Andrew Lyons's List: Artificial Intelligence: Tech and Psychology

• "I think that goes back to the concept that these technologies can actually be empowering and good for the world if the companies implementing them are good," he said. "Could some of these technologies be used for bad purposes? Yes. But will they by us? No."

• EFF has been working with a group of authors and publishers who are concerned about the failure of the settlement to contain any privacy protections for readers. The lack of privacy protections could scare readers away from controversial and noncontroversial subjects alike, hurting authors as well as readers. Reader privacy has strong protection offline; our goal is to ensure that these protections continue as books move online.
• The court rejected a request from the Internet Archive to intervene in the case to raise the concerns of others who have undertaken book digitization efforts.
• New York Law School Prof. James Grimmelmann has filed a letter with the court declaring an intention to file an amicus curiae brief that will address some of the public interest issues raised by the settlement (presumably along the lines described in his highly influential paper on the subject).

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• But what they did is go further than that and go and say, “Not only are we going to address past harm, we’re going to set up new structures for dealing with things in the future. We’re going to come up with a new copyright regime that allows Google to go and sell access to these works,” in this kind of bizarre new scheme that nobody had ever heard of, on a perpetual, going-forward basis. So class action usually tries to address past harm. Here, it’s setting up completely new copyright structures for going and dealing with things in the future. It’s unprecedented.
• BREWSTER KAHLE: What they’re doing is they’re digitizing books up a storm, so out-of-copyright works, which are works before 1923; in-copyright, but out-of-print works, which are the vast majority after 1923 and the present. Most books are out of print. And they’re even digitizing books that are in print. And they’re working with publishers to try to make sure that things that are in print, they can have in their search engine. In the out of copyright, it’s OK; there’s no rights issues there, they can make those available.

• George Dyson, a historian of technology…, Freeman Dyson, was invited to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, in October 2005 to give a speech at the party celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of von Neumann’s invention [of an electronic computer that could store in its memory the instructions for its use]. “Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, “Dyson would later recall of his visit, “I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air.” After his talk, Dyson found himself chatting with a Google engineer about the company’s controversial plan to scan the contents of the world’s libraries into its database. “We are not scanning all of those books to be read by people,” the engineer told him. “We are scanning them to be read by an [artificial intelligence engine].”

• The contemporary notion of the Singularity got started with legendary SF writer Vernor Vinge, whose 1981 novella True Names pictured a society on the verge of this “event.” In a 1993 essay, “The Coming Technological Singularity,” Vinge made his vision clear, writing that “within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”
• I think that in the relatively near historical future, humans, using technology, will be able to create, or become, creatures of superhuman intelligence. I think the term Singularity is appropriate, because unlike other technological changes, it seems to me pretty evident that this change would be unintelligible to us afterwards in the same way that our present civilization is unintelligible to a goldfish.
• The fundamental change that may be taking place -- humans may not be best characterized as the tool-creating animal but as the only animal that has figured out how to outsource its cognition — how to spread its cognitive abilities into the outside world. We’ve been doing that for a little while ten thousand years. Reading and writing is outsourcing of memory. So we have a process going on here, and you can watch to see whether it’s ongoing. So, for instance, in the next ten years, if you notice more and more substitution for using fragments of human cognition in the outside world — if human occupational responsibility becomes more and more automated in areas involving judgment that haven’t yet been automated — then what you’re seeing is rather like a rising tide of this cognitive outsourcing.

  • As far as outsourced memory goes, social bookmarking tools such as Diiggo are moving it forward, and we outsource communication skills to an almost telepathic level through social network and mobile communication tools, whereby people almost instinctively update their social network statuses everytime they take a crap or order a pint and all their friends are updated about these events in the pal's life.
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• The traditional AI answer is the Turing Test, invented by Alan Turing, the gay pioneer of cryptography and artificial intelligence who was forced by the British government to take hormone treatments to "cure" him of his homosexuality, culminating in his suicide in 1954. Turing cut through the existentialism about measuring whether a machine is intelligent by proposing a parlor game: a computer sits behind a locked door with a chat program, and a person sits behind another locked door with his own chat program, and they both try to convince a judge that they are real people. If the computer fools a human judge into thinking that it’s a person, then to all intents and purposes, it’s a person.
• "Turing had the right insight: base the test for intelligence on written language. Turing Tests really work. A novel is based on language: with language you can conjure up any reality, much more so than with images. Turing almost lived to see computers doing a good job of performing in fields like math, medical diagnosis and so on, but those tasks were easier for a machine than demonstrating even a child’s mastery of language. Language is the true embodiment of human intelligence."

• Now, the military wants a new equation: one that explains the human mind as a thermodynamic system. Once that’s done, they’re asking for “abiotic, self-organizing electronic and chemical systems” that display the PI principles. More than just computers that think, Darpa wants to re-envision how thought works — and then design computers whose thought processes are governed by the same laws as our own.

• The ultimate goal of Intelligence Realm is to create an AI or multiple AIs, and use these intelligences in scientific endeavors. By focusing on the human brain as a prototype, they can create an intelligence that solves problems and “thinks” like a human.

• CARL-1, his latest model, is a squat, white trash can contraption with a couple of shopping cart wheels bolted to its side, a video camera wired to the lid, and a couple of bunny ears taped on for good measure. But open up that lid and you’ll find something remarkable — the beginnings of a truly biological nervous system.
• “Put a couple of my robots inside a maze,” says Krichmar, “let them run it a few times, and what each of those robots learns will be different. Those differences are magnified into behavior pretty quickly.” When psychologists define personality, it’s along the lines of “idiosyncratic behavior that’s predictive of future behavior.” What Krichmar is saying is that his brain bots are developing personalities — and they’re doing it pretty quickly.
• Krichmar’s bots develop personalities because, instead of preprogramming behaviors, these robots have neuro-modulatory systems or value judgment systems — move towards something good, move away from something bad — that are modeled around the human’s dopaminergic system (for wanting or reward-based behaviors) and the noradrenergic system (for vigilance and surprise).

  • is this all there is to it in personality development?

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• Love Plus relationships feel more real.
• It made me think that humans could probably pretty easily develop feelings for AI robots.

• RAY KURZWEIL: One area I commented on was the question of a possible link between quantum computing and the brain. Do we need quantum computing to create human level AI? My conclusion is no, mainly because we don‘t see any quantum computing in the brain. Roger Penrose‘s conjecture that there was quantum computing in tubules does not seem to have been verified by any experimental evidence.
• In his presentation, Hameroff said consciousness comes from gamma coherence, basically a certain synchrony between neurons that create gamma waves that are in a certain frequency, something like around 10 cycles per second. And the evidence is, indeed, that gamma coherence goes away with anesthesia.
• memory is not the same thing as consciousness. Consciousness seems to be an emergent property of what goes on in the neocortex, which is where we do our thinking.
• There‘s no “Consciousness Detector”
• there‘s no way the brain could be that complicated.

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• I was also intrigued by Neural Prosthesis. Theodore Berger at USC is working on artificial hippocampuses -- the area of the brain that looks after memory -- and Berger has succeeded in replacing a rat's with one of his own creating. DARPA, the US defense tech agency, is interested in using it to upload F-15 instructions to pilots (yes, as in "I know kung fu"), but of more immediate value is its potential for saving people from diseases such as Alzheimer's.