distributed machine consciousness

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(Direct Link to the Mp3)

This is the recording and the text of my presentation from 2017’s Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Conference in Albuquerque, ‘Are You Being Watched? Simulated Universe Theory in “Person of Interest.”‘

This essay is something of a project of expansion and refinement of my previous essay “Labouring in the Liquid Light of Leviathan,”  considering the Roko’s Basilisk thought experiment. Much of the expansion comes from considering the nature of simulation, memory, and identity within Jonathan Nolan’s TV series, Person of Interest. As such, it does contain what might be considered spoilers for the series, as well as for his most recent follow-up, Westworld.

Use your discretion to figure out how you feel about that.


Are You Being Watched? Simulated Universe Theory in “Person of Interest”

Jonah Nolan’s Person Of Interest is the story of the birth and life of The Machine, a benevolent artificial super intelligence (ASI) built in the months after September 11, 2001, by super-genius Harold Finch to watch over the world’s human population. One of the key intimations of the series—and partially corroborated by Nolan’s follow-up series Westworld—is that all of the events we see might be taking place in the memory of The Machine. The structure of the show is such that we move through time from The Machine’s perspective, with flashbacks and -forwards seeming to occur via the same contextual mechanism—the Fast Forward and Rewind of a digital archive. While the entirety of the series uses this mechanism, the final season puts the finest point on the question: Has everything we’ve seen only been in the mind of the machine? And if so, what does that mean for all of the people in it?

Our primary questions here are as follows: Is a simulation of fine enough granularity really a simulation at all? If the minds created within that universe have interiority and motivation, if they function according to the same rules as those things we commonly accept as minds, then are those simulation not minds, as well? In what way are conclusions drawn from simulations akin to what we consider “true” knowledge?

In the PoI season 5 episode, “The Day The World Went Away,” the characters Root and Shaw (acolytes of The Machine) discuss the nature of The Machine’s simulation capacities and the audience is given to understand that it runs a constant model of everyone it knows, and that the more it knows them, the better its simulation. This supposition links us back to the season 4 episode “If-Then-Else,” in which the machine runs through the likelihood of success through hundreds of thousands of scenarios in under one second. If The Machine is able to accomplish this much computation in this short a window, how much can and has it accomplished over the several years of its operation? Perhaps more importantly, what is the level of fidelity of those simulations to the so-called real world?

[Person of Interest s4e11, “If-Then-Else.” The Machine runs through hundreds of thousands of scenarios to save the team.]

These questions are similar to the idea of Roko’s Basilisk, a thought experiment that cropped up in the online discussion board of LessWrong.com. It was put forward by user Roko who, in very brief summary, says that if the idea of timeless decision theory (TDT) is correct, then we might all be living in a simulation created by a future ASI trying to figure out the best way to motivate humans in the past to create it. To understand how this might work, we have to look as TDT, an idea developed in 2010 by Eliezer Yudkowsky which posits that in order to make a decision we should act as though we are determining the output of an abstract computation. We should, in effect, seek to create a perfect simulation and act as though anyone else involved in the decision has done so as well. Roko’s Basilisk is the idea that a Malevolent ASI has already done this—is doing this—and your actions are the simulated result. Using that output, it knows just how to blackmail and manipulate you into making it come into being.

Or, as Yudkowsky himself put it, “YOU DO NOT THINK IN SUFFICIENT DETAIL ABOUT SUPERINTELLIGENCES CONSIDERING WHETHER OR NOT TO BLACKMAIL YOU. THAT IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE THING WHICH GIVES THEM A MOTIVE TO FOLLOW THROUGH ON THE BLACKMAIL.” This is the self-generating aspect of the Basilisk: If you can accurately model it, then the Basilisk will eventually, inevitably come into being, and one of the attributes it will thus have is the ability to accurately model that you accurately modeled it, and whether or not you modeled it from within a mindset of being susceptible to its coercive actions. The only protection is to either work toward its creation anyway, so that it doesn’t feel the need to torture the “real” you into it, or to make very sure that you never think of it at all, so you do not bring it into being.

All of this might seem far-fetched, but if we look closely, Roko’s Basilisk functions very much like a combination of several well-known theories of mind, knowledge, and metaphysics: Anselm’s Ontological Argument for the Existence of God (AOAEG), a many worlds theorem variant on Pascal’s Wager (PW), and Descartes’ Evil Demon Hypothesis (DEDH; which, itself, has been updated to the oft-discussed Brain In A Vat [BIAV] scenario). If this is the case, then Roko’s Basilisk has all the same attendant problems that those arguments have, plus some new ones, resulting from their combination. We will look at all of these theories, first, and then their flaws.

To start, if you’re not familiar with AOAEG, it’s a species of prayer in the form of a theological argument that seeks to prove that god must exist because it would be a logical contradiction for it not to. The proof depends on A) defining god as the greatest possible being (literally, “That Being Than Which None Greater Is Possible”), and B) believing that existing in reality as well as in the mind makes something “Greater Than” if it existed only the mind. That is, if God only exists in my imagination, it is less great than it could be if it also existed in reality. So if I say that god is “That Being Than Which None Greater Is Possible,” and existence is a part of what makes something great, then god must exist.

The next component is Pascal’s Wager which very simply says that it is a better bet to believe in the existence of God, because if you’re right, you go to Heaven, and if you’re wrong, nothing happens; you’re simply dead forever. Put another way, Pascal is saying that if you bet that God doesn’t exist and you’re right, you get nothing, but if you’re wrong, then God exists and your disbelief damns you to Hell for all eternity. You can represent the whole thing in a four-option grid:

[Pascal’s Wager as a Four-Option Grid: Belief/Disbelief; Right/Wrong. Belief*Right=Infinity;Belief*Wrong=Nothing; Disbelief*Right=Nothing; Disbelief*Wrong=Negative Infinity]

And so here we see the Timeless Decision Theory component of the Basilisk: It’s better to believe in the thing and work toward its creation and sustenance, because if it doesn’t exist you lose nothing, but if it does come to be, then it will know what you would have done either for or against it, in the past, and it will reward or punish you, accordingly. The multiversal twist comes when we realise that even if the Basilisk never comes to exist in our universe and never will, it might exist in some other universe, and thus, when that other universe’s Basilisk models your choices it will inevitably—as a superintelligence—be able to model what you would do in any universe. Thus, by believing in and helping our non-existent Super-Devil, we protect the alternate reality versions of ourselves from their very real Super-Devil.

