Dec Talking Meme Dec 27 - Artificial Intelligence

[bagheera_san]

blindmapmaker asked: Robots/AI or any more or less mechanical/digital life-form. Is SF better off with using them a lot or better without them? (The Culture vs. Vorkosigan for example).I love this question

Comments

[bagheera_san]

1000 GB, heh - on the other hand, the problem isn't how much information is stored in the brain, it's how that information is used by our brains that we can't quite figure out yet. Still, I think that if research continues, it won't always stay a mystery - and who is to say that AI needs to function exactly the same as our brains? That's one of my complaints regarding AI in most universes, they're too damn human. Of course we can't really write about something completely outside our experience/imagination, but it should be possible to think up computers that are little more different, shouldn't it?

"Three magnitudes more complicated than we thought" sounds awfully precise - if we don't know how it works, then how do we know it's three magnitudes and not five or ten? And if we do know that it's three magnitudes then we seem to understand the basics at least.

Huh, I'm more of a science-optimist than I thought!

I was only thinking of sentient AI, and if a bumbling servant type AI is sentient, then I'd still count it as category 2... C3PO, for example. Otherwise it's just a robot.

[blindmapmaker]

Ah yes, optimism. Who'd have thought I'd have a little trouble getting in the mood there? Apart from everybody who knows me that is ^^;

As for AIs being too damn human, I guess neural nets are still the best bet for producing something that can adapt, learn and in a way think. Also most fictional AIs are created by humans or their bumby-headed, ridged-nosed equivalents. And there's the whole "making in your own image" thing going on. I think the best fictional take on what ubiquitous, culture-forming human-made AI (organic and electronic) I've read is in the webcomic Freefall. They start out with simple three-laws robots and it turns hilarious pretty fast. They're still recognisably human, though, only quirked beyond belief.

I spent a fruitless time trying to hunt down that bit about the brain being more complex than assumed, but the flu must be messing with my brain hardware. The main point her was that apparently the charge level in neurons that isn't enough to fire a pulse was enough to influence the likeliness for other neurons on the same nerve cell to fire. Not sure whether that's enough to raise the complexity by three magnitudes, but it's not going to make things much easier. The point I've been trying to make is not that the brain is poorly understood, but that there is a lot of stuff going on in there and we might still be scratching on the surface. I mean the model we learnt is school is not so much wrong as extremely simplified. It's like telling a 13-year-old that the WWII Allies fought to free the world from an evil German dictator. It's not wrong, but you're still missing most of the essential parts.

And now I better stop, because I seem to be replying more to what I think you said instead of what you said. Stupid, complicated brain ^^;

BTW, don't tell me "Zakalwe" is featured in any more Culture novels. I've seldom been so disgusted by a protagonist by the end of a book. Love to hear more of Sma, but I'm not sure I could stand more disjointed drug- or near-death-fuelled episodes.

[bagheera_san]

Hmm, there is one novel (though I'm not telling you which) that has Zakalwe, but for most of the book the character is using a different name and doesn't actually remember who he is (so... a lot like Use of Weapons), and I guess if you've read Use of Weapons first (which I hadn't, then, because I'm reading them out of order) then you'd probably think "eh, what a rehash of Use of Weapons, except this guy is a little less awful" - and then in the end it turns out to be Zakalwe, which is... either a rather pointless twist or quite poignant given the theme of the book, I can't quite decide. Anyway, it means that after UoW, either the Culture decided to continue using him as an agent or he survives by some other means and ends up fighting on their side again.

Sma appears again in "State of the Art", a novella which is actually set on Earth in the seventies (the Culture visits it for an ethnographic survey and to decide whether to interfere), but that one has at least one utterly disgusting scene, too. I don't actually like Sma all that much, I think she's not one of Bank's better female protagonists.

Actually, now that I think of it, there are disgusting bits in almost every Culture novel and considering they're set in an utopian future, they're all rather depressing, because Banks never writes about the Culture being happy, he only writes about its worst crises (all the novels are set centuries apart). "Look to Windward" is pretty harmless (there are some scenes of war which are violent, and some people dying, but nothing really disgusting) and "Excession" would be okay except it has an alien race that is utterly horrible in every way and one Culture protagonist who *likes* them a whole lot - if you hate Zakalwe, then you'll hate him too - but you're meant to be disgusted by him. "Consider Phlebas" is very violent and I liked it a lot less than the other novels - its main protagonist is also on the wrong side, and I found it more depressing than Use of Weapons. My favorite is Surface Detail, but it is arguably the grossest of all, because it's a book about virtual hells - but the good guys win and it has two very good female protagonists.