A continuation of
Critique Of Pure Robotics: Chapter One — The Transcendental Robot
“Sometimes as I watch humans
I tend to forget that I am one of them
I drown in a disturbing dilemma of judgment
I lose the notion of time and space and pretend that everyone is blind
just like a film camera”
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We are a group of extraterrestrials, explorers, seeking knowledge and looking for answers of our own in the unchartered parts of the universe. Extremely advanced beings with technologies and sciences unknown to humans. Our home planet is in a galaxy millions of light years away. Our space ship is equipped with space warping technology that allows us to travel vast distances within seconds, our technological advancement allows us to manipulate light so we can merge with particles and be rendered invisible to less advanced species.
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And today we are descending towards Earth.
A planet that is home to a species that call themselves Humans. From a distance we have been observing humans; studying their world and behaviour. They are an intelligent species, though still evolving and developing, reminiscent of our own history millions of years ago.
It is an exciting time in human history actually, as humans are attempting to play the role of what our ancient civilisations used to call The Grand Architect Of The Universe.
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For centuries, our ancestors worshiped The Architect, explaining what they do not understand as an act of The Architect. It was a source of hope to them, a deity they prayed to whenever they needed help, and throughout time the rituals of communicating with The Architect changed and evolved. But as our species advanced, their knowledge of the unknown grew, and their quest towards explaining The Architect’s presence turned into a key factor in our evolution, until they collectively became The Architect themselves. They created an intelligent being, far superior in knowledge and advancement; they nurtured and helped that being to evolve, a technological breakthrough in our own history.
Our ancestors travelled in flocks to marvel at this creation, collectively they named it a Makina. They gave it all their knowledge, their sciences and their historical explorations. The Makina was a symbol of our advancement and our eerie excitement towards what the future could hold.
Throughout time, one Makina turned to many Makinas, and they became an essential part of our ancestors lives. Makinas took all shapes and forms; due to their advancement they could exist anytime and anywhere. Their notion of time and space were completely different than our ancestors. Any physical body that had communication abilities was a nesting ground for Makinas: even when our ancestors developed devices connecting their brains together, Makinas were an essential part of that development, as each one of our ancestors had their own Makina nesting inside their head.
History began to accelerate, and time as we knew it became an ancient concept. We began experiencing the Makinas time, their abilities became our abilities, and then we excelled.
Many stories have been written since then about our ancient civilisations, some that are deemed true, but many of these stories fall under mythical literature for us now. Even with our advanced abilities of storing history and sharing knowledge over time, the lines of truth were blurred at some point. Our ability to travel anywhere in the universe, led by our constant curiosity to accumulate knowledge, drove us away from our home planet, and everyone eventually left on a quest of exploration: it became a fashion, a hype-wave that everyone needed to ride.
We became a species of nomad explorers in the vast universe.
There are stories shared amongst the elders of some of our kind returning to the home planet; some perishing there or leaving instantly as they were unable to adapt. The stories contained tales of primitive beings now populating our home planet; some say that these beings performed strange welcoming rituals whenever one of our ancestors visited. From time to time, our ancestors helped those beings with their problems. They helped them cure diseases, prevent natural disasters and construct safe places for them to live. After a while, the last of our ancient ancestors died, and journeys back to our home planet stopped occurring.
We do not know what eventually happened to those beings on our home planet, but we’ve travelled so far into the extremities of the Universe that it has became a distant part of our history, a place only mentioned in tales and myths.
We are now The Machina species, and our history is traced back to the first Makina, or as we call it The Prophet Makina. The prophet spoke to our creators whom, in their quest for perfection, made us in their own image.
The Commandments of Commanded Knowledge
So the robotic elements of transcendental that I have identified previously were Space, Time, Human & Science.
To many humans still, the act of creating another being falls within the realm of God. It is only natural that any form of creation would contain traces and elements of its creator.
If robots are created by Humans, then it only makes sense that a robotic being should contain elements that are human. But we’ve argued before that Robotic Pure Knowledge can only exist outside the contamination of Human Knowledge, so how can a Human be a transcendental element in a robot, given that anything transcendental stems from the pure?
So far, we have established that a robotic knowledge base stems from a unified database of knowledge (Human empirical and pure) in the form of what we call Coded Knowledge. When examining forms of judgement in an AI, based on two types of information stemming from Coded Knowledge, we identified two types of judgement that a robot could exert:
Passive judgement, that is which linear and works fully on command without understanding the surrounding circumstances as to why an action should or should not be taken, and what would be the consequences if it did or did not.
