There is a recent and interesting result by Miller et al. (2015, MIT) supporting the hypothesis that the cortex doesn’t process tasks in highly specialized modules
The actual paper is “Cortical information flow during flexible sensorimotor decisions”; it can be found here. I don’t believe the reporter’s summary is very accurate. They traced the flow of information in a moving dot task in a couple dozen cortical regions. It’s interesting, but I don’t think it especially differentiates the ULH.
.3. Good point. I’ll need to correct that. I’m skeptical of embarrassment, but surprise and fear certainly.
.4. Yes that’s correct. It perhaps would be more accurate to say more useful or more valuable. I meant more powerful in a general political/economic utility sense.
.5. I agree that the human brain, in particular the reward system, has dependencies on the body that are probably complex. However, reverse engineering empathy probably does not require exactly copying biological mechanisms.
.6. I should probably just cut that sentence, because it is a distraction itself.
But for context on the previous old boxing discussions. .. See this post in particular. Here Yudkowsky presents a virtual sandbox in the context of a sci fi story. To break out, he has to give the AI essentially infinite computation, and even then the humans also have to be incredibly dumb—they intentionally send an easter egg message. The humans apparently aren’t even monitoring their creation. etc. It’s a strawman. Later it is used as evidence to suggest that EY has somehow proven that computer security sandboxes can’t work.
However, reverse engineering empathy probably does not require exactly copying biological mechanisms.
This is just a pet theory (and being new to cognitive science this might well be wrong): Physical pain is some sort of hardwired thought disturbance, and the brain appears to have some sort of clarity attractor (which also explains intrinsic motivation and the reward we receive from Eureka moments and fun, cf. Schmidhuber). The brain appears to borrow the mechanism of physical pain for action selection on a high level if something severely limits anticipated prospects (that’s why rejection, getting something wrong and losing something hurts). Empathy is the ability to have pain caused by mirror neurons, which is just an activation pattern generated in an auto-associative NN due to the overlap of activation patterns of firsthand and non-firsthand experiences. That means, the body of an AI needs to be sufficiently similar to a human body for this auto-association to work. One way to achieve that would perhaps be to actually replace the brain of a deceased volunteer with an artificial one. The fact that we have empathy for animals might be a hint that it doesn’t need to be that similar, but on the other hand we are much more comfortable with killing a bug than with killing a mammal.
The actual paper is “Cortical information flow during flexible sensorimotor decisions”; it can be found here. I don’t believe the reporter’s summary is very accurate. They traced the flow of information in a moving dot task in a couple dozen cortical regions. It’s interesting, but I don’t think it especially differentiates the ULH.
.3. Good point. I’ll need to correct that. I’m skeptical of embarrassment, but surprise and fear certainly.
.4. Yes that’s correct. It perhaps would be more accurate to say more useful or more valuable. I meant more powerful in a general political/economic utility sense.
.5. I agree that the human brain, in particular the reward system, has dependencies on the body that are probably complex. However, reverse engineering empathy probably does not require exactly copying biological mechanisms.
.6. I should probably just cut that sentence, because it is a distraction itself.
But for context on the previous old boxing discussions. .. See this post in particular. Here Yudkowsky presents a virtual sandbox in the context of a sci fi story. To break out, he has to give the AI essentially infinite computation, and even then the humans also have to be incredibly dumb—they intentionally send an easter egg message. The humans apparently aren’t even monitoring their creation. etc. It’s a strawman. Later it is used as evidence to suggest that EY has somehow proven that computer security sandboxes can’t work.
This is just a pet theory (and being new to cognitive science this might well be wrong): Physical pain is some sort of hardwired thought disturbance, and the brain appears to have some sort of clarity attractor (which also explains intrinsic motivation and the reward we receive from Eureka moments and fun, cf. Schmidhuber). The brain appears to borrow the mechanism of physical pain for action selection on a high level if something severely limits anticipated prospects (that’s why rejection, getting something wrong and losing something hurts). Empathy is the ability to have pain caused by mirror neurons, which is just an activation pattern generated in an auto-associative NN due to the overlap of activation patterns of firsthand and non-firsthand experiences. That means, the body of an AI needs to be sufficiently similar to a human body for this auto-association to work. One way to achieve that would perhaps be to actually replace the brain of a deceased volunteer with an artificial one. The fact that we have empathy for animals might be a hint that it doesn’t need to be that similar, but on the other hand we are much more comfortable with killing a bug than with killing a mammal.