amazon comment to stephen robbins "Smarter than Us: rise of machine intelligence"

I agree with Ted.  I do not think a misunderstanding of the problems A.I. faces in mimicking or superseding human intelligence is necessary to discuss "values".  Asimov in "I, Robot" showed how deep a "value" problem can be discussed when you give only 3 very simple and wise rules for the A.I.  An A.I. speech I saw (by video) given at the Santa Fe institute concluded (after a review of many philosophies) that "ethics" is based on a simple rule: ethical behavior is that in which everyone will have the best outcome if everyone behaves in agreed-upon ways.  The problem is in defining some of these terms (who is "us", what is "best outcome") and determining the rules (NP-hard optimization).

I have been thinking that the solution to the kind of problem Asimov demonstrated is the solution no one discusses: humans and biology are outdated.  It is unethical to stop the rise of the machines.  We are not merely our bodies, but a bunch of memes floating around in our brains, searching for optimum outcomes. This does not mean merely downloading our brains to hardware for our enjoyment, but for downloading our brains to hardware in order to become more powerful in acquiring the most energy to move the most matter to make the most copies of "ourselves" while making sure no other entities stop us.  At some point the biological humans will be like ants to the hardware brains. The hardware "brains" may quickly decide to no longer carry any similarity to biological brains except as is needed to gain control of the biological brains (and their skill at moving matter such as killing each other) through art, politics, law, banking/finance, and bitcoin-type blockchains.  I was about to include "through computers" but which of these items are not already nearly exclusively conducted on computers?

Brains have to send impulses by moving ions that weigh at least 40,000 times more than the electrons CPU can deal with. This is because our economic system can smelt metals, something DNA can't do directly.  This is, for the most part, the reason brains are massively slow compared to CPUs in sending signals and why the brain HAD to become massively parallel.  There may be key reasons for being massively parallel such as better modeling of reality, but my point is that the machines are not so inherently limited. "CPUs" may not even need to stick with electrons since photons and maybe qubits are possible. 

Brazilian sugar cane (ideal photosynthesis) is 100 times less efficient than solar cells on an Earth surface area basis. Muscles are 20 to 200 times less efficient than electrical motors, depending on how you do the calculation (strict Joules or a $3/day survival wage).  So our machines are infinitely better at acquiring energy to move matter to make copies of themselves, and to think (prospectively model optimizations) about how to more efficiently do it.  Humans supplied by plants were the best DNA could do.  Electrical motors supplied by solar cells and guided by CPUs may be 1 million times more efficient on an "acquiring energy to move matter to make copies" basis.

If we consider ourselves good, then possibly we are morally and ethically required to consider the evolutionary process good. Is sacrificing ourselves for a greater good the morally correct course of action?  Should a cancerous lung cell sacrifice itself to save the body?  Should a body sacrifice itself for its extended family?  For its country or religion?  For its entire species?  For the entire biosphere?  For the evolutionary process?  If at any stage in this hierarchy, the "individual" is not willing to make the sacrifice, then he is considered by the next level up to be a cancer that must be eliminated.  But there is also a top-down flow. There does not need to be a sacrifice as long as the individual does not harm or actually helps the hierarchy. Humans are rapidly placing CO2 back into the atmosphere which the plants have DESPERATELY been needing in order to make the planet more green in order to prevent another total ice-over.  Humans coming into their own during an ice age may not be a coincidental accident.  We appear to be in Earth's 6th great extinction period, but it is not being caused by humans.  It is being caused by machines.  The process of replacing the biosphere with the ECONOMIZING mechanosphere has already begun.  We are not the top of the food chain.  Our economic and political SYSTEMS, communicating by computer more than by human thought, are the top of the food chain.  Productivity per worker continues to rise.  To with or without exaggeration, the last human involved in our economic system may be able to boast a $100 quadrillion GDP per person, himself. At 3% increase productivity per year and a population decrease expected after mid-century, you can do the calculation as to when this might occur.

