Tag Archives: humanity
#435196 Avatar Love? New ‘Black Mirror’ ...
This week, the widely-anticipated fifth season of the dystopian series Black Mirror was released on Netflix. The storylines this season are less focused on far-out scenarios and increasingly aligned with current issues. With only three episodes, this season raises more questions than it answers, often leaving audiences bewildered.
The episode Smithereens explores our society’s crippling addiction to social media platforms and the monopoly they hold over our data. In Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too, we see the disruptive impact of technologies on the music and entertainment industry, and the price of fame for artists in the digital world. Like most Black Mirror episodes, these explore the sometimes disturbing implications of tech advancements on humanity.
But once again, in the midst of all the doom and gloom, the creators of the series leave us with a glimmer of hope. Aligned with Pride month, the episode Striking Vipers explores the impact of virtual reality on love, relationships, and sexual fluidity.
*The review contains a few spoilers.*
Striking Vipers
The first episode of the season, Striking Vipers may be one of the most thought-provoking episodes in Black Mirror history. Reminiscent of previous episodes San Junipero and Hang the DJ, the writers explore the potential for technology to transform human intimacy.
The episode tells the story of two old friends, Danny and Karl, whose friendship is reignited in an unconventional way. Karl unexpectedly appears at Danny’s 38th birthday and reintroduces him to the VR version of a game they used to play years before. In the game Striking Vipers X, each of the players is represented by an avatar of their choice in an uncanny digital reality. Following old tradition, Karl chooses to become the female fighter, Roxanne, and Danny takes on the role of the male fighter, Lance. The state-of-the-art VR headsets appear to use an advanced form of brain-machine interface to allow each player to be fully immersed in the virtual world, emulating all physical sensations.
To their surprise (and confusion), Danny and Karl find themselves transitioning from fist-fighting to kissing. Over the course of many games, they continue to explore a sexual and romantic relationship in the virtual world, leaving them confused and distant in the real world. The virtual and physical realities begin to blur, and so do the identities of the players with their avatars. Danny, who is married (in a heterosexual relationship) and is a father, begins to carry guilt and confusion in the real world. They both wonder if there would be any spark between them in real life.
The brain-machine interface (BMI) depicted in the episode is still science fiction, but that hasn’t stopped innovators from pushing the technology forward. Experts today are designing more intricate BMI systems while programming better algorithms to interpret the neural signals they capture. Scientists have already succeeded in enabling paralyzed patients to type with their minds, and are even allowing people to communicate with one another purely through brainwaves.
The convergence of BMIs with virtual reality and artificial intelligence could make the experience of such immersive digital realities possible. Virtual reality, too, is decreasing exponentially in cost and increasing in quality.
The narrative provides meaningful commentary on another tech area—gaming. It highlights video games not necessarily as addictive distractions, but rather as a platform for connecting with others in a deeper way. This is already very relevant. Video games like Final Fantasy are often a tool for meaningful digital connections for their players.
The Implications of Virtual Reality on Love and Relationships
The narrative of Striking Vipers raises many novel questions about the implications of immersive technologies on relationships: could the virtual world allow us a safe space to explore suppressed desires? Can virtual avatars make it easier for us to show affection to those we care about? Can a sexual or romantic encounter in the digital world be considered infidelity?
Above all, the episode explores the therapeutic possibilities of such technologies. While many fears about virtual reality had been raised in previous seasons of Black Mirror, this episode was focused on its potential. This includes the potential of immersive technology to be a source of liberation, meaningful connections, and self-exploration, as well as a tool for realizing our true identities and desires.
Once again, this is aligned with emerging trends in VR. We are seeing the rise of social VR applications and platforms that allow you to hang out with your friends and family as avatars in the virtual space. The technology is allowing for animation movies, such as Coco VR, to become an increasingly social and interactive experience. Considering that meaningful social interaction can alleviate depression and anxiety, such applications could contribute to well-being.
Techno-philosopher and National Geographic host Jason Silva points out that immersive media technologies can be “engines of empathy.” VR allows us to enter virtual spaces that mimic someone else’s state of mind, allowing us to empathize with the way they view the world. Silva said, “Imagine the intimacy that becomes possible when people meet and they say, ‘Hey, do you want to come visit my world? Do you want to see what it’s like to be inside my head?’”
