EMERGENT HYBRID HUMAN/MACHINE CHIMERAS

MARIA SPIROPULU

Experimental particle physicist, Caltech

广告：个人专属 VPN，独立 IP，无限流量，多机房切换，还可以屏蔽广告和恶意软件，每月最低仅 5 美元

So-called artificial intelligence as an emulation of human intelligence is beginning to emerge, based on technology advances and the study of human complexity. The former includes high-performance computing systems tooled with intelligent, agile software—machine learning, deep learning, and the like—and the connection of many such systems in self-organized, autonomous, optimized ways. The latter entails neuroscience, genomics, and new cross-disciplinary fields.

A thinking machine is not, and cannot be, a copy of a human; this is because we cannot yet claim to know the workings of the human brain. But considered as a species developed as the product of advanced human logic, science, and technology, the thinking machine will no doubt surpass the human capacity in many of its functions. With its huge memory and data storage, it will also be able to process all of our knowledge. Tooled impeccably with its data-driven discovery methodologies it will detect unusual patterns in data and learn from them. It will compile everything, surely—but to what end? Human intelligence (hard to define, really) is based on knowledge that produces intuition, hunches, passion—and dares, when it comes down to survival, to conquer new ground and attack the unknown. An almost poetic quest for advancement, innovation, and creativity emerges from the thinking, feeling, dreaming, daring, indomitable, fearless, highly sociable, interacting, independent, and proud human being. Can we code the complex superposition of these attributes to give the thinking machine a fair head start on its evolution from where we stand today? Our own has by now produced an organic, complex intelligence.

There’s a lot of technopanic recently regarding machines that think, coming from thoughtful and otherwise fearless human beings. I, for one, am more concerned about humans who are brainwashed, or stop thinking, than about smart thinking machines taking over—mainly because “machine thinking” cannot fully substitute for the full range of human thinking and operation. Even assuming the Cylon sci-fi case—immortal knowledge and consciousness, a sensory system, a powerful memory—the problem remains: Human intelligence (brain, senses, emotions) is complex intelligence. It masters the complex world with tools that connect disparate facts, and it does so efficiently by dropping most information! Even as we prepare machine-learning algorithms and try mimicking the brain with deep neural networks in all scientific domains, we remain puzzled by the mode of connected knowledge, intuition, imagination, and organic reasoning tools the human mind possesses. This is difficult, perhaps impossible, to replicate in a machine. Infinite, unconnected clusters of knowledge will remain sadly useless and dumb. When a machine can remember a fact on its own initiative, spontaneous and untriggered; when it produces and uses an idea not because that idea was in the algorithm of the human who did the programming but because it connects to other facts and ideas beyond the machine’s training samples or utility function—then I’ll start hoping we can build a totally new branch of artificial species, self-sustainable and endowed with independent thinking.

Meanwhile I foresee the emergence of hybrid human/machine chimeras: human-born beings augmented with new machine abilities that enhance all or most of their human capacities, pleasures, and psychological needs—and to the point where thinking might be rendered irrelevant and, strictly speaking, unnecessary, providing ordinary thinking humans with a better set of the servants they have been looking for in machines.