Quote: Original post by owl
*oinks*

Is this a display of post-Kenkian turkey factor? Like, a poke at me, but in pure fun? If so, then I can accept your behaviour... :)

Uhoh - GD just fullscreened an ad at me when I started to reply.

I can't contribute too much on the actual state of the science behind AI at present time; however, this discussion does bring back quite a few memories from Star Trek: The Next Generation that dabble the issue by analyzing the character of Data. The writers manage to present a number of compelling arguments for and against Data being a sentient being, however the philosophical ambiguity never veers either way beyond the notion of personal opinion: while Picard firmly believes that Data is a sentient being subject to all the privileges provided by human rights, Starfleet treats him (it?) as little more than a machine on several occasions. I think that the for and against arguments presented in TNG are more than valid and the overall conclusion really is that ironic: it boils down to personal opinion derived from experience and this opinion is subject to change as the experience changes.

Quote: Original post by irreversible
Uhoh - GD just fullscreened an ad at me when I started to reply.

Not GD. Virus?

Quote: Original post by irreversible
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I think that there are too many leftists (bleeding heart socialists) to allow for the emotional abuse / murder of a robotic family member. There are already anti-cruelty laws related to animals in a lot of countries.

Quote: Original post by LessBread
This just in:
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We're one step closer to converting the human soul into a set of electrochemical interactions! :)

I think the end of computers would be a cataclysmic event, but I do not think that it would signal the end of humanity. Most likely people, in my opinion, would at first revolt into looting and anarchy. Then people would band together into safe zones, and slowly we'd rebuild. Much like most apocalypse movies, but not quite as bad.

Quote: Original post by taby
If we were to lose our devices now, the world would literally go into a global state of mourning/mental illness (plus our supply system would fail and we'd all die). Whenever I thought of the prospect of global computer failure before now, I never actually thought about mourning for the computers. Neat.

Our culture would be destroyed. Humanity would not, however, and would recover.

Here's the thing: biologically, we're optimized to live as foragers in limited-size social groups where all relationships are more or less personal--i.e. tribes. This is because it's how we lived until ~10K years ago when civilization appeared, and there's not been sufficient time for evolutionary change. Now, despite what sociologists and anthropologists and other soft "sciences" find fashionable, our minds are primarily shaped by our biology, not culture. Our behavioral foundations are more or less hardcoded, and environment only has limited ability to reshape them. Desmond Morris pointed this out way back in the 60s, and subsequently evolutionary psychology has confirmed it.
We are ill-fit for the artificial environment we've created for ourselves, and many problems result. I am in no way advocating dropping civilization, but simply saying--should it fall--the human animal will continue on just fine. Indeed, it might serve as a reboot of sorts and we'll do better next time.

Quote: Original post by irreversible
Uhoh - GD just fullscreened an ad at me when I started to reply.

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Quote: Original post by Prune
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Yah, I'm pretty sure the Inuit would be fine. ;)

This talk of global chaos reminds me of The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I didn't actually read the book, but instead saw the movie adaptation. Did you see it?

I found that McCarthy's co-protagonist, a father (who is living with his son), is such an emotionally clueless person that he nearly personifies every father with 100% accuracy. I seriously see myself being exactly the same way as the father was in this story, if my circumstances were the same. It was quite eerie, and profound. I don't know if anyone else felt that way about it. :)

Quote: Original post by taby

Quote: Original post by LessBread
This just in:
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We're one step closer to converting the human soul into a set of electrochemical interactions! :)

Huh? The Major? Where?

So wouldn't using electrodes to control or say things with our minds be like cheating? Shouldn't we as humans evolve to that state?

But seriously, is our reliance on machines and technology causing to evolve slower, standstill, or just devolve?

Quote: Original post by Alpha_ProgDes
But seriously, is our reliance on machines and technology causing to evolve slower, standstill, or just devolve?

You've just made the case for artificial selection, which is also known by another name historically.

Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, wrote:
"In the long run, it is unavoidable that society will begin to worry about the character of the next generation....I would be astonished if, in the next 100 or 200 years, society did not come round to the view that they would have to try to improve the next generation in some extent or one way or another." James Watson, the other co-discoverer of DNA's structure, was also sympathetic to some forms of eugenics.

Consider a genetic algorithm, where the two main components, other than the candidate solution or candidate algorithm population, are the fitness evaluation function and the mutation procedure. I'm going to ignore crossing/breeding without loss of generality. Now consider that the fitness has been rising over several generations. To be more realistic, we allow the fitness function to smoothly vary over time but mostly in conjugate manner as to avoid going backwards in some sense. The natural selection which this fitness function simulates will cause the population to tend to rise towards local maxima and the mutation will cause some of them to escape these local maxima and explore others in the fitness landscape, so as to allow more global ones to be found. The thing to note here is that over generations there is a bias towards higher fitness compared to an average level of fitness that might be generated by a completely uniform random sampling of the fitness landscape. Due to an obvious topological consideration, removing the fitness selection process and only leaving mutation you would inevitably randomize the population such that the average fitness would degrade. This would only not be the case if the population was biased towards minima, which of course would not be the case. In other words, unless your fitness criteria were reversed, then abandoning selection and leaving only mutation (randomization) would wreck the fitness of the population over further generations.

In our case, even though we've severely curtailed natural selection by things such as modern medicine allowing genetically-caused illness patients to survive into breeding age, and various social programs, one cannot say that we don't have selection overall, just that it's much less forceful and that it's been partially replaced by some measure of artificial selection. But there's no overall plan or reason behind the factors playing into this artificial selection; in other words, nature is no longer holding our genetic evolution reins but neither are we--we're leaving it to ad hoc and even arbitrary processes.

Perhaps it's time, as various esteemed geneticists have suggested over the decades, to take hold of the reins of our evolution.