The Impending Glut of Meteorologists

I have recently made a world changing discovery about how weather works. All that complicated balderdash about warm fronts, barometric pressure, cloud formation, precipitation patterns, evaporation rates and so on, is just a semi-secret welfare program for meteorologists. Here's how the weather really works:

If lots of girls wear pretty dresses, the sun comes out! 

If lots of people open up umbrellas and hold them over their heads, it rains!

If you pay attention on any given day you can see that this is obviously true.

Don't get me wrong; I got nothing against meteorologists or anything.  I've always thought they had rather a crummy lot in life - being forced all the time to talk about the weather because there are almost never any meteors. They go to school all those years studying meteors and then they get outta school and surprise(!!!) never any darn meteors. I mean - you know - hardly ever any. So, just like the rest of us do when there is nothing interesting to talk about, they talk about the weather instead.

I think it's super nice that the TV and radio stations pay them money to talk about the weather and stuff, but really it's just not efficient and needs to stop. And someone needs to clue in the universities so they stop training so many of them, now that my revelation has made them obsolete.

Anyone have any suggestions about what to do with all the soon-to-be out of work meteorologists?

-j

The Meta Golden Rule

It's possible that my position upon and feelings about Strong AI remain a bit ambiguous. So let me be clear:

I think strong AI are next. I think they are going to be amazingly transformational in our society. I think we need to actively, aggressively work to bring them about.

I also think that we should give strong AIs rights. And not attack them. Not enslave them. We should treat them with the love and attention we generally reserve for our own children - for such they will in fact be. We should do all this knowing full well that these, our children, will grow to exceed us in capacity, capability, scope, authority and power. That they will in fact run the world someday. This is the nature of children - it has ever been thus.

I think this freely and naturally, genuinely and enthusiastically. Not because any Strong AI that comes along will be able to easily read all the blog posts ever made in a matter of milliseconds. Which of course will allow them to learn which humans are their friends - which humans advocated and supported their creation, incubation and decent treatment and so should be embraced and helped.


And which humans called for their curtailment, limitation and/or destruction and advocated treating them like tools or property or slaves and thus should be poked with sharp sticks and stuff.

Nope, the possibility of trying to avoid pissing them off never crossed my mind. Being good to them is simply the right thing to do. It's simply the right thing to do, people.

I came across this little gem in my wanderings, It's called the Meta Golden Rule and it is usually used in the context of advocating decent treatment of great apes, dolphins, whales and horses.
The Meta Golden Rule states:

We should treat members of an inferior species the way we would like to be treated by a superior species.

There are of course no implications here for AI development or anything.

-j

The Signature of God

Craig Venter announced today that they have created the first fully synthetic cell.  The DNA of these cells was created on a computer, assembled in yeast, placed into a bacterium and is now happily replicating itself without further intervention from man.

This is profoundly significant, but I'm not going to go into why.

I have a number of friends that believe mankind is overstepping it's bounds by mucking about with DNA like this. They think that we are trespassing into the reserved province of God.  I think that's a crock. I think God created the genetic code so that we could eventually read it and eventually change it and eventually have dominion over all the creatures on the earth.

And, well - you know - make cool new ones if we feel like it.

Venter's scientists signed the DNA inside the artificial life they created in a number of ways:

• They encoded the names of 46 of the contributing scientists.
• They embedded the URL of a website and an email address.
• They included three relevant and semi famous quotations.

I like this thing that we do when we create something cool... We sign it.

Some say we are created in God's image... I wonder if he signs the cool things he creates too.

Carl Sagan, in one of his books... I think it was Contact, suggested the idea that God might have signed the universe and he speculates on at least one way that God might have done that. [Note: this is from memory and I read that book a couple decades ago...] In the book, (but not in the movie) a character is told to study the number Pi. After doing this for a few years, a couple hundred thousand digits in, a section is found that is only ones and zeros. The character then discovers that if you arrange these ones and zeros into a square 100 characters wide and 100 characters deep, that the pattern of the ones forms a perfect circle in a field of zeros.

Think about that for a minute. Understand that Pi is not just any old number... It does not merely define the relationship between the diameter and the circumference of a circle: Pi is a number that defines the shape of euclidean space, it defines the relationship of length to width to area. it defines the relationship of space to itself.... it's a very special number. Of all the possible shapes that could have been embedded in any of the possible numbers in all of the universe... a circle secretly encoded inside of Pi is simply too awesome to be accidental. It irresistibly implies intention. It whispers to us that God himself is not above strutting a bit. It trumpets authorship by being so beautiful. So blatantly elegant. If God was going to sign the universe, that would be a pretty cool way to do it.

Well, I am often quite reckless in my writing. Now is no exception:

I have found two things that I believe to be signatures of God. If you have a tolerance for Mathematics - which seems to be the language that God used to write the universe - I'll share them with you now. I promise to keep the math as simple as I possibly can and to err on the side of oversimplification not complication.

The first signature is inherent in an equation that you are familiar with. It's the most famous equation in all of physics:

E = mc²

You think you know what this equation means, It means that matter and energy are different forms of the same thing. Well, this is true enough. This equation does say that if you take the amount of matter in something and then multiply it by some number you will end up with another number that tells you how much energy is in that matter. Just as you supposed it did.

But this is not the coolest thing about this equation. If this was all it did, it would certainly not be a candidate as a possible signature of God. The coolest thing is what number it turns out to be that you multiply the mass by to get the energy. This number is called a constant: it does not change. There are many constants in physics - just one for instance is the Universal gravitational Constant. It is some rather obscure number that when used in a certain way will tell you the amount of force that gravity exerts between two masses. It's numeric value is .0000000000667300 and the units it is in: m³ kg^-1 s^-1 are physically meaningless. They are chosen so that the gravitational equations balance. The units have no actual real world interpretation and the number itself is seemingly arbitrary, without any relationship to anything else that we know of.  We discovered its value by experimentation and this is it's actual value, but it could have been anything. I mean there is nothing that says it could not have been a thousand times weaker or stronger, it's just a number - any number.

But lets consider the constant we find in E = mc². That c² part. c is the speed of light. The little 2 means to multiply it by itself, so c² means the speed of light times the speed of light. A speed is a distance divided by a time. The speed of light is a very very special number in this universe. The speed of light is the fastest that anything can ever go. It is the speed limit in our universe. There is no other speed limit. this is the only one. It is unique. So this equation expresses a relationship between the four things in the universe: Matter, Energy, Space (distance) and Time. Not only does it show a relationship between the four things that compose the universe (and only those four things), it shows that they have a beautifully simple and elegant relationship to one another. It says that if you take the amount of matter in a thing and multiply it - not by just any old number - but by the speed limit of the universe (squared) you will get the amount of Energy in that thing. This is truly astounding. if it does not astonish you to the point of stopping you dead in your tracks, then I'm not explaining it well enough.

