Of Gods and Creations... An Amateur Speculates On AI

I wanted to respond to the thoughts I had while I was reading this post from @kyriacos:

A.I. Will Accidentally Emerge Through The Blockchain

(Well worth a read so please take a moment to do so)

It's Already Here

At the DOTA 2 tournament here in Seattle over the summer... Elon Musk backed start-up OpenAI introduced an AI that was able to easily beat the top rated player. It was never taught anything about the game, it was able to learn.. and then left to play lifetimes worth of games against a copy of itself.

How are we defining intelligence though?

Researcher	Quote
Alfred Binet	Judgment, otherwise called "good sense," "practical sense," "initiative," the faculty of adapting one's self to circumstances ... auto-critique.
David Wechsler	The aggregate or global capacity of the individual to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with his environment.
Lloyd Humphreys	"...the resultant of the process of acquiring, storing in memory, retrieving, combining, comparing, and using in new contexts information and conceptual skills."
Howard Gardner	To my mind, a human intellectual competence must entail a set of skills of problem solving — enabling the individual to resolve genuine problems or difficulties that he or she encounters and, when appropriate, to create an effective product — and must also entail the potential for finding or creating problems — and thereby laying the groundwork for the acquisition of new knowledge.
Linda Gottfredson	The ability to deal with cognitive complexity.
Sternberg & Salter	Goal-directed adaptive behavior.
Reuven Feuerstein	The theory of Structural Cognitive Modifiability describes intelligence as "the unique propensity of human beings to change or modify the structure of their cognitive functioning to adapt to the changing demands of a life situation."
Legg & Hutter	A synthesis of 70+ definitions from psychology, philosophy, and AI researchers: "Intelligence measures an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments," which has been mathematically formalized.

I tend to feel that all the definitions for Intelligence are met by the OpenAI program. Unless we are talking beyond intelligence and more about self awareness.

The Evolution Of AI

I really enjoy the concept of an AI evolving through a natural process, although I don't really expect that will happen. The fact that there is already "early life" means to me that it won't be allowed the time to happen in another manner. AI will definitely have a creator and I don't expect evolution from that point, or maybe just not evolution as we know and understand it.

Gods And Creations

"Eventually we won't be doing anything different other than serving the sum of humanity's data that have created something greater than themselves. We will always be the Gods and the creations."

The Titans in Greek Mythology created the Gods, as the Gods grew... they no longer needed the Titans. They were removed as the Gods moved on to create man. As man grew, they no longer needed the Gods... who withered into nothing without the attention of man. AI probably won't be malevolent towards us at any point, it may even truly need us for a period of time, but it's the same cycle I see at the start of paragraph. New life is created fundamentally different from life before, after a period of dependance, the previous life passes on.

Final Thought

Above I was trying to illustrate a cycle... all Gods were at one point a creation, and that maybe the act of transitioning to God... begins a death process. The ultimate goal being what it has always been... the continuation of life, but maybe not human life.