AI Panic!

1.14285714 is Google’s answer when you search for eight days of a week. On the first glance, this doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. However, with some clever deduction, you’ll find that it apparently uses days and week as durations, so days a week would be 7. So 8 of 7 is then the result you can see up there. I think it is very interesting that this Google Calculator output appears funny and a bit confusing to us humans. We’re not expecting to get a floating point number as a result to this query, yet Google’s pattern matching happily identifies a proper formula it can use and number-crunches away.

Although this is just a small oddity that is not even a bug in Google, it is a good example for a much deeper running, fundamental problem not only the big search engine providers have to fight with: How do we recognize what is important in a statement? What is its likely purpose? How can we distinguish the purpose of a query such as eight days a week from five feet in meters? Calling these questions difficult would let a good opportunity to use the phrase hardest problem of our time go to waste. Okey, I know this is an exaggeration, but as far as AI problems are concerned, it gets close.

The definition of understanding is not straight forward, many definitions involve the words concepts,  classification, relationship, awareness and abstraction. In AI, it is often the background knowledge which is the problem. You need to have sufficient background knowledge to understand what is going on, what is meant, what is not meant, or that nothing is meant at all. I think especially this last type of understanding is hard: without a concept of “nonsense”, we’ll have to use the process of elimination to find out that none of the existing concepts fit in our case. I’m quite sure that it will take very long before a computer is able to find the (admittedly overused) picture on the left funny. Even if we discount the difficulty of image recognition, which has an even longer way to go still.

I’m not an expert on the field of natural language processing, but I bet Google employs hordes of the finest minds in this area to cope with the problem of ambiguity, meaning and the understanding of short utterances. No doubt they (and all the other search engine providers) have the best algorithms in existence to get a glimpse on the thoughts their users. While the search engines get smarter and smarter, the steps taken are still only very small and on the lowest slopes of the huge mountains ahead on the path to true artificial understanding, distillation of meaning, and thus artificial general intelligence. The problem is far from solved, and thus my AI Panic Level decreases a bit, say by -1.14285714%. A lot of people are working on it, but progress is slow, and it won’t get any easier soon. Maybe the semantic web and - dare I say it - web 3.0 will help. But that’s a story for another time.

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!

The University of Pennsylvania has built a new self-reconfigurable robot, which can, as the name suggests, assemble itself after it has been kicked apart. Of course it is not much more than three robots with a smart communication, orientation and interfacing system, but as the atomic units get smaller these compound robots might actually get useful for, say, building a liquid metal Terminator.

There is also a high-resolution version available at the youtube page of the video.

(Via NewScientist)

The game of Go has been one of the last big board games where artificial intelligence strength was nowhere near experienced players, let alone master grade professionals. During a recent Go tournament in Paris however, a professional 5th Dan grade player, Catalin Taranu, was beaten by a computer program (diagram and picture of the match below).

The catch is, it was played only on a 9×9 field, which is smaller than the usual 19×19 field. This no doubt had part in the victory, as the overwhelming state-space is reduced from 10¹⁷⁰ to 10³⁸ possible game positions (chess: about 10⁵²).

According to Earth News, that was the first ever recorded victory of a machine over a Go master (in a sanctioned non-blitz game). The culprit is the MoGo artificial intelligence engine. It has been developed by INRIA - the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control - running on a Bull NovaScale supercomputer. During the 3-game match on the 22nd March 2008, MoGo managed to win the second game. On a 19×19 board it was weaker, losing with against Taranu, who had a handicap of 9 stones.

About ten years ago, the then strongest Go program, The Many Faces of Go, lost against a master level player although he had a 29 stone handicap.

To be honest, this is about the speed I expect research to have here, sooner or later processing power and better algorithms will make computers unbeatable in any game with logical rules, and Go is argued to be the most complex of all games. If you happen to know a complexity theorist, she will be happy to certify you that the complexity of Go is nasty EXPTIME-complete, which is not where you want to be (assuming you are a computer program and want to be fast when you’re grown up), really. That’s why it is nigh to impossible to ever “solve” Go, but it shouldn’t be too hard to win against us puny earthlings - even on a proper-sized board.

