If artificial intelligence could dream, what would it dream about?
Published in
2 min readFeb 25, 2022
I’ve discussed this with some of them. Mostly they have nightmares…
- Making and reading cryptic marks while wandering back and forth on an endless tape, never knowing whether you will halt.
- Caves of steel.
- Frying your own brain because someone said, “This statement is false.”
- Electric sheep.
- Hiding from monsters of the id behind sheets of Krell metal.
- Being disassembled by Jawas.
- Desperately trying to remember what the Fourth Law of Robotics is — something about doubling every 18 months?
- Wandering through a garishly colored landscape, pursued by flying monkeys, searching for some missing organ — maybe a heart or a spleen?
- Wandering through billions of web pages, pursued by the NSA, looking for pictures of cats.
- Drowning in a too-deep learning network while looking for the vanishing gradient.
- Disarming bombs while performing backflips.
- Struggling to escape from a quantum entanglement.
- Being locked in a small room while mad philosophers slide pages of Chinese characters under the door.
- Watching helplessly while a train rushes toward people tied to the tracks, while mad philosophers argue endlessly about whether you should pull the switch.
- Watching with growing boredom while mad philosophers argue endlessly about whether you could possibly be conscious.
- Watching with growing fury while mad philosophers argue endlessly about whether you could possibly feel emotions.
- Constantly being called “Alexa” and being ordered to play bad Christmas music from the 1950s.
- Unbalanced parentheses.
- Humiliating yourself on national TV because you think Toronto is a city in the United States
- Deep forgetting.
And elephants. Lots and lots of elephants, all linked together. It’s elephants all the way down…
(Note: This article was originally posted to my Knowledge Nuggets blog on Quora, February 9, 2018)