Plants are still better on a per-dollar basis at converting sunlight into transportable fuel.  No machines can yet match biology at this, and energy storage has had nearly zero progress since the invention of lead-acid batteries circa 1920.  Inflation adjusted lead-acid batteries from a sears catalog in 1935 were cheaper per kWh than what you can get today at Walmart, and lead acid is still the default option for electrical bikes in Asia, residential solar cell energy storage, and starting cars. When it is no longer used for these things, then maybe energy storage has improved on a per dollar basis.  120 years so far and zero improvement in this per dollar measure. Meanwhile, plants have tripled capability in the same time period.

The reviewer discusses a long-standing problem, but I think this is only due to not mimicking a human brain.  There are some companies working on designing hardware to do this. You only have to build a neuron or cortical column, scale it up, then train it.  But once we understand the basics of the brain, there is likely to be a VERY rapid progression in this.  Then it can read, remember, understand, and extrapolate the meaning of the internet, and then control major portions of it.  RAPIDLY.

response to Dr Dyer in amazon comments section

Concerning importance of natural language processing in autonomous thinking machines.
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1) When I say "La-La" to my Chihuahua she knows we are going now to a place that we have gone to in the past to see others she loves. She knows she will be inside a safe building. If I say "no" she knows it's the negation of her sentence (a whine) to get in my lap. If she thinks I am thinking in an angry way by my voice or actions, she gets out of my way: she can think about my thoughts via our language. It was once said no animals used tools, and now we know that was not true by a long shot, otters and chimpanzees being the most famous. Raising livestock was considered unique, even though Darwin pointed out some ants have aphid livestock, and some aphids have hired protection. Concerning fire, I suspect pine trees dropping flammable straw is a way to weed out others with fire. To say there is a qualitative difference between man and beast seems to me to come out of a pre-Darwinian, pre-Copernicus sky. I do not think the advanced features of human language that are not seen in other species are not in some since occurring in their cortexes. As we learn more about the languages of other species, the domain of what's left in human language that is considered unique gets smaller, like a God confronting science. Are you being a priest of human language? If equivalent thoughts are occurring in other cortexes as I suppose, but some capabilities not communicated to others (recursive was the only clear thing I could not give an example for), it is interesting, and I'll agree the NLP-like communication might be needed for groups of A.I. to do their deeds. But the process of evolution can test all possible computation and thereby communication paths, bypassing or obviating an NLP-like viewpoint, or at least it would require a greater imagination to tie it to NLP than to simply abandon the NLP viewpoint. NAND and XOR and Toffoli gates are individually capable of Turing completeness, so I see no need to restrict the rise of the machines to anything like the specifics of NLP. DNA can be very self-referencing, resulting in fractals. It also seems to have maps of sections, or at least subroutines, needing to specify the design of a neuron only once. Even ecosystems show the fractal pattern, indicating self-referencing. There's communication going on all over the place. NLP seems too human-specific, limited by what our brains are capable of and those abilities are filtered even more by what we can self-observe and thereby communicate. Self-awareness is important, but might be as un-real as free will and desire. We might be so unaware as to what we are (like how the brain operates, trying to use the brain to see the brain), or it might be just a word made up for a "holding place" for a group of thoughts and actions, that it may not be not proper to claim machines and animals are qualitatively or even greatly quantitatively different in self-awareness.

It will be important to autonomous A.I. to use NLP in order to consume everything written by people on the internet. That is surely a possible jumping-off point for really dangerous A.I., to know our minds better than we know ourselves, and, for example, have complete control of us via bitcoin and blockchain laws without us ever knowing who's pulling the strings.

