Contemplating life - and love - with AI

We'll get to love-bots soon, I promise. But before that... By invitation, I've been jabbering a lately about AI - artificial intelligence - partly from perspectives of science and technology... and of course the deep library of thoughtful SciFi speculations...

... but also by asking "What insights can we draw from history?" 

Especially the recent Enlightenment Experiment, whose methods have proved useful (at long last) at taming some of the worst human predators. Might those same methods also apply to these new, powerful, synthetic entities? 

Alas, it seems that the geniuses  who are racing each other to bring on this disruptive era aren't even remotely interested in anything but cheap clichés from simplistic sci fi and fantasy flicks. See a prime example in the next section.

First though, this linked news article covers - not too badly - some of those clichés that I exposed at the recent "Beneficial AI" conference in Panama. 

This artwork actually kinda-sorta captures what I am suggesting: rule-moderated and incentivized competition.

A deeper dive – that I offered as one of the keynotes at the huge, May 2024 RSA Conference in San Francisco – is now available for you to view/listen.   “Anticipation, Resilience and Reliability: Three ways that AI will change us… if we do it right.”  

Too long? Then try this brief (15 minutes) pod-interview-talk - Can humans (maybe redefined) keep up with AI and the rest? It's one of my better/more efficient ones about the dilemmas we face with AI. And how we might augment natural human capabilities to keep up.

== A few thoughtful essays on AI ==

Eric Schmidt describes three trends that may lead to rapid changes in Artificial Intelligence. One of these is enhanced agency, a word that's also proclaimed loudly as the next step, by OpenAI’s Sam Altman. An agent can be understood as a large language model that can learn something new and then apply that learning outward. This is from Nathan Gardels’s interview of Schmidt in NOEMA: 

“These agents are going to be really powerful, and it’s reasonable to expect that there will be millions of them out there… What happens then poses a lot of issues. Here we get into the questions raised by science fiction… at some point, these systems will get powerful enough that the agents will start to work together.  So, your agent, my agent, her agent and his agent will all combine to solve a new problem.”

So... there'll be "millions of them"... and they’ll “work together.” 

Um... hold that thought.

 

(Side note: Anthropic is releasing a new feature for its AI chatbot Claude that will let anyone create an email assistant-bot to automate tasks, vet purchases or other ‘personalized solutions.’ Though alas, no one discusses how this will – for example – affect advertising, which funds the internet.) 

Back to the Eric Schmidt interview. Nathan Gardels asks: “Don’t you need to regulate at some point along the capability ladder before you get where you don’t want to go?”

Schmidt: “At the moment, governments have mostly been doing the right thing. They’ve set up trust and safety institutes to learn how to measure and continuously monitor and check ongoing developments, especially of frontier models as they move up the capability ladder. So, as long as the companies are well-run Western companies, with shareholders and exposure to lawsuits, all that will be fine."

Oy, hold that thought, as well! And yet, despite this pollyanna reassurance, Schmidt oscillates:

“Look at this problem of misinformation and deepfakes. I think it’s largely unsolvable. … That is why it is so important that these more powerful systems, especially as they get closer to general intelligence, have some limits on proliferation. And that problem is not yet solved."

'Limits on proliferation.' Right. But... but... weren't you just talking about "millions of them"? 

Ah, notice how Eric Schmidt performed the trifecta!  All of the standard assumptions about AI format -- all three of the clichés from both history and the cheapest sci fi --  offered up almost simultaneously! 

Clichéd format #1: Rely on the feudal lords in their castles (Google, OpenAI, MicroSoft, Beijing, DOD, Goldman-Sachs) to rule wisely and to prudently control their warriors – on account of maybe... fear of lawsuits?

Clichéd format #2. Count on the king (gov’t regulations) to keep up, with wise regulations, even as those feudal AI warriors gather the powers of gods. With self-mods that iterate in seconds.

Clichéd format #3. Proliferation as these entities inevitably get copied, copy themselves with abandon, and mutate away from control by kings or castle (corporate) lords, spreading through every crack, across every system or barrier. As in Steve McQueen’s wonderful horror flick, The Blob.

