this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
494 points (96.4% liked)
Technology
59582 readers
3851 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
By what definition of the word? Most dictionaries define it as some variant of 'the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.'
Of course there are various versions of NPCs, some stand and do nothing, others are more complex, they often "adapt" to certain conditions. For example, if an NPC is following the player it might "decide" to switch to running if the distance to the player reaches a certain threshold, decide how to navigate around other dynamic/moving NPCs, etc. In this example, the NPC "acquires" knowledge by polling the distance to the player and applies that "knowledge" by using its internal model to make a decision to walk or run.
The term "acquiring knowledge" is pretty much as subjective as "intelligence". In the case of an ant, for example, it can't really learn anything, at best it has a tiny short-term memory in which it keeps certain most recent decisions, but it surely gets things done, like building colonies.
For both cases, it's just a line in the sand.
NPCs do not have any form of intelligence and don’t decide anything. Or is Windows intelligent cause I click an icon and it decides to do something?
In a way, yes, if you frame it right. To simplify, you're basically asking "is a calculator intelligent?", right? While it's an inanimate object, you could say that, in a way, it acquires knowledge from the buttons user presses and it applies knowledge to provide an output.
"But that's not making decisions, it's just circuits!", you might say. To which I might reply "Who's to say that you're making decisions? For all we know, human brains might also just be very complicated circuits with no agency at all, just like the calculator!".
IIRC, in his book The Singularity Is Near, Ray Kurzweil even assigns certain amount of intelligence to inanimate objects, such as rocks. A very low amount of course, and it might be a stretch, but still.
So yeah, it's really hard to draw a line for intelligence, which is why there's no firm definition and no consensus.