If it has any general goal at all that it takes seriously, it will be better achieved with self-improvement.

How much wattage needs to be spent increasing its intelligence? How many watts will that save in achieving its original goals?

Who said anything about a robot wanting to do anything ? The creator would obviously - he would certainly not build a theme park with his robots. Imagine for one second that you could build such level of AI and robots - do you really think you would need to build a theme park to finance it - WTF ?!? It's like when the AI used human brains as electricity generators in matrix - but at least that movie had cool music and fight scenes.

They were trying to produce consciousness, not raw intelligence. The park was for the robots at first. After Arnold killed himself, Ford opened the park to humans to get money in a pinch without giving up control of the bots.

You don't get it - even if you're some dreamer scientist genius who's trying to build whatever - if they actually got to that level of intelligence the tech would have been "acquired" by military/other companies/whoever and very quickly used for self improvement to get better results. If you could build that level of AI you are absolutely not building a open access theme park to fund it - how's that even remotely plausible to you ?

>if they actually got to that level of intelligence the tech would have been "acquired" by military/other companies/whoever

I don't doubt that that would be a very real consideration, a pressure out there in the world that anyone developing AI would have to contend with.

I think the problem is with treating this like an inevitability. You are always going to deal with the idiosyncracies of the world: personalities, motivations, contingent world circumstances.

And beyond that, I think we have to keep in mind that this is, after all, fiction. The writers may arbitrarily structure their world in a manner that puts a spotlight on things they feel are interesting. And, within the limits of that spotlight, they may consider things like artificial intelligence in a way that is sincere to the subset of futurist considerations they are interested in investigating. And perhaps that involves suppressing plausible forces we would expect to see, such as military and corporate interest in advanced AI tech.

> plausible

Can't imagine the character played by A. Hopkins would even pick up a phone call from military.

With that kind of tech, they wouldn't allow him the option of choosing. It'd be classified immediately as a national security issue and the government would assert ownership via eminent domain. We do not live in a world where a lone genius would be allowed to do what happens in that show.

Aside from literally nuclear tech, when has a government confiscated tech in this way? What you're describing is completely unprecedented.

It has done so over 5000 times so far just under the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act

Wow, I didn't realize that had continued past the second world war.

Even nuclear tech was specially developed with government funding. P and GGP are arguing against the fantasy show because it doesn't behaving according to their own fantasy.

edit: In fact half the time tech moves in the opposite direction. Going onto the internet to argue that potentially civilization-changing technology won't be used largely for entertainment because it'll end up exclusively owned by government shows a profound lack of awareness.

I mean if you start making a nuke the government will come and physically take it away from you :)

AI of that level would be unprecedented and far more dangerous than nukes; to think the government wouldn't interfere would be unrealistic.

I'm sure there's a pitch to be made, but consciousness doesn't seem to me to be a killer app for the military. In fact Dolores repeatedly refuses to kill people even when it's in her best interest. Only one person has died before the last episode, so how could you convince anyone that it's more dangerous than nukes? The other tech in the show seems pretty advanced so I'm sure the military is doing just fine for themselves. And the people are there because outside life is boring, so there's no cold or hot wars where they need an advantage ASAP.

We're discussing what would be realistic in our world, precisely because what's happening in the show is implausible. How Dolores behaves wouldn't be relevant to this conversation.

The show had cool music and fight scenes as well and the AI is orders of magnitude better represented than in the matrix, have you even seen the show?

I love "stupid" questions like this.

We can say that the vast majority of living beings on Earth do not seem to seek any form of radical self improvement beyond ordinary developmental learning and mastery of survival skills. There is no intrinsic reason that there must be an impulse to exceed oneself. Why would AI be different?

Most of the smartest humans spend a significant part of their lives in learning and mastery of skills that go beyond survival.

And not all hosts in the show are conscious. I would say that is a great metaphor for our current society, where you could say that the vast majority of humans aren't really conscious. They might eat and have sex and fight to survive, just like a host does. But they don't really comprehend what it means to be alive.

AI's, like humans, need a purpose. The best way of achieving that purpose is by self improvement so any AI which does not self improve to some extent will be replaced by another that will. Just like humans who don't care to self improve eventually don't reproduce enough to spread their genes.

Why indeed would an AIs motivations even be comprehensible to us.

Because an AI would be created by humans, and would therefore be modeled after human intelligence.

An alien AI, on the other hand, would most likely be incomprehensible to us, at least until we understood the aliens that created it.

Because we have neural networks in our heads. Sure, very differently structured, semantically and physically.