Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
Robots and love
Kwark:
Every day, it saddens me to witness the vanity of my fellow humans.
Is love anything more than chemistry ? I don't think so.
It's only a matter of years before computers can emulate humanity, and they most likely will have to bridle themselves to mimic our many flaws.
Like the DOSBox we use to play vintage video games on our absurdly fast computers.
Our brains are nothing more than organic processors, and I call vain anyone who claims otherwise, unless they can show some proof or at least concrete reasoning for it.
Mad Cat:
Or I finished reading the textbook a long time ago and put it down.
And I'd really like to see see an example of your "small system" that can exhibit intelligent behaviour, let alone emotional behaviour.
Kwark: "Love? Overrated. Biochemicly no different than eating large quantities of chocolate."
Near Lurker:
--- Quote from: Mad Cat on 06 Sep 2011, 19:37 ---Or I finished reading the textbook a long time ago and put it down.
--- End quote ---
Yeah... not really buying it. Thinking QSAT or factorization were NP-complete might be ascribed to being rusty. Thinking the halting problem is NP-complete, alongside the implication either that NP-complete problems can't be solved at all or that the halting problem is exponential-time, can't be. Everyone forgets a lot of material from high school, too, but if someone told you that the fundamental theorem of calculus were the chain rule, you'd think that person failed high school!
--- Quote from: Mad Cat on 06 Sep 2011, 19:37 ---And I'd really like to see see an example of your "small system" that can exhibit intelligent behaviour, let alone emotional behaviour.
--- End quote ---
...okay.
This is completely true.
It's just that, by that point, seeing the rest of the post, especially that first paragraph, I was in full-on condescension mode. Even though it was absolutely right in context, I saw a statement of a rule of thumb not true in the general case and pounced.
Yyyeaaahhhhh...
Skewbrow:
Too much out of context quoting taking place here :x. So I will add some? :evil:
1. Moore's law is bound to fail sooner rather than later. There simply cannot be perpetual exponential growth. See the discussion on XKCD-forum on the strip about compound interest for some numbers.
2. I'm with Near Lurker on all counts related to complexity: NP, NP-hard etc. @MadCat: What it means that a small instance of a difficult problem can still be completely analyzed is, perhaps, best exemplified by the following. The general travelling salesman problem (= given a map and a number of cities, find the shortest route going via all the cities) has no known polynomial time algorithm. Yet it is trivial to solve the problem, when the number of cities is small, say 8, by the brute force method of checking all the 40320 possible orders of visiting the cities. When n=48 (the state capitals being the standard example), the solution is not known, and exhaustive checking of possibilities is out of the question. The question "is there a route of combined length less than a given figure" is in NP, because it is trivial to quickly check a suggested solution. Finding that suggestion OTOH...
3. I apologize for bringing up the catch-phrase "emergent behavior". I certainly won't even attempt to define what it means :evil:
4. AI research is, indeed,making progress, but I don't know where they are, and what it means, so I won't comment for fear of saying something untrue. Thanks for the links, Carl-E.
--- Quote from: Kyrendis on 06 Sep 2011, 12:01 ---
I've learned throughout history that most of the time when somebody says "that will never be done", they end up being proven wrong in short order. Complexity is not an excuse for something being impossible, just that it's complex. Weather predictions are complex, and we are getting better and better at it as faster computers emerge.
If Moore's Law holds or adapts to a new substrate, by 2050 $1000 worth of computing power will be the equivalent processing power of every human brain on the planet. At that point, simulating your mind wholescale will be trivial.
--- End quote ---
5. Selective sampling at work there. Most of the time when a reputable scientist says that something is impossible, it truly is impossible. The occasions, when s/he is wrong just get a lot of pulicity.
6. Our ability to predict weather over a longer period is not limited by lack of computing power. The butterfly effect takes care of that, because more accurate prediction would need more accurate data on the current situation (=wind speed, humidity, temperature at *every frigging point in the atmosphere* - ok, not every point, but the density of the network of sensors places an upper bound on the duration of the validity of forecast) that it is clearly impossible to get. Simulating a mind is more or less the same, but hard to tell exactly depending on how many parameters we need to determine the behavior of a single neuron.
[edit: added the two words in bold]
akronnick:
Can Robots Love?
Short answer: There is no short answer.
Longer answer: To answer that we must first answer two other questions:
* 1.) What is a Robot?
* 2.) What is Love?
I think much of the disagreement about this question stems from inconsistent understanding of the answers to the two questions.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version