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Robots 'Evolve' Altruism
sciencehabit writes "Computer simulations of tiny robots with rudimentary nervous systems show that, over hundreds of generations, these virtual machines evolve altruistic behaviors. They begin to share small disks — a stand-in for food — with each other so that their comrades' traits are passed on to the next generation. Experts say the study sheds light on why various animals — from bees to humans — help each other out, even when it hurts their own chances to reproduce."
Does this mean that robots are now more evolved than Randroids?
"Fry: I’m not a robot like you. I don’t like having disks crammed into me unless they’re Oreos, and then only in the mouth."
So why do we help people who are not related to us?
Compassion and caring is not bounded by family boundaries, so it seems to me that the evolutionary advantage behind altruism is still questionable.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
No, it means that these scientists should stop using the world "altruism" because they don't know what it means.
Yes. Apparently, a few thousand neurons is all that it takes to realize that your own chances of survival go up if you are a member of a group, and that being a member of a group is easier if the other members of the group think you contribute to the group.
Conclusion: Randians have less neurons than bees, and/or a less complex intelligence than these robots.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Is there any chance we could get bit.ly and other URL shorteners outright banned from slashdot? Since we're not constrained in character count, their only purpose is to mask the destination of links, which is a bad thing.
Why are the "quotes" around "evolve" rather than "altruism"? The robots did seem to evolve, but what they evolved was tribalism.
Christ, do you even think before slamming your face into the keyboard? "Objectivism" does not prohibit working together to benefit each other and yourself. Each side gains by the interaction - well within the bounds of Randian "theory." but it is easier to herp derp along an point fingers.
I, for one, welcome our new altruistic overlords!
Altruism (noun): The principle or practice of unselfish concern for or devotion to the welfare of others - dictionary.reference.com
According to the strict definition, I don't think any theory of evolution could ever explain true altruism, because for altruism in it's pure definition, there simply is no reason. If it has a personal reason, then it is, by definition, not altruism.
Now that's out of the way, there are a number of ways that the less-strict form of altruism (let's call it 'altruistic behavior' rather) would be able to evolve. Firstly, as mentioned in TFA (yes, I skimmed it.. there were only 2 comments at the time) - it makes sense to exhibit altruistic behavior if it improves the odds of your immediate relatives to survive, thereby carrying on part your genes. The more genes your share, the closer the relative, and the more likely you are to care 'selflessly' for them.
But in humans, carrying over genes is not the only reason. There is also the matter of respect, and trustworthiness. In order to convince your allies that you are trustworthy and 'good', you would exhibit selfless acts, with no expectation of return from the person concerned, but definite returns from those you know. By always tipping waiters more than required (selfless by any means), your partner sees your selflessness and gains trust in you. Business partners sees this and are more likely to trust you in business ventures. This all improves your chances of reproduction and survival.
all this is made possible by our fantastic ability to remember and build mental models of specific individuals and relationships, keep tabs on how others acted in the past, and spread the word of any 'egotistic' act to other members of society by means of language. Anyone who is /not/ altruistic (at least as far as others perceives it), is therefore placing himself in distrust, and a disadvantage for carrying over his genes.
So no, it's not much of a surprise that altruistic behavior evolves in robots with a built-in desire to spread their own genes. But it still is pretty damn cool.
When Randroids speak of the "freedom to choose when to behave altruistically", it is pretty much implied that they don't really plan to make that choice, ever. What could be more fun that watching your fellow man rot in the gutter, after all.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Nobody said the system works perfectly. Especially considering these patterns have evolved at a slow rate, and our culture has experienced pretty dramatic changes in a few years. We are living in much bigger groups for instance. Our brains are wired for smaller groups, where you know everybody, and where the chance is much greater that this person will be nice to you in the future.
Morality, and all subjective human concepts of "good" and "evil" are just evolved instincts, much like the behaviour of these robots. That doesn't make them any less real, of course, and overanalyzing is likely to lead into dead ends and meaningless moral relativism which isn't really satisfying to the moral instinct which is the only true yardstick of good and evil. But it's sometimes essential to keep in mind the subjectivity of empathy and "fair play".
Emotions! In your brain!
altruism and cooperation are investments without guarantee of return on investment. cooperation is not a bartering situation. nor does your effort to redefine trade to be a form of altruism do anything but prove you don't know a fucking thing about what you are talking about
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The United States doesn't cooperate?
So you missed the US sending military and technological assistance to Japan after the Earthquake and Tsunami, the US sending food aid to North Korea or the US sending aid or offering to send aid to everyone touched by a natural disaster for the last 60+ years.
You missed the US involvement in the Dayton Peace Talks and US Peacekeepers in Bosnia and later Kosovo, US de-mining operations in North Africa, Afghanistan, South East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, the constant US Peacekeeping presence in the Sinai since 1982, US involvement in the UN, NATO and a bunch of other organizations.
You are right about North Korea though, they really don't cooperate with anyone.
I'd like to see the source code and specs, constraints, etc. I've seen robots designed to evolve under certain constraints, that lead to very predictable and obvious traits based on those constraints. For example, if a robot had a goal to pass on its genes, and sharing food was the means to accomplish this, it isn't a surprise that's the result: It didn't evolve that response; it was designed to acheieve it! That's why I'd like to see the actual research. Till then I have to call bogus.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It is worth noting that ants also form colonies and work together...but they do not work together with other colonies.
betterunixthanunix, I'd like to introduce you to the Argentine Ant:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_ant#Global_.22mega-colony.22
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Freedom includes the right to be an asshole. FORCING people to be charitable is the opposite of freedom - it's basically what plantation masters did to slaves (volunteer work picking cotton).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
The robots/virtual robots didn't actually evolve altruism as such. I was hoping they were going to say the robots had discovered they ability to recognize weak kin and share food. Instead, the researchers taught the robots how to share, and also changed their optimization problem to "if we both have a decent amount of food, all of our genes will die, but if I give it all away, your genes might propagate." So they just solved the optimization problem they were taught, as opposed to figuring it out on their own.
Their description of the rudimentary nervous systems make the robots sound like they're related to Braitenberg Vehicles, which are otherwise pretty fascinating.
Yes, it is. I don't think you know what Placebo means.
You have been completely hoodwinked by people who want your money, don't know what the term 'energy' means, and don't understand confirmation bias. AS well as a host of other issue.
Listen to this:
http://www.pusware.com/quackcast/quackcast10.mp3
Read this:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=6839
in fact, you should probably read everything here:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?cat=4
If you know how to read studies, seriously most eople don't, then do research here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/
If you don't understand what makes a proper study, who to use the, how to properly understand p value and apply the results then freaking learn. As a bonus learn to apply the finding in a Bayesian way.
Oh, and be sure to read this. In fact, I HIGHLY recommend you read this first:
http://www.theskepticsguide.org/resources/logicalfallacies.aspx
There is no effect above a placebo effect for any Chiropractic 'treatment'.
Part of the placebo effect is the person doing the test, or treatment. So Yes, chiropractors would claim there was an effect because they are inferring an effect where there is none.
"What placebo effect? I've read this many times and have never seen documented evidence for it in relation to Chiropractic! "
Clearly you haven't looked. There are volumes of good* data showing it has no effect above Placebo.
The site I list usually, if not always, have citation you can follow up on, as well as asked questions.
*Good as in well done. Double blinded, proper controls, and so on. Which is all In care about in a study.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yes there is. You see... society functions dependent on mutual altruism, and we reserve the right, collectively, to punish those who don't act sufficiently altruistically for own needs. Evolutionary models support this as not just more efficient than greed based societies, but natural too.
Robot does what it was programmed to do. Film at 11.
In other news:
Mac fanboys still arrogant hippies.
Windows fanboys still wearing pocket protectors.
Linux fanboys still have 6 digit Slashdot accounts.
These virtual machine robots are computer programs. So, are they, the robots, actually developing altruistic behavior or are the original program(s) somehow biased to include that behavior? I would posit that what is being "seen" is not some simple evolutionary trait, but an artifact of bias installed in the original programming.
If you program a device to seek out the possibilities that garner the greatest success, regardless of how that success is defined, won't the device act based on it's programming? Now, if somehow these virtual machine robots are changing their programming as they go, that would be impressive. Of course, being computer simulations, even that feat would be based on the biases imposed in their original programming.
Even in nature, the simplest organisms, like bacteria, amoebas, etc. don't exhibit this altruistic behavior. Even more complex organisms don't exhibit this behavior and they have been around a lot longer than a few hundred generations of the study.
The result of the study seems to indicate that altruistic behavior develops when an organism (such as the virtual machine robot) is programmed that way by it's programmer. Of course, then that begs the question for those organisms in real life that exhibit the altruistic behavior, who programmed them?
We are Devo.
There's probably a point in there somewhere.
He didn't make fun of all Libertarians, just followers of Ayn Rand, who said:
Soviet Russia is the ultimate result, the final product, the full, consistent embodiment of the altruist morality in practice; it represents the only way that that morality can ever be practiced.
And other fun quotes about the subject.
Dilbert RSS feed
Altruism has a functional definition when referring to evolution, since it's more philosophy if you want to think about animals or bacteria acting morally. I can't recall the precise definition off the top of my head, but it's something along the lines of helping another at personal cost. As I recall, there are three major theories as to why organisms do this.
First is Kin Selection, which is what the article seems fixated upon. Bees and naked mole rats are the classic example. Essentially, it means you'd take a 10% risk of removing yourself from the gene pool to save an individual who shares 15% of your genetic material.
The second is reciprocity. Vampire bats may give a starving individual a blood meal to save their life, and it's a lot more likely if the starving individual offered a blood meal in the past.
The third, and most difficult for people who don't understand math to wrap their head around, is trait group selection. Natural selection has a mathematical model. This is a corollary of that model. In nature, animals form large numbers of groups, either transiently or permanently. Within a group, a non-altruist will always out-compete the altruists and reproduce at a higher relative rate. However, groups with more altruists will reproduce at a greater rate relative to groups with more non-altruists. Overall, you often can have altruists increasing in absolute number despite falling in relative concentration within each group. This process is iterated over generations or within multiple (perhaps infinitesimal) groups that the individual forms within it's life. Being a purely mathematical phenomenal, I would suspect this would emerge within any appropriately complex computer model (it did for the one I wrote for my final project in my Evolution elective back in college).
OTOH, the entire concept of altruism seems offensive to some people. I'm not trying to say any of these are "true altruism", since they happen all the way down to bacteria secreting proteins that deactivate antibiotics, subsequently protecting nearby unrelated bacteria. It's an explanation for observable animal behavior that humans also demonstrate. Plus, "true altruism" isn't a falsifiable hypothesis, so there's little sense in arguing about the moral proclivities of humans, bacteria, chemicals, cultures, or ideas.
Yeah. Survival of the fittest is about the fittest species, not the fittest individual.
Any species that makes selfless sacrifices for others in the species will out-compete the species in which members only look out for no. 1.
Being a social animal (caring what others think of you) and being altruistic is a huge competitive advantage in terms of survival...of your species as a whole, not necessarily you personally. This could explain why people generally feel satisfaction and self-esteem when they help other people, and ashamed when they exploit others. People without these traits are considered deviant, and often end up in prison.
The ideals we hold as truly noble, it turns out, help the species (if at the expense of the individual).
www.cgstock.com
Randian thought and Objectivism works on the basic question of, "Is this good for me?" At it's core is selfishness, and quite a few people—from christians to secular humanists—find this selfishness repugnant.
Before you claim I don't know what I'm talking about, I used to be a Randian drone. It's a sick, inhuman mindset that places self on a pedestal above all others.
