I spent a good part of the week-end with 800 potential "posthumans" attending The Singularity Summit at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. In case you don't know, The Singularity is the technological creation of smarter-than-human-intelligence . There was much discussion about how near or how far away we are from Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or if we'll even notice when it comes around.
The audience was largely comprised of ernest young men - suggesting that the building of intelligent thinking machines based around engineering and computing prowess is less appealing to the female side of our species whose greater focus on emotional intelligence probably deserves a bigger place at this debating table before we unleash "smart" robots designed by men. Some excellent balance is provided by Renee Blodgett who acts as a consultant to the Singularity Summit
Some potential issues were brought into sharp focus during the opening keynote from Rodney Brooks the CTO of iRobot who noted the massive funding for robotics from the military who want to see future wars fought by machines rather than with humans !
A brave member of the audience challenged Rodney after his contention that The Geneva Convention was a way to control the inappropriate use of future military might. The questioner raised the issue of massive funding for robotic research from a government who has side-stepped certain key aspects of the Geneva Convention.
There is some excellent coverage of the event at Between The Lines including some refreshingly, non-techie and humorous coverage by Chris Matyszczyk
Some hightlights:
“What’s missing is a positive, compelling vision that ordinary people can buy into,” Paul Saffo
Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google on the co-evolution of the web
“We were all surprised at how game theoretic it is,”. “We made a copy of the Web and indexed it and we thought it reflected of Web. Now we understand that we are in co-evolution. When we make a move, the Web changes and when Web changes we do. Optimizers look at what we do and we look at what they do and Web moves in different directions because of the interaction between them. We hadn’t expected that.”
Norvig also caused a bit of a stir when he said that computer error is probably killing a couple of hundred people a day in the medical profession. That was as cheery as the prediction from Wendell Wallach that "in the next few years there would be a major human disaster caused by a mistaken decision taken by a computer".
After telling us that Vampire bats were the first animals to bring altruism into the social world. Josh Hall focused on revisions to Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics * :
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
* Asimov added the Zeroth Law: "A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm"
Josh Hall wants the creation of robots to be a singular force for good. He wants them to understand the human condition, to be able to respond to the human condition, to improve themselves in order to improve the human condition.
As I tried to absorb all the information being presented I was left pondering certain issues:
While we are building machines that are capable of actions far superior that those of human beings, cultural and emotional issues are lagging far behind raw power.
Technology continues to develop along exponential lines - but the much slower linear evolutional of the human mind and body will either create a greater and greater gulf or (as many at the event believe) a merging of the human species with technology over the next few decades - at that point how human will we be ?
As we come up to the sixth anniversary of 911, the gulf between Western Capitalism and its reliance on technology and certain fundamentalist religious groups around the world with a radically different perspective seems to widen. I fear great clashes of ideology in the years ahead and we need to work on minimizing the inevitable conflict.
Check out the coverage of this incredibly thought provoking event. No matter your perspective these are real issues that require as wide a discussion as possible. Technology continues its exponential pace.
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