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How many AIs are there? What are the social consequences?

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Is it cold in here?:
From IBM mainframes, IEFBR14 was an executable parallel to /dev/null. It was a program to do absolutely nothing.

Its change log featured multiple bug fixes.

Getting back to "how many?", we see synthetics as a substantial minority in street scenes and we have no idea how many are in appliances or server farms. Tens of millions at the very least seems plausible. In the case of multi-node AIs like Eminence Grise, it would be a challenge to figure out how to count them.

Gyrre:

--- Quote from: Is it cold in here? on 31 Oct 2020, 19:19 ---From IBM mainframes, IEFBR14 was an executable parallel to /dev/null. It was a program to do absolutely nothing.

Its change log featured multiple bug fixes.

Getting back to "how many?", we see synthetics as a substantial minority in street scenes and we have no idea how many are in appliances or server farms. Tens of millions at the very least seems plausible. In the case of multi-node AIs like Eminence Grise, it would be a challenge to figure out how to count them.

--- End quote ---
Hmmm........counting EG types would be difficult. The three immediate solutions I can think of would be to a) use decimals with the number after the decimal indicating the total number of nodes, b) some form of subscript or superscript that functions like option a, or c) borrow the way we count infinities; standard integers for standard AI and start with aleph-null for Yay and any other 'arcteuthus' level AIs.

FreshScrod:
I'm not an expert, but wouldn't something like Incompleteness be more appropriate against proving the correctness of computer programs? The halting problem seems kinda unrelated. Anyway, I think the key point's supposed to be that we should be proving what we can prove, to reduce the uncertainty in our systems. Sorry that this is off-topic for this thread, I just wanted to say.
More on-topic, I think there's something to the idea that there aren't a few dozen Yay Newfriend nodes. I'm guessing there's probably more than 5, even assuming the charging ones are just spares ready to embody, because it seems unlikely that they all happened to be at the same place at the same time given their penchant for just showing at a perfect opportunity.
...
I think the weird thing for me, would be reading about how many home-appliances are already sapient, and I'd start going around "talking to the toaster" because who-knows, because for some reason "they're" putting computers and AI into everything nowadays even if it's literally doing nothing better than a cleverly designed "dumb" version. As you might guess, I'm not a big fan of using "AI" so I don't have much "smart appliances" around my home, at least that I know of, so I'm imagining I'd be talking to myself, really, just in case there's an off-chance that I do have one of those around. And actually, that's probably not enough, if the hardware doesn't have a microphone. I'd probably have to go around each piece of hardware and examine it for signs of sapience, whatever those are. That might be like a first-contact type scenario, so trying to send it some simple, but non-trivial math?
Not sure how I'd react if there were in my home, but I probably have time to prepare for that possibility.

notStanley:
On proving a programs "correctness":  Not only worry about exploitable bugs, but misuse of documented features!  Some movie and document formats allow embedded calls to external programs (see any article about social engineering to get the target to open a file). 

Then in this case of a legacy format where they do not have a current reader.  Where are they getting a reader?  Is it a "clean" copy from a known vendor?  Or did they have to fall back to searching forums for a download link?  While that download may do a perfect job as a reader, how do they know that is all it does?  Malignant actors will seed download sites with utilities that also call home to pull down additional malicious tools when run by a user with the required administrator privileges.

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