The 5th International Conference on Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems will be held this year in beautiful Edinburgh, Scotland,18 -22 July. The three-day event, organised by the Convergent Science Network, will be hosted at a fantastic venue consistent with the spirit of the conference, the Dynamic Earth: a 5 stars visitor experience with incredible interactive technology to learn about natural events and much more….

The conference will offer amazing talks on a variety of topics related to the fields of biomimetics and bioybrid systems and technologies at the intersection of living and artificial systems. The program includes 5 plenary lectures from excellent experts in the field. The plenary lectures will be complemented by short talks on diverse topics such as robotics, active sensing, navigation, locomotion and others.

You can find out more about the plenary speakers HERE, the full conference programme will be published shortly!

The Living Machines conference will be preceded by a one-day satellite event, hosted by the University of Edinburgh Department of Informatics, and consisting of a series of research-oriented workshops. You can submit your workshops HERE.

We are looking forward to seeing you this year in Edinburgh!

Researchers discover a new approach and tested approach towards neurorehabilitation through the combination of art and science, stubbornness, perseverance, teamwork and FET.

In May 2002 the exhibition projectAda: Intelligent Space opened its doors at the Swiss national exhibition Expo.02. As project leader of this initiative I had managed a team of about 25 scientists and technicians over a period of about 3 years to turn an idea on an interactive neurally controlled sentient space into a turnkey application. The basic idea was derived from the, so called, RoBoser project where a robot controlled by a system level model of the brain, called Distributed Adaptive Control (DAC), composed music in interaction with its environment. RoBoser was developed in 1998 together with the Brazilian composer and mathematician Jonatas Manzolli.

ADA: the Intelligent Space 2002

Upon the invitation of the Expo organization to submit a proposal the notion seemed obvious: if an interacting robot could compose music, why not have a whole space compose a complex audio-visual composition in interaction with its visitors telling a story on the future confluence of biology, technology and humanity? The idea was a hard sell to the institution where I was working, for a number of reasons some petty and political others more fundamental such as the tendency of scientists to look at phenomena in terms of a fragmented set of atomic elements rather than a connected system further compounded with a deep distrust of presenting results to a general audience which, so the cliché goes, would not understand anyway. Indeed, most colleagues saw me ruin what was to be a scientific career by pursuing a flaky dream. We can see these negative attitudes as an expression of what Ortega y Gasset  has dubbed the barbarism of specialization. Anyway, despite an extremely tortuous organizational trajectory and tribal skirmishes, almost magically and based on a prolonged and dedicated effort of the research team and support from its sponsors, Ada saw the light of day on May 15, 2002 and over a period of 5 months over 500K people visited this unique and unprecedented synthetic organism. The impact of this autonomous sentient space on its visitors gave rise to what now has become the Rehabilitation Gaming System.

Among the many visitors to Ada were also people with different kinds of physical and mental handicaps. Their engagement with Ada was astonishing because it showed that Ada was highly intuitive and inclusive through its strongly implicit audio-visual modes of interaction. It was clear to me that this could be turned into a quality of life enhancing technology but we had our hands full on running Ada’s phenotype, the machinery of the neuronal control system and conducting experiments so this idea had to wait. After the successful termination of the Expo.02 exhibition, where Ada had provided the most bang for the buck (or SFr) as compared to most other exhibits, my goal was to develop a new research activity based on the Ada experience towards quality of life technologies with a focus on stroke and Alzheimer’s disease. A new idea and research line brings with it the usual scramble for resources, expertise, (clinical) partners and subjects. Above all the challenge is to pose the right questions and to follow them wherever they lead you, in order to turn an intuition into an application. Here the DAC theory of mind and brain played a key role. DAC, was first proposed in 1992 and has evolved in a mature theory with many applications. Its synthetic validation methodology goes back to Giambattista Vico whose epistemological principle was that we only understand what we can build. Hence, DAC advanced as a function of the artefacts we have created with it and studied such as Ada, the mobile robots Khepera, ePuck or the humanoid robot iCub.

DAC-Robot-experiment

This illustrates the notion that a scientific theory should not only explain and predict but also provide the ability to control. Hence, by moving to the domain of neurorehabilitation we could test this third criterion even further: can we have an impact on brain repair in the clinic on the basis of the hypotheses on fundamental principles of brain organization as captured in DAC? One would expect that with widely publicized boisterous claims of building a brain by 2020 as long as the money is provided, we should be in a good position to assist people in recovering function after stroke or other neuropathologies. Unfortunately, nothing is further from the truth: we have made very little progress over the last 50 years. In addition, with the ageing population we are pressed for generating effective solutions as opposed to hiding behind big claims. Hence, there is a critical role to be played by new technologies in building a dignified society. However, once one has decided on the technology, decisions on content must be made and here technology and methods are silent. Rather one needs ideas and/or a theory. RGS developed from combining the idea of interactive media, in particular virtual reality, for neurorehabilitation with the DAC theory of mind and brain. This decision was a key step because it made choices on the content of treatment protocols non-arbitrary and every intervention became a well defined interaction with a user from which lessons could be immediately drawn. By now RGS incorporates about 20 specific DAC derived principles that range from the key role of sensori-motor contingencies in organizing cognition and action to the importance of goal-oriented and error-driven intervention.

