This is really useful, thank you. I feel there is an interesting parallel between our use of historical analogies (AI has variously been compared to industrial revolution/ the internet/ the atom bomb) to help us locate the potential impact of AI and the growing use of philosophical thought experiments.
Thanks Phil - you read our mind! I think (a) historical analogies, (b) thought experiments, and (c) sci-fi are all important scaffolds that people use to make sense of AI, with strengths and limitations to each.
ICYMI, our friend Harry Law had a piece on analogies below, and we hope to have something on sci-fi soon!
Ah interesting - this article is great. Thanks. I'm interested in David Edgerton/ Jean Baptiste Fressoz argument that the 'age of ....' is misleading and technologies tend to be more symbiotic than dominant. I wonder if it's partly because we use the metaphor of competition when thinking about tech history. Also given that LLMs have been trained on historical analogies/ thought experiment/ sci-fi narratives/ metaphors I wonder if there's a sort of reflexive incentive (from the model) to support these narratives.
It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow
I find this idea of a live philosophical experiment with AI fascinating. Is anyone actually doing these experiments to put these thoughts experiments to an evaluation?
This is really useful, thank you. I feel there is an interesting parallel between our use of historical analogies (AI has variously been compared to industrial revolution/ the internet/ the atom bomb) to help us locate the potential impact of AI and the growing use of philosophical thought experiments.
Thanks Phil - you read our mind! I think (a) historical analogies, (b) thought experiments, and (c) sci-fi are all important scaffolds that people use to make sense of AI, with strengths and limitations to each.
ICYMI, our friend Harry Law had a piece on analogies below, and we hope to have something on sci-fi soon!
https://www.aipolicyperspectives.com/p/on-analogies
Ah interesting - this article is great. Thanks. I'm interested in David Edgerton/ Jean Baptiste Fressoz argument that the 'age of ....' is misleading and technologies tend to be more symbiotic than dominant. I wonder if it's partly because we use the metaphor of competition when thinking about tech history. Also given that LLMs have been trained on historical analogies/ thought experiment/ sci-fi narratives/ metaphors I wonder if there's a sort of reflexive incentive (from the model) to support these narratives.
Interested to see your article on sci-fi!
It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow
I find this idea of a live philosophical experiment with AI fascinating. Is anyone actually doing these experiments to put these thoughts experiments to an evaluation?