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April the 6th - Units 11 and 12 (it would be a good idea for you to complete the supplementary material tests for the aforementioned units)

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Do Robots Deserve Rights? What if Machines Become Conscious?

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A provocative new paper is proposing that complex intelligent behavior may emerge from a fundamentally simple physical process. The theory offers novel prescriptions for how to build an AI - but it also explains how a world-dominating superintelligence might come about. We spoke to the lead author to learn more.

In the paper, which now appears in Physical Review Letters, Harvard physicist and computer scientist Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross posits a Maximum Causal Entropy Production Principle - a conjecture that intelligent behavior in general spontaneously emerges from an agent's effort to ensure its freedom of action in the future. According to this theory, intelligent systems move towards those configurations which maximize their ability to respond and adapt to future changes.

Causal Entropic Forces

It's an idea that was partially inspired by Raphael Bousso's Causal Entropic Principle, which suggests that universes which produce a lot of entropy over the course of their lifetimes (i.e., a gradual decline into disorder) tend to have properties, such as the cosmological constant, that are more compatible with the existence of intelligent life as we know it.

"I found Bousso's results, among others, very suggestive since they hinted that perhaps there was some deeper, more fundamental, relationship between entropy production and intelligence," Wissner-Gross told io9.

The reason that entropy production over the lifetime of the universe seems to correlate with intelligence, he says, may be because intelligence actually emerges directly from a form of entropy production over shorter time spans.

"So the big picture - and the connection with the Anthropic Principle - is that the universe may actually be hinting to us as to how to build intelligences by telling us through the tunings of various cosmological parameters what the physical phenomenology of intelligence is," he says.

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To test this theory, Wissner-Gross, along with his MIT colleague Cameron Freer, created a software engine called Entropica. The software allowed them to simulate a variety of model universes and then apply an artificial pressure to those universes to maximize causal entropy production.

"We call this pressure a Causal Entropic Force - a drive for the system to make as many futures accessible as possible," he told us. "And what we found was, based on this simple physical process, that we were actually able to successfully reproduce standard intelligence tests and other cognitive behaviors, all without assigning any explicit goals."

For example, Entropica was able to pass multiple animal intelligence tests, play human games, and even earn money trading stocks. Entropica also spontaneously figured out how to display other complex behaviors like upright balancing, tools use, and social cooperation.

In an earlier version of the upright balancing experiment, which involved an agent on a pogo-stick, Entropica was powerful enough to figure out that, by pushing up and down again repeatedly in a specific manner, it could "break" the simulation. Wissner-Gross likened it to an advanced AI trying to break out of its confinement.

"In some mathematical sense, that could be seen as an early example of an AI trying to break out of a box in order to try to maximize its future freedom of action," he told us.

The Cognitive Niche

Needless to say, Wissner-Gross's idea is also connected to biological evolution and the emergence of intelligence. He points to the cognitive niche theory, which suggests that there is an ecological niche in any given dynamic biosphere for an organism that's able to think quickly and adapt. But this adaptation would have to happen on much faster time scales than normal evolution.

"There's a certain gap in adaptation space that evolution doesn't fill, where complex - but computable - environmental changes occur on a time scale too fast for natural evolution to adapt to," he says, "This so-called cognitive niche is a hole that only intelligent organisms can fill."

Darwinian evolution in such dynamic environments, he argues, when given enough time, should eventually produce organisms that are capable, through internal strategic modeling of their environment, of adapting on much faster time scales than their own generation times.

Consequently, Wissner-Gross's results can be seen as providing an explicit demonstration that the cognitive niche theory can inspire intelligent behavior based on pure thermodynamics.

A New Approach to Generating Artificial Superintelligence

As noted, Wissner-Gross's work has serious implications for AI. And in fact, he says it turns conventional notions of a world-dominating artificial intelligence on its head.