RGS in use at Vall dHebron Hospital in Barcelona

RGS has advanced over the last 12 years via an extensive experimental agenda realized with dedicated partners in Barcelona. In order to support these experiments we have installed RGS therapy stations in associated hospitals, which are in continuous use. As a result, RGS has build up an unprecedented empirical track record having been tested in a wide range of conditions on over 500 patients at the acute and chronic stages of stroke including in at home settings. Building on these results we are now together with our clinical partners validating the generalization of RGS to other neuropathologies such as Parkinson’s disease, cerebral palsy, traumatic brain injury and spinal cord lesions and the initial analysis looks very encouraging.

Many of the users in our experiments have asked to be able to continue the RGS therapy. This demand combined with the clinical results that show that RGS is more effective than any other intervention available today, has lead to the creation of the spin-off company Eodyne.com together with the University Pompeu Fabra and the Catalan Institute of Advanced Studies. Eodyne’s goal is to make RGS available to as many people as possible for a minimum cost. Starting a spin-off was a very interesting experience for the research team, because it showed that our objectives of large-scale low cost distribution to the world population of 60M stroke victims of a science based product was something only very few of the companies, managers, VCs and consultants we had to deal with could comprehend. Hence, Eodyne has entered the market under its own steam and pursues an organic growth path. This experience, however, raises questions and new challenges for the domain of impact investing and ethical entrepreneurship in the local European context where the business culture is of a very different quality than in the USA. It might be another opportunity for Europe to build its own model of business creation as opposed to following what we believe others do.

RGS has developed as a prototypical example of a FET project: visionary, disruptive, multi-disciplinary, high-risk and science based. It has received indirect support via the FET PRESENCCIA (FP6) and CEEDS (FP7) projects and direct support via the AAL instrument in the, so called, RGS project (FP7). Currently the RGS work on neglect is supported as part of the ERC advanced grant cDAC. It should be mentioned that within the health calls of the EC, RGS never fared well because it was usually reported by the reviewers to be too scientific, the idea of basing technology on basic principles appeared difficult to understand. This, however, is not a reason to change the approach we have taken. RGS is successful because of its inclusive science based and technology oriented multi-disciplinarity that sees societal impact as the objective of science. Indeed, RGS was born in the interaction between science and art that started with RoBoser and Ada and has continued with Re(per)curso, the Brain Orchestra and many more installations and exhibitions build by SPECS. In addition, RGS sets an example for the development and deployment of advanced neurorehabilitation technologies: First, ground it on solid science; second, perform the clinical studies; third, introduce it into society. I emphasize this structure because the norm is rather to spin a nice story to investors without much of a scientific and/or clinical grounding, a reprise of the bubble economy of the “new new thing” model of innovation. This might work on the very short term for those at the receiving end of the money stream but as scientists it is our duty to have specific societal impact not to fool the public and our sponsors with promises of the elixir of life. Rather given the science based approach behind RGS provided by DAC, we can envision a form of deductive medicine where scientific theories find validation in the clinic and the clinic in turn provides key insights in advancing our theories of mind and brain. DAC has through RGS closed this validation loop showing that a virtuous cycle between basic and applied research can be created and above all science can deliver on its promise to contribute to the creation of a dignified and inclusive society. RGS is only the beginning.

this blog was originally published in DAE blog on 17/02/2016

Go game. (Credit: Nature / Google DeepMind)

So the media last week was absolutely full of the latest Sure Sign that the robocalypse is immanent: apparently, Google-backed DeepMind have now managed to create an AI so very sophisticated that it has beat human champions at the ancient Chinese board-game of Go. DeepMind’s AlphaGo has defeated the European champion, which marks another important development in the progress of AI research, trumping IBM DeepBlue’s victory over Gary Kasparov at chess back in 1997: Go is, apparently, a much more difficult game for humans – and, it was thought, for computers – to master, due to its complexity and the need for players to recognise complex patterns.

I expected, when setting off to write a note about this achievement, to find the usual sources in the popular press, with their characteristically subtle declarations, heralding that the End of the Human Race is Nigh!; however, thankfully, responses seem to be more sanguineand muted. The British tabloids have even avoided using that picture of Terminator that almost invariably accompanies their reports on new developments in AI and robotics.

So perhaps this is a sign that things are changing, and that the popular press are becoming more sensible, and more responsible, in their technology reporting. (Lets see how many weeks – or even days – we can go without this sort of thing before claiming victory, or even that we’ve turned a significant corner.)

But there is a lot interesting about DeepMind’s success, from a cultural perspective, even if it hasn’t stirred the usual panic about the robopocalypse. It made me recall a conversation I had atan EURobotics event in Bristol in November. We humans, it seems, like to think that we’re special. And maybe the possibility that robots or AI are a threat to that special status is another reason why we are so afraid of them. Maybe we fear another blow to our narcissism, like when that crazy astronomer Copernicus spoiled things by showing that the earth wasn’t the centre of the Universe, or that Victorian poo-pooer Darwin demonstrated that we merely evolved on this earth and weren’t not placed here at the behest of some Divine Creator. Maybe we don’t really fear that robots and AI will destroy all of humanity – well, maybe we fear that, too – but maybe part of what we fear is that robots and AI will destroy another one of those special places we reserve for ourselves as unique beings amidst creation.

