Poster Time.

Just Finished Reading: Hegel – A Very Short Introduction by Peter Singer

GWF Hegel was undoubtedly one of the most important European philosophers of the 18th Century and had a huge influence on the ideas on the 19th and 20th Centuries particularly through the works of Karl Marx. His influence probably stemmed from his strong belief – hardly questioned at the time – that history itself operated with a purpose to ultimately produce the perfect society and the perfect people to live in it. He proposed that few men are truly free because they do not understand the world or themselves sufficiently and are, therefore, victims of strong emotion and avoidable ignorance. Hegel proposed that each human mind is but a small piece of universal mind which strives through history to understand itself. It is this mind, this spirit, that drives history forward. The universal mind is central to Hegel’s thinking and much of his philosophy flows from it.

Singer has managed to produce, in a scant 113 pages, a decent overview of one of the most influential – and to be honest most opaque – philosophers of recent times. I’ve come across some of his ideas before but have tended to shy away from them appreciating how difficult he can be to understand. Whilst not exactly fear free I am, at least, more open to ‘having a go’ at Hegel in the future. I think he’s quite important to get a handle on given his influence on both Mark and Nietzsche. It might indeed be argued that without at least an appreciation of Hegel it is difficult to truly understand the modern world. That being said you should expect to hear more about him – if not actual books by him – in the future. A recommended book for those who have thought about investigating Hegel but were unsure how to start.

Pulp Fiction.

Cartoon Time.

Letter to a ‘German Friend’.

You never believed in the meaning of this world, and you therefore deduced the idea that everything was equivalent and that good and evil could be defined according to one’s wishes. You supposed that in the absence of any human or divine code the only values were those of the animal world – in other words, violence and cunning. Hence you concluded that man was negligible and that his soul could be killed, that in the maddest of histories the only pursuit for the individual was the adventure of power and his only morality, the realism of conquests. And, to tell the truth, I, believing I thought as you did, saw no valid argument to answer you except a fierce love of justice which, after all, seemed to me as unreasonable as the most sudden passion.

Where lay the difference? Simply that you readily accepted despair and I never yielded to it. Simply that you saw the injustice of our condition to the point of being willing to add to it, whereas it seemed to me that man must exalt justice in order to fight against eternal injustice, create happiness in order to protest against the universe of unhappiness. Because you turned your despair into intoxication, because you freed yourself from it by making a principle of it, you were willing to destroy man’s works and fight him in order to add to his basic misery. Meanwhile, refusing to accept that despair and that tortured world, I merely wanted men to rediscover their solidarity in order to wage war against their revolting fate.

I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one. This world has at least the truth of man, and our task is to provide its justification against fate itself. And if it has no justification but man; hence he must be saved if we want to save the idea we have of life. With your scornful smile you will ask me: what do you mean by saving man? And with all my being I shout to you that I mean not mutilating him and yet giving a chance to the justice that man alone can conceive.

Albert Camus, Paris, July 1944.

Cartoon Time.

Smart machines: What's the worst that could happen?

by MacGregor Campbell for New Scientist

27 July 2009

An invasion led by artificially intelligent machines. Conscious computers. A smartphone virus so smart that it can start mimicking you. You might think that such scenarios are laughably futuristic, but some of the world's leading artificial intelligence (AI) researchers are concerned enough about the potential impact of advances in AI that they have been discussing the risks over the past year. Now they have revealed their conclusions. Until now, research in artificial intelligence has been mainly occupied by myriad basic challenges that have turned out to be very complex, such as teaching machines to distinguish between everyday objects. Human-level artificial intelligence or self-evolving machines were seen as long-term, abstract goals not yet ready for serious consideration.

Now, for the first time, a panel of 25 AI scientists, roboticists, and ethical and legal scholars has been convened to address these issues, under the auspices of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in Menlo Park, California. It looked at the feasibility and ramifications of seemingly far-fetched ideas, such as the possibility of the internet becoming self-aware. The panel drew inspiration from the 1975 Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA in California, in which over 140 biologists, physicians, and lawyers considered the possibilities and dangers of the then emerging technology for creating DNA sequences that did not exist in nature. Delegates at that conference foresaw that genetic engineering would become widespread, even though practical applications – such as growing genetically modified crops – had not yet been developed.

Unlike recombinant DNA in 1975, however, AI is already out in the world. Robots like Roombas and Scoobas help with the mundane chores of vacuuming and mopping, while decision-making devices are assisting in complex, sometimes life-and-death situations. For example, Poseidon Technologies, sells AI systems that help lifeguards identify when a person is drowning in a swimming pool, and Microsoft's Clearflow system helps drivers pick the best route by analysing traffic behaviour. At the moment such systems only advise or assist humans, but the AAAI panel warns that the day is not far off when machines could have far greater ability to make and execute decisions on their own, albeit within a narrow range of expertise. As such AI systems become more commonplace, what breakthroughs can we reasonably expect, and what effects will they have on society? What's more, what precautions should we be taking?

These are among the many questions that the panel tackled, under the chairmanship of Eric Horvitz, president of the AAAI and senior researcher with Microsoft Research. The group began meeting by phone and teleconference in mid-2008, then in February this year its members gathered at Asilomar, a quiet town on the north California coast, for a weekend to debate and seek consensus. They presented their initial findings at the International Joint Conference for Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in Pasadena, California, on 15 July. Panel members told IJCAI that they unanimously agreed that creating human-level artificial intelligence – a system capable of expertise across a range of domains – is possible in principle, but disagreed as to when such a breakthrough might occur, with estimates varying wildly between 20 and 1000 years. Panel member Tom Dietterich of Oregon State University in Corvallis pointed out that much of today's AI research is not aimed at building a general human-level AI system, but rather focuses on "idiot-savants" systems good at tasks in a very narrow range of application, such as mathematics.

The panel discussed at length the idea of an AI "singularity" – a runaway chain reaction of machines capable of building ever-better machines. While admitting that it was theoretically possible, most members were skeptical that such an exponential AI explosion would occur in the foreseeable future, given the lack of projects today that could lead to systems capable of improving upon themselves. "Perhaps the singularity is not the biggest of our worries," said Dietterich. A more realistic short-term concern is the possibility of malware that can mimic the digital behavior of humans. According to the panel, identity thieves might feasibly plant a virus on a person's smartphone that would silently monitor their text messages, email, voice, diary and bank details. The virus could then use these to impersonate that individual with little or no external guidance from the thieves. Most researchers think that they can develop such a virus. "If we could do it, they could," said Tom Mitchell of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, referring to organised crime syndicates. Peter Szolovits, an AI researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was not on the panel, agrees that common everyday computer systems such as smartphones have layers of complexity that could lead to unintended consequences or allow malicious exploitation. "There are a few thousand lines of code running on my cell phone and I sure as hell haven't verified all of them," he says. "These are potentially powerful technologies that could be used in good ways and not so good ways," says Horvitz, and cautions that besides the threat posed by malware, we are close to creating systems so complex and opaque that we don't understand them.

Given such possibilities, "what's the responsibility of an AI researcher?" says Bart Selman of Cornell, co-chair of the panel. "We're starting to think about it." At least for now we can rest easy on one score. The panel concluded that the internet is not about to become self-aware.

[Well, at least they’re starting to think about the implications of AI. That’s a hopeful sign]