

AI: Is pain the key? - codecurve
http://bigfatdigitalwedding.wordpress.com/2012/04/04/ai-is-pain-the-key/

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mistercow
Nope. AI is a big, complicated field into which tons of man-hours have been
poured, and you aren't going to stumble upon the "secret ingredient" with your
vague armchair philosophizing about the nature of cognition.

Look, for example, at audio compression. The last few decades have seen a lot
of progress in this field, which lately has tapered off as most of the low-
hanging fruit has already been picked. Now, say I come along with nothing but
the most cursory understanding of how sound is encoded digitally, and say
"Well, until we figure out how to give a computer the qualitative experience
of _harmony_ , I feel that we will never have truly effective audio
compression." Would you say I was contributing anything of value to the
discussion?

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Apocryphon
Once again, the giants of sci-fi have beaten the scientists to the punch.

From Douglas Adams' Mostly Harmless:

A robot was programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches. This was
actually the most difficult part of the whole experiment. Once the robot had
been programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches, a herring
sandwich was placed in front of it. Whereupon the robot thought to itself,
`Ah! A herring sandwich! I like herring sandwiches.'

It would then bend over and scoop up the herring sandwich in its herring
sandwich scoop, and then straighten up again. Unfortunately for the robot, it
was fashioned in such a way that the action of straightening up caused the
herring sandwich to slip straight back off its herring sandwich scoop and fall
on to the floor in front of the robot. Whereupon the robot thought to itself,
`Ah! A herring sandwich..., etc., and repeated the same action over and over
and over again. The only thing that prevented the herring sandwich from
getting bored with the whole damn business and crawling off in search of other
ways of passing the time was that the herring sandwich, being just a bit of
dead fish between a couple of slices of bread, was marginally less alert to
what was going on than was the robot.

The scientists at the Institute thus discovered the driving force behind all
change, development and innovation in life, which was this: herring
sandwiches. They published a paper to this effect, which was widely criticised
as being extremely stupid. They checked their figures and realised that what
they had actually discovered was `boredom', or rather, the practical function
of boredom. In a fever of excitement they then went on to discover other
emotions, Like `irritability', `depression', `reluctance', `ickiness' and so
on. The next big breakthrough came when they stopped using herring sandwiches,
whereupon a whole welter of new emotions became suddenly available to them for
study, such as `relief', `joy', `friskiness', `appetite', `satisfaction', and
most important of all, the desire for `happiness'.

This was the biggest breakthrough of all.

Vast wodges of complex computer code governing robot behaviour in all possible
contingencies could be replaced very simply. All that robots needed was the
capacity to be either bored or happy, and a few conditions that needed to be
satisfied in order to bring those states about. They would then work the rest
out for themselves.

