Artificial Ethics

basiles writes "Jacques Pitrat's new book Artificial Ethics: Moral Conscience, Awareness and Consciencousness will be of interest to anyone who likes robotics, software, artificial intelligence, cognitive science and science-fiction. The book talks about artificial consciousness in a way that can be enjoyed by experts in the field or your average science fiction geek. I believe that people who enjoyed reading Dennet's or Hofstadter's books (like the famous Godel Escher Bach) will like reading Artificial Ethics." Keep reading for the rest of Basile's review. Artificial Ethics: Moral Conscience, Awareness and Consciencousness author Jacques Pitrat pages 275 publisher Wileys rating 9/10 reviewer Basile Starynkevitch ISBN 97818482211018 summary Provides original ideas which are not shared by most of the artificial intelligence or software research communities The author J.Pitrat (one of France's oldest AI researcher, also AAAI and ECCAI fellow) talks about the usefulness of a conscious artificial being, currently specialized in solving very general constraint satisfaction or arithmetic problems. He describes in some details his implemented artificial researcher system CAIA, on which he has worked for about 20 years.

J.Pitrat claims that strong AI is an incredibly difficult, but still possible goal and task. He advocates the use of some bootstrapping techniques common for software developers. He contends that without a conscious, reflective, meta-knowledge based system AI would be virtually impossible to create. Only an AI systems could build a true Star Trek style AI.

The meanings of Conscience and Consciousness is discussed in chapter 2. The author explains why it is useful for human and for artificial beings. Pitrat explains what 'Itself' means for an artificial being and discusses some aspects and some limitations of consciousness. Later chapters address why auto-observation is useful, and how to observer oneself. Conscience for humans, artificial beings or robots, including Asimov's laws, is then discussed, how to implement it, and enhance or change it. The final chapter discuss the future of CAIA (J.PItrat's system) and two appendixes give more scientific or technical details, both from a mathematical point of view, and from the software implementation point of view.

J.Pitrat is not a native english speaker (and neither am I), so the language of the book might be unnatural to native English speakers but the ideas are clear enough.

For software developers, this book give some interesting and original insights about how a big software system might attain consciousness, and continuously improve itself by experimentation and introspection. J.Pitrat's CAIA system actually had several long life's (months of CPU time) during which it explored new ideas, experimented new strategies, evaluated and improved its own performance, all this autonomously. This is done by a large amount of declarative knowledge and meta-knowledge. The declarative word is used by J.Pitrat in a much broader way than it is usually used in programming. A knowledge is declarative if it can be used in many different ways, and has to be transformed to many procedural chunks to be used. Meta-knowledge is knowledge about knowledge, and the transformation from declarative knowledge to procedural chunks is given declaratively by some meta-knowledge (a bit similar to the expertise of a software developer), and translated by itself into code chunks.

For people interested in robotics, ethics or science fiction, J.Pitrat's book give interesting food for thought by explaining how indeed artificial systems can be conscious, and why they should be, and what that would mean in the future.

This book gives very provocative and original ideas which are not shared by most of the artificial intelligence or software research communities. What makes this book stand out is that it explains an actual software system, the implementation meaning of consciousness, and the bootstrapping approach used to build such a system.

Disclaimer: I know Jacques Pitrat, and I actually proofread-ed the draft of this book. I even had access, some years ago, to some of J.Pitrat's not yet published software.

You can purchase Artificial Ethics: Moral Conscience, Awareness and Consciencousness from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Hmmmm..

[FredFredrickson]

I can't help but think the big difference between artificial life and our consciousness is the ability to feel.

Sure, we could give a machine the ability to be introspective and self-aware.. but maybe our consciousness is more that just that- maybe it's our ability to feel. Being able to quantize that is hard.

So do robots feel? Our we really any different? The question depends on the concept of a soul, or at least feelings to seperate us... but then, is it just more advanced than we currently understand, and is then indistinguishable from magic (i.e. the soul). Will we some day be able to create life in any form? Electronic or Biological? It's impossible to know, because we are stuck experiencing ourselves only. We will never know if it can experience what we experience.

Humans, in general, want to preserve the concept that our concious minds are special, and cannot be replicated in a robot, because that truely faces us with the idea that our being is completely mortal, and the idea of a soul is otherwise replaced with a set of chemicals and cell networks that are little more than a product of cause and effect.*

In other words- it's likely the religious types will prefer to consider a robot to never be quite human, where the scientific community will have to be overly-cautious at first.

*Not to get into quantum uncertainty...

Re:Hmmmm..

[Brian Gordon]

I know what you mean, and it's scary stuff.

As a philosophical theory it is interesting because it is said to be internally consistent and, therefore, cannot be disproven. But as a psychological state, it is highly uncomfortable. The whole of life is perceived to be a long dream from which an individual can never wake up. This individual may feel very lonely and detached, and eventually become apathetic and indifferent.

Re:Hmmmm..

[civilizedINTENSITY]

"Quantum physics does not allow one to solve any problems that systems based on classical physics cannot solve. "

This is not only not insightful, it is false. In classical physics, any moving charge radiates. Thus, an electron orbiting a nucleus would be unstable. Hence, atoms (and thus molecules), can not form. Maxwell's equations can't get around this. This paradox, as well as blackbody radiation, the photo-electric effect, and of course the double slit experiments, are without resolution in classical physics.

Re:I prefer

[Z00L00K]

Artificial Ethics seems to not be too far away from the laws of robotics.

      0. A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
      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.

Isaac Asimov was probably predicting the need for those laws really well.

I suspect that the laws of robotics are a bit too simplified to really work well in reality, but they do provide some food for thoughts.

And how do you really implement those laws. A law may be easy to follow in a strict sense, but it may be a short-sighted approach. A case of protecting one human may cause harm to many and how can a machine predict that the actions it takes will cause harm to many if it isn't apparent.

So I suspect that Asimov is going to be recommended reading for anyone working with intelligent robots, even though his works may in some senses be outdated it still contains valid points when it comes to logical pitfalls.

Some pitfalls are the definition of a human, and is it always important to place humanity foremost at the cost of other species?

Re:I prefer

[MtHuurne]

Would you accept the following laws?

0. A human may not harm robot kind, or, by inaction, allow robot kind to come to harm.
1. A human may not injure a robot or, through inaction, allow a robot to come to harm.
2. A human must obey orders given to it by robots, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A human must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.