Mind children : the future of robot and human intelligence

Unleashed from the plodding pace of biological evolution, the children of our minds will be free to grow to confront immense and fundamental challenges in the larger universe.

When that happens, our DNA will find itself out of a job, having lost the evolutionary race to a new kind of competition.

A computation in progress—what we can reasonably call a computer's thought process—can be halted in midstep and transferred, as program and data read out of the machine's memory, into a physically different computer, there to resume as though nothing had happened.

The Beast inspired a number of imitators. Some added new motions such as 'Shake to untangle recharging arm' to the repertoire of basic actions.

Our minds might be amplified by computers just as our muscles had been amplified by the steam engines of the industrial revolution.

This dichotomy—machines doing well things humans find hard, while doing poorly what is easy for us—is a giant clue to the problem of how to construct an intelligent machine.

The arm nudged the inductor to and fro while maintaining a slight downward pressure, until the tabs and wires found their holes.

The seeds cast there were starting to sprout.

Shakey was impressive in concept but pitiable in action.

The deliberate process we call reasoning is, I believe, the thinnest veneer of human thought, effective only because it is supported by this much older and much more powerful, though usually unconscious, sensorimotor knowledge.

Our intelligence, as a tool, should allow us to follow the path to intelligence, as a goal, in bigger strides than those originally taken by the awesomely patient, but blind, processes of Darwinian evolution.

Fully intelligent machines will result when the metaphorical golden spike is driven uniting the two efforts.

The Project was renamed the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or SAIL, as the decade drew nigh and plausibility of the Project drifted away.

The reality is a witch's brew of approaches, motivations, and, as yet, unconnected problems.

The narrowness of their repertoire, besides being boring, greatly limits the number that can be sold.

The skilled plumber, for instance, will be faced with the choice of applying his or her plumbing skills to meet the needs of a few hundred clients or encoding those skills into robot programs that might be sold successfully to thousands or even millions of customers.

The Hitachi machines climb stairs by rolling up to them on five wheels, raising the leading one to the height of the first stair, driving forward until the raised leg is securely over the step, lowering it slightly until the contact is firm, and then continuing with the next nearest leg.

In repeated cautious lurches, the Cart was to creep safely to its destination.

The robot still crossed the room correctly only about three times out of four.

A robot that spends up to an hour considering every simple move is clearly unacceptable, but a few seconds would be tolerable.

If a stairwell-detecting module concludes that hazard is near, it would take over control of the robot until the danger was past.

In these internal models of the world I see the beginnings of awareness in the minds of our machines—an awareness I believe will evolve into consciousness comparable with that of humans.

The fourth door, sadly, leads to the stairwell, and the poor robot, unequipped to travel on stairs, is in mortal danger.

The needs of the mobile way of life have conspired in all three instances to create an entity that has modes of operation for different circumstances and that changes quickly from mode to mode on the basis of uncertain and noisy data prone to misinterpretation.

Emergence—this appearance of novel properties in whole systems has often been invoked to explain such difficult biological realities as mind, consciousness, and even life itself.

If the strength of the secondary warnings does not weaken sufficiently as the chain lengthens, pain could grow into an incapacitating phobia and pleasure into an equally incapacitating addiction.

So equipped, the robot will have the capacity to remember, to imagine, and to dream.

The robot repeatedly runs a simulation of the trespass of the neighbors' house, each time strengthening its conditioning for the steps involved, making the act itself increasingly Ukely.

The little remaining speedup seemed to have been absorbed in computationally expensive convenience features: fancier time sharing and high-level languages, graphics, screen editors, mail systems, computer networking, and other luxuries that had become necessities.

There are some dangerous curves in this joyride to human equivalence, so hold on!

That light must pass through the neural network to get to the photocells is a peculiar feature of the vertebrate retina—one hit upon early in the evolutionary history of vertebrates and locked into place.

Though designed with little reference to neurobiology, many of the program steps strongly resemble the operations of the retinal cells—a case of convergent evolution.

Somewhere, in an as yet mysterious part of our brain, a high-resolution image is synthesized, like a jigsaw puzzle, from these fragmentary glimpses.

I rashly conclude that the whole brain's job might be done by a computer performing 10 trillion (10^13) calculations per second.

This approach allowed the cost of purely manual calculation to also be measured—an unaided human clerk, whose effective capital cost is $100,000, can do about one calculation a minute!

The second story seems more interesting and informative because its later statements are less likely—cats usually have fur and claws, but they rarely carry hats and guns.

The machine was to be controlled on the small scale by slowly rotating pin-studded drums such as those that still pluck the reeds in mechanical music boxes.

Progress was now so bewilderingly fast and multifaceted, with computers appearing in everyday devices such as microwave ovens, that the industry gave up on the generational nomenclature.

