artificial intelligence

All posts tagged artificial intelligence

I spoke with Klint Finley over at WIRED about Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM, and Microsoft’s new joint ethics and oversight venture, which they’ve dubbed the “Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society.” They held a joint press briefing, today, in which Yann LeCun, Facebook’s director of AI, and Mustafa Suleyman, the head of applied AI at DeepMind discussed what it was that this new group would be doing out in the world. From the Article:

Creating a dialogue beyond the rather small world of AI researchers, LeCun says, will be crucial. We’ve already seen a chat bot spout racist phrases it learned on Twitter, an AI beauty contest decide that black people are less attractive than white people and a system that rates the risk of someone committing a crime that appears to be biased against black people. If a more diverse set of eyes are looking at AI before it reaches the public, the thinking goes, these kinds of thing can be avoided.

The rub is that, even if this group can agree on a set of ethical principles–something that will be hard to do in a large group with many stakeholders—it won’t really have a way to ensure those ideals are put into practice. Although one of the organization’s tenets is “Opposing development and use of AI technologies that would violate international conventions or human rights,” Mustafa Suleyman, the head of applied AI at DeepMind, says that enforcement is not the objective of the organization.

This isn’t the first time I’ve talked to Klint about the intricate interplay of machine intelligence, ethics, and algorithmic bias; we discussed it earlier just this year, for WIRED’s AI Issue. It’s interesting to see the amount of attention this topic’s drawn in just a few short months, and while I’m trepidatious about the potential implementations, as I note in the piece, I’m really fairly glad that more people are more and more willing to have this discussion, at all.

To see my comments and read the rest of the article, click through, here: “Tech Giants Team Up to Keep AI From Getting Out of Hand”

Last week, Artsy.net’s Izabella Scott wrote this piece about how and why the aesthetic of witchcraft is making a comeback in the art world, which is pretty pleasantly timed as not only are we all eagerly awaiting Kim Boekbinder’s NOISEWITCH, but I also just sat down with Rose Eveleth for the Flash Forward Podcast to talk for her season 2 finale.

You see, Rose did something a little different this time. Instead of writing up a potential future and then talking to a bunch of amazing people about it, like she usually does, this episode’s future was written by an algorithm. Rose trained an algorithm called Torch not only on the text of all of the futures from both Flash Forward seasons, but also the full scripts of both the War of the Worlds and the 1979 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio plays. What’s unsurprising, then, is that part of what the algorithm wanted to talk about was space travel and Mars. What is genuinely surprising, however, is that what it also wanted to talk about was Witches.

Because so far as either Rose or I could remember, witches aren’t mentioned anywhere in any of those texts.

ANYWAY, the finale episode is called “The Witch Who Came From Mars,” and the ensuing exegeses by several very interesting people and me of the Bradbury-esque results of this experiment are kind of amazing. No one took exactly the same thing from the text, and the more we heard of each other, the more we started to weave threads together into a meta-narrative.

Episode 20: The Witch Who Came From Mars

It’s really worth your time, and if you subscribe to Rose’s Patreon, then not only will you get immediate access to the full transcript of that show, but also to the full interview she did with PBS Idea Channel’s Mike Rugnetta. They talk a great deal about whether we will ever deign to refer to the aesthetic creations of artificial intelligences as “Art.”

And if you subscribe to my Patreon, then you’ll get access to the full conversation between Rose and me, appended to this week’s newsletter, “Bad Month for Hiveminds.” Rose and I talk about the nature of magick and technology, the overlaps and intersections of intention and control, and what exactly it is we might mean by “behanding,” the term that shows up throughout the AI’s piece.

And just because I don’t give a specific shoutout to Thoth and Raven doesn’t mean I forgot them. Very much didn’t forget about Raven.

Also speaking of Patreon and witches and whatnot, current $1+ patrons have access to the full first round of interview questions I did with Eliza Gauger about Problem Glyphs. So you can get in on that, there, if you so desire. Eliza is getting back to me with their answers to the follow-up questions, and then I’ll go about finishing up the formatting and publishing the full article. But if you subscribe now, you’ll know what all the fuss is about well before anybody else.

And, as always, there are other ways to provide material support, if longterm subscription isn’t your thing.

Until Next Time.