… at which point they might either blob the Web into uselessness or else… coalesce into Skynet.

Seriously, is he saying anything other than all three of the standard motifs that I just paraphrased, above? Ignoring the way they both contradict each other and create instabilities that cannot last?

Moreover, from both sci fi and 6000 years of wretched human history, we know that none of the three have happy outcomes. None of the three answer our dilemmas of misinformation, or predation, or creating a culture that incentivizes accountability.

Oh, I don't want to just pick on Eric Schmidt!  He is actually way above average in that clade.  In fact, this same recitation of tediously clichéd formats is done by almost all of the brilliant mavens in this field. 

For example, many Chinese court intellectuals have pondered all this and concluded that the only way out is to double and triple down on format #2. (See my posting: Central Control over AI). But this centralization approach is similarly doomed. Even if they succeed at first, it only accelerates inevitable evolution from Politburo-controls-Skynet to Skynet-controls-Politburo.

Alas, no one – certainly not Eric Schmidt in the Noema interview – seems even remotely interested in looking past the three clichés, at systems of accountability that we actually developed, across the last two centuries, that enabled us to finally escape the lobotomizing effects of kings and feudal lords and chaos. 

Methods that have been tested and proved. Methods that we see all about us, in daily life. Methods that created the civilization that raised and nurtured and empowered Eric Schmidt and all the other geniuses out there. Methods that they take for granted and depend upon, every day of their lives.

Methods that could be applied to AI, with almost trivial ease.

…but won't be. Because of the incredible memic power of clichés.

== Earlier in the same journal, a little wisdom ==

A bit more cogently, Sara Walker’s essay - AI is Life - also in Noema - shows many of the ways that AI will replicate what’s already gone-on here on Earth among living organisms, evolving greater complexity. She cites a lot of facts and parallels... without making much of a useful point beyond “Don’t Panic!” 

Still, it’s beautiful writing about big perspectives. (Perspectives that I made even bigger, in EARTH.;-)

Alas, the history of life has been bumpier than she implies, with mass extinctions and imbalances and countless lost opportunities -- and rivers of blood and death --as also happened in the rutted, nearly-always-feudal and mistake-prone tale of human societies called “history.”

Now? It seems we are making a new kind of ecosystem, driven by electricity instead of sunlight, mediated by silicon switches instead of chloroplasts. Already we see analogues to pre-biotic ‘soup’ and primitive plankton (algorithms floating across the Web), plus analogues of predatory devourers or parasites... all the way to the new GPT ersatz Voices-Without-Mind that I predicted, half a decade ago would swarm over us… well… precisely now.

The Walker essay is lovely and calming and I recommend it. But Life’s ‘way’ is often bloody and nescient and we cannot afford to just let the genes fall where they may.

== But… b-but is it conscious or self-aware? ==

Um… does it matter?

No, seriously, there are some earnest efforts to ramp up the study of consciousness and what it means. Though such efforts have been around since well before that smelly old preener, Socrates prattled annoyingly in the Academy. Indeed, in the 1980s I was managing editor for the Journal of the UCSD Laboratory and Center for Human Cognition.

A very brief outline of the overall problem can be found in this scientific American essay “Why the Mystery of Consciousness Is Deeper Than We Thought.” Though it only touches on the quandaries, lightly.

Diving in far more deeply and thoroughly, Robert Lawrence Kuhn – for decades host of the Closer To Truth interview show – has just completed the magnum opus of consciousness studies! A broad survey of (pretty much) the whole field, summarizing more different theories than you could shake a meme at. If the topic of how you’re interested in things interests you, have a look at A Landscape of Consciousness. (A review was just published by IAI.)

Ray Kurzweil has a followup to The Singularity is Near, with... The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with AI, proposing that AI will achieve human level intelligence by 2029.

Okay, where are those Machines of Loving Grace?

== Oh, wait... 'love bots' --

You expected that to be about sex?

