For a good introduction to the topic, read this post on the “colour of bits”. The post outlines the conflicting viewpoints on information: How computer scientists can’t academically differentiate between one copy of a copyrighted piece of data and another, but the pressure from law to try to make something up regardless (e.g. DRM). It also discusses how, if you perform a reversable mathematical transformation of the bits you are fundamentally changing the data but can restore it at any moment. If you can do that, is the transformed version copyrighted too? Given that with the right transformation you can turn any sequence of bytes into any other. That means there is only one copyright holder: the universe.

My interest in the topic comes from my background in AI and thinking about the mind and consciousness. If making a recording of a song without the permission of the rightholder is illegal, what does it mean when you remember a catchy song in your mind? A lot (if not all) of what brain does is information processing, and the patterns stored in your neurons also store information. Now, clearly we don’t have full HD recordings of feature length films in our head that we can replay at will, … even if some people have photographic memory, “videographic” memory is probably even rarer. Regardless, older memories will still be degraded as new sensory input is absorbed as that’s the nature of intelligence. Full representation doesn’t scale and isn’t actually intelligent (in fact, people believe that the compression research is strongly related to AI research as it’s all to do with predicting the next bit in the bit sequence).

What I’m curious about is when does a piece of copyrighted material lose it’s copyrighted identity?

Everyone by now is familiar with MP3s for storing music. Unlike FLAC, the MP3 format is a lossy compression algorithm. Admittedly, it’s a very good algorithm that is ideal at representing audio well with a minimum of bits, but it’s still not an identical copy of the original recording. It’s only qualitatively the same to a human listener after it is decoded. What happens if you slowly decrease the bitrate though? (The bitrate is the number of bits per second you allow the algorithm to use for storing the audio). At what point does it become indistinguishable from another similar song. At what point does the representation become worse than the ability of our minds to remember the song? This is pretty low – even at 24 kbps one can make out speech (most music is distributed at 192kbps or higher these days)… however, humans are able to identify many songs just from hearing a tiny part of it. So clearly there is a fair amount processing going on in our heads to do this recognition. In other words, you can’t exactly recognise a low quality recording of a song as the original song unless you here the original first. Once you’ve heard the original, it’s easy to hear the song’s melody/rhythm in a lower quality recording.

Why is this of interest right now? I think that as we progress along a continual symbiotic interaction with technology, the more we rely on it to represent our identity. I use Evernote as my offboard memory. This is a curated collection of notes that has a lot of meaning for me and without it I’d be severely crippled in my job. The same goes with my GMail history and ability to search thousands of emails.

This is also not a new thing. People have used notebooks and filed their paper mail for hundreds of years. If someone wrote a copyrighted poem into their notebook, they are essentially breaching copyright. The difference now is that we can trivially share notebooks with essentially zero cost.

I think one of the problems with copyright is that the boundaries of where an individual starts and begins is dissolving. It’s no longer purely about our physical position and the information flow is not constrained to only our local environment and surroundings.

(Note: I wrote a quick note about similar ideas back in 2006: Multimedia copyright. Ironically for the music industry, the specific example I give there is what lead me to buy lots of alternative music!)

The impression of free-will is very believable though as the brain probably exhibits chaotic dynamics[1]. From any given state the brain is in, a slight change, however minute, could give rise to a very different outcome later on. This means that for any system with a model that’s external to an individual brain (e.g. a brain simulation if such a thing is possible), it is impossible for that model to completely predict the behaviour of the brain… eventually the brain’s state will diverge from the model. The important point is, this can happen even if the brain is completely deterministic. So even if the rules governing our cognition are unwavering instructions, which I think is unlikely, there is still the inability for a system outside of the brain to predict it’s behaviour[2].

In addition, I believe that consciousness is due to a recursive model that represents ourselves (ala Douglas Hofstadter’s book – I am a Strange Loop). As this is a model of the epiphenomenon of our “self”, it also has incomplete knowledge of the rest of the brain – this gives our conscious minds the illusion of free will as it can’t completely predict what it/we will do next. We think we are weighing up choices based on our knowledge and then making a “decision”, but that’s because we (our conscious minds) don’t have complete knowledge of the brain’s underlying hardware which ultimately leads us to that choice. This lack of knowledge in our conscious minds is what we call “free will”.

