Steve Wozniak: The Future of AI Is 'Scary and Very Bad for People'

[Fumesucker]

83. There was a quote from one of the researchers in the last line of the piece..

"At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously, and we're not very good at it. We should learn to let our unconscious handle the complicated things," Dijksterhuis says.

My point is that consciousness may not be necessary for sentience, we seem to be smarter at least in some ways if our consciousness is not engaged but rather distracted by other issues.

If that turns out to be true for humans then perhaps consciousness is not all it's cracked up to be and also unnecessary for sentient machines, AI.

What is consciousness actually good for? Is consciousness merely a not particularly useful artifact of sentience?

Think of a baseball player who takes off toward where the ball is going almost immediately after the crack of the bat, it seems to me the player does not consciously calculate where the ball is going, rather it's a process that goes on extremely quickly (at least in our terms) below the conscious level.

So many things we do that if we let our conscious brain get involved it screws things up, I nearly had a bad motorcycle wreck once when I started thinking about what I actually did to steer the motorcycle rather than letting my unconscious reflexes do the job. I learned that day that a motorcycle or bicycle turns the opposite way from the way you push the handlebars but my unconscious reflexes had already "known" that for twenty years or so, I just wasn't aware of what my unconscious was doing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countersteering

Countersteering is used by single-track vehicle operators, such as cyclists and motorcyclists, to initiate a turn toward a given direction by momentarily steering counter to the desired direction ("steer left to turn right&quot . To negotiate a turn successfully, the combined center of mass of the rider and the single-track vehicle must first be leaned in the direction of the turn, and steering briefly in the opposite direction causes that lean.