We're Laughing Now... David Pogue/CBS Sunday Morning on AI

CBS Sunday Morning, June 14, 2015

Nice little piece on the future of robots and artificial intelligence occasioned by DARPA's latest competition, full of untested and hotly disputed hypotheses on timelines and degree of threat:

Also, not sure how I've gone so long without a viewing (probably because it's been almost impossible to rent/stream), but just this weekend managed to see Her. Creepy, beautiful, awkward ... in short, a convincingly well-studied speculative depiction of a possible near-future world where ASI is beginning to dawn. If you haven't seen it yet, it's worth a belated screening:

Putting the I into i, Robot

Metropolis, 1927

Having spent some time with an alternative model's possible answer to the hard problem of consciousness, let's put it aside and turn to the dominant materialist paradigm's treatment - and current state of investigation - of the problem and the efforts to create consciousness that take for granted that the materialist paradigm is true and complete. Indeed, proponents of this view generally believe that any alternative view is laughable and that they are well along in the quest of both understanding and then being able to replicate the requisite parts necessary for a constructed replica of the human brain to achieve human-equivalent self-aware consciousness.

Tony Prescott, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Sheffield, UK, and director of Sheffield Robotics, offers a stimulating and philosophically aware account of his iCub project in the March 21-27th edition of New Scientist (paid subscription required for full article). The article is worth a read - he posits that of Ulric Neisser's five necessary components to human-equivalent consciousness or selfhood, three of the five have been achieved by their iCub creation.

Behold the somehow endearing - and yet simultaneously deeply creepy - iCub in its early childhood: 

Have an hour or so to contemplate what might perhaps be the most significant mystery of human existence: how our brains might create consciousness and therefore how a physical or virtual replica of the human brain might produce it to complete the achievement of inserting an i into i, Robot? If so, the following short talks might be helpful.

First up, Dan Dennet, the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. Dennett's larger position seems to be that there really is no "hard problem" of consciousness, there is no phenomenon of subjective, willful self-aware consciousness to explain - it is an illusion. His point in the following talk is really just that we can't trust the subjective feeling of consciousness and that our almost innate certainty of its existence is because we "experience" consciousness - but that subjective experience is based on trickery in the same way we can easily be tricked by the magician's clever slight of hand or simple optical illusions:

While it deserves a hearing, I personally find Dennett's argument here to be weak sauce and, like many of his "new atheist" bretheren, Dennett seems to be very busy building and burning straw men, missing the forest for the trees and refuting assertions no one of note from the other side is making. I find the magician's slight of hand metaphor to be a more apt descriptor of his alleged chain of logic and what he proports to be able to demonstrate. Nevertheless, this is the sort of somewhat ridiculous tautology (There is no consciousness because consciousness doesn't exist / I don't have to explain consciousness because we are not really conscious) that must be faced and challenged for anything outside the dominant paradigm to get a fair hearing.

For me, the more compelling arguments for the materialists resort to the evidence that there are specific brain structures that correspond to every aspect of human consciousness - and that altering, injuring and/or destroying these structures have entirely predictable affects on specific functions and qualities of consciousness. V.S. Ramachandran's talk is a good example of the sort of survey that might immediately lead one (though it is important to note that Ramachandran is not making this assertion nor denying it here) to the conclusion that if the phenomenon under consideration is altered or stopped when a physical structure is altered, injured or destroyed that the latter must be the necessary cause or source of the former. That is the natural assumption with the following associations between specific phenomena of consciousness and their corresponding brain structures:

Ironically, I actually think something like Dennett's slight of hand might be more at work in our very natural assumptions about causality, but I'll save that for a subsequent post detailing the more moderate / possibly middle-ground view of another theorist.

I'll end today's rabbit hole adventure by checking out the state of the materialists' quest to create a build-a-brain workshop. Henry Markram, the Israeli neuroscientist and director of the Blue Brain Project and the subsequent Human Brain Project, outlined in 2009 the plan to virtually model the human brain in a supercomputer. This is where the rubber is meeting the road in attempting to achieve full consciousness for an artificially conscious entity or robot, assuming the materialists' assumptions are correct and that they have within their reach the ability to solve the raw and immense technical challenges involved in duplicating the structures and processes involved in the human brain's production of consciousness:

Almost six years later, just this past month, Markram delivered an address at the World Economic Forum in Davos, which may provide some good clues as to the status of their quest, the first half of which is reportedly roughly on schedule. If you're like me, you might need to stop and brew a pot of coffee. A stem-winding silver-tongued orator he most certainly is not, but he's very, very smart and he's in charge of one of the most ambitious and potentially important initiatives that may yet prove to be foundational to the achievement of artificial super intelligence in this century. Get ready for human brain chips and Roboy!:

Robot Cars!

