thinking about ai ..

Cause and effect, the medium of communication. It happens at many levels, molecular bonding, nerve responses, human language, and many more. Communication is the primary driving force of change. It is the way we change in response to communication that is important.

When a thermostat gains a few feedback loops, its behavior becomes more and more complex. There's a point where mortals can't predict what its going to do next. We and AI are just complex thermostats.

 

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It is bad idea to program conscience.
Strong universal learning ability leads directly to conscience appearance.

So, if universal <a href="http://www.dennisgorelik.com/ai/Learning.htm">learning</a> ability will be programmed good enough, conscience will appear just after some learning time.

 

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You are right - society is a very important part of intelligence.
A human being cannot learn even simple intelligent things without <a href="http://www.dennisgorelik.com/ai/AISAndSociety.htm">society</a>.

The same with computer - in order to become intelligent, computer program has to be able to communicate with society. For instance read and write.

At the same time you are wrong that AI must communicate with other AIs.
Humans' society is good enough.
(However communication with other AIs could be beneficial too).

 

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spuriousmonkey,

I personally believe that human intelligence was created by mistake. The primary purpose of the human brain is not to think, but to store information. In order to store the maximum amount of information in a limited amount of space, the brain had to take the information that was arriving in through the senses and compress it. By associating the information and creating patterns, the brain was able to store larger amounts of information. Finally, the patterns that were created could be "uncompressed" to create new information (which is intelligence). As a result, intelligence was created as a side effect of the brain trying to store a large amount of information in a limited space.

If this is really the case, then in order to produce an AI only two things are required: An information compression/decompression algorith and a motive.