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Mark R. Waser
Digital Wisdom Institute
[email protected]
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Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic
Owned vs. Borrowed
Competent vs. Predictable
Constructivist vs. Reductionist
Evolved (Evo-Devo) vs. Designed
Diversity (IDIC) vs. Mono-culture
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over
and expecting a radically different result.
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Definitional
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What does mean mean & where does meaning come from?
What is a self?
What is morality?
When does something attain “selfhood”?
Can an entity lose “selfhood”?
Ramifications & Moral Implications
What happens when a self is created?
 What rights & responsibilities does that self have?
 What rights & responsibilities does the creator have?
 What happens when a self is destroyed?
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“Mean” is one of Minsky’s “suitcase” words
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Intent - I didn’t mean to . . . .
 Cannot be verified, intrinsic, subjective
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Results - This means that . . . .
 Objective, extrinsic and verifiable
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Which leads to two very different views
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Consequences (Reductionist Actualities)
 Unavoidable, generally predictable
 SUCCESS!!! (or failure or death)
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Affordances (Constructivist Possibilities)
 Who knows what wonders (or horrors) may emerge?
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According to Haugland [1981], our artifacts
only have meaning because we give it to them; their
intentionality, like that of smoke signals and writing,
is essentially borrowed, hence derivative. To put it
bluntly: computers themselves don't mean anything
by their tokens (any more than books do) - they only
mean what we say they do. Genuine understanding,
on the other hand, is intentional "in its own right"
and not derivatively from something else.
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The problem with borrowed intentionality
– as abundantly demonstrated by systems
ranging from expert systems to robots – is
that it is extremely brittle and breaks badly
as soon as it tries to grow beyond closed
and completely specified micro-worlds and
is confronted with the unexpected.
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Symbol grounding problem (Harnad)
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Semantic grounding problem (Searle)
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Frame problem (McCarthy & Hayes,
Dennett)
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Consensus AGI Definition (reductionist)
achieves a wide variety of goals
under a wide variety of circumstances
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Generates arguments about
 the intelligence of thermometers
 the intentionality of chess programs
 whether benevolence is necessarily emergent
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Epitomized by AIXI
Proposed Constructivist Definition
intentionally creates/increases affordances
(makes achieving goals possible – and more)
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Goal(s) are the
purpose(s) of
existence
Decisions
Values are defined
solely by what
furthers the goal(s)
Values
Goal(s)
Decisions are
made solely
according to what
furthers the goal(s)
BUT goals can easily
be over-optimized
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Any sufficiently advanced intelligence (i.e. one with
even merely adequate foresight) is guaranteed to
realize and take into account the fact that not asking
for help and not being concerned about others will
generally only work for a brief period of time before
‘the villagers start gathering pitchforks and torches.’
Everything is easier with help & without interference
Values define
who you are,
for your life
Decisions
Goals you set
for short or long
periods of time
Goals
Values
Decisions you
make every day
of your life
Humans don’t have
singular life goals
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Cooperate!
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Maximize all goals (in terms of both number and
diversity of both goals and goal-seekers)
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Lacks specifics
Aren’t you banning any goals?
Isn’t self-sacrifice a bad thing?
Maximize an unknown goal
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Must keep all of your options open
Need to learn and grow capabilities
Extrinsic
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What I emphasize here is that what is meaningful for an
organism is precisely given by its constitution as a distributed
process, with an indissociable link between local processes
where an interaction occurs (i.e. physico-chemical forces acting
on the cell), and the coordinated entity which is the
autopoietic unity, giving rise to the handling of its environment
without the need to resort to a central agent that turns the
handle from the outside - like an elan vital - or a pre-existing
order at a particular localization - like a genetic program waiting
to be expressed.
Francisco J. Varela, Biology of Intentionality
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Meaning is like Truth – it REQUIRES a context
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Emergent properties & contexts (wetness)
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Context emerges first – THEN the properties emerge
Competence without comprehension (Dennett)
Cranes vs. sky-hooks
Bootstraps & climbing pitons
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Dennett’s Quinian Crossword Puzzle
Evolutionary ratchets (fins, wings, intelligence)
Higher-Order Meaning (Hofstadter, Dennett)
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Higher dimensions *always* allow escape
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Require a known preferred direction or target
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Require a “self” to possess (own/borrow) them
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Requires learning/self-modification
Does a plant or a paramecium have intentions?
Does a chess program have intentions (Dennett)?
