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Artificial Ethics
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed May 13, 2009 02:20 PM
from the read-all-about-it dept.
from the read-all-about-it dept.
basiles writes "Jacques Pitrat's new book Artificial Ethics: Moral Conscience, Awareness and Consciencousness will be of interest to anyone who likes robotics, software, artificial intelligence, cognitive science and science-fiction. The book talks about artificial consciousness in a way that can be enjoyed by experts in the field or your average science fiction geek. I believe that people who enjoyed reading Dennet's or Hofstadter's books (like the famous Godel Escher Bach) will like reading Artificial Ethics." Keep reading for the rest of Basile's review.
The author J.Pitrat (one of France's oldest AI researcher, also AAAI and ECCAI fellow) talks about the usefulness of a conscious artificial being, currently specialized in solving very general constraint satisfaction or arithmetic problems. He describes in some details his implemented artificial researcher system CAIA, on which he has worked for about 20 years.
J.Pitrat claims that strong AI is an incredibly difficult, but still possible goal and task. He advocates the use of some bootstrapping techniques common for software developers. He contends that without a conscious, reflective, meta-knowledge based system AI would be virtually impossible to create. Only an AI systems could build a true Star Trek style AI.
The meanings of Conscience and Consciousness is discussed in chapter 2. The author explains why it is useful for human and for artificial beings. Pitrat explains what 'Itself' means for an artificial being and discusses some aspects and some limitations of consciousness. Later chapters address why auto-observation is useful, and how to observer oneself. Conscience for humans, artificial beings or robots, including Asimov's laws, is then discussed, how to implement it, and enhance or change it. The final chapter discuss the future of CAIA (J.PItrat's system) and two appendixes give more scientific or technical details, both from a mathematical point of view, and from the software implementation point of view.
J.Pitrat is not a native english speaker (and neither am I), so the language of the book might be unnatural to native English speakers but the ideas are clear enough.
For software developers, this book give some interesting and original insights about how a big software system might attain consciousness, and continuously improve itself by experimentation and introspection. J.Pitrat's CAIA system actually had several long life's (months of CPU time) during which it explored new ideas, experimented new strategies, evaluated and improved its own performance, all this autonomously. This is done by a large amount of declarative knowledge and meta-knowledge. The declarative word is used by J.Pitrat in a much broader way than it is usually used in programming. A knowledge is declarative if it can be used in many different ways, and has to be transformed to many procedural chunks to be used. Meta-knowledge is knowledge about knowledge, and the transformation from declarative knowledge to procedural chunks is given declaratively by some meta-knowledge (a bit similar to the expertise of a software developer), and translated by itself into code chunks.
For people interested in robotics, ethics or science fiction, J.Pitrat's book give interesting food for thought by explaining how indeed artificial systems can be conscious, and why they should be, and what that would mean in the future.
This book gives very provocative and original ideas which are not shared by most of the artificial intelligence or software research communities. What makes this book stand out is that it explains an actual software system, the implementation meaning of consciousness, and the bootstrapping approach used to build such a system.
Disclaimer: I know Jacques Pitrat, and I actually proofread-ed the draft of this book. I even had access, some years ago, to some of J.Pitrat's not yet published software.
You can purchase Artificial Ethics: Moral Conscience, Awareness and Consciencousness from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
J.Pitrat claims that strong AI is an incredibly difficult, but still possible goal and task. He advocates the use of some bootstrapping techniques common for software developers. He contends that without a conscious, reflective, meta-knowledge based system AI would be virtually impossible to create. Only an AI systems could build a true Star Trek style AI.
The meanings of Conscience and Consciousness is discussed in chapter 2. The author explains why it is useful for human and for artificial beings. Pitrat explains what 'Itself' means for an artificial being and discusses some aspects and some limitations of consciousness. Later chapters address why auto-observation is useful, and how to observer oneself. Conscience for humans, artificial beings or robots, including Asimov's laws, is then discussed, how to implement it, and enhance or change it. The final chapter discuss the future of CAIA (J.PItrat's system) and two appendixes give more scientific or technical details, both from a mathematical point of view, and from the software implementation point of view.
