The AI Singularity

The AI Singularity has been defined as a future point in history when machine intelligence will surpass human. A technological transition event of this magnitude has been compared to a cosmological "black hole" with an "event horizon" beyond which it is impossible to know anything.

The idea of the AI fails philosophically because it assumes the following clause: “I am not so smart to know what smarter is”. This clause is implicit in “recognizing” a hyper-intelligence. The acid test of passing through the AI “event horizon” does not suffice in you or I being flabbergasted by the amazing smartness of machines, or human-machine fusion. The acid test is not to be able to comprehend anything! Smartness after the AI Singularity event horizon is defined as so huge that no ordinary human mind can realize that is there. It is similar to asking a chimp to realize how smarter a human is. The chip cannot possibly know that. The question (for the chimp) is meaningless. And equally meaningless would be the question for the human of the future crossing the event horizon of the AI Singularity. For all we know, there might exist today - or have existed for centuries, or millennia – higher intelligences that ours. Perhaps, we live in a “Matrix” world created by smarter than us intelligences. Perhaps we crossed the AI Singularity event horizon many centuries ago, or last year. But we can never possibly know that.

The AI Singularity reduces thus to the “brain-in-a-vat” argument. However, a brain-in-a-vat cannot possibly know that is a brain-in-a-vat because to state that you are a brain-in-a-vat is a self-refuting statement. Therefore, to claim such a thing is nonsense.

The AI Singularity also fails scientifically. In order to have any sensible discussion on intelligence - human, machine or otherwise - we need a theory of intelligence; which we do not currently have. Major questions are looming, the most significant of which is the relationship between a mind and a brain. Until such scientific problems have been clearly defined, researched and reduced to some testable causal explanatory model, we cannot even begin to imagine “machine intelligence”. We can of course (and we do) design and develop machines that perform complex tasks in uncertain environments. But it would be a leap of extreme faith to even compare these machines with “minds”.

The AI Singularity fails sociologically too. It is a version of transhumanism, which is based on a feeble and debatable model of human progress. It ignores an enormous corpus of ideas and data relating to the human psychological and cultural development. It assumes a value system of ever better, faster, stronger, longer, i.e. a series of superlatives which reflect a social system of intense competition. However, not all social systems are ones of competition. Indeed, the most successful ones are of collaboration. In the social context of collaborative reciprocity, superlatives act contrary to the common good. To imagine a society willing to invest resources into building the intelligence of its individual members would be to imagine a society bent on self-annihilation. To put it in simple terms: if I am the smartest person in the world, if I can solve any problem that comes my way, if I can be happy by myself - why should I need you?

The Precautionary Principle

Stavros Dimas, the European Union’s Environment Commissioner, ignoring the opinion of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), recently [nb. 2008] indicated that the Commission will ban two genetically engineered varieties of corn, because of the potential harm it may cause on certain beneficial insects. At present, only one transgenic crop can be cultivated in Europe: Monsanto’s MON810 insect-resistant maize, which now comprises nearly 2% of maize grown in Europe.

In the on-going debate about Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) in Europeans’ plates the mantra is the so-called “precautionary principle”; the idea that regulation should prevent or limit actions that raise even conjectural risks, particularly when the scientific evidence is inconclusive. Add to this the widespread feeling in society that science is moving too far ahead becoming more and more incomprehensible – and should therefore be made to slow down, or even stop – and you get a neo-luddite backlash to anything biotechnology has to offer.

But is this the way to go? If the world rejects GMOs, what other options do we have in order to feed ourselves? Traditional farming, through the intensive use of pesticides and fertilizers, is known to be linked to serious health hazards such as cancer, and is using great amounts of fossil fuels which contribute to climate change. Organic farming is often quoted as a valid alternative, but the figures simply do not add up. We are six billion people on this planet, two billion of whom live on the edge of starvation. Put in this wider context organic farming, with all its splendid benefits, begins to look more like a luxury to be afforded by rich westerners only.

