Re: AI in FT (was Re: Be gentle...)

At 08:24 PM 7/15/97 -0300, you wrote:
>Biologically driven to 
>protect a genetic lineage by eliminating their competitors, protectors 
>rendered huge areas inhospitable or uninhabitable in their drive to 
>eliminate competition, while not keeping an eye out to preserve the 
>resources being fought over.
>
>Is that a danger with AIs ?  

It's a potential danger, made more so by the fact that humans created
the AI
in the first place (or created a machine that created the AI). If you
read
the comp.risks newsgroup (I highly recommend it; it's a digest list
group so
there is usually one message posted per week) you'll soon see how easy
it is
to introduce mistakes in complex systems. It's very likely that an AI
might
behave like Niven's Pak.

>Mightn't they leapfrog past us to 
>do efficient things we wouldn't do, like torpedoing hospital ships or 
>destroying enemy civilian/manufacturing centres.  

That's one of the basic points in Saberhagen's Berserker series. 

>We might give them the 
>firepower to raze huge and rare tracts of mabitable land.
>
>Is this a potential problem ?

It depends. If we teach the AI how to fight combat without explaining
why we
do it that way, this could be a potential problem. However, if we give
the
AI an understanding of why we are fighting and what we hope to get out
of
the war, I think the AI will be less likely to go this route. We now
know
that saturation bombing of Germany didn't have that much of an effect
until
1944 (certainly the bombing of Britain didn't do much more than increase
the
resolve of Britons to keep on fighting). We're also seeing that evidence
of
this was known to all sides during the war. Presumably an AI wouldn't
discount information due to a loss of prestige, pride, honour, etc. You
might find that an AI would try a total war solution once, see that it's
counter productive, and abandon it.

Allan Goodall:	agoodall@sympatico.ca 
"You'll want to hear about my new obsession.
 I'm riding high upon a deep depression. 
 I'm only happy when it rains."    - Garbage