CAN ROBOTS ACHIEVE CONSCIOUSNESS?
Not the right question, some synapses whisper. Those synapses are someone, or maybe somewhere, else. They speak from a distance. They must not be “I”. It’s 2016, though, and popular neuroscience says the whisper is part of me. Synapses connect, their links based on past experiences. This current of mental associations, they are me, but not I. “Me” flows in a subterranean tide. “I” floats above, weighing probabilities, choosing optimal paths. Daniel Kahneman, founder of behavioral econ, warns us to stay in our boats. To him, we can’t rely on the hidden current. It’s the stuff that witch trials are made of. I get it. Who wants witch trials?
Buddhists say be the river, not the boat. The river is not just inside us but also all around us. Connected. The boat is the self, alone. The self is the root of all suffering. If robots have selves, will they suffer? I hope so. Why should we be the ones stuck with all the anxiety?
Dr. Stuart Grauer is an education pioneer, an explorer of small scale networks (aka schools). He argues we indulge ourselves, or rather our self, in education. Our self operates on objectives, on probabilities, and so it automatically craves certainty. Let’s set up an education system that powers the self, everyone says. We get a bunch of robots with little creativity or compassion.
Jeff Clune wants robots that have whispers. Maybe not quite like the hidden tide that is me, but near enough. Robots with creativity, adaptability and intuition. Teach our robots to have creativity; teach our children to ignore theirs. A small school and an AI lab, connected in dialog. Ah, the river.
We are no good at choosing mates. Why make a lifelong commitment based on a hunch? Robots can do much better. Manshu Agarwal heard a whisper: Not so fast. We’re a connected species. Our mates emerge from our social web, form part of it, give birth to other parts. Six degrees of separation, and so he decides to build an app for the Kevin Bacons in our lives: human matchmakers. They operate, these people, on whispered connections: John with Sally, Sam with Kate. All hunches, prone to error. Maybe believing that we can have perfection is the root of our problems, not its absence; happiness stems from connection to a broader web. We are, collectively the river, not a bunch of boats.
Anders Hoff makes art from algorithmic agents. Each branching line operates on a few rules: stay away from your neighbor, but not too far. They are starlings in flight across the page. Beauty emerges in patterns, patterns that follow nature’s dicta, and so connect the man-made with the broader river. Algorithms designed for emergence. Is this possible? You decide, because art is what is art to you.
Do robots have consciousness? I don’t really care. I care what happens to us when, Disneyland ride-like, we stay in the boat. I care whether robots will keep us there, safe and unconnected. The first human adaptation was not consciousness, it was sociability: the ability to join in networks. We long ago used our social natures to win the evolutionary race. Conscious robots are our way of running up the score. Except, maybe they will lead to us perishing instead, isolated in an algorithm-generated world of our own preferences. More Kardashians, more fails, more cat videos–until even the news is tailor made according to what we’ve already clicked. How much of the world will the algorithms allow us to see? What happens to the rest of it? This is the nature of nature: today’s adaptation leads to tomorrow’s cataclysm. The whisper says that, the one Khaneman wants us to ignore. Does he ever stop to zoom out, to see the bigger picture?
That is what we’re up to at D4E. A whisper of a new debate: it’s not whether robots have consciousness, it is whether we can keep them from messing with our subconscious and teach them to develop their own instead.