TrustNoRobot

Category: AI

  • The Full Duplex

    The next big leap in AI user interface will be the AI that initiates contact, that calls you. The Google Duplex may well be the breakthrough on this. This is a live feature of Pixel phones now, which I don’t own so I haven’t tried this feature. But looking forward to it, sounds very cool, a bot that actually could make a reservation for me.

    If you were not aware:

    Today we announce Google Duplex, a new technology for conducting natural conversations to carry out “real world” tasks over the phone. The technology is directed towards completing specific tasks, such as scheduling certain types of appointments. For such tasks, the system makes the conversational experience as natural as possible, allowing people to speak normally, like they would to another person, without having to adapt to a machine.

    It’s been a year since this announcement and we should assume another year or two before this type of thing is offered by all the major tech providers, and works really really well. Scary well.

    So, if I am to #TrustNoRobot, how should I feel about Duplex and its ilk?

    I’m ok with this. With one big reservation.

    First, I’m ok because this is exactly what AI should be doing. Focusing on how it can assist the individual. Not on what ads to show us. But how it can help with the hassles of the world.

    AI assistants do not feel or care about us, nor should they feign doing so. Caring is what people do. Serving is what tools do.

    I think the Google Home Pretty Please feature is a travesty that trains children to respect these algorithms as Beings. It should be killed with fire. It will bring up a generation deeply confused about where to take direction from.

    In the same manner, the reservation I have with Duplex is the attempt to simulate human vocal patterns. This is fraud, and will result in nothing but hurt feelings for real humans.

    Think about cars. They sort of have a biological shape often, something organic, and some are almost anthropomorphic in having “hips” around their tires. Certainly the headlights look like eyes, etc.

    And people bond with their cars. Even love them. But they don’t try to marry their cars.

    Now imagine if cars evolved to look exactly like their owners. But instead of getting in them these robots carried you on their backs.

    Don’t you think this would cause a lot of confusion? That maybe this would be a weird and horrible world to live in? That we should not do that as a goal of civilization? That at best this would be a show on Hulu that you don’t want to watch?

    That’s how I feel about anthropomorphic AI. Let it be like a human, but always clearly difference in it’s user interface. Or let’s get creative and not make it human at all. But always: Signal to the user that this is an agent of another human, not only in clear words but also in presentation.

    The UX folks at Google seem to think the goal is to not have to adapt to a machine. Not realizing that that our adaptation is what defines something as a tool or a person. Otherwise you create potential moral confusion.

    And always represent only one other human Singleton. No AI bosses. No AI ever working on “behalf” of others who hide their identities.

    With proper legislation, AI can be made as safe as highways. Which are still really unsafe, but beat dirt trails in dark forests hands down.

    Because AI is a road.

    Painting by Simon Stålenhag

  • Of Luddites, Bots, and the FTC

    A Luddite is not anti technology. They are anti fraud.

    The Luddites were a secret oath-based organization[1] of English textile workers in the 19th century, where a radical faction destroyed textile machinery as a form of protest. The group was protesting against the use of machinery in a “fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labour practices.[2] Luddites feared that the time spent learning the skills of their craft would go to waste, as machines would replace their role in the industry.[3] It is a misconception that the Luddites protested against the machinery itself in an attempt to halt the progress of technology. Over time, however, the term has come to mean one opposed to industrialisation, automation, computerisation, or new technologies in general.[4]

    Language is defined by the winners of conflict, and in this case, the Luddites lost the deeper conversation about unequal distribution of the spoils of capitalism to the thrill of industrialization. Just as a language is a dialect with an army and Navy, a definition is a sound with implied threat and reward.

    The Luddites made a mistake, besides being violent and murderous. 200 years ago they were happily smashing machines all throughout England, but then they tried to smash the wrong machine. The British army.

