Robot-Human Symbiosis
Einar N. Strømmen & Tor G. Syvertsen, Professors emeriti, Department of Structural Engineering, NTNU
It has been prophesied that robots and “Artificial Intelligence” (AI) will cause the most profound revolution in the history of mankind, and that in its wake most jobs in industry and public services will be lost, leaving many people without income and compelled to meaningless lives.
Future of Life Institute postulates: “In the history of human progress, a few events have stood out as especially revolutionary: the intentional use of fire, the invention of agriculture, the industrial revolution, possibly the invention of computers and the internet. But many anticipate that the creation of advanced artificial intelligence will tower over these achievements.”
There have always been utopian as well as dystopian predictions of the future. Technovelgy provides a wide range of links to sources of “Artificial Intelligence” and Robotics in Science Fiction, along with other speculations and predictions.
Only few have come true. Douglas Adams (1952–2001) noted: “I really didn’t foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course ‒ the computer industry didn’t even foresee that the century was going to end.”
No forecast is needed, we are already way into the the digital revolution. Fidel Castro, who passed away last year, warned: “A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle between the future and the past.” Some seem to have joined the future already (Wikipedia, Linux and Estonia are prime examples). Sweden recently launched a national digital strategy (in Swedish). “Sweden is best in the world at pretty much everything”.
H.G. Wells (1866–1946) predicted a worldwide information network and encyclopedia in his 1936 lecture The Idea of a World Encyclopedia. As Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) advised: “Politicians should read science fiction, not western and detective stories.”
Technology determinists Ray Kurzweil and Hans Moravec have established the myth that increasing technical performance will make machines at some point surpass human intelligence, reaching a level higher than ever seen before, and that this will inevitably increase human well-being!
Whatever “intelligence” might be, and wherever in the universe they may look for it, is unaccountable. Immense computational power could soon turn disadvantageous: “A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention, with the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequila” ( Mitch Ratcliffe).
The term robot originates from Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R., and his definition still holds. In Check robotnik means “forced worker”.
A digital robot may include all kinds of self-acting systems made up of digital software code embedded in non-organic hardware, spanning from the heaviest machinery to the tiniest chip. An ATM is a bank teller robot. An automatic gearshift device is a gear shifting robot. An aircraft autopilot is a pilot robot. Examples are ample.
Robots are different from tools in the sense that tools are actively used by humans, while robots are autonomously performing tasks without any human interference.
We suggest a dichotomy of “intelligent” agents:
- Humans: Organic, intelligent life based on replication of carbon-based digital code (e.g. DNA) at the basic cell level, specialized into various types embedded in cell processing units (that may even do calculations). Cells combine into organs, which in turn combine into organisms, some of which we consider “intelligent”.
- Robots: Nonorganic “intelligent” systems comprising digital code in a lifeless executing environment, like a microprocessor (silicon chip).
We reserve the term robot for class 2, although there may be instances of class 1 behaving likemembers of class 2 ; e.g. bureaucrats and others who strictly follow rules without thinking.
Surprisingly, there is still no proper definition of neither life nor intelligence, except perhaps for the Turing test; an imitation game proposed to determine whether machines can “think”. Alan Turing considered the “Turing machine” contradictory to intelligence: “If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent”, simply because it has been programmed from elementary logic. “The original question, ‘Can machines think?’ I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.”
Later he fell in doubt and admitted: “It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers … They would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage therefore, we should have to expect the machines to take control.”
We endorse the Technology Liberation Front: “The real problem is not whether machines think, but whether men do”.
Presently Google’s New AI is Better at Creating AI Than the Company’s Engineers, telling little about intelligence, but much about Google engineers …
Attempts to mimic the human brain by using computational capacity seem similar to the many futile attempts of making objects heavier-than-air fly by imitating bird flutter. To fly became viable first when the laws of aerodynamics were understood, and then a simple hull with wide, fixed wings and a propelling force driven by a combustion engine was able to take flight on December 17, 1903, without flapping its wings.
