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By Natasha Lomas, 19 November 2008 12:54

COMMENT

Will super intelligent machines ever have souls?
The soul is a synonym for consciousnessÂ… and if we were to consider where consciousness comes from we would have to consider it an emerging property. Brain science is instructive there as we look inside the brain, and we've now looked at it in exquisite detail, you don't see anything that can be identified as a soul - there's just a lot of neurons and they're complicated but there's no consciousness to be seen. Therefore it's an emerging property of a very complex system that can reflect on itself. And if you were to create a system that had similar properties, similar level of complexity it would therefore have the same emerging property and this would be more than an abstraction because these future entitiesÂ… will be convincing.

It also won't be clear - you won't be able to walk into a room and say, 'OK, humans on the left, machines on the right', because it's going to be all mixed up. You'll have biological humans but they'll have machine processes in their brain, there may be a lot more complexity in the machine intelligence in their brain than the biological portion of their brain. It's not going to be a clear distinction of where humans or biological intelligence stops and machine intelligence startsÂ… [So] we will attribute consciousness to entities even if they have no biology, even if they're fully machine entities: they will seem human, they will seem consciousness, we will attribute souls to them but that's not a scientific statement.

In seeking to create artificial intelligence why are we attempting to mimic the human brain when machine intelligence necessarily seems to be a very different type of intelligence?
There are two different approaches to AI and both of them are showing themselves to be successful - one is just to engineer intelligent solutions without consideration of how the brain does it, which is the way we created flying machines without necessarily emulating birds. And a lot of AI - in fact most of it in use today - was done that way. That's because we really couldn't see inside the brain until quite recently - that's another exponential progressionÂ…We now have brain scanners that can actually see inside a living brain at the level of individual synapses and interneural connections and can see the neurotransmitters andÂ… see new spines being created as we think our thoughts - so we can see not only our brain create our thoughts but our thoughts create our brain.

We are able now to actually turn this data into working simulations of brain regions - there's two dozen brain regions that have been modelled and simulatedÂ… and as we simulate these regions we are learning how the brain produces this intelligence and there's a lot to be learned there. The best example of human intelligence we have is the human brain and as we learn its methods we can add that to our tool kit. It doesn't mean we're going to just copy exactly how a human brain works - we're going to basically apply those principlesÂ… That's what engineering does well. As engineering learns scientific principles it can magnify and focus on those principles and dramatically increase their effects.

Is too much technology - and the sheer volume of accessible information - ruining our ability to concentrate?
Not at all. This old controversy goes back to kids using calculators, not learning arithmetic. But if you don't have to bother with the mechanics of arithmetic you need to think more about the abstractions of how to solve a problem. And the fact that we can access knowledge and automate some of the more mechanical aspects of thinking allows us to think more creatively and creative projects are getting done more rapidlyÂ… so we are increasing human creativity with these tools. There's also the phenomena of the wisdom of crowds which the internet is able to harness. The blogosphere for example - an individual blog may be unreliable but the whole blogosphere is able to uncover the truth about issues much more rapidlyÂ… so a crowd can be much wiser than any of the individuals - it's kinda the opposite end of the spectrum from the lynchmob where you have the lowest common denominator of intelligence. But decentralisation tends to harness the wisdom of crowds rather than the wisdom of lynchmobs.

Are there any jobs computers/robots/AI could not eventually do better than humans?
Ultimately artificial intelligence is going to be able to do everything humans doÂ… [It] will operate at the best human levels and do so tirelessly butÂ… there's in fact a larger number of jobs today than there was 100 years ago and they pay eight times as much in constant currency as a century ago and they're more complex and actually more satisfying - and we've also invested a lot more in education as a resultÂ… So these trends are going to continue, work is going to become more and more intellectual. I'd say that already half the population contributes to creating information or intellectual content of one kind or another - none of these jobs existed 50 years ago.

What downsides are there to advanced technologies?
Technology is a double-edged sword, and the internet will spread hate and allow destructive groups to organiseÂ… but I think the destructive side of the internet is fairly subtle. An issue I'm more concerned aboutÂ… is the abuse of biotechnology. I think it's going to be very powerful in terms of enabling us to overcome disease and ageing and extend human longevity and health but it could also be used by a bioterrorist today to reprogram a biological virus to be more deadly or more communicative or more stealthy and so some people have called for a relinquishing of [biotech and other advanced technologies like nanotechnology and AI] because they are too dangerous.

In my view relinquishing these technologies is a bad idea for three reasons: one it would deprive us of these proponed benefits and there's still a lot of suffering in the world that we need to overcomeÂ… Secondly it would require totalitarian government to implement a banÂ… And thirdly it wouldn't work and I think that's really the key pointÂ… we'd just drive these technologies underground where they would be even more dangerous, more out of controlÂ… So my view is the correct response is twofold: one, ethical standards to prevent accidental problems by responsible practitionersÂ… and secondly developing a rapid response system that can deal with people who don't follow the guidelines, who are trying to be destructive like terrorists. The goods news is we now have the tools to do that. We can now sequence a biological virus in one day.