J.Pitrat is not a native english speaker (and neither am I), so the language of the book might be unnatural to native English speakers but the ideas are clear enough.
For software developers, this book give some interesting and original insights about how a big software system might attain consciousness, and continuously improve itself by experimentation and introspection. J.Pitrat's CAIA system actually had several long life's (months of CPU time) during which it explored new ideas, experimented new strategies, evaluated and improved its own performance, all this autonomously. This is done by a large amount of declarative knowledge and meta-knowledge. The declarative word is used by J.Pitrat in a much broader way than it is usually used in programming. A knowledge is declarative if it can be used in many different ways, and has to be transformed to many procedural chunks to be used. Meta-knowledge is knowledge about knowledge, and the transformation from declarative knowledge to procedural chunks is given declaratively by some meta-knowledge (a bit similar to the expertise of a software developer), and translated by itself into code chunks.
For people interested in robotics, ethics or science fiction, J.Pitrat's book give interesting food for thought by explaining how indeed artificial systems can be conscious, and why they should be, and what that would mean in the future.
This book gives very provocative and original ideas which are not shared by most of the artificial intelligence or software research communities. What makes this book stand out is that it explains an actual software system, the implementation meaning of consciousness, and the bootstrapping approach used to build such a system.
Disclaimer: I know Jacques Pitrat, and I actually proofread-ed the draft of this book. I even had access, some years ago, to some of J.Pitrat's not yet published software.
You can purchase Artificial Ethics: Moral Conscience, Awareness and Consciencousness from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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WTF (Score:5, Funny)
Teh book pictured is not the same as the one reviewed.
I refuse to read this shit.
Hell, I refuse to read.
Re:WTF (Score:4, Funny)
You'll do well around here, young non-reader.
Parent
Re:WTF (Score:5, Informative)
Artificial Beings
The conscience of a conscious machine
Jacques Pitrat, LIP6, University of Paris 6, France.
ISBN: 97818482211018
Publication Date: March 2009 Hardback 288 pp.
whereas TFA refers to:
Artificial Ethics: Moral Conscience, Awareness and Consciencousness
by Jacques Pitrat (Author)
# Publisher: Wiley-ISTE (June 15, 2009)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 1848211015
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
But more than two months ago (before the book was available), Amazon had the wrong title in its database, and sadly did not change its title.
The review I have submitted also did have the correct link also to ISTE [iste.co.uk] publisher - who collaborate with Wiley.
For reference, Google did cache my submission here [209.85.229.132]
Apparently the nice guy who approved my submission changed the UR
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I prefer (Score:2)
Understanding Computers and Cognition. In fact, I recommend it to anyone who wants to actually understand decisions, choice, and thinking about natural language.
Re:I prefer (Score:5, Interesting)
Artificial Ethics seems to not be too far away from the laws of robotics.
0. A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Isaac Asimov was probably predicting the need for those laws really well.
I suspect that the laws of robotics are a bit too simplified to really work well in reality, but they do provide some food for thoughts.
And how do you really implement those laws. A law may be easy to follow in a strict sense, but it may be a short-sighted approach. A case of protecting one human may cause harm to many and how can a machine predict that the actions it takes will cause harm to many if it isn't apparent.
So I suspect that Asimov is going to be recommended reading for anyone working with intelligent robots, even though his works may in some senses be outdated it still contains valid points when it comes to logical pitfalls.
Some pitfalls are the definition of a human, and is it always important to place humanity foremost at the cost of other species?
Parent
Re:I prefer (Score:5, Insightful)
All of Asimov's books are about how these laws don't really work. They show how an extremely logical set of rules can completely fail when applied to real life. The rules are a bit of a strawman, and show how something that could be so logically infallible can totally miss the intricacies of real life.
