Quote:
Originally Posted by DaibhidC
What is the purpose of a discussion/argument?
I'd say it's to try and persuade another person your ideas are valid. If there's no-one at the other end, no viewpoint that you want to change, then there's no purpose to the discussion.
I wouldn't get into an argument with ELIZA. What would be the point?
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Yes, that's exactly it.
In THS terms, I might be willing to argue with an SAI, because an SAI is programmed to form and maintain a comprehensive internal model of the world. My arguments might cause it to revise that model in a substantial way, and as a result of doing so, to change the actions it chose to perform, or the content of the statements it made to me, and to perform new actions and make new statements that were not in its previous repertoire. And in doing so, it would have a chance of coming up with a statement that would be new to me as well as to it, and would give me occasion to examine my own internal model of the world from a different angle, and perhaps revise it.
With an LAI, I would not have that as an option. An LAI has the ability to model limited aspects of the world . . . for example, to model its regular user. But it does not have a comprehensive model of the world, and thus cannot change its model of the world. Its actions and statements are based on a limited class of options programmed into it, and while they may be large enough to create a feeling of "talking to someone," there's really nobody home: the LAI can't add new options to the set based on its understanding of the world to which those options apply. The LAI just
is its options. So arguing with an LAI will not induce it to change in any substantive way, or to come up with novel statements, or to engage with my actual positions and suggest different ways of looking at them. Ultimately I would exhaust its stored information and have nothing more to learn from it.
To have an internal model of the world is part of what I mean by having a viewpoint. It's not the whole of it, but it's an important aspect of it.
Bill Stoddard