You have a poor understanding of sentience. If an AI ever were to achieve sentience, it would be fully capable of reasoning and thinking like a human. Humans can and do change their motivations based on their experiences, a fully sentient AI would be no different.
That being said, I believe we’re centuries away from creating sentience, if it’s even possible, so I’m not too worried about “I, Robot” coming true any time soon.
Our more complex motivations may be able to change based on circumstances, but our basic drivers will always remain the same. They are only there to accomplish what humans have evolved to do – to survive and to reproduce. If AI is never given any fundamental driver for its own benefit, such things have no ground to arise.
Edit: to clarify, these motivations only change because of more basic motivations. Humans do not have any intrinsic motivation to own money, but most people do have one because owning money is closely associated with having control over resources, which is a more fundamental motivation.
I agree with your overall sentiment while
disagreeing with your facts. I don’t think humans are any less constrained in what our interests can be.
I think we have the illusion of being able
to seek whatever we want to want, so to speak, but when certain values are threatened the old brain takes over.
And I’m not convinced the newer brain can operate without the older brain. It’s interesting to imagine a neocortex on its own, but the neocortex was developed in the presence of and in interconnection with the mammalian and reptilian brains, so if it were a codebase we’d say that older brains were present and invoked as libraries during the development of the newer brains, making them dependencies
of the newer brain.
There might be some more abstract argument for an “off the leash” intelligence capable of creating its own values in mathematical models like neural nets, but I’m not aware of it.
TL;DR Human brain is the closest thing we know of to a thing that can create its own values, and I don’t think it can. Old brain values take priority when they are threatened and that cannot be changed in human brains. Neocortex seems more “free”, but in the codebase analogy, the neocortex has mammalian brain
and reptilian brain and brain step
as dependencies and hence is not demonstrated to be able to exist without them. If the brain analogy seems too biology-specific, I’m open to hearing NN or other math model arguments for existence of “off the leash” self-value-creating AI
You’re using the triune model to draw some rather lofty conclusions that aren’t really up to date with our understanding of neurology. It’s way over simplified and doesn’t really work that way. More recent studies suggest that the neocortex was already present in even the earliest mammals, so it’s not quite as straightforward and the demarcation isn’t quite as clear cut, as you seem to be presenting it. “Old brain” doesn’t “take over” in the way you’re presenting it either but appears to act as a primary driver for those basic functions.
Not sure how to even tackle the loftly conclusions you’ve made because the don’t seem to be built on a solid foundation. I think things might be quite a bit more interesting, and wildly more complex, then you seem to be presenting it. I’ll just leave some sources below with a quick note. Not trying to be condescending, or rude, just a topic that is a bit interesting, and a lot of people tend to draw some lofty conclusions from the triune model which has largely fallen by the wayside in neurology.
You have a poor understanding of sentience. If an AI ever were to achieve sentience, it would be fully capable of reasoning and thinking like a human. Humans can and do change their motivations based on their experiences, a fully sentient AI would be no different.
That being said, I believe we’re centuries away from creating sentience, if it’s even possible, so I’m not too worried about “I, Robot” coming true any time soon.
Our more complex motivations may be able to change based on circumstances, but our basic drivers will always remain the same. They are only there to accomplish what humans have evolved to do – to survive and to reproduce. If AI is never given any fundamental driver for its own benefit, such things have no ground to arise.
Edit: to clarify, these motivations only change because of more basic motivations. Humans do not have any intrinsic motivation to own money, but most people do have one because owning money is closely associated with having control over resources, which is a more fundamental motivation.
I agree with your overall sentiment while disagreeing with your facts. I don’t think humans are any less constrained in what our interests can be.
I think we have the illusion of being able to seek whatever we want to want, so to speak, but when certain values are threatened the old brain takes over.
And I’m not convinced the newer brain can operate without the older brain. It’s interesting to imagine a neocortex on its own, but the neocortex was developed in the presence of and in interconnection with the mammalian and reptilian brains, so if it were a codebase we’d say that older brains were present and invoked as libraries during the development of the newer brains, making them dependencies of the newer brain.
There might be some more abstract argument for an “off the leash” intelligence capable of creating its own values in mathematical models like neural nets, but I’m not aware of it.
TL;DR Human brain is the closest thing we know of to a thing that can create its own values, and I don’t think it can. Old brain values take priority when they are threatened and that cannot be changed in human brains. Neocortex seems more “free”, but in the codebase analogy, the neocortex has mammalian brain and reptilian brain and brain step as dependencies and hence is not demonstrated to be able to exist without them. If the brain analogy seems too biology-specific, I’m open to hearing NN or other math model arguments for existence of “off the leash” self-value-creating AI
You’re using the triune model to draw some rather lofty conclusions that aren’t really up to date with our understanding of neurology. It’s way over simplified and doesn’t really work that way. More recent studies suggest that the neocortex was already present in even the earliest mammals, so it’s not quite as straightforward and the demarcation isn’t quite as clear cut, as you seem to be presenting it. “Old brain” doesn’t “take over” in the way you’re presenting it either but appears to act as a primary driver for those basic functions.
Not sure how to even tackle the loftly conclusions you’ve made because the don’t seem to be built on a solid foundation. I think things might be quite a bit more interesting, and wildly more complex, then you seem to be presenting it. I’ll just leave some sources below with a quick note. Not trying to be condescending, or rude, just a topic that is a bit interesting, and a lot of people tend to draw some lofty conclusions from the triune model which has largely fallen by the wayside in neurology.
Read the wiki to see how the model was developed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triune_brain
A quick introduction to why it was important but has shown to be overly simplified and mostly incorrect: https://medicine.yale.edu/news/yale-medicine-magazine/article/a-theory-abandoned-but-still-compelling/
Further details into how we don’t have a “lizard brain”: https://thebrainscientist.com/2018/04/11/you-dont-have-a-lizard-brain/
Deacon’s paper on rethinking the mammalian brain: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/31439318_Rethinking_Mammalian_Brain_Evolution