November 23, 2011

Victorian scientific romance and the AI singularity

The 1800s must have been a great time to live. They mark the beginning of many things we take for granted today; most notably democracy, technological and scientific innovation, globalization and international trade. The British Empire was at its height, people started moving with steamships and trains across continents, and inventions like the telegraph and the telephone allowed news to travel faster than ever.

History must have seemed to be taking a whole new course, unimagined by people who lived only a few years earlier. Writers such as Samuel Butler, H.G. Wells, William Morris, and others pondered upon the question of progress, and a new literary genre was created that mixed fantasy, satire and allegory: the scientific romance. A few notable books of this genre are “The Time Machine” (1895) by Wells, “News from Nowhere” (1890) by Morris and “Erewhon” (1872) by Butler.

Samuel Butler (1835-1902)

In Erewhon (an anagram of “nowhere”) Butler describes a utopian society that had become industrialized long before Europe and had opted to banish machines. This was because in Erewhon machines were deemed to be dangerous. Butler expanded on the idea in his “Book of Machines” where he claimed that Darwinism applied to machine evolution, and therefore it was inevitable that machines will ultimately develop consciousness. Butler claimed that  ”it was the race of the intelligent machines and not the race of men which would be the next step in evolution.” Frank Herbert, the author of “Dune”, as a back-story coined the term “Butlerian jihad” to describe an event 10,000 years before the events of Dune where thinking machines were outlawed.

Butlerian Jihad: calling the faithful

Perhaps there is a cautionary take to be found in Victorian scientific romance, something that could possibly resonate in our own age too. The 21st century arrived in an awkward fashion. The events of 9/11 and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars that followed, colored the first decade of our century with the shades of two unnecessary wars that polarized politics. The economic crises of 2008 and the current one in the eurozone have shifted the public debate towards doubting capitalism. Whilst all this take place in the forefront of public awareness an immense technological revolution is quietly brewing in the background. This revolution is all about intelligent machines. They may not have arrived at the level of consciousness yet (but who is to really tell?) but they do control our planet. Our financial and commodity markets, our defense systems, our industries, our infrastructures are all controlled to a greater or lesser degree by autonomous computer programs.

Last month a major military exercise took place across NATO countries in preparation for future cyberwar.  NATO scenarios assumed a cyber attack from a hostile country or terrorist organization. But, what if the “attack” comes as a rebellion of our “mechanical slaves”?  How could we tell the difference?  And what could we possibly do to defend ourselves then?

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November 17, 2011

In memoriam of John McCarthy, father of Artificial Intelligence

John McCarthy passed away on October 24th 2011 aged 84. He was the one who coined the terms “Artificial Intelligence” during the historical Dartmouth Conference in 1956. A stern believer in mathematical logic he developed the list processing language LISP, still in use today. He was one of the pioneers of “time sharing” computing, an architecture whereby simple terminals communicate via a central, powerful computer; an idea that, although out of fashion during the long microcomputer decades (1980s-2000s), it returns nowadays with the advent of “cloud computing”.

John McCarthy (1927-2011)

LISP (the language I coded during my PhD) made use of lambda calculus to express relations between objects, subjects and ideas. It was “programming without programming”, at least on the high-level of the computer language itself. This means that the programmer did not tell the computer how to execute a specific algorithm. Instead, it coded a picture of the world – a “knowledge base”. The computer was then asked questions about that world. The response from the machine was produced by building inferences based on the coded knowledge base. The syntax of the language reflected the aspirations of McCarthy that machines should be able to “think for themselves” in a manner similar to humans: we have an idea of the world based on knowledge and experience; when a new problem comes along we solve it by accessing our knowledge and experience and producing new ideas and solutions.

Early dreams of machines...

McCarthy belonged to a long tradition of engineers that dreamt of machines and their relationship to humans and human society. When in 1962 he moved from MIT to Stanford in order to set up the legendary Artificial Intelligence Lab he declared that he was going to produce an intelligent machine within the next 10 years. The promise was never fulfilled, and later McCarthy conceded that he had been rather hubristic in his predictions. He acknowledged that we know too little about the human thinking processes in order to reproduce them in a machine. Nevertheless, he was confident that given enough resources, both in money and brainpower, a truly artificial intelligent system was feasible. An intelligent computer, he half-joked, would require “1.8 Einsteins and one-tenth of the resources of the Manhattan project”.

He will remain an inspiration to us all.