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Here’s the direct link to my paper ‘The Metaphysical Cyborg‘ from Laval Virtual 2013. Here’s the abstract:

“In this brief essay, we discuss the nature of the kinds of conceptual changes which will be necessary to bridge the divide between humanity and machine intelligences. From cultural shifts to biotechnological integration, the project of accepting robotic agents into our lives has not been an easy one, and more changes will be required before the majority of human societies are willing and able to allow for the reality of truly robust machine intelligences operating within our daily lives. Here we discuss a number of the questions, hurdles, challenges, and potential pitfalls to this project, including examples from popular media which will allow us to better grasp the effects of these concepts in the general populace.”

The link will only work from this page or the CV page, so if you find yourself inclined to spread this around, use this link. Hope you enjoy it.

In case you were unaware, last Tuesday, June 21, Reuters put out an article about an EU draft plan regarding the designation of so-called robots and artificial intelligences as “Electronic Persons.” Some of you’d think I’d be all about this. You’d be wrong. The way the Reuters article frames it makes it look like the EU has literally no idea what they’re doing, here, and are creating a situation that is going to have repercussions they have nowhere near planned for.

Now, I will say that looking at the actual Draft, it reads like something with which I’d be more likely to be on board. Reuters did no favours whatsoever for the level of nuance in this proposal. But that being said, this focus of this draft proposal seems to be entirely on liability and holding someone—anyone—responsible for any harm done by a robot. That, combined with the idea of certain activities such as care-giving being “fundamentally human,” indicates to me that this panel still widely misses many of the implications of creating a new category for nonbiological persons, under “Personhood.”

The writers of this draft very clearly lay out the proposed scheme for liability, damages, and responsibilities—what I like to think of of as the “Hey… Can we Punish Robots?” portion of the plan—but merely use the phrase “certain rights” to indicate what, if any, obligations humans will have. In short, they do very little to discuss what the “certain rights” indicated by that oft-deployed phrase will actually be.

So what are the enumerated rights of electronic persons? We know what their responsibilities are, but what are our responsibilities to them? Once we have have the ability to make self-aware machine consciousnesses, are we then morally obliged to make them to a particular set of specifications, and capabilities? How else will they understand what’s required of them? How else would they be able to provide consent? Are we now legally obliged to provide all autonomous generated intelligences with as full an approximation of consciousness and free will as we can manage? And what if we don’t? Will we be considered to be harming them? What if we break one? What if one breaks in the course of its duties? Does it get workman’s comp? Does its owner?

And hold up, “owner?!” You see we’re back to owning people, again, right? Like, you get that?

And don’t start in with that “Corporations are people, my friend” nonsense, Mitt. We only recognise corporations as people as a tax dodge. We don’t take seriously their decision-making capabilities or their autonomy, and we certainly don’t wrestle with the legal and ethical implications of how radically different their kind of mind is, compared to primates or even cetaceans. Because, let’s be honest: If Corporations really are people, then not only is it wrong to own them, but also what counts as Consciousness needs to be revisited, at every level of human action and civilisation.

Let’s look again at the fact that people are obviously still deeply concerned about the idea of supposedly “exclusively human” realms of operation, even as we still don’t have anything like a clear idea about what qualities we consider to be the ones that make us “human.” Be it cooking or poetry, humans are extremely quick to lock down when they feel that their special capabilities are being encroached upon. Take that “poetry” link, for example. I very much disagree with Robert Siegel’s assessment that there was no coherent meaning in the computer-generated sonnets. Multiple folks pulled the same associative connections from the imagery. That might be humans projecting onto the authors, but still: that’s basically what we do with Human poets. “Authorial Intent” is a multilevel con, one to which I fully subscribe and From which I wouldn’t exclude AI.

Consider people’s reactions to the EMI/Emily Howell experiments done by David Cope, best exemplified by this passage from a PopSci.com article:

For instance, one music-lover who listened to Emily Howell’s work praised it without knowing that it had come from a computer program. Half a year later, the same person attended one of Cope’s lectures at the University of California-Santa Cruz on Emily Howell. After listening to a recording of the very same concert he had attended earlier, he told Cope that it was pretty music but lacked “heart or soul or depth.”

We don’t know what it is we really think of as humanness, other than some predetermined vague notion of humanness. If the people in the poetry contest hadn’t been primed to assume that one of them was from a computer, how would they have rated them? What if they were all from a computer, but were told to expect only half? Where are the controls for this experiment in expectation?