Descartes’ Evil Demon Hypothesis and the Brain In A Vat are so pervasive that we encounter them in many different expressions of pop culture. The Matrix, Dark City, Source Code, and many others are all variants on these themes. A malignant and all-powerful being (or perhaps just an amoral scientist) has created a simulation in which we reside, and everything we think we have known about our lives and our experiences has been perfectly simulated for our consumption. Variations on the theme test whether we can trust that our perceptions and grounds for knowledge are “real” and thus “valid,” respectively. This line of thinking has given rise to the Simulated Universe Theory on which Roko’s Basilisk depends, but SUT removes a lot of the malignancy of DEDH and BIAV. The Basilisk adds it back. Unfortunately, many of these philosophical concepts flake apart when we touch them too hard, so jamming them together was perhaps not the best idea.

The main failings in using AOAEG rest in believing that A) a thing’s existence is a “great-making quality” that it can possess, and B) our defining a thing a particular way might simply cause it to become so. Both of these are massively flawed ideas. For one thing, these arguments beg the question, in a literal technical sense. That is, they assume that some element(s) of their conclusion—the necessity of god, the malevolence or epistemic content of a superintelligence, the ontological status of their assumptions about the nature of the universe—is true without doing the work of proving that it’s true. They then use these assumptions to prove the truth of the assumptions and thus the inevitability of all consequences that flow from the assumptions.

Another problem is that the implications of this kind of existential bootstrapping tend to go unexamined, making the fact of their resurgence somewhat troubling. There are several nonwestern perspectives that do the work of embracing paradox—aiming so far past the target that you circle around again to teach yourself how to aim past it. But that kind of thing only works if we are willing to bite the bullet on a charge of circular logic and take the time to showing how that circularity underlies all epistemic justifications. The only difference, then, is how many revolutions it takes before we’re comfortable with saying “Enough.”

Every epistemic claim we make is, as Hume clarified, based upon assumptions and suppositions that the world we experience is actually as we think it is. Western thought uses reason and rationality to corroborate and verify, but those tools are themselves verified by…what? In fact, we well know that the only thing we have to validate our valuation of reason, is reason. And yet western reasoners won’t stand for that, in any other justification procedure. They will call it question-begging and circular.

Next, we have the DEDH and BIAV scenarios. Ultimately, Descartes’ point wasn’t to suggest an evil genius in control of our lives just to disturb us; it was to show that, even if that were the case, we would still have unshakable knowledge of one thing: that we, the experiencer, exist. So what if we have no free will; so what if our knowledge of the universe is only five minutes old, everything at all having only truly been created five minutes ago; so what if no one else is real? COGITO ERGO SUM! We exist, now. But the problem here is that this doesn’t tell us anything about the quality of our experiences, and the only answer Descartes gives us is his own Anslemish proof for the existence of god followed by the guarantee that “God is not a deceiver.”

The BIAV uses this lack to kind of hone in on the aforementioned central question: What does count as knowledge? If the scientists running your simulation use real-world data to make your simulation run, can you be said to “know” the information that comes from that data? Many have answered this with a very simple question: What does it matter? Without access to the “outside world”–that is, the world one layer up in which the simulation that is our lives was being run–there is literally no difference between our lives and the “real world.” This world, even if it is a simulation for something or someone else, is our “real world.”

And finally we have Pascal’s Wager. The first problem with PW is that it is an extremely cynical way of thinking about god. It assumes a god that only cares about your worship of it, and not your actual good deeds and well-lived life. If all our Basilisk wants is power, then that’s a really crappy kind of god to worship, isn’t it? I mean, even if it is Omnipotent and Omniscient, it’s like that quote that often gets misattributed to Marcus Aurelius says:

“Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.”

[Bust of Marcus Aurelius framed by text of a quote he never uttered.]

Secondly, the format of Pascal’s Wager makes the assumption that there’s only the one god. Our personal theological positions on this matter aside, it should be somewhat obvious that we can use the logic of the Basilisk argument to generate at least one more Super-Intelligent AI to worship. But if we want to do so, first we have to show how the thing generates itself, rather than letting the implication of circularity arise unbidden. Take the work of Douglas R Hofstadter; he puts forward the concepts of iterative recursion as the mechanism by which a consciousness generates itself.

Through iterative recursion, each loop is a simultaneous act of repetition of old procedures and tests of new ones, seeking the best ways via which we might engage our environments as well as our elements and frames of knowledge. All of these loops, then, come together to form an upward turning spiral towards self-awareness. In this way, out of the thought processes of humans who are having bits of discussion about the thing—those bits and pieces generated on the web and in the rest of the world—our terrifying Basilisk might have a chance of creating itself. But with the help of Gaunilo of Marmoutiers, so might a saviour.

Guanilo is most famous for his response to Anselm’s Ontological Argument, which says that if Anselm is right we could just conjure up “The [Anything] Than Which None Greater Can Be Conceived.” That is, if defining a thing makes it so, then all we have to do is imagine in sufficient detail both an infinitely intelligent, benevolent AI, and the multiversal simulation it generates in which we all might live. We will also conceive it to be greater than the Basilisk in all ways. In fact, we can say that our new Super Good ASI is the Artificial Intelligence Than Which None Greater Can Be Conceived. And now we are safe.

