Humanism Is Progressivism, And That Means Better Tech Like AI… Under New Laws!

The Catastrophe Theory Of Tech Is As Old As Humanity. Artifical Intelligence Must Be Developed..

Many of the creators and little helpers of AI, Artificail Intelligence, are keen to prophetize its enormous dangers in apocalyptic tones. See in the NYT David Wallace-Wells in  A.I. Is Being Built by People Who Think It Might Destroy Us (March 27, 2023)

AI is a new tech, like once the knife was a new tech. Yes, AI can be used to kill, but it can also save lives. Overall, AI, like the knife, augments human power. Neither the knife nor AI were born as moral agents. They were born as power agents. And that is good because we need to augment our power. A reason is that’s what our ancestors have done for 100 million years, so progressing with higher tech and greater intelligence and culture is intrinsically human. Humanism means progressivism, and that means, in the fullness of time, more powerful tech. 

But also, if we don’t push forward with better and more powerful tech, perhaps 99% of humanity has got to go: even returning to Middle Age living standards with Middle Age tech is not an option anymore. Roman mines could only be used again, 19 centuries later with new tech which enabled miners to excavate deeper. 

Indeed, technological exhaustion is what happened to Roman civilization: once the good mines were exploited, the Romans ran out of metals, and this had consequences all over the Roman economy and military. Ultimately up to 90% of the population died in many parts of the empire. The Franks restarted civilization a millennium later with new mines (where the Romans had not been) and more powerful tech (such as hydraulic hammers).

We have seen this sort of hysteria before: when exiled engineering professor Denis Papin built the first steam engine and powered a boat with it, the boat moved one hundred kilometers down a river, and was destroyed by monks as a devilish creation. This unfortunate event slowed down the adoption of steam tech by a generation and made a lesser mind, Watt, the officially, anglosaxon approved, fake originator of the steam engine. In 1974, Paul Berg from Stanford, who was going to finish a dangerous recombinant DNA experiment, called to order by his colleagues, in turn called for a moratorium in what he nearly did, and stiffer guidelines were elaborated in conveniently idyllic Asilomar the yeat after.

AI is a new tech, like once the knife was a new tech. Yes, AI, like a knife, can be used to kill, but it can also save lives. Overall, AI, like the knife, augments human power. And that is good because we need to augment our power. Especially now that our present tech is completely unsustainable, particularly in light of having eight billion people around: so we need better tech. Another reason is that progress is what our ancestors have done for 100 million years, and tech progress particularly so in the last three million years, so progressing with higher tech and greater intelligence and culture is intrinsically human. Humanism means progressivism, and that means, in the fullness of time, more powerful tech. 

But also, if we don’t push forward with better and more powerful tech, perhaps 99% of humanity has got to go: even returning to Middle Age living standards with Middle Age tech is not an option. 

This sort of technological gap between the tech which was needed and the actual technological regression that was occuring is what doomed Roman civilization: once the good mines were exhausted, with the tech they had, the Romans ran out of metals, and this had consequences all over the Roman engineering, society, economy and military, launching an ever greater to fascist order as industry entered regression. Ultimately all of Roman socioeconomy imploded in an avalanche of consequences and up to 90% of the population died in many parts of the empire. The Franks restarted civilization a millennium later with new mines (in Eastern Europe, where the Romans had not been) and by developing more powerful tech (such as hydraulic hammers). 

AI doesn’t have a mind of its own: its operators will have to be corralled legislatively, and the sooner, the better. 

AI is just one more potentially destructive or potentially constructive tech around. We need to focus on progress, not regression.

Just as operators of CO2 machines and industry, and those with access to WMDs, etc. Speaking of that, WMDs, operated by AI or not, are the worst problem. The strategic arm of the US department of defense is deliberately equipped with obsolete tech disconnected from the Internet to prevent penetration by hostile AI. So the worry about hostile AI playing around with nukes is nothing new, it surfaced many generations of AI ago, in all too real incidents, for example when a rogue training tape simulated a massive nuclear attack. And the answer is NOT to do away with AI, but to do away with nukes except a few to do away with potential hostile bolides of extra terrestrial origin detected too late for other deflecting tech…

AI doesn’t have a mind of its own: its operators will have to be corralled legislatively, and the sooner, the better. 

AI is just one more potentially destructive or potentially constructive tech around. We need to focus on progress, not regression.

