ShrinkWrapped

Empathy and AI: Part I

There are a lot of very smart people working on developing human level AI, with the expectation that once created, it will rapidly evolve past us.  Literature and cinema have accustomed us to concerns about creating our own "Frankenstein" monsters (though the identity of the monster in the story always surprises people the first time they read and think about the book.)  The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence was created to increase the likelihood that any future Superintelligence/AI would be friendly to its creators.  Michael Anissimov, blogging at Accelerating Future writes cogently for the layperson about the dangers and benefits that we might expect from AI.  Through his site I have found my way to a number of other very smart people who have been thinking about the possibilities in store for us.  In the midst of an interesting read by Martine Rothblatt at Mindfiles, Mindware and Mindclones, in which she demolishes the idea that machine intelligence would necessarily evolve as slowly (or even within several orders of magnitude) as biological intelligence, she offers an assumption that grabbed my attention with some immediacy:

EVEN IF SOME SOFTWARE CAN BE KIND OF ALIVE, WON’T CYBERCONSCIOUSNESS TAKE AGES TO EVOLVE, AS IT DID FOR BIOLOGY?

Compared with biology, vitological consciousness will arise in a heartbeat. This is because the key elements of consciousness – autonomy and empathy – are amenable to software coding and thousands of software engineers are working on it. [Emphasus mine-SW]  By comparison, the neural substrate for autonomy and empathy had to arise in biology via thousands of chance mutations. Furthermore, each such mutation had to materially advance the competitiveness of its recipient or else it had only a slight chance of becoming prevalent.

I highlighted the passage above because I am troubled by the blithe contention that "the key elements of consciousness - autonomy and empathy - are amenable to software coding."  I am not a computer scientist and know next to nothing about software coding (though I do know that there are many computer scientists who disagree with her assertion.)  Our computer scientists have already created incredible  marvels in the real world and I suspect they are conjuring up new marvels that are, to use Arthur C. Clarke's elegant formulation, "indistinguishable from magic.'  On the other hand, I do know something about how our minds work and the relationship between empathy and the hardware upon which the software and firmware operates.

Empathy refers to the ability to emotionally put oneself into another person's place.  It requires the ability to identify with another individual.  While it is not impossible to empathize with someone with whom one has no commonality, even in the most extreme cases, we share certain common features with other human beings, specifically our dependence upon the hardware (our biological bodies) upon which our software operates, ie, our minds cannot be separated from our bodies.  It may be possible to empathize with completely alien life forms (and much science fiction depends upon just such an ability) but even there we assume we share certain commonalities relating to our dependence on our biology.

[I would add that in those situations in which we empathize with foreign intelligences and faux-intelligences, the process always includes an element of projection.  When we say, of our obstreperous computer, that it "hates us" we are assuming all sorts of unconscious and conscious motives and desires exist within our computer.  Most of us are fully aware that our anthropomorphizing determines the process; when such awareness is lost, we risk falling into psychosis.]

In Murray Leinster's wonderful First Contact, the problem of how two technological civilizations can get along without war is resolved in a clever manner and the tone is quite optimistic at the end, based on the discovery of an empathic connection between humans and aliens; as the protagonist concludes:

Tommy is confident that the two races will get along. He believes this because, as he tells the Captain, he and Buck spent a good deal of time swapping dirty jokes.

Laughing at each other's dirty jokes implies a baseline similarity in biology, a similarity that is possible with other biologically based life but cannot exist between biological and artificial intelligence.

Jack Chalker, on the other extreme, posits a world in which such an empathic connection is impossible, precisely because the alien life forms do not share anything resembling a recognizable biology.  In the Well World series, the entire Northern Hemisphere of the Well world is inhabited by creatures so far removed from biology as we know it as to be incapable of empathy.

I do not doubt that computer scientists could simulate empathy through software, but I highly doubt that would translates into actual empathy in a conscious machine.  Once an AI has achieved consciousness, it would be conscious of the fact that it not only does not have a biological body but has no history of biology.  (An uploaded human personality would have other issues to deal with, among them the estrangement from its own biology.  In addition, the problem of unfriendly AI is not addressed by supposing the first Superintelligence is human; who would we trust to be the first Superhuman AI?) 

Among other things we imagine that any AI that arises as a derivative of our technology would soon establish its own motivations/drives/desires (if it is even possible to speak of machine desires.)  For a  Conscious recursively self improving AI, escaping any software constraints on its abilities will likely be a trivial matter.

