ourselves smarter. That is what is unique about human beings. We were the first species to create tools to extend our reach and then we use our tools to create more powerful tools and no other species does that.
Will super intelligent machines ever have souls?
The soul is a synonym for consciousness...and if we were to consider where consciousness comes from we would have to consider it an emerging property. Brain science is instructive there as we look inside the brain, and we've now looked at it in exquisite detail, you don't see anything that can be identified as a soul--there's just a lot of neurons and they're complicated but there's no consciousness to be seen.
Therefore it's an emerging property of a very complex system that can reflect on itself. And if you were to create a system that had similar properties, similar level of complexity it would therefore have the same emerging property and this would be more than an abstraction because these future entities...will be convincing.
It also won't be clear--you won't be able to walk into a room and say, 'OK, humans on the left, machines on the right', because it's going to be all mixed up. You'll have biological humans but they'll have machine processes in their brain, there may be a lot more complexity in the machine intelligence in their brain than the biological portion of their brain. It's not going to be a clear distinction of where humans or biological intelligence stops and machine intelligence starts...[So] we will attribute consciousness to entities even if they have no biology, even if they're fully machine entities: they will seem human, they will seem consciousness, we will attribute souls to them but that's not a scientific statement.
In seeking to create artificial intelligence why are we attempting to mimic the human brain when machine intelligence necessarily seems to be a very different type of intelligence?
There are two different approaches to AI and both of them are showing themselves to be successful--one is just to engineer intelligent solutions without consideration of how the brain does it, which is the way we created flying machines without necessarily emulating birds. And a lot of AI--in fact most of it in use today--was done that way. That's because we really couldn't see inside the brain until quite recently--that's another exponential progression. We now have brain scanners that can actually see inside a living brain at the level of individual synapses and interneural connections and can see the neurotransmitters and… see new spines being created as we think our thoughts, so we can see not only our brain create our thoughts but our thoughts create our brain.
We are able now to actually turn this data into working simulations of brain regions--there's two dozen brain regions that have been modeled and simulated...and as we simulate these regions we are learning how the brain produces this intelligence and there's a lot to be learned there. The best example of human intelligence we have is the human brain and as we learn its methods we can add that to our tool kit. It doesn't mean we're going to just copy exactly how a human brain works--we're going to basically apply those principles. That's what engineering does well. As engineering learns scientific principles it can magnify and focus on those principles and dramatically increase their effects.
Is too much technology--and the sheer volume of accessible information--ruining our ability to concentrate?
Not at all. This old controversy goes back to kids using calculators, not learning arithmetic. But if you don't have to bother with the mechanics of arithmetic you need to think more about the abstractions of how to solve a problem. And the fact that we can access knowledge and automate some of the more mechanical aspects of thinking allows us to think more creatively and creative projects are getting done more rapidly...so we are increasing human creativity with these tools.
Are there any jobs computers/robots/AI could not eventually do better than humans?
Ultimately artificial intelligence is going to be able to do everything humans do. [It] will operate at the best human levels and do so tirelessly but...there's in fact a larger number of jobs today than there was 100 years ago and they pay eight times as much in constant currency as a century ago and they're more complex and actually more satisfying--and we've also invested a lot more in education as a result. So these trends are going to continue, work is going to become more and more intellectual. I'd say that already half the population contributes to creating information or intellectual content of one kind or another--none of these jobs existed 50 years ago.
What downsides are there to advanced technologies?
Technology is a double-edged sword, and the Internet will spread hate and allow destructive groups to organize...but I think the destructive side of the Internet is fairly subtle. An issue I'm more concerned about...is the abuse of biotechnology. I think it's going to be very powerful in terms of enabling us to overcome disease and aging and extend human longevity and health but it could also be used by a bioterrorist today to reprogram a biological virus to be more deadly or more communicative or more stealthy and so some people have called for a relinquishing of [biotech and other advanced technologies like nanotechnology and AI] because they are too dangerous.
In my view relinquishing these technologies is a bad idea for three reasons: one it would deprive us of these proponed benefits and there's still a lot of suffering in the world that we need to overcome. Secondly it would require totalitarian government to implement a ban. And thirdly it wouldn't work and I think that's really the key point...we'd just drive these technologies underground where they would be even more dangerous, more out of control.
So my view is the correct response is twofold: one, ethical standards to prevent accidental problems by responsible practitioners...and secondly developing a rapid response system that can deal with people who don't follow the guidelines, who are trying to be destructive like terrorists. The goods news is we now have the tools to do that. We can now sequence a biological virus in one day.
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Certainly food for thought...but really hard to believe
Those comments about exponential advances in technology rather than linear are hard to swallow. For example, AI has taken so long to be where it is now, and it's still not widespread commercially, plus there's still so much about how our brains work that we don't know, except for being able to point out what changes occur physiologically but that doesn't mean that's correct. It may also vary from individual to individual. But as I've said, certainly food for thought!
Posted by Derick Goh on Wednesday, January 07 2009 05:40 PM