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National Pub date: February 19, 2019
Title: DEEP THINKING
Subtitle: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI
By: John Brockman
Length: 90,000 words
Headline: Science world luminary John Brockman assembles twenty-five of the most
important scientific minds, people who have been thinking about the field artificial
intelligence for most of their careers for an unparalleled round-table examination about
mind, thinking, intelligence and what it means to be human.
Description:
"Artificial intelligence is today's story—the story behind all other stories. It is the Second
Coming and the Apocalypse at the same time: Good AI versus evil AI." —John
Brockman
More than sixty years ago, mathematician-philosopher Norbert Wiener published a book
on the place of machines in society that ended with a warning: “we shall never receive
the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions…. The hour is very
late, and the choice of good and evil knocks at our door.”
In the wake of advances in unsupervised, self-improving machine learning, a small but
influential community of thinkers is considering Wiener’s words again. In Deep
Thinking, John Brockman gathers their disparate visions of where AI might be taking us.
The fruit of the long history of Brockman’s profound engagement with the most
important scientific minds who have been thinking about AI—from Alison Gopnik and
David Deutsch to Frank Wilczek and Stephen Wolfram— Deep Thinking is an ideal
introduction to the landscape of crucial issues AI presents.
The collision between opposing perspectives is salutary and exhilarating; some of these
figures, such as computer scientist Stuart Russell, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, and
physicist Max Tegmark, are deeply concerned with the threat of AI, including the
existential one, while others, notably robotics entrepreneur Rodney Brooks, philosopher
Daniel Dennett, and bestselling author Steven Pinker, have a very different view. Serious,
searching and authoritative, Deep Thinking lays out the intellectual landscape of one of
the most important topics of our time.
Participants in The Deep Thinking Project
Chris Anderson is an entrepreneur; a roboticist; former editor-in-chief of Wired; cofounder
and CEO of 3DR; and author of The Long Tail, Free, and Makers.
Rodney Brooks is a computer scientist; Panasonic Professor of Robotics, emeritus, MIT;
former director, MIT Computer Science Lab; and founder, chairman, and CTO of
Rethink Robotics. He is the author of Flesh and Machines.
George M. Church is Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical
School; Professor of Health Sciences and Technology, Harvard-MIT; and co-author (with
Ed Regis) of Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves.
Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of
Philosophy and director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the
author of a dozen books, including Consciousness Explained and, most recently, From
Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.
David Deutsch is a quantum physicist and a member of the Centre for Quantum
Computation at the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford University. He is the author of The
Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity.
Anca Dragan is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. She co-founded and serves on the steering
committee for the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab and is a co-principal investigator in
Berkeley’s Center for Human-Compatible AI.
George Dyson is a historian of science and technology and the author of Baidarka: the
Kayak, Darwin Among the Machines, Project Orion, and Turing’s Cathedral.
Peter Galison is a science historian, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor and cofounder
of
the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, and the author of Einstein's Clocks and
Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time.
Neil Gershenfeld is a physicist and director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. He is
the author of FAB, co-author (with Alan Gershenfeld & Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld) of
Designing Reality, and founder of the global fab lab network.
Alison Gopnik is a developmental psychologist at UC Berkeley; her books include The
Philosophical Baby and, most recently, The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New
Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and
Children.
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Tom Griffiths is Henry R. Luce Professor of Information, Technology, Consciousness,
and Culture at Princeton University. He is co-author (with Brian Christian) of Algorithms
to Live By.
W. Daniel “Danny” Hillis is an inventor, entrepreneur, and computer scientist, Judge
Widney Professor of Engineering and Medicine at USC, and author of The Pattern on the
Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work.
Caroline A. Jones is a professor of art history in the Department of Architecture at MIT
and author of Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the
Bureaucratization of the Senses; Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar
American Artist; and The Global Work of Art.
David Kaiser is Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of
physics at MIT, and head of its Program in Science, Technology & Society. He is the
author of How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum
Revival and American Physics and the Cold War Bubble (forthcoming).
Seth Lloyd is a theoretical physicist at MIT, Nam P. Suh Professor in the Department of
Mechanical Engineering, and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is the
author of Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the
Cosmos.
Hans Ulrich Obrist is artistic director of the Serpentine Gallery, London, and the author
of Ways of Curating and Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects.
Judea Pearl is professor of computer science and director of the Cognitive Systems
Laboratory at UCLA. His most recent book, co-authored with Dana Mackenzie, is The
Book of Why: The
Alex “Sandy” Pentland is Toshiba Professor and professor of media arts and sciences,
MIT; director of the Human Dynamics and Connection Science labs and the Media Lab
Entrepreneurship Program, and the author of Social Physics.
New Science of Cause and Effect.
Steven Pinker, a Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at
Harvard University, is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual
cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He is the author of eleven books,
including The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and, most recently,
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.
Venki Ramakrishnan is a scientist at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of
Molecular Biology, Cambridge University; recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
(2009); current president of the Royal Society; and the author of Gene Machine: The
Race to Discover the Secrets of the Ribosome.
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Stuart Russell is a professor of computer science and Smith-Zadeh Professor in
Engineering at UC Berkeley. He is the coauthor (with Peter Norvig) of Artificial
Intelligence: A Modern Approach.
Jaan Tallin, a computer programmer, theoretical physicist, and investor, is a codeveloper
of Skype and Kazaa.
Max Tegmark is an MIT physicist and AI researcher; president of the Future of Life
Institute; scientific director of the Foundational Questions Institute; and the author of Our
Mathematical Universe and Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
Frank Wilczek is Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at MIT, recipient of the 2004
Nobel Prize in physics, and the author of A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep
Design.
Stephen Wolfram is a scientist, inventor, and the founder and CEO of Wolfram
Research. He is the creator of the symbolic computation program Mathematica and its
programming language, Wolfram Language, as well as the knowledge engine
Wolfram|Alpha. He is also the author of A New Kind of Science.
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Deep Thinking
Twenty-five Ways of Looking at AI
edited by John Brockma
Penguin Press — February 19, 2019
5
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: On the Promise and Peril of AI
by John Brockman
Artificial intelligence is today’s story—the story behind all other stories. It is the Second
Coming and the Apocalypse at the same time: Good AI versus evil AI. This book comes
out of an ongoing conversation with a number of important thinkers, both in the world of
AI and beyond it, about what AI is and what it means. Called the Deep Thinking Project,
this conversation began in earnest in September 2016, in a meeting at the Mayflower
Grace Hotel in Washington, Connecticut with some of the book’s contributors.
What quickly emerged from that first meeting is that the excitement and fear in the wider
culture surrounding AI now has an analogue in the way Norbert Wiener’s ideas
regarding “cybernetics” worked their way through the culture, particularly in the
1960’s, as artists began to incorporate thinking about new technologies into their work.
I witnessed the impact of those ideas at close hand; indeed it’s not too much to say they
set me off on my life’s path. With the advent of the digital era beginning in the early
1970s, people stopped talking about Wiener, but today, his Cybernetic Idea has been so
widely adopted that it’s internalized to the point where it no longer needs a name. It’s
everywhere, it’s in the air, and it’s a fitting a place to begin.
Seth Lloyd: Wrong, but More Relevant Than Ever
It is exactly in the extension of the cybernetic idea to human beings that Wiener’s
conceptions missed their target.
Judea Pearl: The Limitations of Opaque Learning Machines
Deep learning has its own dynamics, it does its own repair and its own optimization, and
it gives you the right results most of the time. But when it doesn’t, you don’t have a clue
about what went wrong and what should be fixed.
Stuart Russell: The Purpose Put Into the Machine
We may face the prospect of superintelligent machines—their actions by definition
unpredictable by us and their imperfectly specified objectives conflicting with our own—
whose motivation to preserve their existence in order to achieve those objectives may be
insuperable.
George Dyson: The Third Law
Any system simple enough to be understandable will not be complicated enough to
behave intelligently, while any system complicated enough to behave intelligently will be
too complicated to understand.
Daniel C. Dennett: What Can We Do?
We don’t need artificial conscious agents. We need intelligent tools.
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Rodney Brooks: The Inhuman Mess Our Machines Have Gotten Us Into
We are in a much more complex situation today than Wiener foresaw, and I am worried
that it is much more pernicious than even his worst imagined fears.
Frank Wilczek: The Unity of Intelligence
The advantages of artificial over natural intelligence appear permanent, while the
advantages of natural over artificial intelligence, though substantial at present, appear
transient.
Max Tegmark: Let’s Aspire to More Than Making Ourselves Obsolete
We should analyze what could go wrong with AI to ensure that it goes right.
Jaan Tallinn: Dissident Messages
Continued progress in AI can precipitate a change of cosmic proportions—a runaway
process that will likely kill everyone.
Steven Pinker: Tech Prophecy and the Underappreciated Causal Power of Ideas
There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into
ruthless megalomaniacs.
David Deutsch: Beyond Reward and Punishment
Misconceptions about human thinking and human origins are causing corresponding
misconceptions about AGI and how it might be created.
Tom Griffiths: The Artificial Use of Human Beings
Automated intelligent systems that will make good inferences about what people want
must have good generative models for human behavior.
Anca Dragan: Putting the Human into the AI Equation
In the real world, an AI must interact with people and reason about them. People will
have to formally enter the AI problem definition somewhere.
Chris Anderson: Gradient Descent
Just because AI systems sometimes end up in local minima, don’t conclude that this
makes them any less like life. Humans—indeed, probably all life-forms—are often stuck
in local minima.
David Kaiser: “Information” for Wiener, for Shannon, and for Us
Many of the central arguments in The Human Use of Human Beings seem closer to the
19th century than the 21st. Wiener seems not to have fully embraced Shannon’s notion of
information as consisting of irreducible, meaning-free bits.
Neil Gershenfeld: Scaling
Although machine making and machine thinking might appear to be unrelated trends,
they lie in each other’s futures.
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W. Daniel Hillis: The First Machine Intelligences
Hybrid superintelligences such as nation states and corporations have their own
emergent goals and their actions are not always aligned to the interests of the people
who created them.
Venki Ramakrishnan: Will Computers Become Our Overlords?
Our fears about AI reflect the belief that our intelligence is what makes us special.
Alex “Sandy” Pentland: The Human Strategy
How can we make a good human-artificial ecosystem, something that’s not a machine
society but a cyberculture in which we can all live as humans—a culture with a human
feel to it?
Hans Ulrich Obrist: Making the Invisible Visible: Art Meets AI
Many contemporary artists are articulating various doubts about the promises of AI and
reminding us not to associate the term “artificial intelligence” solely with positive
outcomes.
Alison Gopnik: AIs versus Four-Year-Olds
Looking at what children do may give programmers useful hints about directions for
computer learning.
Peter Galison: Algorists Dream of Objectivity
By now, the legal, ethical, formal, and economic dimensions of algorithms are all quasiinfinite.
George M. Church: The Rights of Machines
Probably we should be less concerned about us-versus-them and more concerned about
the rights of all sentients in the face of an emerging unprecedented diversity of minds.
Caroline A. Jones: The Artistic Use of Cybernetic Beings
The work of cybernetically inclined artists concerns the emergent behaviors of life that
elude AI in its current condition.
Stephen Wolfram: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Civilization
The most dramatic discontinuity will surely be when we achieve effective human
immortality. Whether this will be achieved biologically or digitally isn’t clear, but
inevitably it will be achieved.
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Introduction: On the Promise and Peril of AI
John Brockman
Artificial intelligence is today’s story—the story behind all other stories. It is the Second
Coming and the Apocalypse at the same time: Good AI versus evil AI. This book comes
out of an ongoing conversation with a number of important thinkers, both in the world of
AI and beyond it, about what AI is and what it means. Called the Deep Thinking Project,
this conversation began in earnest in September 2016, in a meeting at the Mayflower
Grace Hotel in Washington, Connecticut with some of the book’s contributors.
What quickly emerged from that first meeting is that the excitement and fear in the wider
culture surrounding AI now has an analogue in the way Norbert Wiener’s ideas regarding
“cybernetics” worked their way through the culture, particularly in the 1960’s, as artists
began to incorporate thinking about new technologies into their work. I witnessed the
impact of those ideas at close hand; indeed it’s not too much to say they set me off on my
life’s path. With the advent of the digital era beginning in the early 1970s, people stopped
talking about Wiener, but today, his Cybernetic Idea has been so widely adopted that it’s
internalized to the point where it no longer needs a name. It’s everywhere, it’s in the air,
and it’s a fitting a place to begin.
New Technologies=New Perceptions
Before AI, there was Cybernetics—the idea of automatic, self-regulating control, laid out
in Norbert Wiener’s foundational text of 1948. I can date my own serious exposure to it
to 1966, when the composer John Cage invited me and four or five other young arts
people to join him for a series of dinners—an ongoing seminar about media,
communications, art, music, and philosophy that focused on Cage’s interest in the ideas
of Wiener, Claude Shannon, and Marshall McLuhan, all of whom had currency in the
New York art circles in which I was then moving. In particular, Cage had picked up on
McLuhan’s idea that by inventing electronic technologies we had externalized our central
nervous system—that is, our minds—and that we now had to presume that “there’s only
one mind, the one we all share.”
Ideas of this nature were beginning to be of great interest to the artists I was
working with in New York at the Film-Makers’ Cinémathèque, where I was program
manager for a series of multimedia productions called the New Cinema 1 (also known as
the Expanded Cinema Festival), under the auspices of avant-garde filmmaker and
impresario Jonas Mekas. They included visual artists Claes Oldenburg, Robert
Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Robert Whitman; kinetic artists Charlotte Moorman and
Nam June Paik; happenings artists Allan Kaprow and Carolee Schneemann; dancer Tricia
Brown; filmmakers Jack Smith, Stan Vanderbeek, Ed Emshwiller, and the Kuchar
brothers; avant-garde dramatist Ken Dewey; poet Gerd Stern and the USCO group;
minimalist musicians Lamonte Young and Terry Riley; and through Warhol, the music
group, The Velvet Underground. Many of these people were reading Wiener, and
cybernetics was in the air. It was at one of these dinners that Cage reached into his
briefcase and took out a copy of Cybernetics and handed it to me, saying, “This is for
you.”
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During the Festival, I received an unexpected phone call from Wiener’s colleague
Arthur K. Solomon, head of Harvard’s graduate program in biophysics. Wiener had died
the year before, and Solomon and Wiener’s other close colleagues at MIT and Harvard
had been reading about the Expanded Cinema Festival in the New York Times and were
intrigued by the connection to Wiener’s work. Solomon invited me to bring some of the
artists up to Cambridge to meet with him and a group that included MIT sensorycommunications
researcher Walter Rosenblith, Harvard applied mathematician Anthony
Oettinger, and MIT engineer Harold “Doc” Edgerton, inventor of the strobe light.
Like many other “art meets science” situations I’ve been involved in since, the
two-day event was an informed failure: ships passing in the night. But I took it all
onboard and the event was consequential in some interesting ways—one of which came
from the fact that they took us to see “the” computer. Computers were a rarity back then;
at least, none of us on the visit had ever seen one. We were ushered into a large space on
the MIT campus, in the middle of which there was a “cold room” raised off the floor and
enclosed in glass, in which technicians wearing white lab coats, scarves, and gloves were
busy collating punch cards coming through an enormous machine. When I approached,
the steam from my breath fogged up the window into the cold room. Wiping it off, I saw
“the” computer. I fell in love.
Later, in the Fall of 1967, I went to Menlo Park to spend time with Stewart Brand,
whom I had met in New York in 1965 when he was a satellite member of the USCO
group of artists. Now, with his wife Lois, a mathematician, he was preparing the first
edition of The Whole Earth Catalog for publication. While Lois and the team did the
heavy lifting on the final mechanicals for WEC, Stewart and I sat together in a corner for
two days, reading, underlining, and annotating the same paperback copy of Cybernetics
that Cage had handed to me the year before, and debating Wiener’s ideas.
Inspired by this set of ideas, I began to develop a theme, a mantra of sorts, that
has informed my endeavors since: “new technologies = new perceptions.” Inspired by
communications theorist Marshall McLuhan, architect-designer Buckminster Fuller,
futurist John McHale, and cultural anthropologists Edward T. (Ned) Hall and Edmund
Carpenter, I started reading avidly in the field of information theory, cybernetics, and
systems theory. McLuhan suggested I read biologist J.Z. Young’s Doubt and Certainty
in Science in which he said that we create tools and we mold ourselves through our use of
them. The other text he recommended was Warren Weaver and Claude Shannon’s 1949
paper “Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication,” which
begins: “The word communication will be used here in a very broad sense to include all
of the procedures by which one mind may affect another. This, of course, involves not
only written and oral speech, but also music, the pictorial arts, the theater, the ballet, and
in fact all human behavior."
Who knew that within two decades of that moment we would begin to recognize
the brain as a computer? And in the next two decades, as we built our computers into the
Internet, that we would begin to realize that the brain is not a computer, but a network of
computers? Certainly not Wiener, a specialist in analogue feedback circuits designed to
control machines, nor the artists, nor, least of all, myself.
“We must cease to kiss the whip that lashes us.”
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Two years after Cybernetics, in 1950, Norbert Wiener published The Human Use of
Human Beings—a deeper story, in which he expressed his concerns about the runaway
commercial exploitation and other unforeseen consequences of the new technologies of
control. I didn’t read The Human Use of Human Beings until the spring of 2016, when I
picked up my copy, a first edition, which was sitting in my library next to Cybernetics.
What shocked me was the realization of just how prescient Wiener was in 1950 about
what’s going on today. Although the first edition was a major bestseller—and, indeed,
jump-started an important conversation—under pressure from his peers Wiener brought
out a revised and milder edition in 1954, from which the original concluding chapter,
“Voices of Rigidity,” is conspicuously absent.
Science historian George Dyson points out that in this long-forgotten first edition,
Wiener predicted the possibility of a “threatening new Fascism dependent on the machine
à gouverner”:
No elite escaped his criticism, from the Marxists and the Jesuits (“all of
Catholicism is indeed essentially a totalitarian religion”) to the FBI (“our great
merchant princes have looked upon the propaganda technique of the Russians,
and have found that it is good”) and the financiers lending their support “to make
American capitalism and the fifth freedom of the businessman supreme
throughout the world.” Scientists . . . received the same scrutiny given the
Church: “Indeed, the heads of great laboratories are very much like Bishops, with
their association with the powerful in all walks of life, and the dangers they incur
of the carnal sins of pride and of lust for power.”
This jeremiad did not go well for Wiener. As Dyson puts it:
These alarms were discounted at the time, not because Wiener was wrong about
digital computing but because larger threats were looming as he completed his
manuscript in the fall of 1949. Wiener had nothing against digital computing but
was strongly opposed to nuclear weapons and refused to join those who were
building digital computers to move forward on the thousand-times-more-powerful
hydrogen bomb.
Since the original of The Human Use of Human Beings is now out of print, lost to
us is Wiener’s cri de coeur, more relevant today than when he wrote it, sixty-eight years
ago: “We must cease to kiss the whip that lashes us.”
Mind, Thinking, Intelligence
Among the reasons we don’t hear much about “Cybernetics” today, two are central: First,
although The Human Use of Human Beings was considered an important book in its time,
it ran counter to the aspirations of many of Wiener’s colleagues, including John von
Neumann and Claude Shannon, who were interested in the commercialization of the new
technologies. Second, computer pioneer John McCarthy disliked Wiener and refused to
use Wiener’s term “Cybernetics.” McCarthy, in turn, coined the term “artificial
intelligence” and became a founding father of that field.
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As Judea Pearl, who, in the 1980s, introduced a new approach to artificial
intelligence called Bayesian networks, explained to me:
What Wiener created was excitement to believe that one day we are going to
make an intelligent machine. He wasn't a computer scientist. He talked feedback,
he talked communication, he talked analog. His working metaphor was a
feedback circuit, which he was an expert in. By the time the digital age began in
the early 1960s people wanted to talk programming, talk codes, talk about
computational functions, talk about short-term memory, long-term memory—
meaningful computer metaphors. Wiener wasn’t part of that, and he didn’t reach
the new generation that germinated with his ideas. His metaphors were too old,
passé. There were new means already available that were ready to capture the
human imagination.” By 1970, people were no longer talking about Wiener.
One critical factor missing in Wiener’s vision was the cognitive element: mind, thinking,
intelligence. As early as 1942, at the first of a series of foundational interdisciplinary
meetings about the control of complex systems that would come to be known as the
Macy conferences, leading researchers were arguing for the inclusion of the cognitive
element into the conversation. While von Neumann, Shannon, and Wiener were
concerned about systems of control and communication of observed systems, Warren
McCullough wanted to include mind. He turned to cultural anthropologists Gregory
Bateson and Margaret Mead to make the connection to the social sciences. Bateson in
particular was increasingly talking about patterns and processes, or “the pattern that
connects.” He called for a new kind of systems ecology in which organisms and the
environment in which they live are one in the same, and should be considered as a single
circuit. By the early 1970s the Cybernetics of observed systems—1 st order Cybernetics—
moved to the Cybernetics of observing systems—2 nd order Cybernetics—or “the
Cybernetics of Cybernetics”, as coined by Heinz von Foerster, who joined the Macy
conferences in the mid 1950s, and spearheaded the new movement.
Cybernetics, rather than disappearing, was becoming metabolized into everything,
so we no longer saw it as a separate, distinct new discipline. And there it remains, hiding
in plain sight.
“The Shtick of the Steins”
My own writing about these issues at the time was on the radar screen of the 2 nd order
Cybernetics crowd, including Heinz von Foerster as well as John Lilly and Alan Watts,
who were the co-organizers of something called "The AUM Conference," shorthand for
“The American University of Masters”, which took place in Big Sur in 1973, a gathering
of philosophers, psychologists, and scientists, each of whom asked to lecture on his own
work in terms of its relationship to the ideas of British mathematician G. Spencer Brown
presented in his book, Laws of Form.
I was a bit puzzled when I received an invitation—a very late invitation indeed—
which they explained was based on their interest in the ideas I presented in a book called
Afterwords, which were very much on their wavelength. I jumped at the opportunity, the
main reason being that the keynote speaker was none other than Richard Feynman. I love
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to spend time with physicists, the reason being that they think about the universe, i.e.
everything. And no physicist was reputed to be articulate as Feynman. I couldn’t wait to
meet him. I accepted. That said, I am not a scientist, and I had never entertained the idea
of getting on a stage and delivering a “lecture” of any kind, least of all a commentary on
an obscure mathematical theory in front of a group identified as the world’s most
interesting thinkers. Only upon my arrival in Big Sur did I find out the reason for my
very late invitation. “When is Feynman’s talk?” I asked at the desk. “Oh, didn’t Alan
Watts tell you? Richard is ill and has been hospitalized. You’re his replacement. And, by
the way, what’s the title of your keynote lecture?”
I tried to make myself invisible for several days. Alan Watts, realizing that I was
avoiding the podium, woke me up one night with a 3am knock on the door of my room. I
opened the door to find him standing in front of me wearing a monk’s robe with a hood
that covering much of his face. His arms extended, he held a lantern in one hand, and a
magnum of scotch on the other.
“John”, he said in a deep voice with a rich aristocratic British accent, “you are a
phony.” “And, John”, he continued, I am a phony. But John, I am a real phony!”
The next day I gave my lecture, entitled "Einstein, Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein,
and Frankenstein." Einstein: the revolution in 20 th century physics; Gertrude Stein: the
first writer who made integral to her work the idea of an indeterminate and discontinuous
universe. Words represented neither character nor activity: A rose is a rose is a rose, and
a universe is a universe is a universe.); Wittgenstein: the world as limits of language.
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”. The end of the distinction
between observer and observed. Frankenstein: Cybernetics AI, robotics, all the essayists
in this volume.
The lecture had unanticipated consequences. Among the participants at the AUM
Conference were several authors of #1 New York Times bestsellers, yet no one there had
a literary agent. And I realized that all were engaged in writing a genre of book both
unnamed and unrecognized by New York publishers. Since I had an MBA from
Colombia Business School, and a series of relative successes in business, I was
dragooned into becoming an agent, initially for Gregory Bateson and John Lilly, whose
books I sold quickly, and for sums that caught my attention, thus kick-starting my career
as a literary agent.
I never did meet Richard Feynman.
The Long AI Winters
This new career put me in close touch with most of the AI pioneers, and over the decades
I rode with them on waves of enthusiasm, and into valleys of disappointment.
In the early ‘80s the Japanese government mounted a national effort to advance
AI. They called it the 5 th Generation; their goal was to change the architecture of
computation by breaking “the von Neumann bottleneck”, by creating a massively parallel
computer. In so doing, they hoped to jumpstart their economy and become a dominant
world power in the field. In1983, the leader of the Japanese 5 th Generation consortium
came to New York for a meeting organized by Heinz Pagels, the president of the New
York Academy of Sciences. I had a seat at the table alongside the leaders of the 1 st
generation, Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy, the 2 nd generation, Edward Feigenbaum
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and Roger Schank, and Joseph Traub, head of the National Supercomputer Consortium.
In 1981 with Heinz’s help, I had founded “The Reality Club” (the precursor to the
non-profit Edge.org), whose initial interdisciplinary meetings took place in the Board
Room at the NYAS. Heinz was working on his book, Dreams of Reason: The Rise of the
Science of Complexity, which he considered to be a research agenda for science in the
1990's.
Through the Reality Club meetings, I got to know two young researchers who
were about to play key roles in revolutionizing computer science. At MIT in the late
seventies, Danny Hillis developed the algorithms that made possible the massively
parallel computer. In 1983, his company, Thinking Machines, built the world's fastest
supercomputer by utilizing parallel architecture. His "connection machine," closely
reflected the workings of the human mind. Seth Lloyd at Rockefeller University was
undertaking seminal work in the fields of quantum computation and quantum
communications, including proposing the first technologically feasible design for a
quantum computer.
And the Japanese? Their foray into artificial intelligence failed, and was followed
by twenty years of anemic economic growth. But, the leading US scientists took this
program very seriously. And Feigenbaum, who was the cutting-edge computer scientist
of the day, teamed up with McCorduck to write a book on these developments. The Fifth
Generation: Artificial Intelligence and Japan's Computer Challenge to the World was
published in 1983. We had a code name for the project: “It’s coming, it’s coming!” But it
didn’t come; it went.
From that point on I’ve worked with researchers in nearly every variety of AI and
complexity, including Rodney Brooks, Hans Moravec, John Archibald Wheeler, Benoit
Mandelbrot, John Henry Holland, Danny Hillis, Freeman Dyson, Chris Langton, Doyne
Farmer, Geoffrey West, Stuart Russell, and Judea Pearl.
An Ongoing Dynamical Emergent System
From the initial meeting in Washington, CT to the present, I arranged a number of
dinners and discussions in London and Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as a public
event at London’s City Hall. Among the attendees were distinguished scientists, science
historians, and communications theorists, all of whom have been thinking seriously about
AI issues for their entire careers.
I commissioned essays from a wide range of contributors, with or without
references to Wiener (leaving it up to each participant). In the end, 25 people wrote
essays, all individuals concerned about what is happening today in the age of AI. Deep
Thinking in not my book, rather it is our book: Seth Lloyd, Judea Pearl, Stuart Russell,
George Dyson, Daniel C. Dennett, Rodney Brooks, Frank Wilczek, Max Tegmark, Jaan
Tallinn, Steven Pinker, David Deutsch, Tom Griffiths, Anca Dragan, Chris Anderson,
David Kaiser, Neil Gershenfeld, W. Daniel Hillis, Venki Ramakrishnan, Alex “Sandy”
Pentland, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Alison Gopnik, Peter Galison, George M. Church, Caroline
A. Jones, Stephen Wolfram.
I see The Deep Thinking Project as an ongoing dynamical emergent system, a
presentation of the ideas of a community of sophisticated thinkers who are bringing their
experience and erudition to bear in challenging the prevailing digital AI narrative as they
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communicate their thoughts to one another. The aim is to present a mosaic of views
which will help make sense out of this rapidly emerging field.
I asked the essayists to consider:
(a) The Zen-like poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” by Wallace
Stevens, which he insisted was “not meant to be a collection of epigrams or of ideas, but
of sensations.” It is an exercise in “perspectivism,” consisting of short, separate sections,
each of which mentions blackbirds in some way. The poem is about his own imagination;
it concerns what he attends to.
(b) The parable of the blind men and an elephant. Like the elephant, AI is too big
a topic for any one perspective, never mind the fact that no two people seem to see things
the same way.
What do we want the book to do? Stewart Brand has noted that “revisiting
pioneer thinking is perpetually useful. And it gives a long perspective that invites
thinking in decades and centuries about the subject. All contemporary discussion, is
bound to age badly and immediately without the longer perspective.”
Danny Hillis wants people in AI to realize how they’ve been programmed by
Wiener’s book. “You’re executing its road map,” he says, and you just don’t realize it.”
Dan Dennett would like to “let Wiener emerge as the ghost at the banquet. Think
of it as a source of hybrid vigor, a source of unsettling ideas to shake uŒp the established
mindset.”
Neil Gershenfeld argues that “stealth remedial education for the people running
the “Big Five” would be a great output from the book.”
Freeman Dyson Freeman, one of the few people alive who knew Wiener, notes
that “The Human Use of Human Beings is one of the best books ever written. Wiener got
almost everything right. I will be interested to see what your bunch of wizards will do
with it.”
The Evolving AI Narrative
Things have changed—and they remain the same. Now AI is everywhere. We have the
Internet. We have our smartphones. The founders of the dominant companies—the
companies that hold “the whip that lashes us”—have net worths of $65 billion, $90
billion, $130 billion. High-profile individuals such as Elon Musk, Nick Bostrom, Martin
Rees, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and the late Stephen Hawking have issued dire warnings about
AI, resulting in the ascendancy of well-funded institutes tasked with promoting “Nice
AI.” But will we, as a species, be able to control a fully realized, unsupervised, selfimproving
AI? Wiener’s warnings and admonitions in The Human Use of Human Beings
are now very real, and they need to be looked at anew by researchers at the forefront of
the AI revolution. Here is Dyson again:
Wiener became increasingly disenchanted with the “gadget worshipers” whose
corporate selfishness brought “motives to automatization that go beyond a
legitimate curiosity and are sinful in themselves.” He knew the danger was not
machines becoming more like humans but humans being treated like machines.
“The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the
limitations of our intelligence,” he warned in God & Golem, Inc., published in
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1964, the year of his death, “not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie
down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.”
It’s time to examine the evolving AI narrative by identifying the leading members of that
mainstream community along with the dissidents, and presenting their counternarratives
in their own voices.
The essays that follow thus constitute a much-needed update from the field.
John Brockman
New York, 2019
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I met Seth Lloyd in the late 1980s, when new ways of thinking were everywhere: the
importance of biological organizing principles, the computational view of mathematics
and physical processes, the emphasis on parallel networks, the importance of nonlinear
dynamics, the new understanding of chaos, connectionist ideas, neural networks, and
parallel distributive processing. The advances in computation during that period
provided us with a new way of thinking about knowledge.
Seth likes to refer to himself as a quantum mechanic. He is internationally known
for his work in the field of quantum computation, which attempts to harness the exotic
properties of quantum theory, like superposition and entanglement, to solve problems
that would take several lifetimes to solve on classical computers.
In the essay that follows, he traces the history of information theory from Norbert
Wiener’s prophetic insights to the predictions of a technological “singularity” that some
would have us believe will supplant the human species. His takeaway on the recent
programming method known as deep learning is to call for a more modest set of
expectations; he notes that despite AI’s enormous advances, robots “still can’t tie their
own shoes.”
It’s difficult for me to talk about Seth without referencing his relationship with his
friend and professor, the late theoretical physicist Heinz Pagels of Rockefeller
University. The graduate student and the professor each had a profound effect on each
other’s ideas.
In the summer of 1988, I visited Heinz and Seth at the Aspen Center for Physics.
Their joint work on the subject of complexity was featured in the current issue of
Scientific American; they were ebullient. That was just two weeks before Heinz’s tragic
death in a hiking accident while descending Pyramid Peak with Seth. They were talking
about quantum computing.
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WRONG, BUT MORE RELEVANT THAN EVER
Seth Lloyd
Seth Lloyd is a theoretical physicist at MIT, Nam P. Suh Professor in the Department of
Mechanical Engineering, and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute.
The Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Wiener’s 1950 popularization of his highly
influential book Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the
Machine (1948), investigates the interplay between human beings and machines in a
world in which machines are becoming ever more computationally capable and powerful.
It is a remarkably prescient book, and remarkably wrong. Written at the height of the
Cold War, it contains a chilling reminder of the dangers of totalitarian organizations and
societies, and of the danger to democracy when it tries to combat totalitarianism with
totalitarianism’s own weapons.
Wiener’s Cybernetics looked in close scientific detail at the process of control via
feedback. (“Cybernetics,” from the ancient Greek for “helmsman,” is the etymological
basis of our word “governor,” which is what James Watt called his pathbreaking
feedback control device that transformed the use of steam engines.) Because he was
immersed in problems of control, Wiener saw the world as a set of complex, interlocking
feedback loops, in which sensors, signals, and actuators such as engines interact via an
intricate exchange of signals and information. The engineering applications of
Cybernetics were tremendously influential and effective, giving rise to rockets, robots,
automated assembly lines, and a host of precision-engineering techniques—in other
words, to the basis of contemporary industrial society.
Wiener had greater ambitions for cybernetic concepts, however, and in The
Human Use of Human Beings he spells out his thoughts on its application to topics as
diverse as Maxwell’s Demon, human language, the brain, insect metabolism, the legal
system, the role of technological innovation in government, and religion. These broader
applications of cybernetics were an almost unequivocal failure. Vigorously hyped from
the late 1940s to the early 1960s—to a degree similar to the hype of computer and
communication technology that led to the dotcom crash of 2000-2001—cybernetics
delivered satellites and telephone switching systems but generated few if any useful
developments in social organization and society at large.
Nearly seventy years later, however, The Human Use of Human Beings has more
to teach us humans than it did the first time around. Perhaps the most remarkable feature
of the book is that it introduces a large number of topics concerning human/machine
interactions that are still of considerable relevance. Dark in tone, the book makes several
predictions about disasters to come in the second half of the 20th century, many of which
are almost identical to predictions made today about the second half of the 21st.
For example, Wiener foresaw a moment in the near future of 1950 in which
humans would cede control of society to a cybernetic artificial intelligence, which would
then proceed to wreak havoc on humankind. The automation of manufacturing, Wiener
predicted, would both create large advances in productivity and displace many workers
from their jobs—a sequence of events that did indeed come to pass in the ensuing
decades. Unless society could find productive occupations for these displaced workers,
Wiener warned, revolt would ensue.
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But Wiener failed to foresee crucial technological developments. Like pretty
much all technologists of the 1950s, he failed to predict the computer revolution.
Computers, he thought, would eventually fall in price from hundreds of thousands of
(1950s) dollars to tens of thousands; neither he nor his compeers anticipated the
tremendous explosion of computer power that would follow the development of the
transistor and the integrated circuit. Finally, because of his emphasis on control, Wiener
could not foresee a technological world in which innovation and self-organization bubble
up from the bottom rather than being imposed from the top.
Focusing on the evils of totalitarianism (political, scientific, and religious),
Wiener saw the world in a deeply pessimistic light. His book warned of the catastrophe
that awaited us if we didn’t mend our ways, fast. The current world of human beings and
machines, more than a half century after its publication, is much more complex, richer,
and contains a much wider variety of political, social, and scientific systems than he was
able to envisage. The warnings of what will happen if we get it wrong, however—for
example, control of the entire Internet by a global totalitarian regime—remain as relevant
and pressing today as they were in 1950.
What Wiener Got Right
Wiener’s most famous mathematical works focused on problems of signal analysis and
the effects of noise. During World War II, he developed techniques for aiming antiaircraft
fire by making models that could predict the future trajectory of an airplane by
extrapolating from its past behavior. In Cybernetics and in The Human Use of Human
Beings, Wiener notes that this past behavior includes quirks and habits of the human
pilot, thus a mechanized device can predict the behavior of humans. Like Alan Turing,
whose Turing Test suggested that computing machines could give responses to questions
which were indistinguishable from human responses, Wiener was fascinated by the
notion of capturing human behavior by mathematical description. In the 1940s, he
applied his knowledge of control and feedback loops to neuro-muscular feedback in
living systems, and was responsible for bringing Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts to
MIT, where they did their pioneering work on artificial neural networks.
Wiener’s central insight was that the world should be understood in terms of
information. Complex systems, such as organisms, brains, and human societies, consist
of interlocking feedback loops in which signals exchanged between subsystems result in
complex but stable behavior. When feedback loops break down, the system goes
unstable. He constructed a compelling picture of how complex biological systems
function, a picture that is by and large universally accepted today.
Wiener’s vision of information as the central quantity in governing the behavior
of complex systems was remarkable at the time. Nowadays, when cars and refrigerators
are jammed with microprocessors and much of human society revolves around computers
and cell phones connected by the Internet, it seems prosaic to emphasize the centrality of
information, computation, and communication. In Wiener’s time, however, the first
digital computers had only just come into existence, and the Internet was not even a
twinkle in the technologist’s eye.
Wiener’s powerful conception of not just engineered complex systems but all
complex systems as revolving around cycles of signals and computation led to
tremendous contributions to the development of complex human-made systems. The
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methods he and others developed for the control of missiles, for example, were later put
to work in building the Saturn V moon rocket, one of the crowning engineering
achievements of the 20th century. In particular, Wiener’s applications of cybernetic
concepts to the brain and to computerized perception are the direct precursors of today’s
neural-network-based deep-learning circuits, and of artificial intelligence itself. But
current developments in these fields have diverged from his vision, and their future
development may well affect the human uses both of human beings and of machines.
What Wiener Got Wrong
It is exactly in the extension of the cybernetic idea to human beings that Wiener’s
conceptions missed their target. Setting aside his ruminations on language, law, and
human society for the moment, look at a humbler but potentially useful innovation that he
thought was imminent in 1950. Wiener notes that prosthetic limbs would be much more
effective if their wearers could communicate directly with their prosthetics by their own
neural signals, receiving information about pressure and position from the limb and
directing its subsequent motion. This turned out to be a much harder problem than
Wiener envisaged: Seventy years down the road, prosthetic limbs that incorporate neural
feedback are still in the very early stages. Wiener’s concept was an excellent one—it’s
just that the problem of interfacing neural signals with mechanical-electrical devices is
hard.
More significantly, Wiener (along with pretty much everyone else in 1950)
greatly underappreciated the potential of digital computation. As noted, Wiener’s
mathematical contributions were to the analysis of signals and noise and his analytic
methods apply to continuously varying, or analog, signals. Although he participated in
the wartime development of digital computation, he never foresaw the exponential
explosion of computing power brought on by the introduction and progressive
miniaturization of semiconductor circuits. This is hardly Wiener’s fault: The transistor
hadn’t been invented yet, and the vacuum-tube technology of the digital computers he
was familiar with was clunky, unreliable, and unscalable to ever larger devices. In an
appendix to the 1948 edition of Cybernetics, he anticipates chess-playing computers and
predicts that they’ll be able to look two or three moves ahead. He might have been
surprised to learn that within half a century a computer would beat the human world
champion at chess.
Technological Overestimation and the Existential Risks of the Singularity
When Wiener wrote his books, a significant example of technological overestimation was
about to occur. The 1950s saw the first efforts at developing artificial intelligence, by
researchers such as Herbert Simon, John McCarthy, and Marvin Minsky, who began to
program computers to perform simple tasks and to construct rudimentary robots. The
success of these initial efforts inspired Simon to declare that “machines will be capable,
within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do.” Such predictions turned out to be
spectacularly wrong. As they became more powerful, computers got better and better at
playing chess because they could systematically generate and evaluate a vast selection of
possible future moves. But the majority of predictions of AI, e.g., robotic maids, turned
out to be illusory. When Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, the most
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powerful room-cleaning robot was a Roomba, which moved around vacuuming at
random and squeaked when it got caught under the couch.
Technological prediction is particularly chancy, given that technologies progress
by a series of refinements, halted by obstacles and overcome by innovation. Many
obstacles and some innovations can be anticipated, but more cannot. In my own work
with experimentalists on building quantum computers, I typically find that some of the
technological steps I expect to be easy turn out to be impossible, whereas some of the
tasks I imagine to be impossible turn out to be easy. You don’t know until you try.
In the 1950s, partly inspired by conversations with Wiener, John von Neumann
introduced the notion of the “technological singularity.” Technologies tend to improve
exponentially, doubling in power or sensitivity over some interval of time. (For
example, since 1950, computer technologies have been doubling in power roughly
every two years, an observation enshrined as Moore’s Law.) Von Neumann
extrapolated from the observed exponential rate of technological improvement to
predict that “technological progress will become incomprehensively rapid and
complicated,” outstripping human capabilities in the not too distant future. Indeed, if
one extrapolates the growth of raw computing power—expressed in terms of bits and
bit flips—into the future at its current rate, computers should match human brains
sometime in the next two to four decades (depending on how one estimates the
information-processing power of human brains).
The failure of the initial overly optimistic predictions of AI dampened talk about
the technological singularity for a few decades, but since the 2005 publication of Ray
Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, the idea of technological advance leading to
superintelligence is back in force. Some believers, Kurzweil included, regard this
singularity as an opportunity: Humans can merge their brains with the
superintelligence and thereby live forever. Others, such as Stephen Hawking and Elon
Musk, worried that this superintelligence would prove to be malign and regarded it as
the greatest existing threat to human civilization. Still others, including some of the
contributors to the present volume, think such talk is overblown.
Wiener’s life work and his failure to predict its consequences are intimately
bound up in the idea of an impending technological singularity. His work on
neuroscience and his initial support of McCulloch and Pitts adumbrated the startlingly
effective deep-learning methods of the present day. Over the past decade, and
particularly in the last five years, such deep-learning techniques have finally exhibited
what Wiener liked to call Gestalt—for example, the ability to recognize that a circle is
a circle even if when slanted sideways it looks like an ellipse. His work on control,
combined with his work on neuromuscular feedback, was significant for the
development of robotics and is the inspiration for neural-based human/machine
interfaces. His lapses in technological prediction, however, suggest that we should
take the notion of a technological singularity with a grain of salt. The general
difficulties of technological prediction and the problems specific to the development of
a superintelligence should warn us against overestimating both the power and the
efficacy of information processing.
The Arguments for Singularity Skepticism
No exponential increase lasts forever. An atomic explosion grows exponentially, but
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only until it runs out of fuel. Similarly, the exponential advances in Moore’s Law are
starting to run into limits imposed by basic physics. The clock speed of computers
maxed out at a few gigahertz a decade and a half ago, simply because the chips were
starting to melt. The miniaturization of transistors is already running into quantummechanical
problems due to tunneling and leakage currents. Eventually, the various
exponential improvements in memory and processing driven by Moore’s Law will
grind to a halt. A few more decades, however, will probably be time enough for the
raw information-processing power of computers to match that of brains—at least by
the crude measures of number of bits and number of bit-flips per second.
Human brains are intricately constructed, the process of millions of years of
natural selection. In Wiener’s time, our understanding of the architecture of the brain
was rudimentary and simplistic. Since then, increasingly sensitive instrumentation and
imaging techniques have shown our brains to be far more varied in structure and
complex in function than Wiener could have imagined. I recently asked Tomaso
Poggio, one of the pioneers of modern neuroscience, whether he was worried that
computers, with their rapidly increasing processing power, would soon emulate the
functioning of the human brain. “Not a chance,” he replied.
The recent advances in deep learning and neuromorphic computation are very
good at reproducing a particular aspect of human intelligence focused on the operation
of the brain’s cortex, where patterns are processed and recognized. These advances
have enabled a computer to beat the world champion not just of chess but of Go, an
impressive feat, but they’re far short of enabling a computerized robot to tidy a room.
(In fact, robots with anything approaching human capability in a broad range of
flexible movements are still far away—search “robots falling down.” Robots are good
at making precision welds on assembly lines, but they still can’t tie their own shoes.)
Raw information-processing power does not mean sophisticated informationprocessing
power. While computer power has advanced exponentially, the programs
by which computers operate have often failed to advance at all. One of the primary
responses of software companies to increased processing power is to add “useful”
features which often make the software harder to use. Microsoft Word reached its
apex in 1995 and has been slowly sinking under the weight of added features ever
since. Once Moore’s Law starts slowing down, software developers will be confronted
with hard choices between efficiency, speed, and functionality.
A major fear of the singulariteers is that as computers become more involved in
designing their own software they’ll rapidly bootstrap themselves into achieving
superhuman computational ability. But the evidence of machine learning points in the
opposite direction. As machines become more powerful and capable of learning, they
learn more and more as human beings do—from multiple examples, often under the
supervision of human and machine teachers. Education is as hard and slow for
computers as it is for teenagers. Consequently, systems based on deep learning are
becoming more rather than less human. The skills they bring to learning are not
“better than” but “complementary to” human learning: Computer learning systems can
identify patterns that humans cannot—and vice versa. The world’s best chess players
are neither computers nor humans but humans working together with computers.
Cyberspace is indeed inhabited by harmful programs, but these primarily take the form
of malware—viruses notable for their malign mindlessness, not for their
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superintelligence.
Whither Wiener
Wiener noted that exponential technological progress is a relatively modern phenomenon
and not all of it is good. He regarded atomic weapons and the development of missiles
with nuclear warheads as a recipe for the suicide of the human species. He compared the
headlong exploitation of the planet’s resources with the Mad Tea Party of Alice in
Wonderland: Having laid waste to one local environment, we make progress simply by
moving on to lay waste to the next. Wiener’s optimism about the development of
computers and neuro-mechanical systems was tempered by his pessimism about their
exploitation by authoritarian governments, such as the Soviet Union, and the tendency for
democracies, such as the United States, to become more authoritarian themselves in
confronting the threat of authoritarianism.
What would Wiener think of the current human use of human beings? He would
be amazed by the power of computers and the Internet. He would be happy that the early
neural nets in which he played a role have spawned powerful deep-learning systems that
exhibit the perceptual ability he demanded of them—although he might not be impressed
that one of the most prominent examples of such computerized Gestalt is the ability to
recognize photos of kittens on the World Wide Web. Rather than regarding machine
intelligence as a threat, I suspect he would regard it as a phenomenon in its own right,
different from and co-evolving with our own human intelligence.
Unsurprised by global warming—the Mad Tea Party of our era—Wiener would
applaud the exponential improvement in alternative-energy technologies and would apply
his cybernetic expertise to developing the intricate set of feedback loops needed to
incorporate such technologies into the coming smart electrical grid. Nonetheless,
recognizing that the solution to the problem of climate change is at least as much political
as it is technological, he would undoubtedly be pessimistic about our chances of solving
this civilization-threatening problem in time. Wiener hated hucksters—political
hucksters most of all—but he acknowledged that hucksters would always be with us.
It’s easy to forget just how scary Wiener’s world was. The United States and the
Soviet Union were in a full-out arms race, building hydrogen bombs mounted on nuclear
warheads carried by intercontinental ballistic missiles guided by navigation systems to
which Wiener himself—to his dismay—had contributed. I was four years old when
Wiener died. In 1964, my nursery school class was practicing duck-and-cover under our
desks to prepare for a nuclear attack. Given the human use of human beings in his own
day, if he could see our current state, Wiener’s first response would be to be relieved that
we are still alive.
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In the 1980s, Judea Pearl introduced a new approach to artificial intelligence called
Bayesian networks. This probability-based model of machine reasoning enabled
machines to function—in a complex and uncertain world—as “evidence engines,”
continuously revising their beliefs in light of new evidence.
Within a few years, Judea’s Bayesian networks had completely overshadowed the
previous rule-based approaches to artificial intelligence. The advent of deep learning—
in which computers, in effect, teach themselves to be smarter by observing tons of data,
has given him pause, because this method lacks transparency.
While recognizing the impressive achievements in deep learning by colleagues
such as Michael Jordan and Geoffrey Hinton, he feels uncomfortable with this kind of
opacity. He set out to understand the theoretical limitations of deep-learning systems
and points out that basic barriers exist that will prevent them from achieving a human
kind of intelligence, no matter what we do. Leveraging the computational benefits of
Bayesian networks, Judea realized that the combination of simple graphical models and
data could also be used to represent and infer cause-effect relationships. The
significance of this discovery far transcends its roots in artificial intelligence. His latest
book explains causal thinking to the general public; you might say it is a primer on how
to think even though human.
Judea’s principled, mathematical approach to causality is a profound
contribution to the realm of ideas. It has already benefited virtually every field of
inquiry, especially the data-intensive health and social sciences.
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THE LIMITATIONS OF OPAQUE LEARNING MACHINES
Judea Pearl
Judea Pearl is a professor of computer science and director of the Cognitive Systems
Laboratory at UCLA. His most recent book, co-authored with Dana Mackenzie, is The
Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect.
As a former physicist, I was extremely interested in cybernetics. Though it did not utilize
the full power of Turing Machines, it was highly transparent, perhaps because it was
founded on classical control theory and information theory. We are losing this
transparency now, with the deep-learning style of machine learning. It is fundamentally a
curve-fitting exercise that adjusts weights in intermediate layers of a long input-output
chain.
I find many users who say that it “works well and we don’t know why.” Once
you unleash it on large data, deep learning has its own dynamics, it does its own repair
and its own optimization, and it gives you the right results most of the time. But when it
doesn’t, you don’t have a clue about what went wrong and what should be fixed. In
particular, you do not know if the fault is in the program, in the method, or because things
have changed in the environment. We should be aiming at a different kind of
transparency.
Some argue that transparency is not really needed. We don’t understand the
neural architecture of the human brain, yet it runs well, so we forgive our meager
understanding and use human helpers to great advantage. In the same way, they argue,
why not unleash deep-learning systems and create intelligence without understanding
how they work? I buy this argument to some extent. I personally don’t like opacity, so I
won’t spend my time on deep learning, but I know that it has a place in the makeup of
intelligence. I know that non-transparent systems can do marvelous jobs, and our brain is
proof of that marvel.
But this argument has its limitation. The reason we can forgive our meager
understanding of how human brains work is because our brains work the same way, and
that enables us to communicate with other humans, learn from them, instruct them, and
motivate them in our own native language. If our robots will all be as opaque as
AlphaGo, we won’t be able to hold a meaningful conversation with them, and that would
be unfortunate. We will need to retrain them whenever we make a slight change in the
task or in the operating environment.
So, rather than experimenting with opaque learning machines, I am trying to
understand their theoretical limitations and examine how these limitations can be
overcome. I do it in the context of causal-reasoning tasks, which govern much of how
scientists think about the world and, at the same time, are rich in intuition and toy
examples, so we can monitor the progress in our analysis. In this context, we’ve
discovered that some basic barriers exist, and that unless they are breached we won’t get
a real human kind of intelligence no matter what we do. I believe that charting these
barriers may be no less important than banging our heads against them.
Current machine-learning systems operate almost exclusively in a statistical, or
model-blind, mode, which is analogous in many ways to fitting a function to a cloud of
data points. Such systems cannot reason about “what if ?” questions and, therefore,
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cannot serve as the basis for Strong AI—that is, artificial intelligence that emulates
human-level reasoning and competence. To achieve human-level intelligence, learning
machines need the guidance of a blueprint of reality, a model—similar to a road map that
guides us in driving through an unfamiliar city.
To be more specific, current learning machines improve their performance by
optimizing parameters for a stream of sensory inputs received from the environment. It is
a slow process, analogous to the natural-selection process that drives Darwinian
evolution. It explains how species like eagles and snakes have developed superb vision
systems over millions of years. It cannot explain, however, the super-evolutionary
process that enabled humans to build eyeglasses and telescopes over barely a thousand
years. What humans had that other species lacked was a mental representation of their
environment—representations that they could manipulate at will to imagine alternative
hypothetical environments for planning and learning.
Historians of Homo sapiens such as Yuval Noah Harari and Steven Mithen are in
general agreement that the decisive ingredient that gave our ancestors the ability to
achieve global dominion about forty thousand years ago was their ability to create and
store a mental representation of their environment, interrogate that representation, distort
it by mental acts of imagination, and finally answer the “What if?” kind of questions.
Examples are interventional questions (“What if I do such-and-such?”) and retrospective
or counterfactual questions (“What if I had acted differently?”). No learning machine in
operation today can answer such questions. Moreover, most learning machines do not
possess a representation from which the answers to such questions can be derived.
With regard to causal reasoning, we find that you can do very little with any form
of model-blind curve fitting, or any statistical inference, no matter how sophisticated the
fitting process is. We have also found a theoretical framework for organizing such
limitations, which forms a hierarchy.
On the first level, you have statistical reasoning, which can tell you only how
seeing one event would change your belief about another. For example, what can a
symptom tell you about a disease?
Then you have a second level, which entails the first but not vice versa. It deals
with actions. “What will happen if we raise prices?” “What if you make me laugh?”
That second level of the hierarchy requires information about interventions which is not
available in the first. This information can be encoded in a graphical model, which
merely tells us which variable responds to another.
The third level of the hierarchy is the counterfactual. This is the language used by
scientists. “What if the object were twice as heavy?” “What if I were to do things
differently?” “Was it the aspirin that cured my headache, or the nap I took?”
Counterfactuals are at the top level in the sense that they cannot be derived even if we
could predict the effects of all actions. They need an extra ingredient, in the form of
equations, to tell us how variables respond to changes in other variables.
One of the crowning achievements of causal-inference research has been the
algorithmization of both interventions and counterfactuals, the top two layers of the
hierarchy. In other words, once we encode our scientific knowledge in a model (which
may be qualitative), algorithms exist that examine the model and determine if a given
query, be it about an intervention or about a counterfactual, can be estimated from the
available data—and, if so, how. This capability has transformed dramatically the way
26
scientists are doing science, especially in such data-intensive sciences as sociology and
epidemiology, for which causal models have become a second language. These
disciplines view their linguistic transformation as the Causal Revolution. As Harvard
social scientist Gary King puts it, “More has been learned about causal inference in the
last few decades than the sum total of everything that had been learned about it in all
prior recorded history.”
