Are synths people?
Last episode we talked about the institute and its treatment of synthetic intelligences
and some of you took issue with my implication that synths are legitimately thinking, feeling,
sentient creatures, and that what the Institute does to them doesn’t constitute slavery--which...you
may not be wrong to call me out on.
“Data is not sentient, no.”
The basic premise is this: robots, or artificial intelligences, were created by humans for
a purpose. Whatever that purpose is, doesn’t matter, they’re a tool, like a hammer or
washing machine. They’re more complex, sure, but they’re designed to complete more complex
tasks: diagnosing medical conditions, innovating new designs, or beating people at Jeopardy.
Regardless, anything that may incidentally resemble what we perceive as free will or
self-awareness is an illusion. It’s just a bunch of programming, a directive put there
by humans, either as an accidental consequence, or put there on purpose to make it easier
for us to interface with them. You know, ‘cause it’s easier to interact with something that
acts human than something that doesn’t.
Robots aren’t sentient because they aren’t self-aware like we humans are. While they
may display outwardly the patterns and mannerisms of humanity and intelligence, they don’t
experience the experience of being alive. You know what I’m talking about, right?
You’re sentient. You know what it feels like to be conscious. You’re conscious right
now, watching this video. Look at it. Just feel the feeling of it.
We all know the experience of being human. Issues of race, politics, and culture aside,
that’s one unifying truth in our species, and we’re confident that no man-made object,
no matter how complex their circuitry, could ever truly capture the richness of the human
experience, especially not something that was designed to wash floors. I mean, college
students aren’t ditching class to protest against the treatment of roombas.
Let’s step out of the realm of fantasy for a second and take a look at something a bit
more complex than a Roomba: Watson. Watson is a computer system developed by IBM that
was designed to answer questions asked in natural language. Watson was pitted against
the best contestants the game show Jeopardy had ever seen, and...leaned house. Totally
wrecked the the competition. Watson was capable of recognizing the fucking weird-ass structure
of Jeopardy questions, searching its archives, and composing an answer in the similarly ridiculous
answer format. So what about Watson? I mean, clearly it doesn’t have any pretenses of
thoughts and emotions yet, and it doesn’t have a face of any kind,...but it’s no Roomba,
either. Can we at least agree that it is a powerful thinking machine?
Well, not necessarily. Philosopher John Searle and others like him claim that Watson doesn’t
think because it doesn’t truly “understand.” It doesn’t have a sense of self, or an understanding
of actual meaning. It’s just a complicated program that recognizes patterns and symbols,
and spits back the correct sequence of 1’s and 0’s based upon its predetermined programming
parameters. It’s not conscious.
But what if it’s not that simple?
Earlier I said that we all know what it means to be conscious, because we’re conscious
all the time. Okay. Cool. So tell me: what is consciousness? Is it being awake? Because
that’s what I think of it as. I bet you probably answered with something else. Having
memories? Experiences? Senses? Is it something uniquely human?
Uniquely human. You know something that’s uniquely human? Our neocortex. The neocortex
is the outside part of your brain. The part with all the wrinkles. Lots of other mammals
have them, but NOTHING has a neocortex like ours. It’s only 4 millimeters thick, but
because of all the wrinkles increasing its surface area it takes up almost 80% of our
brain, which is good, because that’s where ALL of our higher-level reasoning exists.
Reading, writing, speech, the angry comment you’re writing underneath this video right
now telling me how stupid I am: all of it comes from your neocortex. The human neocortex
is responsible for every single human innovation, from stone tools, to writing, to the steam
engine, and the computer. The human brain is immensely complicated, but it does seem
to have a hierarchical structure that follows certain rules.
In his book “How To Create A Mind,” Ray Kurzweil, a major pioneer in the field of
machine learning, details algorithms about how our neocortex recognizes various patterns
in our environment on a micro level and pieces them together to create whole pictures and
ideas, which he calls “The Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind.”
It’s not without its critics, but it does get to the root of the problem: what is our
brain if not a wet, biological computer? A machine that’s made out of cells and not
silicon chips? Hell, it even runs off of electricity.
