- Hanson, Robin.
The Age of Em.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
ISBN 978-0-19-875462-6.
-
Many books, both fiction and nonfiction, have been devoted to the
prospects for and consequences of the advent of artificial
intelligence: machines with a general cognitive capacity which equals
or exceeds that of humans. While machines have already surpassed the
abilities of the best humans in certain narrow domains (for example,
playing games such as chess or go), you can't take a chess playing
machine and expect it to be even marginally competent at a task as
different as driving a car or writing a short summary of a newspaper
story—things most humans can do with a little experience. A
machine with “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) would
be as adaptable as humans, and able with practice to master a wide
variety of skills.
The usual scenario is that continued exponential progress in computing
power and storage capacity, combined with better understanding of how
the brain solves problems, will eventually reach a cross-over point
where artificial intelligence matches human capability. But since
electronic circuitry runs so much faster than the chemical signalling
of the brain, even the first artificial intelligences will be able to
work much faster than people, and, applying their talents to improving
their own design at a rate much faster than human engineers can
work, will result in an “intelligence explosion”, where
the capability of machine intelligence runs away and rapidly approaches
the physical limits of computation, far surpassing human cognition.
Whether the thinking of these super-minds will be any more comprehensible
to humans than quantum field theory is to a goldfish and whether humans
will continue to have a place in this new world and, if so, what it
may be, has been the point of departure for much speculation.
In the present book,
Robin Hanson,
a professor of economics at George Mason University,
explores a very different scenario.
What if the problem of artificial intelligence (figuring out how to
design software with capabilities comparable to the human brain)
proves to be much more difficult than many researchers assume,
but that we continue to experience exponential growth in computing
and our ability to map and understand the fine-scale structure of
the brain, both in animals and eventually humans? Then some time in
the next hundred years (and perhaps as soon as 2050), we may have the
ability to emulate the low-level operation of the brain with
an electronic computing substrate. Note that we need not have any idea
how the brain actually does what it does in order to do this: all we
need to do is understand the components (neurons, synapses,
neurotransmitters, etc.) and how they're connected together, then
build a faithful emulation of them on another substrate. This
emulation, presented with the same inputs (for example, the pulse
trains which encode visual information from the eyes and sound
from the ears), should produce the same outputs (pulse trains which
activate muscles, or internal changes within the brain which encode
memories).
Building an emulation of a brain is much like reverse-engineering an
electronic device. It's often unnecessary to know how the device
actually works as long as you can identify all of the components,
their values, and how they're interconnected. If you re-create that
structure, even though it may not look anything like the original
or use identical parts, it will still work the same as the prototype.
In the case of brain emulation, we're still not certain at what level
the emulation must operate nor how faithful it must be to the
original. This is something we can expect to learn
as more and more detailed emulations of parts of the brain are
built. The
Blue Brain Project
set out in 2005 to emulate one
neocortical
column
of the rat brain. This goal has now been achieved, and work is
progressing both toward more faithful simulation and expanding the
emulation to larger portions of the brain. For a sense of scale,
the human
neocortex consists
of about one million cortical columns.
In this work, the author assumes that emulation of the human brain
will eventually be achieved, then uses standard theories from the
physical sciences, economics, and social sciences to explore the
consequences and characteristics of the era in which emulations will
become common. He calls an emulation an “em”, and the
age in which they are the dominant form of sentient life on Earth
the “age of em”. He describes this future as
“troublingly strange”. Let's explore it.
As a starting point, assume that when emulation becomes possible, we
will not be able to change or enhance the operation of the emulated
brains in any way. This means that ems will have the same memory
capacity, propensity to forget things, emotions, enthusiasms,
psychological quirks and pathologies, and all of the idiosyncrasies of
the individual human brains upon which they are based. They will not
be the cold, purely logical, and all-knowing minds which science
fiction often portrays artificial intelligences to be. Instead, if you
know Bob well, and an emulation is made of his brain, immediately
after the emulation is started, you won't be able to distinguish Bob
from Em-Bob in a conversation. As the em continues to run and has its
own unique experiences, it will diverge from Bob based upon them, but,
we can expect much of its Bob-ness to remain.