GMOs have gotten a bad name. They are considered an environmental risk. Releasing mutated organisms in nature, say their opponents, could spread havoc to natural evolution and cause untold damage to ecosystems. What one usually does not hear is that most traditional plant-breeding techniques are simply imprecise forms of genetic engineering. Cross-fertilization and cross-breeding are the most obvious ones but there is also mutagen breeding, whereby plants are bombarded by X-rays, gamma rays, fast neutrons and a variety of toxic elements in an attempt to induce favorable chromosomal changes and genetic mutations. The difference is that genetic engineering is a more targeted and precise method, which has the potential to avoid large scale environmental contamination.

The second big fear is impact on health. I have often been told that “mutant organisms cause cancer, everyone knows that!” The truth may in fact be the very opposite. Traditional farming causes cancer, and there have been numerous epidemiological studies that confirm this. GMO farming may even prevent cancer, as in the case of the transgenic corn that Dimas wants banned. The particular corn product releases a protein that is toxic to insects but harmless to mammals (such as humans). By preventing the corn to be invaded by insects it protects the product from a very dangerous fungal toxin called Fumonisin, which is a known carcinogen and a cause of neural tube defects in newborns. The transgenic corn has been shown to contain 900 percent fewer fungal toxins than the non-GMO corn variety grown by traditional and organic farmers.

Nevertheless, Europe says no. Maybe because we Europeans suspect that big American-based multinational crop companies, such as Monsanto and Syngenta, want to monopolize the agro-food business, to the detriment of our environment and health, no matter what scientists say. After all, scientists could be on their payroll too. I can agree that one should not trust corporations with the public good, and that government regulations as well as alert and well-informed citizens are society’s best defenses. However, the current market of big monopolies selling traditional - as well as transgenic - crops to farmers may be about to change, and change rapidly too.

Synthetic biology is nowadays taught at undergraduate level, and any biology student can create her own artificial organism on a Petri dish. Techno-optimists, such as physics professor Freeman Dyson, are heralding a new era where “domesticated biotechnology, once it gets to the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures, rather than the monoculture crops that big corporations prefer.” Just imagine that future: you can grow whatever you like in your back yard, creating your own varieties of plants and animals, free from the monopolizing corporations. On the other end of the spectrum, technophobes see this as a nightmare scenario where bioterrorism runs rampant and Earth’s ecology is disrupted beyond control. GMOs is the tip of a great big iceberg that floats to our shores, whether we want it, ban it, or not.

The risk of being wrong

However, let me focus on the infamous precautionary principle. The first, and most obvious perhaps, problem with the precautionary principle is that it takes no account of the cost of non-action. For example, let us say that I have a serious heart problem and my doctor thinks I should be given an artificial heart. Unfortunately, no-one can absolutely guarantee that the artificial heart will not fail, thus resulting in my death. By applying the precautionary principle I should refuse the treatment. However, if I do not get the treatment my death is certain. The principle, in this case, should be overridden. And yet, when one moves away from managing the risk of a certain technology on her own life or well-being, and arrives at decisions by governments or by the European Union, the Precautionary Principle of risk management has increasing appeal to politicians and policy-makers. It is a completely different thing for me to decide what to do with my health than deciding what should be done with everyone else’s health.

In the latter case the appeal of the Precautionary Principle is irresistible to politicians, and policy-makers, as well as various advocates of the public good. They are certain to win favors with society because citizens will tend to support a precautionary policy, because human instinct prevails.

Reality vs. experiments:	Reality, idealistically
Experimental results	- (not harmful)	+ (harmful)
- (not harmful)	True	False negative
+ (harmful)	False positive	True

Evolution has programmed us to avoid false negatives at all costs (an error made when we fail to connect A to B, when A is truly connected to B – for example, I did not flee upon hearing a noise, when in fact the noise was a lion coming to get me!). In the case of GMOs a false negative is when the experiment shows that something is harmless when in fact it is harmful (see table above). By the same token evolution has made us more relaxed with respect to false positives (an error made when A is falsely connected to B, for example I hear something which may be a lion about to attack me, and I flee – but there was no lion). In the case of GMOs a false positive is when the experiment shows that something is harmful when in fact it is harmless (see table above). Our survival has depended over eons upon evaluating false negatives as being more risky than false positives. In other words, since we are not absolutely certain that GMOs are safe, let us ban them.