What is most fascinating about Striking Vipers is that it explores how we may redefine love with virtual reality; we are introduced to love between virtual avatars. While this kind of love may seem confusing to audiences, it may be one of the complex implications of virtual reality on human relationships.
In many ways, the title Black Mirror couldn’t be more appropriate, as each episode serves as a mirror to the most disturbing aspects of our psyches as they get amplified through technology. However, what we see in uplifting and thought-provoking plots like Striking Vipers, San Junipero, and Hang The DJ is that technology could also amplify the most positive aspects of our humanity. This includes our powerful capacity to love.
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#435161 Less Like Us: An Alternate Theory of ...
The question of whether an artificial general intelligence will be developed in the future—and, if so, when it might arrive—is controversial. One (very uncertain) estimate suggests 2070 might be the earliest we could expect to see such technology.
Some futurists point to Moore’s Law and the increasing capacity of machine learning algorithms to suggest that a more general breakthrough is just around the corner. Others suggest that extrapolating exponential improvements in hardware is unwise, and that creating narrow algorithms that can beat humans at specialized tasks brings us no closer to a “general intelligence.”
But evolution has produced minds like the human mind at least once. Surely we could create artificial intelligence simply by copying nature, either by guided evolution of simple algorithms or wholesale emulation of the human brain.
Both of these ideas are far easier to conceive of than they are to achieve. The 302 neurons of the nematode worm’s brain are still an extremely difficult engineering challenge, let alone the 86 billion in a human brain.
Leaving aside these caveats, though, many people are worried about artificial general intelligence. Nick Bostrom’s influential book on superintelligence imagines it will be an agent—an intelligence with a specific goal. Once such an agent reaches a human level of intelligence, it will improve itself—increasingly rapidly as it gets smarter—in pursuit of whatever goal it has, and this “recursive self-improvement” will lead it to become superintelligent.
This “intelligence explosion” could catch humans off guard. If the initial goal is poorly specified or malicious, or if improper safety features are in place, or if the AI decides it would prefer to do something else instead, humans may be unable to control our own creation. Bostrom gives examples of how a seemingly innocuous goal, such as “Make everyone happy,” could be misinterpreted; perhaps the AI decides to drug humanity into a happy stupor, or convert most of the world into computing infrastructure to pursue its goal.
Drexler and Comprehensive AI Services
These are increasingly familiar concerns for an AI that behaves like an agent, seeking to achieve its goal. There are dissenters to this picture of how artificial general intelligence might arise. One notable alternative point of view comes from Eric Drexler, famous for his work on molecular nanotechnology and Engines of Creation, the book that popularized it.
With respect to AI, Drexler believes our view of an artificial intelligence as a single “agent” that acts to maximize a specific goal is too narrow, almost anthropomorphizing AI, or modeling it as a more realistic route towards general intelligence. Instead, he proposes “Comprehensive AI Services” (CAIS) as an alternative route to artificial general intelligence.
What does this mean? Drexler’s argument is that we should look more closely at how machine learning and AI algorithms are actually being developed in the real world. The optimization effort is going into producing algorithms that can provide services and perform tasks like translation, music recommendations, classification, medical diagnoses, and so forth.
AI-driven improvements in technology, argues Drexler, will lead to a proliferation of different algorithms: technology and software improvement, which can automate increasingly more complicated tasks. Recursive improvement in this regime is already occurring—take the newer versions of AlphaGo, which can learn to improve themselves by playing against previous versions.
Many Smart Arms, No Smart Brain
Instead of relying on some unforeseen breakthrough, the CAIS model of AI just assumes that specialized, narrow AI will continue to improve at performing each of its tasks, and the range of tasks that machine learning algorithms will be able to perform will become wider. Ultimately, once a sufficient number of tasks have been automated, the services that an AI will provide will be so comprehensive that they will resemble a general intelligence.
One could then imagine a “general” intelligence as simply an algorithm that is extremely good at matching the task you ask it to perform to the specialized service algorithm that can perform that task. Rather than acting like a single brain that strives to achieve a particular goal, the central AI would be more like a search engine, looking through the tasks it can perform to find the closest match and calling upon a series of subroutines to achieve the goal.
For Drexler, this is inherently a safety feature. Rather than Bostrom’s single, impenetrable, conscious and superintelligent brain (which we must try to psychoanalyze in advance without really knowing what it will look like), we have a network of capabilities. If you don’t want your system to perform certain tasks, you can simply cut it off from access to those services. There is no superintelligent consciousness to outwit or “trap”: more like an extremely high-level programming language that can respond to complicated commands by calling upon one of the myriad specialized algorithms that have been developed by different groups.