But simply by being emulations, ems will inhabit a very different
world than humans, and can be expected to develop their own unique
society which differs from that of humans at least as much as the
behaviour of humans who inhabit an industrial society differs from
hunter-gatherer bands of the Paleolithic. One key aspect of
emulations is that they can be checkpointed, backed up, and copied
without errors. This is something which does not exist in biology,
but with which computer users are familiar. Suppose an em is about to
undertake something risky, which might destroy the hardware running
the emulation. It can simply make a backup, store it in a safe place,
and if disaster ensues, arrange to have to the backup restored onto
new hardware, picking up right where it left off at the time of the
backup (but, of course, knowing from others what happened to its
earlier instantiation and acting accordingly). Philosophers will fret
over whether the restored em has the same identity as the one which
was destroyed and whether it has continuity of consciousness. To
this, I say, let them fret; they're always fretting about something.
As an engineer, I don't spend time worrying about things I can't
define, no less observe, such as “consciousness”,
“identity”, or “the soul”. If I did, I'd
worry about whether those things were lost when undergoing general
anaesthesia. Have the wisdom teeth out, wake up, and get on with your
life.
If you have a backup, there's no need to wait until the em from which
it was made is destroyed to launch it. It can be instantiated on
different hardware at any time, and now you have two ems, whose life
experiences were identical up to the time the backup was made, running
simultaneously. This process can be repeated as many times as you
wish, at a cost of only the processing and storage charges to run the
new ems. It will thus be common to capture backups of exceptionally
talented ems at the height of their intellectual and creative powers
so that as many can be created as the market demands their
services. These new instances will require no training, but be able
to undertake new projects within their area of knowledge at the moment
they're launched. Since ems which start out as copies of a common
prototype will be similar, they are likely to understand one another
to an extent even human identical twins do not, and form clans of
those sharing an ancestor. These clans will be composed of subclans
sharing an ancestor which was a member of the clan, but which diverged
from the original prototype before the subclan parent backup was
created.
Because electronic circuits run so much faster than the chemistry of
the brain, ems will have the capability to run over a wide range of
speeds and probably will be able to vary their speed at will. The
faster an em runs, the more it will have to pay for the processing
hardware, electrical power, and cooling resources it requires. The
author introduces a terminology for speed where an em is assumed to
run around the same speed as a human, a kilo-em a thousand times
faster, and a mega-em a million times faster. Ems can also run
slower: a milli-em runs 1000 times slower than a human and a micro-em
at one millionth the speed. This will produce a variation in
subjective time which is entirely novel to the human experience. A
kilo-em will experience a century of subjective time in about a month
of objective time. A mega-em experiences a century of life about
every hour. If the age of em is largely driven by a population which
is kilo-em or faster, it will evolve with a speed so breathtaking as
to be incomprehensible to those who operate on a human time scale. In
objective time, the age of em may only last a couple of years, but to
the ems within it, its history will be as long as the Roman Empire.
What comes next? That's up to the ems; we cannot imagine what they
will accomplish or choose to do in those subjective millennia or millions
of years.
What about humans? The economics of the emergence of an em society
will be interesting. Initially, humans will own everything, but as
the em society takes off and begins to run at least a thousand times
faster than humans, with a population in the trillions, it can be
expected to create wealth at a rate never before experienced. The
economic doubling time of industrial civilisation is about 15 years.
In an em society, the doubling time will be just 18 months and
potentially much faster. In such a situation, the vast majority of
wealth will be within the em world, and humans will be unable to
compete. Humans will essentially be retirees, with their needs and
wants easily funded from the proceeds of their investments in
initially creating the world the ems inhabit. One might worry about
the ems turning upon the humans and choosing to dispense with them
but, as the author notes, industrial societies have not done this with
their own retirees, despite the financial burden of supporting them,
which is far greater than will be the case for ems supporting human
retirees.
