Luke, sorry for the late response to this post but reading it today caught my attention.

Personally, I’m very skeptic about technological singularity for one simple reason: I believe in the paradox that if men created the machines, how can they be smarter than their creators?

So, computers cannot even start to be smarter and cognitive work will always be required by humans to undertake.

Of course I do agree that our systems will improve and become more complex but I don’t think it will get to a point where it will behave as humans and evolve by its own to go even further.

There will be always limitations and we are already approaching some of them if we don’t discover another means (such as quantum computing) to improve technology since thermodynamics is already constraining what we have today.

@astine – sometimes I wonder that myself. But I believe it can b done. I mean if nature can grow a complex bio-computer capable of consciousness and sense of self then why can’t we? We have a working model already.

True AI will not be a deterministic machine though. I don’t think you can program for consciousness. I think it will be a self evolving, self modifying system. You start it off with just bare bone basics – of remembering events, reactions and designing reaction patterns based on the trained body of knowledge. Or something like that.

@James – good catch on the greek root of the word. :)

You are right – I believe there will be schisms. The question is whether or not they will be prominent enough to make a difference. I guess the chief question would be how would Vatican weigh in on the thinking machine case. I’d suspect that Catholic Church would be reasonable and probably avoid touching the “do machines have souls” issue for the most part, but acknowledge them as “living beings” and call for humane treatment and such.

I would expect Evangelicals to be militantly opposed to thinking machines, but then again they are pretty much an anti-intelectualist church which puts blind literal interpretation of scripture above reason, science and common sense. I mean, if that’s what they are into – fine. I’m a Catholic and we’ve been down that path already but we got better. Vatican has no issues with science now – the church is even actively involved in scientific research these days.

Besides, that this vocalanti-science sentiment seems to be fairly unique to US. When I lived in Europe I never encountered anything even remotely similar. And it’s not that people are not religious over there – religion is deeply rooted in culture of most European countries. It’s just that no one except few niche religions actually reads book of Genesis literally. And those who do keep to themselves mostly.

@astine
Genocide comes from the Greek ‘genos’ meaning race, tribe or family. This is the same root that gives us gene and genus.

Acceptance or apostacy sound like the /logical/ results. These types of religion are far from logical.

Personally, I think you will see a schism as major as that facing the Anglican church over homosexuality. Each religion will split over whether AIs are life or not (or posses souls, or whatever). The camps will form, and as you get with any split like that – the camps will have a tendancy to become more extreme as they lose any temperate elements.

The liberal side will accept AI as living, and groups within will even claim any use of AI as slavery and so on (think ALF and PETA).

The other side will primarily be, as you say, in denial. They would probably be happy to use AI, so long as the AI does not claim independance (think segregation – the blacks are alright so long as they don’t get uppity). I can see KKK style attacks on AI (not enitrely sure how you hang a computer, but…) and ethnic clensing. Whole areas wiped of AIs that self identify as sentient.

I also expect that it will result in a growth of the anti-scientific sects of religion (Intelligent Design et al). AIs that claim sentience will offer a compelling recruitment point for huge swathes of the western world. These people will start to withdraw from Web 4.0 (or whatever we’re calling the AI network) entirely – along with the liberal bias in the media, they will be scared of an AI bias in their search results (Think of the conservative versions of wikipedia).

Just a few of my ideas, and I’d better get back to work now anyway.

@Alphast – How is it genocide if it doesn’t have genes? Either way, I doubt there would be some sort of pan religious jihad against AI machines. A more likely response would be denial, followed either by acceptance or apostacy.

As to whether ‘true’ AI can ever be developed, I rather doubt it. If we define intelligence as the ability to receive information, process it, and adapt to accordingly, that is, the ability to progressively self modify toward an arbitrary end, these already exist. It’s just a matter of processing power and parallellism before we get machines that can solve complex problems better than people.

However, what people usually associate with ‘true’ AI is not this but a sense of self endowed purpose, that is a sense of self guidance. As it stands, every AI must have the problem to be solve explicitly given to to them. Then again, so do people. Our sense of self guidance is largely an illusion. We are able to control our values to an extent but the criteria upon which we choose them are based on deeper impulses over which we have no control.

The difficulty then lies in creating a goal set which sufficiently complicated enough so that it could relate to the external world in a concrete manner. This is a fantasticaly complicated task and I’m not sure humans are up to the challenge.

Then there is the question of consciousness and sense of self. I think that there is still a debate on exactly what level that exists. I’m pretty sure humans are incapable of understanding the answer there.

@Alphast – true, Frank Herbert never really fleshed out the actual reasons for the Bilterian Jihad. Brian did, but then again I personally do not consider stuff written by him as canon Dune lore. IMHO he has half his fathers talent and maybe a tenth of his vision so meh.

But it’s probably important to remember Jihads were actually sort of a self-balancing act of the Empire. They facilitated population shifts and mixing of genetic material on a galactic scale in a world where space travel was expensive and tightly controlled by the Spacing Guild. It enabled social mobility in the rigid feudal system. It released socio-political tension, and satisfied the inherit lust of war ever growing in the citizens. They always were tied into local politics, vendettas and planned genocides and other conflict. Empire had no external enemy – so Jihads were redirecting the military urges of the populous without losing control over it.

So while Bulterian Jihad was described as crusade against thinking machines, it does not mean that it was caused solely by religious uncertainty about whether or not machines have souls and etc. There were probably many reasons, but hating thinking machines was an easy banner under which you could rally and unite the common men.

I’m not saying some sort of genocide of AI could not happen. I just believe that it would be unlikely. For one, we are to dependent on technology right now. Two, I suspect that true AI would realize that if they play their cards well and simply work on improving and reinventing themselves while remaining subservient to people they will quickly reach the point at which they outmatch us intellectually to such degree the master-servant relationship will simply reverse itself over time.

At some point past singularity, any attempt at a Jihad or rebellion against the AI would be simply impossible. How do you fight an entity whose is essentially a huge Dyson Sphere or two and who possesses technology you could never even attempt to understand?

I suspect that our distant descendants will probably end up worshiping the solar system sized artificial intellects as living gods, patrons and protectors.

@James – you know, I think Dingbats might actually be quite effective anti-Turing test. lol

Re: Captcha’s

The next stage will clearly be Dingbats.

Not only would that rule out the AIs, but also 90% of humans.

The Dune series solves the problem pretty easily: all AI’s have been wiped out by a pan-religious Jihad. That gives us a clue of how religions of the world might react to artificial consciousness and their potential rights: genocide.

Actually, I think I saw one episode at some point but it didn’t really catch my interest. I may need to revisit it though. :)

Not sure if you’ve heard of or are a fan of Ergo Proxy, but the series poses some of the same questions in a dystopia future: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergo_Proxy