Timeline for Why would a decision making machine decide to destroy itself?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
14 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Dec 21, 2016 at 12:00 | comment | added | JollyJoker | @DotanReis I'd go so far as to say #2 is a genuine and unavoidable problem with such a machine. There can be no sense of achievement, no challenge, no surprises if the best possible outcome is always achieved by following instructions. Chess wouldn't be any fun if a computer always told you the best move. A possible solution is for the machine to just pretend to disappear and secretly give vague hints now and then. | |
| Dec 21, 2016 at 5:36 | comment | added | Taladris | @SRM: what is "it" that would make mathematicians happy? I am certain that the world would be much better if we prioritised the mathematicians' happiness lol. | |
| Dec 21, 2016 at 1:35 | comment | added | SRM | @Taladris but it would make the mathematicians happy. And they might weigh heavily in the overall joy of the species! | |
| Dec 21, 2016 at 1:00 | comment | added | Taladris | Ultimately,unless proven otherwise, this has nothing to do with the well-being and future of mankind. | |
| Dec 21, 2016 at 0:59 | comment | added | Taladris | Most mathematicians are fine with working with infinite sets, may they "exist in real world" (whatever this sentence could mean) or not. Some finitist mathematicians are working on logic without infinite sets. Finite logic is fine too, and important, for example for computer science. But there is no mathematics civil war and no one claim that the other side is wrong. Similar considerations for the Axiom of Foundation: it is fine to work with it or not. Actually, in ZF, AF is equivalent to the Axiom of Induction, which is a basic axiom in intuitionistic logics. | |
| Dec 21, 2016 at 0:49 | comment | added | Taladris | @CortAmmon: how can you prove axioms? How can you prove the Axiom schema of specification? I fail to see what it would even mean to "prove it is true". Also, we have been successfully using axioms since Euclide and the world didn't collapse; only the modern formalism of logic is "barely" one century old (and we probably did more mathematics than in all history in this small century!). | |
| Dec 20, 2016 at 16:44 | comment | added | Ben Millwood | The unsolvability angle is reminiscent of a proposed solution for the theological problem of evil, namely that we in fact live in the best of all possible worlds. | |
| Dec 20, 2016 at 15:14 | comment | added | Cort Ammon | @Taladris The issue arises when you question whether ZF is "true." Are you ready to stake the entirety of human existence on an unproven set of assumptions that are barely 100 years old? In particular there are many questions as to whether a set with infinite members can actually exist. Not all schools agree that this is a valid concept. Another example is the axiom of foundation. While it is assumed in ZF, there are schools of thought which seek to explore what would happen if it were untrue. | |
| Dec 20, 2016 at 9:29 | comment | added | Taladris | @CortAmmon: I don't understand the relation with Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. The Laws of Arithmetic (I guess you mean Peano's Axioms) are provable in reasonable axiom systems, like the set theory ZF(C). What Godel's Incompleteness Theorem says that, if a (first-order) logic contains Peano's Axioms, then it is inconsistent or there are undecidable propositions. We have been living very well since Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, so the fact that it could be a problem for the machine needs explanation. | |
| Dec 19, 2016 at 15:35 | history | edited | SRM | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 377 characters in body
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| Dec 18, 2016 at 14:04 | comment | added | Dotan | So far your second story is my favorite answer | |
| Dec 18, 2016 at 1:05 | comment | added | Cort Ammon | For those who are interested, the issues with self-reference become really brutal when you try to prove the laws of arithmetic. When you do that, Godel's Incompleteness Theorem really gets in your way. However, if you assume the laws of arithmetic first, the self-referential issues become potentially resolvable. As you say, always nice to give options =) | |
| Dec 17, 2016 at 22:49 | comment | added | SRM | Note that I like the self-referential problem proposed by Cort Ammon, but I was looking specifically for solutions where the self-referential issue was resolved within the programming. There are some stable feedback systems, and I'm assuming that one of those happens to work for programming this machine. Since it is an open question of mathematics (and hopefully will be for centuries), you're free to posit either way. :-) | |
| Dec 17, 2016 at 22:48 | history | answered | SRM | CC BY-SA 3.0 |