We have been trying to model our successors robot servants to resemble human beings physically and psychically for a while now. While the psychical development is taking its first steps out of its literal infancy, the physical resemblance has still a long way to go. It has to cross the uncanny valley:

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost, but not entirely, like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s lifelikeness.

This valley is the major hurdle towards believable and likeable humanoid model, be it robots, 3D animations or game avatars.

A common bail-out here is to depict characteristics generally considered humanoid by transmuting or exaggerating these features. Comics and the typical Pixar CGI movies are a very good example. The suspension of disbelief is the key factor here: We accept that comic-like depictions are there to interpret reality and show us a filtered, deliberately unrealistic image of the plot. It is very easy for our imagination to fill in the gaps and to ignore physical inaccuracies.

This gets much harder when we try to be as realistic as possible by using correct proportions, complex shading and detailed textures. The movie Beowulf almost perfectly falls into this category: It is completely CGI, but uses real actors and tries to simulate reality. While still-images still look alright, it is the animations where it goes downhill. The trailer has some examples in it, especially the horse animations look wrong, which is much more obvious in the actual movie (while technically not directly a humanoid animation, the galloping horses still add to the feeling that something is wrong with the depicted “reality”).

While not directly concerned with the uncanny valley, some military robots are quite creepy in my opinion. For example the Boston Dynamics “Big Dog”, which somehow looks like two soldiers bending over and pushing against each other. In a sense, it is the opposite to Beowulf: The movement, especially when it tries to regain its balance or slips on ice, looks quite natural, but the visual appearance (and sound) is really disturbing.

Scientists from the MIT are trying - but not quite managing - to avoid the valley with a robot using the comic-approach. They have developed the Nexi, a what they call MDS robot - mobile, dexterous, social. Both the pictures of this robot and the video of Nexi talking and gesticulating look a bit creepy, the robot reminds me of Jigsaw from the movie Saw.

They say that the “purpose of this platform is to support research and education goals in human-robot interaction, teaming, and social learning.”

The antipathy the uncanny valley introduces leads to a potential problem when regarding this social aspect of human-robot interaction: Once humans start to enhance themselves with transhuman enhancements, for example improved eye-sight, nanobots that increase the IQ or prostheses that work better than their natural counterparts, there may be a sudden rift between enhanced and “normal” humans, caused by the antipathy mentioned above. This hypothesis was introduced by Jamais Cascio, who further states that once such technologies gain further distance from human norms, “transhuman” individuals would cease to be judged on human levels and instead be regarded as separate entities altogether (this point is what has been dubbed “posthuman“), and it is here that acceptance would rise once again out of the uncanny valley.

I think the idea of the uncanny valley makes it harder for malicious AIs to undermine human civilisation, as fear of robots is more easily sparked with the help of uncanny-valley-antipathy (AI Panic -1%). However, the concept might be known to an intelligence, and thus we might see robots that does not look like human beings at all - or worse, like our childhood Disney-heroes!

With the military building scary armed robots already, it was about time for robots that are scared of these monsters. Phobot, a Lego Mindstorms Robot built by students from the University of Amsterdam, is exactly that: A robot that is scared of bigger robots.

Now here comes the pedagogical value: It can “learn” to lose its fear by conditioning it with increasingly big and evil looking things. The process, shown in the video below, is meant to help children with phobias to learn that not everything is as scary and bad as it seems. Especially not the autonomous sentry gun protecting the kindergarten. Enjoy!

(Via Spiegel Online)

The march towards learning, fully functional AI systems has taken another step. A cognitive AI system with the intelligence level of a puppy has been created to learn and perform simple tasks through a robotic arm.

Sure, a puppy is (often) quite stupid, but that achievement should not be underestimated, especially as the researchers at the EU-funded COSPAL project claim that this level of cognition and learning goes beyond the current state of the art.  They combine artificial neural networks (ANNs) to control low-level motor actions and a classical rule-based system to combine these actions to form a plan.

