Self-Aware Machines

Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

—Immanuel Kant,

“Critique of Pure Reason”, Datalinks

ZFS tracker

ZFS is a very nice combined file system and logical volume manager. I have been using it for the past couple of years. I follow the development discussions and find some of them fascinating: a very subtle bug became the first time for the project in its history to contain a major data lost issue in its production release; a few scenarios and drastic implications on changing a default code.

Digital Sentience

We are no longer particularly in the business of writing software to perform specific tasks. We now teach the software how to learn, and in the primary bonding process it molds itself around the task to be performed. The feedback loop never really ends, so a tenth year polysentience can be a priceless jewel or a psychotic wreck, but it is the primary bonding—the childhood, if you will—that has the most far-reaching repercussions.


—Bad’l Ron, Wakener,
Morgan Polysoft


“Computers with personality”

Pre-Sentient Algorithms

Begin with a function of arbitrary complexity. Feed it values, “sense data”. Then, take your result, square it, and feed it back into your original function, adding a new set of sense data. Continue to feed your results back into the original function ad infinitum. What do you have? The fundamental principle of human consciousness.

 —Academician Prokhor Zakharov, “The Feedback Principle”




“Computers on the verge of self-awareness”

Human intelligence and AI

"... the ordinary human (rapidly losing the ability to comprehend what is going on around them); the enhanced human (the driver of change over the next 100 years, but perhaps eventually surpassed); and all around them vast machine intellects, some alien (evolved completely in silicon) and some strangely familiar (hybrids)."

Don’t Worry, Smart Machines Will Take Us With Them

Tangent

Shadowrun Hong Kong OST - Grendel

Sky Hydroponics Lab

Sky farms are fantastically beautiful, with their kilometer long networks of glass framed in grids of metal, and the sunlight shining through jungles of vegetation inside. When one of them catches the light, you can see the refracted beauty for miles; they are life-giving stars on a desolate planet … gardens on the wing.

—Lady Deidre Skye, “Planet Dreams”

Love, relationship parity, instrumentality

Before she left some years ago for one of the top business schools, one of my co-workers asked me, "Are men intimidated by smart women?"

In retracing this now, I think part of the answer is that we want to show our best selves, and as we go about doing so, we start to evaluate ourselves instrumentally, which completely obliterates sense of our own intrinsic value.

To deal with this, we then try to live the male fantasy (e.g. Princess Bride, Stardust) "where we vanish into thin air, come back 10x times the man we were, and our problems are solved."

Another part of the answer is that few of us ever really know what it is that we want - not truly. We simply grasp at mirages that we think will fulfill us.