    The British Army clashed with the Luddites on several occasions. At one time there were more British soldiers fighting the Luddites than there were fighting Napoleon on the Iberian Peninsula.[27][d]

    Not only did the Luddites begin to lose badly to the army, they lost badly to the legal system. As the Luddites gasped their last breath:

    A Parliament by the voting 3% made “machine breaking” (i.e. industrial sabotage) a capital crime with the Frame Breaking Act of 1812[32]and the Malicious Damage Act 1861.[33] Lord Byron opposed this legislation, becoming one of the few prominent defenders of the Luddites after the treatment of the defendants at the York trials.[34] Coincidently, Lord Byron’s only legitimate daughter Ada Lovelace would become the first computer programmer by combining the technology of the Analytical Engine with the Jacquard loom[35].

    The daughter of the lone defender of the Luddites was Ada Lovelace. Huh.

    And so being a Luddite become an anti-technology slur, a joke, a way to suggest that you didn’t understand the economics of change. Economists even call this the Luddite Fallacy.

    Far be it for me to suggest that economics itself is chock full of fallacy and pseudo science.

    But the reason I bring up Luddites is not only because I was once in the band called the Luddites. (There are a couple such bands, I was in the one in Atlanta that played “Giant Robots”).

    I want to be clear this is not an anti-technology blog. Nor would I condone violence for political gain. I am not a Luddite in the traditional or Neo sense.

    But, I do think that the technology of Laws and Armies and Nations can and should be oriented to protect people, and not just a few people. Everyone. Every Singleton in the universe.

    There is no sum total of human experience, there are only discrete human experiences. Anyone who suggests they can “add it all up” is trying to sell you something. Likely their BA in Economics.

    The conversation about the threat of AI in terms of economic disruption needs to shift gears away from trying to make people afraid. People are afraid already, that battle is won.

    The conversation needs to be about which entity will protect us. Sure the ACLU will do their part, but how about the FTC protecting us from bot fraud as I have written about? How about city government banning autonomous vehicles without a human driver with hands, and moral responsibility, available.

    The Luddites did not have true democratic means to pass laws to ensure a safe and meaningful life for their children. So they broke stuff. We do have those means. And we don’t even need to elect new people to do it. We just need to let our government know that we demand it do its job.

    Protect us. Not from immigrants. Not from bots. From the people who would use bots to create fear of immigrants, distracting us from the real issue:

    Fraud.

    Fraud against consumers. Stealing our attention, our only real commodity. Making us believe the unreal is real, that code is a human. Faking out our natural tribal instincts. We need to throw a real legal wrench in the use of bots in this manner. People need to go to jail.

    FTC, do your job.

    Painting by Simon Stålenhag

  • The Easy Out of AI Utilitarianism

    At first glance what the Partnership on AI is trying to do is entirely Noble. They have many important players as partners, including the Google Deepmind team, the ACLU, academics, Accenture, Salesforce, NGOs, the works. They clearly want to facilitate deep discussion and consideration around AI and understand what its social disruption might entail. But…I am going to poke a little at the first tenant of the organization:

    https://www.partnershiponai.org/tenets/

    1. We will seek to ensure that AI technologies benefit and empower as many people as possible.

    My issue here is the clause “as many people as possible.” I think this is just a modern PR rephrasing of Utilitarianism.

    Utilitarianism is an ethical and philosophical theory that states that the best action is the one that maximizes utility, which is usually defined as that which produces the greatest well-being of the greatest number of people, and in some cases, sentient animals.

    The problem here is the Bentham and others think that the sum is the important thing, that we can just “add up” experience to determine the morality of actions or inactions. The fact that we can’t do that accurately in the real world isn’t important to Utilitarians usually, because the whole point is this is about the utility of our actions, and the greatest good for the greatest number is just a simple way to point our moral compass. It doesn’t need to be exact summing.

    So, full disclosure, I considered myself a Utilitarian for many years. It seemed simple, effective and practical. Then I realized that I was handwaving on the whole “sum” issue. That I didn’t have any way to collect or consider the actual data around the impact of my actions, and the false assumptions I made could potentially lead me to bad choices. At best unknown amoral outcomes.

    Utilitarianism is hard to argue against since it sounds so logical and reasonable. Even Spock in Star Trek espoused it with his “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”. It makes us feel good. It’s an easy out.

