Re: AI and creativity.
Reply #42 –
IF, THEN, AND, OR, ELSE statements.
That's all computers really do. IF variable condition with value open exists, THEN perform X AND/OR Y AND/OR Z, activities until variable condition changes to value close. Or something like that.
Do they learn? Well, you could argue that it will create a record of each outcome it performs an action for, and then review how to stop something from happening but it will be performed with another IF statement. Data corruption is more likely to end this whole thing than any other factor. Unplug the data and you unplug the ability for it to be intelligent.
What will quantum computing do? The above sort of parameters is capable of running in microseconds as it is, but the slow bit is the pipeline in, the collection of outcomes, and then after a certain number of outcomes have been collected, looking at them to see which ones are repeated, and what else could be done to stop the outcome from occurring. We are talking a few seconds to minutes of actions being collected, analysed and repeated all with scripting and coding.
The idea that they learn is not the same as someone learning something. We learn that fire is hot, and it is to be feared because when you get that feeling of going near something hot, it could hurt you. That instinct is not what the computer learns. It will learn a sequence of actions that get taken when something is hot to stop the thing from getting hot, or it will implement a sequence of actions to avoid the hot. It doesnt learn this, it finds that information and parrots it. You wipe the disk? The memory is gone? You have the smartest brick on the planet.
Where it gets murky is if someone starts leveraging AI without telling people and safe guards are built in to prevent things from happening, but ive seen far too many systems run into trouble because of stupid stuff.
i.e. A business builds a quantum computer server farm. This leverages all the hardware into a common purpose. That farm is unregulated but able to start doing whatever with only a few people's input. Form then on, how this pans out is largely dependant on whom is in control of that technology. Isolating it from the web is easy, but if it can resolve those issues and bypass security measures itself, then it opens itself up to all manner of input. Once it has the data how it will act is a bit of an unknown known. The programs and conditions it has committed to memory it will enact until conditions change, but the scripts it runs will largely be predetermined.
What Kruddler states about the technology is a mixed bag. I don't think we are going to see 2001: A space odyssey type stuff. The computers arent capable of rational, or irrational thought. They just perform instructions.
Case in point. At my place of employment, we run virtual servers in a microsoft data centre. They had an issue where one of the hosts had an issue and tried to fail us over. The operating system failed to start, and I had to restore the virtual machine from a backup and then perform remedial action to get its SQL server database back to normal. Luckily it was part of a pair, and the primary was happy as larry, and this was the secondary. It wasnt smart enough to realise that the cluster was repaired and to start reconciling the changes made on the primary to the secondary again without human interaction, and it was incapable of restoring itself from backup without interaction from us.
THAT is where these things are not that smart. According to Microsoft, the thing was fine and healthy but in reality the VM was in a failed to start mode that appeared fine.