Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

WCDT Strips 3011-3015 (27 - 31 July 2015)

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Akima:
Momo dancing.


--- Quote from: T on 29 Jul 2015, 19:58 ---Six km/h is just walking speed, not even walking fast. It is slower than those electric scooters for old people.
--- End quote ---
Yeah, but those scooters are capable of well above walking pace (depending on the model and speed setting). Many are capable of over 10km/h (around 3m/s), leading to questions about their safety on pedestrian footpaths. I can walk six kilometres in an hour (three laps of a 2km circuit round streets near my home, as measured with my bicycle GPS), but it is definitely a brisk walk for me.

ReindeerFlotilla:
I argued previously that uploading new skill to an AI in the QC verse is nontrivial.

Think of it this way. A baby is basically a blank slate, though that's not quite accurate.  The human brain does not fully wire until 4 months after birth (this makes sense. Our brains are friggin huge, and having them finish growing after they've passed through mom's  bits is actually reasonably nice to mom. Our oversized heads still cause issues there, but I can only assume they would be worse if we had even bigger heads). So that baby is more like the ingredients to make a blank slate.

The tricky bit is that there are pretty much no instructions on how to make the slate or what to write on it. There are rules. If A then B. Amazingly, these simple rules generate enormous complexity. The notable thing about that complexity is that it is all that baby's. Yours is totally different.

Let's say you could copy your brain to software. It would then be a faithful electronic avatar of you. Let's say you also had a copy of my brain. If you could identify the patterns in my brain that represented my wicked keen knowledge of ISO 9001, and put them in your avatar, the result wouldn't make a damn bit of sense. Because those representations are unique to me. It's a software code that only makes sense in my "OS."

But let's take a physical skill. Let's say we could abstract it somehow so that your avatar was simply given the instructions on how to move. Your brain is holographic. The only way to get that info in there as an innate skill would be to be able to read and understand your OS. But the only thing that can read that is you, or an exact copy of you. So the high-level abstraction would be about as good as a youtube video of how to do that thing. The only way you could learn to do it is by practice.

Consider the psychedelic paintings created by Google's image search AI. It might be that the folks at Google have too much free time, but that's not the case here. Image search is a group of neural networks. These networks are self-organized. All they had were simple rules. They programmed themselves. No one knows exactly how they do what they do. The image creation thing was a means to test what they know. Sure, if you ask the AI to find pictures of dogs, it does a fairly good job. But what does it think a dog looks like? The only way to know was to ask it to draw pictures of dogs (or more accurately, give it a picture of random noise and tell it, "There are dogs here. Find them," then each neural net layer does its level best to find the dogs, with layer 1 feeding its output to layer 2 and so on). One of the interesting results they got was that AI thought that dumbell weights had human arms attached to them.

Let's say Bing has it own, home grown net. And that net knows that dumbell weights are two masses connected by a pole of some kind and that human arms are something else. Even if you could isolate exactly what code "knows" this and give it google's AI, google's couldn't use it. To learn that arms are not dumbells, it has to practice the art of finding dumbells in arbitrary pictures that contain dumbells.

That Momo can't DL "dance" (which was a skill I used as an example, and one assumes she would to remove her secret shame) implies that she's a neural net and that no one understands her program. If we assume that there is an Ur-Momo, that she is copy of, then we must assume that the self-organizing method she uses to think and learn rewrites her network such that any copies of her would rapidly become unique people who can no longer share schemas.

Getting into odd spaces, we know she has drivers. It might possible to execute code that would tell her drivers to dance for her, but then she would not be dancing. She'd be a puppet in her own body. I'm guessing that AIs in the QCverse find that distasteful, if it is even possible.

snubnose:
Actually, since dancing is mostly about technique only, if Momo had a normal processor aside from her neural net, she can download programs into that quite easily.

The normal processor would then be able to give her positive or negative response, depending upon how well or not so well she would dance, thus enable her neural net to learn dancing - quite quickly, most likely. She would have a "perfect" teacher that could correct any error.

The normal processor could also do general computations much faster than her neural nets, so its reasonable to assume that she would have such a processor anyway.

Even human brains kind of have such a processor, though we cant use it for mathematical processing. Its the cerebellum. It contains a lot more computational cells than other parts of the brain, but its function seem to be much more automatized and mechanical, unable for creativity. Interestingly there are people who dont have a cerebellum who still seem to be able to live quite normally.

Once Momo would have learned the basics, she could turn the program off again and turn creative with her neural net.

ReindeerFlotilla:
It's not that easy, though. Not because it couldn't be, in theory, but because we have a fact. Momo, like Phil Collins, can't dance (whether she can sing is unknown).

If self=aware AI existed, we could fully judge the realism of the assertion that this is an issue such that it is her secret shame. They don't, so it's still SciFi. So then we have to ask if it is plausible SciFi. Based on what we know about neural nets, it is.

Based on what we know about Momo's subjective experience of the world (she explained it) she doesn't actually have "computer speed" versus the human mind. She thinks as fast as we do.

So, while any of us could learn to dance (assuming working legs), even with a perfect teacher, it would take time.

Now, I would say that the fact that Momo can't dance suggests she doesn't have the means to perform the trick you suggest, but if she did, the evidence of QC would suggest that she would only have a slight advantage over a human in terms of learning speed. This would be an investment of time. As I argued wrt to robot welders, the evidence of QC suggests that AI are like us. They pick and choose what they want to invest time in, and it seems likely, secret shame or not, it actually not high on Momo's priority list to be a better dancer.

BenRG:
Dancing perfectly to rhythm is a skill that can be taught and, one assumes, be encoded. Momo could indeed download a program to help her dance perfectly. However, it would look exactly what it is, a robot following a pre-encoded sequence of movements to a certain tempo. What she lacks (and a lot of people do) is the natural aptitude to dance from the heart.

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