Nick Graziade
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HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND START LOVING ARITIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Perhaps it was my infatuation with the story of Lawrence of Arabia that inspired my love of Middle Eastern music. Maybe it was simply the colorful prospects of escaping the West that drew me in. Regardless of the origin, I adore the music of Middle East and always shall. Yet it is not an easy task to walk into any retail store and find a wide selection of artists adept in this foreign art. However, little did I realize that a wealth of information lay a mouse-click away.
YouTube.com has become a ubiquitous phenomenon in the world of internet browsers. So powerful was the notion of a free, democratic video streaming network that Google was willing to pay $1.6 billion to attain this asset. But more importantly than that, YouTube has offered a new phase to what the internet has evolved into: a user-friendly tool to share information of any kind. This is free speech at a peak. And to my delight, YouTube is laden with Middle Eastern music.
It is important to note that Middle Eastern music is not my sole passion in the aural realm. Indeed, I fancy myself a jack-of-all-trades with regards to music. In descending order of fluency, I play the bass, the accordion, and the cumbus (pronounced “joom-bush”). These instruments generally have nothing to do with each other, but offer insights into my passion. As I assembled countless video playlists of Middle Eastern performers, I found a strange pattern emerging. YouTube will offer recommendations after each video is played. These recommendations tend to point towards videos of a similar style, offering users an opportunity to explore new videos and “expand their horizons” per se. Yet I was puzzled when YouTube suggested an accordion video of “La Valse d’Amelie,” a French tune, immediately after I had viewed a cumbus performance of the Arabic folk song “Lamma Bada Yatathanna.” I was even more surprised to see that a concert video of bassist Bill Laswell was also listed as a suggestion.
It took only a few moments for me to realize that these were all videos I had viewed in succession many days earlier during one of my more eclectic sampling of music. Each reflected an instrument I played in some way, so I was at first quite surprised that the computer was apparently reading my mind. But the reasoning was much simpler than that: I had been teaching the machine to make these connections. Each time I jumped from one video to the next, the YouTube mainframe recognized the steps and added my personal tastes to its vast database. For YouTube and many other similar websites, each time we enter data into the system, we add a new level of complexity to the web of information. Like the formation of neural pathways, the machines that we take for granted are learning from our every move.
The indisputable fact that machines are now creating networks begs the question of artificial intelligence. Can machines be viewed with the same weight as living organisms? Or, do machines remain tools of human design, never crossing into the realm of being? Though we have no clear answers to these questions, how we perceive the machine has the potential to redefine ethics as we now understand it.
The idea of artificial intelligence is nothing new. While machines and automatons date back ancient legend (such as the famed golem of Jewish folklore), the modern concept of artificial intelligence would take a war and a dramatic apostasy of human belief to be forged. In the aftermath of World War I, society took a radical swing. Whereas once humankind was certain of the existence of God, suddenly we were unsure about the divine. Where kings once ruled mighty empires there emerged new democracies where the voice of all was recognized. Nations that had ceased to exist for hundreds of years were suddenly redrawn on the map. It was a time ripe for change.
One of the most substantial contributions of the post-WWI era was that of modern physics. Brilliant thinkers such as Max Planck and Albert Einstein entered into the forefront of science and brought a new hope to follow the great misery that humanity endured. Owing much to this new advent of science was the beginning of an era of science-fiction. In 1920, Czech writer Karel Čapek christened this new era with a word that in the span of but a few decades would make its mark on humanity. That word is “Robot.”
Of course, robots as we know them come in all manners of being. They range from benevolent helpers (Forbidden Planet’s Robbie the Robot) to machines of destruction and enslavement (the robots of The Matrix) to quirky and amusing (Star Wars’ R2-D2 and C-3PO) to deep ethical reflections of ourselves (Star Trek’s Lt. Commander Data). These are all currently restricted to the realm of science fiction, but as the progression of technology has shown us, we have the potential to create beings with a similar character.
In his book Digital Soul, 1physicist Thomas M. Georges reflects on the importance of drafting an ethical code to reflect the changing environment. He writes that within the massive effort to craft intelligent machines, only a small portion of our work is dedicated to the ethical implications of creating these new intelligences. Georges proposes four levels of ethical problems regarding so-called “Intelligent Machines.” These are:
Georges’s ethical overlay is ultimately optimistic for the future of machines. But he readily identifies the ethical problems and questions that emerge. Nonetheless, he believes that so long as we establish these morals before hand, we can do more good than harm. The government of South Korea seems to agree with Georges. One of the most technically adept societies on earth, the South Korean Ministry of Commerce, Industry, and Energy are sponsoring the creation of a new set of ethics regarding human-robotic relations. Literally, they wish to forge the path that sci-fi robots like C-3PO were designed for: “ human-cyborg relations.” Futurists in South Korea predict that by 2015 or 2020, robots will be commonplace in the domestic household. Eventually, robots like C-3PO or the benevolent android-scientist Data may even enter into the realm of actuality.
Of course, not everyone is optimistic. For every Mr. Data we create, there is the possibility to create his “evil twin” Lore. For, while Data is rational, moral, gentle, and kind, Lore is twisted, demonic, and cruel. Based after the blockbuster movie, The Matrix, The Animatrix displays a cartoon world in which the monstrous machines of the Matrix have taken hold of the earth. But it goes one step further. It shows how machines eventually took control. To quote the short film of The Animatrix, “Second Renaissance: Part I,”
“In the beginning there was Man, and for a time it was good. But humanity’s so-called civil societies soon fell victim vanity and corruption. Then man made the machine in his own likeness. Thus did man become the object of his demise…”
In 1942, Isaac Asimov drafted his famous “Laws of Robotics.” These are aimed to help create robots that would keep from endangering humans. These rules, which are being considered by the South Korean government, are paramount in keeping robots safe and user-friendly. These rules are:
These guidelines offer a promising future for the human-robot relations. It grants the robot rights afforded to any other human, but also recognizes the robot’s initial function as a tool. This may seem like slavery, and indeed Star Trek: the Next Generation condemned the use of sentient robots as slaves, but it nevertheless prevents the horrors of a “robot apocalypse” that we all fear.
All in all, I am hopeful that as machines grow and learn, they too will develop the complex code ethics we humans have come to take for granted at times. The “robot apocalypse” of the Matrix seems impossible to me, for if we create these machines in our own image, they will follow the intrinsic good that humanity has to offer.
1Thomas M. Georges, Digital Soul: Intelligent Machines and Human Values (Westview Press: 2003) 135
2Ibid. 136-145