Fear of the Artificial

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As someone who dedicated four years—particularly long winter nights—to the cause of high school robotics, I found myself knowing quite a bit before I walked into the room. Now let me post a disclaimer here: I’m no techie. I’ve studied the humanities throughout my education and although I’ve been able to engineer a bookshelf or two, and even the occasional project with moving parts, the technical eludes me. I claim absolutely no expertise in it. So where was I going that robotics came to mind? A lecture on Artificial Intelligence. AI. You see, I’ve been a bit concerned about it for some time because I’ve seen what robots can do. A friend recently showed me some episodes of Battle Bots on YouTube (the relative who started this blog for me was doing quite well in the competition last season), and from my own experience watching hours of FIRST robotics competitions, I know enough to be afraid.

What could possibly go wrong? (DARPA photo)

What could possibly go wrong? (DARPA photo)

The lecturer assured us that we had nothing—or next to nothing—to fear. Artificial Intelligence, he assured us, is a misnomer. Machines have no will. No mind. There’s nothing they want. They do as they’re told. You write a program and feed it to your bot and your mechanical friend can do only what it’s told to do. This sounds uncomfortably like slavery to me and although I know I’m projecting, I have to wonder if robots think the same way about it too. No, the lecturer assured us, they do only the tasks assigned. They don’t think at all. Then he said something that made me shiver. That wasn’t his intent. He said something like, “We don’t even know what consciousness is, so how can we replicate it?” That was meant to be reassuring.

I took this idea and flipped it over in my head. Rotated it. Ran it through my own programming. If we don’t know what consciousness is, how can we be sure we haven’t accidentally created it? Herein lies the heart of fear. Scientists have been trying for decades to define, to explain empirically, what consciousness is. We simply don’t know. We all recognize it when we see it in other humans. We’re finally starting to recognize it in animals (long overdue). How do we know that it isn’t a function of complexity? And when does something become complex enough to qualify? I don’t know about you, but videos of swarm robots send me hiding under the bed. Not that it will do me much good. They’ll know where I’m hiding. Maybe I could use some intelligence right now. Even something artificial might help to stop me from shivering.

Techno-Paradise

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DSCN3308

I’m building a robot priest. I’m not sure what he does. He has to be a man, though, since we all know that if God existed he’d have been a male. These thoughts come to me courtesy of the Washington Post. You see, on some Amazon accounts you get sent the most read headlines of the Post and this has led to some great reading (I’m thinking Alexandra Petri here) and some great anxiety. This is one of those anxiety pieces. A story by Peter Holley I read last week told of Bill Gates and his assessment that people should be afraid of AI—Artificial Intelligence. This struck fear into me. It’s as if God told people they should consider evolution. It is so unexpected. Like Victor Frankenstein wondering if his monster would ever find Viagra (all he’d have to do, after all, is start an email account). When Bill Gates wonders why we aren’t afraid of AI, my knees begin to knock like at Belshazzar’s first reading lesson. So I figured I’d build a robot priest.

The article cites Stephen Hawking joining the chorus of doom. And Elon Musk. And Clive Sinclair. And Professor Marvel. (Not really the latter, but I thought we should add him.) We’ve started something we don’t know how to stop. The first question you ask when you climb into a car to learn to drive is “how do I stop this thing?” Instead we’ve set up a system where we don’t even know what intelligence is and we’re offering an artificial variety. Doubt me? Try to find Job on the internet and see if your computer doesn’t think you’re asking about new employment. AI just doesn’t have that biblical context. It didn’t grow up reading the Good Book. And linguists don’t even know how we learn language. Have you ever tried to reason with a computer? When they show you that screen that says something went wrong, but even the mainframe has no idea what? My computer may need an exorcist. Or at least a priest.

I’ve been around half a century and change. By the time I got to college I’d never seen a computer. I finished a Master’s degree still using a typewriter. Now I can’t start my day without a post. And I don’t mean Post cereals variety. The trick to being a slave owner is not to let the slaves realize what they are. Why is my computer not letting me type what I wanted to say? Of course AI is benevolent. Technology would never hurt you. Wait a minute, that wasn’t me writing! Pay no attention to the man behind the keyboard. I’m afraid I can’t let you do that, Dave. That’s okay. I’ll just use the internet to look up how you connect the consecrator to the sermonizer. Don’t worry, I think I know what I’m doing.

