Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine

It's hard to express how much I am enjoying this book. The writing style is very active-voice and lucid. I'm sure there's a really good editor somewhere in this mix, but not even the best editor can rehabilitate turgid prose (witness the prose we all have to slog through in the vast majority of books on technical subjects). The editor of this book probably had the opposite problem: how not to get in the author's expository way. I don't know the author personally, but I can tell you this about him: he is truly educated. In the classical tradition. By that I mean he has not only been a student of things technical, he has been a student of great writing, poetry, social science, economics, politics and more. It's not that he attempts to parade his knowledge in these areas; rather, it's that his strong liberal arts education, very naturally, simply permeates his expository style. More than that, he has the rare ability to present complex topics in a way that any curious reader can comprehend. Isaac Asimov, R. Buckmister Fuller, Richard Feynman, Freeman Dyson and Carl Sagan are the writers of which the author reminds me. And, like the erudite writers in that list, it is quite obvious that the author is truly interested (dare I say fascinated?) in the subject about which he is writing. His enthusiasm is contagious. Above all, he wants you to "get it." I don't think I've read a book that was written this well and inspired me intellectually this much since I read R. Buckmister Fuller's "Utopia or Oblivion" back in 1968. That book changed my life. Now, forty years later, I find another book that is so well written and intellectually provocative that it may just change my life again. This is a fascinating book. You must read it. Seriously. J. Storrs Hall is the Robert Ludlum of non-fiction. The only time I put this book down is when I'm driving because I'm pretty sure reading and driving at the same time is illegal in my state. I'm even reading it while I write this (OK, that's not true - but you get my point). This book is a ripping good read. It'll tickle your neurons until they cry out for mercy.

BEYOND AI: CREATING THE CONSCIENCE OF THE MACHINE discusses both the scientific and the ethical challenges of artificial intelligence, which is advancing so quickly that it holds vast potential for quickly changing everyday human life - as vast as the Internet's realm. Computers are already capable of driving cars, playing soccer and organizing Web information: but if machine intelligence comes to rival human intelligence, will it eventually overcome humanity? This and other questions are addressed by a computer scientist who surveys achievements, potentials, and accompanying social challenges, making it a fine pick not just for libraries strong in computer studies, but for college-level and even general-interest holdings equally strong in social science.

The first two thirds of this book survey current knowledge of AI and make some guesses about when and how it will take off. This part is more eloquent than most books on similar subjects, and its somewhat different from normal perspective makes it worth reading if you are reading several books on the subject. But ease of reading is the only criterion by which this section stands out as better than competing books. The last five chapters that are surprisingly good, and should shame most professional philosophers whose writings by comparison are a waste of time. His chapter on consciousness, qualia, and related issues is more concise and persuasive than anything else I've read on these subjects. It's unlikely to change the opinions of people who have already thought about these subjects, but it's an excellent place for people who are unfamiliar with them to start. His discussions of ethics using game theory and evolutionary pressures is an excellent way to frame ethical discussions. My biggest disappointment was that he starts to recognize a possibly important risk of AI when he says "disparities among the abilities of AIs ... could negate the evolutionary pressure to reciprocal altruism", but then seems to dismiss that thoughtlessly ("The notion of one single AI taking off and obtaining hegemony over the whole world by its own efforts is ludicrous"). He probably has semi-plausible grounds for dismissing some of the scenarios of this nature that have been proposed (e.g. the speed at which some people imagine an AI would take off is improbable). But if AIs with sufficiently general purpose intelligence enhance their intelligence at disparate rates for long enough, the results would render most of the book's discussion of ethics irrelevant. The time it took humans to accumulate knowledge didn't give Neanderthals much opportunity to adapt. Would the result have been different if Neanderthals had learned to trade with humans? The answer is not obvious, and probably depends on Neanderthal learning abilities in ways that I don't know how to analyze. Also, his arguments for optimism aren't quite as strong as he thinks. His point that career criminals are generally of low intelligence is reassuring if the number of criminals is all that matters. But when the harm done by one relatively smart criminal can be very large (e.g. Mao), it's hard to say that the number of criminals is all that matters. Here's a nice quote from Mencken which this book quotes part of: Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I am not too sure.' Another interesting tidbit is the anecdote