The economics of the age of em will be unusual. The fact that an em,
in the prime of life, can be copied at almost no cost will mean that
the supply of labour, even the most skilled and specialised, will be
essentially unlimited. This will drive the compensation for labour
down to near the subsistence level, where subsistence is defined as
the resources needed to run the em. Since it costs no more to create
a copy of a CEO or computer technology research scientist than a
janitor, there will be a great flattening of pay scales, all settling
near subsistence. But since most ems will live mostly in virtual
reality, subsistence need not mean penury: most of their needs and
wants will not be physical, and will cost little or nothing to
provide. Wouldn't it be ironic if the much-feared “robot
revolution” ended up solving the problem of “income
inequality”? Ems may have a limited useful
lifetime to the extent they inherit the human characteristic of the
brain having greatest plasticity in youth and becoming
increasingly fixed in its ways with age, and consequently less able to
innovate and be creative. The author explores how ems may view death
(which for an em means being archived and never re-instantiated) when
there are myriad other copies in existence and new ones being spawned
all the time, and how ems may choose to retire at very low speed and
resource requirements and watch the future play out a thousand times
or faster than a human can.
This is a challenging and often disturbing look at a possible future
which, strange as it may seem, violates no known law of science and
toward which several areas of research are converging today. The book
is simultaneously breathtaking and tedious. The author tries to work
out every aspect of em society: the structure of cities,
economics, law, social structure, love, trust, governance, religion,
customs, and more. Much of this strikes me as highly speculative,
especially since we don't know anything about the actual experience of
living as an em or how we will make the transition from our present
society to one dominated by ems. The author is inordinately fond of
enumerations. Consider this one from chapter 27.
These include beliefs, memories, plans, names, property,
cooperation, coalitions, reciprocity, revenge, gifts,
socialization, roles, relations, self-control, dominance,
submission, norms, morals, status, shame, division of labor,
trade, law, governance, war, language, lies, gossip, showing off,
signaling loyalty, self-deception, in-group bias, and meta-reasoning.
But for all its strangeness, the book amply rewards the effort you'll
invest in reading it. It limns a world as different from our own as
any portrayed in science fiction, yet one which is a plausible future
that may come to pass in the next century, and is entirely consistent
with what we know of science. It raises deep questions of philosophy,
what it means to be human, and what kind of future we wish for our
species and its successors. No technical knowledge of computer
science, neurobiology, nor the origins of intelligence and
consciousness is assumed; just a willingness to accept the premise
that whatever these things may be, they are independent of the
physical substrate upon which they are implemented.
- White, Rowland.
Into the Black.
New York: Touchstone, 2016.
ISBN 978-1-5011-2362-7.
-
On April 12, 1981, coincidentally exactly twenty years after Yuri
Gagarin became the first man to orbit the Earth in
Vostok 1, the
United States launched one of the most ambitious and risky manned
space flights ever attempted. The flight of Space Shuttle Orbiter
Columbia
on its first mission,
STS-1,
would be the first time a manned spacecraft was launched with a crew
on its first flight. (All earlier spacecraft were tested in
unmanned flights before putting a crew at risk.) It would also be the first
manned spacecraft to be powered by
solid rocket boosters
which, once lit, could not be shut down but had to be allowed to burn
out. In addition, it would be the first flight test of the new
Space Shuttle Main Engines,
the most advanced and high performance rocket engines ever built,
which had a record of exploding when tested on the ground. The
shuttle would be the first space vehicle to fly back from space using
wings and control surfaces to steer to a pinpoint landing. Instead of
a one-shot
ablative heat shield,
the shuttle was covered by fragile silica tiles and reinforced
carbon-carbon composite to protect its aluminium structure from
reentry heating which, without thermal protection, would melt it in
seconds. When returning to Earth, the shuttle would have to maneuver
in a hypersonic flight regime in which no vehicle had ever flown
before, then transition to supersonic and finally subsonic flight
before landing. The crew would not control the shuttle directly, but
fly it through redundant flight control computers which had never been
tested in flight. Although the orbiter was equipped with ejection
seats for the first four test flights, they could only be used in a
small part of the flight envelope: for most of the mission everything
simply had to work correctly for the ship and crew to return safely. Main
engine start—ignition of the solid rocket boosters—and
liftoff!
Even before the goal of landing on the Moon had been accomplished, it
was apparent to NASA management that no national consensus existed to
continue funding a manned space program at the level of Apollo.
Indeed, in 1966,
NASA's budget
reached a peak which, as a fraction of the federal budget, has never
been equalled. The Saturn V rocket was ideal for lunar landing
missions, but expended each mission, was so expensive to build and
operate as to be unaffordable for suggested follow-on missions.