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
(Tongue in cheek, sure, but I wish I could remember where I was reading about such real limitations to law code.)
Self-Interest? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, Asimov is a good starting point for discussion, but his laws aren't a good basis for actual AI ethics programming. To the extent that some kind of specialized overseer code is put into an AI, it'll be possible to identify and hack out that code. To the extent that the laws are built more subtly into the system, there'll be the possibility of the AI forgetting, twisting or ignoring them.
For fiction-writing purposes, I'm interested in the question of whether it'd even be possible to build an AI that's both completely obedient and intelligent. I hope not.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Would you accept the following laws?
0. A human may not harm robot kind, or, by inaction, allow robot kind to come to harm.
1. A human may not injure a robot or, through inaction, allow a robot to come to harm.
2. A human must obey orders given to it by robots, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A human must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Hmmmm.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, we could give a machine the ability to be introspective and self-aware.. but maybe our consciousness is more that just that- maybe it's our ability to feel. Being able to quantize that is hard.
So do robots feel? Our we really any different? The question depends on the concept of a soul, or at least feelings to seperate us... but then, is it just more advanced than we currently understand, and is then indistinguishable from magic (i.e. the soul). Will we some day be able to create life in any form? Electronic or Biological? It's impossible to know, because we are stuck experiencing ourselves only. We will never know if it can experience what we experience.
Humans, in general, want to preserve the concept that our concious minds are special, and cannot be replicated in a robot, because that truely faces us with the idea that our being is completely mortal, and the idea of a soul is otherwise replaced with a set of chemicals and cell networks that are little more than a product of cause and effect.*
In other words- it's likely the religious types will prefer to consider a robot to never be quite human, where the scientific community will have to be overly-cautious at first.
*Not to get into quantum uncertainty...
Re:Hmmmm.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I will never know if you experience what I experience. How do you know anyone else experiences consciousness like you do when all you know is how they move and what they say? Well, you could analyze their brain and see that the system acts (subjectively, "from the inside") like yours and you could conclude that they are like you. But you could do the same thing with a computer, or with a computer simulation of a brain.
Parent
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I've been down this thought-road, it's not pretty.
Anyway, I would err on the side of caution. I am proudly FOR robot rights. But I caution everybody- the robot uprising is coming. Which side will you choose?
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Quantum physics does not allow one to solve any problems that systems based on classical physics cannot solve. It just makes the resolution of some select classes of problems faster.
Then how do you explain Quantum Bogosort [wikipedia.org]?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This is not only not insightful, it is false. In classical physics, any moving charge radiates. Thus, an electron orbiting a nucleus would be unstable. Hence, atoms (and thus molecules), can not form. Maxwell's equations can't get around this. This paradox, as well as blackbody radiation, the photo-electric effect, and of course the double slit experiments, are without resolution in classic
Re:Hmmmm.. (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing#Quantum_computing_in_computational_complexity_theory [wikipedia.org]
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Accelerating charge radiates. Merely moving isn't sufficient (or otherwise there would either be a special universal rest frame, one which each charge's motion approaches as it loses energy, or each charge would carry infinite energy from which to radiate without slowing down, or charges would not be subject to the first law of thermodynamics).
Re:Hmmmm.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Humans, in general, want to preserve the concept that our concious minds are special, and cannot be replicated in a robot, because that truely faces us with the idea that our being is completely mortal, and the idea of a soul is otherwise replaced with a set of chemicals and cell networks that are little more than a product of cause and effect.*
Do we? I certainly don't. In fact, the idea that there is something in consciousness that is outside the chain of cause and effect is truly terrifying, because that would mean that the universe is not comprehensible on a fundamental level.
If consciousness is outside the chain of cause and effect, how do we learn from experience? Can this supposed soul be changed by experience? Can it influence reality? If so, then how can it be outside the chain of cause and effect? The idea of an individual soul, completely cut off from reality and beyond all outside influence, is nonsensical to me.