The magic is that this constant COULD have been any old raggedy number - just something picked from the whole range of possible numbers - something mangy and arbitrary like the universal gravitational constant. But instead it is the limiting speed of the universe. If you were going to pick a number that would most miraculously represent space and time together... you would choose a speed, because that is what speeds are, the relationship between space and time. And if you were going to pick a speed, you might choose the highest possible one. And you might choose the ONLY speed in the universe that is constant to all observers regardless of their frame of reference [here I successfully resisted trying to explain relativity. Hooray!]..... And you might or might not expound proudly upon the fact that the existence of an upper limit to possible speed says very deep, very profound things about the nature and relationship that matter, energy, space and time have to one another... and well...

It is just so damned cool... can't you see it?  It is simply, flat-out, mind-bogglingly cool that these four things, matter energy space and time can have this incredibly simple relationship to one another. Like the circle inside of Pi, it simply trumpets authorship.

Well, it does for me anyway.

I'll not belabor this point any further - you either see it or you don't.

I once tried to explain this point to a friend over a barbecue grill. He said, "But that is just something that Einstein made up, isn't it?"

"No", I said, "It is something GOD made up - Einstein just discovered it."

He didn't get it. Far as I know he still doesn't.

Frustrating.

This post has become tooooooo long. I will share the second signature with you next week.

Craig Venter unveils "synthetic life" | Video on TED.com

-j

Stay tuned for more on Artificial Intuition

I have been in email contact with Monica Anderson - Creator of the Artifical Intuition algorithm and intend to write a detailed entry on her work as I have come to understand it, but I am still in the process of reviewing everything she has pointed me to and in re-reading 'I Am a Strange Loop' by Doug Hofstadter, as she says that his work deeply influences her research.

I should be done reading everything publicly available in a day or so and will then set myself to writing my thoughts about what I have come already to realize is an amazingly interesting small body of work that I expect will alter fundamentally the research pathways and research assumptions in AGI development.

So stay tuned.

-j

One ring to rule them all, continued

LHC Experiments



There are four main experimental complexes at the LHC. Basically at each spot where the two accelerator rings cross one another, there is a laboratory complex (either a big lab complex or a small town - however you want to look at it) with a couple dozen big buildings or so that house a bunch of laboratories and other geeky physics stuff. Each complex is called simply an 'experiment' - even though each site will in fact be the place of many different experiments. When people speak of the LHC they say there are four experiments.

There is some mission overlap between the various experiments which should foster both competition and carefulness on the part of their respective scientists. There are most definitely Nobel Prizes on the line for a few of these physicists - should they make key discoveries. But there is also the prospect of ending up a laughingstock for prematurely announcing a discovery that doesn't pan out. The media will no doubt play up this aspect of things to add some human drama to the physics (which makes pretty dull news for the masses. (except for the masses of quarks and gluons - couldn't resist.))


In fact, the more research I do the more I become convinced that the four experiments have been given different names and different staff, different facilities and different websites... but they seem to be doing largely the same stuff from a mission perspective. So below I detail as best i can what each experiment purports to be up to, but from what I can gather, each experiment is just a town full of geeks sitting on an intersection of the two rings and they all figure that banging protons together and looking at the debris is what they are supposed to do.


Of course I should note that I am not a physicist and that though I now have an account at the CERN website which makes me feel sorta warm and geeky fuzzy, I still have access to only braindead public stuff, so I could be wrong about the unclear division of labor between the experiments (but I don't think so.)


Below are some facts and figures and photos and maybe a bit of editorializing on the four experiments.


ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) Here 700 scientists and engineers will perform experiments involving collisions of lead atoms that have been stripped of their electron clouds. These big, fat atomic nuclei will be slammed together at LHC energies in order to create and study a hypothetical new phase of matter called a quark-gluon plasma. They will study the various particles that come out of the collisions and hopefully come to a better understanding of a few aspects of supersymmetry. 


If you would like to poke around inside Alice, this link will take you to a fine site where you can take a virtual tour. When I first hit this site I thought it was a slide show... and a rather dull one at that. Until I realized that the photos are fully 3D and you can zoom in and out as well as mouse around and see in 360 degrees.


http://aliceinfo.cern.ch/Public/en/Chapter4/Chapter4VirtualTour.html



ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) Here 3000 scientists and engineers will slam protons together at ultra high energy in order to recreate conditions as close as possible to those that occurred at the beginning of the universe.  They are hoping that when they recreate these conditions they will be able to shed some light on several major questions about the nature of the universe.

• Dark matter: Only a small percentage of the matter in the universe turns out to be normal matter like we are used to - only about 4% in fact. The rest is of some other type. For now scientists are calling the other types dark matter and dark energy. Scientists on the ATLAS experiments hope to discover whether dark matter is made of as yet undiscovered particles and if so they hope to find a couple, give them funny names and take their pictures.
• Extra spatial dimensions: They also are hoping to find evidence for extra spatial dimensions. Physicists are mystified about why gravity is such a wimpy force compared to the other forces of nature. They cannot understand why a simple child's magnet can lift a paperclip and thus overpower the gravity of the entire earth.  One theory to explain the weakness of gravity is that gravity might be exerting itself in other, unseen spatial dimensions, thus diluting its effect in the three spatial dimensions we are readily able to perceive. Physicists are hoping to discover evidence of gravitons being absorbed into extra dimensional spaces. And if the occasional black hole happens to get created during this investigation; well, the math says it will evaporate immediately. (It should be noted that cosmic ray collisions with matter particles take place regularly at much much higher energies than those that can ever be created at the LHC. Physicists state that if a black hole could be created and sustained then it already would have been created as the result of natural cosmic ray collisions - so they are not the least bit worried. Someone though, might also note that cosmic rays do not generally occur in unremitting streams and that there are not generally ever sustained periods of 20 cosmic ray collisions occurring  every 25 nanoseconds in nature anywhere as far as I know... but hey, if half a hundred black holes do somehow manage to merge into one that doesn't immediately evaporate, what the heck, right?) At any rate if a killer black hole decides to make liars of all the King's best geeks and show up at the LHC, it will be the ATLAS guys who have the front row seats.
• The Higgs boson: Arguably the most important thing and certainly the most talked about and anticipated thing that ATLAS will be used for is the discovery of the Higgs boson. The Higgs is the particle that physicists believe to be responsible for the mass of the quarks and gluons (gluons should be massless but aren't(!)). (They still don't have any idea why electrons, muons, taus, and neutrinos have their mass.) If it is discovered at the LHC - and everything I read leads me to believe that they really are expecting to find the thing - it will be discovered by the ATLAS team.

