The Measure of a Man

So, AI.

I’m going to be a sadly stereotypical geek and start off with a Star Trek reference. In my defence, I’ve only just started watching it, and will be moving onto the 3rd season as soon as I find a cheap / free way to get it that doesn’t involve hours upon hours of downloading.

In an episode in the second season, a Federation scientist requisitions Data (an android, essentially a unique being) with the plan of uploading Data’s data to another computer and then slowly deconstructing his positronic brain to fill in the gaps in his research.

There was a lot to like in this episode. Unlike a lot of the knee-jerk anti-technology/science attitudes in the show (which are always pretty jarring), Data doesn’t object to this in principal. Rather, he feels that the scientist’s research is not sufficiently advanced to ensure that Data’s consciousness will be preserved intact. A legitimate concern, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Eventually we get to the meat of the episode. Data is essentially requisitioned by the scientist, and a trial ensues to determine whether Data is Federation property, or if he is an independent being.

The good stuff continues. Riker is assigned to the prosecution, and executes a fairly emotional attack on Data by switching him off, playing up Data’s existence as a machine. The best part of the episode comes when Picard acts as the defense.

“Commander Riker has dramatically demonstrated to this court that Lieutenant Commander Data is a machine. Do we deny that? No, because it is not relevant – we too are machines, just machines of a different type.”

An excellent line. Picard further demands to know the scientist’s criteria for a sentient being. The scientist seems rather caught off-guard, a bit surprising given that anyone remotely involved in AI research gets caught up in questions of consciousness and sentience. He ends up defining sentience as self-awareness, intelligence, and consciousness.

Now, right there we have a problem. All three criteria over-lap quite a bit. Self-awareness in a basic sense is easy – as machines that have to move about and do things, both Data and humans are aware that they are beings distinct from their surroundings. In different sense, both types of machines are also capable of some degree of introspection or self-monitoring. This is a key evolutionary feature, as it allows one to judge internal changes due to external stimuli, and then to make compensatory changes.

Intelligence is even harder. The debate over just what it is, if there is one measure of several independent types of intelligence, and how to measure it has gone on pretty much since the word was first used in the modern sense. Intelligence tests at one point were almost trivia or general knowledge tests, and you lost IQ points for not knowing the name of US legislative bodies, or the years of the first world war. These days IQ tests rely much more on abstract reasoning, pattern recognition, and that sort of thing, but the debates continue (rightly, to my mind). I’d say intelligence as a criterion for sentience is pretty much useless, especially across species boundaries (in a setting where there are multiple ‘civilizations’ of different species).

Still, the episode once again uses a fairly trivial definition of ‘intelligence’, and Data rattles off some math and facts to mislead the viewing public as to just what makes people ‘smart’.

Now we come to the meat of the question. Consciousness. Now, anyone with even a passing familiarity with philosophy, AI, neuroscience, psychology, etc knows there is basically zero consensus about consciousness.

Can we measure it? Can we accurately report it? Which phenomena count as ‘conscious’, and which count as ‘unconscious’? Where is it located? Are animals conscious (or are the just intelligent)?

Picard goes back to one of my favourite arguments, functionalist that I am. He asks the scientist if he, Picard, is conscious. The scientist replies in the affirmative. He then asks the scientist to prove it. This puts the scientist in a bit of a bind, since Data is pretty clearly able to pass a Turing test. After all, he only lacks a bit of vocal intonation and knowledge of common social interaction, which are also found among humans.

This all leads to a huge facepalm on my part, as the adjudicator exclaims that the entire trial is to see if Data has a soul. Which makes me think that either the writer’s didn’t understand anything they’d written for the entire rest of the episode, or that they felt they had to dumb it down for the audience. Star Trek’s vitalistic tendencies are a whole other issue, though. You’d also think the Federation would have guidelines for dealing with any machine races they ran into, but no. It seems centuries of theorizing about full AI somehow never penetrated the Federation’s policy structure.

Well, this has ended up being more of an episode review than the essay on AI I’d intended. Clearly I’ll need to revisit the subject.

The take-home messages here: when defining your terms, don’t paint yourself into a corner. And don’t try to designate something as non-sentient that is able to carry on lengthy, unscripted conversations. We’ve already covered that. I wonder if we could call this the ‘Turing Trap’.

Human demarcation

I’m wrestling with a post on Popper and manifest truth, but in the meantime, some thoughts on drawing species lines.

What came first, the chicken or the egg? I read an answer somewhere which was quite good – ‘a slightly different egg.’ The first hen, you see, would not have been recognized as such. This is because you cannot point to a single animal and say ‘See? That’s the first chicken.’ Individuals do not evolve, and they do not found whole species. Eve is a myth. (The case of the modern domestic chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus) is a bit confused, as it might have come about due to deliberate cross-breeding between related species, so let’s just say ‘chicken’ to denote a generic bird of a definite species.)

In fact, new species are almost entirely noted in retrospect, when you can say ‘This chicken descended from this chicken-like ancestor.’ The ancestor is not a chicken, and likely cannot breed with modern chickens (an sufficient but not necessary aspect of a distinct species). Many proto-chickens likely bore young which were very similar to modern chickens, many of which bore young which were even more similar to modern chickens, until eventually without realizing it you have ancestral chickens and modern chickens, and aren’t quite sure when in the last hundred/thousand/more years it happened.

This is entirely the same with humans.

An amusing pastime is watching ‘creation scientists’ try to demarcate archaeological finds of hominid (Hominidae refers to all of the great apes, including Homo sapiens) as either ape or human. By ignoring the various gradations, and the fact that any shift from ‘more ape’ to ‘more human’ is obvious only because the fragmentary nature of the fossil record gives us snapshots rather than a continuous view of hominid evolution. This game can be played all across the internet (and in real life), but some good examples of it in play are here, here, and here.

What is human, and what is not, are not clear distinctions. At the risk of digging myself a deeper hole that I can write myself out of in the next year or so, I plan to return to this concept, that in science while there are categories they are non-rigid categories. Something similar applies to sex and gender, but that’s whole other kettle of fish.

But – since this was on my mind today – how do you draw the distinction between human and cyborg? I know this might seem something of a non-sequitor, but it’s something of great interest to me. I and many of my friends read sci-fi, and have played games, in which the characters are part-human and part-machine. These media typically assume that as you add artificial limbs or functions you become less human.

Are we less human now? Because much of the speculation in the books revolves around things we already possess and do. Artificial eyes? (We have them). Are they somehow different than looking through a camera with your own eyes, aside from considerations of rejection or infection? Does wearing night-vision goggles make you a cyborg? How about surgically implanted memory storage? It’s no different than storing information on a computer, which becomes an accessory to your memory function. Computers in fact make much of this debate possible, as for many people in developed countries they are a daily necessity for their jobs. If I lose a tooth and have it replaced by a plastic tooth, am I a cyborg? What if I receive a hip replacement? An artificial leg?

At what point am I no longer human? The answer, I think, is so long as my brain is intact I will remain human, for all intents and purposes – or at least enough of one to pass a Turing test.