What will happen when the internet of things becomes artificially intelligent?

From Stephen Hawking to Spike Jonze, the existential threat posed by the onset of the ‘conscious web’ is fuelling much debate – but should we be afraid?

Who’s afraid of artificial intelligence? Quite a few notable figures, it turns out. Photograph: Alamy

When Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Elon Musk all agree on something, it’s worth paying attention.

All three have warned of the potential dangers that artificial intelligence or AI can bring. The world’s foremost physicist, Hawking said that the full development of artificial intelligence (AI) could “spell the end of the human race”. Musk, the tech entrepreneur who brought us PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX described artificial intelligence as our “biggest existential threat” and said that playing around with AI was like “summoning the demon”. Gates, who knows a thing or two about tech, puts himself in the “concerned” camp when it comes to machines becoming too intelligent for us humans to control.

What are these wise souls afraid of? AI is broadly described as the ability of computer systems to ape or mimic human intelligent behavior. This could be anything from recognizing speech, to visual perception, making decisions and translating languages. Examples run from Deep Blue who beat chess champion Garry Kasparov to supercomputer Watson who outguessed the world’s best Jeopardy player. Fictionally, we have Her, Spike Jonze’s movie that depicts the protagonist, played by Joaquin Phoenix, falling in love with his operating system, seductively voiced by Scarlet Johansson. And coming soon, Chappie stars a stolen police robot who is reprogrammed to make conscious choices and to feel emotions.

An important component of AI, and a key element in the fears it engenders, is the ability of machines to take action on their own without human intervention. This could take the form of a computer reprogramming itself in the face of an obstacle or restriction. In other words, to think for itself and to take action accordingly.

Needless to say, there are those in the tech world who have a more sanguine view of AI and what it could bring. Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine, does not see the future inhabited by HAL’s – the homicidal computer on board the spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kelly sees a more prosaic world that looks more like Amazon Web Services: a cheap, smart, utility which is also exceedingly boring simply because it will run in the background of our lives. He says AI will enliven inert objects in the way that electricity did over 100 years ago. “Everything that we formerly electrified, we will now cognitize.” And he sees the business plans of the next 10,000 startups as easy to predict: “Take X and add AI.”

While he acknowledges the concerns about artificial intelligence, Kelly writes: “As AI develops, we might have to engineer ways to prevent consciousness in them – our most premium AI services will be advertised as consciousness-free.” (my emphasis).

Running parallel to the extraordinary advances in the field of AI is the even bigger development of what is loosely called, the internet of things (IoT). This can be broadly described as the emergence of countless objects, animals and even people with uniquely identifiable, embedded devices that are wirelessly connected to the internet. These ‘nodes’ can send or receive information without the need for human intervention. There are estimates that there will be 50 billion connected devices by 2020. Current examples of these smart devices include Nest thermostats, wifi-enabled washing machines and the increasingly connected cars with their built-in sensors that can avoid accidents and even park for you.

The US Federal Trade Commission is sufficiently concerned about the security and privacy implications of the Internet of Things, and has conducted a public workshop and released a report urging companies to adopt best practices and “bake in” procedures to minimise data collection and to ensure consumer trust in the new networked environment.

Tim O’Reilly, coiner of the phrase “Web 2.0” sees the internet of things as the most important online development yet. He thinks the name is misleading – that IoT is “really about human augmentation”. O’Reilly believes that we should “expect our devices to anticipate us in all sorts of ways”. He uses the “intelligent personal assistant”, Google Now, to make his point.

So what happens when these millions of embedded devices connect to artificially intelligent machines? What does AI + IoT = ? Will it mean the end of civilisation as we know it? Will our self-programming computers send out hostile orders to the chips we’ve added to our everyday objects? Or is this just another disruptive moment, similar to the harnessing of steam or the splitting of the atom? An important step in our own evolution as a species, but nothing to be too concerned about?

The answer may lie in some new thinking about consciousness. As a concept, as well as an experience, consciousness has proved remarkably hard to pin down. We all know that we have it (or at least we think we do), but scientists are unable to prove that we have it or, indeed, exactly what it is and how it arises.

Dictionaries describe consciousness as the state of being awake and aware of our own existence. It is an “internal knowledge” characterized by sensation, emotions and thought.

Just over 20 years ago, an obscure Australian philosopher named David Chalmers created controversy in philosophical circles by raising what became known as the Hard Problem of Consciousness. He asked how the grey matter inside our heads gave rise to the mysterious experience of being. What makes us different to, say, a very efficient robot, one with, perhaps, artificial intelligence? And are we humans the only ones with consciousness?

• Some scientists propose that consciousness is an illusion, a trick of the brain. 
• Still others believe we will never solve the consciousness riddle. 
• But a few neuroscientists think we may finally figure it out, provided we accept the remarkable idea that soon computers or the internet might one day become conscious.

