Rebane's Ruminations

… and now on two legs

George Rebane

Recall the four-legged pack mule robot (here) that clambered up the hillside and could recover from strong shoves.  Well, technology continues to accelerate and Boston Dynamics has now developed its two legged cousin Petman whose walk is eerily human.  (Control and estimation theory rules!)

Can you see it all coming together?

Singularity Signposts - 22sep2009 (updated)

George Rebane

- Advanced, cheaper solar panels rival fossil-fuel electricity;
- Human made crises coming faster than we can deal with them;
- Orwellian public monitoring system developed by EU;
- Nanotube springs as energy storage devices may replace batteries;
- New omni-flu vaccine, ‘one dab'll do ya’.
- The future of human enhancement from Nick Bostrom

New breakthroughs in solar panels promise to start providing electricity at costs competing with fossil fuel powered generators (here).  The advent of such unexpected technological developments in all fields is the prime reason why we should never allow government to become the gatekeeper to innovation in any field.  Today we have governments that more than ever seek to lay their cold, dead hands on human creativity.

In the meantime, there are people who point out that worldwide man-made crises are multiplying faster than our ability to deal with them.  Here is a report on how some scientists are calling for greater global control of everything we do so that life on earth can achieve some grand social engineering goals held by certain people.  My concern is that these scientists may be the intellectual descendants of the ones that had similar aims in the 1920s and 30s.  They seem to have skipped the technical courses teaching that central control of complex systems doesn’t work very well.

Singularity’s Apprehensive Approach

George Rebane

‘Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man’ is the title of an uneven yet revealing piece in the 25jul09 NYT by John Markoff.  The article was apparently motivated by a quiet (‘secret’ sounds too sinister) conference at Asilomar on Monterey Bay sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence last February.  It was a quiet conference in comparison to the concurrent announcements at the time that preceded the opening of the Singularity University this summer.  RR’s Singularity Signposts section has kept readers up to date on this and other events that herald the Singularity as the epochal new age of Man.

The February conference was lead by Microsoft’s Dr. Eric Horvitz who also happens to be the current president of AAAI.  According to the NYT, the conference was motivated by a growing cohort of well-read people from many areas who were now “impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence”.  It focused the discussion of “a group of computer scientists … debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone.”

The attendees seemed to agree that “there was legitimate concern that technological progress would transform the work force by destroying a widening range of jobs, as well as force humans to learn to live with machines that increasingly copy human behaviors. … The researchers also discussed possible threats to human jobs, like self-driving cars, software-based personal assistants and service robots in the home.”

The central idea of the Singularity is the ongoing “intelligence explosion” as proclaimed by Dr. Ray Kurzweil and others.  The inevitable result of this explosion is a world in which ever smarter machines will design ever smarter machines – and this explosion is already well on its way.  The result, for the instant we call the Singularity, will be the arrival of peer intelligence (‘what if your computer were as smart as your spouse?’), and then we enter the unknown post-Singularity era.  All the rules will change.

Singularity in Ten Years?

George Rebane

The rise of conscious machines has become an active focus of study in the artificial intelligence community.  Consciousness and intelligence can and should be viewed as independent attributes of a biological critter, and therefore by extension, of a sentient (conscious) and sapient (wise viz intelligent) machine.  RR readers are familiar with my view that such machines will not be ‘programmed’ per se, but will arise from within very complex computational environments that may or not have inputs from our real world.

We now hear of a team at the Federal Polytechnical College in Lausanne, Switzerland that has ‘assembled’ the beginnings of a virtual rat’s brain from the ground up.  (more here)  This means that they have created software structures that mimic the make-up of (a part of) the rat’s brain down to the neuronal level, with each virtual neuron having all the inter-connections that a biological neuron would have in the brain.  This creates a virtual brain with a gazillion such connections the complex firing patterns of which are thought to give rise to intelligence, and perhaps even consciousness. 

‘Is it Time for the Turing Test to Retire?’

George Rebane

Definitely not.  This question is asked by Dr. Aladdin Ayesh in a brief but serious article with the above title.  I presume Dr. Ayesh is a computer scientist, but he seems to be confused about how Alan Turing proposed his test for machine intelligence or, if you wish, AI almost sixty years ago.

Ayesh states that - Back in 1950, Turing proposed that a machine can demonstrate and be proven to possess true intelligence through a simple test of conversation, in which a human user converses blindly with two entities: a machine and another human. If that user could not tell the difference between the two entities, the machine is considered to be 'intelligent'.

