Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence

The AI we confront will be us

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From an article by Tim O’Reilly

“When news of import spreads around the world in moments, is this not the awareness in some kind of global brain? When an idea takes hold in millions of individual minds, and is reinforced by repetition across our silicon networks, is it not a persistent thought?”

It’s a rare day I don’t “ask Google” a question. Usually several. Increasingly, Google provides a useful answer. As this bit of magic becomes commonplace, the line between Me and the Net becomes thinner and thinner and will soon disappear. (Already, perhaps?) My mind (whatever that is) feels like it’s escaping the cramped confines of my head and it feels wonderful.

“AI that we will confront is not going to be a mind in an individual machine. It will not be something we look at as other. It may well be us.”

As our Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal ancestors slowly became what we are today?

What if you could be remembered forever?

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“What if all the important events, adventures and thoughts in your life would be accessible to future generations, who never met the real you? Eterni.me collects almost everything that you create during your lifetime, and processes this huge amount of information using complex Artificial Intelligence algorithms. Then it generates a virtual YOU, an avatar that emulates your personality and can interact with, and offer information and advice to your family and friends, even after you pass away.”

I heard about this service from a segment of the On the Media podcast (link below). Evan Carroll is co-author of “Your Digital Afterlife.” I signed up for the service, which doesn’t seem to have launched yet.

When we’re not the smartest ones in the room

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Views on Artificial Intelligence (AI or, more common these days, AGI) seem to fall into one of three camps:

  • Never happen. Machines will never be smarter than we are, in any way that really matters
  • It will happen and it’ll be game over for humans. This is is the SkyNet scenario. When our machines no longer need us, they’ll destroy us.
  • The next evolutionary leap. A merging of human and artificial intelligence that will — for the most part — benefit man. Think Bishop (Artificial Person) from Aliens, not Ash from Alien.

There’s countless other takes on this but let’s stop with three.

I think one of the reasons many people tremble at the thought of  really smart machines (although I doubt we, or they, will think of themselves that way) is a subconscious fear of Big Time Payback.

What if these superior entities treat us no better than we have dolphins, mountain gorillas or other non-human intelligent creatures? One might argue they have less reason to do so, not being mammals and all.

But let’s talk about why I’m looking forward to a world controlled (managed?) by AGI’s. And note that I’m assuming they’ll keep humans around for as long as a) they need us for something or b) they find us amusing/lovable/interesting/etc.

If they’re really smart, they’re gonna shit-can a few institutions that threaten the entire planet. Religion, politics, Monsanto, Fox News, carbon emissions, suicide vests, Congress, Power Ball and gun shows. (you can make your own list)

We just won’t be able to do some of the stupid shit our species now insists on doing. Like good parents, they won’t let us. Yes, I see a massive Free Will movement spring up, demanding the right to make our own choices, even if they’re harmful to us. The AGI’s will be too smart to bother explaining that free will is an illusion but will, instead, let natural selection take its course. (Stupid will be a virus for which they quickly create a vaccine)

Cro-Magnon eventually became Homo Sapiens (did I get that right?) but it took a long time. This next evolutionary leap will be like that Red Bull guy that jumped back to earth from the edge of space. Much bigger deal. And it will happen — relatively — so much faster that we’ll sort of see it happening and that will be really scary. The future us will arrive while we’re still here.

For my money (except we probably won’t have money) artificial intelligence will be better than no intelligence at all.

Keloid

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Keloid from BLR_VFX on Vimeo.

“In a not too distant future, societies of all countries come to rely on an intricate network of artificial intelligence devices designed to bring efficacy to man’s life. Yet, man continues to devour himself in useless wars. A strong political hierarchy now divides all powers into three factions, and A. I. devices rapidly gain ground as efficiency becomes a priority.”

“As social revolts grow worse everyday, authorities seek ways to control their citizens. They decide to carry out a series of tests that will determine not only whether some crucial powers can be transferred to non human entities, but also whether man is ready to yield those powers.”

