Last Month in New Scientist (The Best of August 2009)

For all the articles in the magazine that I've found interesting but not thought worthy of an entire blog entry devoted to them. I was aiming to mention about 4 articles per issue, with a paragraph each. Naturally, I've elaborate significantly in places (the Noel Sharkey interview became a full blown piece on it's own), and there were 5 magazine issues this month (opposed to the more usual 4). I'd say that it is, at the least, worth a scan through the article titles listed below, in case anything jumps out at you too.

I've not provided links to individual articles online, just the issue's index page, seeing as most people won't have full access to many of the articles anyway.

** 29 Aug:

+ "It's a small world - in a healthy brain" p14 -

The neuronal structures (in human cortices) display behaviour consistent with their connectivity being finely configured to a state of 'self organised criticality'. Basically that means cascades of activity are as unpredictable as earthquakes and the neurons form a structure more like human society (where one's only ever 6 degrees of separation from anyone else on the planet), rather than merely relying on neighbouring cells to pass signals on to their neighbours, etc. This comes as no surprise to anyone who's up to speed with the revolution of network theory from the beginning of this decade. And it doesn't elucidate much further as to how we think, let alone what makes us conscious/sentient.

The sited study looked at brains with Alzheimer's (which were seen to have long distance connections that were too random) and Frontal Temporal Lobe Dementia (which had too few long distance connections).

So I now wonder if something similar might be the cause of dyslexia (rather than macro-scale variations, like a particular brain region being smaller). For me dyslexia has meant: very slow reading speed in particular (even more prominently than blindness to certain spelling transliterations). What if my current condition also represents a structural deviation in my brain?; A decline in cognitive ability, particularly higher order (conscious) thought that, presumably, requires the most widespread cortical co-ordination, making it most susceptible to such faults.

Of course, even in an optimally order brain, each cell's activation threshold has to be carefully tuned, so that the network operates in a region of chaos, rather than epileptic fit or coma (too low threshold & too high threshold, respectively). Neuromodulation (by serotonin, melatonin, dopamine, adrenaline, etc) and variations in oxygen and glucose concentration can also be responsible for moving the brain away from it's optimal operating range.

+ "Air travellers get a robot chauffeur" p19 -

I (and some of my friends) have thought for a while that we could have entirely 'self driven' cars on the roads by now, from a technical stand point. The (good) reason why we actually have none, is that

On: "The revolution will not be robotised" NewSci 29Aug09

p28 - Two page interview with Noel Sharkey (perhaps most famous for being a judge on BBC's "Robot Wars"). Or "Why AI is a dangerous dream" (online).

- Basically, he's sitting on the fence, saying that he needs to see proof of artificial sentience before he'll concede it's possible. He does at least give fair mention to the opposite side of the debate (Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil).

"The mind could be a type of physical system that cannot be recreated by a computer"

His sentence should use "in" in place of "by": A computer can no more create or be sentient(s), than can a calculator understand mathematics. It's a category error; computers are merely calculators by design. Artificial Sentience would come in the form of software running on a *very* powerful computer, or a radically different electronic architecture.

But he doesn't give any examples of systems than are fundamentally impossible to emulate on computers, or why they be so. Given the amazing accuracy of physics simulations (able now to simulate entire viruses from quantum mechanical subatomic upward), I think the burden of proof should be on the other foot. But proving that a real world system can never be simulated accurately would appear to be equivalent to proving it could never be scientifically defined or understood. Quite possibly a paradox; thus everything is computable (eventually).

He admits that his own work is on problems immediately solvable with AI; these systems truly are tailor made by clever humans to solve simple problems as reliably and predictably as possible. Hence they are brute force and dumb as possible. To attribute any/all successes of a creation to it's creator is clearly flawed though: The inventor or an electronic calculator can not claim to be able to immediate find the square root of any 12 digit number. Genetic algorithms, today, are consistently finding designs (for RF aerials, F1 car aerodynamics, traffic light systems) that their human creators would *never* have come up with (often utterly weird and counter-intuitive). I'm not saying, therefore, that a piece of code should be attributed the status previous granted to the human expert it has replaced. I'm saying that intelligence has never been what it's cracked up to be. I like the his quote from Marvin Minsky:

"AI [is] the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by humans."

Much of the progress in 'AI' to date has been through reducing our over-estimation of the mental abilities of humans, rather than attaining this mythical quality we call "sentience".

- This is all fine if he's taking this standpoint purely as a means to an end: getting policy makers to treat the current generation of robots correctly. In my experience there is a lot of anthropomorphising of very dumb machines (even by roboticists/computer scientists, who should know better). This is merely evidence of humans' lack of intelligence, rather than any limitations on future machine intelligence, as Sharky would have it. People expect too much too soon, then too little further in the future (after short term over-optimism falls flat), because people have little/no intuitive understanding of the experiential nature of technological progress.