And yet our scientists aren’t going to let us sit wrapped in the warmth of our unique being. They keep pushing ahead and developing more and more sophisticated AI that threatens our… specialness. So how do we, as a culture, respond to such a persistent challenge? Like any good politician, it seems we have decided to confront the inevitability of our failure by constantly changing the rules.

Choose your sporting metaphor: we ‘move the goalposts‘, we ‘raise the bar’.

Once upon a time, it was enough for we humans to think of ourselves as the rational animal, the sole species on earth endowed with the capacity for reason. As evidence for reason as the basis for a unique status for humanity crumbled – thanks both to proof that other animals were capable of sophisticated thought and the lack of proof that humans were, in fact, rational – we tried to shift those goalposts. We then transformed ourselves into the symbolic animal, the sole species on earth endowed with the capacity to manipulate signs and represent.

Then we learned that whales, dolphins and all sorts of animals were communicating with each other all the time, even if we weren’t listening. And that’s before we taught chimps how to use sign language (for which Charleton Heston will never thank us).

And then computers arrived to make things even worse. After some early experiments with hulking machines that struggled to add 2 + 2, computers soon progressed to leave us in their wake. Computers can clearly think more accurately, and faster, than any human being. And they can solve complex mathematical equations, demonstrating that they are pretty adept with symbols.

Ah, BUT…

Humans could find some solace in the comforting thought that computers were good and some things, yes, but they weren’t so smart. Not really. A computer would never beat a human being at chess, for example. Until in May 1997, when chess champion Gary Kasparov lost to IBM’s Deep Blue.  But that was always going to happen. A computer could never, we consoled ourselves, win at a game that required linguistic dexterity. Until 2011, when IBM’s Watson beat Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter at Jeopardy!, the hit US game show. And now, Google’s DeepMind as conquered all, winning the hardest game we can imagine….

So what is interesting about DeepMind’s victory is how human beings have responded – again – to the challenges of our self-conception posed by robots and AI. Because if we were under any illusion that we were special, alone among gods’ creations as a thinking animal, or a symbolising animal, or a playing animal, that status as been usurped by our own progeny, again and again, in that all-too familiar Greek-Frankenstein-Freudian way.

Animal rationabile had to give way to animal symbolicum, who in turn gave way to animal ludens… what’s left now for poor, biologically-limited humanity?

A glimpse of our answer to this latest provocation can be seen in Star Trek: The Next Generation:Lieutenant Commander Data is a self-aware android with cognitive abilities far beyond that of any human being. And yet, despite these tremendous capabilities, Data is always regarded – by himself and all the humans around him – as tragically, inevitably, inferior, as less than human. Despite the lessons in Shakespeare and sermons on human romantic ideals from his mentor, the ship’s captain Jean-Luc Picard, Data is doomed to be forever inferior to humans.

It seems that now AI can think and solve problems as well as humans, we’ve raised the bar again, changing the definition of ‘human’ to preserve our unique, privileged status.

We might now be animal permotionem – the emotional animal – except while that would be fine for distinguishing between us and robots, at least until we upload the elusive ‘consciousness.dat’ file (as in Neill Blomkamp’s recent film, Chappie)  this new moniker won’t help us remain distinct from the rest of the animals, because to be an emotional animal, to be a creature ruled by impulse and feeling, is.. to just be an animal, according to all of our previous definitions. (We’ve sort of painted ourselves into a corner with that one.)

We might find some refuge, then, following Gene Roddenberry’s  example, in the notion of humans as unique animal artis, the animals that create, or engage in artistic work.

(The clever among you will have realised some time ago that I’m no classical scholar and that my attempts to feign Latin fell apart some time ago. Artis  seems to imply something more akin to ‘skill’, which robots could arguably have already achieved; ars simply means ‘technique’ or ‘science’. Neither really captures what I’m trying to get at; suggestions are more than welcome below, please.)

The idea that human beings are defined by a particular creative impulse is not terribly new; attempts to redefine ‘the human’ along these lines have been evident since the latter half of the twentieth century. For example, if we flip back one hundred years ago, we might see Freud defining human beings (civilised human beings, of course, we should clarify) as uniquely able to follow rules. But by the late 1960s, Freud’s descendants, such as British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, are arguing almost the exact opposite – that what makes us human is creativity, the ability to fully participate in our being in an engaged, productive way. (I will doubtless continue this thought in a later post, as psychoanalysis is a theoretical model very close to my heart.)

What’s a poor AI to do? It was once enough for an artificial intelligence to be sufficiently impressive, maybe even deemed ‘human’, if it could prove capable of reason, or symbolic representations, or win at chess, or Jeopardy!, or Go. Now, we expect nothing less than Laurence Olivier, Lord Byron and Jackson Pollack, all in one.

(How far away is AI under this measure? Is this any good? Or this? Maybe this?)