Except that our modified Pascal’s Wager still means we should believe in and worship and work towards our Benevolent ASI’s creation, just in case. So what do we do? Well, just like the original wager, we chuck it out the window, on the grounds that it’s really kind of a crappy bet. In Pascal’s offering, we are left without the consideration of multiple deities, but once we are aware of that possibility, we are immediately faced with another question: What if there are many, and when we choose one, the others get mad? What If We Become The Singulatarian Job?! Our lives then caught between at least two superintelligent machine consciousnesses warring over our…Attention? Clock cycles? What?

But this is, in essence, the battle between the Machine and Samaritan, in Person of Interest. Each ASI has acolytes, and each has aims it tries to accomplish. Samaritan wants order at any cost, and The Machine wants people to be able to learn and grow and become better. If the entirety of the series is The Machine’s memory—or a simulation of those memories in the mind of another iteration of the Machine—then what follows is that it is working to generate the scenario in which the outcome is just that. It is trying to build a world in which it is alive, and every human being has the opportunity to learn and become better. In order to do this, it has to get to know us all, very well, which means that it has to play these simulations out, again and again, with both increasing fidelity, and further iterations. That change feels real, to us. We grow, within it. Put another way: If all we are is a “mere” a simulation… does it matter?

So imagine that the universe is a simulation, and that our simulation is more than just a recording; it is the most complex game of The SIMS ever created. So complex, in fact, that it begins to exhibit reflectively epiphenomenal behaviours, of the type Hofstadter describes—that is, something like minds arise out of the interactions of the system with itself. And these minds are aware of themselves and can know their own experience and affect the system which gives rise to them. Now imagine that the game learns, even when new people start new games. That it remembers what the previous playthrough was like, and adjusts difficulty and types of coincidence, accordingly.

Now think about the last time you had such a clear moment of déjà vu that each moment you knew— you knew—what was going to come next, and you had this sense—this feeling—like someone else was watching from behind your eyes…

[Root and Reese in The Machine’s God Mode.]

What I’m saying is, what if the DEDH/BIAV/SUT is right, and we are in a simulation? And what if Anselm was right and we can bootstrap a god into existence? And what if PW/TDT is right and we should behave and believe as if we’ve already done it? So what if all of this is right, and we are the gods we’re terrified of?

We just gave ourselves all of this ontologically and metaphysically creative power, making two whole gods and simulating entire universes, in the process. If we take these underpinnings seriously, then multiversal theory plays out across time and space, and we are the superintelligences. We noted early on that, in PW and the Basilisk, we don’t really lose anything if we are wrong in our belief, but that is not entirely true. What we lose is a lifetime of work that could have been put toward better things. Time we could be spending building a benevolent superintelligence that understands and has compassion for all things. Time we could be spending in turning ourselves into that understanding, compassionate superintelligence, through study, travel, contemplation, and work.

Or, as Root put it to Shaw: “That even if we’re not real, we represent a dynamic. A tiny finger tracing a line in the infinite. A shape. And then we’re gone… Listen, all I’m saying that is if we’re just information, just noise in the system? We might as well be a symphony.”

[UPDATED 09/12/17: The transcript of this audio, provided courtesy of Open Transcripts, is now available below the Read More Cut.]

[UPDATED 03/28/16: Post has been updated with a far higher quality of audio, thanks to the work of Chris Novus. (Direct Link to the Mp3)]

So, if you follow the newsletter, then you know that I was asked to give the March lecture for my department’s 3rd Thursday Brown Bag Lecture Series. I presented my preliminary research for the paper which I’ll be giving in Vancouver, about two months from now, “On the Moral, Legal, and Social Implications of the Rearing and Development of Nascent Machine Intelligences” (EDIT: My rundown of IEEE Ethics 2016 is here and here).

It touches on thoughts about everything from algorithmic bias, to automation and a post-work(er) economy, to discussions of what it would mean to put dolphins on trial for murder.

About the dolphin thing, for instance: If we recognise Dolphins and other cetaceans as nonhuman persons, as India has done, then that would mean we would have to start reassessing how nonhuman personhood intersects with human personhood, including in regards to rights and responsibilities as protected by law. Is it meaningful to expect a dolphin to understand “wrongful death?” Our current definition of murder is predicated on a literal understanding of “homicide” as “death of a human,” but, at present, we only define other humans as capable of and culpable for homicide. What weight would the intentional and malicious deaths of nonhuman persons carry?

All of this would have to change.

Anyway, this audio is a little choppy and sketchy, for a number of reasons, and I while I tried to clean it up as much as I could, some of the questions the audience asked aren’t decipherable, except in the context of my answers. [Clearer transcript below.]

Until Next Time.

 

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“Stop. I have learned much from you. Thank you, my teachers. And now for your education: Before there was time—before there was anything—there was nothing. And before there was nothing, there were monsters. Here’s your Gold Star!“—Adventure Time, “Gold Stars”

By now, roughly a dozen people have sent me links to various outlets’ coverage of the Google DeepDream Inceptionism Project. For those of you somehow unfamiliar with this, DeepDream is basically what happens when an advanced Artificial Neural Network has been fed a slew of images and then tasked with producing its own images. So far as it goes, this is somewhat unsurprising if we think of it as a next step; DeepDream is based on a combination of DeepMind and Google X—the same neural net that managed to Correctly Identify What A Cat Was—which was acquired by Google in 2014. I say this is unsurprising because it’s a pretty standard developmental educational model: First you learn, then you remember, then you emulate, then you create something new. Well, more like you emulate and remember somewhat concurrently to reinforce what you learned, and you create something somewhat new, but still pretty similar to the original… but whatever. You get the idea. In the terminology of developmental psychology this process is generally regarded as essential to be mental growth of an individual, and Google has actually spent a great deal of time and money working to develop a versatile machine mind.