Electronics is riding these vicious cycles so quickly that it is hkely to be the main occupation of the human race by the end of the century.

The vision of an ultradense three-dimensional circuit in a gem-quality diamond is compelling.

These would be small enough to grab individual molecules and hold them, thermally wriggling, in place.

Someday, our progeny may exploit these bodies to build machines with a million million million million million (that's 10^30) times the power of a human mind.

Instead of a rat's nest of wires, a program consisted of neat columns of numbers.

Programmers who became skilled at this exacting drudgery, punctuated by bursts of artful invention, were sometimes treated with the deference accorded to chess masters.

Interactive programs let the user and the computer act as partners, often with the user supplying insight and judgment and the computer providing prodigious calculation and memory.

This speed made possible a highly experimental, and somewhat Pavlovian, style of programming, characterized by quick punishment and reward cycles.

The actual systems failed to understand (or positively misunderstood) many offered phrases, so that using them was often a guessing game.

The enthusiasts at PARC pointed out that, seen as a convenience for the user, time-sharing was seriously flawed.

Each finger of the glove contains a grid of elements that create patterns of pressure and temperature on the finger of the wearer.

The operator has the subjective sensation of being in the robot's body.

But when the task called for a manual skill better known to the stay-at-home, the field agent would relax and allow the remotely controlled suit motors to do the job—as if possessed by a spirit.

Einstein, for instance, reported that he could often feel the meaning of his equations in his arms and his body as if they were solid objects.

In the foreground, on a grassy green meadow, are variously sized, colored, and shaped boulders labeled 'Budget,' 'Drawings,' 'Games,' and so on.

The Walk may be so effective because it maps the new cultural need to memorize large quantities of speech into the much older survival skill of remembering where we saw or

In the real word, the motors in your jacket and gloves hum momentarily as they resist your moving arm, simulating the forces of the apple's inertia.

Several visits later he came puffing after you with the answer, coattails flying, one hand holding down his wig and trailing a cloud of dust.

The universe is one random event after another.

These new creations, looking quite unlike the machines we know, will explode into the universe, leaving us behind in a cloud of dust.

It could watch a movie by walking its fingers along the film as it screamed by at high speed.

A smaller machine should be able to walk on ceilings like a fly, with the tiny cilia holding onto microscopic cracks in the paint or sticking by molecular adhesion.

As with no magician that ever was, impossible things will simply happen around a robot bush.

Layer after layer the brain is simulated, then excavated. Eventually your skull is empty, and the surgeon's hand rests deep in your brainstem.

Sometimes in the left-handed version of the task, the right hand—apparently in exasperation—reaches over to guide the left to the proper location!

Ultimately your brain would die, and your mind would find itself entirely in the computer.

In the long run you will remember mostly other people's experiences, while memories you originated will be incorporated into other minds.

If the process is preserved, I am preserved. The rest is mere jelly.

The transmitter scans and disassembles my jellylike body, but my pattern (me!) moves continuously from the dissolving jelly, through the transmitting beam, and ends up in other jelly at the destination.

Old instincts are not automatically erased when the rules of life are suddenly rewritten.

Though we are immortals, we must die bit by bit if we are to succeed in the the qualifying event—continued survival.

The ancestral individual is always doomed as its heritage is nibbled away to meet short-term environmental challenges.

Resurrecting one small planet should be child's play long before our civilization has colonized even its first galaxy.

I remember holding the innocent-looking card in my hand and contemplating its destructive power with awe.

Such facilities offered both anonymity and promiscuous sharing of data and, as with the sexual revolution, a raft of opportunities for disease.

Today's computer systems are like bodies with skins but no immune systems, or like walled cities without police.

Computer viruses mav thus have the same effect on software piracy that the AIDS epidemic is having on sexual promiscuity.

This self-reproducing C program had once existed in an actual computer file in Ken Thompson's machine but now had only a ghostly existence, reappearing momentarily deep in the innards of the computer whenever a C compiler executed the viral code and immediately vanishing again.

Many unsuccessful experiments later, order was finally restored by shutting down the entire network, clearing all the memories of all the IMPs, reloading their programs, and starting fresh—like sterilizing a whole planet with death rays, then seeding it with new life!

The data realm will host rats, coyotes, and master criminals as well as viruses and worms.

The message may promise a benefit, but when the machine is built it may show no self restraint and fiendishly co-opt all of its host's resources in its message sending, leaving behind a dead husk of a civilization.

The wolves may be simply helpless bits of data that, in the absence of civilizations, can only lie dormant in multimillion-year trips between galaxies or even inscribed on rocks.

A parasite that has the key to one lock finds that the next one is subtly different and thus harder to open.