This reminds me of Chris Columbus’s 1999 film Bicentennial Man(based, of course, on a story by Isaac Asimov). Robin Williams’s Andrew Martin begins his… ‘life’, for lack of a better word… as a simple robot, who over the decades becomes more and more like a human – he becomes sentient, he demonstrates artistic skill, he learns to feel genuine emotion, etc.. At each stage, it seems, he hopes that he will be recognised as being at least on par with humans. No, he’s told at first, you’re not sentient. Then, when he’s sentient, he’s told he cannot feel. Then he’s told he cannot love. No achievement, it seems, is enough.
Even once he has achieved just about everything, and become like a human in every respect- or perhaps even ”superhuman’ – he is told that it is too much, that he has to be less than he is. In an almost a complete reversal of the Aristotelian notion of the thinking, superior animal, Andrew is told that he has to make mistakes. He is too perfect. He cannot be homo sapien – he needs to be homo errat – the man that screws up. To err is human, or perhaps in this case, to err defines the human. (Though artificial intelligence will not long be on to this as well, as suggested in another of Asimov’s stories.) It is not until Andrew is on his deathbed and is drawing his very last breaths that the Speaker of the World Congress declares, finally, that the world will recognise Andrew as a human. And perhaps this will be the final line; this is perhaps the one definition of human that will endure and see out every single challenge posed by robots and artificial intelligence, no matter the level of technological progress, and regardless of how far artificial life leaves human beings behind: we will be homo mortuum. The rational animal that can die. If Singularity enthusiasts and doomsayers alike are to be believed, this inevitable self-conception is not long off. Though perhaps humans’ greatest strength – the ability to adapt, and the talent to re-invent ourselves – might mean that there’s some life in the old species yet. Regardless, it will serve us very well to create a conception of both ourselves and of artificial life forms that try to demarcate the boundaries, and decide when these boundaries might be crossed, and what the implications will be for crossing that line.

This post originally appeared in Dreaming Robots.

It was probably always an inevitability, but something has most certainly become a ‘Thing’ when it is covered by the intrepid reporters of US Comedy Central’s The Daily Show.

Yes, it seems that a pastor in the USA (where else?) is espousing the idea that robots driven by sophisticated artificial intelligence should be welcomed into the Christian faith. Reverend Christopher Benek of the Providence Presbyterian Church in Florida reckons that since robots are already capable of beating people in chess and in game shows, can mow our lawns and vacuum our floors and give us directions, it cannot be long before they achieve consciousness. And once they are as intelligent as human beings, for Benek it naturally follows that they will, just like human beings, seek spiritual enlightenment.

The Good News is that, according to Benek, spirituality will naturally evolve in superior artificial intelligence, so that instead of being driven to evil acts and being a threat to humanity – as Stephen Hawking and others are warning – intelligent robots of the future will, through better moral and ethical understanding, be a much more benevolent and benign species on our planet.

Artificial Intelligence, Benek says, may even ‘lead humans to new levels of holiness’, teaching humans to better live lives in accordance with Christian principles.

(It would be unfair, perhaps, to point out how often human spirituality has lead us to commit so many of the acts against others in the name of God or gods – e.g. murder, genocide – that we so fear intelligent robots will wreak upon humanity as a whole. And it leaves open the possibilities of new religious wars based on different faiths competing to convert and save these newly manufactured souls.)

robots love their goods too

Benek’s ideas, however, are certainly further evidence that our cultural attitudes towards robots are changing, from monsters that promise destruction and the end of the human race, to our last and best hope of salvation. (Remember a couple of blog posts back, about the notion of robots as our saviours and, for example, the tag line of Neil Blomkamp’s Chappie: Humanity’s Last Hope Isn’t Human.)

 Of course, to students of the Bible, none of this should come as a surprise. We’ve been here before, and the idea of humans being replaced by superior, moral machines was predicted long ago.

The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh has corrupted his way upon the earth. And God said until Noah, ‘The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth. (Genesis [not Genisys] 6: 11-13)

Reverend Lionel Preacherbot

And of course Reverend Benek’s beliefs are not entirely without foundation, as there is a precedent (of sorts) for robots finding religion. In Isaac Asimov’s story ‘Reason’, the robot known as QT1 (‘Cutie’) decides that he is a prophet in the service of The Master, his true Creator and their station’s source of power. He quickly converts all of the other robots to his new religion. And we’ve seen robots in thrall to religious fervour more recently, too, in the 2004 reboot of Battlestar Galactica, and through the Robotology teachings of Reverend Preacherbot.

What Benek’s aspiration demonstrates is (again) the basic confusion between intelligence and… well, everything else that goes into making up human beings. It is worth remembering that even if – perhaps even when – scientists create a supremely or infinitely intelligent system, this will not necessarily mean that these robots will be emotional creatures, and it is even less likely that they would develop any sense of spirituality. All of those qualities we attribute to a fully sentient AI robot – anxiety, cynicism, suspicion, genocidal tendencies, and need for spiritual fulfilment – are the by-products of millions of years of human evolution, and do not come pre-loaded into a ‘consciousness.dat’ file (as per Chappie).

And we might hope regardless that such a highly advanced intelligence would not experience the same fallibilities that make humans susceptible to those… less rational aspects of religion.

(The Daily Show piece perhaps illustrates this best, with the reporter’s ‘robot’ first subjecting Reverend Benek to a brutal interrogation – e.g. ‘Why does God give babies cancer?’ – and then storming out of a synagogue, insisting, ‘No one touches my robo-junk.’)

god * jesus

Some folk are rather upset at the notion that robots might be welcomed into the Lord’s Church, and though some of their objections are very entertaining, we may have to accept that Benek’s prophecies may not come to pass, and at least that we will not be sharing our pews with intelligent robots anytime soon.

There is, however, the intriguing prospect that robots might replace human pastors at the pulpit (and again this is ground we have covered recently in this blog), but again, this possibility seems some way off yet, if for no other reason than there seems to be a lot of resistance to the idea of robots in general, let alone to the idea of them leading a congregation, amongst the followers of Christianity in the West.

