Topic: Machines and money - page 4. (Read 12830 times)

On the contrary, I think this will make for a great movie.

Would machines with a superior intellect have feelings? Why would they not allow themselves to be owned?

No, but the hypothesis of Atheist was that jobs would be gone long before we had such intelligent machines.

Would a machine with a superior intellect allow itself to be owned by "haves" as you put it?

I would think that that is very simple: by living off your investments in those machines, or in the machines that produce those machines, or in the machines that produce the machines that produce those machines....

Labor as the main source of income will be replaced by dividend on investment as the main source of income for humans.

You will have the "haves" who are invested in that, and the "have nots".   Those last ones can do their own economy amongst themselves, or starve.  If they starve, then the humanity that remains is entirely invested in the robot economy, and will live off their automatically generated dividends.  What your (great grand) parents have invested in, will determine your standard of living.  But if you have enough of it, you can still play on the stock market, to try to improve your situation (or fail, and starve).

Economic Darwinism, I'd say.

Human labor as a source of income will be over.  Except maybe in the sex industry. 

It doesn't take artificial intelligence to replace most jobs, collapsing our current economy because more than half of the population will need to be on welfare or something, since they will be perpetually unemployed.

No artificial intelligence can remove subjective valuation existing in human mind which is a prerequisite for trade between people. Money just facilitates this trade. So, I think, there will always be room for a monetary system of sorts. Furthermore, there are things which involve competition between humans, and human-like biped robots won't change a thing about it. It doesn't really matter that a supercomputer can smash to pieces any world chess champion by now (and even more world chess champions by then), people still play and will play chess against other people (just an example). And no no-need for work will ever change this either.

Olympic champions are the hardest working people in existence.

By the time we have human-like biped robots walking around and with a brain superior to actual humans we'll be way past needing to work, or at least 99% of tasks will already be automated. You tell me how an economy is supossed to work under a monetary system when 99% of jobs are being automated by machines.

I would like to know why it is a given that all forms of money would become obsolete when humans creat a new form of life that would be more intelligent than themselves. What actually makes you think so? I could weigh in as to why it wouldn't be that (simple), but first I want to hear your ideas (reasons and arguments before all).

It is certain that we're not the only animals who possess the intellectual, cognitive and emotional capacities. Life has survived 3,7 billion years on Earth, most of that time without humans. Does this not speak to the intelligence of all living things? But I am sure that someday humans will create machines intelligent enough to be superior species. When this will happen all forms of money will become obsolete.

Are you padding your post count? Get out of here.

I don't believe you, you meant quite the other, namely, that intelligence doesn't need consciousness at all. Why don't you just recognize that intelligence is not objective, that there is no such thing as intelligence without prior conscious thought, and that you were plain wrong stating that?

There is no such thing as intelligence per se. A calculator is not intelligent by any means, it is a tool, intelligent is its owner.

The capacity to solve the problem is objective of course.  A calculator solves objectively an addition problem.  An AND gate solves objectively a logical problem.  What exactly is an "addition problem" is subjectively defined, because you're right, the very fact that additions are a problem to be solved is indeed only definable by a sentient being.  A non-sentient being couldn't care less whether two numbers resulting in a third number have any "purpose" (because a non-sentient being doesn't care about anything).

So I agreed that in the concept itself of "problem", lies the need for a goal, for a purpose, and hence for a good versus bad experience, and thus a sentient being.  In a world without a sentient being, it doesn't matter at all whether there is a device that can do something like "additions".

However, once "doing additions" is recognized as a purpose by a sentient being, the observation whether or not a system can perform such an addition (whether it has this intelligence) is objective of course.  That's what I meant.

There's no philosophical debate as whether a calculator can or cannot solve an addition problem.  A working calculator can, and a broken one can't.

Artificial Intelligence has bean dead for thirty years, after someone oversold it by stating that it was possible to create a program that could answer all questions, it was called the General Problem Solver. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Problem_Solver

This obviously contradicts what you have been saying in this thread before. You said that intelligence is objective ("Intelligence is observable, objective and so on"). but now you turn your thought 180 degrees and state that intelligence is something that is able to solve a problem defined by a conscious being. By this you confirm that intelligence is also subjective. Thus an AND gate taken as such is not intelligent but only if it serves some purpose. But even in this case it is not an AND gate's intelligence but intelligence of him who assigned its purpose (since intelligence lies in a purpose, not in a device that fulfills it).

As simple.

You are right that in order for even a problem to be declared, and a solution to be declared, a purpose needs to be defined, and purpose means consciousness (because "good" versus "bad" experiences).  However, consciousness is only necessary to DEFINE the problem, not to solve it.

As such, you need a sentient being to RECOGNIZE intelligence.

I call something intelligent if it can SOLVE a problem (as DEFINED by a consciousness).

That is: an purpose is necessary to define a problem and its solution:
"the addition of two numbers".  In order to define that, you need to say that there's a purpose in the notion of "addition". 

However, a thing that can PERFORM the addition is intelligent in my view.  A hand calculator has a certain amount of intelligence (but probably no form of consciousness, although we never know it).

Once, as a conscious being, you have recognized a problem with a purpose, you can recognize any system that can solve it, and as such, declare it to be intelligent.

Once, as a sentient being, you've recognized a system that is intelligent, you can just as well ASSIGN IT A HYPOTHETICAL conscience, for which its good feelings are "solving the problem" and its bad feelings are "not solving the problem".  Because you can never know, so you can arbitrarily assign subjective experience to just any physical system.

This is why you can, if you want to, assign subjective experience to a calculator, who has "good experiences" whenever a calculation is performed correctly, and 'suffers' when it is not.  Whether these experiences are really subjectively lived or not, is impossible to know.  Most people would think that a hand calculator doesn't really "experience feelings", but there's no way to know.

As I said above, true intelligence is not possible without consciousness, though these are different notions indeed (as thought and mind). If we assume the existence of intelligence without consciousness, we inevitably expose ourselves to the issue of purpose. That is, what is the purpose of this intelligence? And the purpose of intelligence cannot stem from intelligence per se. In this way, purposeless intelligence is an oxymoron, and it is mind that provides purpose to intelligence. In other words, intelligence is a device of mind for reaching its ends. That, simply put, sums it up.

Of course nature is intelligent.  The universe is probably the most intelligent device in existence.  The amount of entropy it can produce is gigantic.
However, I doubt that the universe is sentient.  If we say it is, we enter in totally metaphysical or even theological considerations.

Intelligence is the ability to solve a problem.  The greater the problem space, the higher the level of intelligence of course.  An AND gate is really really the lowest form of intelligence.
Being able to do arithmetic is a higher form of intelligence than being able to do a logical operation because the problem space is bigger for arithmetic.

Being conscious or sentient is something totally different: it means that subjective sensations which are "good" or "bad" are experienced by the being, that somehow emerge from the behavioural, physical construction.  

If it can solve a problem, it is intelligent.  If it can suffer or be happy, it is conscious.

This is not intelligence by any means. It is an interaction of two (or more) different physical processes or forces that are working against each other. Is there anything intelligent in them as such? I would most likely agree that whoever coupled these processes in a device is intelligent, but then we should also declare nature as being intelligent, since there are a multitude of such "intelligent devices" created by natural forces alone (they say that at one time there had even been a working natural nuclear fission reactor somewhere in Africa). As to me, true intelligence means a conscious effort.

I didn't understand your example. Keep it simple!