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November 9, 2011

Pandora, the first woman, was an android

Hesiod recounts in Theogony how Zeus became angry with Prometheus for giving the gift of fire to humans, that he decided to take revenge upon the humans by creating the first woman.  Here’s a retelling of the story by using some more familiar terms.

Zeus commanded Hephaestus, the god-engineer, to make the first woman (please note that according to Theogony there were only men living on earth until then). Hephaestus knew the art of making androids (or “gynaekoids” to be more exact) well, because he had already built several of them, beautiful maidens that obediently served him at his lab-cum-workshop. But Pandora had to be special. So after the basic hardware was constructed by Hephaestus, and the operating system was put in place, Zeus invited the other gods in Olympus to give Pandora “gifts”, i.e. special functions and properties.

The all-gifted (by Jules Joseph Lefebvre, 1882)

What made Pandora different from the other robots in Hephaestus lab was a gift given to her by Hermes, the god of thieves and traders: “the gift of deceit”. Pandora was furnished with “theory of mind”; she could tell what other people thought or thought that they thought and use this knowledge to manipulate them. Thus she was named the “all-gifted” and duly dispatched to the middleworld of humans.

The Greek myth of Pandora is one of many in the ancient world where gods, and sometimes talented humans, build artificial beings – usually women. One can read much in stories such as these.

A historian of technology may recognize the roots of imagining artificial life and intelligence. A feminist may read the obsessive will of men to subjugate women taken to an extreme: why not create one according to specification? An ethicist may diagnose a precautionary tale: Pandora with her insatiable curiosity ultimately brings about the fall of humankind. Finally, a philosopher of science may notice a disconnect with evolution: artificial intelligence is created, not evolved. Pandora, the all gifted, is a design.

You may argue that this is just another creation myth from a tribe of white people who lived in the Balkans many thousands of years ago. Yes, it is exactly that, a tale from a non-scientific past. Nevertheless, some of us may see a disturbing symmetry arising – another Pandora being born into a not-so-distant, scientific future.

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October 26, 2011

The Imitation Game

English mathematician Alan Turing (1912-1954) has made many important contributions to mathematics and logic, and is considered one of the fathers of computers and the father of Artificial Intelligence. He was instrumental in breaking the “Enigma” code of the Nazis during WWII, a feat that allowed the Allies to defend their supply lines across the Atlantic and, ultimately, win the war. Two of  Turing’s most important contributions to computing are his seminal paper on computable numbers and his paper on the “Imitation Game”.

Alan Turing (1912-1954)

In the former Turing expands on Gödel’s incompleteness theorem; by assuming a logical machine Turing proved that there is no systematic way of knowing in advance whether such a machine could prove something (a mathematical theorem) to be true or not.

In the latter, he envisages a game whereby a human interrogator queries a “person” without knowing a priori if the person is a man or a woman. Turing showed that the only conclusion that the interrogator could make with regards to the person’s sex would be via his/her answers. Similarly, by replacing the “person” with an intelligent machine Turing argued that if the interrogator could not tell by the answers he got whether the “person” was human or mechanistic then the machine must be regarded as “truly intelligent”.

One of the main criticisms of the Imitation Game – or the “Turing Test”, as it is more commonly known – is its anthropocentricity. Indeed modern AI has moved away from definitions of intelligence specific to humankind, towards a more general – or generic – definition of intelligence. Redefining “intelligent machines” as “intelligent agents” (a more “software” definition) modern AI aims for agents that act so to maximize the expected value of a performance measure, based on past experience and knowledge. Implicit to such a definition are learning and knowledge at the service of some goal-driven operation.

In a way this more “general” definition of artificial intelligence seems like an engineer’s headache pill. By removing such nuances such as behavior and consciousness one is left with little more than a sophisticated control system. Nevertheless, minimalizing the concept of intelligence  means that a thermostat must be considered intelligent too – in a similar way that we suspect a nematode worm to have some rudimentary intelligence.

On the contrary, Turing’s Imitation Game challenges us into thinking more deeply about our own consciousness, as well as our perception of others in a social context. This is a much more demanding, richer, and perhaps more annoying problem where engineers – allergic as they might be to philosophers and social scientists meddling into their business – must find the courage to do so in order to solve.

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October 19, 2011

Androids, robots and autism

Isaac Asimov and Philip Dick in novels about robots and androids often explored what it means to be human. In doing so they have noted that Artificial Intelligence is mostly about thinking and being conscious of thinking. But what about feeling? How about emotions? Can androids “feel” like humans, forge relationships and friendships like we carbon-based lifeforms do?