Turing did not offer his test as any definitive method to ‘prove’ that a machine is intelligent.  In fact, Turing did not even want to answer the seminal question, ‘What is intelligence?’  Instead, in his characteristic and deep fashion, Turing offered an operational answer to a difficult but related question that was posed to him – ‘Can a machine be intelligent?’ – by addressing the question ‘Can machines think?’

Singularity Signposts – 24jun2009

George Rebane

Forbes.com has an excellent extended survey of the current state and portents of AI and robotics.  ‘The AI Report’ is comprised of 24 short articles for the intelligent non-technical reader.  They range from descriptions of how machine or artificial intelligence is currently being developed and embodied, to how AI and robots are being used in corporate and institutional environments.  Various authors conjecture on our progress to the Singularity; all agree that there will be an eventual intimate melding of man and machine.  And this has already started.

RR readers new to these pages will gain a better understanding of my own extension of these technology advances to current and near-term socio-political themes.  The bottom line is very simple – if I don’t understand the advances in machine intelligence and robotics, then I will neither comprehend nor be able to interpret the tsunamis that are reshaping today's social issues such as healthcare, unemployment, education, security, finance, entertainment, and technology abetted tyranny.  In that state of ignorance I will have these issues framed only by a politician’s blather.  If I can’t grasp what a wheel is, I will have a hard time talking about cars.  It is that fundamental.

We deserve only the future that we are able and willing to shape.

Cosmologos

George Rebane

[This little contribution was motivated by the ongoing debate to nowhere on the various Origin Theories – spot creation, intelligent design, evolution, alien intelligence, … - between atheists of the secular humanist persuasion, and Christian organizations of various stripe – e.g. Discovery Institute, BioLogos Foundation, … .]

I am a Christian, although the pastors of our church may take issue with that claim – perhaps with some success.  Over the last fifty years or so I have been privileged to witness the debate between secular humanists – firmly wrapped in the mantle of pre-bounded science – and Christians of diverse leanings and backgrounds, each putting forth arguments that range from the sublime to the ridiculous.  It has been quite a show, a show that may soon be coming to an end and leave both sides muttering in their adult beverage of choice.  Perhaps, resolution lies elsewhere.

Let’s first lay down that well-known observation by the late Arthur C. Clarke –

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The astute reader will immediately expand the truth of the above by substituting ‘religion’ for ‘magic’ – both being notions that can be developed without the bounds of reason.  To subsume the above, I offer –

Once you make the reasonable case that we can (soon) create universes with sentient and sapient life, the proposition that we also exist in a created and evolved cosmos becomes our most compelling Origin Theory.

Today the secular humanist is wedded beyond divorce to the theology that this is a purposeless (non- or extra-teleological) cosmos, and our Sisyphusian fate is to keep peeling back layer after layer of the causal cosmic onion, ad nauseam.  A more modern and proximal anecdote has the punchline, ‘Oh no you don’t sonny, it’s turtles ALL the way down!’  (The final rejoinder from an old-timer explaining his cosmology to a smart-aleck TV reporter trying to best him with the repeated questions of how the world is supported on the backs of turtles upon turtles as claimed by the old-timer.)

To deny my proposition would put one in a situation of maximum and unfounded hubris.  In that state we would go forward with the full support of science and apparent reason, setting in motion the creation of an hierarchy of intelligent universes, while continuing to hold that only we are the progenitor gods able to do this.  More specifically, we would be forced to argue/believe that somehow the technological hierarchy that we created below us, could not, for some unexplicable reason, also have been hierarchically applied to us from above.

In light of this, and if we survive Singularity, I believe that we and our post-human progeny will have the most compelling basis for adopting a position of utter humility and awe on the existence of our own Source. 

 

Singularity Signposts – 20may2009 Machine Augmented Man (Soon)

George Rebane

Let’s look ahead ten years or so.  You have finished lunch and are about to go back to work when you see something in a store window and go inside.  You examine the article and decide to pull up a couple of similar articles for comparison.  By thinking a command you make an overlay display appear in your field of view.  You are already on line as was your cell phone back in the old days. 

You now move the cursor on the browser’s interface to ‘thought recognition’ and by thinking, you command the browser to go to your favorite ecommerce aggregator’s site, and call up similar products by simply looking at the product’s barcode in your hand.  The displays of competing products appear in a matrix in front of you, which you examine while expanding certain features, and then you make a decision.  You will buy the article in your hand from the store’s website, and have it shipped to your home.  Moving the cursor while ‘clicking’ on some links, and you’re done shopping.

You now ‘hear’ a silent voice that reminds you of the early afternoon meeting during which you will make a presentation.  The shopping detour will make you a little late to the meeting, and you decide to call your assistant to tell everyone that you’ll be late.  Again by thought, you pull up the communication interface and by thinking your assistant’s name and silently commanding ‘call’, your assistant soon answers and you recognize the familiar voice.  Without moving your lips, you quietly tell her of the schedule change, and then decide that you will text the notification to the other attendees yourself.