In an extensive Guardian article, the author Oliver Burkeman wrote how Chalmers and others put forth a notion that all things in the universe might be (or potentially be) conscious, “providing the information it contains is sufficiently interconnected and organized.” So could an iPhone or a thermostat be conscious? And, if so, could we in the midst of a ‘Conscious Web’?

Back in the mid-1990s, the author Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg wrote an influential piece for Wired, A Globe, Clothing Itself with a Brain. In it she described the work of a little known Jesuit priest and paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin, who 50 years earlier described a global sphere of thought, the “living unity of a single tissue” containing our collective thoughts, experiences and consciousness.

Teilhard called it the “nooshphere” (noo is Greek for mind). He saw it as the evolutionary step beyond our geosphere (physical world) and biosphere (biological world). The informational wiring of a being, whether it is made up of neurons or electronics, gives birth to consciousness. As the diversification of nervous connections increase, de Chardin argued, evolution is led towards greater consciousness. Or as John Perry Barlow, Grateful Dead lyricist, cyber advocate and Teilhard de Chardin fan said: “With cyberspace, we are, in effect, hard-wiring the collective consciousness.”

So, perhaps we shouldn’t be so alarmed. Maybe we are on the cusp of a breakthrough not just in the field of artificial intelligence and the emerging internet of things, but also in our understanding of consciousness itself. If we can resolve the privacy, security and trust issues that both AI and the IoT present, we might make an evolutionary leap of historic proportions. And it’s just possible Teilhard’s remarkable vision of an interconnected “thinking layer” is what the web has been all along.

• Stephen Balkam is CEO of the Family Online Safety Institute in the US

ORIGINAL: The Guardian

Stephen Balkam

Friday 20 February 2015

Stephen Hawking Has Warned That AI Could 'Spell The End Of The Human Race'

Professor Stephen Hawking has raised his concerns over humanity's search to create artificial intelligence warning that if it were ever created it could "Spell the end of the human race."

The scientists was expanding on a question by the BBC about the current forms of AI that are found in his own laptop.

At present Professor Hawking uses an Intel-built laptop that combines state-of-the-art software including specially written language prediction software courtesy of UK-based company, Swiftkey.

In order to communicate Professor Hawking uses a IR sensor to detect the movement in his cheek, this then allows him to pick letters.

Whereas before he would have to spell out the entire word, prediction software from Swiftkey is now tied into the process meaning he only needs to pick the first letter and then the laptop can predict what he wants to say next.

While this very low-autonomy intelligence has proved useful thus far, Professor Hawking warns that reaching further than our own intelligence levels could prove catastrophic for the human race.

"It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate, humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded."

Hawking isn't the only prominent figure to warn about the risks of AI, indeed entrepreneur Elon Musk has declared that by inventing AI we would be "summoning the demon".

Musk went on to call AI the "biggest existential threat" to our species right now.

Don't panic just yet, because even if we don't face a Terminator-style apocalypse Professor Hawking has handily pointed out in the past that we're actually find some other rather ingenious ways to end our own existence.

Earlier this year Prof Hawking warned that "God Particle" scientists are on the verge of ending the universe via the giant particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

He predicted that if enough energy was directed at the Higgs Boson particle then it would become metastable, causing the following:

"This could mean that the universe could undergo catastrophic vacuum decay, with a bubble of the true vacuum expanding at the speed of light."

Thankfully the level of energy needed to create that outcome would -- with current technology -- require a particle accelerator larger than Earth. 

ORIGINAL: Huffington Post

By Thomas Tamblyn

02/12/2014

Stephen Hawking: 'There are no black holes'

Notion of an 'event horizon', from which nothing can escape, is incompatible with quantum theory, physicist claims.

Artist's impression VICTOR HABBICK VISIONS/SPL/Getty

The defining characteristic of a black hole may have to give, if the two pillars of modern physics — general relativity and quantum theory — are both correct.

Most physicists foolhardy enough to write a paper claiming that “there are no black holes” — at least not in the sense we usually imagine — would probably be dismissed as cranks. But when the call to redefine these cosmic crunchers comes from Stephen Hawking, it’s worth taking notice. In a paper posted online, the physicist, based at the University of Cambridge, UK, and one of the creators of modern black-hole theory, does away with the notion of an event horizon, the invisible boundary thought to shroud every black hole, beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape.

 

“There is no escape from a black hole in classical theory, but quantum theory enables energy and information to escape.”

In its stead, Hawking’s radical proposal is a much more benign “apparent horizon”, which only temporarily holds matter and energy prisoner before eventually releasing them, albeit in a more garbled form.

