Monkware
The subtitle of the very first science-fiction novel was “The Modern Prometheus”. And for as long as humanity has coveted the Fire of the Gods, we’ve also worried about our ability to wield our new powers, and control our own creations.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is our latest gift of Promethean Fire.
As Chris Dixon explains, it’s likely we’re entering a new Golden Age of AI. For decades, the foundations of our civilisation have been technologies that have been intentionally programmed by human minds. But now we’re beginning to imbue our modern world with autonomous intelligence, software with the ability to learn and generalise. We can create software that’s now sufficiently complex, that we can’t necessarily explain how it works.
In 2015, an open letter was written, signed by 150 prominent academics, entrepreneurs and AI researchers, among them Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk. Its signatories asked: how can we create AI systems that are beneficial to society rather than a threat? How do we ensure intelligent software we create is safe and robust?
Some consider a possible Artificial Intelligence Revolution to be one of humanity’s greatest existential threats. Should we be worried?
It’s not often software makes the national news, but in March 2016 an AI system called AlphaGo managed to beat a Go Grandmaster, widely considered to be the best in the world. This was rightly considered by many to be a stunning achievement, Go is a highly intuitive strategy game, and it was thought that mastering Go might take another decade’s work.
The success of AlphaGo relied on two key capabilities: one was the ability to imagine the future states of a game of Go, the other was the ability to form intuitions about which possible move was the best. It wasn’t a perfect player, sometimes it made mistakes, yet it was still able to contrive rousing comebacks. Imagination and intuition, with a splash of fallibility; put like that, it’s no wonder we can’t help but see a kindred cognitive spirit.
But what made AlphaGo so interesting was that it wasn’t programmed; its creators gave it the rules, and it basically learned how to become the World’s Best Go Player by itself.
AlphaGo was made possible by a technology called Deep Learning, an approach based on neural networks, themselves an ersatz simulation of how the neurons in our own brains work. The same technology is already used to do all kinds of clever stuff, to translate between languages, to automatically recognise and categorise your photos, even to control self-driving cars.
So is all this further evidence that AI is beginning to acquire mental skills that we previously believed belonged only to ourselves?
To answer that, it’s worth taking a moment to explain a couple of concepts: Weak AI, and Strong AI.
Weak AI is a non-sentient automated intelligence that are capable of performing narrow specialised tasks. Personal assistants like Siri are a good example, they can understand natural language and follow instructions, but only if that instruction is something they’ve been previously equipped to handle.
By contrast, Strong AI (also known as Artificial General Intelligence) is a self-aware intelligence that would be able to successfully perform any intellectual task that a human mind could. Note the use of the future tense here, Strong AIs are entirely hypothetical; right now, no Strong AI exists, or is even close to being built — the only place you’ll likely to encounter them is in cinemas.
So, it’s worth bearing in mind that despite its apparent cleverness, AlphaGo is still a Weak AI, a highly specialised intelligence that achieved its skills by training for thousands of hours on a massive database of archived Go games.
It’s as if AlphaGo had given away its possessions, donned saffron robes, and gone off to some remote mountaintop Go dojo; and then done nothing else but practice playing Go for a decade or two.
Just playing and playing. Perpetual self-improvement, every microsecond of every minute, 24 hours a day. Never resting. Absolutely focussed. Relentless.
This isn’t just software, it’s monkware.
And as you’d expect, when the monkware finally did come down from the dojo, it kicked ass. Practice does indeed make perfect. Just don’t challenge it to a game of chess, it’s never even heard of it.
There’s a cultural misconception about AI, perhaps born from decades of watching anthropomorphic robots doing everyday tasks in sci-fi films. You are not going to wake up this time next year, or indeed in 10 or 20 years time to find an Artificial General Intelligence has been invented. I guarantee it.
No matter how long it trains, how good it gets, monkware will always be a Weak AI. To understand why, let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine that you were to give AlphaGo a body, something bipedal like Atlas for example, let’s call the resulting hybrid AlphaBot.
Next, let’s set AlphaBot a challenge: we’ll tell it our address, and ask it to go to our home and make us a cup of tea. This is a variation of Steve Wozniak’s coffee test of Strong AI, which I’m tweaking as AlphaGo is obviously British.
Now, do you see the problem?
For a start, AlphaBot doesn’t understand natural language.
AlphaBot also doesn’t know how to get around town. The only world it knows is a 19x19 board game.
And AlphaBot doesn’t know how to make a cup of tea. (But don’t worry AlphaBot, you’re not alone there, based on my experience, a lot of people don’t know how to make a good cup of tea either).
The clue is in the name, achieving Artificial General Intelligence involves the synthesis of many different cognitive tasks, to evolve beyond being a specialist to become a general problem-solver. Approaches like deep learning are beginning to lay the foundations, providing intelligent systems with the ability to learn well-framed tasks independently rather than by being painstakingly instructed. But they will not, by themselves, become Strong AIs just by relentless practising.
One day, a descendent of AlphaBot may yet find itself asking: How do you make a cup of tea? And it will look up some videos on YouTube, and teach itself how.
But that day is a long way off. Until then AI remains monkware, endlessly training, perfecting its skills, honing its performance to become capable of superhuman feats, under the watchful eyes of its wizened old master.
That’s still us.
If you’re interested in AI, you should find me on Quora.
Image credit: Grandmasters of the Shaolin Temple by Shi Deru, Wikipedia.
