Greetings Professor Falken! ::gulp::
This is fascinating to me. Those crazy kids, err, I mean, Researchers at Rensselaer are using Second Life as a platform to test an engineered, self-reasoning avatar. Yes, avatar. The little character on the screen that comes to life when operated by a reasoning human being, only… without the human being. His name is Eddie.
The idea is that using outrageously powerful supercomputers, the RPI engineers can essentially “program” basic reasoning and logic, allowing the avatar to be able to “understand, predict, and manipulate the behavior of other agents, in order to be genuine stand-ins for human beings or autonomous intellects in their own right.” OK, so that’s scary.
What do we have going for us? Right now the avatars can’t think (did I really just say “think”?) much more advanced than a typical 4 year old. But it is a 4 year old with adaptive learning, “In an instant, Eddie’s mind can be improved, and if the test is run again he makes the correct prediction.”
Our aim is not to construct a computational theory that explains and predicts actual human behavior, but rather to build artificial agents made more interesting and useful by their ability to ascribe mental states to other agents, reason about such states, and have - as avatars - states that are correlates to those experienced by humans.
“Applications include entertainment and gaming, but also education and homeland defense.” Homeland defense! So now the already scary “intellects in their own right,” are not just thinking for themselves; they’re being designed think ‘like us,’ presumably in a homeland defense scenario ‘be us.’ Clever way to find out what sort of anarchy will ensue if a cockroach really DOES eat Cincinnati. HA!
(And we thought Wargames was just a silly technophobia-inspired thrill. Can you say “ethical foreshadowing”, Joshua?)
