Life's purpose is to create Artificial General Intelligence

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ProgrammingGodJordan
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Life's purpose is to create Artificial General Intelligence

Post by ProgrammingGodJordan »

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1.a) Life's purpose is reasonably to do optimization. 2.a) Artificial General intelligence (AGI), will probably arise in one decade or more, and they shall probably be better optimizers than humans. 2.d) In fact AGI is often referred to as the last invention mankind need ever make: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9snY7lhJA4c)


3) Thus, our purpose as a species is reasonably to focus on AGI development.

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Some benefits of AGI may be:

I) Solve many problems, including aging, death, etc. II) Agi may be used to help to find a unified theory of everything in physics! III) Enable a new step in the evolutionary landscape; i.e. general intelligence that's not limited to human brain power, where humans may perhaps no longer be required to exist because smarter, stronger artificial sentient things would instead thrive.
Steve3007
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Re: Life's purpose is to create Artificial General Intelligence

Post by Steve3007 »

When you state that this is our purpose, how does that translate into actions? How should we be behaving differently? Should we be devoting all of our time to the development of AGI? Or just more of it? How much more of it? Are there other problems that we ought to try to solve first?
ProgrammingGodJordan
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Re: Life's purpose is to create Artificial General Intelligence

Post by ProgrammingGodJordan »

Steve3007 wrote: January 6th, 2018, 11:03 am When you state that this is our purpose, how does that translate into actions? How should we be behaving differently? Should we be devoting all of our time to the development of AGI? Or just more of it? How much more of it? Are there other problems that we ought to try to solve first?
There are many open problems in the field of artificial intelligence.
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JamesOfSeattle
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Re: Life's purpose is to create Artificial General Intelligence

Post by JamesOfSeattle »

I tend to agree with the OP, but I would be a little more descriptive when ascribing a purpose to "Life". I think there are two different (but related) kinds of purpose. The first is the kind of purpose we ascribe to Nature. This kind of purpose is more a description of what tends to happen. So you might say the purpose of a rock (or raindrop) at the top of a hill is to get to the bottom of the hill. Or you might say, as Jeremy England suggests, the purpose of the universe is not only to increase entropy, but to increase the rate of increasing entropy.

So I think saying the purpose of life is to create AGI is like saying the purpose of single cell organisms is to evolve into multicellular organisms, and the purpose of multicellular organisms is to evolve into intelligent organisms, and the purpose of intelligent organisms is to evolve into technological organisms, and the purpose of technological organisms is to design AGI. (What will be the purpose of AGI?)

Now the other kind of purpose is that which is associated with goals. This type of purpose is also an explanation of what tends to happen, but in this case "what tends to happen" is action which tends to accomplish the goal. Goals are the product of intelligent beings, and these beings are generally concerned with achieving these goals and so tend to ask themselves what actions they should take to achieve these goals. So when you say the purpose of life is to create AGI, people may see that as a statement of a goal rather than a tendency. Thus, you get questions like Steve's. So my answer to Steve would be: creation of AGI is not so much a goal as a tendency. It's just gonna happen. As such, it does not need to drive our choices.

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Sy Borg
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Re: Life's purpose is to create Artificial General Intelligence

Post by Sy Borg »

James wrote:So when you say the purpose of life is to create AGI, people may see that as a statement of a goal rather than a tendency.
I agree. Life's purpose appears to simply be, resulting in drives towards persisting and leaving influence, and those drives bring the tendency to create ever better tools to that end, such as general AI.

This begs the question as to AI's purpose. Again, I'll go with persistence and leaving influence.

Due to resource limits and our ageing star, in much less than a billions years the Earth's surface will be sterilised (unless humanity's successors build biodomes, and will no doubt be well established underground by then too). Life, as we observe, is not inclined to leave without a trace - life is compelled to try to leave a legacy, and the competition for this is fierce, and thus life's skills in persistence are honed ever sharper.

Since humans aren't especially large, strong, protected, weaponised, venomous or even toxic, humans persist because they are smart and curious; they explore the novel and unfamiliar with a passion that other species reserve only for food, mating and territory, and thus gain strategic and logistical advantages over others.

Human exploration and space-faring tie into this dynamic. It's the only way, barring fluky panspermia, that Earth's life will persist once the Sun expands. I see AI as an extension of humans, like a mollusc's shell. If, in time, humans entirely forego their biology and digitise themselves, that would not mean we were no longer alive but would just extend the definition of life. A new category: sentient geology.

Earth's life needs to spread out and, given the complexities and dangers of space, space explorers will increasingly be entirely AI, or heavily modified humans/cyborgs.
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Hereandnow
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Re: Life's purpose is to create Artificial General Intelligence

Post by Hereandnow »

Yeah. Things are going this way and the sooner the better, so people can start collectively having the free time to think philosophically. We won't need a Brave New World, just an AI nanny society. No need for reducing people to trivialities as it is with all we associate with "employment."
ProgrammingGodJordan
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Re: Life's purpose is to create Artificial General Intelligence

Post by ProgrammingGodJordan »

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Why is the purpose of human life to create artificial general intelligence?

1.a) Evolution is optimising ways of contributing to the increase of entropy, as systems very slowly approach equilibrium. (The universe’s predicted end)

1.b) Within that process, work or activities done through several ranges of intelligent behaviour are reasonably ways of contributing to the increase of entropy. (See source)

1.c) As species got more and more intelligent, nature was finding better ways to contribute to increases of entropy. (Intelligent systems can be observed as being biased towards entropy maximization)

1.d) Humans are slowly getting smarter, but even if we augment our intellect by CRISPR-like routines or implants, we will reasonably be limited by how many computational units or neurons etc fit in our skulls.

1.e) AGI/ASI won’t be subject to the size of the human skull/human cognitive hardware. (Laws of physics/thermodynamics permits human exceeding intelligence in non biological form)

1.f) As AGI/ASI won’t face the limits that humans do, they are a subsequent step (though non biological) particularly in the regime of contributing to better ways of increasing entropy, compared to humans.

2) The above is why the purpose of the human species, is reasonably to create AGI/ASI
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