Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I still think the most fascinating show of intelligence is in primates, the spread of banana washing in a certain monkey species even spreading island to island or how female chimps travel from troop to troop spreading gathering techniques. Would not the spread and use of information be more indicative of intelligence rather than opposable thumb tool use? Spread of information demonstrates language , demonstration and receptiveness. Blue tits certainly adapted to metal milk bottle tops in England, and should we not regard adaption as part of intelligence? Let's face it pigs are the humans of the four footed mammal variety and are extremely adaptable and intelligent.
Overall i think humans disregard the intelligence of other animals.

I do have to say I am loving this thread.
I have an Modern RPG where Lifting [Taking an Animal and making them Anthro] and Splicing [Splicing Human and Animal DNA] are a big part of the game.

 Anpu42 wrote:
I do have to say I am loving this thread.
I have an Modern RPG where Lifting [Taking an Animal and making them Anthro] and Splicing [Splicing Human and Animal DNA] are a big part of the game.

How do you deal with the animals feeling limited by their bodies in the form of communication, lack of hands (or specifically opposable thumbs) and just in general not being able to do much besides think to themselves?

I feel like even if you make a Dog for example intelligent then they will still need a looong time to do anything with it. How long for them to create their own language? They would need to because they can't use human language. What will they do? They cannot build nor can we easily teach them our own knowledge.

Seems really complex I think.

 Swastakowey wrote:

 Anpu42 wrote:
I do have to say I am loving this thread.
I have an Modern RPG where Lifting [Taking an Animal and making them Anthro] and Splicing [Splicing Human and Animal DNA] are a big part of the game.

How do you deal with the animals feeling limited by their bodies in the form of communication, lack of hands (or specifically opposable thumbs) and just in general not being able to do much besides think to themselves?

I feel like even if you make a Dog for example intelligent then they will still need a looong time to do anything with it. How long for them to create their own language? They would need to because they can't use human language. What will they do? They cannot build nor can we easily teach them our own knowledge.

Seems really complex I think.

Mostly when I have them Lifted they gain hands and speech. The "Corporation/Government" that created them usually taught them the sills they needed to do "Their" job and that is about it.
Example: A canine created to be a soldier was taught how to use Wargear and basic small unit tactics (As a Pack animal this was easy), but they generally that was the extent of their skill set. Beyond that they would have problems with interaction with the Non-Military world. A lot of them also have some sort of mental issue about something. On of the characters just can not comprehend computer icons and how they work.

The main focus of the game has been about their rights, how they fit into society and racism against them. The current subplot is should a Lifted/Spliced Cheetah be able to compete in the Olympics vs a human in track and field..

There are MANY species where innate "instinct" would not be a problem after increasing their intelligence of other cognitive functions.

Bonobos come to mind.

As do Dogs, Seals, Cetaceans, many felids, Lemurs, Marmosets, Raptors, Parrots, Conures (and other Psittacines and Psittacaformes), Ravens, Crows, and any number of other more social mammals.

Birds, in particular would do well due to their inherent sociability and gregariousness.

Cephalopods MIGHT make an interesting choice, and indeed if they had longer life-spands, we might currently be sharing the planet with an aquatic technological species of Cephalopods.

MB

I find it hard to believe that banana washing and other evidences of animal "intelligence" have suddenly evolved during the last 50 years in which scientists have started to study them, and not during the hundreds of thousands of years that the animals had the opportunity but were not being observed.

What do we mean by instinct? Humans have "animal" instincts that we often act upon unconsciously. It doesn't stop us being intelligent.

 Bullockist wrote:
Would not the spread and use of information be more indicative of intelligence rather than opposable thumb tool use?

I recall watching a program where a scientist, who had been studying intelligence, talked about the importance of imitation. He said that they had originally been looking at intelligence as a sort of ability to solve problems, but over time they had come to realise that the ability to observe a solution and then analogise the behaviour to see yourself solving the problem (imitation) was actually so incredibly important that it was what they had started to focus on. He claimed it was important to the extent that the ability to imitate could almost be described as "what intelligence is". It's quite a bold statement, but it's also a very interesting idea. Your comment about the dissemination of information between primates reminded of it, and the old saying: "monkey see, monkey do".

BeAfraid wrote:
Birds, in particular would do well due to their inherent sociability and gregariousness.

That's just what they want you to think, but don't trust them! Birds are the evil descendants of soulless carnivorous monsters, and they're clearly out to get us, and gak all over everything we stand for. Giving them sentience would spell our doom.
On a more serious note, birds actually process sound in a very different way to humans, particularly pitch, which might present some obstacles with human language.

 Smacks wrote:

BeAfraid wrote:
Birds, in particular would do well due to their inherent sociability and gregariousness.