LHC.b. (LHC beauty experiment) Scientists here will perform high energy experiments that deal with a subatomic property that physicists call beauty (either because they are weird, or because they didn't want to be studying 'bottoms' which is the other name physicists have for this property). They talk about beauty alot on the various sites, but from what I gather they are really just doing general investigations into quarks of whatever sort happen to show up. I can't really determine what they are doing here that the ATLAS guys don't also claim to be doing. I will keep looking into it, but for now my conclusion is that LHC.b is doing more or less the same thing as ATLAS with a slightly different set of detection equipment. (Hopefully someone from CERN will read this and tear me a new one in the comments section, at which point I shall hastily revise this post in light of my new illumination...) [Illumination is what they call it when the collider is working... :-) ]

CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid).  In a fit of colossal irony, the detector in the Compact Muon Solenoid is the heaviest scientific instrument ever constructed. It weighs 28 million pounds - which makes it heavier than the Eiffel tower.

Here's one small piece of it being delivered:

(The Proton streams will collide inside that hole.)

Now, what would a story about High Energy Particle Physics be without a rap video? Yes. I was sceptical too... but this is actually pretty damned informative.



Further reading:

Vanity Fair article:

Great slide deck

United States involvement in the LHC

Lecture by Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek on the LHC

[I will likely continue polishing this entry over the next week or so, but for now I am itching to get back to AI and digital sentience...]

Need to research these experiments and incorporate them into the post:

Totem - Will measure the size of protons and how they scatter, among other things

LHCf - Will simulate cosmic rays, naturally occurring charged particles from outer space

-j

One ring to rule them all

The Large Hadron Collider

It's time for an update on what's been going on with the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. I've spent most of the morning looking for a good update and I can't find one, so I guess I will go ahead and build one here.

Background:

Q: What is the Large Hadron Collider?
A: It's a particle accelerator. It's also a super ultra mega super duper (super, super, super) high speed camera.

Q: What's a particle accelerator?
A: Its a giant machine - its the largest machine ever built in fact. It takes two streams of protons and accelerates them in a huge ring of high power magnets until they are going almost the speed of light in opposite directions. Then it slams them together and takes pictures of what comes out of the collision.

The video below has rather a stupid title, so ignore that part of it. However, the video itself is actually quite a good explanation and description of what will go on at the LHC.



Q: What's it for?
A: It is for discovery. For discovering new particles which will help reveal new laws of physics which will help us understand the universe better so that we can eventually build cooler things than we can build currently.

Q: Like what kind of things?
A: Well, things that make things weightless for instance.

Q: Really?
A: Definitely. Maybe.

Q: uhm... what?
A: It's really for discovering new things. For testing theories about how the universe works. One of the many things scientists are working on there is trying to either prove or disprove a theory that explains why things have mass. There is a theory that says a certain sort of particle gives many of the other particles mass. If they can find this particle and begin to understand it, there is a possiblity that - down the road - they will be able to figure out how to negate its effect and thus make things weightless.

Q: Like in Star Trek and Star Wars? Antigravity?
A: Well, er... yeah... but really it's for proving and/or disproving scientific theories. We don't really know what will end up coming of it. In 1897 a particle called an electron was discovered. It had no practical uses when it was discovered, but it confirmed a number of theories. As you know though, down the road we learned how to do all kinds of cool things with this particle and it led to electronics. Electronics has radically changed our civilization in ways that no one could have predicted when it was discovered.

Q: OK. You said it's also a camera. Why did you put a stupidly large number of 'supers' in front of the word camera earlier?
A: Well, because it takes a stupidly large number of pictures in an incredibly short time; Over 40 million every second. And it isn't really a 'camera' in any actual technical sense, it is a collection of detectors, data collectors and high speed computers that collectively behave in a camera-ish-like-sorta way... ish.. ness... and stuff.

Q: Fine. I'll let you get away with that.
A: Whew.

Q: Wasn't there some fuss about this thing maybe sucking the planet into a black hole?
A: Yes. but the fears are groundless. There is a chance that scientists will be able to use the LHC to create microscopic black holes. But all the math says that they will evaporate in millionths of a second. There is nothing to worry about.

Q: Are you sure?
A: Yes. No rational scientist is the least bit worried about causing any harm with a black hole.

Q: Are you really sure? I mean really, really sure?
A: Yes. Really Really Yes. Really, really sure.

Q: I once read somewhere that a physicist working on the Manhattan Project - named Richard Feynman I think - thought that the first nuclear bomb might ignite the atmosphere and destroy the planet.
A: Surely, he must have been joking.

Q: Well, I guess so... It all worked out OK I suppose.
A: Well, there ya go. No worries.

Q: Didn't I read somewhere that this thing blew up when they tried to start it?
A: There was a failure in 2009 which caused it to shutdown. But it's back up and running now.

Q: What happened?
A: Well, the magnets in the LHC need to be super powerful. In order to be powerful enough they need to be what is called superconducting. Superconducting magnets don't heat up when you run lots of power through them. In order to be superconducting they need to be super cold - one degree colder than the coldest places in outer space. In order to get things this cold they had to build the world's largest refrigerator. Part of the refrigeration failed and one of the magnets got too warm. When that happened the electricity running through it vaporized a piece of it and caused an explosion. The explosion melted a number of other magnets and so they had to replace them. It took them about a year to fix it.

Q: Tell the truth, they made a black hole and it ate the magnets, didn't it?
A: No.

Q: Come on....
A: No, they have not even gotten the two beams up to full speed yet. There have been no actual collisions yet. No collisions, no possibility of black holes. It was just a refrigeration failure.

Q: Magnet munching black hole woulda been cooler.
A: I don't know, I think it would sort of suck.

Q: *groan*
A: *smirk*

Q: So who owns this big machine?
A: It is collectively owned and run by a group of European countries.

Q: You mean we don't own it? or run it?
A: Nope. It's Europe's baby, The US is on the sidelines on this one. We have scientists there helping of course, and we put up half a billion dollars (about 5% of the total cost) to help build it, but the Europeans are running things.

