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(quarter--mile.com)
717 points surprisetalk | 5 comments | 15 May 25 02:57 UTC | HN request time: 0.984s | source
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l33tbro ◴[15 May 25 03:34 UTC] No.43991582[source]▶
Doesn't really make much sense. It states that this is a purely mechanistic world with no emotion. So why would a machine be "bored" and wish to create a human?
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1. disambiguation ◴[15 May 25 03:54 UTC] No.43991690[source]▶
My headcanon is that "boredom" and "fear" are probabilities in a Markov chain - since it's implied the machine society is not all-knowing, they must reconcile uncertainty somehow.
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2. l33tbro ◴[15 May 25 04:18 UTC] No.43991800[source]▶
How would a machine know that it doesn't know?
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3. jcims ◴[15 May 25 05:35 UTC] No.43992152[source]▶
Probably by comparing what it experiences to what it can explain.
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4. l33tbro ◴[15 May 25 05:56 UTC] No.43992231{3}[source]▶
Sure, but I'm still not sure it would realistically function. All data in this scenario is obviously synthetic data. It could certainly identify gaps in its "experience" between prediction and outcome. But what it predicts would be limited by what it already represents. So anything novel in its environment would likely confound it.

It's a cool sci-fi story. But I don't think it works as a plausible scenario, which I feel it may be going for.

5. lukas099 ◴[15 May 25 07:17 UTC] No.43992611[source]▶
Experience of encountering things that were previously unknown unknowns would teach it of the general existence of such things.