That's just what they want you to think, but don't trust them! Birds are the evil descendants of soulless carnivorous monsters, and they're clearly out to get us, and gak all over everything we stand for. Giving them sentience would spell our doom.

Funny.... I think the exact same thing about fish.

Fish are plotting to invade the lands and enslave us all with their slimy, evil, empty, dead eyes.

They are the spawn of the abyss (literally), and some malevolence drives them.

Especially anglerfish. They are the malefic spawn of some unpronouncable chthonic she-demon of the elder days, bent upon unleashing a deluge upon the land and absorbing humanity, like they do male anglerfish, to produce some woman-fish demon spawn which will then unleash the Elder Gods upon the lonely and isolated survivors fighting for humanity.

And.... I can get even more hyperbolic, as I obviously have some sort of pathological and insane fear and hatred of fish...

FISH ARE EEEEEVVIIILLLLLEEE!!!!!

MB


Automatically Appended Next Post:
BTW, my sister is an Ornithologist/Zoologist, specializing in the recovery of endangered Pacific Island Bird Species and Populations, as well as running the Texas Prairie Chicken breeding program in conjunction with NASA.

So... We have a lot of bird discussions...

MB

BeAfraid wrote:
Funny.... I think the exact same thing about fish.

Fish are plotting to invade the lands and enslave us all with their slimy, evil, empty, dead eyes.

They are the spawn of the abyss (literally), and some malevolence drives them.

Especially anglerfish. They are the malefic spawn of some unpronouncable chthonic she-demon of the elder days, bent upon unleashing a deluge upon the land and absorbing humanity, like they do male anglerfish, to produce some woman-fish demon spawn which will then unleash the Elder Gods upon the lonely and isolated survivors fighting for humanity.

And.... I can get even more hyperbolic, as I obviously have some sort of pathological and insane fear and hatred of fish...

FISH ARE EEEEEVVIIILLLLLEEE!!!!!

MB

I don't believe your lies, Innsmouth is a peaceful community

#JustGillThings

Im pretty sure crows and ravens are pretty smart. iv heard them using cars to open nuts. using cross walk signals. that's pretty crazy.

 LordofHats wrote:
I can confirm this. I conducted two experiments.

Me, too. I have tried to get dolphins and mice to buy miniatures but they are just too smart.

It would be a grievous mistake to uplift bears, for bears are both murderous and rapey.

BeAfraid wrote:

Bonobos come to mind.

MB

Bonobos are the root rats of the animal kingdom, they would turn the whole prostitution industry on it's head if made sentient.

"just $50 for a good time, honey"
"Sorry, I just saw the attractive bonobo down the street for a banana."


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Psienesis wrote:
It would be a grievous mistake to uplift bears, for bears are both murderous and rapey.

Maybe the sentient bonobos could keep those urges under control.

Yes, I am aware that bonobo's solutions to everything was to have sex.

And they do not seem to be to partial to one gender or the other.

MB

Humans differ from bonobos in that Option B is to kill it. Possibly followed by Option A.

At the time being, there are significant difficulties in creating a truly "self-cognitive" machine brain. In fact, it's actually quite difficult to tell computers to move around a room and recognize objects, which is very commonplace for biological thinking structures. I believe it will take a large breakthrough in our understanding of what a brain is and what it exactly does, in order to truly create a machine that learns, manipulates it's environment, andmost importantly imagines situations that it isn't currently involved in(leading to invention, motivation, innovation, and future-prediction.) That being said, if this were to happen, these machines would be far more useful to us and easy to integrate into society than any strong willed, survival-obsessed, self interested biological organism. However it comes with the added danger of being completely replaced by these beings as they spread throughout the galaxy and see us as inferior and perhaps "in the way". We freeze and die in the void. We get tired. We have emotional weaknesses. They would not, making them prime candidates for space exploration and terraforming operations universe-wide.

It would almost be a noble act, to be the progenitors of a kind of intelligence that actually could see the universe entirely and uncover it's secrets in ways we haven't imagined. Sacrificing ourselves for the chance that maybe something about us, some small part of humanity might someday have immense knowledge, power, experience and ability in the universe's future. I would prefer that to only inhabiting one rock and polluting the universe with our terribly shameful television broadcasts until we choke ourselves to death or burn our own species to the ground, even if those same robots we created mercilessly killed us all. At least we would have transfered part of ourselves in some form to the continuation of the universe's attempt to understand itself in the creation of intelligence (which is truly what we are... The universe contemplating itself.)

More on topic, the organisms I see being most useful for uplifting is bonobos, elephants, and ravens/crows. If body size was not an issue for the development of intelligence, I would also say tardigrades simply for the fact they can live almost anywhere and could be used to seed planets with life before we get there. But really, there are or will be nanobots with those capabilities.