So what separates us from machines?
As with everything else in life, the answer lies in Zombies.
Okay, no, not those Zombies. And not Ghouls, either. No, instead I’m talking about something
else entirely: the zombies of Philosopher David Chalmer.
A zombie in Chalmer’s world is something that is human in every conceivable way. It
acts exactly like a person does in any given circumstance. It laughs at jokes, it acts
offended when insulted, it expresses fear and pain when injured--the only difference
between a Zombie and you and me is that a zombie lacks “subjective experience,”
or “consciousness.” Just...it’s not there. So let’s say you’re at work or
school with a bunch of normal folk and zombies--you know, just like real life “that was a joke”--how
would you tell the difference between normal people and zombies? And remember, they act
and look human in every way. They’re not unemotional robots, there’s no voight-kampff
test to determine their psychological status. If they’re not convincingly human in every
way, it doesn’t fit the criteria of the experiment. So, if something acts and looks
human, but lacks the ineffable experience of “consciousness,” how do you tell?
The answer is you can’t.
So what is consciousness?
“Prove to the court that I am sentient.”
Kurzweil, has his own idea,
“Consciousness is an emergent property of a complex physical system. In this view a
dog is also conscious, but somewhat less than a human. An ant has some level of consciousness,
too, but much less that of a dog.”
He goes on to say that a computer that’s capable of successfully emulating a human
brain would have the same level of consciousness as an actual human.
But that’s ridiculous, right? I mean, the Institute aside, that’s not actually something
we’re going to have to worry about, is it? Well, yes, actually.
Henry Markram is the head of the Blue Brain Project, whose goal is to completely simulate
the human brain. In 2005 they successfully simulated a human neuron, and in 2008 they
simulated an entire neocortical column of a rat. Their current target for full-brain
emulation is 2023--eight years from now. Scientists at IBM, in a completely different project
have created a cell-by-cell simulation of parts of the human visual neocortex.
I’m reaching about 10 minutes now, and I’ve barely scratched the surface--the fact of
the matter is that there are no easy answers out there. In an age of simulated neurons
and neocortexs, science and philosophy fail to help us.
And these problems aren’t unimportant. Consciousness and free will are at the heart of our strictest
laws and most controversial political issues. You can go to prison for the rest of your
life for extinguishing someone else’s consciousness against their will, or sometimes we’ll even
take yours from you as punishment. And we don’t even know what consciousness is! As
things like Watson, Siri, and Google get more complex, capable, and self-reliant, and the
Institute, Fallout 4, Mass Effect, and Halo less and less resemble fiction, these issues
are only going to become more and more important.
We laugh at the idea now, but there was a time when putting a man on the moon was considered
ridiculous, tablets were considered an unattainable technology only seen in Star Trek, and Pip
Boys, computers on your wrist, were just some whacky invention by game developers.
Some day soon these are issues that will be more important than who will fight with you
against the reapers in Mass Effect, or who’s going to be your ally in the wasteland.
Personally, I think that if you believe that consciousness and free actually exist, you
have to accept that synthetic intelligences possess them too.
I mean, can you really
say that something that’s capable of telling a joke, asking questions, learning, and getting
offended at someone telling it that it isn’t actually real just because its emotions are
digital and not analogue doesn’t have free will or awareness?
Is it a leap of faith? Sure. But no more of a leap of faith than believing that you, someone
who’s not me, is conscious while watching this video. To exist every day is to take
certain things on faith, and in this case, I’m going to err on the side of thinking
that more things are conscious than actually are, as opposed to unfairly mistreating a
sentient creature just because I don’t understand it. Or him. Or her.
What do you think? Are machines capable of sentience and consciousness? Are sentience
and consciousness even real? There’s way more to it than I could get to in this video,
so I definitely encourage you to explore it on your own. And if you do, pick up Kurzweil’s
book “How to Create a Mind.” Or if you're lazy and don't want to read
You can watch this star trek episode that total covers the same thing.
Even if you don't agree, it's a good place to start. Anyway I will see you guys in a couple of weeks.