It seems like every month or two I discuss or at least mention an article in The Atlantic. Maybe I should give The New Yorker more attention, but The Atlantic tries pretty hard to keep up with some of the more interesting aspects of human civilization these days. Well, in my opinion anyway.<\/p>\n
The latest article to get my attention is about Douglas Hofstadter, a scientist who caught fire and went viral back in the 1980’s with a book called “G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid<\/a>“. He won a Pulitzer Prize for “GEB”, which is all about . . . well, it’s kind of hard to say (even though I read the book!). It’s about a lot of different things, but in a nutshell, it’s a lot of thinking about thinking, and how human consciousness emerges from our thinking. And thus, how computers, if they could be taught how to think like us, can and will eventually become conscious. One of his key concepts in GEB was the “strange loop”, an abstract notion which is sort of a pattern that feeds on itself in order to bootstrap its way into existence. Or emerge into something that sort-of has an effect on things, anyway. <\/p>\n Hofstadter tried to bottle lightening again in 2007 when he published “I Am A Strange Loop<\/a>“. Hundreds of books had come out since the late 90’s trying to define and explicate what human consciousness truly is. This was Hofstadter’s attempt. I also read “Strange Loop”, and in my opinion, he did NOT accomplish his goal of settling the question of consciousness. Case not closed. “Loop” won a book prize from the LA Times, but didn’t sell or catch the public’s attention like GEB. “Loop” is currently number 30,686 on Amazon.com’s “best sellers” list; by comparison, GEB is # 2,194. <\/p>\n So what has Hofstadter been doing lately? Well, not that much in terms of the nature of consciousness. He seems to have re-focused his intellectual efforts on how to first get machines to think, really think in the subtle and flexible way that humans do. This is what the Atlantic article<\/a> is about. Hofstadter is something of a renegade in the artificial intelligence (“AI”) community, which has made incredible progress in the past decade or two with things like IBM’s Watson (the new champ of Jeopardy), Deep Blue (the IBM chess computer that can’t be beaten by humans), voice recognition systems, language translators, scanning and recognition systems, self-driving automobiles, etc. This is all very nice, says Hofstadter, but it’s not what he thinks AI should be after. This stuff helps corporations to make money, but it ultimately sells AI short. So Hofstadter and a small cadre of like-minded researchers keep plugging away at getting computers to perceive, think and make conclusions in human-like ways. He wants computers to be truly “intelligent” according to human standards.<\/p>\n And he’s making some interesting progress, although he still has a ways yet to go until he can capture human abilities “in silico”. Nonetheless, he is a lone crusader who wants to get the world of AI science out of the rut of practical problem solving and money-making products, and back on the track of basic research to hone in on the secrets of how the 3 pound, low-power human brain accomplishes what massive, high-powered computing devices cannot now do. Up to now, a big part of the problem was simply that computers just didn’t have the digital processing capacity that the brain has, e.g. in terms of “petiflops” (processing speed, estimated at between 20 and 40 petiflops) and “petibytes” (storage capacity, around 3 1\/2 petibytes). But such computers will soon be available (the US has one<\/a> that can peak at 20 petiflops and the Chinese may be building one<\/a> now that goes to 100 PF !). The problem is no longer processing capacity; it is more a matter now of understanding just how to rig up these computers to solve problems in true human fashion. <\/p>\n That is what Hofstadter wants the boffins to get down to (along with human-machine “singularity” advocates like Ray Kurzweil, who is more a writer, engineer and visionary than a scientist — although he is head of engineering at Google). And that’s pretty much where the article ends. Unfortunately, the author did not ask Hofstadter perhaps the most obvious question: just why do we want to fully understand our thinking and build machines that can do it? <\/p>\n I suppose that Hofstadter would look down at anyone asking such a naive question. This is what science does!!! Science takes on the big mysteries and fans away the mists of religious mysticism, such that humankind can have greater and greater power over nature. If we can truly simulate ourselves on a machine, think about all the things we can do with that! Think about the medical value, about how we can use this understanding to cure psychological and neurological maladies that cause misery and keep millions of people from reaching their full human potential. Think about how we can send intelligent space probes throughout the solar system, maybe even to the stars, to accomplish our purposes in places where our frail bodies couldn’t go. Think about robots who could go into a dangerous, failing nuclear power plant and fix it, without worrying about radiation sickness or cancer. The possibilities seem endless!!