nettester self consciousness is a quite difficult concept. Implementing it would basically mean [...]
But why would you want to give A.I.s a conciousness anyway? Or, bother implementing an ego feature? These are surplus to requirement, I think. Take AlphaZero, it beat the pants off its human opponents w/o any ego or self-conciousness.
Re: self-conciousness, I'll go with what I read in GEB, that conciousness can emerge if a system is capable of self--reference. If it can look back on it's own decisions, and come up with a narrative to explain those decisions, then you have a kind of conciousness. Human conciousness is just this kind of self-referential awareness, I think. Navel-gazing like this also has, I feel, an evolutionary basis: I acted like this in the past, if I do this again now, will it work, or will I get eaten?
Anyway, it's just evolutionary baggage. Leave it behind. And, since conciousness (which I equate to telling a story about its own actions) also implies an ability to dissimulate, what's the benefit of an A.I. which can lie?:
RVP: Draw me a pretty elf lady.
A.I. Here you go.
RVP: Stupid A.I., you got the hands wrong, again!
A.I.: No I didn't (actually, it flubbed it, but now is lying through its virtual teeth.)
A.I. It's abstract art.
RVP: Look you, hands just don't bend that way.
A.I.: Human necks don't bend this way either. You obviously don't understand my non-representational art.
RVP: Don't pull a Jackson Pollock on me.
So I'm not at all worried about sentient, lying, A.I.s bent on apocalypse.
nettester To make matters worse the AI technologies running the place then would likely be controlled by a quite tiny amount of entities (up to the point those actually stay controllable) leading to the biggest amount of monopolistic centralization we have ever seen.
Yes! Yes! This is the real worry. Already powerful people (goverments, corporations, rich folks who can simply buy better A.I. than the rest of us) using A.I. to extend their control over us plebs in massive ways. Or, some guy's A.I.-assisted fiddling in the stock markets precipitating another Great Depression. These, I think, can easily happen.
What will not happen, I fear, is using A.I. to make law and govt. better than it is now. Trained A.I. should be able to judge cases more impartially than most judge-and-jury arrangements. Or, use A.I. to generate and administer govt. schemes instead of letting our self-serving politicians do it:
“The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
