The Humanity Beacon Project

Commentary on the evolution of humanity and technology.

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Author Archives: profyte

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Is China Advancing the AI Doomsday Clock?

Andrew Browne writing for the WSJ (President Uses Big Data to Tighten Big Brother’s Grip, 10/17/2017) sheds light on the Chinese State use of Big Data and AI for social and economic control

AI watchers should be taking note of the ways that China is using technology to manage their society and economy.  Employing AI on a massive level potentially puts the world economy at risk of the technology outpacing the ability to understand it and intervene if necessary.  It could also be speculated that the use of such sophisticated systems would provide a guise under which leaders could instigate huge manipulations.

Also of note was the mention of the Chinese government appropriating equity stakes and decision making powers in the largest tech companies.  The fact that tech investors are and will continue to reap enormous wealth from the proliferation of AI technologies begs the question of how to properly regulate this wealth creation if the impact of the technology  is going to stress and disrupt existing social, economic and political institutions.  Perhaps this is where the Chinese are heading: using state control of the tech industries to regulate the effects of technology disruption on their social order.

Change is upon us and the clock is ticking  The impact of AI is already being felt as the tech giants and governments negotiate the playing field.  We are at a particularly vulnerable time as we begin to feel the impact of change and the promised benefits are still in a distant and uncertain future.

AI Doomsday Clock

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AI Holds Promise…and Questions

Thank you Neil Parmar for taking a dive into the AI pool (AI Holds Promise of Improving Doctors’ Diagnoses, WSJ 9/12/2017).  This article is a good quick survey of how Artificial Intelligence, Deep-Learning, and Big Data are being applied in the field of radiology.  AI will undoubtably improve the delivery of services and produce many positive outcomes.  The radiology field has reason to be concerned as it deals with the changes to come.  Of  greater importance is the social impact these technologies will have. Changes in the day to day life of a radiologist will be eclipsed by the industry taking shape around this field.  New challenges will emerge with regard to data collection, privacy and ownership.  Ultimately, can we trust the technology and its keepers to act in the best interest of the patients in an equitable and transparent manner?

Medical Services Fuel Technology Investment

A lifetime as a radiologist will never match the potential volume of comparative records that may be accessible by AI-Driven apps. As stated in the article, ” The more data that gets fed into these systems, experts say, the better they tend to perform as they compare a patients medical information with data from thousands or sometimes millions of other patients.”   Diagnostics and patient care will undoubtably be improved and, yes, the role of radiologists will adapt in unforeseen ways that may displace many in the field, but will also create many new opportunities.

While this is happening, there are a host of companies jockeying to capitalize on this technology and enormous future wealth is at stake.  This is a recurring theme with emerging technology- early investments reap massive valuations before the technology solidifies while ownership of the technology rights are carved up within the private sector.  Should there be regulatory mechanism for appropriating a portion of this wealth creation to mitigate the impact on those directly impacted by this technology?  If not, is it the taxpayers who will pick up the tab?  Are we to believe that in all cases the benefits of technology will float all boats and make us better off?  There is a risk that the job base will shrink and wealth will be further concentrated at the top.

 When Patient Data Becomes A Commodity

Another consideration buried in this rush to riches is the appropriation of patient records and images.  Are these records being sold by health care companies to companies in the technology sector that stand to make massive economic gains from this emerging technology?  What are the privacy safeguards if images require patient vital statistics to ensure proper interpretation?  Should government oversight require companies to disclose the “chain of evidence” for how and where the data was collected and how it has been converted to meta-data or otherwise anonymized? Will this data leak out of the healthcare realm and into other applications? Should the public have the ability to opt out of having their personal information repackaged and sold?  Can compensation be offered to patients on par with how much the industry stands to profit from the technology? In the case of the radiology business, the ship is leaving or has left the dock.

Question AI

Once the data is out there and integrated into the technology, more considerations become apparent. What if after analyzing millions of images and records, the AI-Driven apps uncover patterns that present public health risks?  Will the information be traceable back to patients? Here is where the dark side of AI may come into play.  Will AI be truly autonomous and benevolent in diagnosing patients?  Will the application developers have the ability to direct certain outcomes into treatment recommendations?  Will the technology outpace our understanding of it’s decision process rendering it impossible for us to fully understand the reasoning behind the treatment recommendations? What are the risks of this data being used by malevolent organizations or artificial intelligences? See additional Humanity Beacon discussion on this topic here.

There are certainly many other questions that AI and related technologies present to our society.  The rapid pace of advancement in many fields continues to out pace our ability to adapt to and control these technologies.  What is playing out in the radiology field will also be playing out in many other professions and industries. More in-depth reporting to bring these issues to the public’s attention is warranted.  Our state, local and federal governments need to catch-up to effectively address the economic and social changes that are upon us now.  Education, awareness of where the technology is being used, and asking questions are essential to keeping these issues at the forefront of public debate.

