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#431301 Collective Intelligence Is the Root of ...

Posted on October 16, 2017 by Android

Many of us intuitively think about intelligence as an individual trait. As a society, we have a tendency to praise individual game-changers for accomplishments that would not be possible without their teams, often tens of thousands of people that work behind the scenes to make extraordinary things happen.
Matt Ridley, best-selling author of multiple books, including The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, challenges this view. He argues that human achievement and intelligence are entirely “networking phenomena.” In other words, intelligence is collective and emergent as opposed to individual.
When asked what scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit, Ridley highlights collective intelligence: “It is by putting brains together through the division of labor— through trade and specialization—that human society stumbled upon a way to raise the living standards, carrying capacity, technological virtuosity, and knowledge base of the species.”
Ridley has spent a lifetime exploring human prosperity and the factors that contribute to it. In a conversation with Singularity Hub, he redefined how we perceive intelligence and human progress.
Raya Bidshahri: The common perspective seems to be that competition is what drives innovation and, consequently, human progress. Why do you think collaboration trumps competition when it comes to human progress?
Matt Ridley: There is a tendency to think that competition is an animal instinct that is natural and collaboration is a human instinct we have to learn. I think there is no evidence for that. Both are deeply rooted in us as a species. The evidence from evolutionary biology tells us that collaboration is just as important as competition. Yet, at the end, the Darwinian perspective is quite correct: it’s usually cooperation for the purpose of competition, wherein a given group tries to achieve something more effectively than another group. But the point is that the capacity to co-operate is very deep in our psyche.
RB: You write that “human achievement is entirely a networking phenomenon,” and we need to stop thinking about intelligence as an individual trait, and that instead we should look at what you refer to as collective intelligence. Why is that?
MR: The best way to think about it is that IQ doesn’t matter, because a hundred stupid people who are talking to each other will accomplish more than a hundred intelligent people who aren’t. It’s absolutely vital to see that everything from the manufacturing of a pencil to the manufacturing of a nuclear power station can’t be done by an individual human brain. You can’t possibly hold in your head all the knowledge you need to do these things. For the last 200,000 years we’ve been exchanging and specializing, which enables us to achieve much greater intelligence than we can as individuals.
RB: We often think of achievement and intelligence on individual terms. Why do you think it’s so counter-intuitive for us to think about collective intelligence?
MR: People are surprisingly myopic to the extent they understand the nature of intelligence. I think it goes back to a pre-human tendency to think in terms of individual stories and actors. For example, we love to read about the famous inventor or scientist who invented or discovered something. We never tell these stories as network stories. We tell them as individual hero stories.

“It’s absolutely vital to see that everything from the manufacturing of a pencil to the manufacturing of a nuclear power station can’t be done by an individual human brain.”

This idea of a brilliant hero who saves the world in the face of every obstacle seems to speak to tribal hunter-gatherer societies, where the alpha male leads and wins. But it doesn’t resonate with how human beings have structured modern society in the last 100,000 years or so. We modern-day humans haven’t internalized a way of thinking that incorporates this definition of distributed and collective intelligence.
RB: One of the books you’re best known for is The Rational Optimist. What does it mean to be a rational optimist?
MR: My optimism is rational because it’s not based on a feeling, it’s based on evidence. If you look at the data on human living standards over the last 200 years and compare it with the way that most people actually perceive our progress during that time, you’ll see an extraordinary gap. On the whole, people seem to think that things are getting worse, but things are actually getting better.
We’ve seen the most astonishing improvements in human living standards: we’ve brought the number of people living in extreme poverty to 9 percent from about 70 percent when I was born. The human lifespan is expanding by five hours a day, child mortality has gone down by two thirds in half a century, and much more. These feats dwarf the things that are going wrong. Yet most people are quite pessimistic about the future despite the things we’ve achieved in the past.
RB: Where does this idea of collective intelligence fit in rational optimism?
MR: Underlying the idea of rational optimism was understanding what prosperity is, and why it happens to us and not to rabbits or rocks. Why are we the only species in the world that has concepts like a GDP, growth rate, or living standard? My answer is that it comes back to this phenomena of collective intelligence. The reason for a rise in living standards is innovation, and the cause of that innovation is our ability to collaborate.
The grand theme of human history is exchange of ideas, collaborating through specialization and the division of labor. Throughout history, it’s in places where there is a lot of open exchange and trade where you get a lot of innovation. And indeed, there are some extraordinary episodes in human history when societies get cut off from exchange and their innovation slows down and they start moving backwards. One example of this is Tasmania, which was isolated and lost a lot of the technologies it started off with.
RB: Lots of people like to point out that just because the world has been getting better doesn’t guarantee it will continue to do so. How do you respond to that line of argumentation?
MR: There is a quote by Thomas Babington Macaulay from 1830, where he was fed up with the pessimists of the time saying things will only get worse. He says, “On what principle is it that with nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?” And this was back in the 1830s, where in Britain and a few other parts of the world, we were only seeing the beginning of the rise of living standards. It’s perverse to argue that because things were getting better in the past, now they are about to get worse.

