View source for Beyond AI

== Is it possible? ==

Is it possible to go beyond traditional AI?
Arguments about whether an artificial system 
could ever be conscious range among scientists
from "possible in principle" to "sure".
So the answer is: '''Yes''', of course, why not. 
It should be possible. And if we really make software 
that comes to life, then [[Evolution|evolution]] will enter a new phase.
There is no doubt that [[Self-Consciousness|self-consciousness]] 
does not require some immaterial mind-stuff.
Daniel C. Dennett writes in his book "Brainchildren - 
Essays on Designing Minds", Penguin Press Science, 1998
(p. 154)

: "Over the centuries, every other phenomenon of initially 'supernatural' mysteriousness has succumbed to an uncontroversial explanation within the commodious folds of physical science. Thales, the pre-Socratic protoscientist, thought the loadstone had a soul, but we now know better; magnetism is one of the best understood of physical phenomena, strange though its manifestations are. The 'miracles' of life itself, and of reproduction, are now analyzed into the well-known intricacies of molecular biology. Why should consciousness be any exception? Why should the brain be the only complex physical object in the universe to have an interface with another realm of being?"

== What is the problem ? ==

No computer has ever been designed that is
aware of what it's doing.
Many biologically inspired fields of computer
science have failed to produce the complexity
of living beings: Connectionism, AI, [[ALife]],
Genetic Algorithms.
Christof Teuscher says in the ACM article
'Biologically Uninspired Computer Science':
"Biological organisms are constantly doing
things no artifact can match. The syllogism
of simple rules governing complex patterns —
or more outlandishly, the whole universe —
is seductive but oversimplified. [...]
Trying to copy or mimic life or lifelike
behavior in all scientific disciplines has
generally produced disillusion after high
initial hopes and hype."

Although living systems are composed only
of non-living atoms, we can not produce
similar things out of non-living items.
Rodney Brooks says "AI just does not seem as
present or aware as even a simple animal and
Alife cannot match the complexities of the
simplest forms of life.". He asked what went
wrong, and lists four possibilities:

* The parameters of our models are wrong;
* We are below some complexity threshold;
* We lack computing power; and
* We are missing something fundamental and unimagined.

Perhaps it is a mixture of all four reasons. 
The major problem is a complexity threshold.
Humans take 20 years to grow up, and they learn all 
these years every day new things. Have we build a machine 
or an agent which is able to learn 20 years? 
No animals learns so long, and all animals except 
humans do not reach our levels of intelligence, 
even if we try to teach them they are not able to 
learn language. They are below some cognitive complexity 
threshold. Cats reach their full size in a half year, 
even big bears and horses in 2-3 years. 

It is’s complexity threshold: to build an adaptive agent 
which is able to match the vast complexity of a whole world 
in a tiny space. Similar to the quest of quantum gravity, 
it is the attempt to match the very large and the very 
small, the infinite and the infinitesimal: It means to put 
a world in a grain of sand - if a brain is like a grain of 
sand. 

Daniel C. Dennett writes in his book "Brainchildren - 
Essays on Designing Minds" (p. 158/159):

: "After all, a normal human being is composed of trillions of parts (if we descend on the level of the macromolecules), and many of these rival in complexity and design cunning the fanciest artifacts that have ever been created. We consist of billions of cells, and a single human cell contains within itself complex 'machinery' that is still well beyond the artifactual powers of engineers. We are composed of thousands of different kinds of cells [...] If all that complexity were needed for consciousness to exist, then the task of making a single conscious robot would dwarf the enire scientific and engineering resources of the planet for millennia. And would play for it?"

== How will it happen? ==

: "A man, viewed as a behaving system, is quite simple. The apparent complexity of his behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which he finds himself." - H.A. Simon in "The Sciences of the Artificial" 

Despite all these obstacles and failures, it 
is very likely that it is indeed possible 
to build a large distributed system of 
computers which is able to achieve [[Self-Consciousness|self-consciousness]]
and which is aware of what it's doing.
How?

Alan Turing's suggestion: 
build a disorganized machine with the curiosity of a child.
"Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, 
why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child's? If 
this were then subjected to an appropriate course of education 
one would obtain the adult brain", see [http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html].
That's exactly the right way: build an adaptive 
agent that is able to learn. Suchs agents would
be able to acquire self-consciousness in exactly the
same way as we do, as Susan Blackmore says:
"they would acquire language, social conventions of behaviour, 
and knowledge of the intellectual world, in roughly the same 
way as we do." [http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Articles/JCS03.htm].

Thus to go beyond traditional AI one has to build or 
simulate an agent that is able to learn, so long
until it is able to understand a complex artificial 
3D world as complex as the real world.
The agent should have a scaleable and adaptive 
architecture, and it should be able to learn. 

* create a adaptable or adaptive system (with the right kind of internal architecture)
* place the system in an artificial environment which is complex enough
* let the system learn and grow

At least this is what humans do for nearly 20
years : to grow and to learn. Of course
the world must be complex enough to create
a complex character. For example an online
multi-player game in a true 3D environment.
If you have created a system which understands a 
3D world, you have created a system which can 
understand natural language, since
language is a description of the physical, real
world and is inseparable from it. As soon as
you start to separate words from it though,
they loose their meaning, and you can regain
it only if you pull them "back to earth" with
metaphors. 

