August 29, 2007

Barney Pell podcast with Dan Farber about the Singularity and AI

Yesterday I was interviewed in a podcast with Dan Farber about my upcoming talk at the Singularity Summit.

It's interesting and fun to have futurist conversations while working hard in a startup. Amidst the short-term pressures of bringing technology to market it is nice to engage in long-term musings about where this all might lead in 30 years. And it will be really fun to look back at these discussions 30 years from now and see who made the best predictions.

Here is Dan's summary of the interview:

In this podcast interview, I talked with Pell about his views on AI and how the development of machines smarter than humans will play out in coming decades. We also discussed the underpinnings of Powerset as an example of technology and collective human intelligence applied to making a smarter search engine, and how natural language understanding is at an inflection point, moving out of the labs and into the world.

Pell said that AI entities will get smarter but also humans, via intelligence augmentation, will gain new capabilities. He suggested that two approaches will meet in the middle–bottom-up complete brain simulations, which develop like human children, and top-down engineered systems.

He provided a framework for thinking about how AIs might evolve, and thoughts about the risks in developing such advanced technologies. “We are going to have to just bite the bullet–because this is going to happen. I don’t think these will be technologies you will be able to control. I do think there is strong value in looking at what are architectural aspects that may or may not be the same as people that can really dispose these systems to be the kinds of systems you want to build and to look at training and development processes that socialize these systems in the right way,” Pell said.

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August 22, 2007

Barney speaking at the Singularity Summit

I am speaking at the upcoming The Singularity Summit
AI & the Future of Humanity
Sat-Sun, September 8th-9th
Palace of Fine Arts Theatre
3301 Lyon St, SF, CA 94123

I am speaking in the first session, on Pathways and Major Challenges to Advanced AI.

Here is my title and abstract:

Pathways to advanced general intelligence: Architecture, Development, and Funding

While there is broad consensus among the AI community that we will have artificial general intelligence (AGI) within the century, there is little discussion about the alternate technical and economic pathways that will bring this about. I present a framework for comparing different approaches, in which we view any intelligent behavior as a combination of architecture and
development, both of which can be characterized as more or less human-brain-like. Seen within this framework, one extreme strives for complete brain simulations that develop like human children. Another extreme strives for unconstrained engineered systems that acquire knowledge through diverse methods. I predict that the path to AGI will be based on a much richer interplay between these two extremes, in which top-down and bottom up approaches meet in the middle.

The hybrid development path combines the benefits of both technical extremes. It also supports applications that create incremental business advantage for incremental improvements in AGI capability, thus driving business competition that accelerates the science. These applications
include video games, virtual worlds, household robots, autonomous vehicles, search, and conversational interfaces.

I have actually been thinking about this particular topic on and off for a while. Despite believing for a long time that the most likely path to human-level AI was through very human-like systems, my professional work has tended to take heavy engineering approaches in which you focus on the required behavior (hopefully a general task) but then approach it using whatever engineering means you can. This has been true for autonomous agents, natural language processing systems, game playing programs, and search engines. Now I think the combination of human-inspired and powerfully-engineered approaches is more likely to be what really comes to pass. It will be fun to share and discuss this with folks at the Singularity Summit.

Here are a few provocative topics that may or may not wind up making it into my talk:

• How many man-hours have actually been applied to the task of creating human-level AI? The number is likely a tiny fraction of the research in AI fields to date. So with advanced computing and communications technology amplifying research and with a focused effort on the core problems, progress might come about faster than anyone thinks.
• If we simulated every neuron and connection in a specific human brain, would this give us an intelligent system?
  • What if hormones are required as well, but we haven't simulated them?
  • What if the brain is a chaotic system, with sensitive dependence on the initial conditions? Then if the simulation was just a little off, it might be completely useless.
• We can take a recently dead human brain and have no idea how to revive the person. So a high-fidelity neural simulation may still be as useless as a dead human brain.
• Any AI system that will inhabit a human world would likely require some form of empathy. But is it possible to have deep empathy with humans if you have a radically different architecture?
• It should be possible in principal to create intelligence by simulating an entire history of evolution, starting with basic single-cellular life. But there are several problems with this.
  • First, how do we impose the selective pressures that give rise to general intelligence and language as opposed to the wide variety of other adaptations?
  • Second, this takes a lot of computing and has no guarantees to get anywhere.
  • Third, intelligent minds are primitive without an intelligent culture and knowledge base. So this doesn't get us to the singularity unless they recreate or learn our cultural advances too.
  • Fourth, if this artificial evolution resulted in intelligent language-using agents, the kind of language they evolve may be very different from humans. Thus they would be isolated from human society, and we may not even be able to recognize them as intelligent. Perhaps such beings exist already and live among us?