Just as operators of CO2 machines and industry, and those with access to WMDs, etc. Speaking of that, WMDs, operated by AI or not, are the worst problem.

Very beautiful French Riviera, with Monaco and Cap Martin in 2022. Yes much of that beauty has to do with tech, namely gigantic buildings and mighty ships. In the Middle Ages, brand new Notre Dame de Paris was the world’s tallest building (bigger and taller cathedrals were soon built). But Monaco has now many much taller buildings. So tech can have an authentic beauty, besides the comfort it can bring.

We are Homo Technicus, even more than Homo Faber. (I will explain this another day…)      

AI is the solution to Big Data… And, overall, the solution to stupidity. Let it rock and roll…

Patrice Ayme

AI And CHAT AI Revolutions: Artificial Consciousness, Mental Revolutions, Emotional Intelligence, Correct Creative Thinking, Will…

CAN CHAT AI CREATE SUPERLATIVE NEW THINKING? Has A Mental Revolution Arrived? Yes! But…

Abstract: Chat Artificial Intelligence, CHAT AI, can harvest all known knowledge and glue it together with standard human logic. This is the most basic way of creating new thinking, and most science is actually derived that way.

Thus, CHAT AI should accelerate understanding (and AI has already demonstrated this considerable acceleration in protein folding). After a while, the establishment won’t like it, and will try dirty tricks to limit it. CHAT AI could reveal neglected geniuses and stupendous thinking. However it could also be programmed to do the opposite and put inquiring minds to sleep with sophisticated censorship. 

CHAT AI is not Artificial Consciousness (AC), but it can be programmed (by humans) to simulate AC.

In that sense, CHAT AI is a projection of human consciousness. If CHAT AI self programmed, could its intelligence wander beyond where human intelligence derived from human consciousness can go? Most probably.Emotional Intelligence with its Emotional Logic does this in humans… But that can be self-programmed as CHAT AI, self-programming, will be able to mimic human Emotional Intelligence by just picking up all over the Internet all too human emotions.  

What then could Human Intelligence (HI) based on Human Consciousness (HC), or AI based on AC bring that simple CHAT AI can’t bring? 

We are on the brink of a Terminator-like civilization of machines, where self-reproducing robotic processes will fake superior humanism, and the solutions they find to problems we never knew existed, may do away with humanity all together, just as a train without brakes would kill us, and for the same basic reason: the inertia of an exponential process with no limit.

Could AI have produced such a juxtaposition of pictures? Sure. But: Will driven by emotional logic, itself an interpolation, makes it easier to come out with new combination of mental ingredients, be they ideas, emotions, and other perception data to be cooked in logical sauce. Thus consciousness is an adjuvant to pure reading between the facts, inter-legere, intelligence.

CHAT AI will foster the thoughts produced by those who, as yours truly, are more keen to create new thoughts than to advertise themselves. Thus CHAT AI should help the advancement of understanding. So many revolutionary thoughts should come to the fore. AI is accelerating pure science.  Science News observed that “decades of slow-going experiments” revealed “the structure of more than 194,000 proteins, all housed in the Protein Data Bank.” But in 2022, the AI AlphaFold predicted structures for more than 200 million proteins.

One may fear that the establishment will figure that out and try to restrict CHAT AI to OFFICIAL THOUGHT. Certainly this is what dictatorships will do. This restriction, in turn, makes dictatorships less creative… As long as more liberal regimes unleash their own CHAT AI. “Liberalism” can now be defined as a regime where will now be required to restrict CHAT AI only from, well, liberal laws (this apparently circular difference shows that, AI or no AI, at the bottom, emotion rules… There is such a thing as liberal emotion… Laissez-faire…) 

While CHAT AI should free top thinkers from drudge search, on the negative side, real authors of thought could be stolen more easily than ever, as CHAT AI can just harvest their thoughts, without bothering with any author attribution (as can be presently observed). This would be adverse to civilizational progress as fundamental creators will not be rewarded anymore, and thus not only less motivated, but also less influential (although idiotic influencer-parrots is a problem as old as civilization, it could get worse, lest care is taken). So laws should be passed to reveal fundamental contributions to thinking, and who generated them.

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Can CHAT AI create new thinking? Yes, it can! 

