Will AI Transcend Human Consciousness?
Sandeep Ozarde
Founder Director at Leaf Design; PhD Student at University of Hertfordshire
The USS Enterprise arrives in orbit around Exo III, to search for exobiologist Dr. Roger Korby. When Kirk asks Spock if Korby could possibly still be alive. Renowned medical archeologist, authority on ancient android civilizations, and fiancé of Christine Chapel, whose corporeal form expired in 2266.
Korby’s consciousness survived for a time in an android body.
Dr. Korby has learned how to construct androids who look and act like humans. His android companions, Ruk and Andrea, amaze Kirk and Chapel with their realness. Although, Korby explains, Ruk existed long before he arrived — a product of “The Old Ones.”
In android form, a human being can have practical immortality. Can you understand what I’m offering mankind?
AI is divided broadly into three stages
- Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI)
- Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and
- Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI)
The first stage, ANI, as the name suggests, is limited in scope with intelligence restricted to only one functional area. ANI is, for example, on par with an infant.
The second stage, AGI, is at an advanced level: it covers more than one field like power of reasoning, problem solving and abstract thinking, which is mostly on par with adults. ASI is the final stage of the intelligence explosion, in which AI surpasses human intelligence across all fields.
The transition from the first to the second stage has taken a long time, but currently on the cusp of completing the transition to the second stage — AGI, in which the intelligence of machines can equal humans.
The Neural Networks, the brain-inspired AI tools behind most of today’s cutting edge artificial intelligence. While concepts like deep learning are relatively new, they’re based on a mathematical theory which dates back to 1943.
In 1934, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts wrote a paper on how neural network might work
In 1943, neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch and mathematician Walter Pitts wrote a paper on how neurons might work. In order to describe how neurons in the brain might work, they modeled a simple Neural Network using electrical circuits.
Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts’ “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity”, “The PageRank Citation Ranking,” the research paper which spawned Google Warren
In “A Logical Calculus,” McCulloch and Pitts describe how networks of artificial neurons can be made to perform logical functions. The dream of AI is born.
A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity paper proposed the first mathematical model of a Neural Network. The unit of this model, a simple formalized neuron, is still the standard of reference in the field of Neural Networks. It is often called a McCulloch–Pitts Neuron.
In 1949, Donald Hebb wrote The Organization of Behavior, a work which pointed out the fact that neural pathways are strengthened each time they are used, a concept fundamentally essential to the ways in which humans learn. If two nerves fire at the same time, he argued, the connection between them is enhanced.
1950 Alan Turing proposes the Turing Test as a measure of machine intelligence
Back in the mid-1960s, a professor at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory developed a computer psychotherapist called ELIZA, which could carry out seemingly intelligent conversations via text with users.
Extract from an exchange that occurred at the ICCC 1972 between PARRY, a chatbot that simulates a person with paranoid schizophrenia, and ELIZA, a simulation of a Rogerian psychotherapist.
The earliest emotion-relevant work in AI dates back to the 1970s, when cognitive science came of age as a discipline, inspired in part by Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon’s 1972 book “Human Problem Solving.” In the same year, Kenneth Colby invented one of the first devices of emotional AI: a computer system called PARRY that simulated a conversation with a human paranoiac.
In 1988, Andrew Ortony co-authored the book “The Cognitive Structure of Emotions,” introducing the OCC model, which explained various emotions and their intensities, and is still used in AI. What makes the OCC model so powerful is that it’s hinged on the basic idea of characterizing emotions in terms of different ways of feeling good or bad about things.
From an emotion-theory perspective, AI developers have started to incorporate these cognitive building blocks for emotion generation and recognition. “They have also developed ways of modulating emotional intensity,” Ortony adds, “and they have started to endow their artificial agents with personality profiles that interact with emotion.”
Among them are the American David Hanson and Hiroshi Ishiguro of Japan, who have both faced the challenges of creating robots capable of recognizing the subtleties in human expressions and emotions.
Hiroshi Ishiguro & Erica, Osaka University, Japan. David Hanson & Sophia, Hanson Robotics, US
1997 was a banner year for AI, as IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer took on world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a chess battle pitting human against machine brain. While there was no doubt that Deep Blue could process information more quickly than Kasparov, the real question was whether it cold think more strategically?
