Algorithms

1 comment on Hacker News

1. PositivemooseyOct 18, 2016

   > If you can explain the mechanism behind the manifestation then you can understand why it isn't real.

   I watched, with my family, the Algorithms documentary available on Netfix. While not perfect (but very, very good), it certainly did a great job of explaining in simple terms some algorithms and how they relate to the world.

   One of the most interesting parts, in my opinion, was the admittance during the section where they were discussing the XBox Kinect. It was all done through some machine learning algorithms, and impressively, they confessed to not being completely certain how the code actually worked. You could argue that this means that they cant explain the mechanism behind the manifestation.

   Now, of course, this is a massively simplified version against the near-future Westworld narrative. However, it does call into question whether we would understand the mechanism of something so advanced. Also, applied to humans, if we end up understanding the mechanisms behind the brain, then does that make us less real?

   They point out in episode three I think that one of the 'Hosts' are experiencing physical discomfort while going through diagnosis. If such a thing were coded, and it was made possible to respond to it (I would argue that the best possibility for making this possible would be a learning algo, similar to the Kinect analogy), then how would that be different from the very physical and chemical responses that a human has to experiencing suffering?

   It's hard for me to make a decision in either direction. It is a complicated and nuanced problem. It reminds me of the short story "They're Made Out of Meat" [1], and could just be the result of human-centric (or in this case, biologically-centric) thinking.

   1: http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html