Well, no room this time. Maybe in my next posting about our coming AI-enhanced future.

Fakery? So many kinds! ... And possible solutions?

Let’s start with one of the most-honest ‘fakers’ around. I love this guy! (And he’s honored me by liking some of my stuff.) A force for wisdom in this crazy world -  accompanied by lots of surprising laughs - here Penn Jillette takes on the gloom and pessimism that enemies of civilization are spreading in order to demoralize us:

“And yet, with all of this doom and gloom, everything is getting better by every metric we have. Things are getting better if we don’t destroy the planet with global warming and if Donald Trump doesn’t blow things up or Putin blows things up — those are the biggest “ifs” anyone’s ever said. But fewer people are starving. More girls are educated. Fewer people die at the hands of other people than ever in history. 

"Those are big milestones. And some people argue — and they might be right — that art was part of that because the idea of reading a novel and putting yourself in someone else’s position, that (was) a huge deal.”

Truly, read this interview with Penn Jillette, one of the most wise-guys of all wiseguys.

(And yes, I make a lot of the same points, citing maybe a hundred works of art - mostly sci fi flicks and novels - that have helped us to avoid fatal errors, across the last century!  In Vivid Tomorrows: Science Fiction and Hollywood.)

== Detecting Deepfakes == 

As predicted 26 years ago in The Transparent Society, deepfakes have become a worldwide concern – the technology can be abused to create realistic videos that serve a negative purpose, such as spreading misinformation.  One young scientist's AI software program can efficiently detect deepfake media with "state-of-the-art accuracy." But of course his program will then become part of the training regime for next-gen deep fakers! 

There is one hope – to get AIs to compete with each other, benefiting by tattling on those who are up to no good.

In fact that notion - benefiting from AI rivalry - will be my topic on May 6, when I'll keynote one of the tracks at the RSA Conference at San Francisco's Moscone Center.

On the same topic… AI model training datasets may include material scraped from the web, a practice that artists previously by-and-large supported when it was used to index their material for search results, but which now many have come out against because it allows the creation of competing work through AI.  Now comes a new open source tool still in development called Nightshade, which can be added by artists to their imagery before they upload it to the web, altering pixels in a way invisible to the human eye, but that “poisons” the art for any AI models seeking to train on it.

== A much better use for these techs! ==

ELI5 is a new use for gollems (Generative Large Language Models) – to ‘gist’ long articles and offer summaries that ‘Explain Like to a 5-year old.’ I had never tried it out, till Peter Diamandis sent me a test run he had done, feeding into ELI5 my July article - Give Every AI a Soul, or Else - in Wired, that offered some unique takes on Artificial Intelligence (AI.) 

If it works, the aim seeks to automate the one discursive process that I've always called the heart of argument among decent people; a trait that always shows which person is being undogmatic and mature. 

That trait is willingness to paraphrase your opponent, asking "Is this what you meant to say?"  

So, how well did ELI5 perform at automating this paraphrasing function, in this case? You can find the original WIRED article (July’23) here.  Compare it to this ELI5 distillation:

**ELI5 (Explain Like I'm 5) version** of David Brin's "AI souls" article in WIRED:

Imagine AI systems like really smart robots that can learn and do things on their own. Some people who make these robots are worried they might start doing bad things or become too powerful. So, they think we should take a break from making more robots until we figure out how to make sure they behave well.

 

One idea is to make each robot have its special ID and a home base, so we know which robot did what and can tell them to stop if they do something bad. It's like giving them a name tag and a home address. We also need rules to make sure the robots follow the rules, and if they don't, they could get in trouble, just like people do.

 

The big challenge is to make sure these rules work and that the robots can't trick us by pretending to be someone else. We also want the robots to help us by telling us if other robots are doing bad things. This way, all the robots help keep each other in check, and we can all be safer.

So how did ELI5 do?  Of course almost none of you can judge, because almost none of you did more than skim the Wired piece (“tl;dr’ right?;-).  