How do we create an agent that is smart enough
to understand a complex 3D world? The complexity of
the code must be able match the billions of 
connections in the human brain.
Take a few of Google's advanced data centers
in the near future. Together they reach the
complexity of a hundred billion interconnected
neurons. Now connect them to a single agent
in a virtual world (this sounds much easier
than it is). Instead of search queries, it gets
input directly from this world: each moment is
a "what is this" query. And instead of search
results, it produces a list of perceptions
and corresponding actions, which human trainers
have proposed. The whole thing is trained for
years, first to recognize the basic environment,
then to move around, and finally to learn a
language, similar to the way kids grow up.

Such a system doesn't and shouldn't know itself,
and one data center doesn't need to know how
the others work. It is important that the system
doesn't know its own distributed structure. It
must perceive itself as a single und unique entity,
who lives in a complex world (and not as a complex
system which lives in a single world). In order
to develop the idea of a personal "self", the
system needs a base, a single body to identify
oneself with. And it needs the ability to
perceive the traces and shadows of the own
actions.

In the end you have a giant program running on
50.000 servers or more, which doesn't has the
slightest idea how it works, and has the impression
that a single self is in charge. It is able
to be aware of itself as long as it is connected
to the virtual world. And in this world, this
massive system thinks it is a unique entity,
a single person. This illusion is similar 
to [[Self-Consciousness|self-consciousness]]
in humans. Unlike the shadow emergence in humans,
though, we have here a real ghost in the machine,
which can be copied to other machines, if you
find 50.000 servers you do not use anymore..

It sounds paradox, but '''if we want to enable a system of computers to think about itself, we must prevent any detailed self-knowledge.'''
If we could perceive how our minds work on 
the microscopic level of neurons, we would 
notice that there is no central organizer or 
controller. The illusion of the self would 
probably break down if a brain would be 
conscious of the distributed nature of it's 
own processing. In this sense, 
[[Self-Consciousness|self-consciousness]] 
is only possible because the true nature of 
the self is not conscious to us.. 

The complex adaptive system in question is 
aware of what is doing only indirectly through 
and with the help of the external world. To be 
more precise, the system can only watch its own 
activity on a certain level: on the macroscopic 
level it can recognize macroscopic things, and 
on the microscopic level, it can recognize other 
microscopic things - a neuron can recognize and
react to other neurons - but there is no 
"level-crossing" awareness of the own activity.

== What do we need ? ==

So you have to build a giant system which
consists of a huge number of computers, and
only if it doesn't have the slightest 
idea how it works, it can develop a form
of self-consciousness. And only if you take
a vast number of items - neurons, computers 
or servers - the system is complex enough to 
get the impression that a single item is in 
charge..

There is something else we need: the idea of 
the [[Self|self]] must have a base, a single item to identify 
oneself with. Thus we need two worlds: one "mental" world 
where the thinking - the complex information 
processing - takes place, and where the system 
is a large distributed network of nodes, and one 
"physical" world where a single "self" walks around
and where the system appears to be a single, 
individual item: a person. This "physical" world 
could also be any virtual world which is complex 
enough to support AI. Each of this worlds could be
be realized by a number of advanced data centers.

There are a number of conditions for both worlds:
The hidden, "mental" world must be grounded in the 
visible, "physical" world, it must be complex enough 
to mirror it, and it must be fast enough to react 
instantly. Grounded means we need a "1:infinite" 
connection between both worlds. The collective action 
of the "hidden" system must result in a single 
action of an item in the "visible" system. 
And a single instant in the "visible" system must
in turn trigger a collective activity of the
"hidden" system during perception. Every perception 
and action for the system must pass a single 
point in the visible, physical world. If both 
worlds are complex enough, then this is the 
point where true self-consciousness can emerge.

Koch and Tononi say "To be conscious, then, you need to be a single integrated entity with a large repertoire of states.", see [http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jun08/6278/3].
To summarize, in order to build a computer 
system which is able to think about itself,
we need to separate the "thinking" from the
"self":

(a) a prevention of self-knowledge which enables self-awareness

(b) a "1:infinite" connection between two very complex worlds which are in coincidence with each other

== What will happen? ==

What will happen if the first "strong" AI with
human-level intelligence and [[Self-Consciousness|self-consciousness]]
is created? Probably

- it will be just a confused as we are
(where was I before? I am that? what am I?..)

- it will be very familiar with the world where
it is living in (for us and robots, this is the
physical world, but in principle this could
be any virtual world which is complex enough
to support AI)

- it will have difficulties to imagine what
it is like to be dead

== Links ==

* Alan Turing, [http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"], Mind, October (1950) 433-460

* Susan Blackmore, [http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Articles/JCS03.htm Consciousness in meme machines] - What would be needed for a machine to have human-like consciousness?

* SEED article, [http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2008/03/out_of_the_blue.php Out of the blue] - Can a thinking, remembering, decision-making, biologically accurate brain be built from a supercomputer?