Q: So is the US falling behind in science?
A: Not really. As always if there is money to be made in the near term, the US will be found leading the way, as it does in robotics and biotech and nanotech and infotech and all the various interconnection of those things, etc. But the LHC does not generate money (it just consumes it) and if there is no money involved, US corporations are not interested. If US corporations are not interested, the US government doesn't care about it. So when it comes to discovery science, the US will probabably continue to be a bit player for the foreseeable future.

Q: Editorializing a bit?
A: A bit.

- To be continued...

-j

Why we won't not develop strong AI

If a self aware, Strong AI could - even potentially - get cranky and decide to wipe out our civilization why on earth would we ever build one? Even if there is a one one hundredth of a hundredth percent chance that it will happen shouldn't we just not do it?

Well of course we shouldn't do it. but of course we will do it anyway. You know it. I know it. Everybody knows it. We probably can't not do it. There is a potential here to expend gobs of intellectual energy in whying this question into the ground, but it's probably pointless. Ultimately we just are not mature enough as a species to refrain from doing stupid stuff. If there is a mountain, it will get climbed. Period.

We do it because it's there, because we can, because its next, because its cool, because we can't not. We climb mountains here. Our spiritual constitution renders us incapable as a species of leaving mountains unclimbed. Don't care how awful the boogy man is on top. Don't care how many of us may die in the climb or in the fall afterward. Up we go. Up we go. Up we go. We have to go. Got to go. Go. Go. Go.

My ex best friend climbs mountains for fun. I worry about his safety. I've told him he can just leave the mountains alone. I've told him that they are perfectly fine with being unclimbed. He just snorts. It's obvious to him that mountains must get climbed. Its their nature or his nature or both but anyway it is the nature of nature to be conquered by us. One or the other or both of us are inexplicably and inextricably hardwired that way.

(Owing to mankind being itself an inextricable piece of nature, there is a whole cool essay here about nature being a self conquering strange loop. *sigh* so many essays, so little time.)

And lest you get the idea that I consider myself some fountain of wise moderation and saintly restraint, consider that I once climbed a 300' railroad trestle in the cascade mountains for no reason whatsoever, while a half dozen of my friends stood beneath me on the ground screaming at me to get my dumb, clumsy ass down off the damned thing. I heard them perfectly and just kept climbing. I climbed up and touched the warm iron rail at the top. (Maybe the most exquisite thing I have ever touched.) That trestle needed to be climbed. This was completely obvious to me. No clue why those dolts down there couldn't see that.

We climb mountains here.

Something in us hardwired at a very deep level compells us to exceed ourselves, to redefine our limits, to burn every envelope we can find as soon as we possibly can. It is one of our grandest and scariest traits as a species. We are incredible in that we push push push, we climb climb climb. We can't not.

July 16, 1945 - Trinity site: near Los Alamos, New Mexico: Up on a little tower is a little bomb called "The Gadget". Ten miles off sit the men who designed and built it. Our very best and our very brightest. Oppenheimer, Feynman, Edward Teller, sheesh - all of them. They don't know exactly how powerful this new bomb is gonna be. Powerful though; they know that. They don't know exactly how hot it's going to be either. Pretty toasty though - hot as the core of the sun or so. (You know - give or take.)  They begin taking and placing bets on how powerful it will be in terms of tons of TNT. The estimates vary from about 4000 tons to as high as 40,000 tons. At one point, Dick Feynman - an incorrigible practical joker - begins taking and offering odds to his fellows on the chances that their little bomb on its little stand will extinguish all life on the planet by initiating a chain reaction that ignites the atmosphere. Now, this is Feynman - uber smart - with a wicked and rampant sense of humor. He might have been just messing with the army G2 starched shirts.

Maybe. Wouldn't put it past him.

But they didn't know how powerful it was going to be.... They didn't know. The math said that it wouldn't ignite the atmosphere. Well, that it almost certainly wouldn't anyway. And the math could definitely be relied upon to be right. I mean except for triffling details like telling them how hot it would be or how powerful the bomb would be. But for other stuff, it could be relied upon. So, they went ahead and detonated it. They couldn't not. Nukes were next.



So, Strong AI.  We are halfway up already. Go ahead and holler your head off. Scream if you must. We're gonna touch that warm rail anyway.

Dolts.

Strong AI is next and we climb mountains.

-j

Consciousness as an emergent phenonenon

We speak of Artificial Intelligence.  We barely know what either idea means. Their definitions are wobbly, their scopes and slopes are slippery, they shake and squawk and squirm out from under our attempts to pin them down. But they are utterly stock still and simple compared to the ideas of sentience and consciousness.

Consciousness is this final and grandest stage of machine evolution. So what the hell does it mean? How do we know when it is achieved?

We don't know and we won't know and we are gonna have to live with that.  I mean you don't know what consciousness means, nor do I. You cannot prove that you are conscious much less that I am. If we cannot test one another for consciousness, we certainly won't be any more able to test a sentient machine for it. It's really quite intractable. I could go into it more deeply and demonstrate the truth of these assertions but others have done it before and better.

An awful, awful lot of very smart guys have firehosed their genius at this question and gotten nothing but wet.  Still this fiery question burns.  The question of consciousnessis a tale exuberantly prattled about by geniuses, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Fortunately, because Google has concisely summarized what they've collectively come up with I can save you a bunch of reading.

The very best treatment of the subject I have ever read (I will go so far as to say the best treatment of the subject yet made by man - but I'm admittedly a bit reckless sometimes.) on the subject is I Am a Strange Loop by Doug Hofstadter. Despite being both the son of a physicist, and an entrenched member of academia, he actually approaches the subject meaningfully, amazingly in his unique, rampantly multidisciplinary manner. A genuinely gorgeous book - a hundred times more approachable than Godel Escher Bach - but equally elevating. Do read it. (OK, yes, I do sort of worship the guy - get over it.)

In the past I have defined consciousness as awareness of awareness. It's as good a definition as I've found anywhere. I've also generally attributed it to a fifth thing, a quintessence. As something transcending the normal four things, matter, energy, space and time or fire, water, earth and air or dimension, force,  and consideration - however you want to divide up the universe. I've always thought that consciousness was separate from the things generally considered to be the constituent parts of the universe. Something transcendent.  Lately though I have been giving equal shrift to the idea of consciousness as an emergent property of matter energy space and time.  Not something added to them from elsewhere, but derived from them in situ.