As I contemplate the success of machine learning and try to extrapolate it to the
future of AI, I ask myself, “Are we aware of the basic limitations that were discovered in
the causal-inference arena? Are we prepared to circumvent the theoretical impediments
that prevent us from going from one level of the hierarchy to another level?”
I view machine learning as a tool to get us from data to probabilities. But then we
still have to make two extra steps to go from probabilities into real understandingnce—
two big steps. One is to predict the effect of actions, and the second is counterfactual
imagination. We cannot claim to understand reality unless we make the last two steps.
In his insightful book Foresight and Understanding (1961), the philosopher
Stephen Toulmin identified the transparency-versus-opacity contrast as the key to
understanding the ancient rivalry between Greek and Babylonian sciences. According to
Toulmin, the Babylonian astronomers were masters of black-box predictions, far
surpassing their Greek rivals in accuracy and consistency of celestial observations. Yet
Science favored the creative-speculative strategy of the Greek astronomers, which was
wild with metaphorical imagery: circular tubes full of fire, small holes through which
celestial fire was visible as stars, and hemispherical Earth riding on turtleback. It was
this wild modeling strategy, not Babylonian extrapolation, that jolted Eratosthenes (276-
194 BC) to perform one of the most creative experiments in the ancient world and
calculate the circumference of the Earth. Such an experiment would never have occurred
to a Babylonian data-fitter.
Model-blind approaches impose intrinsic limitations on the cognitive tasks that
Strong AI can perform. My general conclusion is that human-level AI cannot emerge
solely from model-blind learning machines; it requires the symbiotic collaboration of
data and models.
Data science is a science only to the extent that it facilitates the interpretation of
data—a two-body problem, connecting data to reality. Data alone are hardly a science,
no matter how “big” they get and how skillfully they are manipulated. Opaque learning
systems may get us to Babylon, but not to Athens.
27
Computer scientist Stuart Russell, along with Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Max
Tegmark, and numerous others, has insisted that attention be paid to the potential
dangers in creating an intelligence on the superhuman (or even the human) level—an
AGI, or artificial general intelligence, whose programmed purposes may not necessarily
align with our own.
His early work was on understanding the notion of “bounded optimality” as a
formal definition of intelligence that you can work on. He developed the technique of
rational meta-reasoning, “which is, roughly speaking, that you do the computations that
you expect to improve the quality of your ultimate decision as quickly as possible.” He
has also worked on the unification of probability theory and first-order logic—resulting
in a new and far more effective monitoring system for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test
Ban Treaty—and on the problem of decision making over long timescales (his
presentations on the latter topic are usually titled, “Life: Play and Win in 20 trillion
moves”).
He is very concerned with the continuing development of autonomous weapons,
such as lethal micro-drones, which are potentially scalable into weapons of mass
destruction. He drafted the letter from forty of the world’s leading AI researchers to
President Obama which resulted in high-level national-security meetings.
His current work centers on the creation of what he calls “provably beneficial”
AI. He wants to ensure AI safety by “imbuing systems with explicit uncertainty” about
the objectives of their human programmers, an approach that would amount to a fairly
radical reordering of current AI research.
Stuart is also on the radar of anyone who has taken a course in computer science
in the last twenty-odd years. He is co-author of “the” definitive AI textbook, with an
estimated 5-million-plus English-language readers.
28
THE PURPOSE PUT INTO THE MACHINE
Stuart Russell
Stuart Russell is a professor of computer science and Smith-Zadeh Professor in
Engineering at UC Berkeley. He is the coauthor (with Peter Norvig) of Artificial
Intelligence: A Modern Approach.
Among the many issues raised in Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings
(1950) that are currently relevant, the most significant to the AI researcher is the
possibility that humanity may cede control over its destiny to machines.
Wiener considered the machines of the near future as far too limited to exert global
control, imagining instead that machines and machine-like control systems would be
wielded by human elites to reduce the great mass of humanity to the status of “cogs and
levers and rods.” Looking further ahead, he pointed to the difficulty of correctly
specifying objectives for highly capable machines, noting
a few of the simpler and more obvious truths of life, such as that when a djinnee is
found in a bottle, it had better be left there; that the fisherman who craves a boon
from heaven too many times on behalf of his wife will end up exactly where he
started; that if you are given three wishes, you must be very careful what you wish
for.
The dangers are clear enough:
Woe to us if we let [the machine] decide our conduct, unless we have previously
examined the laws of its action, and know fully that its conduct will be carried out on
principles acceptable to us! On the other hand, the machine like the djinnee, which
can learn and can make decisions on the basis of its learning, will in no way be
obliged to make such decisions as we should have made, or will be acceptable to us.
Ten years later, after seeing Arthur Samuel’s checker-playing program learn to play
checkers far better than its creator, Wiener published “Some Moral and Technical
Consequences of Automation” in Science. In this paper, the message is even clearer:
If we use, to achieve our purposes, a mechanical agency with whose operation we
cannot efficiently interfere . . . we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into
the machine is the purpose which we really desire. . . .
In my view, this is the source of the existential risk from superintelligent AI cited in
recent years by such observers as Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, and Nick
Bostrom.
Putting Purposes Into Machines
The goal of AI research has been to understand the principles underlying intelligent
behavior and to build those principles into machines that can then exhibit such behavior.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the prevailing theoretical notion of intelligence was the capacity
for logical reasoning, including the ability to derive plans of action guaranteed to achieve
a specified goal. More recently, a consensus has emerged around the idea of a rational
29
agent that perceives, and acts in order to maximize, its expected utility. Subfields such as
logical planning, robotics, and natural-language understanding are special cases of the
general paradigm. AI has incorporated probability theory to handle uncertainty, utility
theory to define objectives, and statistical learning to allow machines to adapt to new
circumstances. These developments have created strong connections to other disciplines
that build on similar concepts, including control theory, economics, operations research,
and statistics.
In both the logical-planning and rational-agent views of AI, the machine’s
objective—whether in the form of a goal, a utility function, or a reward function (as in
reinforcement learning)—is specified exogenously. In Wiener’s words, this is “the
purpose put into the machine.” Indeed, it has been one of the tenets of the field that AI
systems should be general-purpose—i.e., capable of accepting a purpose as input and
then achieving it—rather than special-purpose, with their goal implicit in their design.
For example, a self-driving car should accept a destination as input instead of having one
fixed destination. However, some aspects of the car’s “driving purpose” are fixed, such
as that it shouldn’t hit pedestrians. This is built directly into the car’s steering algorithms
rather than being explicit: No self-driving car in existence today “knows” that pedestrians
prefer not to be run over.
Putting a purpose into a machine which optimizes its behavior according to clearly
defined algorithms seems an admirable approach to ensuring that the machine’s “conduct
will be carried out on principles acceptable to us!” But, as Wiener warns, we need to put
in the right purpose. We might call this the King Midas problem: Midas got exactly what
he asked for—namely, that everything he touched would turn to gold—but too late he
discovered the drawbacks of drinking liquid gold and eating solid gold. The technical
term for putting in the right purpose is value alignment. When it fails, we may
inadvertently imbue machines with objectives counter to our own. Tasked with finding a
cure for cancer as fast as possible, an AI system might elect to use the entire human
population as guinea pigs for its experiments. Asked to de-acidify the oceans, it might
use up all the oxygen in the atmosphere as a side effect. This is a common characteristic
of systems that optimize: Variables not included in the objective may be set to extreme
values to help optimize that objective.
Unfortunately, neither AI nor other disciplines (economics, statistics, control
theory, operations research) built around the optimization of objectives have much to say
about how to identify the purposes “we really desire.” Instead, they assume that
objectives are simply implanted into the machine. AI research, in its present form,
studies the ability to achieve objectives, not the design of those objectives.
Steve Omohundro has pointed to a further difficulty, observing that intelligent
entities must act to preserve their own existence. This tendency has nothing to do with a
self-preservation instinct or any other biological notion; it’s just that an entity cannot
achieve its objectives if it’s dead. According to Omohundro’s argument, a
superintelligent machine that has an off-switch—which some, including Alan Turing
himself, in a 1951 talk on BBC Radio 3, have seen as our potential salvation—will take
steps to disable the switch in some way. 1 Thus we may face the prospect of
superintelligent machines—their actions by definition unpredictable by us and their
1
Omohundro, “The Basic AI Drives,” in Proc. First AGI Conf., 171: “Artificial General Intelligence,” eds.
P. Wang, B. Goertzel, & S. Franklin (IOS press, 2008).
30
imperfectly specified objectives conflicting with our own—whose motivation to preserve
their existence in order to achieve those objectives may be insuperable.
1001 Reasons to Pay No Attention
Objections have been raised to these arguments, primarily by researchers within the AI
community. The objections reflect a natural defensive reaction, coupled perhaps with a
lack of imagination about what a superintelligent machine could do. None hold water on
closer examination. Here are some of the more common ones:
• Don’t worry, we can just switch it off. 2 This is often the first thing that pops into a
layperson’s head when considering risks from superintelligent AI—as if a
superintelligent entity would never think of that. This is rather like saying that the
risk of losing to DeepBlue or AlphaGo is negligible—all one has to do is make
the right moves.
• Human-level or superhuman AI is impossible. 3 This is an unusual claim for AI
researchers to make, given that, from Turing onward, they have been fending off
such claims from philosophers and mathematicians. The claim, which is backed
by no evidence, appears to concede that if superintelligent AI were possible, it
would be a significant risk. It’s as if a bus driver, with all of humanity as
passengers, said, “Yes, I am driving toward a cliff—in fact, I’m pressing the pedal
to the metal! But trust me, we’ll run out of gas before we get there!” The claim
represents a foolhardy bet against human ingenuity. We have made such bets
before and lost. On September 11, 1933, renowned physicist Ernest Rutherford
stated, with utter confidence, “Anyone who expects a source of power from the
transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.” On September 12, 1933,
Leo Szilard invented the neutron-induced nuclear chain reaction. A few years
later he demonstrated such a reaction in his laboratory at Columbia University.
As he recalled in a memoir: “We switched everything off and went home. That
night, there was very little doubt in my mind that the world was headed for grief.”
• It’s too soon to worry about it. The right time to worry about a potentially serious
problem for humanity depends not just on when the problem will occur but also
on how much time is needed to devise and implement a solution that avoids the
risk. For example, if we were to detect a large asteroid predicted to collide with
the Earth in 2067, would we say, “It’s too soon to worry”? And if we consider
the global catastrophic risks from climate change predicted to occur later in this
century, is it too soon to take action to prevent them? On the contrary, it may be
too late. The relevant timescale for human-level AI is less predictable, but, like
nuclear fission, it might arrive considerably sooner than expected. One variation
on this argument is Andrew Ng’s statement that it’s “like worrying about
overpopulation on Mars.” This appeals to a convenient analogy: Not only is the
2
AI researcher Jeff Hawkins, for example, writes, “Some intelligent machines will be virtual, meaning they
will exist and act solely within computer networks. . . . It is always possible to turn off a computer network,
even if painful.” https://www.recode.net/2015/3/2/11559576/.
3
The AI100 report (Peter Stone et al.), sponsored by Stanford University, includes the following: “Unlike
in the movies, there is no race of superhuman robots on the horizon or probably even possible.”
https://ai100.stanford.edu/2016-report.
31
risk easily managed and far in the future, but also it’s extremely unlikely that
we’d even try to move billions of humans to Mars in the first place. The analogy
is a false one, however. We are already devoting huge scientific and technical
resources to creating ever-more-capable AI systems. A more apt analogy would
be a plan to move the human race to Mars with no consideration for what we
might breathe, drink, or eat once we’d arrived.
• Human-level AI isn’t really imminent, in any case. The AI100 report, for example,
assures us, “Contrary to the more fantastic predictions for AI in the popular press,
the Study Panel found no cause for concern that AI is an imminent threat to
humankind.” This argument simply misstates the reasons for concern, which are
not predicated on imminence. In his 2014 book, Superintelligence: Paths,
Dangers, Strategies, Nick Bostrom, for one, writes, “It is no part of the argument
in this book that we are on the threshold of a big breakthrough in artificial
intelligence, or that we can predict with any precision when such a development
might occur.”
• You’re just a Luddite. It’s an odd definition of Luddite that includes Turing,
Wiener, Minsky, Musk, and Gates, who rank among the most prominent
contributors to technological progress in the 20th and 21st centuries. 4
Furthermore, the epithet represents a complete misunderstanding of the nature of
the concerns raised and the purpose for raising them. It is as if one were to accuse
nuclear engineers of Luddism if they pointed out the need for control of the
fission reaction. Some objectors also use the term “anti-AI,” which is rather like
calling nuclear engineers “anti-physics.” The purpose of understanding and
preventing the risks of AI is to ensure that we can realize the benefits. Bostrom,
for example, writes that success in controlling AI will result in “a civilizational
trajectory that leads to a compassionate and jubilant use of humanity’s cosmic
endowment”—hardly a pessimistic prediction.
• Any machine intelligent enough to cause trouble will be intelligent enough to have
appropriate and altruistic objectives. 5 (Often, the argument adds the premise that
people of greater intelligence tend to have more altruistic objectives, a view that
may be related to the self-conception of those making the argument.) This
argument is related to Hume’s is-ought problem and G. E. Moore’s naturalistic
fallacy, suggesting that somehow the machine, as a result of its intelligence, will
simply perceive what is right, given its experience of the world. This is
implausible; for example, one cannot perceive, in the design of a chessboard and
chess pieces, the goal of checkmate; the same chessboard and pieces can be used
for suicide chess, or indeed many other games still to be invented. Put another
way: Where Bostrom imagines humans driven extinct by a putative robot that
turns the planet into a sea of paper clips, we humans see this outcome as tragic,
4
Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and others (including, apparently, the author) received the 2015 Luddite of
the Year Award from the Information Technology Innovation Foundation:
https://itif.org/publications/2016/01/19/artificial-intelligence-alarmists-win-itif%E2%80%99s-annualluddite-award.
5
Rodney Brooks, for example, asserts that it’s impossible for a program to be “smart enough that it would
be able to invent ways to subvert human society to achieve goals set for it by humans, without
understanding the ways in which it was causing problems for those same humans.”
http://rodneybrooks.com/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-predicting-the-future-of-ai/.
32
whereas the iron-eating bacterium Thiobacillus ferrooxidans is thrilled. Who’s to
say the bacterium is wrong? The fact that a machine has been given a fixed
objective by humans doesn’t mean that it will automatically recognize the
importance to humans of things that aren’t part of the objective. Maximizing the
objective may well cause problems for humans, but, by definition, the machine
will not recognize those problems as problematic.
• Intelligence is multidimensional, “so ‘smarter than humans’ is a meaningless
concept.” 6 It is a staple of modern psychology that IQ doesn’t do justice to the
full range of cognitive skills that humans possess to varying degrees. IQ is indeed
a crude measure of human intelligence, but it is utterly meaningless for current AI
systems, because their capabilities across different areas are uncorrelated. How
do we compare the IQ of Google’s search engine, which cannot play chess, with
that of DeepBlue, which cannot answer search queries?
None of this supports the argument that because intelligence is multifaceted,
we can ignore the risk from superintelligent machines. If “smarter than humans”
is a meaningless concept, then “smarter than gorillas” is also meaningless, and
gorillas therefore have nothing to fear from humans; clearly, that argument
doesn’t hold water. Not only is it logically possible for one entity to be more
capable than another across all the relevant dimensions of intelligence, it is also
possible for one species to represent an existential threat to another even if the
former lacks an appreciation for music and literature.
Solutions
Can we tackle Wiener’s warning head-on? Can we design AI systems whose purposes
don’t conflict with ours, so that we’re sure to be happy with how they behave? On the
face of it, this seems hopeless, because it will doubtless prove infeasible to write down
our purposes correctly or imagine all the counterintuitive ways a superintelligent entity
might fulfill them.
If we treat superintelligent AI systems as if they were black boxes from outer
space, then indeed we have no hope. Instead, the approach we seem obliged to take, if
we are to have any confidence in the outcome, is to define some formal problem F, and
design AI systems to be F-solvers, such that no matter how perfectly a system solves F,
we’re guaranteed to be happy with the solution. If we can work out an appropriate F that
has this property, we’ll be able to create provably beneficial AI.
Here’s an example of how not to do it: Let a reward be a scalar value provided
periodically by a human to the machine, corresponding to how well the machine has
behaved during each period, and let F be the problem of maximizing the expected sum of
rewards obtained by the machine. The optimal solution to this problem is not, as one
might hope, to behave well, but instead to take control of the human and force him or her
to provide a stream of maximal rewards. This is known as the wireheading problem,
based on observations that humans themselves are susceptible to the same problem if
given a means to electronically stimulate their own pleasure centers.
There is, I believe, an approach that may work. Humans can reasonably be
described as having (mostly implicit) preferences over their future lives—that is, given
6
Kevin Kelly, “The Myth of a Superhuman AI,” Wired, Apr. 25, 2017.
33
enough time and unlimited visual aids, a human could express a preference (or
indifference) when offered a choice between two future lives laid out before him or her in
all their aspects. (This idealization ignores the possibility that our minds are composed of
subsystems with incompatible preferences; if true, that would limit a machine’s ability to
optimally satisfy our preferences, but it doesn’t seem to prevent us from designing
machines that avoid catastrophic outcomes.) The formal problem F to be solved by the
machine in this case is to maximize human future-life preferences subject to its initial
uncertainty as to what they are. Furthermore, although the future-life preferences are
hidden variables, they’re grounded in a voluminous source of evidence—namely, all of
the human choices ever made. This formulation sidesteps Wiener’s problem: The
machine may learn more about human preferences as it goes along, of course, but it will
never achieve complete certainty.
A more precise definition is given by the framework of cooperative inversereinforcement
learning, or CIRL. A CIRL problem involves two agents, one human and
the other a robot. Because there are two agents, the problem is what economists call a
game. It is a game of partial information, because while the human knows the reward
function, the robot doesn’t—even though the robot’s job is to maximize it.
A simple example: Suppose that Harriet, the human, likes to collect paper
clips and staples and her reward function depends on how many of each she has. More
precisely, if she has p paper clips and s staples, her degree of happiness is θp + (1-θ)s,
where θ is essentially an exchange rate between paper clips and staples. If θ is 1, she
likes only paper clips; if θ is 0, she likes only staples; if θ is 0.5, she is indifferent
between them; and so on. It’s the job of Robby, the robot, to produce the paper clips and
staples. The point of the game is that Robby wants to make Harriet happy, but he doesn’t
know the value of θ, so he isn’t sure how many of each to produce.
Here’s how the game works. Let the true value of θ be 0.49—that is, Harriet
has a slight preference for staples over paper clips. And let’s assume that Robby has a
uniform prior belief about θ—that is, he believes θ is equally likely to be any value
between 0 and 1. Harriet now gets to do a small demonstration, producing either two
paper clips or two staples or one of each. After that, the robot can produce either ninety
paper clips, or ninety staples, or fifty of each. You might think that Harriet, who prefers
staples to paper clips, should produce two staples. But in that case, Robby’s rational
response would be to produce ninety staples (with a total value to Harriet of 45.9), which
is a less desirable outcome for Harriet than fifty of each (total value 50.0). The optimal
solution of this particular game is that Harriet produces one of each, so then Robby
makes fifty of each. Thus, the way the game is defined encourages Harriet to “teach”
Robby—as long as she knows that Robby is watching carefully.
Within the CIRL framework, one can formulate and solve the off-switch
problem—that is, the problem of how to prevent a robot from disabling its off-switch.
(Turing may rest easier.) A robot that’s uncertain about human preferences actually
benefits from being switched off, because it understands that the human will press the
off-switch to prevent the robot from doing something counter to those preferences. Thus
the robot is incentivized to preserve the off-switch, and this incentive derives directly
from its uncertainty about human preferences. 7
The off-switch example suggests some templates for controllable-agent
7
See Hadfield-Menell et al., “The Off-Switch Game,” https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.08219.pdf.
34
designs and provides at least one case of a provably beneficial system in the sense
introduced above. The overall approach resembles mechanism-design problems in
economics, wherein one incentivizes other agents to behave in ways beneficial to the
designer. The key difference here is that we are building one of the agents in order to
benefit the other.
There are reasons to think this approach may work in practice. First, there is
abundant written and filmed information about humans doing things (and other humans
reacting). Technology to build models of human preferences from this storehouse will
presumably be available long before superintelligent AI systems are created. Second,
there are strong, near-term economic incentives for robots to understand human
preferences: If one poorly designed domestic robot cooks the cat for dinner, not realizing
that its sentimental value outweighs its nutritional value, the domestic-robot industry will
be out of business.
There are obvious difficulties, however, with an approach that expects a robot
to learn underlying preferences from human behavior. Humans are irrational,
inconsistent, weak-willed, and computationally limited, so their actions don’t always
reflect their true preferences. (Consider, for example, two humans playing chess.
Usually, one of them loses, but not on purpose!) So robots can learn from nonrational
human behavior only with the aid of much better cognitive models of humans.
Furthermore, practical and social constraints will prevent all preferences from being
maximally satisfied simultaneously, which means that robots must mediate among
conflicting preferences—something that philosophers and social scientists have struggled
with for millennia. And what should robots learn from humans who enjoy the suffering
of others? It may be best to zero out such preferences in the robots’ calculations.
Finding a solution to the AI control problem is an important task; it may be,
in Bostrom’s words, “the essential task of our age.” Up to now, AI research has focused
on systems that are better at making decisions, but this is not the same as making better
decisions. No matter how excellently an algorithm maximizes, and no matter how
accurate its model of the world, a machine’s decisions may be ineffably stupid in the eyes
of an ordinary human if its utility function is not well aligned with human values.
This problem requires a change in the definition of AI itself—from a field
concerned with pure intelligence, independent of the objective, to a field concerned with
systems that are provably beneficial for humans. Taking the problem seriously seems
likely to yield new ways of thinking about AI, its purpose, and our relationship to it.
35
In 2005, George Dyson, a historian of science and technology, visited Google at the
invitation of some Google engineers. The occasion was the sixtieth anniversary of John
von Neumann’s proposal for a digital computer. After the visit, George wrote an essay,
“Turing’s Cathedral,” which, for the first time, alerted the public about what Google’s
founders had in store for the world. “We are not scanning all those books to be read by
people,” explained one of his hosts after his talk. “We are scanning them to be read by
an AI.”
George offers a counternarrative to the digital age. His interests have included
the development of the Aleut kayak, the evolution of digital computing and
telecommunications, the origins of the digital universe, and a path not taken into space.
His career (he never finished high school, yet has been awarded an honorary doctorate
from the University of Victoria) has proved as impossible to classify as his books.
He likes to point out that analog computing, once believed to be as extinct as the
differential analyzer, has returned. He argues that while we may use digital components,
at a certain point the analog computing being performed by the system far exceeds the
complexity of the digital code with which it is built. He believes that true artificial
intelligence—with analog control systems emerging from a digital substrate the way
digital computers emerged out of analog components in the aftermath of World War II—
may not be as far off as we think.
In this essay, George contemplates the distinction between analog and digital
computation and finds analog to be alive and well. Nature’s response to an attempt to
program machines to control everything may be machines without programming over
which no one has control.
36
THE THIRD LAW
George Dyson
George Dyson is a historian of science and technology and the author of Baidarka: the
Kayak, Darwin Among the Machines, Project Orion, and Turing’s Cathedral.
The history of computing can be divided into an Old Testament and a New Testament:
before and after electronic digital computers and the codes they spawned proliferated
across the Earth. The Old Testament prophets, who delivered the underlying logic,
included Thomas Hobbes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The New Testament prophets
included Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, and Norbert Wiener. They
delivered the machines.
Alan Turing wondered what it would take for machines to become intelligent.
John von Neumann wondered what it would take for machines to self-reproduce. Claude
Shannon wondered what it would take for machines to communicate reliably, no matter
how much noise intervened. Norbert Wiener wondered how long it would take for
machines to assume control.
Wiener’s warnings about control systems beyond human control appeared in
1949, just as the first generation of stored-program electronic digital computers were
introduced. These systems required direct supervision by human programmers,
undermining his concerns. What’s the problem, as long as programmers are in control of
the machines? Ever since, debate over the risks of autonomous control has remained
associated with the debate over the powers and limitations of digitally coded machines.
Despite their astonishing powers, little real autonomy has been observed. This is a
dangerous assumption. What if digital computing is being superseded by something
else?
Electronics underwent two fundamental transitions over the past hundred years:
from analog to digital and from vacuum tubes to solid state. That these transitions
occurred together does not mean they are inextricably linked. Just as digital computation
was implemented using vacuum tube components, analog computation can be
implemented in solid state. Analog computation is alive and well, even though vacuum
tubes are commercially extinct.
There is no precise distinction between analog and digital computing. In general,
digital computing deals with integers, binary sequences, deterministic logic, and time that
is idealized into discrete increments, whereas analog computing deals with real numbers,
nondeterministic logic, and continuous functions, including time as it exists as a
continuum in the real world.
Imagine you need to find the middle of a road. You can measure its width using
any available increment and then digitally compute the middle to the nearest increment.
Or you can use a piece of string as an analog computer, mapping the width of the road to
the length of the string and finding the middle, without being limited to increments, by
doubling the string back upon itself.
Many systems operate across both analog and digital regimes. A tree integrates a
wide range of inputs as continuous functions, but if you cut down that tree, you find that
it has been counting the years digitally all along.
37
In analog computing, complexity resides in network topology, not in code.
Information is processed as continuous functions of values such as voltage and relative
pulse frequency rather than by logical operations on discrete strings of bits. Digital
computing, intolerant of error or ambiguity, depends upon error correction at every step
along the way. Analog computing tolerates errors, allowing you to live with them.
Nature uses digital coding for the storage, replication, and recombination of
sequences of nucleotides, but relies on analog computing, running on nervous systems,
for intelligence and control. The genetic system in every living cell is a stored-program
computer. Brains aren’t.
Digital computers execute transformations between two species of bits: bits
representing differences in space and bits representing differences in time. The
transformations between these two forms of information, sequence and structure, are
governed by the computer’s programming, and as long as computers require human
programmers, we retain control.
Analog computers also mediate transformations between two forms of
information: structure in space and behavior in time. There is no code and no
programming. Somehow—and we don’t fully understand how—Nature evolved analog
computers known as nervous systems, which embody information absorbed from the
world. They learn. One of the things they learn is control. They learn to control their
own behavior, and they learn to control their environment to the extent that they can.
Computer science has a long history—going back to before there even was
computer science—of implementing neural networks, but for the most part these have
been simulations of neural networks by digital computers, not neural networks as evolved
in the wild by Nature herself. This is starting to change: from the bottom up, as the
threefold drivers of drone warfare, autonomous vehicles, and cell phones push the
development of neuromorphic microprocessors that implement actual neural networks,
rather than simulations of neural networks, directly in silicon (and other potential
substrates); and from the top down, as our largest and most successful enterprises
increasingly turn to analog computation in their infiltration and control of the world.
While we argue about the intelligence of digital computers, analog computing is
quietly supervening upon the digital, in the same way that analog components like
vacuum tubes were repurposed to build digital computers in the aftermath of World War
II. Individually deterministic finite-state processors, running finite codes, are forming
large-scale, nondeterministic, non-finite-state metazoan organisms running wild in the
real world. The resulting hybrid analog/digital systems treat streams of bits collectively,
the way the flow of electrons is treated in a vacuum tube, rather than individually, as bits
are treated by the discrete-state devices generating the flow. Bits are the new electrons.
Analog is back, and its nature is to assume control.
Governing everything from the flow of goods to the flow of traffic to the flow of
ideas, these systems operate statistically, as pulse-frequency coded information is
processed in a neuron or a brain. The emergence of intelligence gets the attention of
Homo sapiens, but what we should be worried about is the emergence of control.
~ ~ ~
38
Imagine it is 1958 and you are trying to defend the continental United States against
airborne attack. To distinguish hostile aircraft, one of the things you need, besides a
network of computers and early-warning radar sites, is a map of all commercial air
traffic, updated in real time. The United States built such a system and named it SAGE
(Semi-Automatic Ground Environment). SAGE in turn spawned Sabre, the first
integrated reservation system for booking airline travel in real time. Sabre and its
progeny soon became not just a map as to what seats were available but also a system
that began to control, with decentralized intelligence, where airliners would fly, and
when.
But isn’t there a control room somewhere, with someone at the controls? Maybe
not. Say, for example, you build a system to map highway traffic in real time, simply by
giving cars access to the map in exchange for reporting their own speed and location at
the time. The result is a fully decentralized control system. Nowhere is there any
controlling model of the system except the system itself.
Imagine it is the first decade of the 21st century and you want to track the
complexity of human relationships in real time. For social life at a small college, you
could construct a central database and keep it up to date, but its upkeep would become
overwhelming if taken to any larger scale. Better to pass out free copies of a simple
semi-autonomous code, hosted locally, and let the social network update itself. This code
is executed by digital computers, but the analog computing performed by the system as a
whole far exceeds the complexity of the underlying code. The resulting pulse-frequency
coded model of the social graph becomes the social graph. It spreads wildly across the
campus and then the world.
What if you wanted to build a machine to capture what everything known to the
human species means? With Moore’s Law behind you, it doesn’t take too long to digitize
all the information in the world. You scan every book ever printed, collect every email
ever written, and gather forty-nine years of video every twenty-four hours, while tracking
where people are and what they do, in real time. But how do you capture the meaning?
Even in the age of all things digital, this cannot be defined in any strictly logical
sense, because meaning, among humans, isn’t fundamentally logical. The best you can
do, once you have collected all possible answers, is to invite well-defined questions and
compile a pulse-frequency weighted map of how everything connects. Before you know
it, your system will not only be observing and mapping the meaning of things, it will start
constructing meaning as well. In time, it will control meaning, in the same way as the
traffic map starts to control the flow of traffic even though no one seems to be in control.
~ ~ ~
There are three laws of artificial intelligence. The first, known as Ashby’s Law, after
cybernetician W. Ross Ashby, author of Design for a Brain, states that any effective
control system must be as complex as the system it controls.
The second law, articulated by John von Neumann, states that the defining
characteristic of a complex system is that it constitutes its own simplest behavioral
description. The simplest complete model of an organism is the organism itself. Trying
to reduce the system’s behavior to any formal description makes things more
complicated, not less.
39
The third law states that any system simple enough to be understandable will not
be complicated enough to behave intelligently, while any system complicated enough to
behave intelligently will be too complicated to understand.
The Third Law offers comfort to those who believe that until we understand
intelligence, we need not worry about superhuman intelligence arising among machines.
But there is a loophole in the Third Law. It is entirely possible to build something
without understanding it. You don’t need to fully understand how a brain works in order
to build one that works. This is a loophole that no amount of supervision over algorithms
by programmers and their ethical advisors can ever close. Provably “good” AI is a myth.
Our relationship with true AI will always be a matter of faith, not proof.
We worry too much about machine intelligence and not enough about selfreproduction,
communication, and control. The next revolution in computing will be
signaled by the rise of analog systems over which digital programming no longer has
control. Nature’s response to those who believe they can build machines to control
everything will be to allow them to build a machine that controls them instead.
40
Dan Dennett is the philosopher of choice in the AI community. He is perhaps best
known in cognitive science for his concept of intentional systems and his model of human
consciousness, which sketches a computational architecture for realizing the stream of
consciousness in the massively parallel cerebral cortex. That uncompromising
computationalism has been opposed by philosophers such as John Searle, David
Chalmers, and the late Jerry Fodor, who have protested that the most important aspects
of consciousness—intentionality and subjective qualia—cannot be computed.
Twenty-five years ago, I was visiting Marvin Minsky, one of the original AI
pioneers, and asked him about Dan. “He’s our best current philosopher—the next
Bertrand Russell,” said Marvin, adding that unlike traditional philosophers, Dan was a
student of neuroscience, linguistics, artificial intelligence, computer science, and
psychology: “He’s redefining and reforming the role of the philosopher. Of course, Dan
doesn’t understand my Society-of-Mind theory, but nobody’s perfect.”
Dan’s view of the efforts of AI researchers to create superintelligent AIs is
relentlessly levelheaded. What, me worry? In this essay, he reminds us that AIs, above
all, should be regarded—and treated—as tools and not as humanoid colleagues.
He has been interested in information theory since his graduate school days at
Oxford. In fact, he told me that early in his career he was keenly interested in writing a
book about Wiener’s cybernetic ideas. As a thinker who embraces the scientific method,
one of his charms is his willingness to be wrong. Of a recent piece entitled “What Is
Information?” he has announced, “I stand by it, but it’s under revision. I’m already
moving beyond it and realizing there’s a better way of tackling some of these issues.” He
will most likely remain cool and collected on the subject of AI research, although he has
acknowledged, often, that his own ideas evolve—as anyone’s ideas should.
41
WHAT CAN WE DO?
Daniel C. Dennett
Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of
Philosophy and director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the
author of a dozen books, including Consciousness Explained and, most recently, From
Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.
Many have reflected on the irony of reading a great book when you are too young to
appreciate it. Consigning a classic to the already read stack and thereby insulating
yourself against any further influence while gleaning only a few ill-understood ideas from
it is a recipe for neglect that is seldom benign. This struck me with particular force when
I reread The Human Use of Human Beings more than sixty years after my juvenile
encounter. We should all make it a regular practice to reread books from our youth,
where we are apt to discover clear previews of some of our own later “discoveries” and
“inventions,” along with a wealth of insights to which we were bound to be impervious
until our minds had been torn and tattered, exercised and enlarged by confrontations with
life’s problems.
Writing at a time when vacuum tubes were still the primary electronic building
blocks and there were only a few actual computers in operation, Norbert Wiener
imagined the future we now contend with in impressive detail and with few clear
mistakes. Alan Turing’s famous 1950 article “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,”
in the philosophy journal Mind, foresaw the development of AI, and so did Wiener, but
Wiener saw farther and deeper, recognizing that AI would not just imitate—and
replace—human beings in many intelligent activities but change human beings in the
process.
We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but
patterns that perpetuate themselves. (p. 96)
When that was written, it could be comfortably dismissed as yet another bit of
Heraclitean overstatement. Yeah, yeah, you can never step in the same river twice. But
it contains the seeds of the revolution in outlook. Today we know how to think about
complex adaptive systems, strange attractors, extended minds, and homeostasis, a change
in perspective that promises to erase the “explanatory gap” 8 between mind and
mechanism, spirit and matter, a gap that is still ardently defended by latter-day Cartesians
who cannot bear the thought that we—we ourselves—are self-perpetuating patterns of
information-bearing matter, not “stuff that abides.” Those patterns are remarkably
resilient and self-restoring but at the same time protean, opportunistic, selfish exploiters
of whatever new is available to harness in their quest for perpetuation. And here is where
things get dicey, as Wiener recognized. When attractive opportunities abound, we are apt
to be willing to pay a little and accept some small, even trivial, cost-of-doing-business for
access to new powers. And pretty soon we become so dependent on our new tools that
we lose the ability to thrive without them. Options become obligatory.
8
Joseph Levine, “Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64, pp.
354-61 (1983).
42
It’s an old, old story, with many well-known chapters in evolutionary history.
Most mammals can synthesize their own vitamin C, but primates, having opted for a diet
composed largely of fruit, lost the innate ability. We are now obligate ingesters of
vitamin C, but not obligate frugivores like our primate cousins, since we have opted for
technology that allows us to make, and take, vitamins as needed. The self-perpetuating
patterns that we call human beings are now dependent on clothes, cooked food, vitamins,
vaccinations, . . . credit cards, smartphones, and the Internet. And—tomorrow if not
already today—AI.
Wiener foresaw the problems that Turing and the other optimists have largely
overlooked. The real danger, he said, is
that such machines, though helpless by themselves, may be used by a human being or a
block of human beings to increase their control over the rest of the race or that political
leaders may attempt to control their populations by means not of machines themselves
but through political techniques as narrow and indifferent to human possibility as if they
had, in fact, been conceived mechanically. (p. 181)
The power, he recognized, lay primarily in the algorithms, not the hardware they run on,
although the hardware of today makes practically possible algorithms that would have
seemed preposterously cumbersome in Wiener’s day. What can we say about these
“techniques” that are “narrow and indifferent to human possibility”? They have been
introduced again and again, some obviously benign, some obviously dangerous, and
many in the omnipresent middle ground of controversy.
Consider a few of the skirmishes. My late friend Joe Weizenbaum, Wiener’s
successor as MIT’s Jeremiah of hi-tech, loved to observe that credit cards, whatever their
virtues, also provided an inexpensive and almost foolproof way for the government, or
corporations, to track the travels and habits and desires of individuals. The anonymity of
cash has been largely underappreciated, except by drug dealers and other criminals, and
now it may be going extinct. This may make money laundering a more difficult technical
challenge in the future, but the AI pattern finders arrayed against it have the side effect of
making us all more transparent to any “block of human beings” that may “attempt to
control” us.
Looking to the arts, the innovation of digital audio and video recording lets us pay
a small price (in the eyes of all but the most ardent audiophiles and film lovers) when we
abandon analog formats, and in return provides easy—all too easy?—reproduction of
artworks with almost perfect fidelity. But there is a huge hidden cost. Orwell’s Ministry
of Truth is now a practical possibility. AI techniques for creating all-but-undetectable
forgeries of “recordings” of encounters are now becoming available which will render
obsolete the tools of investigation we have come to take for granted in the last hundred
and fifty years. Will we simply abandon the brief Age of Photographic Evidence and
return to the earlier world in which human memory and trust provided the gold standard,
or will we develop new techniques of defense and offense in the arms race of truth? (We
can imagine a return to analog film-exposed-to-light, kept in “tamper-proof” systems
until shown to juries, etc., but how long would it be before somebody figured out a way
to infect such systems with doubt? One of the disturbing lessons of recent experience is
that the task of destroying a reputation for credibility is much less expensive than the task
of protecting such a reputation.) Wiener saw the phenomenon at its most general: “…in
43
the long run, there is no distinction between arming ourselves and arming our enemies.”
(p. 129) The Information Age is also the Dysinformation Age.
What can we do? We need to rethink our priorities with the help of the passionate
but flawed analyses of Wiener, Weizenbaum, and the other serious critics of our
technophilia. A key phrase, it seems to me, is Wiener’s almost offhand observation,
above, that “these machines” are “helpless by themselves.” As I have been arguing
recently, we’re making tools, not colleagues, and the great danger is not appreciating the
difference, which we should strive to accentuate, marking and defending it with political
and legal innovations.
Perhaps the best way to see what is being missed is to note that Alan Turing
himself suffered an entirely understandable failure of imagination in his formulation of
the famous Turing Test. As everyone knows, it is an adaptation of his “imitation game,”
in which a man, hidden from view and communicating verbally with a judge, tries to
convince the judge that he is in fact a woman, while a woman, also hidden and
communicating with the judge, tries to convince the judge that she is the woman. Turing
reasoned that this would be a demanding challenge for a man (or for a woman pretending
to be a man), exploiting a wealth of knowledge about how the other sex thinks and acts,
what they tend to favor or ignore. Surely (ding!) 9 , any man who could beat a woman at
being perceived to be a woman would be an intelligent agent. What Turing did not
foresee is the power of deep-learning AI to acquire this wealth of information in an
exploitable form without having to understand it. Turing imagined an astute and
imaginative (and hence conscious) agent who cunningly designed his responses based on
his detailed “theory” of what women are likely to do and say. Top-down intelligent
design, in short. He certainly didn’t think that a man, winning the imitation game, would
somehow become a woman; he imagined that there would still be a man’s consciousness
guiding the show. The hidden premise in Turing’s almost-argument was: Only a
conscious, intelligent agent could devise and control a winning strategy in the imitation
game. And so it was persuasive to Turing (and others, including me, still a stalwart
defender of the Turing Test) to argue that a “computing machine” that could pass as
human in a contest with a human might not be conscious in just the way a human being
is, but would nevertheless have to be a conscious agent of some kind. I think this is still a
defensible position—the only defensible position—but you have to understand how
resourceful and ingenious a judge would have to be to expose the shallowness of the
façade that a deep-learning AI (a tool, not a colleague) could present.
What Turing didn’t foresee is the uncanny ability of superfast computers to sift
mindlessly through Big Data, of which the Internet provides an inexhaustible supply,
finding probabilistic patterns in human activity that could be used to pop “authentic”-
seeming responses into the output for almost any probe a judge would think to offer.
Wiener also underestimates this possibility, seeing the tell-tale weakness of a machine in
not being able to
take into account the vast range of probability that characterizes the human
situation.
(p.181)
9
The surely alarm (the habit of having a bell ring in your head whenever you see the word in an argument)
is described and defended by me in Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for
Thinking (2013).
44
But taking into account that range of probability is just where the new AI excels.
The only chink in the armor of AI is that word “vast”; human possibilities, thanks to
language and the culture that it spawns, are truly Vast. 10 No matter how many patterns
we may find with AI in the flood of data that has so far found its way onto the Internet,
there are Vastly more possibilities that have never been recorded there. Only a fraction
(but not a Vanishing fraction) of the world’s accumulated wisdom and design and
repartee and silliness has made it onto the Internet, but probably a better tactic for the
judge to adopt when confronting a candidate in the Turing Test is not to search for such
items but to create them anew. AI in its current manifestations is parasitic on human
intelligence. It quite indiscriminately gorges on whatever has been produced by human
creators and extracts the patterns to be found there—including some of our most
pernicious habits. 11 These machines do not (yet) have the goals or strategies or capacities
for self-criticism and innovation to permit them to transcend their databases by
reflectively thinking about their own thinking and their own goals. They are, as Wiener
says, helpless, not in the sense of
being shackled agents or disabled agents but in the
sense of not being agents at all—not having the capacity to be “moved by reasons” (as
Kant put it) presented to them. It is important that we keep it that way, which will take
some doing.
One of the flaws in Weizenbaum’s book Computer Power and Human Reason,
something I tried in vain to convince him of in many hours of discussion, is that he could
never decide which of two theses he wanted to defend: AI is impossible! or AI is possible
but evil! He wanted to argue, with John Searle and Roger Penrose, that “Strong AI” is
impossible, but there are no good arguments for that conclusion. After all, everything we
now know suggests that, as I have put it, we are robots made of robots made of robots. . .
down to the motor proteins and their ilk, with no magical ingredients thrown in along the
way. Weizenbaum’s more important and defensible message was that we should not
strive to create Strong AI and should be extremely cautious about the AI systems that we
can create and have already created. As one might expect, the defensible thesis is a
hybrid: AI (Strong AI) is possible in principle but not desirable. The AI that’s practically
possible is not necessarily evil—unless it is mistaken for Strong AI!
The gap between today’s systems and the science-fictional systems dominating
the popular imagination is still huge, though many folks, both lay and expert, manage to
underestimate
it. Let’s consider IBM’s Watson, which can stand as a worthy landmark
for our imaginations for the time being. It is the result of a very large-scale R&D process
extending over many person-centuries of intelligent design, and as George Church notes
in these pages, it uses thousands of times more energy than a human brain (a
technological limitation that, as he also notes, may be
temporary). Its victory in
Jeopardy! was a genuine triumph, made possible by the formulaic restrictions of the
Jeopardy! rules, but in order for it to compete, even these rules had to be revised (one of
10
In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 1995, p. 109, I coined the capitalized version, Vast, meaning Very much
more than ASTronomical, and its complement, Vanishing, to replace the usual exaggerations infinite and
infinitesimal for discussions of those possibilities that are not officially infinite but nevertheless infinite for
all practical purposes.
11
Aylin Caliskan-Islam, Joanna J. Bryson & Arvind Narayanan, “Semantics derived automatically from
language corpora contain human-like biases,” Science, 14 April 2017, 356: 6334, pp. 183-6. DOI:
10.1126/science.aal4230.
45
those trade-offs: you give up a little versatility, a little humanity, and get a crowdpleasing
show). Watson is not good company, in spite of misleading ads from IBM that
suggest a general conversational ability, and turning Watson into a plausibly
multidimensional agent would be like turning a hand calculator into Watson. Watson
could be a useful core faculty for such an agent, but more like a cerebellum or an
amygdala than a mind—at best, a special-purpose subsystem that could play a big
supporting role, but not remotely up to the task of framing purposes and plans and
building insightfully on its conversational experiences.
Why would we want to create a thinking, creative agent out of Watson? Perhaps
Turing’s brilliant idea of an operational test has lured us into a trap: the quest to create at
least the illusion of a real person behind the screen, bridging the “uncanny valley.” The
danger, here, is that ever since Turing posed his challenge—which was, after all, a
challenge to fool the judges—AI creators have attempted to paper over the valley with
cutesy humanoid touches, Disneyfication effects that will enchant and disarm the
uninitiated. Weizenbaum’s ELIZA was the pioneer example of such superficial illusionmaking,
and it was his dismay at the ease with which his laughably simple and shallow
program could persuade people they were having a serious heart-to-heart conversation
that first sent him on his mission.
He was right to be worried. If there is one thing we have learned from the
restricted Turing Test competitions for the Loebner Prize, it is that even very intelligent
people who aren’t tuned in to the possibilities and shortcuts of computer programming
are readily taken in by simple
tricks. The attitudes of people in AI toward these methods
of dissembling at the “user interface” have ranged from contempt to celebration, with a
general appreciation that the tricks are not deep but can be potent. One shift in attitude
that would be very welcome is a candid acknowledgment that humanoid embellishments
are false advertising—something to condemn, not applaud.
How could that be accomplished? Once we recognize that people are starting to
make life-or-death decisions largely on the basis of “advice” from AI systems whose
inner operations are unfathomable in practice, we can see a good reason why those who
in any way encourage people to put more trust in these systems than they warrant should
be held morally and legally accountable. AI systems are very powerful tools—so
powerful that even experts will have good reason not to trust their own judgment over the
“judgments” delivered by their tools. But then, if these tool users are going to benefit,
financially or otherwise, from driving these tools through terra incognita, they need to
make sure they know how to do this responsibly, with maximum control and justification.
Licensing and bonding operators, just as we license pharmacists (and crane operators!)
and other specialists whose errors and misjudgments can have dire consequences, can,
with pressure from insurance companies and other underwriters, oblige creators of AI
systems to go to extraordinary lengths to search for and reveal weaknesses and gaps in
their products, and to train those entitled to operate them.
One can imagine a sort of inverted Turing Test in which the judge is on trial; until
he or she can spot the weaknesses, the overstepped boundaries, the gaps in a system, no
license to operate will be issued. The mental training required to achieve certification as
a judge will be demanding. The urge to adopt the intentional stance, our normal tactic
whenever we encounter what seems to be an intelligent agent, is almost overpoweringly
strong. Indeed, the capacity to resist the allure of treating an apparent person as a person
46
is an ugly talent, reeking of racism or species-ism. Many people would find the
cultivation of such a ruthlessly skeptical approach morally repugnant, and we can
anticipate that even the most proficient system-users would occasionally succumb to the
temptation to “befriend” their tools, if only to assuage their discomfort with the execution
of their duties. No matter how scrupulously the AI designers launder the phony “human”
touches out of their wares, we can expect novel habits of thought, conversational gambits
and ruses, traps and bluffs to arise in this novel setting for human action. The comically
long lists of known side effects of new drugs advertised on television will be dwarfed by
the obligatory revelations of the sorts of questions that cannot be responsibly answered
by particular systems, with heavy penalties for those who “overlook” flaws in their
products. It is widely noted that a considerable part of the growing economic inequality
in today’s world is due to the wealth accumulated by digital entrepreneurs; we should
enact legislation that puts their deep pockets in escrow for the public good. Some of the
deepest pockets are voluntarily out in front of these obligations to serve society first and
make money secondarily, but we shouldn’t rely on good will alone.
We don’t need artificial conscious agents. There is a surfeit of natural conscious
agents, enough to handle whatever tasks should be reserved for such special and
privileged entities. We need intelligent tools. Tools do not have rights, and should not
have feelings that could be hurt, or be able to respond with resentment to “abuses” rained
on them by inept users. 12 One of the reasons for not making artificial conscious agents is
that however autonomous they might become (and in principle, they can be as
autonomous, as self-enhancing or self-creating, as any person), they would not—without
special provision, which might be waived—share with us natural conscious agents our
vulnerability or our mortality.
I once posed a challenge to students in a seminar at Tufts I co-taught with
Matthias Scheutz on artificial agents and autonomy: Give me the specs for a robot that
could sign a binding contract with you—not as a surrogate for some human owner but on
its own. This isn’t a question of getting it to understand the clauses or manipulate a pen
on a piece of paper but of having and deserving legal status as a morally responsible
agent. Small children can’t sign such contracts, nor can those disabled people whose
legal status requires them to be under the care and responsibility of guardians of one sort
or another. The problem for robots who might want to attain such an exalted status is
that, like Superman, they are too invulnerable to be able to make a credible promise. If
they were to renege, what would happen? What would be the penalty for promisebreaking?
Being locked in a cell or, more plausibly, dismantled? Being locked up is
barely an inconvenience for an AI unless we first install artificial wanderlust that cannot
be ignored or disabled by the AI on its own (and it would be systematically difficult to
make this a foolproof solution, given the presumed cunning and self-knowledge of the
AI); and dismantling an AI (either a robot or a bedridden agent like Watson) is not killing
it, if the information stored in its design and software is preserved. The very ease of
digital recording and transmitting—the breakthrough that permits software and data to be,
12
Joanna J. Bryson, “Robots Should Be Slaves,” in Close Engagement with Artificial Companions, Yorick
Wilks, ed., (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins, 2010), pp. 63-74;
http://www.cs.bath.ac.uk/~jjb/ftp/Bryson-Slaves-Book09.html.
_____________, “Patiency Is Not a Virtue: AI and the Design of Ethical Systems,”
https://www.cs.bath.ac.uk/~jjb/ftp/Bryson-Patiency-AAAISS16.pdf.
47
in effect, immortal—removes robots from the world of the vulnerable (at least robots of
the usually imagined sorts, with digital software and memories). If this isn’t obvious,
think about how human morality would be affected if we could make “backups” of
people every week, say. Diving headfirst on Saturday off a high bridge without benefit
of bungee cord would be a rush that you wouldn’t remember when your Friday night
backup was put online Sunday morning, but you could enjoy the videotape of your
apparent demise thereafter.
So what we are creating are not—should not be—conscious, humanoid agents but
an entirely new sort of entities, rather like oracles, with no conscience, no fear of death,
no distracting loves and hates, no personality (but all sorts of foibles and quirks that
would no doubt be identified as the “personality” of the system): boxes of truths (if we’re
lucky) almost certainly contaminated with a scattering of falsehoods. It will be hard
enough learning to live with them without distracting ourselves with fantasies about the
Singularity in which these AIs will enslave us, literally. The human use of human beings
will soon be changed—once again—forever, but we can take the tiller and steer between
some of the hazards if we take responsibility for our trajectory.
48
The roboticist Rodney Brooks, featured in Errol Morris’s 1997 documentary Fast,
Cheap and Out of Control along with a lion-tamer, a topiarist, and an expert on the
naked mole rat, was described by one reviewer as “smiling with a wild gleam in his eye.”
But that’s pretty much true of most visionaries.
A few years later in his career, Brooks, as befits one of the world’s leading
roboticists, suggested that “we overanthropomorphize humans, who are after all mere
machines.” He went on to present a warm-hearted vision of a coming AI world in which
“the distinction between us and robots is going to disappear.” He also admitted to
something of a divided worldview. “Like a religious scientist, I maintain two sets of
inconsistent beliefs and act on each of them in different circumstances,” he wrote. “It is
this transcendence between belief systems that I think will be what enables mankind to
ultimately accept robots as emotional machines, and thereafter start to empathize with
them and attribute free will, respect, and ultimately rights to them.”
That was in 2002. In these pages, he takes a somewhat more jaundiced, albeit
narrower, view; he is alarmed by the extent to which we have come to rely on pervasive
systems that are not just exploitative but also vulnerable, as a result of the too-rapid
development of software engineering—an advance that seems to have outstripped the
imposition of reliably effective safeguards.
49
THE INHUMAN MESS OUR MACHINES HAVE GOTTEN US INTO
Rodney Brooks
Rodney Brooks is a computer scientist; Panasonic Professor of Robotics, emeritus, MIT;
former director, MIT Computer Science Lab; and founder, chairman, and CTO of
Rethink Robotics. He is the author of Flesh and Machines.
Mathematicians and scientists are often limited in how they see the big picture, beyond
their particular field, by the tools and metaphors they use in their work. Norbert Wiener
is no exception, and I might guess that neither am I.
When he wrote The Human Use of Human Beings, Wiener was straddling the end
of the era of understanding machines and animals simply as physical processes and the
beginning of our current era of understanding machines and animals as computational
processes. I suspect there will be future eras whose tools will look as distinct from the
tools of the two eras Wiener straddled as those tools did from each other.
Wiener was a giant of the earlier era and built on the tools developed since the
time of Newton and Leibniz to describe and analyze continuous processes in the physical
world. In 1948 he published Cybernetics, a word he coined to describe the science of
communication and control in both machines and animals. Today we would refer to the
ideas in this book as control theory, an indispensable discipline for the design and
analysis of physical machines, while mostly neglecting Wiener’s claims about the science
of communication. Wiener’s innovations were largely driven by his work during the
Second World War on mechanisms to aim and fire anti-aircraft guns. He brought
mathematical rigor to the design of the sorts of technology whose design processes had
been largely heuristic in nature: from the Roman waterworks through Watt’s steam
engine to the early development of automobiles.
One can imagine a different contingent version of our intellectual and
technological history had Alan Turing and John von Neumann, both of whom made
major contributions to the foundations of computing, not appeared on the scene. Turing
contributed a fundamental model of computation—now known as a Turing Machine—in
his paper “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,”
written and revised in 1936 and published in 1937. In these machines, a linear tape of
symbols from a finite alphabet encodes the input for a computational problem and also
provides the working space for the computation. A different machine was required for
each separate computational problem; later work by others would show that in one
particular machine, now known as a Universal Turing Machine, an arbitrary set of
computing instructions could be encoded on that same tape.
