An examination of A.I. and E.I. using Ex Machina and other movies as a reference.

MaeZe

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Crochet is that way for me, and sometimes, work.
Sometimes I can't think of the right move - if I stop thinking and just let my fingers decide, they make the right choice. I suspect that, like music, it wouldn't work for something new, but if the fingers 'know' the correct choice from past training, they simply follow the pattern.

*My work is traditional 'paper-shuffling', put forms in the right one of a dozen slots. Once I learned them, my fingers could do the walking, if the brain got sidetracked.
That's exactly it. It's not your fingers that know, it's your brain, just not the conscious function.

And there are more than one of these parallel brain functions that simply work outside of the conscious part of your brain. It gives one a different perspective on just what consciousness is.

People with certain kinds of brain damage can do things one would normally think required one's consciousness to achieve. In their case, they cannot see or think of the thing, like the angle of the slit*. But the brain sees that angle and the hand can find the angle all without the person having conscious awareness of the angle the hand is in.

So there may be one mechanism that involves trained movements, but there is another that does not require previous habituation.


*It's weird when they can see the slit but not the angle. It's not like a blind spot, there is some kind of shape blindness. That's a whole topic in itself.
 
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Albedo

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It's kind of scary that everything we know about how the mind works comes from when it breaks. Well, not everything, but a lot.

I see it like this: mind is a whole of brain thing. It's not sitting in the pineal gland or the basal ganglia somewhere directing things. It IS the brain. Mind is what brains do. An AI might be made vastly intelligent, but it won't ever think, unless it sits on a substrate of autonomous, endlessly repurposable elements where every single part is contributing to the whole. And that's called a brain.
 

frimble3

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Yes! Not a conscious function - but still really weird to realize that the info is going directly to the appendages, without my having to select and send it.
Still, I suppose it's what makes repetitive tasks bearable, so people can knit and talk, or shell peas while watching TV.
 

frimble3

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Oh, and back OT, I've never been really interested in how AI, robots or, indeed, FTL travel works. I want a story that shows it working, in accordance with whatever rules there are for it.
Much as I don't need to know how a car's engine works, if the car chase is exciting, or the details of how surgery works, as long as someone is fixed, or dies, at the end.
 

lizmonster

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Oh, and back OT, I've never been really interested in how AI, robots or, indeed, FTL travel works. I want a story that shows it working, in accordance with whatever rules there are for it.
Much as I don't need to know how a car's engine works, if the car chase is exciting, or the details of how surgery works, as long as someone is fixed, or dies, at the end.

I'm with you here, up to a point. If I could design a workable AI - or even come up with a solid theory based on current real-world technology - I'd be off making millions doing that instead of bashing my head against this writing thing. :)

There are credibility points, of course, and that's where these kinds of discussions can be useful. Computers in general are a thing a lot of media gets wrong, from high-level news reporting to movies. When you're talking about something that's currently not possible (like sentient AI), you're going to have to handwave one way or another, but it's worth doing a little homework so you're not doing something like A + B = sandwich.
 

onesecondglance

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MJHeiden

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I've been fascinated by the concept of truly conscious synthetic organisms for quite a while now. I even went so far as to write a sci-fi surrounding it, hence I've looked into what we are capable of currently and what may be in the future.

It seems for the most part, scientists and robotic designers haven't moved beyond that Faux consciousness yet, nor will they in the near future. Hence why many sci-fi writers, movies like Artificial Intelligence and Ex Machina generally leave out the technicalities of these believed to be conscious AI - no one knows how to make that work yet. That being said, I truly believe AI, left to their own development - without the boundaries of human's limited imagination - they will build their successors to have a form of conscious thought distinct from our own.

It won't be the same as ours. Nor should it be, as many people assume. Our conscious thought stems from a unique network of organic matter we call neurons. Some could argue AI circuits are akin to neurons, but I think to achieve true consciousness and not faux programmable consciousness, you'll need an ever-changing environment. It'll be inorganic in nature, and hence consciousness for a synthetic being will be different than our own. They'll have different values, motives, and beliefs, but those things we call "free thinking" and "self awareness" will most certainly be there... in another 1000 years haha.