Hubris Spells Doom for Grandmaster

Sophisticated AI chess programs are continuing to beat the world’s greatest human players, and the humiliated Grandmasters are continuing to gripe & complain. First, Deep Blue defeated world champion Gary Kasparov in 1997, and just five months ago the current champ was beaten in a one-move checkmate by a new AI program.

"I rechecked this variation many times and analyzed quite far ahead," Kramnik protested. "It seemed to me I was winning."

Indeed. Chess had been long regarded as a game requiring much creativity & ingenuity to excel, something that machines would never dominate. But as Deep Blue and others have shown us, our unabashed confidence was no match for the brute force mapping of all possible outcomes. Eventually, human players adapted their game play to try to throw off the computer programs, but the AI have adapted as well, going so far as to invention previously unknown variations, to maintain their chess supremacy.

How long until other domains previously described as bastions of creativity & consciousness give way to algorithms & AI? Many have spoken about the “God of the Gaps” concept, but what about a Consciousness of the Gaps?

An Artificial Conscience for Artificial Warriors

The Economist has more on the U.S. military's attempt to build an ethical decision-making framework for autonomous weapon systems. This particular initiative seeks to map out all possible actions & outcomes in order to select the most appropriate or "ethical" behavior. It sounds a bit like Deep Blue's brute force calculation of all possible moves & consequences, however, the decision space of a battlefield is slightly more complex than a chessboard...to say the least.

From Deep Blue to Deep Thoughts

This week I began exchanging emails with an author who is writing a series of novels based on humanity's march towards the future.

One of the major events in the story is the emergence of a conscious AI. This process is presented from the point of view of the newly conscious entity, an approach that I find to be a wonderfully intriguing and novel concept. The process of becoming self-aware from the first-person perspective is certainly uncharted waters... even we humans cannot recall how or when we first became conscious as small infants. I have often tried to imagine what subjective experience would be like for a non-human intellect, both lower orders of intelligence (animal) and higher, more developed orders. I'm sure it must be very challenging to try to capture and describe that experience using human language and concepts. The small sample included in his most recent email has made me even more eager to read the story when it is completed.

He suggests that the key to subjective experience is likely the realization that the individual is separate and distinct from the rest of the environment, and I would be inclined to agree. He referenced a pdf slideshow by Owen Holland titled Machine Consciousness and Creativity. The central theme is that it is not the 'self,' but rather the 'internal model' of the self that is the conscious entity. If this is truly the case, it would fit well with the evolutionary development of consciousness (in that the capacity to accurately model future events would provide a strategic advantage in the 'survivial of the fittest' arms race), as well as cause a shift or refocus in AI research. It would seem that a conscious mind is more of a 'universal prediction engine' as opposed to a 'universal reaction engine.' So we might say that it would be impossible for a conscious entity to know what to do in every situation (or to program a machine for every possible circumstance), so instead we have developed the ability to predict possible outcomes and act accordingly. Interestingly, it is the ability to predict outcomes and formulate courses of action which is something IBM's Deep Blue has shown a remarkable aptitude for. Not that I am suggesting that a chess program is conscious, but if a machine was developed that was able to similarly model a much broader sample of reality, we might be much closer to accomplishing that goal.