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[Grim Portent]

Well the local punishment for homosexuality back in 1895 was a lifetime of hard labour in prison rather than a lobotomy, so I guess I'd win on that front. Before 1889 the punishment was technically death. It wasn't unusual for homosexuals to just be quietly ignored here though, same in most of Europe to my understanding.

[Iduno]

Raise your hand if you'd have gotten a lobotomy if you were born in 1895

Sure, I've got nothing better going on.

[MCreeper]

So how do you set up a rotating avatar on this forum? Trying to do it with randimg.net, but if i put link in with https, site just switches back to no avatar, and if put it in with http, site freaks out and hangs up.

[heydude6]

So somebody on this forum proposed the idea of renaming AI (Artificial Intelligence) to AC (Artificial Consciousness). Now normally a statement like that would just fade away like the average shower thought, but for some reason this idea really grabbed me.

Currently the average person imagines an AI to be something like C3PO or Skynet. Basically a hyper-intelligent synthetic human that often has a personality. The AI's we currently produce via machine learning and neural networks are nothing like that though. They simply accept a variety of inputs and process it to spit out an output. Our current methods are never going result in a HAL9000 because that's not what the algorithms are designed to produce. Real AI is hyperspecialized.

The thing is though, that doesn't stop us from conflating the two and as result we get a lot people who are irrationally afraid of AI achieving superintelligence and destroying us all! That simply isn't possible cause our algorithms are not capable of creativity despite what music bots may lead you to believe. Real AI is an inside-the-box thinker, and ultimately its the programmer who designs the parameters of this box.

I believe that by separating the concept of fantasy sci-fi AI and real AI into two terms, the average Joe will have an easier time grasping what AI actually is and what problems it can effectively be used to solve, as well as what it can't, so as to avoid falling under the sway of the many magic-men who make claims that can't be backed up. I believe George Orwell's theory of language influencing thought is right on.

The question now is whether to use the term AI for fantastical sci-fi things, since that was what the term was originally coined for, or should we change the meaning of AI to only describe the modern stuff and ascribe a new term for the sci-fi consciousnesses (from what I understand, AI researchers want to call them GI or General Intelligence rather than AC). If we kept the original meaning of the word AI, what should we call the alogrithmic things we use currently? Automatic Optimizers or AOs?

[McTraveller]

The industry generally refers to neural-network type stuff that just solves problems in a non-algorithmic manner "machine learning."

I got the term Artificial Consciousness from an article (can't remember where) on self-driving cars; basically the research is that it's consciousness which gives some animals "autonomy", rather than just solving control loops or crunching numbers or doing image/language classification.

Consciousness is the thing which gives us "focus" and the ability to choose - it's the thing that ties together all the "equation-solving" machinery that is basically just advanced math processors.  So "general intelligence" is probably (I'm not that familiar with the literature) a synonym for what I mean by "consciousness".  An interesting distinction though is that you don't need to have massive computational capabilities to have consciousness though - that is, you don't have to be able to be the best chess player or image recognizer or whatever to have consciousness.

It is, I think, I nice way to think about the field.

[martinuzz]

I'm sure there are people here who would find that interesting

[TD1]

But the only way to properly know is to make a thread.

Worst case scenario, no one posts and you find out your answer.

[scriver]

I hope it will be a thread about all bugs and not just insects,  or I will protest-post about spiders in it

[TD1]

Kinda bad manners not to include spiders when you're hosting the conversation on something called the World Wide Web

[None]

I hope it will be a thread about all bugs and not just insects,  or I will protest-post about spiders in it

So there's this button on a page that one user persona has access to, but not permissions to complete the flow on, and the fix for that was to remove the button entirely from that persona... Along with four others, including the administrator persona.

It's a really cool bug.

[Egan_BW]

Spoiler: relevant to the conversation a while back :v (click to show/hide)

[feelotraveller]

what comes after infinity?
for that matter, what comes before?

Nothing comes before infinity.

More pragmatically people both come before and come after infinity.

[MaxTheFox]

So how do you set up a rotating avatar on this forum? Trying to do it with randimg.net, but if i put link in with https, site just switches back to no avatar, and if put it in with http, site freaks out and hangs up.

Signavatar works for me.

As for the AI thing, in my hard sci-fi setting, non-sapient "AIs" are called just AIs, while strong AIs are called ACs.

[King Zultan]

I have an AC in my house, is it secretly filling my house with mindcontrol nanobots that pass themselves off as cool air?

[Magmacube_tr]

Yes.