The Gap

In the case of technology, however, the possibility of false negatives will always be with us. Owing to the intrinsic nature of statistical errors, as well as the philosophical impossibility of knowing for certain the link between cause and effect, there can be no absolute knowledge of experimental consequences. Science is a systematic, logical and experimental method of probing into an “ideal” realm that we hypothesize it exists and is called “reality”. We will never know if “reality” really exists. Therefore, the sum total of all our experiments does not exclude the possibility of a false negative.

In the case of science a false negative is a blessing, as it may falsify a given theory. This is another reason for the usual lack of understanding between science and society. Scientists love false negatives, but society does not. Scientists are usually more ready to take risks with new technologies than citizens.

If we do not wish to return to pre-industrial times, there can be no other way forward than through technology. One may argue that this is a recipe for humankind’s eventual doom. I would, however, like to remind of Malthus and his predictions about an unsustainable world which was not supposed to feed the billions of people. Only technology can beat demographics, as the “green revolution” of intensive farming proved. In a projected world of 9 billion people, everyone should be given an equal chance of economic and social development. We cannot hope to achieve this by banning or over-regulating technological progress. The only thing we can do is develop better channels of communication between science and society, to bridge the gap mentioned above, and prepare society for the changes ahead.

When I see a tree what do I, really, see?

The question of what comprises an external reality is ancient. The frustrated physicist cries “shut up and measure”; and he is right for all that we can know is only that which we can measure. The rest, we cannot know. The rest is the unknowable. We can only describe the knowable, and so we do through science, and sometimes through art. Optimists amongst us contend that we could also describe the relationship between the knowable and the unknowable. I think that we can do so only as a conjecture. Let’s call it “the objective world conjecture”. Our favorite tool here is logical abstractions; that is; thinking about non-objects. In the abstract, therefore, we can assume that there exists U, the unknown. And the K – the known – is, somehow (via the mysterious chance mechanisms of evolution perhaps), configured within U. This is a conjecture that, alas, we can never prove. The objective world will be forever unknowable. The reason for this should be obvious by the definition we give to U; K is always a subset of U; K+K1 ,where K1 is a new discovery, is also a subset of U and so on, for any Ki, ad infinitum.
From this U-neverland arise the ghosts of our measurements, the contents of our consciousness, and the K-objects of our senses, emotions and feelings. When I look at a tree I see the only thing that can be seen. I call it a “tree” and, if I utter the word in any language, or draw a “tree”, the overwhelming majority of my species will intuitively imagine a “tree”, different in its details but similar in its essence. Our “essential tree” is an object of K made up of things we decide to call “cells” and “atoms” and so on.
Interestingly, as we expand through scientific observation the limits of K into the vast (conjecturally) expanse of U, we arrive at logical paradoxes. The objective world conjecture is paradoxical in itself, since we assume an increasing infinite progression of Knowledge (ΣΚi) which forever remains a subset of U.
The more abstract our reasoning the more paradoxical it becomes. And we thus arrive at the ultimate walls of K. When classical “objects” fade into quantum ghosts, our “K-trees” become U-trees, things of the unknowable; and we are fenced inside the realm of subjectivity, the only reality knowable.

