The always entertaining (habitually entertaining?) Jaron Lanier (Rasta-haired VR guru) wrote an opinion editorial piece for the New York Times "The First Church of Robotics" which confronts the inevitable hubris-spiral as humans react to the ever quickening pace of development in robotics and AI. Jaron is always a bit of a fear monger – anything for a show – but he leaves lots of fun emotional/societal/technology nuggets to snatch up and digest.

A pull quote for Monica and the rest of us word graph-ers:

"Consider too the act of scanning a book into digital form. The historian George Dyson has written that a Google engineer once said to him: “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an A.I.” While we have yet to see how Google’s book scanning will play out, a machine-centric vision of the project might encourage software that treats books as grist for the mill, decontextualized snippets in one big database, rather than separate expressions from individual writers. In this approach, the contents of books would be atomized into bits of information to be aggregated, and the authors themselves, the feeling of their voices, their differing perspectives, would be lost."

After bemoaning the loss of human trust in human decisions (Lanier says we risk this as we habituate to the use of recommendation engines like Pandora and Amazon), he discusses the tendency amongst AI and Robotics enthusiasts to replace traditional religious notions of transcendence and immortality with the supposed rapture that is the coming Singularity – who needs God when you've a metal friend smart enough to rebuild you every time you wear out?.

Cautioning fellow scientists he writes:

"We serve people best when we keep our religious ideas out of our work."

The separation of church and work! Good luck. Most of us don't have an internal supreme court to vigilantly enforce such high moral standards. The whole concept of a "religious scientist" seems to me a non-starter –like a "vegetarian carnivore".

Yet, as a hard atheist, I applaud Jaron's thesis. To me, science is, at base, the act of learning to get better at recognizing the difference between myopic want-driven self interest and the foundational truths that give rise to the largest most inclusive (universal) vantage – and then doing everything in one's power to avoid confusing the two. As we build towards this post-biological evolutionary domain, crystal clear awareness of this difference has never been more important.

Those of us pursuing "hard" AI, AI that reasons autonomously as we do(?), eventually discuss the capacity of a system to flexibly overlay patterns gleaned from one domain onto other domains. Yet, at least within the rhetorically noisy domain of existential musings, we humans seem almost incapable of achieving to this bar. Transhumanists and Cryonicists can identify religious thinking when it involves guys in robes swinging incense, yet are incapable of assigning the "religious" tag when the subject matter involves nano-bot healing tanks or n-life digital-upload-of-the-soul heaven simulations.

Why does it matter? Traditional human ideas about transcendence are exclusively philosophical. The people inhabiting traditional religious heavens (and hells) don't eat our food, drink our water, breath our air, consume our electricity, or compete for our land or placement in our schools. Yet the new-age, digital, post-singularity, friendly-AI omnipotence scheme isn't abstract or etherial… the same inner fear of death in these schemes leads to a world in which humans (a small, exclusive, rich, and arrogant subset of human kind) never actually die, don't end up on another plain, stay right here thank you very much, and continue to eat and drink and build houses and consume scarce resources along side anyone unfortunate enough to be enjoying(?) their first life right now.

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by… " Howl, Allen Ginsberg, 1955

Every generation must at some point gather the courage to stand up and give an accounting for its own inventive forms of arrogant blindness and the wastefulness that litters its meandering. When it is our turn, we will have to laugh and cry at our silly and dangerous taking that is the reification of the "life ever after" fantasy. And while we are confessing hubris, we might as well admit our myopic obsession with "search". Google has been our very own very shiny golden cow (is it simply because there aren't any other cows left standing?).

When self interest goes head to head with a broader vantage, vantage wins. Vantage wins by looking deep into the past and the future and seeing that change trumps all. I guess it comes down to the way that an entity selects the scope of its own boundaries. If an entity thinks itself a bounded object living right now, it will resist change in itself or its environment. I can hear the rebuttal, "Entities not driven by selfishness won't protect themselves and won't successfully compete." Entities who see themselves as an actual literal extension of a scheme stretching from the beginning of time laugh at the mention of living forever… because they already do!

The scheme never dies.

Germain to this discussion is how a non-bounded definition of self impacts the decisions one makes as regards the allocation of effort and interest. What would Thermodynamics do?

"…Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life!… " Ulysses, Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Is there something about the development of AI that is qualitatively different than any challenge humans have previously undertaken? Most human labors are not radically impacted by philosophy. A shoe designer might wrestle with the balance between aesthetics and comfort or between comfort and durability, between durability and cost, but questions of to whom or what they choose to pray, or how they deal with death, don't radically impact the shoes they design.

