Karnak’s Genius: Faith in AI
“Our relationship with true AI will always be a matter of faith, not proof.” George Dyson called it. Much to my editor’s chagrin, if I read George Dyson’s sentiment years ago, Neon Lieben would be in reader’s hands a half decade sooner. Oh the irony of an author’s struggle to find the perfect muse-inspired thought to feed a manuscript of bits and timelines into one cohesive piece. All from a historian, who dropped out of high school. Goes to show academia isn’t the stop-gap to wisdom, even if it has its’ uses. The relationship with true (or what I would say general) AI, resides firmly for me in the realms of faith. Like trust in the divine, or the hopes of lovers on their wedding days they’ll never stray. All who investigate the creation of true artificial sapience are living within the hope their AI will act as intended and only develop in beneficial ways. Leaving out the mad scientist, who wants to see the world ‘get its comeuppance’, this sense of faith over proof is a central theme of the call for controlled ethics in artificial intelligence development.
Baiko’s reverie dissipated when Lieben stood and dusted off her dress. This in itself was novel behaviour, where did she learn that? Simple, but human. The silicone skin shimmered in the canopy’s diffused light.
“What are you doing, Lieben?” Baiko noted the corresponding cascade of learning required to dust off her dress. Stimulus detection. Desire to stand, awareness of the fabric. Awareness of the particulates on fabric, desire to brush the particulates off… awareness the fabric was ‘dirty/inappropriate’
“Eradicating stagnation.” Lieben put her foot on a rock on the bank, and kicked. It crumbled off its’ moorings and tumbled into the dry riverbed. Water and nettles trickled then poured down the once dry stream. Slowly, the water began to clear, and Baiko could see the mosaic scattered along the bottom.
Neon Lieben by Sapha Burnell
Ashby’s Law states any effective control system must be as complex as the system it controls. Where does that take us with the control of general artificial intelligence? A fever-dream with our current understanding and capabilities in quantum computing and Bosemann Machines, general AI, the ‘human-esque’ all around super intelligences in Sci-Fi are always going to be firmly within the realms of faith. No amount of research into potentialities and simulations will give definitive 100% solid proof to the temperament or development of post-human consciousness. The research already conducted via Facebook had them shut down one attempt at AI, when their fledgelings created non-human languages to better communicate.
We can set the sphere upon the waters of space-time, but once our hand rises off the planetary object spun like a top, its’ spin and trajectory are no longer our control. Where does it go? What external stimulus will affect the beneficial intelligence crafted as the ultimate altruist?
This is the realm of science fiction, and those whose task it is to research and create AI ought to keep the pulse of science fiction firmly under index and middle fingers. Here’s looking at you, Elon. Mark. Jeff… especially you, Elon, let’s be honest. May I call you Elon? Read my book, Neon Lieben. Read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Phillip K Dick and Idoru by William Gibson. Pitching novels to billionaires aside, the act of writing science fiction is an act of speculating change, of seeing one myriad chain of possibilities and how far it’ll take the techno-tapestry until it hits a snag in reality’s fabric.
John von Neumann’s Law states the defining characteristic of a complex system is that it constitutes its own simplest behavioural description. The simplest complete model of an organism is the organism itself.
The Third Law of Artificial Intelligence states any system simple enough to be understandable will not be complicated enough to behave intelligently, while any system complicated enough to behave intelligently will be too complicated to understand.
Dr. Dieter Karnak hunches in the Cloister, his spherical laboratory deep in the middle of the Conglomerate’s Vancouver Research Facility. He pours over Dyson’s words, Ashby’s Law and Jon von Neumann’s work on complexity in the inherent system.
Faith, the true imperative of quantum computer based artificial intelligence was something the scientific community of his rational academic education deemed… flippant. A superstition of the past. He programmed algorithms, investigated the nature of quartz-drives for data storage and processing, but the anchor, the blink against disincorporation of the data was absent. There it was again, faith. The hole in his theories, faith.
Eventually, investigatory algorithms, testing Lieben’s logic and ability to identify creativity required the faith his beloved machine would not only function as its’ own singular artificial organism, but in an altruistic way.
Could he program kindness, humility or mercy into a machine?
“It’s why Papa made me. To give the rocks a push.” Lieben gazed upon her handiwork, computations of flow rates, volumes and the rate of decay of Sino-Himalayan Pine needles filling her processors.
“Why, Baiko? What did you want me to say?”
Baiko’s throat worked, as she set the tablet down on the bench beside her, to purchase time, thumb idly pressing the record button.
“You put down your tablet. Your heart-rate increased, and now your mouth is apparently dry. Something I said. What was it?” Lieben tilted her head to the side, and watched Baiko’s attempt at remaining still.
“I wanted to know how you came to dust off your dress… and you surprised me with a more abstract line of thought.” Baiko folded her hands in her lap, putting on a dim but honest smile. “You surprise me, Lieben. I keep thinking you are of one level of consciousness and you open like a blossoming flower.”
Neon Lieben by Sapha Burnell
Questions about whether we should build true artificial intelligence are moot. We are building them, they are occurring like Blake’s plodding monster to Bethlehem. How we build them, the nature of their electro-epigenetic creation becomes the integral piece. It’s faith. Baiko’s trust in Lieben’s agency builds through Neon Lieben to a crux point best defined by Jaron Lanier’s ‘One Half a Manifesto’:
“There has often been a tender, but unintended humor in the argumentative writing by advocates of eventual computer sentience. The quest to rationally prove the possibility of sentience in a computer (or perhaps in the internet), is the modern version of proving God’s existence. As is the case with the history of God, a great many great minds have spent excesses of energy on this quest, and eventually a cybernetically-minded 21st century version of Kant will appear in order to present a tedious “proof” that such adventures are futile. I simply don’t have the patience to be that person.”
“Do you like my river, Baiko?”
The sound of the waterfall surged in its’ contentment in the background, trickles babbling along the rocks of the stream. Clear now, the water looked less like a closed system of whirling, slow reeling circles. Life, in its’ abundance let the bric-a-brac flow downriver.
“Yes.” Baiko picked up her tablet and patted the space beside her, thumb slipping onto the pause button for the recording. “Lieben, do you know what a secret is?”