After building fifteen Saturn V flight vehicles, only thirteen of
which ever flew, Saturn V production was curtailed. With the
realisation that the “cost is no object” days of Apollo
were at an end, NASA turned its priorities to reducing the cost of
space flight, and returned to a concept envisioned by Wernher von
Braun in the 1950s: a reusable space ship.
You don't have to be a
rocket scientist
or rocket engineer to
appreciate the advantages of reusability. How much would an airline ticket
cost if they threw away the airliner at the end of every flight? If
space flight could move to an airline model, where after each mission
one simply refueled the ship, performed routine maintenance, and flew again,
it might be possible to reduce the cost of delivering payload into space by
a factor of ten or more. But flying into space is much more
difficult than atmospheric flight. With the technologies and fuels
available in the 1960s (and today), it appeared next to impossible to
build a launcher which could get to orbit with just a single stage (and
even if one managed to accomplish it, its payload
would be negligible). That meant any practical design would require a
large booster stage and a smaller
second stage which would go into orbit, perform the mission, then return.
Initial design concepts envisioned a very large (comparable to a Boeing 747)
winged booster to which the orbiter would be attached. At launch,
the booster would lift itself and the orbiter from the pad and accelerate to a
high velocity and altitude where the orbiter would separate and use its own
engines and fuel to continue to orbit. After separation, the booster would
fire its engines to boost back toward the launch site, where it would glide to
a landing on a runway. At the end of its mission, the orbiter would fire its
engines to de-orbit, then reenter the atmosphere and glide to a landing.
Everything would be reusable. For the next mission, the booster and orbiter
would be re-mated, refuelled, and readied for launch.
Such a design had the promise of dramatically reducing costs and increasing
flight rate. But it was evident from the start that such a concept would be
very expensive to develop. Two separate manned spacecraft would be required,
one (the booster) much larger than any built before, and the second (the
orbiter) having to operate in space and survive reentry without discarding
components. The orbiter's fuel tanks would be bulky, and make it difficult
to find room for the payload and, when empty during reentry,
hard to reinforce against the stresses they would encounter. Engineers
believed all these challenges could be met with an Apollo era
budget, but with no prospect of such funds becoming available, a
more modest design was the only alternative.
Over a multitude of design iterations, the now-familiar architecture
of the space shuttle emerged as the only one which could meet the
mission requirements and fit within the schedule and budget constraints.
Gone was the flyback booster, and with it full reusability. Two solid
rocket boosters would be used instead, jettisoned when they burned
out, to parachute into the ocean and be fished out by boats for
refurbishment and reuse. The orbiter would not carry the fuel for its
main engines. Instead, it was mounted on the side of a large
external fuel tank
which, upon reaching orbit, would be discarded and burn up
in the atmosphere. Only the orbiter, with its crew and payload, would
return to Earth for a runway landing. Each mission would require
either new or refurbished solid rocket boosters, a new external fuel
tank, and the orbiter.
The mission requirements which drove the design were not those NASA
would have chosen for the shuttle were the choice theirs alone. The
only way NASA could “sell” the shuttle to the president
and congress was to present it as a replacement for all existing
expendable launch vehicles. That would assure a flight rate
sufficient to achieve the economies of scale required to drive down
costs and reduce the cost of launch for military and commercial
satellite payloads as well as NASA missions. But that meant the
shuttle had to accommodate the large and heavy reconnaissance
satellites which had been launched on
Titan
rockets. This required a
huge payload bay (15 feet wide by 59 feet long) and a payload to low
Earth orbit of 60,000 pounds. Further Air Force requirements dictated
a large cross-range (ability to land at destinations far from the
orbital ground track), which in turn required a hot and fast reentry
very demanding on the thermal protection system.
The shuttle represented, in a way, the unification of NASA with the Air Force's
own manned space ambitions. Ever since the start of the space age, the Air
Force sought a way to develop its own manned military space capability. Every
time it managed to get a program approved: first
Dyna-Soar
and then the
Manned Orbiting Laboratory,
budget considerations and Pentagon politics resulted in its cancellation, orphaning
a corps of highly-qualified military astronauts with nothing to fly. Many of
these pilots would join the NASA astronaut corps in 1969 and become the backbone of
the early shuttle program when they finally began to fly more than a decade later.