This skirts the complex problem of consciousness and all of the sticky moral quandaries that arise in making minds that might be like ours. After all, if you could simulate a human mind, you could simulate it experiencing unimaginable pain. Black Mirror-esque dystopias where emulated minds have no rights and are regularly “erased” or forced to labor in dull and repetitive tasks, hove into view.
Drexler argues that, in this world, there is no need to ever build a conscious algorithm. Yet it seems likely that, at some point, humans will attempt to simulate our own brains, if only in the vain attempt to pursue immortality. This model cannot hold forever. Yet its proponents argue that any world in which we could develop general AI would probably also have developed superintelligent capabilities in a huge range of different tasks, such as computer programming, natural language understanding, and so on. In other words, CAIS arrives first.
The Future In Our Hands?
Drexler argues that his model already incorporates many of the ideas from general AI development. In the marketplace, algorithms compete all the time to perform these services: they undergo the same evolutionary pressures that lead to “higher intelligence,” but the behavior that’s considered superior is chosen by humans, and the nature of the “general intelligence” is far more shaped by human decision-making and human programmers. Development in AI services could still be rapid and disruptive.
But in Drexler’s case, the research and development capacity comes from humans and organizations driven by the desire to improve algorithms that are performing individualized and useful tasks, rather than from a conscious AI recursively reprogramming and improving itself.
In other words, this vision does not absolve us of the responsibility of making our AI safe; if anything, it gives us a greater degree of responsibility. As more and more complex “services” are automated, performing what used to be human jobs at superhuman speed, the economic disruption will be severe.
Equally, as machine learning is trusted to carry out more complex decisions, avoiding algorithmic bias becomes crucial. Shaping each of these individual decision-makers—and trying to predict the complex ways they might interact with each other—is no less daunting a task than specifying the goal for a hypothetical, superintelligent, God-like AI. Arguably, the consequences of the “misalignment” of these services algorithms are already multiplying around us.
The CAIS model bridges the gap between real-world AI, machine learning developments, and real-world safety considerations, as well as the speculative world of superintelligent agents and the safety considerations involved with controlling their behavior. We should keep our minds open as to what form AI and machine learning will take, and how it will influence our societies—and we must take care to ensure that the systems we create don’t end up forcing us all to live in a world of unintended consequences.
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#435098 Coming of Age in the Age of AI: The ...
The first generation to grow up entirely in the 21st century will never remember a time before smartphones or smart assistants. They will likely be the first children to ride in self-driving cars, as well as the first whose healthcare and education could be increasingly turned over to artificially intelligent machines.
Futurists, demographers, and marketers have yet to agree on the specifics of what defines the next wave of humanity to follow Generation Z. That hasn’t stopped some, like Australian futurist Mark McCrindle, from coining the term Generation Alpha, denoting a sort of reboot of society in a fully-realized digital age.
“In the past, the individual had no power, really,” McCrindle told Business Insider. “Now, the individual has great control of their lives through being able to leverage this world. Technology, in a sense, transformed the expectations of our interactions.”
No doubt technology may impart Marvel superhero-like powers to Generation Alpha that even tech-savvy Millennials never envisioned over cups of chai latte. But the powers of machine learning, computer vision, and other disciplines under the broad category of artificial intelligence will shape this yet unformed generation more definitively than any before it.
What will it be like to come of age in the Age of AI?
The AI Doctor Will See You Now
Perhaps no other industry is adopting and using AI as much as healthcare. The term “artificial intelligence” appears in nearly 90,000 publications from biomedical literature and research on the PubMed database.
AI is already transforming healthcare and longevity research. Machines are helping to design drugs faster and detect disease earlier. And AI may soon influence not only how we diagnose and treat illness in children, but perhaps how we choose which children will be born in the first place.
A study published earlier this month in NPJ Digital Medicine by scientists from Weill Cornell Medicine used 12,000 photos of human embryos taken five days after fertilization to train an AI algorithm on how to tell which in vitro fertilized embryo had the best chance of a successful pregnancy based on its quality.
Investigators assigned each embryo a grade based on various aspects of its appearance. A statistical analysis then correlated that grade with the probability of success. The algorithm, dubbed Stork, was able to classify the quality of a new set of images with 97 percent accuracy.