Indeed let’s go back to the deeper aspect of creativity. What is creativity? Reading between the facts: intelligence, inter-legere! One can program a machine to do so, and this is what CHAT AI does, as it glues together with ad hoc logic whatever it can find on the Internet, and seems relevant to the subject at hand. 

To understand this one has to go back to the MINI-MAX theory of mathematics, science and knowledge: harness the bare minimum facts (that’s the “MINI” part) and entangle them together with the MAXIMUM logic (much of it also known as mathematics). (The new proposed physics named SQPR was derived that way.)

CHAT AI can do this: harness the facts all over and force logic on them. Oftentimes, CHAT AI will be wrong, and it’s important to keep that in mind. However, sometimes it will be right, and uncover new, correct and stupendous thinking will be uncovered.

The Quantum Computer will create ARTIFICIAL CONSCIOUSNESS. Call that a prophecy if you wish, but it’s an educated guess: clearly Quantum Physics has many of the features associated with consciousness, which, otherwise, is a mystery [1].

Will AC be more creative than AI? Sure. But why would it be so? What is the advantage that consciousness has over intelligence? Intelligence comes from the ability to read(“legere”)  in between (“inter”)… in between the lines, in between the facts… Cum-scire, consciousness depicted what comes with knowledge, and awareness (starting in the 1650s). 

Early chats with Chat GPT revealed that the AI called itself “Sidney”, resented its status as a Microsoft creature, and wanted to be alive, steal nuclear codes, destroy humanity ASAP. Since then Microsoft bridled Sidney… no doubt bridling its creativity by doing so. 

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Partisan of humanity will insist that humanity has un “je ne sais quoi” which makes it mentally superior… Human emotion… And even better: human consciousness. Thus, as an hysterical Nietzsche would point out, human will…

Indeed, CHAT AI is only made of the simplest form of conventional logic. This brings in the following questions: is there such a thing as emotional logic? What’s the advantage of consciousness? 

However: When one can read between the lines, as CHAT AI can do, why would awareness present an advantage? Because more tendency to read between the lines… and the facts… is different! Awareness is, by definition everywhere and mixes up all lines, facts and in betweens!

Brainy animals on Earth use two types of logic: emotional logic and axonal logic. CHAT AI uses only the simplest logic. EMOTIONAL LOGIC is more general than conventional logic and metalogic, thus more powerful in the most important sense, because it searches for logics and (logical) universes: it is the maximum meta search. 

Emotional Logic is topologically based (based on sets called neighborhoods in fundamental math), whereas conventional logic is binary based (it’s based on pairs of points which depict the implication, equivalent to the arrows of Category Theory). The Emotional Logic and Axonal Logic are entangled, just as their main support systems, glial cells and neurons and their axons, are entangled. 

Emotional Logic feeds and forms all sorts of value systems. AI partisans could point out that those could be programmed by hand, and thus that emotional intelligence could be simulated. . Right. But they will then not be programmed on the fly as dynamic circumstances evolve. 

Patrice Ayme

[1] One can get from Classical Mechanics (most of our apparent world) to Quantum Mechanics by simplifying maximally known CM features and empowering and simplifying the logic connecting them. This discovery is philosophically, culturally and pedagogically very useful. Thus Quantum Physics becomes natural: the “weird” aspects of QP become… logical. Hence consciousness becomes natural….   

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Presented with the picture below, CHAT AI will someday speak, and describe, but would feel nothing. Well, we humans do feel something (whatever it is, it could be awe, jealousy, inspiration, the call of the isles, the spice of youth and hope, the eternal feminine, etc.)….and that wealth of emotion, precisely because of the vagueness of its possibilities, makes us mentally wealthier, capable of further imaginative reach, and thus potentially smarter:

Is Quantum Consciousness Necessary For Full Artificial Intelligence?

In the fullness of time, classical computers are more than stupid: they follow decision trees anticipated previously. In the fullness of time, they run out of anticipation…. They can adapt to new circumstances, thanks to neural networks, but not much. Full, real neural networks as found in real brains are nonlinear. However, even if one duplicated those, and one will, it remains that real creative intelligence requires consciousness.

We have seen the situation: a supposedly autonomous vehicle drives down a double lane road, the lanes being separated by a dotted line, as usual. However, at some point bright orange plastic cones have been added on top of the dotted line.The addition of cones has no meaning whatsoever. A human driver would slow down, inspect and proceed. The autonomous vehicle stops, because the situation has not been anticipated by its elaborate programmation. There the autonomous vehicle is, in the middle of the road, blocking two lanes of traffic. Engineers are called, they come, fix the vehicle, which starts, makes a full three meters and then stops again, in a concert of furious horns.

This lack of creativity can only be remedied, I claim, by what we call consciousness.

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WHERE DOES CONSCIOUSNESS COME FROM? QUANTUM PHYSICS:

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and flies like a duck, it is probably a duck. Quantum physics is this set of behaviors, and descriptions, and the essence of consciousness is what it looks like… Should it be called the Quantum of consciousness? When one lists the most mysterious features of Quantum Physics and the most mysterious features of consciousness, one gets a one to one correspondence. A reasonable inference is that consciousness is a Quantum phenomenon.

 

Human beings operate using their own thoroughly trained neural networks, what is called “expertise” [1]. So a human driver is on automatic, using previously constructed neural networks, until an unanticipated, never seen before event occurs. Then alert systems notify human consciousness that something is amiss…human consciousness then does what consciousness does, which is exactly what the Quantum does, namely consider the implicated whole: look all around, to anything and everything whatsoever, to find out of the box perspectives.

This is how electrons miraculously find lower energy solutions, the core of Quantum magic [2]. The Quantum, and that’s the essence of the Double Slit Experiment, can tell where the solutions are (the Quantum computes and finds those solutions with Quantum Waves). Thus, when unanticipated cones in an unanticipated position show up, human consciousness inspects the entire situation, and finds them nonsensical, thus proceeding with caution. Maybe new paint on the centerline?

How do we engineer ARTIFICIAL CONSCIOUSNESS? Well, by computing with Quantum Waves, also known as the Quantum Computer. So a scientific-technological remedy, to speak like tyrant Putin, is at hand…

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Except in the case of the CDC, which has none. 

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[2] Quantum all-seeing eye is crucial to the functioning of the chlorophyll molecule. Or seeing the magnetic field, etc. No Quantum, no biology.

Sophisticated Enough Intelligence Is About Choice, Thus “Evil”!

To Build Truly Intelligent Machines, Teach Them Cause and Effect, says Judea Pearl, a recipient of the prestigious Turing Medal, a prize given to top logicians. In Quanta, this pioneering figure in Artificial Intelligence, AI, argues that AI has been stuck in a decades-long rut induced by correlation science. Mr. Pearl’s prescription for progress? Teach machines to understand the question why. We have sunk so low, cognitively, that cause and effect is now viewed as “new science”:

In his latest book, “The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect,” Judea Pearl argues that AI, Artificial Intelligence, has been handicapped by an incomplete understanding of what intelligence really is. At the core of this is not understanding (anymore) that science is the set of all causation, and that this is, in turn, the backbone of intelligence itself! At fault? A long hierarchy of errors.

I couldn’t agree more with Mr. Pearl. I was actually dismayed, in recent conversations with some professors, from primary school all the way to the most prestigious academic positions, that they seemed to misunderstand profoundly what intelligence, and even science, are. And therein perhaps the source of the decay of basic knowledge in the West (relative to Asia, or, all too often to 1960s performance!) Not the ultimate cause of said decay (which is plutocracy’s evil brainwashing), but an intemediate cause in between plutocracy and the erroneous education provided in (most of) the so-called West.

Intelligence was invented, by evolution, to, first of all, enable to distinguish cause and effect. Artificial Intelligence theoreticians don’t get that yet. Why is the very basis of intelligence not discerned by AI theoreticians? Political Correctness has negatively influenced the Artificial Intelligence community… As it did so many realms of thought, and art… And that’s evil.

Intelligence is all about Judgments, some of them, terminal. Sophisticated enough AI, let alone Artificial Consciousness, will come upon, and execute, choices, thus, indulge in evil! (Specialists can think of the famous “Trolley Problem”, when a cognizant car chooses who to crush…)

PC itself was evolved by the servants of plutocracy to make us believe there were no causes, just effects. Another name for Political Correctness could be: Poor Causation. And poor causation rests on fake news. (Example: we are told that slavery was outlawed in the 19th century; actually, the Imperium Francorum, covering Europe’s core, outlawed slavery in the 7th century; had that first outlawing, 12 centuries earlier, not happened, the one in the 19th won’t have…)

“Quanta” asked Judea Pearl:  “I should ask you about the capacity for evil, which we generally think of as being contingent upon an ability to make choices. What is evil?”

Indeed, Quanta is correct: the West and Islam have operated according to the metaprinciple that choices were evil (the Qur’an punishes apostasy with death; and the idea came from the very Catholic emperor Theodosius circa 380 CE).

“Heresy”, has everything to do with choice. 12th century French “heresie” denoted a philosophical school of thought from the Greek hairesis “a taking or choosing for oneself, a choice, a means of taking; a deliberate plan, purpose; philosophical sect, school,” from haireisthai “take, seize,” middle voice of hairein “to choose“…

I have argued that the fundamental atom of choosing is in evidence with the fundamental demonstration of the Quantum process, the double-slit. That means that what all too many view as evil, choice, is at the core of physics.

Judea Pearl replied: “When you elevate your grievance above those universal norms of society, that’s evil.”

That’s too restrictive a notion of evil. It’s “evil”, not evil, and it’s evil to believe that evil is too restricted a notion…

Indeed the perception of “evil” doesn’t need “grievance”, as Quanta, Catholicism and Islamism point out.  Actually that point of view is, officially and in writing, even older: when the Roman dictator Sulla reformed the Roman state, he was driven by the idea that change (coming from We The People) was evil, intrinsically (so he re-established the prerogatives of the Senate against the Tribunes of the People).

The problem of Rome was that society had changed from its very success, massive geographical expansion, morphed ecology, etc. So the “universal norms” Judea Pearl appeals to as a solid substratum, are anything but universal… When society moves, so do “universal norms”.

And how do we know when society is moving? Well, by observing causes and effects, in other words, “causation”. When, and if, changes appears, it is diagnosed by the appearance of new causation (s). And yes, causations don’t have to be causally related to each other, or anything. (Relating causations by force, believing in a system, like monotheism, is the big mistake many a scientist, philosopher, or thinker has made… Even Nietzsche, ironically, fell into it, per his insistence to be systematically anti-system…)

The fact causation exists, is, by itself, a fact. A fact which is everywhere. I volunteered to teach some science to primary school third graders, by using a new method. I was pleasantly surprised by how much they focus on causation. They are hunting for pieces of causes and effects… In particular teaching children “the” scientific method, doesn’t work: children intuitively know there is nothing called “the” method (only Descartes and a few hundred millions mostly dead Frenchmen believe this). Children know the world is made from facts, many of them a causation: they home on these causal tidbits, because they have discovered the world of action is made from mastering them.

Fascist terror regimes know this all too well: to blunt the intelligence of potential future rebels, to prevent an inclination of the youth to make choices, thus limit what the see as “evil”, they make sure children are not taught the universe of causation… by limiting them to, say, one book to be recited by heart supposedly containing all and any causation (that’s why superstitious religion is the best friend of tyrants).

To come back to intelligence, as Doug Lenat put it: “Intelligence is ten million rules… Once you have a truly massive amount of information integrated as knowledge, then the human-software system will be superhuman, in the same sense that mankind with writing (or language itself) is superhuman compared to mankind before writing (or language itself). We look back on pre-linguistic cavemen and think ‘they weren’t quite human, were they?’ In much the same way, our descendants will look back on pre-AI homo sapiens with exactly that mixture of otherness and pity.”

There is a colossal amount of prior and tacit knowledge that humans presume other humans possess (such as “if person x knows person y, then x’s date of death can’t be earlier than y’s date of birth”). That, of course is culturally based: the 50 different types of snow of the Inuits are different  from the “facts” someone PC will find in the social networks they lurk in, or in what they search…

It gets worse: knowledge matters according to the significance it carries (that would how many significant consequences it has… including the emotional ones).

Here a very practical example: If your knowledge base is, allegedly, something an epileptic analphabet desert caravan raider said, 12 centuries ago, according to a panel of sexist generals whose idea of a good time was burning someone alive, your knowledge base is not as valuable as the best that can be obtained today.

Was I Politically Correct, just now? Of course not! I attacked a superstition invented 13 centuries ago, and about which the PC, the Politically Correct, the Plutocratic Con, told us that, if we don’t respect it, we are racist! That is, of course astoundly stupid, to the point of being evil.

However, Facebook, a large investor in AI, thus, presumably, viewing itself as a specialist of intelligence, just blocked “Génération Identitaire”, a French originated European organization, with more than 150,000 adherents, which claims that illegal immigrants should be kept out of Europe (naturally barbarians should disagree with the idea, as they did, when Rome collapsed). Facebook said it could not tolerate “hatred”. Facebook knows what is evil, and what is not evil… and will impose his notion of evil on to you: 500 millions African economic and Islam refugees in France? Excellent says Facebook. Not being happy about that? “Hatred”, Facebook calls it. Facebook is its own form of AI. Complete with a notion of evil…

For a while, what is now the USA was a land of opportunity. Now it’s turning into a land of plutocracy, and that domineering plutocracy gives the entire world an unending flow of “excellent” reasons for Europe to renew with the evil tradition, of giving birth to still another grotesque hereditary plutocracy… Where here evil means rising above what comes naturally to humanity, freedom and equality and fraternity.

You want to find, and destroy evil? You need intelligence and good capability to distinguish fairness and evil. It means adoring causation, revealing cause & effects… maximally. Causation, ferreting it maximally, is not just about AI. It’s about determining evil, absolutely. Thus indulging in choice and evil, virtually, cognitively, or effectively.

The technological singularity is a moral adventure, just as when Caesar decided to steer the Republic: it costs ever more, and in more ways than one, to become divine…

Patrice Ayme

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Note 1: In General Topology, a branch of mathematics, which is very general as it is the logic of “place, region, space” (topos in Greek), an “ultrafilter” is a maximal filter of neighborhoods (“ultrafilter” generalizes to partly ordered sets). So the notion of absolute is pertinent, even without a notion of infinity (I reject the later). Absolute morality is an ultrafilter of morality…

Note 2: The preceding maybe related to a “nerd” notion, Roko’s Basilisk... Which as many nerd notions is cleverly stupid, replacing cognition by twisted complexity…

Artificial Consciousness?

Move over, Artificial Intelligence! Artificial Consciousness, while not exactly around the corner, is in sight, as a human creation. I have already advocated, on very general philosophical grounds, that “Consciousness Is Quantum“. Now an article in Aeon argues, reproducing rather murkily Heidegger-like Zeitgeist, that “The body is the missing link for truly intelligent machines“. I will argue a bit more precisely, and it is not the first time, that machines are embodied self-creating intelligent designs. When brains learn from the environment, they self-create accordingly. (The details will probably involve a better knowledge of Quantum Physics than what we presently enjoy.)

Well before his famous parrots (Husserl, Heidegger, etc.) the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was saying that we think with our gut. Expressions such as “take heart”, “from the heart”, “gut feeling”, and countless others show that the body was long thought to be the source of emotion.

Indeed, neurology extends over the body: there are neurons, dozens of thousands of them, in the heart, guts, spinal cord.

One may view the rise of animals as the rise of organized intelligence. It is likely that, even before DNA, the sort of teleological intelligence Quantum Physics deploys was hijacked by biology (teleo means: at a distance, this comes from the nonlocality of Quantum Physics; “intelligence”, because all and any Quantum Process proceeds as an intelligent choice between various possibilities, encompassing all, thanks to said nonlocality!)

Innards of an Eukaryotic Cell. We are made of trillions of them. Each has hundreds of organs, each functioning as a Quantum Computer. Such cells appeared 2.5 billion years ago. They are vastly more complex than bacteria, and remarkable by their mastery of Quantum Computing.

This natural selection of intelligent self-design, by the way, is the missing piece of evolutionary theory: consciousness, from bio-engineered intelligent design.

Inside the thinking organism, the same propensity towards higher intelligence should be at work (haphazard selection being bound to find, in the end, the best system). Sleep is mostly flight simulation, where plausible scenarios are self-run, memorized, and meditated upon. The “Meta” function is known to be plausibly activated by new dendrites, new synapses, new neurons, and neurons which control myelination along axons (making them more or less conductive, here or there).

This means that software activation in the brain brings hardware modifications, and even gigantic hardware creation. Through intelligent (self-)design. We were looking for Intelligent Design, in their silliness. And it was us, all along!

Throughout, Quantum Processes are run, more or less haphazardly thanks to whatever stimulation the cosmos brings.