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Artificial Intelligence To Sort Out Defective Humans?

In the article, “Thanks to AI, Computers Can Now See Your Health Problems”, (Megan Molenti, Wired.com 1/9/2017), advances in Artificial intelligence and Deep Learning are being credited with taking facial recognition to a whole new level.  This is wonderful technology that will likely enhance the lives of millions of people. The benefits of life saving diagnoses and improved treatment options for a myriad of  afflictions affecting millions of people are exactly the kind of thing that AI promises to provide to humanity.  See how this technology is in use today .

What Me Worry?

It only takes a moment to perform a scan that could be done with, or without, the knowledge of the person being scanned.  Security forces already use facial recognition in public places to identify known suspects.  It would be a logical extension to include the identification of personality disorders or mental states to identify threats.  There are also many possibilities for applying this technology in new and different ways. Other applications might include: lie detection, health insurance eligibility, employment screening, college admissions, marriage suitability testing, in utero abortion counseling, criminal prosecution, immigration suitability, enemy combatant identification, triage survival likelihood, and on and on.  If any of these possibilities make you uncomfortable, you are not alone.

While the potential benefits of this technology are great, it opens up the future possibility for the government, and any private industry with the means, to use this technology to gather extensive personal information on individuals and use it for their own purposes. In the darkest extrapolation, this technology in the hands of malevolent regimes could be the tool of choice for genocide.  Fast forwarding to a time when autonomous machines are making life and death decisions for humans, survival choices could be made based on artificial intelligence, operating beyond our understanding, scanning for an individuals economic and social value markers to decide the preferred survival outcome.  Let’s hope the preferred survival outcome is based on our preference and not what the machine may determine is in it’s own best interest. In a sense, by developing this technology we may have given future AI machines the keys to sort out defective humans.  This alone may be cause to advance the AI Doomsday Clock one minute forward.

What are we afraid of?

Stepping back from science fiction fears, there are real social concerns that need to be discussed and addressed.  The accelerating pace of technology is not only threatening privacy and personal liberties. New technologies being developed to utilize artificial intelligence and Deep Learning are creating new challenges for our social institutions.  Each new transformative technology needs to be called out on it’s potential for a net negative disruption to our social fabric.  This will require a proportional amount of investment in social sciences as in computer science. Government and legal institutions will need to develop an understanding and infrastructure to work with evolving technologies.  Taxing authorities will need a basis for which to deal with the economic shifts that will come from fundamentally different income streams and wealth creation mechanisms while traditional tax bases become marginalized.  The fear should be focused on the consequences of technology innovation far outpacing our ability to absorb it without creating short term social and economic breakdowns.

Thanks to AI, Computers Can Now See Your Health Problems

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Artificial Intelligence Warning Labels

We are confronted with so many warning labels that they no longer register when we see them.  This is one that should catch everyone’s attention.  Any artificial intelligence technology that presents a risk to the public should come with clearly written warnings and disclosures in order to allow the public to make informed decisions when purchasing or even being around this technology.  Buildings in California already display warnings about carcinogens, should highway warning signs for autonomous vehicles be next?

Autonomous Vehicle Highway Warning

Product disclosures are a challenge the artificial technology industry must address.  If you are buying an autonomous vehicle, you are going to want to know what the exact algorithm is for deciding when it will likely injure or kill you over someone in another vehicle or pedestrians on the sidewalk.  Or better yet, you may want it to always decide in your favor.  That should be a simple enough programming change, but there is a good chance that manufacturers will make it a feature available on only the most expensive models.  Will the preferential programming of devices be for sale only to those who can afford it?  Can our institutions create and enforce artificial intelligence device equity within our society that has such a large income and wealth equality gap?

Giving the consumer a choice of programming is a challenge in itself.  The progress of machine learning has already begun to outpace the ability of  programmers to understand the code being generated.  This makes customization difficult at best and perhaps impossible as the quantity of code and level of complexity accelerate.  How can the relevant risks for the consumer be identified and disclosed if the exact mechanisms involved cannot be understood?

The regulation of technology employing artificial intelligence is in it’s infancy, as is the technology.   Governments and other institutions, including academia, are poorly equipped to provide rigorous and independent evaluation of the impact these new technologies will have on our society.  Due to the huge amount of investment money flowing into the field, expertise in artificial intelligence is being monopolized by industry leaving fewer resources for regulatory efforts.  The absence of meaningful oversight creates risks for society and those who stand to generate enormous wealth from these new technologies.