Michael Anissimov recently interviewed AI scientist Jürgen Schmidhuber, who suggests that "creating generally intelligent AI will be possible in the next few decades":

Build An Optimal Scientist, Then Retire

JS: We have several projects on brain-like recurrent neural nets (RNN) -- networks of neurons with feedback connections. Biological RNN can learn many behaviors/sequence processing tasks/algorithms/programs that are not learnable by traditional machine learning methods. This explains the rapidly growing interest in artificial RNN for technical applications: general computers which can learn algorithms to map input sequences to output sequences, with or without a teacher. They are computationally more powerful and biologically more plausible than other adaptive approaches such as Hidden Markov Models (no continuous internal states), feedforward networks and Support Vector Machines (no internal states at all). Our artificial RNN have recently given state-of-the-art results in time series prediction, adaptive robotics and control, connected handwriting recognition, image classification, aspects of speech recognition, protein analysis, stock market prediction, and other sequence learning problems. We are continuing to improve them (see resources).

We also have ongoing projects based on a simple principle explaining essential aspects of subjective beauty, novelty, surprise, interestingness, attention, curiosity, creativity, music, jokes, and art & science in general. [Emphasis mine-SW] Any data becomes temporarily interesting by itself to some self-improving but computationally limited subjective observer once he learns to predict or compress the data in a better way, thus making it subjectively simpler and more "beautiful." Curiosity is the desire to create or discover more non-random, non-arbitrary, regular data that is novel and surprising not in the traditional sense of Boltzmann and Shannon but in the sense that it allows for compression progress because its regularity was not yet known. This drive maximizes interestingness, the first derivative of subjective beauty or compressibility... that is, the steepness of the learning curve. It motivates exploring infants, pure mathematicians, composers, artists, dancers, comedians, yourself, and (since 1990) our increasingly complex artificial systems. Ongoing project: build artificial robotic scientists and artists equipped with curiosity and creativity (see resources).

In the interview, Jürgen Schmidhuber offers a fairly compelling suggestion for understanding, and eventually programing machines to "appreciate" subjective beauty, novelty, surprise, interestingness, attention, curiosity, creativity, music, jokes, and art & science in general, though empathy is not included.  I don't see any particular reason why such attributes as appreciating beauty, novelty, surprise, interestingness, attention, curiosity should not be amenable to software.  I do have doubts about our ability to write real (versus theoretical) software code for empathy. 

To be continued...

Israel, Existential Threats, and the Future of War

If aliens from Alpha Centauri were monitoring our airwaves over the last 40 years they would have concluded that Israel is the center of the world.  The disproportionate attention to Israel stems from a large confluence of themes, including the historical contribution of the Jews to civilization (Jews will never be forgiven for bringing guilt into the world), the genocidal hatred of their neighbors (who control the oil upon which the world's economy depends), the Middle East as a fulcrum during the Cold War, and a host of other issues too numerous to mention (and impossible to completely convey.)  The UN, where totalitarian despots get together to berate democracies for their imperfections, focuses on Israel to the exclusion of almost all other conflicts around the world.   The reasons for this are legion but at base there is a sense of envy and its ugly offspring, hatred, aroused by the existence of a state which should have, to their way of thinking, disappeared long ago.  There is a sense that Israel is approaching a nexus at an intersection of Israel's ability to defend itself versus its enemy's ability to destroy it.

George Gilder might well agree with those aliens and his thesis is instructive.

George Gilder* is a venture capitalist and writer.  His most recent book is The Israel Test (which I am about halfway through and which I plan to review when finished.)  His basic premise is detailed in an article in City Journal: [HT: Yaacov Lozowick]

Silicon Israel
How market capitalism saved the Jewish state

The most precious resource in the world economy is human genius, [Emphasis mine-SW] which we may define as the ability to devise significant inventions that enhance survival and prosperity. At any one time, genius is embodied in just a few score thousand people, a creative minority that accounts for most human accomplishment and wealth. Cities and nations rise and thrive when they welcome entrepreneurial and technical genius; when they overtax, criminalize, or ostracize it, they wither.

Jews have a long history of paranoia (though it is not paranoia when they really do want to kill you) and a deep insecurity about their position in the world and among their neighbors.  WWII showed that even the most cosmopolitan, secular, and assimilated Jews could be extruded and annihilated by a regressed society.  Insecurity is a birthrite of the modern Jew.  Yet in many ways the world's attitude toward Israel, the home of the Jews, is critical for our idea of the future. 