There seems little difference between the products of hindu and christian grocers, between the products of Muslim and atheist dentists, road builders, novel writers, painters, gynecologists, and city planners. Even when you compare the daily labor of those practitioners that directly support a particular philosophy; the Monks, the Pastors, the Priests, the Imams, the Holy Them's… you find little difference.

So why should AI be different? Why should it matter who does AI and what world views they hold? I think it is because the design of AI isn't an act in reference to God, it isn't even "playing" God – it is quite literally, actually being God.

[part 1 of 2]

The Separation of Church and Labor
[part 2 of 2]

What training do we humans, we mammals, we vertebrates, we animals, we eukaryotes, we biological entities, what does our past offer us as preparation for acting the part of God?

It is true that each of us are the singular receptacles of an unbroken chain of evolutionary learning. The lessons of fourteen thousand million years of trial and error are encoded into the very fabric of our being. We are walking talking reference tables of what works in evolution. Yet very little of that information deals with any kind of understanding or explanation of the process. Nowhere in any of this great tome of reference in the nucleus of each of our cells does there exist any information that would give context. There is no "this is why evolution works" or "this is why this chunk of genetic code works in the context of the full range of potential solutions" coded into our DNA or our molecular or atomic or quantum structure.

And that makes sense. Reasons and context are high order abstraction structures and biology has been built up from the most simple to the most simple of the complex. It is only within the thinnest sliver of the history of evolution that there been any structural scheme complex enough to wield (store and process) structures as complex as abstraction or language.

We are of evolution yet none of our structure encodes any knowledge of evolution as a process. What we do know about the process and direction of change we have had to build through culture, language, inquiry. Which is fine, if that is, you have hundreds (or thousands) of millions of years and a whole planet smack in the energy path of a friendly star. This time around we are interested in an accelerated process. No time for blindly exploring every dead end. This time around we explore by way of a map. The map we wield is an abstracted model of the essential influences that shape reality in this universe. The "map" filters away all of the universe that is simply instance of pattern, economically holding only the patterns themselves. The map is the polarized glasses that allow us to ignore anecdote and repetition, revealing only essence, salience.

What biology offers in stead of a map is a sophisticated structural scheme for the playing of a very wasteful and blind form of planet wide billiards, a trillion trillion monkeys typing on a trillion trillion DNA typewriters, a sort of evolutionary brownian motion where direction comes at the cost of almost overwhelming failure.

And again we ask, "Why does it matter?" Imagine a large ocean liner – say the Queen Elizabeth II. Fill its tanks with fuel, point it in the right direction, and it will steam across any ocean. It really doesn't matter what kind of humans you bring aboard, or what they do once they there. A big ship, once built, will handle an amazing array of onboard activity or wild shifts in weather. Once built, a ship's structure is so stable and robust that its behavior becomes every bit as predictable. But if you brought dancing girls, water slides, and drunk retirees into the offices of the navel architects while they were designing the ship, it probably wouldn't make it out of the dry dock. The success of any project is unequally sensitive to the initial stages of its development. Getting it right, up front, is more than a good idea, it is the only way any project ever gets built. Acquiring the knowledge to be a passenger on a ship is far easier than acquiring the knowledge to design or build it.

We General AI researchers work at the very earliest stage of a brand new endeavor. This ship has never been built before. Ships have never been built. In a very real sense, "building" has never been built before. We have got to get this right. Where navel architects must first acquire knowledge of hydrodynamics, about structural engineering, material science, propulsion, navigation, control systems, ocean depths, weather systems, currents, geography, etc., AI researchers must bring to the project an understanding of pattern, language, information, logic, processing, mathematics, transforms, latency, redundancy, communication, memory, causality, abstraction, limits, topology, grammar, semantics, syntactics, compression, etc.

But this is where my little ship design analogy falls short. AI requires a category of knowledge not required of any other engineering endeavor. Intelligence is a dynamic and additive process, what gets built tomorrow is totally dependent on what gets built today. Building AI therefore requires an understanding of the dynamics of change itself. I guess you could say the same of any system, but there is something necessarily "black-box" about intelligence. As an evolutionary system intelligence depends upon an active and practical minimalism that appears to repel real time monitoring from within. How does a system evolve towards greater complexity handling capacity when that system causally resists the construction of internal fitness metrics?

Do we understand change?

[to be continued]

Randall, Who’s out there? Is it just me and you talking to ourselves? I see 78 views of this discussion thread. I saw 98 regarding the last one I hosted. There were routinely 4 or 5 views added every time we added a response apart from the editing we did to them. So, someone is looking. What are they too self-centered and here only to take some freebee? What else, they can’t type or maybe they can’t think? Even some arrogant implication of how base we are would be better than this vacuum. If it’s going to be just you and I, we can do that much better on the phone! Let me know what you think. By the way, nice stuff this. Lex

Lex, I can't possibly know. My "intuition" says that people (you and I included) are mostly caught up in our own momentums… hurtling through idea space on the straight or barely parabolic lines of which Newton would be proud. It is rare indeed when any two people find themselves on parallel paths at the same time, and impossible that their accelerations will match well enough to maintain that fleeting locality.