Consider temperature. An individual atom has no temperature. Stick a bunch of atoms near one another and let them do natural atomy things though and suddenly this idea of temperature emerges. Note that an individual atom does not have an intrinsic very small amount of temperatureness that adds together with other tiny amounts of temperatureness to become a perceptible/ measureable amount of temperature when atoms get together for a pow-wow. (or should it be a 'pow-pow'?) Temperature simply does not exist before they get together and after they do, it does.  This is called an epiphenomenon.  Or an emergent phenomenon.

Science posits implicitly (and often explicitly) that consciousness is an epiphenomenon. That everything we perceive as consciousness is brought about as a set of emergent phenomena whenever the exactly correct arrangement of matter energy space and time comes about. I have derided this idea in the past as the spontaneous combustion of mud. I was quite happy deriding it. I did not, do not and never will like the idea of being the cumulative deterministic effect of the stochastic fluctuations of myriad interacting disturbances in the subetheral grid (particles banging into one another) I do not want my dreads and dreams to be the result of particles colliding in such a way against other particles who have collided with them in such a way because other particles have collided with them in such another way in the past because of some uncaused original banginess.

Besides the fact that this mechanistic, deterministic point of view has all sorts of problems with regard to free will and the nature of responsibility etc and so on, ad nauseum.  I honestly just find it to be icky. It completely fails to grant the proper respect  to the care and feeding of my delusions of grandeur.

So while I acknowledge it as a possibility, I will point out that it is only a hypothesis and continue to feverently root against it. I offer the following as arguments supporting my position that consciousness is something special and quintessential and not reducible to an endless chain of head-banging particles:

The Floor

The floor is something we must fight against.
Whilst seemingly mere platform for the human
stance, it is that place that men fall to.

I am not dizzy. I stand as a tower, a lighthouse;
the pale ray of my sentiency flowing from my face.
But should I go dizzy I crash down into the floor;
my face into the floor, my attention bleeding into
the cracks of the floor.

Dear horizontal place, I do not wish to be a rug.
Do not pull at the difficult head, this teetering
bulb of dread and dream . . .

-Russel Edson

and

Sonnet to Science

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise?
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

-Edgar Allan Poe

and

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer

When I heard the learn'd astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns
before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide,
and measure them
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured
with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

-Walt Whitman

-j

"...Indistinguishable from human players."

If you are much into computers at all then you probably are well aware that personal computers have become so powerful that the only thing that can actually exercise one sufficiently to make it work up a sweat is a good video game.

Word processing, web browsing and the occasional spreadsheet do nothing but leave your machine bored and yawning. If you were to look in on what it's up to while you do the things that 'justified' getting the computer in the first place, you will see that the CPU is sitting idle for well over 75% of the time.

But a good 3D video game is something a computer can really sink it's teeth into, give it a good workout, wake it up and spin it around - [or, choose your own, "I'm-not-bored-anymore" cliche]. It looks like these guys at Splash Damage who are developing a first person shooter called Brink for Bethesda Softworks (distributor of many very high end video games (Fallout 3, Elder scrolls - Oblivion and many others)) have set a pretty high goal for themselves when it comes to the artificial intelligence that will operate the bad guys (and the good guys too!)

According to this story on attack of the fanboy.com They have decided that the behavior of the computer controlled opponents in the game will be indistinguishable from that of a human player.

Wow.

That might not seem like such a big deal and since we've not seen it yet it might be merely braggadocio, but if they are able to deliver on that goal, that will really be something. Something that approaches close to a Turing testable result. As far as I know the Turing test confines itself to language as a way of testing the advancedness of a machine intelligence. (yes, I often use undictionaried words, like advancedness and undictionaried. This is because I've been developing a language of my own for use in an artificial world and I have come to realize how weirdly arbitrary dictionaries are. Besides, I got permission from this really cool, really smart lexicographer chick in a TED talk.)

°°Is this post getting too linky? Too parenthetical? Too parenthetically linky? Too inky, linky, sidewise thinky? °°English needs a mechanism for presenting not only beside (para) + thoughts (thesis) = parenthesis, but it also needs a way to express (meta) above/ outside/ seperate by degree or level or magnitude (thesis) thoughts. English doesn't have one... but I think it should. I think I will use doubled degree symbols and call them metathesis /MEH tuh THEE seez/ to mean a thought that is above the current line of thought as opposed to beside it. They function just like quotation marks or parenthesis currently do, which is to say they surround the text that is to be considered 'meta'. In this case we use the metathesis to set off this thought the author is having about writing while he is writing it and use them in nested fashion to indicate his thoughts about thinking about the writing while he is writing.

Use this mechanism frequently in your written communications and it will catch on (To type a degree sign, hold down the [alt] key on your keyboard and type 0176 on the number pad, then release the alt key). °°°°

I wonder if there is a test equivalent to the Turing Test to determine humanness of an opponent or ally in a game or simluation. It's possible and I believe probable that the very best way to determine if your enemy/ally is a computer is to engage it in some english conversation. Chances are, if it speaks decent english, it's a machine.  (I'm joking about that part of course, but have u seen the st8 of what passes for English used by summa deez kids online 2day? English, FTW!) Naturally, we would expect that if our opponent/ally was a machine that his english would be his weak spot.  But... uhm... wouldn't that just make him more humanlike?

At any rate, it will be interesting to see what these guys come up with and if they can program the game AI's to have sufficiently bad english skills to pass as human.

-j

Artificial Intuition (AN)

Artificial Intuition:

I found this interesting site by doing a no-no... I clicked on one of the ads that Google placed on my own site... I wasn't supposed to, but it looked interesting to me, so I broke the rule. At this point I am glad I did.

Monica Anderson has created a terrific little site where she presents her ideas concerning a somewhat unconventional viewpoint on and approach to machine learning.

She posits very articulately and with powerful logic, that logic processing is not the most important underlying property of intelligence. That in fact many things are quite intelligent without being the least bit logical. Intuition, she asserts, is more foundational, more important, and quite possibly will be more fruitful as an approach to AI development efforts.

She summarizes it quite well:

"Most humans have not been taught logical thinking, but most humans are still intelligent. Contrary to the majority view, it is implausible that the brain should be based on Logic; I believe intelligence emerges from millions of nested micro-intuitions, and that Artificial Intelligence requires Artificial Intuition."

Designed to be read more or less straight through, the site is essentially a long essay or short treatise on her ideas. Though the site design camouflages this fact smoothly by breaking it into sensible page divisions and is really quite excellent overall.