“There is no escape from a black hole in classical theory,” Hawking told Nature. Quantum theory, however, “enables energy and information to escape from a black hole”. A full explanation of the process, the physicist admits, would require a theory that successfully merges gravity with the other fundamental forces of nature. But that is a goal that has eluded physicists for nearly a century. “The correct treatment,” Hawking says, “remains a mystery.”

Hawking posted his paper on the arXiv preprint server on 22 January1. He titled it, whimsically, 'Information preservation and weather forecasting for black holes', and it has yet to pass peer review. The paper was based on a talk he gave via Skype at a meeting at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, in August 2013 (watch video of the talk).

Fire fighting Hawking's new work is an attempt to solve what is known as the black-hole firewall paradox, which has been vexing physicists for almost two years, after it was discovered by theoretical physicist Joseph Polchinski of the Kavli Institute and his colleagues (see 'Astrophysics: Fire in the hole!').

In a thought experiment, the researchers asked what would happen to an astronaut unlucky enough to fall into a black hole. Event horizons are mathematically simple consequences of Einstein's general theory of relativity that were first pointed out by the German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild in a letter he wrote to Einstein in late 1915, less than a month after the publication of the theory. In that picture, physicists had long assumed, the astronaut would happily pass through the event horizon, unaware of his or her impending doom, before gradually being pulled inwards — stretched out along the way, like spaghetti — and eventually crushed at the 'singularity', the black hole’s hypothetical infinitely dense core.

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But on analysing the situation in detail, Polchinski’s team came to the startling realization that the laws of quantum mechanics, which govern particles on small scales, change the situation completely. Quantum theory, they said, dictates that the event horizon must actually be transformed into a highly energetic region, or 'firewall', that would burn the astronaut to a crisp.

This was alarming because, although the firewall obeyed quantum rules, it flouted Einstein’s general theory of relativity. According to that theory, someone in free fall should perceive the laws of physics as being identical everywhere in the Universe — whether they are falling into a black hole or floating in empty intergalactic space. As far as Einstein is concerned, the event horizon should be an unremarkable place.

Beyond the horizon Now Hawking proposes a third, tantalizingly simple, option. Quantum mechanics and general relativity remain intact, but black holes simply do not have an event horizon to catch fire. The key to his claim is that quantum effects around the black hole cause space-time to fluctuate too wildly for a sharp boundary surface to exist.

In place of the event horizon, Hawking invokes an “apparent horizon”, a surface along which light rays attempting to rush away from the black hole’s core will be suspended. In general relativity, for an unchanging black hole, these two horizons are identical, because light trying to escape from inside a black hole can reach only as far as the event horizon and will be held there, as though stuck on a treadmill. However, the two horizons can, in principle, be distinguished. If more matter gets swallowed by the black hole, its event horizon will swell and grow larger than the apparent horizon.

Conversely, in the 1970s, Hawking also showed that black holes can slowly shrink, spewing out 'Hawking radiation'. In that case, the event horizon would, in theory, become smaller than the apparent horizon. Hawking’s new suggestion is that the apparent horizon is the real boundary. “The absence of event horizons means that there are no black holes — in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity,” Hawking writes.

“The picture Hawking gives sounds reasonable,” says Don Page, a physicist and expert on black holes at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, who collaborated with Hawking in the 1970s. “You could say that it is radical to propose there’s no event horizon. But these are highly quantum conditions, and there’s ambiguity about what space-time even is, let alone whether there is a definite region that can be marked as an event horizon.”

Although Page accepts Hawking’s proposal that a black hole could exist without an event horizon, he questions whether that alone is enough to get past the firewall paradox. The presence of even an ephemeral apparent horizon, he cautions, could well cause the same problems as does an event horizon.

Unlike the event horizon, the apparent horizon can eventually dissolve. Page notes that Hawking is opening the door to a scenario so extreme “that anything in principle can get out of a black hole”. Although Hawking does not specify in his paper exactly how an apparent horizon would disappear, Page speculates that when it has shrunk to a certain size, at which the effects of both quantum mechanics and gravity combine, it is plausible that it could vanish. At that point, whatever was once trapped within the black hole would be released (although not in good shape).

If Hawking is correct, there could even be no singularity at the core of the black hole. Instead, matter would be only temporarily held behind the apparent horizon, which would gradually move inward owing to the pull of the black hole, but would never quite crunch down to the centre. Information about this matter would not destroyed, but would be highly scrambled so that, as it is released through Hawking radiation, it would be in a vastly different form, making it almost impossible to work out what the swallowed objects once were.

“It would be worse than trying to reconstruct a book that you burned from its ashes,” says Page. In his paper, Hawking compares it to trying to forecast the weather ahead of time: in theory it is possible, but in practice it is too difficult to do with much accuracy.

Polchinski, however, is sceptical that black holes without an event horizon could exist in nature. The kind of violent fluctuations needed to erase it are too rare in the Universe, he says. “In Einstein’s gravity, the black-hole horizon is not so different from any other part of space,” says Polchinski. “We never see space-time fluctuate in our own neighbourhood: it is just too rare on large scales.”

