The First Conscious Machines Will Probably Be on Wall Street

This makes as much sense as saying the first robots capable of swimming will be human-form-factor pack mules designed to take small waterproof packs from China, swim over the Pacific, and deposit them in America. Container ships make a heck of a lot more sense, right? Why optimize for pattern-matches-with-a-human on a task that humans inherently suck at?<p>Incidentally, in quite possibly the only time I&#x27;ve ever agreed with him, Noam Chomsky said that this sort of example makes debating whether a machine will ever &quot;think&quot; pointless, since you&#x27;re debating the word &quot;think&quot; in English rather than any fact about material reality. We don&#x27;t say that container ships count as a machine &quot;swimming&quot;, but Russians do.

The stimulus space provided by wallstreet is incredibly impoverished. While a bundle of algos that deal with text and numbers (and has quite a bit of agency) might one day develop into something very similar to what we call consciousness I suspect we will have an extremely hard time recognizing it. We really have zero way to measure consciousness. Autonomous agency? Yes, there are already machines that build their own models and take action based on them (most people, rightly or wrongly, don&#x27;t consider them to be conscious). Perhaps wallstreet will seek to create algos that examine themselves as part of their model of the world but that can lead to some nasty chaotic behavior, and without having some sense of &#x27;being&#x27; in the world that informs its own actions I might argue that we can simply point to the Chinese room experiment and suggest that we come up with better measures for whatever it is we refer to when talking about consciousness.<p>I might also note that the author grossly oversimplifies human beings and the vast amount and diversity of information our nervous system is continually collecting and processing without our awareness that ultimately feeds into consciousness.<p>Also worth noting that our experience of consciousness is very much a fabrication created by our brain to impose consistency on the world (my go to example, used here before being our blind spot). I&#x27;m not so sure that wallstreet really wants to replicate the kind of &#x27;filling in&#x27; that seems to be a critical part of our conscious experience.

&quot;today’s Wall Street is the first and perhaps only industry putting artificial intelligence toward actual productive ends&quot;<p>What are you talking about?<p>Google (search, navigation, advertising), Amazon (recommendations), Facebook (advertising, whatever the hell else they do).<p>The United States Military (robotics, autonomous drones, scheduling, pretty much all AI applications). UPS (scheduling). NSA (data mining metadata to detect &#x27;em terrorists), NASA (control systems, detection of objects).<p>You are right though, Wall Street&#x27;s applications are much more productive.

&gt; Wall Street is the first and perhaps only industry putting artificial intelligence toward actual productive ends<p>Huh?<p>How about Google, Facebook and endless number of other businesses that use artificial intelligence all the time in their programs.