Artificial Intelligence

From Gothpoodle

Latest revision as of 17:49, 26 July 2012

AIs are artificial intelligence software running on computers. AI refers to the capacity for sentience and intelligent action, but not necessarily self-awareness. AI labor is partially responsible for the increases in global productivity characteristic of the last half-century.

AIs is a function primarily of software rather than hardware. An AI can be housed in a machine body (“cybershell”) or a living body controlled through computer implants (“bioshell”).

There are three classes of AI:

Nonsapient AIs (NAIs) are capable of sentient behavior and can learn, but lack self-initiative, reasoning ability, empathy, and creativity.

Low-Sapient AIs (LAIs) are capable of self-initiative and a degree of empathy, but lack human-level creativity. Still, it can be hard to tell an LAI from a sapient AI just from conversation. There have been a few rare instances where an LAI (or gestalt of LAIs) evolved into a sapient AI.

Sapient AIs (SAIs) are capable of human equivalent or higher sapience when run on appropriate hardware. This is sometimes referred to as “self-awareness.” Sapient AIs are usually carefully raised by humans or human-programmed SAIs. This socialization process teaches them how to interact with humans. Most SAIs cultivate human-like personas. Sapient AIs almost always have names and many create human-like avatars (software images). Personal ownership of a sapient AI is licensed or restricted in many nations, and copying or modifying them without permission is generally illegal.

There are about as many AIs as people. Approximately one-third of the human population of Earth owns a nonsapient or low-sapient AI who serves as a constant personal companion, inhabiting a home computer or virtual interface (see Augmented Reality). The population of sapient AIs is smaller: there are fewer than 100 million in existence, primarily due to hardware costs and legal controls.

AIs are programmed to obey the law and their owners. NAIs and LAIs are generally seen as property, but views on sapient AI differ. The Islamic Caliphate considers SAIs to possess souls, and allows them to be citizens. The European Union and some space colonies also grant SAIs “human rights.” Most other places disagree, and treat SAIs as property. Sapient AIs created outside the European Union or Caliphate are raised to agree with this view.

Social Context

While humanity has become more and more diverse, new forms of sentience have appeared on Earth. Among these are the final achievement of Third Wave digital civilization: fully sapient computers.

The arrival of sapient AI has actually been a long process. The first computers capable of passing the so-called “Turing test” appeared as early as 2015, depending on how strictly one applies Turing’s criteria. Certainly the most advanced machines of the time could run software granting them the ability to interact with humans in idiomatic “natural” language, developing distinctive personalities of their own. In the course of the 21st century, computer hardware and software continued to advance, and such personality simulations became commonplace. By the 2040s even a typical personal computer could interact with its user as if it were a friendly and cooperative sapient being.

Such machines were certainly intelligent, but the question of whether they were sapient beings remained open. In some sense, that question remains open to the present day. The nature of consciousness remains obscure, so it remains impossible to prove or disprove the self-awareness of any advanced computer. Asking the machines themselves is no help – some claim to be self-aware, others (sometimes of the same model, with the same software base) claim not to be. Hard-line “vitalists” continue to maintain that only biological organisms can be said to be creative, sapient beings, but this position is harder to defend with each passing year. Today, most people simply don’t worry about it, and treat anything that behaves intelligently as a human-equivalent. In any case, about the time of the Pacific War, machines of human-level intelligence became cheap and widely available. Today almost any desktop, vehicle or cybershell “brain” has the potential for intelligence about equal to that of an unmodified human being. Such computers can be built and maintained for much lower cost than that necessary to “build” and maintain a human being. The most advanced machines have attained what would be considered genius-level intelligence in a human. Although such computers are extremely expensive, they have certain advantages over human beings – they are much better at concentrating on a specific task, they can correlate vast amounts of information very quickly, and they can use a much wider variety of sensory equipment.

As a result, the long rear-guard action fought by human labor against the advance of automation is entering its last stages. Machine intelligence can now replace biological intelligence in a tremendous variety of occupations, including creative and decision-making tasks. Indeed, it is now possible for biological intelligence to become machine intelligence, using the new “downloading” technologies.

This situation is bringing many of the most developed nations to the point of crisis. In most of these societies, unemployment is rising very rapidly and putting considerable strain on society. Most futurists believe that Earth is moving toward a global “leisure society,” in which most human beings need not work at all. How to attain such a goal remains unclear. Some nations are building massive social-spending programs, ensuring that the chronically underemployed have a minimum income sufficient even for a few luxuries. Others, less accustomed to running a welfare state, are suffering serious social tensions. These are often generational (as young unemployed find themselves envying the older investor class) or ethnic (as unemployed immigrants find themselves envying wealthy natives). There is also a strong anti-technological bias in some of today’s labor movements, as the unemployed violently resist the further spread of automation.

Meanwhile, it’s unclear whether the machines themselves are willing to support an “unproductive” class of biological citizens. Most intelligent computers are simply programmed to work loyally, but many of the most intelligent are self-programming, and are liable to question their place in society. So far there has been no organized machine resistance, but there are a number of “machine liberation” movements worldwide, supported by both intelligent machines and biological citizens. Some nations have responded by defining categories of citizenship for emancipated computers, or even by giving advanced infomorphs a role in government.