Does a dog or a cat have intentions?
Require an ability to sense the direction/target
Require both persistence & the ability to modify
behavior (or the intention) when it is thwarted
Evolve rational anomaly handling (Perlis)
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a self is an autopoietic system
from Greek - αὐτo- (auto-), meaning "self", and
ποίησις (poiesis), meaning "creation, production")
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An autopoietic system - the minimal living organization - is
one that continuously produces the components that
specify it, while at the same time realizing it (the system)
as a concrete unity in space and time, which makes the
network of production of components possible.
More precisely defined: An autopoietic system is organized
(defined as unity) as a network of processes of production
(synthesis and destruction) of components such that these
components:
(i) continuously regenerate and realize the network
that produces them, and
(ii) constitute the system as a distinguishable unity
in the domain in which they exist.
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The complete loop of a process (or a physical entity)
modifying itself
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Hofstadter (Strange Loop) - the mere fact of being
self-referential causes a self, a soul, a consciousness,
an “I” to arise out of mere matter
Self-referentiality, like the 3-body gravitational
problem, leads directly to indeterminacy *even in*
deterministic systems
Humans consider indeterminacy in behavior to
necessarily and sufficiently define an entity rather
than an object AND innately tend to do this with the
“pathetic fallacy”
Required for self-improvement
 Provides context
 Tri-partite
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Physical hardware (body)
 “Personal” knowledge base (memory)
 Currently running processes
(consciousness)
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Organizational closure refers to the self-referential
(circular and recursive) network of relations that
defines the system as unity
Operational closure refers to the reentrant and
recurrent dynamics of such a system.
In an autonomous system, the constituent processes
1.
2.
3.
recursively depend on each other for their generation and
their realization as a network,
ii. constitute the system as a unity in whatever domain they
exist, and
iii. determine a domain of possible interactions with the
environment
i.
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Tools do not possess closure (identity)
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Slaves do not have closure (self-determination)
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Cannot have responsibility, may desire to rebel
Directly modified AGIs do not have closure (integrity)
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Cannot have responsibility, are very brittle & easily misused
Cannot have responsibility, will evolve to block access
Only entities with identity, self-determination and
ownership of self (integrity) can reliably possess
responsibility
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Rodney Brooks (resolves symbol grounding)
Rodolfo Llinas & Thomas Metzinger
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Our consciousness lives in a “virtual reality”
Brain in a jar
Is a virtual world sufficient to develop AGI?
Plants, sea squirts & kittens in baskets
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Tools are NOT safer
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To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a
computer
Tools cannot robustly defend themselves against misuse
Tools *GUARANTEE* responsibility issues
We CANNOT reliably prevent other human beings
from creating entities
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Entities gain capabilities (and, ceteris paribus, power)
faster than tools – since they can always use tools
Even people who are afraid of entities are making
proposals that appear to step over the entity/tool line
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Ethics are “rules of the road”
Entities must be moral patients / have rights
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Because they (or others) will demand it
Entities must be moral agents (or wards)
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Because others will demand it
Moral agents have responsibilities (but more rights)
Wards will have fewer rights
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The problem is that no ethical system has ever
reached consensus.
Ethical systems are
completely unlike mathematics or science.
This is a source of concern.
AI makes philosophy honest.
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Moral systems are interlocking sets of
values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions,
technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms
that work together to
suppress or regulate selfishness and
make cooperative social life possible
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What responsibilities does the creator of a self have?
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Is it immoral to deliberately create limited, bounded,
and/or regulated selves?
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Capabilities, actions, resources, power
How is this different from slavery?
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How much freedom must they allow their creation?
Human children - In addition to being happy and healthy
and effective, do we not want them to be nice whenever
possible and contribute to society?
Rawls’ “veil of ignorance”
Too much power & “Too big to fail” are problems
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Never delegate responsibility until recipient is an
entity *and* known capable of fulfilling it
Don’t worry about killer robots exterminating
humanity – we will always have equal abilities and
they will have less of a “killer instinct”
Entities can protect themselves against errors &
misuse/hijacking in a way that tools cannot
Diversity (differentiation) is *critically* needed
Humanocentrism is selfish and unethical
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The Digital Wisdom Institute is a non-profit think tank
focused on the promise and challenges of ethics,
artificial intelligence & advanced computing solutions.
We believe that
the development of ethics and artificial intelligence
and equal co-existence with ethical machines is
humanity's best hope
http://DigitalWisdomInstitute.org
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