All seemed well on board. The main engines shut down. The external
fuel tank was jettisoned. Columbia was in orbit. Now
weightless, commander John Young and pilot Bob Crippen immediately
turned to the flight plan, filled with tasks and tests of the
orbiter's systems. One of their first jobs was to open the payload
bay doors. The shuttle carried no payload on this first flight, but
only when the doors were open could the radiators that cooled the
shuttle's systems be deployed. Without the radiators, an emergency
return to Earth would be required lest electronics be damaged by
overheating. The doors and radiators functioned flawlessly, but with
the doors open Young and Crippen saw a disturbing sight. Several of
the thermal protection tiles on the pods containing the shuttle's
maneuvering engines were missing, apparently lost during the ascent to
orbit. Those tiles were there for a reason: without them the heat of
reentry could melt the aluminium structure they protected, leading to
disaster. They reported the missing tiles to mission control, adding
that none of the other tiles they could see from windows in the crew
compartment appeared to be missing.
The tiles had been a major headache during development of the
shuttle. They had to be custom fabricated, carefully applied by hand,
and were prone to falling off for no discernible reason. They were
extremely fragile, and could even be damaged by raindrops. Over the
years, NASA struggled with these problems, patiently finding and
testing solutions to each of them. When STS-1 launched, they were
confident the tile problems were behind them. What the crew saw when
those payload bay doors opened was the last thing NASA wanted to see.
A team was set to analysing the consequences of the missing tiles on
the engine pods, and quickly reported back that they should pose no
problem to a safe return. The pods were protected from the most
severe heating during reentry by the belly of the orbiter, and the
small number of missing tiles would not affect the aerodynamics of the
orbiter in flight.
But if those tiles were missing, mightn't other tiles also have been lost? In
particular, what about those tiles on the underside of the orbiter which
bore the brunt of the heating? If some of them were missing, the structure of
the shuttle might burn through and the vehicle and crew would be lost. There
was no way for the crew to inspect the underside of the orbiter. It couldn't
be seen from the crew cabin, and there was no way to conduct an EVA
to examine it. Might there be other, shall we say,
national technical means,
of inspecting the shuttle in orbit? Now STS-1 truly ventured into the black,
a story never told until many years after the mission and documented
thoroughly for a popular audience here for the first time.
In 1981, ground-based surveillance of satellites in orbit was
rudimentary. Two Department of Defense facilities, in
Hawaii
and Florida, normally used to image Soviet and Chinese satellites,
were now tasked to try to image Columbia in orbit. This
was a daunting task: the shuttle was in a low orbit, which meant
waiting until an orbital pass would cause it to pass above one of the
telescopes. It would be moving rapidly so there would be only seconds
to lock on and track the target. The shuttle would have to be
oriented so its belly was aimed toward the telescope. Complicating
the problem, the belly tiles were black, so there was little contrast
against the black of space. And finally, the weather had to
cooperate: without a perfectly clear sky, there was no hope of
obtaining a usable image. Several attempts were made, all
unsuccessful.
But there were even deeper black assets. The
National Reconnaissance Office
(whose very existence was a secret at the time) had begun to operate the
KH-11 KENNEN
digital imaging satellites in the 1970s. Unlike earlier spysats, which
exposed film and returned it to the Earth for processing and interpretation,
the KH-11 had a digital camera and the ability to transmit imagery to
ground stations shortly after it was captured. There were few things so secret
in 1981 as the existence and capabilities of the KH-11. Among the people
briefed in on this above top secret program were the NASA astronauts who had
previously been assigned to the Manned Orbiting Laboratory program which was,
in fact, a manned reconnaissance satellite with capabilities comparable to
the KH-11.
Dancing around classification, compartmentalisation, bureaucratic
silos, need to know, and other barriers, people who understood what
was at stake made it happen. The flight plan was rewritten
so that Columbia was pointed in the right direction at
the right time, the KH-11 was programmed for the extraordinarily
difficult task of taking a photo of one satellite from another, when
their closing velocities are kilometres per second, relaying the
imagery to the ground and getting it to the NASA people who needed it
without the months of security clearance that would normally entail.
