Stross did, Hanson said he doesn’t like email interviews. But Stross didn’t state his explicit permission that I am allowed to publish his answers. And since I was mainly interested in his opinion myself I didn’t bother to ask him again. But I don’t think he would be bothered at all if I provide an extract?
He seems to think that embodied cognition plays an important role. In other words, human intelligence is strongly dependent on physiology.
Further, as far as I understand him, he believes to some extent into the Kurzweilian adaption of technology. It will be slowly creeping into our environment in the form of expert systems capable of human-like information processing.
Other points include that risks from friendly AI are to be taken seriously as well. For example, having some superhuman intelligence around who has it all figured out will deprive much of our intellectual curiosity of its value.
He mostly commented on existential risks, e.g. that we don’t need AI to wipe us out:
I’m much more concerned about cheap, out-of-control gene hacking and synthetic organisms. The Australian mousepox/interleukin-4 experiment demonstrates the probable existence of a short, cheap path to human extinction, and that’s something they stumbled across pretty much by accident. There’s a lot we don’t know about human immunobiology that can bite us on the ass—see the TGN1412 accident, for example, or SARS. I find the idea of some idiot accidentally releasing a strain of the common cold that triggers cytokine storm terrifying. Not because anyone would want to do that, but because it could happen by accident.
Grey goo seems to be thermodynamically impossible, and anyway, we’ve got an existence proof for nanotechnology replicators in the shape of carbon-based life—but knowing grey goo is impossible is no damn consolation if you’ve got necrotising fasciitis or ebola zaire.
His comment on AI and FOOM:
Similarly, I suspect we’re still a way from understanding the neurobiological underpinnings of human intelligence—we don’t even have a consensus definition of what it means to be human and conscious...it’s like asking, during a debate on the possibility of heavier-than-air powered flight in 1901, what the possibility is of developing an ornithopter than will eventually lay eggs. The question relies on multiple sequential assumptions that I think are individually invalid, or at least highly unlikely...
Can you think of any milestone such that if it were ever reached you would expect human‐level machine intelligence to be developed within five years thereafter?
A good functional simulation of a human neuron, and a good block level functional model of how the human brain and peripheral nervous system operates. There may well be unforseen gotchas along the way: immune system modulation, hormone effects, other tissues found to conduct an action potential (e.g. glial cells) which radically modify the picture before we get there.
Alternatively, show me a household robot that can clean the toilet or sew a new hem on a pair of jeans and I’ll start stocking up on canned goods and ammunition. (A lot of “trivial” tasks in the human environment are remarkably hard to handle by mechanised logic.)
Depends on how thoroughly the toilet needs to be cleaned, of course, but here’s some rough idea of the procedure:
-Look at the toilet and determine if it needs cleaning, and what kind, and where. You can’t always assume a toilet is made of white porcelain, with its implications for simple, visual hacks to toilet-cleaning.
In any environment where a lot of dust accumulates, the toilet will periodically get a layer of scum and dust (which isn’t a contamination risk AFAIK the way leftover, ah, residue might be but is definitely visually-unpleasant, and well outside the scope of “clean” for most people). This will mostly affect the lid and the tank-top. In low-dust environments it may never come up at all—better hope the toilet-cleaning-robot designer understands that geography makes a difference!
Residue inside the bowl can be effluents, or just mineralization (the pinkish-orange colour you sometimes see inside of porcelain bowls). The internal angles and shapes of toilet bowls vary; you have to adapt your basic “brushstroke/cleanser-application” procedure to the actual shape, which may not be plannable ahead of time.
There’s the floor around the toilet and its base, as well! This can get pretty messy in some situations, whether from settled dust, spilled effluents or mineralization. There are usually bolt covers protecting the bolts that hold the toilet down, ones that mustn’t be dislodged during cleaning (and won’t respond the same way to pressure as the substrate they rest on; they’re designed to be removable by unassisted human hands to make unscrewing the bolt easy).
There’s the bit where the lid and seat attach—this has hinges which may be made of another material yet, or they may be covered.
The toilet might not be porcelain—and if it is, it might not be white. The seat color might not match the base, the toilet might have a shag rug over the lid or on the tank top. Some people stack things on top of their toilets; these must generally be removed and yet not thrown away, and placed back when they’re done. And it’s hard to make simple algorithms for this—if your toilet-cleaning robot shortcuts by comparing against a template of “porcelain white” and inferring the type of mess by probabilistic colour-matching (effluents, mineralization and dust usually look different), what does it do when it encounters a white porcelain toilet, mineralized, with a hardwood seat and a black shag carpet on the tank top, with some magazines stacked there?