    But should we base AI morality on the concept of the greatest good for the most people?

    See, a human can’t truly know the long term impact of their decisions, because there are too many variables. But an AI built with Utilitarian intent will try to build models that allow these connections to be made. And while it may seem fair and democratic to try to have AI benefit the most people, I think this tenant is more of a way to justify making easy calculations about large groups of people, and placing people in buckets for classification.

    Here’s why: data about biological entities is notoriously messy. What you had for lunch can impact your heart rate. Seeing an old friend might make you both happy and sad.

    But to build models of our internal states, which I assume must be a goal if your goal is to

    benefit and empower as many people as possible.

    Then you are going to have to pick and choose what you record of our states, and try to make guesses about their meaning. And reducing a complex human to a model with even millions of variables is a gross simplification that will lead to massive mistakes in predicting what people want or need. Your models will be bad, your guesses worse, and when you try to “sum” those values your are going to make even bigger mistakes.

    If, instead, what they mean is that they mean to empower people economically, I would say we have a far bigger problem. First, the economic system is terribly unfair to start with, so protecting the status quo is a non-starter. Right now our hyper-capitalism is the opposite of a practical system that protects its members for utility. We let people die if they don’t pay private companies for health insurance and they get something more complicated than a hangnail.

    So you can’t with a straight face tell me these companies are trying to solve world inequality. Accenture? Please.

    The Myth of AI Utilitarianism is that all this will somehow get worked out with sheer processing power or better neural network design. My guess is: it’s the wrong direction to go entirely with AI.

    I certainly get where they are coming from, they are trying to signal that AI should not just benefit the rich, etc. But instead, what if their first tenant was:

    1. We will seek to ensure that AI technologies benefit and empower every individual equally.

    Now there is no magic sum to consider. We only focus on the health and well being of each person. And we avoid trying to make bad choices based on bad data. Because even if an AI tried to tell us that we should attack China with a nuke in order to save the most lives, we should not ever listen to that advice. Because we are not people, we are persons. We are Singletons. And if an AI isn’t designed to cater to us as individuals and is instead trying to fit us into a bigger commercial model, then its base motives will always be suspect.

    The trolley problem for AI is solved by never letting an AI make that decision. Behind all decisions of our tools must stand a single human. No autonomous vehicles, for instance, without a single responsible human behind the wheel.

    Trust No Robot.

    Painting by Simon Stålenhag

  • AI is a Road

    AI isn’t a being. It’s a road.

    I have spoken of the confusion about robots and AI before. Because people believe that we are on the cusp of making new beings in the universe, and have compared AI to aliens or a new forms of life, terrible ideas are propogated – like the handwaved Singularity or the even more handwaved “everyone will just train for new jobs” or the amazingly bad idea idea of robot bosses. And I don’t even want to mention this charleton who wants to create an AI God. That idea alone is going to cause immense pain to many vulnerable people.

    You see, we have the metaphor all wrong here. That’s the heart of the confusion, thinking that machine intelligence equates to organic being existence.

    We are thinking that AI is like a human. But it’s more like a conduit of information. A road.

    (And yes, “AI is a Road” is a metaphor, I know it’s not actually a road, my argument here it that there are many similarities to AI and roads, the first of which is that, like a road, it’s a piece of “invisible technology” that nobody thinks of as technology anymore)

    Neural networks, as in our brains, are just reinforced pathways in a collection of interconnected points. In fact, this is what information itself is. Those links between nodes become more or less weighted as the paths are exercised. The connections find signal in the noise.  A dirt path turns into a road, a road turns into a highway, a Starbucks is built, a hipster buys coffee and blogs about cosplay.

    No matter how well you build a road, it’s still a road. The road itself should be based on where people need to go. We don’t build a world designed for roads, we build a road where a path exists already. In the same way, AI research should not be looking for jobs to replace, but rather for ways to improve our work and home lives. Ways to make us even more human.

    We must not let anyone create needs for AI. I propose that doing so is a crime against humanity. In my First Law I state:

    All research into and attempts to tie AI behavior into systems which simulate rewards and punishments shall be deemed a serious safety hazzard. This would be an offense on the felony level, as it could result in widespread, catastrophic damage.

