EDGE Question 2015: WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT MACHINES THAT THINK?

It's time again for the annual EDGE question for 2015 - What do you think about machines that think? Among this years respondents are many authors and thinkers who work in psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and consciousness research. Here are a few:

Stanislas Dehaene, Alison Gopnik, Thomas Metzinger, Bruce Sterling, Kevin Kelly, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Andy Clark, Michael Shermer, Nicholas Humphrey, Gary Marcus, George Dyson, Paul Davies, Douglas Rushkoff, Helen Fisher, Stuart A. Kauffman, Robert Sapolsky, Maria Popova, Steven Pinker, and many others - 186 in all.

2015 : WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT MACHINES THAT THINK?

Contributors [ 185 ]  |  View All Responses [ 182 ]

"Dahlia" by Katinka Matson |  Click to Expand | www.katinkamatson.com

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In recent years, the 1980s-era philosophical discussions about artificial intelligence (AI)—whether computers can "really" think, refer, be conscious, and so on—have led to new conversations about how we should deal with the forms that many argue actually are implemented. These "AIs", if they achieve "Superintelligence" (Nick Bostrom), could pose "existential risks" that lead to "Our Final Hour" (Martin Rees). And Stephen Hawking recently made international headlines when he noted "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race."   

THE EDGE QUESTION—2015 

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT MACHINES THAT THINK?

But wait! Should we also ask what machines that think, or, "AIs", might be thinking about? Do they want, do they expect civil rights? Do they have feelings? What kind of government (for us) would an AI choose? What kind of society would they want to structure for themselves? Or is "their" society "our" society? Will we, and the AIs, include each other within our respective circles of empathy?

Numerous Edgies have been at the forefront of the science behind the various flavors of AI, either in their research or writings. AI was front and center in conversations between charter members Pamela McCorduck (Machines Who Think) and Isaac Asimov (Machines That Think) at our initial meetings in 1980. And the conversation has continued unabated, as is evident in the recent Edge feature "The Myth of AI", a conversation with Jaron Lanier, that evoked rich and provocative commentaries.

Is AI becoming increasingly real? Are we now in a new era of the "AIs"? To consider this issue, it's time to grow up. Enough already with the science fiction and the movies, Star Maker, Blade Runner, 2001, Her, The Matrix, "The Borg".  Also, 80 years after Turing's invention of his Universal Machine, it's time to honor Turing, and other AI pioneers, by giving them a well-deserved rest. We know the history. (See George Dyson's 2004 Edge feature "Turing's Cathedral".) So, once again, this time with rigor, the Edge Question—2105: WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT MACHINES THAT THINK?

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[182 Responses—126,000 words:] Pamela McCorduck, George Church, James J. O'Donnell, Carlo Rovelli, Nick Bostrom, Daniel C. Dennett, Donald Hoffman, Roger Schank, Mark Pagel, Frank Wilczek, Robert Provine, Susan Blackmore, Haim Harari, Andy Clark, William Poundstone, Peter Norvig, Rodney Brooks, Jonathan Gottschall, Arnold Trehub, Giulio Boccaletti, Michael Shermer, Chris DiBona, Aubrey De Grey, Juan Enriquez, Satyajit Das, Quentin Hardy, Clifford Pickover, Nicholas Humphrey, Ross Anderson, Paul Saffo, Eric J. Topol, M.D., Dylan Evans, Roger Highfield, Gordon Kane, Melanie Swan, Richard Nisbett, Lee Smolin, Scott Atran, Stanislas Dehaene, Stephen Kosslyn, Emanuel Derman, Richard Thaler, Alison Gopnik, Ernst Pöppel, Luca De Biase, Maraget Levi, Terrence Sejnowski, Thomas Metzinger, D.A. Wallach, Leo Chalupa, Bruce Sterling, Kevin Kelly, Martin Seligman, Keith Devlin, S. Abbas Raza, Neil Gershenfeld, Daniel Everett, Douglas Coupland, Joshua Bongard, Ziyad Marar, Thomas Bass, Frank Tipler, Mario Livio, Marti Hearst, Randolph Nesse, Alex (Sandy) Pentland, Samuel Arbesman, Gerald Smallberg, John Mather, Ursula Martin, Kurt Gray, Gerd Gigerenzer, Kevin Slavin, Nicholas Carr, Timo Hannay, Kai Krause, Alun Anderson, Seth Lloyd, Mary Catherine Bateson, Steve Fuller, Virginia Heffernan, Barbara Strauch, Sean Carroll, Sheizaf Rafaeli, Edward Slingerland, Nicholas Christakis, Joichi Ito, David Christian, George Dyson, Paul Davies, Douglas Rushkoff, Tim O'Reilly, Irene Pepperberg, Helen Fisher, Stuart A. Kauffman, Stuart Russell, Tomaso Poggio, Robert Sapolsky, Maria Popova, Martin Rees, Lawrence M. Krauss, Jessica Tracy & Kristin Laurin, Paul Dolan, Kate Jefferey, June Gruber & Raul Saucedo, Bruce Schneier, Rebecca MacKinnon, Antony Garrett Lisi, Thomas Dietterich, John Markoff, Matthew Lieberman, Dimitar Sasselov, Michael Vassar, Gregory Paul, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Andrian Kreye, Andrés Roemer, N.J. Enfield, Rolf Dobelli, Nina Jablonski, Marcelo Gleiser, Gary Klein, Tor Nørretranders, David Gelernter, Cesar Hidalgo, Gary Marcus, Sam Harris, Molly Crockett, Abigail Marsh, Alexander Wissner-Gross, Koo Jeong-A, Sarah Demers, Richard Foreman, Julia Clarke, Georg Diez, Jaan Tallinn, Michael McCullough, Hans Halvorson, Kevin Hand, Christine Finn, Tom Griffiths, Dirk Helbing, Brian Knutson, John Tooby, Maximilian Schich, Athena Vouloumanos, Brian Christian, Timothy Taylor, Bruce Parker, Benjamin Bergen, Laurence Smith, Ian Bogost, W. Tecumseh Fitch, Michael Norton, Scott Draves, Gregory Benford, Chris Anderson, Raphael Bousso, Christopher Chabris, James Croak, Beatrice Golomb, Moshe Hoffman, Matt Ridley, Matthew Ritchie, Eduardo Salcedo-Albaran, Eldar Shafir, Maria Spiropulu, Tania Lombrozo, Bart Kosko, Joscha Bach, Esther Dyson, Anthony Aguirre, Steve Omohundro, Murray Shanahan, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Steven Pinker, Max Tegmark, Jon Kleinberg & Senhil Mullainathan, Freeman Dyson, Brian Eno, W. Daniel Hillis, Katinka Matson

