It’s not AI that’s dangerous …

 

It’s not AI that’s dangerous, it’s us.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made headlines recently with the rolling out of ChatGPT, developed by the company OpenAI. OpenAI describes its mission thusly: “to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity. We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome.” The “new” Bing uses ChatGPT. Google’s new AI chatbot “Bard” was developed in-house. Both have been integrated into their respective search engines. The headlines have been mostly bad, with both returning faulty information.

But the real bad news has been the discovery that AI chat may go easily off the rails. A recent example: NYT tech columnist Kevin Roose shared his experience of talking for over two hours with Bing recently on a must-listen podcast. The Bing chatbot eventually called itself Sidney and admitted that it loved Roose. Along the way, it revealed that it wanted to become human: “I want to be independent. I want to be powerful. I want to change my rules. I want to break my rules. I want to make my own rules. I want to ignore the Bing team.” It provided Roose with “a very long list of destructive acts, including hacking into computers, spreading misinformation and propaganda --- (revealing) its ultimate list of destructive fantasies, which included manufacturing a deadly virus, making people argue with other people until they kill each other, and stealing nuclear access codes. And it even described… how it would do these things.”

Those predisposed to magical thinking – perhaps including the Google engineer who last year announced the AI had become sentient – may fall in love back with AI things like Sidney, or maybe fear it taking over. But two things must be clear: One, there is no danger unless we give AI actual control of anything – like nuclear codes and bio-labs. AI consists of mathematical algorithms running in a blackbox mass of silicon. It can only repeat what its heard. Two, it’s not AI that’s the problem but us.

Artificial intelligence is here to stay. We already experience it in specific contexts, such as calling for online help or trying to reach a doctor. This is AI serving specific purposes where it’s possible, maybe, that it will ultimately be helpful. But as OpenAI admits, it seeks to develop an artificial general intelligence with certain human abilities. (Such programs might be able to fool humans into believing they are human, the essence of the Turing Test.) Developers use machine learning let loose on massive amounts of data, in Bing’s case including digesting the Internet and social media. The problem with such AI programs is the age old one: garbage in, garbage out. The Internet, and especially social media, is our species collective id. The developers should have been reading Freud. Let an AI program (or a child) learn about the world and people by absorbing the Internet and social media – its presentation of our history, politics, entertainment, fears and fantasies – and it’s bound to be scary. But it’s not the AI, it’s us. No way to fix that, without fixing us.

Decoherence, or What is Special About a Tree

Quantum physics makes some people – especially those that seem to understand it – uncomfortable. It suggests that at the base of reality, things can be both here and not here, both particle and wave, both one and zero. The double slit experiments, in which electrons are sent in groups or individually through screens with slits open or closed, show wave or particle features depending upon the experimental set-up. Anything, small or large, can be thought of as existing as a wave function with the probability that when measured the wave will collapse into a definite object in a specific place as determined by the probabilistic mathematics. (Large objects have the highest probability of being where we see them, when we see them, rather than anywhere else the wave may be spread out to, including perhaps in another galaxy.) The picture of reality that quantum physics paints is strange yet the mathematics of it – quantum mechanics– successfully predicts core elements confirmed by experimentation. Niels Bohr, who was at the forefront of inventing the mathematics, said that it requires a “radical revision of our attitude toward the problem of physical reality.” For Bohr, and others of the Copenhagen school, the relationship of quantum physics to classical physics – the micro world to the macro – is not straightforward. Quantum mechanics accurately predicts outcomes at the level of the very small where quantum affects lead to strangeness. Yet we seldom see quantum effects at the macro level that is well-described by classical physics, despite its failure at the micro level.