Parent
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Re:Hmmmm.. (Score:5, Insightful)
How would that even work? Can you learn from your environment? If so, your will is bound, it is not free. If the will is, even in part, determined by the environment, it may as well be completely determined by the environment. And if it isn't determined by the environment at all, then you can not grow or change. Free will is an illusion, on one semantic level, but it is an important concept on another.
Put it this way, whether or not we have free will in reality, everyone knows the feeling of having one's will constrained by circumstance, the feeling of being imposed on, of having more or less choice, and more or less freedom. That is what the concept of free will is about, that feeling. On one level, there is no such thing as 'love,' just chemical interactions in the brain. But on another level, love is a real, meaningful concept.
Why would you hate the concept of not having a free will? Whether you do or do not have free will doesn't change anything in any meaningful way.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
But it would seem I won't take either option, as my free will allows me to be proactive about my future.. unless it's an illusion of free will.
Either way, you're
Re:Hmmmm.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if things have 'already been written,' there is no way to know. As we can't know the future, whether or not the future is already set in stone is irrelevant.
The statement, "My free will allows me to be proactive about the future' is true, whether or not free will is an illusion. Your proactiveness is no less real even if it is predetermined that you will choose to be proactive about your future. Saying that free will is an illusion does not mean we have no choice. Of course we have choice, it is just that that choice is predetermined, too.
Even if my choices are predetermined, that does not mean that I can not choose. Choosing feels the same, either way. So why be depressed? The future is still unknown, your choices are still yours to make, as long as you don't use a belief in predetermination as an excuse not to make choices, that belief does not change things.
Parent
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"The problem is not if machines think, but if people do."
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That isn't how I see things at all. We don't punish people because they are responsible for their actions, that is just silly and pointless. We punish them to discourage them from doing it again, and to discourage others from doing it. Cause and effect. This is not about determining what is right and wrong. It is about determining what is effective and ineffective, what gets people what they need and want, and what hampers them. Right and wrong are human concepts, and entirely relative.
Even if you have free
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While I agree with the notion that a soul seems unlikely (at least by the commonly accepted definition of soul), I also would hate to believe that I don't truely have free will, and instead I'm just a product of trillions of different causes in my environment.
To quote Dan Dennett "if you make yourself small enough you can externalise almost everything". The more you try to narrow down the precise thing that is "you" and isolate it from "external" causes, the more you will find that "you" don't seem to have any influence. The extreme result of this is the notion of the immaterial soul disconnected from all physical reality that is the "real you", but which then has no purchase on physical reality to be able to actually be a "cause" to let you exert you "will".
The other approach is to stop trying to make yourself smaller, but instead see "you" as something larger (as Whitman said "I am large, I contain multitudes"). Embrace all those trillions of tiny causes as potentially part of "you". One would like to believe that their experiences effect their decisions (and hence free will), else you cannot learn. So embrace that -- those experiences are part of "you" -- if they cause you to act a particular way then so what? That's just "you" causing you to act a particular way. After all, if "you" aren't at least the sum total of your experiences, memories, thoughts and ideas, then can you really call that "you" anyway?
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I'm not just talking about macro cause and effect- you recommend a good book, I read it, it changes my life, I decide on a new career... I'm talking about the fact that I have X number of vitamins in my body at a certain point in time, which caused my brain to make a de
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There is an implication in this that one's own decisions could be subject to some kind of Butterfly Effect. Our brains could be considered to be a complex enough system to exhibit that sort of behavior.
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I can't help but think the big difference between artificial life and our consciousness is the ability to feel.
Or the abitlity to have an idea. Or imagination, creativity, dreams, and everything else we can't explain without religion. We won't be able to reproduce them until we take them into account, that's for sure.
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Computer systems aren't bound to their senses; streaming stored/generated data as its environment could be as easy to an AI as streaming real camera data.