Social Echo and Rational Economics

In the construction of economic theories, from Plato and Aristotle to Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes and beyond, assumptions about human nature have taken their toll to the detriment of effective predictability of markets and systems. The need to predict, plan and reason about systemic behaviour, too strong to admit postponement, overrun the obvious lack of knowledge about the human animal. Economics thus framed new ideologies, such as Marxism or capitalism, which in turn guided scientific exploration. An example of ideological framing causing a sociological paradox is eugenics. Since Galton and Darwin, eugenics has been the logical projection of evolutionary theory applied to humans. But although the idea was accepted in the beginning by liberals and leftists, it became an abomination following its corruption by the Nazis. Since the end of WWII whenever it resurfaces it is being slammed down by an almost hysterical reaction from academia and the Press (James Watson being a recent victim of this). And yet the idea persists, albeit dressed in other hides; in socialist-inspired models of egalitarianism, in laws that regulate abortions to the detriment of the middle classes, in genetics research (cloning in particular), and in educational systems. Eugenics makes one huge assumption: that by selecting for higher intelligence humanity will become, in a few generations, less violent, more altruistic and wiser. And yet, the correlation between higher intelligence and the desired attributes of peace, social cohesion and wisdom is a weak one. It smacks of wishful thinking and cultural bias. Human beings are highly intelligent animals, not angels, not creatures that stand apart from the rest. We are apes, and when push comes to shove we act like ones too – regardless of our intelligence, or good manners. War is the most obvious testament to our innate cruelty. If anything, our ingenuity seems to have been invested more in engineering war machines that in anything else.
Recent discoveries in neuroscience promise to shed much-needed light in what constitutes a human being. Deciphering the unconscious circuitry would be a task of monumental proportions dwarfing the Human Genome Project by several degrees of magnitude. Alas, the result - if successful - will be of limited use. As in the case of genes, interactions in the whole seem to play a role more important than the interacting parts alone. The infusion of neuroscience into sociology and economics is a welcome development. Nevertheless, owing to the infancy of neuroscience it should be expected that social framing will once again take the upper hand, leading to new “realistic” economic theories that reason the animal inside us. Once more, experts will reason about social systems forgetting that human activity is diffused and dominated by unconscious, autonomic, neuropsychological systems that enable people to function effectively without always calling upon the brain's scarcest resource– attentional and reasoning circuitry. To reason about non-reason is a paradox that we cannot escape. We can only understand an echo of what the human society is truly all about. The dilemma will always be how much we want to believe in it.

Whence narrative?

Recently, I happened to be coordinating a public discussion on literature at the National Research Foundation. Being the organizer of the discussion, my objective was to explore, with the aid of an English Literature professor and a writer/critic, fictional narratives as inroads to humanness. Indeed, what could have been more profound than that! Still, my “ulterior” motive was to compare literary narratives to scientific ones.
Psychologists use personal narrative routinely, as a way to explore their patients’ personalities, but I was more interested to see if there was some connection to non-personal narratives, such as the Big Bang Theory, or the Evolutionary Theory. Then the question came from a member of the audience: why does the brain produce narratives? In a way, the question relates – to a higher level – to the structure of memory. And yet, memory has a biological foundation. What could that foundation be?
I am no expert, but the only way that I could have answered the question (“whence narrative?”) would be to point out our “sense of time”. Why do we have a perception of time? Obviously there have been evolutionary reasons for it. The interchange of light and darkness and the resulting circadian rhythm commission us with the sense of “before”, as distinct from “now” and “after”. And yet: of all the things that modern physics tell us about the Universe, of all the quantum paradoxes of electrons being at many places at the same time, the most unimaginable of all is that time does not flow but is still. That time is an “illusion”. This seems not only counter-intuitive (so much of modern physics is) but unimaginable. A universe where time is like length, or width, a dimension upon which points stretch and exist regardless of us being there, of time being still in other words, is a universe without narrative. Therefore, a universe without before, now and after. Our minds are evolved to produce narratives and therefore the only way we can comprehend anything succinctly and effectively is by incorporating it somehow into a narrative. The more explicit the narrative the more comprehendible the object, and vice-versa. Abstraction, the loss of narrative, equates with artistic amnesia, it makes time freeze to a still, space reduced to a point and communication to a silent pause.