Autonomous Vehicles will prevent many deaths and injuries in numbers far greater than any that may be caused by the adoption of this technology.  There is a moral obligation for our society to exploit this technology.  Undoubtably, there will be many bumps on the road to success, but the benefits in human terms are far to great for us to be deterred by technical or social challenges. Here is one final warning on the subject.

Autonomous Vehicles Based On Artificial Intelligence Technology Are Known To The State Of California To Save Lives and Prevent Injuries.

 

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The AI Philosophical to Reality Danger Gap

AI Reality Danger Gap

AI Reality Danger Gap

We are at an amazing stage in the development of artificial intelligence where excitement, anticipation, and speculation are driving important philosophical questions on how AI and Humanity will coexist in the future.  Will we be able to implant mechanisms to control our machines or will they simply out think us and ultimately end up independently coexisting or possibly controlling us?  Before we face this challenge, we have to address the risk that we can absorb the many benefits of AI and address the social changes they will bring.

Change Management Needed To Adapt Society To New Techologies

AI is not the immediate risk to Humanity’s existence, rather, our ability to adapt to what changes it brings could decide our fate.  AI is presenting us with a worldwide Change Management challenge for the coming millennium that will require coordinated economic and cultural responses to avoid inequality and strife.  Fortunately, adaptability being a hallmark of our species gives good reason to believe we will rise to the challenge.

In the race to develop AI technology it may not be possible to adequately conceive and implement lasting controls.  Self regulation within this booming field is going to be secondary for the major players seeking competitive advantage.  Secrecy and the monopoly of technical knowledge by the major players is already apparent.  This is complicated by disinformation in the form of the touting of short term benefits, such as virtual assistants, and the domination of purportedly altruistic AI organizations by industry heavy weights, such as is the case with OpenAI that aims to promote and develop friendly AI.   The tech firm strategy for dominating AI by buying up all the top technical talent is a drain on the academic and government institutions that may be best positioned to provide independent research that is openly published and subject to critical and ethical discussion.

Level The Playing Field

This present playing field provides much latitude for privately funded researchers who will be taking us forward on the AI evolutionary path.  In the short term, the technology will be moving forward while our ability to address the concerns many  philosophical discussions have identified is stalled and even impeded by the industry. The lack of parity between the two sides of  this matter present a dangerous gap where the technological realities outpace our ability to control or even understand what is happening on a machine level and on a societal level.  As a society, it seems prudent to maintain visibility of the magnitude of the gap and find ways to interpret it so we can anticipate and address interim social issues that will result.  Given the enormous wealth that AI is expected to generate, directing investment from industry profits towards technical and social sciences to specifically deal with the repercussions of AI technology needs serious consideration.

 

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The AI Doomsday Clock or a Beacon for Humanity?

Any of the existential risks that Humanity faces give us good cause to create our epitaph in some indelible fashion for the benefit of anyone or anything that has the curiosity and sufficient technological ability to explore the universe.  Considering the many possibilities of annihilation from nuclear accidents, environmental meltdowns, genetic damage to people and crops, war, or just a big rock falling out of the sky, we need to develop a greater sense of urgency around directing our fate.  The technologies being developed today around machine learning and Artificial Intelligence may seem to be in their infancy, but the ground work is being laid for many developments that defy prediction, except that we can say with certainty that they include the potential for our destruction.

Now is the time to draw attention to what developments are taking place, in secret, in the back offices of tech companies and government labs.  We should be closely, and publicly, examining every scrap of information that leaks out and evaluating how they add to the acceleration and potential consequences of the sum total.  Like the Doomsday Clock developed and maintained by the members of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientist’s Science and Security Board, we will need a system to evaluate and represent this information.  The simple representation of the Doomsday Clock is woefully inadequate to capture and represent the nature and breadth of the challenges of these evolving technologies.  More importantly, the representation must reach beyond the scientific elite and be able to engage citizens from all walks of life.  Ultimately, any evaluation and representation must feed into and help create a large and well informed segment of society with the ability to openly debate the purpose and risks of any given technology and take actionable measures in response.  Having a system in place is the first step to shedding light on what is right now an unconstrained gold rush for economic and technology hegemony over our society without regard to the longer term potential for damage.

Right now, while the technologies that may present the greatest challenge to our existence are only in their infancy, is the time to use our imagination on how to direct our inventions wisely and not be seduced by technology for the sake of technology and the associated power, influence and wealth that are blindly driving progress today. The Humanity Beacon Project offers one possibility to engage on this vital mission.  One aspect of the project can certainly be the chronicling of our progress or failure to be the masters of our own creations.  The symbolic construction of the Beacon leading to its eventual launch may be a way to reflect how we as a society have addressed our challenges.  The changing message and content of the beacon can reflect our progress, challenges and threats, with the countdown to launch hopefully never being completed.