Data trying to have some fun

In Star Trek Commander Data is a sentient android created by Dr. Noonien Soong on planet Omicron Theta. With its narrative roots to Robbie the Robot from the movie “Forbidden Planet” Data is a hyper-intelligent super-being which nevertheless lacks the most essential element of humanness: the ability to empathize. Often he must imitate expressions of emotion in order not to upset his human colleagues, whilst feeling nothing in reality. Thus he remains forever an outsider to human society. The “problem”  is solved when Dr Soon equips Data with an “emotion chip”.

Commander Data before the emotion chip exhibits many of the symptoms of a form of autism called “Asperger Syndrome”. People with this syndrome often have IQ above average both in language and cognition, however they suffer from an impaired ability for social interaction. Like Data they seem to lack the ability to empathize. Although there is no conclusive evidence with regards to the cause of Asperger Syndrome and autism in general, the syndrome affects information processing in the brain by altering how nerve cells and their synapse connect and organize.

Simon Baron-Cohen, a psychologist at Cambridge University, has suggested that autism is a result of delayed development of a “theory of mind” in certain children. In short, “theory of mind” is what we acquire approximately at the age of three as a result of brain development, and we begin to realize that other people have “minds” of their own. Theory of mind produces the feeling that other persons are conscious, like us; and we must therefore respect their feelings. It is also the reason we lie to others (we aim to trick their minds) and enjoy theatre and movies (we can suspend our disbelief that what we see on stage is not, in fact, real).

This feeling of “the other mind” is often challenged in people suffering from a variety of neurological diseases, such as Capgrass Syndrome and autism. Factors of evolutionary selection may be at play. People with autism, according to Baron-Cohen’s research, are severe cases of the “male brain”. Males are less empathetic than females, because evolutionary history required females to forge stronger emotional bonds with their offspring and family. This hypothesis, if true, may explain why the ratio of autistic boys versus girls is so profoundly biassed. Epidemiological data from the US show that the ratio is 5.3 cases of autism in boys versus 1.5 in girls, per 1000 children.

KASPAR and friend

Enter the robots. Faced with robots and androids non-autistic people feel increasingly unnerved as the artifact begins to look and behave more like a human. This is a phenomenon called “uncanny-valley”. Interestingly, autistic people feel the contrary. Recent experiments at the University of Hertfordshire have shown that robots can be used as therapeutic tools for children with autism.

KASPAR (Kinetics and Synchronization in Personal Assistance Robotics) robots can be programmed to help children with autism learn how to distinguish between friendly and unfriendly behavior. The robot is designed to look as featureless as possible, something that helps the children to approach it without fear or confusion.

Professor Dautenhahn who leads the project and her team will experiment with many more autistic children in the near future. Commander Data would have applauded. Perhaps interacting with another robot, rather than the noisy humans aboard USS Enterprise, would have rendered installation of the “emotion chip” unnecessary.

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October 11, 2011

Are we all mechanical zombies?

What is the difference between thinking and appearing to be thinking? How can one tell them apart? An interesting answer comes from philosophy of mind in the shape and form of zombies.

A philosophical zombie (or “p-zombie”) is a hypothetical being indistinguishable from a human but without conscious experience, or “qualia”. When pinched, a p-zombie will feel nothing but will nevertheless cry “ouch!” convincingly enough, so that we will be unable to tell the difference.

P-zombies have been used by dualist philosophers in their attacks of physicalism. Dualists believe there are two essences in the natural world, matter and something else beyond the scope of science. Physicalists hold the view that everything is matter and nothing else exists but matter. In the case of consciousness physicalists believe that our thoughts and feelings can be reduced to neurobiological interactions. Au contraire, dualists claim that consciousness is much more that the sum of biological pathways and brain states.

So let us imagine a hypothetical world of synthetic beings with artificial intelligence looking and behaving identically to us; a mirror world of artificial p-zombies on another planet or another dimension. Now say that something happens and while you were asleep you were transposed in that mirror world, whilst your double p-zombie was zapped over here, to our “real” world. When you wake up, how will you tell which world you inhabit now? And how will your friends and family tell that the “you” who walks down the stairs for breakfast is in fact a p-zombie from a mirror universe?

The answer to both these questions is the same: neither you, nor your family will know the difference.

In fact, both physicalists and dualists are at a loss in suggesting a way to distinguish the two world experiences. The former because for physicalists a p-zombie is impossible: as said, a physicalist believes that consciousness is the result of physical processes. If a zombie is the physical equivalent of a non-zombie, if every cell and function has been precisely copied in the zombie as is in the non-zombie, then there can be no distinction between the two.