“The world has become a cell for all men and women, who withstand and endure their lives, rather than living them. Machines might have found a solution.”

“From now on, you are set free.”

Dignity in doing other things

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I’m not sure why Kevin Drum is an expert on robots but he wrote an interesting article for Mother Jones. The excerpts below are from the Washington Post Wonkblog:

“There’s a couple of arguments against the idea that AI is coming soon. One is, as you say, a philosophical argument, which boils down to “However smart machines seem to get, they’ll never have true human intelligence.” I just don’t think that matters. You can call it intelligence or something difference, but that’s semantic. What matters is that they can accomplish the same things humans can.”

“So who has all the money? It’s whoever has the robots. And who has the robots? The people who have all the money. Today’s income inequality will be peanuts compared to income inequality then. […]  If I’m right about what happens with artificial intelligence, there won’t be any work, period, so there won’t be dignity in work. We’ll have to find dignity in doing other things.”

“How Google Dominates Us”

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James Gleick’s The Information was one of the more interestisng books I’ve read this year. And this piece in the New York Review of Books he talks about “How Google Dominates Us. A few of my favorites:

  • “The business of finding facts has been an important gear in the workings of human knowledge, and the technology has just been upgraded from rubber band to nuclear reactor.”
  • “When (we) say Google “possesses” all this information, that’s not the same as owning it. What it means to own information is very much in flux.”
  • “(Google has) been relentless in driving computer science forward. Google Translate has achieved more in machine translation than the rest of the world’s artificial intelligence experts combined.”
  • “The merchandise of the information economy is not information; it is attention. These commodities have an inverse relationship. When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive. Attention is what we, the users, give to Google, and our attention is what Google sells—concentrated, focused, and crystallized.”
  • “Google makes more from advertising than all the nation’s newspapers combined”
  • “The perfect search engine, as Sergey and Larry imagine it, reads your mind and produces the answer you want. The perfect advertising engine does the same: it shows you the ads you want. Anything else wastes your attention, the advertiser’s money, and the world’s bandwidth.”

Almost every article about Google worries about the potential danger of someone having so much information about us. And yet, few seem concerned about how much power, information and control governments have over us. I’ll trust Larry and Sergey over any politician that has come along in my lifetime.

Scott Adams: Digital Ghosts

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A couple of years ago I imagined a sort of online immortality:

In twenty years, we’ll have AI’s (artificial intelligence). For a fee, mine will read those 16, 000 posts to get a feel for what I wrote about and linked to, picking up a sense of my interests and writing styles in the process.

It will have access to all the books in My Library Thing, my iTunes and iPhoto, flickr, YouTube, etc.

The AI will continuously scour the web of the future, snatching bits and pieces and posting them here. Surviving friends will be able to correspond with smays.com who/which will reply. You might find him/her/it more interesting. Certainly better informed.

There’s plenty of video and audio of smays.com and I fully expect my AI will be capable of reproducing an acceptable version. So you can talk or iChat with me as well.

Today the always brilliant Scott Adams takes the idea a bit further but the similiarities are hard to miss. Just sayin’

When your mortal body ends, you will have stored all the data you need to create your permanent digital ghost. As the technology in the cloud improves, so too does your ghost, learning to move more naturally, perhaps learning from videos it has of you, or even based on some type of profiling based on clues such as your level of testosterone (from face shape), and the types of sports you did in life. In a hundred years your digital ghost would be indistinguishable from a living human appearing on video or in a holographic projection.

Digital ghosts need to see their environment to interact properly. Phones will all have video “eyes” someday, as will most computers. The new Xbox Kinect has “eyes” that literally follow your movement around the room. You could install additional cameras in any room in which you wished to be visited by digital ghosts. The malicious ghosts might commandeer video cameras or your phone’s camera function. My point is that you are already surrounded by cameras attached to the Internet, and that trend will continue. Your ghost will be able to see most rooms in the world.