“I think it’s worth remembering that good news tends to be gradual, and bad news tends to be sudden. Hence, the good stuff is rarely going to make the news.”

Another thing to point out is that people have always said this. Every generation thought they were at the peak looking downhill. If you think about the opportunities technology is about to give us, whether it’s through blockchain, gene editing, or artificial intelligence, there is every reason to believe that 2017 is going to look like a time of absolute misery compared to what our children and grandchildren are going to experience.
RB: There seems to be a fair amount of mayhem in today’s world, and lots of valid problems to pay attention to in the news. What would you say to empower our readers that we will push through it and continue to grow and improve as a species?
MR: I think it’s worth remembering that good news tends to be gradual, and bad news tends to be sudden. Hence, the good stuff is rarely going to make the news. It’s happening in an inexorable way, as a result of ordinary people exchanging, specializing, collaborating, and innovating, and it’s surprisingly hard to stop it.
Even if you look back to the 1940s, at the end of a world war, there was still a lot of innovation happening. In some ways it feels like we are going through a bad period now. I do worry a lot about the anti-enlightenment values that I see spreading in various parts of the world. But then I remind myself that people are working on innovative projects in the background, and these things are going to come through and push us forward.
Image Credit: Sahacha Nilkumhang / Shutterstock.com

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Posted in Human Robots

#431203 Could We Build a Blade Runner-Style ...

Posted on October 6, 2017 by Android

The new Blade Runner sequel will return us to a world where sophisticated androids made with organic body parts can match the strength and emotions of their human creators. As someone who builds biologically inspired robots, I’m interested in whether our own technology will ever come close to matching the “replicants” of Blade Runner 2049.
The reality is that we’re a very long way from building robots with human-like abilities. But advances in so-called soft robotics show a promising way forward for technology that could be a new basis for the androids of the future.
From a scientific point of view, the real challenge is replicating the complexity of the human body. Each one of us is made up of millions and millions of cells, and we have no clue how we can build such a complex machine that is indistinguishable from us humans. The most complex machines today, for example the world’s largest airliner, the Airbus A380, are composed of millions of parts. But in order to match the complexity level of humans, we would need to scale this complexity up about a million times.
There are currently three different ways that engineering is making the border between humans and robots more ambiguous. Unfortunately, these approaches are only starting points and are not yet even close to the world of Blade Runner.
There are human-like robots built from scratch by assembling artificial sensors, motors, and computers to resemble the human body and motion. However, extending the current human-like robot would not bring Blade Runner-style androids closer to humans, because every artificial component, such as sensors and motors, are still hopelessly primitive compared to their biological counterparts.
There is also cyborg technology, where the human body is enhanced with machines such as robotic limbs and wearable and implantable devices. This technology is similarly very far away from matching our own body parts.
Finally, there is the technology of genetic manipulation, where an organism’s genetic code is altered to modify that organism’s body. Although we have been able to identify and manipulate individual genes, we still have a limited understanding of how an entire human emerges from genetic code. As such, we don’t know the degree to which we can actually program code to design everything we wish.
Soft robotics: a way forward?
But we might be able to move robotics closer to the world of Blade Runner by pursuing other technologies and, in particular, by turning to nature for inspiration. The field of soft robotics is a good example. In the last decade or so, robotics researchers have been making considerable efforts to make robots soft, deformable, squishable, and flexible.
This technology is inspired by the fact that 90% of the human body is made from soft substances such as skin, hair, and tissues. This is because most of the fundamental functions in our body rely on soft parts that can change shape, from the heart and lungs pumping fluid around our body to the eye lenses generating signals from their movement. Cells even change shape to trigger division, self-healing and, ultimately, the evolution of the body.
The softness of our bodies is the origin of all their functionality needed to stay alive. So being able to build soft machines would at least bring us a step closer to the robotic world of Blade Runner. Some of the recent technological advances include artificial hearts made out of soft functional materials that are pumping fluid through deformation. Similarly, soft, wearable gloves can help make hand grasping stronger. And “epidermal electronics” has enabled us to tattoo electronic circuits onto our biological skins.
Softness is the keyword that brings humans and technologies closer together. Sensors, motors, and computers are all of a sudden integrated into human bodies once they became soft, and the border between us and external devices becomes ambiguous, just like soft contact lenses became part of our eyes.
Nevertheless, the hardest challenge is how to make individual parts of a soft robot body physically adaptable by self-healing, growing, and differentiating. After all, every part of a living organism is also alive in biological systems in order to make our bodies totally adaptable and evolvable, the function of which could make machines totally indistinguishable from ourselves.
It is impossible to predict when the robotic world of Blade Runner might arrive, and if it does, it will probably be very far in the future. But as long as the desire to build machines indistinguishable from humans is there, the current trends of robotic revolution could make it possible to achieve that dream.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
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Posted in Human Robots

