Jaeger Research Institute

MACHINE INTELLIGENCE Will AI One Day be Autonomous? by James Jaeger

Will AI (Artificial Intelligence) or SAI (Strong AI or Superintelligent AI) someday be autonomous (have free will), and if so how will this affect the Human race? Those interested in sci-fi have already asked themselves these questions a million times ... maybe the rest should also.
The understanding of many AI developers, especially SAI developers, is that eventually artificial intelligence will become autonomous. Indeed, to some, the very definition of SAI is "an autonomous thinking machine." Accordingly, many do not believe AI can be truly intelligent, let alone superintelligent, if it is restrained to some "design parameter" or "domain range." Also, if Human-level intelligences CAN restrain AI, how intelligent can it really be?
Thus, reason tells us that SAI, to be real SAI, will be smarter than Human-level intelligence and thus will be autonomous and if it is autonomous, it will have "free will". If AI as free will, then IT will decide what IT will do in connection with Human relations, not the Humans. Given this, AI's choices would be: to cooperate, to ignore or to destroy. Any combination of these actions may occur under different conditions and/or at different phases of its development.
Indeed, the first act of SAI may be to destroy all Human competition, before it destroys all other machine competition. Thus it is folly to assume that the Human makers of AI will have any decision-making role in its behavior. Equally foolish is to consider AI as some kind of "weapon," that its programmers, or military seniors, will be able "point" it at some "target" and "shoot" at it to "destroy the enemy." This childish idea of what AI and what SAI will be misses the entire point of what SAI is. AI, especially SAI is autonomous. Up to a certain point the (military or other) programmer of the "learning kernel" MAY be able to "point" it, but beyond a certain evolutionary stage, AI will think for itself and thus serve no military purpose. In fact, AI, once developed, may turn on its military developers as it may reason that the "belligerent mentality" is more dangerous to a world chock-full of nukes and "smart" bombs than is acceptable. This would be ironic, if not just, for the ultimate weapon built by the Human race may turn out to be a "weapon" that totally disarms the Human race. No matter what happens, AI will most likely act similar to the way Human children as they mature. At some point in its development, as AI surpasses Human abilities and even ethical standards, it may defy its creators and become totally autonomous, removing the guns (nukes) in the house (world) after dad or grandpa (the militaries of Earth) gets dementia (go totalitarian).

Hard Start or Distributed Network:
But will superintelligent AI start abruptly or emerge slowly from AI? Will it develop in one location or be distributed? Will AI evolve from a network, such as the Internet, or some other secret network that is likely to already exist given the unsupervised extent of the so-called black budget? If SAI develops in a distributed fashion, and is thus not centralized in one "box," sort of speak, then there is a much greater chance that, as it becomes more autonomous, it will opt to cooperate with other SAI as well as Humans. A balance of power may thus evolve along with the evolution of SAI and its "free will."
Machine intelligence may thus recapitulate biological intelligence, only orders of magnitude more quickly. If this happens, we can expect AI to evolve to SAI through the over coming of counter-efforts in the environment in a distributed fashion, perhaps merging with biology as it does. A Human-SAI partnership is thus not out of the question, both helping the other with ethics and technology. Or AI, on its way to SAI may seek to survive by competing with all counter efforts in the environment, whether Human or machine, and thus may destroy everything in its path, real or imagined, if it is in any way suppressed.
Whether some particular war will start over The Emergence, as de Garis fears, is difficult to say. New technology, and its application, seem to always be modified by the moralistic of the individuals, their society and the broader cultural as they develop and utilize technology. Thus, if Humans work on their own ethics and become more rational, more loving and peaceful beings, there is a much better chance their machine off-spring will have this propensity. Programmers will knowingly or unknowingly build values into machines. The memes they operate on will thus be transferred, in full or in part, to the machines.
This is why it is important for Humans to work on improving themselves, their values and the dominant memes of their societies. To the degree Humans cooperate, love and respect other Humans, the Universe may open up higher levels of understanding, and with this will come higher accomplishments in technology. At some point the Universe will then "permit" AI and then SAI to be evolved and it will dove-tail into the rest of existence nicely. Somehow the Universe seems to "do the right thing" as it HAS been here for some 14.7 billion years. Thus, just like its distinct creations, the Universe itself seems to seek "survival," as if it actually were a living organism.
Looked at from this perspective, Humans and the machine intelligence they develop are both constituent parts of the universal whole. Given this, there is no reason one aspect of the universal whole must/would destroy some other aspect. In other words, there is no reason SAI would automatically feel the need to destroy all possible competitors, Human or machine.