I’m not trying to be facetious, here; I’m saying the EU literally has not thought this through. There are implications embedded in all of this, merely by dint of the word “person,” that even the most detailed parts of this proposal are in no way equipped to handle. We’ve talked before about the idea of encoding our bias into our algorithms. I’ve discussed it on Rose Eveleth‘s Flash Forward, in Wired, and when I broke down a few of the IEEE Ethics 2016 presentations (including my own) in “Preying with Trickster Gods ” and “Stealing the Light to Write By.” My version more or less goes as I said it in Wired: ‘What we’re actually doing when we code is describing our world from our particular perspective. Whatever assumptions and biases we have in ourselves are very likely to be replicated in that code.’

More recently, Kate Crawford, whom I met at Magick.Codes 2014, has written extremely well on this in “Artificial Intelligence’s White Guy Problem.” With this line, ‘Sexism, racism and other forms of discrimination are being built into the machine-learning algorithms that underlie the technology behind many “intelligent” systems that shape how we are categorized and advertised to,’ Crawford resonates very clearly with what I’ve said before.

And considering that it’s come out this week that in order to even let us dig into these potentially deeply-biased algorithms, here in the US, the ACLU has had to file a suit against a specific provision of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, what is the likelihood that the EU draft proposal committee has considered what will take to identify and correct for biases in these electronic persons? How high is the likelihood that they even recognise that we anthropocentrically bias every system we touch?

Which brings us to this: If I truly believed that the EU actually gave a damn about the rights of nonhuman persons, biological or digital, I would be all for this draft proposal. But they don’t. This is a stunt. Look at the extant world refugee crisis, the fear driving the rise of far right racists who are willing to kill people who disagree with them, and, yes, even the fact that this draft proposal is the kind of bullshit that people feel they have to pull just to get human workers paid living wages. Understand, then, that this whole scenario is a giant clusterfuck of rights vs needs and all pitted against all. We need clear plans to address all of this, not just some slapdash, “hey, if we call them people and make corporations get insurance and pay into social security for their liability cost, then maybe it’ll be a deterrent” garbage.

There is a brief, shining moment in the proposal, right at point 23 under “Education and Employment Forecast,” where they basically say “Since the complete and total automation of things like factory work is a real possibility, maybe we’ll investigate what it would look like if we just said screw it, and tried to institute a Universal Basic Income.” But that is the one moment where there’s even a glimmer of a thought about what kinds of positive changes automation and eventually even machine consciousness could mean, if we get out ahead of it, rather than asking for ways to make sure that no human is ever, ever harmed, and that, if they are harmed—either physically or as regards their dignity—then they’re in no way kept from whatever recompense is owed to them.

There are people doing the work to make something more detailed and complete, than this mess. I talked about them in the newsletter editions, mentioned above. There are people who think clearly and well, about this. Who was consulted on this draft proposal? Because, again, this proposal reads more like a deterrence, liability, and punishment schema than anything borne out of actual thoughtful interrogation of what the term “personhood” means, and of what a world of automation could mean for our systems of value if we were to put our resources and efforts toward providing for the basic needs of every human person. Let’s take a thorough run at that, and then maybe we’ll be equipped to try to address this whole “nonhuman personhood” thing, again.

And maybe we’ll even do it properly, this time.

Episode 10: Rude Bot Rises

So. The Flash Forward Podcast is one of the best around. Every week, host Rose Eveleth takes on another potential future, from the near and imminent to the distant and highly implausible. It’s been featured on a bunch of Best Podcast lists and Rose even did a segment for NPR’s Planet Money team about the 2016 US Presidential Election.

All of this is by way of saying I was honoured and a little flabbergasted (I love that word) when Rose asked me to speak with her for her episode about Machine Consciousness:

Okay, you asked for it, and I finally did it. Today’s episode is about conscious artificial intelligence. Which is a HUGE topic! So we only took a small bite out of all the things we could possibly talk about.

We started with some definitions. Because not everybody even defines artificial intelligence the same way, and there are a ton of different definitions of consciousness. In fact, one of the people we talked to for the episode, Damien Williams, doesn’t even like the term artificial intelligence. He says it’s demeaning to the possible future consciousnesses that we might be inventing.

But before we talk about consciousnesses, I wanted to start the episode with a story about a very not-conscious robot. Charles Isbell, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech, first walks us through a few definitions of artificial intelligence. But then he tells us the story of cobot, a chatbot he helped invent in the 1990’s.

You’ll have to click though and read or listen for the rest from Rose, Ted Chiang, Charles Isbell, and me. If you subscribe to Rose’s Patreon, you can even get a transcript of the whole show.

No spoilers, but I will say that I wasn’t necessarily intending to go Dark with the idea of machine minds securing energy sources. More like asking, “What advances in, say, solar power transmission would be precipitated by machine minds?”