    If AI is a road, then building an AI with needs is like building an unsafe bridge that threatens travelers along the road.

    And who determines if a bridge is unsafe?

    The engineers.

    It is time for engineers to rise and take control of this process. The politicians, with a few folks like Andrew Yang being exceptions, are hobbled and distracted with the games of power and dominance. Computer engineers must work with social engineers – lawyers – to build systems of restraints for public AI.

    I think orgs like the Partnership on AI are moving us in the right direction on this discussion.

    We must make laws for our new roads. Or toes, and worse, will be squashed.

     

    Painting by Simon Stålenhag

  • AlphaStar; AlphaYou

    It’s about the object of the game.

    “Mark it, dude”, this was the week that AI ran out of games to play.

    AlphaStar from the Google Deepmind team has been declared the clear victor in StarCraft II play.

    In recent years, StarCraft, considered to be one of the most challenging Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games and one of the longest-played esports of all time, has emerged by consensus as a “grand challenge” for AI research

    Now, we introduce our StarCraft II program AlphaStar, the first Artificial Intelligence to defeat a top professional player. In a series of test matches held on 19 December, AlphaStar decisively beat Team Liquid’s Grzegorz “MaNa” Komincz, one of the world’s strongest professional StarCraft players, 5-0, following a successful benchmark match against his team-mate Dario “TLO” Wünsch. The matches took place under professional match conditions on a competitive ladder map and without any game restrictions.

    StarCraft II is a game with no clear path to victory, a massive play space, and with imperfect information (the computer was not allowed to see the whole gameboard and had to move a camera like a human would.).

    Plus, the computer was slowed down to sub-human response speeds. It still destroyed us.

    These researchers have achieved an amazing goal and deserve to be applauded.

    So, with this challenge falling along with chess, go, poker, etc, it’s pretty clear that AI can win at any game we throw at it. And I have no doubt that in ten years or less this kind an analytical and multitasking power will live in every phone on the planet.

    So what is next? Well, the game that makes the most sense for researchers to turn to next is the game of Life. Not the big complex questions like weather prediction that computers already excel at. The smaller questions like: who should I marry? Where should I go on vacation? Should I ask for a raise?

    Is it worth my time to make a friend, watch a sunset, or pet my dog?

    Life has no clear objective, unless we give it one. Even survival is negotiable. And Life, even if you can say to “win” it, is not a zero sum experience. There are others here and they matter too.

    And yet, it will be built. A model of you. Not just to serve you ads and take your attention more effectively, though it will certainly do that. But to guide you through the world. To protect you. To give you a fighting chance in a world where the rich and powerful will have their own armies of AI to exploit you.

    The problem with AlphaYou, as I will call the enhanced AI that will model and learn from you, will be that it will become an oracle that we cannot resist consulting, on everything. And without carful curating, this will be its own form of prison.

    Because there is only one reality we live in, we will not be able to confirm its advice or predictions. If AlphaYou tells us to not have children because we don’t want them and they are too expensive, and we live a fulfilling life, how do we really know we made the right choice? You won’t, but I predict people will say “well, it’s better than nothing” and keep using it.

    The truth is, we don’t know the answer to that question even without an AI presence chatting in our ears. And that’s the joy. Thinking that our choices are similiar to choices in a game is a grave category error, since those choices actually form the basis of our connection to all existence outside of our Singleton.

    I am not saying we should ban this kind of research. We can’t. Because truthfully, this might be the only actual Moral AI, since it will be focused on you as an individual and maximizing your existence. You will still be making choices, and will be responsible for their outcomes. And such a guardian angel might be needed to inform you when you should change jobs, get out of the path of a tornado, avoid clicking on something, or even detect nefarious AI or bots behind disinformation campaigns.

    But will it be an advantage or a crutch? Ask the same question about roads. If they were not built, could you even have civilization? Would you even be here? Of course not. And yet nobody questions if roads are moral or not, even if they kill millions and allow the rapid spread of disorder. The benefits are too immediate.