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"It has long been implicitly speculated that at some point in the future we will develop an ultrapowerful computer and that it will pass some critical threshold of intelligence, and then after passing that threshold it will suddenly turn megalomaniacal and try to take over the world," he said.

No doubt, this general assumption has been the premise for a lot of science fiction, ranging from Colossus: The Forbin Project and 2001: A Space Odyssey, through to the Terminator films and The Matrix.

"The conventional storyline," he says, "has been that we would first build a really intelligent machine, and then it would spontaneously decide to take over the world."

But one of the key implications of Wissner-Gross's paper is that this long-held assumption may be completely backwards - that the process of trying to take over the world may actually be a more fundamental precursor to intelligence, and not vice versa.

"We may have gotten the order of dependence all wrong," he argues. "Intelligence and superintelligence may actually emerge from the effort of trying to take control of the world - and specifically, all possible futures - rather than taking control of the world being a behavior that spontaneously emerges from having superhuman machine intelligence."

Instead, says Wissner-Gross, from the rather simple thermodynamic process of trying to seize control of as many potential future histories as possible, intelligent behavior may fall out immediately.

Seizing Future Histories

Indeed, the idea that intelligent behavior emerges as an effort to keep future options open is an intriguing one. I asked Wissner-Gross to elaborate on this point.

"Think of games like chess or Go," he said, "in which good players try to preserve as much freedom of action as possible."

The game of Go in particular, he says, is an excellent case study.

"When the best computer programs play Go, they rely on a principle in which the best move is the one which preserves the greatest fraction of possible wins," he says. "When computers are equipped with this simple strategy - along with some pruning for efficiency - they begin to approach the level of Go grandmasters." And they do this by sampling possible future paths.

A fan of Frank Herbert's Dune series, Wissner-Gross drew another analogy for me, but this time to the character of Paul Atreides who, after ingesting the spice melange and becoming the Kwisatz Haderach, could see all possible futures and hence choose from them, enabling him to become a galactic god.

Moreover, the series' theme of humanity learning the importance of not allowing itself to become beholden to a single controlling interest by keeping its futures as open as possible resonates deeply with Wissner-Gross' new theory.

Recursive Self-Improvement

Returning to the issue of superintelligent AI, I asked Wissner-Gross about the frightening prospect of recursive self-improvement - the notion that a self-scripting AI could iteratively and unilaterally decide to continually improve upon itself. He believes the prospect is possible, and that it would be consistent with his theory.

"The recursive self-improving of an AI can be seen as implicitly inducing a flow over the entire space of possible AI programs," he says. "In that context, if you look at that flow over AI program space, it is conceivable that causal entropy maximization might represent a fixed point and that a recursively self-improving AI will tend to self-modify so as to do a better and better job of maximizing its future possibilities."

Is Causal Entropy Maximization Friendly?

So how friendly would an artificial superintelligence that maximizes causal entropy be?

"Good question," he responded, "we don't yet have a universal answer to that." But he suggests that the financial industry may provide some clues.

"Quantitative finance is an interesting model for the friendliness question because, in a volume sense, it has already been turned over to (specialized) superhuman intelligences," he told io9. Wissner-Gross previously discussed issues surrounding financial AI in a talk he gave at the 2011 Singularity Summit.

Now that these advanced systems exist, they've been observed to compete with each other for scarce resources, and - especially at high frequencies - they appear to have become somewhat apathetic to human economies. They've decoupled themselves from the human economy because events that happen on slower human time scales - what might be called market "fundamentals" - have little to no relevance to their own success.

But Wissner-Gross cautioned that zero-sum competition between artificial agents is not inevitable, and that it depends on the details of the system.

"In the problem solving example, I show that cooperation can emerge as a means for the systems to maximize their causal entropy, so it doesn't always have to be competition," he says. "If more future possibilities are gained through cooperation rather than competition, then cooperation by itself should spontaneously emerge, speaking to the potential for friendliness."

