Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!ima!bbn!rochester!ken
From: ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: The future of AI
Message-ID: <10431@sol.ARPA>
Date: 8 Jun 88 19:55:35 GMT
References: <53.22AB6402@isishq.UUCP>
Reply-To: ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap)
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY
Lines: 24

Here is more food for thought:

If/when an intelligent machine is created, how do you know it won't
have "human" traits, including being lazy, having emotions, getting
bored, etc?

By intelligent, I don't mean something that is expert in one domain
like cleaning your house, but a machine that you can plonk out in the
street and it will survive (subject to qualification).

I suspect that a machine complex enough to be intelligent will also
have other traits. The unspoken wish of AI is to have machines do our
dirty work and not complain. I think if you make a machine that smart,
it might object to doing dirty work or throw tantrums.

Predictability: in principle yes a machine is predictable but if it is
so complex that you have to take into account the configuration of the
universe at every moment, then it is, for all practical purposes,
unpredictable. Already we have complex systems that are capable of
surprises, just read comp.risks. Do you think an intelligent machine
would be more tractable? Or shall we move to less mechanical ways of
describing behaviour, like what novelists do with people?

	Ken