[1] Or at least I’d expect it to, I don’t have references I’ve read over, but this looks promising.

[2] That is, assuming we exclude the almost impossible ideal of having perfect knowledge of the brain’s state which would include all neurochemistry as well as structure.

This post is taken from a comment I made to Leo Parker Dirac’s post on “Free Will and Turing-completeness of the Brain”. Turns out I think it’s a relatively succinct description of what the concept of free will actually is so I thought I’d repost it here…

Another post from the draft pile that I finally polished into something that isn’t a series of half formed sentences… enjoy

The human body as a closed system is not sustainable, as any closed system eventually achieves an equilibrium lacking order. Entropy would increase as the second law of thermodynamics asserts itself. Flux of energy/matter is required to maintain and build order. This is a central part of Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s paper on “general systems theory” and his theory of open systems:

“the conventional formulation of physics are, in principle, inapplicable to the living organism being open system having steady state. We may well suspect that many characteristics of living systems which are paradoxical in view of the laws of physics are a consequence of this fact.”

I think though, that a similar law applies to intelligent systems. Without stimulus the mind is not alive and eventually a lack of synaptic firing would lead to the neuronal weighting between neurons to deteriorate. This would result in a reversal to the initial states that most artificial neural networks start in (they are usually initiated with random weights)… but perhaps this reversal of weights on neurons that no longer fire isn’t a bad thing. It may lead to them being re-purposed…

As one ages, it can become more difficult to pick up new information as existing synaptic channels get reinforced and so the neuronal tributaries of our brains because less used, or require more active effort to use than taking the ready associations that come easily to our consciousness. While these tributaries may get reset to random weightings due to dis-use, this may allowed them to later get stimulated and used to store new associations.

The NY Times earlier this year posted “How to train the aging brain”:

“There’s a place for information,” Dr. Taylor says. “We need to know stuff. But we need to move beyond that and challenge our perception of the world. If you always hang around with those you agree with and read things that agree with what you already know, you’re not going to wrestle with your established brain connections.”

Such stretching is exactly what scientists say best keeps a brain in tune: get out of the comfort zone to push and nourish your brain. Do anything from learning a foreign language to taking a different route to work.

These new scenarios make the brain utilise alternative neuronal branches:

“As adults we have these well-trodden paths in our synapses,” Dr. Taylor says. “We have to crack the cognitive egg and scramble it up. And if you learn something this way, when you think of it again you’ll have an overlay of complexity you didn’t have before — and help your brain keep developing as well.”

Not only that, but if you are encouraging more interesting events in your life, especially those that push and challenge you and your preconceptions, then your perception of time expands. While in the moment it may seem like time flies, retrospectively it will seem like the past took longer. The brain collapses intervals of time where nothing much happens.

So if you don’t push your brain to learn new things, you’re cutting it off from having anything new to work with. It will also be easier to efficiently and compactly store your experiences based on what you already know. This shrinks your temporal impression of memory and, retrospectively, it will seem as though the last 5 or 10 years were but a blink. If you keep using the same arguments, and facing the same challenges, then you will become optimised and specialised at that task, but this will come at the cost of generality and breadth of understanding.

Things like racism or sexism, or over-generalising on a class of people is one of the more socially inappropriate things you can do. However, depending on how your logic system works, it’s not an entirely unreasonable method of thinking (the word “unreasonable” chosen purposefully) – and for any other subject, where the things being reasoned about are not humans, we wouldn’t particularly care. In fact, certain subjects like religion and spirituality are held to less strict standards of reasoning… there’s actually more defense in being racist/sexist then being a practitioner of certain religions. Perhaps this is why these occasionally go hand in hand[1].

So what do I actually mean by this? I’m going to use two methods of reasoning, deduction and induction, and then explain them in terms of uncertain truth. Nothing in this world is ultimately absolute[2] and so it behooves us to include probabilistic uncertainty in to any conclusion or relationship within our logic set.

Deduction can be summarised as inferring the specific from the general. e.g.