Attempting to Contain AIs

We also discussed the so-called boxing problem - the fear that we won't be able to contain an AI once it gets smart enough. Wissner-Gross argues that the problem of boxing may actually turn out to be much more fundamental to AI than it has been previously assumed.

"Our causal entropy maximization theory predicts that AIs may be fundamentally antithetical to being boxed," he says. "If intelligence is a phenomenon that spontaneously emerges through causal entropy maximization, then it might mean that you could effectively reframe the entire definition of Artificial General Intelligence to be a physical effect resulting from a process that tries to avoid being boxed."

Which is quite frightening when you think about it.

Read the entire paper: A. D. Wissner-Gross, et al., " Causal Entropic Forces," Physical Review Letters 110, 168702 (2013).

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How Skynet Might Emerge From Simple Physics

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A provocative new paper is proposing that complex intelligent behavior may emerge from a fundamentally simple physical process. The theory offers novel prescriptions for how to build an AI - but it also explains how a world-dominating superintelligence might come about. We spoke to the lead author to learn more.

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Use this link to choose an ugly animal you want to save. Remember to include information on why this animal is important to mankind in your ad/campaign.

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Most, according to National Geographic, goes toward protecting a handful of our favorite animals -- apes, elephants, big cats, black rhinos and giant pandas hold the top five spots. Public opinion of these creatures is highly positive, but also highly biased.

Although there are mathematical models that could be used to determine return on investment in any particular species, at the end of the day "what we decide to save really is very arbitrary -- it's much more often done for emotional or psychological or national reasons," The Nature Conservatory's M. Sanjayan told National Geographic.

Here's a quick snapshot of some less popular endangered species that may not be around much longer if we don't start paying attention.

Golden Poison Dart Frog

Researchers trying to harness the dart frog's venom have so far been able to produce a synthetic version, which has shown signs of leading to a new painkiller. Unfortunately, the golden poison dart frog's population has been dwindling -- although they're plentiful within the small region they call home -- and is threatened further by deforestation.

Short-Tailed Albatross

Unfortunately, these breeding grounds are where most short-tailed albatross met their demise in the mid-1900s when Japanese hunters started harvesting the birds for their feathers, which women across Europe had deemed exceedingly fashionable. The hunters didn't realize the entire global population of the short-tailed albatross descended on the few islands they were prowling, though, and killed off most of the species. Luckily the birds have rebounded some, but recent run-ins with fishing lines are a threat to that progress. The Tristan Albatross and Amsterdam Albatross are also critically endangered.

The largest predator in South America -- a massive croc that used to number in the millions along the Orinoco river in Colombia and Venezuela -- is still in jeopardy due to the whims of fashionable ladies and gents in the middle of the last century. Demand for crocodile skin was so high in the 1930s and 40s that the animals were nearly wiped out. Today there are only about 1,500 left.

There does seem to be hope for the Orinoco crocodile, though, thanks to El Frío ranch in Venezuela. Ranchers started breeding the animals -- which can grow up to 24 feet according to one Spanish priest and researcher -- in the 1980s, and now around 400 live in El Frío's waters. If everyone accepted that crocodile skin is so totally over and gave these guys half a chance, they may be able to regain their footing.

Mussels of North America

Their death is a testament to the long-term changes humans have made to water systems, since mussels are known to be hardy creatures capable of withstanding harsh environmental conditions, so long as it's temporary.

Until the mid-1990s, everything we knew about the Ganges shark came from three specimens hauled out of the water in the late 19th century, and our knowledge could still be described as sketchy. The shark lives, as one might expect, in the Ganges-Hooghly River system of India. Due to pollution and active hunting, however, it's in critical danger of being wiped from this river's ecosystem.

At one time, the Addax -- a stockier antelope with corkscrew horns -- roamed widely throughout northern Africa, but in the last three generations has declined 80 percent in population. There are now fewer than 300 of these guys around.

