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#431362 Does Regulating Artificial Intelligence ...

Posted on October 28, 2017 by Android

Some people are afraid that heavily armed artificially intelligent robots might take over the world, enslaving humanity—or perhaps exterminating us. These people, including tech-industry billionaire Elon Musk and eminent physicist Stephen Hawking, say artificial intelligence technology needs to be regulated to manage the risks. But Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg disagree, saying the technology is not nearly advanced enough for those worries to be realistic.
As someone who researches how AI works in robotic decision-making, drones and self-driving vehicles, I’ve seen how beneficial it can be. I’ve developed AI software that lets robots working in teams make individual decisions as part of collective efforts to explore and solve problems. Researchers are already subject to existing rules, regulations and laws designed to protect public safety. Imposing further limitations risks reducing the potential for innovation with AI systems.
How is AI regulated now?
While the term “artificial intelligence” may conjure fantastical images of human-like robots, most people have encountered AI before. It helps us find similar products while shopping, offers movie and TV recommendations, and helps us search for websites. It grades student writing, provides personalized tutoring, and even recognizes objects carried through airport scanners.
In each case, the AI makes things easier for humans. For example, the AI software I developed could be used to plan and execute a search of a field for a plant or animal as part of a science experiment. But even as the AI frees people from doing this work, it is still basing its actions on human decisions and goals about where to search and what to look for.
In areas like these and many others, AI has the potential to do far more good than harm—if used properly. But I don’t believe additional regulations are currently needed. There are already laws on the books of nations, states, and towns governing civil and criminal liabilities for harmful actions. Our drones, for example, must obey FAA regulations, while the self-driving car AI must obey regular traffic laws to operate on public roadways.
Existing laws also cover what happens if a robot injures or kills a person, even if the injury is accidental and the robot’s programmer or operator isn’t criminally responsible. While lawmakers and regulators may need to refine responsibility for AI systems’ actions as technology advances, creating regulations beyond those that already exist could prohibit or slow the development of capabilities that would be overwhelmingly beneficial.
Potential risks from artificial intelligence
It may seem reasonable to worry about researchers developing very advanced artificial intelligence systems that can operate entirely outside human control. A common thought experiment deals with a self-driving car forced to make a decision about whether to run over a child who just stepped into the road or veer off into a guardrail, injuring the car’s occupants and perhaps even those in another vehicle.
Musk and Hawking, among others, worry that a hyper-capable AI system, no longer limited to a single set of tasks like controlling a self-driving car, might decide it doesn’t need humans anymore. It might even look at human stewardship of the planet, the interpersonal conflicts, theft, fraud, and frequent wars, and decide that the world would be better without people.
Science fiction author Isaac Asimov tried to address this potential by proposing three laws limiting robot decision-making: Robots cannot injure humans or allow them “to come to harm.” They must also obey humans—unless this would harm humans—and protect themselves, as long as this doesn’t harm humans or ignore an order.
But Asimov himself knew the three laws were not enough. And they don’t reflect the complexity of human values. What constitutes “harm” is an example: Should a robot protect humanity from suffering related to overpopulation, or should it protect individuals’ freedoms to make personal reproductive decisions?
We humans have already wrestled with these questions in our own, non-artificial intelligences. Researchers have proposed restrictions on human freedoms, including reducing reproduction, to control people’s behavior, population growth, and environmental damage. In general, society has decided against using those methods, even if their goals seem reasonable. Similarly, rather than regulating what AI systems can and can’t do, in my view it would be better to teach them human ethics and values—like parents do with human children.
Artificial intelligence benefits
People already benefit from AI every day—but this is just the beginning. AI-controlled robots could assist law enforcement in responding to human gunmen. Current police efforts must focus on preventing officers from being injured, but robots could step into harm’s way, potentially changing the outcomes of cases like the recent shooting of an armed college student at Georgia Tech and an unarmed high school student in Austin.
Intelligent robots can help humans in other ways, too. They can perform repetitive tasks, like processing sensor data, where human boredom may cause mistakes. They can limit human exposure to dangerous materials and dangerous situations, such as when decontaminating a nuclear reactor, working in areas humans can’t go. In general, AI robots can provide humans with more time to pursue whatever they define as happiness by freeing them from having to do other work.
Achieving most of these benefits will require a lot more research and development. Regulations that make it more expensive to develop AIs or prevent certain uses may delay or forestall those efforts. This is particularly true for small businesses and individuals—key drivers of new technologies—who are not as well equipped to deal with regulation compliance as larger companies. In fact, the biggest beneficiary of AI regulation may be large companies that are used to dealing with it, because startups will have a harder time competing in a regulated environment.
The need for innovation
Humanity faced a similar set of issues in the early days of the internet. But the United States actively avoided regulating the internet to avoid stunting its early growth. Musk’s PayPal and numerous other businesses helped build the modern online world while subject only to regular human-scale rules, like those preventing theft and fraud.
Artificial intelligence systems have the potential to change how humans do just about everything. Scientists, engineers, programmers, and entrepreneurs need time to develop the technologies—and deliver their benefits. Their work should be free from concern that some AIs might be banned, and from the delays and costs associated with new AI-specific regulations.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
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Posted in Human Robots

#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

#431243 Does Our Survival Depend on Relentless ...