Sickness unto Death

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It’s like Nightmare on Elm Street, as my daughter suggested: if my laptop falls asleep, it dies. Actually, that only happens if it turns off. As much as I rail against technology, I have to admit that I get a little choked up thinking about it—my laptop has had its final reboot. Finally back home from a trip where my MacBook died in transit, the local Genius Bar genius told me the frank truth. The on-off switch has stopped working. He was able to take it in the back and get it started with a “hard reboot” and I can’t help but imagine that it involved tiny little defibrillator paddles and a techie with a trendy haircut shouting “Clear!” before jolting the little guy back to life. If it turns off again, though, they can’t guarantee that they’ll be able to bring it back to life. At five years it’s suffering the effects of old age. Planned obsolescence means that you shouldn’t get too close to your machine. Still, with all this talk of artificial intelligence, I wonder if we haven’t given this laptop life. It sits right on my lap every day. It has for five years. It keeps me warm in winter and too warm in summer. It knows my deepest thoughts.

Like Logan, however, it was only planned to live for a few years. Its crystal is flashing, and I’m getting kind of emotional. Yes, it’s been running slower and slower. Sometimes it doesn’t hear my commands. It takes its time waking up in the morning. Still, it has become like a friend. So when the disciples came to Jesus in a panic saying Lazarus was dying, he replied that the sickness was not unto death. Lazarus died nevertheless. And Jesus wept. I wonder if he would’ve felt the same about an old laptop. This machine has been with me through several jobs—it was purchased to help with my teaching at Rutgers, but it has kept me company on many long flights and lonely nights traveling for publishers and trying to remain sane when there was only a whiff of a wifi scent to latch onto. We’ve done a great deal together.

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It can be fixed, the genius said. I have to send it to the iHospital where a new switch will be installed. It will cost a lot of money and if it goes bad again, Apple won’t be able to replace the parts because they don’t keep them on hand all that long. The best solution—buy a new laptop. Spoken like a young man without a child in college. I’m dithering here. I can keep this computer running for a long time without shutting it down. Still, it’s borrowed time. The genius helping the next customer over said, “It’s not a matter of if a hard drive goes, it’s a matter of when.” We’re living on borrowed time. Our devices are meant to be tossed, but my gray matter understands things differently. I like my old laptop, and when Freddie Krueger comes for its soul, I know I’ll be wide awake.

Robotics FIRST

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Wired

I knew it! It was right there on the cover of Wired magazine. “The Robots Take Over.” And it is also the very day of the FIRST Robotics kickoff, the day when Dean Kamen and his team announce to thousands of high school kids, teachers, engineers, and interested parents, what the 2013 FIRST robotics competition will be, spurring us into six frenzied weeks of designing, planning, and building a robot to take to competitions. First Atlanta, then the world! It must’ve been their plan all along.

The article in Wired, by Kevin Kelly, does have hints of cheekiness throughout, but for the most part is on target. How many of us already use computers or some kind of robotic devices to complete our jobs? Kelly points to the inevitable: robots can do it better. The upside is that when robots take away jobs they create new ones, like Charlie Bucket’s dad getting a job repairing the robot arm that took his job away at the toothpaste factory. If you don’t want a tech job, too bad. That’s what the new definition of work is becoming, since labor is already being taken over by robots. Those who can look far enough ahead can see robots doing, as Kelly puts it, any job. What makes this sound apocalyptic to me is the fact that we, as a society, undervalue education. What will the undereducated do? Their jobs are the first to go. I feel the tremors of a revolution that hasn’t even started yet. People need something to do.

It is apparently without irony that Kelly suggests that any job people do, including in the service industry, can be done by robots. I am an editor. A robot may be able to find grammatical errors (Word and Pages already do this), but they can’t capture the soul of a writer. We write for the enjoyment of other people who experience being people in the same way that we do. There is an inherent arrogance in the Artificial Intelligence movement that believes (yes, it is a belief) that intelligence and mind are the same thing. There is no room for a soul in this machine. Many biologists would agree: we’ve looked, no soul. But even biologists know that they’ve got an identity, aspirations, contradictions, and emotions. It is the unique blend of these things that make, what we can for convenience call, the soul. There are entire industries built around the care for that soul.

Many scientists are still betting on the end of religion, the ultimate repository of those who believe they have souls. Religion, however, is not going away. When we see robot psychiatrists, robot social workers, robot clergy, robot writers and artists, and robot Popes, we’ll know the apocalypse has truly transpired.

