Singularity Sunrise

Debating The Use of Warbots

Sorry for the lack of posts lately, I've been traveling. Here's something that caught my eye and may be of interest to you. According to this report from BBC News, a leading academic is calling for an international debate on using robots in warfare. The report notes that the current state of artificial intelligence is not yet advanced enough for an autonomous warbot to be able to tell friend from foe or to determine the proper amount of force to use in any given situation. Although it's encouraging that the need for debate on this issue is being recognized, I suspect that the debate will be ongoing even as more advanced nearly-autonomous warbots are deployed in combat, and eventually the state of the debate will be overtaken by the state of the technology. After all, it's not like the U.S. or any other country will call a halt to the use of warbots until the academic community reaches a consensus on their proper use. For more on this subject, check out this h+ magazine interview with Dr. Ronald Arkin on the difficulties arising in teaching robots the rules of war.

Photo Credit: BBC News

Google Spoofs Singularity in April Fools Joke

Google has not let us down with their annual April Fool's Joke. This year they spoofed the singularity and AI, offering a new service that sounds rather remarkable:

Research group switches on world's first "artificial intelligence" tasked-array system.

For several years now a small research group has been working on some challenging problems in the areas of neural networking, natural language and autonomous problem-solving. Last fall this group achieved a significant breakthrough: a powerful new technique for solving reinforcement learning problems, resulting in the first functional global-scale neuro-evolutionary learning cluster.

Since then progress has been rapid, and tonight we're pleased to announce that just moments ago, the world's first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) was switched on and began performing some initial functions. It's an exciting moment that we're determined to build upon by coming to understand more fully what CADIE's emergence might mean, for Google and for our users. So although CADIE technology will be rolled out with the caution befitting any advance of this magnitude, in the months to come users can expect to notice her influence on various google.com properties. Earlier today, for instance, CADIE deduced from a quick scan of the visual segment of the social web a set of online design principles from which she derived this intriguing homepage.

These are merely the first steps onto what will doubtless prove a long and difficult road. Considerable bugs remain in CADIE'S programming, and considerable development clearly is called for. But we can't imagine a more important journey for Google to have undertaken.

For more information about CADIE see this monograph, and follow CADIE's progress via her YouTube channel and blog.

Thank you Google for bringing a smile to the face of singulatarians everywhere.

Microsoft Prepares Desktop AI

Microsoft is hoping that their Windows operating system may yet be the shape of things to come as they prepare for an AI powered version of the personal assistant. According to this report from The New York Times, they envision an artificially-intelligent avatar as your interface to a powerful personal assistant program that can interpret your mood and expressions while making your appointments, sorting your e-mail and taking care of other routine tasks:

Meet Laura, the virtual personal assistant for those of us who cannot afford a human one. Built by researchers at Microsoft, Laura appears as a talking head on a screen. You can speak to her and ask her to handle basic tasks like booking appointments for meetings or scheduling a flight. More compelling, however, is Laura’s ability to make sophisticated decisions about the people in front of her, judging things like their attire, whether they seem impatient, their importance and their preferred times for appointments. Instead of being a relatively dumb terminal, Laura represents a nuanced attempt to recreate the finer aspects of a relationship that can develop between an executive and an assistant over the course of many years.

I think this is a worthy effort, but if Google ever creates a cloud based avatar interface for standard search, they may leapfrog Microsoft as consumers will probably prefer quick efficiency over a digital relationship. And with Google, they would probably figure out the relationship part (sustained by a steady diet of cookies and datamining) eventually. Of course, Google has no comparable project in the works that I know of, so perhaps this is one innovation in which Microsoft will take the early lead.

Here is more on the project:

Is The Singularity A Spy?

Could the development of a smarter than human artificial intelligence arise to facilitate the information processing demands of the total surveillance state? That's the provocative question I would ask after reading about a new NSA effort reviewed by the PBS television series Nova. According to their report:

The National Security Agency (NSA) is developing a tool that George Orwell's Thought Police might have found useful: an artificial intelligence system designed to gain insight into what people are thinking.

With the entire Internet and thousands of databases for a brain, the device will be able to respond almost instantaneously to complex questions posed by intelligence analysts. As more and more data is collected—through phone calls, credit card receipts, social networks like Facebook and MySpace, GPS tracks, cell phone geolocation, Internet searches, Amazon book purchases, even E-Z Pass toll records—it may one day be possible to know not just where people are and what they are doing, but what and how they think.

The system is so potentially intrusive that at least one researcher has quit, citing concerns over the dangers in placing such a powerful weapon in the hands of a top-secret agency with little accountability.

[...]

"The technology behaves like a robot, understanding and answering complex questions," said a former Aquaint researcher. "Think of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the most memorable character, HAL 9000, having a conversation with David. We are essentially building this system. We are building HAL." A naturalized U.S. citizen who received her Ph.D. from Columbia, the researcher worked on the program for several years but eventually left due to moral concerns. "The system can answer the question, 'What does X think about Y?'" she said. "Working for the government is great, but I don't like looking into other people's secrets. I am interested in helping people and helping physicians and patients for the quality of people's lives." The researcher now focuses on developing similar search techniques for the medical community.