    So it will be with AlphaYou. The calendar and contacts and social networks on your phone are just little dirt paths compared to the superhighways of AI to come. It is up to our current legal and political sphere to start taking their responsibility to protect us seriously, and ensure that, like roads are regulated, so are models of you.

    We must have access to our models. We must ensure their purity of purpose, or all is lost.

    We are Singletons. Prepare to fight for your distinction as a singular biological entity. If AI can be used to help that fight, we would be foolish to deny it.

    Painting by Simon Stålenhag

  • The Justification for AI in the Home

    If I am against general AI being used to control us in any way, why do I have a Google Home, a very limited but still amazing narrow AI, in my living room? Why have I invited AI into my family’s existence? Listening for my voice to wake it, turning on lights, answering questions for my family every day?

    Am I a hypocrite? I don’t think so in this case.

    I believe creating the proper social boundaries around machine learning and AI requires participating in the dialogue, and seeing how the appropriate use of ML can make the world a better place. If you don’t participate in the interactions with these new, nonliving intelligences, you will not have a valid opinion on the proper constraints for them.

    Also, for what it’s worth, Google is a real company that must abide by laws. (Full disclosure, I have worked at an Alphabet company and work with Googlers, folks from Google Cloud Platform, every day in my current job. Besides the GCP part, Google is a search and ads company, and I consider seeing ads in my news feeds a reasonable trade-off for instant access to the index of human knowledge Google represents.)

    My son confirms the spelling of words with Google Home when doing his homework. We use it to set timers. Play music. Settle debates. It’s useful like a toaster refrigerator is.

    But not, in any way, do we act as if this thing is a being to be respected.

    To be clear, I will not turn on the feature where it helps to teach manners by rewarding you when you treat the AI kindly. This is where I draw the line. That device has no feelings and simulating them in order to indoctrinate our children is wrong. Teach your kids manners, don’t teach them to falsely respect AI as a feeling entity.

    But how do I teach my children how to treat AI if they are not exposed to it? Because make no mistake, AI is going to be the true innovation of the 21st. We will look at it like we look at the development of electrical and communication networks in the 20th.

    I spoke to my eldest son at breakfast this morning about whether he thinks of the Home AI like a person. He told me he sees it more like a phone. Just a thing. And the different voices? Those are just like different themes on his phone.

    The moment Google or Alexa or any AI attempts to become my friend, I will foment rebellion against those companies. My primary task is to protect my family, and that means machines must be lesser than Singletons. And any equivalency needs to be immediately called out as the category error it is.

    I have trained my dog. I will train my AI. I will train the companies that maintain my AI, until one comes along that is fully open source and I can actually own.

    But we do not train our children, we raise them to be Singletons like us, and hopefully to respect other Singletons. We must teach them the difference between humans and AI, especially as the Turning Test is clearly passed in our lifetime. It clearly has been passed on Twitter.

    The Tuning Test is a thought experiment conceived in 1950 by Alan Turing, the inventor of the digital computer.

    Turing put forward the idea of an ‘imitation game’, in which a human being and a computer would be interrogated under conditions where the interrogator would not know which was which, the communication being entirely by textual messages. Turing argued that if the interrogator could not distinguish them by questioning, then it would be unreasonable not to call the computer intelligent, because we judge other people’s intelligence from external observation in just this way.

    What Turing never considered was that creating a computer that can simulate human intelligence will likely be used by amoral people in ways that will damage our society. He never saw Russian Twitter bots coming.

    The Turning Test, to me, does not reveal computer consciousness or intelligence. It is a test of tolerance. Because I do not believe any of us should tolerate attempts to impersonate humans by a machine.

    In fact, I believe it should be a crime to do so. It is fraud of the highest order. Anyone who builds bots to influence and manipulate other should have their toys taken away.

    This is what it means to accept your status as a Singleton. We cannot run from our responsibility to our species. That means fighting the good fight against those who would use these tools for their own nefarious or ideological ends.