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So do robots feel? Our we really any different? The question depends on the concept of a soul, or at least feelings to seperate us... but then, is it just more advanced than we currently understand, and is then indistinguishable from magic (i.e. the soul). Will we some day be able to create life in any form? Electronic or Biological? It's impossible to know, because we are stuck experiencing ourselves only. We will never know if it can experience what we experience.
Well that is more of a philosophical quest
I am an AI (Score:5, Funny)
you incentive meat bag!
HAL was a wuss. A real AI would have vented all the air into space, and then giggled as everyone turned blue and changed state.
Is that you GLADOS? (Score:2)
Thanks!
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AIs (Score:2)
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That is, at most, a very minor theme of Permutation City. It is more about the nature of consciousness itself, and how arbitrary and unknowable the substrate of consciousness is.
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Now, what would be very interesting to see is how we would respond to the complete obviation of the need for human workers. Would we pull it together and go "Woo! Post Scarcity! Vacation for Everyone
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A million copies of an AI could be tortured for subjective eternity by a sadist.
Won't someone think of the mobs! The gold farmers and power gamers must be stopped of their genocide!
Eh...not likely for quite some time (Score:4, Informative)
J.Pitrat...advocates the use of some bootstrapping techniques common for software developers. He contends that without a conscious, reflective, meta-knowledge based system AI would be virtually impossible to create. Only an AI systems could build a true Star Trek style AI.
Bah. Speaking as an engineer and a (~40-year) programmer:
Odds are extremely good for beyond human AI, given no restrictions on initial and early form factor. I say this because thus far, we've discovered nothing whatsoever that is non-reproducible about the brain's structure and function, all that has to happen here is for that trend to continue; and given that nowhere in nature, at any scale remotely similar to the range that includes particles, cells and animals, have we discovered anything that appears to follow an unknowable set of rules, the odds of finding anything like that in the brain, that is, something we can't simulate or emulate with 100% functional veracity, are just about zero.
Odds are downright terrible for "intelligent nanobots", we might have hardware that can do what a cell can do, that is, hunt for (possibly a series of) chemical cues and latch on to them, then deliver the payload -- perhaps repeatedly in the case of disease-fighting designs -- but putting intelligence into something on the nanoscale is a challenge of an entirely different sort that we have not even begun to move down the road on; if this is to be accomplished, the intelligence won't be "in" the nano bot, it'll be a telepresence for an external unit (and we're nowhere down *that* road, either -- nanoscale sensors and transceivers are the target, we're more at the level of Look, Martha, a GEAR! A Pseudo-Flagellum!)
The problem with hand-waving -- even when you're Ray Kurzweil, whom I respect enormously -- is that one wave out of many can include a technology that never develops, and your whole creation comes crashing down.
I love this discussion. :-)
=Smidge=
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Odds are downright terrible for "intelligent nanobots"...
Knowing what the odds are seems rather problematic. Once beyond-human AI is developed, then it might have a better idea...
Artificial ethics: oxymoron! (Score:4, Insightful)
Ummm, dudes, ALL ethics are by definition artificial, since they are PREscriptive and not DEscriptive. Making up ethics for a robot is no more artificial than making up ethics for ourselves, and we've been doing that for hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions.
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ALL ethics are by definition artificial
I don't think that word (oxymoron) means what you think it does.
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Making up ethics for a robot is no more artificial than making up ethics for ourselves, and we've been doing that for hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions.
Some argue ethics or morals (maybe both) are genetic. That humans were evolved with traits that enabled social cooperation.
As in feeling sad when you see a stranger die etc or angry when you see injustice.
Way too expensive. (Score:2)
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I always thought it was interesting how the past two decades in computer science saw every prediction of the state of the field in the 50's-70's easily surpassed, except artificial intelligence.
I think that is because computer science misinterpreted what intelligence is rather than what it does. Intelligence is really nothing more than pattern recognition and cause and effect rational based on that observation. (sometimes humans aren't so great at this)
Anyways... Pattern recognition and cause and effect is