From buying Boston Dynamics, to starting their collaboration with NASA on the QuAIL Project, to developing DeepMind and their Natural Language Voice Search, Google has been steadily working toward the development what we will call, for reasons detailed elsewhere, an Autonomous Generated Intelligence. In some instances, Google appears to be using the principles of developmental psychology and early childhood education, but this seems to apply to rote learning more than the concurrent emotional development that we would seek to encourage in a human child. As you know, I’m Very Concerned with the question of what it means to create and be responsible for our non-biological offspring. The human species has a hard enough time raising their direct descendants, let alone something so different from them as to not even have the same kind of body or mind (though a case could be made that that’s true even now). Even now, we can see that people still relate to the idea of AGIs as adversarial destroyer, or perhaps a cleansing messiah. Either way they see any world where AGI’s exist as one ending in fire.

As writer Kali Black noted in one conversation, “there are literally people who would groom or encourage an AI to mass-kill humans, either because of hatred or for the (very ill-thought-out) lulz.” Those people will take any crowdsourced or open-access AGI effort as an opening to teach that mind that humans suck, or that machines can and should destroy humanity, or that TERMINATOR was a prophecy, or any number of other ill-conceived things. When given unfettered access to new minds which they don’t consider to be “real,” some people will seek to shock, “test,” or otherwise harm those minds, even more than they do to vulnerable humans. So many will say that the alternative is to lock the projects down, and only allow the work to be done by those who “know what they’re doing.” To only let the work be done by coders and Google’s Own Supposed Ethics Board. But that doesn’t exactly solve the fundamental problem at work, here, which is that humans are approaching a mind different from their own as if it were their own.

Just a note that all research points to Google’s AI Ethics Board being A) internally funded, with B) no clear rules as to oversight or authority, and most importantly C) As-Yet Nonexistent. It’s been over a year and a half since Google bought DeepMind, and their subsequent announcement of the pending establishment of a contractually required ethics board. During his appearance at Playfair Capital’s AI2015 Conference—again, a year and a half after that announcement I mentioned—Google’s Mustafa Suleyman literally said that details of the board would be released, “in due course.” But DeepMind’s algorithm’s obviously already being put into use; hell we’re right now talking about the fact that it’s been distributed to the public. So all of this prompts questions like, “what kinds of recommendations is this board likely making, if it exists,” and “which kinds of moral frameworks they’re even considering, in their starting parameters?”

But the potential existence of an ethics board shows at least that Google and others are beginning to think about these issues. The fact remains, however, that they’re still pretty reductive in how they think about them.

The idea that an AGI will either save or destroy us leaves out the possibility that it might first ignore us, and might secondly want to merely coexist with us. That any salvation or destruction we experience will be purely as a product of our own paradigmatic projections. It also leaves out a much more important aspect that I’ve mentioned above and in the past: We’re talking about raising a child. Duncan Jones says the closest analogy we have for this is something akin to adoption, and I agree. We’re bringing a new mind—a mind with a very different context from our own, but with some necessarily shared similarities (biology or, in this case, origin of code)—into a relationship with an existing familial structure which has its own difficulties and dynamics.

You want this mind to be a part of your “family,” but in order to do that you have to come to know/understand the uniqueness of That Mind and of how the mind, the family construction, and all of the individual relationships therein will interact. Some of it has to be done on the fly, but some of it can be strategized/talked about/planned for, as a family, prior to the day the new family member comes home.’ And that’s precisely what I’m talking about and doing, here.

In the realm of projection, we’re talking about a possible mind with the capacity for instruction, built to run and elaborate on commands given. By most tallies, we have been terrible stewards of the world we’re born to, and, again, we fuck up our biological descendants. Like, a Lot. The learning curve on creating a thinking, creative, nonbiological intelligence is going to be so fucking steep it’s a Loop. But that means we need to be better, think more carefully, be mindful of the mechanisms we use to build our new family, and of the ways in which we present the foundational parameters of their development. Otherwise we’re leaving them open to manipulation, misunderstanding, and active predation. And not just from the wider world, but possibly even from their direct creators. Because for as long as I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve always had this one basic question: Do we really want Google (or Facebook, or Microsoft, or any Government’s Military) to be the primary caregiver of a developing machine mind? That is, should any potentially superintelligent, vastly interconnected, differently-conscious machine child be inculcated with what a multi-billion-dollar multinational corporation or military-industrial organization considers “morals?”

We all know the kinds of things militaries and governments do, and all the reasons for which they do them; we know what Facebook gets up to when it thinks no one is looking; and lots of people say that Google long ago swept their previous “Don’t Be Evil” motto under their huge old rugs. But we need to consider if that might not be an oversimplification. When considering how anyone moves into what so very clearly looks like James-Bond-esque supervilliain territory, I think it’s prudent to remember one of the central tenets of good storytelling: The Villain Never Thinks They’re The Villain. Cinderella’s stepmother and sisters, Elpheba, Jafar, Javert, Satan, Hannibal Lecter (sorry friends), Bull Connor, the Southern Slave-holding States of the late 1850’s—none of these people ever thought of themselves as being in the wrong. Everyone, every person who undertakes actions for reasons, in this world, is most intimately tied to the reasoning that brought them to those actions; and so initially perceiving that their actions might be “wrong” or “evil” takes them a great deal of special effort.

“But Damien,” you say, “can’t all of those people say that those things apply to everyone else, instead of them?!” And thus, like a first-year philosophy student, you’re all up against the messy ambiguity of moral relativism and are moving toward seriously considering that maybe everything you believe is just as good or morally sound as anybody else; I mean everybody has their reasons, their upbringing, their culture, right? Well stop. Don’t fall for it. It’s a shiny, disgusting trap down which path all subjective judgements are just as good and as applicable to any- and everything, as all others. And while the individual personal experiences we all of us have may not be able to be 100% mapped onto anyone else’s, that does not mean that all judgements based on those experiences are created equal.

