Educating artificial minds
Educating artificial minds posted in Equipment, Cybertech and Weapons forum comment posted by Orc Hi all, and in particular Derek,
derek_holland Posted on Apr 26 2025, 14:38
| Author |
| I want to read your thoughts on using programming vs teaching skills to educate artificial minds*. What are the advantages of using over the other? |
I've bumped into a few SF pieces that refer to Synthetic Intelligences (can't actually remember the titles right now). Both Abrash and Ian Banks referred to their artificial minds as 'Minds' (with a capital M, which if you consider some of Abrash's Minds is the very least courtesy you can do for them).
The current tech trend with machine learning and massive machine language models is basically a symptom of human programmers having reached the limits of what they could do in terms of making more sophisticated 'AI'. They looked around for the tech that most resembled their vision of AI and then borrowed heavily from it. The model they chose is that of a sophisticated search engine like Google. This is, perhaps, a poor choice.
Let's be clear the current AIs are no more Artificial Intelligence than Chess playing computers or fake psychologist programs of yesteryear or the spelling and grammer checking in your word processor or browser. The 'AI's resulting from this process are basically crunching huge amounts of data (usually numbers) and deciding on which of the millions of 'averages' best fits the question that needs answering. Because the algorithm learns from its own results any pre-existing prejudice and faults soon become amplified to ridiculous scales.
Someone close to me recently did some research into 'AI's being used in real world medical diagnosis. Unsurprisingly the software had developed some significant prejudice toward female patients. Not surprising because it was using data provided by male doctors for male patients, in an environment (both professional and cultural) where women are considered to be an irritating abnormality. The survival rates of patients with identical conditions clearly pointed toward a significant prejudice and even a degree of malpractice. Unfortunately the female patients were blamed for their failure to recover after receiving inferior treatment and the male doctors and the AIs are allowed to continue their work.
That aside, I have not so recently dealt with an 'AI' had a singular particular purpose. It provided excellent and accurate answers to a wide array of questions within its field. For the thousands of people who needed this sort of help it is awesome, but it is completely useless once you step outside of its frame of reference. For the curious the AI in question is the CS50.ai that supports the CS50 Intro to Code at Edx.org . Fantastic at answering your course material related problems, while still only feeding you enough info so that you have to do the work yourself. Ask it the slightest bit of C++ instead of C and it shuts you down so fast (politely of cause).
How to get around these problems? At least another generation or two dozen of human programmers banging their heads against brick walls. Potentially (and I think this is a long shot) the more that computer scientists can build a neural net that looks and mimics the functions of a biological brain (not necessarily human) might yield some interesting and far reaching results.
Anyway, Orc has rambled for too long.
Regards
Orc
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