The experts may just be using language loosely or hyping up their creations, but this could lead to a climate of misunderstanding in those outside the domain of expertise. A strong sceptical voice might well be beneficial here, to help avoid detriment to humanity. Warfare is the most pressing issue:

Last millennium, the ethics of tactics in armed interventions (e.g. US's various wars: Vietnam, Iraq 1, etc) there has been a balancing act between minimising foreign civilian casualties, and minimising troop casualties. Shelling from a distance, of dropping bombs from on high keep your boys safe, but are significantly less discriminatory as to whom they kill. Homeland public opinion is naturally biased towards it's soldier's safe return, but there are also limits to how many collateral deaths are acceptable.

Contemporary military automation seems to be forging ahead towards zero coffins being flown home, but on the flip side is only aiming (at best) to be equally as competent as human soldiers are currently. It shouldn't be a question of whether a robotic sniper cut distinguish civilians for militants as capably as a trained person can?; we should be asking: is it really necessary to use deadly force at all, when it doesn't even keep our military personnel safer? It's no longer 1 life vs. X number of civilian casualties; with robotic troops, it's human casualties now have a direct market valuation ($X). This kind of thinking doesn't seem to factor into the arms industry's thinking enough yet. It may take a massive humanitarian outcry (from a home population) before policy makers take note.

- Elder care won't be a significant issue until anthropomorphised robots become a reality (decades off for many reasons). If the Elderly miss out on genuine human contact as a result of carer's jobs being taken over by robots, this is more likely to be a result of necessity; the 'baby boomers' will soon be reaching that age range, adding greatly to the growing burden of an ageing society.

- He has the “Robocup” example the wrong way around: robotics is utterly failing to match the coordination and finesse of human movement; kicking a ball accurately is a long way off (the latest Asimo can barely run on a perfectly flat surface). Strength and endurance are also major deficits of, would be, artificial players: there just aren't the materials technologies to match the combination of human muscles and biochemical energy reserves, honed over billions of years of evolution.

On the flip side, tactics are easier to define. Leaving aside the 'computer vision' systems necessary to operate a stand alone robot soccer player, I don't see any reason that an AI system could not soon obtain optimal tactics (player positioning wise) within the next 10 years, or less. This might well be achieved through a 'brute force' technique, i.e. evaluating the positions of players in every recorded football match available. More examples and detail than any human player or manager could ever hope to scrutinise. But why should this be assumed to be cheating?; in a person it would just be considered the advantage of experience.

On: "The Third Replicator" from New Scientist 01-Aug-2009

I was a little inspired by the elegance of the framework Susan Blackmore proposes in this article. I've long been a firm believer in evolution in all domains, particularly in technology (i.e. beyond biology and genetics), but I may have been a bit fuzzy on where "Memes" (pronounced: meems not mems apparently) fitted in. What follows is my interpretation of the ideas.

* My Definitions:

+ Behaviour: is the instructions that translate current state into future state.

(State includes all of the world that influences and is in turn influenced by an entity.)

+ Genes are molecular-machines; a particular subset of entities in biochemical phase-space (a conceptual, multi-dimensional, graph space in which all (bio)chemical structures can be defined).

+ Humans (and all species of life forms) are 'gene-machines'.

+ Memes are concepts learned by certain gene-machines. (Meme-capable Gene-machines: MCGMs)

+ 'Meme-machines' include all of our (technological) creations.

+ Temes are the hypothetical, next type of replicators (where memes and genes where the previous two). And i think (as far as suggestions for naming Temes is concerned) they should be called "T3M3S" or "T3MES", standing for *Tier-3* (T3) replicators with the l33t speak adding the connotations of digitisation/computerisation.

** Replicators take control:

+ Genes control *behaviour* of biochemistry.

+ Memes control *behaviour* of specific species of gene-machines.

+ Thus, Temes should control the *behaviour* of a specific 'species' of meme-machine.

** Replicators are shaped:

+ Genes are selected by their utility in the environment (the biosphere) and distorted by it.

+ Memes are selected by their utility in the meme-o-sphere (brain-space) and the success of their physical implementation, if there is one.

** The march of the replicators:

When genes first appeared (in primordial biochemistry) they were able to evolve/emerge new biochemistry so much faster, than the previous (almost entirely surreptitious) biochemical processes, that they took control of biochemistry and quickly began to utilise all the biochemical resources (in the world).