Could the pursuit of “artificial intelligence” be equivalent?
Instead of trying to imitate human “thinking”, perhaps one should first aim at understanding the underlying nature of intelligence. The human brain is nither rule-based nor search-oriented, like a computer program.
Or, is it futile to assume that thinking and consciousness can be created mechanically from parts, like many computer scientists seem to do?
Fernando Flores and Terry Winograd presented a different approach in their 1986 book Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design.
Intelligent organization may be perceived as a kind of autopoiesis, an idea first proposed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in 1972: Autopoiesis and Cognition — The Realization of the Living; “Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process ogf cognition. This statement is valid for all organisms, with and without a nervous system”.
An extension to self-organization, illustrated by the sand-pile model, was proposed by the Danish physicist Per Bak.
A strange property of the human brain is the ability of instant negation, i.e. one can immediately tell what one does not know. Even if it is done in microseconds, a robot will have to search its entire memory, ending up with the answer: “no result found”, or “try narrowing your search”.
2500 years before computers, Socrates pointed out ; “I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.”
Socrates’ student Plato observed: “Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.” The least notable part is knowledge, as humans often seem unable to transform rational knowledge into “intelligent” behavior. Plato’s view conforms to Paul MacLean’s evolutionary idea of a triune brain, comprising the reptilian, mammalian and primate parts of the human brain.
Perhaps the attempts to create “artificial intelligence” are aiming too low; imitating humans may bring nothing but more and faster stupidity.
As a higher aim; we suggest creating a fourth level of the brain, above the neocortex … That level will require attention and thinking which are the scarcest resource in the world as of today. Unfortunately, the supply of money is plentiful to anyone who shouts “artificial intelligence”.
Robots are expected to behave completely rational, in sharp contrast to humans, whose behaviour veer towards desire and emotion, and whose character contains self-awareness or consciousness.
As the physicist Erwin Schrödinger put it : “Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.” Is it possible to rationalise an “artificial” copy of a quality where the real counterpart is totally unknown?
Tor Nørretranders explains consciousness in terms of exformation, i.e. discarded useless information: “Millions and millions of bits are condensed to a conscious experience that contains practically no information at all. Every single second, every one of us discards millions of bits in order to arrive at the special state known as consciousness…Consciousness is not about information, but about its opposite: order…Consciousness is ingenious because it knows what is important. But the sorting and interpretation required for it to know what is important is not conscious. Subliminal perception and sorting is the real secret behind consciousness”.
Nørretranders distinguishes between Me and I; Me being the entire body and nervous system, I being the conscious part of us. Hence, our main “intelligence” is in Me working hard on discarding most of the information received in order for I to grasp meaning.
Our brain receive over 11 million bits of information every second, from the eyes, skin, ears, nose, and mouth. But our consciousness can only process a limited amount (1–16 bits, or perhaps up to about 40, per second).
A basic property of life is metabolism; i.e. the processing of matter, energy and information input, accepting beneficial parts and discarding waste. For the process of extracting a few meaningful bits from Exabytes of meaningless crap, we prefer Tom Stonier’s term “Semantic metabolism”. AI, on the other hand, tends to collect and store as much information as possible without extracting any immediate meaning out of the junk.
One might suggest that it would be better to put efforts into eradicating natural stupidity rather than wasting money on creating inferior “artificial intelligence”. The imminent danger is that ossified work procedures are codified into software that is glamoured as “artificial intelligence”, which may be harder to get rid of than the most pig-headed bureaucrat. Such stupidity may come to double every week!
Similarly, since the knowledge and understanding of our surroundings are limited to the perception of ourselves, the search for other intelligent life, on earth or elsewhere, may prove impossible. We may find ourselves in an inescapable bubble, a global membrane, or as Marshall McLuhan pointed out: “One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.”