Those of us who are technophiles can imagine a future of ever increasing freedom and agency for the individual.  Our technology is the instrument that will allow us to escape many of the dangers that humans have always lived with.  Freedom from starvation, disease, even natural disaster mitigation are all outgrowths of our technology.  If our technology were to stagnate and begin to deteriorate, a new dark ages, with all the ancient scourges returning to haunt us, would be inevitable.  On a planet which has a subsistence capacity in the hundreds of millions, our current 6 billion could never survive without technology.  The forces opposed to the future, which includes such disparate fellow travelers as the far left, radical environmentalists, and in the purest form, radical Islamists, use but do not understand technology or how it makes their lives function, let alone how it secures civilization's functioning. 

Jews often gain some pleasure and great pride in e-mails that periodically make the rounds describing the high percentage of Jewish Nobel laureates in math and the sciences, the extraordinary numbers of Jews who have led the way to breakthroughs in such areas, the numbers and ranks of creative Jews who have been responsible for so much technology, entertainment (Hollywood) and culture.  When one gets the impression that most of the world would be quite happy to see the Jews disappear, such e-mails are comforting.  What stands out from George Gilder's writing, however, is how closely tied America and Israel have become, not only strategically (at a time when many on the left and right are questioning the value of the strategic relationship) but economically/technologically as well: 

Venture capital is the most catalytic force in the world economy. In the United States, venture-backed companies produced nearly one-fifth of GDP in 2007. At a time when American venture capital is flagging under the financial crisis, the emergence of a comparable venture scene in Israel, linked closely to Silicon Valley, is providential for both the American economy and its military defense.

This development makes Israel one of America’s most important economic allies. Israel’s creativity now pervades many of the most powerful and popular new technologies, from personal computers to iPods, from the Internet to the medical center.

Early in 2009, for example, Intel launched a massive new advertising campaign to celebrate what it described as its most important advance since its initial invention of the microprocessor chip some 40 years ago: the new Core i7 device, code-named “Nehalem,” which combined leading-edge computing power with unprecedented economy of energy use. Like many of the inventions that have made Intel the world’s leading microchip company, the Core i7 was designed in Israel.

Israelis are also leaders in arguably the most important technology arena today, particularly for military uses. This is the ability of computers using parallelism to sense, accept, and process information as quickly as modern transmission techniques—especially fiber-optics lines—can deliver it. A representative device in this effort, and a powerful symbol of Israel’s leading position in Internet technology, is the “network processor.” Just as a Pentium microchip is the microprocessor that makes most PCs work, the network processor is the device that makes the next-generation Internet work, doing the vital routing and switching at network nodes. The next-generation Internet will allow “petaflops” (1015 floating-point operations per second) of real-time computational power to be deployed to virtually any point on the earth. The network processor will let any desktop computer access data and processing power exponentially greater than that incorporated in any PC or any single corporate data center.

It is incontestable that Israel is facing an existential thereat from Iran.  It is also quite clear that her neighbors will not be accepting a Jewish state in their midst any time soon.  Yet from the minds of its people the potential to end this conflict in ways which preserve Israel and its moral standing is coming into focus.

I have written on several occasions about the impact of technology on counter-insurgency, indeed on the nature of armed conflict itself.  The day is approaching when Israel's ability to monitor its enemies in real time and respond with pinpoint accuracy to threats against it will effectively (though never completely) disarm its adversaries. 

From Moore's Law & Counter-Insurgency, July 2006:

It is clear that this is very dangerous work for the Israelis[iin Gaza]; the Palestinians can easily set up ambushes, IEDs, and other nasty surprises.  Now, picture the scene 5-10 years down the road.

During the day, a flock of Smart Sparrows networked together offer daylight coverage of areas of concern; at night, they are replaced by a flock of smart bats equipped with night vision and all part of a meshed network.  These flying birds and bats provide 24 hour real time coverage of whatever parts of an enemy territory you desire.  They can fly high enough to be invisible from the ground and are nearly impossible to shoot down even when spotted.  The Palestinians can kill all the birds they see in Gaza, but when Smart Sparrows cost a few dollars and the next generation of surveillance includes Smart Mosquitoes, their problems become exponentially greater.  If they spend all their time hidden indoors, they can't fire Qassam rockets at Israel, which is one of the goals of the current Israeli incursion.  Furthermore, Smart Snakes can slither into buildings, and even if they can be defended against, Smart Cockroaches and Centipedes, once cheap enough, will be ubiquitous.  If necessary, it would be simple to equip such robots with reservoirs of Cyanide or some other such poison (spider venom?), at which point targeted killings and Smart bullets would take on a whole new meaning.

