Something of major significance happened on Friday June 3rd . The computing world collided with the world of nueroscience, here are the two relevant referneces:
The Independent reported that Elon Musk came out and said there is a 1 in 1 billion chance that we, we as in humankind, are part an experiment in an AI world
The Huffington Post reported that same day Deepak Chopra stating that AI could never rival the deep complexity of the human brain
The two views are quite opposed, let me try to explain it.
Deepak Chopra's thesis lies in the belief that computers are strictly rational, cannot create, can compute but not understand, and not cable to relate to human existence, such as love, beauty and truth. All of these grounded in the notion of what it is to "be alive" something inextricably tied to human existence. In other words, the AI is only boxed into the box which the programmer itself has written the code who themselves are bound by a set of codes which they implement into code. The crux of this theorem falls into this sentence:
"Aesthetics, morals, love, transcendence, idealism — all of these fields of thought, having persisted for thousands of years, in the East and in the West, mean nothing in scientific terms because they cannot be reduced to data, measurements and experimentation."
The interpretation of this is that actions are formed through a basis of fundamental values and belief systems, these belief systems are not homogenous and vary based on 4 variables which all human systems fall into (1) Faith (2) Necessity (3) Habit & (2) Conformity.
The other view claims the evolution of video games into virtual reality games will take human existence to a point that makes it indiscernible to distinguish between what is reality and what is simulated digital reality. Let me elaborate when you sit down have a VR headset with all the sensors and actuators attached to your body with 360 axis movement, you will not know difference between reality and simulation. Taking it further, you can also get it right down to the emotions and human interactions we have with one another. Now this won't happen overnight. Let's a take a simple example with a call center
You call today and talk to an AI voice, you know that because if you say "operator enough times" it says "ok, sounds like you want to talk to someone, let me get someone right away" -- in other words we are thinking "please, please go away AI". Overtime we will feel that are talking to a machine less and less till eventually it will be indistinguishable.
Another way to think about this, when I hark back to my younger days when I used to play dungeons and dragons. I recall we created characters with a set of attributes - Strength, Charisma, Dexterity, Constitution, etc. Whenever we came into an encounter we would always these odd, different sided dice to calculate the odds. E.g. tree falls down in front of you, roll the dice if you can swerve out. Orc swings axe at you, both parties roll the dice and outcome is calculated on percentages e.g. based on your characters #s and the other characters #s the dice make the determination. Fundamentally each step could be calculated through a set of parameters combined with random number generators (dice).
E.g. if you have a low dexterity and the orc has a low dexterity, it's likely he would had been successful in whacking you. Then the strength score determine how much "damage" you do. In much the same way it's conceivable to calculate many of the physical word. The exception to the rule is of course emotional thought, how you respond, how you choose to respond, how you inflect your voice, eye & body movement. It is possible to calculate some of emotions your seeing from the other person as know from Apple's acquisition of emotient, however for a percentage of the population, it will be difficult to predict that individuals next thought, emotion, and action, because those people maybe unpredictable. This is a big part of the movie Matrix. For the rest of us, AI may just convince us they are human.
Thank you for sharing that, the notion of simulated reality as I read it does not allow for an autonomous conscious becuase it assumes the individual is a product of the simulation who is given attributes at birth, these attributes evovle as the person grows and interacts with the environment, but it still no concious so more toward's Elon Musk's view.
You might like the WIkipedia article on
Simulated reality - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
They have an argument there that an advanced civilization could make simulations - and very many of them so the chances of being in a simulated reality are very high.
If we don't want The Player to switch us off and start another game we better do something interesting ;-)