Digital ghosts could continue learning throughout their afterlives, by reading the news and following the Facebook pages of friends and family. The ghosts would also be free to make friends with other ghosts and live their lives independently. Ghosts could stay with the ghosts of their life partners forever, so long as that was specified in the will of both people.

The Singularity Is Near

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“The technological singularity is a theoretical future point of unprecedented technological progress, caused in part by the ability of machines to improve themselves using artificial intelligence.” [Wikipedia]

I’m clawing my way through Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near. It’s not an easy read. Lots of charts and graphs and stuff I skipped in college. But it’s a wonderfully optimistic view of the near future.

“I set the date for the Singularity –representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability– as 2045. The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.”

“Despite the clear preponderance of nonbiological intelligence by the mid-2040s, ours will still be a human civilization. We will transcend biology, but not our humanity.”

I’m only about a third of the way through the book but I think “transcend biology” might be good news if I’m still around in 2045. I’ll be 93 and in serious need of a tune-up.

I originally posted this on 8/13/08 and re-post here with some of my a-ha’s.

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“The slow swarm of spinning things” (Count Zero)

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The Sprawl trilogy is William Gibson’s first set of novels, composed of Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). One of the “characters” in Neuromancer is Wintermute, “one-half of a super-AI entity.” On page 274 of Count Zero, we find a description of Wintermute creating art.

Cornellbox“She caught herself on the thing’s folded, jointed arms, pivoted and clung there, watching the swirl of debris. There were dozens of the arms, manipulators, tipped with pliers, hexdrivers, knives, a subminiature circular saw, a dentist’s drill … They bristled from the alloy thorax of what must once have been a construction remote, the sort of unmanned, semiautonomous device she knew from childhood videos of the high frontier. But this one was welded into the apex of the dome, its sides fused with the fabric of the Place, and hundred of cables and optic lines snaked across the geodesics to enter it. Two of the arms, tipped with delicate force-feedback devices, were extended; the soft pads cradled an unfinished box.

Eyes wide, Marly watched the uncounted things swing past.

A yellowing kid glove, the faceted crystal stopper from some vial of vanished perfume, an armless doll with a face of French porcelain, a fat, gold-fitted black fountain pen, rectangular segments of perf board, the crumpled red and green snake of a silk cravat … Endless, the slow swarm of spinning things…”

I love the image and I love the idea of an artificial intelligence creating art. In this story, futuristic Joseph Cornell style boxes.

All we need is an ending

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I have this idea for a screenplay but I’m thinking it’s already been done. And, if not, I don’t have an ending.

Famous female rock star breaks off high-profile engagement to equally famous sports figure. This tough, smart, independent woman hears her biological clock ticking and decides to have a baby on her own  and worry about meeting Mr. Right later (or never). But she needs sperm donor. The normal procedure sounds cold and sterile so she decides to do it the old fashioned way and starts looking for the lucky guy. Several humorous, unsuccessful candidates later, she’s about to give up when fate brings her together with The Guy.

He’s a romantic who wants nothing to do with the scheme but gets tricked into the sack and the deed gets done. She tries to give him a bunch of go-away money but he doesn’t want it and just goes back to his anonymous life.

A few months pass and the media notices that Famous Female Rock Star is in a family way and goes searching for the father. Relentless Reporter tracks down The Guy.

So we’ve got Girl-Meets-Boy…Girl-Loses-Boy… but I’m stuck on how to get them back together.

And I’m thinking this movie has already been made but I can’t come up with the title. Sounds a little like Notting Hill. Any of you film buffs out there help me out on this? Have I seen this movie and just forgotten it?

I kind of see Kevin Connolly as The Guy. And maybe Sienna Miller as The Rock Star? Would help if she could sing but not critical.

I’m gonna keep working on this because I want a happy ending for the Famous Female Rock Star.