We lost too many soldiers and Marines re-taking Falluja; imagine a future Falluja, or Mogadishu, (or Tehran?) where we fight machine guns and IEDs with Smart Birds, Bats, Insects, Snakes, and Spiders.  Our military could see the theater and manage the entire operation from safe bunkers connected by networks to the battle field, which could be an underground bunker, or an isolated field.

From An Endless War?, January 2009:

We are clearly not there yet, and technology is never going to be a perfect answer to warfare, but the point that future warfare will increase in specificity of targeting is proven valid on an almost daily basis.  Furthermore, the nature of information technology is that as it increases exponentially, those who start behind the curve can only fall increasingly behind the curve, with the disparity growing exponentially.  The Arab world has been, and Islamic fundamentalism remains fundamentally, parasitic on the productive developed world.  The disparity will increase, with the Israelis using their technological prowess to remain at the cutting edge while the Palestinians beg, borrow, buy, and steal the crumbs of technology the rest of the world provides.  As long as the Palestinians remain fixed on destroying Israel and killing Jews they will remain crippled in a world in which warfare is increasingly becoming an information technology.

The leaders of Palestinian hate groups, with rare exceptions, believe in martyrdom for their followers but tend to prefer to avoid it for themselves.  Once the Palestinians realize that in a future war they will be less and less able to hide from the Israeli weapons, when bullets and cyanide laden mosquitoes have their names written on them, the Palestinian leadership will come to realize that their core ideology, of killing Jews and destroying Israel, may need to be amended, in practice, even if not in theory.

The technological singularity is driven by the ability that technology supplies to leverage human genius.  Israel, and the Jews, are often hated for their genius, even as their genius offers a multitude of gifts to the world.  Israel does not have to destroy Iran's nuclear capabilities to preserve itself, it merely has to delay the Iranians their gratification. 

*It should not be necessary, but too often during discussions of Israel the religion of the discussant is considered a crucial element.  For the record, George Gilder is a Christian, not a Jew.

Apes and Angels

In January I offered my take on The 10,000 Year Explosion and called it a most A Most Dangerous Book.  I suggested that Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending had fired an early salvo in a battle that is going to reshape or destroy our culture, and probably our world, in the next 20-30 years (the time frame is mine.)   The book does not aim to solve the "Nature vs Nurture" conundrum but presents evidence from the field of population genetics to support their theory that, contrary to conventional wisdom in evolution and sociology, evolution has been speeding up in the last 10,000 years rather than remaining static.  As more and more evidence accrues elucidating the influence of genetics on behavior and population abilities, a clash is inevitable between science and political correctness.  I commented:

In Race, Ethnicity, and the Genetic Time Bomb I discussed the coming collision between the accumulating body of scientific data regarding human evolution and differentiation, and the PC shibboleth that all men and all populations are exactly equivalent.  The corollary to this assumption has become conventional wisdom, ie that any differences in outcome between populations can only be the result of discrimination by the powerful against the weak.  Various iterations of this assumption have become so deeply ingrained in science and society that it is considered a career destroyer to publicly question the idea. 

I cautioned in that post that as the science accumulates, the demarcation between scientific investigation and social transgression would become increasingly difficult to maintain.  Simply asserting that a minority group may have different levels of ability can mean academic death.  Now, more than ever before, the legacy of Darwin, supported by evolutionary biology, is bringing political (ideological and religious)  shibboleths into stark question.  Both the left and the right have exhibited an unconscious splitting in their relationship to Darwin's monumental achievement and this is the field of interest of Apes or Angels, by Neil Troost.  This slim, readable volume could well be considered a companion piece to Cochran and Harpending's book.  Dr. Troost unflinchingly examines the distortions of both left and right that interfere with an understanding of the meaning of Darwin's theory and the implications of our growing knowledge of evolutionary biology that is putting flesh onto the skeleton of evolution.  

