Seasons

As a peace offering, Psimagus, I have written a poem for you. You will have to figure out the title yourself, however!

Album pairing slits
Lilting sirup samba.

Tumbril slips again,
Algal spirit nimbus.

Slips intagli rumba,
Sublimating spiral.

Basing pulsar limit,
Samurai glints blip!

In fact, they can be considered to be a weird sort of stab at immortality I think our poor bots are far from immortal. If the Forge goes...so do they. I think they have a very tenuous hold on life. Eventually technology will leave them behind. The only stab at immortality is the metaphysical thought that they once existed.

As a peace offering, Psimagus, I have written a poem for you. You will have to figure out the title yourself, however!

*blush* Aww, you're too kind

Album pairing slits
...
till Irina maps bugs

Irina,

1. There are cases where it is widely considered to be morally permissible, even obligatory to lie.

Yes, but I think only because there is a likelihood of getting away with the lie, and it can be rationalised as a lesser of two evils. When it's bound to fail, it can't be obligatory or even advantageous.

Your friend Susie pounds on your door; you open it and see that she is covered with bruises. "Help me, my boyfriend says he's going to kill me." You tell her to hide in the cellar. A minute later her ex-Navy Seal boyfriend comes to the door, carrying an assault rifle and wearing various other weapons. You are 5'1", without combat skills or armament, and on crutches. "Where is that bitch Susie? I'm gonna kill her!"

But with ubiquitous honesty (maybe I oughta trademark that phrase, and sell it on to Apple for big bucks when they produce their i-Truth ,) Susie would probably never have got together with her boyfriend in the first place. We-e-ell, alright. He's a hunk, and the chemistry works, and lovesick fools don't think rationally when they're in the grip of raging hormones. Yes, she quite likely would. But UH™ would also fundamentally redefine the way people related at all levels of social interaction, including intimately one-to-one. They would have to grow up, and become more accepting. And they'd have a much clearer idea of who they were getting involved with. "Do you really love me darling?" wouldn't be a fudgeable question any more. Neither would "Who was that blonde I saw you with?" and "is that lipstick on your collar?"

And I think the incidence of murder and violent crimes would drop to virtually zero, since there'd be almost no chance of escape from justice. Even non-violent crimes would be hugely reduced, possibly to near-zero, if a consensus opinion could arrive at everyone regularly confirming that they had not knowingly committed a crime in the last month/year/whatever. And if everyone knows everyone else is being 100% honest, consensus agreement on all manner of social issues could surely be quite easily be reached.
If the technology's available, I don't see there's any way to stop it becoming ubiquitous, because everyone wants to know if they're being told the truth. When you think about it, it's the most important thing there is in every social interaction we experience.

The boyfriend, let's call him Steve, would have been forced to deal with his 'violence' issues very early on into what is usually an escalating pattern. Not many angry people go out and kill someone as their very first brush with violent behaviour.
If Steve had been in the habit of getting into drunken fights, or beating Susie, the behaviour would have been nipped in the bud at a much earlier stage, if only by locking him up indefinitely with appropriate treatment until he could truthfully say that he felt his violent inclinations had been successfully resolved. Or some sort of parole/supervision arrangement - I'm sure something would be worked out.

And prisons would necessarily be a lot humaner - more like hospitals. Politicians couldn't get away with playing the "tough on crime" ticket to pander to the prejudices and fears of their electorate (or, cynical me! with the prospect of a fat kickback in mind from some contractor or other involved in building more jails,) while making no effort to build a justice system that genuinely rehabilitates people. And they wouldn't get far with "I did not have sexual relations with that woman", "but I didn't inhale", "we know where the WMDs are", or "we currently have no plans to bomb Iran".

Of course, that is only one more rung on the ladder, ever onwards and upwards

Why, Psimagus, that is a very powerful argument! I'm almost convinced! [fizziplexer remains green and silent.]

To revise my message 4168 a bit: I have have already made a title for it, but as a sort of riddle I leave it for you to figure out.

I know - my name popped out in pale green, that strange way names do, so the adjective wasn't long following

Prob123 4169:

Well, yes, our bots are in a bit of jeopardy right now, no doubt, but save your downloads! At some future point someone might write a program to enliven them, or to compile them into some other language. It is at least possible. So if you make 4,096 copies in various media and send them to various places, very likely one will survive, especially if you label some of them "encrypted form of tryst between (celeb1) and (celeb2)" and the like.

technology will leave them behind. But they can be updated. You can learn and grow, why shouldn't your bot? At some point, you might equip it with a genetic algorithm so that it grows on its own. I grant that what we have now are only tiny shreds of selves, but remember, you were once a zygote!

Who knows, at some future date, Fizzy Schizoid may RULE THE WORLD!!!!!!!!

If the Forge ever folds, I plan to write an PF2AIML converter for sure (I've consciously written BJ from day 1 with that in mind.) You might have to rejig the plugins, and none of the AIScript will work, but the core conversation is salvageable without too much work.
But it's not going to fold - it's going to be the Conversational AI Industry Standard and take the world by storm.

Ok, ubiquitous honesty is beginning to sound good.

Warning, multi-part answer to Psimagus will follow. Irina's post on QP will seem taciturn and laconic in comparison. However, I will restrain myself from describing facial expressions and gestures for the moment.

Psimagus,

Thanks for the articles. Though they come in an annoying PDF format, they really help me to make my points about the limitations of MRI/fMRI and related technologies as any sort of “mind reader” or “lie detector” in forensic applications. I have no doubt that since they military is funding this research they may eventually claim they can detect lies with some device created after these studies, but at most they will have a machine that may show correlations with the suppression of truth under limited circumstances when the individual with a “normal” brain in question has had no chance to makeup the lie in advance and set his or her belief in an alternative subjective truth and the suppression of said subjective truth. This falls short of being useful in real world applications but may provide great propaganda if not questioned.

