The analogy seems a bit disingenuous to me… the reason that it’s believable that this earthful of Einsteins can decipher the ‘outside’ world is because they already have an internal world to compare it to. They have a planet, there’s laws of physics that govern how this inside world works, which have been observed and quantified. As you’re telling the story, figuring out the psychology and physics is as simple as making various modifications to the physics ‘inside’ and projecting them onto 2D. Perhaps that is not your intent, but that is how the story comes across—that the world inside is pretty much the same as the world outside, and that’s why we can suspend disbelief for a bit and say that ‘sure, these hypothetical einsteins could crack the outsiders world like that.’ I think you can see yourself why this isn’t very persuasive when dealing with anything about a hypothetical future AI—it doesn’t deal with the question of how an AI without the benefit of an entire world of experiences to deal with can figure out something from a couple of frames.
The analogy seems a bit disingenuous to me… the reason that it’s believable that this earthful of Einsteins can decipher the ‘outside’ world is because they already have an internal world to compare it to. They have a planet, there’s laws of physics that govern how this inside world works, which have been observed and quantified. As you’re telling the story, figuring out the psychology and physics is as simple as making various modifications to the physics ‘inside’ and projecting them onto 2D. Perhaps that is not your intent, but that is how the story comes across—that the world inside is pretty much the same as the world outside, and that’s why we can suspend disbelief for a bit and say that ‘sure, these hypothetical einsteins could crack the outsiders world like that.’ I think you can see yourself why this isn’t very persuasive when dealing with anything about a hypothetical future AI—it doesn’t deal with the question of how an AI without the benefit of an entire world of experiences to deal with can figure out something from a couple of frames.