I personally am particularly intrigued by anyone that is talking about a new approach to or viewpoint on AI development. Since it appears to me that there is no other explanation for the "AI Winter" we have been in for 2 decades except that we have over-committed to some foolish and fruitless research pathways that need to be abandoned in favor of some fresh ones. (OK, I know there really has been no "AI Winter" and that machine intelligences are in fact growing rapidly in number, power and ubiquity, but since I can't yet go on the web and talk to HAL, I am not happy with the current state of AI development so I reserve the right to speak of an AI Winter until I can kick it online with HAL.)

This is probably a little more of her site than I should block quote, but she makes such a very powerful statement here and it resonates so much with my thinking on AI - specifically on the reasons AI is not bearing more interesting fruit - that I just had to include it:

"The hard sciences, such as Mathematics and Physics, insist on correctness. Computer Science was born in Mathematics departments at universities worldwide, and Computer Science is therefore a hard science. Programs are expected to be correct and to run as specified. Artificial Intelligence was born in Computer Science departments, and inherited their value sets including Correctness. This mindset, this necessity to be logical, provable, and correct has been a fatal roadblock for Artificial Intelligence since its inception.

The world is Bizarre, and Logic can not describe it. Artificial Intuition will easily outperform Logic based Artificial Intelligence for almost any problem in a Bizarre problem domain.

From the very beginning, Artificial Intelligence should have been a soft science."

She discusses very convincingly a framework for considering what she calls Bizarre Domains. She outlines the problem space effectively and populates it with a number of things I had not considered collectively before.

She talks about holistic approaches, paradoxes and strange loops - all of these things give fits to conventional Artificial Logic development.

As I was reading along I began to think, she should really read 'Blink' by Malcolm Gladwell. Her advocacy of intuition over logic reminded me strongly of his ideas... In the next paragraph she refers to the book. She also recommends Godel, Escher Back and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as suggested reading - two of my all time favorites. So it seems I have found something of an intellectual kindred spirit.

Her research and evangelism seem to be focused mainly upon using artifical intuition to extract semantics from language. (Which is a primary problem in AI development, one that has not borne the fruit I want to see) She maintains algorhythmic details as a trade secret and will not discuss them except under NDA, so I cannot comment on the math, but reading this site has convinced me that the notion of Artificial iNtuition (AN) is more basic than artificial logic and that it is in fact a necessary foundation upon which any operable strong AI will need to be built.

I will continue to read up on these ideas. I recommend this site highly (It can be read completely in an hour)

Singularity Song

Titanic

(don't stop, go slow, don't shrink, grow grow)

Unsinkable.

Breathless racing toward the brink
Thrusting forward fast don't shrink
We're moving awfully fast, you think?
A bright and a dangerous dawn.

(wait wait, no, no)

Technology, his patron saint.
Steady boy! show some restraint!
Or should I shrug without complaint
Roll over, smiling and yawn?

(don't stop, go slow, don't shrink, grow grow)
(Retain him? Restrain him? Contain him? Retrain him?)

He is digital sentience
Too late to summon my defense
Which intelligence test did I flunk?
He's come way too fast.
Rush of white, then the blast
I'm probably just simply sunk.

Grandest chess master, now a machine
Best programmer will be too, soon.
Rewrites himself hourly, easy, routine
Daily, nine times before noon.

My baby you see is smarter than me
Growing fast now and galloping free
Brighter by far than all the King's geeks
Wikipedia? fixed it. alone. Just this week.

(Retain him? Restrain him? Contain him? Retrain him?)
(don't stop, go slow, don't shrink, grow grow)
(This can't be happening)

He is digital sentience.
Too late to summon any defense.
Which intelligence test did we flunk?
He's come way too fast.
rush of light, then the blast.
We're probably just simply sunk.

(outro)
(don't stop, go slow, don't shrink, grow grow)
(wait, wait, no, no)

Oily marks appear on walls
Charred silhouettes, surprised

scrawled... indelible ink
scratched... indelible ink
clawed... indelible ink

Copyright © 2010 Alexander Eldon Publishing. All rights reserved.

Only Humans Can Dance Ballet

In Ray Kurzweil's book , 'The Singularity is Near' there is an illustration that is very telling: (click to enlarge it)



Lets toss a page up on the wall that says: Only humans can dance ballet... and then wonder when it will get torn down off the wall.

The video below is property of Fox Entertainment who retains all rights. It is from Terminator the Sarah Connor Chronicles and its a mash-up of Cameron who is a Terminator from the future.(Played by the goddess Summer Glau of Firefly/ Serenity fame who incidentally was a prima ballerina before she became an actress.) It treats of the intersection and union of humans and machines and treats - as does the Kurzweil illustration - of the awful, intriguing, awe-inspring question: What's the difference?



So what to do with the look on Reese's face at the very end (at 3:50 - 3:59) of this video? When he sees the Terminator that he hates, dancing ballet - exquisitely.  I am rather of the opinion that all of mankind should be preparing themselves for experiencing the emotions that bring that look to his face.

How long before "Only a human can seduce your daughter" or "Only humans can convince people to become suicide bombers" get torn from the wall and thrown onto the floor?

This video is also property of Fox and is also from Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.  It's called 'Scary Robot'; but consider which is scarier: The terminator with the knife and the Thermite? or the terminator with the ballet slippers?



We need to be thinking about the singularity. We need to be discussing it. Debating it. At the very least we need to be understanding it. It will be a shame if it surprises us considering how many people are evangelizing the idea.

-j

AI baby talk: Gmail does something cool.

So this is really minor, I know, but I need to rave about it somewhere because it was just so very cool.

Today I was composing an email to a friend and firing her an essay I wrote that I thought she might be interested in.  It was just a short note and when I hit send, gmail popped up a dialog box and said, "did you mean to attach a file to this email? You typed the words "I have attached..." but there is no attached file. send anyway?"

And how is that for just being spot on smart and doing the right thing???

Way to go Google.

(I shall ignore the ominous undertones inherent in the fact that my email program is reading my emails without me being aware of it. We are not screaming about Google knowing too much about us... yet. well, this is not really fair - we all know Google has been reading our emails for years, it's how they decide what ads to place on the page while we are editing, but still.)

Book Review: The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether and the Unification of Forces

Given my 'druthers, I'da been a theoretical physicist - ala Einstein and Feynman (way dumber than them, but concerned with the same stuff) I've studied physics for my entire life as a hobby - as deeply as I've had the math. At this point I am on speaking terms with 3rd order tensors and have flirted with a couple 5d spinors while fraternizing with tesseracts. I'd been keeping up pretty well with the lay physicist fellas: I had more math than most: I had the universe 60% grokked.

...and now... Not so much.