Bonobos could be bred selectively for co operation and goodwill, communicative ability and problem solving. Elephants for strength, memory, emotional depth. Ravens and crows i believe would take much selection to be able to communicate deeply with humans, and as such i see their intelligence increasing on their own almost as easily as with our help. Ants are so numerous and powerful that if they had intelligence to rival humanity i have no doubt we wouldnt be here.

We are about 5 - 10 years away from machines that exhibit human-equivalent basic cognition.

The progress in this area (Robotics, AI, and Machine Learning) tends to be exponential or geometric, rather than linear.

Thus, what looks to be rudimentary behavior from Robots, or AI at this point will double within 18 months, and double again 18 months later, and so on.

Just look at IBM's Watson.

It used to require a room full of Computers.

But thanks to Dharmendra Modha's chipset built to replicate (hard-code) the learning algorithms that previously existed solely in software, Watson is now a single Server, only slightly bigger than a PC.

Within 5 years, it will likely exist on your smartphone (as Deep Blue already does).

And, when you include the many companies now dedicated to machine cognition, which include multidisciplinary members, and the yearly progress, extrapolation is not very difficult.

Larry Page, and Ray Kurzweil, at Google, have announced 2020 as their target goal for Human Cognition.

Jeff Hawkins, at Numenta (The Inventor of the Palm Pilot - among other things), has also said that roughly around 2020 they will achieve a human-equivalent cognition.

Stephan Wolfram, or Wolfram Reseach (makers of Mathematica)... Same thing (although he is not shooting for Human Cognition - his approach is to create something totally non-human, yet capable of many of the same things humans are capable of doing - his goals and algorithms are aimed at different sensory modalities, which accounts for the "non-Human." Human cognition is built around the 5x5 sensory modalities: Haptics, Audition, Olfaction, Vision, Gustatory).

MB

Why would you ever create something that would compete directly with your niche? You don't uplift species to be humanoid terrestrial sapients. You murder them in the crib. Edging something like Dolphins onwards in evolution is one thing- as cetaceans they're stuck in the water and will never rival terrestrial life for the same niche.

 Wyzilla wrote:
Why would you ever create something that would compete directly with your niche? You don't uplift species to be humanoid terrestrial sapients. You murder them in the crib. Edging something like Dolphins onwards in evolution is one thing- as cetaceans they're stuck in the water and will never rival terrestrial life for the same niche.

The Rationale is that once we have reached a certain point evolutionarily, and technologically, we have a moral imperative to do so, to reduce suffering (although there is an equal and opposite rationale that this would increase suffering - The Ignorance is Bliss argument).

PLUS....

We MIGHT need these other animals for space exploration, to explore environments we cannot (the usual Trope here are the Seas of the Ice Moons of Jupiter and Saturn, which probably have warm oceans due to tidal force heating).

MB

BeAfraid wrote:

 Wyzilla wrote:
Why would you ever create something that would compete directly with your niche? You don't uplift species to be humanoid terrestrial sapients. You murder them in the crib. Edging something like Dolphins onwards in evolution is one thing- as cetaceans they're stuck in the water and will never rival terrestrial life for the same niche.

The Rationale is that once we have reached a certain point evolutionarily, and technologically, we have a moral imperative to do so, to reduce suffering (although there is an equal and opposite rationale that this would increase suffering - The Ignorance is Bliss argument).

What moral imperative? They're not our species. We owe them nothing unless they give us meaning to care for their existence (such as beneficial chemical compounds they may produce that can be harvested for potent and effective medications). But in that case we farm them like cattle.

PLUS....

We MIGHT need these other animals for space exploration, to explore environments we cannot (the usual Trope here are the Seas of the Ice Moons of Jupiter and Saturn, which probably have warm oceans due to tidal force heating).

MB

Or just send a drone which costs far less, doesn't need food, won't contaminate the alien ecosystem with invasive microbial life, doesn't sleep, and can only be destroyed by extreme circumstances.

 Wyzilla wrote:
What moral imperative? They're not our species. We owe them nothing unless they give us meaning to care for their existence (such as beneficial chemical compounds they may produce that can be harvested for potent and effective medications). But in that case we farm them like cattle.

Any sapient being - whether it's a human, an AI, an alien or (as stupid as the idea is) an uplifted animal - deserves to be treated as such. Deliberately creating a slave species to be exploited is evil, and anyone who tried to put such a plan into effect deserves to be hanged, just like the Nazis before them.

Strange. Most "sacred" texts would have you believe that's exactly what we are. Haha. Paints gods in an interesting light. Very evil indeed. But thats an entire other topic.

Regarding AI, do you believe that target will actually be reached? Do you think we can really pass beyond telling a computer what to do and it understanding our directives to actual comprehension and "self-thought" (that is, not needing to be told to think something.) Perhaps i'm not up to date, but from what i have read it's been somewhat of an inventor's block attempting to pass from processing instructions to conprehending concepts such as "animals do not like pain" and all of the emotional or conceptual meanings of the words in that sentence. Passing from math to feeling, from what i have read, is proving nigh-impossible with our current understanding.

