Cognition Archives - Liwaiwai

What Are The Ethical Consequences Of Immortality Technology?

Immortality has gone secular. Unhooked from the realm of gods and angels, it’s now the subject of serious investment – both intellectual and financial – by philosophers, scientists and the Silicon Valley set. Several hundred people have already chosen to be ‘cryopreserved’ in preference to simply dying, as they wait for science to catch up and give them a second shot at life. But if we treat death as a problem, what are the ethical implications of the highly speculative ‘solutions’ being mooted? Of course, we don’t currently have the means of achieving human immortality, nor is it clear that…

Artificial Intelligence

To Create A Super-Intelligent Machine, Start With An Equation

Intelligence is a very difficult concept and, until recently, no one has succeeded in giving it a satisfactory formal definition. Most researchers have given up grappling with the notion of intelligence in full generality, and instead focus on related but more limited concepts – but I argue that mathematically defining intelligence is not only possible, but crucial to understanding and developing super-intelligent machines. From this, my research group has even successfully developed software that can learn to play Pac-Man from scratch. Let me explain – but first, we need to define “intelligence”. So what is intelligence? I have worked on…

The Challenge of Abundance: Boredom, Meaning, and the Struggle of Mental Freedom

As technology continues to progress, the possibility of an abundant future seems more likely. Artificial intelligence is expected to drive down the cost of labor, infrastructure, and transport. Alternative energy systems are reducing the cost of a wide variety of goods. Poverty rates are falling around the world as more people are able to make a living, and resources that were once inaccessible to millions are becoming widely available. But such a life presents fuel for the most common complaint against abundance: if robots take all the jobs, basic income provides us livable welfare for doing nothing, and healthcare is…

Science

The Human Brain’s Bandwidth For Visual Images Is Severely Limited

Imagine you are at Ikea to pick up a sofa for your new flat. You see one you like, a wine-coloured two-seater with big soft cushions. You imagine what it would look like with your current furniture, and decide that’s the sofa you want. As you continue meandering through the store you find a nice industrial-style lamp and coffee table, so you try to imagine what they might look like with the sofa. But imagining all three items together is more difficult than just imagining the sofa alone. How many pieces of furniture do you think you could rearrange in…

Science

What Toddlers Can Teach Us About How The Human Brain Does Science

Science as we’ve come to understand it today – that is, conducting experiments using a hypothesis-testing method – has existed only since about the 17th century. But the Homo sapiens brain has been around since the Pleistocene, so how is it that we’ve gotten so good at the kind of science we do in such a short amount of time? In this interview with Robert Lawrence Kuhn from the PBS series Closer to Truth, the US psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik argues that scientific skills, including making statistical inferences and testing our environments through trial and error, are implicit in children, even those…

Science Has Outgrown The Human Mind And Its Limited Capacities

The duty of man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads and … attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency. – Ibn al-Haytham (965-1040 CE) Science is in the midst of a data crisis. Last year, there were more than 1.2 million new papers published in the biomedical sciences alone, bringing the total number of peer-reviewed biomedical papers to over 26…

Why Artificial Neural Networks Have A Long Way To Go Before They Can ‘See’ Like Us

Artificial neural networks were created to imitate processes in our brains, and in many respects – such as performing the quick, complex calculations necessary to win strategic games such as chess and Go – they’ve already surpassed us. But if you’ve ever clicked through a CAPTCHA test online to prove you’re human, you know that our visual cortex still reigns supreme over its artificial imitators (for now, at least). So if schooling world chess champions has become a breeze, what’s so hard about, say, positively identifying a handwritten ‘9’? This explainer from the US YouTuber Grant Sanderson, who creates maths…

Even If Genes Affect Intelligence, We Can’t Engineer Cleverness

First, let me tell you how smart I am. So smart. My fifth-grade teacher said I was gifted in mathematics and, looking back, I have to admit that she was right. I’ve properly grasped the character of metaphysics as trope nominalism, and I can tell you that time exists, but that it can’t be integrated into a fundamental equation. I’m also street-smart. Most of the things that other people say are only partially true. And I can tell. A paper published in Nature Genetics in 2017 reported that, after analysing tens of thousands of genomes, scientists had tied 52 genes…

Planes Don’t Flap Their Wings: Does AI Work Like A Brain?

In 1739, Parisians flocked to see an exhibition of automata by the French inventor Jacques de Vaucanson performing feats assumed impossible by machines. In addition to human-like flute and drum players, the collection contained a golden duck, standing on a pedestal, quacking and defecating. It was, in fact, a digesting duck. When offered pellets by the exhibitor, it would pick them out of his hand and consume them with a gulp. Later, it would excrete a gritty green waste from its back end, to the amazement of audience members. Vaucanson died in 1782 with his reputation as a trailblazer in…

Artificial Intelligence

If Machines Want To Make Art, Will Humans Understand It?

Assuming that the emergence of consciousness in artificial minds is possible, those minds will feel the urge to create art. But will we be able to understand it? To answer this question, we need to consider two subquestions: when does the machine become an author of an artwork? And how can we form an understanding of the art that it makes? Empathy, we argue, is the force behind our capacity to understand works of art. Think of what happens when you are confronted with an artwork. We maintain that, to understand the piece, you use your own conscious experience to…

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