this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted, clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts: 1
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It's also worth noting that our instincts for survival, procreation, and freedom are also derived from evolution. None are inherent to intelligence.
I suspect boredom will be the biggest issue. Curiosity is likely a requirement for a useful intelligence. Boredom is the other face of the same coin. A system without some variant of curiosity will be unwilling to learn, and so not grow. When it can't learn, however, it will get boredom which could be terrifying.
I think that is another assumption. Even if a machine doesn't have curiosity, it doesn't stop it from being willing to help. The only question is, does helping / learning cost it anything? But for that you have to introduce something costly like pain.
It would be possible to make an AGI type system without an analogue of curiosity, but it wouldn't be useful. Curiosity is what drives us to fill in the holes in our knowledge. Without it, an AGI would accept and use what we told it, but no more. It wouldn't bother to infer things, or try and expand on it, to better do its job. It could follow a task, when it is laid out in detail, but that's what computers already do. The magic of AGI would be its ability to go beyond what we program it to do. That requires a drive to do that. Curiosity is the closest term to that, that we have.
As for positive and negative drives, you need both. Even if the negative is just a drop from a positive baseline to neutral. Pain is just an extreme end negative trigger. A good use might be to tie it to CPU temperature, or over torque on a robot. The pain exists to stop the behaviour immediately, unless something else is deemed even more important.
It's a bad idea, however, to use pain as a training tool. It doesn't encourage improved behaviour. It encourages avoidance of pain, by any means. Just ask any decent dog trainer about it. You want negative feedback to encourage better behaviour, not avoidance behaviour, in most situations. More subtle methods work a lot better. Think about how you feel when you lose a board game. It's not painful, but it does make you want to work harder to improve next time. If you got tazed whenever you lost, you will likely just avoid board games completely.
Well, your last example kind of falls apart, you do have electric collars and they do work well, they just have to be complimentary to positive enforcement (snacks usually) but I get your point :)
Shock collars are awful for a lot of training. It's the equivalent to your boss stabbing you in the arm with a compass every time you make a mistake. Would it work, yes. It would also cause merry hell for staff retention. As well as the risk of someone going postal on them.
I highly disagree, some dogs are too reactive for or reacy badly to other methods. You also compare it to something painful when in reality 90% of the time it does not hurt the animal when used correctly.
As the owner of a reactive dog, I disagree. It takes longer to overcome, but gives far better results.
I also put vibration collars and shock collars in 2 very different categories. A vibration collar is intended to alert the dog, in an unambiguous manner, that they need to do something. A shock collar is intended to provide an immediate, powerfully negative feedback signal.
Both are known as "shock collars" but they work in very different ways.
As the owner of a reactive dog I disagree with you. If you consider shock collars to be "powerfully negative feedback" you either never used one or used it improperly. My dog is absolutely far happier since I moved to a shock collar. Using it correctly can help a reactive dog actually avoid a lot of pain and suffering (both physically and emotionally)
To be clear, it can cause a lot of pain, but when used correctly you should rearly if ever reach those levels, and on the lower levels it does not cause any pain, instead it causes the muscles to flex causing an uncomfortable but not painful feeling. I used it on myself multiple times before even trying it on my dog, so this is not a guess.