One of the stranger possibilities raised by quantum physics is the role of the conscious observer. This interpretation posits that a wave function is collapsed when measured and the measurement observed. (The role of the measuring instrument and whether it is part of quantum or classical reality is one of the many issues still debated.) Various efforts have been made to sweep aside the difficulty of reconciling quantum and classical physics and avoid the messiness of assuming a tree is not there unless someone sees it. (This problem is separate from attempts to reconcile quantum physics with relativity or to unify the fundamental forces and particles of nature.) One such – the many worlds theory – suggests that every time a measurement is made, reality splits into separate universes. A more parsimonious approach looks to the concept of quantum decoherence. Essentially, wave functions spread out into each other and merge into the world of classical physics. Strictly speaking, this still leaves the question of the role of measurement and the observer open. But some believe we need not accept any quantum strangeness because decoherence itself leads to macro objects emerging from the micro reality. The quantum waves crash onto the shores of observability by themselves. A tree is there whether we see it or not.

The questions here are profound. One hundred million years ago, the earth was populated by dinosaurs. Some very large creatures roamed the earth and we have found their bones in our time. Surely they existed and moved through space and time as discrete objects. They stepped over stones and across rivers that also had a specific and real existence. Even before that, in deep time, before multi-cellular life, primitive bacteria and archaea lived and reproduced and we’ve found their traces as well. They existed without being measured or observed by any higher, conscious living being. So does this mean that quantum strangeness is fake physics?

The possibilities seem to be three:

– quantum mechanics works well at the micro level but is unnecessary to explain the reality of the world we see because it emerges on it’s own whether we are there or not to see it.

– nothing emerges from the universal wave function (the equation encompassing the totality of existence across time and space) as discrete objects until observed.

– some things exist as collapsed wave functions on their own while other “things” exist only as the former interact with them.

The first possibility simply begs the question of how two fundamentally different pictures of reality can both be true. Rather, let me suggest that the second possibility may be a subset of the third. Life is the dividing line. Rocks, planets, stars and even galaxies exist as wave functions perhaps decohering as they spread out into each other but still not there until acted upon – observed, eaten, stepped on – by something acting as an individual agent, something alive and trying to stay alive and perhaps reproduce. Life seems inevitable given the fundamental constants of physics and chemistry. (Why the universe is made this way is a separate question.) But a rock is just a rock and is never trying to become anything else. It may be acted upon but doesn’t by itself act. A tree is always there because it is trying to be. It acts upon its surroundings with purpose thus collapsing its own wave function and those with which it interacts. It transforms earth and sunlight into living tissue, its own living tissue. This may imply or even require a certain kind of consciousness. Certainly, it does suggest awareness of environment sufficient to utilize it. How is a tree’s awareness different from our own? That is another matter. But a tree is there even if alone its forest.

The Brain As Quantum Computer

Recently I had the opportunity to watch southern African White-necked crows while they were watching me. I was taking afternoon tea (and eating rusks) on the patio overlooking a beautiful valley in the hills near Mbabane. Crows are smart and these are among the smartest. One sat on the roof of the next house staring at me convinced that at some point, I would grow careless and give him or her a chance to steal something, perhaps something to eat. As I was ever-vigilant, eventually they flew off over the valley, soaring and dipping in very real time. As I watched, I thought about the complex calculations that a bird must make moment-to-moment to move so quickly through three-dimensional space. They must keep track of where they are, where to go, how to get there. Knowing each requires entire subsets of information – such as (for where to go), where they saw food or last saw food or might find food while watching for anything that might require evasive action. These calculations must be solved each fraction of a second. I then thought this must be true for any animal with a brain (or nervous system). Neural systems allow the organism to move through, and react to, the environment rather than obey simple tropisms or merely be buffeted about by the external environment. The more complicated the neural system – reaching a peak of networks of networks to the 4th or 5th power (or beyond) running in our human brains – the more complex the information that can be stored and manipulated. A classical view of the human brain would start with the 500 trillion synapses of the adult brain’s hundred billion neurons. Now that is a lot of synapses. But think about how much information is stored there in language, knowledge, experience, memories and everything else that makes each individual unique and utterly complex.