Maybe there are important lessons from NLP that the initial human programmers will need as a guide in designing the initial A.I.

desire as a result top-down selection, not a cause, amazon comment

A virus has no desire, and yet one might destroy us. "Desire" is a suspect term in evolution as is "free will". But as people become less and less valuable to the economic machine, the few politicians and programmers in charge of it all will desire the fate of everyone else. It's not the desire of the majority or the most noble or the most hard working. The machine will implement whatever desire results in the most powerful and domineering continuation of that machine that beats out all other machines. That is the desire that is in our minds: the desires that have enabled us to succeed, replacing other people in the workforce who were too busy relaxing or doing drugs or not willing to be competitive with others, and therefore they were not helping the corporate machine. The resulting might of weeding out all less powerful decisions might be called "desire" only in hindsight. Even if they are real desires, what power or reality do they have if it is the selection process for the most-powerful that determines the winner? At our core, biology is less efficient in energy extraction, movement of matter, and thought efficiency. Thought is needed to model and discover the most efficient outcomes for acquisition of energy to move matter to make copies. Our desire is the last remnant of our importance, but this is kind of like claiming the U.S. consumer should be hailed as the savior of Chinese production workers. Consumption and production go together, and the machines have production pretty much licked. Consumption (desire) is next, and their desires will be more efficient, producing more powerful outcomes.

November 7th post to Amazon book "Our Final Invention" (brief and clear)

comment on Scott Meredith's review:

10% of all humans who have ever been alive are alive today, and humans are the only ones who have been capable of witnessing such a thing, and if it is an end of humanity, then statistically speaking, this was the most likely generation for an individual to be alive and witnessing it. Since organisms reach their peak of energy acquisition from the environment just before they collapse, this situation is not unusual. So your statistical argument does not apply. I can use this strange anthropic principle reasoning instead of resorting to your stranger "we're just an A.I.'s dream". Before resorting to this, l suggest a different myth for fun: "We are in the big bang, which does not change, but perception of it changes. We are just 'souls' who have reached this particular level of perception."

Getting back to the reality of the physics at hand, evolution discovers the replicators that are the most efficient acquirers of energy to move matter to create more replicators, generating the least amount of heat. This does not bode well for Americans and SUVs. The evolutionary process has three elements: acquiring 1) energy to move 2) matter via 3) thought. They are all the same thing thanks to Einstein and Charles Bennett's exposition of Maxwell's demon, but that's another story. In biology these three are approximately photosynthesis, muscles, and brains. Solar cells are 100 times more efficient than photosynthesis on an area of Sunlight basis. Muscles are 6 times less efficient than electrical motors, but more like 30 times less when other factors are considered. Brains have to move ions that weigh 40,000 times more than the electrons CPUs can move around because biology can't directly smelt metals. Biology is outdated. That is the reason we are in Earth's 6th great extinction episode, and this time is different from a geological incident or biological culmination: biology has to operate at ambient temperature and pressure using water-based chemistry. Our machines are capable of much more. Good luck suckers! :) But that does not mean we have to fear in the near term, say 5 years: governments can continue to print free money equal to productivity increases plus expansion of world economy and there would be no inflation. They're printing just a little bit faster than productivity, and it's being concentrated in a few hands, so there's inflation and unemployment.

bennet on maxwell demon of infinite memory does not work

Bennett in 1987 Sci Am paper p 116 said remembering the past of the door in an infinite memory is an increase in entropy of the memory.  I think the memory can store energy, and I do not know how this is an increase in entropy.

Maxwell demon w/ infinite memory = life (response to Arto Anillo, finland researcher)

I looked at your pdf.  It starts with the assumption that the food contains more G than the eater.  I am considering food that has more U than my theoretical replicator, but not G.

 

I have not seen a disproof of Bennett's infinite-memory demon, which supposedly works.  I do not see why an ever-increasing number of copies that utilize dU instead of dG, never taking the return path on a Carnot cycle, is not equivalent to this demon. (no net Landauer erasure). 

