Well ...
Hi new-ish person! Very interesting post, and it leaves me with a few questions (Also: Do you have a CS-background? Would you be willing to expand a bit on the terms you used for us laypeople, like 'neural networks'?)
Well. In QC universe it doesnt seem that AI are based on neural networks, so only what we can apply here are general concepts.
What makes you think that QC-verse AI don't incorporate building blocks that
function like neural networks? We know of at least two realizations of the concept - the ones in our heads, and the ones simulated in our Turing-machine class computers. While the physical realisations of the concept are completely different, the operating principle is the same - so why should QC verses AI's not use the concept? It does appear to have it's uses.
What
Jeph said (3376) was (*):
"The AI mind, as those of organic beings, is self-constructing and self-organizing. It is an emergent system. Just as we do not fully comprehend the organic mind, the AI mind remains mysterious. However, we do have a better understanding of the building blocks. Quantum spin states in foamed nanocrystal lattices can be manipulated, and with a greater degree than possible with organic matter"
I see nothing here that would preclude those spin-states from simulating neural networks? Did I miss something?
It bugs me that I have no idea how feasible that idea of Jeph's would be, despite it actually touching on my job ... many-body spin lattice systems are a huge subtopic in both experimental and theoretical solid state physics research - though the more interesting ones (read: "more complex, and therefore potentially more useful') tend to feature many-particle correlations, which could make it hard to edit parts of the collective spin-state without changing entirely unrelated ones. It wouldn't be like editing DNA - more like DNA that sometimes spontaneously decides to re-write entire coding sequences of itself just because you exchanged one base-pair for another. So changing a comma might end up re-writing a sentence.
It's Good 'TechTheTech', in any case.
One of them is that it is subsymbolic and distributed, which would point to memories more akin to human ones.
Could you elaborate on the meaning of those two terms? And how they relate to memory? From what I've found, the term 'subsymbolic' relates to
processing, not necessary storage (though the latter is a part of the former, to some degree):
‘Symbolic’ and ‘subsymbolic’ characterize two different approaches to modeling cognition. Traditionally, as I understand it, this dichotomy pitted anything easily understandable as a symbol manipulation system (logic and symbol string rewrite systems and associated abstract computing machines that classify or generate strings of symbols - e.g. Turing machines, finite state machines) as fundamentally different in some meaningful way from basically just neural networks (the biological ones and the biologically-inspired but simplistic artificial models of them) and things like them. Crucially, representations and algorithms in the second approach don’t feature things you can point to that easily look like crisp, discrete, categorical symbols.
This divide coincided with other divides in AI and related philosophy; some of the associated buzzwords (for further exploration of your own) are "neats and scruffies", "embodied cognition" and "the symbol grounding problem" (see "the Chinese room argument" against the possibility of "strong AI"). The divide has become less consequential as time has gone on: for starters, the two flavors of cognition are not really at odds with each other - IIRC, there's a proof of the equivalence of some form of neural network and Turing machines (meaning that for any Turing machine, there exists at least one corresponding neural network that behaves the same and vice versa), and people have (probably always?) implemented subsymbolic models on/in very symbol system-y hardware and programming languages.
("What's the difference between symbolic and subsymbolic processing?")
I'm
pretty sure my squishy matter can handle
both symbolic and subsymbolic processing. The former is what I earn my croissants with, the latter enables me to prefer croissants over some healthy fruit-salad (and hands me a bad conscience to go along with the bakery, entirely for free ...
). But my copy of Mathematica is much better than I am at handling
certain parts of symbolic manipulations (It's still a crap physicist, though. Even a bad
'symbolic computer' - For starters, it doesn't know what to
do with its abilities)
So I'm not sure whether 'symbolic' and 'subsymbolic' is analogous to the 'human/machine'-divide. Mostly because nearly all humans can do both.
Hovewer, we know that AI here have their OS, files and whatnot. So i envision that there are two complementary memory systems. One being ordinary files and other being memories in AI itself. Files probably wouldnt be real memories but something more akin to notebook in your mind, but that would be just speculation.
I'm definitely able to memorize a small notebook - just not very reliably, or quickly. And unlike other memories - smells for example - I'd be able to access those
'data memories' nearly at will. Just like opening a file in my mind ... By contrast: Right now, I cannot recall the smell of weed to my mind - but I
know I'd instantly recognize it if I smelled it. So it seems I also have two different, complementary memory systems that look pretty similar to what you describe. Soooooooh ... would your hypothetical "QC-verse AI Mod 2.1 by Mehre" really be
that different from a human mind? Or from a machine?
I can do anything your QC-AI can - maybe not as fast, or as reliable, but I have the ability. But I can also do what a standard computer can do.
Even an optical link goes through a (small) flaw in the shielding, though.
If the EMP mostly sticks to the microwave-part of the spectrum, you'd probably be fine with apertures
smaller than 1mm. From the pulse-shapes I've seen, it looks like only EMP's from nukes are really delta-distribution-like, and therefore cover large parts of the whole EM-spectrum. The other, non-nuclear EMP pulse-shapes were significantly broader (and therefore more restricted in their 'Fourier-space support', or bandwidth)