

The First Conscious Machines Will Probably Be on Wall Street - clarkm
http://mitrailleuse.net/2014/07/01/conscious-machines/

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patio11
This makes as much sense as saying the first robots capable of swimming will
be human-form-factor pack mules designed to take small waterproof packs from
China, swim over the Pacific, and deposit them in America. Container ships
make a heck of a lot more sense, right? Why optimize for pattern-matches-with-
a-human on a task that humans inherently suck at?

Incidentally, in quite possibly the only time I've ever agreed with him, Noam
Chomsky said that this sort of example makes debating whether a machine will
ever "think" pointless, since you're debating the word "think" in English
rather than any fact about material reality. We don't say that container ships
count as a machine "swimming", but Russians do.

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omonra
Actually in Russian a ship 'goes' :)

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gus_massa
Perhaps it’s only a Internet myth, but I remember a comment that said that in
Russian the _submarines_ swim (not the _ships_ ).

I tried to google it, but I was unlucky, especially because a submarine crew
decided to swim (without the submarine) in the arctic and make a video.

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Turing_Machine
In Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels (set in the Age of Sail), the
characters often refer to ships and boats as "swimming" (e.g., the ship's
carpenter saying "she'll swim" after repairing one of the boats).

While that's not a primary source, O'Brian is generally conceded to have done
painstaking research to make his novels as authentic as possible.

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hyperion2010
The stimulus space provided by wallstreet is incredibly impoverished. While a
bundle of algos that deal with text and numbers (and has quite a bit of
agency) might one day develop into something very similar to what we call
consciousness I suspect we will have an extremely hard time recognizing it. We
really have zero way to measure consciousness. Autonomous agency? Yes, there
are already machines that build their own models and take action based on them
(most people, rightly or wrongly, don't consider them to be conscious).
Perhaps wallstreet will seek to create algos that examine themselves as part
of their model of the world but that can lead to some nasty chaotic behavior,
and without having some sense of 'being' in the world that informs its own
actions I might argue that we can simply point to the Chinese room experiment
and suggest that we come up with better measures for whatever it is we refer
to when talking about consciousness.

I might also note that the author grossly oversimplifies human beings and the
vast amount and diversity of information our nervous system is continually
collecting and processing without our awareness that ultimately feeds into
consciousness.

Also worth noting that our experience of consciousness is very much a
fabrication created by our brain to impose consistency on the world (my go to
example, used here before being our blind spot). I'm not so sure that
wallstreet really wants to replicate the kind of 'filling in' that seems to be
a critical part of our conscious experience.

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mjfl
"today’s Wall Street is the first and perhaps only industry putting artificial
intelligence toward actual productive ends"

What are you talking about?

Google (search, navigation, advertising), Amazon (recommendations), Facebook
(advertising, whatever the hell else they do).

The United States Military (robotics, autonomous drones, scheduling, pretty
much all AI applications). UPS (scheduling). NSA (data mining metadata to
detect 'em terrorists), NASA (control systems, detection of objects).

You are right though, Wall Street's applications are much more productive.

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dennisgorelik
> Wall Street is the first and perhaps only industry putting artificial
> intelligence toward actual productive ends

Huh?

How about Google, Facebook and endless number of other businesses that use
artificial intelligence all the time in their programs.

