Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Sentient Beings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sentient Beings. Show all posts

Monday, May 21, 2018

A Mathematical Framework for Superintelligent Machines

Daniel J. Buehrer
IEEE Access

Here is an excerpt:

Allowing machines to modify their own model of the world and themselves may create “conscious” machines, where the measure of consciousness may be taken to be the number of uses of feedback loops between a class calculus’s model of the world and the results of what its robots actually caused to happen in the world. With this definition, if the programs, neural networks, and Bayesian networks are put into read-only hardware, the machines will not be conscious since they cannot learn. We
would not have to feel guilty of recycling these sims or robots (e.g. driverless cars) by melting them in incinerators or throwing them into acid baths, since they are only machines. However, turning off a conscious sim without its consent should be considered murder, and appropriate punishment should be administered in every country.

Unsupervised hierarchical adversarially learned inference has already shown to perform much better than human handcrafted features. The feedback mechanism tries to minimize the Jensen-Shanon information divergence between the many levels of a generative adversarial network and the corresponding inference network, which can correspond to a stack of part-of levels of a fuzzy class calculus IS-A hierarchy. 

From the viewpoint of humans, a sim should probably have an objective function for its reinforcement learning that allows it to become an excellent mathematician and scientist in order to “carry forth an ever-advancing civilization”. But such a conscious superintelligence “should” probably also make use of parameters to try to emulate the well-recognized “virtues” such as empathy, friendship, generosity, humility, justice, love, mercy, responsibility, respect, truthfulness, trustworthiness, etc.

The information is here.

A ‘Master Algorithm’ may emerge sooner than you think

Tristan Greene
thenextweb.com
Originally posted April 18, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

It’s a revolutionary idea, even in a field like artificial intelligence where breakthroughs are as regular as the sunrise. The creation of a self-teaching class of calculus that could learn from (and control) any number of connected AI agents – basically a CEO for all artificially intelligent machines – would theoretically grow exponentially more intelligent every time any of the various learning systems it controls were updated.

Perhaps most interesting is the idea that this control and update system will provide a sort of feedback loop. And this feedback loop is, according to Buehrer, how machine consciousness will emerge:
Allowing machines to modify their own model of the world and themselves may create “conscious” machines, where the measure of consciousness may be taken to be the number of uses of feedback loops between a class calculus’s model of the world and the results of what its robots actually caused to happen in the world.
 Buehrer also states it may be necessary to develop these kinds of systems on read-only hardware, thus negating the potential for machines to write new code and become sentient. He goes on to warn, “However, turning off a conscious sim without its consent should be considered murder, and appropriate punishment should be administered in every country.”

The information is here.

Tuesday, May 3, 2016

The Challenge of Determining Whether an A.I. Is Sentient

By Carissa VĂ©liz
Slate.com
Originally posted April 14, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

Sentience is important because it warrants moral consideration. Whether we owe any moral consideration to things is controversial; things cannot be hurt, they have no interests, no preferences. Paraphrasing philosopher Thomas Nagel, there is nothing it is like for a thing to be a thing, an inanimate object. In contrast, there is something it is like to be a sentient being. There is a quality to experience; there is a comforting warmth in pleasure and a disagreeable sharpness in pain. There is something it is like to be thirsty, afraid, or joyful. Because sentient beings can feel, they can be hurt, they have an interest in experiencing wellbeing, and therefore we owe them moral consideration. Other things being equal, we ought not to harm them.

It is not easy to determine when an organism is sentient, however. A brief recount of past and present controversies and mistakes makes it clear that human beings are not great at recognizing sentience.

The article is here.

Sunday, August 30, 2015

Inside the Monkey Lab: The Ethics of Testing on Animals

By Miriam Wells
Vice News
July 7, 2015

"Of course it's pitiful for the monkeys. Everyone feels the same — you see it and you don't want it. But the point is if you want something different then you have to make something different. It doesn't happen overnight."

Speaking to VICE News, Jeffrey Bajramovic, a scientist from the Biomedical Primate Research Centre (BPRC) in Holland, was refreshingly honest. What happens to the monkeys tested on inside the center — a not for profit laboratory which is the largest facility of its kind in Europe, housing around 1,500 primates — is horrible. Those sent for experimentation suffer pain and distress, sometimes severe, in studies that sometimes last for months, before ending their lives on an autopsy table.

But the tests they undertake contribute to the understanding of and development of vaccines and treatments for some of the world's most deadly and prevalent diseases. And in a grim paradox, as Bajramovic pointed out, the captive primates are also contributing to the development of alternative research methods that scientists can use so that ultimately, they don't have to test on animals at all.

It's a messy and emotional ethical dilemma that VICE News came face to face with when we gained rare access to the BPRC to see just what happens inside.

The entire article is here.

WARNING: There is a graphic and disturbing (to me) video embedded within the article.