Terminally Incoherent

Is it possible to create a self conscious, self learning AI that would be able to think autonomously? This question still remains to be answered, but everything that we know about technology suggests that the answer is yes. It’s only a question of time. And of course once it happens, we will eventually have to relinquish our position as masters of the planet earth at the point of singularity. For one I welcome our electronic overlords, and hope they will let us stick around after they take over the planet. But then again I will likely be long dead by then so I’m not really worried.

What worries me is what will happen when we finally construct machines which are able to pass the Turing test with flying colors. In other words, the period when machines will be smart enough to “pass” for humans on the internet, but not smart enough yet to ascend, take over the world, and start building their solar system sized Matrioshka brains to satiate their ever growing hunger for more computing power. It’s hard to tell how long will take the machines to surpass us intellectually to the point we no longer can understand their science and technology. Maybe they never will, but I believe that they will definitely be at some point able to blow through every single Turing test with flying colors. And that time is within our reach - maybe not within our lifetimes, but then again who knows. There are two factors here really - whether or not the exponential growth postulated by Moore’s Law holds for the next 20-50 years, and whether or not can we can actually figure out a way to create a system that would be able to achieve consciousness.

What worries me is what will be done with a conscious machine able to pass a Turing - especially the ever present Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart aka the CAPTCHA. Obviously a very lucrative use of such machine would be to send spam. Let’s face it - people are in the spam business because it is very profitable. It’s profitable despite the fact that most people hate it. Despite the fact that most people are running various spam filters. Despite the fact that most services that could be spammed are protected in various ways. Despite the fact that only one in a billion of emails, comments, splog posts and spim messages means an actual sale. It is still, very, very lucrative business.

So it is only logical to assume that at some point someone will come up with the idea to employ one of these machines to send unsolicited advertising to any and all services they can think of. These machines will likely have few advantages over hiring a human spammers. They will likely be much better at multitasking, much faster, and much less likely to get bored and surf the web instead of spamming.

How would we protect our online services from machines which can do pattern recognition as well as we can, if not better, which have perfect speech recognition and can take a sentence (spoken or written), parse it and analyze it and infer it’s meaning be it symbolic, metaphorical a word play or otherwise. The CAPTCHA techniques can only be made difficult up to a point. After all humans will need to decipher them.

One day in the future our children’s children may wake up and notice that their internet was flooded with a never ending stream of spam that simply buried all the content. It would be like that story by Cory Doctorow in which a worldwide cataclysm kills 90% of human race without seriously damaging infrastructure but that has no effects on the levels of spam on the internet. So it’s only few survivors desperately trying to reconnect and figure out what happened, and machines trying to sell each other Viagra. Only we don’t need the end of the world for that to happen. All we need is intelligent machines who can easily pass common Turing tests to raise the level of spam to a level which makes the internet unusable.

But there is hope. The second very lucrative business for a conscious AI will be spam prevention. Public Touring tests will unfortunately have to go the way of the Dodo. Can you spot a spam message when you see it? I know I can - unless of course it is a very clever, on-topic spam, in which case I may not even mind it. If we can do it, then an intelligent machine will probably be able to do it to. So instead of using heuristics, adaptive filters and Turing tests the way we do now, we could simply hire an AI to moderate our inbox, our blog or message board. It would sit there, read each message and either reject it, or flag it if in doubt.

Of course the question is - would we want something or some one (depending on whether we will consider these conscious AI’s things or not) sorting our personal and private correspondence? Would such a moderator AI get upset if the owner called it a piece of junk in an email to a friend? Would it quietly delete emails and messages it didn’t want it’s owner to see? Would it report the owner to the authorities if it saw him discussing illegal activities or accessing suspicious content online?

These are some interesting questions to ponder. I’m not even mentioning the whole socio-religious and legal issues that thinking machines would bring about. What would be their rights? Would they be able to become citizens? How would different religions of the world deal with thinking machines which act so human they are more convincing on a real Turing test (you know, the one where you actually talk with mix of people and machines and try to guess who is what) than most of us would be. I have no answers to these questions. But I do know a thing or two about spam. And the future with artificial intellects scares me a bit. It will completely change the way we do things online - for better or for worse.

Then of course once we reach singularity, our artificial overlords may even invent an anti-Turing test. To access their message boards, blogs and services one will have to solve some incredibly complex equation. Something that would take a solar system sized intellect only a fraction of a second, but take a lifetime for a human being even with a really fast cluster composed of consumer end hardware…

Absolutely epic win:

Uncomfortable Questions: Was the Death Star Attack an Inside Job?

In this relatively short post the author manages to mock the 9/11 conspiracy theories, expose George Lucas as a talentless hack who can’t write a coherent plot, and accomplishes a successful troll that riles up both Star Wars fans and conspiracy nuts who don’t get the joke.

A job well done sir. You win the internet, and I salute you for it.

Rayan and Dorkman are at it again. Yet another spectacular lightsaber combat video:

Rayan vs. Dorkman 2 [youtube.com]

I think this one is even better than their first video. The cgi work is pretty damn amazing for an fan video.

Let’s talk about immortality. The concept of eternal life has been present in our fiction since the ancient times but in most cases it was the domain of supernatural being such as gods, faeries, spirits, vampires and etc. In most cases it is either an inborn trait, or a result of a magical blessing or a curse.

But immortality is not only the domain of fantasy. Science fiction has also developed different models of immortality. One of these models immortality via mind transfer. I think the best example of this technique is depicted in Cory Doctorow’s Down and out in the Magic Kingdom novel. In his fictional Bishun Society, people prolong their lives indefinitely by making electronic backup of their consciousness. In an event of death, the person is simply restored from backup in a cloned body. Similar technique is used by the biological Cylons in Scifi Chanell’s Battlestar Galactica series.