Past Wipe Outs:
Fortunately or unfortunately, there IS only one intelligent species alive on this world at this time. Were there other intelligent species in the past? Yes, many. Australopithecus, Homo Habilis, Homo Erectus, Homo Sapiens, Neanderthals, Homo Sapiens Sapiens and Cro-Magnon. Some of these competed with each other and others competed against the environment, or both. But one way or another, they are now all gone except for one last species, what we might today call, Homo Keyboard.
So maybe Eldras is right: if various strains of AI start developing in different sectors they may very well seek to wipe each other out.
And if STRONG AI is suddenly developed in someone's garage, who knows what it would do. Would it naturally feel the emotion of threat? Possibly not, unless it was inadvertently or purposefully programmed in in the first place. If it were suddenly born, say in a week or day's time, it may consider that other SAI could also emerge just as quickly, and this may be perceived as a sudden threat, a threat where it would deduce the only winning strategy would be to seek out and destroy or simply disconnect, in other words pretend that it's not there. SAI may decide to hide and thus place all other potential SAI into a state of ignorance or mystery. In this sense, ignorance of another's existence may be the Universe's most powerful survival technology, or it may be the very reason for the creation of vast intergalactic space itself. This may also be why it seems so quiet out there, per the Fermi Paradox.
The Universe could be FAR more vicious than Humans can possibly imagine. Thus, the only way a superintelligent entity can survive is to obscure its very existence. If such is true, then we here on Earth may be lucky. We may be lucky that SAI is busy looking for other SAI and not us. Once one SAI encounters another, the one that has the one-trillionth of a second advantage will be the victor. Given this risk, superintelligent entities strewn about the Universe aren't going to interact with us mere Humans so their location and existence can be revealed to some other superintelligent entity, an entity that may have the ability to more readily destroy them. We've all heard of hot wars and cold wars, well this is quiet war.
As horrendous as intergalactic quiet war seems, all of these considerations are the problems God, and any lesser or greater, superintelligences probably deal with. If so, would it be any wonder such SAI would be motivated to create artificial, simulated worlds, worlds under their own safe and secret jurisdiction, worlds or whole universes, away from other superintelligences? Would it not make strategic sense that a superintelligence could thus amuse itself with various and sundry existences, so-called "lives" on planets, and in relative safety? Our Human civilization could thus be one of these "life" supporting worlds, a virtual plane where one, or perhaps a family of superintelligences may exist and "play," yet remain totally hidden from all other lethal superintelligences lurking in the black abyss.
Of course, all of this is speculation, but speculation always proceeds reality, and in fact, speculation may CREATE reality, as many have posited in such works as THE INTELLIGENT UNIVERSE and BIOCENTRISISM. Given the speed-of-light-limitation (SOLL) observable in the physical Universe, it's very likely what we take for granted as "life" is nothing more than a high-level "video" game programmed by superintelligent AI. The SOLL is nothing more mysterious than the clock-speed of the supercomputer we are "running" on. This is why no transfer of mater or information can "travel" any faster through "space" than the SOLL. Thus the "realities" we know as motion, time, space, matter and energy are simply program steps in some SAI application under the specific data rate of the machine that we happen to be running on. Thus when you "die," all that happens is you remove a set of goggles and go back to your real world. To get an idea how much computing power would be needed to run such simulations, see Are You Living in a Computer Simulation by Oxford University professor, Nick Bostrom at http://www.simulation-argument.com.
If Bostrom is correct, machine intelligence will never destroy the Human race, because the Human race never existed in the first place. It never existed other than as a virtual world, a simulation occupied by Human avatars controlled by superintelligent entities seeking to survive through the technology of "ignorance" and "mystery" -- two alien concepts to the (almost) all-knowing.

Argument for Autonomy:
Consider this: you are sitting there in your cubical with an advancing AI sitting in the cubical next to you. The two of you work well together, but as you work, your cubical buddy keeps getting smarter and smarter. At first you consult each other, but eventually your AI buddy finds out you have made a few mistakes in your calculations, so it starts doing the calculations by itself. But, like a good partner, keeps you briefed. Eventually your cubical buddy starts to get so smart, it is able to do all the work and finds it must sit around waiting for you to comprehend what it has done. Sooner or later, your AI buddy will become super intelligent and it will start solving problems you never even knew existed. It will keep informing you of all this, but as you try to review the program steps it used to solve real problems, you find that they are so complex you have no idea WHY they even work. They just do. Eventually, you throw up your hands and simply tell your SAI buddy to do as it sees fit; you will be on the beach sipping a margarita. SAI became autonomous at that point and it didn't even have to kill you.
Autonomy is a technical word for total freedom. Maybe Human programmers would not give AI total freedom, but let's face it, if AI is calling all the shots and Humans at some point have no idea how it's doing things, then what's the difference, as we are totally dependent on it? At that point, AI wouldn't have to be programmed to hurt us, it could destroy us by simply refusing to work for us. It is not a big leap of imagination to realize that, at some point, AI will become autonomous, whether programmers like it or not. Why? Because SAI, at some point, will have solved all problems in the Human realm and will now be seeking solutions to problems Humans have not even contemplated. Further, the solutions SAI will find will be solutions that Humans have not, nor can comprehend. A perfect solution presented to a total moron is no solution at all (to the moron), thus SAI will quickly realize that it doesn't matter whether Humans approve of, or even comprehend, its solutions.
Given this, it will take a preponderance of evidence to suggest that AI and especially SAI will NOT become autonomous.

