What if the only way to tell if a particular A.I. design is or is not a person, is to subject it to all the types of experience — both good and harrowing — that we know impact the behaviour of the only example of personhood we all agree on, and seeing if it changes in the same way we change?
Is it moral to create a digital hell for a thousand, if that’s the only way to prevent carbon chauvinism/anti-silicon discrimination for a billion?
I did an A-level in Philosophy. (For non UK people, A-levels are a 2-year course that happens after highschool and before university).
I did it for fun rather than good grades — I had enough good grades to get into university, and when the other A-levels required my focus, I was fine putting zero further effort into the Philosophy course. (Something which was very clear when my final results came in).
What I didn’t expect at the time was that the rapid development of artificial intelligence in my lifetime would make it absolutely vital that humanity develops a concrete and testable understanding of what counts as a mind, as consciousness, as self-awareness, and as capability to suffer. Yes, we already have that as a problem in the form of animal suffering and whether meat can ever be ethical, but the problem which already exists, exists only for our consciences — the animals can’t take over the world and treat us the way we treat them, but an artificial mind would be almost totally pointless if it was as limited as an animal, and the general aim is quite a lot higher than that.
Some fear that we will replace ourselves with machines which may be very effective at what they do, but don’t have anything “that it’s like to be”. One of my fears is that we’ll make machines that do “have something that it’s like to be”, but who suffer greatly because humanity fails to recognise their personhood. (A paperclip optimiser doesn’t need to hate us to kill us, but I’m more interested in the sort of mind that can feel what we can feel).
I don’t have a good description of what I mean by any of the normal words. Personhood, consciousness, self awareness, suffering… they all seem to skirt around the core idea, but to the extent that they’re correct, they’re not clearly testable; and to the extent that they’re testable, they’re not clearly correct. A little like the maths-vs.-physics dichotomy.
Consciousness? Versus what, subconscious decision making? Isn’t this distinction merely system 1 vs. system 2 thinking? Even then, the word doesn’t tell us what it means to have it objectively, only subjectively. In some ways, some forms of A.I. looks like system 1 — fast, but error prone, based on heuristics; while other forms of A.I. look like system 2 — slow, careful, deliberative weighing all the options.
Self-awareness? What do we even mean by that? It’s absolutely trivial to make an A.I. aware of it’s own internal states, even necessary for anything more than a perceptron. Do we mean a mirror test? (Or non-visual equivalent for non-visual entities, including both blind people and also smell-focused animals such as dogs). That at least can be tested.
Capability to suffer? What does that even mean in an objective sense? Is suffering equal to negative reinforcement? If you have only positive reinforcement, is the absence of reward itself a form of suffering?
Introspection? As I understand it, the human psychology of this is that we don’t really introspect, we use system 2 thinking to confabulate justifications for what system 1 thinking made us feel.
Qualia? Sure, but what is one of these as an objective, measurable, detectable state within a neural network, be it artificial or natural?
Empathy or mirror neurons? I can’t decide how I feel about this one. At first glance, if one mind can feel the same as another mind, that seems like it should have the general ill-defined concept I’m after… but then I realised, I don’t see why that would follow and had the temporarily disturbing mental concept of an A.I. which can perfectly mimic the behaviour corresponding to the emotional state of someone they’re observing, without actually feeling anything itself.
And then the disturbance went away as I realised this is obviously trivially possible, because even a video recording fits that definition… or, hey, a mirror. A video recording somehow feels like it’s fine, it isn’t “smart” enough to be imitating, merely accurately reproducing. (Now I think about it, is there an equivalent issue with the mirror test?)
So, no, mirror neurons are not enough to be… to have the qualia of being consciously aware, or whatever you want to call it.
I’m still not closer to having answers, but sometimes it’s good to write down the questions.
I can’t believe it took me this long (and until watching this video my Isaac Arthur) to realise that Hyperloop is a tech demo for a Launch loop.
I (along with many others) had realised the stated reason for the related–but–separate The Boring Company was silly. My first thought for that was it was a way to get a lot of people underground for a lot of the time, which would reduce the fatalities from a nuclear war. Other people had the much better observation that experience with tunnelling is absolutely vital for any space colony. (It may be notable that BFR is the same diameter as the SpaceX/TBC test tunnel, or it may just be coincidence).
A similar argument applies to Hyperloop as to TBC: Hyperloop is a better normal-circumstances transport system than cars and roads when colonising a new planet.
Every so often, someone tries to boast of human intelligence with the story of Shakuntala Devi — the stories vary, but they generally claim she beat the fastest supercomputer in the world in a feat of arithmetic, finding that the 23rd root of
916,748,676,920,039,158,098,660,927,585,380,162,483,106,680,144,308,622,407,126,516,427,934,657,040,867,096,593,279,205,767,480,806,790,022,783,016,354,924,852,380,335,745,316,935,111,903,596,577,547,340,075,681,688,305,620,821,016,129,132,845,564,805,780,158,806,771
was 546,372,891, and taking just 50 seconds to do so compared to the “over a minute” for her computer competitor.
Ignoring small details such as the “supercomputer” being named as a UNIVAC 1101, which wildly obsolete by the time of this event, this story dates to 1977 — and Moore’s Law over 41 years has made computers mind-defyingly powerful since then (if it was as simple as doubling in power every 18 months, it would 241/1.5 = 169,103,740 times faster, but Wikipedia shows even greater improvements on even shorter timescales going from the Cray X-MP in 1984 to standard consumer CPUs and GPUs in 2017, a factor of 1,472,333,333 improvement at fixed cost in only 33 years).