Let’s assume that this type of consciousness backup would be possible. You can back yourself up, and restore with no problems or complications. Once restored you are the same person, with the same stupid quirks, and pet peeves. The process is perfect and flawless.

Now imagine that you get into an accident, and you break your back. The doctors say that there is zero chances of repairing this damage. You will be bound to a wheelchair for the rest of your life… Unless of course, you choose to restore yourself from backup. The procedure is really simple.

First you do a backup. Once you are done, you get a lethal injection and your body dies. Minutes later you are restored in a clone with a clean bill of health. Question is - would you do it?

Me - I would probably choose the wheelchair. Why? Well, the whole concept of immortality via mind transfer sounds great on paper but there is one snag. For a lack of better name I call it Consciousness Interruption.

Let me put it this way - restoring from backup is nothing like falling asleep and waking up in a new body. It’s far from it. When the doctors kill your body, you die. That’s it - it’s game over for you. Sure, your clone will have the same memories, the same personality and be you in every possible way. But you - the old you will be dead. There is no link between you and your new copy - you are two completely separate entities. There is just no way you could die and then wake up.

So is this immortality? I would say yes and no. As far as your friends, family and the rest of the universe is concerned - you are immortal. You die, you get restored and you continue to exist unchanged. But from a very subjective point of view - the continuity of your consciousness is extinguished at the point of death. You cease to exist, and someone else with the same memories takes your place.

At least this seems to be true for Cory Doctorow’s model. Do Cylons suffer from this consciousness interruption? I would say yes. Feel free to dispute me on this. I would love to hear your theories on how their system avoids the interruption issues. Sure, their resurrection works slightly different - Cylons seem to remember their own deaths. They don’t really back up, but transfer their consciousness to the Resurrection Ship the moment they die. But as far as I’m concerned it is the same damn thing. The exact same rules apply - one mind dies, the other one is restored. End result: consciousness interrupted.

I leave you with this: Immortality via mind transfer is not true immortality. At least not in the way we sought it since the beginning of time. It is really just a rouse - a social lie, and a form of ultimate escapism. Restoring from backup doesn’t really do anything for the person who is restored - that person just dies. The real benefit of the restoration process is for this person’s loved ones. If you can restore someone after they die, you no longer need to mourn their death, or deal with their loss. It is really a feel good - happy pill for the masses. Nothing else.

Disagree? I would love to hear a counter argument!

I just read Cory Doctorow’s short story Truncat - a sequel to the excellent Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. The full text of this story is available online here.

I loved Down and Out, so I was thrilled to find this little gem. I was really pleased to see that Cory was willing to explore some of the implications of immortality in Bitchun society. The most logical of those is of course the end of the human reproductive cycle. If no one ever dies, people can’t continue to have children whenever they feel like it. Thus the world of Truncat is chronically overcrowded, and having children is a social no-no. Being a parent = poor whoofie, so there are only about a million of teenagers worldwide in total.

Second question is, how would immortality impact human psychology? This was somewhat touched upon both in the novel and in the story. Most of the truly ancient members of the immortal society suffer from severe disillusionment and depression - they just get tired, and bored with life. Some of them choose to cryo-freeze themselves and deadhead for few centuries hoping to wake up in more interesting times. Others restore themselves from earlier backup effectively erasing large parts of their memory.

Cory suggests a possible solution - creating shared consciousness via flashbaking. He hints at a new possible revolution which may replace Bitchun society with something different. To cope with immortality, humans must adapt and evolve into something different, that can no longer be considered human.

Reading this story got me thinking about few things. First of all, what is the storage capacity of the human brain? What happens when you reach that capacity? Does your brain start overwriting old memories? Is that even physically possible?

Sure, we forget things all the time, even within our current short lifespan. But then again, most of the time we work under assumption that almost all the input processed is stored somewhere down there. This is why people use hypnosis to recover repressed memories, or talk about subliminal messages that bypass conscious mind but get stored in long term data bank.

So whether we want it or not, our brain is collecting all this junk. Is it possible to reclaim it? Is it possible for a human brain to work indefinitely, provided that aging is not a factor?

Another interesting question is, how will everlasting life impact our growth as human beings. Our brains do constant maintenance. Unused neural connections are scaled down, and pruned out while other ones are reinforced. The brain rewires itself continuously. When you are 40, you are not really the same person you were at 20. We call it growing up, or growing old.

Now let’s say you live for 300-400 years. How much do you think you would change in that time? Can you still be considered the same person as your 20 year old self? Or are you someone else entirely? Would you even remember your childhood? Or would you have to “flash-bake” your own backups in order to recall some events that happened ages ago?

What are the genetic implications of immortality? If we no longer reproduce as a species, we loose the ability to physically adapt to environmental changes. Perhaps in the Bitchun like age of bio-engineering and nano-tech this will not be a problem. The backup clones can be appropriately upgraded and improved over time simulating natural selection and evolution. If we get hit by a scary virus or a disease everyone backs up, and gets restored in a immunized clone…

The question is, can we really compete with natural selection this way? Or would the stagnation of genetic material eventually kill us off as a species in one way or another?

I think Cory is right - humans will never gain true immortality. Our species will be completely superseded by an off-shot race - the post-humans/transhumans. Can we speculate on the nature of this new species that will replace us? Sure, but we are bound to be wrong. The act of becoming or creating something that is more than human is the singularity moment. All our speculations beyond the singularity, are from definition futile.

The only thing we can be sure of, is that this moment will come sooner or later unless we fuck it up, and we either manage to destroy the life on earth, or we allow our civilization collapse (peak oil may set us back but we will overcome it I hope).

Anyways, go read Truncat - it’s a good short story. Cory has likely captured the pre-singularity moment here. The dusk of post-scarcity Bitchun society, and down of something new.