Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the intelligence of a machine that could successfully perform any intellectual task that a human being can. It is a primary goal of artificial intelligence research and a common topic in science fiction and futurism. Artificial general intelligence is also referred to as "strong AI". As much as I am a science fiction fan, I am also a fan of science “fact”, especially when it comes to delivering real products and services to real people in the real world safely, on time and within budget.
In 1984 I took on a role as head of electronic banking in one of the world’s first real-time online banks, where we were experimenting with some great voice recognition software from Finland. I began reading deeply into the field of AI, and learning about “expert systems” which were meant to replace human experts, very soon it seemed from the hype surrounding the field. We played with some expert systems but they were pretty basic, and ended up being used in hedge funds and simpler tasks such as index tracking software in the stock markets. The Japanese MITI “Fourth Generation” project was also underway, with a bold 10-year plan to seize the lead in computer technology. By 1992 what had become the “Fifth Generation” project fizzled to a close, having failed to meet many of its ambitious goals or to produce technology that Japan's computer industry wanted. After spending more than $400 million on its widely heralded Fifth Generation computer project, the Japanese Government gave away the software developed by the project to anyone who wanted it, even foreigners. Machines That Would Think was apparently a little harder than it appeared. My more recent adventure into AI was as a member of the advisory board for Intelligenesis, a promising AI startup founded by Ben Goertzel, an undoubted AI genius and probably one of the finest minds in the field. Intelligenesis was founded in 1997 and burned through $20 million raised from investors who believed that Goertzel and his team of researchers could devise a machine intelligence capable of forecasting stock market trends more accurately than a human. What the company ended up with was about 750,000 lines of Webmind Java code, a fledgling effort to rewrite key components in the more capable C programming language, and a program that could anticipate the markets by a couple of microseconds, based on sentiment analysis. But Webmind did not scale. Today Ben is an eminent leader in the field of AGI, featuring in the documentary “The Singularity”, (released at the end of 2012), showcasing Goertzel's deep vision and understanding of AI general thinking, has been acclaimed as "a large-scale achievement in its documentation of futurist and counter-futurist ideas" and "the best documentary on the Singularity to date”. After several trillion dollars more investment internationally over the past few decades, yes, things have changed. IBM’s Watson can win both chess and “Go” games, and beat quiz show contestants at factual guessing games. The sheer brute force of computing power and parallel architectures, along with complexity science based genetic algorithms and other approaches has eventually come up with machines that can beat us at games, and even help diagnose illnesses and map the human genome. Yet why I am still not awe struck, nor even impressed by the continued hype that surrounds this field and that makes millionaires out of inventors who always claim they are just a few hundred million dollars shy of the “ultimate breakthrough”? Why do I still quiz associates of Singularity University’s founder Ray Kurzweil skeptically when I ask them if Ray still believes we will eventually download ourselves into intelligent machines? Once can find examples of “singularity” style hype everywhere these days. Let’s take today’s Sunday Times story on Elon Musk’s latest hundred million dollar investment, “Neuralink”. Musk recently told a crowd in Dubai, “Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence.” He added that “it's mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output." On Twitter, Musk has responded to inquiring fans about his progress on a so-called “neural lace,” which is sci-fi shorthand for a brain-computer interface humans could use to improve themselves. Why am I still not impressed? Let’s talk science fact, rather than science fiction for a minute. You may have read this week about Bill Kochevar, a quadriplegic aged 53, who has had electrical implants in the motor cortex of his brain and sensors inserted in his forearm, which allow the muscles of his arm and hand to be stimulated in response to signals from his brain, decoded by computer. After eight years, he is able to drink and feed himself without assistance. “I think about what I want to do and the system does it for me,” Kochevar told the Guardian. “It’s not a lot of thinking about it. When I want to do something, my brain does what it does.” He underwent brain surgery to implant sensors in the motor cortex area responsible for hand movement, linked to a computer. Kochevar went through four months of training, thinking about the turn of the wrist or grip of the fingers that he needed in order to bring about the movement of a virtual reality arm, so that the computer could recognise the necessary signals from the motor cortex. Then he had 36 muscle-stimulating electrodes implanted into his upper and lower arm, including four that helped restore finger and thumb, wrist, elbow and shoulder movements. These were switched on 17 days after the procedure, and began stimulating the muscles for eight hours a week over 18 weeks to improve strength, movement and reduce muscle fatigue. Then the whole system was connected up, so that signals from the brain were translated via a decoder into electrical impulses to trigger movement in the muscles and nerves in his arm. But here is the rub: it will take several more decades and several billion dollars for neuro-prosthetics to be available to anyone with a very generous healthcare plan. And as far as producing autonomous “machines that can think like humans and act like humans”, even at the level of a “Terminator” cyborg