Raphael Bousso, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former student of Hawking's, says that this latest contribution highlights how “abhorrent” physicists find the potential existence of firewalls. However, he is also cautious about Hawking’s solution. “The idea that there are no points from which you cannot escape a black hole is in some ways an even more radical and problematic suggestion than the existence of firewalls,” he says. "But the fact that we’re still discussing such questions 40 years after Hawking’s first papers on black holes and information is testament to their enormous significance." Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2014.14583

References

Hawking, S. W. Preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.5761 (2014). Hide contextHawking posted his paper on the arXiv preprint server on 22 January1



ORIGEN: Nature

Zeeya Merali
24 January 2014

Stephen Hawking y el CERN ganan premio de física fundamental

ORIGINAL: Milenio

EFE

12 DICIEMBRE 2012

El científico británico fue recompensado en la primera categoría por su trayectoria; los otros ocho científicos, por su contribución para encontrar el Bosón de Higgs.

Foto: Maximilien Brice/Cern/Archivo

EL HALLAZGO DE LOS HOYOS NEGROS, UNO DE LOS MOTIVOS PARA PREMIARLO.

Londres • El recién creado Premio Especial de Física Fundamental, que es el galardón científico con mayor dotación económica del mundo, ha sido otorgado al científico británico Stephen Hawking y a un equipo de ocho investigadores del gran acelerador de partículas del Centro Europeo de Investigación Nuclear (CERN), que participaron en el descubrimiento del Bosón de Higgs.

La primera edición de dicho reconocimiento, que es financiado por una organización que instituyó el multimillonario ruso Yuri Milner, otorgará, tanto a Hawking como al equipo de ocho científicos del CERN, tres millones de dólares (aproximadamente 38.5 millones de pesos), lo que representa más del doble de la aportacón económica que brindan los Nobel.

Para su nieto

En un correo electrónico remitido al periódico británico The Guardian, el físico británico, autor del libro Una breve historia del tiempo, anunció que se gastará el dinero del premio en ayudar a su nieto autista y en una casa para vacacionar.

Hawking, catedrático de la Universidad de Cambridge de 70 años, que desde los 21 sufre una enfermedad neurodegenerativa (esclerosis lateral amiotrófica), fue galardonado por los logros de toda su trayectoria como investigador, incluido su descubrimiento de los agujeros negros, informó la fundación de Milner en un comunicado difundido ayer.

“Nadie investiga en física con la intención de obtener un galardón, sino por la alegría de descubrir algo que nadie sabía hasta el momento. Pese a ello, premios como éste desempeñan un papel importante a la hora de obtener el reconocimiento del público.

Aumentan el prestigio de la física y el interés por ella”, afirmó el científico.

Hawking, que es catedrático de la Universidad de Cambridge (sur de Inglaterra), “es un auténtico gigante de la física moderna”, dijo Nima Arkani-Hamed, especialista estadunidense en esa materia que formó parte del jurado encargado de elegir a los ganadores.

Partícula evasiva

Además, la Fundación del Premio de Física Fundamental reconoció la labor de ocho científicos del CERN por su contribución a la detección del bosón de Higgs —la evasíva partícula que teóricamente permitió la formación del Universo y de todo lo que existe—, en julio de este año.

Este grupo está encabezado por Lyn Evans, actual director del acelerador de partículas, y por los directores actuales y pasados de los experimentos ATLAS y CMS, entre los que figuran Peter Jenni, Fabiola Gianotti, Michel Della Negra, Tejinder Singh Virdee, Guido Tonelli y Joe Incandela.

“Recibí una llamada de teléfono anunciándome que había ganado un premio millonario. Me quedé patidifuso. Lo primero que hice fue sentarme. Esto es genial para nosotros, ya que suple algunas deficiencias del premio Nobel, que no puede recaer en más de tres personas”, dijo Evans a The Guardian.

Yuri Milner, doctor en física teórica y promotor de este premio, espera atraer la atención masiva del público sobre la labor de los físicos.

“Espero que estos premios aporten más reconocimiento a algunas de las mentes más brillantes del mundo y a los grandes logros que han conseguido”, afirmó Milner, que construyó una fortuna valorada en mil millones de dólares invirtiendo en compañías de internet como Twitter, Facebook y Groupon.

La fundación también anunció a tres ganadores del premio Fronteras de la Física, que otorga a cada uno 300 mil dólares, y a los que recibieron el galardón Nuevas Fronteras de la Física, que recibirán 100 mil dólares.

El jurado estuvo compuesto por físicos internacionales entre los que se encontraban los estadunidenses Ed Witten, especialista en la teoría de las cuerdas, y Alan Guth, autor de la primera teoría sobre la expansión del universo.