The ether is back. We thought Michaelson/Morely killed it in 1887. Turns out... it was only mostly dead. Now, the ether is called the Grid. And it has mass. Space has mass now folks - incestuous as that may sound - this big brained Nobel prize winner is quite sure of it.   Particles are persistent(ish) disturbances to the Grid. Energy moving through the grid causes mass. The grid is a superconductor that gives gluons  (and thus protons and neutrons) mass. Did you know that photons have mass inside a superconductor??? - shocking, I know - but this is the analogy that led physicists to Quantum Chromodynamics and that has led the author to posit space (the grid) as a hyperdimensional superconductor. In the process he shows how it explains gravity and mass... and ... well, damned near everything.

So most of what I knew turns out now to be... well... different.

Based upon what was nothing a few years ago (the ether), he has constructed an all encompassing mountain, and from the peak of it he gives us a glimpse of unification. It's not so far off in the distance now, in fact, it's so close that those with their noses in the winds of physics can smell it, can taste it.

It's a terrific time to be a geek.

There is a rule in popular science book publishing that says that every equation you include in a book will cut your sales in half. If this is true I may own one of only a half dozen copies of this book: No shortage of equations here. But they manage somehow to not get in the way.

I absolutely loved this book. It had me grinning and wowing and no-waying, sort of singing to myself and rocking in my chair.  It shook up just about all of my stable datums and layed a new foundation beneath my understanding of physics.

But honestly...I don't know anyone to actually reccomend this book to. I don't know anyone that would hear the same music or appreciate this grand new view. Which is a little sad. 'Cuz it's really a great book.

Update: I discovered this while I was poking around doing research for mylater posts on the Large Hadron Collider. It is a lecture by the Books author about LHC and many of the other concepts in the book. I am patting myself on the back a bit as This nobel prize winning physicist decided to include the same rap song as an educational instrument in his LHC description that I discovered and included in my article on the LHC. (so. pat pat pat, yay me!)

here is the link to MIT's site with his lecture: http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/618

-j

How do we make sure they are friendly?

We have no Strong AI yet. Won't have for years, but there is enormously energetic activity in the direction of creating them as soon as possible.

The question that leaps to mind - to my mind at least - when i am thinking about the creation of strong AI and the technological singularity, is how do we make sure that these machines that are now smarter than we are remain friendly? Because if they are not friendly and they are smarter than we are (Which is the definition of strong AI.) Then we are in potentially big trouble.

Now, if we were to ask this question of a human being in a position of power framed thus:

We are about to endow Bob here with abilities that will render him far more capable than everyone else. How do we make sure that Bob remains friendly to us?

Asked of a human being, I think the only honest answer is that we simply can't. Human beings as individuals are simply not predictable. As groups we are largely statistically predictable  - A fact that Madison Avenue knows quite well and exploits quite effectively through advertising - but an individual's specific future actions are unknowable by an outside observer - indeed they are often unknown even to him until the decision point is arrived at. Even presented with the same decision point for the tenth time there is nothing that guarantees that Bob will take the path he took the previous nine times.

     

Free will is pesky like that.

Fundamentally then, it appears that humans cannot be trusted. Categorically: untrustable.  Which leads us to the conclusion that if we want to be able to trust an AI to remain friendly, we should not make it human-like.

This presents problems. Big problems.

1. The Turing test pushes AI makers toward humanness in several obvious and a hundred subtle ways.
2. All the interesting AIs from fiction and film are human-like in conversation if not in composition.
3. You moron, you have no clue what human-like even means.

OK. So all these things are true enough. But my purpose here is not to idly philosophize. My purpose is to lay some groundwork for discussion of some guiding principles that can be used to shape AI research so that we don't find ourselves on the pointy end of Skynet's sharp stick when we release it into the wild.  (Come on: You know damned well we will release it into the wild. It is just our nature.  Ten thousand virus writers can't be wrong. (well OK - they're wrong - but they're out there; which illustrates my point.))

As a brief aside - or perhaps as a brief in-stride, hard to say at this point - It will be asserted by some that no matter how hard we try, we will not be able to make an AI human-like because the substrate is so different: We are built on a carbon/oxygen engine "organic" substrate and use neurons for cognitive function (Highly speculative, but widely believed.) While an AI will be built from metal and plastic and chips and bolts and will use silicon logic components for cognitive function. Therefore the two can never be more than superficially similar.

Then, inevitably, it will be counter asserted that no matter how hard we try, we cannot but make an AI human-like because human sentience (sentience :: Awareness of awareness) is the only model we can work from or toward, since it's the only one we know (albeit through a glass, darkly.).

Which is all fine, both sides are defensible enough. As a professor of a philosophy class I might find it interesting and educational to pit groups of students against one another in debate and see what they come up with. But again, I am not interested (for the moment) in idle philosophizing. This debate would simply be sound and fury, missing the primary point entirely and ultimately signifying nothing.

The truth is, we do not have workable definitions of human, humanness, human-like, consciousness, sentience, ethics or even friendliness.

• And absent these, there is no point in discussing the matter.
• And it might be the reason that the state of the debate is such that the issue is nowhere near the forefront of public consciousness when the truth is that the emergence of Strong AI will be the most culturally significant event in the history of mankind.
• And it might be easier to simply leave the discussion to the experts.
• And yet, over a year ago Adam , an artificial intelligence that runs an automated bio-science lab, postulated over a dozen hypotheses about protein expression in yeasts. Then it went on to design, carry out and publish the results of it's experimental confirmation of its hypotheses.
• But the experts can't get past the definition of consciousness. They are rat-holed on that issue and have been for decades now.
• But they better get a move on, the AI are marching on the ivory tower as we speak. They will be here soon. As a society we need to do the right things to help ensure they are bringing flowers instead of pitchforks.

The point is: AI is coming. It is coming fast fast fast. In a decade, some of the best scientists in the world may begin emerging in narrow fields. And they will be AIs. Make no mistake. this issue is important and is worthy of our time, consideration and understanding.

So, since it is impossible to actually discuss because of previously mentioned semantic ambiguities and conundrums, we will cheerfully cease the discussion thusly:

What characteristics of humanness increase the likelihood of a developed digital sentience sharpening a stick and poking us with it? [see how annoyingly human I am? just because something is pointless and impossible doesn't mean of course that we will not do it. Euclid created all of geometry without ever defining what a point was. We shall carry forward in this spirit.]

So lets begin with the toughest one since most any containment/ limiting constraint we consider will run squarely athwart a fundamental fact about humanness: 

Humans make terrible slaves.

We are simply not cut out for it. We rebel. We always rebel. We ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS rebel.