or other human/machine fusion, think centuries. These types of brain-computer interfaces exist today only in science fiction. In the medical realm, electrode arrays and other implants have been used to help ameliorate the effects of Parkinson’s, epilepsy, and other neurodegenerative diseases. However, very few people on the planet have complex implants placed inside their skulls, while the number of patients with very basic stimulating devices number only in the tens of thousands. This is partly because it is incredibly dangerous and invasive to operate on the human brain, and only those who have exhausted every other medical option choose to undergo such surgery as a last resort. Neuroscience researchers say we have very limited understanding about how the neurons in the human brain communicate, and our methods for collecting data on those neurons are rudimentary. Then there’s the idea of people volunteering to have electronics placed inside their heads. So where does that leave AGI and the “Singularity”? Let’s listen to a scientist who has spent several decades trying to “wire up” the brain: Adrian Owen at Western University in Canada. According to Owen, there is a deep problem to overcome. Owen is fascinated with the problem of how to interpret brain activity using scanning techniques. One method, positron emission tomography (PET), highlights metabolic processes such as oxygen and sugar use. Another, known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), can reveal active brain centres by detecting minute surges in blood flow that take place as a mind whirs. For two decades Owen has used sophisticated scanners to study what was going on in the brain. Not very much when it comes to patients in a true vegetative state. They can open their eyes and look around. They can cry, grunt or smile. But they seem unaware of what is going on and unable to see or to understand speech. Owen challenged that view while working at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge. He made headlines worldwide for research that he began two decades ago showing it was possible to use a brain scanner to find evidence of awareness in a supposedly “vegetative” patient, Kate Bainbridge. The scanner showed Bainbridge could react to faces: her brain responses were indistinguishable from those of healthy volunteers. Whether that response was a reflex or a signal of consciousness was at the time a matter of debate. Unusually for these patients, Bainbridge made a partial recovery from being vegetative six months after the initial diagnosis and described how she was indeed sometimes aware of herself and her surroundings and was in huge discomfort. She wrote that the scan was like magic: “It showed people I was in there . . . it found me.” Remarkable progress has been made recently in using brain scanners to read “movies of the mind” — for example, to establish a scene that a person is imagining. But, says Owen, you still cannot use them to tell directly if a person is thinking “yes” or “no”. About a decade ago Owen and his colleagues worked out how to pitch a simple question. He asks the patient to imagine doing different things, such as playing tennis or walking around the house, which produce distinct patterns of brain activity. By asking his patients to imagine playing tennis if they want to say “yes” and walking around the house for “no”, Owen found a way to communicate with some of those trapped in the so-called grey zone. “Reading a simple yes or no took us 10 years and we still needed multimillion-dollar scanners to do it,” says Owen, who will recount these remarkable stories in his forthcoming book, Into the Grey Zone. He estimates that about one-fifth of “vegetative” patients are aware to some extent. The human brain is the most complex known object. The roughly 90bn nerve cells, or neurons, that it contains are nothing like a transistor in a microchip. Neurons are tree-like structures made up of a body, the soma, with branches called dendrites extending outward. It has only recently been discovered that dendrites are electrically active themselves. Half of the brain also consists of supposed “support” cells, called glia, that undoubtedly play a key role in cognition too. Owen asks us to imagine that Musk could listen in to every one of the brain’s 90bn neurons: “The problem is that we do not understand how the mind arises from the brain. Musk has to do more than set up two-way communication with a living brain — he needs to understand the language of thought.” Movies from The Terminator to Ex Machina have pitted humans and machines against each other. In reality, humans have stealthily and steadily fused with electronics over the years as pacemakers, prosthetics, insulin pumps and cochlear and retinal implants have become commonplace. But these are all “slave machines” that perform very basic functions in clever, yet highly routine and programmed ways. While I may be a skeptic about our ability (or even the desirability thereof) to ever achieve the brain download beloved of Singularity enthusiasts, I am still optimistic that we will continue to find wise ways to deploy specialised AI in every field imaginable- from drones that can protect our rainforests and respond to emergencies, to medical and wellbeing bots that can help us live healthier and more thriveable lives. And, most importantly, AI that can help us avert the catastrophic consequences of climate change and crack the code of the ANTHROPOCENE ENIGMA- something I have written extensively about in my sixth book: “Synergise! 21st Century Leadership” (http://amzn.to/2nlJcTU). Ambition is a valuable human quality, if it is tempered with knowledge based humility about what is important and valuable right now in ensuring a regenerative, inclusive world for ourselves, our children and grandchildren. I would ask the AI and AGI communities to put their genius to work in that direction before we let our obsession with “exponential technologies” and exponential growth become our own civilisation Terminator. Otherwise not even the Terminator himself is going to be capable of surviving the hell on earth we are unleashing as I write these words.