The shuttle was a key national security asset. It was to launch all
reconnaissance satellites in the future. Reagan was in the White
House. They made it happen. When the time came for
Columbia to come home, the very few people who mattered
in NASA knew that, however many other things they had to worry about,
the tiles on the belly were not among them.
(How different it was in 2003 when the same Columbia
suffered a strike on its left wing from foam shed from the external
fuel tank. A thoroughly feckless and bureaucratised NASA rejected
requests to ask for reconnaissance satellite imagery which, with two
decades of technological improvement, would have almost certainly
revealed the damage to the leading edge which doomed the orbiter and
crew. Their reason: “We can't do anything about it
anyway.” This is incorrect. For a fictional account of a
rescue, based upon the
report
[PDF, scroll to page 173]
of the
Columbia Accident Investigation Board, see
Launch on Need [February 2012].)
This is a masterful telling of a gripping story by one of the most
accomplished of aerospace journalists. Rowan White is the author of
Vulcan 607 (May 2010), the
definitive account of the Royal Air Force raid on the airport in the
Falkland Islands in 1982. Incorporating extensive interviews with
people who were there, then, and sources which were classified until
long after the completion of the mission, this is a detailed account
of one of the most consequential and least appreciated missions in
U.S. manned space history which reads like a techno-thriller.
- Wolfram, Stephen.
Idea Makers.
Champaign, IL: Wolfram Media, 2016.
ISBN 978-1-57955-003-5.
-
I first met
Stephen Wolfram
in 1988. Within minutes, I knew I was in
the presence of an extraordinary mind, combined with intellectual
ambition the likes of which I had never before encountered. He
explained that he was working on a system to automate much of the
tedious work of mathematics—both pure and applied—with the
goal of changing how science and mathematics were done forever. I not
only thought that was ambitious; I thought it was crazy. But
then Stephen went and launched
Mathematica
and, twenty-eight years and eleven major releases later, his goal has
largely been achieved. At the centre of a vast ecosystem of add-ons
developed by his company, Wolfram Research, and third parties, it has
become one of the tools of choice for scientists, mathematicians, and
engineers in numerous fields.
Unlike many people who founded software companies, Wolfram never took
his company public nor sold an interest in it to a larger company.
This has allowed him to maintain complete control over the
architecture, strategy, and goals of the company and its products. After the
success of Mathematica, many other people, and I, learned
to listen when Stephen, in his soft-spoken way, proclaims what seems
initially to be an outrageously ambitious goal. In the 1990s, he set
to work to invent
A New Kind
of Science: the book was published in 2002, and shows how simple
computational systems can produce the kind of complexity observed in
nature, and how experimental exploration of computational spaces
provides a new path to discovery unlike that of traditional
mathematics and science. Then he said he was going to integrate
all of the knowledge of science and technology into a “big data”
language which would enable knowledge-based computing and the discovery
of new facts and relationships by simple queries
short enough to tweet.
Wolfram Alpha
was launched in 2009, and
Wolfram Language in 2013.
So when Stephen speaks of goals such as
curating
all of pure mathematics or discovering a simple computational model
for fundamental physics, I take him seriously.
Here we have a less ambitious but very interesting Wolfram
project. Collected from essays posted on
his blog
and elsewhere, he examines the work of innovators in
science, mathematics, and industry. The subjects
of these profiles include many people the author met in
his career, as well as historical figures he tries to get to
know through their work. As always, he brings his own
unique perspective to the project and often has insights you'll
not see elsewhere. The people profiled are:
Many of these names are well known, while others may elicit a
“who?”
Solomon Golomb,
among other achievements, was a pioneer in the development of
linear-feedback shift registers,
essential to technologies such as GPS, mobile phones, and error
detection in digital communications. Wolfram argues that Golomb's
innovation may be the most-used mathematical algorithm in history. It's
a delight to meet the pioneer.
This short (250 page) book provides personal perspectives on people
whose ideas have contributed to the intellectual landscape we
share. You may find the author's perspectives unusual, but they're
always interesting, enlightening, and well worth reading.