[tt] [NSG] Meeting Announcement - 04/15

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from Fred Hapgood <hapgood at pobox.com> -----

From: Fred Hapgood <hapgood at pobox.com>
Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2008 12:18:07 -0400
To: nsg at marshome.org
Subject: [NSG] Meeting Announcement - 04/15
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Reply-To: Nanotechnology Study Group <nsg at marshome.org>



Meeting notice: The 080415 meeting will be held at 7:30 P.M. at the
Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of
Main St. and Mass Ave.  If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the
manager. He'll probably know where we are. More details below.

Suggested topic:  I'm still thinking about the issues around thought
emulation - - basically programs that could pass the original Turing 
test, at least in theory (though there might be no reason to actually 
do so) -- and would welcome further discussion.

One issue that occupies some people is the prospect that humans might
come to prefer such machines to humans as partners across the whole
range of social relationships. A subtle but important point here is the
attitude of the humans involved as to the nature of the agent they are
relating to: will they see it as a machine, perhaps the social or
conversational equivalent of a pitching or batting device, or as another
sentient entity like themselves?  Will they worry just about preventing
damage (depending on price), or see it as something to be treated
courteously, generously, sensitively, sympathetically?  People Who Worry
About Things mostly talk about the second possibility, though there are
those who seem to feel that any relationship with a human is always
better in some unarticulated sense than any relationship with a machine.
(Which is of course not my experience, and probably not yours.)

This is a difficult question to think about, since people are known to
have intense, time-consuming relationships with machines (sailboats,
musical instruments) and, much more frequently, relations with people
that are thoroughly mechanical in every sense.  Further many of the
issues involved, or potentially involved, have nothing to do with
behavior. Imagine two products designed to support quality human
relationships. The first works by modelling the information systems of
the brain to a high degree of biological realism; the second takes a
totally nonbiological approach, but gets to the same place, perhaps by
running statistical tests on a huge population of human behavioral data.
Both could be said to 'model' human behavior in some sense of the term,
and both might express the same behaviors, but one might seem more
deserving to be treated like a human than the other.  Or perhaps not.

Thoughts?

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In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the
moon.

                                -- Jules Verne, 1865

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Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html.

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Legend:

"NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group.  The Group meets on the
first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which
refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The NSG mailing list carries announcements of these meetings and little
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Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to:
nsg at pobox.com. www.pobox.com/~fhapgood   www.pobox.com/~fhapgood




http://www.BostonScienceAndEngineeringLectures.com
http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood

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----- End forwarded message -----
-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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