Note that obviously there are exceptions to the starting generalisation (1) of four-legged cats. Poor Aristotle could have been in a car accident and had a leg amputated making (2) a false conclusion. That’s where the probability and uncertain truth comes in…

Here we’ll use two parts to truth values (TVs), strength and confidence[3]. The first, strength, is how often the relationship holds true. E.g. with strength 0.9 for the we’d expect approximately 90% of cats we saw to have four legs. Confidence however, indicates how sure we are of the strength. The exact semantics of confidence are not important for the current discussion, but basically if the confidence is low then we’re not very sure about the number of legs cats have – perhaps because we haven’t seen many.

On the other hand induction is used to infer the general from the specific. e.g.

In other words, if, within all our experience, all cats we’ve seen have four legs it’s sensible to assume all cats do. With such a small sample size of only 3 cats, and without any other background knowledge (like animals of a particular species generally all have the same number of legs) we’d generally not afford much confidence in the result of this deduction[5].

So where does the sex/race/other-isms come in? Well if you haven’t worked it out yet, it’s when you use too small a sample set to do induction or you adopt generalisations from others without using your own evidence[4]. Or perhaps you do know lots of one sex that all fit your model, in that case the problem is using a single generalisation to deduct information about a new member of that sex that you know nothing about. Essentially sexism/racism is due to too large a bias towards sex/race determining an overall conclusion or understanding of the other.

I guess one thing should be clarified, the relationship between generalisation of sexism/racism. When does a generalisation turn into one of these categories. I’m not sure I really know, after all if you made generalisations about the basic anatomy of males/female or say something superficial like the colour of someone’s skin, then there wouldn’t be a whole lot of controversy there[6] but I guess it’s when you use that information to fully define everyone that falls into a category. The thing that I’m grappling with, is that, in the absence of any extra information on someone it’s sensible to use what you have to start trying to represent and understand someone new. In fact, if you didn’t, you’re demonstrating you don’t care enough about the other person to think about them at all!

And then we come to insurance brokers. They make huge generalizations. Law usually prevents them from using race as a factor, but for some reason they are still allowed to use your sex to determine the premium you’ll pay. They are also allowed to generalise on your age among many other things. In fact, pretty much the entire way the insurance industry works is through generalisations.

So what makes it okay for businesses to blatantly be sexist and ageist among many other categorical assumptions? I don’t know.

Ahem… got a little side-tracked there. Sorry…

So when is this generalization okay? If every interaction you have with people that fall into a category supports the conclusion then your confidence will increase – and you’ll have no examples of any alternative. Few people actually have such a life history to conclude this. I suspect many people who display racism or sexist tendencies probably get this strong bias from another human or information source. If it’s someone they highly respect, such as a parent, or someone who’s the social leader amongst a group, then they may adopt conclusions with high confidence without having the experience to conclude things themselves.

How can we protect against broad conclusions about people?

• By making it exceedingly difficult to increase our confidence of very broad generalizations. Realise that when making any large scale conclusion that confidence must be limited – especially when reasoning about dynamic entities like humans.
• Favour the use of more specific categories when reasoning. This can be hard, as when you don’t know someone and all you have is their apparent race and sex then any generalisations you’ve made will be your sole source of information. You can argue that this shouldn’t be the case, but any pre-consolidated knowledge you have will come to the fore until you learn more about the person to develop a more complete representation of them.

Why is it hard to change the behavior or views of people who are already displaying ism-ness?

• I guess that confidence in belief generally erodes slowly, unless presented with directly conflicting evidence. And sometimes conflicting evidence just makes people stop listening to you because it radically challenges their world view.
• Perhaps it’s physically more effort/energy to update generalisations on large groups? If you have to adjust your confidence of conclusion on a large group, then they’ll be many many connections from the neuron that potentially represents that group and the instances and associations within that group. Since the brain is massively connected, larger groups probably require more effort to shift. Think of all those tens of thousands of synapses having to reconfigure themselves or die.
• Generalisations may be self-reinforcing. While someone might not fit your generalisation, that may slightly alter your confidence in it, but not enough to completely remove it from your mind.

I hope I’ve raised some questions in the readers head. I don’t like sexism or racism, but at the same time I can (kind of) understand the logical reasoning that might lead to it and I haven’t completely resolved how it’d sit in a fully functional artificial intelligence. After all, I really don’t want OpenCog to turn into a racist bigot!

[1] I was going to link to an appropriate example here, but couldn’t easily think of one I could back up, feel free to suggest one.
[2] If people think otherwise, I suggest they study enough quantum physics or Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.
[3] This is based on the simple truth value type of OpenCog.
[4] Not that accepting generalizations from others is bad thing. Everyone does it because we cannot experience everything directly.
[5] Although if your sum experience of the universe you live in is merely these three cats then you’d be very confident and not only that but induct that everything has four legs (and is a cat).
[6] Yeah yeah, I know, some people are transgendered. I’m keeping this simple okay?

It is my belief that empathy is a a prerequisite to consciousness.

I recently read Hofstadter’s I am a strange loop, whose central themes are around recursive representations of self leading to our perception of consciousness. For some, the idea that our consciousness is somewhat of an illusion might be hard to swallow – but then, quite likely, so are all the other qualia. They seem real to us, because our mind makes it real. To me, it’s not a huge hurdle to believe. I find the idea that our minds are infinitely representing themselves via self-reflection kind of beautiful in simplicity. You can get some very strange things happening when things start self-reflecting.

For example, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem originally broke Principia Mathematica and can do the same for any sufficiently expressive formal system when you force that formal system to reason about itself. One day I’ll commit to explaining this in a post, but people write entire books about the idea to make Godel’s theorem and it’s consequences easy to understand!

And as an example of self-reflection and recursion being beautiful, I merely have to point to fractals which exhibit self-similarity at arbitrary levels of recursion. Or perhaps the recursive and repeating hallucinations induced by psychedelics give us some clue about the recursive structures within the brain.

Hofstadter also later in the book delves into slightly murky mystical waters, which I find quite entertaining and not without merit. He says that, due to us modelling of the behaviour of others, we also start representing their consciousness too. The eventual conclusion, which is explained in much greater and philosophical detail in his book, is that our “consciousness” isn’t just the sum of what’s in our head but is a holistic total of ourselves and everyone’s representation of us in their heads.

I don’t think the Turing test will really be complete until a machine can model humans as individual and make insightful comments on their motivations. Ok, so that wouldn’t formally be the Turing test any more, but I think that as a judgement of conscious intelligence, the artificial agent needs to at least be able to reflect the motivations of others and understand the representation of itself within others. Lots of recursive representations!

The development of consciousness within AI via empathy is what, in my opinion, will allow us to create friendly AI. Formal proofs won’t work due to computational irreducibility of complex systems. In an admittedly strained analogy this is similar to trying to formally prove where a toy sailboat will end up after dropping it in a river upstream. Trying to prove that it won’t get caught in an eddy before it reaches the ocean of friendliness (or perhaps if you’re pessimistic and you view the eddy as the small space of possibilities for friendly AI). Sure computers and silicon act deterministically (for the most part), but any useful intelligence will interact with an uncertain universe. It will also have to model humans out of necessity as humans are one of the primary agents on the Earth that will need to interact with… perhaps not if it becomes all-powerful but certainly initially. By modelling humans, it’s effectively empathising with our motivations and causing parts of our consciousness to be represented inside it[1].

Given that machine could increase it’s computationally capacity exponentially via Moore’s law (not to mention via potentially large investment and subsequently rapid datacenter expansion) it could eventually model many more individuals than any one human does. So if the AI had a large number of simulated human minds, which would, if accurately modelled, probably bawk at killing the original, then any actions the AI performed would likely benefit the largest number of individuals.

Or perhaps the AI would become neurotic trying to satisfy the desires and wants of conflicting opinions.

In some ways this is similar to Eliezer’s Collected Extrapolated Volition (as I remember it at least… It was a long time ago that I read it. I should do so again to see how/if it fits with what I’ve said here).

[1] People might claim that this won’t be an issue because digital minds designed from scratch will be able to box up individual representations to prevent a bleed through of beliefs. Unfortunately, I don’t think this is a tractable design for AI, even if it was desirable. AI is about efficiency of computation and representation, so these concepts and beliefs will blend. Besides, conceptual blending is quite likely a strong source of new ideas and hypotheses in the human brain.

