Articles

On killer robots

The Guardian's editorial of 14th April 2014 (Weapons systems are becoming autonomous entities. Human beings must take responsibility) argued that killer robots should always remain under human control, because robots can never be morally responsible. They kindly published my reply, which said that this may not be true if and when we create machines whose cognitive abilities match or exceed those of humans in every respect. Surveys indicate that around 50% of AI researchers think that could happen before 2050. But long before then we will face other dilemmas. If wars can be fought by robots, would that not be...

On boiling frogs

If you drop a frog into a pan of boiling water it will jump out. Frogs aren't stupid. But if a frog is sitting in a pan which is gradually heated it will become soporific and fail to notice when it boils to death at 100 degrees. This story has been told many times, not least by the leading management thinker, Charles Handy, in his best-selling book The Age of Unreason. Unfortunately, the story isn't true. It was put about by 19th-century experimenters, but has been refuted several times since. Never mind: it's a good metaphor, and metaphors aren't supposed...

Interview on Singularity Weblog

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zISzqmtojD8#t=1036[/embed] This week I interviewed with Nikola Danaylov, the creator of Singularity Weblog.  It was great fun, and quite an honour to follow in the footsteps of his 160-plus previous guests. We talked about hope and optimism as a useful bias, about the promise and peril of AGI, about whether automation will end work and force the introduction of universal basic income ... and of course about Pandora's Brain.
Science fiction gives us metaphors to think about our biggest problems

Science fiction gives us metaphors to think about our biggest problems

Science fiction, it has been said, tells you less about what will happen in the future than it tells you about the predominant concerns of the age when it was written. The 1940s and 50s is known as the golden age of science fiction: short story magazines ruled, and John Campbell, editor of Astounding Stories, demanded better standards of writing than the genre had seen before. Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, AE van Vogt, and Robert Heinlein all got started in this period. The Cold War was building up, but the West was emerging from the destruction and austerity of...

Singularity University Summit, Seville, March 2015

Hyatt Hotels has revenues of $4bn and a market value of $8.4bn. AirBnB has revenues of $250m, 13 staff, pretty much no assets, and a market value of $14bn. It will soon be the world’s largest hotel company. Über was founded in 2009 and has a market cap of $40bn, despite – again – having pretty much no physical assets. It has taxi drivers up in arms all over the world. Magic Leap, a virtual reality company, raised $50m in February 2014 and then $550m in October. It persuaded the second set of investors to contribute by showing them a...
Science fiction is philosophy in fancy dress

Science fiction is philosophy in fancy dress

Looking back, I think I have always understood that science fiction is philosophy in fancy dress.  My favourite science fiction stories are the ones that make you think – the ones that ask, “what would it be like if…”  That is what I tried to do in my novel, Pandora's Brain. I started reading the stories of Arthur C Clark, Isaac Asimov, JG Ballard and the rest as a young boy, and that was also when I formed my first lasting ambition – to study philosophy at Oxford.  (I still don’t know where that ambition came from.  Perhaps it was something...

Pandora’s Brain is published!

Pandora's Brain is available today on Amazon sites around the world in both ebook and paperback formats. I'm celebrating by attending the Singularity University Summit in Seville.  The content of this conference has been inspiring and uplifting but also very grounded.  As you would expect, the word "exponential" has been used a great deal, but the presenters - mostly SU faculty - have focused on changes expected in the near term, and have provided solid evidence and examples to support their claims about the future they envisage. I've met some great SU people - including AI expert Neil Jacobstein, medical expert Daniel...

It’s that man again!

OK, I know some people have had enough of Mr Musk lately, but he does keep saying and doing interesting things. In a wide-ranging and intriguing 8-minute interview with Max Tegmark (leading physicist and a founder of the Future of Life Institute), Musk lists the five technologies which will impact society the most.  He doesn't specify the timeframe. His list of five is (not verbatim - it appears at 4 minutes in): Making life multi-planetary Efficient energy sources Growing the footprint of the internet Re-programming human genetics Artificial Intelligence A pretty good list, IMHO. What is very cool is that he...

