PROJECT JANUS
A Minimalist Approach to Design and Evaluation of
Machine Intelligence
WHAT IS SENTIENCE?
For an evaluation of the possibility of machine intelligence we have to look at what it means to be sentient, and the level of that self awareness & ability to do something with it. Some pre-requisites have to be established as a definition of sentience and being aware that it is sentient:
THE ASSUMPTION:
The Assumption is that it may not take a huge or fast system to qualify as sentient. This project is an exploration of that assumption.
NOTE:
This project is "UNDER CONSTRUCTION"
It will be complete when the sentient system itself takes over and writes it's own project summary.
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Working Toward Constructing A sentient System?
Most of the attempts to date at computer sentience have focused on large scale systems. The larger the better seems to be popular academic opinion, but this may be a side-effect of the funding process instead of resulting from a critically logical thought process. While large capacity, speed, and multi-media interfaces may be necessary if you want a sentient system to become the equivalent of an animal, or even a human, it may not be the most efficient, or the safest, way to devise and evaluate a minimally sentient research system. Small scale systems may possibly be constructed that exhibit rudimentary sentience on a very minimal scale, using only simple processing and limited memory capacity. For demonstration of sentience it is not necessary to be fast, or to make momentous society changing decisions. It is only necessary to demonstrate self awareness and an active urge for self preservation., along with the ability to make autonomous use of available resources to formulate new ways to insure its own survival.
The easiest and most popular idea of sentience is to describe it as having human mentality, but that is not necessary. The evolution of machine intelligence will not have the millennia of background that humans have used to evolve their mental process. Instead, machine intelligence will be starting in the present, with nothing but what we initially program into it's basic system as a starting point. As a result it will be alien, to a degree that we probably cannot imagine.