

Digital immortality, true AI and the destruction of mankind - daivd
http://fakeguido.blogspot.com/2010/06/digital-immortality-true-ai-and.html

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Unseelie
The reason this isn't the accepted ideal method for building an AI is that it
-doesn't build an AI-.

A decision tree attached to your incoming email doesn't constitute an AI; its
only automation. It isn't making decisions, and a structure of these decision
trees, even complicated enough to perfectly mimic a person, is not an
intelligence, its a philosophical zombie.

Yeah, it is theoretically possible to build a model of me that mimics me
entirely by clearly defining the decision trees, but that's not the problem of
AI: Its easy enough to teach it to do something, but hard to build something
that actually learns.

~~~
hegemonicon
A philosophical zombie is not a decision tree incapable of learning. A
philosophical zombie is something that is exactly like a human in every way
except that it lacks consciousness. The concept has more than a few problems -
see <http://lesswrong.com/lw/p7/zombies_zombies/>

If a decision tree (or a clever algorithm or whatever) REALLY did perfectly
mimic a thinking human (including our ability to learn), do you still think it
wouldn't REALLY be intelligent? That there's some sort of important,
qualitative difference between being shifted through a decision tree and
sensory inputs and feedback loops building up neuron action potentials? That
may be true, but the evidence is heavily stacked against such a worldview.

That said, I agree that this is a bad approach to AI. It's not like people
haven't been trying to stitch together various subproblems of intelligence for
the better part of 50 years.

~~~
ThomPete
But 50 years is hardly a long time is it?