Again by thought, you form the text message and command its transmission to your colleagues as you walk toward your office building down the street.  It occurs to you that there is a slide in your PowerPoint that you forgot to include.  You pull up your presentation, and it floats in front of you as an overlay of the passing scene during your brisk walk back.  Quickly you identify where the new slide will go.  Its composition will require a bar chart that combines both your corporate data with some census data from the Department of Commerce.

Again, while walking, into the building you pull up the corporate data array, with a cursor select the part you want, go on line to a government site that you had bookmarked and grab the corresponding data you need.  Before you get out of the elevator, you have composed the needed bar chart and inserted the new slide.  As you walk to the conference room, you pull up and view your afternoon schedule and the emails in your inbox.

Your colleagues are already assembled in the conference room, some chatting, some quietly staring out the window, working as you have been while your returned from lunch.  People greet you as they sit down.  Again by thought alone, you upload your revised PowerPoint to the company’s data archive and command the conference room display system to bring it up for viewing as you begin your presentation in ‘traditional mode’.

You and your colleagues decided to attend the presentation as a group because old habits die hard, and you did want to discuss it face-to-face using normal human interaction.  There are still some things you can get from face-to-face that you can’t from a machine user interface   You could, of course, have done all this on line with everyone in their office/cubicle ‘viewing’ and ‘hearing’ the presentation with complete ability to interact.

Singularity Signposts – 11may2009 ‘Physical Intelligence’

George Rebane

Physical Intelligence (PI) is the latest AI paradigm added to the efforts to develop machines smarter than humans.  A few days ago DARPA (Defense Projects Research Agency), the people who brought you the Internet and other spooky things you shouldn’t know about, posted a notice announcing informational workshops as a preamble to issuing RFPs (Request for Proposal) for PI research and developments.  A more accessible description of PI is given in this Wired post.

You can look at PI as the latest addition to modeling human brain function using the formalisms of mathematics and physics – i.e. these are physical processes described by sets of equations which describe how the brain senses, processes, decides, issues orders, and so on.  Maybe PI will even explain and implement how it (some matter and energy) becomes conscious with a sense of self and ability to synthesize aspirations of what it wants to do or become.  PI will join such approaches as hierarchical temporal memory to build complex substrates that may become intelligent.

Again, dear Reader, don’t think about any of these steady and accelerating steps toward Singularity as efforts where humans presume to ‘program’ a computer to be smart like a human.  ‘Smart like a human’ is most likely beyond human programming capacity – for you techies, it's something to do with self-reference and Gödel’s Theorem (or in this case Gödel’s Constraint).  Instead, the more promising approach is to fashion physical brains as very complex and adaptive systems that then can learn like we did as babies and children – but, of course, learn much more rapidly.

So DARPA is going to sponsor this work under its national security charter, which may or not be a bit scary.  People like me, who spent a good part of their lives designing and building spooky systems for the government, are always on the lookout for the dark side of success in such areas.  The more light that shines on this work in the coming years, the better.  And it may all happen very fast, we will never know.

Singularity Signposts - 3may2009 (8may09 update)

George Rebane

Stephen Wolfram may just be on to the next big thing on the internet.  He and the boys and girls at Wolfram Research, Inc. are scheduled to launch Wolfram Alpha, a “computational knowledge engine” for the web.  This engine is designed to “compute the answer to all factual questions”, questions the answer to which is an acknowledged fact.  Examples are ‘What is the population of Berlin?’, ‘How much copper has Peru mined over the last 30 years?’, ‘Plot the spread of swine flu over the last three weeks.’, 'Solve a*x^3 - b*x = 0.'.

WAlpha will complement the Google search service, which provides you with a whole bunch of links that may or not answer your question or relate to your keyword(s) input.  The WAlpha service will actually parse (pick apart with understanding) your query, and then go through a computational inference process to develop the answer either through known relationships (like in physics) or access it from available “curated” knowledge bases.  The system will, of course, grow and get smarter with the passage of time and continued use.

Some of you will recall that Dr. Wolfram is a celebrated systems scientist who recently wrote A New Kind of Science.  In this thick book Wolfram argues that very complex systems, like perhaps the entire universe, really operate on a foundation of myriads of simple algorithms executing and interacting – fundamentally the universe is a big ongoing computation.  The complex dynamic activity we see around us is nothing more than emergent properties as a result of the execution and interaction of very simple algorithms.  The universe is (in?) a giant computer.