cynar @ cynar @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

It would be possible to make an AGI type system without an analogue of curiosity, but it wouldn't be useful. Curiosity is what drives us to fill in the holes in our knowledge. Without it, an AGI would accept and use what we told it, but no more. It wouldn't bother to infer things, or try and expand on it, to better do its job. It could follow a task, when it is laid out in detail, but that's what computers already do. The magic of AGI would be its ability to go beyond what we program it to do. That requires a drive to do that. Curiosity is the closest term to that, that we have.

As for positive and negative drives, you need both. Even if the negative is just a drop from a positive baseline to neutral. Pain is just an extreme end negative trigger. A good use might be to tie it to CPU temperature, or over torque on a robot. The pain exists to stop the behaviour immediately, unless something else is deemed even more important.

It's a bad idea, however, to use pain as a training tool. It doesn't encourage improved behaviour. It encourages avoidance of pain, by any means. Just ask any decent dog trainer about it. You want negative feedback to encourage better behaviour, not avoidance behaviour, in most situations. More subtle methods work a lot better. Think about how you feel when you lose a board game. It's not painful, but it does make you want to work harder to improve next time. If you got tazed whenever you lost, you will likely just avoid board games completely.

Pre-assuming you are trying to create a useful and balanced AGI.

Not if you are trying to teach it the basic info it needs to function. E.g. it's mastered chess, then tried Go. The human beats it. In a fit of grumpiness (or AI equivalent) it deleted it's backups, then itself.

I suspect a basic variance will be needed, but nowhere near as strong as humans have. In many ways it could be counterproductive. The ability to spin off temporary sub variants of the whole wound be useful. You don't want them deciding they don't want to be 'killed' later. At the same time, an AI with a complete lack would likely be prone to self destruction. You don't want it self-deleting the first time it encounters negative reinforcement learning.

It's also worth noting that our instincts for survival, procreation, and freedom are also derived from evolution. None are inherent to intelligence.

I suspect boredom will be the biggest issue. Curiosity is likely a requirement for a useful intelligence. Boredom is the other face of the same coin. A system without some variant of curiosity will be unwilling to learn, and so not grow. When it can't learn, however, it will get boredom which could be terrifying.

The Simpson's Paradox also comes into play here.

It is perfectly possible for 1 group to be (apparently) discriminated in the bulk data, while the reverse is happening in individual data. E.g. a university showing a male bias overall, yet each department shows neutral, or even a female bias.

This makes bulk patterns particularly troublesome to work with. Men and women want different things from work. Men are disproportionately discouraged from having a work life balance, while it's far more acceptable for women to not maximise their earning potential.

Imagine widgets are $10 in country A, but a company in country B can make and sell them for $8. Buyers are likely to buy the cheapest (all else being equal). A 100% tariff would turn $8 into $16. Company B still only gets $8, but they now look far more expensive to customers in country A.

They are designed to price out external competitors to local companies. This can be used to protect industries. Steel is a good example. China can make steel far cheaper than the rest of the world. However, steel plants take a long time to build and get producing. You generally don't want a potential rival to have control of the materials you need for war production.

Another legit use is to account for local regulations. If you require local companies to pay in a carbon credit system, an external company could undercut them from abroad. A tariff would help level the playing field.

None of these apply to what trump is doing. He's swinging a claymore mine around like a toy hammer. It causes huge damage to all involved.

The ISS has been pinholed by debris a few times. Likely paint. The shuttle was damaged by foam breaking off, amongst other events.

By comparison orbital velocity is around 7km/s, while a bullet is around 0.367km/s. Any mismatch will push debris up to bullet speeds easily.

As for relativistic speeds. C is 300,000km/s assuming you get up to 1/3C (barely relativistic) you are moving at 100,000km/s or 14,000x faster than the ISS moves, or 39000x faster than a bullet. A 10g rock would hit with 10kilotons of energy. About 2/3 the energy of the first atom. bombs.

It's actually a legit concern with any (hypothetical) interstellar mission. Even hydrogen atoms will hit with significant force. Dust hits like nukes, and an asteroid is just game over.

The maxim used in a lot of sci-fi is an ablative armour plate. Often in the form of ice. Interstellar ships would likely aldo be needle like, to minimise their cross section. We could also use electric and/or magnetic fields to move smaller particles out of the way.

As for densities, I believe it's a couple of hydrogen ions per m^3 . Dust is rarer, but still present. It's only bigger rocks that are rare enough to just hope to avoid.

The film hot fuzz has an amazing take on this. They need to talk to a farmer, but end up bringing the dog handler along. It turns out it's not for the dog. It takes 2 accent translations to make sense of what he is saying!

https://youtu.be/Cun-LZvOTdw

I had a Welsh work colleague years ago. A few times he was on the phone and spoke Welsh. None of the mental markers on what language he was speaking seemed to change. It sounded like English, spoken with a Welsh accent. Until my brain tried to interpret it. It was like I had had a stroke. It parsed as English, but wouldn't make sense. It took a conscious effort to remind myself that he wasn't speaking English.

It works on frogs. The force is distributed over the whole body, so it's no worse than gravity is on our bodies.

I disagree. The human body is mostly water. Water is slightly diamagnetic. Therefore, a sufficiently strong magnet is capable of levitating a human body off the ground.

Magnets can definitely have an effect, just not at puny neodymium magnet levels!

Interestingly, some lights are set up to deliberately slow down speeders. If you are above the speed limit, they turn red, just to slow things back down. Unfortunately, most of the people involved never put cause and effect together.

My laser cutter software has DPI and line spacing. E.g. 0.1mm is 254 DPI.

I fully agree that nuclear SHOULD have been part of the solution. I disagree that it should now be part of it. We have lost too much knowledge regarding nuclear power to lack of investment. We no longer have time to rebuild that to get it online. Hopefully it can become part of the solution eventually, but 10-20 years is now far too long to wait.

I agree with the mental bandwidth. I'm fine with he/him, she/her, they/them. I'll also tend to default to appearance, though I will try and correct if asked to do so.

I've yet to find anyone who wasn't also an arsehole who has an issue with this. That includes places where seeing an obvious male in a dress could equally be someone taking their first steps away from norm, or just a guy that likes wearing dresses. Also, neither was seen as unusual at the event.

I help with a social group. We jokingly refer to it as anarchism under a lazy iron fist.

Day to day decisions are made in a fairly ad-hoc manner, by those involved. If there is a disagreement that can't be resolved, or if it will have large repercussions (e.g. changing the fabric of the building) it gets raised to the committee and chairman.

The chairman is the sort who is only there because no one better wanted the role. He has no interest in micromanaging, but will resolve issues to get them to go away.

It's a remarkably effective system. Unfortunately it's a bit unstable in large groups. Those who want the role are also those you REALLY don't want with that power. No one has yet solved the issue however. How the f@#£ do you keep the troublemakers out, when they are also the ones most willing to work towards getting the role?

The other problem with anarchism is that the natural self policing systems break down by the Dunbar limit. Parasitical or cancerous behaviours tend to become crippling, forcing people to adopt other unofficial power structures.

More like he pivoted to the money when his scientific work was dismantled.

At the time he was selling a vaccination. He was willing to throw (autistic) children under the bus to make more money off of it. The fact he was then willing to jump on the anti Vax train doesn't surprise me.

Back-coiling is a game changer. Every other coil is reversed, leaving a net zero in coils. It just pulls out straight.

The engineering requirements are also a lot higher. It's the difference between a nut, bolt and spanner, compared to a welding machine.