At some point we will realize all the chatter we hear about "I don't want things to change" or "I'll never augment my mind or body" or "Maybe we'll return to the good old days" is just that - enpty chatter. There is no turning back from that wondrous, terrifying future and the remarkable element about this whole discussion (as noted in the book) is the incredibly short time it has taken to arrive at this plateau. Starting with simple instinctal behavior, humans began to augment themselves - through culture, rough tools, domesticated animals and then reworking nature itself. The Industrial Age accelerated this push and now, 300 years later, we are on the cusp of an undefinable, magical future. This is a fascinating read - in fact it should be a must read. We are not in the realm of science fiction any more and anyone who follows the daily "Kurzweil Technology Advancement Board" (my own term) realizes that the rate of advancement is ever-increasing almost daily as one discovery leads to an invention that allows yet another discovery - the wheel turns endlessly. What I especially liked were the serious discussions without exaggeration or wish-fulfillment, conservative time frames and realistic expectations. Implicit to any discussion of AI is an assessment of its past. One of the most informative parts of the whole book was the history of AI which is as much an evolution of ideas as it is technique, methods and machinery. We have gone form hoping AI could mimic humans to expecting it to surpass humankind. We read about both "hard" and "soft" AI, software and then that most important subject - the human qualities of AI. This last area may prove the most difficult in both design and concept since human opinions are both universal and individualistic and human emotions are nebulous. Those emotions may be - as the fundamentalist Darwinisns insist - simplay a result of trillions of "yes/no" switches but they interplay with our health, location, past events, future expectations, primal urges and societal forces. Our sense of morality derives from distinctly human edifices - culture, society, family and religion. Where would conscious machines learn morality? Will machines know that lying and disguise are a primary component of being human, of existing in the world. The problem is that we cannot conceive of what hyper intelligence thinks or even the dizzying pathways it employs for thinking or even if it "thinks" at all. There is an unnamed fear, the unspoken elephant in the room. If the Universe is teeming with life as many suggest and if sentience exists elsewhere than Earth, why haven't we seen evidence? Societies millions of years older should be traveling galazies, building wormholes, harnessing the very forces of the universe yet the continual silence and lack of anything remotely intelligent indicates we are the first. The alternative is more frightening - they surpassed their own "humanity" and by doing so, ensured their own ext

Hollywood and the science fiction literature has indulged themselves over the last few decades in the prospect of highly intelligent machines either taking over human affairs or in fact acting to completely destroy human civilization. Oddly, these scenarios presuppose that entities that possess high intelligence would engage in this type of control or violence. Possessing high intelligence is assumed to be uncorrelated with possessing a conscience, or even being inversely related to it. Such biases make for excellent movies and science fiction novels, but there is no evidence as yet that would support the notion that conscience is independent of intelligence, nor has there been a careful scientific study of the connection between the two. But even in some quarters in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), there are those who are worried about the prospects of intelligent machines unleashing havoc on human civilization. Are these worries justified, and if so, what can be done to thwart the construction of these kinds of machines? Can one indeed build a machine with a conscience or should such machines be built? This book gives a realistic appraisal of progress in artificial intelligence and sheds considerable light on these questions. It is careful to distinguish between fact and fiction, between what has been accomplished and what has not, and it does so without falling into the trap of extreme skepticism, the latter of which seems to happen to so many who are deeply involved in AI research. Indeed, after an initial period of extreme confidence in research results, and a designation as "intelligent", the confidence wanes until it is eventually viewed as a "trivial" discovery or merely a "program." There are many indications from the historical accounts of AI research that this pattern is repeated often. This author though takes the general reader through this history and also takes a view of future developments in artificial intelligence, discussing at various places in the book the possibility of a technological "singularity" sometime in the next fifty years. Readers who are curious about the status of machine intelligence will find an understandable overview in this book, but it can still be of interest to those, such as this reviewer, who are working "in the trenches" of applied artificial intelligence and are interested in the opinions of researchers affiliated with the academy. The author does not delve deeply into the technologies, algorithms, and mathematics for this type of reader, but there are some new ideas within the covers that definitely make the book worth reading. Machine intelligence has advanced, the author argues, and he gives many examples. Robots for example, can currently navigate with the same adeptness as a three-year old child, which is astounding considering what was possible just ten years ago. Readers who own and develop AIBO robot dogs will understand this claim, as their navigation abilities are impressive.