Several factors have contributed to the addax's decline, foremost among them being hunting by humans who think shooting at a slow-moving target from a Jeep sounds like fair hunting. Or jerk tourists who just like to chase the poor, pudgy things until they keel over from exhaustion.

Snakes are probably only second to spiders on mankind's list of most abhorred creepy-crawlies. Few may be glad to hear of one rising from extinction, but that's where we find the St. Lucia racer snake, which was rediscovered in 1973 after being declared lost to the world in 1936. The snake is one of -- if not the -- rarest snake on earth, with only 18 specimens counted in 2011 on one tiny mongoose-free island.

The lack of mongoose is important to note, since it's that fierce, reptile-eating animal who's to blame for the racer snake's brush with extinction -- or rather, the humans who shipped them in from India to control St. Lucia's venomous snake population. The mongooses, of course, did not discriminate between those and the small, harmless racer snakes, wanting only an easy meal. Which they got.

This animal is basically a three-toed sloth in a smaller package, and very rare. It's so slow, algae is often found growing on its fur. Its arms and widely spaced thighs make moving along the ground a supremely awkward affair -- picture a furry baby doing an army crawl with super-long arms. But the sloth is perfectly suited to hanging upside down, and its fur actually grows the opposite direction of other mammals' so water can flow off its body more easily.

Unfortunately for the pygmy three-toed sloth, which lives solely within the mangroves of Panama, loss of habitat caused by locals, along with occasional hunting, has greatly reduced their numbers enough to earn a spot on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's "critically endangered" list. One 2011 survey found just 79 of the animals remaining.

There is nothing heartwarming about the condor. Ugly as sin, this thing subsists on the rotting flesh of deceased animals and communicates by grunting and hissing at other condors. The birds soar lazily on wind currents instead of effortfully flapping their nine-foot wingspans, and prefer stealing other scavengers' finds instead of using their own sense of smell to locate a carcass, which they sometimes eat with such reckless abandon that they can't pick themselves up to fly away for the next several hours.

But the species that was raised from extinction in the 1980s still only numbers below 300 individuals. Thousands of years ago, condors roamed all of North America, but that population started dwindling in the last century because of human-induced habitat loss, shooting and poisoning by lead bullets embedded in their food.
Although conservation programs remain in place today, the animal still holds a spot on the IUCN's list of"vulnerable" species.

What's this? Some kind of deer-horse-zebra-donkey hybrid? Nope. Meet the okapi, whose closest living relative is the giraffe. Really.

Actually, if only more people knew about this crazy beast we could probably save it, because the okapi is bizarrely awesome. This is a large and "secretive" mammal that creeps around the forests of the Congo in herds, trying not to be seen. And it's been successful -- researchers didn't even know it existed until the turn of the last century, and it's not like it's a rainforest gnat or a deep-sea microbe. But the okapi are understandably people-shy. People have been hunting these guys for their meat and skin and forcing them out of their habitats for decades, causing a 50 percent drop in population from 1995 to the present.

Lord Howe Island Stick-Insect

Alternatively known as the Land Lobster and Lord Howe Island Phasmid, this is one giant-ass bug. You won't be surprised to know it hails from Australia -- or rather a gorgeous island off the southeast coast of that continent -- because of course the harmless stick insects you found fascinating as a kid are monstrously terrifying in Australia. Thought to be extinct in 1920 after humans went and introduced rats to Lord Howe, they were rediscovered in 2001 on a rocky outcrop 14 miles from the main island.

Perhaps nothing can kill off the Lord Howe Island stick-insect. But judging from our past history in the subject, humans seem to have a pretty good shot.

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11 Animals We May Allow To Go Extinct Because They're Not Cute And Fuzzy

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Most, according to National Geographic, goes toward protecting a handful of our favorite animals -- apes, elephants, big cats, black rhinos and giant pandas hold the top five spots. Public opinion of these creatures is highly positive, but also highly biased.

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We do comedy with a conservation twist!