Doomsday Narratives

When discussing the formation of ideas for the Society of the Future, a most important element of the synthesis is prophecy. Prophecy is an important contributor to the development of the western thought. Although elements of ritualistic foretelling can be found across many cultures, it is in the West that foretelling was historically institutionalized, whether one refers to the Oracle of Delphi, or the Prophets of the Bible. The underlying theme of prophecy is the juxtaposition of teleology with moral conditioning. In other words, do what you must do, for if you do otherwise you will be lost in the whirl of upcoming events. Therefore, prophecy frames the ethical debate of today by stressing the daunting onslaught of a frightful tomorrow. Redemption is offered only if one falls back.
The idea of prophecy has transformed into the idea of predictability, as the western world moved away from a mostly metaphysical explanatory model towards a materialistic one. Science and engineering succeeded in the social arena because they offered consistently predictable results. Indeed, it is in the core of scientific ideology that experimental results must be verified by their idependent repetition. This means that a prediction made by a theory - a mini-prophecy in disguise if you will - must be verified in various labs to hold any water.
Prophecy in the pre-scientific Christian world was dominated by the Book of Revelation, which in turn expressed pre-existing ideas of “telos”, a word meaning both “end” in the temporal sense, as well “end” in the purpose sense. As science takes over, the prophetic narrative transforms and gradually finds its way into science fiction. In turn, science fiction not only nourishes the imagination and aspirations of scientists-to-be (most scientists were sci-fi funs when they were children), but also fuels the media debate whenever ethical issues on science and technology are raised. The latter happens because contemporary media is primarily a narrative-transformation machine that recycles stories and threads of stories by adding sensationalism, in order to attract attention.
I think that there are three distinctive “doomsday stories” that haunt us today. The first I label “the post-apocalyptic primitivism”. It implies an ecological catastrophe. This could happen either as a result of a nuclear war, or change in the climate, or a run-away virus, or a hit by a meteorite, etc. The result is prophesized as a collapse of civilization and the regression of the human race (providing anyone survives) to a primitive state. Post-apocalyptic primitivism is the logical extension of the Book of revelation (or the Nordic myth of the twilight of the gods, if you prefer another context).
The second doomsday narrative for the future I will label the “AI Singularity”. This is the assumed point in the future when machine intelligence surpasses the human one. At this point the narrative is broken suddenly. Nothing can be further predicted. An impenetrable discontinuity appears. The “event horizon” of the AI Singularity implies the end of the power of prediction, the nullification of prophecy and, to my mind, suggests the absolute negation of science.
The third doomsday narrative may be referred to as the “post-human scenario”. This implies a more controlled process for history, where technology fuses with humans and transforms the world and society. Humans become Cyborgs, either as independent units incorporating a variety of mechano-electronic and biochemical paraphernalia, or as interdependent units hooked up in a grid, a kin of super-organism that fuels progress. This third narrative is the most optimistic of the three, mainly because it is inspired by utopian (or dystopian, depending upon your emotional inclination) ideas.
But I must return to these narratives later and analyze each in turn.

Climate, Apocalypse

Our planet has been warming up since the Industrial Revolution mainly due to the accumulation of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere, gases that result from the burning of fossil fuels that spur and sustain our economic development. This is a scientific fact that no one doubts. Paleoclimatologists place the current trend in a wider context by comparing past periods of Earth’s history where warming up had occurred due to natural processes. We also know of the Milankovitch 100,000-year cycles that determine the phasing of ice ages with interglacials. According to those cycles we ought to be entering into an ice age. Temperatures ought to be dropping and ice on the polar caps ought to be thickening. Ironically, our pumping of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere seems to compensate for all that.
Science can describe with relative accuracy the past and the processes by which we got where we are today. Logic, and some rather crude computer models that run on computers, predict that if we continue with business-as-usual many nasty things will happen to our environment. Indeed many of those things are happening already. Earth is sick; there can be no question about it. And, very probably - why almost certainly -it has been made sick because of human industrial activity.
Two questions follow:
Question 1: Can we do something about it?
Question 2: Providing we can what should we do?