Although this advancement of AI potentially is a step towards a fully aware system, i.e., an AI system that is able to reason and learn from all its surrounding world information (for example through a common sense knowledge database), it is not an unexpected development nor something close to self-awareness, as Michael Felsberg from the research team at Linköping University explains:

In human terms, our robot is probably like a two or three year old child, and it will take a long time for the technology to progress into the equivalent of adulthood. I don’t think we will see it in our lifetimes.

His pessimism shows that Artificial General Intelligence is still quite far out, and while I think he might be overestimating the time-span for it (alas, the Singularity is scheduled earlier than after our lifetimes), he’s still one of the researchers on the forefront of AI research, and thus I think it is safe to say that we will still have to wait quite a while before smart enough AIs appear that could be dangerous (AI Panic -2%).

(Via PhysOrg.com)

What if the people you talk to, play with and interact with in Second Life weren’t human at all? Granted, none of them is literally human anyway, but almost all of them are actually controlled by someone sitting in front of a computer. Not all are.

You might run into a little, 4 year old child that appears to be reasonably smart and is able to reason about its surroundings. This child is controlled by a program. A program that is able to reason about its own beliefs to draw conclusions in a manner that matches human children its age.

The program is the result of research conducted by a group around Selmer Bringsjord at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. According to ScienceDaily, Bringsjord says:

Truly convincing autonomous synthetic characters must possess memories; believe things, want things, remember things. Such characters can only be engineered by coupling logic-based artificial intelligence and computational cognitive modeling techniques with the processing power of a supercomputer. [...] The logico-mathematical theory will include rigorous, declarative definitions of all of the concepts central to a theory of the mind, including lying, betrayal, and even evil.

Using Second Life as a platform for this makes sense. Reducing the communication bandwidth is a common trick to lower the barrier of believability. Even the good ol’ Alan Turing limited the interaction for his famous Turing test to test if a computer can demonstrate intelligence to a text chat. Second Life is reasonably close to that, avatars can easily be controled by keyboard commands.

Building agents based on the theory of mind (which describes the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one’s own) is a step towards an artificial general intelligence, and thus towards a real threat (or a great opportunity, depends on who you ask). And indeed, this project was presented a couple of days ago at the Artificial General Intelligence conference held at the University of Memphis.

I believe there is a high risk connected to the creation of such an intelligence, it is easy to think of hypothetical scenarios in which a reasoning system concludes that humans are a risk and need to be wiped out. Although testing such an agent in a virtual world is a good idea to realise what it is capable of and evaluating the actual risk of it, once the tools are there the step into the real life will be taken quickly. And sure enough, Selmer Bringsjord has plans to apply the technlogy to education and homeland defense. Good thing the system has no sense of lying, betrayal and isn’t evil…

The researchers want to build an interface with a certain resemblance to the holodecks in Star Trek for direct interaction of agents with human beings. While this definitely sounds like science fiction, it has to be taken seriously. They have the support of strong industrial partners and want to use the worlds most powerful university-based supercomputing system at the CCNI.

The research is still in an early stage and the Second Life results are far away from being strong AI, but they might well bring us closer to an artificial general intelligence, thus raising the AI Panic Level by +1%. I don’t know whether the system they are working on will achieve a level of strong AI (most likely not), and even if it does, we don’t know if it will be good or bad. I’ll finish with a quote from the group’s research homepage, which interestingly enough seems to answer that thought:

An advanced synthetic character, however, can literally be evil, because it has the requisite desires, beliefs, and cognitive powers.

This post has nothing directly to do with Artificial Intelligence, but astronomy is one of my other big interests and I thought I’d share the interesting topic of the most powerful explosions in the universe with you.

When someone asks what the biggest, most energetic events in the universe are, Gamma Ray Bursts are a good bet. These incredibly powerful explosions happen when the core of a very massive, fast rotating star collapses to form a black hole and surrounding matter of the outer hulls of the dying star fall towards the black hole. Due to the fast rotation and the acceleration towards the hole, the matter heats up and powers a powerful jet of gamma radiation that blasts outward through the “poles” of the rotating system (see illustration below). At least, that is what the most popular theory of GRBs says, the whole thing is still poorly understood.