One evening, I had an interesting discussion in bed with my partner that was related to licensing such technology. OpenCog is open source, which is my personal preference for the development of AGI, even if the jury on whether it’s beneficial or needless reckless is still out. As open source software, it means that if we sold expert systems based on OpenCog to end-users, we’d have to also provide the source. Even though we can license it under different terms from SIAI, this isn’t entirely needed since my current viewpoint is that the real value will be in data within the system.

As an analogy, the biological design for the brain isn’t what makes us unique or what encompasses our knowledge and experience of the world. The pattern that’s formed during our childhood and education is what is really valuable, otherwise we’d make no distinction between twins and not particularly care if one twin passed away.

So, the digital mind’s pattern would be the important part that we’d license or sell. However dealing with a dynamic system makes that interesting, since the pattern that was sold/licensed would inevitably change. Learning software could well have the valuable part (the “identity” if you will) morph and change beyond the original deployment. In fact, the software could learn new things which makes the individual deployment “smarter” than the original or any other deployment.

In that case, who owns those improvements? Should we get
the rights, since it was our software that altered itself, or does it belong to the license-holder since the AI learnt the improvement in their environment?

I’m sure with sufficiently rigorous legal-work one could protect towards one view over another, but I’m more interested in what seems right.

I googled “It’s better to give than receive.” since that’s the quote that’s automatically been ingrained into my psyche. Turns out it’s from the Bible, Acts 20:35 (King James Version):

“I have showed you all things, how that so labouring ye ought to support the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said: ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’”

(I guess “more blessed” translates to “better” these days.)

Never mind that giving psychologically makes us happier than spending money on ourselves. It also physiologically affects us, by releasing, not only the good old reward molecule Dopamine, but also the love neurotransmitter Oxytocin (unfortunately the mention of oxytocin isn’t in the abstract, but it’s discussed here).

There is another aspect of gift giving I want to mention, which I haven’t got any references for, but is based on my intuition on the mechanics of intelligence. When we give someone a gift, we usually have a reason for it, and when we choose a gift for them we tend to think “Will the person like this?”. The act of that means we have to emulate, model, and predict what they want and by activation it re-enforces their pattern within our mind. Does this inadvertently get us thinking of other aspects of their personality and of what other people might like too? I’ve discussed how part of love is the strong bonding of patterns, one’s self in another mind, their mind emulated in the self. This twinning makes us feel connected to the other person. To me, it makes sense that going through this process while selecting gifts for other people will inevitably make one feel more connected in general. And as mentioned above, the neurotransmitter associated with love is also released during giving.

Maybe this is why the gifting economy of Kiwiburn (and the American equivalent) is such a central part of the festivals and contributes to them being such enjoyable experiences.

“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”
– Winston Churchill

1. The first step to doing anything is believing you can – One thing that I’ve noticed, is that some people sabotage themselves before they even try. They just believe that they can’t do something, or it’s too hard. Some people have told me I’m smart, whereas mostly I think I’m pretty average. What I do however, is have an absence of restriction. If I want to do something, the only restriction is time. This is important when you’re doing something like working on a thinking machine.
2. You can’t do everything – You’ll notice the caveat above about time being the only restriction. When I was a kid, I wanted to read the entirety of Encyclopaedia Britannica… I got to about “Aardvark” before I realised it was mostly dull (no offense to the long-nosed beasts!). I’m still struggling with this one, I have so many things I’d like to do, that I frequently wonder if I’m overcommitted and if the more optimal path would be to obsessively focus on one thing and one thing only… but then I realised that if I tried that I’d get bored. I’m too curious and have grown up in the age of variegated knowledge at our finger tips.
3. Emotions are cues – they give you an indication of something going on internally. Something that might not be able to be immediately expressed verbally, and if it’s a negative emotion it probably indicates something isn’t right. And by “isn’t right” I don’t mean it’s necessarily to do with the external world, it could be an indication that there’s something inside that hasn’t been resolved. However, don’t make them the focus.. since everyone likes analogies, and I’m particularly good at straining my analogies: think of emotions like the gauges on your car for temperature, fuel, etc. They are important, so that the engine doesn’t explode, or so that you don’t run out of fuel, but if you spend the whole time focusing on the gauges, you’ll miss the scenary. Anger specifically, I feel can be boiled down to “when something or someone doesn’t act the way you expect/want them to” – every time I’ve been angry, it’s because my expectations don’t match reality… so mostly it’s about having a world view that doesn’t quite match reality (or the consensus of reality, as described below).
4. Nothing is objective – you can argue whatever view you like, but most of us reach consensus about a specific interpretation of physical reality because of shared modalities and the wet-ware for interpreting them. That doesn’t mean you’re right if you subscribe to the current scientific consensus. Humanity collectively believed silly things like the world being flat, or the Earth being the centre of the universe. Knowledge and truth are dynamic, and they’ll continue to be so. Keep an open mind. And because I like loops, link back to point 1 about believing you can… since nothing is objective, you can believe you can do anything you like[1].

