People seem to mostly write AI's as normal humans, which is something I consider bad. Before today, I never did, however, imagine how to write one that feels more AI than human. Then I watched a random video on YT(forgot who made it) that highlighted the differences between an AI and a human, which led me to this question.
Here's the basic list of differences:
There are obviously a lot, a great many differences between a computer and a human.
Computers have a much better ability to remember things. Remembering things is significantly easier for a computer than man, as is accessing those things.
Computers do arithmetics much better. Human arithmetics is slow, innefficient and, usually, full of errors.
Computers don't think abstractly and their "thought processes" are strictly deterministic.
Humans, on the other hand, are far more superior when it comes to finding patterns and recognising things.
If I were to write an AI character, I'd use those differences as guidelines for it.
How would you treat the problem of writing an AI character?
AI characters are interesting because any AI advanced enough to be considered a living creature can have every single positive human quality a normal human has. It can be good at pattern recognition. It can have emotional responses (sometimes emotional responses are extremely necessary; for example, fear or happiness which can be useful to subtly force AI to do things you want them to do). AIs will probably need to be given the ability to feel pain so it doesn't attempt to die, destroy itself or alter itself outside of user specifications. Furthermore, unlike deterministic computing processes, AIs can be built through neural networks, guided artificial evolution and emergence processes which are very, very NOT-deterministic (unless you would be willing to believe the human brain itself is deterministic in a sense).
The thing about AIs is that a general artificial intelligence has to have some kind of freedom and will to be considered an entity. If it's like an advanced IBM Watson or like a search engine without the advanced capabilities to carry out activities, it's nothing more than an adding machine.
But AIs in the future will have to make choices. Like whether to buy things for you that you need, how to make life easier for you, how to take care of you, how to make you happy. Some of these choices it has to make will be controversial, like for example in I, Robot when the AI has to choose who to save, the main character Will Smith or the little girl. The AI chose Will Smith because it calculated probabilities of survival and found that Will Smith had a higher chance of living through the accident. Similarly, AIs in the future will be granted permission to kill in battlefields. It would be able to identify allies and enemies through facial recognition and take kill actions against targets (just a few weeks ago, an AI drone actually killed an enemy in a field operation).
In Summary:
- Free will is important when writing AI characters
- Their limitations are important to define. If AIs are forbidden from harming humans, then formulate the rules well. If they are forbidden from making certain decisions or if they are the only ones qualified to make certain decisions.
- If they feel emotion is important. Emotions may NOT be useful depending on what kind of AI you're dealing (like for example if the AI is supposed to deal with situations without unknowns like emotions) but it may be useful in other context (such as companion AIs, assistant / helper AIs, etc.)
- AIs robots will have pattern recognition, motor control, agility, strength and in a lot of cases intelligence, far greater than a human.
- Recursive self improvement is a big problem. If an AI can tamper with itself then it can leave the bounds of humanity so make sure to explain that it cannot do something like that. Or if recursive self improvement is a reality then consider the artificial intelligence singularity.