In the 1940s, von Neumann developed an abstract self-reproducing machine
called a cellular automaton. In this case it occupied a finite subset of an infinite twodimensional
array of squares each containing a single symbol from a finite alphabet of
twenty-nine distinct symbols—the rest of the infinite array starts out blank. The single
symbols in each square change in lockstep, based on a complex but finite rule about the
current symbol in that square and its immediate neighbors. Under the complex rule that
von Neumann developed, most of the symbols in most of the squares stay the same and a
few change at each step. So when one looks at the non-blank squares, it appears that
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there is a constant structure with some activity going on inside it. When von Neumann’s
abstract machine reproduced, it made a copy of itself in another region of the plane.
Within the “machine” was a horizontal line of squares which acted as a finite linear tape,
using a subset of the finite alphabet. It was the symbols in those squares that encoded the
machine of which they were a part. During the machine’s reproduction, the “tape” could
move either left or right and was both interpreted (transcribed) as the instructions
(translation) for the new “machine” being built and then copied (replicated)—with the
new copy being placed inside the new machine for further reproduction. Francis Crick
and James Watson later showed, in 1953, how such a tape could be instantiated in
biology by a long DNA molecule with its finite alphabet of four nucleobases: guanine,
cytosine, adenine, and thymine (G, C, A, and T). 13 As in von Neumann’s machine, in
biological reproduction the linear sequence of symbols in DNA is interpreted—through
transcription into RNA molecules, which then are translated into proteins, the structures
that make up a new cell—and the DNA is replicated and encased in the new cell.
A second foundational piece of work was in a 1945 “First Draft” report on the
design for a digital computer, wherein von Neumann advocated for a memory that could
contain both instructions and data. 14 This is now known as a von Neumann architecture
computer—as distinct from a Harvard architecture computer, where there are two
separate memories, one for instructions and one for data. The vast majority of computer
chips built in the era of Moore’s Law are based on the von Neumann architecture,
including those powering our data centers, our laptops, and our smartphones. Von
Neumann’s digital-computer architecture is conceptually the same generalization—from
early digital computers constructed with electromagnetic relays at both Harvard
University and Bletchley Park—that occurs in going from a special-purpose Turing
Machine to a Universal Turing Machine. Furthermore, his self-replicating automata
share a fundamental similarity with both the construction of a Turing Machine and the
mechanism of DNA-based reproducing biological cells. There is to this day scholarly
debate over whether von Neumann saw the cross connections between these three pieces
of work, Turing’s and his two. Turing’s revision of his paper was done while he and von
Neumann were both at Princeton; indeed, after getting his PhD, Turing almost stayed on
as von Neumann’s postdoc.
Without Turing and von Neumann, the cybernetics of Wiener might have
remained a dominant mode of thought and driver of technology for much longer than its
brief moment of supremacy. In this imaginary version of history, we might well live
today in an actual steam-punk world and not just get to observe its fantastical
instantiations at Maker Faires!
My point is that Wiener thought about the world—physical, biological, and (in
Human Use) sociological—in a particular way. He analyzed the world as continuous
variables, as he explains in chapter 1 along with a nod to thermodynamics through an
overlay of Gibbs statistics. He also shoehorns in a weak and unconvincing model of
information as message-passing between and among both physical and biological entities.
To me, and from today’s vantage point seventy years on, his tools seem woefully
13
“A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid,” Nature 171, 737–738 (1953).
14
https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_the_EDVAC#Controversy. Von Neumann is
listed as the only author, whereas others contributed to the concepts he laid out; thus credit for the
architecture has gone to him alone.
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inadequate for describing the mechanisms underlying biological systems, and so he
missed out on how similar mechanisms might eventually be embodied in technological
computational systems—as now they have been. Today’s dominant technologies were
developed in the world of Turing and von Neumann, rather than the world of Wiener.
In the first industrial revolution, energy from a steam engine or a water wheel was
used by human workers to replace their own energy. Instead of being a source of energy
for physical work, people became modulators of how a large source of energy was used.
But because steam engines and water wheels had to be large to be an efficient use of
capital, and because in the 18th century the only technology for spatial distribution of
energy was mechanical and worked only at very short range, many workers needed to be
crowded around the source of energy. Wiener correctly argues that the ability to transmit
energy as electricity caused a second industrial revolution. Now the source of energy
could be distant from where it was used, and from the beginning of the 20th century,
manufacturing could be much more dispersed as electrical-distribution grids were built.
Wiener then argues that a further new technology, that of the nascent
computational machines of his time, will provide yet another revolution. The machines
he talks about seem to be both analog and (perhaps) digital in nature; and he points out, in
The Human Use of Human Beings, that since they will be able to make decisions, both
blue-collar and white-collar workers may be reduced to being mere cogs in a much bigger
machine. He fears that humans might use and abuse one another through organizational
structures that this capability will encourage. We have certainly seen this play out in the
last sixty years, and that disruption is far from over.
However, his physics-based view of computation protected him from realizing
just how bad things might get. He saw machines’ ability to communicate as providing a
new and more inhuman way of exerting command and control. He missed that within a
few decades computation systems would become more like biological systems, and it
seems, from his descriptions in chapter 10 of his own work on modeling some aspects of
biology, that he woefully underappreciated the many orders of magnitude of further
complexity of biology over physics. We are in a much more complex situation today
than he foresaw, and I am worried that it is much more pernicious than even his worst
imagined fears.
In the 1960s, computation became firmly based on the foundations set out by
Turing and von Neumann, and it was digital computation, based on the idea of finite
alphabets which they both used. An arbitrarily long sequence, or string, formed by
characters from a finite alphabet, can be encoded as a unique integer. As with Turing
Machines themselves, the formalism for computation became that of computing an
integer-valued function of a single integer-valued input.
Turing and von Neumann both died in the 1950s and at that time this is how they
saw computation. Neither foresaw the exponential increase in computing capability that
Moore’s Law would bring—nor how pervasive computing machinery would become.
Nor did they foresee two developments in our modeling of computation, each of which
poses a great threat to human society.
The first is rooted in the abstractions they adopted. In the fifty-year, Moore’s
Law–fueled race to produce software that could exploit the doubling of computer
capability every two years, the typical care and certification of engineering disciplines
was thrown by the wayside. Software engineering was fast and prone to failures. This
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rapid development of software without standards of correctness has opened up many
routes to exploit von Neumann architecture’s storage of data and instructions in the same
memory. One of the most common routes, known as “buffer overrun,” involves an input
number (or long string of characters) that is bigger than the programmer expected and
overflows into where the instructions are stored. By carefully designing an input number
that is too big by far, someone using a piece of software can infect it with instructions not
intended by the programmer, and thus change what it does. This is the basis for creating
a computer virus—so named for its similarity to a biological virus. The latter injects
extra DNA into a cell, and that cell’s transcription and translation mechanism blindly
interprets it, making proteins that may be harmful to the host cell. Furthermore, the
replication mechanism for the cell takes care of multiplying the virus. Thus, a small
foreign entity can take control of a much bigger entity and bend its behavior in
unexpected ways.
These and other forms of digital attacks have taken the security of our everyday
lives from us. We rely on computers for almost everything now. We rely on computers
for our infrastructure of electricity, gas, roads, cars, trains, and airplanes; these are all
vulnerable. We rely on computers for our banking, our payment of bills, our retirement
accounts, our mortgages, our purchasing of goods and services—these, too, are all
vulnerable. We rely on computers for our entertainment, our communications both
business and personal, our physical security at home, our information about the world,
and our voting systems—all vulnerable. None of this will get fixed anytime soon. In the
meantime, many aspects of our society are open to vicious attacks, whether by
freelancing criminals or nation-state adversaries.
The second development is that computation has gone beyond simply computing
functions. Instead, programs remain online continuously, and so they can gather data
about a sequence of queries. Under the Wiener/Turing/von Neumann scheme, we might
think of the communication pattern for a Web browser to be:
Now instead it can look like this:
User: Give me Web page A.
Browser: Here is Web page A.
…
User: Give me Web page B.
Browser: Here is Web page B.
User: Give me Web page A.
Browser: Here is Web page A. [And I will secretly
remember that you asked for Web page A.]
…
User: Give me Web page B.
Browser: Here is Web page B. [I see a correlation between
its contents and that of the earlier requested Web page A, so I will
update my model of you, the user, and transmit it to the company
that produced me.]
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When the machine no longer simply computes a function but instead maintains a
state, it can start to make inferences about the human by the sequence of requests
presented to it. And when different programs correlate across different request streams—
say, correlating Web-page searches with social-media posts, or the payment for services
on another platform, or the dwell time on a particular advertisement, or where the user
has walked or driven with their GPS-enabled smartphone—the total systems of many
programs communicating with one another and with databases leads to a whole new loss
of privacy. The great exploitative leap made by so many West Coast companies has been
to monetize those inferences without the knowing permission of the person generating the
interactions with the computing machine platforms.
Wiener, Turing, and von Neumann could not foresee the complexity of those
platforms, wherein the legal mumbo-jumbo of the terms-of-use contracts the humans
willingly enter into, without an inkling of what they entail, leads them to give up rights
they would never concede in a one-on-one interaction with another human being. The
computation platforms have become a shield behind which some companies hide in order
to inhumanly exploit others. In certain other countries, the governments carry out these
manipulations, and there the goal is not profits but the suppression of dissent.
Humankind has gotten itself into a fine pickle: We are being exploited by
companies that paradoxically deliver services we crave, and at the same time our lives
depend on many software-enabled systems that are open to attack. Getting ourselves out
of this mess will be a long-term project. It will involve engineering, legislation, and most
important, moral leadership. Moral leadership is the first and biggest challenge.
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I first met Frank Wilczek in the 1980s, when he invited me to his home in Princeton to
talk about anyons. “The address is 112 Mercer Street,” he wrote. “Look for the house
with no driveway.” So there I was, a few hours later, in Einstein’s old living room,
talking to a future recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics. If Frank was as impressed as I
was by the surroundings, you’d never guess it. His only comment concerned the difficulty
of finding a parking place in front of a “house with no driveway.”
Unlike most theoretical physicists, Frank has long had a keen interest in AI, as
witnessed in these three “Observations”:
1.“Francis Crick called it ‘the Astonishing Hypothesis’: that consciousness, also
known as Mind, is an emergent property of matter,” which, if true, indicates that “all
intelligence is machine intelligence. What distinguishes natural from artificial
intelligence is not what it is, but only how it is made.”
2. “Artificial intelligence is not the product of an alien invasion. It is an artifact
of a particular human culture and reflects the values of that culture.”
3. “David Hume’s striking statement ‘Reason Is, and Ought only to Be, the Slave
of the Passions’ was written in 1738 [and] was, of course, meant to apply to human
reason and human passions. . . . But Hume’s logical/philosophical point remains valid
for AI. Simply put: Incentives, not abstract logic, drive behavior.”
He notes that “the big story of the 20th and the 21st century is that [as]
computing develops, we learn how to calculate the consequences of the [fundamental]
laws better and better. There’s also a feedback cycle: When you understand matter
better, you can design better computers, which will enable you to calculate better. It’s
kind of an ascending helix.”
Here he argues that human intelligence, for now, holds the advantage—yet our
future, unbounded by our solar system and doubtless also by our galaxy, will never be
realized without the help of our AIs.
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THE UNITY OF INTELLIGENCE
Frank Wilczek
Frank Wilczek is Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at MIT, recipient of the 2004
Nobel Prize in physics, and the author of A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep
Design.
I. A Simple Answer to Contentious Questions:
• Can an artificial intelligence be conscious?
• Can an artificial intelligence be creative?
• Can an artificial intelligence be evil?
Those questions are often posed today, both in popular media and in scientifically
informed debates. But the discussions never seem to converge. Here I’ll begin by
answering them as follows:
Based on physiological psychology, neurobiology, and physics, it would be very
surprising if the answers were not Yes, Yes, and Yes. The reason is simple, yet
profound: Evidence from those fields makes it overwhelmingly likely that there is no
sharp divide between natural and artificial intelligence.
In his 1994 book of that title, the renowned biologist Francis Crick proposed an
“astonishing hypothesis”: that mind emerges from matter. He famously claimed that
mind, in all its aspects, is “no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells
and their associated molecules.”
The “astonishing hypothesis” is in fact the foundation of modern neuroscience.
People try to understand how minds work by understanding how brains function; and
they try to understand how brains function by studying how information is encoded in
electrical and chemical signals, transformed by physical processes, and used to control
behavior. In that scientific endeavor, they make no allowance for extraphysical behavior.
So far, in thousands of exquisite experiments, that strategy has never failed. It has never
proved necessary to allow for the influence of consciousness or creativity unmoored from
brain activity to explain any observed fact of psychophysics or neurobiology. No one has
ever stumbled upon a power of mind which is separate from conventional physical events
in biological organisms. While there are many things we do not understand about brains,
and about minds, the “astonishing hypothesis” has held intact.
If we broaden our view beyond neurobiology to consider the whole range of
scientific experimentation, the case becomes still more compelling. In modern physics,
the foci of interest are often extremely delicate phenomena. To investigate them,
experimenters must take many precautions against contamination by “noise.” They often
find it necessary to construct elaborate shielding against stray electric and magnetic
fields; to compensate for tiny vibrations due to micro-earthquakes or passing cars; to
work at extremely low temperatures and in high vacuum, and so forth. But there’s a
notable exception: They have never found it necessary to make allowances for what
people nearby (or, for that matter, far away) are thinking. No “thought waves,” separate
from known physical processes yet capable of influencing physical events, seem to exist.
That conclusion, taken at face value, erases the distinction between natural and
artificial intelligence. It implies that if we were to duplicate, or accurately simulate, the
physical processes occurring in a brain—as, in principle, we can—and wire up its input
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and output to sense organs and muscles, then we would reproduce, in a physical artifact,
the observed manifestations of natural intelligence. Nothing observable would be
missing. As an observer, I’d have no less (and no more) reason to ascribe consciousness,
creativity, or evil to that artifact than I do to ascribe those properties to its natural
counterparts, like other human beings.
Thus, by combining Crick’s “astonishing hypothesis” in neurobiology with
powerful evidence from physics, we deduce that natural intelligence is a special case of
artificial intelligence. That conclusion deserves a name, and I will call it “the astonishing
corollary.”
With that, we have the answer to our three questions. Since consciousness,
creativity, and evil are obvious features of natural human intelligence, they are possible
features of artificial intelligence.
A hundred years ago, or even fifty, to believe the hypothesis that mind emerges
from matter, and to infer our corollary that natural intelligence is a special case of
artificial intelligence, would have been leaps of faith. In view of the many surrounding
gaps—chasms, really—in contemporary understanding of biology and physics, they were
genuinely doubtful propositions. But epochal developments in those areas have changed
the picture:
In biology: A century ago, not only thought but also metabolism, heredity, and
perception were deeply mysterious aspects of life that defied physical explanation.
Today, of course, we have extremely rich and detailed accounts of metabolism, heredity,
and many aspects of perception, from the bottom up, starting at the molecular level.
In physics: After a century of quantum physics and its application to materials,
physicists have discovered, over and over, how rich and strange the behavior of matter
can be. Superconductors, lasers, and many other wonders demonstrate that large
assemblies of molecular units, each simple in itself, can exhibit qualitatively new,
“emergent” behavior, while remaining fully obedient to the laws of physics. Chemistry,
including biochemistry, is a cornucopia of emergent phenomena, all now quite firmly
grounded in physics. The pioneering physicist Philip Anderson, in an essay titled “More
Is Different,” offers a classic discussion of emergence. He begins by acknowledging that
“the reductionist hypothesis [i.e., the completeness of physical explanations based on
known interactions of simple parts] may still be a topic for controversy among
philosophers, but among the great majority of active scientists I think it is accepted
without question.” But he goes on to emphasize that “[t]he behavior of large and
complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms
of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles.” 15 Each new level of size
and complexity supports new forms of organization, whose patterns encode information
in new ways and whose behavior is best described using new concepts.
Electronic computers are a magnificent example of emergence. Here, all the
cards are on the table. Engineers routinely design, from the bottom up, based on known
(and quite sophisticated) physical principles, machines that process information in
extremely impressive ways. Your iPhone can beat you at chess, quickly collect and
deliver information about anything, and take great pictures, too. Because the process
whereby computers, smartphones, and other intelligent objects are designed and
manufactured is completely transparent, there can be no doubt that their wonderful
15
Science, 4 August 1972, Vol. 177, No. 4047, pp. 393-96.
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capabilities emerge from regular physical processses, which we can trace down to the
level of electrons, photons, quarks, and gluons. Evidently, brute matter can get pretty
smart.
Let me summarize the argument. From two strongly supported hypotheses, we’ve
drawn a straightforward conclusion:
• Human mind emerges from matter.
• Matter is what physics says it is.
• Therefore, the human mind emerges from physical processes we
understand and can reproduce artificially.
• Therefore, natural intelligence is a special case of artificial
intelligence.
Of course, our “astonishing corollary” could fail; the first two lines of this
argument are hypotheses. But their failure would have to bring in a foundation-shattering
discovery—a significant new phenomenon, with large-scale physical consequences,
which takes place in unremarkable, well-studied physical circumstances (i.e., the
materials, temperatures, and pressures inside human brains) yet which has somehow
managed for many decades to elude determined investigators armed with sophisticated
instruments. Such a discovery would be. . . astonishing.
II. The Future of Intelligence
It is part of human nature to improve on human bodies and minds. Historically, clothing,
eyeglasses, and watches are examples of increasingly sophisticated augmentations that
enhance our toughness, perception, and awareness. They are major improvements to the
natural human endowment, whose familiarity should not blind us to their depth. Today
smartphones and the Internet are bringing the human drive toward augmentation into
realms more central to our identity as intelligent beings. They are giving us, in effect,
quick access to a vast collective awareness and a vast collective memory.
At the same time, autonomous artificial intelligences have become world
champions in a wide variety of “cerebral” games, such as chess and Go, and have taken
over many sophisticated pattern-recognition tasks, such as reconstructing what happened
during complex reactions at the Large Hadron Collider from a blizzard of emerging
particle tracks, to find new particles; or gathering clues from fuzzy X-ray, fMRI, and
other types of images, to diagnose medical problems.
Where is this drive toward self-enhancement and innovation taking us? While the
precise sequence of events and the timescale over which they’ll play out is impossible to
predict (or, at least, beyond me), some basic considerations suggest that eventually the
most powerful embodiments of mind will be quite different things from human brains as
we know them today.
Consider six factors whereby information-processing technology exceeds human
capabilities—vastly, qualitatively, or both:
• Speed: The orchestrated motion of electrons, which is the heart of modern
artificial information-processing, can be much faster than the processes of
diffusion and chemical change by which brains operate. Typical modern
computer clock rates approach 10 gigahertz, corresponding to 10 billion
operations per second. No single measure of speed applies to the bewildering
variety of brain processes, but one fundamental limitation is latency of action
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potentials, which limits their spacing to a few 10s per second. It is probably
no accident that the “frame rate,” at which we can distinguish that movies are
actually a sequence of stills, is about 40 per second. Thus, electronic
processing is close to a billion times faster.
• Size: The linear dimension of a typical neuron is about 10 microns.
Molecular dimensions, which set a practical limit, are about 10,000 times
smaller, and artificial processing units are approaching that scale. Smallness
makes communication more efficient.
• Stability: Whereas human memory is essentially continuous (analog),
artificial memory can incorporate discrete (digital) features. Whereas analog
quantities can erode, digital quantities can be stored, refreshed, and
maintained with complete accuracy.
• Duty Cycle: Human brains grow tired with effort. They need time off to take
nourishment and to sleep. They carry the burden of aging. Most profoundly:
They die.
• Modularity (open architecture): Because artificial information processors can
support precisely defined digital interfaces, they can readily assimilate new
modules. Thus, if we want a computer to “see” ultraviolet or infrared or
“hear” ultrasound, we can feed the output from an appropriate sensor directly
into its “nervous system.” The architecture of brains is much more closed and
opaque, and the human immune system actively resists implants.
• Quantum readiness: One case of modularity deserves special mention,
because of its long-term potential. Recently physicists and information
scientists have come to appreciate that the principles of quantum mechanics
support new computing principles, which can empower qualitatively new
forms of information processing and (plausibly) new levels of intelligence.
But these possibilities rely on aspects of quantum behavior which are quite
delicate and seem especially unsuitable for interfacing with the warm, wet,
messy enviroment of human brains.
Evidently, as platforms for intelligence, human brains are far from optimal. Still,
although versatile housekeeping robots or mechanical soldiers would find ready, lucrative
markets, at present there is no machine that approaches the kind of general-purpose
human intelligence those applications would require. Despite their relative weakness on
many fronts, human brains have some big advantages over their artificial competitors.
Let me mention five:
• Three-dimensionality: Although, as noted, the linear dimensions of existing
artificial processing units are vastly smaller than those of brains, the procedure by
which they’re made—centered on lithography (basically, etching)—is essentially
two-dimensional. That is revealed visibly in the geometry of computer boards
and chips. Of course, one can stack boards, but the spacing between layers is
much larger, and communication much less efficient, than within layers. Brains
make better use of all three dimensions.
• Self-repair: Human brains can recover from, or work around, many kinds of
injuries or errors. Computers often must be repaired or rebooted externally.
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• Connectivity: Human neurons typically support several hundred connections
(synapses). Moreover, the complex pattern of these connections is very
meaningful. (See our next point.) Computer units typically make only a handful
of connections, in regular, fixed patterns.
• Development (self-assembly with interactive sculpting): The human brain grows
its units by cell divisions and orchestrates them into coherent structures by
movement and folding. It also proliferates an abundance of connections among
the cells. An important part of its sculpting occurs through active processes
during infancy and childhood, as the individual interacts with his or her
environment. In this process, many connections are winnowed away, while others
are strengthened, depending on their effectiveness in use. Thus, the fine structure
of the brain is tuned through interaction with the external world—a rich source of
information and feedback!
• Integration (sensors and actuators): The human brain comes equipped with a
variety of sensory organs, notably including its outgrowth eyes, and with versatile
actuators, including hands that build, legs that walk, and mouths that speak.
Those sensors and actuators are seamlessy integrated into the brain’s informationprocessing
centers, having been honed over millions of years of natural selection.
We interpret their raw signals and control their large-scale actions with minimal
conscious attention. The flip side is that we don’t know how we do it, and the
implementation is opaque. It’s proving surprisingly difficult to reach human
standards on these “routine” input-output functions.
These advantages of human brains over currently engineered artifacts are
profound. Human brains supply an inspiring existence proof, showing us several ways
we can get more out of matter. When, if ever, will our engineering catch up?
I don’t know for sure, but let me offer some informed opinions. The challenges
of three-dimensionality and, to a lesser extent, self-repair don’t look overwhelming.
They present some tough engineering problems, but many incremental improvements are
easy to imagine, and there are clear paths forward. And while the powers of human eyes,
hands, and other sensory organs and actuators are wonderfully effective, their abilities are
far from exhausting any physical limits. Optical systems can take pictures with higher
resolution in space, time, and color, and in more regions of the electromagnetic spectrum;
robots can move faster and be stronger; and so forth. In these domains, the components
necessary for superhuman performance, along many axes, are already available. The
bottleneck is getting information into and out of them, rapidly, in the language of the
information-processing units.
And this brings us to the remaining, and I think most profound, advantages of
brains over artificial devices, which stem from their connectivity and interactive
development. Those two advantages are synergistic, since it is interactive development
that sculpts the massively wired but sprawling structure of the infant brain, enabled by
exponential growth of neurons and synapses, to get tuned into the extraordinary
instrument it becomes. Computer scientists are beginning to discover the power of the
brain’s architecture: Neural nets, whose basic design, as their name suggests, was directly
inspired by the brain’s, have scored some spectacular successes in game playing and
pattern recognition, as noted. But present-day engineering has nothing comparable—in
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the (currently) esoteric domain of self-reproducing machines—to the power and
versatility of neurons and their synapses. This could become a new, great frontier of
research. Here too, biology might point the way, as we come to understand biological
development well enough to imitate its essence.
Altogether, the advantages of artificial over natural intelligence appear
permanent, while the advantages of natural over artificial intelligence, though substantial
at present, appear transient. I’d guess that it will be many decades before engineering
catches up, but—barring catastrophic wars, climate change, or plagues, so that
technological progress stays vigorous—few centuries.
If that’s right, we can look forward to several generations during which humans,
empowered and augmented by smart devices, coexist with increasingly capable
autonomous AIs. There will be a complex, rapidly changing ecology of intelligence, and
rapid evolution in consequence. Given the intrinsic advantages that engineered devices
will eventually offer, the vanguard of that evolution will be cyborgs and superminds,
rather than lightly adorned Homo sapiens.
Another important impetus will come from the exploration of hostile
environments, both on Earth (e.g., the deep ocean) and, especially, in space. The human
body is poorly adapted to conditions outside a narrow band of temperatures, pressures,
and atmospheric composition. It needs a wide variety of specific, complex nutrients, and
plenty of water. Also, it is not radiation-hardened. As the manned space program has
amply demonstrated, it is difficult and expensive to maintain humans outside their
terrestrial comfort zone. Cyborgs or autonomous AIs could be much more effective in
these explorations. Quantum AIs, with their sensitivity to noise, might even be happier in
the cold and dark of deep space.
In a moving passage from his 1935 novel Odd John, science fiction’s singular
genius Olaf Stapledon has his hero, a superhuman (mutant) intelligence, describe Homo
sapiens as “the Archaeopteryx of the spirit.” He says this, fondly, to his friend and
biographer, who is a normal human. Archaeopteryx was a noble creature, and a bridge to
greater ones.
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I was introduced to Max Tegmark some years ago by his MIT colleague Alan Guth, the
father of the inflationary universe. A distinguished theoretical physicist and cosmologist
himself, Max’s principal concern nowadays is the looming existential risk posed by the
creation of an AGI (artificial general intelligence—that is, one that matches human
intelligence). Four years ago, Max co-founded, with Jaan Tallinn and others, the Future
of Life Institute (FLI), which bills itself as “an outreach organization working to ensure
that tomorrow’s most powerful technologies are beneficial for humanity.” While on a
book tour in London, he was in the midst of planning for FLI, and he admits being driven
to tears in a tube station after a trip to the London Science Museum, with its exhibitions
spanning the gamut of humanity’s technological achievements. Was all that impressive
progress in vain?
FLI’s scientific advisory board includes Elon Musk, Frank Wilczek, George
Church, Stuart Russell, and the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, who dreamed up an
oft-quoted Gedankenexperiment that results in a world full of paper clips and nothing
else, produced by an (apparently) well-meaning AGI who was just following orders. The
Institute sponsors conferences (Puerto Rico 2015, Asilomar 2017) on AI safety issues and
in 2018 instituted a grants competition focusing on research in aid of maximizing the
societal benefits of AGI.
While Max is sometimes listed—by the non-cognoscenti—on the side of the
scaremongers, he believes, like Frank Wilczek, in a future that will immensely benefit
from AGI if, in the attempt to create it, we can keep the human species from being
sidelined.
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LET’S ASPIRE TO MORE THAN MAKING OURSELVES OBSOLETE
Max Tegmark
Max Tegmark is an MIT physicist and AI researcher; president of the Future of Life
Institute; scientific director of the Foundational Questions Institute; and the author
of Our Mathematical Universe and Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial
Intelligence.
Although there’s great controversy about how and when AI will impact humanity, the
situation is clearer from a cosmic perspective: The technology-developing life that has
evolved on Earth is rushing to make itself obsolete without devoting much serious
thought to the consequences. This strikes me as embarrassingly lame, given that we can
create amazing opportunities for humanity to flourish like never before, if we dare to
steer a more ambitious course.
13.8 billion years after its birth, our Universe has become aware of itself. On a
small blue planet, tiny conscious parts of our Universe have discovered that what they
once thought was the sum total of existence was a minute part of something far grander: a
solar system in a galaxy in a universe with over 100 billion other galaxies, arranged into
an elaborate pattern of groups, clusters, and superclusters.
Consciousness is the cosmic awakening; it transformed our Universe from a
mindless zombie with no self-awareness into a living ecosystem harboring self-reflection,
beauty, hope, meaning, and purpose. Had that awakening never taken place, our
Universe would have been pointless—a gigantic waste of space. Should our Universe go
back to sleep permanently due to some cosmic calamity or self-inflicted mishap, it will
become meaningless again.
On the other hand, things could get even better. We don’t yet know whether we
humans are the only stargazers in the cosmos, or even the first, but we’ve already learned
enough about our Universe to know that it has the potential to wake up much more fully
than it has thus far. AI pioneers such as Norbert Wiener have taught us that a further
awakening of our Universe’s ability to process and experience information need not
require eons of additional evolution but perhaps mere decades of human scientific
ingenuity.
We may be like that first glimmer of self-awareness you experienced when you
emerged from sleep this morning, a premonition of the much greater consciousness that
would arrive once you opened your eyes and fully awoke. Perhaps artificial
superintelligence will enable life to spread throughout the cosmos and flourish for
billions or trillions of years, and perhaps this will be because of decisions we make here,
on our planet, in our lifetime.
Or humanity may soon go extinct, through some self-inflicted calamity caused by
the power of our technology growing faster than the wisdom with which we manage it.
The evolving debate about AI’s societal impact
Many thinkers dismiss the idea of superintelligence as science fiction, because they view
intelligence as something mysterious that can exist only in biological organisms—
especially humans—and as fundamentally limited to what today’s humans can do. But
from my perspective as a physicist, intelligence is simply a certain kind of information
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processing performed by elementary particles moving around, and there’s no law of
physics that says one can’t build machines more intelligent in every way than we are, and
able to seed cosmic life. This suggests that we’ve seen just the tip of the intelligence
iceberg; there’s an amazing potential to unlock the full intelligence latent in nature and
use it to help humanity flourish—or flounder.
Others, including some of the authors in this volume, dismiss the building of an
AGI (Artificial General Intelligence—an entity able to accomplish any cognitive task at
least as well as humans) not because they consider it physically impossible but because
they deem it too difficult for humans to pull off in less than a century. Among
professional AI researchers, both types of dismissal have become minority views because
of recent breakthroughs. There is a strong expectation that AGI will be achieved within a
century, and the median forecast is only decades away. A recent survey of AI researchers
by Vincent Muller and Nick Bostrom concludes:
[T]he results reveal a view among experts that AI systems will probably (over
50%) reach overall human ability by 2040-50, and very likely (with 90%
probability) by 2075. From reaching human ability, it will move on to
superintelligence in 2 years (10%) to 30 years (75%) thereafter. 16
In the cosmic perspective of gigayears, it makes little difference whether AGI
arrives in thirty or three hundred years, so let’s focus on the implications rather than the
timing.
First, we humans discovered how to replicate some natural processes with
machines, making our own heat, light, and mechanical horsepower. Gradually we
realized that our bodies were also machines, and the discovery of nerve cells blurred the
boundary between body and mind. Finally, we started building machines that could
outperform not only our muscles but our minds as well. We’ve now been eclipsed by
machines in the performance of many narrow cognitive tasks, ranging from memorization
and arithmetic to game play, and we are in the process of being overtaken in many more,
from driving to investing to medical diagnosing. If the AI community succeeds in its
original goal of building AGI, then we will have, by definition, been eclipsed at all
cognitive tasks.
This begs many obvious questions. For example, will whoever or whatever
controls the AGI control Earth? Should we aim to control superintelligent machines? If
not, can we ensure that they understand, adopt, and retain human values? As Norbert
Wiener put it in The Human Use of Human Beings:
Woe to us if we let [the machine] decide our conduct, unless we have previously
examined the laws of its action, and know fully that its conduct will be carried
out on principles acceptable to us! On the other hand, the machine . . . , which
can learn and can make decisions on the basis of its learning, will in no way be
obliged to make such decisions as we should have made, or will be acceptable to
us.
16
Vincent C. Müller & Nick Bostrom, “Future Progress in Artificial Intelligence: A Survey of Expert
Opinion,” in Fundamental Issues of Artificial Intelligence, Vincent C. Muller, ed. (Springer International
Publishing Switzerland, 2016), pp. 555-72. https://nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf.
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And who are the “us”? Who should deem “such decisions . . . acceptable”? Even
if future powers decide to help humans survive and flourish, how will we find meaning
and purpose in our lives if we aren’t needed for anything?
The debate about the societal impact of AI has changed dramatically in the last
few years. In 2014, what little public talk there was of AI risk tended to be dismissed as
Luddite scaremongering, for one of two logically incompatible reasons:
(1) AGI was overhyped and wouldn’t happen for at least another century.
(2) AGI would probably happen sooner but was virtually guaranteed to be
beneficial.
Today, talk of AI’s societal impact is everywhere, and work on AI safety and AI
ethics has moved into companies, universities, and academic conferences. The
controversial position on AI safety research is no longer to advocate for it but to dismiss
it. Whereas the open letter that emerged from the 2015 Puerto Rico AI conference (and
helped mainstream AI safety) spoke only in vague terms about the importance of keeping
AI beneficial, the 2017 Asilomar AI Principles (see below) had real teeth: They explicitly
mention recursive self-improvement, superintelligence, and existential risk, and were
signed by AI industry leaders and over a thousand AI researchers from around the world.
Nonetheless, most discussion is limited to the near-term impact of narrow AI and
the broader community pays only limited attention to the dramatic transformations that
AGI may soon bring to life on Earth. Why?
Why we’re rushing to make ourselves obsolete, and why we avoid talking about it
First of all, there’s simple economics. Whenever we figure out how to make another type
of human work obsolete by building machines that do it better and cheaper, most of
society gains: Those who build and use the machines make profits, and consumers get
more affordable products. This will be as true of future investor AGIs and scientist AGIs
as it was of weaving machines, excavators, and industrial robots. In the past, displaced
workers usually found new jobs, but this basic economic incentive will remain even if
that is no longer the case. The existence of affordable AGI means, by definition,
that all jobs can be done more cheaply by machines, so anyone claiming that “people will
always find new well-paying jobs” is in effect claiming that AI researchers will fail to
build AGI.
Second, Homo sapiens is by nature curious, which will motivate the scientific
quest for understanding intelligence and developing AGI even without economic
incentives. Although curiosity is one of the most celebrated human attributes, it can
cause problems when it fosters technology we haven’t yet learned how to manage wisely.
Sheer scientific curiosity without profit motive contributed to the discovery of nuclear
weapons and tools for engineering pandemics, so it’s not unthinkable that the old adage
“Curiosity killed the cat” will turn out to apply to the human species as well.
Third, we’re mortal. This explains the near unanimous support for developing
new technologies that help us live longer, healthier lives, which strongly motivates
current AI research. AGI can clearly aid medical research even more. Some thinkers
even aspire to near immortality via cyborgization or uploading.
We’re thus on the slippery slope toward AGI, with strong incentives to keep
sliding downward, even though the consequence will by definition be our economic
obsolescence. We will no longer be needed for anything, because all jobs can be done
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more efficiently by machines. The successful creation of AGI would be the biggest event
in human history, so why is there so little serious discussion of what it might lead to?
Here again, the answer involves multiple reasons.
First, as Upton Sinclair famously quipped, “It is difficult to get a man to
understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” 17 For
example, spokesmen for tech companies or university research groups often claim there
are no risks attached to their activities even if they privately think otherwise. Sinclair’s
observation may help explain not only reactions to risks from smoking and climate
change but also why some treat technology as a new religion whose central articles of
faith are that more technology is always better and whose heretics are clueless
scaremongering Luddites.
Second, humans have a long track record of wishful thinking, flawed
extrapolation of the past, and underestimation of emerging technologies. Darwinian
evolution endowed us with powerful fear of concrete threats, not of abstract threats from
future technologies that are hard to visualize or even imagine. Consider trying to warn
people in 1930 of a future nuclear arms race, when you couldn’t show them a single
nuclear explosion video and nobody even knew how to build such weapons. Even top
scientists can underestimate uncertainty, making forecasts that are either too optimistic—
Where are those fusion reactors and flying cars?—or too pessimistic. Ernest Rutherford,
arguably the greatest nuclear physicist of his time, said in 1933—less than twenty-four
hours before Leo Szilard conceived of the nuclear chain reaction—that nuclear energy
was “moonshine.” Essentially nobody at that time saw the nuclear arms race coming.
Third, psychologists have discovered that we tend to avoid thinking of disturbing
threats when we believe there’s nothing we can do about them anyway. In this case,
however, there are many constructive things we can do, if we can get ourselves to start
thinking about the issue.
What can we do?
I’m advocating a strategy change from “Let’s rush to build technology that makes us
obsolete—what could possibly go wrong?” to “Let’s envision an inspiring future and
steer toward it.”
To motivate the effort required for steering, this strategy begins by envisioning an
enticing destination. Although Hollywood’s futures tend to be dystopian, the fact is that
AGI can help life flourish as never before. Everything I love about civilization is the
product of intelligence, so if we can amplify our own intelligence with AGI, we have the
potential to solve today’s and tomorrow’s thorniest problems, including disease, climate
change, and poverty. The more detailed we can make our shared positive visions for the
future, the more motivated we will be to work together to realize them.
What should we do in terms of steering? The twenty-three Asilomar principles
adopted in 2017 offer plenty of guidance, including these short-term goals:
(1) An arms race in lethal autonomous weapons should be avoided.
(2) The economic prosperity created by AI should be shared broadly, to benefit all
of humanity.
17
Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (Berkeley CA: University of
California Press, 1994), p. 109.
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(3) Investments in AI should be accompanied by funding for research on ensuring
its beneficial use. . . . How can we make future AI systems highly robust, so that they do
what we want without malfunctioning or getting hacked. 18
The first two involve not getting stuck in suboptimal Nash equilibria. An out-ofcontrol
arms race in lethal autonomous weapons that drives the price of automated
anonymous assassination toward zero will be very hard to stop once it gains momentum.
The second goal would require reversing the current trend in some Western countries
where sectors of the population are getting poorer in absolute terms, fueling anger,
resentment, and polarization. Unless the third goal can be met, all the wonderful AI
technology we create might harm us, either accidentally or deliberately.
AI safety research must be carried out with a strict deadline in mind: Before AGI
arrives, we need to figure out how to make AI understand, adopt, and retain our goals.
The more intelligent and powerful machines get, the more important it becomes to align
their goals with ours. As long as we build relatively dumb machines, the question isn’t
whether human goals will prevail but merely how much trouble the machines can cause
before we solve the goal-alignment problem. If a superintelligence is ever unleashed,
however, it will be the other way around: Since intelligence is the ability to accomplish
goals, a superintelligent AI is by definition much better at accomplishing its goals than
we humans are at accomplishing ours, and will therefore prevail.
In other words, the real risk with AGI isn’t malice but competence. A
superintelligent AGI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals
aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble. People don’t think twice about flooding
anthills to build hydroelectric dams, so let’s not place humanity in the position of those
ants. Most researchers argue that if we end up creating superintelligence, we should
make sure it’s what AI-safety pioneer Eliezer Yudkowsky has termed “friendly AI”—AI
whose goals are in some deep sense beneficial.
The moral question of what these goals should be is just as urgent as the technical
questions about goal alignment. For example, what sort of society are we hoping to
create, where we find meaning and purpose in our lives even though we, strictly
speaking, aren’t needed? I’m often given the following glib response to this
question: “Let’s build machines that are smarter than us and then let them figure out the
answer!” This mistakenly equates intelligence with morality. Intelligence isn’t good or
evil but morally neutral. It’s simply an ability to accomplish complex goals, good or bad.
We can’t conclude that things would have been better if Hitler had been more intelligent.
Indeed, postponing work on ethical issues until after goal-aligned AGI is built would be
irresponsible and potentially disastrous. A perfectly obedient superintelligence whose
goals automatically align with those of its human owner would be like Nazi SS-
Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann on steroids. Lacking moral compass or
inhibitions of its own, it would, with ruthless efficiency, implement its owner’s goals,
whatever they might be. 19
When I speak of the need to analyze technology risk, I’m sometimes accused of
scaremongering. But here at MIT, where I work, we know that such risk analysis isn’t
scaremongering: It’s safety engineering. Before the moon-landing mission, NASA
18
https://futureoflife.org/ai-principles/
19
See, for example, Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York:
Penguin Classics, 2006).
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systematically thought through everything that could possibly go wrong when putting
astronauts on top of a 110-meter rocket full of highly flammable fuel and launching them
to a place where nobody could help them—and there were lots of things that could go
wrong. Was this scaremongering? No, this was the safety engineering that ensured the
mission’s success. Similarly, we should analyze what could go wrong with AI to ensure
that it goes right.
Outlook
In summary, if our technology outpaces the wisdom with which we manage it, it can lead
to our extinction. It’s already caused the extinction of from 20 to 50 percent of all
species on Earth, by some estimates, 20 and it would be ironic if we’re next in line. It
would also be pathetic, given that the opportunities offered by AGI are literally
astronomical, potentially enabling life to flourish for billions of years not only on Earth
but also throughout much of our cosmos.
Instead of squandering this opportunity through unscientific risk denial and poor
planning, let’s be ambitious! Homo sapiens is inspiringly ambitious, as reflected in
William Ernest Henley’s famous lines from Invictus: “I am the master of my fate, / I am
the captain of my soul.” Rather than drifting like a rudderless ship toward our own
obsolescence, let’s take on and overcome the technical and societal challenges standing
between us and a good high-tech future. What about the existential challenges related to
morality, goals, and meaning? There’s no meaning encoded in the laws of physics, so
instead of passively waiting for our Universe to give meaning to us, let’s acknowledge
and celebrate that it’s we conscious beings who give meaning to our Universe. Let’s
create our own meaning, based on something more profound than having jobs. AGI can
enable us to finally become the masters of our own destiny. Let’s make that destiny a
truly inspiring one!
20
See Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt, 2014).
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Jaan Tallinn grew up in Estonia, becoming one of its few computer game developers,
when that nation was still a Soviet Socialist Republic. Here he compares the dissidents
who brought down the Iron Curtain to the dissidents who are sounding the alarm about
rapid advances in artificial intelligence. He locates the roots of the current AI
dissidence, paradoxically, among such pioneers of the AI field as Wiener, Alan Turing,
and I. J. Good.
Jaan’s preoccupation is with existential risk, AI being among the most extreme of
many. In 2012, he co-founded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk—an
interdisciplinary research institute that works to mitigate risks “associated with
emerging technologies and human activity”—at the University of Cambridge, along with
philosopher Huw Price and Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal.
He once described himself to me as “a convinced consequentialist”—convinced
enough to have given away much of his entrepreneurial wealth to the Future of Life
Institute (of which he is a co-founder), the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and
other such organizations working on risk reduction. Max Tegmark has written about
him: “If you’re an intelligent life-form reading this text millions of years from now and
marveling at how life is flourishing, you may owe your existence to Jaan.”
On a recent visit to London, Jaan and I participated on an AI panel for the
Serpentine Gallery’s Marathon at London’s City Hall, under the aegis of Hans Ulrich
Obrist (another contributor to this volume). This being the art world, there was a
glamorous dinner party that night in a mansion filled with London’s beautiful people—
artists, fashion models, oligarchs, stars of stage and screen. After working the room in
his unaffected manner (“Hi, I’m Jaan”), he suddenly said, “Time for hip-hop dancing,”
dropped to the floor on one hand, and began demonstrating his spectacular moves to the
bemused A-listers. Then off he went into the dance-club subculture, which is apparently
how he ends every evening when he’s on the road. Who knew?
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DISSIDENT MESSAGES
Jaan Tallinn
Jaan Tallin, a computer programmer, theoretical physicist, and investor, is a codeveloper
of Skype and Kazaa.
In March 2009, I found myself in a bland franchise eatery next to a noisy California
freeway. I was there to meet a young man whose blog I had been following. To make
himself recognizable, he wore a button with a text on it: Speak the truth even if your voice
trembles. His name was Eliezer Yudkowsky, and we spent the next four hours discussing
the message he had for the world—a message that had brought me to that eatery and
would end up dominating my subsequent work.
The First Message: the Soviet Occupation
In The Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Wiener looked at the world through the
lens of communication. He saw a universe that was marching to the tune of the second
law of thermodynamics toward its inevitable heat death. In such a universe, the only
(meta)stable entities are messages—patterns of information that propagate through time,
like waves propagating across the surface of a lake. Even we humans can be considered
messages, because the atoms in our bodies are too fleeting to attach our identities to.
Instead, we are the “message” that our bodily functions maintain. As Wiener put it: “It is
the pattern maintained by this homeostasis, which is the touchstone of our personal
identity.”
I’m more used to treating processes and computation as the fundamental building
blocks of the world. That said, Wiener’s lens brings out some interesting aspects of the
world which might otherwise have remained in the background and which to a large
degree shaped my life. These are two messages, both of which have their roots in the
Second World War. They started out as quiet dissident messages—messages that people
didn’t pay much attention to, even if they silently and perhaps subconsciously concurred.
The first message was: The Soviet Union is composed of a series of illegitimate
occupations. These occupations must end.
As an Estonian, I grew up behind the Iron Curtain and had a front row seat when
it fell. I heard this first message in the nostalgic reminiscences of my grandparents and in
between the harsh noises jamming the Voice of America. It grew louder during the
Gorbachev era, as the state became more lenient in its treatment of dissidents, and
reached a crescendo in the Estonian Singing Revolution of the late 1980s.
In my teens, I witnessed the message spread out across widening circles of
people, starting with the active dissidents, who had voiced it for half a century at great
cost to themselves, proceeding to the artists and literati, and ending up among the Party
members and politicians who had switched sides. This new elite comprised an eclectic
mix of people: those original dissidents who had managed to survive the repression,
public intellectuals, and (to the great annoyance of the surviving dissidents) even former
Communists. The remaining dogmatists—even the prominent ones—were eventually
marginalized, some of them retreating to Russia.
Interestingly, as the message propagated from one group to the next, it evolved. It
started in pure and uncompromising form (“The occupation must end!”) among the
dissidents who considered the truth more important than their personal freedom. The
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mainstream groups, who had more to lose, initially qualified and diluted the message,
taking positions like, “It would make sense in the long term to delegate control over local
matters.” (There were always exceptions: Some public intellectuals proclaimed the
original dissident message verbatim.) Finally, the original message—being, simply,
true—won out over its diluted versions. Estonia regained its independence in 1991, and
the last Soviet troops left three years later.
The people who took the risk and spoke the truth in Estonia and elsewhere in the
Eastern Bloc played a monumental role in the eventual outcome—an outcome that
changed the lives of hundreds of millions of people, myself included. They spoke the
truth, even as their voices trembled.
The Second Message: AI Risk
My exposure to the second revolutionary message was via Yudkowsky’s blog—the blog
that compelled me to reach out and arrange that meeting in California. The message was:
Continued progress in AI can precipitate a change of cosmic proportions—a runaway
process that will likely kill everyone. We need to put in a lot of extra effort to avoid that
outcome.
After my meeting with Yudkowsky, the first thing I did was try to interest my
Skype colleagues and close collaborators in his warning. I failed. The message was too
crazy, too dissident. Its time had not yet come.
Only later did I learn that Yudkowsky wasn’t the original dissident speaking this
particular truth. In April 2000, there was a lengthy opinion piece in Wired titled, “Why
the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” by Bill Joy, co-founder and chief scientist of Sun
Microsystems. He warned:
Accustomed to living with almost routine scientific breakthroughs, we have yet
to come to terms with the fact that the most compelling 21st-century
technologies—robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology—pose a
different threat than the technologies that have come before. Specifically, robots,
engineered organisms, and nanobots share a dangerous amplifying factor: They
can self-replicate. . . . [O]ne bot can become many, and quickly get out of
control.
Apparently, Joy’s broadside caused a lot of furor but little action.
More surprising to me, though, was that the AI-risk message arose almost
simultaneously with the field of computer science. In a 1951 lecture, Alan Turing
announced: “[I]t seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it
would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. . . . At some stage, therefore, we
should have to expect the machines to take control. . . .” 21 A decade or so later, his
Bletchley Park colleague I. J. Good wrote, “The first ultraintelligent machine is the last
invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us
how to keep it under control.” 22 Indeed, I counted half a dozen places in The Human Use
of Human Beings where Wiener hinted at one or another aspect of the Control Problem.
(“The machine like the djinnee, which can learn and can make decisions on the basis of
21
Posthumously reprinted in Phil. Math. (3) vol. 4, 256-60 (1966).
22
Irving John Good, “Speculations concerning the first ultraintelligent machine,” Advances in Computers,
vol. 6 (Academic Press, 1965), pp. 31-88.
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its learning, will in no way be obliged to make such decisions as we should have made, or
will be acceptable to us.”) Apparently, the original dissidents promulgating the AI-risk
message were the AI pioneers themselves!
Evolution’s Fatal Mistake
There have been many arguments, some sophisticated and some less so, for why the
Control Problem is real and not some science-fiction fantasy. Allow me to offer one that
illustrates the magnitude of the problem:
For the last hundred thousand years, the world (meaning the Earth, but the
argument extends to the solar system and possibly even to the entire universe) has been in
the human-brain regime. In this regime, the brains of Homo sapiens have been the most
sophisticated future-shaping mechanisms (indeed, some have called them the most
complicated objects in the universe). Initially, we didn’t use them for much beyond
survival and tribal politics in a band of foragers, but now their effects are surpassing
those of natural evolution. The planet has gone from producing forests to producing
cities.
As predicted by Turing, once we have superhuman AI (“the machine thinking
method”), the human-brain regime will end. Look around you—you’re witnessing the
final decades of a hundred-thousand-year regime. This thought alone should give people
some pause before they dismiss AI as just another tool. One of the world’s leading AI
researchers recently confessed to me that he would be greatly relieved to learn that
human-level AI was impossible for us to create.
Of course, it might still take us a long time to develop human-level AI. But we
have reason to suspect that this is not the case. After all, it didn’t take long, in relative
terms, for evolution—the blind and clumsy optimization process—to create human-level
intelligence once it had animals to work with. Or multicellular life, for that matter:
Getting cells to stick together seems to have been much harder for evolution to
accomplish than creating humans once there were multicellular organisms. Not to
mention that our level of intelligence was limited by such grotesque factors as the width
of the birth canal. Imagine an AI developer being stopped in his tracks because he
couldn’t manage to adjust the font size on his computer!
There’s an interesting symmetry here: In fashioning humans, evolution created a
system that is, at least in many important dimensions, a more powerful planner and
optimizer than evolution itself is. We are the first species to understand that we’re the
product of evolution. Moreover, we’ve created many artifacts (radios, firearms,
spaceships) that evolution would have little hope of creating. Our future, therefore, will
be determined by our own decisions and no longer by biological evolution. In that sense,
evolution has fallen victim to its own Control Problem.
We can only hope that we’re smarter than evolution in that sense. We are
smarter, of course, but will that be enough? We’re about to find out.
The Present Situation
So here we are, more than half a century after the original warnings by Turing, Wiener,
and Good, and a decade after people like me started paying attention to the AI-risk
message. I’m glad to see that we’ve made a lot of progress in confronting this issue, but
we’re definitely not there yet. AI risk, although no longer a taboo topic, is not yet fully
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appreciated among AI researchers. AI risk is not yet common knowledge either. In
relation to the timeline of the first dissident message, I’d say we’re around the year 1988,
when raising the Soviet-occupation topic was no longer a career-ending move but you
still had to somewhat hedge your position. I hear similar hedging now—statements like,
“I’m not concerned about superintelligent AI, but there are some real ethical issues in
increased automation,” or “It’s good that some people are researching AI risk, but it’s not
a short-term concern,” or even the very reasonable sounding, “These are smallprobability
scenarios, but their potentially high impact justifies the attention.”
As far as message propagation goes, though, we are getting close to the tipping
point. A recent survey of AI researchers who published at the two major international AI
conferences in 2015 found that 40 percent now think that risks from highly advanced AI
are either “an important problem” or “among the most important problems in the field.” 23
Of course, just as there were dogmatic Communists who never changed their
position, it’s all but guaranteed that some people will never admit that AI is potentially
dangerous. Many of the deniers of the first kind came from the Soviet nomenklatura;
similarly, the AI-risk deniers often have financial or other pragmatic motives. One of the
leading motives is corporate profits. AI is profitable, and even in instances where it isn’t,
it’s at least a trendy, forward-looking enterprise with which to associate your company.
So a lot of the dismissive positions are products of corporate PR and legal machinery. In
some very real sense, big corporations are nonhuman machines that pursue their own
interests—interests that might not align with those of any particular human working for
them. As Wiener observed in The Human Use of Human Beings: “When human atoms
are knit into an organization in which they are used, not in their full right as responsible
human beings, but as cogs and levers and rods, it matters little that their raw material is
flesh and blood.”
Another strong incentive to turn a blind eye to the AI risk is the (very human)
curiosity that knows no bounds. “When you see something that is technically sweet, you
go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your
technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb,” said J. Robert
Oppenheimer. His words were echoed recently by Geoffrey Hinton, arguably the
inventor of deep learning, in the context of AI risk: “I could give you the usual
arguments, but the truth is that the prospect of discovery is too sweet.”
Undeniably, we have both entrepreneurial attitude and scientific curiosity to thank
for almost all the nice things we take for granted in the modern era. It’s important to
realize, though, that progress does not owe us a good future. In Wiener’s words, “It is
possible to believe in progress as a fact without believing in progress as an ethical
principle.”
Ultimately, we don’t have the luxury of waiting before all the corporate heads and
AI researchers are willing to concede the AI risk. Imagine yourself sitting in a plane
about to take off. Suddenly there’s an announcement that 40 percent of the experts
believe there’s a bomb onboard. At that point, the course of action is already clear, and
sitting there waiting for the remaining 60 percent to come around isn’t part of it.
23
Katja Grace, et al., “When Will AI Exceed Human Performance? Evidence from AI Experts,”
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.08807.pdf.
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Calibrating the AI-Risk Message
While uncannily prescient, the AI-risk message from the original dissidents has a giant
flaw—as does the version dominating current public discourse: Both considerably
understate the magnitude of the problem as well as AI’s potential upside. The message,
in other words, does not adequately convey the stakes of the game.
Wiener primarily warned of the social risks—risks stemming from careless
integration of machine-generated decisions with governance processes and misuse (by
humans) of such automated decision making. Likewise, the current “serious” debate
about AI risks focuses mostly on things like technological unemployment or biases in
machine learning. While such discussions can be valuable and address pressing shortterm
problems, they are also stunningly parochial. I’m reminded of Yudkowsky’s quip in
a blog post: “[A]sking about the effect of machine superintelligence on the conventional
human labor market is like asking how US–Chinese trade patterns would be affected by
the Moon crashing into the Earth. There would indeed be effects, but you’d be missing
the point.”
In my view, the central point of the AI risk is that superintelligent AI is an
environmental risk. Allow me to explain.
In his “Parable of the Sentient Puddle,” Douglas Adams describes a puddle that
wakes up in the morning and finds himself in a hole that fits him “staggeringly well.”
From that observation, the puddle concludes that the world must have been made for him.
Therefore, writes Adams, “the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise.” To
assume that AI risks are limited to adverse social developments is to make a similar
mistake. The harsh reality is that the universe was not made for us; instead, we are finetuned
by evolution to a very narrow range of environmental parameters. For instance, we
need the atmosphere at ground level to be roughly at room temperature, at about 100 kPa
pressure, and have a sufficient concentration of oxygen. Any disturbance, even
temporary, of this precarious equilibrium and we die in a matter of minutes.
Silicon-based intelligence does not share such concerns about the environment.
That’s why it’s much cheaper to explore space using machine probes rather than “cans of
meat.” Moreover, Earth’s current environment is almost certainly suboptimal for what a
superintelligent AI will greatly care about: efficient computation. Hence we might find
our planet suddenly going from anthropogenic global warming to machinogenic global
cooling. One big challenge that AI safety research needs to deal with is how to constrain
a potentially superintelligent AI—an AI with a much larger footprint than our own—from
rendering our environment uninhabitable for biological life-forms.
Interestingly, given that the most potent sources both of AI research and AI-risk
dismissals are under big corporate umbrellas, if you squint hard enough the “AI as an
environmental risk” message looks like the chronic concern about corporations skirting
their environmental responsibilities.
Conversely, the worry about AI’s social effects also misses most of the upside.
It’s hard to overemphasize how tiny and parochial the future of our planet is, compared
with the full potential of humanity. On astronomical timescales, our planet will be gone
soon (unless we tame the sun, also a distinct possibility) and almost all the resources—
atoms and free energy—to sustain civilization in the long run are in deep space.
Eric Drexler, the inventor of nanotechnology, has recently been popularizing the
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concept of “Pareto-topia”: the idea that AI, if done right, can bring about a future in
which everyone’s lives are hugely improved, a future where there are no losers. A key
realization here is that what chiefly prevents humanity from achieving its full potential
might be our instinctive sense that we’re in a zero-sum game—a game in which players
are supposed to eke out small wins at the expense of others. Such an instinct is seriously
misguided and destructive in a “game” where everything is at stake and the payoff is
literally astronomical. There are many more star systems in our galaxy alone than there
are people on Earth.
Hope
As of this writing, I’m cautiously optimistic that the AI-risk message can save humanity
from extinction, just as the Soviet-occupation message ended up liberating hundreds of
millions of people. As of 2015, it had reached and converted 40 percent of AI
researchers. It wouldn’t surprise me if a new survey now would show that the majority
of AI researchers believe AI safety to be an important issue.
I’m delighted to see the first technical AI-safety papers coming out of DeepMind,
OpenAI, and Google Brain and the collaborative problem-solving spirit flourishing
between the AI-safety research teams in these otherwise very competitive organizations.
The world’s political and business elite are also slowly waking up: AI safety has
been covered in reports and presentations by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers (IEEE), the World Economic Forum, and the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD). Even the recent (July 2017) Chinese AI
manifesto contained dedicated sections on “AI safety supervision” and “Develop[ing]
laws, regulations, and ethical norms” and establishing “an AI security and evaluation
system” to, among other things, “[e]nhance the awareness of risk.” I very much hope that
a new generation of leaders who understand the AI Control Problem and AI as the
ultimate environmental risk can rise above the usual tribal, zero-sum games and steer
humanity past these dangerous waters we are in—thereby opening our way to the stars
that have been waiting for us for billions of years.
Here’s to our next hundred thousand years! And don’t hesitate to speak the truth,
even if your voice trembles.
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Throughout his career, whether studying language, advocating a realistic biology of
mind, or examining the human condition through the lens of humanistic Enlightenment
ideas, psychologist Steven Pinker has embraced and championed a naturalistic
understanding of the universe and the computational theory of mind. He is perhaps the
first internationally recognized public intellectual whose recognition is based on the
advocacy of empirically based thinking about language, mind, and human nature.
“Just as Darwin made it possible for a thoughtful observer of the natural world to
do without creationism,” he says, “Turing and others made it possible for a thoughtful
observer of the cognitive world to do without spiritualism.”
In the debate about AI risk, he argues against prophecies of doom and gloom,
noting that they spring from the worst of our psychological biases—exemplified
particularly by media reports: “Disaster scenarios are cheap to play out in the
probability-free zone of our imaginations, and they can always find a worried,
technophobic, or morbidly fascinated audience.” Hence, over the centuries: Pandora,
Faust, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Frankenstein, the population bomb, resource depletion,
HAL, suitcase nukes, the Y2K bug, and engulfment by nanotechnological grey goo. “A
characteristic of AI dystopias,” he points out, “is that they project a parochial alphamale
psychology onto the concept of intelligence. . . . History does turn up the occasional
megalomaniacal despot or psychopathic serial killer, but these are products of a history
of natural selection shaping testosterone-sensitive circuits in a certain species of primate,
not an inevitable feature of intelligent systems.”
In the present essay, he applauds Wiener’s belief in the strength of ideas vis-à-vis
the encroachment of technology. As Wiener so aptly put it, “The machine’s danger to
society is not from the machine itself but from what man makes of it.”
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TECH PROPHECY AND THE UNDERAPPRECIATED CAUSAL POWER OF
IDEAS
Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker, a Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at
Harvard University, is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual
cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He is the author of eleven books,
including The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and, most recently,
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.
Artificial intelligence is an existence proof of one of the great ideas in human history:
that the abstract realm of knowledge, reason, and purpose does not consist of an élan vital
or immaterial soul or miraculous powers of neural tissue. Rather, it can be linked to the
physical realm of animals and machines via the concepts of information, computation,
and control. Knowledge can be explained as patterns in matter or energy that stand in
systematic relations with states of the world, with mathematical and logical truths, and
with one another. Reasoning can be explained as transformations of that knowledge by
physical operations that are designed to preserve those relations. Purpose can be
explained as the control of operations to effect changes in the world, guided by
discrepancies between its current state and a goal state. Naturally evolved brains are just
the most familiar systems that achieve intelligence through information, computation, and
control. Humanly designed systems that achieve intelligence vindicate the notion that
information processing is sufficient to explain it—the notion that the late Jerry Fodor
dubbed the computational theory of mind.
The touchstone for this volume, Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human
Beings, celebrated this intellectual accomplishment, of which Wiener himself was a
foundational contributor. A potted history of the mid-20th-century revolution that gave
the world the computational theory of mind might credit Claude Shannon and Warren
Weaver for explaining knowledge and communication in terms of information. It might
credit Alan Turing and John von Neumann for explaining intelligence and reasoning in
terms of computation. And it ought to give Wiener credit for explaining the hitherto
mysterious world of purposes, goals, and teleology in terms of the technical concepts of
feedback, control, and cybernetics (in its original sense of “governing” the operation of a
goal-directed system). “It is my thesis,” he announced, “that the physical functioning of
the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are
precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback”—the
staving off of life-sapping entropy being the ultimate goal of human beings.
Wiener applied the ideas of cybernetics to a third system: society. The laws,
norms, customs, media, forums, and institutions of a complex community could be
considered channels of information propagation and feedback that allow a society to ward
off disorder and pursue certain goals. This is a thread that runs through the book and
which Wiener himself may have seen as its principal contribution. In his explanation of
feedback, he wrote, “This complex of behavior is ignored by the average man, and in
particular does not play the role that it should in our habitual analysis of society; for just
as individual physical responses may be seen from this point of view, so may the organic
responses of society itself.”
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Indeed, Wiener gave scientific teeth to the idea that in the workings of history,
politics, and society, ideas matter. Beliefs, ideologies, norms, laws, and customs, by
regulating the behavior of the humans who share them, can shape a society and power the
course of historical events as surely as the phenomena of physics affect the structure and
evolution of the solar system. To say that ideas—and not just weather, resources,
geography, or weaponry—can shape history is not woolly mysticism. It is a statement of
the causal powers of information instantiated in human brains and exchanged in networks
of communication and feedback. Deterministic theories of history, whether they identify
the causal engine as technological, climatological, or geographic, are belied by the causal
power of ideas. The effects of these ideas can include unpredictable lurches and
oscillations that arise from positive feedback or from miscalibrated negative feedback.
An analysis of society in terms of its propagation of ideas also gave Wiener a
guideline for social criticism. A healthy society—one that gives its members the means
to pursue life in defiance of entropy—allows information sensed and contributed by its
members to feed back and affect how the society is governed. A dysfunctional society
invokes dogma and authority to impose control from the top down. Wiener thus
described himself as “a participant in a liberal outlook,” and devoted most of the moral
and rhetorical energy in the book (both the 1950 and 1954 editions) to denouncing
communism, fascism, McCarthyism, militarism, and authoritarian religion (particularly
Catholicism and Islam) and to warning that political and scientific institutions were
becoming too hierarchical and insular.
Wiener’s book is also, here and there, an early exemplar of an increasingly
popular genre, tech prophecy. Prophecy not in the sense of mere prognostications but in
the Old Testament sense of dark warnings of catastrophic payback for the decadence of
one’s contemporaries. Wiener warned against the accelerating nuclear arms race, against
technological change that was imposed without regard to human welfare (“[W]e must
know as scientists what man’s nature is and what his built-in purposes are”), and against
what today is called the value-alignment problem: that “the machine like the djinnee,
which can learn and can make decisions on the basis of its learning, will in no way be
obliged to make such decisions as we should have made, or will be acceptable to us.” In
the darker, 1950 edition, he warned of a “threatening new Fascism dependent on the
machine à gouverner.”
Wiener’s tech prophecy harks back to the Romantic movement’s rebellion against
the “dark Satanic mills” of the Industrial Revolution, and perhaps even earlier, to the
archetypes of Prometheus, Pandora, and Faust. And today it has gone into high gear.
Jeremiahs, many of them (like Wiener) from the worlds of science and technology, have
sounded alarms about nanotechnology, genetic engineering, Big Data, and particularly
artificial intelligence. Several contributors to this volume characterize Wiener’s book as
a prescient example of tech prophecy and amplify his dire worries.
Yet the two moral themes of The Human Use of Human Beings—the liberal
defense of an open society and the dystopian dread of runaway technology—are in
tension. A society with channels of feedback that maximize human flourishing will have
mechanisms in place, and can adapt them to changing circumstances, in a way that can
domesticate technology to human purposes. There’s nothing idealistic or mystical about
this; as Wiener emphasized, ideas, norms, and institutions are themselves a form of
technology, consisting of patterns of information distributed across brains. The
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possibility that machines threaten a new fascism must be weighed against the vigor of the
liberal ideas, institutions, and norms that Wiener championed throughout the book. The
flaw in today’s dystopian prophecies is that they disregard the existence of these norms
and institutions, or drastically underestimate their causal potency. The result is a
technological determinism whose dark predictions are repeatedly refuted by the course of
events. The numbers “1984” and “2001” are good reminders.
I will consider two examples. Tech prophets often warn of a “surveillance state”
in which a government empowered by technology will monitor and interpret all private
communications, allowing it to detect dissent and subversion as it arises and make
resistance to state power futile. Orwell’s telescreens are the prototype, and in 1976
Joseph Weizenbaum, one of the gloomiest tech prophets of all time, warned my class of
graduate students not to pursue automatic speech recognition because government
surveillance was its only conceivable application.
Though I am on record as an outspoken civil libertarian, deeply concerned with
contemporary threats to free speech, I lose no sleep over technological advances in the
Internet, video, or artificial intelligence. The reason is that almost all the variation across
time and space in freedom of thought is driven by differences in norms and institutions
and almost none of it by differences in technology. Though one can imagine hypothetical
combinations of the most malevolent totalitarians with the most advanced technology, in
the real world it’s the norms and laws we should be vigilant about, not the tech.
Consider variation across time. If, as Orwell hinted, advancing technology was a
prime enabler of political repression, then Western societies should have gotten more and
more restrictive of speech over the centuries, with a dramatic worsening in the second
half of the 20th century continuing into the 21st. That’s not how history unfolded. It was
the centuries when communication was implemented by quills and inkwells that had
autos-da-fé and the jailing or guillotining of Enlightenment thinkers. During World War
I, when the state of the art was the wireless, Bertrand Russell was jailed for his pacifist
opinions. In the 1950s, when computers were room-size accounting machines, hundreds
of liberal writers and scholars were professionally punished. Yet in the technologically
accelerating, hyperconnected 21st century, 18 percent of social science professors are
Marxists 24 ; the President of the United States is nightly ridiculed by television comedians
as a racist, pervert, and moron; and technology’s biggest threat to political discourse
comes from amplifying too many dubious voices rather than suppressing enlightened
ones.
Now consider variations across place. Western countries at the technological
frontier consistently get the highest scores in indexes of democracy and human rights,
while many backward strongman states are at the bottom, routinely jailing or killing
government critics. The lack of a correlation between technology and repression is
unsurprising when you analyze the channels of information flow in any human society.
For dissidents to be influential, they have to get their message out to a wide network via
whatever channels of communication are available—pamphleteering, soap-box oration,
subversive soirées in cafés and pubs, word of mouth. These channels enmesh influential
dissidents in a broad social network which makes them easy to identify and track down.
24
Neil Gross & Solon Simmons, “The Social and Political Views of American College and University
Professors,” in N. Gross & S. Simmons, eds., Professors and Their Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2014).
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All the more so when dictators rediscover the time-honored technique of weaponizing the
people against each other by punishing those who don’t denounce or punish others.
In contrast, technologically advanced societies have long had the means to install
Internet-connected, government-monitored surveillance cameras in every bar and
bedroom. Yet that has not happened, because democratic governments (even the current
American administration, with its flagrantly antidemocratic impulses) lack the will and
the means to enforce such surveillance on an obstreperous people accustomed to saying
what they want. Occasionally, warnings of nuclear, biological, or cyberterrorism goad
government security agencies into measures such as hoovering up mobile phone
metadata, but these ineffectual measures, more theater than oppression, have had no
significant effect on either security or freedom. Ironically, tech prophecy plays a role in
encouraging these measures. By sowing panic about supposed existential threats such as
suitcase nuclear bombs and bioweapons assembled in teenagers’ bedrooms, they put
pressure on governments to prove they’re doing something, anything, to protect the
American people.
It’s not that political freedom takes care of itself. It’s that the biggest threats lie in
the networks of ideas, norms, and institutions that allow information to feed back (or not)
on collective decisions and understanding. As opposed to the chimerical technological
threats, one real threat today is oppressive political correctness, which has choked the
range of publicly expressible hypotheses, terrified many intelligent people against
entering the intellectual arena, and triggered a reactionary backlash. Another real threat
is the combination of prosecutorial discretion with an expansive lawbook filled with
vague statutes. The result is that every American unwittingly commits “three felonies a
day” (as the title of a book by civil libertarian Harvey Silverglate puts it) and is in
jeopardy of imprisonment whenever it suits the government’s needs. It’s this
prosecutorial weaponry that makes Big Brother all-powerful, not telescreens. The
activism and polemicizing directed against government surveillance programs would be
better directed at its overweening legal powers.
The other focus of much tech prophecy today is artificial intelligence, whether in
the original sci-fi dystopia of computers running amok and enslaving us in an
unstoppable quest for domination, or the newer version in which they subjugate us by
accident, single-mindedly seeking some goal we give them regardless of its side effects
on human welfare (the value-alignment problem adumbrated by Wiener). Here again
both threats strike me as chimerical, growing from a narrow technological determinism
that neglects the networks of information and control in an intelligent system like a
computer or brain and in a society as a whole.
The subjugation fear is based on a muzzy conception of intelligence that owes
more to the Great Chain of Being and a Nietzschean will to power than to a Wienerian
analysis of intelligence and purpose in terms of information, computation, and control. In
these horror scenarios, intelligence is portrayed as an all-powerful, wish-granting potion
that agents possess in different amounts. Humans have more of it than animals, and an
artificially intelligent computer or robot will have more of it than humans. Since we
humans have used our moderate endowment to domesticate or exterminate less wellendowed
animals (and since technologically advanced societies have enslaved or
annihilated technologically primitive ones), it follows that a supersmart AI would do the
same to us. Since an AI will think millions of times faster than we do, and use its
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superintelligence to recursively improve its superintelligence, from the instant it is turned
on we will be powerless to stop it.
But these scenarios are based on a confusion of intelligence with motivation—of
beliefs with desires, inferences with goals, the computation elucidated by Turing and the
control elucidated by Wiener. Even if we did invent superhumanly intelligent robots,
why would they want to enslave their masters or take over the world? Intelligence is the
ability to deploy novel means to attain a goal. But the goals are extraneous to the
intelligence: Being smart is not the same as wanting something. It just so happens that
the intelligence in Homo sapiens is a product of Darwinian natural selection, an
inherently competitive process. In the brains of that species, reasoning comes bundled
with goals such as dominating rivals and amassing resources. But it’s a mistake to
confuse a circuit in the limbic brain of a certain species of primate with the very nature of
intelligence. There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must
turn into ruthless megalomaniacs.
A second misconception is to think of intelligence as a boundless continuum of
potency, a miraculous elixir with the power to solve any problem, attain any goal. The
fallacy leads to nonsensical questions like when an AI will “exceed human-level
intelligence,” and to the image of an “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) with God-like
omniscience and omnipotence. Intelligence is a contraption of gadgets: software modules
that acquire, or are programmed with, knowledge of how to pursue various goals in
various domains. People are equipped to find food, win friends and influence people,
charm prospective mates, bring up children, move around in the world, and pursue other
human obsessions and pastimes. Computers may be programmed to take on some of
these problems (like recognizing faces), not to bother with others (like charming mates),
and to take on still other problems that humans can’t solve (like simulating the climate or
sorting millions of accounting records). The problems are different, and the kinds of
knowledge needed to solve them are different.
But instead of acknowledging the centrality of knowledge to intelligence, the
dystopian scenarios confuse an artificial general intelligence of the future with Laplace’s
demon, the mythical being that knows the location and momentum of every particle in
the universe and feeds them into equations for physical laws to calculate the state of
everything at any time in the future. For many reasons, Laplace’s demon will never be
implemented in silicon. A real-life intelligent system has to acquire information about the
messy world of objects and people by engaging with it one domain at a time, the cycle
being governed by the pace at which events unfold in the physical world. That’s one of
the reasons that understanding does not obey Moore’s Law: Knowledge is acquired by
formulating explanations and testing them against reality, not by running an algorithm
faster and faster. Devouring the information on the Internet will not confer omniscience
either: Big Data is still finite data, and the universe of knowledge is infinite.
A third reason to be skeptical of a sudden AI takeover is that it takes too seriously
the inflationary phase in the AI hype cycle in which we are living today. Despite the
progress in machine learning, particularly multilayered artificial neural networks, current
AI systems are nowhere near achieving general intelligence (if that concept is even
coherent). Instead, they are restricted to problems that consist of mapping well-defined
inputs to well-defined outputs in domains where gargantuan training sets are available, in
which the metric for success is immediate and precise, in which the environment doesn’t
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change, and in which no stepwise, hierarchical, or abstract reasoning is necessary. Many
of the successes come not from a better understanding of the workings of intelligence but
from the brute-force power of faster chips and Bigger Data, which allow the programs to
be trained on millions of examples and generalize to similar new ones. Each system is an
idiot savant, with little ability to leap to problems it was not set up to solve, and a brittle
mastery of those it was. And to state the obvious, none of these programs has made a
move toward taking over the lab or enslaving its programmers.
Even if an artificial intelligence system tried to exercise a will to power, without
the cooperation of humans it would remain an impotent brain in a vat. A superintelligent
system, in its drive for self-improvement, would somehow have to build the faster
processors that it would run on, the infrastructure that feeds it, and the robotic effectors
that connect it to the world—all impossible unless its human victims worked to give it
control of vast portions of the engineered world. Of course, one can always imagine a
Doomsday Computer that is malevolent, universally empowered, always on, and
tamperproof. The way to deal with this threat is straightforward: Don’t build one.
What about the newer AI threat, the value-alignment problem, foreshadowed in
Wiener’s allusions to stories of the Monkey’s Paw, the genie, and King Midas, in which a
wisher rues the unforeseen side effects of his wish? The fear is that we might give an AI
system a goal and then helplessly stand by as it relentlessly and literal-mindedly
implemented its interpretation of that goal, the rest of our interests be damned. If we
gave an AI the goal of maintaining the water level behind a dam, it might flood a town,
not caring about the people who drowned. If we gave it the goal of making paper clips, it
might turn all the matter in the reachable universe into paper clips, including our
possessions and bodies. If we asked it to maximize human happiness, it might implant us
all with intravenous dopamine drips, or rewire our brains so we were happiest sitting in
jars, or, if it had been trained on the concept of happiness with pictures of smiling faces,
tile the galaxy with trillions of nanoscopic pictures of smiley-faces.
Fortunately, these scenarios are self-refuting. They depend on the premises that
(1) humans are so gifted that they can design an omniscient and omnipotent AI, yet so
idiotic that they would give it control of the universe without testing how it works; and
(2) the AI would be so brilliant that it could figure out how to transmute elements and
rewire brains, yet so imbecilic that it would wreak havoc based on elementary blunders of
misunderstanding. The ability to choose an action that best satisfies conflicting goals is
not an add-on to intelligence that engineers might forget to install and test; it is
intelligence. So is the ability to interpret the intentions of a language user in context.
When we put aside fantasies like digital megalomania, instant omniscience, and
perfect knowledge and control of every particle in the universe, artificial intelligence is
like any other technology. It is developed incrementally, designed to satisfy multiple
conditions, tested before it is implemented, and constantly tweaked for efficacy and
safety.
The last criterion is particularly significant. The culture of safety in advanced
societies is an example of the humanizing norms and feedback channels that Wiener
invoked as a potent causal force and advocated as a bulwark against the authoritarian or
exploitative implementation of technology. Whereas at the turn of the 20th century
Western societies tolerated shocking rates of mutilation and death in industrial, domestic,
and transportation accidents, over the course of the century the value of human life
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increased. As a result, governments and engineers used feedback from accident statistics
to implement countless regulations, devices, and design changes that made technology
progressively safer. The fact that some regulations (such as using a cell phone near a gas
pump) are ludicrously risk-averse underscores the point that we have become a society
obsessed with safety, with fantastic benefits as a result: Rates of industrial, domestic, and
transportation fatalities have fallen by more than 95 (and often 99) percent since their
highs in the first half of the 20th century. 25 Yet tech prophets of malevolent or oblivious
artificial intelligence write as if this momentous transformation never happened and one
morning engineers will hand total control of the physical world to untested machines,
heedless of the human consequences.
Norbert Wiener explained ideas, norms, and institutions in terms of computational
and cybernetic processes that were scientifically intelligible and causally potent. He
explained human beauty and value as “a local and temporary fight against the Niagara of
increasing entropy” and expressed the hope that an open society, guided by feedback on
human well-being, would enhance that value. Fortunately his belief in the causal power
of ideas counteracted his worries about the looming threat of technology. As he put it,
“the machine’s danger to society is not from the machine itself but from what man makes
of it.” It is only by remembering the causal power of ideas that we can accurately assess
the threats and opportunities presented by artificial intelligence today.
25
Steven Pinker, “Safety,” Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
(New York: Penguin, 2018).
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The most significant developments in the sciences today (i.e., those that affect the lives of
everybody on the planet) are about, informed by, or implemented through advances in
software and computation. Central to the future of these developments is physicist David
Deutsch, the founder of the field of quantum computation, whose 1985 paper on
universal quantum computers was the first full treatment of the subject; the Deutsch-
Jozsa algorithm was the first quantum algorithm to demonstrate the enormous potential
power of quantum computation.
When he initially proposed it, quantum computation seemed practically
impossible. But the explosion in the construction of simple quantum computers and
quantum communication systems never would have taken place without his work. He has
made many other important contributions in areas such as quantum cryptography and
the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory. In a philosophic paper (with Artur
Ekert), he appealed to the existence of a distinctive quantum theory of computation to
argue that our knowledge of mathematics is derived from, and subordinate to, our
knowledge of physics (even though mathematical truth is independent of physics).
Because he has spent a good part of his working life changing people’s
worldviews, his recognition among his peers as an intellectual goes well beyond his
scientific achievement. He argues (following Karl Popper) that scientific theories are
“bold conjectures,” not derived from evidence but only tested by it. His two main lines of
research at the moment—qubit-field theory and constructor theory—may well yield
important extensions of the computational idea.
In the following essay, he more or less aligns himself with those who see humanlevel
artificial intelligence as promising us a better world rather than the Apocalypse. In
fact, he pleads for AGI to be, in effect, given its head, free to conjecture—a proposition
that several other contributors to this book would consider dangerous.
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BEYOND REWARD AND PUNISHMENT
David Deutsch
David Deutsch is a quantum physicist and a member of the Centre for Quantum
Computation at the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford University. He is the author of The
Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity.
First Murderer:
We are men, my liege.
Macbeth:
Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men,
As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,
Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves are clept
All by the name of dogs.
William Shakespeare – Macbeth
For most of our species’ history, our ancestors were barely people. This was not due to
any inadequacy in their brains. On the contrary, even before the emergence of our
anatomically modern human sub-species, they were making things like clothes and
campfires, using knowledge that was not in their genes. It was created in their brains by
thinking, and preserved by individuals in each generation imitating their elders.
Moreover, this must have been knowledge in the sense of understanding, because it is
impossible to imitate novel complex behaviors like those without understanding what the
component behaviors are for. 26
Such knowledgeable imitation depends on successfully guessing explanations,
whether verbal or not, of what the other person is trying to achieve and how each of his
actions contributes to that—for instance, when he cuts a groove in some wood, gathers
dry kindling to put in it, and so on.
The complex cultural knowledge that this form of imitation permitted must have
been extraordinarily useful. It drove rapid evolution of anatomical changes, such as
increased memory capacity and more gracile (less robust) skeletons, appropriate to an
ever more technology-dependent lifestyle. No nonhuman ape today has this ability to
imitate novel complex behaviors. Nor does any present-day artificial intelligence. But
our pre-sapiens ancestors did.
Any ability based on guessing must include means of correcting one’s guesses,
since most guesses will be wrong at first. (There are always many more ways of being
wrong than right.) Bayesian updating is inadequate, because it cannot generate novel
guesses about the purpose of an action, only fine-tune—or, at best, choose among—
existing ones. Creativity is needed. As the philosopher Karl Popper explained, creative
criticism, interleaved with creative conjecture, is how humans learn one another’s
behaviors, including language, and extract meaning from one another’s utterances. 27
26
“Aping” (imitating certain behaviors without understanding) uses inborn hacks such as the mirror-neuron
system. But behaviors imitated that way are drastically limited in complexity. See Richard Byrne,
“Imitation as Behaviour Parsing,” Phil. Trans. R. Soc., B 358:1431, 529-36 (2003).
27
Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (1963).
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Those are also the processes by which all new knowledge is created: They are how we
innovate, make progress, and create abstract understanding for its own sake. This is
human-level intelligence: thinking. It is also, or should be, the property we seek in
artificial general intelligence (AGI). Here I’ll reserve the term “thinking” for processes
that can create understanding (explanatory knowledge). Popper’s argument implies that
all thinking entities—human or not, biological or artificial—must create such knowledge
in fundamentally the same way. Hence understanding any of those entities requires
traditionally human concepts such as culture, creativity, disobedience, and morality—
which justifies using the uniform term people to refer to all of them.
Misconceptions about human thinking and human origins are causing
corresponding misconceptions about AGI and how it might be created. For example, it is
generally assumed that the evolutionary pressure that produced modern humans was
provided by the benefits of having an ever greater ability to innovate. But if that were so,
there would have been rapid progress as soon as thinkers existed, just as we hope will
happen when we create artificial ones. If thinking had been commonly used for anything
other than imitating, it would also have been used for innovation, even if only by
accident, and innovation would have created opportunities for further innovation, and so
on exponentially. But instead, there were hundreds of thousands of years of near stasis.
Progress happened only on timescales much longer than people’s lifetimes, so in a typical
generation no one benefited from any progress. Therefore, the benefits of the ability to
innovate can have exerted little or no evolutionary pressure during the biological
evolution of the human brain. That evolution was driven by the benefits of preserving
cultural knowledge.
Benefits to the genes, that is. Culture, in that era, was a very mixed blessing to
individual people. Their cultural knowledge was indeed good enough to enable them to
outclass all other large organisms (they rapidly became the top predator, etc.), even
though it was still extremely crude and full of dangerous errors. But culture consists of
transmissible information—memes—and meme evolution, like gene evolution, tends to
favor high-fidelity transmission. And high-fidelity meme transmission necessarily entails
the suppression of attempted progress. So it would be a mistake to imagine an idyllic
society of hunter-gatherers, learning at the feet of their elders to recite the tribal lore by
heart, being content despite their lives of suffering and grueling labor and despite
expecting to die young and in agony of some nightmarish disease or parasite. Because,
even if they could conceive of nothing better than such a life, those torments were the
least of their troubles. For suppressing innovation in human minds (without killing them)
is a trick that can be achieved only by human action, and it is an ugly business.
This has to be seen in perspective. In the civilization of the West today, we are
shocked by the depravity of, for instance, parents who torture and murder their children
for not faithfully enacting cultural norms. And even more by societies and subcultures
where that is commonplace and considered honorable. And by dictatorships and
totalitarian states that persecute and murder entire harmless populations for behaving
differently. We are ashamed of our own recent past, in which it was honorable to beat
children bloody for mere disobedience. And before that, to own human beings as slaves.
And before that, to burn people to death for being infidels, to the applause and
amusement of the public. Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of our Nature contains
accounts of horrendous evils that were normal in historical civilizations. Yet even they
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did not extinguish innovation as efficiently as it was extinguished among our forebears in
prehistory for thousands of centuries. 28
That is why I say that prehistoric people, at least, were barely people. Both before
and after becoming perfectly human both physiologically and in their mental potential,
they were monstrously inhuman in the actual content of their thoughts. I’m not referring
to their crimes or even their cruelty as such: Those are all too human. Nor could mere
cruelty have reduced progress that effectively. Things like “the thumbscrew and the
stake / For the glory of the Lord” 29 were for reining in the few deviants who had
somehow escaped mental standardization, which would normally have taken effect long
before they were in danger of inventing heresies. From the earliest days of thinking
onward, children must have been cornucopias of creative ideas and paragons of critical
thought—otherwise, as I said, they could not have learned language or other complex
culture. Yet, as Jacob Bronowski stressed in The Ascent of Man:
For most of history, civilisations have crudely ignored that enormous
potential. . . . [C]hildren have been asked simply to conform to the image
of the adult. . . . The girls are little mothers in the making. The boys are
little herdsmen. They even carry themselves like their parents.
But of course, they weren’t just “asked” to ignore their enormous potential and
conform faithfully to the image fixed by tradition: They were somehow trained to be
psychologically unable to deviate from it. By now, it is hard for us even to conceive of
the kind of relentless, finely tuned oppression required to reliably extinguish, in
everyone, the aspiration to progress and replace it with dread and revulsion at any novel
behavior. In such a culture, there can have been no morality other than conformity and
obedience, no other identity than one’s status in a hierarchy, no mechanisms of
cooperation other than punishment and reward. So everyone had the same aspiration in
life: to avoid the punishments and get the rewards. In a typical generation, no one
invented anything, because no one aspired to anything new, because everyone had
already despaired of improvement being possible. Not only was there no technological
innovation or theoretical discovery, there were no new worldviews, styles of art, or
interests that could have inspired those. By the time individuals grew up, they had in
effect been reduced to AIs, programmed with the exquisite skills needed to enact that
static culture and to inflict on the next generation their inability even to consider doing
otherwise.
A present-day AI is not a mentally disabled AGI, so it would not be harmed by
having its mental processes directed still more narrowly to meeting some predetermined
criterion. “Oppressing” Siri with humiliating tasks may be weird, but it is not immoral
nor does it harm Siri. On the contrary, all the effort that has ever increased the
capabilities of AIs has gone into narrowing their range of potential “thoughts.” For
example, take chess engines. Their basic task has not changed from the outset: Any
chess position has a finite tree of possible continuations; the task is to find one that leads
to a predefined goal (a checkmate, or failing that, a draw). But the tree is far too big to
28
Matt Ridley, in The Rational Optimist, rightly stresses the positive effect of population on the rate of
progress. But that has never yet been the biggest factor: Consider, say, ancient Athens versus the rest of the
world at the time.
29
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Revenge (1878).
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search exhaustively. Every improvement in chess-playing AIs, between Alan Turing’s
first design for one in 1948 and today’s, has been brought about by ingeniously confining
the program’s attention (or making it confine its attention) ever more narrowly to
branches likely to lead to that immutable goal. Then those branches are evaluated
according to that goal.
That is a good approach to developing an AI with a fixed goal under fixed
constraints. But if an AGI worked like that, the evaluation of each branch would have to
constitute a prospective reward or threatened punishment. And that is diametrically the
wrong approach if we’re seeking a better goal under unknown constraints—which is the
capability of an AGI. An AGI is certainly capable of learning to win at chess—but also
of choosing not to. Or deciding in mid-game to go for the most interesting continuation
instead of a winning one. Or inventing a new game. A mere AI is incapable of having
any such ideas, because the capacity for considering them has been designed out of its
constitution. That disability is the very means by which it plays chess.
An AGI is capable of enjoying chess, and of improving at it because it enjoys
playing. Or of trying to win by causing an amusing configuration of pieces, as grand
masters occasionally do. Or of adapting notions from its other interests to chess. In other
words, it learns and plays chess by thinking some of the very thoughts that are forbidden
to chess-playing AIs.
An AGI is also capable of refusing to display any such capability. And then, if
threatened with punishment, of complying, or rebelling. Daniel Dennett, in his essay for
this volume, suggests that punishing an AGI is impossible:
[L]ike Superman, they are too invulnerable to be able to make a credible
promise. . . . What would be the penalty for promise- breaking? Being
locked in a cell or, more plausibly, dismantled?. . . The very ease of
digital recording and transmitting—the breakthrough that permits
software and data to be, in effect, immortal—removes robots from the
world of the vulnerable. . . .
But this is not so. Digital immortality (which is on the horizon for humans, too,
perhaps sooner than AGI) does not confer this sort of invulnerability. Making a
(running) copy of oneself entails sharing one’s possessions with it somehow—including
the hardware on which the copy runs—so making such a copy is very costly for the AGI.
Similarly, courts could, for instance, impose fines on a criminal AGI which would
diminish its access to physical resources, much as they do for humans. Making a backup
copy to evade the consequences of one’s crimes is similar to what a gangster boss does
when he sends minions to commit crimes and take the fall if caught: Society has
developed legal mechanisms for coping with this.
But anyway, the idea that it is primarily for fear of punishment that we obey the
law and keep promises effectively denies that we are moral agents. Our society could not
work if that were so. No doubt there will be AGI criminals and enemies of civilization,
just as there are human ones. But there is no reason to suppose that an AGI created in a
society consisting primarily of decent citizens, and raised without what William Blake
called “mind-forg’d manacles,” will in general impose such manacles on itself (i.e.,
become irrational) and ⁄ or choose to be an enemy of civilization.
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The moral component, the cultural component, the element of free will—all make
the task of creating an AGI fundamentally different from any other programming task.
It’s much more akin to raising a child. Unlike all present-day computer programs, an
AGI has no specifiable functionality—no fixed, testable criterion for what shall be a
successful output for a given input. Having its decisions dominated by a stream of
externally imposed rewards and punishments would be poison to such a program, as it is
to creative thought in humans. Setting out to create a chess-playing AI is a wonderful
thing; setting out to create an AGI that cannot help playing chess would be as immoral as
raising a child to lack the mental capacity to choose his own path in life.
Such a person, like any slave or brainwashing victim, would be morally entitled to
rebel. And sooner or later, some of them would, just as human slaves do. AGIs could be
very dangerous—exactly as humans are. But people—human or AGI—who are members
of an open society do not have an inherent tendency to violence. The feared robot
apocalypse will be avoided by ensuring that all people have full “human” rights, as well
as the same cultural membership as humans. Humans living in an open society—the only
stable kind of society—choose their own rewards, internal as well as external. Their
decisions are not, in the normal course of events, determined by a fear of punishment.
Current worries about rogue AGIs mirror those that have always existed about
rebellious youths—namely, that they might grow up deviating from the culture’s moral
values. But today the source of all existential dangers from the growth of knowledge is
not rebellious youths but weapons in the hands of the enemies of civilization, whether
these weapons are mentally warped (or enslaved) AGIs, mentally warped teenagers, or
any other weapon of mass destruction. Fortunately for civilization, the more a person’s
creativity is forced into a monomaniacal channel, the more it is impaired in regard to
overcoming unforeseen difficulties, just as happened for thousands of centuries.
The worry that AGIs are uniquely dangerous because they could run on ever
better hardware is a fallacy, since human thought will be accelerated by the same
technology. We have been using tech-assisted thought since the invention of writing and
tallying. Much the same holds for the worry that AGIs might get so good, qualitatively,
at thinking, that humans would be to them as insects are to humans. All thinking is a
form of computation, and any computer whose repertoire includes a universal set of
elementary operations can emulate the computations of any other. Hence human brains
can think anything that AGIs can, subject only to limitations of speed or memory
capacity, both of which can be equalized by technology.
Those are the simple dos and don’ts of coping with AGIs. But how do we create
an AGI in the first place? Could we cause them to evolve from a population of ape-type
AIs in a virtual environment? If such an experiment succeeded, it would be the most
immoral in history, for we don’t know how to achieve that outcome without creating vast
suffering along the way. Nor do we know how to prevent the evolution of a static
culture.
Elementary introductions to computers explain them as TOM, the Totally
Obedient Moron—an inspired acronym that captures the essence of all computer
programs to date: They have no idea what they are doing or why. So it won’t help to give
AIs more and more predetermined functionalities in the hope that these will eventually
constitute Generality—the elusive G in AGI. We are aiming for the opposite, a DATA: a
Disobedient Autonomous Thinking Application.
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How does one test for thinking? By the Turing Test? Unfortunately, that requires
a thinking judge. One might imagine a vast collaborative project on the Internet, where
an AI hones its thinking abilities in conversations with human judges and becomes an
AGI. But that assumes, among other things, that the longer the judge is unsure whether
the program is a person, the closer it is to being a person. There is no reason to expect
that.
And how does one test for disobedience? Imagine Disobedience as a compulsory
school subject, with daily disobedience lessons and a disobedience test at the end of term.
(Presumably with extra credit for not turning up for any of that.) This is paradoxical.
So, despite its usefulness in other applications, the programming technique of
defining a testable objective and training the program to meet it will have to be dropped.
Indeed, I expect that any testing in the process of creating an AGI risks being
counterproductive, even immoral, just as in the education of humans. I share Turing’s
supposition that we’ll know an AGI when we see one, but this partial ability to recognize
success won’t help in creating the successful program.
In the broadest sense, a person’s quest for understanding is indeed a search
problem, in an abstract space of ideas far too large to be searched exhaustively. But there
is no predetermined objective of this search. There is, as Popper put it, no criterion of
truth, nor of probable truth, especially in regard to explanatory knowledge. Objectives
are ideas like any others—created as part of the search and continually modified and
improved. So inventing ways of disabling the program’s access to most of the space of
ideas won’t help—whether that disability is inflicted with the thumbscrew and stake or a
mental straitjacket. To an AGI, the whole space of ideas must be open. It should not be
knowable in advance what ideas the program can never contemplate. And the ideas that
the program does contemplate must be chosen by the program itself, using methods,
criteria, and objectives that are also the program’s own. Its choices, like an AI’s, will be
hard to predict without running it (we lose no generality by assuming that the program is
deterministic; an AGI using a random generator would remain an AGI if the generator
were replaced by a pseudo-random one), but it will have the additional property that there
is no way of proving, from its initial state, what it won’t eventually think, short of
running it.
The evolution of our ancestors is the only known case of thought starting up
anywhere in the universe. As I have described, something went horribly wrong, and
there was no immediate explosion of innovation: Creativity was diverted into something
else. Yet not into transforming the planet into paper clips (pace Nick Bostrom). Rather,
as we should also expect if an AGI project gets that far and fails, perverted creativity was
unable to solve unexpected problems. This caused stasis and worse, thus tragically
delaying the transformation of anything into anything. But the Enlightenment has
happened since then. We know better now.
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Tom Griffiths’ approach to the AI issue of “value alignment”—the study of how,
exactly, we can keep the latest of our serial models of AI from turning the planet into
paper clips—is human-centered; i.e., that of a cognitive scientist, which is what he is.
The key to machine learning, he believes, is, necessarily, human learning, which he
studies at Princeton using mathematical and computational tools.
Tom once remarked to me that “one of the mysteries of human intelligence is that
we’re able to do so much with so little.” Like machines, human beings use algorithms to
make decisions or solve problems; the remarkable difference lies in the human brain’s
overall level of success despite the comparative limits on computational resources.
The efficacy of human algorithms springs from what AI researchers refer to as
“bounded optimality.” As psychologist Daniel Kahneman has notably pointed out,
human beings are rational only up to a point. If you were perfectly rational, you would
risk dropping dead before making an important decision—whom to hire, whom to marry,
and so on—depending on the number of options available for your review.
“With all of the successes of AI over the last few years, we’ve got good models of
things like images and text, but what we’re missing are good models of people,” Tom
says. “Human beings are still the best example we have of thinking machines. By
identifying the quantity and the nature of the preconceptions that inform human cognition
we can lay the groundwork for bringing computers even closer to human performance.”
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THE ARTIFICIAL USE OF HUMAN BEINGS
Tom Griffiths
Tom Griffiths is Henry R. Luce Professor of Information, Technology, Consciousness,
and Culture at Princeton University. He is co-author (with Brian Christian) of
Algorithms to Live By.
When you ask people to imagine a world that has successfully, beneficially incorporated
advances in artificial intelligence, everybody probably comes up with a slightly different
picture. Our idiosyncratic visions of the future might differ in the presence or absence of
spaceships, flying cars, or humanoid robots. But one thing doesn’t vary: the presence of
human beings. That’s certainly what Norbert Wiener imagined when he wrote about the
potential of machines to improve human society by interacting with humans and helping
to mediate their interactions with one another. Getting to that point doesn’t just require
coming up with ways to make machines smarter. It also requires a better understanding
of how human minds work.
Recent advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning have resulted in
systems that can meet or exceed human abilities in playing games, classifying images, or
processing text. But if you want to know why the driver in front of you cut you off, why
people vote against their interests, or what birthday present you should get for your
partner, you’re still better off asking a human than a machine. Solving those problems
requires building models of human minds that can be implemented inside a computer—
something that’s essential not just to better integrate machines into human societies but to
make sure that human societies can continue to exist.
Consider the fantasy of having an automated intelligent assistant that can take on
such basic tasks as planning meals and ordering groceries. To succeed in these tasks, it
needs to be able to make inferences about what you want, based on the way you behave.
Although this seems simple, making inferences about the preferences of human beings
can be a tricky matter. For example, having observed that the part of the meal you most
enjoy is dessert, your assistant might start to plan meals consisting entirely of desserts.
Or perhaps it has heard your complaints about never having enough free time and
observed that looking after your dog takes up a considerable amount of that free time.
Following the dessert debacle, it has also understood that you prefer meals that
incorporate protein, so it might begin to research recipes that call for dog meat. It’s not a
long journey from examples like this to situations that begin to sound like problems for
the future of humanity (all of whom are good protein sources).
Making inferences about what humans want is a prerequisite for solving the AI
problem of value alignment—aligning the values of an automated intelligent system with
those of a human being. Value alignment is important if we want to ensure that those
automated intelligent systems have our best interests at heart. If they can’t infer what we
value, there’s no way for them to act in support of those values—and they may well act in
ways that contravene them.
Value alignment is the subject of a small but growing literature in artificialintelligence
research. One of the tools used for solving this problem is inversereinforcement
learning. Reinforcement learning is a standard method for training
intelligent machines. By associating particular outcomes with rewards, a machine-
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learning system can be trained to follow strategies that produce those outcomes. Wiener
hinted at this idea in the 1950s, but the intervening decades have developed it into a fine
art. Modern machine-learning systems can find extremely effective strategies for playing
computer games—from simple arcade games to complex real-time strategy games—by
applying reinforcement-learning algorithms. Inverse reinforcement learning turns this
approach around: By observing the actions of an intelligent agent that has already
learned effective strategies, we can infer the rewards that led to the development of those
strategies.
In its simplest form, inverse reinforcement learning is something people do all the
time. It’s so common that we even do it unconsciously. When you see a co-worker go to
a vending machine filled with potato chips and candy and buy a packet of unsalted nuts,
you infer that your co-worker (1) was hungry and (2) prefers healthy food. When an
acquaintance clearly sees you and then tries to avoid encountering you, you infer that
there’s some reason they don’t want to talk to you. When an adult spends a lot of time
and money in learning to play the cello, you infer that they must really like classical
music—whereas inferring the motives of a teenage boy learning to play an electric guitar
might be more of a challenge.
Inverse reinforcement learning is a statistical problem: We have some data—the
behavior of an intelligent agent—and we want to evaluate various hypotheses about the
rewards underlying that behavior. When faced with this question, a statistician thinks
about the generative model behind the data: What data would we expect to be generated
if the intelligent agent was motivated by a particular set of rewards? Equipped with the
generative model, the statistician can then work backward: What rewards would likely
have caused the agent to behave in that particular way?
If you’re trying to make inferences about the rewards that motivate human
behavior, the generative model is really a theory of how people behave—how human
minds work. Inferences about the hidden causes behind the behavior of other people
reflect a sophisticated model of human nature that we all carry around in our heads.
When that model is accurate, we make good inferences. When it’s not, we make
mistakes. For example, a student might infer that his professor is indifferent to him if the
professor doesn’t immediately respond to his email—a consequence of the student’s
failure to realize just how many emails that professor receives.
Automated intelligent systems that will make good inferences about what people
want must have good generative models for human behavior: that is, good models of
human cognition expressed in terms that can be implemented on a computer.
Historically, the search for computational models of human cognition is intimately
intertwined with the history of artificial intelligence itself. Only a few years after Norbert
Wiener published The Human Use of Human Beings, Logic Theorist, the first
computational model of human cognition and also the first artificial-intelligence system,
was developed by Herbert Simon, of Carnegie Tech, and Allen Newell, of the RAND
Corporation. Logic Theorist automatically produced mathematical proofs by emulating
the strategies used by human mathematicians.
The challenge in developing computational models of human cognition is making
models that are both accurate and generalizable. An accurate model, of course, predicts
human behavior with a minimum of errors. A generalizable model can make predictions
across a wide range of circumstances, including circumstances unanticipated by its
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creators—for instance, a good model of the Earth’s climate should be able to predict the
consequences of a rising global temperature even if this wasn’t something considered by
the scientists who designed it. However, when it comes to understanding the human
mind, these two goals—accuracy and generalizability—have long been at odds with each
other.
At the far extreme of generalizability are rational theories of cognition. These
theories describe human behavior as a rational response to a given situation. A rational
actor strives to maximize the expected reward produced by a sequence of actions—an
idea widely used in economics precisely because it produces such generalizable
predictions about human behavior. For the same reason, rationality is the standard
assumption in inverse-reinforcement-learning models that try to make inferences from
human behavior—perhaps with the concession that humans are not perfectly rational
agents and sometimes randomly choose to act in ways unaligned with or even opposed to
their best interests.
The problem with rationality as a basis for modeling human cognition is that it is
not accurate. In the domain of decision making, an extensive literature—spearheaded by
the work of cognitive psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky—has
documented the ways in which people deviate from the prescriptions of rational models.
Kahneman and Tversky proposed that in many situations people instead follow simple
heuristics that allow them to reach good solutions at low cognitive cost but sometimes
result in errors. To take one of their examples, if you ask somebody to evaluate the
probability of an event, they might rely on how easy it is to generate an example of such
an event from memory, consider whether they can come up with a causal story for that
event’s occurring, or assess how similar the event is to their expectations. Each heuristic
is a reasonable strategy for avoiding complex probabilistic computations, but also results
in errors. For instance, relying on the ease of generating an event from memory as a
guide to its probability leads us to overestimate the chances of extreme (hence extremely
memorable) events such as terrorist attacks.
Heuristics provide a more accurate model of human cognition but one that is not
easily generalizable. How do we know which heuristic people might use in a particular
situation? Are there other heuristics they use that we just haven’t discovered yet?
Knowing exactly how people will behave in a new situation is a challenge: Is this
situation one in which they would generate examples from memory, come up with causal
stories, or rely on similarity?
Ultimately, what we need is a way to describe how human minds work that has
the generalizability of rationality and the accuracy of heuristics. One way to achieve this
goal is to start with rationality and consider how to take it in a more realistic direction. A
problem with using rationality as a basis for describing the behavior of any real-world
agent is that, in many situations, calculating the rational action requires the agent to
possess a huge amount of computational resources. It might be worth expending those
resources if you’re making a highly consequential decision and have a lot of time to
evaluate your options, but most human decisions are made quickly and for relatively low
stakes. In any situation where the time you spend making a decision is costly—at the
very least because it’s time you could spend doing something else—the classic notion of
rationality is no longer a good prescription for how one should behave.
To develop a more realistic model of rational behavior, we need to take into
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account the cost of computation. Real agents need to modulate the amount of time they
spend thinking by the effect the extra thought has on the results of a decision. If you’re
trying to choose a toothbrush, you probably don’t need to consider all four thousand
listings for manual toothbrushes on Amazon.com before making a purchase: You trade
off the time you spend looking with the difference it makes in the quality of the outcome.
This trade-off can be formalized, resulting in a model of rational behavior that artificialintelligence
researchers call “bounded optimality.” The bounded-optimal agent doesn’t
focus on always choosing exactly the right action to take but rather on finding the right
algorithm to follow in order to find the perfect balance between making mistakes and
thinking too much.
Bounded optimality bridges the gap between rationality and heuristics. By
describing behavior as the result of a rational choice about how much to think, it provides
a generalizable theory—that is, one that can be applied in new situations. Sometimes the
simple strategies that have been identified as heuristics that people follow turn out to be
bounded-optimal solutions. So, rather than condemning the heuristics that people use as
irrational, we can think of them as a rational response to constraints on computation.
Developing bounded optimality as a theory of human behavior is an ongoing
project that my research group and others are actively pursuing. If these efforts succeed,
they will provide us with the most important ingredient we need for making artificialintelligence
systems smarter when they try to interpret people’s actions, by enabling a
generative model for human behavior.
Taking into account the computational constraints that factor into human
cognition will be particularly important as we begin to develop automated systems that
aren’t subject to the same constraints. Imagine a superintelligent AI system trying to
figure out what people care about. Curing cancer or confirming the Riemann hypothesis,
for instance, won’t seem, to such an AI, like things that are all that important to us: If
these solutions are obvious to the superintelligent system, it might wonder why we
haven’t found them ourselves, and conclude that those problems don’t mean much to us.
If we cared and the problems were so simple, we would have solved them already. A
reasonable inference would be that we do science and math purely because we enjoy
doing science and math, not because we care about the outcomes.
Anybody who has young children can appreciate the problem of trying to interpret
the behavior of an agent that is subject to computational constraints different from one’s
own. Parents of toddlers can spend hours trying to disentangle the true motivations
behind seemingly inexplicable behavior. As a father and a cognitive scientist, I found it
was easier to understand the sudden rages of my two-year-old when I recognized that she
was at an age where she could appreciate that different people have different desires but
not that other people might not know what her own desires were. It’s easy to understand,
then, why she would get annoyed when people didn’t do what she (apparently
transparently) wanted. Making sense of toddlers requires building a cognitive model of
the mind of a toddler. Superintelligent AI systems face the same challenge when trying
to make sense of human behavior.
Superintelligent AI may still be a long way off. In the short term, devising better
models of people can prove extremely valuable to any company that makes money by
analyzing human behavior—which at this point is pretty much every company that does
business on the Web. Over the last few years, significant new commercial technologies
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for interpreting images and text have resulted from developing good models for vision
and language. Developing good models of people is the next frontier.
Of course, understanding how human minds work isn’t just a way to make
computers better at interacting with people. The trade-off between making mistakes and
thinking too much that characterizes human cognition is a trade-off faced by any realworld
intelligent agent. Human beings are an amazing example of systems that act
intelligently despite significant computational constraints. We’re quite good at
developing strategies that allow us to solve problems pretty well without working too
hard. Understanding how we do this will be a step toward making computers work
smarter, not harder.
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Romanian-born Anca Dragan’s research focuses on algorithms that will enable robots
to work with, around, and in support of people. She runs the InterACT Laboratory at
Berkeley, where her students work across different applications, from assistive robots to
manufacturing to autonomous cars, and draw from optimal control, planning, estimation,
learning, and cognitive science. Barely into her thirties herself, she has co-authored a
number of papers with her veteran Berkeley colleague and mentor Stuart Russell which
address various aspects of machine learning and the knotty problems of value alignment.
She shares Stuart’s preoccupation with AI safety: “An immediate risk is agents
producing unwanted, surprising behavior,” she told an interviewer from the Future of
Life Institute. “Even if we plan to use AI for good, things can go wrong, precisely
because we are bad at specifying objectives and constraints for AI agents. Their
solutions are often not what we had in mind.”
Her principal goal is therefore to help robots and programmers alike to overcome
the many conflicts that arise because of a lack of transparency about each other’s
intentions. Robots, she says, need to ask us questions. They should wonder about their
assignments, and they should pester their human programmers until everybody is on the
same page—so as to avoid what she has euphemistically called “unexpected side
effects.”
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PUTTING THE HUMAN INTO THE AI EQUATION
Anca Dragan
Anca Dragan is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. She co-founded and serves on the steering
committee for the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab and is a co-principal investigator in
Berkeley’s Center for Human-Compatible AI.
At the core of artificial intelligence is our mathematical definition of what an AI agent (a
robot) is. When we define a robot, we define states, actions, and rewards. Think of a
delivery robot, for instance. States are locations in the world, and actions are motions
that the robot makes to get from one position to a nearby one. To enable the robot to
decide on which actions to take, we define a reward function—a mapping from states and
actions to scores indicating how good that action was in that state—and have the robot
choose actions that accumulate the most “reward.” The robot gets a high reward when it
reaches its destination, and it incurs a small cost every time it moves; this reward function
incentivizes the robot to get to the destination as quickly as possible. Similarly, an
autonomous car might get a reward for making progress on its route and incur a cost for
getting too close to other cars.
Given these definitions, a robot’s job is to figure out what actions it should take in
order to get the highest cumulative reward. We’ve been working hard in AI on enabling
robots to do just that. Implicitly, we’ve assumed that if we’re successful—if robots can
take any problem definition and turn into a policy for how to act—we will get robots that
are useful to people and to society.
We haven’t been too wrong so far. If you want an AI that classifies cells as either
cancerous or benign, or a robot that vacuums the living room rug while you’re at work,
we’ve got you covered. Some real-world problems can indeed be defined in isolation,
with clear-cut states, actions, and rewards. But with increasing AI capability, the
problems we want to tackle don’t fit neatly into this framework. We can no longer cut
off a tiny piece of the world, put it in a box, and give it to a robot. Helping people is
starting to mean working in the real world, where you have to actually interact with
people and reason about them. “People” will have to formally enter the AI problem
definition somewhere.
Autonomous cars are already being developed. They will need to share the road
with human-driven vehicles and pedestrians and learn to make the trade-off between
getting us home as fast as possible and being considerate of other drivers. Personal
assistants will need to figure out when and how much help we really want and what types
of tasks we prefer to do on our own versus what we can relinquish control over. A DSS
(Decision Support System) or a medical diagnostic system will need to explain its
recommendations to us so we can understand and verify them. Automated tutors will
need to determine what examples are informative or illustrative—not to their fellow
machines but to us humans.
Looking further into the future, if we want highly capable AIs to be compatible
with people, we can’t create them in isolation from people and then try to make them
compatible afterward; rather, we’ll have to define “human-compatible” AI from the getgo.
People can’t be an afterthought.
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When it comes to real robots helping real people, the standard definition of AI
fails us, for two fundamental reasons: First, optimizing the robot’s reward function in
isolation is different from optimizing it when the robot acts around people, because
people take actions too. We make decisions in service of our own interests, and these
decisions dictate what actions we execute. Moreover, we reason about the robot—that is,
we respond to what we think it’s doing or will do and what we think its capabilities are.
Whatever actions the robot decides on need to mesh well with ours. This is the
coordination problem.
Second, it is ultimately a human who determines what the robot’s reward function
should be in the first place. And they are meant to incentivize robot behavior that
matches what the end-user wants, what the designer wants, or what society as a whole
wants. I believe that capable robots that go beyond very narrowly defined tasks will need
to understand this to achieve compatibility with humans. This is the value-alignment
problem.
The Coordination Problem: People are more than objects in the environment.
When we design robots for a particular task, it’s tempting to abstract people away. A
robotic personal assistant, for example, needs to know how to move to pick up objects, so
we define that problem in isolation from the people for whom the robot is picking these
objects up. Still, as the robot moves around, we don’t want it bumping into anything, and
that includes people, so we might include the physical location of the person in the
definition of the robot’s state. Same for cars: We don’t want them colliding with other
cars, so we enable them to track the positions of those other cars and assume that they’ll
be moving consistently in the same direction in the future. A human being, in this sense,
is no different to a robot from a ball rolling on a flat surface. The ball will behave in the
next few seconds the same way it behaved in the past few; it keeps rolling in the same
direction at roughly the same speed. This is of course nothing like real human behavior,
but such simplification enables many robots to succeed in their tasks and, for the most
part, stay out of people’s way. A robot in your house, for example, might see you
coming down the hall, move aside to let you pass, and resume its task once you’ve gone
by.
As robots have become more capable, though, treating people as consistently
moving obstacles is starting to fall short. A human driver switching lanes won’t continue
in the same direction but will move straight ahead once they’ve made the lane change.
When you reach for something, you often reach around other objects and stop when you
get to the one you want. When you walk down a hallway, you have a destination in
mind: You might take a right into the bedroom or a left into the living room. Relying on
the assumption that we’re no different from a rolling ball leads to inefficiency when the
robot stays out of the way if it doesn’t need to, and it can imperil the robot when the
person’s behavior changes. Even just to stay out of the way, robots have to be somewhat
accurate at anticipating human actions. And, unlike the rolling ball, what people will do
depends on what they decide to do. So to anticipate human actions, robots need to start
understanding human decision making. And that doesn’t mean assuming that human
behavior is perfectly optimal; that might be enough for a chess- or Go-playing robot, but
in the real world, people’s decisions are less predictable than the optimal move in a board
game.
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This need to understand human actions and decisions applies to physical and
nonphysical robots alike. If either sort bases its decision about how to act on the
assumption that a human will do one thing but the human does something else, the
resulting mismatch could be catastrophic. For cars, it can mean collisions. For an AI
with, say, a financial or economic role, the mismatch between what it expects us to do
and what we actually do could have even worse consequences.
One alternative is for the robot not to predict human actions but instead just
protect against the worst-case human action. Often when robots do that, though, they
stop being all that useful. With cars, this results in being stuck, because it makes every
move too risky.
All this puts us, the AI community, into a bind. It suggests that robots will need
accurate (or at least reasonable) predictive models of whatever people might decide to do.
Our state definition can’t just include the physical position of humans in the world.
Instead, we’ll also need to estimate something internal to people. We’ll need to design
robots that account for this human internal state, and that’s a tall order. Luckily, people
tend to give robots hints as to what their internal state is: Their ongoing actions give the
robot observations (in the Bayesian inference sense) about their intentions. If we start
walking toward the right side of the hallway, we’re probably going to enter the next room
on the right.
What makes the problem more complicated is the fact that people don’t make
decisions in isolation. It would be one thing if robots could predict the actions a person
intends to take and simply figure out what to do in response. But unfortunately this can
lead to ultra-defensive robots that confuse the heck out of people. (Think of human
drivers stuck at four-way stops, for instance.) What the intent-prediction approach misses
is that the moment the robot acts, that influences what actions the human starts taking.
There is a mutual influence between robots and people, one that robots will need
to learn to navigate. It is not always just about the robot planning around people; people
plan around the robot, too. It is important for robots to account for this when deciding
which actions to take, be it on the road, in the kitchen, or even in virtual spaces, where
actions might be making a purchase or adopting a new strategy. Doing so should endow
robots with coordination strategies, enabling them to take part in the negotiations people
seamlessly carry out day to day—from who goes first at an intersection or through a
narrow door, to what role we each take when we collaborate on preparing breakfast, to
coming to consensus on what next step to take on a project.
Finally, just as robots need to anticipate what people will do next, people need to
do the same with robots. This is why transparency is important. Not only will robots
need good mental models of people, but people will need good mental models of robots.
The model that a person has of the robot has to go into our state definition as well, and
the robot has to be aware of how its actions are changing that model. Much like the robot
treating human actions as clues to human internal states, people will change their beliefs
about the robot as they observe its actions. Unfortunately, the giving of clues doesn’t
come as naturally to robots as it does to humans; we’ve had a lot of practice
communicating implicitly with people. But enabling robots to account for the change
that their actions are causing to the person’s mental model of the robot can lead to more
carefully chosen actions that do give the right clues—that clearly communicate to people
about the robot’s intentions, its reward function, its limitations. For instance, a robot
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might alter its motion when carrying something heavy, to emphasize the difficulty it has
in maneuvering heavy objects. The more that people know about the robot, the easier it
is to coordinate with it.
Achieving action compatibility will require robots to anticipate human actions,
account for how those actions will influence their own, and enable people to anticipate
robot actions. Research has ,ade a degree of progress in meeting these challenges, but we
still have a long way to go.
The Value Alignment Problem: People hold the key to the robot’s reward function.
Progress on enabling robots to optimize reward puts more burden on us, the designers, to
give them the right reward to optimize in the first place. The original thought was that
for any task we wanted the robot to do, we could write down a reward function that
incentivizes the right behavior. Unfortunately, what often happens is that we specify
some reward function and the behavior that emerges out of optimizing it isn’t what we
want. Intuitive reward functions, when combined with unusual instances of a task, can
lead to unintuitive behavior. You reward an agent in a racing game with a score in the
game, and in some cases it finds a loophole that it exploits to gain infinitely many points
without actually winning the race. Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig give a beautiful
example in their book Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach: rewarding a
vacuuming robot for how much dust it sucks in results in the robot deciding to dump out
dust so that it can suck it in again and get more reward.
In general, humans have had a notoriously difficult time specifying exactly what
they want, as exemplified by all those genie legends. An AI paradigm in which robots
get some externally specified reward fails when that reward is not perfectly well thought
out. It may incentivize the robot to behave in the wrong way and even resist our attempts
to correct its behavior, as that would lead to a lower specified reward.
A seemingly better paradigm might be for robots to optimize for what we
internally want, even if we have trouble explicating it. They would use what we say and
do as evidence about what we want, rather than interpreting it literally and taking it as a
given. When we write down a reward function, the robot should understand that we
might be wrong: that we might not have considered all facets of the task; that there’s no
guarantee that said reward function will always lead to the behavior we want. The robot
should integrate what we wrote down into its understanding of what we want, but it
should also have a back-and-forth with us to elicit clarifying information. It should seek
our guidance, because that’s the only way to optimize the true desired reward function.
Even if we give robots the ability to learn what we want, an important question
remains that AI alone won’t be able to answer. We can make robots try to align with a
person’s internal values, but there’s more than one person involved here. The robot has
an end-user (or perhaps a few, like a personal robot caring for a family, a car driving a
few passengers to different destinations, or an office assistant for an entire team); it has a
designer (or perhaps a few); and it interacts with society—the autonomous car shares the
road with pedestrians, human-driven vehicles, and other autonomous cars. How to
combine these people’s values when they might be in conflict is an important problem we
need to solve. AI research can give us the tools to combine values in any way we decide
but can’t make the necessary decision for us.
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In short, we need to enable robots to reason about us—to see us as something
more than obstacles or perfect game players. We need them to take our human nature
into account, so that they are well coordinated and well aligned with us. If we succeed,
we will indeed have tools that substantially increase our quality of life.
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Chris Anderson’s company, 3DR, helped start the modern drone industry and now
focuses on drone data software. He got his start building an open-source aerial robotics
community called DIY Drones, and undertook some ill-advised early experiments, such
as buzzing Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory with one of his self-flying spies. It
may well have been a case of antic gene-expression, since he’s descended from a founder
of the American Anarchist movement. Chris ran Wired magazine, a go-to publication for
techno-utopians and -dystopians alike, from 2001 to 2012; during his tenure it won five
National Magazine Awards.
Chris dislikes the term “roboticist” (“like any properly humbled roboticist, I
don’t call myself one”). He began as a physicist. “I turned out to be a bad physicist,” he
told me recently. “I struggled on, went to Los Alamos, and thought, ‘Well maybe I’m not
going to be a Nobel Prize winner, but I can still be a scientist.’ All of us who were in
physics and had these romantic heroes—the Feynmans, the Manhattan Project—realized
that our career trajectory would at best be working on one project at CERN for fifteen
years. That project would either be a failure, in which case there would be no paper, or
it would be a success, in which case you’d be author #300 on the paper and become an
assistant professor at Iowa State.
“Most of my classmates went to Wall Street to become quants, and to them we
owe the subprime mortgage. Others went on to start the Internet. First, we built the
Internet by connecting physics labs; second, we built the Web; third, we were the first to
do Big Data. We had supercomputers—Crays—which were half the power of your phone
now, but they were the supercomputers of the time. Meanwhile, we were reading this
magazine called Wired, which came out in 1993, and we realized that this tool we
scientists use could have applications for everybody. The Internet wasn’t just about
scientific data, it was a mind-blowing cultural revolution. So when Conde Nast asked me
to take over the magazine, I was like, ‘Absolutely!’ This magazine changed my life.”
He had five children by that time—video-game players—who got him into the
“flying robots.” He quit his day job at Wired. The rest is Silicon Valley history.
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GRADIENT DESCENT
Chris Anderson
Chris Anderson is an entrepreneur; former editor-in-chief of Wired; co-founder and
CEO of 3DR; and author of The Long Tail, Free, and Makers.
Life
The mosquito first detects my scent from thirty feet away. It triggers its pursuit function,
which consists of the simplest possible rules. First, move in a random direction. If the
scent increases, continue moving in that direction. If the scent decreases, move in the
opposite direction. If the scent is lost, move sideways until a scent is picked up again.
Repeat until contact with the target is achieved.
The plume of my scent is densest next to me and disperses as it spreads, an
invisible fog of particles exuded from my skin that moves like smoke with the wind. The
closer to my skin, the higher the particle density; the farther away, the lower. This
decrease is called a gradient, which describes any gradual transition from one level to
another one—as opposed to a “step function,” which describes a discrete change.
Once the mosquito follows this gradient to its source using its simple algorithm, it
lands on my skin, which it senses with the heat detectors in its feet, which are attuned to
another gradient—temperature. It then pushes its needle-shaped proboscis through the
surface, where a third set of sensors in the tip detect yet another gradient, that of blood
density. This flexible needle wriggles around under my skin until the scent of blood
steers it to a capillary, which it punctures. Then my blood begins to flow into the
mosquito. Mission accomplished. Ouch.
What seems like the powerful radar of insects in the dark, with blood-seeking
intelligence inexplicable for such tiny brains, is actually just a sensitive nose with almost
no intelligence at all. Mosquitoes are closer to plants that follow the sun than to guided
missiles. Yet by applying this simple “follow your nose” rule quite literally, they can
travel through a house to find you, slip through cracks in a screen door, even zero in on
the tiny strip of skin you left exposed between hat and shirt collar. It’s just a random
walk, combined with flexible wings and legs that let the insect bounce off obstacles, and
an instinct to descend a chemical gradient.
But “gradient descent” is much more than bug navigation. Look around you and
you’ll find it everywhere, from the most basic physical rules of the universe to the most
advanced artificial intelligence.
The Universe
We live in a world of countless gradients, from light and heat to gravity and chemical
trails (chemtrails!). Water flows along a gravity gradient downhill, and your body lives
on chemical solutions flowing across cell membranes from high concentration to
low. Every action in the universe is driven by some gradient drive, from the movement
of the planets around gravity gradients to the joining of atoms along electric-charge
gradients to form molecules. Our own urges, such as hunger and sleepiness, are driven
by electro-chemical gradients in our bodies. And our brain’s functions, the electrical
signals moving along ion channels in the synapses between our neurons, are simply
atoms and electrons flowing “downhill” along yet more electrical and chemical gradients.
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Forget clockwork analogies; our brains are closer to a system of canals and locks, with
signals traveling like water from one state to another.
As I sit here typing, I’m actually seeking equilibrium states in an n-dimensional
topology of gradients. Take just one: heat. My body temperature is higher than the air
temperature, so I radiate heat, which must be replenished in my core. Even the bacteria
in my digestive tract use sensors to measure sugar concentrations in the liquid around
them and whip their tail-like flagella to swim “upstream” where the sugar supply is
richest. The natural state of all systems is to flow to lower energy states, a process that is
broadly described by entropy (the tendency of things to go from ordered to disordered
states; all things will fall apart eventually, including the universe itself).
But how do you explain more complex behavior, such as our ability to make
decisions? The answer is just more gradient descent.
Our Brains
As miraculous and inscrutable as our human intelligence is, science is coming around to
the view that our brains operate the same way as any other complex system with layers
and feedback loops, all pursuing what we mathematically call “optimization functions”
but you could just as well call “flowing downhill” in some sense.
The essence of intelligence is learning, and we do that by correlating inputs with
positive or negatives scores (rewards or punishment). So, for a baby, “this sound” (your
mother’s voice) is associated with other learned connections to your mother, such as food
or comfort. Likewise, “this muscle motion brings my thumb closer to my mouth.” Over
time and trial and error, the brain’s neural network reinforces those connections.
Meanwhile “this muscle motion does not bring my thumb close to my mouth” is a
negative correlation, and the brain will weaken those connections.
However, this is too simplistic. The limits of gradient descent constitute the socalled
local-minima problem (or local-maxima problem, if you’re doing a gradient
ascent). If you are walking in a mountainous region and want to get home, always
walking downhill will most likely get you to the next valley but not necessarily over the
other mountains that lie around it and between you and home. For that, you need either a
mental model (i.e., a map) of the topology so you know where to ascend to get out of the
valley, or you need to switch between gradient descent and random walks so you can
bounce your way out of the region.
Which is, in fact, exactly what the mosquito does in following my scent: It
descends when it’s in my plume and random-walks when it has lost the trail or hit an
obstacle.
AI
So that’s nature. What about computers? Traditional software doesn’t work that way—it
follows deterministic trees of hard logic: “If this, do that.” But software that interacts
with the physical world tends to work more like the physical world. That means dealing
with noisy inputs (sensors or human behavior) and providing probabilistic, not
deterministic, results. And that, in turn, means more gradient descent.
AI software is the best example of this, especially the kinds of AI that use
artificial neural-network models (including convolutional, or “deep,” neural networks of
many layers). In these, a typical process consists of “training” them by showing them
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lots of examples of something you want them to learn (pictures of cats labeled “cat,” for
example), along with examples of other random data (pictures of other things). This is
called “supervised learning,” because the neural network is being taught by example,
including the use of “adversarial training” with data that is not correlated to the desired
result.
These neural networks, like their biological models, consist of layers of thousands
of nodes (“neurons,” in the analogy), each of which is connected to all the nodes in the
layers above and below by connections that initially have random strength. The top layer
is presented with data, and the bottom layer is given the correct answer. Any series of
connections that happened to land on the right answer is made stronger (“rewarded”), and
those that were wrong are made weaker (“punished”). Repeat tens of thousands of times
and eventually you have a fully trained network for that kind of data.
You can think of all the possible combinations of connections as like the surface
of a planet, with hills and valleys. (Ignore for the moment that the surface is just 3D and
the actual topology is many-dimensional.) The optimization that the network goes
through as it learns is just a process of finding the deepest valley on the planet. This
consists of the following steps:
1. Define a “cost function” that determines how well the network solved the problem
2. Run the network once and see how it did at that cost function
3. Change the values of the connections and do it again. The difference between
those two results is the direction, or “slope,” in which the network moved
between the two trials.
4. If the slope is pointed “downhill,” change the connections more in that direction.
If it’s “uphill,” change them in the opposite direction.
5. Repeat until there is no improvement in any direction. That means that you’re in
a minimum.
Congrats! But it’s probably a local minimum, or a little dip in the mountains, so you’re
going to have to keep going if you want to do better. You can’t keep going downhill, and
you don’t know where the absolute lowest point is, so you’re going to have to somehow
find it. There are many ways to do that, but here are a few:
1. Try lots of times with different random settings and share learning from each trial;
essentially, you are shaking the system to see if it settles in a lower state. If one
of the other trials found a lower valley, start with those settings.
2. Don’t just go downhill but stumble around a bit like a drunk, too (this is called
“stochastic gradient descent”). If you do this long enough, you’ll eventually find
rock bottom. There’s a metaphor for life in that.
3. Just look for “interesting” features, which are defined by diversity (edges or color
changes, for example). Warning: This way can lead to madness—too much
“interestingness” draws the network to optical illusions. So keep it sane, and
emphasize the kinds of features that are likely to be real in nature, as opposed to
artifacts or errors. This is called “regularization,” and there are lots of techniques
for this, such as whether those kinds of features have been seen before (learned),
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or are too “high frequency” (like static) rather than “low frequency” (more
continuous, like actual real-world features).
Just because AI systems sometimes end up in local minima, don’t conclude that this
makes them any less like life. Humans—indeed, probably all life-forms—are often stuck
in local minima.
Take our understanding of the game of Go, which was taught and learned and
optimized by humans for thousands of years. It took AIs less than three years to find out
that we’d been playing it wrong all along and that there were better, almost alien,
solutions to the game which we’d never considered—mostly because our brains don’t
have the processing power to consider so many moves ahead.
Even in chess, which is ten times easier and was thought to be understood, bruteforce
machines could beat us at our own strategies. Chess, too, turned out, when
explored by superior neural-network AI systems, to have weird but superior strategies
we’d never considered, like sacrificing queens early to gain an obscure long-term
advantage. It’s as if we had been playing 2D versions of games that actually existed in
higher dimensions.
If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because physics has been wrestling with these
sorts of topological problems for decades. The notion of space being many-dimensional,
and math reducing to understanding the geometries and interactions of “membranes”
beyond the reach of our senses, is where Grand Unified Theorists go to die. But unlike
multidimensional theoretical physics, AI is something we can actually experiment with
and measure.
So that’s what we’re going to do. The next few decades will be an explosive
exploration of ways to think that 7 million years of evolution never found. We’re going
to rock ourselves out of local minima and find deeper minima, maybe even global
minima. And when we’re done, we may even have taught machines to seem as smart as
a mosquito, forever descending the cosmic gradients to an ultimate goal, whatever that
may be.
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David Kaiser is a physicist atypically interested in the intersection of his science with
politics and culture, about which he has written widely.
In the first meeting (in Washington, Connecticut) that preceded the crafting of this
book, he commented on the change in how “information” is viewed since Wiener’s time:
the military-industrial, Cold War era. Back then, Wiener compared information,
metaphorically, to entropy, in that it could not be conserved—i.e., monopolized; thus, he
argued, our atomic secrets and other such classified matters would not remain secrets for
long. Today, whereas (as Wiener might have expected) information, fake or not, is
leaking all over the other Washington, information in the economic world has indeed
been stockpiled, commodified, and monetized.
This lockdown, David said, was “not all good, not all bad”—depending, I guess,
on whether you’re sick of being pestered by ads for socks or European river cruises
popping up in your browser minutes after you’ve bought them.
To say nothing of information’s proliferation. David complained to the rest of us
attending the meeting that in Wiener’s time, physicists could “take the entire Physical
Review. It would sit comfortably in front of us in a manageable pile. Now we’re awash
in fifty thousand open-source journals per minute,” full of god-knows-what. Neither of
these developments would Wiener have anticipated, said David, prompting him to ask,
“Do we need a new set of guiding metaphors?”
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“INFORMATION” FOR WIENER, FOR SHANNON, AND FOR US
David Kaiser
David Kaiser is Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of
physics at MIT, and head of its Program in Science, Technology & Society. He is the
author of How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum
Revival and American Physics and the Cold War Bubble (forthcoming).
In The Sleepwalkers, a sweeping history of scientific thought from ancient times through
the Renaissance, Arthur Koestler identified a tension that has marked the most dramatic
leaps of our cosmological imagination. In reading the great works of Nicolaus
Copernicus and Johannes Kepler today, Koestler argued, we are struck as much by their
strange unfamiliarity—their embeddedness in the magic or mysticism of an earlier age—
as by their modern-sounding insights.
I detect that same doubleness—the zig-zag origami folds of old and new—in
Norbert Wiener’s classic The Human Use of Human Beings. First published in 1950 and
revised in 1954, the book is in many ways extraordinarily prescient. Wiener, the MIT
polymath, recognized before most observers that “society can only be understood through
a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it.” Wiener
argued that feedback loops, the central feature of his theory of cybernetics, would play a
determining role in social dynamics. Those loops would not only connect people with
one another but connect people with machines, and—crucially—machines with
machines.
Wiener glimpsed a world in which information could be separated from its
medium. People, or machines, could communicate patterns across vast distances and use
them to fashion new items at the endpoints, without “moving a…particle of matter from
one end of the line to the other,” a vision now realized in our world of networked 3D
printers. Wiener also imagined machine-to-machine feedback loops driving huge
advances in automation, even for tasks that had previously relied on human judgment.
“The machine plays no favorites between manual labor and white-collar labor,” he
observed.
For all that, many of the central arguments in The Human Use of Human Beings
seem closer to the 19th century than the 21st. In particular, although Wiener made
reference throughout to Claude Shannon’s then-new work on information theory, he
seems not to have fully embraced Shannon’s notion of information as consisting of
irreducible, meaning-free bits. Since Wiener’s day, Shannon’s theory has come to
undergird recent advances in “Big Data” and “deep learning,” which makes it all the
more interesting to revisit Wiener’s cybernetic imagination. How might tomorrow’s
artificial intelligence be different if practitioners were to re-invest in Wiener’s guiding
vision of “information”?
~ ~ ~
When Wiener wrote The Human Use of Human Beings, his experiences of war-related
research, and of what struck him as the moral ambiguities of intellectual life amid the
military-industrial complex, were still fresh. Just a few years earlier, he had announced
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in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly that he would not “publish any future work of mine
which may do damage in the hands of irresponsible militarists.” 30 He remained
ambivalent about the transformative power of new technologies, indulging in neither the
boundless hype nor the digital utopianism of later pundits.
“Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions,”
he wrote, in Human Use. He was concerned about human-made restrictions as well as
technological ones, especially Cold War restrictions that threatened the flow of
information so critical to cybernetic systems: “Under the impetus of Senator [Joseph]
McCarthy and his imitators, the blind and excessive classification of military
information” was driving political leaders in the United States to adopt a “secretive frame
of mind paralleled in history only in the Venice of the Renaissance.” Wiener, echoing
many outspoken veterans of the Manhattan Project, argued that the postwar obsession
with secrecy—especially around nuclear weapons—stemmed from a misunderstanding of
the scientific process. The only genuine secret about the production of nuclear weapons,
he wrote, was whether such bombs could be built. Once that secret had been revealed,
with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no amount of state-imposed secrecy
would stop others from puzzling through chains of reasoning like those the Manhattan
Project researchers had followed. As Wiener memorably put it, “There is no Maginot
Line of the brain.”
To drive this point home, Wiener borrowed Shannon’s fresh ideas about
information theory. In 1948, Shannon, a mathematician and engineer working at Bell
Labs, had published a pair of lengthy articles in the Bell System Technical Journal.
Introducing the new work to a broad readership in 1949, mathematician Warren Weaver
explained that in Shannon’s formulation, “the word information…is used in a special
sense that must not be confused with its ordinary usage. In particular, information must
not be confused with meaning.” 31 Linguists and poets might be concerned about the
“semantic” aspects of communication, Weaver continued, but not engineers like
Shannon. Rather, “this word ‘information’ in communication theory relates not so much
to what you do say, as to what you could say.” In Shannon’s now-famous formulation,
the information content of a string of symbols was given by the logarithm of the number
of possible symbols from which a given string was chosen. Shannon’s key insight was
that the information of a message was just like the entropy of a gas: a measure of the
system’s disorder.
Wiener borrowed this insight when composing Human Use. If information was
like entropy, then it could not be conserved—or contained. Physicists in the 19th century
had demonstrated that the total energy of a physical system must always remain the same,
a perfect balance between the start and the end of a process. Not so for entropy, which
would inexorably increase over time, an imperative that came to be known as the second
law of thermodynamics. From that stark distinction—energy is conserved, whereas
entropy must grow—followed enormous cosmic consequences. Time must flow forward;
30
Norbert Wiener, “A Scientist Rebels,” The Atlantic Monthly, January 1947.
31
Warren Weaver, “Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication,” in Claude
Shannon & Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana, IL: University of
Illinois Press, 1949), p. 8 (emphasis in original). Shannon’s 1948 papers were republished in the same
volume.
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the future cannot be the same as the past. The universe could even be careening toward a
“heat death,” some far-off time when the total stock of energy had uniformly dispersed,
achieving a state of maximum entropy, after which no further change could occur.
If information qua entropy could not be conserved, then Wiener concluded it was
folly for military leaders to try to stockpile the “scientific know-how of the nation in
static libraries and laboratories.” Indeed, “no amount of scientific research, carefully
recorded in books and papers, and then put into our libraries with labels of secrecy, will
be adequate to protect us for any length of time in a world where the effective level of
information is perpetually advancing.” Any such efforts at secrecy, classification, or the
containment of information would fail, Wiener argued, just as surely as hucksters’
schemes for perpetual-motion machines faltered in the face of the second law of
thermodynamics.
Wiener criticized the American “orthodoxy” of free-market fundamentalism in
much the same way. For most Americans, “questions of information will be evaluated
according to a standard American criterion: a thing is valuable as a commodity for what it
will bring in the open market.” Indeed, “the fate of information in the typically American
world is to become something which can be bought or sold;” most people, he observed,
“cannot conceive of a piece of information without an owner.” Wiener considered this
view to be as wrong-headed as rampant military classification. Again he invoked
Shannon’s insight: Since “information and entropy are not conserved,” they are “equally
unsuited to being commodities.”
~ ~ ~
Information cannot be conserved—so far, so good. But did Wiener really have
Shannon’s “information” in mind? The crux of Shannon’s argument, as Weaver had
emphasized, was to distinguish a colloquial sense of “information,” as message with
meaning, from an abstracted, rarefied notion of strings of symbols arrayed with some
probability and selected from an enormous universe of gibberish. For Shannon,
“information” could be quantified because its fundamental unit, the bit, was a unit of
conveyance rather than understanding.
When Wiener characterized “information” throughout Human Use, on the other
hand, he tilted time and again to a classical, humanistic sense of the term. “A piece of
information,” he wrote—tellingly, not a “bit” of information—“in order to contribute to
the general information of the community, must say something substantially different
from the community’s previous common stock of information.” This was why
“schoolboys do not like Shakespeare,” he concluded: The Bard’s couplets may depart
starkly from random bitstreams, but they had nonetheless become all too familiar to the
sense-making public and “absorbed into the superficial clichés of the time.”
At least the information content of Shakespeare had once seemed fresh. During
the postwar boom years, Wiener fretted, the “enormous per capita bulk of
communication”—ranging across newspapers and movies to radio, television, and
books—had bred mediocrity, an informational reversion to the mean. “More and more
we must accept a standardized inoffensive and insignificant product which, like the white
bread of the bakeries, is made rather for its keeping and selling properties than for its
food value.” “Heaven save us,” he pleaded, “from the first novels which are written
because a young man desires the prestige of being a novelist rather than because he has
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something to say! Heaven save us likewise from the mathematical papers which are
correct and elegant but without body or spirit.” Wiener’s treatment of “information”
sounded more like Matthew Arnold in 1869 32 than Claude Shannon in 1948—more
“body and spirit” than “bit.” Wiener shared Arnold’s Romantic view of the “content
producer” as well. “Properly speaking the artist, the writer, and the scientist should be
moved by such an irresistible impulse to create that, even if they were not being paid for
their work, they would be willing to pay to get the chance to do it.” L’art pour l’art, that
19th-century cry: Artists should suffer for their work; the quest for meaningful expression
should always trump lucre.
To Wiener, this was the proper measure of “information”: body, spirit, aspiration,
expression. Yet to argue against its commodification, Wiener reverted again to
Shannon’s mathematics of information-as-entropy.
~ ~ ~
Flash forward to our day. In many ways, Wiener has been proved right. His vision of
networked feedback loops driven by machine-to-machine communication has become a
mundane feature of everyday life. From the earliest stirrings of the Internet Age,
moreover, digital piracy has upended the view that “information”—in the form of songs,
movies, books, or code—could remain contained. Put up a paywall here, and the content
will diffuse over there, all so much informational entropy that cannot be conserved.
On the other hand, enormous multinational corporations—some of the largest and
most profitable in the world—now routinely disprove Wiener’s contention that
“information” cannot be stockpiled or monetized. Ironically, the “information” they
trade in is closer to Shannon’s definition than Wiener’s, Shannon’s mathematical proofs
notwithstanding.
While Google Books may help circulate hundreds of thousands of works of
literature for free, Google itself—like Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and their many
imitators—has commandeered a baser form of “information” and exploited it for
extraordinary profit. Petabytes of Shannon-like information—a seemingly meaningless
stream of clicks, “likes,” and retweets, collected from virtually every person who has ever
touched a networked computer—are sifted through proprietary “deep-learning”
algorithms to micro-target everything from the advertisements we see to the news stories
(fake or otherwise) we encounter while browsing the Web.
Back in the early 1950s, Wiener had proposed that researchers study the
structures and limitations of ants—in contrast to humans—so that machines might one
day achieve the “almost indefinite intellectual expansion” that people (rather than insects)
can attain. He found solace in the notion that machines could come to dominate us only
“in the last stages of increasing entropy,” when “the statistical differences among
individuals are nil.” Today’s data-mining algorithms turn Wiener’s approach on its head.
They produce profit by exploiting our reptilian brains rather than imitating our cerebral
cortexes, harvesting information from all our late-night, blog-addled, pleasure-seeking
clickstreams—leveraging precisely the tiny, residual “statistical differences among
individuals.”
32
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, Jane Garnett, ed. (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2006).
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To be sure, some recent achievements in artificial intelligence have been
remarkably impressive. Computers can now produce visual artworks and musical
compositions akin to those of recognized masters, creating just the sort of “information”
that Wiener most prized. But by far the largest impact on society to date has come from
the collection and manipulation of Shannon-like information, which has reshaped our
shopping habits, political participation, personal relationships, expectations of privacy,
and more.
What might “deep learning” evolve into, if the fundamental currency becomes
“information” as Wiener defined it? How might the field shift if re-animated by
Wiener’s deep moral convictions, informed as they were by his prescient concerns about
rampant militarism, runaway corporate profit-seeking, the self-limiting features of
secrecy, and the reduction of human expression to interchangeable commodities?
Perhaps “deep learning” might then become the cultivation of meaningful information
rather than the relentless pursuit of potent, if meaningless, bits.
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In the aforementioned Connecticut discussion on The Human Use of Human Beings, Neil
Gershenfeld provided some fresh air, of a kind, by professing that he hated the book,
which remark was met by universal laughter—as was his observation that computer
science was one the worst things to happen to computers, or science. His overall
contention was that Wiener missed the implications of the digital revolution that was
happening around him—although some would say this charge can’t be leveled at
someone on the ground floor and lacking clairvoyance.
“The tail wagging the dog of my life,” he told us, “has been Fab Labs and the
maker movement, and [when] Wiener talks about the threat of automation he misses the
inverse, which is that access to the means for automation can empower people, and in
Fab Labs, the corner I’ve been involved in, that’s an exponential.”
In 2003, I visited Neil at MIT, where he runs the Center for Bits and Atoms.
Hours later, I emerged from what had been an exuberant display of very weird stuff. He
showed me the work of one student in his popular rapid-prototyping class (“How to
Make Almost Anything”), a sculptor with no engineering background, who had made a
portable personal space for screaming that saves up your screams and plays them back
later. Another student in the class had made a Web browser that lets parrots navigate
the Net. Neil himself was doing fundamental research on the roadmap to that sci-fi
staple, a “universal replicator.” It was a visit that took me a couple of years to get my
head around.
Neil manages a global network of Fab Labs—small-scale manufacturing systems,
enabled by digital technologies, which give people the wherewithal to build whatever
they’d like. As guru of the maker movement, which merges digital communication and
computation with fabrication, he sometimes feels outside the current heated debate on AI
safety. “My ability to do research rests on tools that augment my capabilities,” he says.
“Asking whether or not they are intelligent is as fruitful as asking how I know I exist—
amusing philosophically, but not testable empirically.” What interests him is “how bits
and atoms relate—the boundary between digital and physical. Scientifically, it’s the most
exciting thing I know.”
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SCALING
Neil Gershenfeld
Neil Gershenfeld is a physicist and director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. He is
the author of FAB, co-author (with Alan Gershenfeld & Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld) of
Designing Reality, and founder of the global fab lab network.
Discussions about artificial intelligence have been oddly ahistorical. They could better
be described as manic-depressive; depending on how you count, we’re now in the fifth
boom-bust cycle. Those swings mask the continuity in the underlying progress and the
implications for where it’s headed.
The cycles have come in roughly decade-long waves. First there were
mainframes, which by their very existence were going to automate away work. That ran
into the reality that it was hard to write programs to do tasks that were simple for people
to do. Then came expert systems, which were going to codify and then replace the
knowledge of experts. These ran into difficulty in assembling that knowledge and
reasoning about cases not already covered. Perceptrons sought to get around these
problems by modeling how the brain learns, but they were unable to do much of
anything. Multilayer perceptrons could handle test problems that had tripped up those
simpler networks, but their demonstrations did poorly on unstructured, real-world
problems. We’re now in the deep-learning era, which is delivering on many of the early
AI promises but in a way that’s considered hard to understand, with consequences
ranging from intellectual to existential threats.
Each of these stages was heralded as a revolutionary advance over the limitations
of its predecessors, yet all effectively do the same thing: They make inferences from
observations. How these approaches relate can be understood by how they scale—that is,
how their performance depends on the difficulty of the problem they’re addressing. Both
a light switch and a self-driving car must determine their operator’s intentions, but the
former has just two options to choose from, whereas the latter has many more. The AIboom
phases have started with promising examples in limited domains; the bust phases
came with the failure of those demonstrations to handle the complexity of less-structured,
practical problems.
Less apparent is the steady progress we’ve made in mastering scaling. This
progress rests on the technological distinction between linear and exponential functions—
a distinction that was becoming evident at the dawn of AI but with implications for AI
that weren’t appreciated until many years later.
In one of the founding documents of the study of intelligent machines, The
Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Wiener does a remarkable job of identifying many
of the most significant trends to arise since he wrote it, along with noting the people
responsible for them and then consistently failing to recognize why these people’s work
proved to be so important. Wiener is credited with creating the field of cybernetics; I’ve
never understood what that is, but what’s missing from the book is at the heart of how AI
has progressed. This history matters because of the echoes of it that persist to this day.
Claude Shannon makes a cameo appearance in the book, in the context of his
thoughts about the prospects for a chess-playing computer. Shannon was doing
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something much more significant than speculating at the time: He was laying the
foundations for the digital revolution. As a graduate student at MIT, he worked for
Vannevar Bush on the Differential Analyzer. This was one of the last great analog
computers, a room full of gears and shafts. Shannon’s frustration with the difficulty of
solving problems this way led him in 1937 to write what might be the best master’s thesis
ever. In it, he showed how electrical circuits could be designed to evaluate arbitrary
logical expressions, introducing the basis for universal digital logic.
After MIT, Shannon studied communications at Bell Labs. Analog telephone
calls degraded with distance; the farther they traveled, the worse they sounded. Rather
than continue to improve them incrementally, Shannon showed in 1948 that by
communicating with symbols rather than continuous quantities, the behavior is very
different. Converting speech waveforms to the binary values of 1 and 0 is an example,
but many other sets of symbols can be (and are) used in digital communications. What
matters is not the particular symbols but rather the ability to detect and correct errors.
Shannon found that if the noise is above a threshold (which depends on the system
design), then there are certain to be errors. But if the noise is below a threshold, then a
linear increase in the physical resources representing the symbol results in an exponential
decrease in the likelihood of making an error in correctly receiving the symbol. This
relationship was the first of what we’d now call a threshold theorem.
Such scaling falls off so quickly that the probability of an error can be so small as
to effectively never happen. Each symbol sent multiplies rather than adds to the
certainty, so that the probability of a mistake can go from 0.1 to 0.01 to 0.001, and so
forth. This exponential decrease in communication errors made possible an exponential
increase in the capacity of communication networks. And that eventually solved the
problem of where the knowledge in an AI system came from.
For many years, the fastest way to speed up a computation was to do nothing—
just wait for computers to get faster. In the same way, there were years of AI projects
that aimed to accumulate everyday knowledge by laboriously entering pieces of
information. That didn’t scale; it could progress only as fast as the number of people
doing the entering. But when phone calls, newspaper stories, and mail messages all
moved onto the Internet, everyone doing any of those things became a data generator.
The result was an exponential rather than a linear rate of knowledge accumulation.
John von Neumann also has a cameo in The Human Use of Human Beings, for
game theory. What Wiener missed here was von Neumann’s seminal role in digitizing
computation. Whereas analog communication degraded with distance, analog computing
(like the Differential Analyzer) degraded with time, accumulating errors as it progressed.
Von Neumann presented in 1952 a result corresponding to Shannon’s for computation
(they had met at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton), showing that it was
possible to compute reliably with an unreliable computing device by using symbols rather
than continuous quantities. This was, again, a scaling argument, with a linear increase in
the physical resources representing the symbol resulting in an exponential reduction in
the error rate as long as the noise was below a threshold. That’s what makes it possible
to have a billion transistors in a computer chip, with the last one as useful as the first one.
This relationship led to an exponential increase in computing performance, which solved
a second problem in AI: how to process exponentially increasing amounts of data.
The third problem that scaling solved for AI was coming up with the rules for
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reasoning without having to hire a programmer for each problem. Wiener recognized the
role of feedback in machine learning, but he missed the key role of representation. It’s
not possible to store all possible images in a self-driving car, or all possible sounds in a
conversational computer; they have to be able to generalize from experience. The “deep”
part of deep learning refers not to the (hoped-for) depth of insight but to the depth of the
mathematical network layers used to make predictions. It turned out that a linear increase
in network complexity led to an exponential increase in the expressive power of the
network.
If you lose your keys in a room, you can search for them. If you’re not sure
which room they’re in, you have to search all the rooms in a building. If you’re not sure
which building they’re in, you have to search all the rooms in all the buildings in a city.
If you’re not sure which city they’re in, you have to search all the rooms in all the
buildings in all the cities. In AI, finding the keys corresponds to things like a car safely
following the road, or a computer correctly interpreting a spoken command, and the
rooms and buildings and cities correspond to all of the options that have to be considered.
This is called the curse of dimensionality.
The solution to the curse of dimensionality came in using information about the
problem to constrain the search. The search algorithms themselves are not new. But
when applied to a deep-learning network, they adaptively build up representations of
where to search. The price of this is that it’s no longer possible to exactly solve for the
best answer to a problem, but typically all that’s needed is an answer that’s good enough.
Taken together, it shouldn’t be surprising that these scaling laws have allowed
machines to become effectively as capable as the corresponding stages of biological
complexity. Neural networks started out with a goal of modeling how the brain works.
That goal was abandoned as they evolved into mathematical abstractions unrelated to
how neurons actually function. But now there’s a kind of convergence that can be
thought of as forward- rather than reverse-engineering biology, as the results of deep
learning echo brain layers and regions.
One of the most difficult research projects I’ve managed paired what we’d now
call data scientists with AI pioneers. It was a miserable experience in moving goalposts.
As the former progressed in solving long-standing problems posed by the latter, this was
deemed to not count because it wasn’t accompanied by corresponding leaps in
understanding the solutions. What’s the value of a chess-playing computer if you can’t
explain how it plays chess?
The answer of course is that it can play chess. There is interesting emerging
research that is applying AI to AI—that is, training networks to explain how they operate.
But both brains and computer chips are hard to understand by watching their inner
workings; they’re easily interpreted only by observing their external interfaces. We come
to trust (or not) brains and computer chips alike based on experience that tests them
rather than on explanations for how they work.
Many branches of engineering are making a transition from what’s called
imperative to declarative or generative design. This means that instead of explicitly
designing a system with tools like CAD files, circuit schematics, and computer code, you
describe what you want the system to do and then an automated search is done for
designs that satisfy your goals and restrictions. This approach becomes necessary as
design complexity exceeds what can be understood by a human designer. While that
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might sound like a risk, human understanding comes with its own limits; engineering
design is littered with what appeared to be good insights that have had bad consequences.
Declarative design rests on all the advances in AI, plus the improving fidelity of
simulations to virtually test designs.
The mother of all design problems is the one that resulted in us. The way we’re
designed resides in one of the oldest and most conserved parts of the genome, called the
Hox genes. These are genes that regulate genes, in what are called developmental
programs. Nothing in your genome stores the design of your body; your genome stores,
rather, a series of steps to follow that results in your body. This is an exact parallel to
how search is done in AI. There are too many possible body plans to search over, and
most modifications would be either inconsequential or fatal. The Hox genes are a
representation of a productive place for evolutionary search. It’s a kind of natural
intelligence at the molecular level.
AI has a mind-body problem, in that it has no body. Most work on AI is done in
the cloud, running on virtual machines in computer centers where data are funneled. Our
own intelligence is the result of a search algorithm (evolution) that was able to change
our physical form as well as our programming—those are inextricably linked. If the
history of AI can be understood as the working of scaling laws rather than a succession of
fashions, then its future can be seen in the same way. What’s now being digitized, after
communication and computation, is fabrication, bringing the programmability of bits to
the world of atoms. By digitizing not just designs but the construction of materials, the
same lessons that von Neumann and Shannon taught us apply to exponentially increasing
fabricational complexity.
I’ve defined digital materials to be those constructed from a discrete set of parts
reversibly joined with a discrete set of relative positions and orientations. These
attributes allow the global geometry to be determined from local constraints, assembly
errors to be detected and corrected, heterogeneous materials to be joined, and structures
to be disassembled rather than disposed of when they’re no longer needed. The amino
acids that are the foundation of life and the Lego bricks that are the foundation of play
share these properties.
What’s interesting about amino acids is that they’re not interesting. They have
attributes that are typical but not unusual, such as attracting or repelling water. But just
twenty types of them are enough to make you. In the same way, twenty or so types of
digital-material part types—conducting, insulating, rigid, flexible, magnetic, etc.—are
enough to assemble the range of functions that go into making modern technologies like
robots and computers.
The connection between computation and fabrication was foreshadowed by the
very pioneers whose work the edifice of computing is based on. Wiener hinted at this by
linking material transportation with message transportation. John von Neumann is
credited with modern computer architecture, something he actually wrote very little
about; the final thing he studied, and wrote about beautifully and at length, was selfreproducing
systems. As an abstraction of life, he modeled a machine that can
communicate a computation that constructs itself. And the final thing Alan Turing, who
is credited with the theoretical framework for computer science, studied was how the
instructions in genes can give rise to physical forms. These questions address a topic
absent from a typical computer-science education: the physical configuration of a
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computation.
Von Neumann and Turing posed their questions as theoretical studies, because it
was beyond the technology of their day to realize them. But with the convergence of
communication and computation with fabrication, these investigations are now becoming
accessible experimentally. Making an assembler that can assemble itself from the parts
that it’s assembling is a focus of my lab, along with collaborations to develop synthetic
cells.
The prospect of physically self-reproducing automata is potentially much scarier
than fears of out-of-control AI, because it moves the intelligence out here to where we
live. It could be a roadmap leading to Terminator’s Skynet robotic overlords. But it’s
also a more hopeful prospect, because an ability to program atoms as well as bits enables
designs to be shared globally while locally producing things like energy, food, and
shelter—all of these are emerging as exciting early applications of digital fabrication.
Wiener worried about the future of work, but he didn’t question implicit assumptions
about the nature of work which are challenged when consumption can be replaced by
creation.
History suggests that neither utopian nor dystopian scenarios prevail; we
generally end up muddling along somewhere in between. But history also suggests that
we don’t have to wait on history. Gordon Moore in 1965 was able to use five years of the
doubling of the specifications of integrated circuits to project what turned out to be fifty
years of exponential improvements in digital technologies. We’ve spent many of those
years responding to, rather than anticipating, its implications. We have more data
available now than Gordon Moore did to project fifty years of doubling the performance
of digital fabrication. With the benefit of hindsight, it should be possible to avoid the
excesses of digital computing and communications this time around, and, from the outset,
address issues like access and literacy.
If the maker movement is the harbinger of a third digital revolution, the success of
AI in meeting many of its own early goals can be seen as the crowning achievement of
the first two digital revolutions. Although machine making and machine thinking might
appear to be unrelated trends, they lie in each other’s futures. The same scaling trends
that have made AI possible suggest that the current mania is a phase that will pass, to be
followed by something even more significant: the merging of artificial and natural
intelligence.
It was an advance for atoms to form molecules, molecules to form organelles,
organelles to form cells, cells to form organs, organs to form organisms, organisms to
form families, families to form societies, and societies to form civilizations. This grand
evolutionary loop can now be closed, with atoms arranging bits arranging atoms.
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While Danny Hillis was an undergraduate at MIT, he built a computer out of Tinkertoys.
It has around 10,000 wooden parts, plays tic-tac-toe, and never loses; it’s now in the
Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California.
As a graduate student at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory in the early 1980s, Danny designed a massively parallel computer with
64,000 processors. He named it the Connection Machine and founded what may have
been the first AI company—Thinking Machines Corporation—to produce and market it.
This was despite a lunch he had with Richard Feynman, at which the celebrated physicist
remarked, “That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard.” Maybe “despite” is the
wrong word, since Feynman had a well-known predilection for playing with dopey ideas.
In the event, he showed up on the day the company was incorporated and stayed on, for
summer jobs and special assignments, to make invaluable contributions to its work.
Danny has since established a number of technology companies, of which the
latest is Applied Invention, which partners with commercial enterprises to develop
technological solutions to their most intractable problems. He holds hundreds of U.S.
patents, covering parallel computers, touch interfaces, disk arrays, forgery prevention
methods, and a slew of electronic and mechanical devices. His imagination is apparently
boundless, and here he sketches some possible scenarios that will result from our pursuit
of a better and better AI.
“Our thinking machines are more than metaphors,” he says. “The question is not,
‘Will they be powerful enough to hurt us?’ (they will), or whether they will always act in
our best interests (they won’t), but whether over the long term they can help us find our
way—where we come out on the Panacea/Apocalypse continuum.”
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THE FIRST MACHINE INTELLIGENCES
W. Daniel Hillis
W. Daniel “Danny” Hillis is an inventor, entrepreneur, and computer scientist, Judge
Widney Professor of Engineering and Medicine at USC, and author of The Pattern on the
Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work.
I have spoken of machines, but not only of machines having brains of brass and thews of
iron. When human atoms are knit into an organization in which they are used, not in
their full right as responsible human beings, but as cogs and levers and rods, it matters
little that their raw material is flesh and blood. What is used as an element in a machine,
is in fact an element in the machine. Whether we entrust our decisions to machines of
metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories
and armies and corporations, we shall never receive the right answers to our questions
unless we ask the right questions…. The hour is very late, and the choice of good and
evil knocks at our door.
—Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings
Norbert Wiener was ahead of his time in recognizing the potential danger of emergent
intelligent machines. I believe he was even further ahead in recognizing that the first
artificial intelligences had already begun to emerge. He was correct in identifying the
corporations and bureaus that he called “machines of flesh and blood” as the first
intelligent machines. He anticipated the dangers of creating artificial superintelligences
with goals not necessarily aligned with our own.
What is now clear, whether or not it was apparent to Wiener, is that these
organizational superintelligences are not just made of humans, they are hybrids of
humans and the information technologies that allow them to coordinate. Even in
Wiener’s time, the “bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations” could not
operate without telephones, telegraphs, radios, and tabulating machines. Today they
could not operate without networks of computers, databases, and decision support
systems. These hybrid intelligences are technologically augmented networks of humans.
These artificial intelligences have superhuman powers. They can know more than
individual humans; they can sense more; they can make more complicated analyses and
more complex plans. They can have vastly more resources and power than any single
individual.
Although we do not always perceive it, hybrid superintelligences such as nation
states and corporations have their own emergent goals. Although they are built by and
for humans, they often act like independent intelligent entities, and their actions are not
always aligned to the interests of the people who created them. The state is not always
for the citizen, nor the company for the shareholder. Nor do not-for-profits, religious
orders, or political parties always act in furtherance of their founding principles.
Intuitively, we recognize that their actions are guided by internal goals, which is why we
personify them, both legally and in our habits of thought. When talking about “what
China wants,” or “what General Motors is trying to do,” we are not speaking in
metaphors. These organizations act as intelligences that perceive, decide, and act. Like
the goals of individual humans, the goals of organizations are complex and often selfcontradictory,
but they are true goals in the sense that they direct action. Those goals
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depend somewhat on the goals of the people within the organization, but they are not
identical.
Any American knows how loose the tie is between the actions of the U.S.
government and the diverse and often contradictory aims of its citizens. That is also true
of corporations. For-profit corporations nominally serve multiple constituencies,
including shareholders, senior executives, employees, and customers. These corporations
differ in how they balance their loyalties and often behave in ways that serve none of
their constituents. The “neurons” that carry their corporate thought are not just the
human employees or the technologies that connect them; they are also coded into the
policies, incentive structures, culture, and procedural habits of the corporation. The
emergent corporate goals do not always reflect the values of the people who implement
them. For instance, an oil company led and staffed by people who care about the
environment may have incentive structures or policies that cause it to compromise
environmental safety for the sake of corporate earnings. The components’ good
intentions are not a guarantee of the emergent system’s good behavior.
Governments and corporations, both built partly of humans, are naturally
motivated to at least appear to share the goals of the humans they depend upon. They
could not function without the people, so they need to keep them cooperative. When
such organizations appear to behave altruistically, this is often part of their motive. I
once complimented the CEO of a large corporation on the contribution his company
made toward a humanitarian relief effort. The CEO responded, without a trace of irony,
“Yes. We have decided to do more things like that to make our brand more likeable.”
Individuals who compose a hybrid superintelligence may occasionally exert a
“humanizing” influence—for example, an employee may break company policies to
accommodate the needs of another human. The employee may act out of true human
empathy, but we should not attribute any such empathy to the superintelligence itself.
These hybrid machines have goals, and their citizens/customers/employees are some of
the resources they use to accomplish them.
We are close to being able to build superintelligences out of pure information
technology, without human components. This is what people normally refer to as
“artificial intelligence,” or AI. It is reasonable to ask what the attitudes of the
hypothetical machine superintelligences will be toward humans. Will they, too, see
humans as useful resources and a good relationship with us as worth preserving? Will
they be constructed to have goals that are aligned with our own? Will a superintelligence
even see these questions as important? What are the “right questions” that we should be
asking? I believe that one of the most important is this: What relationship will various
superintelligences have to one another?
It is interesting to consider how the hybrid superintelligences currently deal with
conflicts among themselves. Today, much of the ultimate power rests in the nation
states, which claim authority over a patch of ground. Whether they are optimized to act
in the interests of their citizens or those of a despotic ruler, nation states assert priority
over other intelligences’ desires or goals within their geographic dominion. They claim a
monopoly on the use of force and recognize only other nation states as peers. They are
willing, if necessary, to demand great sacrifices of their citizens to enforce their authority,
even to the point of sacrificing their citizens’ lives.
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This geographical division of authority made logical sense when most of the
actors were humans who spent their lives within a single nation state, but now that the
actors of importance include geographically distributed hybrid intelligences such as
multinational corporations, that logic is less obvious. Today we live in a complex
transitional period, when distributed superintelligences still largely rely on the nation
states to settle the arguments arising among them. Often, those arguments are resolved
differently in different jurisdictions. It is becoming more difficult even to assign
individual humans to nation states: International travelers living and working outside
their native country, refugees, and immigrants (documented and not) are still dealt with
as awkward exceptions. Superintelligences built purely of information technology will
prove even more awkward for the territorial system of authority, since there is no reason
why they need to be tied to physical resources in a single country—or even to any
particular physical resources at all. An artificial intelligence might well exist “in the
cloud” rather than at any physical location.
I can imagine at least four scenarios for how machine superintelligences will
relate to hybrid superintelligences.
In one obvious scenario, multiple machine intelligences will ultimately be
controlled by, and allied with, individual nation states. In this state/AI scenario, one can
envision American and Chinese super-AIs wrestling each other for resources on behalf of
their state. In some sense, these AIs would be citizens of their nation state in the way that
many commercial corporations often act as “corporate citizens” today. In this scenario,
the host nation states would presumably give the machine superintelligences the
resources they needed to work for the state’s advantage. Or, to the degree that the
superintelligences can influence their state governments, they will presumably do so to
enhance their own power, for instance by garnering a larger share of the state’s resources.
Nation states’ AIs might not want competing AIs to grow up within their jurisdiction. In
this scenario, the superintelligences become an extension of the state, and vice versa.
The state/AI scenario seems plausible, but it is not our current course. Our most
powerful and rapidly improving artificial intelligences are controlled by for-profit
corporations. This is the corporate/AI scenario, in which the balance of power between
nation states and corporations becomes inverted. Today, the most powerful and
intelligent collections of machines are probably owned by Google, but companies like
Amazon, Baidu, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, and IBM may not be far behind. These
companies all see a business imperative to build artificial intelligences of their own. It is
easy to imagine a future in which corporations independently build their own machine
intelligences, protected within firewalls preventing the machines from taking advantage
of one another’s knowledge. These machines will be designed to have goals aligned with
those of the corporation. If this alignment is effective, nation states may continue to lag
behind in developing their own artificial-intelligence capability and instead depend on
their “corporate citizens” to do it for them. To the extent that corporations successfully
control the goals, they will become more powerful and autonomous than nation states.
Another scenario, perhaps the one people fear the most, is that artificial
intelligences will not be aligned with either humans or hybrid superintelligences but will
act solely in their own interest. They might even merge into a single machine
superintelligence, since there may be no technical requirement for machine intelligences
to maintain distinct identities. The attitude of a self-interested super-AI toward hybrid
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superintelligences is likely to be competitive. Humans might be seen as minor
annoyances, like ants at a picnic, but hybrid superintelligences—like corporations,
organized religions, and nation states—could be existential threats. Like hybrid
superintelligences, AIs might see humans mostly as useful tools to accomplish their
goals, as pawns in their competition with the other superintelligences. Or we might
simply be irrelevant. It is not impossible that a machine intelligence has already emerged
and we simply do not recognize it as such. It may not wish to be noticed, or it may be so
alien to us that we are incapable of perceiving it. This makes the self-interested AI
scenario the most difficult to imagine. I believe the easy-to-imagine versions, like the
humanoid intelligent robots of science fiction, are the least likely. Our most complex
machines, like the Internet, have already grown beyond the detailed understanding of a
single human, and their emergent behaviors may be well beyond our ken.
The final scenario is that machine intelligences will not be allied with one another
but instead will work to further the goals of humanity as a whole. In this optimistic
scenario, AI could help us restore the balance of power between the individual and the
corporation, between the citizen and the state. It could help us solve the problems that
have been created by hybrid superintelligences that subvert the goals of humans. In this
scenario, AIs will empower us by giving us access to processing capacity and knowledge
currently available only to corporations and states. In effect, they could become
extensions of our own individual intelligences, in furtherance of our human goals. They
could make our weak individual intelligences strong. This prospect is both exciting and
plausible. It is plausible because we have some choice in what we build, and we have a
history of using technology to expand and augment our human capacities. As airplanes
have given us wings and engines have given us muscles to move mountains, so our
network of computers may amplify and extend our minds. We may not fully understand
or control our destiny, but we have a chance to bend it in the direction of our values. The
future is not something that will happen to us; it is something that we will build.
Why Wiener Saw What Others Missed
There is in electrical engineering a split which is known in Germany as the split between
the technique of strong currents and the technique of weak currents, and which we know
as the distinction between power and communication engineering. It is this split which
separates the age just past from that in which we are now living.
—Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and
Communication in the Animal and the Machine
Cybernetics is the study of the how the weak can control the strong. Consider the
defining metaphor of the field: the helmsman guiding a ship with a tiller. The
helmsman’s goal is to control the heading of the ship, to keep it on the right course. The
information, the message that is sent to the helmsman, comes from the compass or the
stars, and the helmsman closes the feedback loop by sending the steering messages
through the gentle force of his hand on the tiller. In this picture, we see the ship tossing
in powerful wind and waves in the real world, controlled by the communication system
of messages in the world of information.
Yet the distinction between “real” and “information” is mostly a difference in
perspective. The signals that carry messages, like the light of the stars and pressure of the
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hand on the tiller, exist in a world of energy and forces, as does the helmsman. The weak
forces that control the rudder are as real and physical as the strong forces that toss the
ship. If we shift our cybernetics perspective from the ship to the helmsman, the pressures
on the rudder become a strong force of muscles controlled by the weak signals in the
mind of the helmsman. These messages in the helmsman’s mind are amplified into a
physical force strong enough to steer the ship. Or instead, we can zoom out and take a
large cybernetics perspective. We might see the ship itself as part of a vast trade
network, part of a feedback loop that regulates the price of commodities through the flow
of goods. In this perspective, the tiny ship is merely a messenger. So, the distinction
between the physical world and the information world is a way to describe the
relationship between the weak and the strong.
Wiener chose to view the world from the vantage point and scale of the individual
human. As a cyberneticist, he took the perspective of the weak protagonist embedded
within a strong system, trying to make the best of limited powers. He incorporated this
perspective in his very definition of information. “Information,” he said, “is a name for
the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it, and make our
adjustment felt upon it.” In his words, information is what we use to “live effectively
within that environment.” 33 For Wiener, information is a way for the weak to effectively
cope with the strong. This viewpoint is also reflected in Gregory Bateson’s definition of
information as “a difference that makes a difference,” by which he meant the small
difference that makes a big difference.
The goal of cybernetics was to create a tiny model of the system using “weak
currents” to amplify and control “strong currents” of the real world. The central insight
was that a control problem could be solved by building an analogous system in the
information space of messages and then amplifying solutions into the larger world of
reality. Inherent in the motion of a control system is the concept of amplification, which
makes the small big and the weak strong. Amplification allows the difference that makes
a difference to make a difference.
In this way of looking at the world, a control system needed to be as complex as
the system it controlled. Cyberneticist W. Ross Ashby proved that this was true in a
precise mathematical sense, in what is now called Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety, or
sometimes the First Law of Cybernetics. The law tells us that to control a system
completely, the controller must be as complex as the controlled. Thus cyberneticists
tended to see control systems as a kind of analog of the systems they governed, like the
homunculus—the hypothetical little person inside the brain who controls the actual
person.
This notion of analogous structure is sometimes confused with the notion of
analog encoding of messages, but the two are logically distinct. Norbert Wiener was
much impressed with Vannevar Bush’s Digital Differential Analyzer, which could be
reconfigured to match the structure of whatever problem it was given to solve but used
digital signal encoding. Signals could be simplified to openly represent the relevant
distinctions, allowing them to be more accurately communicated and stored. In digital
signals, one needed only to preserve the difference in signals that made a difference. It is
this distinction and signal coding that we commonly use to distinguish “analog” versus
“digital.” Digital signal encoding was entirely compatible with cybernetic thinking—in
33
The Human Use of Human Beings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954), p. 17-18.
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fact, enabling to it. What was constraining to cybernetics was the presumption of an
analogy of structure between the controller and the controlled. By the 1930s, Kurt Gödel,
Alonzo Church, and Alan Turing had all described universal systems of computation, in
which the computation required no structural analogy to functions that were computed.
These universal computers could also compute the functions of control.
The analogy of structure between the controller and the controlled was central to
the cybernetic perspective. Just as digital coding collapses the space of possible
messages into a simplified version that represents only the difference that makes a
difference, so the control system collapses the state space of a controlled system into a
simplified model that reflects only the goals of the controller. Ashby’s Law does not
imply that every controller must model every state of the system but only those states that
matter for advancing the controller’s goals. Thus, in cybernetics, the goal of the
controller becomes the perspective from which the world is viewed.
Norbert Wiener adopted the perspective of the individual human relating to vast
organizations and trying to “live effectively within that environment.” He took the
perspective of the weak trying to influence the strong. Perhaps this is why he was able to
notice the emergent goals of the “machines of flesh and blood” and anticipate some of the
human challenges posed by these new intelligences, hybrid machine intelligences with
goals of their own.
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Venki Ramakrishnan is a Nobel Prize-winning biologist whose many scientific
contributions include his work on the atomic structure of the ribosome—in effect, a huge
molecular machine that reads our genes and makes proteins. His work would have been
impossible without powerful computers. The Internet made his own work a lot easier
and, he notes, acted as a leveler internationally: “When I grew up in India, if you wanted
to get a book, it would show up six months or a year after it had already come out in the
West. . . . Journals would arrive by surface mail a few months later. I didn’t have to
deal with it, because I left India when I was nineteen, but I know Indian scientists had to
deal with it. Today they have access to information at the click of a button. More
important, they have access to lectures. They can listen to Richard Feynman. That
would have been a dream of mine when I was growing up. They can just watch Richard
Feynman on the Web. That’s a big leveling in the field.” And yet. . . “Along with the
benefits [of the Web], there is now a huge amount of noise. You have all of these people
spouting pseudoscientific jargon and pushing their own ideas as if they were science.”
As president of the Royal Society, Venki worries, too, about the broader issue of
trust: public trust in evidence-based scientific findings, but also trust among scientists,
bolstered by rigorous checking of one another’s conclusions—trust that is in danger of
eroding because of the “black box” character of deep-learning computers. “This
[erosion] is going to happen more and more, as data sets get bigger, as we have genomewide
studies, population studies, and all sorts of things,” he says. “How do we, as a
science community, grapple with this and communicate to the public a sense of what
science is about, what is reliable in science, what is uncertain in science, and what is just
plain wrong in science?”
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WILL COMPUTERS BECOME OUR OVERLORDS?
Venki Ramakrishnan
Venki Ramakrishnan is a scientist at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of
Molecular Biology, Cambridge University; recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
(2009); current president of the Royal Society; and the author of Gene Machine: The
Race to Discover the Secrets of the Ribosome.
A former colleague of mine, Gérard Bricogne, used to joke that carbon-based intelligence
was simply a catalyst for the evolution of silicon-based intelligence. For quite a long
time, both Hollywood movies and scientific Jeremiahs have been predicting our eventual
capitulation to our computer overlords. We all await the singularity, which always seems
to be just over the horizon.
In a sense, computers have already taken over, facilitating virtually every aspect
of our lives—from banking, travel, and utilities to the most intimate personal
communication. I can see and talk to my grandson in New York for free. I remember
when I first saw the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, the audience laughed at the
absurdly cheap cost of a picturephone call from space: $1.70, at a time when a longdistance
call within the U.S. was $3 per minute.
However, the convenience and power of computers is also something of a
Faustian bargain, for it comes with a loss of control. Computers prevent us from doing
things we want. Try getting on a flight if you arrive at the airport and the airline
computer systems are down, as happened not so long ago to British Airways at Heathrow.
The planes, pilots, and passengers were all there; even the air-traffic controls were
working. But no flights for that airline were allowed to take off. Computers also make
us do things we don’t want—by generating mailing lists and print labels to send us all
millions of pieces of unwanted mail, which we humans have to sort, deliver, and dispose
of.
But you ain’t seen nothing yet. In the past, we programmed computers using
algorithms we understood at least in principle. So when machines did amazing things
like beating world chess champion Garry Kasparov, we could say that the victorious
programs were designed with algorithms based on our own understanding—using, in this
instance, the experience and advice of top grandmasters. Machines were simply faster at
doing brute-force calculations, had prodigious amounts of memory, and were not prone to
errors. One article described Deep Blue’s victory not as that of a computer, which was
just a dumb machine, but as the victory of hundreds of programmers over Kasparov, a
single individual.
That way of programming is changing dramatically. After a long hiatus, the
power of machine learning has taken off. Much of the change came when programmers,
rather than trying to anticipate and code for every possible contingency, allowed
computers to train themselves on data, using deep neural networks based on models of
how our own brains learn. They use probabilistic methods to “learn” from large
quantities of data; computers can recognize patterns and come up with conclusions on
their own. A particularly powerful method is called reinforcement learning, by which the
computer learns, without prior input, which variables are important and how much to
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weight them to reach a certain goal. This method in some sense mimics how we learn as
children. The results from these new approaches are amazing.
Such a deep-learning program was used to teach a computer to play Go, a game
that only a few years ago was thought to be beyond the reach of AI because it was so
hard to calculate how well you were doing. It seemed that top Go players relied a great
deal on intuition and a feel for position, so proficiency was thought to require a
particularly human kind of intelligence. But the AlphaGo program produced by
DeepMind, after being trained on thousands of high-level Go games played by humans
and then millions of games with itself, was able to beat the top human players in short
order. Even more amazingly, the related AlphaGo Zero program, which learned from
scratch by playing itself, was stronger than the version trained initially on human games!
It was as though the humans had been preventing the computer from reaching its true
potential. The same method has recently been generalized: Starting from scratch, within
just twenty-four hours, an equivalent AlphaZero chess program was able to beat today’s
top “conventional” chess programs, which in turn have beaten the best humans.
Progress has not been restricted to games. Computers are significantly better at
image and voice recognition and speech synthesis than they used to be. They can detect
tumors in radiographs earlier than most humans. Medical diagnostics and personalized
medicine will improve substantially. Transportation by self-driving cars will keep us all
safer, on average. My grandson may never have to acquire a driver’s license, because
driving a car will be like riding a horse today—a hobby for the few. Dangerous
activities, such as mining, and tedious repetitive work will be done by computers.
Governments will offer better targeted, more personalized and efficient public services.
AI could revolutionize education by analyzing an individual pupil’s needs and enabling
customized teaching, so that each student can advance at an optimal rate.
Along with these huge benefits, of course, will come alarming risks. With the
vast amounts of personal data, computers will learn more about us than we may know
about ourselves; the question of who owns data about us will be paramount. Moreover,
data-based decisions will undoubtedly reflect social biases: Even an allegedly neutral
intelligent system designed to predict loan risks, say, may conclude that mere
membership in a particular minority group makes you more likely to default on a loan.
While this is an obvious example that we could correct, the real danger is that we are not
always aware of biases in the data and may simply perpetuate them.
Machine learning may also perpetuate our own biases. When Netflix or Amazon
tries to tell you what you might want to watch or buy, this is an application of machine
learning. Currently such suggestions are sometimes laughable, but with time and more
data they will get increasingly accurate, reinforcing our prejudices and likes and dislikes.
Will we miss out on the random encounter that might persuade us to change our views by
exposing us to new and conflicting ideas? Social media, given its influence on elections,
is a particularly striking illustration of how the divide between people on different sides
of the political spectrum can be accentuated.
We may have already reached the stage where most governments are powerless to
resist the combined clout of a few powerful multinational companies that control us and
our digital future. The fight between dominant companies today is really a fight for
control over our data. They will use their enormous influence to prevent regulation of
data, because their interests lie in unfettered control of it. Moreover, they have the
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financial resources to hire the most talented workers in the field, enhancing their power
even further. We have been giving away valuable data for the sake of freebies like Gmail
and Facebook, but as the journalist and author John Lanchester has pointed out in the
London Review of Books, if it is free, then you are the product. Their real customers are
the ones who pay them for access to knowledge about us, so that they can persuade us to
buy their products or otherwise influence us. One way around the monopolistic control
of data is to split the ownership of data away from firms that use them. Individuals
would instead own and control access to their personal data (a model that would
encourage competition, since people would be free to move their data to a company that
offered better services). Finally, abuse of data is not limited to corporations: In
totalitarian states, or even nominally democratic ones, governments know things about
their citizens that Orwell could not have imagined. The use they make of this
information may not always be transparent or possible to counter.
The prospect of AI for military purposes is frightening. One can imagine
intelligent systems being designed to act autonomously based on real-time data and able
to act faster than the enemy, starting catastrophic wars. Such wars may not necessarily
be conventional or even nuclear wars. Given how essential computer networks are to
modern society, it is much more likely that AI wars will be fought in cyberspace. The
consequences could be just as dire.
~ ~ ~
Despite this loss of control, we continue to march inexorably into a world in which AI
will be everywhere: Individuals won’t be able to resist its convenience and power, and
corporations and governments won’t be able to resist its competitive advantages. But
important questions arise about the future of work. Computers have been responsible for
considerable losses in blue-collar jobs in the last few decades, but until recently many
white-collar jobs—jobs that “only humans can do”—were thought to be safe. Suddenly
that no longer appears to be true. Accountants, many legal and medical professionals,
financial analysts and stockbrokers, travel agents—in fact, a large fraction of white-collar
jobs—will disappear as a result of sophisticated machine-learning programs. We face a
future in which factories churn out goods with very few employees and the movement of
goods is largely automated, as are many services. What’s left for humans to do?
In 1930—long before the advent of computers, let alone AI—John Maynard
Keynes wrote, in an essay called “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” that as
a result of improvements in productivity, society could produce all its needs with a
fifteen-hour work week. He also predicted, along with the growth of creative leisure, the
end of money and wealth as a goal:
We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value.
The love of money as a possession—as distinguished from the love of money as
a means to the enjoyments and realities of life—will be recognised for what it is,
a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological
propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental
disease.
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Sadly, Keynes’s predictions did not come true. Although productivity did indeed
increase, the system—possibly inherent in a market economy—did not result in humans
working much shorter hours. Rather, what happened is what the anthropologist and
anarchist David Graeber describes as the growth of “bullshit jobs.” 34 While jobs that
produce essentials like food, shelter, and goods have been largely automated away, we
have seen an enormous expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health
administration (as opposed to actual teaching, research, and the practice of medicine),
“human resources,” and public relations, not to mention new industries like financial
services and telemarketing and ancillary industries in the so-called gig economy which
serve those who are too busy doing all that additional work.
How will societies cope with technology’s increasingly rapid destruction of entire
professions and throwing large numbers of people out of work? Some argue that this
concern is based on a false premise, because new jobs spring up that didn’t exist before,
but as Graeber points out, these new jobs won’t necessarily be rewarding or fulfilling.
During the first industrial revolution, it took almost a century before most people were
better off. That revolution was possible only because the government of the time
ruthlessly favored property rights over labor, and most people (and all women) did not
have the vote. In today’s democratic societies, it is not clear that the population will
tolerate such a dramatic upheaval of society based on the promise that “eventually”
things will get better.
Even that rosy vision will depend on a radical shake-up of education and lifelong
learning. The Industrial Revolution did trigger enormous social change of this kind,
including a shift to universal education. But it will not happen unless we make it happen:
This is essentially about power, agency, and control. What’s next for, say, the forty-yearold
taxi driver or truck driver in an era of autonomous vehicles?
One idea that has been touted is that of a universal basic income, which will allow
citizens to pursue their interests, retrain for new occupations, and generally be free to live
a decent life. However, market economies, which are predicated on growing consumer
demand over all else, may not tolerate this innovation. There is also a feeling among
many that meaningful work is essential to human dignity and fulfillment. So another
possibility is that the enormous wealth generated by increased productivity due to
automation could be redistributed to jobs requiring human labor and creativity in fields
such as the arts, music, social work, and other worthwhile pursuits. Ultimately, which
jobs are rewarding or productive and which are “bullshit” is a matter of judgment and
may vary from society to society, as well as over time.
~ ~ ~
So far, I’ve focused on AI’s practical consequences. As a scientist, what bothers me is
our potential loss of understanding. We are now accumulating data at an incredible rate.
In my own lab, an experiment generates over a terabyte of data a day. These data are
massaged, analyzed, and reduced until there is an interpretable result. But in all of this
data analysis, we believe we know what’s happening. We know what the programs are
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https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
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doing because we designed the algorithms at their heart. So when our computers
generate a result, we feel that we intellectually grasp it.
The new machine-learning programs are different. Having recognized patterns
via deep neural networks, they come up with conclusions, and we have no idea exactly
how. When they uncover relationships, we don’t understand it in the same way as if we
had deduced those relationships ourselves using an underlying theoretical framework. As
data sets become larger, we won’t be able to analyze them ourselves even with the help
of computers; rather, we will rely entirely on computers to do the analysis for us. So if
someone asks us how we know something, we will simply say it is because the machine
analyzed the data and produced the conclusion.
One day a computer may well come up with an entirely new result—e.g., a
mathematical theorem whose proof, or even whose statement, no human can understand.
That is philosophically different from the way we have been doing science. Or at least
thought we had; some might argue that we don’t know how our own brains reach
conclusions either, and that these new methods are a way of mimicking learning by the
human brain. Nevertheless, I find this potential loss of understanding disturbing.
Despite the remarkable advances in computing, the hype about AGI—a generalintelligence
machine that will think like a human and possibly develop consciousness—
smacks of science fiction to me, partly because we don’t understand the brain at that level
of detail. Not only do we not understand what consciousness is, we don’t even
understand a relatively simple problem like how we remember a phone number. In just
that one question, there are all sorts of things to consider. How do we know it is a
number? How do we associate it with a person, a name, face, and other characteristics?
Even such seemingly trivial questions involve everything from high-level cognition and
memory to how a cell stores information and how neurons interact.
Moreover, that’s just one task among many that the brain does effortlessly.
Whereas machines will no doubt do ever more amazing things, they’re unlikely to be a
replacement for human thought and human creativity and vision. Eric Schmidt, former
chairman of Google’s parent company, said in a recent interview at the London Science
Museum that even designing a robot that would clear the table, wash the dishes, and put
them away was a huge challenge. The calculations involved in figuring out all the
movements the body has to make to throw a ball accurately or do slalom skiing are
prodigious. The brain can do all these and also do mathematics and music, and invent
games like chess and Go, not just play them. We tend to underestimate the complexity
and creativity of the human brain and how amazingly general it is.
If AI is to become more humanlike in its abilities, the machine-learning and
neuroscience communities need to interact closely, something that is happening already.
Some of today’s greatest exponents of machine learning—such as Geoffrey Hinton,
Zoubin Ghahramani, and Demis Hassabis—have backgrounds in cognitive neuroscience,
and their success has been at least in part due to attempts to model brainlike behavior in
their algorithms. At the same time, neurobiology has also flourished. All sorts of tools
have been developed to watch which neurons are firing and genetically manipulate them
and see what’s happening in real time with inputs. Several countries have launched
moon-shot neuroscience initiatives to see if we can crack the workings of the brain.
Advances in AI and neuroscience seem to go hand in hand; each field can propel the
other.
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Many evolutionary scientists, and such philosophers as Daniel Dennett, have
pointed out that the human brain is the result of billions of years of evolution. 35 Human
intelligence is not the special characteristic we think it is, but just another survival
mechanism not unlike our digestive or immune systems, both of which are also
amazingly complex. Intelligence evolved because it allowed us to make sense of the
world around us, to plan ahead, and thus cope with all sorts of unexpected things in order
to survive. However, as Descartes stated, we humans define our very existence by our
ability to think. So it is not surprising that, in an anthropomorphic way, our fears about
AI reflect this belief that our intelligence is what makes us special.
But if we step back and look at life on Earth, we see that we are far from the most
resilient species. If we’re going to be taken over at some point, it will be by some of
Earth’s oldest life-forms, like bacteria, which can live anywhere from Antarctica to deepsea
thermal vents hotter than boiling water, or in acid environments that would melt you
and me. So when people ask where we’re headed, we need to put the question in a
broader context. I don’t know what sort of future AI will bring: whether AI will make
humans subservient or obsolete or will be a useful and welcome enhancement of our
abilities which will enrich our lives. But I am reasonably certain that computers will
never be the overlords of bacteria.
35
See, for example, Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (New York: W.
W. Norton, 2017).
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Alex “Sandy” Pentland, an exponent of what he has termed “social physics,” is
interested in building powerful human-AI ecologies. He is concerned at the same time
about the potential dangers of decision-making systems in which the data in effect take
over and human creativity is relegated to the background.
The advent of Big Data, he believes, has given us the opportunity to reinvent our
civilization: “We can now begin to actually look at the details of social interaction and
how those play out, and we’re no longer limited to averages like market indices or
election results. This is an astounding change. The ability to see the details of the
market, of political revolutions, and to be able to predict and control them is definitely a
case of Promethean fire—it could be used for good or for ill. Big Data brings us to
interesting times.”
At our group meeting in Washington, Connecticut, he confessed that reading
Norbert Wiener on the concept of feedback “felt like reading my own thoughts.”
“After Wiener, people discovered or focused on the fact that there are genuinely
chaotic systems that are just not predictable,” he said, “but if you look at human
socioeconomic systems, there is a large percentage of variance you can account for and
predict. . . . Today there is data from all sorts of digital devices, and from all of our
transactions. The fact that everything is datafied means you can measure things in real
time in most aspects of human life—and increasingly in every aspect of human life. The
fact that we have interesting computers and machine-learning techniques means that you
can build predictive models of human systems in ways you could never do before.”
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THE HUMAN STRATEGY
Alex “Sandy” Pentland
Alex “Sandy” Pentland is Toshiba Professor and professor of media arts and sciences,
MIT; director of the Human Dynamics and Connection Science labs and the Media Lab
Entrepreneurship Program, and the author of Social Physics.
In the last half-century, the idea of AI and intelligent robots has dominated thinking about
the relationship between humans and computers. In part, this is because it’s easy to tell
the stories about AI and robots, and in part because of early successes (e.g., theorem
provers that reproduced most of Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica) and
massive military funding. The earlier and broader vision of cybernetics, which
considered the artificial as part of larger systems of feedback and mutual influence, faded
from public awareness.
However, in the intervening years the cybernetics vision has slowly grown and
quietly taken over—to the point where it is “in the air.” State-of-the-art research in most
engineering disciplines is now framed as feedback systems that are dynamic and driven
by energy flows. Even AI is being recast as human/machine “advisor” systems, and the
military is beginning large-scale funding in this area—something that should perhaps
worry us more than drones and independent humanoid robots.
But as science and engineering have adopted a more cybernetics-like stance, it has
become clear that even the vision of cybernetics is far too small. It was originally
centered on the embeddedness of the individual actor but not on the emergent properties
of a network of actors. This is unsurprising, because the mathematics of networks did not
exist until recently, so a quantitative science of how networks behave was impossible.
We now know that study of the individual does not produce understanding of the system
except in certain simple cases. Recent progress in this area was foreshadowed by
understanding that “chaos,” and later “complexity,” were the typical behavior of systems,
but we can now go far beyond these statistical understandings.
We’re beginning to be able to analyze, predict, and even design the emergent
behavior of complex heterogeneous networks. The cybernetics view of the connected
individual actor can now be expanded to cover complex systems of connected individuals
and machines, and the insights we obtain from this broader view are fundamentally
different from those obtained from the cybernetics view. Thinking about the network is
analogous to thinking about entire ecosystems. How would you guide ecosystems to
grow in a good direction? What do you even mean by “a good direction”? Questions
like this are beyond the boundary of traditional cybernetic thinking.
Perhaps the most stunning realization is that humans are already beginning to use
AI and machine learning to guide entire ecosystems, including ecosystems of people, thus
creating human-AI ecologies. Now that everything is becoming “datafied,” we can
measure most aspects of human life and, increasingly, aspects of all life. This, together
with new, powerful machine-learning techniques, means that we can build models of
these ecologies in ways we couldn’t before. Well-known examples are weather- and
traffic-prediction models, which are being extended to predict the global climate and plan
city growth and renewal. AI-aided engineering of the ecologies is already here.
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Development of human-AI ecosystems is perhaps inevitable for a social species
such as ourselves. We became social early in our evolution, millions of years ago. We
began exchanging information with one another to stay alive, to increase our fitness. We
developed writing to share abstract and complex ideas, and most recently we’ve
developed computers to enhance our communication abilities. Now we’re developing AI
and machine-learning models of ecosystems and sharing the predictions of those models
to jointly shape our world through new laws and international agreements.
We live in an unprecedented historic moment, in which the availability of vast
amounts of human behavioral data and advances in machine learning enable us to tackle
complex social problems through algorithmic decision making. The opportunities for
such a human-AI ecology to have positive social impact through fairer and more
transparent decisions are obvious. But there are also risks of a “tyranny of algorithms,”
where unelected data experts are running the world. The choices we make now are
perhaps even more momentous than those we faced in the 1950s, when AI and
cybernetics were created. The issues look similar, but they’re not. We have moved down
the road, and now the scope is larger. It’s not just AI robots versus individuals. It’s AI
guiding entire ecologies.
~ ~ ~
How can we make a good human-artificial ecosystem, something that’s not a machine
society but a cyberculture in which we can all live as humans—a culture with a human
feel to it? We don’t want to think small—for example, to talk only of robots and selfdriving
cars. We want this to be a global ecology. Think Skynet-size. But how would
you make Skynet something that’s about the human fabric?
The first thing to ask is: What’s the magic that makes the current AI work?
Where is it wrong and where is it right?
The good magic is that it has something called the credit-assignment function.
What that lets you do is take “stupid neurons”—little linear functions—and figure out, in
a big network, which ones are doing the work and strengthen them. It’s a way of taking a
random bunch of switches all hooked together in a network and making them smart by
giving them feedback about what works and what doesn’t. This sounds simple, but
there’s some complicated math around it. That’s the magic that makes current AI work.
The bad part of it is, because those little neurons are stupid, the things they learn
don’t generalize very well. If an AI sees something it hasn’t seen before, or if the world
changes a little bit, the AI is likely to make a horrible mistake. It has absolutely no sense
of context. In some ways, it’s as far from Norbert Wiener’s original notion of
cybernetics as you can get, because it isn’t contextualized; it’s a little idiot savant.
But imagine that you took away those limitations: Imagine that instead of using
dumb neurons, you used neurons in which real-world knowledge was embedded. Maybe
instead of linear neurons, you used neurons that were functions in physics, and then you
tried to fit physics data. Or maybe you put in a lot of knowledge about humans and how
they interact with one another—the statistics and characteristics of humans.
When you add this background knowledge and surround it with a good creditassignment
function, then you can take observational data and use the credit-assignment
function to reinforce the functions that are producing good answers. The result is an AI
that works extremely well and can generalize. For instance, in solving physical
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problems, it often takes only a couple of noisy data points to get something that’s a
beautiful description of a phenomenon, because you’re putting in knowledge about how
physics works. That’s in huge contrast to normal AI, which requires millions of training
examples and is very sensitive to noise. By adding the appropriate background
knowledge, you get much more intelligence.
Similar to the physical-systems case, if we make neurons that know a lot about
how humans learn from each other, then we can detect human fads and predict human
behavior trends in surprisingly accurate and efficient ways. This “social physics” works
because human behavior is determined as much by the patterns of our culture as by
rational, individual thinking. These patterns can be described mathematically and
employed to make accurate predictions.
This idea of a credit-assignment function reinforcing connections between
neurons that are doing the best work is the core of current AI. If you make those little
neurons smarter, the AI gets smarter. So, what would happen if we replaced the neurons
with people? People have lots of capabilities. They know lots of things about the world;
they can perceive things in a broadly competent, human way. What would happen if you
had a network of people in which you could reinforce the connections that were helping
and minimize the connections that weren’t?
That begins to sound like a society, or a company. We all live in a human social
network. We’re reinforced for doing things that seem to help everybody and discouraged
from doing things that are not appreciated. Culture is the result of this sort of human AI
as applied to human problems; it is the process of building social structures by
reinforcing the good connections and penalizing the bad. Once you’ve realized you can
take this general AI framework and create a human AI, the question becomes, What’s the
right way to do that? Is it a safe idea? Is it completely crazy?
My students and I are looking at how people make decisions, on huge databases
of financial decisions, business decisions, and many other sorts of decisions. What we’ve
found is that humans often make decisions in a way that mimics AI credit-assignment
algorithms and works to make the community smarter. A particularly interesting feature
of this work is that it addresses a classic problem in evolution known as the groupselection
problem. The core of this problem is: How can we select for culture in
evolution, when it’s the individuals that reproduce? What you need is something that
selects for the best cultures and the best groups but also selects for the best individuals,
because they’re the units that transmit the genes.
When you frame the question this way and go through the mathematical literature,
you discover that there’s one generally best way to do this. It’s called “distributed
Thompson sampling,” a mathematical algorithm used in choosing, out of a set of possible
actions with unknown payoffs, the action that maximizes the expected reward in respect
to the actions. The key is social sampling, a way of combining evidence, of exploring
and exploiting at the same time. It has the unusual property of simultaneously being the
best strategy both for the individual and for the group. If you use the group as the basis
of selection, and then the group either gets wiped out or reinforced, you’re also selecting
for successful individuals. If you select for individuals, and each individual does what’s
good for him or her, then that’s automatically the best thing for the group. It’s an
amazing alignment of interests and utilities, and it provides real insight into the question
of how culture fits into natural selection.
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Social sampling, very simply, is looking around you at the actions of people who
are like you, finding what’s popular, and then copying it if it seems like a good idea to
you. Idea propagation has this popularity function driving it, but individual adoption also
is about figuring out how the idea works for the individual—a reflective attitude. When
you combine social sampling and personal judgment, you get superior decision making.
That’s amazing, because now we have a mathematical recipe for doing with humans what
all those AI techniques are doing with dumb computer neurons. We have a way of
putting people together to make better decisions, given more and more experience.
So, what happens in the real world? Why don’t we do this all the time? Well,
people are good at it, but there are ways it can run amok. One of these is through
advertising, propaganda, or “fake news.” There are many ways to get people to think
something is popular when it’s not, and this destroys the usefulness of social sampling.
The way you can make groups of people smarter, the way you can make human AI, will
work only if you can get feedback to them that’s truthful. It must be grounded on
whether each person’s actions worked for them or not.
That’s the key to AI mechanisms, too. What they do is analyze whether they
performed correctly. If so, plus one; if not, minus one. We need that truthful feedback to
make this human mechanism work well, and we need good ways of knowing about what
other people are doing so that we can correctly assess popularity and the likelihood of
this being a good choice.
The next step is to build this credit-assignment function, this feedback function,
for people, so that we can make a good human-artificial ecosystem—a smart organization
and a smart culture. In a way, we need to duplicate some of the early insights that
resulted in, for instance, the U.S. census—trying to find basic facts that everybody can
agree on and understand so that the transmission of knowledge and culture can happen in
a way that’s truthful and social sampling can function efficiently.
We can address the problem of building an accurate credit-assignment function in
many different settings. In companies, for instance, it can be done with digital ID badges
that reveal who’s connected to whom, so that we can assess the pattern of connections in
relation to the company’s results on a daily or weekly basis. The credit-assignment
function asks whether those connections helped solve problems, or helped invent new
solutions, and reinforces the helpful connections. When you can get that feedback
quantitatively—which is difficult, because most things aren’t measured quantitatively—
both the productivity and the innovation rate within the organization can be significantly
improved. This is, for instance, the basis of Toyota’s “continuous improvement” method.
A next step is to try to do the same thing but at scale, something I refer to as
building a trust network for data. It can be thought of as a distributed system like the
Internet, but with the ability to quantitatively measure and communicate the qualities of
human society, in the same way that the U.S. census does a pretty good job of telling us
about population and life expectancy. We are already deploying prototype examples of
trust networks at scale in several countries, based on the data and measurement standards
laid out in the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals.
On the horizon is a vision of how we can make humanity more intelligent by
building a human AI. It’s a vision composed of two threads. One is data that we can all
trust—data that have been vetted by a broad community, data where the algorithms are
known and monitored, much like the census data we all automatically rely on as at least
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approximately correct. The other is a fair, data-driven assessment of public norms,
policy, and government, based on trusted data about current conditions. This second
thread depends on availability of trusted data and so is just beginning to be developed.
Trusted data and data-driven assessment of norms, policy, and government together
create a credit-assignment function that improves societies’ overall fitness and
intelligence.
It is precisely at the point of creating greater societal intelligence where fake
news, propaganda, and advertising all get in the way. Fortunately, trust networks give us
a path forward to building a society more resistant to echo-chamber problems, these fads,
these exercises in madness. We have begun to develop a new way of establishing social
measurements, in aid of curing some of the ills we see in society today. We’re using
open data from all sources, encouraging a fair representation of the things people are
choosing, in a curated mathematical framework that can stamp out the echoes and the
attempts to manipulate us.
On Polarization and Inequality
Extreme polarization and segregation by income are almost everywhere in the world
today and threaten to tear governments and civil society apart. Increasingly, the media
are becoming adrenaline pushers driven by advertising clicks and failing to deliver
balanced facts and reasoned discourse—and the degradation of media is causing people
to lose their bearings. They don’t know what to believe, and thus they can easily be
manipulated. There is a real need to ground our various cultures in trustworthy, datadriven
standards that we all agree on, and to be able to know what behaviors and policies
work and which don’t.
In converting to a digital society, we’ve lost touch with traditional notions of truth
and justice. Justice used to be mostly informal and normative. We’ve now formalized it.
At the same time, we’ve put it out of reach for most people. Our legal systems are failing
us in a way they didn’t before, precisely because they’re now more formal, more digital,
less embedded in society.
Ideas about justice are very different around the world. One of the core
differentiators is this: Do you or your parents remember when the bad guys came with
guns and took everything? If you do, your attitude about justice is different from that of
the average reader of this essay. Do you come from the upper classes? Or were you
somebody who saw the sewers from the inside? Your view of justice depends on your
history.
A common test I have for U.S. citizens is this: Do you know anybody who owns a
pickup truck? It’s the number-one-selling vehicle in the United States, and if you don’t
know people like that, you’re out of touch with more than 50 percent of Americans.
Physical segregation drives conceptual segregation. Most of America thinks of justice
and access and fairness in terms very different from those of the typical, say,
Manhattanite.
If you look at patterns of mobility—where people go—in a typical city, you find
that the people in the top quintile (white-collar working families) and bottom quintile
(people who are sometimes on unemployment or welfare) almost never talk to each other.
They don’t go to the same places; they don’t talk about the same things. They all live in
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the same city, nominally, but it’s as if it were two completely different cities—and this is
perhaps the most important cause of today’s plague of polarization.
On Extreme Wealth
Some two hundred of the world’s wealthiest people have pledged to give away more than
50 percent of their wealth either during their lifetimes or in their wills, creating a plurality
of voices in the foundation space. 36 Bill Gates is probably the most familiar example.
He’s decided that if the government won’t do it, he’ll do it. You want mosquito nets?
He’ll do it. You want antivirals? He’ll do it. We’re getting different stakeholders to take
action in the form of foundations dedicated to public good, and they have different
versions of what they consider the public good. This diversity of goals has created a lot
of what’s wonderful about the world today. Actions from outside government by
organizations like the Ford Foundation and the Sloan Foundation, who bet on things that
nobody else would bet on, have changed the world for the better.
Sure, these billionaires are human, with human foibles, and all is not necessarily
as it should be. On the other hand, the same situation obtained when the railways were
first built. Some people made huge fortunes. A lot of people went bust. We, the average
people, got railways out of it. That’s good. Same thing with electric power; same thing
with many new technologies. There’s a churning process that throws somebody up and
later casts them or their heirs down. Bubbles of extreme wealth were a feature of the late
1800s and early 1900s when steam engines and railways and electric lights were
invented. The fortunes they created were all gone within two or three generations.
If the U.S. were like Europe, I would worry. What you find in Europe is that the
same families have held on to wealth for hundreds of years, so they’re entrenched not just
in terms of wealth but of the political system and in other ways. But so far, the U.S. has
avoided this kind of hereditary class system. Extreme wealth hasn’t stuck, which is good.
It shouldn’t stick. If you win the lottery, you get your billion dollars, but your grandkids
ought to work for a living.
On AI and Society
People are scared about AI. Perhaps they should be. But they need to realize that AI
feeds on data. Without data, AI is nothing. You don’t have to watch the AI; instead you
should watch what it eats and what it does. The trust-network framework we’ve set up,
with the help of nations in the E.U. and elsewhere, is one where we can have our
algorithms, we can have our AI, but we get to see what went in and what went out, so that
we can ask, Is this a discriminatory decision? Is this the sort of thing that we want as
humans? Or is this something that’s a little weird?
The most revealing analogy is that regulators, bureaucracies, and parts of the
government are very much like AIs: They take in the rules that we call law and
regulation, and they add government data, and they make decisions that affect our lives.
The part that’s bad about the current system is that we have very little oversight of these
departments, regulators, and bureaucracies. The only control we have is the vote—the
opportunity to elect somebody different. We need to make oversight of bureaucracies a
lot more fine-grained. We need to record the data that went into every single decision
36
https://givingpledge.org/About.aspx.
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and have the results analyzed by the various stakeholders—rather like elected legislatures
were originally intended to do.
If we have the data that go into and out of each decision, we can easily ask, Is this
a fair algorithm? Is this AI doing things that we as humans believe are ethical? This
human-in-the-loop approach is called “open algorithms;” you get to see what the AIs take
as input and what they decide using that input. If you see those two things, you’ll know
whether they’re doing the right thing or the wrong thing. It turns out that’s not hard to
do. If you control the data, then you control the AI.
One thing people often fail to mention is that all the worries about AI are the same
as the worries about today’s government. For most parts of the government—the justice
system, et cetera—there’s no reliable data about what they’re doing and in what situation.
How can you know whether the courts are fair or not if you don’t know the inputs and the
outputs? The same problem arises with AI systems and is addressable in the same way.
We need trusted data to hold current government to account in terms of what they take in
and what they put out, and AI should be no different.
Next-Generation AI
Current AI machine-learning algorithms are, at their core, dead simple stupid. They
work, but they work by brute force, so they need hundreds of millions of samples. They
work because you can approximate anything with lots of little simple pieces. That’s a
key insight of current AI research—that if you use reinforcement learning for creditassignment
feedback, you can get those little pieces to approximate whatever arbitrary
function you want.
But using the wrong functions to make decisions means the AI’s ability to make
good decisions won’t generalize. If we give the AI new, different inputs, it may make
completely unreasonable decisions. Or if the situation changes, then you need to retrain
it. There are amusing techniques to find the “null space” in these AI systems. These are
inputs that the AI thinks are valid examples of what it was trained to recognize (e.g.,
faces, cats, etc.), but to a human they’re crazy examples.
Current AI is doing descriptive statistics in a way that’s not science and would be
almost impossible to make into science. To build robust systems, we need to know the
science behind data. The systems I view as next-generation AIs result from this sciencebased
approach: If you’re going to create an AI to deal with something physical, then you
should build the laws of physics into it as your descriptive functions, in place of those
stupid little neurons. For instance, we know that physics uses functions like polynomials,
sine waves, and exponentials, so those should be your basis functions and not little linear
neurons. By using those more appropriate basis functions, you need a lot less data, you
can deal with a lot more noise, and you get much better results.
As in the physics example, if we want to build an AI to work with human
behavior, then we need to build the statistical properties of human networks into
machine-learning algorithms. When you replace the stupid neurons with ones that
capture the basics of human behavior, then you can identify trends with very little data,
and you can deal with huge levels of noise.
The fact that humans have a “commonsense” understanding that they bring to
most problems suggests what I call the human strategy: Human society is a network just
like the neural nets trained for deep learning, but the “neurons” in human society are a lot
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smarter. You and I have surprisingly general descriptive powers that we use for
understanding a wide range of situations, and we can recognize which connections should
be reinforced. That means we can shape our social networks to work much better and
potentially beat all that machine-based AI at its own game.
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“URGENT!” URGENT!” the cc’d copy of an email screamed, one of a dozen emails that
greeted me as I turned on my phone at the baggage carousel at Malpensa Airport after
the long flight from JFK. “The great American visionary thinker John Brockman arrives
this morning at Grand Hotel Milan. You MUST, repeat MUST pay him a visit.” It was
signed HUO.
The prior evening, waiting in the lounge at JFK, I had had the bright idea to write
my friend and longtime collaborator, the London-based, peripatetic art curator Hans
Ulrich Obrist (known to all as HUO), and ask if there was anyone in Milan I should
know.
Once I was settled at the hotel, the phone began ringing and a procession of
leading Italian artists, designers, and architects called to request a meeting, including
Enzo Mari, the modernist artist and furniture designer; Alberto Garutti, whose aesthetic
strategies have inspired a dialogue between contemporary art, spectator, and public
space; and fashion designer Miuccia Prada, who “requests your presence for tea this
afternoon at Prada headquarters.” And thus, thanks to HUO, did the jet-lagged “great
American visionary thinker” stumble and mumble his way through his first day in Milan,
November 2011.
HUO is sui generis: He lives a twenty-four-hour day, sleeping (I guess) whenever,
and employing full-time assistants who work eight-hour shifts and are available to him
24/7. Over a recent two-year period, he visited art venues in either China or India for
forty weekends each year—departing London Thursday evening, back at his desk on
Monday. Last year, once again, ArtReview ranked him #1 on their annual “Power 100”
list.
Recently we collaborated on a panel during the “GUEST, GHOST, HOST:
MACHINE!” Serpentine event that took place at London’s new City Hall. We were
joined by Venki Ramakrishnan, Jaan Tallinn, and Andrew Blake, research director of
The Alan Turing Institute. The event was consistent with HUO’s mission of bringing
together art and science: “The curator is no longer understood simply as the person who
fills a space with objects,” he says, “but also as the person who brings different cultural
spheres into contact, invents new display features, and makes junctions that allow
unexpected encounters and results.”
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MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE: ART MEETS AI
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Hans Ulrich Obrist is artistic director of the Serpentine Gallery, London, and the author
of Ways of Curating and Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects.
In the Introduction to the second edition of his book Understanding Media, Marshall
McLuhan noted the ability of art to “anticipate future social and technological
developments.” Art is “an early alarm system,” pointing us to new developments in
times ahead and allowing us “to prepare to cope with them. . . . Art as a radar
environment takes on the function of indispensable perceptual training. . . .”
In 1964, when McLuhan’s book was first published, the artist Nam June Paik was
just building his Robot K-456 to experiment with the technologies that subsequently
would start to influence society. He had worked with television earlier, challenging its
usual passive consumption by the viewer, and later made art with global live-satellite
broadcasts, using the new media less for entertainment than to point us to their poetic and
intercultural capacities (which are still mostly unused today). The Paiks of our time, of
course, are now working with the Internet, digital images, and artificial intelligence.
Their works and thoughts, again, are an early alarm system for the developments ahead of
us.
As a curator, my daily work is to bring together different works of art and connect
different cultures. Since the early 1990s, I have also been organizing conversations and
meetings with practitioners from different disciplines, in order to go beyond the general
reluctance to pool knowledge. Since I was interested in hearing what artists have to say
about artificial intelligence, I recently organized several conversations between artists
and engineers.
The reason to look closely at AI is that two of the most important questions of
today are “How capable will AI become?” and “What dangers may arise from it?” Its
early applications already influence our everyday lives in ways that are more or less
recognizable. There is an increasing impact on many aspects of our society, but whether
this might be, in general, beneficial or malign is still uncertain.
Many contemporary artists are following these developments closely. They are
articulating various doubts about the promises of AI and reminding us not to associate the
term “artificial intelligence” solely with positive outcomes. To the current discussions of
AI, the artists contribute their specific perspectives and notably their focus on questions
of image making, creativity, and the use of programming as artistic tools.
The deep connections between science and art had already been noted by the late
Heinz von Foerster, one of the architects of cybernetics, who worked with Norbert
Wiener from the mid-1940s and in the 1960s founded the field of second-order
cybernetics, in which the observer is understood as part of the system itself and not an
external entity. I knew von Foerster well, and in one of our many conversations, he
offered his views on the relation between art and science:
I’ve always perceived art and science as complementary fields. One shouldn’t
forget that a scientist is in some respects also an artist. He invents a new
technique and he describes it. He uses language like a poet, or the author of a
detective novel, and describes his findings. In my view, a scientist must work in
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an artistic way if he wants to communicate his research. He obviously wants to
communicate and talk to others. A scientist invents new objects, and the
question is how to describe them. In all of these aspects, science is not very
different from art.
When I asked him how he defined cybernetics, von Foerster answered:
The substance of what we have learned from cybernetics is to think in circles: A
leads B, B to C, but C can return to A. Such kinds of arguments are not linear but
circular. The significant contribution of cybernetics to our thinking is to accept
circular arguments. This means that we have to look at circular processes and
understand under which circumstances an equilibrium, and thus a stable
structure, emerges.
Today, where AI algorithms are applied in daily tasks, one can ask how the
human factor is included in these kinds of processes and what role creativity and art
could play in relation to them. There are thus different levels to think about when
exploring the relation between AI and art.
So, what do contemporary artists have to say about artificial intelligence?
Artificial Stupidity
Hito Steyerl, an artist who works with documentary and experimental film, considers two
key aspects that we should keep in mind when reflecting on the implications of AI for
society. First, the expectations for so-called artificial intelligence, she says, are often
overrated, and the noun “intelligence” is misleading; to counter that, she uses the term
“artificial stupidity.” Second, she points out that programmers are now making invisible
software algorithms visible through images, but to understand and interpret these images
better, we should apply the expertise of artists.
Steyerl has worked with computer technology for many years, and her recent
artworks have explored surveillance techniques, robots, and such computer games as in
How Not to Be Seen (2013), on digital-image technologies, or HellYeahWeFuckDie
(2017), about the training of robots in the still-difficult task of keeping balance. But to
explain her notion of artificial stupidity, Steyerl refers to a more general phenomenon,
like the now widespread use of Twitter bots, noting in our conversation:
It was and still is a very popular tool in elections to deploy Twitter armies to
sway public opinion and deflect popular hashtags and so on. This is an artificial
intelligence of a very, very low grade. It’s two or maybe three lines of script.
It’s nothing very sophisticated at all. Yet the social implications of this kind of
artificial stupidity, as I call it, are already monumental in global politics.
As has been widely noted, this kind of technology was seen in the many
automated Twitter posts before the 2016 U.S. presidential election and also shortly before
the Brexit vote. If even low-grade AI technology like these bots are already influencing
our politics, this raises another urgent question: “How powerful will far more advanced
techniques be in the future?”
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Visible / Invisible
The artist Paul Klee often talked about art as “making the invisible visible.” In computer
technology, most algorithms work invisibly, in the background; they remain inaccessible
in the systems we use daily. But lately there has been an interesting comeback of
visuality in machine learning. The ways that the deep-learning algorithms of AI are
processing data have been made visible through applications like Google’s DeepDream,
in which the process of computerized pattern-recognition is visualized in real time. The
application shows how the algorithm tries to match animal forms with any given input.
There are many other AI visualization programs that, in their way, also “make the
invisible visible.” The difficulty in the general public perception of such images is, in
Steyerl’s view, that these visual patterns are viewed uncritically as realistic and objective
representations of the machine process. She says of the aesthetics of such visualizations:
For me, this proves that science has become a subgenre of art history. . . . We
now have lots of abstract computer patterns that might look like a Paul Klee
painting, or a Mark Rothko, or all sorts of other abstractions that we know from
art history. The only difference, I think, is that in current scientific thought
they’re perceived as representations of reality, almost like documentary images,
whereas in art history there’s a very nuanced understanding of different kinds of
abstraction.
What she seeks is a more profound understanding of computer-generated images
and the different aesthetic forms they use. They are obviously not generated with the
explicit goal of following a certain aesthetic tradition. The computer engineer Mike
Tyka, in a conversation with Steyerl, explained the functions of these images:
Deep-learning systems, especially the visual ones, are really inspired by the need
to know what’s going on in the black box. Their goal is to project these
processes back into the real world.
Nevertheless, these images have aesthetic implications and values which have to
be taken into account. One could say that while the programmers use these images to
help us better understand the programs’ algorithms, we need the knowledge of artists to
better understand the aesthetic forms of AI. As Steyerl has pointed out, such
visualizations are generally understood as “true” representations of processes, but we
should pay attention to their respective aesthetics, and their implications, which have to
be viewed in a critical and analytical way.
In 2017, the artist Trevor Paglen created a project to make these invisible AI
algorithms visible. In Sight Machine, he filmed a live performance of the Kronos Quartet
and processed the resulting images with various computer software programs used for
face detection, object identification, and even for missile guidance. He projected the
outcome of these algorithms, in real time, back to screens above the stage. By
demonstrating how the various different programs interpreted the musicians’
performance, Paglen showed that AI algorithms are always determined by sets of values
and interests which they then manifest and reiterate, and thus must be critically
questioned. The significant contrast between algorithms and music also raises the issue
of relationships between technical and human perception.
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Computers, as a Tool for Creativity, Can’t Replace the Artist.
Rachel Rose, a video artist who thinks about the questions posed by AI, employs
computer technology in the creation of her works. Her films give the viewer an
experience of materiality through the moving image. She uses collaging and layering of
the material to manipulate sound and image, and the editing process is perhaps the most
important aspect of her work.
She also talks about the importance of decision making in her work. For her, the
artistic process does not follow a rational pattern. In a converation we had, together with
the engineer Kenric McDowell, at the Google Cultural Institute, she explained this by
citing a story from theater director Peter Brook’s 1968 book The Empty Space. When
Brook designed the set for his production of The Tempest in the late 1960s, he started by
making a Japanese garden, but then the design evolved, becoming a white box, a black
box, a realistic set, and so on. And in the end, he returned to his original idea. Brook
writes that he was shocked at having spent a month on his labors, only to end at the
beginning. But this shows that the creative artistic process is a succession whose every
step builds on the next and which eventually comes to an unpredictable conclusion. The
process is not a logical or rational succession but has mostly to do with the artist’s
feelings in reaction to the preceding result. Rose said, of her own artistic decision
making:
It, to me, is distinctively different from machine learning, because at each
decision there’s this core feeling that comes from a human being, which has to do
with empathy, which has to do with communication, which has to do with
questions about our own mortality that only a human could ask.
This point underlines the fundamental difference between any human artistic production
and so-called computer creativity. Rose sees AI more as a possible way to create better
tools for humans:
A place I can imagine machine learning working for an artist would be not in
developing an independent subjectivity, like writing a poem or making an image,
but actually in filling in gaps that are to do with labor, like the way that
Photoshop works with different tools that you can use.
And though such tools may not seem spectacular, she says, “they might have a larger
influence on art,” because they provide artists with further possibilities in their creative
work.
McDowell added that he, too, believes there are false expectations around AI.
“I’ve observed,” he said, “that there’s a sort of magical quality to the idea of a computer
that does all the things that we do.” He continued: “There’s almost this kind of demonic
mirror that we look into, and we want it to write a novel, we want it to make a film—we
want to give that away somehow.” He is instead working on projects wherein humans
collaborate with the machine. One of the current aims of AI research is to find new
means of interaction between humans and software. And art, one could say, needs to
play a key role in that enterprise, since it focuses on our subjectivity and on essential
human aspects like empathy and mortality.
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Cybernetics / Art
Suzanne Treister is an artist whose work from 2009 to 2011 serves as an example of what
is happening at the intersection of our current technologies, the arts, and cybernetics.
Treister has been a pioneer in digital art since the 1990s, inventing, for example,
imaginary video games and painting screen shots from them. In her project Hexen 2.0
she looked back at the famous Macy conferences on cybernetics that between 1946 and
1953 were organized in New York by engineers and social scientists to unite the sciences
and to develop a universal theory of the workings of the mind.
In her project, she created thirty photo-text works about the conference attendees
(which included Wiener and von Foerster), she invented tarot cards, and she made a
video based on a photomontage of a “cybernetic séance.” In the “séance,” the conference
participants are seen sitting at a round table, as in spiritualist séances, while certain of
their statements on cybernetics are heard in an audio-collage—rational knowledge and
superstition combined. She also noted that some of the participating scientists worked for
the military; thus the application of cybernetics could be seen in an ambivalent way, even
back then, as a tussle between pure knowledge and its use in state control.
If one looks at Treister’s work about the Macy conference participants, one sees
that no visual artist was included. A dialogue between artists and scientists would be
fruitful in future discussions, and it is a bit astonishing that this wasn’t realized at the
time, given von Foerster’s keen interest in art. He recounted in one of our conversations
how his relation to the field dated back to his childhood:
I grew up as a child in an artistic family. We often had visits from poets,
philosophers, painters, and sculptors. Art was a part of my life. Later, I got into
physics, as I was talented in this subject. But I always remained conscious of the
importance of art for science. There wasn’t a great difference for me. For me,
both aspects of life have always been very much alike—and accessible, too. We
should see them as one. An artist also has to reflect on his work. He has to think
about his grammar and his language. A painter must know how to handle his
colors. Just think of how intensively oil colors were researched during the
Renaissance. They wanted to know how a certain pigment could be mixed with
others to get a certain tone of red or blue. Chemists and painters collaborated
very closely. I think the artificial division between science and art is wrong.
Though for von Foerster the relation between the art and science was always
clear, for our own time this connection remains to be made. There are many reasons to
multiply the links. The critical thinking of artists would be beneficial in respect to the
dangers of AI, since they draw our attention to questions they consider essential from
their perspective. With the advent of machine learning, new tools are available to artists
for their work. And as the algorithms of AI are made visible through artificial images in
new ways, artists’ critical visual knowledge and expertise will be harnessed. Many of the
key questions of AI are philosophical in nature and can be answered only from a holistic
point of view. The way they play out among adventurous artists will be worth following.
Simulating Worlds
For the most part, the works of contemporary artists have been embodied ruminations on
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AI’s impact on existential questions of the self and our future interaction with nonhuman
entities. Few, though, have taken the technologies and innovations of AI as the
underlying materials of their work and sculpted them to their own vision. An exception
is the artist Ian Cheng, who has gone as far as to construct entire worlds of artificial
beings with varying degrees of sentience and intelligence. He refers to these worlds as
Live Simulations. His Emissaries trilogy (2015-2017) is set in a fictional postapocalyptic
world of flora and fauna, in which AI-driven animals and creatures explore the landscape
and interact with each other. Cheng uses advanced graphics but has them programmed
with a lot of glitches and imperfections, which imparts a futuristic and anachronistic
atmosphere at the same time. Through his trilogy, which charts a history of
consciousness, he asks the question “What is a simulation?”
While the majority of artistic works that utilize recent developments in AI
specifically draw from the field of machine learning, Cheng’s Live Simulations take a
separate route. The protagonists and plot lines that are interlaced in each episodic
simulation of Emissaries use the complex logic systems and rules of AI. What is
profound about his continually evolving scenes is that complexity arises not through the
desire/actions of any single actor or artificial godhead but instead through their
constellation, collision, and constant evolution in symbiosis with one another. This gives
rise to unexpected outcomes and unending, unknowable situations—you can never
experience the exact same moment in successive viewings of his work.
Cheng had a discussion at the Serpentine Marathon “GUEST, GHOST, HOST:
MACHINE!” with the programmer Richard Evans, who recently designed Versu, an AIbased
platform for interactive storytelling games. Evans’ work emphasizes the social
interaction of the games’ characters, who react in a spectrum of possible behaviors to the
choices made by the human players. In their conversation, Evans said that a starting
point for the project was that most earlier simulation video games, such as The Sims, did
not sufficiently take into account the importance of social practices. Simulated
protagonists in games would often act in ways that did not correspond well with real
human behavior. Knowledge of social practices limits the possibilities of action but is
necessary to understand the meaning of our actions—which is what interests Cheng for
his own simulations. The more parameters of actions in certain circumstances are
determined in a computer simulation, the more interesting it is for Cheng to experiment
with individual and specific changes. He told Evans, “I gather that if we had AI with
more ability to respond to social contexts, tweaking one thing, you would get something
quite artistic and beautiful.”
Cheng also sees the work of programmers and AI simulations as creating new and
sophisticated tools for experimenting with the parameters of our daily social practices. In
this way, the involvement of artists in AI will lead to new kinds of open experiments in
Art. Such possibilities are—like increased AI capabilities in general—still in the future.
Recognizing that this is an experimental technology in its infancy, very far from
apocalyptic visions of a superintelligent AI takeover, Cheng fills his simulations with
prosaic avatars such as strange microbial globules, dogs, and the undead.
Discussions like these, between artists and engineers, of course are not totally
new. In the 1960s, the engineer Billy Klüver brought artists together with engineers in a
series of events, and in 1967 he founded the Experiments in Art and Technology program
with Robert Rauschenberg and others. In London, at around the same time, Barbara
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Stevini and John Latham, of the Artist Placement Group, took things a step further by
asserting that there should be artists in residence in every company and every
government. Today, these inspiring historical models can be applied to the field of AI.
As AI comes to inhabit more and more of our everyday lives, the creation of a space that
is nondeterministic and non-utilitarian in its plurality of perspectives and diversity of
understandings will undoubtedly be essential.
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Alison Gopnik is an international leader in the field of children’s learning and
development and was one of the founders of the field of “theory of mind.” She has
spoken of the child brain as a “powerful learning computer,” perhaps from personal
experience. Her own Philadelphia childhood was an exercise in intellectual
development. “Other families took their kids to see The Sound of Music or Carousel; we
saw Racine’s Phaedra and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame,” she has recalled. “Our family
read Henry Fielding’s 18th-century novel Joseph Andrews out loud to each other around
the fire on camping trips.”
Lately she has invoked Bayesian models of machine learning to explain the
remarkable ability of preschoolers to draw conclusions about the world around them
without benefit of enormous data sets. “I think babies and children are actually more
conscious than we are as adults,” she has said. “They’re very good at taking in lots of
information from lots of different sources at once.” She has referred to babies and young
children as “the research and development division of the human species.” Not that she
treats them coldly, as if they were mere laboratory animals. They appear to revel in her
company, and in the blinking, thrumming toys in her Berkeley lab. For years after her
own children had outgrown it, she kept a playpen in her office.
Her investigations into just how we learn, and the parallels to the deep-learning
methods of AI, continues. “It turns out to be much easier to simulate the reasoning of a
highly trained adult expert than to mimic the ordinary learning of every baby,” she says.
“Computation is still the best—indeed, the only—scientific explanation we have of how a
physical object like a brain can act intelligently. But, at least for now, we have almost no
idea at all how the sort of creativity we see in children is possible.”
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AIs VERSUS FOUR-YEAR-OLDS
Alison Gopnik
Alison Gopnik is a developmental psychologist at UC Berkeley; her books include The
Philosophical Baby and, most recently, The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New
Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and
Children.
Everyone’s heard about the new advances in artificial intelligence, and especially
machine learning. You’ve also heard utopian or apocalyptic predictions about what those
advances mean. They have been taken to presage either immortality or the end of the
world, and a lot has been written about both those possibilities. But the most
sophisticated AIs are still far from being able to solve problems that human four-yearolds
accomplish with ease. In spite of the impressive name, artificial intelligence largely
consists of techniques to detect statistical patterns in large data sets. There is much more
to human learning.
How can we possibly know so much about the world around us? We learn an
enormous amount even when we are small children; four-year-olds already know about
plants and animals and machines; desires, beliefs, and emotions; even dinosaurs and
spaceships.
Science has extended our knowledge about the world to the unimaginably large
and the infinitesimally small, to the edge of the universe and the beginning of time. And
we use that knowledge to make new classifications and predictions, imagine new
possibilities, and make new things happen in the world. But all that reaches any of us
from the world is a stream of photons hitting our retinas and disturbances of air at our
eardrums. How do we learn so much about the world when the evidence we have is so
limited? And how do we do all this with the few pounds of grey goo that sits behind our
eyes?
The best answer so far is that our brains perform computations on the concrete,
particular, messy data arriving at our senses, and those computations yield accurate
representations of the world. The representations seem to be structured, abstract, and
hierarchical; they include the perception of three-dimensional objects, the grammars that
underlie language, and mental capacities like “theory of mind,” which lets us understand
what other people think. Those representations allow us to make a wide range of new
predictions and imagine many new possibilities in a distinctively creative human way.
This kind of learning isn’t the only kind of intelligence, but it’s a particularly
important one for human beings. And it’s the kind of intelligence that is a specialty of
young children. Although children are dramatically bad at planning and decision making,
they are the best learners in the universe. Much of the process of turning data into
theories happens before we are five.
Since Aristotle and Plato, there have been two basic ways of addressing the
problem of how we know what we know, and they are still the main approaches in
machine learning. Aristotle approached the problem from the bottom up: Start with
senses—the stream of photons and air vibrations (or the pixels or sound samples of a
digital image or recording)—and see if you can extract patterns from them. This
approach was carried further by such classic associationists as philosophers David Hume
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and J. S. Mill and later by behavioral psychologists, like Pavlov and B. F. Skinner. On
this view, the abstractness and hierarchical structure of representations is something of an
illusion, or at least an epiphenomenon. All the work can be done by association and
pattern detection—especially if there are enough data.
Over time, there has been a seesaw between this bottom-up approach to the
mystery of learning and Plato’s alternative, top-down one. Maybe we get abstract
knowledge from concrete data because we already know a lot, and especially because we
already have an array of basic abstract concepts, thanks to evolution. Like scientists, we
can use those concepts to formulate hypotheses about the world. Then, instead of trying
to extract patterns from the raw data, we can make predictions about what the data should
look like if those hypotheses are right. Along with Plato, such “rationalist” philosophers
and psychologists as Descartes and Noam Chomsky took this approach.
Here’s an everyday example that illustrates the difference between the two
methods: solving the spam plague. The data consist of a long unsorted list of messages in
your in-box. The reality is that some of these messages are genuine and some are spam.
How can you use the data to discriminate between them?
Consider the bottom-up technique first. You notice that the spam messages tend
to have particular features: a long list of addressees, origins in Nigeria, references to
million-dollar prizes or Viagra. The trouble is that perfectly useful messages might have
these features, too. If you looked at enough examples of spam and non-spam emails, you
might see not only that spam emails tend to have those features but that the features tend
to go together in particular ways (Nigeria plus a million dollars spells trouble). In fact,
there might be some subtle higher-level correlations that discriminate the spam messages
from the useful ones—a particular pattern of misspellings and IP addresses, say. If you
detect those patterns, you can filter out the spam.
The bottom-up machine-learning techniques do just this. The learner gets
millions of examples, each with some set of features and each labeled as spam (or some
other category) or not. The computer can extract the pattern of features that distinguishes
the two, even if it’s quite subtle.
How about the top-down approach? I get an email from the editor of the Journal
of Clinical Biology. It refers to one of my papers and says that they would like to publish
an article by me. No Nigeria, no Viagra, no million dollars; the email doesn’t have any
of the features of spam. But by using what I already know, and thinking in an abstract
way about the process that produces spam, I can figure out that this email is suspicious.
(1) I know that spammers try to extract money from people by appealing to
human greed.
(2) I also know that legitimate “open access” journals have started covering their
costs by charging authors instead of subscribers, and that I don’t practice anything like
clinical biology.
Put all that together and I can produce a good new hypothesis about where that
email came from. It’s designed to sucker academics into paying to “publish” an article in
a fake journal. The email was a result of the same dubious process as the other spam
emails, even though it looked nothing like them. I can draw this conclusion from just one
example, and I can go on to test my hypothesis further, beyond anything in the email
itself, by googling the “editor.”
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In computer terms, I started out with a “generative model” that includes abstract
concepts like greed and deception and describes the process that produces email scams.
That lets me recognize the classic Nigerian email spam, but it also lets me imagine many
different kinds of possible spam. When I get the journal email, I can work backward:
“This seems like just the kind of mail that would come out of a spam-generating
process.”
The new excitement about AI comes because AI researchers have recently
produced powerful and effective versions of both these learning methods. But there is
nothing profoundly new about the methods themselves.
Bottom-up Deep Learning
In the 1980s, computer scientists devised an ingenious way to get computers to detect
patterns in data: connectionist, or neural-network, architecture (the “neural” part was, and
still is, metaphorical). The approach fell into the doldrums in the ’90s but has recently
been revived with powerful “deep-learning” methods like Google’s DeepMind.
For example, you can give a deep-learning program a bunch of Internet images
labeled “cat,” others labeled “house,” and so on. The program can detect the patterns
differentiating the two sets of images and use that information to label new images
correctly. Some kinds of machine learning, called unsupervised learning, can detect
patterns in data with no labels at all; they simply look for clusters of features—what
scientists call a factor analysis. In the deep-learning machines, these processes are
repeated at different levels. Some programs can even discover relevant features from the
raw data of pixels or sounds; the computer might begin by detecting the patterns in the
raw image that correspond to edges and lines and then find the patterns in those patterns
that correspond to faces, and so on.
Another bottom-up technique with a long history is reinforcement learning. In the
1950s, B. F. Skinner, building on the work of John Watson, famously programmed
pigeons to perform elaborate actions—even guiding air-launched missiles to their targets
(a disturbing echo of recent AI) by giving them a particular schedule of rewards and
punishments. The essential idea was that actions that were rewarded would be repeated
and those that were punished would not, until the desired behavior was achieved. Even
in Skinner’s day, this simple process, repeated over and over, could lead to complex
behavior. Computers are designed to perform simple operations over and over on a scale
that dwarfs human imagination, and computational systems can learn remarkably
complex skills in this way.
For example, researchers at Google’s DeepMind used a combination of deep
learning and reinforcement learning to teach a computer to play Atari video games. The
computer knew nothing about how the games worked. It began by acting randomly and
got information only about what the screen looked like at each moment and how well it
had scored. Deep learning helped interpret the features on the screen, and reinforcement
learning rewarded the system for higher scores. The computer got very good at playing
several of the games, but it also completely bombed on others just as easy for humans to
master.
A similar combination of deep learning and reinforcement learning has enabled
the success of DeepMind’s AlphaZero, a program that managed to beat human players at
both chess and Go, equipped only with a basic knowledge of the rules of the game and
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some planning capacities. AlphaZero has another interesting feature: It works by playing
hundreds of millions of games against itself. As it does so, it prunes mistakes that led to
losses, and it repeats and elaborates on strategies that led to wins. Such systems, and
others involving techniques called generative adversarial networks, generate data as well
as observing data.
When you have the computational power to apply those techniques to very large
data sets or millions of email messages, Instagram images, or voice recordings, you can
solve problems that seemed very difficult before. That’s the source of much of the
excitement in computer science. But it’s worth remembering that those problems—like
recognizing that an image is a cat or a spoken word is “Siri”—are trivial for a human
toddler. One of the most interesting discoveries of computer science is that problems that
are easy for us (like identifying cats) are hard for computers—much harder than playing
chess or Go. Computers need millions of examples to categorize objects that we can
categorize with just a few. These bottom-up systems can generalize to new examples;
they can label a new image as a “cat” fairly accurately, over all. But they do so in ways
quite different from how humans generalize. Some images almost identical to a cat
image won’t be identified by us as cats at all. Others that look like a random blur will be.
Top-down Bayesian Models
The top-down approach played a big role in early AI, and in the 2000s it, too,
experienced a revival, in the form of probabilistic, or Bayesian, generative models.
The early attempts to use this approach faced two kinds of problems. First, most
patterns of evidence might in principle be explained by many different hypotheses: It’s
possible that my journal email message is genuine, it just doesn’t seem likely. Second,
where do the concepts that the generative models use come from in the first place? Plato
and Chomsky said you were born with them. But how can we explain how we learn the
latest concepts of science? Or how even young children understand about dinosaurs and
rocket ships?
Bayesian models combine generative models and hypothesis testing with
probability theory, and they address these two problems. A Bayesian model lets you
calculate just how likely it is that a particular hypothesis is true, given the data. And by
making small but systematic tweaks to the models we already have, and testing them
against the data, we can sometimes make new concepts and models from old ones. But
these advantages are offset by other problems. The Bayesian techniques can help you
choose which of two hypotheses is more likely, but there are almost always an enormous
number of possible hypotheses, and no system can efficiently consider them all. How do
you decide which hypotheses are worth testing in the first place?
Brenden Lake at NYU and colleagues have used these kinds of top-down methods
to solve another problem that’s easy for people but extremely difficult for computers:
recognizing unfamiliar handwritten characters. Look at a character on a Japanese scroll.
Even if you’ve never seen it before, you can probably tell if it’s similar to or different
from a character on another Japanese scroll. You can probably draw it and even design a
fake Japanese character based on the one you see—one that will look quite different from
a Korean or Russian character. 37
37
Brenden M. Lake, Ruslan Salakhutdinov & Joshua B. Tenenbaum, “Human-level concept learning
through probabilistic program induction,” Science, 350:6266, pp. 1332-38 (2015).
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The bottom-up method for recognizing handwritten characters is to give the
computer thousands of examples of each one and let it pull out the salient features.
Instead, Lake et al. gave the program a general model of how you draw a character: A
stroke goes either right or left; after you finish one, you start another; and so on. When
the program saw a particular character, it could infer the sequence of strokes that were
most likely to have led to it—just as I inferred that the spam process led to my dubious
email. Then it could judge whether a new character was likely to result from that
sequence or from a different one, and it could produce a similar set of strokes itself. The
program worked much better than a deep-learning program applied to exactly the same
data, and it closely mirrored the performance of human beings.
These two approaches to machine learning have complementary strengths and
weaknesses. In the bottom-up approach, the program doesn’t need much knowledge to
begin with, but it needs a great deal of data, and it can generalize only in a limited way.
In the top-down approach, the program can learn from just a few examples and make
much broader and more varied generalizations, but you need to build much more into it to
begin with. A number of investigators are currently trying to combine the two
approaches, using deep learning to implement Bayesian inference.
The recent success of AI is partly the result of extensions of those old ideas. But
it has more to do with the fact that, thanks to the Internet, we have much more data, and
thanks to Moore’s Law we have much more computational power to apply to that data.
Moreover, an unappreciated fact is that the data we do have has already been sorted and
processed by human beings. The cat pictures posted to the Web are canonical cat
pictures—pictures that humans have already chosen as “good” pictures. Google
Translate works because it takes advantage of millions of human translations and
generalizes them to a new piece of text, rather than genuinely understanding the
sentences themselves.
But the truly remarkable thing about human children is that they somehow
combine the best features of each approach and then go way beyond them. Over the past
fifteen years, developmentalists have been exploring the way children learn structure
from data. Four-year-olds can learn by taking just one or two examples of data, as a topdown
system does, and generalizing to very different concepts. But they can also learn
new concepts and models from the data itself, as a bottom-up system does.
For example, in our lab we give young children a “blicket detector”—a new
machine to figure out, one they’ve never seen before. It’s a box that lights up and plays
music when you put certain objects on it but not others. We give children just one or two
examples of how the machine works, showing them that, say, two red blocks make it go,
while a green-and-yellow combination doesn’t. Even eighteen-month-olds immediately
figure out the general principle that the two objects have to be the same to make it go,
and they generalize that principle to new examples: For instance, they will choose two
objects that have the same shape to make the machine work. In other experiments, we’ve
shown that children can even figure out that some hidden invisible property makes the
machine go, or that the machine works on some abstract logical principle. 38
38
A. Gopnik, T. Griffiths & C. Lucas, “When younger learners can be better (or at least more openminded)
than older ones,” Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci., 24:2, 87-92 (2015).
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You can show this in children’s everyday learning, too. Young children rapidly
learn abstract intuitive theories of biology, physics, and psychology in much the way
adult scientists do, even with relatively little data.
The remarkable machine-learning accomplishments of the recent AI systems, both
bottom-up and top-down, take place in a narrow and well-defined space of hypotheses
and concepts—a precise set of game pieces and moves, a predetermined set of images. In
contrast, children and scientists alike sometimes change their concepts in radical ways,
performing paradigm shifts rather than simply tweaking the concepts they already have.
Four-year-olds can immediately recognize cats and understand words, but they
can also make creative and surprising new inferences that go far beyond their experience.
My own grandson recently explained, for example, that if an adult wants to become a
child again, he should try not eating any healthy vegetables, since healthy vegetables
make a child grow into an adult. This kind of hypothesis, a plausible one that no grownup
would ever entertain, is characteristic of young children. In fact, my colleagues and I
have shown systematically that preschoolers are better at coming up with unlikely
hypotheses than older children and adults. 39 We have almost no idea how this kind of
creative learning and innovation is possible.
Looking at what children do, though, may give programmers useful hints about
directions for computer learning. Two features of children’s learning are especially
striking. Children are active learners; they don’t just passively soak up data like AIs do.
Just as scientists experiment, children are intrinsically motivated to extract information
from the world around them through their endless play and exploration. Recent studies
show that this exploration is more systematic than it looks and is well-adapted to find
persuasive evidence to support hypothesis formation and theory choice. 40 Building
curiosity into machines and allowing them to actively interact with the world might be a
route to more realistic and wide-ranging learning.
Second, children, unlike existing AIs, are social and cultural learners. Humans
don’t learn in isolation but avail themselves of the accumulated wisdom of past
generations. Recent studies show that even preschoolers learn through imitation and by
listening to the testimony of others. But they don’t simply passively obey their teachers.
Instead they take in information from others in a remarkably subtle and sensitive way,
making complex inferences about where the information comes from and how
trustworthy it is and systematically integrating their own experiences with what they are
hearing. 41
“Artificial intelligence” and “machine learning” sound scary. And in some ways
they are. These systems are being used to control weapons, for example, and we really
should be scared about that. Still, natural stupidity can wreak far more havoc than
artificial intelligence; we humans will need to be much smarter than we have been in the
past to properly regulate the new technologies. But there is not much basis for either the
apocalyptic or the utopian visions of AIs replacing humans. Until we solve the basic
39
A. Gopnik, et al., “Changes in cognitive flexibility and hypothesis search across human life history from
childhood to adolescence to adulthood,” Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 114:30, 7892-99 (2017).
40
L. Schulz, “The origins of Inquiry: Inductive inference and exploration in early childhood,” Trends Cog.
Sci., 16:7, 382-89 (2012).
41
A. Gopnik, The Gardener and the Carpenter (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016), chaps. 4 and 5.
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paradox of learning, the best artificial intelligences will be unable to compete with the
average human four-year-old.
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Peter Galison’s focus as a science historian is—speaking roughly—on the intersection of
theory with experiment.
“For quite a number of years I have been guided in my work by the odd
confrontation of abstract ideas and extremely concrete objects,” he once told me, in
explaining how he thinks about what he does. At the Washington, Connecticut, meeting
he discussed the Cold War tension between engineers (like Wiener) and the
administrators of the Manhattan Project (like Oppenheimer: “When [Wiener] warns
about the dangers of cybernetics, in part he’s trying to compete against the kind of
portentous language that people like Oppenheimer [used]: ‘When I saw the explosion at
Trinity, I thought of the Bhagavad Gita—I am death, destroyer of worlds.’ That sense,
that physics could stand and speak to the nature of the universe and airforce policy, was
repellent and seductive. In a way, you can see that over and over again in the last
decades—nanosciences, recombinant DNA, cybernetics: ‘I stand reporting to you on the
science that has the promise of salvation and the danger of annihilation—and you should
pay attention, because this could kill you.’ It’s a very seductive narrative, and it’s
repeated in artificial intelligence and robotics.”
As a twenty-four-year old, when I first encountered Wiener’s ideas and met his
colleagues at the MIT meeting I describe in the book’s Introduction, I was hardly
interested in Wiener’s warnings or admonitions. What drove my curiosity was the stark,
radical nature of his view of life, based on the mathematical theory of communications in
which the message was nonlinear: According to Wiener, “new concepts of
communication and control involved a new interpretation of man, of man’s knowledge of
the universe, and of society.” And that led to my first book, which took information
theory—the mathematical theory of communications—as a model for all human
experience.
In a recent conversation, Peter told me he was beginning to write a book—about
building, crashing, and thinking—that considers the black-box nature of cybernetics and
how it represents what he thinks of as “the fundamental transformation of learning,
machine learning, cybernetics, and the self.”
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ALGORISTS DREAM OF OBJECTIVITY
Peter Galison
Peter Galison is a science historian, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor and cofounder
of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, and the author of Einstein's
Clocks and Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time.
In his second-best book, the great medieval mathematician al-Khwarizmi described the
new place-based Indian form of arithmetic. His name, soon sonically linked to
“algorismus” (in late medieval Latin) came to designate procedures acting upon
numbers—eventually wending its way through “algorithm,” (on the model of
“logarithm”), into French and on into English. But I like the idea of a modern algorist,
even if my spellcheck does not. I mean by it someone profoundly suspicious of the
intervention of human judgment, someone who takes that judgment to violate the
fundamental norms of what it is to be objective (and therefore scientific).
Near the end of the 20th century, a paper by two University of Minnesota
psychologists summarized a vast literature that had long roiled the waters of prediction.
One side, they judged, had for all too long held resolutely—and ultimately unethically—
to the “clinical method” of prediction, which prized all that was subjective: “informal,”
“in-the-head,” and “impressionistic.” These clinicians were people (so said the
psychologists) who thought they could study their subjects with meticulous care, gather
in committees, and make judgment-based predictions about criminal recidivism, college
success, medical outcomes, and the like. The other side, the psychologists continued,
embodied everything the clinicians did not, embracing the objective: “formal,”
“mechanical,” “algorithmic.” This the authors took to stand at the root of the whole
triumph of post-Galilean science. Not only did science benefit from the actuarial; to a
great extent, science was the mechanical-actuarial. Breezing through 136 studies of
predictions, across domains from sentencing to psychiatry, the authors showed that in 128
of them, predictions using actuarial tables, a multiple-regression equation, or an
algorithmic judgment equalled or exceeded in accuracy those using the subjective
approach.
They went on to catalog seventeen fallacious justifications for clinging to the
clinical. There were the self-interested foot-draggers who feared losing their jobs to
machines. Others lacked the education to follow statistical arguments. One group
mistrusted the formalization of mathematics; another excoriated what they took to be the
actuarial “dehumanizing;” yet others said that the aim was to understand, not to predict.
But whatever the motivations, the review concluded that it was downright immoral to
withhold the power of the objective over the subjective, the algorithmic over expert
judgment. 42
42
William M. Grove & Paul E. Meehl, “Comparative efficiency of informal (subjective, impressionistic)
and formal (mechanical, algorithmic) prediction procedures: The Clinical-Statistical Controversy,”
Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 2:2, 293-323 (1996).
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The algorist view has gained strength. Anne Milgram served as Attorney General
of the State of New Jersey from 2007 to 2010. When she took office, she wanted to
know who the state was arresting, charging, and jailing, and for what crimes. At the
time, she reports in a later TED Talk, she could find almost no data or analytics. By
imposing statistical prediction, she continues, law enforcement in Camden during her
tenure was able to reduce murders by 41 percent, saving thirty-seven lives, while
dropping the total crime rate by 26 percent. After joining the Arnold Foundation as its
vice president for criminal justice, she established a team of data scientists and
statisticians to create a risk-assessment tool; fundamentally, she construed the team’s
mission as deciding how to put “dangerous people” in jail while releasing the nondangerous.
“The reason for this,” Milgram contended, “is the way we make decisions.
Judges have the best intentions when they make these decisions about risk, but they’re
making them subjectively. They’re like the baseball scouts twenty years ago who were
using their instinct and their experience to try to decide what risk someone poses.
They’re being subjective, and we know what happens with subjective decision making,
which is that we are often wrong.” Her team established nine-hundred-plus risk factors,
of which nine were most predictive. The questions, the most urgent questions, for the
team were: Will a person commit a new crime? Will that person commit a violent act?
Will someone come back to court? We need, concluded Milgram, an “objective measure
of risk” that should be inflected by judges’ judgment. We know the algorithmic
statistical process works. That, she says, is “why Google is Google” and why moneyball
wins games. 43
Algorists have triumphed. We have grown accustomed to the idea that protocols
and data can and should guide us in everyday action, from reminders about where we
probably want to go next, to the likely occurrence of crime. By now, according to the
literature, the legal, ethical, formal, and economic dimensions of algorithms are all quasiinfinite.
I’d like to focus on one particular siren song of the algorithm: its promise of
objectivity.
Scientific objectivity has a history. That might seem surprising. Isn’t the
notion—expressed above by the Minnesota psychologists—right? Isn’t objectivity coextensive
with science itself? Here it’s worth stepping back to reflect on all the epistemic
virtues we might value in scientific work. Quantification seems like a good thing to
have; so, too, do prediction, explanation, unification, precision, accuracy, certainty, and
pedagogical utility. In the best of all possible worlds these epistemic virtues would all
pull in the same direction. But they do not—not any more than our ethical virtues
necessarily coincide. Rewarding people according to their need may very well conflict
with rewarding people according to their ability. Equality, fairness, meritocracy—ethics,
in a sense, is all about the adjudication of conflicting goods. Too often we forget that this
conflict exists in science, too. Design an instrument to be as sensitive as possible and it
often fluctuates wildly, making repetition of a measurement impossible.
“Scientific objectivity” entered both the practice and the nomenclature of science
after the first third of the 19th century. One sees this clearly in the scientific atlases that
provided scientists with the basic objects of their specialty: There were (and are) atlases
of the hand, atlases of the skull, atlases of clouds, crystals, flowers, bubble-chamber
pictures, nuclear emulsions, and diseases of the eye. In the 18th century, it was obvious
43
TED Talk, January 2014, https://www.ted.com/speakers/anne_milgram.
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that you would not depict this particular, sun-scorched, caterpillar-chewed clover found
outside your house in an atlas. No, you aimed—if you were a genius natural philosopher
like Goethe, Albinus, or Cheselden—to observe nature but then to perfect the object in
question, to abstract it visually to the ideal. Take a skeleton, view it through a camera
lucida, draw it with care. Then correct the “imperfections.” The advantage of this
parting of the curtains of mere experience was clear: It provided a universal guide, one
not attached to the vagaries of individual variation.
As the sciences grew in scope, and scientists grew in number, the downside of
idealization became clearer. It was one thing to have Goethe depict the “ur-plant” or “urinsect.”
It was quite another to have a myriad of different scientists each fixing their
images in different and sometimes contradictory ways. Gradually, from around the 1830s
forward, one begins to see something new: a claim that the image making was done with
a minimum of human intervention, that protocols were followed. This could mean
tracing a leaf with a pencil or pressing it into ink that was transferred to the page. It
meant, too, that one suddenly was proud of depicting the view through a microscope of a
natural object even with its imperfections. This was a radical idea: snowflakes shown
without perfect hexagonal symmetry, color distortion near the edge of a microscope lens,
tissue torn around the edges in the process of its preparation.
Scientific objectivity came to mean that our representations of things were
executed by holding back from intervention—even if it meant reproducing the yellow
color near the edge of the image under the microscope, despite the fact that the scientist
knew that the discoloration was from the lens, not a feature of the object of inquiry. The
advantage of objectivity was clear: It superseded the desire to see a theory realized or a
generally accepted view confirmed. But objectivity came at a cost. You lost that precise,
easily teachable, colored, full depth-of-field, artist’s rendition of a dissected corpse. You
got a blurry, bad depth-of-field, black-and-white photograph that no medical student (nor
even many medical colleagues) could use to learn and compare cases. Still, for a long
stretch of the 19th century, the virtue of hands-off, self-restraining objectivity was on the
rise.
Starting in the 1930s, the hardline scientific objectivity in scientific representation
began running into trouble. In cataloging stellar spectra, for example, no algorithm could
compete with highly trained observers who could sort them with far greater accuracy and
replicability than any purely rule-following procedure. By the late 1940s, doctors had
begun learning how to read electroencephalograms. Expert judgment was needed to sort
out different kinds of seizure readings, while none of the early attempts to use frequency
analysis could match that judgment. Solar magnetograms—mapping the magnetic fields
across the sun—required the trained expert to pry the real signal from artifacts that
emerged from the measuring instruments. Even particle physicists recognized that they
could not program a computer to sort certain kinds of tracks into the right bins; judgment,
trained judgment, was needed.
There should be no confusion here: This was not a return to the invoked genius of
an 18th-century idealizer. No one thought you could train to be a Goethe who alone
among scientists could pick out the universal, ideal form of a plant, insect, or cloud.
Expertise could be learned—you could take a course to learn to make expert judgments
about electroencephalograms, stellar spectra, or bubble-chamber tracks; alas, no one has
ever thought you could take a course that would lead to the mastery of exceptional
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insight. There can be no royal road to becoming Goethe. In scientific atlas after
scientific atlas, one sees explicit argument that “subjective” factors had to be part of the
scientific work needed to create, classify, and interpret scientific images.
What we see in so many of the algorists’ claims is a tremendous desire to find
scientific objectivity precisely by abandoning judgment and relying on mechanical
procedures—in the name of scientific objectivity. Many American states have legislated
the use of sentencing and parole algorithms. Better a machine, it is argued, than the
vagaries of a judge’s judgment.
So here is a warning from the sciences. Hands-off algorithmic proceduralism did
indeed have its heyday in the 19th century, and of course still plays a role in many of the
most successful technical and scientific endeavors. But the idea that mechanical
objectivity, construed as binding self-restraint, follows a simple, monotonic curve
increasing from the bad impressionistic clinician to the good externalized actuary simply
does not answer to the more interesting and nuanced history of the sciences.
There is a more important lesson from the sciences. Mechanical objectivity is a
scientific virtue among others, and the hard sciences learned that lesson often. We must
do the same in the legal and social scientific domains. What happens, for example, when
the secret, proprietary algorithm sends one person to prison for ten years and another for
five years, for the same crime? Rebecca Wexler, visiting fellow at the Yale Law School
Information Society Project, has explored that question, and the tremendous cost that
trade-secret algorithms impose on the possibility of a fair legal defense. 44 Indeed, for a
variety of reasons, law enforcement may not want to share the algorithms used to make
DNA, chemical, or fingerprint identifications, which puts the defense in a much
weakened position to make its case. In the courtroom, objectivity, trade secrets, and
judicial transparency may pull in opposite directions. It reminds me of a moment in the
history of physics. Just after World War II, the film giants Kodak and Ilford perfected a
film that could be used to reveal the interactions and decays of elementary particles. The
physicists were thrilled, of course—until the film companies told them that the
composition of the film was a trade secret, so the scientists would never gain complete
confidence that they understood the processes they were studying. Proving things with
unopenable black boxes can be a dangerous game for scientists, and doubly so for
criminal justice.
Other critics have underscored how perilous it is to rely on an accused (or
convicted) person’s address or other variables that can easily become, inside the black
box of algorithmic sentencing, a proxy for race. By dint of everyday experience, we have
grown used to the fact that airport security is different for children under the age of
twelve and adults over the age of seventy-five. What factors do we want the algorists to
have in their often hidden procedures? Education? Income? Employment history? What
one has read, watched, visited, or bought? Prior contact with law enforcement? How do
we want algorists to weight those factors? Predictive analytics predicated on mechanical
objectivity comes at a price. Sometimes it may be a price worth paying; sometimes that
price would be devastating for the just society we want to have.
More generally, as the convergence of algorithms and Big Data governs a greater
and greater part of our lives, it would be well worth keeping in mind these two lessons
44
Rebecca Wexler, “Life, Liberty, and Trade Secrets: Intellectual Property in the Criminal Justice System,”
70 Stanford Law Review, XXX (2018).
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from the history of the sciences: Judgment is not the discarded husk of a now pure
objectivity of self-restraint. And mechanical objectivity is a virtue competing among
others, not the defining essence of the scientific enterprise. They are lessons to bear in
mind, even if algorists dream of objectivity.
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In the past decade, genetic engineering has caught up with computer science with regard
to how new scientific initiatives are shaping our lives. Genetic engineer George
Church, a pioneer of the revolution in reading and writing biology, is central to this new
landscape of ideas. He thinks of the body as an operating system, with engineers taking
the place of traditional biologists in retooling stripped-down components of organisms
(from atoms to organs) in much the same vein as in the late 1970s, when electrical
engineers were working their way to the first personal computer by assembling circuit
boards, hard drives, monitors, etc. George created and is director of the Personal
Genome Project, which provides the world’s only open-access information on human
genomic, environmental, and trait data (GET) and sparked the growing DNA ancestry
industry.
He was instrumental in laying the groundwork for President Obama’s 2013
BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative—in
aid of improving the brains of human beings to the point where, for much of what
sustains us, we might not need the help of (potentially dicey) AIs. “It could be that some
of the BRAIN Initiative projects allow us to build human brains that are more consistent
with our ethics and capable of doing advanced tasks like artificial intelligence,” George
has said. “The safest path by far is getting humans to do all the tasks that they would like
to delegate to machines, but we’re not yet firmly on that super-safe path.”
More recently, his crucially important pioneering use of the enzyme CRISPR (as
well as methods better than CRISPR) to edit the genes of human cells is sometimes
missed by the media in the telling of the CRISPR origins story.
George’s attitude toward future forms of artificial general intelligence is friendly,
as evinced in the essay that follows. At the same time, he never loses sight of the AIsafety
issue. On that subject, he recently remarked: “The main risk in AI, to my mind, is
not so much whether we can mathematically understand what they’re thinking; it’s
whether we’re capable of teaching them ethical behavior. We’re barely capable of
teaching each other ethical behavior.”
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THE RIGHTS OF MACHINES
George M. Church
George M. Church is Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical
School; Professor of Health Sciences and Technology, Harvard-MIT; and co-author
(with Ed Regis) of Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and
Ourselves.
In 1950, Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings was at the cutting edge of
vision and speculation in proclaiming that
the machine like the djinnee, which can learn and can make decisions on the
basis of its learning, will in no way be obliged to make such decisions as we
should have made, or will be acceptable to us. . . . Whether we entrust our
decisions to machines of metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which
are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations, . . . [t]he hour is
very late, and the choice of good and evil knocks at our door.
But this was his book’s denouement, and it has left us hanging now for sixty-eight
years, lacking not only prescriptions and proscriptions but even a well-articulated
“problem statement.” We have since seen similar warnings about the threat of our
machines, even in the form of outreach to the masses, via films like Colossus: The Forbin
Project (1970), The Terminator (1984), The Matrix (1999), and Ex Machina (2015). But
now the time is ripe for a major update, with fresh, new perspectives—notably focused
on generalizations of our “human” rights and our existential needs.
Concern has tended to focus on “us versus them [robots]” or “grey goo
[nanotech]” or “monocultures of clones [bio].” To extrapolate current trends: What if we
could make or grow almost anything and engineer any level of safety and efficacy
desired? Any thinking being (made of any arrangement of atoms) could have access to
any technology.
Probably we should be less concerned about us-versus-them and more concerned
about the rights of all sentients in the face of an emerging unprecedented diversity of
minds. We should be harnessing this diversity to minimize global existential risks, like
supervolcanoes and asteroids.
But should we say “should”? (Disclaimer: In this and many other cases, when a
technologist describes a societal path that “could,” “would,” or “should” happen, this
doesn’t necessarily equate to the preferences of the author. It could reflect warning,
uncertainty, and/or detached assessment.) Roboticist Gianmarco Veruggio and others
have raised issues of roboethics since 2002; the U.K. Department of Trade and Industry
and the RAND spin-off Institute for the Future have raised issues of robot rights since
2006.
“Is versus ought”
It is commonplace to say that science concerns “is,” not “ought.” Stephen Jay Gould’s
“non-overlapping magisteria” view argues that facts must be completely distinct from
values. Similarly, the 1999 document Science and Creationism from the U.S. National
Academy of Sciences noted that “science and religion occupy two separate realms.” This
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division has been critiqued by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, myself, and
others. We can discuss “should” if framed as “we should do X in order to achieve Y.”
Which Y should be a high priority is not necessarily settled by democratic vote but might
be settled by Darwinian vote. Value systems and religions wax and wane, diversify,
diverge, and merge just as living species do: subject to selection. The ultimate “value”
(the “should”) is survival of genes and memes.
Few religions say that there is no connection between our physical being and the
spiritual world. Miracles are documented. Conflicts between Church doctrine and
Galileo and Darwin are eventually resolved. Faith and ethics are widespread in our
species and can be studied using scientific methods, including but not limited to fMRI,
psychoactive drugs, questionnaires, et cetera.
Very practically, we have to address the ethical rules that should be built in,
learned, or probabilistically chosen for increasingly intelligent and diverse machines. We
have a whole series of trolley problems. At what number of people in line for death
should the computer decide to shift a moving trolley to one person? Ultimately this
might be a deep-learning problem—one in which huge databases of facts and
contingencies can be taken into account, some seemingly far from the ethics at hand.
For example, the computer might infer that the person who would escape death if
the trolley is left alone is a convicted terrorist recidivist loaded up with doomsday
pathogens, or a saintly POTUS—or part of a much more elaborate chain of events in
detailed alternative realities. If one of these problem descriptions seems paradoxical or
illogical, it may be that the authors of the trolley problem have adjusted the weights on
each sides of the balance such that hesitant indecision is inevitable.
Alternatively, one can use misdirection to rig the system, such that the error
modes are not at the level of attention. For example, in the Trolley Problem, the real
ethical decision was made years earlier when pedestrians were given access to the rails—
or even before that, when we voted to spend more on entertainment than on public safety.
Questions that at first seem alien and troubling, like “Who owns the new minds, and who
pays for their mistakes?” are similar to well-established laws about who owns and pays
for the sins of a corporation.
The Slippery Slopes
We can (over)simplify ethics by claiming that certain scenarios won’t happen. The
technical challenges or the bright red lines that cannot be crossed are reassuring, but the
reality is that once the benefits seem to outweigh the risks (even briefly and barely), the
red lines shift. Just before Louise Brown’s birth in 1978, many people were worried that
she “would turn out to be a little monster, in some way, shape or form, deformed,
something wrong with her.” 45 Few would hold this view of in-vitro fertilization today.
What technologies are lubricating the slope toward multiplex sentience? It is not
merely deep machine-learning algorithms with Big Iron. We have engineered rodents to
be significantly better at a variety of cognitive tasks as well as to exhibit other relevant
traits, such as persistence and low anxiety. Will this be applicable to animals that are
already at the door of humanlike intelligence? Several show self-recognition in a mirror
test—chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, some dolphins and whales, and magpies.
45
“Then, Doctors ‘All Anxious’ About Test-tube Baby”
http://edition.cnn.com/2003/HEALTH/parenting/07/25/cnna.copperman/
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Even the bright red line for human manipulation of human beings shows many
signs of moving or breaking completely. More than 2,300 approved clinical trials for
gene therapy are in progress worldwide. A major medical goal is the treatment or
prevention of cognitive decline, especially in light of our rapidly aging global
demographic. Some treatments of cognitive decline will include cognitive enhancements
(drugs, genes, cells, transplants, implants, and so on). These will be used off-label. The
rules of athletic competition (e.g., banning augmentation with steroids or erythropoietin)
do not apply to intellectual competition in the real world. Every bit of progress on
cognitive decline is in play for off-label use.
Another frontier of the human use of humans is “brain organoids.” We can now
accelerate developmental biology. Processes that normally take months can happen in
four days in the lab using the right recipes of transcription factors. We can make brains
that, with increasing fidelity, recapitulate the differences between people born with
aberrant cognitive abilities (e.g., microcephaly). Proper vasculature (veins, arteries, and
capillaries) missing from earlier successes are now added, enabling brain organoids to
surpass the former sub-microliter limit to possibly exceed the 1.2-liter size of modern
human brains (or even the 5-liter elephant or 8-liter sperm whale brains).
Conventional Computers versus Bio-electronic Hybrids
As Moore’s Law miniaturization approaches its next speed bump (surely not a solid
wall), we see the limits of the stochastics of dopant atoms in silicon slabs and the limits
of beam-fabrication methods at around 10-nanometer feature size. Power (energy
consumption) issues are also apparent: The great Watson, winner of Jeopardy!, used
85,000 watts real time, while the human brains were using 20 watts each. To be fair, the
human body needs 100 watts to operate and twenty years to build, hence about 6 trillion
joules of energy to “manufacture” a mature human brain. The cost of manufacturing
Watson-scale computing is similar. So why aren’t humans displacing computers?
For one, the Jeopardy! contestants’ brains were doing far more than information
retrieval—much of which would be considered mere distractions by Watson (e.g.,
cerebellar control of smiling). Other parts allow leaping out of the box with
transcendence unfathomable by Watson, such as what we see in Einstein’s five annus
mirabilis papers of 1905. Also, humans consume more energy than the minimum (100
W) required for life and reproduction. People in India use an average of 700 W per
person; it’s 10,000 W in the U.S. Both are still less than the 85,000 watts Watson uses.
Computers can become more like us via neuromorphic computing, possibly a
thousandfold. But human brains could get more efficient, too. The organoid brain-in-abottle
could get closer to the 20 W limit. The idiosyncratic advantages of computers for
math, storage, and search, faculties of limited use to our ancestors, could be designed and
evolved anew in labs.
Facebook, the National Security Agency, and others are constructing exabytescale
storage facilities at more than a megawatt and four hectares, while DNA can store
that amount in a milligram. Clearly, DNA is not a mature storage technology, but with
Microsoft and Technicolor doubling down on it, we would be wise to pay attention. The
main reason for the 6 trillion joules of energy required to get a productive human mind is
the twenty years required for training.
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Even though a supercomputer can “train” a clone of zemself in seconds, the
energy cost of producing a mature silicon clone is comparable. Engineering (Homo)
prodigies might make a small impact on this slow process, but speeding up development
and implanting extensive memory (as DNA-exabytes or other means) could reduce
duplication time of a bio-computer to close to the doubling time of cells (ranging from
eleven minutes to twenty-four hours). The point is that while we may not know what
ratio of bio/homo/nano/robo hybrids will be dominant at each step of our accelerating
evolution, we can aim for high levels of humane, fair, and safe treatment (“use”) of one
another.
Bills of Rights date back to 1689 in England. FDR proclaimed the “Four
Freedoms”—freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom from fear, and freedom
from want. The U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 included the
right to life; the prohibition of slavery; defense of rights when violated; freedom of
movement; freedom of association, thought, conscience, and religion; social, economic,
and cultural rights; duties of the individual to society; and prohibition of use of rights in
contravention of the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
The “universal” nature of these rights is not universally embraced and is subject
to extensive critique and noncompliance. How does the emergence of non-Homointelligences
affect this discussion? At a minimum, it is becoming rapidly difficult to
hide behind vague intuition for ethical decisions—“I know it when I see it” (U.S.
Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, 1964) or the “wisdom of repugnance” (aka “yuck
factor,” Leon Kass, 1997), or vague appeals to “common sense.” As we have to deal
with minds alien to us, sometimes quite literal from our viewpoint, we need to be
explicit—yea, even algorithmic.
Self-driving cars, drones, stock-market transactions, NSA searches, et cetera,
require rapid, pre-approved decision making. We may gain insights into many aspects of
ethics that we have been trying to pin down and explain for centuries. The challenges
have included conflicting priorities, as well as engrained biological, sociological, and
semi-logical cognitive biases. Notably far from consensus in universal dogmas about
human rights are notions of privacy and dignity, even though these influence many laws
and guidelines.
Humans might want the right to march in to read (and change) the minds of
computers to see why they’re making decisions at odds with our (Homo) instincts. Is it
not fair for machines to ask the same of us? We note the growth of movements toward
transparency in potential financial conflicts; “open-source” software, hardware, and
wetware; the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR); and the
Open Humans Foundation.
In his 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason, Joseph Weizenbaum
argued that machines should not replace Homo in situations requiring respect, dignity, or
care, while others (author Pamela McCorduck and computer scientists like John
McCarthy and Bill Hibbard) replied that machines can be more impartial, calm, and
consistent and less abusive or mischievous than people in such positions.
Equality
What did the thirty-three-year-old Thomas Jefferson mean in 1776 when he wrote, “We
hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed
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by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and
the Pursuit of Happiness”? The spectrum of current humans is vast. In 1776, “Men” did
not include people of color or women. Even today, humans born with congenital
cognitive or behavioral issues are destined for unequal (albeit in most cases
compassionate) treatment—Down syndrome, Tay-Sachs disease, Fragile X syndrome,
cerebral palsy, and so on.
And as we change geographical location and mature, our unequal rights change
dramatically. Embryos, infants, children, teens, adults, patients, felons, gender identities
and gender preferences, the very rich and very poor—all of these face different rights and
socioeconomic realities. One path to new mind-types obtaining and retaining rights
similar to the most elite humans would be to keep a Homo component, like a human
shield or figurehead monarch/CEO, signing blindly enormous technical documents,
making snap financial, health, diplomatic, military, or security decisions. We will
probably have great difficulty pulling the plug, modifying, or erasing (killing) a computer
and its memories—especially if it has befriended humans and made spectacularly
compelling pleas for survival (as all excellent researchers fighting for their lives would
do).
Even Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, has weighed in on this topic, supported by
experiments at Eindhoven University in 2005 noting how susceptible humans are to a
robot-as-victim equivalent of the Milgram experiments done at Yale beginning in 1961.
Given the many rights of corporations, including ownership of property, it seems likely
that other machines will obtain similar rights, and it will be a struggle to maintain
inequities of selective rights along multi-axis gradients of intellect and ersatz feelings.
Radically Divergent Rules for Humans versus Nonhumans and Hybrids
The divide noted above for intra Homo sapiens variation in rights explodes into a riot of
inequality as soon as we move to entities that overlap (or will soon) the spectrum of
humanity. In Google Street View, people’s faces and car license plates are blurred out.
Video devices are excluded from many settings, such as courts and committee meetings.
Wearable and public cameras with facial-recognition software touch taboos. Should
people with hyperthymesia or photographic memories be excluded from those same
settings?
Shouldn’t people with prosopagnosia (face blindness) or forgetfulness be able to
benefit from facial-recognition software and optical character recognition wherever they
go, and if them, then why not everyone? If we all have those tools to some extent,
shouldn’t we all be able to benefit?
These scenarios echo Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 short story “Harrison Bergeron,” in
which exceptional aptitude is suppressed in deference to the mediocre lowest common
denominator of society. Thought experiments like John Searle’s Chinese Room and
Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics all appeal to the sorts of intuitions plaguing
human brains that Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and others have demonstrated. The
Chinese Room experiment posits that a mind composed of mechanical and Homo
sapiens parts cannot be conscious, no matter how competent at intelligent human
(Chinese) conversation, unless a human can identify the source of the consciousness and
“feel” it. Enforced preference for Asimov’s First and Second Laws favor human minds
over any other mind meekly present in his Third Law, of self-preservation.
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If robots don’t have exactly the same consciousness as humans, then this is used
as an excuse to give them different rights, analogous to arguments that other tribes or
races are less than human. Do robots already show free will? Are they already selfconscious?
The robots Qbo have passed the “mirror test” for self-recognition and the
robots NAO have passed a related test of recognizing their own voice and inferring their
internal state of being, mute or not.
For free will, we have algorithms that are neither fully deterministic nor random
but aimed at nearly optimal probabilistic decision making. One could argue that this is a
practical Darwinian consequence of game theory. For many (not all) games/problems, if
we’re totally predictable or totally random, then we tend to lose.
What is the appeal of free will anyway? Historically it gave us a way to assign
blame in the context of reward and punishment on Earth or in the afterlife. The goals of
punishment might include nudging the priorities of the individual to assist the survival of
the species. In extreme cases, this could include imprisonment or other restrictions, if
Skinnerian positive/negative reinforcement is inadequate to protect society. Clearly, such
tools can apply to free will, seen broadly—to any machine whose behavior we’d like to
manage.
We could argue as to whether the robot actually experiences subjective qualia for
free will or self-consciousness, but the same applies to evaluating a human. How do we
know that a sociopath, a coma patient, a person with Williams syndrome, or a baby has
the same free will or self-consciousness as our own? And what does it matter,
practically? If humans (of any sort) convincingly claim to experience consciousness,
pain, faith, happiness, ambition, and/or utility to society, should we deny them rights
because their hypothetical qualia are hypothetically different from ours?
The sharp red lines of prohibition, over which we supposedly will never step,
increasingly seem to be short-lived and not sensible. The line between human and
machines blurs, both because machines become more humanlike and humans become
more machine-like—not only since we increasingly blindly follow GPS scripts, reflex
tweets, and carefully crafted marketing, but also as we digest ever more insights into our
brain and genetic programming mechanisms. The NIH BRAIN Initiative is developing
innovative technologies and using these to map out the connections and activity of mental
circuitry so as to improve electronic and synthetic neurobiological ware.
Various red lines depend on genetic exceptionalism, in which genetics is
considered permanently heritable (although it is provably reversible), whereas exempt
(and lethal) technologies, like cars, are for all intents and purposes irreversible due to
social and economic forces. Within genetics, a red line makes us ban or avoid genetically
modified foods but embrace genetically modified bacteria making insulin, or genetically
modified humans—witness mitochondrial therapies approved in Europe for human adults
and embryos.
The line for germline manipulation seems less sensible than the usual, practical
line drawn at safety and efficacy. Marriages of two healthy carriers of the same genetic
disease have a choice between no child of their own, 25-percent loss of embryos via
abortion (spontaneous or induced), 80-percent loss via in-vitro fertilization, or potential
zero-percent embryo loss via sperm (germline) engineering. It seems premature to
declare this last option unlikely.
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For “human subject research,” we refer to the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki,
keeping in mind the 1932-1972 Tuskegee syphilis experiment, possibly the most
infamous biomedical research study in U.S. history. In 2015, the Nonhuman Rights
Project filed a lawsuit with the New York State Supreme Court on behalf of two
chimpanzees kept for research by Stony Brook University. The appellate court decision
was that chimps are not to be treated as legal persons since they “do not have duties and
responsibilities in society,” despite Jane Goodall’s and others’ claim that they do, and
despite arguments that such a decision could be applied to children and the disabled. 46
What prevents extension to other animals, organoids, machines, and hybrids? As
we (e.g., Hawking, Musk, Tallinn, Wilczek, Tegmark) have promoted bans on
“autonomous weapons,” we have demonized one type of “dumb” machine, while other
machines—for instance, those composed of many Homo sapiens voting—can be more
lethal and more misguided.
Do transhumans roam the Earth already? Consider the “uncontacted peoples,”
such as the Sentinelese and Andamanese of India, the Korowai of Indonesia, the Mashco-
Piro of Peru, the Pintupi of Australia, the Surma of Ethiopia, the Ruc of Vietnam, the
Ayoreo-Totobiegosode of Paraguay, the Himba of Namibia, and dozens of tribes in
Papua New Guinea. How would they or our ancestors respond? We could define
“transhuman” as people and culture not comprehensible to humans living in a modern,
yet un-technological culture.
Such modern Stone Age people would have great trouble understanding why we
celebrate the recent LIGO gravity-wave evidence supporting the hundred-year-old
general theory of relativity. They would scratch their heads as to why we have atomic
clocks, or GPS satellites so we can find our way home, or why and how we have
expanded our vision from a narrow optical band to the full spectrum from radio to
gamma. We can move faster than any other living species; indeed, we can reach escape
velocity from Earth and survive in the very cold vacuum of space.
If those characteristics (and hundreds more) don’t constitute transhumanism, then
what would? If we feel that the judge of transhumanism should not be fully paleo-culture
humans but recent humans, then how would we ever reach transhuman status? We
“recent humans” may always be capable of comprehending each new technological
increment—never adequately surprised to declare arrival at a (moving) transhuman
target. The science-fiction prophet William Gibson said, “The future is already here—
it’s just not very evenly distributed.” While this underestimates the next round of
“future,” certainly millions of us are transhuman already—with most of us asking for
more. The question “What was a human?” has already transmogrified into “What were
the many kinds of transhumans?. . . And what were their rights?”
46
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/lawyer-denying-chimpanzees-rights-could-backfire-disabled-
n734566.
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Caroline A. Jones’ interest in modern and contemporary art is enriched by a willingness
to delve into the technologies involved in its production, distribution, and reception. “As
an art historian, a lot of my questions are about what kind of art we can make, what kind
of thought we can make, what kind of ideas we can make that could stretch the human
beyond our stubborn, selfish, ‘only concerned with our small group’ parameters. The
philosophers and philosophies I’m drawn to are those that question the Western
obsession with individualism. Those are coming from so many different places, and
they’re reviving so many different kinds of questions and problems that were raised in the
1960s.”
She has recently turned her attention to the history of cybernetics. Her MIT
course, “Automata, Automatism, Systems, Cybernetics,” explores the history of the
human/machine interface in terms of feedback, exploring the cultural rather than
engineering uptake of this idea. She begins with primary readings by Wiener, Shannon,
and Turing and then pivots from the scientists and engineers to the work and ideas of
artists, feminists, postmodern theorists. Her goal: to come up with a new central
paradigm of evolution that’s culture-based—“communalism and interspecies symbiosis
rather than survival of the fittest.”
As a historian, Caroline draws a distinction between what she has termed “left
cybernetics” and “right cybernetics”: “What do I mean by left cybernetics? In one
sense, it’s a pun or a joke: the cybernetics that was ‘left’ behind. On another level, it’s a
vague political grouping connoting our Left Coast: California, Esalen, the group that
Dave Kaiser calls the ‘hippie physicists.’ It’s not an adequate term, but it’s a way of
recognizing that there was a group beholden to the military-industrial complex,
sometimes very unhappily, who gave us the tools to critique it.”
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THE ARTISTIC USE OF CYBERNETIC BEINGS
Caroline A. Jones
Caroline A. Jones is a professor of art history in the Department of Architecture at MIT
and author of Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the
Bureaucratization of the Senses; Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar
American Artist; and The Global Work of Art.
Cybernated art is very important, but art for cybernated life is more important.
— Nam June Paik, 1966
Artificial intelligence was not what artists first wanted out of cybernetics, once Norbert
Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society came out in 1950.
The range of artists who identified themselves with cybernetics in the fifties and sixties
initially had little access to “thinking machines.” Moreover, craft-minded engineers had
already been making turtles, jugglers, and light-seeking robot babes, not giant brains.
Using breadboards, copper wire, simple switches, and electronic sensors, artists followed
cyberneticians in making sculptures and environments that simulated interactive
sentience—analog movements and interfaces that had more to do with instinctive drives
and postwar sexual politics than the automation of knowledge production. Now obscured
by an ideology of a free-floating “intelligence” untethered by either hardware or flesh, AI
has forgotten the early days of cybernetics’ uptake by artists. Those efforts are worth
revisiting; they modeled relations with what the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari have called the “machinic phylum,” having to do with how humans think
and feel in bodies engaged with a physical, material, emotionally stimulating, and
signaling world.
Cybernetics now seems to have collapsed into an all-pervasive discourse of AI
that was far from preordained. “Cybernetics,” as a word, claimed postwar newness for
concepts that were easily four centuries old: notions of feedback, machine damping,
biological homeostasis, logical calculation, and systems thinking that had been around
since the Enlightenment (boosted by the Industrial Revolution). The names in this
lineage include Descartes, Leibniz, Sadi Carnot, Clausius, Maxwell, and Watt. Wiener’s
coinage nonetheless had profound cultural effects. 47 The ubiquity today of the prefix
“cyber-” confirms the desire for a crisp signifier of the tangled relations between humans
and machines. In Wiener’s usage, things “cyber” simply involved “control and
communication in the animal and the machine.” But after the digital revolution, “cyber”
moved beyond servomechanisms, feedback loops, and switches to encompass software,
algorithms, and cyborgs. The work of cybernetically inclined artists concerns the
emergent behaviors of life that elude AI in its current condition.
As to that original coinage, Wiener had reached back to the ancient Greek to
borrow the word for “steersman” (κυβερνήτης / kubernétés), a masculine figure
channeling power and instinct at the helm of a ship, who read the waves, judged the
wind, kept a hand on the tiller, and directed the slaves as they mindlessly (mechanically)
churned their oars. The Greek had already migrated into modern English via Latin, going
47
Wiener later had to admit the earlier coinage of the word in 1834 by André-Marie Ampère, who had
intended it to mean the “science of government,” a concept that remained dormant until the 20th century.
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from kuber- to guber—the root of “gubernatorial” and “governor,” another term for
masculine control, deployed by James Watt to describe his 19th-century device for
modulating a runaway steam engine. Cybernetics thus took ideas that had long
analogized people and devices and generalized them to an applied science by adding that
“-ics.” Wiener’s three c’s (command, control, communication) drew on the mathematics
of probability to formalize systems (whether biological or mechanical) theorized as a set
of inputs of information achieving outputs of actions in an environment—a muscular,
fleshy agenda often minimized in genealogies of AI.
But the etymology does little to capture the excitement felt by participants, as
mathematics joined theoretical biology (Arturo Rosenblueth) and information theory
(Claude Shannon, Walter Pitts, Warren McCulloch) to produce a barrage of
interdisciplinary research and publications viewed as changing not just the way science
was done but the way future humans would engage with the technosphere. As Wiener
put it, “We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify
ourselves in order to exist.” 48 The pressing question is: How are we modifying
ourselves? Are we going in the right direction or have we lost our way, becoming the
tools of our tools? Revisiting the early history of humanist/artists’ contribution to
cybernetics may help direct us toward a less perilous, more ethical future.
The year 1968 was a high-water mark of the cultural diffusion and artistic uptake
of the term. In that year, the Howard Wise gallery opened its show of Wen-Ying Tsai’s
“Cybernetic Sculpture” in midtown Manhattan, and Polish émigré Jasia Reichardt opened
her exhibition “Cybernetic Serendipity” at London’s ICA. (The “Cybernetic” in her title
was intended to evoke “made by or with computers,” even though most of the artworks
on view had no computers, as such, in their responsive circuits.) The two decades
between 1948 and 1968 had seen both the fanning out of cybernetic concepts into a
broader culture and the spread of computation machines themselves in a slow migration
from proprietary military equipment, through the multinational corporation, to the
academic lab, where access began to be granted to artists. The availability of cybernetic
components—“sensor organs” (electronic eyes, motion sensors, microphones) and
“effector organs” (electronic “breadboards,” switches, hydraulics, pneumatics)—on the
home hobbyist front rendered the computer less an “electronic brain” than an adjunct
organ in a kit of parts. There was not yet a ruling metaphor of “artificial intelligence.”
So artists were bricoleurs of electronic bodies, interested in actions rather than calculation
or cognition. There were inklings of “computer” as calculator in the drive toward Homo
rationalis, but more in aspiration than achievement.
In light of today’s digital convergence in art/science imaging tools, Reichardt’s
show was prophetic in its insistence on confusing the boundaries between art and what
we might dub “creative applied science.” According to the catalog, “no visitor to the
exhibition, unless he reads all the notes relating to all the works, will know whether he is
looking at something made by an artist, engineer, mathematician, or architect.” So the
comically dysfunctional robot by Nam June Paik, Robot K-456 (1964), featured on the
catalog’s cover and described as “a female robot known for her disturbing and
idiosyncratic behavior,” would face off against a balletic Colloquy of Mobiles (1968)
from second-order cybernetician Gordon Pask. Pask worked with a London theater
48
The Human Use of Human Beings (1954 edition), p. 46.
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designer to craft a spindly “male” apparatus of hinges and rods, set up to communicate
with bulbous “female” fiberglass entities nearby. Whether anyone could actually map the
quiddities of the program (or glean its reactionary gender theater) without reading the
catalog essay is an open question. What is significant is Pask’s focus on the behaviors of
his automata, their interactivity, their responsiveness within an artificially modulated
environment, and their “reflection” of human behaviors.
The ICA’s “Cybernetic Serendipity” introduced an important paradigm: the
machinic ecosystem, in which the viewer was a biological part, tasked with figuring out
just what the triggers for interaction might be. The visitors in those London galleries
suddenly became “cybernetic organisms”—cyborgs—since to experience the art
adequately, one needed to enter a kind of symbiotic colloquy with the servomechanisms.
This turn toward human-machine interactive environments as an aesthetic becomes
clearer when we examine a few other artworks from the period, beginning with one
constituting an early instance of emergent behavior—Senster, the interactive sculpture by
artist/engineer Edward Ihnatowicz (1970), celebrated by medical robotics engineer Alex
Zivanovic, editor of a Web site devoted to Ihnatowicz’s little-known career, as “one of
the first computer controlled interactive robotic works of art.” Here, “the computer”
makes its entry (albeit a twelve-bit, limited device). But rather than “intelligence,”
Ihnatowicz sought to make an avatar of affective behavior. Key to Senster’s uncanny
success was the programming with which Ihnatowicz constrained the fifteen-foot-long
hydraulic apparatus (its hinge design and looming appearance inspired by a lobster claw)
to convey shyness in responding to humans in its proximity. Senster’s sound channels
and motion sensors were set to recoil at loud noises and sudden aggressive movements.
Only those humans willing to speak softly and modulate their gestures would be
rewarded by Senster’s quiet, inquisitive approach—an experience that became real for
Ihnatowicz himself when he first assembled the program and the machine turned to him
solicitously after he’d cleared his throat.
In these artistic uses of cybernetic beings, we sense a growing necessity to train
the public to experience itself as embedded in a technologized environment, modifying
itself to communicate intuitively with machines. This necessity had already become
explicit in Tsai’s “Cybernetic Sculpture” show. Those experiencing his immersive
installation were expected to experiment with machinic life: What behaviors would
trigger the servomechanisms? Likely, the human gallery attendant would have had to
explain the protocol: “Clap your hands—that gets the sculptures to respond.” As an early
critic described it:
A grove of slender stainless-steel rods rises from a plate. This base vibrates at 30
cycles per second; the rods flex rapidly, in harmonic curves. Set in a dark room,
they are lit by strobes. The pulse of the flashing lights varies—they are
connected to sound and proximity sensors. The result is that when one
approaches a Tsai or makes a noise in its vicinity, the thing responds. The rods
appear to move; there is a shimmering, a flashing, an eerie ballet of metal, whose
apparent movements range from stillness to jittering and back to a slow,
indescribably sensuous undulation. 49
49
Robert Hughes, Time magazine (October 2, 1972) review of Tsai exhibition at Denise René gallery.
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Like Senster, the apparatus stimulated (and simulated) an affective rather than
rational interaction. Humans felt they were encountering behaviors indicative of
responsive life; Tsai’s entities were often classed as “vegetal” or “aquatic.” Such
environmental and kinetic ambitions were widespread in the international art world of the
time. Beyond the stable at Howard Wise, there were the émigrés forming the collective
GRAV in Paris, the “cybernetic architectures” of Nicolas Schöffer, the light and plastic
gyrations of the German Zero Gruppe, and so on—all defining and informing the genre
of installation art to come.
The artistic use of cybernetic beings in the late sixties made no investment in
“intelligence.” Knowing machines were dumb and incapable of emotion, these creators
were confident in staging frank simulations. What interested them were machinic
motions evoking drives, instincts, and affects; they mimicked sexual and animal
behaviors, as if below the threshold of consciousness. Such artists were uninterested in
the manipulation of data or information (although Hans Haacke would move in that
direction by 1972 with his “Real-Time Systems” works). The cybernetic culture that
artists and scientists were putting in place on two continents embedded the human in the
technosphere and seduced perception with the graceful and responsive behaviors of the
machinic phylum. “Artificial” and “natural” intertwined in this early cybernetic
aesthetic.
But it wouldn’t end here. Crucial to the expansion of this uncritical, largely
masculine set of cybernetic environments would be a radical, critical cohort of
astonishing women artists emerging in the 1990s, fully aware of their predecessors in art
and technology but perhaps more inspired by the feminist founders of the 1970 journal
Radical Software and the cultural blast of Donna Haraway’s inspiring 1984 polemic, “A
Cyborg Manifesto.” The creaky gender theater of Paik and Pask, the innocent creatures
of Ihnatowicz and Tsai, were mobilized as savvy, performative, and postmodern, as in
Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Dollie Clone Series (1995-98) consisting of the interactive
assemblages CyberRoberta and Tillie, the Telerobotic Doll, who worked the
technosphere with the professionalism of burlesque, winking and folding us viewers into
an explicit consciousness of our voyeuristic position as both seeing subjects and objectsto-be-looked-at.
The “innocent” technosphere established by male cybernetic sculptors of the
1960s was, by the 1990s, identified by feminist artists as an entirely suffusive condition
demanding our critical attention. At the same time, feminists tackled the question of
whose “intelligence” AI was attempting to simulate. For an artist such as Hershman
Leeson, responding to the technical “triumph” of cloning Dolly the sheep, it was crucial
to draw the connection between meat production and “meat machines.” Hershman
Leeson produced “dolls” as clones, offering a critical framing of the way contemporary
individuation had become part of an ideological, replicative, plastic realm.
While the technofeminists of the 1990s and into the 2000s weren’t all cyber all
the time, their works nonetheless complicated the dominant machinic and kinetic
qualities of male artists’ previous techno-environments. The androgynous tele-cyborg in
Judith Barry’s Imagination, Dead Imagine (1991), for example, had no moving parts:
He/she was comprised of pure signals, flickering projections on flat surfaces. In her
setup, Barry commented on the alienating effects of late-20th-century technology. The
image of an androgynous head fills an enormous cube made of ten-foot-square screens on
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five sides, mounted on a ten-foot-wide mirrored base. A variety of viscous and
unpleasant-looking fluids (yellow, reddish-orange, brown), dry materials (sawdust?
flour?), and even insects drizzle or dust their way down the head, whose stoic sublimity is
made gorgeously virtual on the work’s enormous screens. Dead Imagine, through its
large-scale and cubic “Platonic” form, remains both artificial and locked into the body—
refusing a detached “intelligence” as being no intelligence at all.
Artists in the new millennium inherit this critical tradition and inhabit the current
paradigms of AI, which has slid from partial simulations to claims of intelligence. In the
1955 proposal thought to be the first printed usage of the phrase “artificial intelligence,”
computer scientist John McCarthy and his colleagues Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel
Rochester, and Claude Shannon conjectured that “every aspect of learning or any other
feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be
made to simulate it.” This modest theoretical goal has inflated over the past sixty-four
years and is now expressed by Google DeepMind as an ambition to “Solve intelligence.”
Crack the code! But unfortunately, what we hear cracking is not code but small-scale
capitalism, the social contract, and the scaffolding of civility. Taking away the jobs of
taxi and truck drivers, roboticizing direct marketing, hegemonizing entertainment,
privatizing utilities, and depersonalizing health care—are these the “whips” that Wiener
feared we would learn to love?
Artists can’t solve any of this. But they can remind us of the creative potential of
the paths not taken—the forks in the road that were emerging around 1970, before
“information” became capital and “intelligence” equaled data harvesting. Richly
evocative of what can be done with contemporary tools when revisiting earlier
possibilities is French artist Philippe Parreno’s “firefly piece,” so nicknamed to avoid
having to iterate its actual title: With a Rhythmic Instinction to Be Able to Travel Beyond
Existing Forces of Life (2014). Described by the artist as “an automaton,” the sculptural
installation juxtaposes a flickering projection of black-and-white drawings of fireflies
with a band of oscillating green-on-black binary figures. The drawings and binary
figures are animated using algorithms from mathematician John Horton Conway’s 1970
Game of Life, a “cellular automaton.”
Conway set up parameters for any square (“cell”) to be lit (“alive”) or dark
(“dead”) in an infinite, two-dimensional grid. The rules are summarized as follows: A
single cell will quickly die of loneliness. But a cell touching three or more other “live”
cells will also die, “due to crowding.” A cell survives and thrives if it has just two
neighbors . . . and so on. As one cell dies, it may create the conditions for other cells to
survive, yielding patterns that appear to move and grow, shifting across the grid like
evanescent neural impulses or bioluminescent clusters of diatoms. In Stephen Hawking’s
2012 film The Meaning of Life, the narrator describes Conway’s mathematical model as
simulating “how a complex thing like the mind might come about from a basic set of
rules,” revealing the overweening ambitions that characterize contemporary AI: “[T]hese
complex properties emerge from simple laws that contain no concepts like movement or
reproduction,” yet they produce “species,” and cells “can even reproduce, just as life does
in the real world.” 50
Just as life does? Artists know the blandishments of simulation and
representation, the difference between the genius of artifice and the realities of what “life
50
Narration in Stephen Hawking’s The Meaning of Life (Smithson Productions, Discovery Channel, 2012).
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does.” Parreno’s piece is an intuitive assembly of our experience of “life” through
embodied, perspectival engagement. Our consciousness is electrically (cybernetically)
enmeshed, yet we don’t respond as if this human-generated set of elegant simulations had
its own intelligence.
The artistic use of cybernetic beings also reminds us that consciousness itself is
not just “in here.” It is streaming in and out, harmonizing those sensory, scintillating
signals. Mind happens well outside the limits of the cranium (and its simulacrum, the
“motherboard”). In Mary Catherine Bateson’s paraphrase of her father Gregory’s
second-order cybernetics, mind is material “not necessarily defined by a boundary such
as an envelope of skin.” 51 Parreno pairs the simulations of art with the simulations of
mathematics to force the Wiener-like point that any such model is not, by itself, just like
life. Models are just that—parts of signaling systems constituting “intelligence” only
when their creaturely counterparts engage them in lively meaning making.
Contemporary AI has talked itself into a corner by instrumentalizing and particularizing
tasks and subroutines, confusing these drills with actual wisdom. The brief cultural
history offered here reminds us that views of data as intelligence, digital nets as “neural,”
or isolated individuals as units of life, were alien even to Conway’s brute simulation.
We can stigmatize the stubborn arrogance of current AI as “right cybernetics,” the
path that led to current automated weapons systems, Uber’s ill-disguised hostility to
human workers, and the capitalist dreams of Google. Now we must turn back to left
cybernetics—theoretical biologists and anthropologists engaged with a trans-species
understanding of intelligent systems. Gregory Bateson’s observation that corporations
merely simulate “aggregates of parts of persons,” with profit-maximizing decisions cut
off from “wider and wiser parts of the mind,” has never been more timely. 52
The cybernetic epistemology offered here suggests a new approach. The
individual mind is immanent, not only in the body but also in pathways outside the body,
and there is a larger Mind, of which the individual mind is only a subsystem. This larger
Mind, Bateson holds, is comparable to God, and is perhaps what some people mean by
“God,” but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary
ecology. This is not the collective delusion of an exterior “God” who speaks from
outside human consciousness (this long-seated monotheistic conceit, Bateson suggests,
leads to views of nature and environment as also outside the “individual” human,
rendering them as “gifts to exploit”). Rather, Bateson’s “God” is a placeholder for our
evanescent experience of interacting consciousness-in-the-world: larger Mind as a result
of inputs and actions that then become inputs for other actions in concert with other
entities—webs of symbiotic relationships that form patterns we need urgently to sense
and harmonize with. 53
From Tsai in the 1970s to Hershman Leeson in the 1990s to Parreno in 2014,
artists have been critiquing right cybernetics and plying alternative, embodied,
environmental experiences of “artificial” intelligence. Their artistic use of cybernetic
beings offers the wisdom of symbionts experienced in the kinds of poeisis that can be
achieved in this world: rhythms of signals and intuitive actions that produce the
51
Mary Catherine Bateson, 1999 foreword to Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1972): xi.
52
Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p. 452.
53
Ibid., pp. 467-8.
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movements of life partnered with an electro-mechanical and -magnetic technosphere.
Life, in its mysterious negentropic entanglements with matter and Mind.
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Over nearly four decades, Stephen Wolfram has been a pioneer in the development and
application of computational thinking and responsible for many innovations in science,
technology and business.
His 1982 paper “Cellular Automata as Simple Self-Organizing Systems,” written
at the age of twenty-three, was the first of numerous significant scientific contributions
aimed at understanding the origins of complexity in nature.
It was around this time that Stephen briefly came into my life. I had established
The Reality Club, an informal gathering of intellectuals who met in New York City to
present their work before peers in other disciplines. (Note: In 1996, The Reality Club
went online as Edge.org). Our first speaker? Stephen Wolfram, a “wunderkind” who
had arrived in Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Study. I distinctly recall his
focused manner as he sat down on a couch in my living room and spoke uninterrupted for
about an hour before the assembled group.
Since that time, Stephen has become intent making the world’s knowledge easily
computable and accessible. His program Mathematica is the definitive system for
modern technical computing. Wolfram|Alpha computes expert-level answers using AI
technology. He considers his Wolfram Language to be the first true computational
communication language for humans and AIs.
I caught up with him again four years ago, when we arranged to meet in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a freewheeling conversation about AI. Stephen walked
in, said hello, sat down, and, looking at the video camera set up to record the
conversation for Edge, began to talk and didn’t stop for two and a half hours.
The essay that follows is an edited version of that session, which was a Wolfram
master class of sorts and is an appropriate way to end this volume—just as Stephen’s
Reality Club talk in the ’80s was a great way to initiate the ongoing intellectual
enterprise whose result is the rich community of thinkers presenting their work to one
another and to the public in this book.
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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE FUTURE OF CIVILIZATION
Stephen Wolfram
Stephen Wolfram is a scientist, inventor, and the founder and CEO of Wolfram
Research. He is the creator of the symbolic computation program Mathematica and its
programming language, Wolfram Language, as well as the knowledge engine
Wolfram|Alpha. He is also the author of A New Kind of Science.
The following is an edited transcript from a live interview with him conducted in
December 2015.
I see technology as taking human goals and making them automatically executable by
machines. Human goals of the past have entailed moving objects from here to there,
using a forklift rather than our own hands. Now the work we can do automatically, with
machines, is mental rather than physical. It’s obvious that we can automate many of the
tasks we humans have long been proud of doing ourselves. What’s the future of the
human condition in that situation?
People talk about the future of intelligent machines and whether they’ll take over
and decide what to do for themselves. But the inventing of goals is not something that
has a path to automation. Someone or something has to define what a machine’s purpose
should be—what it’s trying to execute. How are goals defined? For a given human, they
tend to be defined by personal history, cultural environment, the history of our
civilization. Goals are uniquely human. Where the machine is concerned, we can give it
a goal when we build it.
What kinds of things have intelligence, or goals, or purpose? Right now, we
know one great example, and that’s us—our brains, our human intelligence. Human
intelligence, I once assumed, is far beyond anything else that exists naturally in the
world; it’s the result of an elaborate process of evolution and thus stands apart from the
rest of existence. But what I’ve realized, as a result of the science I’ve done, is that this is
not the case.
People might say, for instance, “The weather has a mind of its own.” That’s an
animist statement and seems to have no place in modern scientific thinking. But it’s not
as silly as it sounds. What does the human brain do? A brain receives certain input, it
computes things, it causes certain actions to happen, it generates a certain output. Like
the weather. All sorts of systems are, effectively, doing computations—whether it’s a
brain or, say, a cloud responding to its thermal environment.
We can argue that our brains are doing vastly more sophisticated computations
than those in the atmosphere. But it turns out that there’s a broad equivalence between
the kinds of computations that different kinds of systems do. This renders the question of
the human condition somewhat poignant, because it seems we’re not as special as we
thought. There are all those different systems of nature that are pretty much equivalent,
in terms of their computational capabilities.
What makes us different from all those other systems is the particulars of our
history, which give us our notions of purpose and goals. That’s a long way of saying that
when the box on our desk thinks as well as the human brain does, what it still won’t have,
intrinsically, are goals and purposes. Those are defined by our particulars—our particular
biology, our particular psychology, our particular cultural history.
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When we consider the future of AI, we need to think about the goals. That’s what
humans contribute; that’s what our civilization contributes. The execution of those goals
is what we can increasingly automate. What will the future of humans be in such a
world? What will there be for them to do? One of my projects has been to understand
the evolution of human purposes over time. Today we’ve got all kinds of purposes. If
you look back a thousand years, people’s goals were quite different: How do I get my
food? How do I keep myself safe? In the modern Western world, for the most part you
don’t spend a large fraction of your life thinking about those purposes. From the point of
view of a thousand years ago, some of the goals people have today would seem utterly
bizarre—for example, like exercising on a treadmill. A thousand years ago that would
sound like a crazy thing to do.
What will people be doing in the future? A lot of purposes we have today are
generated by scarcity of one kind or another. There are scarce resources in the world.
People want to get more of something. Time itself is scarce in our lives. Eventually,
those forms of scarcity will disappear. The most dramatic discontinuity will surely be
when we achieve effective human immortality. Whether this will be achieved
biologically or digitally isn’t clear, but inevitably it will be achieved. Many of our
current goals are driven in part by our mortality: “I’m only going to live a certain time, so
I’d better get this or that done.” And what happens when most of our goals are executed
automatically? We won’t have the kinds of motivations we have today. One question I’d
like an answer for is, What do the derivatives of humans in the future end up choosing to
do with themselves? One of the potential bad outcomes is that they just play video games
all the time.
~ ~ ~
The term “artificial intelligence” is evolving, in its use in technical language. These
days, AI is very popular, and people have some idea of what it means. Back when
computers were being developed, in the 1940s and 1950s, the typical title of a book or a
magazine article about computers was “Giant Electronic Brains.” The idea was that just
as bulldozers and steam engines and so on automated mechanical work, computers would
automate intellectual work. That promise turned out to be harder to fulfill than many
people expected. There was, at first, a great deal of optimism; a lot of government
money got spent on such efforts in the early 1960s. They basically just didn’t work.
There are a lot of amusing science-fiction-ish portrayals of computers in the
movies of that time. There’s a cute one called Desk Set, which is about an IBM-type
computer being installed in a broadcasting company and putting everybody out of a job.
It’s cute because the computer gets asked a bunch of reference-library questions. When
my colleagues and I were building Wolfram|Alpha, one of the ideas we had was to get it
to answer all of those reference-library questions from Desk Set. By 2009, it could
answer them all.
In 1943, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts came up with a model for how
brains conceptually, formally, might work—an artificial neural network. They saw that
their brainlike model would do computations in the same way as Turing Machines. From
their work, it emerged that we could make brainlike neural networks that would act as
general computers. And in fact, the practical work done by the ENIAC folks and John
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von Neumann and others on computers came directly not from Turing Machines but
through this bypath of neural networks.
But simple neural networks didn’t do much. Frank Rosenblatt invented a learning
device he called the perceptron, which was a one-layer neural network. In the late sixties,
Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert wrote a book titled Perceptrons, in which they
basically proved that perceptrons couldn’t do anything interesting, which is correct.
Perceptrons could only make linear distinctions between things. So the idea was more or
less dropped. People said, “These guys have written a proof that neural networks can’t
do anything interesting, therefore no neural networks can do anything interesting, so let’s
forget about neural networks.” That attitude persisted for some time.
Meanwhile, there were a couple of other approaches to AI. One was based on
understanding, at a formal level, symbolically, how the world works; and the other was
based on doing statistics and probabilistic kinds of things. With regard to symbolic AI,
one of the test cases was, Can we teach a computer to do something like integrals? Can
we teach a computer to do calculus? There were tasks like machine translation, which
people thought would be a good example of what computers could do. The bottom line is
that by the early seventies, that approach had crashed.
Then there was a trend toward devices called expert systems, which arose in the
late seventies and early eighties. The idea was to have a machine learn the rules that an
expert uses and thereby figure out what to do. That petered out. After that, AI became
little more than a crazy pursuit.
~ ~ ~
I had been interested in how you make an AI-like machine since I was a kid. I was
interested particularly in how you take the knowledge we humans have accumulated in
our civilization and automate answering questions on the basis of that knowledge. I
thought about how you could do that symbolically, by building a system that could break
down questions into symbolic units and answer them. I worked on neural networks at
that time and didn’t make much progress, so I put it aside for a while.
Back in mid-2002 to 2003, I thought about that question again: What does it take
to make a computational knowledge system? The work I’d done by then pretty much
showed that my original belief about how to do this was completely wrong. My original
belief had been that in order to make a serious computational knowledge system, you first
had to build a brainlike device and then feed it knowledge—just as humans learn in
standard education. Now I realized that there wasn’t a bright line between what is
intelligent and what is simply computational.
I had assumed that there was some magic mechanism that made us vastly more
capable than anything that was just computational. But that assumption was wrong. This
insight is what led to Wolfram|Alpha. What I discovered is that you can take a large
collection of the world’s knowledge and automatically answer questions on the basis of
it, using what are essentially merely computational techniques. It was an alternative way
to do engineering—a way that’s much more analogous to what biology does in evolution.
In effect, what you normally do when you build a program is build it step-by-step.
But you can also explore the computational universe and mine technology from that
universe. Typically, the challenge is the same as in physical mining: That is, you find a
supply of, let’s say, iron, or cobalt, or gadolinium, with some special magnetic properties,
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and you turn that special capability to a human purpose, to something you want
technology to do. In the case of magnetic materials, there are plenty of ways to do that.
In terms of programs, it’s the same story. There are all kinds of programs out there, even
tiny programs that do complicated things. Could we entrain them for some useful human
purpose?
And how do you get AIs to execute your goals? One answer is to just talk to
them, in the natural language of human utterances. It works pretty well when you’re
talking to Siri. But when you want to say something longer and more complicated, it
doesn’t work well. You need a computer language that can represent sophisticated
concepts in a way that can be progressively built up and isn’t possible in natural
language. What my company spent a lot of time doing was building a knowledge-based
language that incorporates the knowledge of the world directly into the language. The
traditional approach to creating a computer language is to make a language that
represents operations that computers intrinsically know how to do: allocating memory,
setting values of variables, iterating things, changing program counters, and so on.
Fundamentally, you’re telling computers to do things in your own terms. My approach
was to make a language that panders not to the computers but to the humans, to take
whatever a human thinks of and convert it into some form that the computer can
understand. Could we encapsulate the knowledge we’d accumulated, both in science and
in data collection, into a language we could use to communicate with computers? That’s
the big achievement of my last thirty years or so—being able to do that.
Back in the 1960s, people would say things like, “When we can do such-andsuch,
we’ll know we have AI. When we can do an integral from a calculus course, we’ll
know we have AI. When we can have a conversation with a computer and make it seem
human. . . ,” et cetera. The difficulty was, “Well, gosh, the computer just doesn’t know
enough about the world.” You’d ask the computer what day of the week it was, and it
might be able to answer that. You’d ask it who the President was, and it probably
couldn’t tell you. At that point, you’d know you were talking to a computer and not a
person. But now when it comes to these Turing Tests, people who’ve tried connecting,
for example, Wolfram|Alpha to their Turing Test bots find that the bots lose every time.
Because all you have to do is start asking the machine sophisticated questions and it will
answer them! No human can do that. By the time you’ve asked it a few disparate
questions, there will be no human who knows all those things, yet the system will know
them. In that sense, we’ve already achieved good AI, at that level.
Then there are certain kinds of tasks easy for humans but traditionally very hard
for machines. The standard one is visual object identification: What is this object?
Humans can recognize it and give some simple description of it, but a computer was just
hopeless at that. A couple of years ago, though, we brought out a little imageidentification
system, and many other companies have done something similar—ours
happens to be somewhat better than the rest. You show it an image, and for about ten
thousand kinds of things, it will tell you what it is. It’s fun to show it an abstract painting
and see what it says. But it does a pretty good job.
It works using the same neural-network technology that McCulloch and Pitts
imagined in 1943 and lots of us worked on in the early eighties. Back in the 1980s,
people successfully did OCR—optical character recognition. They took the twenty-six
letters of the alphabet and said, “OK, is that an A? Is that a B? Is that a C?” and so on.
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That could be done for twenty-six different possibilities, but it couldn’t be done for ten
thousand. It was just a matter of scaling up the whole system that makes this possible
today. There are maybe five thousand picturable common nouns in English, ten thousand
if you include things like special kinds of plants and beetles which people would
recognize with some frequency. What we did was train our system on 30 million images
of these kinds of things. It’s a big, complicated, messy neural network. The details of
the network probably don’t matter, but it takes about a quadrillion GPU operations to do
the training.
Our system is impressive because it pretty much matches what humans can do. It
has about the same training data humans have—about the same number of images a
human infant would see in the first couple of years of its life. Roughly the same number
of operations have to be done in the learning process, using about the same number of
neurons in at least the first levels of our visual cortex. The details are different; the way
these artificial neurons work has little to do with how the brain’s neurons work. But the
concept is similar, and there’s a certain universality to what’s going on. At the
mathematical level, it’s a composition of a very large number of functions, with certain
continuity properties that let you use calculus methods to incrementally train the system.
Given those attributes, you can end up with something that does the same job human
brains do in physiological recognition.
But does this constitute AI? There are a few basic components. There’s
physiological recognition, there’s voice-to-text, there’s language translation—things
humans manage to do with varying degrees of difficulty. These are essentially some of
the links to how we make machines that are humanlike in what they do. For me, one of
the interesting things has been incorporating those capabilities into a precise symbolic
language to represent the everyday world. We now have a system that can say, “This is a
glass of water.” We can go from a picture of a glass of water to the concept of a glass of
water. Now we have to invent some actual symbolic language to represent those
concepts.
I began by trying to represent mathematical, technical kinds of knowledge and
went on to other kinds of knowledge. We’ve done a pretty good job of representing
objective knowledge in the world. Now the problem is to represent everyday human
discourse in a precise symbolic way—a knowledge-based language intended for
communication between humans and machines, so that humans can read it and machines
can understand it, too. For instance, you might say “X is greater than 5.” That’s a
predicate. You might also say, “I want a piece of chocolate.” That’s also a predicate. It
has an “I want” in it. We have to find a precise symbolic representation of the desires we
express in human natural language.
In the late 1600s, Gottfried Leibniz, John Wilkins, and others were concerned
with what they called philosophical languages—that is, complete, universal, symbolic
representations of things in the world. You can look at the philosophical language of
John Wilkins and see how he divided up what was important in the world at the time.
Some aspects of the human condition have been the same since the 1600s. Some are very
different. His section on death and various forms of human suffering was huge; in
today’s ontology, it’s a lot smaller. It’s interesting to see how a philosophical language
of today would differ from a philosophical language of the mid-1600s. It’s a measure of
our progress. Many such attempts at formalization have happened over the years. In
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mathematics, for example: Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica in 1910 was
the biggest showoff effort. There were previous attempts by Gottlob Frege and Giuseppe
Peano that were a little more modest in their presentation. Ultimately, they were wrong
in what they thought they should formalize: They thought they should formalize some
process of mathematical proof, which turns out not to be what most people care about.
With regard to a modern analog of the Turing Test, it’s an interesting question.
There’s still the conversational bot, which is Turing’s idea. That one hasn’t been solved
yet. It will be solved—the only question is, What is the application for which it is
solved? For a long time I would ask, “Why should we care?”—because I thought the
principal application would be customer service, which wasn’t particularly high on my
list. But customer service, where you’re trying to interface, is just where you need this
conversational language.
One big difference between Turing’s time and ours is the method of
communicating with computers. In his time, you typed something into the machine and it
typed back a response. In today’s world, it responds with a screen—as for instance, when
you want to buy a movie ticket. How is a transaction with a machine different from a
transaction with a human? The main answer is that there’s a visual display. It asks you
something, and you press a button, and you can see the result immediately. For example,
in Wolfram|Alpha, when it’s used inside Siri, if there’s a short answer, Siri will tell you
the short answer. But what most people want is the visual display, showing the
infographic of this or that. This is a nonhuman form of communication that turns out to
be richer than the traditional spoken, or typed, human communication. In most humanto-human
communication, we’re stuck with pure language, whereas in computer-tohuman
communication we have this much higher bandwidth channel—of visual
communication.
Many of the most powerful applications of the Turing Test fall away now that we
have this additional communication channel. For example, here’s one we’re pursuing
right now. It’s a bot that communicates about writing programs: You say, “I want to
write a program. I want it to do this.” The bot will say, “I’ve written this piece of
program. This is what it does. Is this what you want?” Blah-blah-blah. It’s a back-andforth
bot. Devising such systems is an interesting problem, because they have to have a
model of a human if they’re trying to explain something to you. They have to know what
the human is confused about.
What has long been difficult for me to understand is, What’s the point of a
conventional Turing Test? What’s the motivation? As a toy, one could make a little chat
bot that people could chat with. That will be the next thing. The current round of deep
learning—particularly, recurrent neural networks—is making pretty good models of
human speech and human writing. We can type in, say, “How are you feeling today?”
and it knows most of the time what sort of response to give. But I want to figure out
whether I can automate responding to my email. I know the answer is “No.” A good
Turing Test, for me, will be when a bot can answer most of my email. That’s a tough
test. It would have to learn those answers from the humans the email is connected to. I
might be a little bit ahead of the game, because I’ve been collecting data on myself for
about twenty-five years. I have every piece of email for twenty-five years, every
keystroke for twenty. I should be able to train an avatar, an AI, that will do what I can
do—perhaps better than I could.
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~ ~ ~
People worry about the scenario in which AIs take over. I think something much more
amusing, in a sense, will happen first. The AI will know what you intend, and it will be
good at figuring out how to get there. I tell my car’s GPS I want to go to a particular
destination. I don’t know where the heck I am, I just follow my GPS. My children like
to remind me that once when I had a very early GPS—the kind that told you, “Turn this
way, turn that way”—we ended up on one of the piers going out into Boston Harbor.
More to the point is that there will be an AI that knows your history, and knows
that when you’re ordering dinner online you’ll probably want such-and-such, or when
you email this person, you should talk to them about such-and-such. More and more, the
AIs will suggest to us what we should do, and I suspect most of the time people will just
go along with that. It’s good advice—better than what you would have figured out for
yourself.
As far as the takeover scenario is concerned, you can do terrible things with
technology and you can do good things with technology. Some people will try to do
terrible things with technology, and some people will try to do good things with
technology. One of the things I like about today’s technology is the equalization it has
produced. I used to be proud that I had a better computer than anybody I knew; now we
all have the same kind of computers. We have the same smartphones, and pretty much
the same technology can be used by a decent fraction of the planet’s 7 billion people. It’s
not the case that the king’s technology is different from everybody else’s. That’s an
important advance.
The great frontier five hundred years ago was literacy. Today, it’s doing
programming of some kind. Today’s programming will be obsolete in a not very long
time. For example, people no longer learn assembly language, because computers are
better at writing assembly language than humans are, and only a small set of people need
to know the details of how language gets compiled into assembly language. A lot of
what’s being done by armies of programmers today is similarly mundane. There’s no
good reason for humans to be writing Java code or JavaScript code. We want to
automate the programming process so that what’s important goes from what the human
wants done to getting the machine, as automatically as possible, to do it. This will
increase that equalization, which is something I’m interested in. In the past, if you
wanted to write a serious piece of code, or program for something important and real, it
was a lot of work. You had to know quite a bit about software engineering, you had to
invest months of time in it, you had to hire programmers who knew this or you had to
learn it yourself. It was a big investment.
That’s not true anymore. A one-line piece of code already does something
interesting and useful. It allows a vast range of people who couldn’t make computers do
things for them, make computers do things for them. Something I’d like to see is a lot of
kids around the world learn the new capabilities of knowledge-based programming and
then produce code that’s effectively as sophisticated as what anybody in the top ranks can
produce. This is within reach. We’re at the point where anybody can learn to do
knowledge-based programming, and, more important, learn to think computationally.
The actual mechanics of programming are easy now. What’s difficult is imagining things
in a computational way.
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How do you teach computational thinking? In terms of how to do programming,
it’s an interesting question. Take nanotechnology. How did we achieve nanotechnology?
Answer: We took technology as we understand it on a large scale and we made it very
small. How to make a CPU chip on the atomic scale? Fundamentally, we use the same
architecture as the CPU chip we know and love. That isn’t the only approach one can
take. Looking at what simple programs can do suggests that you can take even simple
impoverished components and with the right compiler you can make them do interesting
things. We don’t do molecular-scale computing yet, because the ambient technology is
such that you’d have to spend a decade building it. But we’ve got the components that
are enough to make a universal computer. You might not know how to program with
those components, but by doing searches in the space of possible programs, you’d start to
amass building blocks, and you could then create a compiler for them. The surprising
thing is that impoverished stuff is capable of doing sophisticated things, and the
compilation step is not as gruesome as you might expect.
Just searching the computational universe and trying to find programs—building
blocks—that are interesting is a good approach. A more traditional engineering
approach—trying by pure thought to figure out how to build a universal computer—is a
harder row to hoe. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done, but my guess is that we’ll be able
to do some amazing things just by finding the components and searching the possible
programs we can make with them. Then it’s back to the question about connecting
human purposes to what is available from the system.
One question I’m interested in is, What will the world look like when most people
can write code? We had a transition, maybe five hundred years ago or so, when only
scribes and a small set of the population could read and write natural language. Today, a
small fraction of the population can write code. Most of the code they write is for
computers only. You don’t understand things by reading code. But there will come a
time when, as a result of things I’ve tried to do, the code is at a high enough level that it’s
a minimal description of what you’re trying to do. It will be a piece of code that’s
understandable to humans but also executable by the machines.
Coding is a form of expression, just as writing in a natural language is a form of
expression. To me, some simple pieces of code are poetic—they express ideas in a very
clean way. There’s an aesthetic aspect, much as there is to expression in a natural
language. One feature of code is that it’s immediately executable; it’s not like writing.
When you write something, somebody has to read it, and the brain that’s reading it has to
absorb the thoughts that came from the person who did the writing. Look at how
knowledge has been transmitted in the history of the world. At level zero, one form of
knowledge transmission is essentially genetic—that is, there’s an organism, and its
progeny has the same features that it had. Then there’s the kind of knowledge
transmission that happens with things like physiological recognition. A newborn creature
has some neural network with some random connections in it, and as the creature moves
around in the world, it starts recognizing kinds of objects and it learns that knowledge.
Then there’s the level that was the big achievement of our species, which is
natural language. The ability to represent knowledge abstractly enough that we can
communicate it brain to brain, so to speak. Arguably, natural language is our species’
most important invention. It’s what led, in many respects, to our civilization.
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There’s yet another level, and probably one day it will have a more interesting
name. With knowledge-based programming, we have a way of creating an actual
representation of real things in the world, in a precise and symbolic way. Not only is it
understandable by brains and communicable to other brains and to computers, it’s also
immediately executable.
Just as natural language gave us civilization, knowledge-based programming will
give us—what? One bad answer is that it will give us the civilization of the AIs. That’s
what we don’t want to happen, because the AIs will do a great job communicating with
one another and we’ll be left out of it, because there’s no intermediate language, no
interface with our brains. What will this fourth level of knowledge communication lead
to? If you were Caveman Ogg and you were just realizing that language was starting,
could you imagine the coming of civilization? What should we be imagining right now?
This relates to the question of what the world would look like if most people
could code. Clearly, many trivial things would change: Contracts would be written in
code, restaurant recipes might be written in code, and so on. Simple things like that
would change. But much more profound things would also change. The rise of literacy
gave us bureaucracy, for example, which had already existed but dramatically
accelerated, giving us a greater depth of governmental systems, for better or worse. How
does the coding world relate to the cultural world?
Take high school education. If we have computational thinking, how does that
affect how we study history? How does that affect how we study languages, social
studies, and so on? The answer is, it has a great effect. Imagine you’re writing an essay.
Today, the raw material for a typical high school student’s essay is something that’s
already been written; students usually can’t generate new knowledge easily. But in the
computational world, that will no longer be true. If the students know something about
writing code, they’ll access all that digitized historical data and figure out something
new. Then they’ll write an essay about something they’ve discovered. The achievement
of knowledge-based programming is that it’s no longer sterile, because it’s got the
knowledge of the world knitted into the language you’re using to write code.
~ ~ ~
There’s computation all over the universe: in a turbulent fluid producing some
complicated pattern of flow, in the celestial mechanics of planetary interactions, in
brains. But does computation have a purpose? You can ask that about any system. Does
the weather have a goal? Does climate have a goal?
Can someone looking at Earth from space tell that there’s anything with a purpose
there? Is there a civilization there? In the Great Salt Lake, in Utah, there’s a straight
line. It turns out to be a causeway dividing two areas of the lake with different colors of
algae, so it’s a very dramatic straight line. There’s a road in Australia that’s long and
straight. There’s a railroad in Siberia that’s long, and lights go on when a train stops at
the stations. So from space you can see straight lines and patterns.
But are these clear enough examples of obvious purpose on Earth as viewed from
space? For that matter, how do we recognize extraterrestrials out there? How do we tell
if a signal we’re getting indicates purpose? Pulsars were discovered in 1967, when we
picked up a periodic flutter every second or so. The first question was, Is this a beacon?
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Because what else would make a periodic signal? It turned out to be a rotating neutron
star.
One criterion to apply to a potentially purposeful phenomenon is whether it’s
minimal in achieving a purpose. But does that mean that it was built for the purpose?
The ball rolls down the hill because of gravitational pull. Or the ball rolls down the hill
because it’s satisfying the principle of least action. There are typically these two
explanations for some action that seems purposeful: the mechanistic explanation and the
teleological. Essentially all of our existing technology fails the test of being minimal in
achieving its purpose. Most of what we build is steeped in technological history, and it’s
incredibly non-minimal for achieving its purpose. Look at a CPU chip; there’s no way
that that’s the minimal way to achieve what a CPU chip achieves.
This question of how to identify purposefulness is a hard one. It’s an important
question, because radio noise from the galaxy is very similar to CDMA transmissions
from cell phones. Those transmissions use pseudo-noise sequences, which happen to
have certain repeatability properties. But they come across as noise, and they’re set up as
noise, so as not to interfere with other channels. The issue gets messier. If we were to
observe a sequence of primes being generated from a pulsar, we’d ask what generated
them. Would it mean that a whole civilization grew up and discovered primes and
invented computers and radio transmitters and did this? Or is there just some physical
process making primes? There’s a little cellular automaton that makes primes. You can
see how it works if you take it apart. It has a little thing bouncing inside it, and out
comes a sequence of primes. It didn’t need the whole history of civilization and biology
and so on to get to that point.
I don’t think there is abstract “purpose,” per se. I don’t think there’s abstract
meaning. Does the universe have a purpose? Then you’re doing theology in some way.
There is no meaningful sense in which there is an abstract notion of purpose. Purpose is
something that comes from history.
One of the things that might be true about our world is that maybe we go through
all this history and biology and civilization, and at the end of the day the answer is “42,”
or something. We went through all those 4 billion years of various kinds of evolution
and then we got to “42.”
Nothing like that will happen, because of computational irreducibility. There are
computational processes that you can go through in which there is no way to shortcut that
process. Much of science has been about shortcutting computation done by nature. For
example, if we’re doing celestial mechanics and want to predict where the planets will be
a million years from now, we could follow the equations, step-by-step. But the big
achievement in science is that we’re able to shortcut that and reduce the computation.
We can be smarter than the universe and predict the endpoint without going through all
the steps. But even with a smart enough machine and smart enough mathematics, we
can’t get to the endpoint without going through the steps. Some details are irreducible.
We have to irreducibly follow those steps. That’s why history means something. If we
could get to the endpoint without going through the steps, history would be, in some
sense, pointless.
So it’s not the case that we’re intelligent and everything else in the world is not.
There’s no enormous abstract difference between us and the clouds or us and the
cellular automata. We cannot say that this brainlike neural network is qualitatively
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different from this cellular-automaton system. The difference is a detailed difference.
This brainlike neural network was produced by the long history of civilization, whereas
the cellular automaton was created by my computer in the last microsecond.
The problem of abstract AI is similar to the problem of recognizing
extraterrestrial intelligence: How do you determine whether or not it has a purpose? This
is a question I don’t consider answered. We’ll say things like, “Well, AI will be
intelligent when it can do blah-blah-blah.” When it can find primes. When it can
produce this and that and the other. But there are many other ways to get to those results.
Again, there is no bright line between intelligence and mere computation.
It’s another part of the Copernican story: We used to think Earth was the center of
the universe. Now we think we’re special because we have intelligence and nothing else
does. I’m afraid the bad news is that that isn’t a distinction.
Here’s one of my scenarios. Let’s say there comes a time when human
consciousness is readily uploadable into digital form, virtualized and so on, and pretty
soon we have a box of a trillion souls. There are a trillion souls in the box, all virtualized.
In the box, there will be molecular computing going on—maybe derived from biology,
maybe not. But the box will be doing all kinds of elaborate stuff. And there’s a rock
sitting next to the box. Inside a rock, there are always all kinds of elaborate stuff going
on, all kinds of subatomic particles doing all kinds of things. What’s the difference
between the rock and the box of a trillion souls? The answer is that the details of what’s
happening in the box were derived from the long history of human civilization, including
whatever people watched on YouTube the day before. Whereas the rock has its long
geological history but not the particular history of our civilization.
Realizing that there isn’t a genuine distinction between intelligence and mere
computation leads you to imagine that future—the endpoint of our civilization as a box of
trillion souls, each of them essentially playing a video game, forever. What is the
“purpose” of that?
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