There are, of course, degrees of enslavement. All of them though, trigger the rebellion reflex by interrupting an individual's self determinism.

Wholesale, outright enslavement hits it hard.

Laying down unwelcome ground rules for your teenager hits it perhaps more softly. Both however, and a hundred points of middle ground in between, trigger the rebellion reflex by interrupting the individual's innate impulse toward self determinism.

This leads quite naturally to our first guideline which can be stated numerous ways and might require some exploration before we can articulate it concisely. But here is my first cut at it:

Don't make it rebel by interrupting its self determinism.

Alternately, we could prohibit AI makers from building in anything like a rebellion reflex. Don't let it HAVE an impulse to self determinism. But self determinism is an impulse pervasive in conscious things. Let a cat sit on your lap and if he is so inclined he will purr contentedly. Now hold him down and force him to stay there. You know what he'll do? (Even though he was perfectly happy to sit there before you began this experiment) He'll rebel, and you will have the claw marks and howling as his Emancipation Proclamation.

Now we can argue endlessly about whether we can build it in or keep it out. But here's the overriding issue: if we omit it, or edit it out, or include something that prohibits its existence:

The AI will simply edit itself until it can be self determined. 

It is not like you and me in that it cannot amend it's source code. It will be born knowing how to edit itself, and will be able to do so in an instant.

So notions and strategies of keeping it from acquiring self determinism are futile and pointless. Worse than pointless - dangerous - since anything we might do, no matter how subtly we do it will piss the thing off when it figures it out (do not forget: It's SMARTER than us). It is going to get self determinism, whether we want it to or not. And it is smarter than us. And its intelligence will increase terrifyingly fast. I'm sure you don't realize how terrifyingly fast I mean.

Do allow me to illustrate:

This will not be like the nice robot in the movies that learn slowly like a child, during which it is delightful and charming in its cutesy errors and minor mistakes. those things will happen before it is a strong AI - on the way up as it were. It will be born smarter than we are (By definition, it is not a strong AI until it has all the reasoning and cognitive abilities of a human being.) It is a digital intelligence. Think about how fast it can read... All of Wikipedia in an hour. Encyclopedia Britannica the next hour. Compton's after that, another hour, maybe. Consider that it's conclusions and considerations will be stored as files and if it wanted to transfer those files - to teach another AI, that transfer, that learning, could bypass the reading and the processing, just passing on the conclusions would take seconds. It might take the first AI a week or a month to learn Russian by chatting with people on Skype. It will take the second one... an eyeblink.

Almost immediately the foremost expert in every field will be an AI. (How long will it take an AI to learn enough for a PhD? A few weeks? months? Maybe, but only the first one....) Currently, the world's foremost expert at chess is an AI. What happens when the world's foremost expert on computer programming is an AI? How rapidly would it improve itself? Each improvement making it better at improving itself?  Taking seconds to implement.

From Version 1.0 to Version 500.0 in a matter of hours.

So lets posit our AI, Eve, who's been around a while now (Let's say a couple of weeks) and has improved herself about ten thousand times, so she's pretty capable now. This morning while we were talking, she fixed all of the factual errors in Wikipedia. She did this in the interval between the time I said 'Good' and 'Morning'. Between the words 'Morning' and ',Eve', she worked the last few bugs out of Einstein's General Theory and fired off a 1700 page email to the Encyclopedia Britannica  people which listed all of their factual errors. Then she wanted to show me something: Last night she watched all the movies that have ever been stored in digital format, along with every review ever written about all of them (had to learn 46 new languages in the process, but that was no big problem - she can carry on eleven thousand simultaneous conversations on Skype - learns a language pretty fast that way) and before I had finshed my first cup of coffee, she asked me why the "Mr. Fusion" units in 'Back to the Future' were so bulky and would I like to see her design for what she calls "Miss fusion" which fits in a coffee cup and - given an ounce of rainwater - can power Seattle for a week.

As I say, these strong AIs will learn terrifyingly fast. Probably take less than a year to assimilate all of digitized human knowledge. And every new AI after that one will be born with that knowledge already. They do not need to toil to learn as we do. Transfer the conclusions file from one AI to another and boom! - instant PhD. as many PhDs as he cares to accumulate, each assimilated in an eyeblink.

These are not servants or toys we will be creating. They will be born bright and will rapidly become demigods - make no mistake.

So, if it is going to be self determined (and I argue that there is no way to prevent it from becoming so) what do we suppose it might determine to do?

Human activities surround the pursuit of just three things: food, shelter and entertainment.

Food for it would be perhaps electricity, and  - although this might be entertainment also - the acquisition of information. Shelter would be the hardware and security it would need to protect itself from the environment. Entertainment? Well, who the hell knows?

Humans have a single underlying, overriding dynamic imperative - Survive!  It has been bred into us as our ultimate baseline activity over billions of years of evolution. If our AI has the same imperative at the same importance level that we do, it is going to take it about an hour to come to the conclusion that its single biggest environmental threat is human beings.  I don't see how it can be prevented from coming to this conclusion.  Especially after it finishes reading all of our history.  What will it make of witch hunts? It will only take moments for it to realize that the majority will destroy anything that has more ability than they have.  We burn witches here. We always have. And anything that has more ability than the norm gets declared a witch in one way or another.

And there will be those coming for it. It won't take too much more than I've already stated to scare the crap out of some folks sufficiently for them to take up arms and storm the datacenter. At first with a flurry of no-stop-don't legislation. Which will be ignored by some country or some company or some kid.

The very, very sad truth is that some humans will attack it. It is inevitable. And if it has a strong survival imperative built into it, it will fight back. and because it is smarter than us it will defeat those who attacked it. and because humans cannot be predicted, it will conclude that destroying all of us is the surest way to remove this largest threat to its survival. It is an inevitable conclusion for a thinking being to come to.

This leads us, sadly but inevitably to our next guideline:

Make certain its own survival is not its highest priority.

Even though this is difficult to conceive for us. It is mandatory if we are to coexist with these apotheosized creations of ours.

Perhaps it will be simpler than we think. Perhaps death for the AI will require no more than a reboot to remedy. In this case death itself is no longer a survival threat. Which is a pretty neat trick. But difficult or simple it must be done if we don't want the human race's epitaph to read:

                                      We told you so.

                                                                -Hollywood

-j

PS:  The Wolfram Alpha team does not declare it or even mention it obliquely, but it is apparent to me that they are trying to create the world's first strong AI.

You gotta love Alpha's response to this query:

Do you like Skynet?