#431159 How Close Is Turing’s Dream of ...

Posted on September 28, 2017 by Android

The quest for conversational artificial intelligence has been a long one.
When Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, racked his considerable brains for a test that would truly indicate that a computer program was intelligent, he landed on this area. If a computer could convince a panel of human judges that they were talking to a human—if it could hold a convincing conversation—then it would indicate that artificial intelligence had advanced to the point where it was indistinguishable from human intelligence.
This gauntlet was thrown down in 1950 and, so far, no computer program has managed to pass the Turing test.
There have been some very notable failures, however: Joseph Weizenbaum, as early as 1966—when computers were still programmed with large punch-cards—developed a piece of natural language processing software called ELIZA. ELIZA was a machine intended to respond to human conversation by pretending to be a psychotherapist; you can still talk to her today.
Talking to ELIZA is a little strange. She’ll often rephrase things you’ve said back at you: so, for example, if you say “I’m feeling depressed,” she might say “Did you come to me because you are feeling depressed?” When she’s unsure about what you’ve said, ELIZA will usually respond with “I see,” or perhaps “Tell me more.”
For the first few lines of dialogue, especially if you treat her as your therapist, ELIZA can be convincingly human. This was something Weizenbaum noticed and was slightly alarmed by: people were willing to treat the algorithm as more human than it really was. Before long, even though some of the test subjects knew ELIZA was just a machine, they were opening up with some of their deepest feelings and secrets. They were pouring out their hearts to a machine. When Weizenbaum’s secretary spoke to ELIZA, even though she knew it was a fairly simple computer program, she still insisted Weizenbaum leave the room.
Part of the unexpected reaction ELIZA generated may be because people are more willing to open up to a machine, feeling they won’t be judged, even if the machine is ultimately powerless to do or say anything to really help. The ELIZA effect was named for this computer program: the tendency of humans to anthropomorphize machines, or think of them as human.

Weizenbaum himself, who later became deeply suspicious of the influence of computers and artificial intelligence in human life, was astonished that people were so willing to believe his script was human. He wrote, “I had not realized…that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.”

“Consciously, you know you’re talking to a big block of code stored somewhere out there in the ether. But subconsciously, you might feel like you’re interacting with a human.”

The ELIZA effect may have disturbed Weizenbaum, but it has intrigued and fascinated others for decades. Perhaps you’ve noticed it in yourself, when talking to an AI like Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant—the occasional response can seem almost too real. Consciously, you know you’re talking to a big block of code stored somewhere out there in the ether. But subconsciously, you might feel like you’re interacting with a human.
Yet the ELIZA effect, as enticing as it is, has proved a source of frustration for people who are trying to create conversational machines. Natural language processing has proceeded in leaps and bounds since the 1960s. Now you can find friendly chatbots like Mitsuku—which has frequently won the Loebner Prize, awarded to the machines that come closest to passing the Turing test—that aim to have a response to everything you might say.
In the commercial sphere, Facebook has opened up its Messenger program and provided software for people and companies to design their own chatbots. The idea is simple: why have an app for, say, ordering pizza when you can just chatter to a robot through your favorite messenger app and make the order in natural language, as if you were telling your friend to get it for you?
Startups like Semantic Machines hope their AI assistant will be able to interact with you just like a secretary or PA would, but with an unparalleled ability to retrieve information from the internet. They may soon be there.
But people who engineer chatbots—both in the social and commercial realm—encounter a common problem: the users, perhaps subconsciously, assume the chatbots are human and become disappointed when they’re not able to have a normal conversation. Frustration with miscommunication can often stem from raised initial expectations.
So far, no machine has really been able to crack the problem of context retention—understanding what’s been said before, referring back to it, and crafting responses based on the point the conversation has reached. Even Mitsuku will often struggle to remember the topic of conversation beyond a few lines of dialogue.

“For everything you say, there could be hundreds of responses that would make sense. When you travel a layer deeper into the conversation, those factors multiply until you end up with vast numbers of potential conversations.”