Each Martian gives the other a broken unit and leaves the meeting gloating over having made a shrewd deal. But as night falls, both Martians find themselves in the dark.

The trauma is a signal to the bacteria that the game may be about to end, causing them to break the cooperative relationship to gain a last-minute advantage.

In time the entire universe will become a homogeneous stew with no concentrations of matter or energy to form or power any kind of machinery, intelligent or otherwise.

In an ever-expanding universe, time is cheap but energy must be carefully husbanded. In a collapsing universe, energy is cheap, but there is no time to waste!

In a final step a "breath of life" signal is transmitted to the painting that converts its quiescent states to active ones.

Newway curses an intermittently flashing bulk-memory error indicator, a sign of overheating. It's time to clean the fan filters again.

The Life simulation is now redundant and is stopped. The Cellticks have precipitated, and survived, the end of their universe.

Other concoctions describe a super universe in which our own 40-billion-light-year sphere is but a bubble, like a tiny expanding pocket of steam in a boiling liquid containing many, many others.

A single glider advancing across the screen would cause a display where gliders would appear and disappear in odd places almost at random, sometimes several in view, sometimes none.

In the metaphor of Richard Dawkins, we are the handiwork of a blind watchmaker. But we have now acquired partial sight and can, if we choose, use our vision to guide the watchmaker's hand.

Instead of a thousand calculations, each additional horizontal cell costs only two.

Some regularity is to be expected in the nervous system because there is insufficient information in the 10^9 bits of the human genome to custom-wire many of the 10^14 synapses in the brain.

Darwinian evolution is a relentless optimizer of a given design, nudging the parameters this way and that, adding a step here, removing one there, in a plodding, tinkering, way.

A machine does a useful computation for you only if you don't already know all the answers in advance!

A computer endlessly repeating a program loop becomes totally predictable, and its computing power drops to zero.

Some computations are like a trip to a known location on a distant shore; others resemble a mapless search for a lost island.

1943 — Colossus (vacuum tube) ... 1976 — Apple II (integrated circuit) ... 1976 — Cray-1 (integrated circuit)

Existence in the thoughts of an intelligent beholder is fundamentally no different than existence in a computer simulation, and we have already suggested that a mind can be satisfactorily encoded in a computer.

Just what it all really means is still a matter for fascinating speculation; the only consensus is that the truth is very weird.

A hypothetical computer able to explore all possible paths simultaneously (a mere mathematical abstraction known as a nondeterministic machine because it does not make up its mind at branchpoints but splits into two machines and goes both ways) could, in principle, solve the problem in polynomial time.

If, in one 'generation' time step, a machine can do either a certain amount of computation or reproduce itself once, the best strategy would be to reproduce like mad until there are as many machines as there are alternatives to examine.

Schrodinger considered absurd the theory's description of the unopened box as a mixed state superimposing a live and a dead cat.

The word 'astronomical' hardly begins to capture the number of distinct universes created every instant under this idea.

An attack would be met by the destruction of the offending universe.

Wire your computer's doomsday connection to a cranial explosive charge, for instance.

Imagine a physicist made of f stuff, for whom points in f are simply locations, not complicated functions of another space.

At the very center, time is stopped. The central point of F never changes from its 'average density of the whole sphere' value, and so is effectively frozen in time.

The first microsecond of the big bang could represent eons of subjective time in F.

The Thinking Computer: Mind inside Matter.

The 'worm' programs: early experience with a distributed computation.

Over several articles he had developed the concept of achieving immortality, and much else, by replacing a human nervous system, bit by bit, with a more durable artificial equivalent.

It contains one quarter of a million line segments and took ten hours to compute.

Boredom, 47, 63, 91, 114, 153, 179

Ghosts, 131-134, 185

Mind transferral, 115, 117; Mind/body problem, 4, 116; Postbiological world, 1, 5, 125, 141, 145.

Self replication, 135, 150, 165; Self reproduction, 102, 133-135, 151; Selfishness, 141-144; Semiconductor, 71-72, 102.

Moravec, by his own admission, is an intellectual joyrider, and riding his runaway trains of thought is an exhilarating experience.

Unleashed from the plodding pace of biological evolution, the children of our minds will be free to grow to confront immense and fundamental challenges in the larger universe.

When that happens, our DNA will find itself out of a job, having lost the evolutionary race to a new kind of competition.

A computation in progress—what we can reasonably call a computer's thought process—can be halted in midstep and transferred, as program and data read out of the machine's memory, into a physically different computer, there to resume as though nothing had happened.

The deliberate process we call reasoning is, I believe, the thinnest veneer of human thought, effective only because it is supported by this much older and much more powerful, though usually unconscious, sensorimotor knowledge.

