Science and Technology

Last Thursday, February 27, 2020, my good friend Fred Skiff, chair of the physics department at the University of Iowa, and I discussed themes in my book BEING AS COMMUNION as they relate to the primacy of information for science. The two sponsors of the event were the campus ministries Ratio Christi (thank you James Klopfenstein) and Geneva (thank you Thomas Wolthuis).

Below is a lightly edited version of the conversation, which James Klopfenstein graciously gave me permission to post on YouTube:

The conversation examines why information is the most basic object of study in science and how Conservation of Information naturally leads to the conclusion that intelligence is the ultimate source of information.

Below is the flyer distributed for this event:

AI (artificial intelligence) poses a challenge to human work, threatening to usurp many human jobs in coming years. But a related question that’s too often ignored and needs to be addressed is whether this challenge will come from AI in fact being able to match and exceed human capabilities in the environments in which humans currently exercise those capabilities, or whether it will come from AI also manipulating our environments so that machines thrive where otherwise they could not.

AI never operates in a vaccuum. Rather, any instance of AI operates in an environment. We often think that AI will leave an environment untouched and simply supersede human capability as it operates in that environment. But what if the success of AI depends not so much on being able to rival human capabilities as in “changing the game” so that AI has an easier job of it. The mathematician George Polya used to quip that if you can’t solve a problem, find an easier problem and solve it. Might AI in the end not so much supersede humans as rather impoverish the environments in which humans find themselves so that machines can thrive at their expense?

To see what’s at stake with this line of concern over AI, consider the prospect of automated vehicles. Automated vehicles, we are told, are poised to take over all of human driving. Once the machine learning for the automation of driving matures just a bit more, we are assured that human drivers will be out of a job — the machines will drive so much better than us that it would in fact be unethical for humans to continue to drive. And, of course, as an unfortunate side effect, humans whose jobs depend on driving will all be put out of work (truck drivers, taxi drivers, etc.).

Now the actual progress of automated vehicles has not reflected this rosy picture (rosy if you’re an AI advocate, dismal if you’re out of a job). Recent fatalities with automated vehicles have undercut this picture to the public at large. But the deeper conceptual problem with the automation of driving is that there appear just too many contingencies on the road, contingencies that human drivers can handle without difficulty but for which machines require specialized training. [Read more…] about Virtual Railroads and West Virginia Back Roads: AI’s Temptation to Theft Over Honest Toil

The other day, almost simultaneously, two colleagues emailed me with the same request, though worded differently — namely, to ask for a good argument to show that AI is no match, and indeed can be no match (however far it is developed), for human intelligence.

Here’s how my colleagues posed their questions.

COLLEAGUE 1: I was listening to [a podcast] on fears of AI raised by Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, and Elon Musk. Apart from Goedel’s theorem, are there known information science barriers to AI being able to think like a human?

COLLEAGUE 2: What’s exactly wrong [with AI] philosophically? … Even to say “as machines become smarter” is simply wrong. We don’t have a scientific definition of intelligence itself… What, exactly, does that even mean? A simple calculator is a genius, because it multiplies large numbers effortlessly… What’s gone wrong with this most important modern debate?

Both these colleagues are skeptics of strong AI, the view that machines will catch up to and eventually exceed humans in intelligence. Moreover, given the current limitations of what AI has in fact accomplished (for instance, natural language processing and accurate translation between languages remain duds for AI), their skepticism has some justification. But the worry is what AI might accomplish given faster machines and more advanced programming — that given better hardware and software, machines will eventually surpass us.

What my colleagues and I would like (I’m also a skeptic of strong AI), then, is some good reason for thinking that however far AI is developed with advances in hardware and software, there will always remain a sharp discontinuity between machine and human intelligence, a discontinuity that cuts so deep and marks such a hard divide between the two that we can safely set aside the worry that machines will supplant us. [Read more…] about Artificial Intelligence’s Homunculus Problem: Why AI Is Unlikely Ever to Match Human Intelligence

Here’s a reprint of an article I published at TheBestSchools.org in April 2017 on the challenge of artificial intelligence to meaningful human work:

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In the last days of the Obama administration, on December 20, 2016, the White House published a white paper (no pun intended) titled “Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy.” Listed among the contributors were John Holdren, the President’s science advisor, as well as world-class experts in economics, technology, and domestic policy. This paper was a big deal.

Its upshot was that advances in artificial intelligence (especially machine learning) threaten to phase out as many as 50 percent of U.S. jobs over the next 20 years, and that this occurrence will so disrupt the economy that it will require a vigorous multi-pronged governmental response, ranging from improved education to increased social safety nets. MIT Technology Review as well as Wired picked up on this white paper and underscored its concerns. The title of the Wiredpiece captured the worry for the future: “The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet. It’s the End of the Middle Class.” (Skynet is, of course, the malevolent conscious artificial intelligence intent on enslaving and destroying humanity in the Terminator films.)

Threats to jobs from technology have been with us since the Industrial Revolution. But in reading the White House paper, one gets the sense “this time is different.” An extended box on page 20 titled “The End of Work?” (the question mark is especially troubling) raises the possibility of AI not just phasing out some jobs but instead phasing out all human work period, rendering human work passé because, if the promise of AI comes true, everything that we can do machines will eventually do better. But even leaving aside such a grand dystopian vision (which these days is promoted with a smile by singularity and transhumanist enthusiasts), the paper argues convincingly that many jobs as we know them now won’t be around much longer. The case study it presents about AVs (automated vehicles) and the human drivers soon to be displaced is hard to discount.  [Read more…] about The Future of Meaningful Work