentions from your understanding of it is a light year away. 300 years is a guess; no one has a clue any more than anyone has an idea about an interstellar drive.
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kowdermeister 3244 days ago
What would prevent you to create a NN with a specific configuration whose goal is to come up with goals based on past knowledge to optimize on a certain parameter or thousands of parameters? You can train it on social media profiles, analyze hundreds of years of books, there's tons of data that cover how people act an various situations. I don't see how a set of goals is not simply another vector space.

> but parsing the real world and deriving intentions from your understanding of it is a light year away. 300 years is a guess; no one has a clue any more than anyone has an idea about an interstellar drive.

They need to filter the real world as we do. Focus, attention, sleeping, dreaming, chasing rewards, staying alive... we do this without effort, but we've had 150k years (counting from first homo sapiens) to train our brains to filter out noise efficiently and act on meaningful signals.

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goatlover 3244 days ago
I always wondered how Skynet acquired the goal of preventing John Connor's birth, because that involved inventing time travel in order to have such a goal.
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