If you read these thoughts before the conference, please feel free to post comments or send me your thoughts.

Posted by barney at 11:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Singularity Summit

The Singularity Summit
AI & the Future of Humanity
Sat-Sun, September 8th-9th
Palace of Fine Arts Theatre
3301 Lyon St, SF, CA 94123

I attended last year (along with Ron Kaplan, then at PARC and now Powerset's CTO) and really enjoyed the event.

This year, I am now an Advisor to the Singularity Institute for AI and I am happy to help promote the event. With keynote talks by Peter Norvig and Rod Brooks, and talks by lots of my friends and even a talk by me, it should be even more fun than last year!

The event is very affordably priced ($50!) and at a great location so everyone should be able to attend.

Continue reading "The Singularity Summit"

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April 8, 2006

robot fighting video

I really enjoyed this video of robots fighting. I think the natural and flexible motion demonstrated by the winning robot platform should lead to advances in autonomous humanoid robots (like Asimo) and entertainment robots (like Aibo). The fighting robots themselves would make great toys. Way better than the race car sets I used to play with as a kid.

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May 15, 2005

Ethical Artificial Intelligence

Psychologist John E. LaMuth has received a United States Patent (No. 6,587,846) concerning ethical artificial intelligence entitled: Inductive Inference Affective Language Analyzer Simulating Artificial Intelligence .

Describing his invention, LaMuth writes:

"this new breakthrough represents the world's first affective language analyzer encompassing ethical/motivational behaviors, providing a convincing simulation of ethical artificial intelligence. It enables a computer to reason and speak employing ethical parameters, an innovation based upon a primary complement of instinctual behavioral terms (rewards-leniency-appetite-aversion).

The framework is related to an emerging set of recent work on Emotions in AI. It also relates to other work coming out of psychology, including Ken Wilbur and the Enneagram.

Based on his analyis, he develops Ten Ethical Laws of Robotics . I've reprinted them here, as I find this really quite intriguing:

Continue reading "Ethical Artificial Intelligence"

Posted by barney at 4:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 1, 2005