To most people, these posts are exactly and only an annoyance. If not, they are but barely audible mumblings in the distance (as most of their posts are, from my perspective).

If someone invented faith in a world that had never seen it, you'd see a lot of very different people sitting around together until deep delta's became obvious, splinter groups formed, and people drifted out on their own vectors. I seriously doubt that you and I share much intellectual territory or intent. What we do share is an interest in asking the big questions, and we don't seem to mind being wrong and awkward in public if that is what it takes to feel around in the darkness that is complexity and information and computation.

Also, people are busy. Most people have to protect their image for very real professional and academic reasons. It is common nature for humans to persecute those who disregard public opinion. This too can be explained practically – which Pied Piper do we follow when we know that most will lead us off a cliff? Great (causally accurate) ideas are first introduced by brilliant minds. Most minds aren't brilliant. Why should non-brilliant minds trust ideas they don't or can't understand and the people giving voice to them? The ideas that resonate with the most minds are ideas that support or pretend to support personal transcendence. I can't think of a causally accurate idea that supports transcendence. There are plenty of rhetorical methods by which a causally accurate idea can be dressed up and pass as supporting transcendence. Peer review at this level simply doesn't exist. We have noisy minds… minds that seek reinforcement of ideas born of individual survival… our minds select for hubris.

I remind myself that ideas remain philosophy until they are reified as physical systems. We must periodically build before we get overly upset that everyone is skeptically reticent of our words when the best we have to prop them up upon is still more words.

What form of insanity allows a person to actually act on their own hunches? Of social daredevils, what percentage are saying things that will prove to illuminate more than just the insides of their own cognitive house of mirrors?

Randall

P.S. On a practical note, I feel compelled to explain that I have a tendency to interact with this discussion system in a post/edit/re-post cycle that artificially boosts the times-viewed stats. Impetuous! Meetup reports 891 members of this group! How many are still active, still interested, still alive? Eventually, the meetup organization is going to have to find an algorithmic way of dealing with attrition, drift, and relationship/employment/sales leads phishing.

And, yes, I have been actively vampired (though not in this group) by intellectual parasites seeking sound bytes and cutting edge pull quotes they can wield in lunch rooms or around white boards as their own. The most obvious of these was desperately over his head in a Ph.D. program he had been forced into by an unrelenting family and the political structure of an emerging 2nd world government desperate for academic status. There are people who haunt these meetups for the same reasons that realtors and insurance agents go to church… "networking".

Randall, Well developed perspective. Thanks!

“I seriously doubt that you and I share much intellectual territory or intent.”

Interesting that you would point this out. I recall in my youth when it occurred to me that I was different from others. At that time it was only a slight difference but it mattered. I could maneuver where they could not. That slight difference in perspective allowed my views to have the content that theirs were missing. I received attention for this. But to me it was remarkable just how slight those differences really were. If they were to have taken an extra second or two to consider some detail, their conclusion would have been entirely different. This is the point where conceptualization enters. Not the quantitative ability to conceptualize that hardware provides but the debilitative effect that aggregates of procedural concept can represent intellectually. Major concepts such as personal self image and minor concepts such as religion curtail our abilities. They prevent the exercise of our minds in ways that normally would allow greater understanding. Also diverse is the manner of which the capabilities of those abilities do blossom and how they represent themselves. Furthermore, this does serve to illuminate a basic concept: Intelligence forms from conceptual aggregation. I do see that our “intellectual territory or intent” is on different grounds. Reality suggests that it’s unimportant regarding the task at hand. However, discussion and investigation are important and I don’t see much of that here.

Though there is much in your last post I don't understand (overly compressed), I am particularly hopeful that you might take the time to explain these two sentences:

"This is the point where conceptualization enters. Not the quantitative ability to conceptualize that hardware provides but the debilitative effect that aggregates of procedural concept can represent intellectually."

Randal, In the case of religion, if you believe in god than you aren’t going to be able to benefit from the expansion of other universal theories that are available. It is procedural in the regard that this one concept of “God” prevents procession into other more meaningful and complex concepts. In a broader sense, self-image is profoundly limiting in nature. This is a well-known fact. But the important aspect here is that it is a concept and it contains aggregates. Some of these aggregates buff you up and some but you down. If the ones that buff you up are consistent with the real world than your behaviors in those circumstances will be appropriate. The negative ones paralyze. It is from this perspective that I have referred to self-concept as a procedural concept. Accordingly, with regard to what you refer as “intellectual territory” what you or anyone holds meaningfully important resides in those structures. It is how you relate in the world that build these structures. If you were left alone striped from the reactions of others but with the same information you now posses, would you be able to consider yourself to have “intellectual territory”. There wouldn’t be those with less ability than you to establish that kind of self-image. You have been able to advance into areas where others simply don’t have permission. My point is to set ability aside and turn the discussion to the productivity of the ideas.