Google Has Acquired AI Start-Up DeepMind - What Are They Planning?

Via Live Science, who re-posted an article originally from The Conversation, this is an op-ed by Matthew Higgs about Google's acquisition of the artificial intelligence start-up DeepMind.

Hmmm . . . Ray Kurzweil + Boston Dynamics (robotics) + DeepMind (artificial intelligence) . . . . Google is planning to upload Ray into an intelligent robot that is immortal?

What Does Google Want with DeepMind? Here are Three Clues (Op-Ed)

By Matthew Higgs, University College London | January 30, 2014

 

The golden age of AI is upon us. Credit: kidpixo.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

All eyes turned to London this week, as Google announced its latest acquisition in the form of DeepMind, a company that specialises in artificial intelligence technologies. The £400m pricetag paid by Google and the reported battle with Facebook to win the company over indicate that this is a firm well worth backing.

Although solid information is thin on the ground, you can get an idea of what the purchase might be leading to, if you know where to look.

Clue 1: what does Google already know?

Google has always been active in artificial intelligence and relies on the process for many of its projects. Just consider the “driver” behind its driverless cars, the speech recognition system in Google Glass, or the way its search engine predicts what we might search for after just a couple of keystrokes. Even the page-rank algorithm that started it all falls under the banner of AI.

Acquiring a company such as DeepMind therefore seems like a natural step. The big question is whether Google is motivated by a desire to help develop technologies we already know about or whether it is moving into the development of new technologies.

Given its track record, I’m betting on the latter. Google has the money and the drive to tackle the biggest questions in science, and developing computers that think like humans has, for a long time, been one of the biggest of them all.

Clue 2: what’s in the research?

The headlines this week have described DeepMind as a “secretive start-up”, but clues about what it gets up to at its London base can be gleaned from some of the research publications produced by the company’s co-founder, Demis Hassabis.

Hassabis' three most recent publications all focus on the brain activity of human participants as they undergo particular tasks. He has looked into how we take advantage of our habitat, how we identify and predict the behaviour of other people and how we remember the past and imagine the future.

As humans, we collect information through sensory input and process it many times over using abstraction. We extract features and categorise objects to focus our attention on the information that is relevant to us. When we enter a room we quickly build up a mental image of the room, interpret the objects in the room, and use this information to assess the situation in front of us.

The people at Google have, until now, generally focused on the lower-level stages of this information processing. They have developed systems to look for features and concepts in online photos and street scenes to provide users with relevant content, systems to translate one language to another to enable us to communicate, and speech recognition systems, making voice control on your phone or device a reality.

The processes Hassabis investigates require these types of information processing as prerequisites. Only once you have identified the relevant features in a scene and categorised objects in your habitat can you begin to take advantage of your habitat. Only once you have identified the features of someone’s face and recognised them as a someone you know can you start to predict their behaviour. And only once you have built up vivid images of the past can you extrapolate a future.

Clue 3: what else is on the shopping list?

Other recent acquisitions by Google provide further pieces to the puzzle. It has recently appointed futurist Ray Kurzweil, who believes in search engines with human intelligence and being able to upload our minds onto computers, as its director of engineering. And the purchase of Boston Dynamics, a company developing ground breaking robotics technology, gives a hint of its ambition.

Google is also getting into smart homes in the hope of more deeply interweaving its technologies into our everyday lives. DeepMind could provide the know-how to enable such systems to exhibit a level of intelligence never seen before in computers.

Combining the machinery Google already uses for processing sensory input with the ideas under investigation at DeepMind about how the brain uses this sensory input to complete high-level tasks is an exciting prospect. It has the potential to produce the closest thing yet to a computer with human qualities.

Building computers that think like humans has been the goal of AI ever since the time of Alan Turing. Progress has been slow, with science fiction often creating false hope in people’s minds. But these past two decades have seen unimaginable leaps in information processing and our understanding of the brain. Now that one of the most powerful companies in the world has identified where it wants to go next, we can expect big things. Just as physics had its heyday in the 20th century, this century is truly the golden age of AI.

Matthew Higgs receives funding from the EPSRC.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on LiveScience.


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