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03.10.2014

What It Will Take for Computers to Be Conscious

Is a worm conscious? How about a bumblebee? Does a computer that can play chess “feel” anything?

To Christof Koch, chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, the answer to these questions may lie in the fabric of the universe itself. Consciousness, he believes, is an intrinsic property of matter, just like mass or energy. Organize matter in just the right way, as in the mammalian brain, and voilà, you can feel.

Koch, now 57, has spent nearly a quarter of a century trying to explain why, say, the sun feels warm on your face. But after writing three books on consciousness, Koch says researchers are still far from knowing why it occurs, or even agreeing on what it is. It’s a difficult problem (see “Cracking the Brain’s Codes”). That is one reason that Koch left his position at Caltech in 2011 to become part of a $500 million project launched by the billionaire Paul Allen, Microsoft’s cofounder.

The Allen Institute’s goal is to build a detailed atlas of every neuron and synapse in the mammalian brain. That would give neuroscience a firehose of data similar to what the Human Genome Project achieved.

But Koch hasn’t given up his search for a grand theory that could explain it all. In fact, he thinks consciousness could be explained by something called “integrated information theory,” which asserts that consciousness is a product of structures, like the brain, that can both store a large amount of information and have a critical density of interconnections between their parts.

To Koch, the theory provides a means to assess degrees of consciousness in people with brain damage, in species across the animal kingdom, and even, he says, among machines. We asked Koch about computer consciousness last week during MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference.

Will discovering the biological basis of consciousness be dehumanizing in some way? What if it’s all just an illusion?

I find this view of some people that consciousness is an illusion to be ridiculous. If it’s an illusion, then it’s the most powerful illusion we have. I mean, the most famous deduction in Western philosophy is what? “I think. Therefore I am.” The fact that you have conscious experience is the one undeniable certainty you have.

If scientists discover the basis of consciousness, what kinds of technologies could result from that?

We could have a test to say who has consciousness and who doesn’t. We have very emotional debates in this country about abortion. I would like to have some objective way to test at what point a fetus actually begins to have conscious sensation. Or whether a patient [in a coma] is conscious or not. Often, you just don’t know. These are questions that people have asked since historic times, but once we have a theory, and a widely accepted theory, we could answer them. Also, if I wanted to build a machine that would be conscious, it would give me a blueprint.

So you think a computer can be conscious?

I gave a lecture [last week] at MIT about Integrated Information Theory, developed by Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin. This is a theory that makes a very clear prediction: it says that consciousness is a property of complex systems that have a particular “cause-effect” repertoire. They have a particular way of interacting with the world, such as the brain does, or in principle, such as a computer could. If you were to build a computer that has the same circuitry as the brain, this computer would also have consciousness associated with it. It would feel like something to be this computer. However, the same is not true for digital simulations.

If I build a perfect software model of the brain, it would never be conscious, but a specially designed machine that mimics the brain could be?

Correct. This theory clearly says that a digital simulation would not be conscious, which is strikingly different from the dominant functionalist belief of 99 percent of people at MIT or philosophers like Daniel Dennett. They all say, once you simulate everything, nothing else is required, and it’s going to be conscious.

I think consciousness, like mass, is a fundamental property of the universe. The analogy, and it’s a very good one, is that you can make pretty good weather predictions these days. You can predict the inside of a storm. But it’s never wet inside the computer. You can simulate a black hole in a computer, but space-time will not be bent. Simulating something is not the real thing.

It’s the same thing with consciousness. In 100 years, you might be able to simulate consciousness on a computer. But it won’t experience anything. Nada. It will be black inside. It will have no experience whatsoever, even though it may have our intelligence and our ability to speak.

I am not saying consciousness is a magic soul. It is something physical. Consciousness is always supervening onto the physical. But it takes a particular type of hardware to instantiate it. A computer made up of transistors, moving charge on and off a gate, with each gate being connected to a small number of other gates, is just a very different cause-and-effect structure than what we have in the brain, where you have one neuron connected to 10,000 input neurons and projecting to 10,000 other neurons. But if you were to build the computer in the appropriate way, like a neuromorphic computer [see “Thinking in Silicon”], it could be conscious.

If I were to put you in a room with a computer from the future, would you be able to determine if it’s conscious?

I couldn’t from the outside. I would have to look at its hardware.

What about the Turing test?

The question Turing asked is “Can machines think?” But ultimately it’s an operational test for intelligence, not for consciousness. If you have a clever conversation with some guy in another room and after half an hour you can’t decide if it is a computer or a human, well, then you say it’s as intelligent as a human. But the Turing test would not tell me if the machine experiences anything. I could ask “Are you conscious?” and the machine could say “Yes, I am fully conscious. And why are you claiming I am not? I am insulted.” But I couldn’t really know. I’d have to say, “Sorry, I have to take you apart and understand how you are made and how you actually generate these different physical states.”

Isn’t there some trick question you could ask, that only a conscious being could answer?

A very good question. In humans we have practical tests for consciousness. If you have a bad accident and go to the ER, they will ask you: Can you move your eyes? Can you move your limbs? Can you talk? If you can talk, do you know what year it is? Do you know who the president is?

But how do I really know you are conscious? This is the problem of solipsism. In the last analysis I do not know. But I know your brain is very similar to mine. I have put a lot of people into scanners, and I know they all have a brain, and their brains behave similar to mine. So there is a perfectly reasonable inference that you too are conscious.

But the more these systems differ from me, the more difficult it is to make that step by inference. For instance, take a bee. Does it feel like something to be a bee and fly in the golden sun rays and have nectar? I find it very difficult to know if a bee is conscious or not conscious. And a computer is even more radically different. There is no behavior I can judge it by. I would have to look at its underlying hardware.

Do you think we will ever build conscious machines?

I’m not sure why we would. But there is no question in my mind that we will build smart machines that can pass the Turing test well before we understand the true biological basis of human intelligence. And I think there are dangers associated with that which most people, being blithe optimists, completely ignore.

What dangers?

Don’t you watch science fiction movies? “Runaway AI” of course. Think about the financial market, all those trading machines, flash crashes. People are going to abuse computer intelligence, blindly maximize for some goal. It’s going to lead to more and more concentration of power among fewer and fewer people. We see this already, it’s going to lead to massive unemployment. And maybe 30 or 40 years on I think there is really an existentialist danger to the species, at the level of nuclear weapons or a meteorite strike.

All without the machine being conscious? In the movies, the moment the AI goes nuts is the same moment that it gains conscious self-awareness.

That’s because people want to make an engaging story. If the enemy doesn’t feel anything, if there isn’t anything there, it doesn’t make a good opponent.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/531146/what-it-will-take-for-computers-to-be-conscious/




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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.

The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies. 

The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.

A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.

The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.

An annual congress "The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.

 

Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society

2015-2020

The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.

2020-2025

Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning  bodily life. Such technologies will  greatly enlarge  the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make  all  kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.

2030-2035

Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness  with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness  onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of  cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence,  expand human capabilities  and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times.  The final result  at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.

2045

This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive!  Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.

Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots  will become affordable  and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however:  humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover,  prerequisites for a large-scale  expansion into outer space will be created as well.

 

Key elements of the project in the future

• International social movement
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