AI Panic!

Sadly, John McCarthy has passed away yesterday, at the age of 84.

McCarthy is one of the founding fathers of AI, he organized the important Dartmouth Conference, which is now considered as the defining event that pretty much created AI as a field (John McCarthy himself coined the term “Artificial Intelligence”).

As a mathematician, he championed the use of logic in AI, and invented the programming language Lisp in 1958, a multi-paradigm high-level language that quickly became the language of choice for artificial intelligence research. I found this nice and sad programming analogy earlier today on reddit:

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Anyone who codes in Lisp knows what it means to type a long series of close parentheses — the more parentheses, the bigger the work being brought to a close.

Unfortunately, in real life, we seldom get the opportunity to close all of those parens. Life just ends with a whole bunch of unmatched open parentheses.

In his later years, McCarthy became very interested in the sustainability of progress and looked into the question of simulated emotions (”The Robot and the Baby” is a lighthearted short story he wrote on the topic).

It is a sad day for us, having lost our proverbial father. In fact, it has been a sad month, with Dennis Ritchie (the inventor of C and co-creator of UNIX) also passing away.

Having a couple of raw drafts in wordpress, I never really got around to finish a proper post during the summer. But now that Michael Anissimov ended his summer break with a post on the non-storyness of the future, and I just had a nice post on Wall-E in my queue, I felt I had to waffle a bit about that topic, too. Damn peer pressure!

Last week I saw the new Pixar animated movie Wall-E, and I must say, it’s one of the best movies I’ve seen in a while. Although I have to admit that I’m a sucker for animated and movies loaded with special effects, critics agree with me here, and it’s already on #26 of the all time best movie list on imdb (Warning: minor spoilers ahead).

It’s an interesting story with lots of (heavily) anthropomorphised robots in it, which is already a gem for its slapstick and brilliant display of robotic “emotions” alone. However, it also picks up the classic idea of machines disobeying humans and robots acting on their own judgement, with an interesting twist: Mankind has to be saved by robots gone rogue that act against other command-obeying robots. Now if this conveys the right ideas to the younger audience, I don’t know. However, it makes the younger generation think about “what could happen if robots were ubiquitous and we relied entirely on this autopilot?”.

Wall-E draws an exaggerated but hilarious picture of our future selves of what I’d consider American unlimited consumerism. In an almost matrix-esque way humans are reduced to stupid meatballs without any sense of reality. But I guess that’s necessary in order for the audience to sympathise even more with the robotic protagonists. And, by the way, from a “real AI” point-of-view the programming of the robots in Wall-E isn’t very sound. They possess all kinds of human characteristics that make absolutely no sense to be programmed into specialised robots (such as trembling because of fear) while they lack others (a robot with a full-blown personality, but no proper sound output?). But of course, that’s not the point of a movie. The content was made interesting on a human level, as Michael phrased it.

This cunning bridge brings us right to his the future is not a story-post. Micheal argues that only stories that humans can relate to are interesting:

For a story to be interesting to humans, it has to feature interesting content occurring at the human level. [...] Conversely, humans cannot write meaningful stories about content above the human level, because we lack the cognitive complexity to imagine such things.

Now, ignoring that the “human level” doesn’t seem to be a fixed barrier to me that cannot be moved, this ironically reminds a bit of religious beliefs into a superiour being: God moves in mysterious ways. And, staying in this limping analogy, many people find god quite interesting, although his motives of letting millions of children starve are indeed mysterious.

Of course, I could have just fallen in this very trap of being unable to imagine anything above the human level, but I just don’t think transhuman (AI) actions will be that much more incomprehensible than, say, a superpower declaring war on a small country to get their natural resources under some false pretenses (WMDs, for example).

Total annihilation is also what Michael has in mind when thinking about unfriendly AIs:

More likely, when confronted by a recursively self-improving unFriendly AI with abstract mathematical goals unrelated to human concerns, the simple outcome is death.

Obviousy, this is not content above the human level, because we just imagined it. You could even call it interesting, as it is definitely relating to human concerns. Hey - maybe we should make a movie out of this!

I agree with Michael on the “interestingness bias” (authors make up showy stories to get attention), especially when fiction is sold as science and scentific authors get carried away by stories that start with “no, it we will survive, because…” and then go on with some fancy explanation, that reduce to “or not” when we apply logic or - God forbid! - occams razor to it. However, I don’t really see a worrisome problem with all that. Of course, the “true” threat might be waved aside as fiction, but that may be true for every futuristic scenario. The more we talk about it, the better. And to be honest, most of the futuristic movies nowadays assume rogue robots anyway, so we’re well prepared!

I’ve been home and relaxing a bit over Easter the last days, and didn’t get around to write much on AI Panic (partly because I wanted to have Wikipedia on my MP3-Player which took a while to program). Although most of the stuff that happened is already yesterdays news now, I feel I should mention it anyways, as it is relevant or interesting to AI. 

