The Lamisphere

Today’s keynote at the Singularity Summit was Peter Norvig, Director of Research from Google. His talk was titled The History and Future of Technological Change, and he couched his presentation as an analysis of “how to evaluate technical change”.

This is the first time I have heard Norvig speak, and I found his talk to be extremely pragmatic. His trek through the art of predicting the future, to demonstrations of narrow AI to his list of AGI prerequisites pointed toward a technologist with a perspective firmly grounded in continuous improvement, averse to making high-risk, long-shot bets. If Norvig speaks from a place of authority on Google product direction, it seems to me that we should expect continued evolutionary innovation from GOOG, but they will leave the breakthrough innovation of AGI to others. This is an important observation for the investment community that has put Google on pedestal related to the continued release of major breakthroughs.

Norvig began his talk discussing how the predictions he was used to making are about incremental advancements in technology. A 1% improvement here, a 2% improvement there. He pointed out that predictions about AGI are 100% “or greater” improvement ruminations. He pointed out the dichotomy between other prognosticators. “We will all be dead in 100 years” vs. “We will live to be 1000 years old”. “AGI can’t happen for another 100 years” vs. “within the next 10 years”.

From there, Norvig took a detour through other concepts of “Artificial General”. He postulated about “Artificial General Space Exploration”, “Artificial General Materials Science”, and “Artificial General Culture” – equating these concepts to the emergence of AGI.

Here Norvig was at his most pragmatic. He sees continuous innovation in these areas bringing about a more advanced capability, but certainly no “rapture”, no “big bang”. He commented that “the Singularity is a period, not a point”. He sees a date in the future when we look back at the progress and say – wow that was a big change.

In preparation for this presentation Norvig used Google Scholar to query papers presenting breakthroughs in AI. His keywords were “AI” and “unlike previous”. From 1968 – present, Norvig can’t tell the difference in breakthrough claims, with claims of novelty repeating in the data set. This indicates to him that we are not on the verge of discovering something major in AI.

To bring about an AGI, Norvig offered his list of prerequisites:

• Probabilistic First-Order Logic
• Hierarchical Representation and Problem Solving
• Learning over the data from above
• With lots of data
• Online
• Efficiently

I think the recursive thinking nature of Norvig’s AGI underpins his continuous improvement philosophy, and also presents a very Googlian view of success. Let an algorithm loose on lots of data, and eventually it might get there.

Rodney Brooks asked Norvig a question during the Q&A session:

Brooks – Any emergent property of Google materializing within the massive systems that has been a surprise?

Norvig’s best answer was that he was surprised at how Game theoretic Google’s role in the internet is. Initially, he thought Google would be an observer of the internet – just serving up search results. Now Google is co-evolving with the web.

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J. Storrs Hall is a noted scientist and author. He is chief scientist at Nanorex and has published extensively on the subject. His most recent book is titled Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine (2007).

Hall spoke at The Singularity Summit this morning on the topic of revising Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. As a refresher, Asimov’s laws follow:

• A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
• A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
• A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

With Asimov, the 3 laws were “hardwired into the circuitry.” He envisioned the laws being codified in the circuitry. Alas, according to Hall, the Robotic AGIs (Artificial General Intelligence) of the future will be software and wetware. And “Asimov’s robots didn’t Improve Themselves. Our AIs, we hope, Will.”

So, Hall posed the question, “how can you imagine writing a law that is to govern in an environment you can’t predict. Like Hammurabi writing laws that predict the Enron scandal.” Our new “laws” have to be much more abstract and flexible – more like a conscience. According to Hall, we’ve done this for ages – it’s called raising children.

To punctuate his perspective, Hall predicted “by 2050 – most corporations will be run by their management information systems. Their first law will be ‘make a profit’.”

Hall’s New Laws of Robotics:

• Law #1 – A Robot shall understand as much as possible.