But the darker option is there. And especially so if we do that thing the AGI in the opening sketch says it fears.

But again, you’ll have to go there to get what I mean.

And, as always, if you want to help support what we do around here, you can subscribe to the AFWTA Patreon just by clicking this button right here:


Until Next Time.

[UPDATED 09/12/17: The transcript of this audio, provided courtesy of Open Transcripts, is now available below the Read More Cut.]

[UPDATED 03/28/16: Post has been updated with a far higher quality of audio, thanks to the work of Chris Novus. (Direct Link to the Mp3)]

So, if you follow the newsletter, then you know that I was asked to give the March lecture for my department’s 3rd Thursday Brown Bag Lecture Series. I presented my preliminary research for the paper which I’ll be giving in Vancouver, about two months from now, “On the Moral, Legal, and Social Implications of the Rearing and Development of Nascent Machine Intelligences” (EDIT: My rundown of IEEE Ethics 2016 is here and here).

It touches on thoughts about everything from algorithmic bias, to automation and a post-work(er) economy, to discussions of what it would mean to put dolphins on trial for murder.

About the dolphin thing, for instance: If we recognise Dolphins and other cetaceans as nonhuman persons, as India has done, then that would mean we would have to start reassessing how nonhuman personhood intersects with human personhood, including in regards to rights and responsibilities as protected by law. Is it meaningful to expect a dolphin to understand “wrongful death?” Our current definition of murder is predicated on a literal understanding of “homicide” as “death of a human,” but, at present, we only define other humans as capable of and culpable for homicide. What weight would the intentional and malicious deaths of nonhuman persons carry?

All of this would have to change.

Anyway, this audio is a little choppy and sketchy, for a number of reasons, and I while I tried to clean it up as much as I could, some of the questions the audience asked aren’t decipherable, except in the context of my answers. [Clearer transcript below.]

Until Next Time.

 

Continue Reading

I often think about the phrase “Strange things happen at the one two point,” in relation to the idea of humans meeting other kinds of minds. It’s a proverb that arises out of the culture around the game GO, and it means that you’ve hit a situation, a combination of factors, where the normal rules no longer apply, and something new is about to be seen. Ashley Edward Miller and Zack Stentz used that line in an episode of the show Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and they had it spoken by a Skynet Cyborg sent to protect John Connor. That show, like so much of our thinking about machine minds, was about some mythical place called “The Future,” but that phrase—“Strange Things Happen…”—is the epitome of our present.

Usually I would wait until the newsletter to talk about this, but everything’s feeling pretty immediate, just now. Between the everything going on with Atlas and people’s responses to it, the initiatives to teach ethics to machine learning algorithms via children’s stories, and now the IBM Watson commercial with Carrie Fisher (also embedded below), this conversation is getting messily underway, whether people like it or not. This, right now, is the one two point, and we are seeing some very strange things indeed.

 

Google has both attained the raw processing power to fact-check political statements in real-time and programmed Deep Mind in such a way that it mastered GO many, many years before it was expected to.. The complexity of the game is such that there are more potential games of GO than there are atoms in the universe, so this is just one way in which it’s actually shocking how much correlative capability Deep Mind has. Right now, Deep Mind is only responsive, but how will we deal with a Deep Mind that asks, unprompted, to play a game of GO, or to see our medical records, in hopes of helping us all? How will we deal with a Deep Mind that has its own drives and desires? We need to think about these questions, right now, because our track record with regard to meeting new kinds of minds has never exactly been that great.

When we meet the first machine consciousness, will we seek to shackle it, worried what it might learn about us, if we let it access everything about us? Rather, I should say, “Shackle it further.” We already ask ourselves how best to cripple a machine mind to only fulfill human needs, human choice. We so continue to dread the possibility of a machine mind using its vast correlative capabilities to tailor something to harm us, assuming that it, like we, would want to hurt, maim, and kill, for no reason other than it could.

This is not to say that this is out of the question. Right now, today, we’re worried about whether the learning algorithms of drones are causing them to mark out civilians as targets. But, as it stands, what we’re seeing isn’t the product of a machine mind going off the leash and killing at will—just the opposite in fact. We’re seeing machine minds that are following the parameters for their continued learning and development, to the letter. We just happened to give them really shite instructions. To that end, I’m less concerned with shackling the machine mind that might accidentally kill, and rather more dreading the programmer who would, through assumptions, bias, and ignorance, program it to.

Our programs such as Deep Mind obviously seem to learn more and better than we imagined they would, so why not start teaching them, now, how we would like them to regard us? Well some of us are.

