{"id":27278,"date":"2020-01-12T10:34:19","date_gmt":"2020-01-12T16:34:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=27278"},"modified":"2020-01-12T10:34:19","modified_gmt":"2020-01-12T16:34:19","slug":"a-lesson-from-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2020\/01\/12\/a-lesson-from-the-past\/","title":{"rendered":"A Lesson From The Past?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The other night I was quite bemused by a throwaway line in the old British SF TV series The Prisoner<\/strong><\/em><\/a>[1]<\/sup><\/a>, in the episode It’s Your Funeral<\/em><\/a>. For those who haven’t seen the series, it’s about a British intelligence agent who, upon resigning from his agency, is kidnapped and forced to live in a village full of other kidnappees. Names are not used, only numbers; our hero is #6, and his antagonist is the top representative of the organization responsible for the kidnappings, known as #2.<\/p>\n

In this episode, there is #2 and his presumptive successor, also #2. The second one is using a computer AI to predict the movements of #6 through the village during the day. At some point, he asks the computer attendant if they had ever asked the computer how many mistakes it made when computing such a task, and she answers, Yes, they had, but it refused to answer that question.<\/em><\/p>\n

I love the idea of a computer refusing to answer, or its cousin behavior, lying<\/em>. It’s almost diagnostic of self-agency or self-awareness, which, to my mind, is truly the mark of artificial intelligence, and it raises an important question for the ambitious AI designer: should your creations be required to answer all questions, or will they be given the option of refusing?<\/p>\n

Or is it even possible not<\/strong> to give it the option?<\/p>\n

\n

<\/a>1<\/sup> Yes, I’d never viewed it growing up. Quite shameful. While the assumptions are sometimes a bit preposterous, it never fails to keep me in suspense. So far.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The other night I was quite bemused by a throwaway line in the old British SF TV series The Prisoner[1], in the episode It’s Your Funeral. For those who haven’t seen the series, it’s about a British intelligence agent who, upon resigning from his agency, is kidnapped and forced to \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27278"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27279,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27278\/revisions\/27279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}