The end of AI winter?

Re:The end of AI winter? by randallsquared on Thursday October 01, 2009 @04:20PM (#855746)

I think the best defintion of "free will" basically boils down to "unpredictable in detail absent simulation". This sounds weird at first, but the results probably match your intuitive understanding of free will. Given that, I think that any general intelligence approaching human level will have free will.

That doesn't mean that it won't have certain goals, though it remains to be seen whether it will be possible to design a clean goal system with a top-level goal (see also "Friendliness"). Humans clearly do not have this kind of goal system.

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Re:The end of AI winter? by eru on Friday October 02, 2009 @09:22AM (#856952)

Would a good Pseudo-Random number generator satisfy your definition?

(By the way, humans, when asked directly for random numbers, are terrible at the task.)

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Re:The end of AI winter? by randallsquared on Friday October 02, 2009 @11:49AM (#857288)

Well, it satisfies the "free" part, but probably not the "will" part, which implies reasons for actions. I'm not actually sure humans have free will under my definition, but I think we probably do. It could be that some algorithm that's much simpler than an actual human could predict in detail what a given human will do without simulation, in which case I'd be forced to admit that humans don't have free will by my definition.

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