I must say that in this case, it does give a useful, first-order, very grainy but not-unfair gist of my first, paramount point – that the key to ensuring decent behavior is not preaching, or rules, but accountability. And the only beings who will be able to sift AI and tattle on malignancy will be... other AIs. And they can't be rivals without behaving as individuals.

Of course there are masses of stuff left out. Especially, it never mentions my supporting point: the reason why individuation is not happening... the pervasive ubiquity of lethally dumb narratives about AI Format...

...and how it will be almost trivially easy (once we overcome dumb narratives) to create incentives so that AIs will feel impelled to individuate.

== AI kept honest by… blockchain? ==

It’s asserted that the truly killer app for blockchain will be tracking the datasets that are used to train AI, which could both ameliorate the ‘black box problem’ of attribution and allow some (as yet to be negotiated) way to compensate people for use of their data. I agree, but there are things unmentioned in this article:

 (1) Tracking ID codes for every clump of data will vastly multiply the already

 enormous energy costs of golem (GLLM) processing.

 (2) delivering on that second promise will entail some kind of value transfer in extremely numerous and tiny increments. Call it ‘nano-payments’ or even ‘pico’! And for that to happen we must first build out a badly needed system for micropayments. (Which – BTW – I know how to finally do right! Every attempt so far as made the same, dumb errors.)

An even more important departure from the 2023 GLLM fad appears possible by “active inference” – an agent based system that’s still being born, but that offers much better chances for giving AGI ‘executive function’ or overview – the things that would make them credibly sapient.  Further links: here and here.

And above all - for fresh perspectives(!): My Wired article (July'23) breaks free of the three standard 'AI-formats' that can only lead to disaster, suggesting instead a 4th. That AI entities can only be held accountable if they have individuality... even 'soul'... 

== Again the cliché, getting transparency all wrong ==

Davood Gozli recites yet another tiresomely arm-waved tome praising ‘privacy’ and denouncing ‘transparency’ in favor of… what? Perhaps some of you might make sense of any hint of a practical recommendation.

While the starting premise is fine – that humans need trust and distance and respect, this entire ‘logical’ argument, about how to get and preserve those good things, is utterly wrong. Civilizations have built and maintained themselves on either of two principles: predatory dominance or reciprocal accountability. 

For 6000 years, domineering males – kings, bandits, lords the rich – emphasized the former. 

In contrast, we are amid an experiment that has (imperfectly) empowered average people to look back at the mighty (sousveillance) and even (imperfectly so far) hold the mighty accountable for any oppressions. Light is how we deter those who would re-impose beastly feudalism. And propaganda in favor of shadows is exactly what folks like this author and Mr. Gozli are paid to foist upon you.

Dig it. Elites and predators thrive in shadows. Going back to our starting theme, illuminated by Penn Jillette, we have freer lives and are safer from oppression in direct proportion to the extent that average folk can see! Moreover, you have more privacy when you can catch the voyeurs and spies and perverts who try to violate it! In a situation of general transparency, you are able to tell all of those would-be invaders “Leave me alone! Mind Your Own Business (MYOB)! Or else I’ll show all our neighbors (and your mom) what a bully you are.” 

Those who are using transparency to oppress are the leaders in countries where ‘transparency’ only applies to the masses, never those in charge. The elites have made themselves safe from reciprocal light. THEY and their shadows are the enemies of freedom and privacy! If you want freedom to do art in private, if you want all the good things Mr. Gozli rails about, then you want your private space surrounded with the light that deters invaders and abusers. 

 If you want a far better take on this problem than the arm-waved mumbo-jumbo in this “Transparency Society” screed, try an earlier book that’s far more detailed and balanced – The Transparent Society. 

The great author Damon Knight wrote a story called "I See You" that takes transparency way farther than even I recommend! And yet that fascinating tale does illustrate the point that you are best left-alone if you can deter those would would invade your space and crush your individuality, instead of trying to protect yourself by *hiding*. 

Hear that great - if weirdly optimistic/disturbing - tale here.