I’m sure there are others, but those are the ones that came to me just now. What do you wish they’d mentioned to you when in school?

[1] If you believe you can fly, you can (buy a plane ticket, or go sky-diving). But jumping off a building is just dumb, so don’t do that ok?



]]> http://ferrouswheel.me/2009/11/things-i-have-learned/feed/ 1 http://ferrouswheel.me/2009/10/crime-and-punishment-existential-style/ http://ferrouswheel.me/2009/10/crime-and-punishment-existential-style/#comments Wed, 30 Sep 2009 20:16:59 +0000 Joel http://ferrouswheel.me/?p=352 Following on from other’s recent discussions of crime and punishment, I offer these completely unhelpful transhumanist thoughts:
• A mind from the past can become completely different from the one that committed the crime. So is it fair to punish someone in the present, when their current mind state bears as much similarity to the mind that committed the crime in the past is it does to a completely separate person?
• A body replaces most of it’s cells over the course of many years. So it’s not really someone’s body we convict, but their structure. What happens when people can upload? Supposing we can represent that structure digitally or otherwise (but in a form of easily copy-able data) what happens to the replicates of that individual? Are they convicted as well? Does it become illegal for other people to harbour that sequence of data, even if it’s in stasis and getting no processor time? (which is essentially the same as dead, but with the difference of being revivable at a moments notice)
• Continuing from the assumption that it’s the structure of a criminal we want to punish/remove from society: Since a baby is essentially derived from the fair proportion of the parent’s structure, if the parent commits a crime, then shouldn’t the child also be considered a criminal? Even though the child takes some of it’s structure from the other, hopefully non-criminal, parent, the first point seems to imply that exact similarity isn’t required.

(Note, most of these thoughts are me just musing on a theoretical level that is not at all pragmatic. I don’t actually believe children of criminals are also guilty)



]]> http://ferrouswheel.me/2009/10/crime-and-punishment-existential-style/feed/ 0 http://ferrouswheel.me/2009/08/why-an-ai-based-singularity/ http://ferrouswheel.me/2009/08/why-an-ai-based-singularity/#comments Sun, 02 Aug 2009 01:09:03 +0000 Joel http://ferrouswheel.me/?p=324 A friend of mine, JMM knew that I’ve been funded in the past by SIAI to work on OpenCog, so he asked the following question:

“The Singularity Institutes “main purpose” is meant to be to investigate whether a recursively improving intelligence can maintain “friendliness” towards human kind. “

Okay, but my standpoint is: Why does the recursively improving intelligence need to be non-human? It seems counter-intuitive to me to devolve this power to something outside of ourselves – and also a bit like we’re just trying vainly to become a kind of God, creating another type of being.

I think the main reason there is a focus on AI rather than improvement of human intelligence is because it’s so damn hard to do experiments on people’s brains. It’s ethically difficult to justify various experiments, and it only gets harder as things become more regulated (and rightfully so for the most case). I think they’ll definitely be continuing research into this stuff though. For myself, occasionally taking Modafinil enhances my productivity significantly (so long as I maintain focus on what I’m meant to be doing, it’s easy to get enthralled with something that interests me, but isn’t related to my work).