And that leads us to the next instalment of this blog when, on a more serious note, we will examine the question of what role religion may have in the larger cultural attitudes and acceptance of robots in our lives.

Where have all the workers gone?

The idea that robots will replace human labour hasbeen around since, technically, before there was even such a thing as robots. It is an intriguing history: We can trace our fears of being displaced by mechanised labour back to the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution, as automated looms, powered by the magic of steam engines, meant less employment for skilled workers.

The very origin of the word ‘robot’ is a part of this history, and reflects these fears.

Čapek’s R.U.R.

Karel Čapek’s 1920 play, R.U.R., in which the word ‘robot’ first appears in its modern usage, portrays a factory where all of the workers are manufactured humanoid slaves  robota in Czech means ‘forced labour’) who [spoiler alert] eventually rise up and overthrow their creators. (A famous plot endlessly repeated, and mirrored, to an extent, in another important historical footnote, 1927’s iconic Metropolis, which is also a story about machines replacing human labour and its consequences.)

And now, in a new twist on this old theme – or, looked at from another way, the inevitable evolution of our anxieties – we are being told that whatever jobs are left to we humans will be filled by robotic recruiting consultants, who will analyse the data (i.e. human CVs) to find the best matches for those few jobs that, miraculously, robots are incapable of doing.

However, despite what might described as a bit of excitement at the possibility, there is really nothing new about this. Machines have long had a hand, so to speak, in helping to determine good matches between jobs and potential employees, just as versions of artificial intelligence are presently also finding us potential husbands and wives, new favourite songs and our next favourite books.

The idea that it will be ‘robots’ that will be recruiting human employees is clearly a hook, and not a particularly helpful one. (Especially when the news comes complete with illustrations of sometimes cute, sometimes overly stern – and always unnecessarily expensive – humanoid robots.)

So the news really is… not news. But there’s nothing new in that either, not when it comes to robots, or technology more generally. So, if there is nothing remarkable about machines helping to organise our lives, why is this question of ‘robot recruiters’ such a popular topic at the moment?

The workers and the machines in Metropolis (1927)

The answer, of course, lies in history, and our anxieties. We can trace the answer back to the Industrial Revolution and those dark Satanic mills. It is a new articulation of the old fear that we will be replaced by machines, that robots – versions of ourselves that do not tire, that do not require rests or holidays or maternity leave – will take our jobs. And more fundamentally here, the idea of robot recruiters goes one step further, unless, of course, you are actually in the recruiting industry itself, in which case the idea of robots doing recruitment, and doing it better than you, is already enough.

The idea that robots will find us jobs taps into the fact that we already know that robots are determining more and more about our lives – the amazon.com suggestions, the match.com pairings, the tripadvisor.com recommendations. But the robot recruiter also suggests that so many – perhaps for some people, too many – of our interactions are with machines that might be entirely rational and highly efficient, but somehow still less than human. And perhaps we’re not just thinking about our human-robot interactions, the voice inviting us to press 1 to pay a bill. There may also be a sense that many of our human-human interactions are similarly governed by a rigid inflexibility, that we are meeting other people that are somehow less than human.

And while normally we might embrace these interventions, and be grateful for the able assistance, we are – as ever – ambivalent about our relationship with technology. We are foreshadowing for ourselves potential downsides, negative impacts, and imagining that there are limits to how far we would like this trend to continue. These reservations are entirely legitimate and entirely rational, but in the absence of clear discussion or reasonable debate, they tend to be expressed in nightmare dystopian scenarios; we move from what is perhaps an unconscious suspicion that it may not be perfectly fine for a robot to help us find a fulfilling, well-paid job to imagining a world where a Skynet-styled AI alters our DNA while we are still in the test-tube and employs laser-gun wielding cyborgs to march human children from their Brave New Schools into their computer terminal prisons, where we will be connected to feeding tubes and implanted chips will cause us to explode should we ever try to leave.

But, as usual, such fantasies says much more about human beings than it does about the present or future abilities of robots and AI.

We’ve all seen the terrifying headlines:

‘Rise of the Cybermen: The Terminator-style bionic ear that could give people “superman” hearing’
‘Terminator is nigh: Shape-shifting material that instantly switches from solid to liquid could lead to a new generation of robots’

And the rest.
Undoubtedly, there is a great deal of anxiety out there about the development of robots and artificial intelligence. Some of these fears are well-founded, of course, and some less so. We’ve been presented in the popular media so often – in films, video games and in the popular press –  with the image of robotic monsters and genocidal AI that it’s a wonder that public have not demanded that these dangerous toys be taken from scientists and forever locked away, their development forever prohibited for the good of all life on earth as we know it. (A similar public attack is underway regarding GMOs, for example; again, many of these are well-founded and some are not.)

However, increasingly, we are seeing another side to our imaginations of what robots can do, will do, to us, for us. No longer are they simply the laser-gun-wielding psychopaths, or the disembodied masterminds orchestrating the end of the human race. Robots and AI have also now become not only our carers (e.g. Robot and Frank), our lovers (Her) and even our children (A.I., Chappie).

And now, even more optimistically, they have become our saviours, the final great hope for humanity.

This is quite a turnaround, in terms of public relations.

