The Road to Strong AI

Introduction

There have been a great many strides in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) lately, with self driving cars becoming a reality, computers now routinely beating human masters at chess and go, computers accurately recognizing speech and even providing real time translation between languages. We have digital assistants like Alexa or Siri.

This article expands on some ideas in my previous article: “Some Thoughts on Artificial Intelligence”. This article is a little over a year old and I thought I might want to expand on some of the ideas here. Mostly since I’ve been reading quite a few articles and books recently that claim this is all impossible and true machine intelligence will never happen. I think there is always a large number of people that argue that anything that hasn’t happened is impossible, after all there were a large number of people still believed human flight was impossible after the Wright brothers actually did fly and for that matter it’s amazing how many people still believe the world is flat. Covering this all in one article is too much, so I’ll start with an overview this time and then expand on some of the topics in future articles.

The Quest for Strong AI

Strong AI or Artificial General Intelligence usually refers to the goal of producing a true intelligence with consciousness, self awareness and any other cognitive functions that a human processes. This is the form of AI you typically see in Science Fiction movies. Weak AI refers to solving narrow tasks and to appear intelligent at doing them. Weak AI was what you you are typically seeing with computers playing Go or Chess, self driving cars or machine pattern recognition. For practical purposes weak AI research is proving to solve all sorts of common problems and there are a great many algorithms that contribute to making this work well.

At this point Strong AI tends to be more a topic for research, but at the same time many companies are working hard on this, but often we suspect in highly secretive labs.

Where is AI Today?

A lot of AI researchers and practitioners today consider themselves working on modules that will later be connected to build a much larger whole. Perhaps a good model for this are the current self driving cars where people are working on all sorts of individual components, like vision recognition, radar interpretation, choice of what to do next, interpreting feedback from the last action. All of these modules are then connected up to form the whole. A self driving car makes a good model of what could be accomplished this way, but note that I don’t think anyone would say a self driving car has any sort of self awareness or consciousness, even to the level of say a cat or dog.

Researchers today in strong AI are building individual components, for instance good visual pattern recognition that use algorithms very similar to how neurologists have determined the visual cortex in the brain work. Then they are putting these components together on a “bus” and getting them to work together. At this point they are developing more and more modules, but they are still really working in the weak AI world and haven’t figured out quite how to make the jump to strong AI.

The Case Against Strong AI

There have been quite a few books recently about why strong AI is impossible, usually arguing that the brain isn’t a computer, that it is something else. Let’s have a look at some of these arguments.

This argument takes a few different forms. One compares the brain to a typical von Neumann architecture computer, and I think it’s clear to everyone that this isn’t the architecture of the brain. But the von Neumann architecture was just a convenient way for us poor humans to build computers in a fairly structured way that weren’t too hard to program. Brains are clearly highly parallel and distributed. However there is Turing’s completeness theorem which does say all computers are equivalent, so that means a von Neuman computer could be programmed for intelligence (if the brain is some sort of computer). But like all theoretical results, this says nothing about performance or practicality.

I recently read “Beyond Zero and One” by Andrew Smart which seems to infer that machines can never hallucinate or do LSD and hence must somehow be fundamentally different than the brain. The book doesn’t say what the brain is instead of being a computer, just that it can’t be a computer.

I don’t buy this argument. I tend to believe that machine intelligence doesn’t need to fail the same way human brains fail when damaged, but at the same time we learn an awful lot about the brain when studying it when it malfunctions. It may turn turn out that hallucinations are a major driver in creativity and that once we achieve a higher level of AI, that AIs in fact hallucinate, have dreams and exhibit the same creativity as humans. One theory is that LSD removes the filters through which we perceive the world and opens us up to greater possibilities, if this is the case, removing or changing filters is probably easier for AIs than for biological brains.

Another common argument is that the brain is more than a current digital computer, and is in fact a quantum computer of far greater complexity than we currently imagine. That in fact it isn’t chemical reactions that drive intelligence, but quantum reactions and that in fact every neuron is really a quantum computer in its own right. I don’t buy this argument at all, since the scale and speed of the brain exactly match that of the general chemical reactions we understand in biology and that the scale of the brain is much larger than the electronic circuits where we start to see quantum phenomena.

A very good book on modern Physics is “The Big Picture” by Sean Carroll. This book shreds a lot of the weird quantum brain model theories and also shows how a lot of the other more flaky theories (usually involving souls and such) are impossible under modern Physics.

The book is interesting, in that it explains very well the areas we don’t understand, but also shows how much of what happens on our scale (the Earth, Solar System, etc.) are mathematically provable to be completely understood to a very high accuracy. For instance if there is an unknown force that interacts with the brain, then we must be able to see its force carrier particle when we crash either antiprotons with protons or positrons with electrons. And since we haven’t seen these to very high energies, it means if something unknown exists then it would operate at the energy of a nuclear explosion.

Consciousness and Intelligence in Animals

I recently read “Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are?” by Frans de Waal. This was an excellent book highlighting how we (humans) often use our own prejudices and sense of self-importance to denigrate or deny the ability of the “lesser” animals. The book contains many examples of intelligent behaviour in animals including acts of reasoning, memory, communication and emotion.

I think the modern study of animal intelligence is showing that intelligence and self-awareness isn’t just an on/off attribute. That in fact there are levels and degrees. I think this bodes very well for machine intelligence, since it shows that many facets of intelligence can be achieved at a complexity far less than that inherent in a human brain.

Summary

I don’t recommend the book “Beyond Zero and One”, however I strongly recommend the books: “Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?” and “The Big Picture”. I don’t think intelligence will turn out to be unique to humans and as we are recognizing more and more intelligence in animals, so we will start to see more and more intelligence emerging in computers. In future articles we will look at how the brain is a computer and how we are starting to copy its operations in electronic computers.