Posted on October 12, 2017 by Android

Malthus had a fever dream in the 1790s. While the world was marveling in the first manifestations of modern science and technology and the industrial revolution that was just beginning, he was concerned. He saw the exponential growth in the human population as a terrible problem for the species—an existential threat. He was afraid the human population would overshoot the availability of resources, and then things would really hit the fan.
“Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful resource of nature. The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation.”
So Malthus wrote in his famous text, an essay on the principles of population.
But Malthus was wrong. Not just in his proposed solution, which was to stop giving aid and food to the poor so that they wouldn’t explode in population. His prediction was also wrong: there was no great, overwhelming famine that caused the population to stay at the levels of the 1790s. Instead, the world population—with a few dips—has continued to grow exponentially ever since. And it’s still growing.
There have concurrently been developments in agriculture and medicine and, in the 20th century, the Green Revolution, in which Norman Borlaug ensured that countries adopted high-yield varieties of crops—the first precursors to modern ideas of genetically engineering food to produce better crops and more growth. The world was able to produce an astonishing amount of food—enough, in the modern era, for ten billion people. It is only a grave injustice in the way that food is distributed that means 12 percent of the world goes hungry, and we still have starvation. But, aside from that, we were saved by the majesty of another kind of exponential growth; the population grew, but the ability to produce food grew faster.
In so much of the world around us today, there’s the same old story. Take exploitation of fossil fuels: here, there is another exponential race. The exponential growth of our ability to mine coal, extract natural gas, refine oil from ever more complex hydrocarbons: this is pitted against our growing appetite. The stock market is built on exponential growth; you cannot provide compound interest unless the economy grows by a certain percentage a year.

“This relentless and ruthless expectation—that technology will continue to improve in ways we can’t foresee—is not just baked into share prices, but into the very survival of our species.”

When the economy fails to grow exponentially, it’s considered a crisis: a financial catastrophe. This expectation penetrates down to individual investors. In the cryptocurrency markets—hardly immune from bubbles, the bull-and-bear cycle of economics—the traders’ saying is “Buy the hype, sell the news.” Before an announcement is made, the expectation of growth, of a boost—the psychological shift—is almost invariably worth more than whatever the major announcement turns out to be. The idea of growth is baked into the share price, to the extent that even good news can often cause the price to dip when it’s delivered.
In the same way, this relentless and ruthless expectation—that technology will continue to improve in ways we can’t foresee—is not just baked into share prices, but into the very survival of our species. A third of Earth’s soil has been acutely degraded due to agriculture; we are looming on the brink of a topsoil crisis. In less relentless times, we may have tried to solve the problem by letting the fields lie fallow for a few years. But that’s no longer an option: if we do so, people will starve. Instead, we look to a second Green Revolution—genetically modified crops, or hydroponics—to save us.
Climate change is considered by many to be an existential threat. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has already put their faith in the exponential growth of technology. Many of the scenarios where they can successfully imagine the human race dealing with the climate crisis involve the development and widespread deployment of carbon capture and storage technology. Our hope for the future already has built-in expectations of exponential growth in our technology in this field. Alongside this, to reduce carbon emissions to zero on the timescales we need to, we will surely require new technologies in renewable energy, energy efficiency, and electrification of the transport system.
Without exponential growth in technology continuing, then, we are doomed. Humanity finds itself on a treadmill that’s rapidly accelerating, with the risk of plunging into the abyss if we can’t keep up the pace. Yet this very acceleration could also pose an existential threat. As our global system becomes more interconnected and complex, chaos theory takes over: the economics of a town in Macedonia can influence a US presidential election; critical infrastructure can be brought down by cybercriminals.
New threats, such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, or a generalized artificial intelligence, could put incredible power—power over the entire species—into the hands of a small number of people. We are faced with a paradox: the continued existence of our system depends on the exponential growth of our capacities outpacing the exponential growth of our needs and desires. Yet this very growth will create threats that are unimaginably larger than any humans have faced before in history.

“It is necessary that we understand the consequences and prospects for exponential growth: that we understand the nature of the race that we’re in.”

Neo-Luddites may find satisfaction in rejecting the ill-effects of technology, but they will still live in a society where technology is the lifeblood that keeps the whole system pumping. Now, more than ever, it is necessary that we understand the consequences and prospects for exponential growth: that we understand the nature of the race that we’re in.
If we decide that limitless exponential growth on a finite planet is unsustainable, we need to plan for the transition to a new way of living before our ability to accelerate runs out. If we require new technologies or fields of study to enable this growth to continue, we must focus our efforts on these before anything else. If we want to survive the 21st century without major catastrophe, we don’t have a choice but to understand it. Almost by default, we’re all accelerationists now.
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Posted in Human Robots

#431199 You just can’t keep a good robot ...

Posted on October 11, 2017 by Android

This Humanoid Robot immediately gets right up when it falls over. It is part of its so-called “Robotic Fall Protection System” but – to me – just looks a little bit scary! Anyone say “Terminator”?

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