The results may not have shown AI to be capable of anything more than working exceptionally well at problems with clearly defined rules, it was still a massive leap forward for artificial intelligence as a field.
In June 2012, Google researchers Jeff Dean and Andrew Ng trained a giant Neural Network of 16,000 computer processors by feeding it 10 million unlabelled images taken from YouTube videos
Despite being given no identifying information about them, the AI was able to learn to detect pictures of felines, using its deep learning algorithms. It turns out that, just like us, even impressively smart AI enjoys cat videos.
On March 2016, Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo AI defeated the Go world champion Lee Sedolin four games to one. The match was watched by 60 million people around the world. The reason this was such a landmark was due to the sheer number of allowable board positions in the game, which add up to more than the total number of atoms in the universe. It’s AI’s most astonishing feat to date.
Alibaba language processing AI outscores top humans at a Stanford University reading and comprehension test, scoring 82.44 against 82.304 on a set of 100,000 questions
Announcement of Google Duplex, a service to allow an AI assistant to book appointments over the phone. The LA Times judges the AI’s voice to be a “nearly flawless” imitation of human-sounding speech.
Erica, I want to be more like a human
And Erica is not alone: Hanson Robotics’ Sophia, who boasts of having about 60 expressions, can currently interact and lead simple conversations. Experts believe that AI’s ability to relate convincingly to humans would eventually enhance its everyday application. Such emotive AI could, for example, lead to a preference for AI services in customer service over their crankier human counterparts.
By 2050, we should expect to see humanlike AI-powered robots occupying many frontline service sectors, like in retail and banking, and “living” alongside people. And given its near-omnipresence, AI will likely inhabit most electronic devices and live day and night as an amorphous body in another realm of consciousness — one prohibited to humanity due to our inherent limitations.
The technological Singularity hypothesis
The Singularity, the point at which machines become smarter than humans, hasn’t happened yet. But in 1993, author and computer scientist Vernor Vinge published an article which popularised the idea.
iRobot, the Artificially Intelligent supercomputer, VIKI (Virtual Interactive Kinesthetic Interface) is created with the “3 laws”, which are taken from Isaac Asimov’s book of the same name.
The three laws of Robotics by Isaac Asimov
The Three Laws of Robotics are a set of rules devised by the science fiction author Isaac Asimov.
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
The coming technological Singularity
The Coming Technological Singularity, Vernor Vinge (American science fiction author and professor) predicted that, within the next 30 years, humankind would have the ability to create superhuman intelligence. “Shortly after, the human era will be ended,” he wrote. It’s a warning that others like Elon Musk have reiterated in the years since.
The technological singularity is the hypothesis that accelerating progress in technologies will cause a runaway effect wherein artificial intelligence will exceed human intellectual capacity and control, thus radically changing civilization in an event called the singularity. Because the capabilities of such an intelligence may be impossible for a human to comprehend, the technological singularity is an occurrence beyond which events may become unpredictable, unfavorable, or even unfathomable.
“Our technology, our machines, is part of our humanity. We created them to extend ourselves, and that is what is unique about human beings.”
— Ray Kurzweil
Raymond Kurzweil is an American author, computer scientist, inventor and futurist.
Ray Kurzweil gives the year 2045 as his predicted year of the occurrence of the Singularity, from 25 years ago he was making quite accurate predictions for the development of computers and the growth of their abilities.
Transcendent Man is a 2009 documentary film by American filmmaker Barry Ptolemy about inventor, futurist and author Ray Kurzweil and his predictions about the future of technology in his 2005 book, The Singularity is Near.
In the film, Ptolemy follows Kurzweil around his world as he discusses his thoughts on the technological singularity, a proposed advancement that will occur sometime in the 21st century when progress in artificial intelligence, genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics will result in the creation of a human-machine civilization.
Disclaimer: Ideas shared here are based on personal views and has no commercial value. Research Reference: WEF, MIT, Star Trek, Wiki. Photos: Unsplash, Wiki, Google.