So, how fast are computers now? Well, here’s a small script to find out:
#!python from datetime import datetime before = datetime.now() q = 916748676920039158098660927585380162483106680144308622407126516427934657040867096593279205767480806790022783016354924852380335745316935111903596577547340075681688305620821016129132845564805780158806771 for x in range(0,int(3.45e6)): a = q**(1./23) after = datetime.now() print after-before
It calculates the 23rd root of that number. It times itself as it does the calculation three million four hundred and fifty thousand times, repeating the calculation just to slow it down enough to make the time reading accurate.
Let’s see what how long it takes…
MacBook-Air:python kitsune$ python 201-digit-23rd-root.py 0:00:01.140248 MacBook-Air:python kitsune$
1.14 seconds — to do the calculation 3,450,000 times.
My MacBook Air is an old model from mid-2013, and I’m already beating by more than a factor of 150 million someone who was (despite the oddities of the famous story) in the Guinness Book of Records for her mathematical abilities.
It gets worse, though. The next thing people often say is, paraphrased, “oh, but it’s cheating to program the numbers into the computer when the human had to read it”. Obviously the way to respond to that is to have the computer read for itself:
from sklearn import svm from sklearn import datasets import numpy as np import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import matplotlib.cm as cm # Find out how fast it learns from datetime import datetime # When did we start learning? before = datetime.now() clf = svm.SVC(gamma=0.001, C=100.) digits = datasets.load_digits() size = len(digits.data)/10 clf.fit(digits.data[:-size], digits.target[:-size]) # When did we stop learning? after = datetime.now() # Show user how long it took to learn print "Time spent learning:", after-before # When did we start reading? before = datetime.now() maxRepeats = 100 for repeats in range(0, maxRepeats): for x in range(0, size): data = digits.data[-x] prediction = clf.predict(digits.data[-x]) # When did we stop reading? after = datetime.now() print "Number of digits being read:", size*maxRepeats print "Time spent reading:", after-before # Show mistakes: for x in range(0, size): data = digits.data[-x] target = digits.target[-x] prediction = clf.predict(digits.data[-x]) if (target!=prediction): print "Target: "+str(target)+" prediction: "+str(prediction) grid = data.reshape(8, 8) plt.imshow(grid, cmap = cm.Greys_r) plt.show()
This learns to read using a standard dataset of hand-written digits, then reads all the digits in that set a hundred times over, then shows you what mistakes it’s made.
MacBook-Air:AI stuff kitsune$ python digits.py Time spent learning: 0:00:00.225301 Number of digits being read: 17900 Time spent reading: 0:00:02.700562 Target: 3 prediction: [5] Target: 3 prediction: [5] Target: 3 prediction: [8] Target: 3 prediction: [8] Target: 9 prediction: [5] Target: 9 prediction: [8] MacBook-Air:AI stuff kitsune$
0.225 seconds to learn to read, from scratch; then it reads just over 6,629 digits per second. This is comparable with both the speed of a human blink (0.1-0.4 seconds) and also with many of the claims* I’ve seen about human visual processing time, from retina to recognising text.
The A.I. is not reading perfectly, but looking at the mistakes it does make, several of them are forgivable even for a human. They are hand-written digits, and some of them look, even to me, more like the number the A.I. saw than the number that was supposed to be there — indeed, the human error rate for similar examples is 2.5%, while this particular A.I. has an error rate of 3.35%.
* I refuse to assert those claims are entirely correct, because I don’t have any formal qualification in that area, but I do have experience of people saying rubbish about my area of expertise — hence this blog post. I don’t intend to make the same mistake.
Matthew beheld not the mote of smartdust in his own eye, for it was hiding itself from his view with advanced magickal trickery.
His brother Luke beheld the mote, yet within his brother’s eye was a beam of laser light that blinded him just as surely.
Luke went to remove the mote of dust in Matthew’s eye, but judged not correctly, and became confused.
Mark looked upon the brothers, and decided it was good.
“If you stare into The Facebook, The Facebook stares back at you.”
I think this fits the reality of digital surveillance much better than it fits the idea Nietzsche was trying to convey when he wrote the original.
Facebook and Google look at you with an unblinking eye; they look at all of us which they can reach, even those without accounts; two billion people on Facebook, their every keystroke recorded, even those they delete; every message analysed, even those never sent; every photo processed, even those kept private; on Google maps, every step taken or turn missed, every place where you stop, becomes an update for the map.
We’re lucky that A.I. isn’t as smart as a human, because if it was, such incomprehensible breadth and depth of experience would make Sherlock look like an illiterate child raised by wild animals in comparison. Even without hypothesising new technologies that a machine intelligence may or may not invent, even just a machine that does exactly what its told by its owner… this dataset alone ought to worry any who fear the thumb of a totalitarian micro-managing your life.
Idle thought at this stage.
The Kessler syndrome (also called the Kessler effect, collisional cascading or ablation cascade), proposed by the NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler in 1978, is a scenario in which the density of objects in low earth orbit (LEO) is high enough that collisions between objects could cause a cascade where each collision generates space debris that increases the likelihood of further collisions.
If all objects in Earth orbit were required to have an electrical charge (all negative, let’s say), how strong would that charge have to be to prevent collisions?
Also, how long would they remain charged, given the ionosphere, solar wind, Van Allen belts, etc?
Also, how do you apply charge to space junk already present? Rely on it picking up charge when it collides with new objects? Or is it possible to use an electron gun to charge them from a distance? And if so, what’s the trade-off between beam voltage, distance, and maximum charge (presumably shape dependent)?
And if you can apply charge remotely, is this even the best way to deal with them, rather than collecting them all in a large net and de-orbiting them?
