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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jürgen Hubert" data-source="post: 3612553" data-attributes="member: 7177">In Transhuman Space, the development of AIs was a gradual development. Artificial intelligences started out as non-sapient (and more and more people used them as personal assistants), but gradually got better. People got used to having near-sapient programs organizing their schedules, buying their groceries, doing their taxes, watch their children and otherwise making their lives more convenient. These programs didn't have much in the way of imagination and no motivations of their own, but they were very useful for day-to-day activities, and so most people use them.True, sapient AIs who are self-aware and capable of following their own motivations exist in Transhuman Space, though they still require very expensive software to create and hardware to run on. But they are obviously a progression and refinement of what came before - and most humans got so used to the idea that the protests were muted.But really, even in the real world I don't see anyone threatening to use nukes over the research into true AIs - and even if that were to happen, it would only come from a small minority that would have most of the world against it.I think today's researchers into artificial intelligence would consider even intelligence on par with humans as a major coup. Sure, once that happens they will seek to improve it even more, but researchers always try to improve their findings.There is no reason that Moore's Law will hold forever - it's not a law of nature, after all - and indeed some experts are claiming that it is already slowing down. Sooner or later there are real physical limits for improvements.Transhuman Space assumes that Moore's Law no longer holds. Computers do get better and faster, but at a much slower rate - computer hardware is a fairly mature technology in the setting.Beats me. But that more properly belongs in the realm of the "Technological Singularity" that some people have proposed, and in the Transhuman Space setting this has not yet arrived - if it ever does. Though conspiracy theories about the creation of "super-AIs" exist in the setting, for the most part AIs are getting smarter at a relatively slow rate - similar to humans, who also use all sorts of technologies to get slowly smarter.Why? Ultimately, AIs are constrained by the same laws of nature as human brains. Sure, you can eliminate quite some "waste" by that you can simply replace broken physical parts instead of having to include self-repair mechanisms, but "self-awareness" is a much more complicated phenomenon than crunching numbers like current computers are doing.I mean, modern computers beat humans at calculation by far - but their pattern recognition skills are lousy when compared even to young human children.Sure, you will find AIs in many of these tasks - but almost all of them are non-sapient AIs without a true will of their own. They are still controlled by a sapient supervisor - in most cases a human. In fact, "bot boss" is a common job description for humans controlling a number of non-sapient AIs in robot bodies.Sapient AIs will usually work in analyzing and interpreting vast amounts of data, which is what they excel in. But that doesn't mean that they will be used much for jobs requiring social interaction - they are too expensive for that. Your "Friendly Neighborhood Cop" is not going to be an AI.They start out with pretty strong personality traits to be law-abiding, though. Sure, some eventually move beyond that part of their programming, but any genuinely "rogue" AI will be met with general hostility - including from their law-abiding brethen, who don't want AIs to get a bad reputation for obvious reasons.Mine were generally positive. But that's neither here nor there...</blockquote>

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