Future Current

One might imagine that AI systems with harmless goals will demonstrate harmless behavior. A paper by Self-Aware Systems founder and president Steve Omohundro submitted for the AGI-08 conference on artificial general intelligence shows instead that intelligent systems will need to be carefully designed to prevent them from behaving in harmful ways. This presentation on the basic AI drives, taking place at the post-conference workshop, identifies a number of “drives” that will appear in sufficiently advanced AI systems of any design.

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Steve Omohundro is president of Self-Aware Systems, a Silicon Valley think tank aimed at bringing human values to emerging technologies. His talk “AI and the Future of Human Morality,” delivered at the Silicon Valley World Transhumanist Association Meetup, examines the origins of human morality and its future development to cope with advances in artificial intelligence.

The presentation begins with a discussion of the dangers of philosophies which put ideas ahead of people, then presents Kohlberg’s six stages of human moral development, evidence for recent advances in human morality, the theory underlying co-opetition, recent advances in understanding the sexual and social origins of altruism, and the five human moral emotions and their relationship to political systems. The discussion then considers the likely behavior of advanced AI systems, showing that they will want to understand and improve themselves, will have drives toward self-preservation and resource acquisition, and will be vigilant in avoiding corruption and addiction. The presentation ends with a description of the three primary challenges that humanity faces in guiding future technology toward human-positive ends.

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At the AGI-08 post-conference workshop on the ethical implications of artificial general intelligence, J. Storrs Hall, author of Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine, presented on “Engineering Utopia.” The paper asserts that the likely advent of AGI and the long-established trend of improving computational hardware promise a dual revolution in coming decades: machines which are both more intelligent and more numerous than human beings. This possibility raises substantial concern over the moral nature of such intelligent machines, and of the changes they will cause in society. Will we have the chance to determine their moral character, or will evolutionary processes and/or runaway self-improvement take the choices out of our hands?

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The study of reproducible errors of human reasoning, and what these errors reveal about underlying mental processes, is known as the heuristics and biases program in cognitive psychology. This program has made discoveries highly relevant to assessors of global catastrophic risks.  Eliezer Yudkowsky, who writes on the subject of cognitive biases at Overcoming Bias, presented at the  Global Catastrophic Risks conference in Mountain View on the subject of cognitive biases in the assessment of risk.

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Mike Treder of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology and J. Hughes of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies introduce the November 14 conference on Global Catastrophic Risks taking place in Mountain View, California.  The event followed a meeting on the same subject, an immensely diverse collection of events could constitute global catastrophes, in July at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University in the United Kingdom.  The topic for the conference was “Building a Resilient Civilization.”

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Photo by brewbrooks

At the AGI-08 post-conference workshop Ben Goertzel presented on a paper with Stephan Vladimir Bugaj on the theory of stages of ethical development as applied to artificial intelligence systems.  Incorporating prior related theories by Kohlberg and Gilligan, as well as Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, the theory is then applied to the ethical development of integrative artificial general intelligence systems that contain components carrying out simulation and uncertain inference – the key hypothesis being that effective integration of these components is central to the ascent of the AGI system up the ethical-stage hierarchy.

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 At AGI-08: The First Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, Novamente LLC CSO Ben Goertzel presented on a paper by Cassio Pennachin et al. on a teaching methodology called Imitative-Reinforcement-Corrective (IRC) learning, proposed as a general approach for teaching embodied non-linguistic AGI systems.  IRC  is a framework for automatically learning a procedure that generates a desired type of behavior.  A set of exemplars of the target behavior-type are utilized for fitness estimation, reinforcement signals from a human teacher are used for fitness evaluation, and the execution of candidate procedures may be modified by the teacher via corrections delivered in real-time.

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The IEET, Center for Responsible Nanotechnology and the Lifeboat Foundation hosted a meeting on Global Catastrophic Risks on Friday, November 14 in Mountain View, California, one day prior to the Convergence 08 Unconference.  The seminar’s theme was “Building a Resilient Civilization,” for which IEET executive director J. Hughes argued in favor of strengthening transnational governance to mitigate risks.

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Aubrey de Grey of the Methuselah Foundation and Tanya Jones of Alcor Life Extension

The free public event preceding the Understanding Aging conference organized by the Methuselah Foundation was entitled “Aging: the disease, the cure, the implications.” Held in Royce Hall at UCLA on the evening of June 27th, 2008, the event aimed at putting the postponement of aging more firmly on the political and social map than ever before. There, biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey offered his own underlying arguments for why aging can and should be the target of current-day regenerative medicine.

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The Methuselah Foundation is a 501c(3) non-profit organization committed to the acceleration of progress toward a cure for age-related disease. Biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey has formulated a wide-ranging plan for the comprehensive and eventually indefinite postponement of age-related physical and mental decline, named Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. He is the organizer of an ongoing series of conferences and workshops that focus on the key biomedical research relevant to SENS, the most recent of which was entitled “Aging: the disease, the cure, the implications.”

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In the introduction to the AGI-08 post-conference workshop on the futurological implications of artificial general intelligence, Novamente Chief Science Officer Ben Goertzel argued that it is worthwhile in planning for the future to put a certain amount of attention on the speculative aspects of present-day emerging technologies. The workshop’s introductory talk focuses on the significance of artificial general intelligence to the hypothesis of a technological singularity.

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At the AGI-08 post-conference workshop, Ben Goertzel presented on a paper by the speaker and the Singularity Institute’s director of open source projects, David Hart.  There he described the OpenCog software development framework for integrative artificial general intelligence. The framework’s libraries include a flexible knowledge representation embodied in a scalable knowledge store, a cognitive process scheduler, and a plug-in architecture for allowing interaction between cognitive, perceptual, and control algorithms.

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