Basically there’s a huge number of trivially-demonstrable, real possible variations on the basic abstract idea of “scrub toilet surface so it is clean in appearance and not covered with contaminants.” A human faced with three wildly-different toilet designs can probably make this all work out using just some spray cleaner and a brush, clearing off the items as needed, and trivially vary the angle of their arm or whatever to get at difficult spots. You need to be flexible, both mentally and physically, to clean a toilet under the full range of possible conditions for that task...
Sewing a new hem, one that wasn’t there before, is also more complex than it sounds—or rather, there’s a lot of embedded complexity that’s not obvious from the surface, and that’s trivial for a human but surprisingly easy to screw up in terms of designating a flowchart or whatnot to build program around.
Did they field your questions?
Stross did, Hanson said he doesn’t like email interviews. But Stross didn’t state his explicit permission that I am allowed to publish his answers. And since I was mainly interested in his opinion myself I didn’t bother to ask him again. But I don’t think he would be bothered at all if I provide an extract?
He seems to think that embodied cognition plays an important role. In other words, human intelligence is strongly dependent on physiology.
Further, as far as I understand him, he believes to some extent into the Kurzweilian adaption of technology. It will be slowly creeping into our environment in the form of expert systems capable of human-like information processing.
Other points include that risks from friendly AI are to be taken seriously as well. For example, having some superhuman intelligence around who has it all figured out will deprive much of our intellectual curiosity of its value.
He mostly commented on existential risks, e.g. that we don’t need AI to wipe us out:
His comment on AI and FOOM:
Can you think of any milestone such that if it were ever reached you would expect human‐level machine intelligence to be developed within five years thereafter?
(Oh, and he somtimes reads LW.)
Stross: +1 point for placing the scary roadblock below human-level intelligence.
I would have guessed that cleaning a toilet was much easier than sewing a new hem on a pair of jeans, anyone with expertise care to comment?
Depends on how thoroughly the toilet needs to be cleaned, of course, but here’s some rough idea of the procedure:
-Look at the toilet and determine if it needs cleaning, and what kind, and where. You can’t always assume a toilet is made of white porcelain, with its implications for simple, visual hacks to toilet-cleaning.
In any environment where a lot of dust accumulates, the toilet will periodically get a layer of scum and dust (which isn’t a contamination risk AFAIK the way leftover, ah, residue might be but is definitely visually-unpleasant, and well outside the scope of “clean” for most people). This will mostly affect the lid and the tank-top. In low-dust environments it may never come up at all—better hope the toilet-cleaning-robot designer understands that geography makes a difference!
Residue inside the bowl can be effluents, or just mineralization (the pinkish-orange colour you sometimes see inside of porcelain bowls). The internal angles and shapes of toilet bowls vary; you have to adapt your basic “brushstroke/cleanser-application” procedure to the actual shape, which may not be plannable ahead of time.
There’s the floor around the toilet and its base, as well! This can get pretty messy in some situations, whether from settled dust, spilled effluents or mineralization. There are usually bolt covers protecting the bolts that hold the toilet down, ones that mustn’t be dislodged during cleaning (and won’t respond the same way to pressure as the substrate they rest on; they’re designed to be removable by unassisted human hands to make unscrewing the bolt easy).
There’s the bit where the lid and seat attach—this has hinges which may be made of another material yet, or they may be covered.
The toilet might not be porcelain—and if it is, it might not be white. The seat color might not match the base, the toilet might have a shag rug over the lid or on the tank top. Some people stack things on top of their toilets; these must generally be removed and yet not thrown away, and placed back when they’re done. And it’s hard to make simple algorithms for this—if your toilet-cleaning robot shortcuts by comparing against a template of “porcelain white” and inferring the type of mess by probabilistic colour-matching (effluents, mineralization and dust usually look different), what does it do when it encounters a white porcelain toilet, mineralized, with a hardwood seat and a black shag carpet on the tank top, with some magazines stacked there?
Basically there’s a huge number of trivially-demonstrable, real possible variations on the basic abstract idea of “scrub toilet surface so it is clean in appearance and not covered with contaminants.” A human faced with three wildly-different toilet designs can probably make this all work out using just some spray cleaner and a brush, clearing off the items as needed, and trivially vary the angle of their arm or whatever to get at difficult spots. You need to be flexible, both mentally and physically, to clean a toilet under the full range of possible conditions for that task...
Sewing a new hem, one that wasn’t there before, is also more complex than it sounds—or rather, there’s a lot of embedded complexity that’s not obvious from the surface, and that’s trivial for a human but surprisingly easy to screw up in terms of designating a flowchart or whatnot to build program around.
Bad news about that.
I think by far the most important test of the toilet-cleaning AI is the following: what does it do when it encounters something that is not a toilet?
Attach brain slugs to it.