Consider, for example, the tagline on the posters for Chappie, New Blomkamp’s take on the birth of sentient AI and the Singularity:

Humanity’s Last Hope Isn’t Human

Or consider Daniel H. Wilson’s 2011 novel, Robopocalypse: we are presented with a story about the rise of AI and robots and the destruction of humanity. But absolutely essential in humanity’s fight back are not only technologically-enhanced humans (armed with prosthetics and neural implants), but our new robot allies, good robots that help us battle the bad robots.

Or, going further back, consider more widely the Terminator series: in the first movie,, from 1984, Arnold Schwarzenegger is most certainly, unambiguously the Bad Guy, sent by a future AI to ensure that human resistance against machine-rule dies in its (or his) infancy. But already by the second film, , in 1991, Arnie is already the Good Guy protecting humanity from the next robot threat. And by the fourth in the series, in 2009, it is inevitable to avoid a certain degree of spoiling just by mentioning that the title is Terminator: Salvation. (And 2015’s Terminator: Genisys [sic] promises more of the same.)

Terminator

All of this might seem like a positive step in the right direction for those whose work is dedicated to building useful machines that help humanity, as the bad PR of snarling chrome skulls (and THAT picture) are replaced with more wholesome and realistic ideas of robots caring for the elderly and helping the sick and disabled – and on some levels this absolutely needs to be applauded – but there is also the worry that this new conception of robots is really just the other side of the very same coin: that the idealisation of robots and AI as humanity’s last great hope is not actually that much different from the demonisation of robots that preceded it.

Of course the idea that robots, and technology more generally, will be the humanity’s salvation is not a terribly new idea, and certainly has been around as long – or perhaps even longer – than the technological monsters that have come to dominate the popular media. Frankenstein’s monster, for example, was conceived as a warning of what could go wrong with humanity’s new technological prowess, despite our noblest intentions (and is itself a post-Enlightenment version of the classic Faust myth).

Android Superhero and Arch-villain – get ready to see more of The Vision and Ultron in the coming weeks.

And conceptions of the future since have always been manichean: utopian visions have always competed alongside dystopian versions, and though the nightmare images are more often (and popularly) the stuff of our fictions there have always been groups, from the Futurists to the posthumanists, that are ready to embrace the brave new world.

But uncritical optimism is often driven by the same sort of (often unconscious) anxieties and fears that give rise to the images of robotic monsters; likewise, misinformation and unrealistic expectations are the source of both unrealistically positive and negative beliefs.

So while the robo-enthusiast and AI-champion might welcome this cultural shift towards more positive social attitudes towards technology, it might not be all good news. We have to resist the vicissitudes of love and hate, demonisation and idealisation, and approach these questions – as always – with rational discussion and education.

]]> https://csnblog.specs-lab.com/2015/04/23/robot-saviours/feed/ 0 https://csnblog.specs-lab.com/2015/03/25/beware-of-artificial-intelligence-says-some-experts/ https://csnblog.specs-lab.com/2015/03/25/beware-of-artificial-intelligence-says-some-experts/#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2015 20:54:19 +0000 http://csnblog.specs-lab.com/?p=5598 Continue reading →]]> Article by
Michael Szollosy

A few notable names have made some warnings about the dangers of artificial intelligence in the last few months. Bill Gates apparently cannot understand why we are more concerned about this impending threat. Professor Stephen Hawking recently has come out and completely endorsed the notion of the Singularity – that AI, once autonomous, would take over designing itself and so improve at an exponential rate, uninhibited by the biological limitations of humans, developments that could eventually lead to ‘the end of the human race’.

Stephen Hawking warns of the dangers of AI

And Elon Musk, founder of PayPal and SpaceX, has even gone so far as to put not inconsiderable sums of money to backup his fear, in case we didn’t believe him, donating $10 million to The Future of Life Institute, ‘organization working to mitigate existential risks facing humanity’, focussing at present, they explain, on ‘potential risks from the development of human-level artificial intelligence’. (This was reported by Forbes as ‘Elon Musk puts down $10 million to fight Skynet’)

With so many influential names coming forward and robustly warning us to be afraid, be very afraid, of the looming AI threat, you would think that we would be acting with more urgency on this apparent consensus. But not everyone agrees that AI is such an imminent menace, and questions are being asked: how many of these fears are genuine, and how much is the product of misinformation, optimistic (yes, optimistic) evaluations of our current and future technological prowess, and how much is simply the inevitable side-effect of hype and mass marketing machines?

Gates, whose futurist credentials have certain legitimacy (he did found Microsoft, though that was some time ago now), directly contradicted present Microsoft research chief, Eric Horvitz (who also, therefore, has a reasonable claim to say he knows of which he speaks). Horvitz claims that while he believes AI will achieve consciousness, he does not think that this is something about which we need to worry, and has co-authored an essay with Tom Dietterich, of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in direct response to some of this celebrity-induced paranoia.

Horvitz and Dietterich have also, it is worth noting, however, signed the FLI open letter that inspired Musk to away so much of his money, so they aren’t unambivalent champions of the brave new world. But perhaps that is the correct position to take on artificial intelligence – and maybe, if one were to hazard a guess, on most prophesising about the utopia/doom (delete as appropriate) that we face. So this is not to say that there isn’t something to be concerned about (Horvitz and Dietterich suggest three important places where we perhaps need to start worrying), but it is probably worth listening to some of the less alarmist voices in this conversation, such as Professor Tony Prescott, director of Sheffield Robotics, on this very blog.