Robot Car, DJ Shin, cc Creative Commons

Okay, so it's not a flying car, but robot cars (autonomous vehicles) are starting to appear on the near horizon in a couple of recent announcements. Mr. "summoning the demon" himself, Elon Musk, announced this week that Tesla will provide a software update this summer for its Model S sedans that will enable them to function in "autopilot" mode while on highways.  Google's "director of self-driving cars," Chris Urmson, projects that fully autonomous cars will be available to the public and on the roads within the next five years, in time to ensure his now 11-year-old son won't have to take a driver's test. These are very bold predictions, and are probably taking a good chunk of the population, perhaps the vast majority, by surprise. Urmson's declaration was made at session 3 of TED 2015, and was accompanied there by more than a little discussion around artificial intelligence and some of the complicated technological, philosophical and ethical issues and topics that have been the focused interests of this blog.

But even just taking the topic of the decidedly un-super artificial intelligence of self-driving cars, one can easily see current technological capability on a collision course with our ability to regulate its development and / or revise our norms and laws to even accomodate it, as a quick review of the New York Times article on Musk's announcement will demonstrate. If we're getting stumped in legally dealing with auto-cars and Amazon's wished-for delivery drones, how much more difficulty will our legal and ethical systems have with artificial super intelligence? Here we are in 2015, very much at the base of one of Kurzweil's exponential S-curves and already the issues seem overwhelming.

Personally, all this reminds me of a recurring nightmare I had as a child in which our hulking Chevy family station wagon (the kind with the vomit-inducing rear-facing seat) would take off by itself with me strapped in the back, panicked as the car mumbled non-sensically back to me in response to my pleas that it stop and let me out. So, strap yourself in, kiddos, it's going to be a bumpy ride, and there's a fair to middlin' chance no one's going to stop and let us get out. 

The good news is that the demon cars look a lot more comfortable and luxurious than my family's 1970s Chevy station wagon. But, I'd bet everything I have that they'll still make little kids vomit:

The Future isn't what it used to be...

A Trip to the Moon, 1902, Georges Méliès

Much of what has been discussed on this blog to date has been theoretical and abstract. Abstractions and theory are perhaps the relatively more stable and reliable elements of prognostication, but they lack soul - they are the skeleton framework of dry bones that hunger for the flesh and blood of imagined and lush new worlds. As we gaze into the abyss of the event horizon, these questions echo only, without answer: "But what will the future look like, feel like, taste like?" "What will it mean?" "Will we still be ourselves?" 

All of these questions bounce off of the offered mathmatical extrapolations and exponential S-curves which can whisper only about what is theoretically possible, that can tell us only that what we're trying to imagine ultimately may not be within our merely human conceptual grasp.

But we imagine still. If you're a Gen-Xer, like me, the perenial questions, "Where's my jet pack?" "Where's my flying car?" linger to cast a healthy dose of skepticism in reply to any fool who comes along claiming to tell us what the future is going to be like. And all these imaginings from time immemorial probably only really tell us something accurate about our present, as they are simply the projections of ourselves at very particular points of time and the context framing us in the present. If we're Jules Verne or George Méliès, our future cosmonauts wear bloomers and are shot at the moon out of giant gold cannons. If we're Gene Roddenberry, our Starship Enterprise crew wears 1960s bouffants and only more refined polyester combos of leisure/track suits. If we're producing a 1976 SNL skit peering into 1999, everyone then sports identical polyester getups (again) and giant afros. Even when we're not trying to be funny, there are elements of our present we simply just can't imagine being dated, that trip us up, that evoke chuckles and giggles only with decades of hindsight. So much more so when contemplating a radical break like the singularity.

But, sometimes, we get it right. Certainly, no major advance in human technological history happened without being first imagined and most often presented in fantastical science fiction. And so science fiction is a menu of possibility and most often the choices are dictated less by true technical limitation (though that is certainly sometimes the case) than what our future selves find important enough to achieve (somehow, jet packs and flying cars never really developed a compelling market for themselves - a Manhattan project-style initiative for either or both and we'd have flying cars and jet packs aplenty). Our imagination fails most often in anticipating what we'll actually find to be important and crucial in the future. When it does, our imagination fails then in intuiting the evolution of our desire and our own deepest internal motivations. Ultimately, we are a mystery most unto our selves.

With all that said, and with the amount this blog has dwelled on the apocalyptic dangers lurking in the development of AI and ASI, the utopian futurist vision of Ray Kurzweil deserves a hearing. It's compelling and beautiful and seductive. It leaves you wondering if he and others like him are dangerous crackpots or if they just might be on to something. I suspect a little of both and I've probably got a strong history of precedent on my side in imagining that about them. At any rate, enjoy a picture of what could be if he and others like him are 100% right about the most important things and if all goes well in our dangerous quest, straight from the horse's mouth. Nothing huge promised, only immortality:

And here's a recent and condensed version of a talk he's been giving now for a few years:

Finally, enjoy one of my favorite bands - who provided the inspiration for the title of this post:

CBS This Morning Tackles AI

Enjoyed seeing this segment pop up in my favorite morning news program this morning. - [Original video removed from public site by CBS - replaced with an article, the above is a subsequent video treatment of AI questions from CBS This Morning - March 9, 2015]