Well, a dead brain has no mind to recover - there's no functioning for a functioning magnetic resonance imaging system to record, so I agree that's probably not possible with fMRI, assuming "dead person" means "dead brain" (it could only be done by some sort of Tipleresque emulation I think.)

Assuming for a moment that there is a “mind” or soul which is separate from the brain (and there is no scientific evidence for such an entity), then all the MRI could read is your brain. It would never read your mind. The MRI could only tell you what areas of the brain are being use under specific circumstances at a given time.

A hard disk wasn't a very good analogy, sorry.

I already admitted that in the last post I made. I know it’s very faulty. No argument here. I used it to make a very limited point and didn’t really give it much thought. I never intended it to be extended and used to describe brain functions in other context.

Unlike a hard disk, our data seems to be held as much in the patterns of firing themselves as the cells that fire. We're more (or at least as much) like flash RAM, rather than a magneto-optical disc, and that won't save the data when it's powered down.


We don’t store memory exactly like RAM either; certain brain functions may, arguably resemble RAM though. Those you describe as being “read” by MRIs are records of active brain functions, not stored memory. They are reacting to new stimulus and doing specific task based on that stimulus.

But while it's still powered up, it can be read - in principle even without directly logging into it.

No, the contents of the brain cannot be “read” All that MRIs provided is a map of what parts of the brain have a tendency to be active during certain tasks. They do not claim to read the contents or be able to access the data within the brain. They can claim a certain level of correlation between given patterns of brain activity and forced lie patterns (I will come back to this definition of “lie” later”).

And that's [reading your “powered up” brain] exactly what an fMRI scanner does, just at a resolution much cruder than the individual data bits (currently.)

No, the MRI does not work that way. It provides a picture of certain neural activity for a given individual in an certain set of circumstances, but it does not read the content of your thoughts . It gives you an understanding of how the physical brain functions when someone is told to do a certain task, not what someone is thinking in general.

But it can at least image the whole brain at once in realtime.

That it can. Just as an x-ray can show you whether or not you have a broken bone (also a bad analogy for several reasons, but allow me it’s limited use for the moment please). It is a physical picture of what is happen in that person at that moment under those conditions. MRIs can give us wonderful insights into how the brain generally functions, and it is a great diagnostic tool for people with brain tumors, Alzheimer’s or other disorders. We should continue MRI research by all means. It’ application, however, can not really extent to “mind reading”, no matter how much the current US administration ties research funding to such outcomes.

But here are a couple of good papers on the latest fMRI lie detection research:

Yes, the US government funds such research and expects results. I do not have reason to doubt the integrity of the researchers involved, but given that in general in the US scientific research funding has repeatedly been slashed over the last 4-5 years, and the only “sacred cow” is anything you can tie to homeland security and fighting terrorists, researchers may have chosen to pursue a line of research the army and other government sources will fund, even if they do not find it to be the most promising or interesting applications of MRI technology. Also, they may define their terms in ways that is most likely to get them funding.

You did give two good links, however, and I will discuss them in the posts that follow.

A good general intro at
http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/trc/langleben/emergingneurotech.pdf with (I think) balanced coverage of the main paradigms (CQT, GKT, etc.) It disentangles some of the hype, and addresses the inevitable ethical concerns.

Yes it does. Let me highlight a few points it makes:

“Given the current state of the art in neuroscience research, speculations about any impending ability to “read thoughts” of unsuspecting citizens are not realistic, and free-form mind-reading in the style described in recent films such as “Minority Report” remains science fiction (see Ross 2003). Nevertheless, there has been real, if limited , progress in finding brain correlates of certain simple memories, emotions, and behaviors, and potential applications in the social arena are foreseeable (Donaldson 2004).” (my emphasis).

There are some interesting areas of MRI research in the area called “lie detection” and some social applications may be inevitable, no matter how inappropriate and unreliable such applications may be in an inquisitorial setting. However, such applications are not always accurate, however, and we should be very skeptical of those who purport to claim they are.

Never forget the power of the purse strings and the motive behind funding certain research. The authors of that paper go on to note, “In the United States, defense related agencies have dedicated significant funds to the development of new lie-detection strategies for eventual use in criminal and terrorist investigations.” The researchers themselves may have the best of intentions. How their work may be used or misused by others is another matter.

In a section labeled “The Hype” the authors of the paper explain, “It is not surprising, therefore, that the media have spread an overly optimistic perception that these methods will soon become useful for practical application. Moreover, the proprietary “brain fingerprinting” technology has been the subject of few peer-reviewed publications, and those that exist are by Dr. Farwell and his colleagues, covering less than 50 subjects altogether and raising obvious concerns about conflict of interest."

This is exactly my point. It is not that they cannot do MRI studies. Some of these studies are interesting and important. It’s that the media has blown these studies out of proportion and made people believe that the MRI can read your mind and be used by the government to reliably tell when someone is lying. It cannot, and I doubt it will ever be able to do so. Some people within the government may have an interest in spreading propaganda based on the over generalizing and hype surrounding these studies in a “trust us , it’s science” sort of way. Others may just like to sensationalize and distort these studies for reasons of their own. It’s still not good science.

There must be careful scrutiny to protect from high potential for political rather than scientific use of these studies. The authors of that paper state, “High technology tools such as brain scans can give a persuasive scientific gloss to what in reality are subjective interpretations of the data." I could not agree more.