Attitudes towards Artificial General Intelligence

Following the recent comments by Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, more people are thinking and talking about the possibility of an AGI being created, and what it might mean. That's a good thing. The chart below is a sketch of how I suspect the opinions are forming within the various groups participating in the debate.  (The general public is not yet participating to any significant degree.) It's conjecture based on news reporting and personal discussions, and not intended to offend, so please don't sue me.  Otherwise, comments welcome. CESR = Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (Cambridge University) FHI = Future of Humanity Institute (Oxford...
Book review: “Superintelligence” by Nick Bostrom

Book review: “Superintelligence” by Nick Bostrom

Nick Bostrom is one of the cleverest people in the world.  He is a professor of philosophy at Oxford University, and was recently voted 15th most influential thinker in the world by the readers of Prospect magazine.  He has laboured mightily and brought forth a very important book, Superintelligence: paths, dangers, strategies.  I hesitate to tangle with this leviathan, but its publication is a landmark event in the debate which this blog is all about, so I must. I hope this book finds a huge audience.  It deserves to.  The subject is vitally important for our species, and no-one has...

Volvo speeds up driverless car project

Volvo's test of self-driving cars seems to be progressing significantly ahead of schedule.  In a press release last December, the company said that "the project would commence in 2014 with customer research and technology development, [with the first cars] expected to be on the roads in Gothenburg by 2017."  An update just released says that "the first test cars are already rolling around the Swedish city of Gothenburg and the sophisticated Autopilot technology is performing well." Why the rush into self-driving cars, and what will be the consequences – intended and otherwise? One big reason for introducing self-driving cars is...

Terminator or Transcendence?

Yesterday I participated in an online discussion of the movie Transcendence, along with Nikola Danaylov, the "Larry King" of transhumanism, and Stuart Armstrong of the Oxford Institute for the Future of Humanity.  The debate was chaired by David Wood, chair of the London Futurist Group. The video is here: Terminator ot Transcendence?  

Stephen Hawking joins the debate

Stephen Hawking has joined the small group of people sounding the alarm about the possibility of super-intelligence arriving in the next few decades. In a blog in the Huffington Post, he and three American professors at MIT and Berkeley warn that it "would be a mistake, and potentially our worst mistake ever ... to dismiss the notion of highly intelligent machines as mere science fiction." "Artificial intelligence (AI) research is now progressing rapidly," the post continues, arguing that Watson's Jeopardy success and self-driving cars " will probably pale against what the coming decades will bring. ... Success in creating AI...
Movie review: “Transcendence”

Movie review: “Transcendence”

It was keenly awaited by people interested in the possible near-term arrival of super-intelligence, but Transcendence has opened to half-empty cinemas and terrible reviews - at the time of writing it has a 20% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The distributors kept changing the release date, which might indicate they realised the film wouldn't open with a splash, but that they hope it could grow to become a cult classic.  Sadly, I doubt it.  Sadly, because in some ways Transcendence is a fine film with great ambitions.  For me it is one of the best science fiction films of recent...

Paul Allen’s institute maps a mouse brain

The Allen Institute for Brain Science has published a paper in Nature describing how they have posted a comprehensive data set on the wiring of a mouse brain.  The data is freely available at the Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas, in case you want to see for yourself. A mouse brain has 75 million neurons, far fewer than the 100 or so billion in a human brain.  The only species for which we so far have a complete wiring diagram (or "connectome") is the C. Elegans worm, with only 302 neurons. The researchers used genetically engineered viruses to illuminate and trace individual...

The EU and the USA to build a brain together

The world's two biggest brain mapping projects are to join forces.  The EU's €1bn Human Brain Project (HBP) and the United States’ $1bn BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) will start to collaborate later this year. Details are yet to be provided, but the effort will start this summer and will include all of the BRAIN Initiative's government partners — the NIH (National Institutes of Health), the NSF (National Science Foundation) and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). Henry Markram, who directs the HBP at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), says that Israel's brain...

"Transcendence": 2-minute mini-feature

The director, writer, producer and stars of "Transcendence" talk here about the movie and the ideas behind it.  They all seem to think that uploading a human mind into a supercomputer is a serious possibility.  Paul Bettany reports neuroscientists at CalTech telling him that it may be only 30 years away. Of course this may just be movie hype.

More funding for Obama’s BRAIN

Just under a year ago, President Obama launched the BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research though Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies), a multi-agency project to revolutionize our understanding of the human brain.  The scale of his ambition is enormous: "There is this enormous mystery waiting to be unlocked, and the BRAIN Initiative will [do it] by giving scientists the tools they need to get a dynamic picture of the brain in action and better understand how we think and how we learn and how we remember. That knowledge could be -- will be -- transformative." The spend in 2014 was $100m, and the 2015 Budget proposes...