The Kyoto Protocol, as well as the recent international discussion at Bali for the successor agreement, emphatically answer “Yes” to the first question and “Curb carbon emissions” to the second. There seems to be worldwide consensus on those answers and, with the exception of the US government and a handful of die-hard skeptics, the rest of the world seems willing to bite the bullet and proceed with a more responsible, equitable and collective stewardship of the planet, at a nominal cost. Sounds all right, doesn’t it?
Well it does and perhaps it is. However, I will examine the nature of the two questions posed in order to argue that the climate change debate is not really about climate science, or economics. Inexactness is in the method and nature of both, and one could argue ad nauseum about the merits of different approaches, analyses and the like. Evidently, the issue is not an academic one, although scientists are being involved in an unprecedented way and are being awarded not the Nobel Prize for Physics or Economics but the Nobel Prize for Peace, a distinction usually reserved for politicians or activists.
Additionally, I would argue that the debate is not even a political one. Of course, many heads of state would envy Al Gore and would like a piece of his action and fame. Climate change seems to galvanize electorates across the globe, even when no one really bothers to explain the details to them. But let us leave the cunning politicos aside, for their perfidiousness is well-documented. Even honest, well-wishing politicians fall back on inexact science in order to validate their decisions and by doing so fall into the abyss of folly. Their decisions usually evoke the insurance argument: i.e. curb emissions at a premium now in order to avoid dire consequences in the future. But the insurance argument is a weak one. Its weakness lies firstly in selecting and prioritizing future risks, and secondly in defining the premium. Climate change is not the only thing threatening future generations. If the world wants to buy insurance on its future safety then funds need to be established in order to deal with rogue asteroids, supervolcanic eruptions, supernova explosions in the vicinity of our solar system, pandemics, plume explosions, and – why not – invasion of Earth by an alien civilization. The list of possible threats can go almost forever. And how about that premium? How much does it cost? How can one be certain that forgoing A% of the world’s output is optimal and not A+B%, when the science of prediction is so inexact? If one is talking about the future of the planet shouldn’t one be generous with premiums? If the alternative is life on a scorched planet without wildlife, a barren rock in space, shouldn’t we consider eliminating greenhouse gases altogether as soon as possible? And if this sounds illogical, where is the logic in defining an optimal premium?

All in all, I will argue that the debate on climate change is principally and foremost an emotional one.

Both questions I asked above are scientifically unanswerable because they deal with certainties. The fact that many scientists have become evangelical in their predictions is unassailable evidence of emotionalism blurring their better judgment. Healthy skepticism has been replaced by much-applauded scientific fundamentalism, which is being rewarded the Nobel. There have been reports of “tears” during the Bali meeting. And the manner by which the meeting proceeded reminds one of an operetta. Why so much passion? The emotional charge that permeates all debates on climate needs to be analyzed by sociologists and psychologists. By being “alarmist” and “apocalyptic” cunning politicians join the chorus of scientists-turned-Bible-prophets in a replay of a very old story, namely the herding of the human flock under an ideological banner, this time the banner being “eco-friendly”. The threat is nature’s revenge on the sinful humankind. God has been replaced by mystical natural forces, by a cybernetic Gaia. Often, the high moral ground is being hijacked by atheists who re-discover faith dressed up as computer simulations of looming Apocalypse. The end is at hand ladies and gentlemen! Repent! Shut the factories down! Shun your riches! Be poor in body and mind! Love thy neighbor! And redemption will surely come!

There is obviously a positive side to all this that needs to be mentioned. Al Gore has been explicit about it too. I will rephrase it as the dawning of a new era in international politics where leaders adopt a common, environment-centered, agenda that, ultimately, can lead only to cooperation and peace. In a world that is about to fall apart there is no point fighting. Or isn’t there?
Well, you see, when the debate is so emotionally charged, when logic and the inexactness of scientific argument have been replaced by certainties, feelings can swing either way unpredictably. You could have Al Gore’s fantastic vision of world cooperation and mutual support but, alas, you could also have war and mutual annihilation. And this is precisely the danger that the world faces as we are being herded into taking decisions about the future, eluding ourselves that we are powerful enough to engineer climate by adopting an equitable sharing of greenhouse gas quotas.