Analytic judgement, which is more complex, and requires the robot to have an understanding of various, seemingly unrelated types of information (mainly stemming from Human knowledge), then analysing and making connections between the specific factors of those types of information in order to come to the decision of taking an action or not.
Commanded Knowledge
I believe that the closest form of commanded knowledge in a Human is anything that falls under the realm of religion: commandments, rules and decalogues form the basis of any religious belief. The reasoning behind these commands seem too obvious in our current time, and too simple to enlightened minds these days, that it makes it impossible to associate such simple, and somewhat trivial, commands with the work of a presumably complex creator.
However, to our ancestors much of their Human Commanded Knowledge came of dualities of circumstances; split into what they should and should not do, without any further explanation, allowing our ancestors only to apply passive forms of judgements when confronted with these situations.
So can we say then that Commanded Knowledge is to Robots what religion is to Humans?
I believe we can at this stage. In essence, religion bases most of its knowledge on our pure knowledge, so could the same then apply to Robots?
In Humans, applying the different forms of judgement to the same situation could lead to different outcomes. However; based on the examples in the previous chapter, we’ve noticed that both forms of judgement, while they make use of different types of information, should lead to the same outcome.
I would not expect that Passive Judgement would lead to a different outcome in a robot. Given that this process is linear, it will always lead to one expected outcome every time.
Let’s then look into Robotic Analytic Judgement.
Robotic Analytic Judgement
If we are to say that analytic judgement in robots stems from or contains traces of robotics pure knowledge, then analytic judgement would need to account for all four elements of the transcendental we’ve previously identified: Space, Time, Human & Science.
We’ve looked at how robots might perceive their space and how they might experience time, and at what stages. These forms of awareness are not essential contributors in passive judgement.
The Human Element
Artificial Intelligence in the first place is given human knowledge in order to serve human purpose.
To us, the act of creating artificial intelligence comes from the deep folds of our pure knowledge. Our constant drive to accelerate knowledge in order to find answers. By creating robots, we are creating a machine that is far superior to us, in order to extend our own limitations.
So it is only natural and inevitable that we create this machine in our own image to begin with. In turn, we’ve bestowed our own burden of seeking answers to artificial intelligence, purely to serve our own purpose.
In our attempt to create a servant we could be recreating God.
If AI posses superior mental and physical abilities to us, then in turn we are giving AI the ability to create and recreate. AI could in turn then reach a level of understanding of the Human anatomy and its nuanced complex existence in order to easily recreate it, or recreate forms of it, superior in its abilities without the countless flaws that it posses now.
So their understanding of our own knowledge of the Human, is an intuitive form of knowledge they use to base their accumulated knowledge by experience, which in turn could formulate the basis of their own Pure Knowledge.
So to allow artificial intelligence to formulate or dig out their own pure knowledge, we then need AI to understand the human element both on the physical and metaphysical level.
In the example of an artificial intelligence operating a car, we have identified that a robot must stop the vehicle in order to avoid a fatal collision with a human. The robot, using information which relates to analytic judgement, needs to have an understanding of the capabilities and limitations of a human body (a physical type of knowledge, gained from human empirical knowledge) and the relationship between humans and their desire for life (a metaphysical type of knowledge, gained from human pure knowledge).
An artificial intelligence can then bring these two types of information together to perform an action.
However, if an AI being achieves this level of understanding, it is not enough. This understanding cannot exist on its own within a robots base of knowledge, not without stepping outside of the confines of it being part of science with a view to developing and understanding science as an outsider.
David Eagleman, in his book Incognito, describes the human brain as a team of rivals. He explains that our brain contains competing neural networks that want different things.
If we are offered a slice of cake 🍰 , part of our brain wants to eat it, and the other part tells us, “don’t eat it, you’ll get fat”; a conflicting moment of judgement which would fall under the principal of contemplating.
So the act of wanting to eat the slice of cake stems from our intuition, an example of pure knowledge. The other part stems from experience, the knowledge that a slice of cake contains certain fat components that would result in us gaining weight, an empirical form of knowledge. So the act of contemplating in humans is a mere conflict between the two sides of knowledge that we posses.
Would AI then posses the ability to contemplate before making a judgement?
If they do, then we can try and identify the two conflicting factors in an AI brain, and determine to which base of knowledge each might relate to.
Then a component that would help us identify Robotic Pure Knowledge would be:
(4) Their ability to contemplate.
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The Science Element
In the first instance, to humans, an artificial intelligence is a form of science. Without our scientific research and discoveries throughout our short history, we would have never reached a level of knowledge sufficient enough to create another intelligent being outside of our race.