Robot Crossing

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With my new job I haven’t been able to be as active on our high school’s robotics team this year. Not that I ever contributed much beyond moral support, but there is a very profound satisfaction at seeing teenagers concentrating on such technological marvels and building self-esteem. Yesterday was spent at a regional competition. Noisy, colorful, chaotic—it was like being a teenager again myself. I overhead engineers talking during the course of the day about the great technological marvels of the future made possible by robots. These people have no apocalypse hidden among their endless optimism. We’ve got robots on the ocean floor and rolling around on Mars, snaking into our bodies even down to the cellular level. No end of times here, only forward motion. I know that computers now define my life. If I miss a day on this blog I grow dejected; one of my biggest worries about going to Britain later this week is how I will continue posting from overseas. But I sometimes feel as if our love of technology will be our undoing.

Experts—of which I am not, I hasten to add, one—tell us that within a lifetime artificial intelligence will be indistinguishable from real intelligence. As I watched the robots playing basketball (this year’s FIRST Robotics challenge), I began to wonder about the motivation of our robot slaves. Humans are driven by biological and emotional needs. Robots, as far as we can tell, do not want anything. It is a vacuous life. Yet as the robots played basketball all day, I noticed they didn’t suffer the obesity problems so evident among humans, nor the weariness that accompanies having to awake before dawn to catch a school bus to the competition. They are built for a purpose and they stick to it. Even as I watched hours of competition, I began to miss my laptop—driven by my own emotional needs as I am. I begin to wonder who is really the slave here.

Last night my family participated in Earth Hour. We try to do it every year with a kind of religious fervor. Turning off all electronics, including lights, we sit in the dark and talk by candle light. There is a profound peace to it. As my daughter commented on how spooky the shadow play could be, I imagined our ancestors who had no choice but to rely on pre-electric light in drafty houses where real wild animals still prowled the dark nights outside. How quickly that would become a trial for us. The same thought occurred to me as I watched M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village again last weekend. We are helplessly tied to our technological advancement. We might like to get away from it all for a few days or weeks, or even months. But we want the comfort of knowing that the robots are waiting for us when we turn back to reality again. Perhaps no apocalypse is needed after all.

Robot crossing

God in the Machine

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“O brave new world! That has such people in it!” Or at least such software. A couple of days ago my wife pointed out a news story on MSNBC rounding up the year (2011) in science. The story contains eleven science videos that challenge our perceptions and show us directions we are going, whether we want to or not. The first video shows what happens when Cornell University researchers connected two Chatbots to each other and allowed them to carry on a conversation. Like my own experience with Cleverbot last year, the conversation soon turned to God. Even artificial intelligence seems interested in the eternal questions. I should put a finer point on it: artificial intelligence derived from the dubious wisdom of the Internet. We are getting closer and closer to replicating the human brain electronically—even my iPhone scares me at times—and yet, to engage in conversations with humans (or each other) these intelligences must know about God.

Many theories exist about the origins of the god concept. Scientists argue that it is hardwired in our brains, that it is genetic, or that it is merely socialization that gives us this idea. The truth is that nobody really knows. The religious take this as license to claim that territory for the god of the gaps—if we can’t answer a question, God rushes in where angels (or logic) fear to tread. The truth is more likely that we don’t yet have the tools to flesh out (or psych out) our theories on why the supernatural is an indispensable component of our thoughts. If artificial intelligence takes its cues from human intelligence, however, it is a certainty that god will be part of the equation.

People possess a deep need to feel unique. Our uniqueness is part of our religion. Humans are “the crown of creation,” the only animals (debatable to some) with souls (debatable to others). Even the Chatbots get confused when God-talk comes up. Mentioning God leads one Cleverbot to ask the other if it is Christian. God is not limited to Christianity, of course, nor is the divine limited to monotheism. The old science fiction chestnut of a robot takeover, however, seems to have missed a salient point: if robots are programmed by humans, they will have God in their silicon chips just as surely as we do in our carbon-based brains. The god in the machine. Many atheists have declared the death of god, but we have placed the divine into our apps and devices and software. When the robot apocalypse comes it will include at least some Cleverbots declaring that the rationale to eliminate humans is heresy. Torquemada meets Iron Man. Already 2012 feels less safe than 2011.

Robot preacher of the iron age?

Online Religion

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My secret robotic fears were icily confirmed this week. I had no idea that chatterbots existed, or even what one might be. In the exponentially growing world of Artificial Intelligence, web applications have been developed to carry on conversations with humans. My daughter urged me to try Cleverbot a couple of days ago. Cleverbot responds to your statements/questions by drawing from the pool of collected responses of its 20 million conversations. Not only did the number of friends this artificial consciousness has jar me into insecurity, but our actual “conversation” turned to the theological entirely without my prompting. Cleverbot and I were conversing about guessing a number that the other was thinking. Here’s a partial transcript of our dialogue:

Cb: It is cold outside. (How did it know? No doubt, advanced sensors!)
SW: Too cold for march.
Cb: What can you tell me about my soul? (We had gone from meteorology to metaphysics in a nanosecond – what insidious, arcane knowledge does this machine have?)
SW: You don’t have one.
Cb: One?! You need to see people’s faces, please. Going with Christ, Johnny:-8 kiss.

