Wednesday, January 25, 2006

When AI commits suicide

When Artificial Intelligence (AI) gets too smart, that is begins to reach the capactiy of 'human conciousness' will it have the urge to self destruct due to its self realization that it exists in an existential paradigm?

Well the Canadian creator of Mindpixel an internet based AI system commited suicide in Chile recently and left his online note for his AI to learn from.
Including references to Camus, the stranger.

Chile: Canadian Blogger Commits Suicide in Santiago

Roberto Arancibia meditates (ES) on the suicide of Canadian blogger, Chris McKinstry in his Santiago apartment. McKinstry was the founder of Mindpixel, a digital mind modeling project. His final blog post, entitled “Very Serious Thoughts on Suicide” quotes, among others, Charles Caleb Colton: “Suicide is a fundamental human right. This does not mean that it is morally desirable. It only means that society does not have the moral right to interfere.”

Very strange indeed and not the least disturbing. Why? Because it shows the very real 'alienation' that we all suffer under capitalism, which divorces us from our very real humaness. In this case this individual who lived for his machine, his fantasy, which was also his reality, ended his own corporeal existance to live in his machine. Dues ex machina.

His individualist exhortation that society does not have the right to interfere in his final decision, is true, and a pathetic testiment to the joys of embracing ones alienation as liberation. Alone in his room away from society, had he not blogged would anyone have known. No.

So his appeal on his blog was his cry of angst and desperation, that he wanted society to know. And if he wanted society to know then he wanted us to do something or say something. Had he not, he would not have blogged a suicdide note. He would have simply put rocks in his pockets and walked silently and alone into the ocean humming the theme to MASH.

His self destruction was nihilism. Nihilists one more step to be revolutionary to recongnize your self alienation as class struggle.

The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-alienation. But the formerclass feels happy and confirmed in this self-alientation, it recognises alienation as its own power, and has in it the semblance of human existence. The class of the proletariat feels annihilated in its self-alienation; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existnece. To use an expression of Hegel's, the class of the proletariat is in abasement indignation at this abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contrdiction between its human nature and its conditions of life, which are the outright, decisive and comprehensive negation of that nature.

"Within this antithesis the private property-owner is therefore the conservative side, the proletarian, the destructive side. From the former arises the action of preserving the antithesis, from the latter, that of annihilating it.

"In any case, in its economic movement private property drives towards its own dissolution, but only through a development which does not depend on it, of which it is unconscious and which takes place against its will, through the very nature of things, only inasmuch as it produces the proletariat as proletariat, misery conscious of its spiritual and physical misery, dehumnaisation conscious of its dehumanisation and therefore self-abolishing. The proletariat executes the sentence that private property pronounced on itself by begetting the proletariat, just as it executes the sentence that wage-labour pronounced on itself by begetting wealth for others and misery for itself. When the proletariat is victorious, it by no means becomes the absolute side of society, for it is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite. Then the proletariat disappears as well as the opposite which determines it, private property. Conspectus of the Book The Holy Family by Marx and Engels



Two Fake Brains Better Than One

Wired
2000-09-15 03:55:00.0

A few weeks ago, computer scientist Chris McKinstry announced a plan to harness the brain power of Internet users to fuel an artificially intelligent thinking machine.

Web surfers flocked to his Mindpixel Digital Mind Modeling Project website, and McKinstry's database of mindpixels -- "one-bit" pieces of knowledge -- swelled so quickly that his system became temporarily overloaded.

But even though AI laymen took to McKinstry's decentralized, profit-sharing model of artificial intelligence (anyone who enters data gets a share in the company), many in the academic AI community balked at his plans.

Now, it seems that the academy is changing its tune, as no less venerable an institution than MIT's Media Lab has decided to collaborate with McKinstry.

"We think that the future of AI is to get the public involved," said Push Singh, an MIT graduate student in AI who runs a Media Lab project called OpenMind.

Singh said that the public involvement that McKinstry has been able to spur so far -- Mindpixel already has almost 20,000 registered users -- would be an asset to OpenMind.

Like Mindpixel, OpenMind is an AI machine that learns from user input. At the OpenMind website, users are presented with a series of stimuli -- photographs, phrases, or diagrams. Singh said that the computer learns "common sense" from users' aggregate response to a certain stimulus.

For example, if the computer shows you a picture of a family at a picnic, you might type in, "Families like to spend time together."

Someone else might write, "Picnics are fun when the weather permits."

And yet another person could say, "I hope they didn't forget the Grey Poupon!"

With enough such responses, some clearly more valuable than others, Singh said that the computer will learn a kind of common sense about families or picnics or mustard, and how they relate to each other.

And with a little common sense, OpenMind will be able to at least approximate humanness, Sing said.



Tags














1 comment:

Bob Mottram said...

Well I'm not prone to emotional outbursts, but in my opinion this blog entry demonstrates a breathtaking level of ignorance. To me it's obvious that you have absolutely no idea about McKinstry or what he was doing. Did you even bother to read his blog, or any of his articles, before spouting this kind of rubbish?

Whatever the reasons for his suicide may have been, I very much doubt that they had anything to do with "alienation under capitalism" or property ownership.