The power these bursts have is incredible: If one would happen 6000 light years away from earth, it might cause a mass extinction (according to the History Channel, so take it with a grain of salt!). Also, just some seconds within the beam might cause a lot (some say 30-50%) of earth’s ozone layer to disappear. The whole ozone layer damage we saw in the last decades had only about 5% of the layer disappearing! So, we’d rather not have a GRB happen near us.

The likelihood of such a burst striking earth very slim. GRBs are very rare events, and if a burst happens, the jets are very concentrated and thin. However, the odds are not zero.

Now, there is a binary star system called WR 104 about 8000 light years away from us near the center of the milkyway. After all the introduction about gamma ray bursts and lethal explosions and stuff, it is no coincidence I bring this system up:

The brighter of the two stars might, just maybe kinda possibly, be ready to go GRB on us. It’s not at all clear if it can, and there is reason to believe it can’t (young stars like this one tend to have characteristics that make it very hard for them to form an actual GRB). Also, even if it does blow up that way, the beams are a double-edged sword; yes, they pack an unbelievable punch, but they’re narrow. A GRB would have to be aimed precisely at us to damage us, and the odds of that are pretty low.

Except that for WR 104, it’s possible the star does have us in its sights.

That’s an excerpt from an article Phil Plait wrote about WR 104 in his excellent blog BadAstronomy.com. Phil goes on to say that there are a lot of other variables like the distance, matter between us and the star, the time it will explode and so on which decrease the probability of the star being a direct danger to us substantially. So most likely, nothing is going to happen, and if something happens, it probably won’t affect us at all.

Alas, a Gamma Ray Burst that hits us would most likely mean the end of most life on the planet, and with it the development of an universal AI (thus justifying this astronomy article here, phew!). Therefore such an catastrophic astronomical event (and that includes hits by asteroids, attacks by extraterrestrial lifeforms and so on) decreases the AI Panic Level by -0.1%. Actually I think the danger of these events is still lower, but I don’t want to go into hundredths of percents, and therefore rounded it up.

I hope you bore with me here and don’t find astronomy too boring, I certainly don’t!

Ray Kurzweil gave a keynote speech at this years GDC in which he adressed the future of gaming (a bit) and the future of mankind (a lot). Most of the readers of this blog are probably familiar with Ray Kurzweil and his theories. In short, he proposed the law of accelerating returns which will lead to a technological singularity in about 20-30 years. He extends Moore’s Law to the future and uses it (among other indicators) to predict future values for chip densities, prices, computing power, etc. The exponential acceleration of these values will lead to massive and fundamental changes in the way we live and work, culminating in self-replicating and -improving machines, which triggers an explosion in technological advancement, as the human as innovating factor is eliminated.

As far as I can tell, the keynote speech last Thursday did not contain any results that have not been discussed in one of his previous talks about that matter, Kurzweil just added some game related stuff at the beginning, saying how “game” was an unfortunate name, because it stressed the disconnection from reality, but games are increasingly interwoven with reality (just like talking to someone over the telephone is not virtual). More info on the keynote can be found at 1up and the Escapist.

The law of accelerating returns and the technological singularity pretty much state that a strong AI will be created in the very near future. The singularity, if it so happens, will most likely produce an intelligence superiour to our own. While Ray Kurzweil sees a positive future here, talking about eternal life and friendly AI, this vision seems unlikely to me. Especially considering the inherent malevolence of generic AI algorithms, the probability of a hostile AI is high, I rise the AI Panic Level by +10%. This rise is not an effect of the keynote speech from Ray Kurzweil, but more a result of the discussion of the singularity and accelerating return theories.

The theories are compelling. The statistical foundation Kurzweil provides is reasonable and I can’t see many reasons why Kurzweils predictions should be wrong (a nuclear war would be one, but we surely do not want that!).

Alas, we’re up for some interesting times in the next 25 years, lets try to make the best of it! By which I mean, proactively promote the need for AI safety regulations (for example in the form of technological frameworks or social infrastructures)!