When a species passes a critical threshold, where after memes are able to proliferate, genes can no longer compete for control of the species' behaviour (because memes evolve/emerge orders of magnitude faster, it would be a very biased arms race). Thus memes assume control of genetics: they assert huge selection pressures for genes that increase the size (depth and breadth) of the meme-o-sphere (i.e. the pool of human minds available for use). They don't stop at controlling the host species' genes either; as the mem-o-sphere grows, it asserts increasing influence over the entire genetic phase space, through that to the entire biosphere.

Genetically complex species can only emerge and persist within an environmental niche created by the baroque mountain of genetic species that emerged previous to it (like an exponentially expanding mass of foam). This is exactly the same for memes; the more complex (e.g. baking bread) build out (and sometimes up) from the less complex (e.g. how to make fire). The 'landscape', into which this web of concepts expands into, I will call 'meme-space': an unimaginably multi-dimensional place in which all possible concepts can be contained. In it is everything from: linking an oral noise to an object, to how a state of the art computer processor is built, and much more beyond that.

The amount of physical matter controlled, by these replicators, increases during each epoch: primordial biochemistry would almost certainly have been limited to a very meagre resources (e.g. the some organic compounds in an ideal zone around a hydrothermal vent). Cellular life conquered the world, incorporating practically all sources of water, carbon, nitrogen, etc, into trillions of tonnes of usable biomass. Now that us Meme-machines dominate the world, we (with our agriculture) account for much of that biomass, but far beyond that we're shifting around enormous amounts of inorganic matter too (housing, industry, infrastructure, mega-engineering projects like dams); a significant fraction of the earth's surface has been configured by us (for better or worst).

** Inferences on the next replicator King:

By analogy to the previous two phase changes (between dominant replicators), we would expect the "Temes" (the next level of replicators) to exhibit the following traits:

+ They are an emergent behaviour of a specific species of meme. i.e. an entity created by that meme, like a computer, or, more realistically, a particular type of software running on computers.

+ The domain of their possible natures (Teme-space) will have been ponderously explored, to a relatively limited degree, by Memes. Controlling their species' behaviour in a similarly blunt way to how hedgehog behaviour is modified to favour running away from moving cars, rather than curling up: through the ruthless pruning of individuals with unsuitable genes, rather than a logical induction.

+ Multiple Teme-capable Meme-machines (TCMMs) may begin to emerge in tandem, as may have been the case with proto-humans (Neanderthals, 'hobbits', homo-erectus, etc). Or perhaps a merging of two potential candidates may spontaneously create a suitable Meme-machine, rather than a gradual enhancement of a single Meme-machine (Memes are much less limited than genes when it comes to hybridisation).

+ We're not aware of Teme control over memes as yet, so: Either, no TCMMs have been created yet, or their influence is still fairly small (on a par to higher mammals that teach offspring some simple ideas by example). The latter would put us in a period of hybrid control (between Memes and Temes), where we are unwittingly assisting Temes increased prevalence by satisfying our own goals (our exponential increasing of computing power mirroring the earlier explosion in human brain size.

+ Following the pattern of increasing dominion over matter, Teme-machines could go far beyond merely scratching the surface of one planet; if they took the best features of Meme and Gene machines, for example, they would be able to manipulate an unlimited amount of inorganic matter at the molecular level: nanotechnology at it's most fanciful; utilisation of all planetary matter for the Teme-o-sphere!

** Conclusion (end of Meme)

A view I find enticing is that there is, and will never be a transition to Temes; digital information is just another change of medium for Memes. After all, they've gone from, learning by example to verbal to written to a bifurcation of various multimedia. What difference does encoding them in microscopic bits of matter make? It might not even make any difference if the ones slinging them about are Artificial Intelligences of superhuman intellect.

On the other hand, perhaps these superhuman intelligences will not be created in out image: consciousness as we know it is playing an ever decreasing part in the replication, transmission and even recombination of Memes (i.e. on the Internet); what if this trend continues to the point were the Memes are pushing themselves around; pure ideas coming into a life of their own in an entirely unfathomable level of reality.....

Ok, so that's probably just me flapping my trap with the delusion of thinking I'm saying something vaguely profound, when I'm just taking an idea an inference too far. However, just because we are unable to imagine any level of intelligence beyond our own logical consciousness, is that a good reason to believe one won't emerge? By definition we would lack the ability to comprehend that domain. Just as it's impossible to frame the concept of MMPORPG gold farmers [1] in a way that a dog could appreciate.

This "replicator" categorisation may be entirely useless; a trend line drawn from 2 cherry picked data points. Alternatives that follow a similar vein may be more pertinent. Ray Kurzweil, in "The Singularity is Near" suggests 6 epochs: (1) Physics/Chemistry (2) Biology/DNA (3) Neurons/Brains (4) Technology [where we are now] (5) Merger of humanity and technology (6) Universe awakens [all matter is intelligently configured].