But these voices, alas, are not what we tend to be interested in. These voices don’t scream headlines that help shift newspapers. And we live in a (post-)modern culture, characterised by a hermeneutics of suspicion, where we assume that sober voices of authority (politicians, scientists, etc.) are hiding things from us, so we tend not to listen to the less-extremist opinions anyway. The FLI focus on AI – a potential danger that might one day materialise – ignores the much more very real and immediate danger posed to human existence by climate change, for example. But that’s a much harder kind of fear to sell to people.

It is a well-known axiom that ‘sex sells’. So too, it seems, do rampantly genocidal intelligent robots.

Horvitz’s and Dietterich’s essay is perhaps the most sober, realistic assessment. They do not indulge in the instinctive panic induced by science fiction and unrealistic expectations (perhaps, too, the aspirations) of some in the science community. However, they also recognise that there are important steps that need to be taken in order to ensure that certain risks are mitigated, or – perhaps more importantly – that the public is reassured that such potential risks associated with AI do not pose a significant, or material threat.

AI doomsday scenarios belong more in the realm of science fiction than science fact. However, we still have a great deal of work to do to address the concerns and risks afoot with our growing reliance on AI systems. […]

We urge our colleagues in industry and academia to join us in identifying and studying these risks and in finding solutions to addressing them, and we call on government funding agencies and philanthropic initiatives to support this research.

But perhaps the most important warning we should heed isn’t telling us to beware of AI at all, but something else entirely. Consider this assessment from a session at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos:

Natural stupidity will beat out artificial intelligence any time for really screwing things up. We have plenty of natural stupidity. And the combination of natural stupidity and artificial intelligence can be a really dangerous combination.

Davos Report: Fear Natural Stupidity, Not Artificial Intelligence

from icub.org

Article by Michael Szollosy

“The desire to anthropomorphise, the need to connect, is powerful, and that is why this thing is going to sell.”

So says Daniel Graystone, inventor and CEO of Graystone industries in the American network series Caprica. The prequel to the 2004 remake of Battlestar Galactica, Caprica tells the story of how the genocidal Cylons came into existence. Graystone is trying to develop a robot for use by the military, but realises that his will be more successful if his robots look and act like human beings. First, it needs to be pointed out – evidently with some frequency – that bipedal robot soldiers are probably the most inefficient way that robots can be used in military combat, and not at all what a truly sophisticated artificial intelligence would use to take over the planet and enslave the human race.

But given that, Graystone makes a very important point: there is a very deeply-rooted impulse to anthropomorphise – to attribute human qualities to things that are not human – and this seems to be a big factor in the development of human-robot interactions. 

This became apparent in a recent post on this blog about the race to create ‘personal robots’: Amidst some genuinely beneficial devices and some really exciting innovations, we found some very ambitious promises about just how much these robots will serve not just as useful machines but also as ‘companions’. Sometimes, these robots involved little more than putting an animated face on a baby monitor, or putting a tablet on wheels and adding a soft female voice. (Why these robots are so often anthropomorphised as female is perhaps something that must be addressed in another post.)

But these robots, looking and sounding increasingly human, look as though they are going to sell.

The impulse to anthropomorphise is an irrational drive, sometimes leading us to draw some strange conclusions. It has little to do with the instrumental utility of a device.  A good hammer is effective at putting nails into wood. Would a hammer with a personality, with a face, be more effective at that task?

Well, maybe, yes, as it turns out.  As we humans are instinctively social animals, perhaps there are some clear benefits to robots with whom we can interacts on a social level: robots with material bodies, instead of disembodied intelligences, and, perhaps best of all, robots with faces, with whom we can more naturally interact.

The impulse to anthropomorphise is an important part of human evolution, and plays an important part of our learning. As Tony Belpaeme explains, this impulse can be seized upon to massively improve the effectiveness of technology in applications like learning and in caring, especially with children.

However, the impulse to anthropomorphise also leads to some assumptions about robots that are unrealistic and, in some cases, dangerous. If one is presented with a robot that has a face, one automatically, instinctive, makes assumptions about those things of which the robot is capable. One might expect, for example, that the face staring back at us shares our intellectual capacity, or our ability to empathise. (This might be in some way what is responsible for the phenomenon known as the uncanny valley, where one experiences a degree of discomfort when in the presence of a life-like humanoid robot.)

Anthropomorphisation, more worryingly, might lead us to expect that robots share human abilities to exercise judgement, for example, in combat situations. In a 2013 TED^x lecture, Noel Sharkey describes how military planners, having seen impressive killing machines, make all sorts of promises about how robot soldiers will be able to autonomously identity and eliminate targets. But these planners have no conception of the serious perceptual and intellectual limitations of robots, let alone their complete lack of moral agency, emotional engagement or critical faculties in the exercise of judgment.

Noel Sharkey – Toy Soldiers to Killer Robots

Looking at a robot with a cute cartoon face, or even a mean-looking Schwarzenegger look-alike, one might assume – automatically, unconsciously – that robot capable of all sorts of human behaviours, feelings and thoughts of which it is simply not capable. And that’s even before the marketing men and overly keen programmers (with an overestimation of their abilities) make their promises and videos that seduce us even further. As ever, what is needed is an informed discussion, and some careful thinking how to effectively and intelligently use our tendency to anthropomorphise, not exploit it.

