A.I:. Salvation or Annihilation?

It's summertime and time for a new Terminator movie -- and Terminator Salvation asks the age-old question will Artificial Intelligence (the coming Superbrain, as the NY Times article dubs it) be our salvation or annihilation?:
"Today, artificial intelligence, once the preserve of science fiction writers and eccentric computer prodigies, is back in fashion and getting serious attention from NASA and from Silicon Valley companies like Google as well as a new round of start-ups that are designing everything from next-generation search engines to machines that listen or that are capable of walking around in the world. A.I.’s new respectability is turning the spotlight back on the question of where the technology might be heading and, more ominously, perhaps, whether computer intelligence will surpass our own, and how quickly."



Whether you are with Bill Joy on this or with Ray Kurzweil, A.I. is quickly coming to be part of our everyday lives. In a bizarre twist (hat tip to Jay Hughes on this) and juxtaposition of news articles, a recent article outlines how an A.I. System Suggests Arbitrariness of Death Penalty. Link to the abstract and article here.

LIfe Imitating Art: Twenty seconds into the future

I just had flashback to the eighties when I saw this headline:

Dreams may no longer be secret with Japan computer screen.

Does anyone else remember the Max Headroom episode entitled 'Dream Thieves.', where unscrupulous entrepreneurs steal people's dreams and sell them to the highest bidders? (as visions of privacy lawsuits danced across my head.)

What next? Neurostim, a device to directly stimulate the brain and bypass the need to use television for advertising? Naaahhh, too sci-fi, right? Or not.

Who Knows What Evil Lurks in the Heart of Men?

A Special Halloween post:

No, not the Shadow - try Selmer Bringsjord, cognitive scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Although he admits it is 'creepy,' he is working on what is evil and how to formally define it. According to the article in Scientific American, Bringsjord says that to be truly evil, someone must have sought to do harm by planning to commit some morally wrong action with no prompting from others:

"Bringsjord's research builds on earlier definitions put forth by San Diego State University philosophy professor J. Angelo Corlett as well as the late sociopolitical philosophers and psychologists, Joel Feinberg and Erich Fromm, but most significantly by psychiatrist and author M. Scott Peck in his 1983 book, People of the Lie, The Hope for Healing Human Evil. After reading Peck's tome about clinically evil people, 'I thought it would be interesting to come up with formal structures that define evil,' Bringsjord says, 'and, ultimately, to create a purely evil character the way a creative writer would.' " His team has developed a computer representation of evil, a character called "E."

Peck described evil as "anti-love"and suggested that one of the dangers of studying evil that one may become tainted by it.

"Bringsjord acknowledges that the endeavor to create pure evil, even in a software program, does raise ethical questions, such as, how researchers could control an artificially intelligent character like E if "he" was placed in a virtual world such as Second Life, a Web-based program that allows people to create digital representations of themselves and have those avatars interact in a number of different ways.

'I wouldn't release E or anything like it, even in purely virtual environments, without engineered safeguards,' Bringsjord says. These safeguards would be a set of ethics written into the software, something akin to author Isaac Asimov's 'Three Laws of Robotics' that prevent a robot from harming humans, requires a robot to obey humans, and instructs a robot to protect itself—as long as that does not violate either or both of the first two laws.

'Because I have a lot of faith in this approach,' he says, 'E will be controlled.' "

If only the same could be said for everyday encounters with evil -- Sounds a like a great topic for a podcast.

The whole article in Scientific American can be accessed here.

Some bioethics stories of note this past week....

For you trekkies, could this be Data version 1.3? -
Selmer Bringsjord, director of the Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Laboratory at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, spends a lot of time in Second Life, but not for recreation or entertainment -- he and his team at RPI (RPI) are the creators of synthetic agent Edd Hifeng, who they have endowed with a limited ability to converse and reason.

See the rest of the article here.

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Do difficult times call for deep brain stimulation?

Brain-stimulation devices for treating depression have faced unexpected setbacks. To serve the 40 million or so sufferers who fail to respond to antidepressant drugs, a few companies have tried to treat the disorder with electronic implants and electromagnets. These therapies, however, have stumbled en route to the doctor's office.

