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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.
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).
Escalating processing power does not have to result in "intelligence".
An example. 30 years ago, slide rules and nimble brains dominated mathematical circles. Eventually someone invented a small calculator which would add, subtract, multiply and divide. This helped out those who had difficulty multiplying 4 and 5 digit numbers in their head and could do it more quickly than most humans. (Note that in the example, we already have a machine that is superior to the vast majority of human brains in one aspect: simple arithmetic). These calculators were added to, soon including square root functions and other higher level math. A college student studying math was now not required to be able to do many of these functions manually. If you look at current calculators, they are able to do much of what is required in a college mathematics course. Following your extrapolation, because these calculators have been able to perform an increasing percentage of the requirements of college mathematics courses, eventually, the calculators would be able to get a college education.
Surpassing the computing power of the human brain != simulating said brain.
I would also like to note that I don't recall many documented predictions which were able to accurately describe society even 10-20 years out, much less 70 years. Even those predictions which included some things which came to pass were missing the big picture and tons of important details.
LetterJ
Writing Geek/Pixel Pusher
jwynia@earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~jwynia
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
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.