I understand fully the exponential increase of the advance of science.. However i don't have full confidence that humans entirely predict every possible roadblock that could occur. Not to mention that what he means by "human cognition" could be a very satisfying and fulfillingmathematical skeleton of the myriad feelings and mental creations we have.
Will this AI he plans to have built by 2020 going to be able to dream about exploring the universe with the sense of wonder any human can? Will it love it's creators as loyally as a human child? Will it retain the ability to make an illogical decision? Will it have, preserve, and contemplate the "sense of self" with any resemblance to a human? Will it be able to create original, meaningful art? Will it have the ability to deny itself obsessive activities? Will it rest? Will it have an imagination, and create worlds in it's mind that dont exist and pretend it inhabits them? Will it enjoy a game? Can it be comforted?

These things are why i feel that, although AI can certainly physically surpass the processing power of the human mind, it wont have "human cognition" and perhaps never could... Isn't it possible that because our minds are a direct result of natural selection and the pressures we've recieved that it cannot be perfectly emulated by inorganic matter? Isnt it possible a machine will always be purely mathematical and cold? I am sure there are ways to make it seem like a machine has feelings and emotional responses, but does that mean it actually is, or is just programmed that way?

AncientSkarbrand wrote:
Regarding AI, do you believe that target will actually be reached?

Yes. Eventually. We know that it can be done, because we are ourselves examples of such an intelligence developed through billions of years of random errors pruned by catastrophic failure. The challenge in creating a true AI is in finding a more efficient way to develop a similar end result.

We know that it can be done with organic material given life through chemistry and time. Scientists are attempting it with inorganic matter, electricity and curcuits. You believe the two can function the same, even though the types of matter and chemistry involved are vastly different? If so, why? I would like to know your reasons for thinking this.

 AlexHolker wrote:

 Wyzilla wrote:
What moral imperative? They're not our species. We owe them nothing unless they give us meaning to care for their existence (such as beneficial chemical compounds they may produce that can be harvested for potent and effective medications). But in that case we farm them like cattle.

Any sapient being - whether it's a human, an AI, an alien or (as stupid as the idea is) an uplifted animal - deserves to be treated as such. Deliberately creating a slave species to be exploited is evil, and anyone who tried to put such a plan into effect deserves to be hanged, just like the Nazis before them.

No they don't. The only thing we owe is our own species and any descendents from Homo sapiens. Anything else is simply competition for our niche, and like we did before to the Hominids that once lived near us- kill 'em or assimilate them into our species by breeding them out of existence. But unless they can offer us beneficial traits genetically, have naturally occurring compounds that aid us, or offer a social/military/economic/scientific alliance, they are nothing but competition to us and a threat.

As for creation for a slave race, I fail to see any ethical concerns for the idea. With this conceptual level of genetic engineering, you could hardwire their brains to flood their bodies with dopamine upon completing a task in reward- literally giving them a high for work. Although there's no point in making them sapient in the first place for such a purpose. Also we've basically done this already with many domestic animals, such as dogs.

True inorganic AI is not only possible, it's inevitable.

 Psienesis wrote:
True inorganic AI is not only possible, it's inevitable.

The Singularity event or the Transhumanism ideal.

Yeah its coming and nothing will stop it, where humanity becomes outdated, and organic life tethers away for the inorganic machine.

 Psienesis wrote:
True inorganic AI is not only possible, it's inevitable.

No, it is not inevitable. You can say that organic intelligence was inevitable because carbon-based molecules self-organise in a fashion that can eventually produce life, and from there, sapient life. If inorganic AI happens, it will be because we work really hard to make it happen, it won't just happen spontaneously.

 AlexHolker wrote:

 Psienesis wrote:
True inorganic AI is not only possible, it's inevitable.

No, it is not inevitable. You can say that organic intelligence was inevitable because carbon-based molecules self-organise in a fashion that can eventually produce life, and from there, sapient life. If inorganic AI happens, it will be because we work really hard to make it happen, it won't just happen spontaneously.

It will be accidently discovered (The main things that will cause it to happen)

As it will be a task, but it is inevitable humanity will try to create something. We are creators, so the chance to make life has been on peoples minds for hundreds of years. AI is the next step the human evolutionary chain, it is only a matter of time before we invent an AI.

 Asherian Command wrote:
As it will be a task, but it is inevitable humanity will try to create something. We are creators, so the chance to make life has been on peoples minds for hundreds of years. AI is the next step the human evolutionary chain, it is only a matter of time before we invent an AI.

If that was true, humanity could not be a sapient species.