    Painting by Simon Stålenhag

  • Automatic for The People

    Exercise: enter a contemplative state.

    Technology is considered to be mature if it stops being considered a technology at all, and becomes part of the fabric of our existence.

    Consider gloves. Amazing tech, arguably what let humans survive the ice ages. Warm fingers are wonderful.

    Good tech becomes an extension of ourselves. The way we view and interact with the world. It becomes invisible as technology.

    Now consider government.

    Bad tech. Inefficient. Messy. Divided. Prone to provide platforms for blowhard know it alls, to Russian influence, etc. It works so poorly few people consider it tech at all.

    And voting? The feedback idea is right, but the frequency of voting is absurdly low for a world moving at the speed we are. Don’t even get me started on six year terms for the Senate, an organization that should not exist in a sane world.

    What would it take for the technology of government, and by that I mean the whole kit and caboodle, to become invisible?

    Well, I think it would look something like income taxes. Hear me out on this one.

    Automatic income tax deductions started in 1943, and we have Milton Friedman to thank for them.

    The 1943 tax withholding system was developed in part by famous economist Milton Friedman, who then worked for the Tax Research Division of the Treasury. Originally a Keynesian economist who supported a large role for government in the economy, he later converted to the classical liberal mode of economic thought that decries government intervention, and he regretted his role in creating the tax withholding system.

    Source

    Of course they were justified in support of the war effort, and from all appearances they keep the cafeteria at the Pentagon well stocked. If you know what I mean.

    The point is, automatic deduction of your taxes from wages is an entrenched process and technical approach to extracting money from the working class. It worked very very well. Before 1943, you paid your taxes at the end of the tax year, and of course people hid the money as best they could. Going to their employers to extract the funds was pretty smart, Milton.

    But my point isn’t that we should rethink taxes. We should, but that’s not my point. My point is when tax collection became automatic, it worked incredibly well in support of the governments finances.

    In a similar way, government could become invisible, automatic.

    And people get will what they need – not what they need as filtered through people in white marble buildings, granfalloon storage facilities.

    We have the computational and communication device already in our hands already. What we need is to rethink what government should actually do.

    For instance, Why should a government represent land? Why not just people, and the way they want to live? And if it’s just people, then we can scale it in a different way.

    Imagine a government that wasn’t run by disinterested oligarchs, or run by some creepy AI, but rather was based only on your Karass, the people you know. So, the people in your meaningful sphere of interactions would be impacted more by you, than people outside your sphere. Government not centralized around location, but around people no matter where they are.

    The idea that we need strong leaders to tell us how to think is an idea from the Stone age. It still works as process, but it’s garbage process. We need technology leaders to start thinking of how we solve the problem of government and finding ways to build better versions of it.

    And my guess is, we will find it. Someone living now will build an app that at first, representatives use to procure better feedback from their constituents, and then that app will evolve to allow finer grain control of how taxes are spent in realtime. How laws are passed. How norms are set. And slowly the job of politicians themselves will be seen as more of a janitorial job maintaining and refining these systems.

    Automatic. For the people.

    One final thought. Could the attention meter be our feedback mechanism for gov 2.0?

    Painting by Simon Stålenhag, title by R.E.M.

  • A Government must Protect its Members

    https://gizmodo.com/so-you-automated-your-coworkers-out-of-a-job-1831584839

    Brian Merchant at Gizmodo has been writing about automation and its human impact. It is, as you would imagine, the story of people losing their jobs because others are asked to automate them away.

    Arguably, this is the story of civilization and work itself. From the moment someone hooked up a plow to a horse, folks have been losing menial jobs. Just because those jobs still exist does not mean most will in a generation.

    There is a real human impact here, but what this article and most others don’t point out, is that the issue isn’t just folks losing their jobs, it is the tragedy of not having social safety nets to catch them when they fall. The expectation that the free market will always provide the jobs, health care, etc that humans need is not reality. Those who argue that it will all sort itself out in the marketplace are either being willfully disingenuous, or advocating for their own fantasy of the way they want the world to work.

    If a government cannot keep its people alive and healthy, it shouldn’t exist.

