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Downloadable PDF of the 77500-Word Manuscript From left: W. Daniel Hillis, Neil Gershenfeld, Frank Wilczek, David Chalmers, Robert Axelrod, Tom Griffiths, Caroline Jones, Peter Galison, Alison Gopnik, John Brockman, George Dyson, Freeman Dyson, Seth Lloyd, Rod Brooks, Stephen Wolfram, Ian McEwan. In absentia: Andy Clark, George Church, Daniel Kahneman, Alex "Sandy" Pentland (Click to expand photo) INTRODUCTION by Venki Ramakrishnan The field of machine learning and AI is changing at such a rapid pace that we cannot foresee what new technical breakthroughs lie ahead, where the technology will lead us or the ways in which it will completely transform society. So it is appropriate to take a regular look at the landscape to see where we are, what lies ahead, where we should be going and, just as importantly, what we should be avoiding as a society. We want to bring a mix of people with deep expertise in the technology as well as broad 1 thinkers from a variety of disciplines to make regular critical assessments of the state and future of AI. —Venki Ramakrishnan, President of the Royal Society and Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, 2009, is Group Leader & Former Deputy Director, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology; Author, Gene Machine: The Race to Decipher the Secrets of the Ribosome. [ED. NOTE: In recent months, Edge has published the fifteen individual talks and discussions from its two-and-a-half-day Possible Minds Conference held in Morris, CT, an update from the field following on from the publication of the group-authored book Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI. As a special event for the long Thanksgiving weekend, we are pleased to publish the complete conference—10 hours plus of audio and video, as well as this downloadable PDF of the 77,500-word manuscript. Enjoy.] John Brockman Editor, Edge Table of Contents IAN MCEWAN Machines Like Me RODNEY BROOKS The Cul-de-Sac of the Computational Metaphor STEPHEN WOLFRAM Mining the Computational Universe FREEMAN DYSON The Brain Is Full of Maps CAROLINE A. JONES Questioning the Cranial Paradigm 2 ROBERT AXELROD Collaboration and the Evolution of Disciplines ALISON GOPNIK A Separate Kind of Intelligence TOM GRIFFITHS Doing More with Less FRANK WILCZEK Ecology of Intelligence NEIL GERSHENFELD Morphogenesis for the Design of Design DAVID CHALMERS The Language of Mind GEORGE DYSON AI That Evolves in the Wild PETER GALISON Epistemic Virtues SETH LLOYD Communal Intelligence W. DANIEL HILLIS Emergences IAN MCEWAN Machines Like Me I would like to set aside the technological constraints in order to imagine how an embodied artificial consciousness might negotiate the open system of human ethics—not how people think they should behave, but how they do behave. For example, we may think the rule of law is preferable to revenge, but matters get blurred when the cause is just and we love the one who exacts the revenge. 3 A machine incorporating the best angel of our nature might think otherwise. The ancient dream of a plausible artificial human might be scientifically useless but culturally irresistible. At the very least, the quest so far has taught us just how complex we (and all creatures) are in our simplest actions and modes of being. There’s a semi-religious quality to the hope of creating a being less cognitively flawed than we are. IAN MCEWAN is a novelist whose works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He is the recipient of the Man Booker Prize for Amsterdam (1998), the National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award, and the Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction for Atonement (2003). His most recent novel is Machines Like Me. * * * * IAN MCEWAN: I feel something like an imposter here amongst so much technical expertise. I’m the breakfast equivalent of an after-dinner mint. What’s been preoccupying me the last two or three years is what it would be like to live with a fully embodied artificial consciousness, which means leaping over every difficulty that we’ve heard described this morning by Rod Brooks. The building of such a thing is probably scientifically useless, much like putting a man on the moon when you could put a machine there, but it has an ancient history. Then of course you had Frankenstein’s monster, which shifted the debate into what it means to conjure up a version of ourselves. Now, you have the contemporary TV series of Westworld and movies like Blade Runner specifically addressing the notion of what it would be like to have an artificial being aware of its own mortality. In medieval churches or cathedrals, you will find wax effigies of the Virgin Mary that, on certain occasions, weep or shed blood. As anyone who's been on the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin will know, there’s a Virgin Mary that bleeds. Throughout the 18th century you had water-powered android figures, figures driven by levers and cogs, and as clockwork got more sophisticated in the 18th century, such figures remained a matter of profound interest and fascination. 4 I’ve been thinking about what it would be like to live alongside someone we made who is artificial and who claims to have consciousness, about which we’d be very skeptical and to which we’d be applying a constant form of Turing tests. Since it behaved as if it had consciousness, would we then have to accept it much as we have to accept it amongst each other? I’ve written a novel which takes as a starting point the delivery of such a machine. The year is 1982. Alan Turing, on advice of a close friend, decides that he should not proceed if found guilty on homosexual charges to go for chemical castration and instead does one year in Wandsworth prison. Cut away from wet bench work, he returns to pure mathematics. He said at that point in his life he was very interested in Dirac. He thought that quantum mechanics had been largely neglected because of the war, and so he sets out to solving, although it’s formulated differently, positively P versus NP which, along with various other factors, puts science, robotics, and AI in a different position than it is. Through this novel, I want to reflect on the fragility of the present. It seems the way things are is the way they were always bound to be, but the éminence grise of this novel is Turing at the age of seventy. He is head of a very large corporation, an outfit rather like Demis Hassabis’ Deep Mind by King’s Cross. He’s beaten Go masters and he’s still working on notions of what it would be to compute a general intelligence. I came across a letter that Turing wrote. In fact, it’s not only our pink shirts that bind us here, Rod. Turing wrote to a close friend about 1947 saying that he was just ten years away, he thought, from a reasonable emulation of the human mind, and I see this as a form of cultural optimism which is constantly beaten back by the facts. It's worth remembering that Turing was a very good chess player, and it was tempting for him to think of chess as a model of human intelligence, whereas of course it’s a closed system. Players and observers are never in any disagreement at any given point as to what a move means or what a conclusion of a game is, whereas general intelligence working in open systems, and language itself being an open system, has to face a completely different form of problem. 5 Ten years ago, as a layman, I went on the Internet to answer a simple question: How many neurons are there in a human brain? Seven years ago, the figure was 25 billion. Four years ago, I saw a figure of 40 billion. Now, I see a consensus between 80 and 100 billion. Twenty billion difference seems to me to show that we still have a long way to go in understanding the most fundamental fact about ourselves. Then I looked up what the average connection between neurons was. Again, seven or eight years ago it was about 1,000. I see now the average figure again rather blurred between 7,000 and 10,000 inputs and outputs per neuron. Then we have the vast range of connectivity between them. In fact, we probably cannot think of a machine as intelligent unless it can learn, which means that anything we would build would have to have a degree of plasticity and Hebbian process of firings being either suppressed or encouraged. It would have to be somehow imitated, all this within a liter of matter running on about 24 watts. That’s like the energy of a dim light bulb—quite appropriate maybe. I have a real sense just thinking of this how very far we have to go. I look online at various sorts of effigies that are made with frubber and are talking. I notice that always at the back of their necks is a thick cable because we haven’t even solved the most fundamental question of storing energy in such a being. I’ve decided to leap across, as is the luxury of fiction writers, and I don’t know whether it was against one of John’s many rules about this conference, but I just want to read the opening couple of pages to place this in the context of a crisis for humanism, not one for science and technology and the problems of computation. I'm going to start with a simple quotation from Rudyard Kipling, who wrote a long poem about robots.
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