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I can't find it but I distinctly remember that there was part of an episode of 3-2-1 contact in the 80s about what must have been an early version of this system. It was the exact same thing as brundolf mentions* about the common sense system and how they set up the system to ask questions when contradictions arose. An example they used was it had asked if a human is still human when shaving. It is interesting that the system still exists.

Of course, I don't recall them mentioning any of the more dystopian things it could be (and sounds like has been) used for :/.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21784105

On second thought, it might have been an Alan Kay presentation. I couldn't find that either but looking I did find this interesting Wired article from 2016:

https://www.wired.com/2016/03/doug-lenat-artificial-intellig...




Amusingly, or sadly, depending on your perspective, in practical settings the default behavior of that question depends on exactly what you want human to mean in the vocabulary of the local use case, because continuants are a very leaky abstraction if they are used to type biological systems, and while to our 'common sense' the type of human and human shaving should obviously be the same, when you get to questions about whether seemingly insignificant numerical differences in rates of catalysis constitute differences in type, then suddenly the distinction between "protein" and "protein wiggling slightly faster than usual" or "protein binding molecule a" (think "human holding shaver") becomes very much not obvious depending on exactly what question you want to answer. In the protein example if you black box the system, they can be fundamentally different. If human means predator, and your question is how dangerous is this human, then "human" and "human holding razor" becomes "agentous thing" and "agentous thing with sharp edged object" practically different things in very important ways if you are trying not to be filleted.




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