Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!strath-cs!glasgow!gilbert
From: gilbert@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Gilbert Cockton)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Free Will & Self Awareness
Message-ID: <1300@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk>
Date: 30 May 88 08:42:35 GMT
References: <770@onion.cs.reading.ac.uk> <1177@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu> <10942@sunybcs.UUCP> <31024@linus.UUCP> <1176@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU> <1187@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <1209@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU>
Reply-To: gilbert@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Gilbert Cockton)
Distribution: comp
Organization: Comp Sci, Glasgow Univ, Scotland
Lines: 27

In article <1209@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU> geb@cadre.dsl.pittsburgh.edu.UUCP (Gordon E. Banks) writes:
>>Are there any serious examples of re-programming systems, i.e. a system
>>that redesigns itself in response to punishment.
>
>Certainly!  The back-propagation connectionist systems are "punished"
>for giving an incorrect response to their input by having the weight
>strengths leading to the wrong answer decreased.
I was expecting this one.  What a marvellous way with words has mens
technica.  To restore at least one of the many subtle connotations of
the word "punishment", I would ask

Are there any serious examples of resistant re-programming systems, i.e. a 
system that redesigns itself only in response to JUST punishment, but
resists torture and other attempts to coerce it into falsehood?

I suspect the next AI pastime will be lying to the Connectionist
machine (Hey, I've got this one to blow raspberries when it sees the
word "Reagan", and that one now adds 2 and 2 to get 5!).

Who gets the key to these machines?  I'm already having visions of
Luddite workers corrupting their connectionist robots :-)  Will the
first machine simulation be of some fundamentalist religious fanatic?
-- 
Gilbert Cockton, Department of Computing Science,  The University, Glasgow
	gilbert@uk.ac.glasgow.cs !ukc!glasgow!gilbert

	     The proper object of the study of humanity is humans, not machines