Are we prepared to let HAL track our movements, read our e-mail, and assess our threat potential? Like many, I would prefer to think of AI and the possible rise of the technological singularity as a good thing, something that will promote the traditional human goals of creating stable and prosperous societies, but what if our persuit of security (certainly an elusive goal for much of human history) leads to a much darker dystopian society in which the promise of the singularity is turned against human freedom?

Turing Testing

This report notes the latest effort to pass the Turing Test (UK university holds artificial intelligence test):

The contest draws on the ideas of British mathematician Alan Turing, who came up with a subjective but simple rule for determining whether machines were capable of thought. Writing in 1950, Turing argued that conversation was proof of intelligence. If a computer talked like a human, then for all practical purposes it thought like a human too.

But judging a computer's eloquence was tricky: Humans might be prejudiced against a machine. So Turing devised the test in which a human judge would swap messages simultaneously with a computer and another human, without being told which was which. If the judge had trouble telling his correspondents apart, Turing said, then the computer met the human standard of intelligence.

The winner of Loebner Artificial Intelligence Prize's bronze medal was a chatbot named Elbot designed by Fred Roberts. No contestant has ever won the gold or silver medal, as they require higher levels of interaction with the human judges. Do you agree that chatbots represent the most precise definition or practical realization of artificial intelligence?

Smart Cams

Imagine a future (dystopian?) in which surveillance cameras can not only watch you but also listen, and thanks to AI, they may also start to understand a bit of what they overhear (BBC News - CCTV cameras 'taught to listen'):

"The longer artificial intelligence is in the software the more it learns." He added: "Later versions will get cleverer as time goes on, perhaps eventually being able to identify specific words being said or violent sounds. [...] By the end of the study, the researchers hope to have generated algorithms - a mathematical formula for solving problems - that can be used inside existing CCTV software. Then each successive generation of algorithms would become more sophisticated as they "learn" what they are looking and listening out for.

I wonder if this would mean that law-abiding citizens would then have to engage in self-censorship while talking in public for fear of saying a suspicious word within earshot of a smartcam?

AI in SL

I mentioned before the possibility that virtual environments like Second Life may provide the perfect testing ground for human-AI interaction, and it looks like there has been some progress in this area (AP - Researchers teach 'Second Life' avatar to think):

Edd is a creation of artificial intelligence, or AI, by researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who endowed him with a limited ability to converse and reason. It turns out "Second Life" is more than a place where pixelated avatars chat, interact and fly about. It's also a frontier in AI research because it's a controllable environment where testing intelligent creations is easier. [...] "Second Life" is attractive to researchers in part because virtual reality is less messy than plain-old reality. Researchers don't have to worry about wind, rain or coffee spills. And virtual worlds can push along AI research without forcing scientists to solve the most difficult problems - like, say, creating a virtual human - right away, said Michael Mateas, a computer science professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

So, will the Turing Test finally be passed in Second Life? Stay tuned.

Designing Intelligence

It is something of a paradox that humans are attempting to design artificial intelligence based on the pattern of human intelligence, which (intelligent design theory to the contrary) was not purposively designed. Gary Marcus, author of Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, New York University, argues that the mind is a "kluge" - a clumsy, cobbled-together contraption. In this video presentation, Marcus discusses the accidents of evolution that caused this structure and what we can do about it.

Meme Machines

Here is an interview with psychologist Susan Blackmore of the University of the West of England who sees humans as meme machines (Wired News - Humans Are Just Machines for Propagating Memes):

Up until very recently in the world of memes, humans did all the varying and selecting. We had machines that copied -- photocopiers, printing presses -- but only very recently do we have artificial machines that also produce the variations, for example (software that) mixes up ideas and produces an essay or neural networks that produce new music and do the selecting. There are machines that will choose which music you listen to. It's all shifting that way because evolution by natural selection is inevitable. There's a shift to the machines doing all of that. [...] Well, it will look like humans are just a minor thing on this planet with masses (of) silicon-based machinery using us to drag stuff out of the ground to build more machines.

I get the impression that Blackmore would be quite content to be bossed around by machines. She, as a mere complex of memes, could hardly object. The leap from meme making as a function of human culture and language to machine domination is rather absurd, so I'm not taking her seriously, I just wanted to note it, because she presents a pretty dark viewpoint along with a barely veiled cynical disdain for human cultures and religions. Where is the joy of celebrating humanity? Though I would see the creation of a technological singularity as a great human achievement, if machine intelligence can't be used to serve humanity, I would not see that as a good thing. That's why this blog has been posed as a question - sunrise or sunset? I think the jury is still out, even if we know which side Blackmore is on.

Machine Intelligence

Kurzweil is talking more about the rise of machine intelligence (Belfast Telegraph - Computers 'to match human brains by 2030'):

There will be 32 times more technical progress during the next half century than there was in the entire 20th century, and one of the outcomes is that artificial intelligence could be on a par with human intellect by the 2020s, said the American computer guru Ray Kurzweil.

This is an interesting report that ties in a bit of history with a bit of Hollywood to cover the topic of machine intelligence. It even mentions HAL. Sadly, they don't mention the singularity.