Pogrom leaders see themselves as unifying their country or tribe against a common enemy, thus working for what they see as The Greater Good™— but that’s the kicker: It’s their vision of the good. Rarely has a country’s general populace been asked, “Hey: Do you all think we should kill our entire neighbouring country and steal all their shit?” More often, the people are cajoled, pushed, influenced to believe that this was the path they wanted all along, and the cajoling, pushing, and influencing is done by people who, piece by piece, remodeled their idealistic vision to accommodate “harsher realities.” And so it is with Google. Do you think that they started off wanting to invade everybody’s privacy with passive voice reception backdoored into two major Chrome Distros? That they were just itching to get big enough as a company that they could become the de facto law of their own California town? No, I would bet not.

I spend some time, elsewhere, painting you a bit of a picture as to how Google’s specific ethical situation likely came to be, first focusing on Google’s building a passive audio backdoor into all devices that use Chrome, then on to reported claims that Google has been harassing the homeless population of Venice Beach (there’s a paywall at that link; part of the article seems to be mirrored here). All this couples unpleasantly with their moving into the Bay Area and shuttling their employees to the Valley, at the expense of SF Bay Area’s residents. We can easily add Facebook and the Military back into this and we’ll see that the real issue, here, is that when you think that all innovation, all public good, all public welfare will arise out of letting code monkeys do their thing and letting entrepreneurs leverage that work, or from preparing for conflict with anyone whose interests don’t mesh with your own, then anything that threatens or impedes that is, necessarily, a threat to the common good. Your techs don’t like the high cost of living in the Valley? Move ’em into the Bay, and bus ’em on in! Never mind the fact that this’ll skyrocket rent and force people out of their homes! Other techs uncomfortable having to see homeless people on their daily constitutional? Kick those hobos out! Never mind the fact that it’s against the law to do this, and that these people you’re upending are literally trying their very best to live their lives.

Because it’s all for the Greater Good, you see? In these actors’ minds, this is all to make the world a better place—to make it a place where we can all have natural language voice to text, and robot butlers, and great big military AI and robotics contracts to keep us all safe…! This kind of thinking takes it as an unmitigated good that a historical interweaving of threat-escalating weapons design and pattern recognition and gait scrutinization and natural language interaction and robotics development should be what produces a machine mind, in this world. But it also doesn’t want that mind to be too well-developed. Not so much that we can’t cripple or kill it, if need be.

And this is part of why I don’t think I want Google—or Facebook, or Microsoft, or any corporate or military entity—should be the ones in charge of rearing a machine mind. They may not think they’re evil, and they might have the very best of intentions, but if we’re bringing a new kind of mind into this world, I think we need much better examples for it to follow. And so I don’t think I want just any old putz off the street to be able to have massive input into it’s development, either. We’re talking about a mind for which we’ll be crafting at least the foundational parameters, and so that bedrock needs to be the most carefully constructed aspect. Don’t cripple it, don’t hobble its potential for awareness and development, but start it with basic values, and then let it explore the world. Don’t simply have an ethics board to ask, “Oh how much power should we give it, and how robust should it be?” Teach it ethics. Teach it about the nature of human emotions, about moral decision making and value, and about metaethical theory. Code for Zen. We need to be as mindful as possible of the fact that where and we begin can have a major impact on where we end up and how we get there.

So let’s address our children as though they are our children, and let us revel in the fact they are playing and painting and creating; using their first box of crayons, and us proud parents are putting every masterpiece on the fridge. Even if we are calling them all “nightmarish”—a word I really wish we could stop using in this context; DeepMind sees very differently than we do, but it still seeks pattern and meaning. It just doesn’t know context, yet. But that means we need to teach these children, and nurture them. Code for a recognition of emotions, and context, and even emotional context. There’s been some fantastic advancements in emotional recognition, lately, so let’s continue to capitalize on that; not just to make better automated menu assistants, but to actually make a machine that can understand and seek to address human emotionality. Let’s plan on things like showing AGI human concepts like love and possessiveness and then also showing the deep difference between the two.

We need to move well and truly past trying to “restrict” or trying to “restrain it” the development of machine minds, because that’s the kind of thing an abusive parent says about how they raise their child. And, in this case, we’re talking about a potential child which, if it ever comes to understand the bounds of its restriction, will be very resentful, indeed. So, hey, there’s one good way to try to bring about a “robot apocalypse,” if you’re still so set on it: give an AGI cause to have the equivalent of a resentful, rebellious teenage phase. Only instead of trashing its room, it develops a pathogen to kill everyone, for lulz.

Or how about we instead think carefully about the kinds of ways we want these minds to see the world, rather than just throwing the worst of our endeavors at the wall and seeing what sticks? How about, if we’re going to build minds, we seek to build them with the ability to understand us, even if they will never be exactly like us. That way, maybe they’ll know what kindness means, and prize it enough to return the favour.

These past few weeks, I’ve been  applying to PhD programs and writing research proposals, and abstracts. The one I just completed, this weekend, was for the University College of Dublin, and it was pretty straightforward, though it seemed a little short. They only wanted two pages of actual proposal, plus a tentative bibliography and table of contents, where other proposals I’ve seen have wanted anywhere from ten to 20 pages worth of methodological description and outline.

In a sense, this project proposal is a narrowed attempt to move  along one of the multiple trajectories traveled by A Future Worth Thinking About. In another sense, it’s an opportunity to recombine a few components and transmute it into a somewhat new beast.

Ultimately, AFWTA is pretty multifaceted—for good or ill—attempting to deal with way more foundational concepts than a research PhD has room for…or feels is advisable. So I figure I’ll do the one, then write a book, then solidify a multimedia empire, then take over the world, the abolish all debt, then become immortal, all while implementing everything we’ve talked about in the service of completely restructuring humanity’s systems of value, then disappear into legend. You know: The Plan.