A dualist will also be unable to resolve your conundrum but for a different reason. She will not have any test to offer that may tell which world is the real one and which one is the zombie-world. Such “test” would require third-person verification, i.e. some objective measurement of “something”, in other words it must be a scientific test. But dualists believe that the extra essence that separates real beings from zombies is non-physical and therefore impossible to measure by scientific methods.

Whichever you look at it you may never know if you now inhabit a zombie world or a world of “truly” conscious beings.

A p-zombie world

This rather unnerving realization leaves you with the only question that you can seemingly answer in the positive: are you a zombie? Of course not, you may hasten to answer.

But let’s look at your answer somewhat deeper . In answering “of course not” you are in fact asserting your inner experience of “being somebody”, your so-called “self-awareness”.  Of course, as far as we, your listeners, are concerned we must remain unimpressed by your answer. We can neither trust your answer, nor the way you look or behave, because for all the reasons I explained you could be a zombie pretending to be a real human being.

Maybe, for exactly the same reasons, you should be skeptical of your answer too!

For, how do you know that your so-called “self-awareness” is not an artificially programmed agent which when triggered by the question “are you a zombie?” returns the answer “no”? What if this agent while answering places a memory in your artificial memory banks of having just answered the question, thus creating a feedback loop which you, rather arbitrarily, call “self awareness”? What if “you”, your “inner experience”, your “memories”, are programs? What if “you” are the multi-agent, artificial being from the mirror world of p-zombies, which slipped into our “real” world?

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October 5, 2011

Sex with robots II: robot reproduction

It is rumored that when Descartes left France to go to work as the tutor of young Queen Christina of Sweden he was asked by his royal student what could be said of the human body. Descartes answer was that it could be regarded as a machine; whereby the Queen pointed to a clock ordering him to “see to it that it produces offspring”.

Since this anecdotal conversation there have been many who imagined machines that reproduced. Stanislaw Lem in his novel “The Invincible” (1964) recounted the story of a spaceship landing on a distant planet to find a mechanical life form, the product of millions of years of mechanical evolution. Interestingly, Lem’s lifeform exhibited swarm intelligence: relatively “dumb” parts united into a hyper-organism with hyper-intelligence.

John von Neumann (1903-1957)

Philosophy and literature pointed the way that science and technology followed. Self-replicating machines have been proposed since 1802 when William Paley formulated the first teleological argument of machines producing other machines. A detailed model for mechanical self-replication was suggested by John von Neumann: a universal constructor that was both an active component of the construction as well as the target of the copying process. This meant that the medium of replication was at the same time the storage of instructions for the replication. This notion allowed open-ended complexity and therefore errors in the replication – in other words, it opened up self-replicating non-biological systems to the laws of evolution. Neumann’s brilliant insight predated the discovery of the double DNA helix by Crick and Watson.

Although von Neumann’s model works in the mathematical space of cellular automata it was a clear demonstration that evolution may influence mechanical evolution.

The RepRap project: a self-replicating machine

We may imagine several other ways of orchestrating robot reproduction. For instance a robotic factory with three classes of robots: one for mining and transporting raw material, one for assembling raw materials into finished robots and one for designing processes and products. The latter class, the “brains” of the autonomous robotic factory, would have to be AI. Could this ever happen?

On planet Earth safety legislation impedes, although it does not preclude, the development of a fully autonomous robotic factory that reproduces itself.  Nevertheless, planting such a factory on a distant planet is a different story. Mars colonization could benefit from self-reproducing robots preparing the planet for human habitation. George Dyson has proposed using self-replicating robots in order to cut and ferry ice from Engeladus (a frozen Saturn satellite) to Mars and use it to terraform it.

A very nasty self-reproducing machine

Science fiction has worked various possible scenarios for robot reproduction, the commonest of all being robotic life running amok. But maybe we are missing an important point here. In robotic reproduction guided by Artificial Intelligence evolution will play a minor role, if any. Error correction will be automated in a teleologically-guided evolution designed by the supervisory programs.

Unlike natural evolution where high-level consciousness and intelligence evolved very late as by-products of cerebral development, in robotic evolution they will be the guiding forces. Brains will come before bodies.

Ironically, robotic evolution will be Intelligent Design par excellence. Creators of complex machines will be themselves highly complex machines . In this scenario it is highly probable that self-replication will involve recursive self-improvement, until the original supervisory programs are superseded by the next generation of superintelligent designers. At which point we will have arrived at the singularity point of human civilization.

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