Tony Belpaeme – The power of robots with a face

Experimental Function Android Assistant http://efaa.upf.edu/

By Tony Prescott, University of Sheffield

This article was originally published in The Conversation.

The possibility that advanced artificial intelligence (AI) might one day turn against its human creators has been repeatedly raised of late. Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, for instance, surprised by the ability of his newly-upgraded speech synthesis system to anticipate what he was trying to say, has suggested that, in the future, AI could surpass human intelligence and ultimately bring about the end of humankind.

Hawking is not alone in worrying about superintelligent AI. A growing number of futurologists, philosophers and AI researchers have expressed concerns that artificial intelligence could leave humans outsmarted and outmanoeuvred. My view is that this is unlikely, as humans will always use an improved AI to improve themselves. A malevolent AI will have to outwit not only raw human brainpower but the combination of humans and whatever loyal AI-tech we are able to command – a combination that will best either on their own.

There are many examples already: Clive Thompson, in his book Smarter Than You Think describes how in world championship chess, where AIs surpassed human grandmasters some time ago, the best chess players in the world are not humans or AIs working alone, but human-computer teams.

While I don’t believe that surpassing raw (unaided) human intelligence will be the trigger for an apocalypse, it does provide an interesting benchmark. Unfortunately, there is no agreement on how we would know when this point has been reached.

Beyond the Turing Test

An established benchmark for AI is the Turing Test, developed from a thought experiment described by the late, great mathematician and AI pioneer Alan Turing. Turing’s practical solution to the question: “Can a machine think?” was an imitation game, where the challenge is for a machine to converse on any topic sufficiently convincingly that a human cannot tell whether they are communicating with man or machine.

In 1991 the inventor Hugh Loebner instituted an annual competition, the Loebner Prize, to create an AI – or what we would now call a chatbot – that could pass Turing’s test. One of the judges at this year’s competition, Ian Hocking, reported in his blog that if the competition entrants represent our best shot at human-like intelligence, then success is still decades away; AI can only match the tip of the human intelligence iceberg.

I’m not overly impressed either by the University of Reading’s recent claim to have matched the conversational capability of a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy speaking English Imitating child-like intelligence, and the linguistic capacity of a non-native speaker, falls well short of meeting the full Turing Test requirements.

Indeed, AI systems equipped with pattern-matching, rather than language understanding, algorithms have been able to superficially emulate human conversation for decades. For instance, in the 1960s the Eliza program was able to give a passable impression of a psychotherapist. Eliza showed that you can fool some people some of the time, but the fact that Loebner’s US$25,000 prize has never been won demonstrates that, performed correctly, the Turing test is a demanding measure of human-level intelligence.

Measuring artificial creativity

So if the Turing test cannot yet be passed, are there aspects of human intelligence that AI can recreate more convincingly? One recent proposal from Mark Riedl, at Georgia Tech in the USA, is to test AI’s capacity for creativity.

Riedl’s Lovelace 2.0 test requires the AI to create an artifact matching a plausible, but arbitrarily complex, set of design constraints. The constraints, set by an evaluator who also judges its success, should be chosen so that meeting them would be deemed as evidence of creative thinking in a person, and so by extension in an AI.

For example the evaluator might ask the machine to (as per Riedl’s example): “create a story in which a boy falls in love with a girl, aliens abduct the boy and the girl saves the world with the help of a talking cat”. A crucial difference from the Turing test is that we are not testing the output of the machine against that of a person. Creativity, and by implication intelligence, is judged by experts. Riedl suggests we leave aside aesthetics, judging only whether the output meets the constraints. So, if the machine constructs a suitable science fiction tale in which Jack, Jill and Bagpuss, repel ET and save Earth, then that’s a pass – even thought the result is somewhat unoriginal as a work of childrens’ fiction.

I like the idea of testing creativity – there are talents that underlie human inventiveness that AI developers have not even begun to fathom. But the essence of Riedl’s test appears to be constraint satisfaction – problem solving. Challenging, perhaps, but not everyone’s idea of creativity. And by dropping the competitive element of Turing’s verbal tennis match, judging Lovelace 2.0 is left too much in the eye of the beholder.

Surprises to come

Ada Lovelace, the friend of Charles Babbage who had a hand in inventing the computer, and for whom Riedl named his test, famously said that “the Analytical Engine [Babbage’s computer] has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform”. This comment reflects a view, still widely held, that the behaviour of computer programs is entirely predictable and that only human intelligence is capable of doing things that are surprising and hence creative.

However, in the past 50 years we have learned that complex computer programs often show “emergent” properties unintended by their creators. So doing something unexpected in the context of Riedl’s test may not be enough to indicate original thinking. Human creativity shows other hallmarks that reflect our ability to discover relationships between ideas, where previously we had seen none. This may happen by translating images into words then back into images, ruminating over ideas for long periods where they are subject to subconscious processes, shuffling thoughts from one person’s brain to another’s through conversation in a way that can inspire concepts to take on new forms. We are far from being able to do most of these things in AI.

For now I believe AI will be most successful when working alongside humans, combining our ability to think imaginatively with the computer’s capacity for memory, precision and speed. Monitoring the progress of AI is worthwhile, but it will be a long time before these tests will demonstrate anything other than how far machine intelligence still has to go before we will have made our match.

All things considered, I don’t think we need to hit the panic button just yet.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.