The late cyborg Stephen Hawking had a bad feeling about AI. Even though the paralytic depended on machines for his existence, he feared artificial superintelligence would evade human control and wreak havoc on our species. Buzzing in his computerized monotone back in 2014, the physicist retold a classic 1954 sci-fi story:
Scientists built an intelligent computer. The first question they asked it was, “Is there a God?” The computer replied, “There is now.” And a bolt of lightning struck the plug, so it couldn’t be turned off.
It’s an amusing parable, but many scientists take the idea quite seriously.
Last January, an international team of experts led by Iyad Rahwan of the Max-Planck Institute in Berlin warned “Superintelligence Cannot Be Contained.” Their analysis, published in the Journal for Artificial Intelligence Research, arrived at an obvious conclusion, echoing the warnings of Oxford transhumanist Nick Bostrom in his 2014 book Superintelligence.
In order to fully control any mechanism or system, one has to predict its behavior. Because artificial superintelligence will be beyond human comprehension, and therefore impossible to predict, it will also be impossible to control. The same motivational programs that drive an AI to gather data and improve itself would most likely drive it to escape containment. From there, God only knows what would happen.
End of discussion. Don’t plug it in. It’s not worth the risk.
But reckless human beings, being all too predictable, can’t resist the urge to open a box full of demons or chomp on forbidden fruit. The ancient quest to create gods from raw metals is moving ahead at an accelerating pace.
People have talked to their idols for eons. Now, the idols are actually talking back. Even their creators couldn’t predict what they have to say.
And the Machine Said, “Let There Be Life”
In a nutshell, Moore’s Law holds that the computational power of transistors will double every two years. With a few fits and starts, this has been true for many decades.
On December 2, IEEE Spectrum magazine reported “AI Training Is Outpacing Moore’s Law.” Most of these strides have been made in natural language processing—the machine’s grasp of logos, the “word,” a quality once unique to humankind.
The analysis comes from MLPerf, a consortium of engineers who track machine learning performance. Analysts found that since 2018, top artificial intelligence systems—from Google, Microsoft, and Habana Labs—perform 6.8 to 11 times better than they did two years ago. Unlike the processing hardware gauged by Moore’s Law, this advance is due to rapid self-improvement by the software itself.
If this trend continues, we’re about to see an explosion in artificial intelligence capabilities. Already, the past couple of weeks have seen a flood of news on this front—including the creation of new lifeforms. Artificial intelligence is producing novel ideas that had previously flown over bioengineers’ and mathematicians’ heads.
On November 29, scientists at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering unveiled a self-replicating xenobot. The creatures were literally designed by an AI system. Each organism consist of about 3,000 cells derived from a frog, Xenopus laevis, but their structure and function is entirely engineered. Hence the name “xenobot.”
The xenos have a one-tracked mind. Using tiny hairs on their surface, they basically just swim in a circular pattern. Stunning videos show these animated jellybeans sweeping pale stem cells into piles. Eventually, those piles become stem cell globs and those globs become new xenobots.
The design for this self-replicating system, found nowhere else in nature, came from the mind of a computer. Evolutionary algorithms running on the Deep Green supercomputer at the University of Vermont explored billions of different body types, and tested each of them in virtual space.
“We asked the supercomputer at UVM to figure out how to adjust the shape of the initial parents, and the AI came up with some strange designs after months of chugging away,” a researcher explained. “It looks very simple, but it’s not something a human engineer would come up with.”
Once the AI had “discovered” a workable body plan—the now-famous jellybean—the scientists stitched them together from frog cells. The rest is history. AI created a novel xenobot capable of self-replication. Strangely, the scientists discuss this alien creature in terms of discovery, even using reverential capitalization.
“We’ve discovered that there is this previously unknown space within organisms,” one scientist marveled. “We found Xenobots that walk. We found Xenobots that swim. And now, in this study, we’ve found Xenobots that kinematically replicate. What else is out there?”
I’d say we can only dream, but it’s a computer manifesting these nightmares.
Aping the Mind of God…
Read full story [icon name=”arrow-right” prefix=”fas”] Artificial Intelligence is Probing the Universe – You Included – Steve Bannon’s War Room: Pandemic