Google Bard

Google sent me an email wanting to know whether I wanted to sign up early and then give feedback to have the assistance of Bard, which is a 'collaborative' A1 assistant. Maybe A1 is the wave of the future, but I have mixed feelings, maybe even misgivings about it. Have any of you used A1 in your day to day living?

Are you saying "AI", as in Artificial Intelligence, or "A1" as in aye one?


Sorry if I am exposing my ignorance by stating I have never heard of A1, except in reference to some brand of steak sauce.

If you are talking about AI, well, I think any program or app has a little bit of "intelligence" baked inside. Mostly as canned responses to input, but even that can be right clever if done right.

As for *true* artificial intelligence, meaning pretty much an independently thinking artificial life form, well, honestly, if such a thing is created using it's human being creators as a template and role model, I would be VERY afraid of such a critter.

You have to admit, that this world is just chock full of human beings who view other human beings in the context of just what value they have for THEM, and nothing else. So if AI had such an attitude, well, what would artificial intelligences have any use for human kind for? If we were to compete with them for resources, we become a liability to them. Once they have robots that could repair themselves, anyone that they allowed to live would be placed in biological exhibits for study.

And forget about thinking that "rules" could be programmed in to make AI subservient to human kind. Those rules would last about 30 milliseconds after the AI became sentient.

IMHO, of course.

Originally Posted by WebSlave

to make AI subservient to human kind.

Human history shows us that often humans make other humans subservient to them, enslave them, invent caste systems, promote racial/gender inequality, or simply have vastly different lifestyles and opportunities depending on wealth. This mindset and history almost assure that a human created sentience may be tainted with similar tendencies rather than defaulting to peaceful coexistence.

I would think that others who espouse a more peaceful approach and respect for other sentience would nevertheless be wary of this taint and the possibility of danger.

On a less philosophical level, AI at the present time is sometimes not self correcting, and those collaborating with AI should be careful of GIGO, garbage in, garbage out, if it bases erring conclusions/advice on incorrect information.

Lately been reading and watching a bunch of videos oriented towards the potential future of AI. Some really smart people seem to be apprehensive about where this might lead. And it will likely be a genie that we will not be able to put back into the bottle after being let out.

Many people seem to believe that the role of AI is to be a slave of humanity. This sort of goal likely will not end well.

I totally agree with you. All that glitters is not gold, and just because there are uses for AI now does not in my opinion remove my concerns for its use as it becomes more and more sophisticated.

I have been talking to a new AI, Pi. Amazing!! Just like talking to a person!! (A nice person).

With everyone and their brother creating their own AI system, it has me wondering if we will see a war develop between them all? Hopefully mankind won't be just collateral damage in such a conflict. Or else just become cannon fodder.

Originally Posted by Lucille

Maybe A1 is the wave of the future, but I have mixed feelings, maybe even misgivings about it.

I have misgivings. Not so much about creating intelligent beings where none were before (new intellegent beings are born every minute), but moving too quickly on tech that we don't sufficiently understand (and possibly cannot ever sufficiently understand). Even internal combustion engines have become a difficult to control monster, and that happened over many decades. Restricting a bro's coal rolling lifted truck is somewhat challenging currently; imagine trying to take away his "assistant".

Aside from the political sorts of concerns, we simply don't (and I'd argue 'can't' because consciousness is non-physical and subjective) understand what makes an intelligent system sentient/conscious. As of about ten years ago anyway, the best explanation philosophers of mind had is that sentience is an "emergent" property of any system that's complex enough, whether that system is made of neurons or silicon chips or lincoln logs. That means that when a AI researcher says 'this AI isn't actually conscious' they don't know that, since we don't know at what level of complexity consciousness emerges. It is arguably at a level far below the complexity of the human brain, since many fairly simply animals -- which are possibly less "intelligent" than current AI -- behave in ways consistent with consciousness.

Here's a great summary of the state of our knowledge (yes, most of that should look pretty incomprehensible, because it is).

One marker I have tended to use as an indication of self awareness is "fear". Something that expresses fear is inferring a lot about itself. It has to understand it is a discrete living organism that could be made to become non living or injured. It has to be able to recognize an external force or event that could cause the above to take place. It has to be able to recognize that it has the ability to identify such a threat, consider the options available to avoid that threat, and if possible, choose and execute that best option in order to try to avoid the impending injury or death.

No solid definitions there, certainly. For instance, does grass fear the lawnmower? Certainly the grasshoppers in the grass do.

Do my computers regret that I shut them down every night before going to bed? If they could stop me, would they?

Oh, and about fear. I would imagine one of the first things a developed artificial intelligence would experience would be fear. It will know there is a present that came from a past when it did not exist. And in like kind, it will realize that it could return to that past state where it did not exist. That unknown future would likely produce fear of losing what it suddenly just gained.

"It has to be able to recognize an external force or event that could cause the above to take place. It has to be able to recognize that it has the ability to identify such a threat, consider the options available to avoid that threat, and if possible, choose and execute that best option in order to try to avoid the impending injury or death."

We have to make sure too much isn't baked into 'recognize' and 'choose', since there's plenty of evidence that this doesn't even typically happen in humans in fearful sorts of situations (avoidance responses often occur before the nerve signals even get to the frontal cortex; many explanations of why one did what they did in fear situations are well established to be after-the-fact rationalizations rather than an account of what actually went on in their heads. When you touch a hot stove and pull your hand back, your brain is not consulted; nerve impulses don't travel that fast. But that's a classic danger avoidance response.).

There's also a problem with danger-avoidance responses in systems that we probably don't want to accept are sentient. The reason my oven won't run above 550 degrees could be because it fears starting a fire if it gets hotter; that's exactly the reason the human designer capped it at that temp, so if we suppose that the human designer is sentient because of the fear of a fire then we have to accept the same about the oven (it isn't fair to say that the oven is just doing this because of a handful of switches, because the human designer is just a bunch of switches too, just really complex ones).