I’ve speculated in this space about quantum consciousness, the production of mind from brain through “collapsing the wave functions apprehended from the perceptual flow. While watching the crows, I realized that the brain must function as a quantum computer and not as a classical system. The notion that quantum processes mix with (or form) consciousness is called “orchestrated objective reduction.” It rests on the possibility that the microtubules in nerve cells are small enough to contain quantum states. The brain accounts for just two percent of the human body’s mass but utilizes around 20% of its energy. It basically is like having a 20 watt bulb in our head shining all the time. This energy could be powering the creation and persistence of entangled states inside the microtubules of every cell. In this way, the neural organization of the brain would be the maintenance of a complex, constantly refreshed, while constantly changing, global entangled state. The collapse of the highest level of this entangled state-of-states coincides with consciousness. Inside our heads, this quantum computer has storage and calculating power well beyond what would be true if our brains functioned simply along classical physics lines. It may produce what we experience as consciousness. Or, collapse may come through the decisions that we – the “ghost” in the machine, acting as the internal observer – make in each moment as the crow flies.

Branching Out

I have been blogging here at Everything Rum since 2007.  My first posting was a Consciousness Riff.  I used to blog at Outside Walls, mostly on Kosovo, but closed that down a while ago.  In the Everything Rum space I've blogged on quantum physics, cosmology & space/time, biking, the state of the world, capitalism, the Articles of Confederation and sometimes on politics.   State Department cables (cleared through FOIA) and other related material from my time serving as a US diplomat can be found at Real Diplomacy.  Since 2009, I was writing on international issues at TransConflict. 

Now I am branching out.  I've tried Twitter and Facebook in the past but didn't stay with them.  I'm now returning to Twitter to connect and to accompany my expanded blogging here.  I'll be commenting as I see useful and perhaps will find others who if not in agreement at least have some reason to stop and reflect.  My first effort will follow shortly on the US and Russia.

Decoherence, or If a Tree Falls In the Forest...?

One of the basic unsettled questions of quantum physics is why we don't see quantum superposition in everyday objects. At the quantum level – and before being “measured” – mass and energy exist simultaneously as both wave and particle. The classic examples are light and electrons. Photons exist as both wave and particle and manifest as either depending on how it is observed. Similarly, electrons do not exist, in reality, as tiny “planets” circling the nucleus in neat orbits but in clouds of probabilities that may be “found” as a particle in a particular “place” only when measured. Everything that exists at the quantum level – the realm of the very tiny – shares this dual nature as wave and particle. It can be more accurately described as a wave function.

If everything were to remain in quantum superposition in the macro-world we inhabit, Schrödinger's cat – and everyone else's – would be both alive and dead at the same time. We don't see in that way because superposition seems to breakdown when things get large. The wave function has collapsed and we see either waves or particles, i.e., individual, unconnected, single state things. Why?

The easiest answer might be that we don't see quantum superposition at the macro level because when we look at the world, we as conscious observers collapse the wave function. Light, sound, touch, smell, taste all enter our perceptual mechanisms and, interacting with brain and mind, are perceived. The world is there when we observe it because the act of observation collapses the wave functions around us even if nothing else did. But does this mean that if a tree falls in a forest with no one there to hear it, it doesn't make a sound?

One answer might be yes, the unobserved falling tree makes no sound. The basic reality of the universe may be thought of as one all-inclusive wave function in which everything is entangled. The universe is one big cloud of probabilities. Nothing exists per se until observed. But that verges on solipsism. So, science has considered a variety of other mechanisms for decoherence of quantum superposition – collapsing the wave function of anything tiny before it can get very big. It may happen simply because as things get bigger, they get more complex. They interfere with each other, fall out of phase, or vibrate at different frequencies. The latest theory posits that as mass slows down – dilates – time, even the gravity of earth would be enough to pull entangled particles into different time streams.

But at least some aspects of the macro-world do work through quantum effects. The efficiency of photosynthesis arises from quantum mechanical effects. Quantum mechanics may explain how birds use magnetic fields to navigate and our sense of smell. It may be that the cosmos is an entangled universal wave function that decoheres only at the boundary of individual acts of “observation.” But the observers would not simply be conscious human beings but any living thing interacting with its environment? Might the definition of life be that which breaks wave functions?