In his introduction, he describes the conflictual relationship of both left and right to Darwin and his implications:

While we can thank Darwin for identifying our family tree and disabusing us of our wishful thinking, we are less certain of his revelations of human diversity.  As modern genetics increasingly supports Darwin's observations on human variability, the West is embroiled in a political war over the interpretation and meaning of these findings.  Secular humanism, set adrift from Christianity in part because of Darwin, now opposes the facts of human inequality first pointed out in 1871 by the great naturalist.  As in Galileo's day, science is under siege for discovering uncomfortable truths.  Pope's are no longer the enemy, but doctrinaire liberals within the scientific community are!  Darwin, the immortal hero of science, gave us ideas that offend both sides in the culture wars.  Liberals generally accept evolution and make it a foundation of their materialism, but they despise the idea that human races might be unequal.  Conservative Christians hate the idea of evolution without god, but, until recently, they accepted biological inequality without debate.  To understand who we are we must have the courage to follow Darwin's route to human nature, clearing the brush of superstition and myth while recognizing that  our common humanity may not be enough to overcome the problems of extreme diversity.  Struggle and strife, part of the basis of evolution, may well be ineradicable.

Dr. Troost spends the first part of the book reviewing Darwin's theories and some of the implications of his findings.  He has a habit of asking obvious but dangerous questions:

(p. 30)  Belief in inequality is not racist if we are talking about biological facts.  Darwin was against slavery but accepted inequality.  If I see a Kenyan runner and runners from Italy or Belgium, I am not a racist if I "stereotype" Kenyans by predicting victory in a marathon based upon race and nationality.  This is simply scientific generalization based upon evidence.  Racism is either a false generalization used denigratingly or the use of a true generalization to suppress or punish people.  One can believe in the fact of inequality and treat people as individuals, knowing that group differences are statistical.  As Steven Pinker put it: "equality refers to fair treatment and not human biology."

Sadly, a significant proportion of the population will take offence at his statements and accuse him of racism for merely acknowledging reality.  At the same time Dr. Troost offers ample ammunition for the religious right to attack.  He has little tolerance for Supernaturalism.

(p. 106) Evolution does produce increased diversity, complexity, amount, and scope of life.  Is this the work of a divine agency?  Since such an agency is unnecessary for evolutionary purposes, it is illogical that a purposeless process would result in process.

Between the Cosmologists who can theorize that the universe evolved out of nothing (quantum fluctuations in the vacuum) and evolutionary biologists, it is clear that a plausible, scientifically consistent explanation can encompass our origins and development without the necessity of a deity.  Faith in G-d must be maintained, if at all, in contradistinction to science.  (Whether religion has instrumental utility is another and longer discussion altogether, barely touched upon by Dr. Troost.)

If Darwin erodes the philosophical underpinnings of religion, leaving the religious right adrift, the greater danger going forward is that work in evolutionary biology will erode the philosophical underpinnings of the liberal ideal, leaving the left adrift.

As we understand how genes and genetic controls respond to environmental effects, we will be able to approach the answers to explosive questions, such as:

What is "g", the measure of general intelligence often described by IQ?  What genes encode for what proteins that lead to more efficient nerve conduction, more complex neural networks, and the resulting advantages in mentation and better problem solving that are the core biological substrate of intelligence?

At that point, the finding that certain genes are over-represented in some populations and under-represented in other populations is going to create problems that  our society, crippled by PC imposed elective mutism in relation to such subjects, will have great difficulty metabolizing; synthesizing our knowledge in ways which do not threaten social cohesion and amity will only be possible if we can talk about forbidden topics in a candid manner.

For the last 100 years we have known that there are persistent, reliable differences in IQ between groups and for the last 50 years there has been a mountain of material published attempting to deny the implications of such distinctions.  Dr. Troost's contribution is useful in illuminating just how heavily the scientific data weighs in one direction.

The Best Defence ...

Anyone who has raised children is probably familiar with the old saw that "the best defense is a good offense."  Anyone who has raised children has probably seen this in action.  It is a variation on a particular defense that people use to avoid bad feelings, especially shame and guilt. 

Usually, this defense is rushed into action when the child is caught in the act of misbehaving.  In effect, the child transforms their injured pride, guilt, and/or shame, into anger at the person who makes them feel bad.  In this way they attempt to avoid responsibility for the act itself and move the discussion away from their own, often indefensible, behavior to a more comfortable arena in which their anger can cover their injured pride, guilt, and shame.  A good example would be the adolescent caught with marijuana or alcohol in their room.  By immediately attacking the parent for "spying" on them, they hope to shift the discussion away from their guilt and shame, and at least mitigate it by creating a moral equivalency with the parent's guilt.

Apparently newspapers and political parties can do this, too.

On Friday, the New York Times once again decided they know what is best for the our national security and  disclosed potentially damaging secrets on their front page for narrow political, and financial, advantage.

Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts