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Can Androids Feel Pain?
Guess what? They aren't.
"Can Androids Feel Pain?" Dr. John Irving Good of Trinity College, Oxford, asked in an essay published a few years ago.
It's a good question, one that year by year seems less rhetorical, less the stuff of fantasy, and more an ethical and social concern.
Inventor and author Ray Kurzweil projects that computers will match the computational functions of the human brain early in the next century, and that soon afterwards humans and computers will merge to become a new species.
As early as 1891 (in an article in the Atlantic Monthly), scholars and sci-fi writers have been writing about what many have seen as the inevitable fusion of men and machines.
Fantasists have also been drawn to aliens and the Space Age, themes still flourishing in epically popular evocations like "Star Trek" and "Star Wars." But if a new species arrives to dominate the earth, it probably won't come from distant galaxies. We're making it in labs and universities and teenagers bedrooms.
Good believes that humanity's survival depends on building Artificial Intelligence (AI) machines. More intelligent than we are, they'll answer our questions and solve many of our problems.
The great sci-fi novelist and essayist Arthur C. Clarke takes this idea still further in an ultra-brilliant collection, "Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!" just published by St. Martin's Press.
The evolution of UltraIntelligent (UI) machines is imminent, Clarke predicts. Today's kids will witness the evolution of a species that's part machine, part human being and then, eventually, some combination.
"Perhaps 99 per cent of all the men who have ever lived have known only need; they have been driven by necessity and have not been allowed the luxury of choice," Clarke philosophizes. " In the future, this will no longer be true. It maybe the greatest virtue of the UltraIntelligent (UI) machine that it will force us to think about the purpose and meaning of human existence. It will compel us to make some far-reaching and perhaps painful decisions, just as thermonuclear weapons have made us face the realities of war and aggression, after five thousand years of pious jabber."
Clarke imagines AI machines taking over all but the most creative and trivial human work, inserting themselves into the loop between humans, work, creativity and entertainment.
To co-exist with UltraIntelligent (UI) machines and hold our own, Clarke posits, the entire human race, without exception, must reach the literacy level of the average college graduate -within the next 50 years.
"This represents what may be called the minimum survival level; only if we reach it will we have a sporting change of seeing the year 2200," Clarke says.
This also represents something that isn't going to happen. Except for the most technologically advanced countries - those in Scandanavia come to mind - even prosperous industrial societies like those in the United States, Western Europe and parts of Asia haven't begun to make education about new information technologies - or technology itself -- universally available to citizens.
In the United States, primitive politicians and journalists citing safety and moral issues argue for less, not more, access to technology. The only presidential candidate to make the Internet a major political issue is Elizabeth Dole, and she argues for more restrictions on youthful access to sexual imagery. This isn't a country trying to get to the minimum survival level Dr. Clarke writes about.
If Clarke is right, then for the first time we can begin to imagine a future in which the human race is no longer the planet's dominant species.
As he was thousands of years ago, man will again become a fairly rare animal, probably a nomadic one. Towns may still exist in places of unusual beauty or historic importance, but most homes will be self-contained and completely mobile, relocatable to any spot within hours. The continents will have reverted to wilderness; a rich variety of life forms will return.
It becomes clearer daily that we aren't going to be turned into alien pod people or probably even obliterated by the dread weapons we've been building. We are likely instead to simply become dumber, less durable, and les efficient than the computer-based machines we're creating.
A more concrete and hard-headed look at this evolution appears in Steven Levy's "Artificial Life: A Report From the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology," now in paperback from Vintage. Levy opens his book describing creatures that cruise silently, seeing, reproducing, dying, even cannibalizing themselves for nourishment. The name of the ecosystem he describes is Poly World, located not in some jungle or forest but in the chips and disk drives of a Silicon Graphics Irix Workstation.
Levy calls this new species "a-life," (AL) and he argues that we're fast approaching the point where a-life will surpass our ability to control and shape it. As far back as 1980, he reports, the members of the NASA Self-Replicating Systems (SRS) unit confronted the possibility that artificial life would drive natural life out of existence.
Writes Levy: "The almost innate skepticism about whether it could happen at all, combined with the vague feeling that the entire enterprise has a whiff of the crackpot to it, assures that the alarm over what those scientists [making a-life] are doing will be minimal. The field of artificial life will therefore be policed only by itself, a freedom that could conceivably continue until the artificial-life community ventures beyond the point where the knowledge can be stuffed back into its box. By then it may be too late to deal with the problem by simply turning off the computers."
And what, exactly, are the problems? Will computers become conscious? Will they replicate our personalities and souls? Will they seek to push us and our inadequate and inferior ways aside? Will there be room enough for Us and Them? Will all this God-playing wreak havoc with the nature of human existence, as Mary Shelley warned a couple of hundred years ago?
Scientists, computing and otherwise, are hopelessly divided about the urgency of confronting the implications of a-life. Most don't think UI machines pose great danger to the human race, as long as we can turn them off when we want to.
"But can we?" scientist Norbert Winner asks in Levy's book. "To turn a machine off effectively, we must be in possession of information as to whether the danger point has come. The mere fact that we have made the machine does not guarantee that we shall have the proper information to do this."
Leaders of the artificial life movement are well aware of questions like this. But society at large has paid no attention whatever to the staggering ethical and other issues surrounding the science of artificial life. For most Americans, technology - as presented by a shallow political and media structure - is IPO's and start-ups, software and games, e-auctioning and e-trading, pornography or brain-damaging Net games. But AI threatens to alter human life more than all of them combined.
As much or more than any other social aspect of computing and science, AI, UI and AL suggest a monumental social and cultural story, however currently ignored. They won't be much considered until human beings discover a new life form imminently threatening to dominate the planet, or at least carving out its own space and behavior.
Pop culture, as usual, does a better job of raising these questions than journalism. Clarke's own "200l: A Space Odyssey" took a more malevolent view of computing's ultimate intentions than his non-fiction writing. And the looming conflict between humans and the AI machines they have made was at the heart of the evocative movie "The Matrix," which depicts a cataclysmic battle for survival between the human and mechanical species of the future. In fact, the "Matrix" asks the very question posed by Levy's scientists: will humans be able to turn the things off once they make them?
As the Space Age fizzles and the Digital Age takes shape, the sci-fi futurists and novelists are forgetting the alien invasion scenarios of the last half-century and turning their dark sides towards the evolution of the spiritual machines Kurzweil and others have been writing about.
The evolution of AI-life makes it even clear why the great sci-fi writers - Clarke, Verne, Asimov and Bradbury - have always had such hold on the imaginations of bright people. They weren't imagining the future so much as they were describing it.
Huh... I always run Katz stories through my X-Files meter-- Big Brother, spying, etc. being the keywords. I also included a few words from the actual X-Files series...
Jesus. He had to put "Kurzweil", "AI", "Clarke", "ethical", "romantic", and a bunch of other words in the same story. My little perl script gave it the highest rating so far-- 5 out of 5!
Is Katz really Chris Carter in disguise?
I think it is extremely important how we will perceive this new form of life, considering that everything I have mentioed above will certainly transpire in the next 70 years.
Vernor Vinge's Technological Singularity should be required reading on this topic. I'll summarize it, for those unwilling to hit the link:
Within 30 years, we will have created computers that, intelligent or not, can solve problems faster than mankind can. The computers will, among other things, be able to build better computers faster than men can. An automated economy will emerge, with the artificial quasintelligences directing progress almost completely.
The change in how homo sapiens sapiens moves forward technologically will be approximately as drastic as that of homo sapiens neandertalis discovering fire. No Neandertal could have predicted what the world would have been like post-fire.
Will we live to see homo sapiens++?
I personally believe Vinge is correct. It'll be a hell of a ride.
The point of no return has already passed us by. We have, a long time ago, created a world so full of complexity, that we have become reliant on our technology. We need the air traffic control systems, the banking networks, the databases, the ISP's, the chips in our cars. We rely on the IC controllers that run our assembly lines and decide how to make our clothes, cook our food, route our electricity.
It is irrelevant to wonder if the machines will ever become sentient, or what effect that will have on us as a species. It's a moot point. We're already two species. There's the homo informaticus to which all reading this belong, and the old homo sapiens that isn't at all sapient to how we are changing it's world.
The old species is already nomadic, living hand-to-mouth and at odds with nature. The new species has been able to avoid the dismal lifestyle of the old through it's fusion with technology. The fact that we have embraced technology, and evolved thereby, was a willful, convenience driven event.
We are dependent on our technology as much as birds are dependent on their ability to fly. To un-plug means death. We may not be left biologically dead without our tech, but our lifestyle, our standard of living, would end. Is that no death? We, as we are, would cease to exist. We would revert to an earlier stage of evolution, and our species would prove to be another failed mutation.
It is our survival instinct, our will to live, that drives us to develop new technology, and to become even more dependent on it. As birds that once only glided from tree to tree and now rise into the sky under their own power, we too will learn to soar in our newly claimed environment. But don't think that we will still be human when we do.
With our beepers and PDA's, and our Internet access that makes us better informed (read better adapted to the environment than our predecessors) and better suited to survive. We are more fit that the agrarian society we are replacing. We are the new species. The earth will not overgrow with vegetation, because we, the new species, eat paper for a living. We burn fossils for sustinence and we belch smoke. We will for a long time, and then things will change somehow.
Just because there are not Hunter-Killer aircraft and terminators running around, just because we are not batteries, does not mean that the machines are not in charge. They are - and we are them. We have already merged, we are one.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Hoo boy, off into the techno-spiritualism and "porn makes kids better" garbage again ...
A complete, well-structuted and footnoted criticism of everything wrong with this essay would take far more time than I dare give it this morning, but a few thoughts:
Pain is irrelevant:
That's right, the ability of an AI or a-life program to "feel" pain is irrelevant to any moral or ethical issues. It is interesting, but it is not the ethical quandry that Katz makes it out to be. Think about it for a moment -- we already share the planet with entities which are demonstrably intelligent and capable of experiencing pain. We call them "animals". They've been around for a long time, perhaps you've encountered one recently?
Now, if an AI could achieve personhood, that would be a different can of worms. But what, exactly, is personhood? That, at either an explicit or implicit level, is a crucial question in today's "culture wars." The traditional Christian answer which shaped Western culture for many centuries is that personhood is a spiritual attribute, and humans are persons because we are created in the imago dei, the Image of God, Who is Himself personal.
Therefore, (to steal a phrase from A Canticle for Leibowitz), "all that is born of woman" are persons.
The current, post-Christian viewpoint seems to be to reject any spiritual basis for personhood, and to then try to base recognition of personhood from some observed attribute, perhaps cleverness (if it's intelligent enough, it must be a person) or emotional response (if it feels pain and can articulate enough angst, it must be a person). But, the distinction between person and non-person is muddled, because (it is argued) there is no way to draw distinctions other than quantitative. So, a Darwinist would claim that humans are simply animals with opposable thumbs. Minsky, etc., claim that humans are simply carbon-based computers with a big specialized processor and complicated software.
From the Christian perspective, the issue with AIs is simple enough -- we have to determine whether an AI could ever be a person, and proceed accordingly. From that, one can proceed figuring out the ethical issues.
From the post-Christian, modern/post-Modern materialist viewpoint, there's no good way to make any distinction other than some quantitative ones, so you drop into a quagmire of muddle, providing wonderful employment opportunities for professors of ethics and for cyber-pundits.
Modern technology does not provide "choice" or "meaning":
Katz quotes Clarke:
For argument's sake, I'll take Clarke's 99% statistic as a given. It's not clear to me that a European peasant of the Middle Ages, who had a secure landholding, the ability to live off of it, and little regulation other than some taxes, had less "choice" than today's Dilbert-ized cubicle dwellers, who don't own their own homes but merely lease them from the bank, and who are at the mercy of the next "rightsizing."
It is simply ludicrous that Clarke can believe that "the purpose of meaning of human existance" has not been thought about to this point. He seems to want to have it both ways, because what is this "pious jabber" that he so casually dismisses if not the very thing he claims has never yet existed?
As for his example of thermonuclear weapons, give me a break. If anything, thermonuclear weapons have made us less able to face "the realities of war and agression" than generations past, by making war an unimaginable catastrophe. And I truly think that those for whom war meant close combat had a better handle on war and agression than we for whom war means smart bombs and air strikes.
Chesterton wrote this as a warning. It is perhaps the most frightening thing about Clarke and Katz that they seem to think this is a desirable state.
Yes, Clarke predicted the use of satellites for communications long before it happened, but he also predicted:
Large space stations orbiting the earth inhabited by everyday citizens, which supposedly would have happened 10 years ago.
colonies on the moon by today.
Travels to Jupiter in less than 2 years from now.
