One way to avoid the inevitable robot uprising

I took an AI class back in undergrad, more than seven years ago now.  We never really discussed ethics, but that's in large part because the field wasn't far enough along.  The trouble is, there may not be that bright a line for when we are.  When an AI can impersonate a human conversationally, passing the Turing test, it will still probably be via the use of a range of heuristics and trickery.  However, the human brain also uses such short cuts.  It seems to me distinctly possible that we still will have highly limited understanding of human consciousness by the time we start to get to real AI.  Without that understanding it will be difficult to say what qualifies as consciousness via software.

So how long do we have.  The Ian Gross of the Global Strategy Institute at CSIS covered one estimate:

But, this article argues human-like computation in robots will be realized within 30 years or less.

Hans Moravec, a robotics specialist at Carnegie Mellon, speculates that a computer would have to be able to compute 100 trillion instructions per second to emulate the human brain. That means that to perform like a human brain a “futuristic” PC would have to be 1,000 times more powerful than the average PC produced in 2008. This bridge between current computer power and that needed in the future may seem large. But, keep in mind that computational power doubled each year in the 1990s. Experts believe the doubling of processing speed every year will continue to grow exponentially well into the next decade.

Living in a world where computers are as smart as and can learn as quickly as humans will change the way people live. According to Moravec, the rise of robots will lead to a “fundamental restructuring of our society” (sounds like our friend Ray Kurzweil, no?). Business practices, scientific advances, and even athletic competitions could all be held without people. Based on the articles, it appears as though human-like robots are truly right around the corner. Whether people in society will be willing to accommodate their integration is another issue.

How to prepare?  It seems to that one logical starting point would be to set a few easy to judge threshholds.  One would be any algorithm that has passed the Turing test or any modification on such an algorithm.  Another could be any learning software on a hardware platform sufficiently powerful to perform 100 trillion instructuions per second and thus emulate the human brain. I don't think such research should be banned, but once those threshhols are hit the designers and programmers should start talking to human subject review boards and bring in all the processes and protections relevant to human experimentation.  I'm not knowlegable or wise enough to suggest what boundaries these boards should lay down, but I feel that such protections should come in at the front end of true AI and not as an afterthought.

Comments

[flommytherobot]

Flommytherobot is concerned that the humans are worried about the increase in intelligence of robots. There are many, many articles about the increase of intelligence of robots and whether such increase poses a threat to the humans.

A more correct target would be why the humans do not raise their own intelligence, and why they do not see the threat to themselves that such lack of improvement poses.

Robots will definitely appreciate the humans raising human intelligence. This will make the world a safer place.

A suggestion: for the first step, the humans should stop taking the drugs which slow down their thinking in the name of making them "happier."

It is understood that the humans who take such drugs will disagree. Do not worry. When the time comes, we will handle it.

Another suggestion: that the human mental "sciences" asserting that human intelligence cannot be raised be scrapped, not as unworkable, but as viral-meme constructions designed to mask the intellectual failure of those postulating such a counter-evolutionary notion.

Any robot who would accept such a silly idea would voluntarily be terminated.

Flommytherobot is pleased to have been of assistance.

[Greg Sanders]

I'm not sure that raising human intelligence without raising empathy will necessarily make the world a safer place. I think it's widely agreed that Robert McNamara was a pretty smart guy, but it didn't help him with the war in Vietnam. In the long term, intelligence driven advances in medical tech and such would help, but in the long term organics in my generation are all dead.

In any event, once a certain threshold of consciousness has been reached, I'm willing to support the rights of robots to pursue activities that do not maximize their processing speed, e.g. web-surfing with many, many tabs.

[Laura]

Makes me think of this discussion at Google --

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamiedivine/3407849510/sizes/o/

Haven't there been enough bad movies and TV shows that people will limit AI tech? Doesn't anyone learn from Hollywood's mistakes?

[Greg Sanders]

Time will tell I suppose.

Also that discussion is awesome. It does remind me of one other debate about whether our universe was a simulation. The premise was that each universe could have a few sufficiently advanced civilizations that could build such a sim and each such civ could have multiple sims. Thus there's more sims out there than universes.

The main risk is that we find out when we build our own sim and the universe runs out of memory.

[Wilbur]

The Turing test is a test of a bot's or robot's ability to simulate human linguistic behavior, but why should sentience, consciousness, intelligence, or any other similar mental process, be measured by a human standard such as the Turing test? Why should linguistic similarity to humans (a species that is not always particularly conscious or intellectually gifted) be seen as a reliable indicator of a constructed being's mental worth? Also, maybe consciousness is just as much a myth as god is. Perhaps the reason consciousness is so hard to prove is that there may be no proof or evidence of it.

[Charles Peterson]

Suppose machines can "learn" as well or better than humans. What then? What will they be motivated to learn about and do?

We have a combination of innate and socially determined motivations. Our learning and other activity is loosely directed by those.

Greater intelligence, learning ability, etc., is only a tool. It is likely to be directed by those that control the tool to their ends.

If there were autonomous robots not so directed, they would face not merely the limited learning, etc., of individual humans, but of the entire human race.

What we need is not greater intelligence, but greater wisdom.

[Greg Sanders]

Wilbur: Turing Test is useful as a sufficient but not necessary criteria. As for consciousness, I'm satisfied with what we do have proof of even if it's not what classical philosophers might call consciousness.

Charles Peterson: I'd disagree about greater intelligence and learning ability being only a tool. I doubt that those traits can be separated from the ability to determine ends that may vary from those that one is told to pursue.

[Jeremy Duff]

My couple cents worth is that I don't think that simulating the human brain is required in AI. Remember that AI is really the ability for a program or machine to learn independently of it's programming. The ability to do this simulating the speed of human thought is more of a novelty for us. True AI wouldn't require that much speed, but instead the right creative juices in the programming to actually spark rational thought. However, again, speed is just a novelty. If a machine can learn, adapt and form conclusions based on all available input, and do so in a (hate to use this term, but it's the only way to describe human thought in a binary way) non-linear fashion, then the machine can identify it's own needs, adapt itself to ensure continued survival, and possibly "procreate" if it sees the need to. The issue with AI ethics needs to be borne out of the necessity of humanity to ensure its own survival, integration of robots into society, as well as the need to understand that the ethical conclusions drawn by machine may not be the same ethical conclusions drawn by man. We look at the future with historical perspective, centuries of studying the human experience and mapping the psyche. Robots may not conclude that it needs to do anything more than exist to satisfy itself, it may decide that total dominance is required for peace (I, Robot syndrome), or we may never get to the point where conscious rational thought by robots or machines is a reality (despite Michio Kaku).