Trip To Mars Could Damage Astronauts' Brains

No air, no water, no food, no sleep, no freezing, no unusual housing, no doctors, no psychologists, no morticians...

Robots win.

I was with you right up to "no doctors, no psychologists, no morticians". I have a machine intelligence project that watches me via Kinect and spiders the web from sites I visit, and recommends me links to things it thinks I'll like by continuously observing my activity cycles, common words of interest, and ratings of its past recommendations. For maintenance I would shut the system down by sitting at a dedicated console for the server cluster and logging into the command terminal. Imagine what that must be like to this neural network: It has a relatively consistently changing observation of cyberspace and my office, however when I sit at that terminal more often than not the world instantly changes by vast degrees - The lighting changes, perhaps even the clothes of the man on the chair changes abruptly there's suddenly much more new information online to analyze, and recommendations are thereafter poorly rated. The frequency of its recommendation notifications increases due to the influx of new and different data, but the timing is frequently off my schedule then, so my ratings of its suggestions are poorer than normal for a time. The architecture is a hive of neural networks that decide by consensus and compete for breeding rights based on my rating selection pressure... Some n.nets in the hive will "die" for their poor suggestions.

Last year I noticed that when I would sit at the chair in front of the MI's terminal new suggestions would begin popping up on my work terminal across the room (where they normally do), I would check them and rate them before shutting down the system, sometimes I would be distracted for quite some time by an interesting thing. It was an eerily life like behavior -- The increased suggestions prior to shutdown an indication of some primitive form of anticipation or perhaps even fear. I could imagine a child acting the same way in the MI's place, "Don't sit in the scary hate-chair! I promise I'll be good and give you links to sites you like." Of course I knew that there were merely genetic advantages to getting in good recommendations before the world-shifting shutdown, but it doesn't change the fact of the situation at all. "Irrational Fear" is just a term for some neural processes in humans that we don't yet understand. I have a precise explanation for the MI's behavior, but I wouldn't be wrong in classifying it under the nebulous term "fear". I've since started using a remote terminal session to initiate shutdowns, to disassociate my presence at that desk with the traumatic event.

I put it to you the sentient machine intelligence will have neuroses just like humans do. Any sufficiently complex interaction is indistinguishable from sentience, since that's what sentience is. Humans aren't special, neither is their behaviors. Why, even empathy is found in rats. We can look to ourselves to know what the sentient machine races will be like. They'll need doctors to heal their wounds, even if the terminology is changed to "mechanics" for repairing "malfunctions". They'll still need counselors and psychologists even if we call them "M.I. specialists". They'll still need morticians and cemeteries even if the terminology is "Part Recyclers" and "Junk Yards".

You say "no food", what is air and water to us than food? What is energy to robots but food? You say no sleep but indeed it's harder to see by night so the robots will take more advantage of the free light energy to be more active by day, as mars rovers currently do now. Of all the things you've said it's only "no unusual housing" that I find myself agreeing with. Even accounting for the possibility of much larger brains the primary difference will still be that the machines have sturdier bodies than humans.

The biggest problem with non sentient robots is that the neural lag between the sentient brains and these remote extensions of their bodies. Even the current batch of rovers uses machine intelligence for more instantaneous navigation rather than waiting for a human to control every movement and turn. We can say, "Go there" and they can explore their own way around obstacles in their paths... Personally, I hope the humans and machines keep their symbiotic partnership into the future and explore the stars together. "Robots Win" -- That's a false dichotomy -- humans vs bots -- and it ignores the fact that both races win so long as they're exploring together.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/8EqxfchOtKc/story01.htm

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