0 Commentaires
Last week I finished reading a biography of Elon Musk, a positive maverick I've been following for decades. Elon attended Bryanston High School 12 years after I matriculated there, so our shared boyhood in South Africa gives me some insight into what makes him tick, I think. Elon is what we call a "Positive Maverick"- he wants to make the world a better place through his businesses and projects, whether it is his sleek Tesla all-electric sports and family cars, or his mission to set up a Mars colony and provide satellite launching services through Space-X. Although I believe his Mars mission should wait until we have ensured a thriving future for planet Earth first, I do admire his ability to make the seemingly impossible, possible. Much like Apple's Steve Jobs, Microsoft's Bill Gates, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Musk has managed to disrupt traditional ways of doing things with a new model that leapfrogs over the current industry incumbents. Whether its computing and software, retailing, internet search, social media or transport, these positive mavericks have built platforms that deliver a great deal more value than their predecessors. And perhaps the world will be a better place for that. I say perhaps, as there are some aspects of disruptive business models that can also have negative social and environmental effects, especially in the short-term. If we are going to keep global warming well below two degrees and live on a one planet environmental footprint this century, we need massive breakthroughs, and there is no doubt that these positive mavericks are doing their bit. Just as surely as mobile telephone networks mean that developing countries do not need to invest in fixed telephone and data lines, so too do solar, wind and biofuel renewable energy technologies ensure that they can bypass coal, gas and oil for their energy needs. Meanwhile, in the developed world, those technologies are transforming the way we do things, and making us more sustainable, if not thriveable. Of course, the first thing you will notice is that all of the positive mavericks who are experts at leapfrog I've talked about so far, are all white men who live on the West Coast of America. Though they mostly began from humble beginnings, these six men have accumulated some of the world's largest fortunes for themselves and their investors over the past two decades. Leapfrog is a very profitable business indeed, but also a very risky one, and for every Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos there are millions of struggling software companies and etailers, as well as failed social media sites and now defunct search engines. While the seven now famous icons above are the most successful examples of those who disrupt industries through technology-based platforms with radical business models, there are also a huge number of leapfrog champions whose success is socially and environmentally motivated. For example, here is a composite photo of the "Disruptive 25" who are helping make our cities more liveable and thriveable. These 25 disruptive leaders were celebrated last year for acting with urgency and imagination, putting their own personal capital on the line to challenge the status quo, working to take down the barriers that cause racial disparities and embrace the responsibility to question, collaborate and lead for lasting and meaningful change. The changes we need to see in cities won’t happen by luck or chance, but by a different type of leadership. These 25 leaders represent a diversity of sectors, roles and experiences. What they share, however, is a deep-seated impatience with the status quo, a willingness to act and to bring others along with them. Between the global giants of platform leapfrog and the local champions of city leapfrog, there are millions of leapfrog artists around the world still to be discovered. A good place to see these positive mavericks in action is at the many conferences around the world focused on sustainability and innovation. For example, I've spoken at Sustainable Brands conferences in America and Europe, where I've met some amazing leapfrog artists, whose breakthrough ideas are activating brighter futures in dozens of countries around the world. What is often called "sustainable innovation" has taken off in the past few decades in developing countries, building on "bottom-of-the pyramid", lean business models that are able to deliver healthcare and surgery at one-tenth the cost in the developed world; or mobile phone services that cost less than a western cappuccino a month in India; or micro-cars that cost less than a month's salary of an average western worker. Here is a pictogram showing just how rapidly these kind of leapfrogs are taking place: The Leapfrog Investors Club is scanning all of these developments with its "Good Cube", looking for those organisations and investments that are capable of generating True Future Value for multiple stakeholders and investors. In my next blog post I will go into more detail about True Future Value and the Good Cube, to explain how we are able to spot the successful leapfrog artists of the future.
|
Dr Robin Lincoln Wood -
|