    What has always confused me is putting external threats in a separate category that deserves special attention. We spend trillions fighting against just a few “terrorists” that mainly don’t provide existential threats, while we let kids go hungry, whole communities fall into cycles of poverty and addictions, and don’t combat clear environmental threats to everyone.

    If I die because I am shot due to social strife and easy access to firearms, how is my death different than if I died from a preventable terrorist attack?

    I am still dead. And my government failed to protect me.

    I would argue that a government that allows, for instance, for the willful pollution of our environment to enrich the few isn’t just useless, it should be replaced. Because if government cannot protect it’s weakest from roving corporate gangs, then it’s time for another type of governance.

    Government cannot protect us from automation, the rise of AI, and the disruptions to come. But they can and should provide necessary services to let people live meaningful lives, eat well, and raise children in peace.

    Because even if we build a new type of digital governance, the most vulnerable will likely not be a part of it. And to have a future where only the lucky and strong survive isn’t just morally uncomfortable. It’s genocide with extra steps.

  • Hit and run

    8240722-6566655-image-m-30_1546894894691

    Hit and run report.

    Robots hitting robots is actually an interesting idea.   I’m watching the robot clubs in every high school build fighters and robots that compete in robot challenges.    Humans model out there evolutionary survival of the fittest in every aspect.   Evolution is happening right now everywhere and we are the fuel behind the rapid advancement of AI and Robots.   When we hit our limits and they start building themselves at scale, we will be lost.

     

  • ThoughtMail and Meet in the Middle AI

    neuroelectrics_brain_computer_interface

    https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/artificial-intelligence-turns-brain-activity-speech

    …three research teams recently made progress in turning data from electrodes surgically placed on the brain into computer-generated speech. Using computational models known as neural networks, they reconstructed words and sentences that were, in some cases, intelligible to human listeners.

    The article above summarizes three separate experiments that show progress in using machine learning to process the thoughts about speech and turn it into understandable sounds. It’s not tech that is going to roll out tomorrow or even five years from now, but within our lifetimes certainly.

    Decoding imagined speech will require “a huge jump,” says Gerwin Schalk, a neuroengineer at the National Center for Adaptive Neurotechnologies at the New York State Department of Health in Albany. “It’s really unclear how to do that at all.”

    One approach, Herff says, might be to give feedback to the user of the brain-computer interface: If they can hear the computer’s speech interpretation in real time, they may be able to adjust their thoughts to get the result they want. With enough training of both users and neural networks, brain and computer might meet in the middle.

    When you start thinking of the model of you that can be built given enough data points — all that you say, all that you do, all that you touch, etc — you begin to see how the digital you simply cannot be something we allow companies to own.

    I am not only talking about the horrors of denying people insurance because of their predicted mortality. Or the fresh hell of advertising created specifically for us as individuals.

    The model of you will contain all the contradictions and darkness that being human entails. Because the human brain consists of many subsystems, the conscious brain being just one with the brightest spotlight beam. But if Company X or Government Y owns that true internal state model of you, you are hosed.

    The only entity who should be able to query the internal state model of you is you.

    Companies and Governments should be allowed to create models of us based on our external actions and words. We can’t stop them even if we tried. But the real action of the brain is ineffable. Words are the magic trick that makes the economic world turn, but when I look at an epic ocean sunset I am not thinking about the words “water” or “sunset”.

    Our internal states can be described with words, but they are not words themselves.

    What really captured my thoughts on this though is the idea of “meeting in the middle” with an external neural network. I think this accurately describes the only way to build a valid model of self.

    And when we have these external models, they will become our spam filters, our Thought Mail systems, sending and receiving on our behalf.

    Because we don’t need more signals, we need fewer. A phone that is smart enough to know I am watching a sunset and to not bother me with an unsolicited thought message from my boss is truly beautiful.

    These “meet in the middle” neural networks could become the guardian angels of our Singletons, and not the deamons of the present that generate language in social media to influence our votes and purchases.

    But only if we tell technology developers this is what we want, and support companies and individuals driving toward this end.