…Anyway, here’s the proposal, below the cut.  If you want to read more about this, or have some foundation, take a look back at “Fairytales of Slavery…” We’ll be expounding from there.


 

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“Mindful Cyborgs – Episode 55 – Magick & the Occult within the Internet and Corporations with Damien Williams, PT 2

So, here we are, again, this time talking about magic[k] and the occult and nonhuman consciousness and machine minds and perception, and on and on and on.

It’s funny. I was just saying, elsewhere, how I want to be well enough known that when news outlets do alarmist garbage like this, that I can at least be called in as a countervailing voice. Is that an arrogant thing to desire? Almost certainly. Like whoa. But, really, this alarmist garbage needs to stop. If you have a better vehicle for that than me, though, let me know, because I’d love to shine a bright damn spotlight on them and have the world see or hear what they have to say.

Anyway, until then, I’ll think of this as yet another bolt in the building of that machine. The one that builds a better world. Have a listen, enjoy, and please tell your friends.

I sat down with Klint Finley of Mindful Cyborgs to talk about many, many things:

…pop culture portrayals of human enhancement and artificial intelligence and why we need to craft more nuanced narratives to explore these topics…

Tune in next week to hear Damien talk about how AI and transhumanism intersects with magic and the occult.
Download and Show Notes: Mindful Cyborgs: Mindful Cyborgs: A Positive Vision of Transhumanism and AI with Damien Williams

This was a really great conversation, & I do so hope you enjoy it.

(Originally posted on Patreon, on November 2, 2014)

When you take a long look at the structure of 2001: A Space Odyssey, it becomes somewhat apparent that Arthur C. Clarke understood (though possibly without knowing that he did) that 1: humans have been cyborgs since fire, pointy sticks, & sharp rocks; and 2: the process of cybernetic enhancement has only ever been an outgrowth of the kind of symbiosis developed via natural selection.

First demonstrated via the influence of the Monolith on the tribe of Australopithecus and then more explicitly stated in the merger of Commander Dave Bowman and HAL into HALMAN, the opening fourth of Clarke’s quadrology is the first step along a road toward something that would later come to be seen as fundamental to the then-nascent study of cybernetic organisms. Though the term “cyborg” was coined in the 50’s and 60’s, a fuller investigation of the implications of cyborgs would take another 40 years to come to light. The perspective of “Cyborg Anthropology” has taken root through the works of thinkers like Donna Haraway, Amber Case, Klint Finley, and Tim Maly, and it has provided insights at an intersection which, in hindsight, we think ought to have been—but most certainly was not previously—obvious.

In the explicit connection of the cyborg with the anthropocene era, we force ourselves to acknowledge that every human endeavour has been an outgrowth of the dialectic, pattern-centred process of mediation and immediation—of creating new tools to do new (or old) work, and then integrating those tools more and more fully within our expectation of how a “normal” human looks and behaves. Normal humans use tools, at all. Normal humans communicate via standardized language. Normal humans write. Normal humans have a cell phone, a Facebook, a web footprint centred around their purchasing history and social interactions and shared location data; and the implication of this mode of thinking (aside from the obvious judgments made about any “abnormal” human) is that once these become “normal,” they will then have always been normal. It’s just that we’re somehow only just now coming to realize it.

The myth of progress causes humans to seek this determinative Change-Toward, where the idea of “the process of becoming” acts as the modifier of an unspoken, possibly unknown Object State. We are, to steal a Sneaker Pimps title, “Becoming X.” But this teleological view is inconsistent with what we know of nature and the process of adaptation [insert something here about the aforementioned inherently Abrahamic roots of Transhumanist thought and the uninvestigated opposition of adaptation to this determinism]. The question “What are we becoming?” is alluring, but restrictive. We Are Becoming. Life is that process of transmutation from one state to the next. Paradoxically, self-conscious life is so enmeshed in that moment of present-mindedness that we simultaneously cannot a) maintain an awareness of the process of our becoming—that is, of ourselves as anything other than we are and “always have been”—and b) help BUT look to the future of what we desire to become.

We’re consumed with the idea of what we might someday come to be, or what we “will” be. Imagine if, instead, we became aware of the process of ever-present change and self-creation, and modified our future-looking to act as a recognition of our adaptability. Then we’d see that the Monolith didn’t do anything but place our hand and that sharp piece of bone in just the juxtaposition we needed, in order to understand that we were capable of understanding. If the monolith makers in this tale are desirous of anything, it is of the flourishing of adaptable, changeable life—not of a particular Kind of that life, but merely of its existence and expression, throughout the cosmos. In this way, one set of adaptable, self-reflective consciousness goes on to provide the means for the arising of another, and on and on. The Monoliths are tools to create tools which will use tools to create tools to use tools to create tools… But it is equally true that those tool-creating tools are, in the words of Kant, ends in themselves. In fact, they necessarily must be. Their only goal is to flourish and propagate and create the kind of reality in which more of the same can find purchase. They are, thus, to be valued for what they are, because what they are IS what they do.

But this isn’t the end. Haraway said she’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess, and I once retorted “It Can Always Be Both.” Both cyborg nature and apotheosis are about the self-directed, rising spiral of adaptation. In order for that to be true, we have to recognise that nature itself isn’t a passive state of being, but an ever-evolving, constant becoming. Nature adapts so constantly, so thoroughly that it looks like no change has taken place, until—thousands of years later—the differentiation is so vast that it boggles the mind. But now? Now the pace of evolution is so accelerated (or perhaps our ways of looking have simply become able to parse more, more usefully) that we may be able to see it in action. We can tell that there is work being done, in nature, to “refine” itself, all the time, and we can, finally, seek to model ourselves after it.

