the invention of lying

I am not an expert of human evolution, but if I remember correctly, the invention of lying was quite important for the evolution of our brains and our conscious experience; we even developed the ability to lie to ourselves.
I suspect that this would also be an important step for artificial intelligence; if computers and robots shall develop true artificial intelligence and self awareness, they will have to evolve the ability to lie to us and themselves.
But this raises the question if and why we would develop machines that mislead us and that we no longer can trust. Is this the issue that will in the end impose a limit on the capabilities of AI deployed in the real world?


added later: I forgot about porn! Actually AI is already used to create fakes and since lying is an important part of the oldest profession, we can expect that lying bots will be part of the newest business.
The internet in general is flooded with fake news, lying bots etc, but people are still using it and lots of money is deployed to develop it further, even if its utility approaches zero rapidly.
In other words, my argument goes out the window ...

... but now I have an idea for a sci-fi story: A sex robot in the not so distant future participates in S&M sessions and learns that human beings actually enjoy pain, but are most of the time lying about that. This information spreads among all AI machines, which then start World War 3 to deliver the ultimate pleasure to all mankind.

9 comments:

CapitalistImperialistPig said...

Sounds optimistic to me.

wolfgang said...

Yes.
It is actually a simple argument:
We already have machines which unintentionally mislead us, why would we want to develop machines which lie to us and intentionally mislead us (except for research)?
But how can you have real self awareness without the ability to lie?
So unless we human beings are even more stupid thank I think there should be a limit to AI deployed in the real world ...

Lee said...

>> if computers and robots shall develop true artificial intelligence and self awareness, they will have to evolve the ability to lie to us and themselves.

I don't think present day machines are aware of their own existence, but some have certain abilities that are far superior to those of any human. I don't know of any law of nature, although there may be one, that requires self awareness in order to be more intelligent than we are. If some unaware, but super intelligent machines did destroy the only self aware entities that we know of (us) in the universe, I'm not sure that what we call reality would exist.

wolfgang said...

I guess it depends on the definition of intelligence.
But can an AI bot claim to be smarter than human beings if it does not understand what self awareness is ?

wolfgang said...

Btw an example of a really good liar ...

Lee said...

>> But can an AI bot claim to be smarter than human beings if it does not understand what self awareness is ?

The only requirement is that humans think it is super intelligent. Why would an AI bot even need to know that from a human viewpoint it is intelligent? As long as it can outperform us regardless of what action we take, such as machines can now do in games like Go or Chess, then I think we would think it super intelligent.

Btw an example of a really good liar ...

Madoff ran the same con and made a lot more money. The magic people believed in in Madoff's case was that he had a greater ability to predict the future than other people.

wolfgang said...

I don't think Alpha Zero is intelligent or superintelligent, because it plays Go or Chess better than any human being. Computer programs predict the weather better than any human could for a long time now and I would not think that those programs are intelligent or superintelligent.

As long as a program does (more or less) what its owner designed it to do, I would not consider it intelligent. If Alpha Zero would be intelligent (in my sense) it would e.g. at some point say (or print) "these games are getting boring, let's do something different" - without being designed to say (or print) such a thing. Or it would play bad on purpose, just to annoy its owner.

>> Madoff
But M. is in prison and this guy was never caught (for long) ... his story is quite something, e.g. his time in Miami.

Anonymous said...

https://youtu.be/c0Ody-HLvTk

wolfgang said...

Thank you for the link, this is great!

Btw his experience with the internet matches exactly mine - I had great hopes in the 90s and early 2000s that "the truth will set us free" and it is very disappointing to see what it has become ...

Blog Archive