New xkcd comic pokes fun at the AI-box experiment, author of the experiment comes into /r/xkcd to explain his views (self.SubredditDrama)
SubredditDrama
62 ups - 0 downs = 62 votes
The comic: link
The author's long response: link
Some other comment trees were mild drama is taking place: a, b
Full comments, who knows what might pop up.
145 comments submitted at 14:11:17 on Nov 21, 2014 by happy_otter
The only thing you need to know about AI is that the people who believe in artificial sentience are loons.
Not totally. I mean, there's nothing fundamentally uncomputable about the human mind. It or something similar to it will be simulated eventually. But given that this will be such a different kind of being it's impossible to guess at what it will be like.
And there's nothing fundamentally standing in the way of zombies walking the earth, but the people who believe it's going to happen are loons. Much like those who believe in artificial sentience.
There is a lot standing in the way of zombies walking the earth.
Even if a virus with vaguely zombie-like symptoms would be plausible, as soon as it appeared we would quarantine it. Turns out infections that can only spread by biting really suck at spreading.
That's not really comparable to the observation that a technical product, that many scientists are actively working to create, is only out of reach from us because of engineering problems, which tend to consistently go away over time.
You're assuming a virus based zombie. There are different potential zombie vectors, c.f. The original Night of the Living Dead or Return of the Living Dead.
Yeah, but don't those require magic? If we're going to allow magic in our line of reasoning then nothing is implausible.
No, NotLD was radiation and RotLD was chemical-based. The first is a silly premise, the second less so. Again though, the point is not to limit the potential vector for restoring animation.
Are you seriously suggesting that radiation could turn someone into a zombie?
No, I'm just saying that you shouldn't limit it to viruses.
Radiation is pretty well understood. Nothing about it leads to Zombification.
At best you'll get a brain tumor from the radiation which will press against your brain and might possibly cause vaguely zombie-like behavior, but otherwise there's nothing about radiation that would make you anything like a zombie.
Swell. And nowhere did I say you should lean on radiation either, what I said was don't restrict the vector to viruses.
> And there's nothing fundamentally standing in the way of zombies walking the earth
Yeah there is. The problems are different depending on which flavor of Zombies we're talking about, but none of them are feasible in the real world.
And besides, we don't have multiple mega-corporations actively researching how to make Zombies happen. We do for intelligent computers.
We don't have mega-corporations researching sentient AI either. "Strong AI" research has almost entirely dried up by now because there is so much low hanging fruit in other subfields.
> We don't have mega-corporations researching sentient AI either.
We definitely do. I know people who work at said megacorperations who work with researchers whose long term goal is strong AI.
> And besides, we don't have multiple mega-corporations actively researching how to make Zombies happen.
Yeah, like Apple isn't installing a zombie wing in their new spaceship…
More seriously, what are some of the fundamental blockers of zombification?
> More seriously, what are some of the fundamental blockers of zombification?
Thermodynamics is a big one for most kinds of zombies. Any kind of Zombie that is able to keep moving despite missing entire organs is fundamentally not going to happen either. Your organs aren't there for show, each one plays a part in keeping your body moving.
The closest you'd get is a rabies-like sickness that makes you aggressive and irrational. Certain kinds of mental illness can do that sort of thing to you now, but none are transmitted zombie style. But that's just a behavioral issue, not a full blown zombie infection that lets you keep moving after death and requires a bullet to the head to stop.
Not to mention not very many people are actively trying to research zombie creation while many people are actively working on AI research.
And why are you assuming entire missing organs or missing irgans without some external substitute? I suppose the word zombie carries a lot of connotative baggage, but I'm just looking more for a reanimated dead type of situation. Frankenstein's monster works just as well as The Walking Dead.
> And there's nothing fundamentally standing in the way of zombies walking the earth
Except, I don't know, thermodynamics.
Well I'd better ask the department at my university to shut down.
FFS it's not rocket science. Sentience != sapience.
Whoops. You are correct.
My apologies.