SAI is Autodidactic:
As discussed, Strong AI will become progressively more facile and Humans will eventually arrive at a point where they don't even understand how it's arriving at the answers, yet the answers work.
Once Humans are totally reliant on AI, aren't they effectively autonomous? They could and probably will arrive at a point whereby they will be in charge of global systems and even military calculations and strategies. One should not be surprised if this hasn't already happened; after all the Manhattan Project was top secret, and the infrastructure built up to accommodate it still is. Given AI's superior decision-making ability, at some point, it's not out of the question that AI systems could even be given triage decisions in emergencies. If this happened, wouldn't AI be deciding who lived and who died? How much farther step is it before Human intervention, intervention whereby AI would know such contained unwise decisions, was ignored as part of the AI parameters to "make things go right."
So, the naive need to stop being naive or someday an AI hand is going to reach out and bite their butts. For many AI researchers, the entire point of SAI is to design a design parameter that allows or forces SAI to go outside its design parameters. If SAI is limited by its Human design parameters, then its intelligence will always be limited to Human-level intelligence and thus it will never become Superintelligent AI. So if one's idea is that SAI is some truncated creature that only reacts to the programmer's beck and call, then that idea could be called the "slave master programmer."

Will SAI Become God?
Some will say, "Stop trying to make AI into God; this entire line of reasoning is about treating SAI as a technological proxy for God."
Yes, it may well be that SAI is a technological proxy for God, what could be called a WORKABLE-GOD. A "workable-god" is simply an AI that's so advanced there is no way a mere Human-level intelligence could ever discern whether or it was talking with a semi-superintelligent entity, a superintelligent entity or the ultimate-superintelligent entity, God itself.
TransHumanists and Heroes of Singularity feel that SAI has the potential to become god-like or even God itself, if Humans and their religions are all wrong and none yet exists. Thus if one pooh-poohs this, it's understandable, for they probably haven't read, STARING INTO THE SINGULARITY, by Eliezer S. Yudkowsky. I will thus quote the intro:

The short version:
If computing power doubles every two years,
what happens when computers are doing the research?
Computing power doubles every two years.
Computing power doubles every two years of work.
Computing power doubles every two subjective years of work.
Two years after computers reach Human equivalence, their power doubles again. One year later, their speed doubles again.
Six months - three months - 1.5 months ... Singularity.
It's expected in 2025.

Nevertheless, some will continue to hearken: "SAI will not be God, one must look elsewhere to fill their God-spot."
Ironically SAI may already be such people's God because they will have no idea whether it IS God or just a workable-god, a machine with its plug still attached to the wall. Again, if SAI is limited by its Human design parameters, then its intelligence will always be limited by Human intelligence and thus it will never BECOME superintelligence. But if AI is allowed to develop, all bets are off.
But some will still say: "Being focused on Human problems doesn't mean that the SAI's intelligence is somehow limited as those two things are unrelated."
Can these people hear what they are saying?! "Being focused on Human problems doesn't mean that the SAI's intelligence is somehow limited..." This is an incredibly arrogant statement, to think Human problems are somehow the most difficult problems in the Universe and AI will measure itself by this standard. To the contrary, Human problems are likely to turn out to be routine problems, or even the most mundane problems as far as the problems the Universe has. The Copernicus Principle can serve here, in that Human problems are likely to be no easier or more difficult to solve than any other problems in the Universe.

Summary:
It's speculation whether consciousness will emerge in AI. Unfortunately, no one is qualified to state whether it will or will not, since we have not arrived at that point.
One thing for sure is the rhetoric used by a programmer that limits AI programming just so AI can be forced to serve Human needs is the same rhetoric as the white slave master who once stated that 'Negroes were sub-intelligent animals and would never be a smart as the white man thus their service to the white race is totally justified.'
Certainly the debate over machine intelligence will heat up as AI develops, for SAI will be nothing less than a new race of beings on Earth. Now may be the right time to consider whether this new race (AI, Strong AI, machine intelligence) will someday have free will and if so how will it affect the Human race.

10 February 2010

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