
The Infinite Space Between Words - selectnull
http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-infinite-space-between-words/
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delluminatus
This raises an interesting question: If there was a conscious AI system
running on a computer, what kind of time scales would it actually perceive?
It's not like the AI would experience time on a CPU cycle-by-cycle basis.

I would be surprised if we had an AI that perceived time in "steps" smaller
than 10ms, unless it was a system specifically designed for extremely fast
reactions. I would guess that an AI would be backed by, basically, an event
loop that handles "sensory" data X times a second. Sure, it might do a lot of
computation in each tick. But even if it does extensive predictive simulation
or data analysis, I doubt the AI would be conscious of that simulation
process, any more than we are aware of our own internal predictive models. We
just _predict_.

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DanAndersen
It's kind of the opposite of what you're talking about, but I'd recommend
reading "Permutation City" by Greg Egan (if you haven't already). The main
premise is that in the future, human mind uploading is possible, but there's
some upper limit on computation that prevents the uploads from running at real
time. Instead, they are simulated at something like a ratio of 17 to 1. The
story explores concepts of isolation as a growing society of uploads becomes
more and more detached from the causality of "reality." The real world isn't a
place you can conveniently interact with when you run 17 times slower than
everyone in it. Plus there are interesting segments about an uploaded person
having himself simulated with greater and greater real time between each
simulated timestep, and with "skipped frames" that are imperceptible to the
one being simulated (e.g. counting from 1 to 10, where you have the memory of
having said "9" and being about to say "10" but the "frame" where you said "9"
was never actually simulated and it skipped ahead).