“Our algorithm will help embryologists maximize the chances that their patients will have a single healthy pregnancy,” said Dr. Olivier Elemento, director of the Caryl and Israel Englander Institute for Precision Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, in a press release. “The IVF procedure will remain the same, but we’ll be able to improve outcomes by harnessing the power of artificial intelligence.”
Other medical researchers see potential in applying AI to detect possible developmental issues in newborns. Scientists in Europe, working with a Finnish AI startup that creates seizure monitoring technology, have developed a technique for detecting movement patterns that might indicate conditions like cerebral palsy.
Published last month in the journal Acta Pediatrica, the study relied on an algorithm to extract the movements from a newborn, turning it into a simplified “stick figure” that medical experts could use to more easily detect clinically relevant data.
The researchers are continuing to improve the datasets, including using 3D video recordings, and are now developing an AI-based method for determining if a child’s motor maturity aligns with its true age. Meanwhile, a study published in February in Nature Medicine discussed the potential of using AI to diagnose pediatric disease.
AI Gets Classy
After being weaned on algorithms, Generation Alpha will hit the books—about machine learning.
China is famously trying to win the proverbial AI arms race by spending billions on new technologies, with one Chinese city alone pledging nearly $16 billion to build a smart economy based on artificial intelligence.
To reach dominance by its stated goal of 2030, Chinese cities are also incorporating AI education into their school curriculum. Last year, China published its first high school textbook on AI, according to the South China Morning Post. More than 40 schools are participating in a pilot program that involves SenseTime, one of the country’s biggest AI companies.
In the US, where it seems every child has access to their own AI assistant, researchers are just beginning to understand how the ubiquity of intelligent machines will influence the ways children learn and interact with their highly digitized environments.
Sandra Chang-Kredl, associate professor of the department of education at Concordia University, told The Globe and Mail that AI could have detrimental effects on learning creativity or emotional connectedness.
Similar concerns inspired Stefania Druga, a member of the Personal Robots group at the MIT Media Lab (and former Education Teaching Fellow at SU), to study interactions between children and artificial intelligence devices in order to encourage positive interactions.
Toward that goal, Druga created Cognimates, a platform that enables children to program and customize their own smart devices such as Alexa or even a smart, functional robot. The kids can also use Cognimates to train their own AI models or even build a machine learning version of Rock Paper Scissors that gets better over time.
“I believe it’s important to also introduce young people to the concepts of AI and machine learning through hands-on projects so they can make more informed and critical use of these technologies,” Druga wrote in a Medium blog post.
Druga is also the founder of Hackidemia, an international organization that sponsors workshops and labs around the world to introduce kids to emerging technologies at an early age.
“I think we are in an arms race in education with the advancement of technology, and we need to start thinking about AI literacy before patterns of behaviors for children and their families settle in place,” she wrote.
AI Goes Back to School
It also turns out that AI has as much to learn from kids. More and more researchers are interested in understanding how children grasp basic concepts that still elude the most advanced machine minds.
For example, developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik has written and lectured extensively about how studying the minds of children can provide computer scientists clues on how to improve machine learning techniques.
In an interview on Vox, she described that while DeepMind’s AlpahZero was trained to be a chessmaster, it struggles with even the simplest changes in the rules, such as allowing the bishop to move horizontally instead of vertically.
“A human chess player, even a kid, will immediately understand how to transfer that new rule to their playing of the game,” she noted. “Flexibility and generalization are something that even human one-year-olds can do but that the best machine learning systems have a much harder time with.”
Last year, the federal defense agency DARPA announced a new program aimed at improving AI by teaching it “common sense.” One of the chief strategies is to develop systems for “teaching machines through experience, mimicking the way babies grow to understand the world.”
Such an approach is also the basis of a new AI program at MIT called the MIT Quest for Intelligence.
The research leverages cognitive science to understand human intelligence, according to an article on the project in MIT Technology Review, such as exploring how young children visualize the world using their own innate 3D models.
“Children’s play is really serious business,” said Josh Tenenbaum, who leads the Computational Cognitive Science lab at MIT and his head of the new program. “They’re experiments. And that’s what makes humans the smartest learners in the known universe.”
In a world increasingly driven by smart technologies, it’s good to know the next generation will be able to keep up.
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