Barney Pell's Research on Agents and Autonomy

• Integrated Planning and Execution for Satellite Tele-Communications. Christian Plaunt, Kanna Rajan, Barney Pell and Nicola Muscettola. Submitted to AAAI 1998 Fall Symposium. Abstract is here.
• Automating Mission Scheduling for Space-Based Observatories. Nicola Muscettola, Barney Pell, Othar Hansson, and Sunil Mohan. In G.W. Henry and J.A. Eaton, eds, Robotic Telescopes: Current Capabilities, Present Developments, and Future Prospects for Automated Astronomy. Provo, UT: Astronomical Society of the Pacific, ASP Conference Series number 79, 1995. Abstract is here.
• A Remote Agent Prototype for Spacecraft Autonomy. Barney Pell, Douglas E. Bernard, Steven A. Chien, Erann Gat, Nicola Muscettola, P. Pandurang Nayak, Michael D. Wagner, and Brian C. Williams. In Proceedings of the SPIE Conference on Optical Science, Engineering, and Instrumentation , 1996. Abstract is here . This is the original paper on the Remote Agent architecture used in Newmaap.
• An Autonomous Spacecraft Agent Prototype. Barney Pell, Douglas E. Bernard, Steven A. Chien, Erann Gat, Nicola Muscettola, P. Pandurang Nayak, Michael D. Wagner, and Brian C. Williams. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Autonomous Agents, Marina del Rey, CA 1997. Abstract is here. PDF Version is here. This is an updated version of the NMRA architecture paper, with less details of the spacecraft domain.
• An Autonomous Spacecraft Agent Prototype. Barney Pell, Douglas E. Bernard, Steven A. Chien, Erann Gat, Nicola Muscettola, P. Pandurang Nayak, Michael D. Wagner, and Brian C. Williams. Autonomous Robots 5(1), March, 1998. Abstract is here. This is the full-length journal article on the prototype NMRA architecture.
• Plan Execution for Autonomous Spacecraft. Barney Pell, Erann Gat, Ron Keesing, Nicola Muscettola, and Ben Smith. Appears in the Working Notes of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Plan Execution, Cambridge, MA, 1996. Abstract is here.
• Robust Periodic Planning and Execution for Autonomous Spacecraft. Barney Pell, Erann Gat, Ron Keesing, Nicola Muscettola, and Ben Smith. Proceedings of IJCAI-97. Abstract is here.
• Remote Agent: To Boldly Go Where No AI System Has Gone Before. Nicola Muscettola, P. Pandurang Nayak, Barney Pell, and Brian Williams. Artificial Intelligence (To appear). Abstract is here. This is a journal article based on an Invited Talk presented at IJCAI-97 in Nayoga, Japan.
• Designed for Autonomy: Remote Agent for the New Millennium Program. Douglas E. Bernard and Barney Pell. Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Automation for Space (i-SAIRAS), 1997. Abstract is here.
• A Hybrid Procedural/Deductive Executive For Autonomous Spacecraft. Barney Pell, Ed Gamble, Erann Gat, Ron Keesing, Jim Kurien, Bill Millar, P. Pandurang Nayak, Christain Plaunt, and Brian Williams. Appears in the Working Notes of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Model-Directed Autonomous Systems, Cambridge, MA, 1997. Abstract is here.
• A Hybrid Procedural/Deductive Executive For Autonomous Spacecraft. Barney Pell, Ed Gamble, Erann Gat, Ron Keesing, Jim Kurien, Bill Millar, P. Pandurang Nayak, Christain Plaunt, and Brian Williams. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents, Minneapolis, MI 1998, to appear. Abstract is here. This is a much revised version of the fall symposium paper above.
• Issues in Temporal Reasoning for Autonomous Control Systems. Nicola Muscettola, Paul Morris, Barney Pell, and Ben Smith. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents, Minneapolis, MI 1998, to appear. Abstract is here.
• The Remote Agent Executive: Capabilities to Support Integrated Robotic Agents. Barney Pell, Gregory A. Dorais, Christian Plaunt and Richard Washington. Appears in the Working Notes of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Integrated Robotic Architectures, Stanford, CA, 1998. Abstract is here.
• Abstract Resource Management in an Unconstrained Plan Execution System. Erann Gat and Barney Pell. In Proceedings of IEEE Aerospace Conference, Snomass, CO, 1998.
• The Remote Agent Executive: Capabilities to Support Integrated Robotic Agents. Barney Pell, Gregory A. Dorais, Christian Plaunt and Richard Washington. Submitted to Autonomous Robotics Journal, for publication in 1999. This is an expanded version of the 1998 Spring Symposium paper with the same title.
• Adjustable Autonomy for Human-Centered Autonomous Systems on Mars. Gregory A. Dorais, R. Peter Bonasso, David Kortenkamp, Barney Pell, and Debra Schreckenghost. In Proceedings of the First International Conference of the Mars Society, Aug/98. To appear.
• Autonomous Rovers for Human Exploration of Mars. John Bresina, Gregory A. Dorais, Keith Golden, David E. Smith, Richard Washington. In Proceedings of the First International Conference of the Mars Society, Aug/98. To appear.

Links to articles on the Remote Agent

• Intell igent craft takes tedium out of space flight By Kristi Coale (Wired).
• NASA has big plans for Remote Agent technology By Kristi Coale (Wired).
• A Spacecraft with a Mind of Its Own By Kristi Coale (Wired).
• PRESS RELEASE: SOFTWARE FOR FIRST NEW MILLENNIUM MISSION CLOSEST YET TO "HAL 9000" by John Bluck and Douglas Isbell.
• New NASA Software "Closest Yet" to HAL 9000 (Spaceviews)
• Happy Birthday HAL By David L. Chandler, Boston Globe, 01/12/97.
• NASA takes lesson from sci-fi tale By Vimla Sriram.
• DS1 Software Resembles HAL Innovation, Volume 5, Number 2, March/April 1997.
• ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ON DEEP SPACE ONE High-Tech Shower International, 3/5/97.

Last updated Jan 21, 1997. Direct feedback to Barney Pell (pell@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov)

- Barney D. P ell <pell@barney.arc.nasa.go v>, 11/4/96

Posted by barney at 9:32 PM | Comments (1)