Simon Watt has been busy touring The Ugly Animal Roadshow (our family show) around the UK recently. It is available to go into schools, theatres and to festivals right now.

The Ugly Animal Preservation Society comedy night tours the country bringing each town the chance to elect its own Ugly Animal Mascot. You can find up and coming gigs here. We have a regular new material night once a month at the Book Club in Shoredich, London.

Previous acts have includes, Sarah Pascoe, Suzi Ruffell, Ellie Taylor, Raymond Mearns, Helen Arney, Dan Schrieber, Iszi Lawrence, Steve Mould, Jonny Berliner, Sarah Bennetto, Bec Hill, Ian Stirling, Steve Cross, Dean Burnett, Kevin Fong and many, many more.

Simon Watt's new book, The Ugly Animals- We Can't All be Pandas is out now and available in all good bookshops in the UK, USA and Bulgaria.

The Ugly Animal Preservation Society is dedicated to raising the profile of some of Mother Nature's more aesthetically challenged children. The panda gets too much attention.

Our society needs a mascot, one to rival the cute and cuddly emblems of many charities and organisations. And so I have gathered a terrific line up of comedians who will each champion a different ugly endangered species and at the end of the evening the audience shall vote for what will become our society's symbol. It is going to be a great night!

This short film made while we were gigging in Edinburgh sums it up quite well.

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We do comedy with a conservation twist! Simon Watt has been busy touring The Ugly Animal Roadshow (our family show) around the UK recently. It is available to go into schools, theatres and to festivals right now. The Ugly Animal Preservation Society comedy night tours the country bringing each town the chance to elect its own Ugly Animal Mascot.

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Advertisement

The koala is a cutie, but does it steal too much of the limelight? A new study adds quantitative detail to an ongoing debate over whether such "conservation mascots" receive publicity and funding to the detriment of animals typically deemed less attractive. Researchers at Murdoch University and Curtain University, both in Western Australia, combed through 14,248 journal papers, books and conference proceedings about 331 Down Under mammals and found an overwhelming bias against investigations of "ugly" species. In fact, 73 percent of the publications covered marsupials, such as koalas and kangaroos. In contrast, rodents and bats received 11 percent of the attention, even though they made up 45 percent of the mammals included.

Even worse, most research into these aesthetically challenged animals is at the surface level, including taxonomic descriptions that merely name the species and provide measurements, says lead author Patricia Fleming. And without knowledge of their habitats, food sources and behaviors, these creatures are harder to protect against threats that could lead to extinction. Such information gaps afflict animals well beyond Australia, too. "There are many taxa worldwide, such as amphibians, that we know are doing even worse and have even less research into them," says Simon Watt, founder of the Ugly Animal Preservation Society. These organisms could be more ecologically important than the ones typically held up as worth saving. Bats, for example, help to control pest insects that can carry diseases or devastate crops.

Fleming describes her paper as a call to action for research on more diverse wildlife but acknowledges that funding to study or save unappealing creatures might always be lacking. "It's a small pie to divide up, and that leaves some species unfunded," she says. In Australia, for example, most of the federal conservation budget goes toward fighting another group: "bad" invasive species. And whereas elimination of introduced European rabbits might be good for Australia's native plants, it does little to help the spinifex hopping mouse or ghost bat-let alone the koala.

This article was originally published with the title "Ugly Critters Get No Love"

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

John R. Platt

John R. Platt is the editor of The Revelator. An award-winning environmental journalist, his work has appeared in Scientific American, Audubon, Motherboard, and numerous other magazines and publications. His "Extinction Countdown" column has run continuously since 2004 and has covered news and science related to more than 1,000 endangered species. John lives on the outskirts of Portland, Ore., where he finds himself surrounded by animals and cartoonists.

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The koala is a cutie, but does it steal too much of the limelight? A new study adds quantitative detail to an ongoing debate over whether such "conservation mascots" receive publicity and funding to the detriment of animals typically deemed less attractive.

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