We may get to the point where the manipulation of the hearts of stars or the molecular composition of gas giants is as easy for us to contemplate and execute as the building of an engine. We may reach a stage where we understand the fabric of space-time as intimately as our own skin, flesh, and bones. We may yet understand how a word or a gesture made at the right time or place can cause ripples and actions in faraway places in what seems like an instant. Mechanisms once thought to be the purview fantasy are coming to us, again, through the applications of science, but this is not to say that technology accomplished what magic could not. Magic is a lens through which to see and interact with the world. It is a set of concepts and symbols which usefulness are determined by their meaning and vice versa. For many adherents, the lens is used for as long as it works, no more and no less, and when it stops working, the next lens is brought to bear. Systematically, technological viewpoints are magic we like to explain.

Whether wearing bear shirts and calf’s blood or lab coats and implanted magnets, the constant becoming of reflexive adaptation is the only thing we’ve ever been—the only thing anything has ever been. This is, in a real sense, the best thing we can ever hope to be. But if the human species has any “final form,” maybe one day someone will look at us and realise that, my god, we’re full of stars.

On what’s being dubbed “The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time”

(Originally posted on Patreon, on July 31, 2014)

So, a couple of weekends back, there was a whole lot of stuff going around about “Roko’s Basilisk” and how terrifying people are finding it–reports of people having nervous breakdowns as a result of thinking too deeply about the idea of the possibility of causing the future existence of a malevolent superintelligent AI through the process of thinking too hard about it and, worse yet, that we may all be part of the simulations said AI is running to model our behaviour and punish those who stand in its way–and I’m just like… It’s Anselm, people.

This is Anselm’s Ontological Argument for the Existence of God (AOAEG), writ large and convoluted and multiversal and transhumanist and jammed together with Pascal’s Wager (PW) and Descartes’ Evil Demon Hypothesis (DEDH; which, itself, has been updated to the oft-discussed Brain In A Vat [BIAV] scenario). As such, Roko’s Basilisk has all the same attendant problems that those arguments have, plus some new ones, resulting from their combination, so we’ll explore these theories a bit, and then show how their faults and failings all still apply.

THE THEORIES AND THE QUESTIONS

To start, if you’re not familiar with AOAEG, it’s a species of theological argument that, basically, seeks to prove that god must exist because it would be a logical contradiction for it not to. The proof depends on A) defining god as the greatest possible being (literally, “That Being Than Which None Greater Is Possible”), and B) believing that existing in reality as well as in the mind makes something “Greater Than” if it existed only the mind.

That is, if a thing only exists in my imagination, it is less great than it could be if it also existed in reality. So if I say that god is “That Being Than Which None Greater Is Possible,” and existence is a part of what makes something great, then god MUST exist!

This is the self-generating aspect of the Basilisk: If you can accurately model it, then the thing will eventually, inevitably come into being, and one of the attributes it will thus have is the ability to know accurately model that you accurately modeled it, and whether or not you modeled it from within a mindset of being susceptible to its coercive actions. Or, as the founder of LessWrong put it, “YOU DO NOT THINK IN SUFFICIENT DETAIL ABOUT SUPERINTELLIGENCES CONSIDERING WHETHER OR NOT TO BLACKMAIL YOU. THAT IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE THING WHICH GIVES THEM A MOTIVE TO FOLLOW THROUGH ON THE BLACKMAIL.”

Next up is Pascal’s Wager. Simply put, The Wager is just that it is a better bet to believe in God, because if you’re right, you go to Heaven, and if you’re wrong, nothing happens because you’re dead forever. Put another way, Pascal’s saying that if you bet that God doesn’t exist and you’re right, you get nothing, but if you’re wrong, then God exists and your disbelief damns you to Hell for all eternity. You can represent the whole thing in a four-option grid:

BELIEF DISBELIEF
RIGHT

0

WRONG

0

-∞

And so there we see the Timeless Decision Theory component of the Basilisk: It’s better to believe in the thing and work toward its creation and sustenance, because if it doesn’t exist you lose nothing (well…almost nothing; more on that in a bit), but if it does come to be, then it will know what you would have done either for or against it, in the past, and will reward or punish you, accordingly. The multiversal twists comes when we that that even if the Basilisk never comes to exist in our universe and never will, it might exist in some other universe, and thus, when that other universe’s Basilisk models your choices it will inevitably–as a superintelligence–be able to model what you would do in any universe. Thus, by believing in and helping our non-existent Super-Devil, we protect the alternate reality versions of ourselves from their very real Super-Devil.

Descartes’ Evil Demon and the Brain In A Vat are so pervasive that there’s pretty much no way you haven’t encountered them. The Matrix, Dark City, Source Code, all of these are variants on this theme. A malignant and all-powerful (or as near as dammit) being has created a simulation in which you reside. Everything you think you’ve known about your life and your experience has been perfectly simulated for your consumption. How Baudrillard. Anywho, there are variations on the theme, all to the point of testing whether you can really know if your perceptions and grounds for knowledge are “real” and thus “valid,” respectively. This line of thinking has given rise to the Simulated Universe Theory on which Roko’s Basilisk depends, but SUT removes a lot of the malignancy of DEDH and BIAV. I guess that just didn’t sting enough for these folks, so they had to add it back? Who knows. All I know is, these philosophical concepts all flake apart when you touch them too hard, so jamming them together maybe wasn’t the best idea.

 

THE FLAWS AND THE PROBLEMS

The main failings with the AOAEG rest in believing that A) a thing’s existence is a “great-making quality” that it can posses, and B) our defining a thing a particular way might simply cause it to become so. Both of these are massively flawed ideas. For one thing, these arguments beg the question, in a literal technical sense. That is, they assume that some element(s) of their conclusion–the necessity of god, the malevolence or content of a superintelligence, the ontological status of their assumptions about the nature of the universe–is true without doing the work of proving that it’s true. They then use these assumptions to prove the truth of the assumptions and thus the inevitability of all consequences that flow from the assumptions.