A different approach will be needed in order to get a clue; the only promising approach as far as we can see is the quantum brain. In order to make a synthetic quantum brain, technology might sometime provide quantum power to match the brain?
Marcelo Gleiser dampens the most ardent: “Unless you are intellectually numb, you can’t escape the allure of the quantum, the tantalizing possibility that we are immersed in mystery, forever bound within the shores of the Island of Knowledge. Unless you are intellectually numb, you can’t escape the awe-inspiring feeling that the essence of reality is unknowable.”
There are many approaches to emergent cognition. According to Buddha in Avatamsaka Sutra:
In the mind is no painting,
In painting there is no mind;
Yet not apart from mind
Is any painting to be found.
Some major differences of character between robots and humans are listed in the table below.
It may only be a matter of time before the best option for humans is to become enhanced by robots, i.e. to accept a state of human-robot symbiosis, in a cooperation for superior performance.
This view complies with Douglas C. Engelbart’s vision 55 years ago of using automats in the form of computers for Augmenting the Human Intellect, or Boosting our Collective IQ. He devised and demonstrated a set of tools that now are commonplace in refined forms.
In Man-Computer Symbiosis by J.C.R. Licklieder from 1960 he used an analogy to explain a mutually beneficial symbiosis: “The fig tree is pollinated only by the insect Blastophaga grossorun. The larva of the insect lives in the ovary of the fig tree, and there it gets its food. The tree and the insect are thus heavily interdependent: the tree cannot reproduce without the insect; the insect cannot eat without the tree; together, they constitute not only a viable but a productive and thriving partnership. This cooperative living together in intimate association, or even close union, of two dissimilar organisms is called symbiosis.”
His vision has to some extent become a reality. Facebook and similar foolish systems are rudimentary symbiosis of tight robotic interdependence. The symbiosis is not smarter than each party independently, but that is not the robots fault. There is, however, a fundamental difference between Licklider’s figtree-larvae symbiotic system and Facebook-users: the former produces something useful (figs) for the external world while the Facebook-system is entirely introvert and is mainly enhancing human stupidity.
If the present trends of technological development continue and a lack of human wisdom prevail, then a more unpleasant alternative is that the robots beat us in coming up with the idea of a symbiosis between themselves and human beings as their interface to the external world.
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) noted: “Men have become the tools of their tools.”
In any case, it seems inevitable that we are approaching a future where robots and humans cannot exist without each other. Which way around the symbiosis will take place, who will have the upper hand, is hard to predict. If robots dominate we will become their slaves and perhaps even their pets, in which case they will pick only the people they find best qualified for their purpose of symbiosis. Or perhaps, they will conjure up the idea of setting up training academies, where we are trained to improve our capacities as world-robot interface.
In the epic film The Matrix, the main character Neo is being fed mental and physical knowledge via a cranial jack by Tank who decides what software to be run in order to augment Neo’s skills. The film was based on William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer where the term “cyberspace” was coined. The novel mention: “The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games… early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jack”.
Presently, the US military is performing experiments in uploading thinking to the brain. Welcome to Cyberspace! AI robots are not required, the US military human robot will determine your thinking, you cannot escape, you are tracked wherever you are in the universe!
According to Marvin Minsky, co-founder of MIT AI-Lab, “Artificial Intelligence” is nothing more than a branch of (computer) science: “Artificial Intelligence is the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men”.
As most branches of science, this is a never-ending story, claiming ever-increasing sums of money for bloated promises.
E.M. Forster’s short story THE MACHINE STOPS (or a digested version published in Wired: Nov. 1, 1909: ‘ The Machine Stops’) is warmly recommended.
The revolution of a human-machine symbiosis will inevitably cause fear and pain for many. For those who embrace it as a natural evolution, there will be an ocean of opportunities ahead. Presently, statistics show that robots are disrupting fewer jobs than ever before.
However, from dreams of utopia mankind has always woken up to a reality of misery…
