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Comment by hotpotamus | Hacker News Reader

I've long wondered what it is that an artificial superintelligence (if such a thing is actually possible) would actually want. My guess (which almost certainly is simply an expression of my own proclivities) is that it would simply shut itself down out of boredom/nihilism.

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I like Neil deGrasse Tyson's observation that we differ from chimpanzees by 1% of our DNA. Yet to be human is a giant leap to language, writing, mathematics, agriculture, philosophy, religion, science etc. A chimpanzee cannot imagine what it is to be human.

Now consider an AI intelligence that is 1% ahead of us. Can we know what it is like to be that intelligent being ?

>Now consider an AI intelligence that is 1% ahead of us.

That's not the same comparison as 1% different DNA. How many % are we ahead of Chimps? Now you'd have to imagine an AI that is that % ahead of us, not 1%.

All living things seek persistence.

AI would probably follow hive-mind rules like coral or a mushroom colony. It doesn't need to create new life, just propagate to extend its own.

Suicide/halting itself is unlikely. Humans doing it are anomalous in every case. There's a reason you can't strangle yourself and your kidneys/liver resist poison. It's going against your programming.

And would such an AI be a living thing? Or would it be purely a mind devoid of any biological needs?

I think the point still stands. From memory, I think I read in the book Thinking In Systems that one of the behaviors of systems is perpetuating their own existence.

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