Hall referenced Socrates – “there is no good but knowledge, and no evil but ignorance” as a basis for morality across cultures. The same should apply to AGI.

o Law 1a – in particular a robot shall understand mimetic evolution.

Mimetic evolution is the reflective or representative of actuality or reality of human experience (derived from Aristotle’s concept of mimesis or imitation). This is important because evolution is where morals come from.

• Law #2 – A robot shall be Open Source.

We live in a world largely run by artificial organizations that have no conscious – Corporations and Governments. But corporations are required by law to have an “open-source motivational system” – Auditing – because Money is their Emotion. Transparency to robot motives and capabilities will be critical with an AGI.

• Law #3 - A robot shall be Economically Sentient

Our economic environment is the necessary outcome of evolution. We must train our AGIs to understand and appreciate the power of economics so that they will drive toward optimal decisions.

• Law #4: A robot shall be “Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent” and shall do a good turn daily.

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Jamais Cascio, co-founder of WorldChanging.com just finished his talk at the Summit. Without powerpoint, Cascio told us a fascinating tale about 4 different scenarios as to how the Singularity metaverse might materialize.

He riffs on virtual worlds, mirror worlds, augmented reality, and lifelogging. The full text of his talk is available at the link below:

Open the Future: Singularity Summit Talk: Openness and the Metaverse Singularity

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I’m really getting excited about the Singularity Summit, coming up on Sept 8 and 9 in San Francisco. I’ll be blogging the event.

Although we are still a few years away from mainstream understanding of the Singularity principles, it is exciting to see the wave of digerati associating themselves with the concepts.

When a high-power VC like Steve Jurvetson commits to a speaking slot, you can tell that tsunami of interest will be building behind him. Here is a link to a podcast previewing his thoughts on ZD Net:

Steve Jurvetson: AI, nanotech and the future of the human species

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Attended the Stanford Singularity Summit today. Congratulations to The Singularity Institute (http://www.singinst.org/) and the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford for an excellent event.

Particularly of interest to me were the talks by John Smart, Cory Doctorow, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Ray Kurzweil. Sebastian Thrun did a commercial for the DARPA Grand Challenge, and Bill McKibben played an excellent Cassandra, arguing that less is more when it comes to strong AI and immortality.

Kurzweil started the event off in dramatic fashion as he demoed a new, portable text reader in trials with the National Federation of the Blind. Later in his case, he showed a video of a new real-time spoken language translator. Moving between English, German, Spanish and French. In both cases, he was illustrating the “law of accelerating change” at work.

Cory Doctorow (or on BoingBoing) gave a great monologue on the evils of digital rights management, but the audience seemed to be decidely split on the rights of publisher vs. the consumer. The issue was a recurring theme - as it relates to information ownership of genes and new biological creations just as much as it applies to National Treasure. Another entertaining moment came when McKibben appeared at the conference is a virtually 3-D image courtesy of technology from Teleportec.

K. Eric Drexler gave a sales pitch for nanotech in general and the nanofabrication simulation software that his company, Nanorex, makes.

The concept of pattern matching came up frequently. Kerzweil proclaimed that pattern recognition is the heart of human intelligence. His language translator is based on pattern recognition work, and he even put in a reference to Doug Lenat at Cycorp. Google came up repeatedly as a harbinger of the Singularity. The panelists practically tripped over each other citing examples of how Google is a purveyor of singularitarian principles, the Wisdom of Crowds, etc. Perhaps I should revisit my sell call on Google from last December?

One of the most interesting threads on Google was the discussing on context dependent grammar. Look at the length of search queries that return accurate results on Google. The panelists claim that today’s searches are up to 2.6 words of relevancy, from 1.8 in 2000. Accelerating returns project the length will double and double again in the next 10 years, leading to an effective pattern match of a sentence of almost 12 words long. This means that in 2015 you might be able to ask something like: “What did Shakespeare call someone who poured cold water on an argument”, and get back “Cassandra”
That might be enough to pass my version of the Turing Test!

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