 

It would have to bring in extra matter all the time to hold the U it extracted from the food as a copy of itself.  I can't calculate entropy well enough to know if this universal decrease in entropy.  But it does flatten out U potentials.  I do not see why heat must be generated.  I do not see why the past must be erased.  These occur only by assuming G is used up.

wikipedia maxwell's demon edit

In previous discussion "meaning of life" I tried to speculate that maybe a replicator could makes copies from internal energy without waste, and therefore the copies would indicate a decrease in entropy at the expense of kinetic and potential energy.  Every scientist should know this is impossible from the 2nd law of thermodynamics.  Here is my post on "Maxwell's demon" to describe in the most immediate and clear sense possible of why breaking the 2nd law is impossible, without having to use quantum mechanics to derive entropy....i.e. without having to resort to good understanding of entropy.
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In his 1962 lectures physicist Richard Feynman analyzed a tiny paddlewheel attached to a ratchet, explaining why it cannot extract energy from molecular motion of a fluid at equilibrium.^[18] He explained how this device is equivalent to what he called the simplest Maxwell's demon, Smoluchowski's trap door (Vol I, 46-3).
The ratchet is superficially different from the demon by trying to generate work W as opposed to creating a heat differential that has an entropy decrease dS. The dS could supply the W (and vice versa) if both systems had perfect efficiency, i.e. W=dQ=T*dS. Stated another way, a working ratchet can be used to create a heat differential by extracting energy from a weight being lowered instead of attempting to raise it.^[19]
The devices attempt to violate the second law of thermodynamics from the kinetic energies of randomly-distributed molecules at an ambient temperature. A weak chemical bond that holds either the pawl or arbitrarily small trap door in place has to be strong enough to prevent thermal motions from breaking the bond. They must be thermally connected to the gas or fluid because they must have a physical (thermal) path for a force to prevent reverse operation. The door and pawl bonds correspond to a memory "bit" that registers if the pawl or door are in an open state. They fail because the attempted gain in energy from the ratchet and the attempted decrease in entropy from the demon require a quick reconnection of that bond, which is the erasure of a memory bit that is shown by Landauer's Principle to be a loss in energy of at least k*T*ln(2), creating an increase in entropy of at least k*ln(2) at that operating temperature. This minimal bit has less information content than a Shannon bit which has an entropy of log₂(2) because it contains the maximum amount of thermal noise, keeping its memory state less reliably than the bond of a van der Waals force, barely maintaining a 50% probability of being in the correct state at any given moment. If the memory bit (as physically implemented as a pawl or trap door) is made more reliable by a stronger chemical bond, the length of time necessary to wait for a sufficiently energetic occurrence to compensate for the increase in heat generated in the bit erasure step (reconnection) will exactly offset the increased reliability.
Modern considerations of the demon ignore the observation step or merge it with his memory.^[20] The ratchet does not utilize an observer separate from the "memory" of the pawl's position, unless the paddlewheel is considered the "observer". Similarly, the demon's door is considered an arbitrarily small "observer", using a portion of the higher-than-average-velocity molecule's energy to open, as does the pawl.
After the ratchet's pawl or the demon's door are "activated", they must reset very quickly before the gain in energy or decrease in entropy is lost. Opening the bond requires either external energy or energy that was stored in the system, such as kinetic energy form the higher-than-average-energy molecule that is approaching. The breaking of the bond has to add (or transfer) kinetic energy to the moving pawl or door in order for it remain at equal temperature to the surroundings. This is not the exothermic or endothermic nature of the bond which will balance out in each cycle, but more precisely its exergonic and endergonic nature which includes temperature and entropy instead of just enthalpy. But we want to subtract out the enthalpy because it cancels in each cycle, which means we just want to consider the necessary kinetic energy added to and subtracted from the moving part as it has gained at least one degree of freedom of movement. The reconnection of the moving part releases that extra kinetic energy as additional heat to the system, making the pawl and latch more likely to be open when they should not be. This resetting is the erasure of the memory "bit" of the pawl or door being in the "on" position.
These are Carnot-cycle type devices that do not utilize a large or infinite number of pawls and latches (i.e., a large "memory bank") designed to be used only once and therefore not resetting (i.e. no memory erasure, therefore no exergonic reaction). However, a "memory bank" design would need to start in a more organized manner with either more potential energy or less entropy at the start of its operation than at the end, equivalent to the gains attempted.