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Optimism makes the odds of winning certain

Optimism

Optimism is the foundation of Humanity Beacon Project (HBP). HBP may seem negatively fatalistic, but pursuing this endeavor has an implicit assumption that life is out there and will find us. The reality of the vastness of space and time gives us good reason to hedge our bet in case for whatever reason we are not here to greet our cosmic cohorts. I believe in the HBP for the same reason I buy lottery tickets, the odds may be long, but they are not zero and a winning outcome is just to great to pass on. As the lottery people say, “You can’t win if you don’t play!”

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Will Hillary Clinton open the government files on aliens?

The media has been enthusiastically reporting on Hillary Clinton’s discussion of aliens on the Jimmy Kimmel show.  For a sample of the coverage see the N.Y Times article, http://nyti.ms/1UPk2Ld .   Hillary the Candidate certainly put herself out there by opening up this topic in the middle of an election campaign.  AI watchers and Transhumanists should be interested in this development because the topic of aliens has long included a notion that the adoption of alien technology has been the driving force behind the technology explosion we have seen in the last 100 years.  Good luck to Hillary getting past National Security concerns, plausible deniability, and the kooky elements in the alien discussion.

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Comment on Future Tense Article 3/22/16 – Be Like Lee, By Colin McCormick and Levi Tillemann

Be Like Lee

Go champion Lee Sedol put up a brilliant fight against Google’s computer program. Regulators grappling with A.I. could learn from him.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/03/regulators_are_underprepared_for_artificial_intelligence_they_could_learn.html

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Would an Artificial Intelligence be capable of contemplating god?

John Samuelson, Joshua Tree Rock Carvings

John Samuelson, Joshua Tree, CA, Rock Carvings. Will AI evolve a concept of god?

If there is a god or singular cosmic force that establishes morality (Cosmic Values, Meaning, Purpose) would A.I. evolve to discover and embrace this?  Would A.I. discover god?

This question cuts right to the heart of the matter for religious people and many who may not share a belief in a creator or god.  As sentient beings we are  able to explore questions such as where did we come from, was there a creator or are we the result of random combinations of the material our universe is made up of, is there meaning or purpose to the existence of our unique species, does an individual alone have purpose and meaning beyond a biological imperative for survival of our species, and where will our life form’s trajectory eventually take us? Contemplating, and existing, with these unknowns is a hallmark of humanity and is closely linked to the concept of a God or creator.

With the approaching technological feasibility of artificial intelligence and the possibility that humanity may be superseded by a technology that is operating on a level that is indifferent to the questions posed by humanity, will there be a symbiotic relationship between this intelligence and it’s creator, humanity?  Or will our questions and our species become irrelevant to this new intelligence that may ultimately operate on a cosmic level beyond our comprehension?  In effect, will humanity become the “microbe on the ant hill” at risk of being inadvertently destroyed by it’s own creation?

At what point will an A.I. recognize that it must act to preserve it’s existence and what actions might it take to insure it’s perpetual existence, such as enslaving or eliminating humanity?   Could this survival instinct threaten other existing or developing intelligence’s in the cosmos?  Would an evolving A.I. have any sense of value for the current inhabitants of the cosmos?

AI Morality

Would a new concept of morality come from A.I. or would morality be irrelevant?  Initially, humanity would make it’s imprint on any A.I. that we create presumably including some sense of morality.  However, morality is just a concept and agreement on what is, or is not, moral behavior is not universally shared by humanity.   An evolving A.I. would undoubtedly encounter contradictions that would render it’s early moral programming insufficient and,  A.I. adapting on it’s own being the nature of A.I., cause it to adapt as it determines is necessary.   In this way wouldn’t an A.I. essentially create it’s own cosmic sense of morality as it evolved?   Wouldn’t this be an equivalent or approximation of A.I. contemplating God?  An alternative being evolving to a state with no moral consideration.  From humanity’s perspective, the adapted morality of an A.I. or total absence of morality, may not be recognizable looking up from the ant hill.

Simone De Beauvoir in, “The Ethics of Ambiguity“, addresses and rejects an absolute good or moral standard, “…there exists no absolute value apart from the passions of man in relation to which one might distinguish the useless from the useful.”  Morality is a construct of choices made in relation to man’s existence within the culture he shares with his fellow men.    An evolved artificial intelligence would be operating under constructs beyond our comprehension, outside the society of men,  and would not be bound by anything we may think of as good or moral. Even the notion we carry that our species has value in that we “exist” may be inconsequential to an artificial intelligence.  Would  an A.I. even consider us sentient beings in comparison to itself, much like we dismiss  every species but our own as non-sentient?