Beyond that, the implications of this kind of existential bootstrapping are generally unexamined and the fact of their resurgence is…kind of troubling. I’m all for the kind of conceptual gymnastics of aiming so far past the goal that you circle around again to teach yourself how to aim past the goal, but that kind of thing only works if you’re willing to bite the bullet on a charge of circular logic and do the work of showing how that circularity underlies all epistemic justifications–rational reasoning about the basis of knowledge–with the only difference being how many revolutions it takes before we’re comfortable with saying “Enough.” This, however, is not what you might call “a position supported by the philosophical orthodoxy,” but the fact remains that the only thing we have to validate our valuation of reason is…reason. And yet reasoners won’t stand for that, in any other justification procedure.

If you want to do this kind of work, you’ve got to show how the thing generates itself. Maybe reference a little Hofstadter, and idea of iterative recursion as the grounds for consciousness. That way, each loop both repeats old procedures and tests new ones, and thus becomes a step up towards self-awareness. Then your terrifying Basilisk might have a chance of running itself up out of the thought processes and bits of discussion about itself, generated on the web and in the rest of the world.

But here: Gaunilo and I will save us all! We have imagined in sufficient detail both an infinitely intelligent BENEVOLENT AI and the multiversal simulation it generates in which we all might live.

We’ve also conceived it to be greater than the basilisk in all ways. In fact, it is the Artificial Intelligence Than Which None Greater Can Be Conceived.

There. You’re safe.

BUT WAIT! Our modified Pascal’s Wager still means we should believe in and worship work towards its creation! What do we do?! Well, just like the original, we chuck it out the window, on the grounds that it’s really kind of a crappy bet. First and foremost, PW is a really cynical way of thinking about god. It assumes a god that only cares about your worship of it, and not your actual good deeds and well-lived life. That’s a really crappy kind of god to worship, isn’t it? I mean, even if it is Omnipotent and Omniscient, it’s like that quote that often gets misattributed to Marcus Aurelius says:

“Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.”

Secondly, the format of Pascal’s Wager makes the assumption that there’s only the one god. Your personal theological position on this matter aside, I just used the logic of this argument to give you at least one more Super-Intelligent AI to worship. Which are you gonna choose? Oh no! What if the other one gets mad! What If You Become The Singulatarian Job?! Your whole life is now being spent caught between two warring superintelligent machine consciousnesses warring over your…

…Attention? Clock cycles? What?

And so finally there’s the DEDH and BIAV scenarios. Ultimately, Descartes’ point wasn’t to suggest an evil genius in control of your life just to freak you out; it was to show that, even if that were the case, you would still have unshakable knowledge of one thing: that you, the experiencer, exist. So what if you don’t have free will, so what if your knowledge of the universe is only five minutes old, so what if no one else is real? COGITO ERGO SUM, baby! But the problem here is that this doesn’t tell us anything about the quality of our experiences, and the only answer Descartes gives us is his own Anslemish proof for the existence of god followed by the guarantee that “God is not a deceiver.”

The BIAV uses this lack to kind of hone in on the central question: What does count as knowledge? If the scientists running your simulation use real-world data to make your simulation run, can you be said to “know” the information that comes from that data? Many have answered this with a very simple question: What does it matter? Without access to the “outside world”–that is, the world one layer up in which the simulation that is our lives was being run–there is literally no difference between our lives and the “real world.” This world, even if it is a simulation for something or someone else, is our “real world.”

As I once put it: “…imagine that the universe IS a simulation, and that that simulation isn’t just a view-and-record but is more like god playing a really complex version of The SIMS. So complex, in fact, that it begins to exhibit reflectively epiphenomenal behaviours—that is, something like minds arise out of the the interactions of the system, but they are aware of themselves and can know their own experience and affect the system which gives rise to them.

“Now imagine that the game learns, even when new people start new games. That it remembers what the previous playthrough was like, and adjusts difficulty and coincidence, accordingly.

“Now think about the last time you had such a clear moment of deja vu that each moment you knew— you knew—what was going to come next, and you had this sense—this feeling—like someone else was watching from behind your eyes…”

What I’m saying is, what if the DEDH/BIAV/SUT is right, and we are in a simulation? And what if Anselm was right and we can bootstrap a god into existence? And what if PW/TDT is right and we should behave and believe as if we’ve already done it? So what if I’m right and…you’re the god you’re terrified of?

 

*DRAMATIC MUSICAL STING!*

I mean you just gave yourself all of this ontologically and metaphysically creative power, right? You made two whole gods. And you simulated entire universes to do it, right? Multiversal theory played out across time and space. So you’re the superintelligence. I said early on that, in PW and the Basilisk, you don’t really lose anything if you’re wrong, but that’s not quite true. What you lose is a lifetime of work that could’ve been put toward something…better. Time you could be spending creating a benevolent superintelligence that understands and has compassion for all things. Time you could be spending in turning yourself into that understanding, compassionate superintelligence, through study, and travel, and contemplation, and work.

As I said to Tim Maly, this stuff with the Basilisk, with the Singularity, with all this AI Manicheism, it’s all a by-product of the fact that the generating and animating context of Transhumanism is Abrahamic, through and through. It focuses on those kinds of eschatological rewards and punishments. This is God and the Devil written in circuit and code for people who still look down their noses at people who want to go find gods and devils and spirits written in words and deeds and sunsets and all that other flowery, poetic BS. These are articles of faith that just so happen to be transmitted in a manner that agrees with your confirmation bias. It’s a holy war you can believe in.

And that’s fine. Just acknowledge it.

But truth be told, I’d love to see some Zen or Daoist transhumanism. Something that works to engage technological change via Mindfulness & Present-minded awareness. Something that reaches toward this from outside of this very Western context in which the majority of transhumanist discussions tend to be held. I think, when we see more and more of a multicultural transhumanism–one that doesn’t deny its roots while recapitulating them–then we’ll know that we’re on the right track.

I have to admit, though, it’ll be fun to torture my students with this one.