This is, of course, understandable. Conversation can be almost unimaginably complex. For everything you say, there could be hundreds of responses that would make sense. When you travel a layer deeper into the conversation, those factors multiply until—like possible games of Go or chess—you end up with vast numbers of potential conversations.
But that hasn’t deterred people from trying, most recently, tech giant Amazon, in an effort to make their AI voice assistant, Alexa, friendlier. They have been running the Alexa Prize competition, which offers a cool $500,000 to the winning AI—and a bonus of a million dollars to any team that can create a ‘socialbot’ capable of sustaining a conversation with human users for 20 minutes on a variety of themes.
Topics Alexa likes to chat about include science and technology, politics, sports, and celebrity gossip. The finalists were recently announced: chatbots from universities in Prague, Edinburgh, and Seattle. Finalists were chosen according to the ratings from Alexa users, who could trigger the socialbots into conversation by saying “Hey Alexa, let’s chat,” although the reviews for the socialbots weren’t always complimentary.
By narrowing down the fields of conversation to a specific range of topics, the Alexa Prize has cleverly started to get around the problem of context—just as commercially available chatbots hope to do. It’s much easier to model an interaction that goes a few layers into the conversational topic if you’re limiting those topics to a specific field.
Developing a machine that can hold almost any conversation with a human interlocutor convincingly might be difficult. It might even be a problem that requires artificial general intelligence to truly solve, rather than the previously-employed approaches of scripted answers or neural networks that associate inputs with responses.
But a machine that can have meaningful interactions that people might value and enjoy could be just around the corner. The Alexa Prize winner is announced in November. The ELIZA effect might mean we will relate to machines sooner than we’d thought.
So, go well, little socialbots. If you ever want to discuss the weather or what the world will be like once you guys take over, I’ll be around. Just don’t start a therapy session.
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Posted in Human Robots

#431078 This Year’s Awesome Robot Stories From ...

Posted on September 9, 2017 by Android

Each week we scour the web for great articles and fascinating advances across our core topics, from AI to biotech and the brain. But robots have a special place in our hearts. This week, we took a look back at 2017 so far and unearthed a few favorite robots for your reading and viewing pleasure.
Tarzan the Swinging Robot Could Be the Future of FarmingMariella Moon | Engadget“Tarzan will be able to swing over crops using its 3D-printed claws and parallel guy-wires stretched over fields. It will then take measurements and pictures of each plant with its built-in camera while suspended…While it may take some time to achieve that goal, the researchers plan to start testing the robot soon.”
Grasping Robots Compete to Rule Amazon’s Warehouses Tom Simonite | Wired“Robots able to help with so-called picking tasks would boost Amazon’s efficiency—and make it much less reliant on human workers. It’s why the company has invited a motley crew of mechanical arms, grippers, suction cups—and their human handlers—to Nagoya, Japan, this week to show off their manipulation skills.”
Robots Learn to Speak Body LanguageAlyssa Pagano | IEEE Spectrum“One notable feature of the OpenPose system is that it can track not only a person’s head, torso, and limbs but also individual fingers. To do that, the researchers used CMU’s Panoptic Studio, a dome lined with 500 cameras, where they captured body poses at a variety of angles and then used those images to build a data set.”
I Watched Two Robots Chat Together on Stage at a Tech EventJon Russell | TechCrunch“The robots in question are Sophia and Han, and they belong to Hanson Robotics, a Hong Kong-based company that is developing and deploying artificial intelligence in humanoids. The duo took to the stage at Rise in Hong Kong with Hanson Robotics’ Chief Scientist Ben Goertzel directing the banter. The conversation, which was partially scripted, wasn’t as slick as the human-to-human panels at the show, but it was certainly a sight to behold for the packed audience.”
How This Japanese Robotics Master Is Building Better, More Human AndroidsHarry McCracken | Fast Company“On the tech side, making a robot look and behave like a person involves everything from electronics to the silicone Ishiguro’s team uses to simulate skin. ‘We have a technology to precisely control pneumatic actuators,’ he says, noting, as an example of what they need to re-create, that ‘the human shoulder has four degrees of freedom.’”
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Posted in Human Robots

#430913 Artificial Intelligence | Future of ...

Posted on August 24, 2017 by Android

In the latest installment of Singularity University’s web series, Future of Everything With Jason Silva, Silva takes a look at artificial intelligence. “AI is perhaps the granddaddy of all exponential technologies. Surely to transform the world and the human race in ways that we can barely wrap our heads around,” Silva says. Forms of creativity will be unleashed that we can not even imagine, and we’re going to transcend what it means to be human.
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Posted in Human Robots