more on who is on the committee?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Brad Templeton <btm () templetons com>
Date: July 16, 2005 6:07:03 PM EDT
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Re: [IP] who is on the committee?



Dave, you may be amused by an essay I wrote a few years ago which
was also published on Ray Kurzweil's AI news site.

It is entitled, "If we are lucky, our pets may keep us as pets."

Here is the HTML form:

    http://www.templetons.com/brad/apes.html

Here is the first part as plain text:

Many have debated just how the first superior or "post-human"
intelligences might come to be. While some don't think we'll ever
spawn something smarter than humans, many people in the AI, uploading,
nanotechnology and related communities think it's only a question of
how and when.

The big debate is whether we will do this by creating an "uploaded"
human being, or a true artificial intelligence. An uploaded human being
comes about by scanning the brain of an existing person in some fashion,
and using that information to create an artificial brain with the same
neural pathways and other connections and systems that make a brain what
it is. This uploaded person could be a re-creation of a living person
or a deceased one, or the process could be done gradually, replacing a
biological brain neuron by neuron, turning a living "cell"-based brain
into one based on something else right in the skull.

The uploaded person would think and act just like a traditional  
human, if
given a similar environment and body (biological or otherwise) to be  
part
of. However, the temptation to enhance this new brain would be  
tremendous,
and many predict such people would quickly become super-human. They  
would
start by thinking faster, and expanding and perfecting their memory and
other mental abilities. Then they might connect themselves with outside
data networks and databases, giving them the ability to learn knowledge
just by copying it, or gather more of it faster than any biological
human. And of course they (we?) will enhance their brains in ways that
present-day thinkers have not yet conceived.

Others expect the success will first come to the effort to create an
artificial intelligence with hand-written or evolved software, running
on computers like the ones we have today, or their successors. Such
beings would be more alien to us than uploaded people, though they
would be our children in a fairly real sense, designed at first by us,
instilled with our values, and quite possibly raised by us as children
are. However, clearly they will begin superior to us in many aspects
(perfect memories, superb mathematical and rote skills and much more)
and initially inferior to us in others. It's hard to dispute that soon
they would surpass our biological abilities in a wide variety of areas.

Modern humans can't really conceive of how these "post humans"
would think or act, any more than apes can write stories about human
philosophy. Indeed, noted author Vernor Vinge calls this point of
transition to post-human intelligence a "singularity," a metaphorical
reference to the mathematical discontinuities beyond which prediction
is impossible.

I happen to slightly favour the uploading camp. To upload a mind it is
necessary only to understand the lower level workings of the brain  
enough
to recreate them in another medium. One need not understand much about
the higher level activities which bring about conscious and intelligent
thought. Just as a hardware engineer can build a computer which can play
chess knowing only about how transistors and logic gates work. The chess
software she simply copies. To build a real AI requires that we actually
either understand how intelligence works -- which we are not close to
doing, or perhaps that we understand its mid-level functions and create
something we can turn intelligent by raising it over the course of many
years, just as we do with our own babies.

However, the uploading scenario presents a rather disturbing
conclusion. The first super-beings may not be based on humans at all,
but instead may be apes.

In the course of modern science, it is always the case that we  
experiment
with animals first, years before we attempt anything on people. It's the
ethical way, and in many cases the only legal way. As such, as we  
develop
the technology to scan or convert an existing brain into an artificial
form, we'll try this first on animals. We'll start with lower ones,
and then work up to our closest relatives, the chimpanzee and bonobo.

Some suppose the uploading process might begin by scanning a
recently deceased human brain, which can be done with minimal legal
complication. Others feel it might be better to work with a living
brain, or a healthy brain that was killed deliberately for the purpose
of scanning -- what might be called a "destructive scan" if expressed
in cold technical language. We'll do this with apes several years before
we do it with humans. Of this I am fairly certain.

Indeed a great moment of success will come when somebody first creates
an artificial brain that is a copy of a real chimp's brain, and which
is shown to all outside signs to act, think and remember like the
original living chimp. It is unlikely that scientific ethics or law
would allow things to be done with humans until the process has been
reliably demonstrated multiple times on apes. That even applies to dead
humans, since many, including myself, would argue that the human with a
non-biological brain is still a human being and worthy of certain  
rights.

Once this chimp brain is created, it will cause a flurry of
research. Quite possibly, the "software" part of the brain will be
published and made available for others to work on, and the hardware
will be readily available too.

Indeed, the software of this chimp brain might be made available for
free distribution. An "open source" ape, for all to experiment on.

And they will experiment on it. Once again, even if a human brain is
similarly available, moral and legal considerations will limit what
experimentation can be done, while actions on the ape-brain will  
probably
not be nearly as limited.

Apes however are remarkably similar to humans. As you may know, chimps
share 98% of our DNA. In addition, we have made intensive study of the
ways in which they are different, and we will attempt to learn more.

Thus some of the first experiments on this artificial chimp brain  
will be
to enhance it along the lines that humans and chimps are different.  
Humans
are not so qualitatively different in our brains from chimps, though the
fiew differences have a magnified effect in our capabilities. We have
more of certain types of brain structures, and some of our structures
are larger and have more neural connections. There is no component of a
human brain not found in a chimp brain. Experimenters will quickly try
to see what happens if you modify those aspects of the working chimp
brain. They will also "graft" information from post-mortem and live
scans of human brains, where available.

If the artificial chimp brains "run" much faster than biological ones,
they will be able to perform these experiments quickly. They may be
able to have their computer play out a thousand different experimental
scenaria, each playing out years of biological scale time -- perhaps
in just a day of real time. They will quickly learn what works and what
doesn't, what enhances and what doesn't. And there will be many of them.

I think quite quickly they could create a chimp brain capable of human
level intelligence or beyond. She may then need training or "rearing"
by real human parents, but she will be a very quick and supremely  
capable
learner. All this will happen much more quickly than the ethical changes
to occur which would allow scientists to do similar experiments on human
based brains.

Rest of essay continues at...

    http://www.templetons.com/brad/apes.html


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