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
Around 1987 I simulated cannibalistic robot by accident on a Symbolics 3600 in ZetaLisp+Flavors. It was perhaps one of the first simulations of self-replicating robots in a 2D sea of spare parts. The parts were something like a computer, a welder, a gripper, a battery, a radar, and another rock-like item. The first robot was programmed to collect parts to attach to itself to duplicate itself as two similar halves as a sort of repair process back towards and ideal, and then cut itself in two, and then each separate piece was supposed to go off and do the same. But I did not think it through all the way, and the first thing the original robot did as the copy started up was to start to cut the copy in two to reuse the parts because they were the closest available that were not in itself. So, the robot was both cannibalistic and killing its own offspring.
It goes to show how easy it is to make a mistake designing artificial life. I had to add a sense of "smell" to prevent that from happening, where the robots would set a smell on each item they used and would leave similar smelling items (in offspring) alone.
I gave a talk about the simulation around 1988 at a workshop on AI and Simulation at CHI+GI in Minnesota, and talked about how easy it was to make robots that were destructive and how much harder it would be to make them cooperative. Afterwards someone from the Army working with DARPA literally patted me on the back and told me to keep up the good work. And that was one reason I stopped working on it. :-)
And since then we have sadly seen the rise or an ironic use of military robots when robotics could otherwise bring us abundance (like President Obama authorizing a drone strike within days of taking office that allegedly lead to the deaths of three Pakistani children).
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article5575883.ece
But, to the army officer's credit back then, I don't know if he was more interested in the destructive or constructive aspects of what I had to say. And in truth, both construction and destruction are both related in this plane of existence. And we all need some security, the issue is how we go about getting it. An essay I wrote on that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
I do believe robots will learn cooperation. The issue is more if humanity will be wiped out first and then later any robots (if they too survive) might be regretful, or whether we will co-evolve together somehow. As long as much of our R&D is mostly driven by short-term profit maximization and the push to privatize profits and to socialize risks and costs, I don't know...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Rand didn't redefine anything, she just phrased the definition according to the usage of those words - in harsh contrast to the dictionaries which are again written by altruists.
Altruism is also donating to charity, generally helping those less fortunate, doing any "good works" without expectation of recompense (monitary or otherwise), sustaining risk for the betterment, or protection of others... etc..
Actually when I hear the term"Altruism" I think of the above... The bible never comes to mind, neither does people with money spending it on their family (there is no problem with that, and I'm a liberal who thinks Rand is laughable) . I think that you, personally, don't understand the term, either that or your trying to twist it to agree with a meaning your comfortable with (since it fits your ideas).
Objectivism is nothing more than a post hoc intellectual excuse for sociopaths to feel morally justified. They hold the same intellectual footing as scientologists and other fundamentalists when it comes down to it. You want to be a greedy, completely self-serving, worthless human? Ayn Rand's got you covered, you can feel superior now. Sadly the rest of the race will find you to be a greedy, self-serving, worthless individual... but what do they know? Your special... Your somehow doing something while contributing nothing... Your better than people strictly because you act like an asshole!
Ayn Rand was nothing but over-reacting to her upbringing. She came from a society ruled by the worst bits of "collectivism", so dismissed it completely, deciding that sociopathic extreme individualism was the only answer. Her whole "philosophy" is basically an endorsement of the fallacy of the excluded middle.
I recently had a party, and handed out free t-shirts. One of them had a picture of Ayn Rand, with the caption "Ayn Rand Makes Me Randy!" So... I gave it out for free... is that irony?
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
And that's why I stopped voting and consider mind-hacking lobby and media people a far more effective strategy.
Ignoring for the moment the fact that you do not have to chose between one and the other (voting still makes sense given how low-cost it is compared to the alternative), this is something that more people need to realize. We the people need protections against lobby and media people. Hacking them - in the general sense - is an important tool and needs to be done more often.