But there’s no exclusion of human intelligence amplification from the singularity concept. If we create smarter humans, then this begets even smarter humans. Again we can’t really predict what those enhanced “humans” would do, because they are a significant step smarter than us.

Human intelligence amplification has a whole raft of other ethical issues associated with it though too. When it becomes more mainstream/available it’s going to be a major political and social issue. What happens when not everyone can afford (or wants) to enhance themselves? Will we develop two classes? One of naturals and another of post-humans? Will employers require certain professions to use performance enhancement (say for example, for brain surgeons performing long surgeries)? It’s also going to raise the question about the ownership of our bodies. There are laws against taking recreational drugs, but for some, LSD helps with certain types of thought and could be seen as a form of an intelligence manipulator (or an amplifier of certain facets of intelligence).

At the moment at least, governments and enforcement agencies seem completely uninterested in actively stopping this, due to the prevalence of various performance enhancement drugs throughout academia and other cognitively demanding professions. Obviously it’s not necessary, but for some the edge or boost it gives them is sufficient to outweigh the risks of off-prescription drug use.

That was my main beef with Kurzweil: He assumed that the intelligence beyond the horizon would be non-human. This, of course, begs the deeper philosophical question: what *is* “human?” But I’m sure you’ve mulled that one over plenty. Indeed, it would be interesting to hear what you have to say on the subject.

It simply strikes me that, the human ego being what it is, we would naturally be trying to improve our own intelligence and not worrying too much about creating AI as a standalone entity. Am I wrong? Is the human ego instead more interested in giving birth to a new species?

There is one other reason there is a focus on AI. Which is related to human ego. Once humans have an advantage over others, such as a significant step up in intelligence, then there’s a good
chance some will use that power over others in a negative way. It’s the old adage, “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” – and it’s my opinion, that this could lead to the same power/intelligence imbalance between an intelligence-amplified human and humans, as that between humans and dogs.

Or more succinctly, humans have plenty of evolutionary baggage that we
don’t necessarily want to amplify!

Yeah I’ve thought about that a little as well. What I wonder (and this really is just pure speculation) is whether hyper-intelligent humans would have more faculty for reason and logic; and, if so, if they would see the benefits in spreading the gift and/or using their gifts in more compassionate or benevolent ways…? Because, surely, that’s evolution as well.

Again, it would seem somehow counter-intuitive to improve intelligence without, for example, attempting to improve our capacity for processing emotions — our ‘emotional intelligence’, as it were.

I tend to think that many of the world’s problems today come down to a focus on what is scientifically possible rather than what is philosophically ‘good’ or ‘true’.

Basic agreement, improving intelligence is really just a catch all for all sort of cognition improvements. Depending on where we focussed neuron regeneration, we could expect to see improvements in different aspects of cognition.

Science and technology will inevitably advance, and while we can regulate technology to some extent, we can’t stop it. Telling people they can’t work on AI would merely push it underground, and one of the reason I work on OpenCog is because it’s an open-source framework. It can be inspected by other experts for flaws to ensure there isn’t some hidden time-bomb sitting in the code, and allows an international approach which might otherwise be over-regulated within a university-specific project (this ignores the actual issue of friendly vs. unfriendly AI, since the latter doesn’t have to be intentionally designed – I may write more about that one day, but SIAI and it’s fellows have already written plenty on that).

To bring it back to AI, what place is there for emotions in an artifically constructed intelligence? Is there a capacity for compassion or fear, if they serve a function for processing input and generating responses? I am guessing that cognitive scientists have thought about this one…

That’s a BIG topic, so all I’ll say is that my opinion is that emotions are just a particular mind state. Sure this mind state is influenced by hormones and neurotransmitters, but so is the rest of the brain’s functioning.

My opinion is that emotions are just extremely strong aspects of a human’s mental world. If we gave an AI an extremely strong desire/goal to make humans happy, and the AI design had some kind of reward based system (such that the AI was trying to maximise these) and achieving these rewards caused other effects in the AI’s mind, such a propensity to use positive phrases to describe the world, then is there any reason to believe that the AI isn’t happy itself?

Disclaimer: I’m no longer in the employ of the SIAI, so my thoughts are not endorsed by them at all.



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