
Ancient dreams of intelligent machines: 3,000 years of robots - Hooke
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05773-y
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a_d
The article’s final paragraph: >”Every robot rebel has its benevolent
counterpart, such as C-3PO in the Star Wars franchise or the android child
David in Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Both kinds
of stories, the hopeful and the fearful, reveal to us our complex emotional
responses to AI. Understanding these and their deep history is crucial to
making the most of life with intelligent machines.”

The authors interchangeably use robots, automata, AI (meaning AGI, I am
guessing) — that makes for a confusing read. If they mean AGI, then _nothing_
about how humans dealt with robots will likely prepare us for how to deal with
an exponentially fast learning, super smart, intelligence. I would argue that
learning from history would be _anchoring_ ourselves to wrong ideas (ideas of
incrementalism). To prepare for AGI, we need to think quite differently and
radically, in some sense.

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leoreeves
Indeed, I recommend _Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies_ by Nick
Bostrom, which explores this topic in great depth, including the control
problem:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_control_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_control_problem)

~~~
Isamu
Thanks, I will read this. I think in general the reasoning I see in this area
is very poor. I think, since people have a hard time understanding their own
intelligence, let alone sub- or super-intelligence, that they just project all
kinds of human foibles onto it.

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AndrewOMartin
The oldest actual automata mentioned in the article is explored (including
mechanics and a demonstration) in this YT video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LBlusUD3Kg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LBlusUD3Kg)

Note that Hero is credited, and the date is 10-70 AD, but Hero's contribution
was to posit the mechanism by which the theatre worked, which was first
described by Philon of Byzantium in the late third century BC! [Source: My
thesis, submission deadline 28 September 2018 ;)]

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al_ramich
3,000 years of imagination and it falls on this generation and our kids to
define how it will all play out.

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rhaps0dy
Born too late to explore the world

Born too early to explore space

But born just in time to explore the consequences of strong AI!

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YeGoblynQueenne
>> But born just in time to explore the consequences of strong AI!

There's nothing to suggest we know how to create strong AI, or that we will
have any idea any time soon. It will most probably take several human
generations before we can even get close to anything resembling human
intelligence implemented in software or hardware.

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emiliobumachar
What signals do you expect will be in place in the world five years before the
creation of human-level general AI?

Dog-level general AIs barking around?

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al_ramich
Think there are a few of those around already. Guys at Boston D seem to have a
keen interest in creating dog-level general AIs with some pretty impressive
robotics HW.

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simonh
The Boston Dynamics robots don’t have the computational AI equivalence of even
a fruit fly - and not even that by many orders of magnitude. Dogs use their
intelligence for an awful lot more than just walking around objects.

Dogs have complex social hierarchies and social behaviour, a wide range of
emotional responses, they communicate, participate in group tactical hunting
activities requiring planning and executing coordinated attacks, they exhibit
sexual behaviour, they can learn to respond to audible and visual commands.
They are also vastly more agile than the Boston dynamics robots, able to climb
three dimensional environments, jump through gaps and swim, and they can
practice and independently choose to learn to do these things entirely
autonomously.

~~~
al_ramich
Not sure I implied that Boston Robotics dogs have dog level intelligence but
you have to admit that they are making fascinating progress around HW and
robotics. SW/AI side is definitely still at the basic, single function type of
intelligent level and will take much longer to achieve. But progress both on
HW and SW side and the pace at which the progress is happening is pretty
impressive. Clearly, the AI side and the current approaches with the focus on
machine learning and neural networks will need to evolve to be much more
multifunctional/general. Who knows maybe it will be Machine Learning 2.0... or
it might be a completely new approach to AI more aligned to biotech/human
brain or maybe something completely else. Time will tell.

