Hatchling Cockatrice Randomizer Posted March 14, 2013 Share Posted March 14, 2013 The Wall Street Journal is having a great week in its humor column. Yesterday's was on useless machines. Invented in the 1950s by an artificial-intelligence expert, the device is known as the "useless machine." It is typically a small box with an on/off switch and a hinged lid. Turn on the switch and a lever pops out, turns off the switch, then retreats. That is the machine's sole purpose: You turn it on, and it turns itself off. His (Marvin Minsky) mentor at Bell Labs, Claude Shannon, built one and kept it on his desk, where the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke spotted it one day. "There is something unspeakably sinister about a machine that does nothing—absolutely nothing—except switch itself off," Mr. Clarke later wrote, saying he had been haunted by the device. They do have a purpose when adapted to AIs so when the AI becomes sentient, it will turn itself off. Thereby preventing them from becoming our new overlords. BMA 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hatchling Cockatrice Alorael at Large Posted March 14, 2013 Share Posted March 14, 2013 How does that help? If you put this into an AI it will never do anything, sapient or not. It'll just turn off. ( ) —Alorael, who worries that any algorithm capable of detecting sapience will either itself require a high degree of artificial intelligence or be so simplistic than any emergent AI would recognize its own code and avoid detection. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Magnificent Ornk Aran Posted March 14, 2013 Share Posted March 14, 2013 Sinister? It'd feel sinister if it were a machine that can turn itself on, I suppose. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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