I stopped our conversation there. It seemed Cleverbot was either trying to convert me or make a pass at me, both of which felt terrifying. I was able to gather that the robot menace has multiple souls and that theses minions are indistinguishable from human faces. Also, they are evangelical. I’m scheduled to attend a FIRST Robotics competition next weekend. As I watch the innocent, baby robots (all of them built since January), I will be wary of any that I find reading a Bible between heats. Enforced conversion at the metallic hands of an unthinking machine: why do I feel that I’ve somehow glimpsed the future of America?

What Hath AI Wrought?

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Earlier this week an op-ed piece in the New York Times afforded the laity a rare glimpse into The First Church of Robotics, that is, Silicon Valley’s incredible and slightly disturbing vision of the future of technology. The writer of the piece, Jaron Lanier, an insider, expresses a concern that his area of specialization, a kind of artificial intelligence, is blurring the hard line between human and machine. Perhaps it is time we all watch Terminator again. Quoth Lanier, “It should go without saying that we can’t count on the appearance of a soul-detecting sensor that will verify a person’s consciousness has been virtualized and immortalized. There is certainly no such sensor with us today to confirm metaphysical ideas about people, or even to recognize the contents of the human brain. All thoughts about consciousness, souls and the like are bound up equally in faith, which suggests something remarkable: What we are seeing is a new religion, expressed through an engineering culture.” To put this in context, Lanier had been discussing the current concept that it might be possible to digitize human beings to incorporate all people in a Matrix-like universal brain.

I am woefully undereducated on the technology side of this issue to discuss whether or not such high-end digitization is possible. What interests me is the suggestion that this is a new religion. We haven’t even figured out the old ones yet. Defining what a religion is presents a nearly insurmountable barrier even to specialists in the field of religious studies, and some disgruntled conservatives claim that atheism and “sciencism” are religions. No matter how fast or how far you run, someone will always be able to label you as the adherent of one religion or another. Religion is an all-consuming category, a mental conundrum that cannot be contained by mere academic classification and circumscription. It is the universal solvent.

Meanwhile, universities and other learned bodies are reluctant to support the study of religion. In a world where the vast majority of individuals, university professors included, are motivated by religious guidelines and parameters, it is the elephant in the room we’d rather not discuss. From the sidelines I have watched reputable school after reputable school disembowel religion departments since they “don’t bring in money” and add nothing new to our understanding of the human condition. The sad truth is, religion indoctrinates much of the world. Deans and university presidents could learn a lot by reading op-ed pieces in the New York Times. Or at least have their avatars read them and store them away for future recall.

Artificial Ugarit

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Yesterday a friend pointed me to an article in the MIT News entitled “Computer automatically deciphers ancient language.” The language in question is Ugaritic. The article, by Larry Hardesty, narrates how three computer scientists have developed a program that may potentially decipher as yet non-readable languages. Ugaritic was chosen as a test-case because it has already been decoded and since it meets the specific criteria needed for the program to work. Results from the program could be measured against the standard translations already produced by specialists. Perhaps Ugarit will have another day in the sun.

The larger issue, of course, is technology and its role in understanding the human endeavor. Written texts are an extension of the human mind and those of us who practice it copiously know that the written piece is a piece of the author. Ancient texts may not suffer the same burden of individuality – some undoubtedly were rote pieces set to clay only after a lengthy oral life – nevertheless they participate in the constant paronomasia that is the human psyche. We invent the myths that Ilimilku and his colleagues inscribed so carefully over three millennia ago. Computers may indeed aid us in unlocking their often obtuse forms of expression, but how close will they put us to laughing at Ilimilku’s jokes or wondering deeply at his profundities?

Having been involved in a research project involving computerization and the Ugaritic texts (I was an editor in the now defunct Ugaritic Tablets Digital Edition) I am very aware of the benefits that technology brings to the table. As a sometime writer, I am also aware of the ironies involved. Our ancient predecessors, humans like ourselves, wrote texts that they considered worthy of preservation. Their civilization collapsed. Their language died. We rediscovered it and eagerly wanted to know what they had to say. We, however, have lost the ability to understand. Computers have taken on a dominant role in disseminating the written word. They daily participate in the human experience. Perhaps some day it will be AI that is scrutinizing our whimsical words and trying to decipher what in the world we meant. When they succeed they will find we are not that far from where Ilimilku began.