This is not of the love of steak and lettuces. Simply not of those conceptual levels. It is late and sleep beckons good night.

Lex, I entertain this and other conversations to the extent I can trust that they lead to expanded understanding in me and you (but mostly in others who might be listening in).

However, I am not convinced that you poses the requisite interest to translate your ideas into universally comprehendible explanations (please prove me wrong).

Are you suggesting that your ideas are too deep for communication in standard language? That your ideas are profoundly dependent upon a level of intellectual transcendence others can not achieve? That your ideas are so uniquely dependent upon your own personal history and experience that no one will ever understand no matter how clearly you explain them? That we, your audience, are too stupid or lazy or rhetorically bound to ever comprehend your ideas?

I don't buy any of that. You are not talking to fundamentalists. I am not a fundamentalist. The "God" I believe in is the causal hierarchy of influence. If your notions of intelligence and AI are relevant, I will gladly load them into this framework and see how deeply they can be subsumed. Fundamentalists say "This is true because I believe it is true." In science we attempt a less personally dependent test of validity. We say "This is true because it explains the most phenomena in the most elegant and minimal, and universal description we have been able to construct so far."

I fear that you have simply not yet done a sufficient job explaining and contextualizing your ideas. Certainly you can show how your ideas are "like this" but with "these modifications". Otherwise you must build a completely new cosmology. I seriously doubt that any definition of intelligence, any definition of something so aggregate and Johnny-come-lately as intelligence would ever need a new and foundational cosmology as support.

And obviously, I am all ears. There are others in this group who aren't nearly as patient as I am. Most don't have the time or interest that I have in the process of exploring (and constantly re-exploring) AI's philosophical foundations and boundaries. But I need to know what the hell you are talking about before we can talk about anything.

I will ask now as I always do, for an explanation of your intent and motivation with regard to AI. This framing will go a long way to situate, anchor, and inform all subsequent communication. What brought you to, and subsequently drives, your interest in AI?

Once that is clearly and honestly explained and exposed, I ask you to take the time to write your ideas into clearer and less compressed language. I like to say that simple ideas can be communicated in complex language, but complex ideas must be communicated in the simplest of language. AI concepts certainly fall into the complex ideas category. I suggest you write yours in language not unlike the setup instructions that accompany a new lawn mower or a recipe from a cooking for dummies book.

If what you want to communicate is incomprehensible in fewer than a hundred sentences, don't bother unless you have the time to write at least a hundred sentences. Break your ideas into procedural steps that slowly build up to the full concept from commonly understood foundations. Else all is lost.

I do have the desire and patience to tackle your concepts. If there is anything of any true importance and novelty in your conceptual understanding of AI, it would be worth our while to know it and worth your while to communicate it so that we can know it.

Randall

Randall,
“Are you suggesting that your ideas are too deep for communication in standard language?”
No! Nether of us need to rise to a new depth of communication. My ideas are simple and because of this they maybe overlooked or seem invisible. My perspective requires a paradigm shift to recognize its presents. It is about how simplicity leads to complexity. In the past you’ve agreed about how animal input structures have supplied the basis for conceptualization. And I believe you agree that these structures can be easily duplicated mechanically. I have discussed need structures or homeostasis and how it is represented within a stored experience. I have not, with any depth, explained how simple concepts form or grow into mammoth ones. Mammoth concepts such as any of the sciences, mathematics, the arts and for that mater language. Regarding issues such as these, I think you feel that we would be able to ignore all the “Find meaning through experience” stuff if we could simply understand the complexities of the man behind the mask. Define the methodology, apply it to a database of words and the world would have a thinking machine. Forgive my simplistic condensation. Instead of noticing that complex concepts are formed from simpler ones, we look to understand and imagine what could be at the complexity level that would allow for human thought. This concept of intelligence is held separate from the rest of the animal world and serves to blind us. But what is necessary is a discussion of what concepts are and how they are formed. From this perspective it’s easy to see similarities in the animal world, it’s easy to see an evolutionary thread. But people are out there enjoying their PHDs in AI without the development of anything that is actually or theoretically artificially intelligent. The force is with them, not me. You’re right to suggest that I examine my motivation. Monica said once, after a disagreement, that I should not waist time talking and build it. I think I’m going to do that. I will continue to go to some of the meetups but I don’t think that I’ll be responding too much of the discussions. Good luck Lex