I think that the premise of the question is somewhat flawed. It assumes that it can be explained to believers that a certain morality is NOT faith based - In my experience, this is not possible. Many believers will even twist truths to fit into their beliefs. As an atheist, my advise will be to let go of this compulsion to explain to others and look inside to discover yourself.
Full disclosure : I was born in an Hindu family, went to Catholic school and have a good understanding of most faiths. I do not identify myself with any one religion and am partly atheist. I believe in the Vedic statement - “Tut Twam Asi” - which in my interpretation means, you are who you think you are.
Because they know who their creator is - and are not impressed?
BTW guys, as a computer designer, don’t hold your breath waiting for computers to design themselves. On the hardware side probably 90% of what was manually done 30 years ago is now automatically done, but the high level architecture is still humanly created. I don’t know if this counts as computers designing computers or not. We could probably write some tools that starting from some very basic options will design a full computer. There are companies already which accept instruction set definitions and spit out processor designs. They won’t be very interesting, though.
But in terms of software we are nowhere close to computers writing their own.
We know how to create AI. The only two things holding back progress is the lack of hardware good enough to simulate that many neural nodes in a reasonable amount of time, and the fact that no one’s particularly interested in raising an AI from a baby to adulthood over the course of a few decades. Everyone keeps hoping that we can come up with a way to create AI rather than develop it organically. That’s probably impossible until we have at least one non-organic intelligence that we can copy-paste-modify.
And of course you realize that this is not a universally accepted axiom. Not a few of us are of the opinion that humans have been proven to be pretty vile creatures in general, the only really good reason to advocate for the survival of h. s. s. would be in the hope that we can breed out our arrogance and rapacity or (likely) failing that, produce GM’dO successors that are less jerkish.
It occurs to me that we handle the suffering of “lesser” animals in a specific way that might countervail what you mean here.
And that kind of has some relevance to how I, personally, view morality. Codifying a morality is actually kind of immoral. There is so much variance in application that one has to approach nearly everything situationally, which is in fact how morality is applied anyway. Strict adherence to even utilitarian ethics does not work all the time. So, really, undivine morality should typically be ad hoc, because that is what isnormal as it is.
Because you are ensnared in the contemporary paradigm. By the end of the next decade, instruction sets, pipelines and architecture in general will be quaint relics of the past, after we move to pure dynamic logic array processing. At that point, hardware design will become mostly irrelevant, improvement in performance will be had by making larger arrays and by streamlining the “hyperware” programming.
Could you rephrase this in standard techspeak, please? When I googled dynamic logic array the only thing I got was an FPGA patent from 2002. FPGAs and I go way back, including their momma PLDs. Cool stuff, but not likely to do away with normal hardware.
You can’t make FPGAs as dense as standard logic. They also can’t be as fast. They are great for relatively low volume products since they do away with the ridiculous cost of a tapeout these days. But high volume stuff, no way.
I have no idea what hyperware programming is.
The biggest complaint I have about how computers are handled in science fiction is that there is still a tendency to have a big and complex enough computer become aware. Not going to happen. We run simulations on thousands of interconnect computer servers - and the thing is dumb as a brick.
It is going to take some fancy programming to get a computer to become aware, and before that a theory of intelligence. I’m betting on brain simulators becoming aware before programmed from scratch systems myself. And if I see a working brain simulator in my lifetime I’ll be surprised.
Yeah, the 40 years of no progress counts a lot more than the billion years.
The stuff Pat Winston talked about in the AI class included chess, the automated solving of complex differential equations, generating directions to go from one place to another, and the recognition of relationships of objects in block worlds. We have all that stuff today. We have a lot more.Watson was beyond imagination then, What we don’t have is a real understanding of intelligence and how to produce it in software. I’m not sure we’ve made any progress at all, if we have it’s been minimal.
Neural networks were the great hope a few years ago. They are still widely used for machine learning and data mining. The problem isn’t the size.
Now simulating neurons will work, but mapping the brain is the tricky part. But I do expect they’ll do a nematode in not too long if worm-level intelligence counts as AI.
Simulate any living creature in a virtual environment and you’ve proved that AI is possible. We don’t need to map the brain, we just need to be able to grow a human from sperm and an egg in a physics simulator.
Though I’m not sure what any of this has to do with the topic of the thread?
Do you have faith in your axioms when logic and situations are applied to them? In that sense of the word faith, which is different that faith=belief in deities, then you have that kind of faith. My morals come from that axiomatic faith that you have. My religious belief comes from the belief in a deity kind of faith. There is some overlap and ambiguity in the word faith in that way.
What you have described is the normal human view of cooperation. What the religious are afraid of about atheists is that they might be what we call colloquially either sociopaths or psychopaths: people like Bernie Madoff who pretend but “defect” when it suits them hoping nobody will notice. Well, that isn’t limited to either the religious or the atheist, but can be found small numbers in all human being populations.
The problem isn’t with your understanding of faith, but rather that of my fellow religionists. We don’t behave only because God is watching, but because it is the socially cooperative thing to do. Those who behave only because God is watching are not to be trusted.