If any of you geeks have seen "Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World" you would know better than to use him to "prove" your pet theories. He's gone from a genius author to a old crackpot out there on Sri Lanka, so I would seriously doubt any predictions by him that we'll be having AI buddies in our lifetime, or in our children's lifetime.
As we see from the AI storywriting contest, real AI has hardly progressed in over 30 years. Programs get longer, machines get faster, but there is nothing near that spark of human thought or human creativity. The general consensus was that the AI storywriting machine was just fed a very long set of rules, that it really was hardly writing the story itself at all.
Today we have pacemakers. Tomorrow we will probably have more mechanical replacements for body parts, but there is currently no point in "fixing what ain't broke" in the human body. it's such massive surgery with huge amounts of drugs that have to be taken for the rest of the patient's life that I would prefer staying the way I am, thank you very much.
My final point: They predict AI robots will help us do all the heavy labor that humans normally do. We already have machines, but is there really any reason to make them intelligent? I would feel much more comfortable ordering my hamburger sans pickles with a non-sentient robot than one that actually thinks. Adding AI to those robots used to make cars just opens up a whole new can of worms. Why do that when our current solution works just fine?
I guess that as long as our boxes are independent, i.e. not networked, machines are just machines. Cut the power and anything that may be considered "A-Life" gets nuked.
OTOH, once you create a program that "lives" on the net, is capable of replication and adaptation and so on, it's ecology becomes more stable and elimination of the entity may become difficult. I see no particular reason why this type of entity should not qualify as a sort of "life" although its universe is certainly rather different than our own.
As to the concern that humans are about to become obsolete - bring it on. We tend to be highly adaptable and are certainly aggressive competitors in the evolutionary arena.
"I believe the children are our future: nasty, brutish and short."
It has been argued very persuasively that traditional top-down AI won't work (see e.g. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach), and while bottom-up AI (be it artificial life, neural networks or evolutionary computation) has produced some interesting results (like the WEBSOM classification system), I'm still very skeptical about "Real Soon Now" predictions of AI.
Of course, I still hope someone proves me wrong (and that if they do that it's going to be "interesting times" but not in the Chinese curse sense).
I've got to admit I'm having a hard time considering machines as anything other than machines. And, open-minded free-thinker that I like to imagine myself as, I can't see computers taking over to the extent that Jon seems to be envisioning.
We are in danger of becoming too dependent on machines to the extent that one really big solar flare could kill off most of the developed world in a matter of weeks. But that says nothing about machines.
Remember the end of Wells' The Time Machine? Technology did everything, and the remaining humans were apathetic, lassitudinous (is that a word?) beings incapable of anything. This is far more likely -- and far more worth consideration -- than the 'machines will take over' cry that's been popular since the first issue of 2000AD.
Hmmm. A bunch of (rather past it) novelists predict that in n years we will be doing all sorts of wild far out things with new acronyms. How many times have these novelists been right in the past?
"just as thermonuclear weapons have made us face the realities of war and aggression, after five thousand years of pious jabber."
What? So, you mean the soldiers involved in the Napoleonic wars, who after battles piled bodies into piles so large they started to burn spontaneously like compost, did not face the realities of war and aggression? Or were they jabbering piously?
Or is it rather CNN in the post nuclear age, who jabber piously about defending human rights as they replay in slo mo for the 16th time that evening a missile hitting some black and white blob in a far off land.
I've yet to see any artificial life, or anything that comes close to it. Maybe when I do see it it will evolve so fast we'll all be slaves to it by tea time.
And as to whether androids feel pain - who cares? Do worms feel pain? Do cats? If androids feel pain, do they suffer from it? These are questions that have been asked for hundreds of years by people who have thought much harder about it than old AC Clarke.
Philosophers have a greater insight into the mind than do computer programers and authors. Try:
http://ling.ucsc.edu/~chalmers/biblio.html
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We are already to a point where computers require really good computers and good software for their manufacture. Try to design a chip like Merced with pencil and paper sometime.
To me, a critical point will be passed when computers become better at writing software and designing hardware than humans are, and have the ability to improve themselves in this way. We are already seeing neural net and genetic designs that work very well, but we don't really understand why. It's entirely possible that computers in the future will be very difficult for us to understand at all on the lower levels, because they are self-designed and programmed.
Nothing scary here, we specify a problem space, a computer optimizes connections and software operations to provide solutions in the space. But conciousness can't arise without self-referentiality and I wonder if this is where it will come from.