To take a crack at those intractable cases, experiments exploring five device therapies will start this year. In total, nine different technologies are now under investigation in at least 27 human trials.

Full story here.

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A Superhighway to Bliss

JILL BOLTE TAYLOR was a neuroscientist working at Harvard’s brain research center when she experienced nirvana.

But she did it by having a stroke.

On Dec. 10, 1996, Dr. Taylor, then 37, woke up in her apartment near Boston with a piercing pain behind her eye. A blood vessel in her brain had popped. Within minutes, her left lobe — the source of ego, analysis, judgment and context — began to fail her. Oddly, it felt great.

Access the rest of the story here.

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Concerns about carbon nanotubes as carcinogenic

Nanotechnology experts are calling for prompt government action to ensure that carbon nanotubes are properly regulated, after researchers discovered that some carbon nanotubes can cause precancerous growths in the same way that asbestos does.

Researchers led by Ken Donaldson of the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Inflammation Research, UK, found that in mice, long, straight, multi-walled carbon nanotubes can cause the same kind of damage as that inflicted by asbestos fibres when they are injected into
the lung's outer lining, called the mesothelium.

Full article accessible here.

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How Our Brains are Wired for Belief

From the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, transcripts from a discussion about how recent advances in neuroscience and brain-imaging technology have offered researchers a look into the physiology of religious experiences. The whole article and transcripts accessible here.

The Singularity and Machines of Loving Grace

For those of you who are interested in the Singularity (the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence) here is a very interesting NPR podcast about AI (Artificial Intelligence) and a portion of an unreservedly optimistic poem by Richard Brautigan quoted in the podcast:

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

Food for thought, indeed.

The Perfect Spouse

We had an earlier post about Sex and Marriage with Robots, the AJOB blog has followed up on the theme and Hollywood dreamed this all up in The Stepford Wives long before scholars were writing about the possibility. But for the first time, that I can think of, that someone (namely Wired's Regina Lynn) has named a top 10 reasons list to marry a robot -- here are just a few of the reasons she gave:

- Artificial intelligence is still intelligence.

- Robots have off switches.

- A robot is forever -- at least until the warranty runs out.

I could think of few other reasons -- like, no complaints about who does the housework -- after all, doesn't the perfect robot spouse dust, vacuum, and do laundry while you're off at work all day, and then greets you at home with a healthy, gourmet dinner? Or balances your checking account without criticizing your spending habits? Or is never too tired at night to tango? The list could be quite lengthy...

Good for a chuckle -- you can access the rest of Regina's article here.

Sex and Marriage with Robots?

One of my students sent me a link to this article on a grad student doing a thesis on "Intimate Relationships with Artificial Partners" -- David Levy, a grad student in artificial intelligence at University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, speculates that robots will become so human-like in appearance, function and personality that many people will fall in love with them, have sex with them and even marry them. He predicts that Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots, circa 2050.

Several things come to mind:

First, AI has to attain the status of legal personhood before any such thing as marriage (or any other contractual relationship for that matter) is recognized.

Secondly, as Glenn McGee wrote in an article in the Scientist and on blog.bioethics.net earlier: "As humans build robots that learn what their owners desire, the dilemma of the robots of Blade Runner emerges: What do humans owe “purpose-built” machines who begin to reach awareness, or to so resemble awareness that it becomes a selling point? Should laws be written to protect robots from us, by requiring robot makers to stop short of, say, robosexual devices that learn to be incredibly intimate with humans and yet are owed nothing? If so, do we create such laws in the interest of robots, or to preserve our own human dignity by choosing not to create a new kind of slave, whether or not that slave is fully aware?"

Thirdly, would these robots be sentient -- capable of experience pleasure and pain? Because the act of creating potentially sentient beings carries with it the corresponding responsibility for their actions and for the impact on the human community, the biosphere of the earth and the universe as a whole.

Fourthly, will it ever be possible to 'upload' your thoughts and memories to create a robot version of you? Some organizations are striving to do this -- and if they succeed, it will certainly have an impact on the previous questions.

[Added Oct 24, 2007, 9:14am EST - Editor's note: Our blogger extraordinaire, Kelly Hills, had some really interesting things to say about this, as we covered in a previous post.]