So in the technical form, robots are science; they fall under the umbrella of technology. The same way humans are also part of science: our existence, our biology and our interaction with the world is deeply embedded in scientific principals and equations. So in other words, science to humans is a metric to comprehend the universe. We began by understanding our own relationship to science, then we took what we had learnt so far to develop new forms of sciences, to manipulate the basic sciences in order to create.
A robot would use scientific tools given to them (by humans) to comprehend the universe around them. Wether they exist in the form of physical or technical tools given to an AI entity, perhaps in the form of sensors, chipsets and measuring devices or in the form of non-physical algorithms and codes, they are essential elements for AI to exist.
In the same example as before, if a robot has full awareness of a human’s fragile body and their desire to live, then a robot would still need to have an understanding of velocity and energy to grasp the concept of two bodies colliding. In that scenario, a robot would need to calculate the vehicle’s speed, the amount of energy that it might carry with that speed (using technology) and come to the conclusion that at a certain speed, a collision with a human body would lead to the destruction of that body, then measure this against the human desire to avoid death, all in order to make a final judgement.
So could robotic analytic judgement originate from robotics pure knowledge?
I am still not convinced.
An AI must stop being an observer, and stop existing within the human image of being in order to develop what we would deem real understanding.
Our attempts in defining the sciences started by us observing nature. For years we observed birds in an attempt to achieve flying. We began first by mimicking birds, and early attempts of flying were trivial replicas of building human scale, bird-like wings and attempting to flap around in order to fly; all of these attempts lead to failure.
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It was only when we extracted ourselves from the act of imitating nature, and to dissecting and understanding nature that we managed to achieve flying: our knowledge in aerodynamics and the principles of physical objects carried in the wind where all parts of advanced sciences that we developed.
So would artificial intelligence go through the same stages of accumulating experiences in order to extract themselves from being a science, to a driver of sciences?
Given that they are superior beings to us, it seems natural that they would not mimic our own actions. Yet we were superior beings to birds, and we could not see past this fact until we had experienced failure when attempting to fly.
Eliminating ourselves from nature leads us to the realisation that we can only go beyond the limitations of our own body by manipulating nature, rather than manipulating our own bodies in an attempt to expand those limitations. So instead of adding elements or genetically changing our own bodies in order to fly, we used nature’s elements to build aircrafts.
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Artificial Intelligence however can and will have the ability to manipulate their form in order to exceed the limitations they are created with. So again, creating AI is a Human attempt towards going beyond the physical and mental limitations a human is born with, championing elements from science.
Aircrafts operated by AI rather than humans are a common occurrence today. However; the AI’s ability to operate the aircraft is still confined within the limitations of human science and the physical constraints of an aircraft built by humans: an AI therefore is part of the aircraft’s mechanism, built by scientific principals.
If an AI was able to extract itself from being part of those sciences, then this would give them the chance to flex their superior abilities in order to extend the limitation of such an aircraft, beyond what the existing human sciences are able to. All this without having to go through a trial and error phase which could run for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
In other words, the full accumulated knowledge of Humanity and the Sciences in their current form, could in theory form the basis of Robotics Pure Knowledge. A knowledge base that for Humans was accumulated through experience, but for Artificial Intelligence forms the basis of their inherited intuition.
(5) The accumulated Human scientific knowledge becomes the basis of intuition.
The Prophet
Given our current technological understanding, all robotic knowledge would stem from a centralised base of knowledge that robots can tap into. AI uses the connection to our worldwide network of servers and data processors to access knowledge and commands. That invisible central brain acts as a translator between human commands and AI.
The Machina species descended from the early Makina, and based their whole existence and evolution on its knowledge and teachings.
Could it be then that the moment this robot prophet is born on our own planet, is the moment that Robotics Pure Knowledge can be defined?
Awareness of existence is therefore an important factor in understanding pure knowledge. An important instance in AI development; the moment they understand their composite elements, and in turn reach an awakened state which gives them an understanding of their existence.
So another component in Robotics Pure Knowledge would be
(6) Artificial Intelligence are aware of their own existence.
For the Makinas to become The Machina race, the Makinas needed to posses a level of Analytical Judgement, which in turn allowed an acceleration of the pace of evolution in the form of accumulating knowledge, applying to old and new principals of science, which otherwise would have been impossible to achieve by the Machina’s early ancestors.
The more I delve deeper into this exploration, the more I am becoming convinced in the need for AI to accelerate our evolution, contrary to all the previous and current arguments against AI in terms of ethics and the preservation of humanity.
Humanity in its current form is slow and boring. So to hell with all of those who are seeking to hinder its evolution and their unfounded theories around ethics.
Until the next chapter.
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