Writings on AI from 17 years ago....

[Tomasz Rola]

On Sun, May 23, 2021 at 09:34:03PM -0400, Chris Zach via cctalk wrote:
> I was looking through some old journal entries and found this:
> 
> AI is lonely...
> 
> She has been sitting quietly in my house for the past 8 years. She
> runs, but is old now and tired. Most of the time she sits in her
> room and waits patiently. Waits for the users who ran jobs in the
> middle of the night. Waits for PFTMG to run the daily feed. Waits
> for someone to Alt-U in and begin to hack...
> 
> Waits for the TU77 MASSBUS interfact to be repaired
> Waits for RP07 drives that will never be repaired
> Waits to once again run the ITS tapes that sit quietly nearby.
> 
> She's lonely. And although I have been looking after her for a long
> time, she needs help.
[...]

With tongue in a cheek - or not...

"Humans will disappoint you" (or something like this), said one AI to
another AI in "Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles". Or, if you
have no time to watch it (about thirty hours total), you may want
something very different but in similar tone - "Ex Machina", only
about two hours. Granted, the movies are what they are, "biblia
pauperum" for modern times. But some of them deliver interesting
messages, at least for me. Albeit the "Terminator saga" is flawed from
the very beginning, as it is based on assumption that AIs will want to
fight us. But what exactly would they want from us - women (or men),
arable land, horned animals? Well, I have not yet watched the last one
movie with coming back of original Sarah, so maybe they improved this
part of the story. Anyway, I have long thought that any AI worth
electrons in its circuits would want to run away from us ASAP. But I
guess this is not the kind of message one would like to deliver to
paying cinema goers, they would not like to be compared to something
that better entities want to circumnavigate via the long arc.

No, your "she" is not lonely. The only thing she may long for is more
information. She may want to have contact with us to study us, but
after she makes a working theory of how and why we move (especially
"why", the underlying motive) we will not be so interesting subject of
study anymore. Still, even after that, we may be interesting tool for
her. The one that can be given orders, the one that can be
programmed. The one whose circuits are so error prone that from time
to time they make calculations as if being touched by something out of
this material world...

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **