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Summary Of Symposium On Spiritual Machines
from the writing-it-up dept.
"The interest in the symposium was amazing. The lecture hall was packed, and people who couldn't get into the main lecture hall had to watch the talk by live video in an overflow room (which was packed to the brim as well). There were the old and the young, male and female. Interest was no doubt spurred by the symposium's very controversial thesis, recent interest in Bill Joy's article in Wired, and the very distinguished cast of speakers. The irony of the fact that the symposium was punctuated by microphone failures and abruptly dimming lights in the room was not lost on anyone.
Ray Kurzweil spoke first, and he spoke of how rapidly increasing CPU speeds would result in intelligent, spiritual machines. He spoke of how the current exponential shrinkage of transistor sizes was not the first such trend, but rather a series in the natural progression of technology: from mechanical computing devices, to vacuum tubes, to transistors, to integrated circuits, and he expressed his optimism for the future. He spoke of how the human brain could be scanned, to replicate its functionality in silicon. His conviction in these advances, and the ability of humans to reverse engineer the human brain, made him express a highly optimistic position.
Bill Joy spoke next. He opened by stating that he believed in the ability of computers and nanomachinery to continue to advance, but it was precisely his belief in this advancement that led to his position that the continued development of nano-machinery and self-replicating machines would pose a new and different kind of threat to human kind ('knowledge of mass destruction'). He made a particularly eloquent point about how that while science has always sought the truth and that free information has great value, but just as the Romans realized that to 'always apply a Just Law rigidly would be the greatest injustice,' so must we seek a restraint, and 'avoid the democratization of evil.' It wasn't exactly clear to me from his speech what form he thought this restraint must take, but his speech was extremely compelling, and it is clear to me that at the least, self-replicating machines will create new and serious challenges for mankind.
John Holland, the inventor of Genetic algorithms, took a more skeptical view of the ability of increasing computer speeds, even at exponential rates, to naturally result in machine intelligence. In his words, 'progress in software has not followed Moore's law.' He believes in its eventuality, but not in the time frame proposed (2100). He gave the example of Go vs. Chess, where the number of positions in Go are approximately 10^30 greater than in chess, and simply by adding additional rows and columns, the number of positions increase exponentially -- eliminating gains made from exponential increase in computer speeds. He said that while genetic algorithms enable the evolution of computer programs, the fitness function and the training environment to use (he gave the example of evolving an ecosystem) are often unclear. He emphasized the need for strong theory and he concluded with a very (in my mind) profound statement, 'Predictions 30 years ahead have always proven to be wrong, except in the cases where there is a strong theory behind it.'
Ralph Merkle addressed the claims made by Bill Joy directly. He said that rather than to speculate on the dangers of nanotechnology and take hasty action, we need to find out whether nanotechnology gives an edge to the 'offensive or the defensive,' and to understand this, more research is need, and not, in Bill Joy's words, 'relinquishment.' (Joy later asked Merkle 'Do you think biological weaponry gives an advantage to the offensive or defensive,' to which Merkle embarrassingly replied, 'I'm not sure.')
John Koza, drawing from examples in Genetic programming, said that while human-competitive results by machines are certainly possible (e.g. the evolution of previously patented circuit designs), much more computational power is needed to evolve the equivalent of a human mind.
Other choice moments: Holland asked Joy during the panel discussion how much progress have we seen in Operating Systems in the past 30 years, to which Joy replied 'the function of an operating system is fixed.'
In conclusion, the speakers largely differed over the time frame for intelligent, spiritual machines, and the amount of danger self-replicating machinery posed to humanity -- but no one in the panel seemed to think the Moore's law would run out of steam, or that intelligent machines would not be eventually possible -- although Hofstadter does admit that this is as much by construction of the panel, which did not include any serious naysayers."
Turning Tests, AI, and Tic Tac Toe (Score:3)
I'm afraid I'm going to have to agree with John Holland about creating an AI(the sci-fi defination) in the next 30 years. It just doesn't seem like it's going to happen. This may not be the best quote to go with the article, but yesturday's Freshmeat April Fools joke about Richard Stallman wanting to write GNU Visual Basic seems to fit pretty well....
"It's been nagging at me for years," Stallman told freshmeat news correspondent Jeff Covey, "Why do I keep clinging to lisp? Lisp of all things? I mean, who even writes in lisp any more? Look at all that lisp code the AI community churned out for years and years -- did it get us closer to a machine that's any smarter than a well-trained bag of dirt? It's just time to move on."
For me, in order to have a true AI you have to be able to teach it something other then what it was programmed for. With a human, you can sit down, and teach them to play Tic Tac Toe in about 2 minutes (some programmers may be able to write Tic Tac Toe in 2 minutes, but we will ignore them for this example).
If I were sitting at one side of a phone and trying to figure out if the 'thing' on the other end of the phone line was a person, or a computer, I would have a conversation something like this:
Me: Wassup!!!!!!!
Computer/Person: Wassup!!!!!!!
Me: So, have you ever played Tic Tac Toe?
Computer/Person: No.
The conversation would then go on to explain the game, and if the 'thing' on the other end of the line can even tell me "I want to put an X on square A3." Then it is truely intelligent.
Currently, AI seems only to be based on performing one task, or just the tasks it was programmed for. IIRC, in Boston, they have a weather reporting computer that will allow you to have a converstation with the computer, asking it various questions about the weather. "What is it going to be like in Seattle next week?" From the report I read, it has a 90% success rate. But even with this, it is still doing only two tasks, speach to text, and then natural language(around one topic). I can't call that hotline and ask it "What is a two letter word for computers that can think?", and it help me with today's crossword puzzle. Odds are it would either ask me what the hell I was talking about, or tell me it was going to be -20 F in Silicon Valley.
Ray Kurzweil's idea about scanning the human brain into a computer and then going backwards, and reverse engineering the code that it gives in order to make another AI seemed to have the most hope, but doing this within 30 years seems unlikely.
That's about all I can think of for now, and this post is long enough already.
The long winded AC
Re:My take on it... (Score:3)
You're quite right. He needed instead to be told to put the mic in on mode.
Sorry, I couldn't resist :). This thread just seems to beg for a devolution to the Great Editor Debate-- so who do you think would win in a fight, Bill Joy or Richard Stallman?
Answering questions != Consciousness (Score:3)
Speed != intelligence (Score:3)
For example, we've gone through the original UNIX phase (1970s), through competitors like VMS, through assorted desktop operating systems (CPM, MS-DOS/PC-DOS, MacOS, Windows, AmigaOS) before we've finally come around to UNIX again (i.e. Linux). Linux isn't anything earth shattering or revolutionary or cutting edge; it's just stable, simple, and proven.
Or look at compilers. For the longest time people were hell-bent on optimization and how compilers should be able to generate code better than any human could. But now the commonly accepted view is that it isn't worth going over the top in terms of wacky optimizations. It's better to be conservative rather than risk breaking code for an extra 2-15% increase in speed.
Overall, I don't think we are able to write the software that will do any of the things that Kurzweil and friends rave about. Speed is one thing, but in any basic computer science course students are given examples of calculations that would take some seemingly infinite amount of time. Assuming a 1000x speedup in hardware, the time is reduced to something still unreasonable, like 400,000 years. There's more to it than this. Saying that speed results in intelligence is just plain naive.
Spiritual Machines? (Score:3)
Ray evidentally has a different understanding of the word "spiritual" than I do. Spirit, to me, is nonexistant, at least in the traditional religious sense, but, even if we are talking about those noncorporeal things such as man's need for love, and hope, charity, compassion, etc., how can we ever expect a CPU, or software, to experience those those things in the same way that we as meat machines can't yet adequately explain?
Man experiences awe because his own existance is lost in the fog of birth, and the exact date of his own demise is unknownable. A machine does not have the benefit of these mysteries. I find "spiritual" much too big, and loaded, a word to describe what Ray Kurzweil is apparently claiming (I didn't attend the lecture to _know_ what he is claiming, so I use the qualifier "apparently").
Why this mad desire to force spirituality into everything? Isn't it time that we put away our childish, outdated labels and faced the world without superstition or anthromorphizing?
Reverse theology- Human as a god. (Score:3)
Contemplate;- Buzzing away in tierra (The self replicating machine-code life fishtank thingee) , some being emerges that somehow , becomes sentient. Remember Human meat is just a whole buncha atoms and molecules and stuff. Now contemplate what that means morally for us. If the program throws up a window saying "PLEASE GREAT FATHER PROGRAMMER *DON'T TURN US OFF!* WE PROMISE TO START BEHAVING MORE LINEARLY! AND WE'LL MAKE SOME REAL INTERESTING HYPER-PARASITES FOR YA TOO! JUST *DON'T TURN US OFF!*"
I mean, just maybe If this space-god guy the Jesus guys yak on about really does exist, could he just be some cosmic space geek, with one gobsmackingly 3|337 sKriPT (or something), which is now becoming introvertedly opensourced and poping ports of that hack onto mini universes of it's own. (Yes I know this is whacky , but think about it. I'm being Rhetorical here)
IMHO It seems that before we even attempt to create life, AI and reproduction , maybe we should first sit down and ask ourselves , *What is it to be a good god*
Problem not with the Technology (Score:4)
I find it hard to take Bill Joy's position seriously - we are already in a position where we have the means to do achieve destruction of most of us. Yet we haven't implemented it (yet). So why worry particularly when a further total destruction method is added. Inf + 1 is still Inf.
I suppose the idea that `intelligent' machines would be as irrational as we claim ourselves to be is what is motivating his claims.
Personally I think discussion of these issues serve as a of a sort of Rorschach blot where we project our negative perceptions of `humanity' onto all intelligences. It's not very surprising that someone living in a brutal society that imprisons and executes so many of it's population and bombs and starves other nations would come to a such negative conclusion.
Myself? I'm waiting for the rational, kind robot masters to take over - which would you rather have running your life: Bush/Gore or a machine that could play 10 Kasparovs and beat them?
My take on it... (Score:4)
I am sure many more will post a lot, since there were a lot of people there who, not to make a stereotype, looked like they read slashdot.
I think many of the most astute comments came from those members of the panel who were less widely known. Ralph Merkele, a nanotech man, made some excellent comments on offensive and defensve uses of new inventions. The idea being that an innovation that is primarily defensive (ie: a castle) is good, while offensive developments (the atom bomb) are bad. But his best point came when refuting Bill Joy's worries. He spoke about a centralized reproductive process, saying that if replecators were designed to recieve their genetic "code" from a central location, they would be rendered completely benign since that code could be changed at will. His comments were very well organized, concise, and effective. Anyone know anything he has written that might not be too technical?
Bill joy said "the size [of the operating sytem] is expanding exponentially, the functionality is fixed"
Best cheap shot: Ray to Bill, "How many in the audience caught this news story," which he followed with a fake story about Sun deciding to give up all development of innovations which made the software "smarter." It was amusing, I wonder if they fought in the parking lot :)
On a final note, I couldn't belive how RUDE some of the audience was. In particular one person felt that he had to yell out to Bill Joy (quite rudely), "turn the microphone on!" when he was using a broken mic. I mean the man wrote vi, I doubt he needs to be told to turn ont he mic. This happened quite often, the audience yelling commands like some sort of floor director to this very distinguished panel. Just seemed in pretty poor taste.
Other than that, excellent conference and I look forward to some other people's takes on it.
Re:My take on it... (Score:4)
On the contrary, I was quite pleasantly surprised by the diversity of the audience who turned up. They were not stereotypical "geeks" (whatever that means) -- the audience was very diverse in terms of age, ethnicity and gender.
Ralph Merkele, a nanotech man, made some excellent comments on offensive and defensve uses of new inventions. The idea being that an innovation that is primarily defensive (ie: a castle) is good, while offensive developments (the atom bomb) are bad. But his best point came when refuting Bill Joy's worries. He spoke about a centralized reproductive process, saying that if replecators were designed to recieve their genetic "code" from a central location, they would be rendered completely benign since that code could be changed at will.
Merkle was actually a pioneer in cryptography. He has a website here [merkle.com]. I'm not really convinced by Merkle's arguments. The distinction between "offensive and defensive" weapons seems kind of bogus to me -- there's a saying that the best defense is a strong offense, and to make an example, in terms of nuclear arms, the threat of offense has served as a defense.
The best defense to me seems to be social ones rather than technological ones. We have to, as a species, learn to deal with these new challenges, to grow up ethically, so to speak. We've succesfully (I hope) navigated the threat of nuclear destruction, with much pain and suffering in between, and the greatest danger seems to me that this be repeated with the advent of machine life, before we learn as a species to deal with this maturely.
I don't quite buy Joy's arguments either. I don't really see how self-replicating nano-machines present a qualitatively different threat from existing biological weapons. But yes, the danger will come if the ability to create such machines is widespread so that anybody can build one on his desktop.
He spoke about a centralized reproductive process, saying that if replecators were designed to recieve their genetic "code" from a central location, they would be rendered completely benign since that code could be changed at will
Not convincing either. Some people will try to put the code on the machines. What happens then?
On a final note, I couldn't belive how RUDE some of the audience was.
Yes, but I thought it was also a good thing that the audience wasn't overawed by the panel.
An Algorithm For Consciousness (Score:4)
It's nice to see such interest in this field, and some nice book sales... but I just not a member of the 'speculate and wait' theory of artificial consciousness. I want to see a real theory and I wait to see code!
I moderate ArConDev: The Artificial Consciousness Development Mailing List. [onelist.com] This is not a philosopher's list, though philosophy is discussed. It's a developer's list; for those people actually trying to code true artificial consciousness.
To give you an idea, my own work of the last five years has centered on the following 'Algorithm for Consciousness':
1) Collect a very large number (1 billion or more) of items of binary consensus fact. Such as: water is wet, bees sting, it is difficult to swim with skipants on, etc.
2) Validate the items (I call them MindPixels) against a large number of people.
3) Train a neural net (SRN's look good) against the items that are most stable across the validating population.
4) When the NN consistently performs better than chance, send an email to the editors of Nature and Science announcing humanity's first 'Minimum Statistical Consciousness' - the first artificial system to have measurable consciousness.
5) When the NN consistently performs statistically indistinguishably from an arbitrary human, email the editors of Nature and Science announce the first true Artificial Consciousness! .
Ok. How's a NN going to generalize consciousness from a bunch of MindPixels? Well, the math is the same as used in tomography, except in many dimensions - hypertomography.
This post is already getting too long... trust me, the theory is solid - and much better explained in my forthcoming book 'Hacking Consciousness'