An elderly man has killed himself by programming a robot to shoot him in the head after building the machine from plans downloaded from the internet. Apparently, he used a jigsaw power tool that was connected to a .22 semi-automatic to create a “robot” that could fire multiple shots once triggered remotely (i guess by connecting the plug of the jigsaw tool to the power supply). This simple contraption (althoug remarkably complex for an 81 year old who’s tired of life) is nowhere near a modern, autonomous robot. It is just way too much hassle to put a sophisticated AI into a machine whose single purpose is killing its creator. Remember, we are talking about suicide machines here, so the “user” of that machine actually cooperates and works towards its goal. So I see no danger from the AI side in these robots. Military robots are more likely to turn into suicide robots — unintentionally.

Wired has a very well written and long article about Ray Kurzweil. It covers his early inventions that earned him his first little fortune while still an undergraduate, his reading machines for the blind, his pills to extend his life and of course his thoughts on the technological singularity. Nothing ground-breaking, but if you want to have glimpse into Ray Kurzweils life it is a good read.

There is an interesting paper on Utilitarian Essays about Friendly AI. The author analyses an approach called CEV (Coherent Extrapolated Volition) and his concerns with this approach. The essay does not deal at all with an AI turing evil, but only with the problems of extrapolating volition. There are three concerns the author rises: whose volitions to extrapolate, what about wild animals and lab universes and possible ramifications for religion. I’m not yet familiar enough with CEV to feel competent to criticise the raised points extensively (Michael Anissimov has some more interesting thoughts on the essay). Some quick questions that crossed my mind would be: How big is the role of primal urges and drives in general volition? Will we be able to do anything at all if we decide to always decrease suffering in every creature that can suffer? How can lab universes physically exist at all? What if we don’t like the extrapolated volition (”Trust me, it’s all for your best!”)?

Pioneering science fiction writer, visionary and futurist Arthur C. Clarke, best known for his work on the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (where he created the prime example of an AI turned bad, HAL 9000), has died in his adopted home of Sri Lanka at the age of 90 on the 19th of March. He was also known for “inventing” the idea of geostationary satellites and was the last living of the “big three” science fiction writers. The two others were the Russian-born Isaac Asimov, who died in 1992, and Robert A. Heinlein, a Missouri native who died in 1988. Although he didn’t believe in an afterlife (or religion), he does live on through his brilliant works and ideas.

Also, I’m happy that my blog has been mentioned by Michael Anissimov during a Radio Interview and my post on COSPAL has been picked up by io9, which gave me a new visitor record of whopping 120 visitors on one day. I know I know, but you have to cherish the small things in life … and I don’t think thats too bad for a blog only 2 months old. AI Panic was also the Site Of The Week on scifi.com a while back, which is cool! I am quite surprised how quick I got addicted to media attention once the blog was up, sometimes I catch myself just watching the visitor counter go up and checking where all the visitors come from… Thanks for reading, dear visitor

Our death is our last service for the world: If we didn’t clear the path, following generations would not have to recreate human culture. It would become stiff, changeless, thus dead. And with the death of culture everything human would perish, too.

– Joseph Weizenbaum in one of his last e-mails (translated from German)

Joseph Weizenbaum died yesterday at the age of 85 in Berlin from a stroke.

Born in Berlin, Germany to Jewish parents, he escaped Nazi Germany in 1936, emigrating with his family to the United States. He started studying mathematics in 1941 in the US, but his studies were interrupted by the war, during which he served in the military. Around 1950 he worked on analog computers, and helped create a digital computer for Wayne State University. In 1955 he worked for General Electric on the first computer used for banking, and in 1963 took a position at MIT.

In 1966, he published a comparatively simple program called ELIZA which demonstrated natural language processing by engaging humans into a conversation resembling that with an empathic psychologist. The program applied pattern matching rules to the human’s statements to figure out its replies. (Programs like this are now called chatterbots.) Weizenbaum was shocked that his program was taken seriously by many users, who would open their hearts to it. He started to think philosophically about the implications of Artificial Intelligence and later became one of its leading critics. His influential 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason displays his ambivalence towards computer technology and lays out his case: while Artificial Intelligence may be possible, we should never allow computers to make important decisions because computers will always lack human qualities such as compassion and wisdom. This he saw as a consequence of their not having been raised in the emotional environment of a human family.

I feel honoured to have met Joseph Weizenbaum in person about three years ago, when he gave a lecture at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany. He was a very charismatic and gifted speaker with important messages that not enough people take to heart, even I did not, at that time.

Farewell, Joseph Weizenbaum.

(Paragraphs about Weizenbaums life taken from Wikipedia, quotation found at heise.de)