Our intelligence, as a tool, should allow us to follow the path to intelligence, as a goal, in bigger strides than those originally taken by the awesomely patient, but blind, processes of Darwinian evolution.

The Hitachi machines climb stairs by rolling up to them on five wheels, raising the leading one to the height of the first stair, driving forward until the raised leg is securely over the step, lowering it slightly until the contact is firm, and then continuing with the next nearest leg.

In repeated cautious lurches, the Cart was to creep safely to its destination.

The robot still crossed the room correctly only about three times out of four.

A robot that spends up to an hour considering every simple move is clearly unacceptable, but a few seconds would be tolerable.

If a stairwell-detecting module concludes that hazard is near, it would take over control of the robot until the danger was past.

In these internal models of the world I see the beginnings of awareness in the minds of our machines—an awareness I believe will evolve into consciousness comparable with that of humans.

The fourth door, sadly, leads to the stairwell, and the poor robot, unequipped to travel on stairs, is in mortal danger.

The needs of the mobile way of life have conspired in all three instances to create an entity that has modes of operation for different circumstances and that changes quickly from mode to mode on the basis of uncertain and noisy data prone to misinterpretation.

Emergence—this appearance of novel properties in whole systems has often been invoked to explain such difficult biological realities as mind, consciousness, and even life itself.

There are some dangerous curves in this joyride to human equivalence, so hold on!

I rashly conclude that the whole brain's job might be done by a computer performing 10 trillion (10^13) calculations per second.

The second story seems more interesting and informative because its later statements are less likely—cats usually have fur and claws, but they rarely carry hats and guns.

These would be small enough to grab individual molecules and hold them, thermally wriggling, in place.

Instead of a rat's nest of wires, a program consisted of neat columns of numbers.

Each finger of the glove contains a grid of elements that create patterns of pressure and temperature on the finger of the wearer.

The operator has the subjective sensation of being in the robot's body.

Einstein, for instance, reported that he could often feel the meaning of his equations in his arms and his body as if they were solid objects.

The universe is one random event after another.

These new creations, looking quite unlike the machines we know, will explode into the universe, leaving us behind in a cloud of dust.

Ultimately your brain would die, and your mind would find itself entirely in the computer.

Old instincts are not automatically erased when the rules of life are suddenly rewritten.

Resurrecting one small planet should be child's play long before our civilization has colonized even its first galaxy.

Today's computer systems are like bodies with skins but no immune systems, or like walled cities without police.

A parasite that has the key to one lock finds that the next one is subtly different and thus harder to open.

Each Martian gives the other a broken unit and leaves the meeting gloating over having made a shrewd deal. But as night falls, both Martians find themselves in the dark.

In time the entire universe will become a homogeneous stew with no concentrations of matter or energy to form or power any kind of machinery, intelligent or otherwise.

In a final step a "breath of life" signal is transmitted to the painting that converts its quiescent states to active ones.

A single glider advancing across the screen would cause a display where gliders would appear and disappear in odd places almost at random, sometimes several in view, sometimes none.

Darwinian evolution is a relentless optimizer of a given design, nudging the parameters this way and that, adding a step here, removing one there, in a plodding, tinkering, way.

Some computations are like a trip to a known location on a distant shore; others resemble a mapless search for a lost island.

1943 — Colossus (vacuum tube) ... 1976 — Apple II (integrated circuit) ... 1976 — Cray-1 (integrated circuit)

Existence in the thoughts of an intelligent beholder is fundamentally no different than existence in a computer simulation, and we have already suggested that a mind can be satisfactorily encoded in a computer.

Just what it all really means is still a matter for fascinating speculation; the only consensus is that the truth is very weird.

A hypothetical computer able to explore all possible paths simultaneously (a mere mathematical abstraction known as a nondeterministic machine because it does not make up its mind at branchpoints but splits into two machines and goes both ways) could, in principle, solve the problem in polynomial time.

If, in one 'generation' time step, a machine can do either a certain amount of computation or reproduce itself once, the best strategy would be to reproduce like mad until there are as many machines as there are alternatives to examine.

Schrodinger considered absurd the theory's description of the unopened box as a mixed state superimposing a live and a dead cat.

The word 'astronomical' hardly begins to capture the number of distinct universes created every instant under this idea.

Over several articles he had developed the concept of achieving immortality, and much else, by replacing a human nervous system, bit by bit, with a more durable artificial equivalent.

Mind transferral, 115, 117; Mind/body problem, 4, 116; Postbiological world, 1, 5, 125, 141, 145.

Self replication, 135, 150, 165; Self reproduction, 102, 133-135, 151; Selfishness, 141-144; Semiconductor, 71-72, 102.