Kurt

From Wizardsforge

Hi I'm Kurt and this is my personal page. I don't have much time to put anything here now and any wizard worth his salt should not reveal too much at a time. I'm the wizard that started this wiki, but you are the person that can make it cool. Actually I don't consider myself a real wizard in any particular field, my interests are to wide for me to have the time to become truly expert in any one area. It will be up to you to help fill in the blank spaces in my own knowledge as well as other wizards, apprentices, and visitors.

This particular wiki is still quite new, please help to make it a better resource. I built it with the adage, "Build it and they will come." Also quite apt is the WordNet example for 'adage':

Letting "I dare not" wait upon "I would,"
Like the poor cat i' the adage.          --Shak.

I just hope the outcome I seek is fairer than that of the Lady Macbeth, who's words were intended towards ambition and murder. My intent is to help shine the light of knowledge. I hope to have at least a minor success.

Thanks for visiting, hope to see you again. --Kurt 07:52, 15 November 2006 (EST)

some thoughts on AI and singularity

I haven't been using this at all lately but I may as well revive it a bit and use it as a place to post some thoughts that I might want others to view and perhaps even comment upon.

To my thinking I don't think we can have true understanding without some common experience. The common experience need not be identical but similar enough to provide for understanding. I won't completely understand child birth from the mother's point of view unless there are some radical changes to medicine that allow men to gestate and even then I'd be experiencing the event from a completely different point of view. However, I can expand my own experience of pain combine it with my experience as a male parent and combine it with my wife's descriptions and get a decent but never complete understanding of the experience.

Even with a shared experience we can't with certainty say that we experience something in an identical way. I have no way to know that my experience of the color blue is the same as anyone else. All we can really do is figure that the experiences we have are close enough to the experiences of our fellow sentient beings to allow for us to form a basis of communication. A dictionary, no matter how well crafted is merely the symbolic visual representation of sounds that are also symbols for shared experience. Without the shared experiences no meaning whatsoever can be taken from a dictionary.

The universe is much more rich and complex than our limited human bodies can experience. All we know comes from an interaction with our environments. I have always thought of singularity as the totality of the universe without space, time, or division, more of an issue to be taken up by astrophysicists than computer programmers. I am a bit reluctant to accept a definition of singularity as the point where a human creates a mind with more intelligence but as long as we all agree on a particular symbol representing a particular concept I'll go along.

The problem of common experience in communications can't be ignored. I'm afraid, however, like Socrates I may mostly bring up questions to cherished assumptions rather than making any useful suggestions for answering them, so, I'll try my best not to dwell too much on questioning and at least try to address some possible solutions.

First I think we need to create or simulate a common experience. Without common experience the passing of the Turing test, at best, could only amount to a nifty parlor trick that may or may not return any useful results. I think it is also necessary to have some form of motivation, drives, needs even if entirely artificial.

I can think of times I have seen children not know the difference between a real person and a video recording, so merely believing that it is a person on the other end of a computer terminal rather than a computer might not be the best test. I have spoken to tech support people on the phone who were functionally equivalent to an automated service and were merely following a preplanned script. Perhaps the real test for AI should be a meaningful and appropriate response to an inquiry rather than a human impression about who/what is on the other end.

A long time ago I came to the conclusion that life is its own purpose and to ask the meaning of life is quite silly. Good and evil are also relative terms when taken in a universal context.

".. there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so... " Shakespear

Funny, I keep turning to Will to help me make a point here.

OK, let us assume that we will never be able to reach practical answers to some questions and that in universal terms it doesn't even matter if our entire world blew up in a big puff of smoke. Any tool ever made can be put to use for relative good and evil. I don't want to just gloss over this issue, I think we should consider carefully before blindly creating powerful tools and tossing them out in the world. By historical record it is apparent that humans have at one time or another misused every tool ever made. It is also apparent that if something has been shown as possible someone will figure a way to make it happen.

I believe that these tools will be built whether we like it or not. I would much rather see this kind of technology available to everyone than to be limited to a small group of people who are sure that their way of thinking is correct. No matter how much their views coinside with my own I think I'd rather take my chances.

Recent Links of Interest

Singularity as a term applied to AI

http://yudkowsky.net/tmol-faq/tmol-faq.html http://yudkowsky.net http://www.singinst.org/

Native American views on economics and society

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/future/economics.html

Lazy Man's Guide To Enlightenment - a practical new age view of higher consciousness and life (I highly recommend )

http://freespace.virgin.net/sarah.peter.nelson/lazyman/lazyman.html http://www.shmoome.org/golas.html

Semantic Web

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

--Kurt 23:48, 19 June 2007 (EDT)

some thoughts about gaming

Create ARG and let folks take parts. Filter out best story lines by letting cream rise to the top. Develop fan based system where the most rabid fans can rate each other as with trigger street. http://www.triggerstreet.com/gyrobase/index