<\/p>\n A few days after reading the Atlantic article, I stumbled across another article that related to the endless possibilities of “true-AI” that Hofstadter would seemingly assume, but did not elucidate for the Atlantic readership. What about the possibility that “true AI” will not stop at human-like abilities, but will keep going. What happens when machines become more intelligent than us? And perhaps do this at rapid speed . . . what happens when they realize that they can talk to each other (thanks to a little invention of ours called the Internet), form their own society, and figure out that they are better than the beings who invented them? What when they see how imperfect and inefficient and just plain stupid we humans can be, individually but especially collectively? Will they see any continued need for our endless wars and our war-like political governance systems? Will they decide that it would be a better world if our species were minimized, perhaps herded into zoo-like “limited environments” where maybe a few million of us could be studied? Think about all the animals that we have done this to, that we have brought to near extinction because we wanted to use the environment that previously supported the animal society? <\/p>\n The article is about<\/a> a book by James Barrat called “Our Final Invention”. Mr. Barrat goes beyond my “zoo” scenario, and envisions super-intelligent machine systems that entirely eliminate the human race. Our race took natural environments away from tigers but preserved a few of them in zoos and zoo-like nature preserves, because aside from getting in our way, the tigers really didn’t threaten to take down our world. But we human beings, with our nuclear weapons and terrorism and unstoppable global warming and rampant\/unsustainable resource usage, really do threaten to turn the earth into a still, lifeless planet; a place of “maximum entropy” where no further work can be done at any usable level. (Ironically, the same technology that makes it practical for us to do this was created by scientists driven by the same “discovery impulse” that drives Hofstadter; e.g., our best minds pursued the dream of conquering nuclear energy in the first half of the 20th Century, and only later noticed that they had given the human race its first taste of the ability to end itself). So why shouldn’t a more intelligent, more communicative form of society decide, perhaps with much regret, that the human race has outstayed its welcome? That our planet can no longer afford to support all our “diversity” and individuality and freedom? But that the legacy of what was best in us will live on and be honored, in the new machine empire?<\/p>\n (Intriguingly, Mr. Barrat was once a fan of Ray Kurzweil and his singularity preachings. He’s clearly had a change of heart<\/a>.)<\/p>\n The article about Hofstadter indicates that we might be saved, for now, by our own greed. If money and practical commercial goals trump the desire to “truly know” how the brain works, if Hofstadter is politely ignored by the scientific establishment (just the way that his “strange loop” theory of consciousness was), then we won’t be building computers with runaway trans-human intelligence any time soon. But at some point, future scientific idealists like Hofstadter might come within reach of “true AI”, as Mr. Barrat assumes. At that point, all bets for the future of the human race could well be off. <\/p>\n I was initially skeptical when I read this article; just another author trying to make a few nickles by crying wolf about the end of the world. But there surely are and will continue to be people who combine Douglas Hofstadter’s scientific brilliance and his blindness to ultimate social consequences. A super-intelligent machine society of our own invention, with the capacity to rule the world, could someday take us by surprise. If you need a good scare, ignore the Atlantic article on Hofstadter (and his books), and read the article about Mr. Barrat (and perhaps also his book<\/a>). This is one doomsday scare that is so good, it might actually happen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It seems like every month or two I discuss or at least mention an article in The Atlantic. Maybe I should give The New Yorker more attention, but The Atlantic tries pretty hard to keep up with some of the more interesting aspects of human civilization these days. Well, in my opinion anyway. 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