What human traits would you include in the ultimate android?

Jeff Hawkins wrote On Itelligence He helped develop the Palm Pilot and looked into AI and how the human brain works. His model of the brain, especially the cerebrum, is that it all odes the same thing, kind of like microchips. It then just depends on how it is all wired together.

He posits that when we make androids (or AI more specifically), we will only put in things like intelligent pattern finding and context association. Lizard brain things like fear and ego will be purposely left out.

Sexual Perversion.

@ragingloli How long should the android’s tentacle need to be?

Long enough to completely traverse the intestines and come out of the other end.

Empathy .
=)

Subservience.

no skynet shit on my watch

Twisted sense of humor. ^ ^ ^

How about an overwhelming desire to do boring chores?

A good sense of smell so my house android doesn’t forget to clean the litter box twice a day.

The ultimate android already exists. He’s fully functional and anatomically correct. (Sort of NSFW. It’s all Star Trek innuendo.)

Do Androids need to wear condoms? lol

@drhat77 Great answer. That’s a decently informed perspective. I just wonder how many of the things we might consider negative, like ego for instance, are not really required to keep a sentient being or device functional for any length of time.

@ragingloli & @talljasperman Ohh. The ultimate sex doll, one with artificial intelligence and long, long tentacles.

@lx102303 Empathy would be a must have. Also probably not an easy thing to wrap into a simple algorithm.

@Blondesjon Copy that!

@Tropical_Willie And that ^^^ too.

@ccrow If they manage that, then I want one.

@Coloma The urge to purge the litter box would be high on the desirable traits list. As to androids needing birth control, I guess that depends on how far anatomically correct goes.

@Haleth How about those attracted to fem-bots? The Borg Queen was truly a no-go for me.

@ETpro wait… too many double negatives. Are you saying ego may be important for sentience? Or not?

@drhat77 I am saying that evolution probably pulled together a reasonable set of drives; and that I honestly don’t know which can be excluded without compromising the functionality of a pseudo-life-form. No android would be much good if it couldn’t survive.

@ETpro but we are using legacy programming designed to keep us safe from hundreds of millions of years ago where, if we had to come up with a solution from scratch with the hardware available in human brains now, we would have a much more optimized solution. I think the fear first/ask questions later lizard brain response is the cause of a lot of problems in human society, which has evolved so much faster than our biology can. I think we can work robust self preservation in while making sure it doesn’t devolve into any response that is excessive or unecessary

@drhat77 I admire your confidence that today’s scientists could outguess biological evolution, but I am not so sure I share it.

Ability to raise children?

Like you point out our mind is adapted for life on the savanah, without a major update for the past 100,000 years or so. Meanwhile our society has changed so fast, that a lot of the social programming in our DNA is either unnecessary or even destructive. I think an organized approach could adapt a solution that is tailored to our society faster than the lugubrious random walk that evolutionary genetics takes. But for changes on evolutionary time frames, yes you’re right, evolution has a leg up because of how comprehensive the testing environment is (ie, the real world)

@drhat77 What makes you think evolution has been utterly quiescent in humans for the last 100,000 years. Our move from ordinary primate to tool wielding sentient being capable of thinking through complex problems and communicating in complex sentences seems to have happened in less time than that.

I think very little genetic change has occurred in that time. I think we are still using the same capabilities we had 100000 years ago, but are now trying and failing to make them work in a global village.

@drhat77 Research points strongly in the opposite direction. It shows that humans have rapidly evolved with most changes coming in the last 5,000 years. I’m convinced The Singularity is coming soon, and when it arrives, man and machine will merge and take complete control of DNA modifications. From there forward, the pace of evolution will asymptotically rise off the charts.

@ETpro that’s pretty awesome didn’t know that. But I think you’re making my point with the singularity. Directed evolution will be much better than random walk / culling evolution. And things likes excessive fear will be replaced by measured self preservation.

@drhat77 As long as we are smart and wise in its use, amen to that.

Psychic powers.

@drhat77 Check this and this out.

The Eureka program functions by spawning a first generation of approximations at an algorithm capable of modeling actual observed data. It then runs each and selects the one that comes closest to modeling observed data to spawn a second generation with the first generation winner plus a second generation having slight mutations. It keeps repeating the process until an accurate and parsimonious algorithm emerges. Eureka can run on a PC. Imagine what can be modeled by a massively parallel network of supercomputers.

Heh, sounds like 42, especially when they fed it biology data with out asking a real question, and got an answer they cannot understand.
But I still see this as nascent steps in the right (and ultimately unstoppable) direction.

@drhat77 But I still see this as nascent steps in the right (and ultimately unstoppable) direction. Agreed, so long as we note that a major breakthrough (dare I say quantum leap) like quantum computing could mean that the time/technology acceleration curve is going to be highly asymptotic and its slope soon approaching infinity. It may not happen in the next 200 years, but it also could easily happen in the next 10 to 20 years. It just depends on how hard it turns our to be to build a large-scale quantum computer with programs like Eureka are helping.