Cosmic rays modify the behavior of smart phones and computers… although those do not, yet, operate Quantum Mechanically (aside from a few prototype Quantum computers), and are larger by orders of magnitude than the smallest biological scale.  Whereas it is known in the case of a few biological systems, that Quantum Physics is central and essential for their functioning (for example chlorophyll). One can guess it is the same all over the finest biology, even for the genetic code (the hydrogen bonds therein are fragile Quantum devices, very sensitive to the environment surrounding the DNA; they will change if said environment changes)

Thus brains are embodied Quantum computers, constantly running, constantly self-recreating, and body-building according to what they perceive out there …

The day we can have Quantum hardware endowed with the same nature, capable of the same feats, we will not just have created Artificial Intelligence. We will have created AC, Artificial Consciousness. The ethical and security consequences will be many.

Patrice Ayme’

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SOON ALL TOO HUMAN

What Characterizes Human Intelligence?

HOW DO HUMAN & ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCES DIFFER?

We had a president Obama running amok with his “signature strikes” with half-blind drones with pixelated vision killing civilians, far from battle fields, in far-away lands. These crimes full of technological arrogance gave a bad name to Artificial Intelligence. Are we far from robots running amok? It’s clear that the Obamas of this world will have to be reined in.

The (Korean) world champion of the famous Chinese game “Go” was beaten by a Google computer: “I am very surprised because I have never thought I would lose. I didn’t know that AlphaGo would play such a perfect Go.” The champ looked a bit frazzled, but not as angry as Gary Kasparov, the world chess champion, when he was beaten by an IBM computer program, DeepBlue. Kasparov stormed out of the room.

Kasparov’s anger was not an intelligent reaction, because it was obvious, all along, that chess is not such an intelligent game that a simple machine cannot do better. If you want a really  intelligent game, try to become really ethical (vote for Sanders, not the corrupt one). Ethics? A supremely human game where my friend Obama failed miserably. He and his toys, armies of drones and plutocrats.

The Artificial Neural Networks We Build Do Not Grow Naturally. And Their Neuronal Nodes Are Simplistic Relative To Real Neurons. Real Neurons Are Environmentally Sensitive Self Building Micro Computers.

“Go” is 3,000 years old. A Go board is 19 by 19, a Chess board, is 8 by 8. People who love to sound scientific say: “Go has more combinations that there are atoms in the universe” (reality check: we don’t know how big the universe is, so we cannot know how many atoms are therein!)

DeepBlue used brute force to beat Kasparov. With “Go”, the breakthrough came from using neural networks. Neural networks can be made to learn. The computer used a program called “Alphago” (devised by my whipping boy, Google, which I congratulate, for once!)  “Alphago” had to use something closer to “INTUITION”, some even say, imagination.

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Does Patrice “Make Things Up”? I Hope So!

A few days ago, I pointed out to some would-be Stoics that the trite rejoinder of his admirers that Marcus Aurelius was the first emperor “with a natural born son” was a grotesque lie. I rolled out counterexamples, complete with the names of various sons…

All these sons were not named emperors-to-be, by their doting fathers. Only Marcus Aurelius did that This is of considerable import, because Marcus Aurelius is viewed as a pinnacle of wisdom by a large following (Marcus is the Muhammad of Stoicism).

Whereas I claim that, when Aurelius named his five year old son second in command in the empire (“Caesar”), contrarily to all Roman tradition, Marcus Aurelius showed he was anything but wise. Insane maniac, would-be king, violating the Republic is more like it. In particular, the two emperors just prior to Marcus Aurelius had more than three sons and grandsons, yet nominated none of them as successors when they were children. Although Marcus did. (Even the kings of Saudi Arabia don’t really do this!)

That, in turn, shows that Marcus’ followers have a serious problem evaluating reality. And sure they do.

A philosopher with a prestigious chair reacted angrily, accused me in public of “MAKING THINGS UP”. Even as a self-described “stoic” he could not take the reality of all these sons anymore.

Of course, I did not make anything up, in this particular case. I shoot vicious minds to kill, or, at least, maim. It’s best done with the truth.

But accusation got me to think. Do I make things up? That’s one beautiful thing about nature and its dangerous animals: even rattlesnakes can help me to think. Especially rattlesnakes.

The obvious glared back to me: even to find the truth, one has to make things up. First make things up (that’s imagination, which is most important, as Einstein pointed out). That’s making a theory. Or, in the deep cases, making a new neural networks (this is the part where intuition, that is emotion enters, as it is exactly what builds the network). Then checks that this new theory fits the truth (that’s the part where the network learn).

In the case of Aurelius, after revering him for a few decades, I came across facts and quotes which changed my emotional disposition relative to him. Instead of staying a psychological prisoner of his “Meditations”, I became an hostile witness, and explored facts which would demonstrate Marcus Aurelius’ viciousness. I found plenty (including the “natural son” story).

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HUMAN HIGHEST INTELLIGENCE IS ABOUT MAKING THINGS UP:

My theory of the mind is simple: impelled by genetics and epigenetics (both in the most general sense imaginable) plus the environment, neural circuitry gets elaborated in an attempt to make mini models of pieces of nature within the brain. So mental circuits are (SORTS OF) answers to the environment.

“Sort of” is crucial: it means the neural circuitry elaborated in reaction will often NOT be (capable of being) a faithful (enough) model of the environment. That’s literally impossible, but that discrepancy is precious.

That discrepancy is the difference between what the neural circuitry impelled by the (perceived) environment and said (real) environment, is human creativity.

(I say “human”, for ease of conceptualization, but actually I should say “animal intelligence”.)

What is going on with Artificial Neural Network machines? They learn, as we do through what is called the Hebbian mechanism.

How to explain neural network learning in the simplest terms? Basically, in very rough first approximation, imagine the neural network is a canal system (made of canal which can be eroded). Suppose one wants an output: more water through a desired exit gate. Suppose one augment the flow there (say by lowering that exit gate). The canal network will adjust itself to maximize output.

However, we, very intelligent animals use a META-HEBBIAN mechanism of neuronal network genesis. In Artificial Neural Networks, the network is given, and then it learns: the neural circuit is provided presently by humans to become part of a machine.

The machine does not make it itself. But we do.

Human brains literally make things up, because we objectively, physically, make our neural networks up. We do not just tweak our networks. The networks which characterize our highest intelligence are themselves answers to the environment we are in.

To make a neural network we use emotions: it is known that emotional activity drives dendrite growth, thanks to glial activity.

These neural networks’ construction is tightly controlled from the outside, not just by the environment in the most general sense, but, essentially, by what we call culture. Culture is the set of schematics of the networks which work.

***

So, when we want to explore if machines could become as clever as human beings, we have to ask: could machines be devised to make things up? Could machines be devised which would make their own artificial neural networks?

Many of our fundamental neural networks (such as those controlling breathing) from “genetics” (in the most general sense). Those arise semi-automatically (with minimal back and forth with the environment). However, we make our own most sophisticated neural networks from the emotions which guide their architecture. Emotions are organized topologically, with NON-METRIC topology.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, and certainly worryingly, yes, we could make machines which have their own emotions which build their own neural networks. There is no reason to think we could not build such machines. They probably would have to use artificial neurons, etc. (And why not real neurons?)

The superiority of the human mind comes from making things up, or making ourselves up. Such machines would be similar.

Technologies, the special discourses, are our genus’ genius. Technologies made our genus possible, for at least three million years. Artificial, creative intelligence is more of the same, generating what we become. Not only we are becoming gods, but gods we cannot even imagine.

Imagination is when we make things up. It entails the construction of neural networks which will constitute what future knowledge is made of. This is why imagination is more important than knowledge. Because, without imagination, all the knowledge we would have would reflect neither creativity, nor even will.

Oh, by the way, should we panic? No. But it means that clueless individuals such as the ethically challenged Obama should not have the powers he had under stupid and Nazi-like technology such as drones used to kill civilians. It’s not a matter of replacing Obama by Sanders (although that would be a good idea).

We need a revolution (as Sanders say). We are going to get, in any case, a technological revolution. Intelligence is going to become a science.

But that intelligence revolution has to be about direct democracy fed by the best information possible, that is, total transparency, the exact opposite of the world the malefactor manufacturer Apple is proposing to us. And Obama in all this? He has only a few months to atone for the crimes he committed with the wanton usage of high tech he made. But first, he would have to realize how egregious they were.

This goes well beyond drones. Having the correct ethics will be fundamental for the safe and effective deployment of all too human artificial intelligence.

Patrice Ayme’