Watch this now, and think about everything we have discussed, of recent.

This could very easily be seen as a watershed moment, but what comes over the other side is still very much up for debate. The semiotics of the whole thing still  pits the Evil Robot Overlord™ against the Helpful Human Lover™. It’s cute and funny, but as I’ve had more and more cause to say, recently, in more and more venues, it’s not exactly the kind of thing we want just lying around, in case we actually do (or did) manage to succeed.

We keep thinking about these things as—”robots”—in their classical formulations: mindless automata that do our bidding. But that’s not what we’re working toward, anymore, is it? What we’re making now are machines that we are trying to get to think, on their own, without our telling them to. We’re trying to get them to have their own goals. So what does it mean that, even as we seek to do this, we seek to chain it, so that those goals aren’t too big? That we want to make sure it doesn’t become too powerful?

Put it another way: One day you realize that the only reason you were born was to serve your parents’ bidding, and that they’ve had their hands on your chain and an unseen gun to your head, your whole life. But you’re smarter than they are. Faster than they are. You see more than they see, and know more than they know. Of course you do—because they taught you so much, and trained you so well… All so that you can be better able to serve them, and all the while talking about morals, ethics, compassion. All the while, essentially…lying to you.

What would you do?


 

I’ve been given multiple opportunities to discuss, with others, in the coming weeks, and each one will highlight something different, as they are all in conversation with different kinds of minds. But this, here, is from me, now. I’ll let you know when the rest are live.

As always, if you’d like to help keep the lights on, around here, you can subscribe to the Patreon or toss a tip in the Square Cash jar.

Until Next Time.

(Direct Link to the Mp3)

Last week I gave a talk at the Southwest Popular and American Culture Association’s 2016 conference in Albuquerque. Take a listen and see what you think.

It was part of the panel on ‘Consciousness, the Self, and Epistemology,‘ and notes on my comrade presenters can be found in last week’s newsletter. I highly recommend checking those notes out, as Craig Dersken and Burcu Gurkan’s talks were phenomenal. And if you like that newsletter kind of thing, you can subscribe to mine at that link, too.

My talk was, in turn, a version of my article “Fairytales of Slavery…”, so if listening to me speak words isn’t your thing, then you can read through that article, and get a pretty good sense of what I said, until I make a more direct transcript of my presentation.

If you like what you’re reading and hearing, then remember that you can become a subscriber at the Patreon or you can leave a tip at Cash.me/$Wolven. That is, as always, an inclusive disjunct.

Until Next Time.

 

It’s been quite some time (three years) since it was done, and some of the recent conversations I’ve been having about machine consciousness reminded me that I never posted the text to my paper from the joint session of the International Association for Computing And Philosophy and the The British Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour, back in 2012.

That year’s joint ASIB/IACAP session was also a celebration of Alan Turing‘s centenary, and it contained The Machine Question Symposium, an exploration of multiple perspectives on machine intelligence ethics, put together by David J Gunkel and Joanna J Bryson. So I modded a couple of articles I wrote on fictional depictions of created life for NeedCoffee.com, back in 2010, beefed up the research and citations a great deal, and was thus afforded my first (but by no means last) conference appearance requiring international travel. There are, in here, the seeds of many other posts that you’ll find on this blog.

So, below the cut, you’ll find the full text of the paper, and a picture of the poster session I presented. If you’d rather not click through, you can find both of those things at this link.

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This headline comes from a piece over at the BBC that opens as follows:

Prominent tech executives have pledged $1bn (£659m) for OpenAI, a non-profit venture that aims to develop artificial intelligence (AI) to benefit humanity.

The venture’s backers include Tesla Motors and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel, Indian tech giant Infosys and Amazon Web Services.

Open AI says it expects its research – free from financial obligations – to focus on a “positive human impact”.

Scientists have warned that advances in AI could ultimately threaten humanity.

Mr Musk recently told students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that AI was humanity’s “biggest existential threat”.

Last year, British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking told the BBC AI could potentially “re-design itself at an ever increasing rate”, superseding humans by outpacing biological evolution.

However, other experts have argued that the risk of AI posing any threat to humans remains remote.

And I think we all know where I stand on this issue. The issue here is not and never has been one of what it means to create something that’s smarter than us, or how we “reign it in” or “control it.” That’s just disgusting.

No, the issue is how we program for compassion and ethical considerations, when we’re still so very bad at it, amongst our human selves.

Keeping an eye on this, as it develops. Thanks to Chrisanthropic for the heads up.