In my below recent list of ways to improve the power of human intelligent augmentation I forgot to think about possible ways to actually increase the bandwidth of the top level decision making of the brain, which I had listed as a real problem but had made no suggestions of how to improve (other than mentioning a conceivable, but un-defined sharing of consciousnesses that would be more than just implanted I/O between brain and AGI).
On way to improve the bandwidth of the top level of human decision making would be to replace or augment the brain's machinery for performing it, which is probably in the prefrontal cortex, basil ganglia, and general cortico-thalamic loop. Some include the Cerebellum in such mechanism for its role in fine tuning behaviors into the current context (including very time sensitive feedback) and by controlling the timing of learned sequential behaviors, including mental behaviors. Some possible approaches -A--have the AGI learn the goal system of the human brain and have delegated authority to make decisions on its own, much as the basil ganglia often does relative to our conscious decision processes. (i.e., if you drop something you are often first aware of that fact by the subconscious response your body is making to catch it.) Such a system could respond in real time to complex inputs thousands or millions of times faster than a human. Although it might not always do what we want, neither does our basil ganglia. It might be just as faithful to our goals and emotions as the basil ganglia, Such a system could help us keep pace with many superintelligences, when, for example trying to prevent them from infecting our trusted machines. -B--Create a super intelligent basil ganglia (either by replacement or supplementation) that receives the inputs from the portions of the cortex the basil ganglia currently does, but also receives inputs from the AGI and according to a goal system learned from the human mind, performs the go-no-go, behavior/attention selecting function of the basil ganglia, on a mix of inputs from the cortex and AGI's. This would help prevent behavioral conflicts between behaviors by a system like A and the rest of the human brain ---or a combination of these two, or these two with other suggestions made below. Perhaps such a close connection between the top level of an AGI and a human brain could help provide the type of complex motivational grounding and biases Richard Loosemore was talking about in his November 02, 2007 11:15 AM post as the proper approach for keeping AGI's subservient to human interests. Of course, thereis still no guarantee they would keep them subservient until the end of history. I know this is wacked-out stuff, but it actually might be relevant to the future of mankind. Ed Porter -----Original Message----- From: Edward W. Porter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, November 03, 2007 4:42 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: [agi] can superintelligence-augmented humans compete Can, and how can, our human descendants compete with superintelligences, other than by deserting human wetware and declaring machines to be our descendants? There are real issues about the extent to which any intelligence that has a human brain at its top level of control can compete with machines that conceivably could have a top level decision process with hundreds or perhaps millions of times the bandwidth. There are also questions of how much bandwidth of machine intelligence can be pumped into, or shared, with a human consciousness and/or subconscious, i.e., how much of the superintelligence we humans could be conscious of and/or effectively use in our subconscious. It would seem that if the human brain is not at the top level of decision making, we would no longer be in control. And if our consciousnesses are not capable of appreciating more than a small part of what the superintelligence we are part of is doing, we won't even be aware of exactly what most of the bionic entity were are part of is thinking. (Of course, this is somewhat similar to the way the subconscious affects us. ) (In fact, it would not be that hard to have a system where the superintelligence only communicates to our brain its consciousness, or portions of its consciousness that its learning indicate will have importance or interest to us, so that it would be acting somewhat like an extended subconsciousness that would occasionally pop ideas up into our subconsciousness or consciousness. This would greatly increase our mental powers, particularly if we had the capability to send information down to control it, give it sub-goals, or queries, etc. ) (But this would not solve the limited bottle neck of the human brain's top level decision making) So we would not be keeping up with the machines. They would be taking us along for the ride - that is, for as long as they desired to continue doing so. OF COURSE IT IS AT LEAST CONCEIVABLE THAT WAYS COULD FOUND TO MERGE AND SHARE HUMAN AND VASTLY SUPERHUMAN-MACHINE CONSCIOUSNESSES. I DON'T KNOW OF ANY, BUT I WOULD BE INTERESTING IN ANY FRACTIONALLY SOLID IDEAS ABOUT THIS FROM READERS. I currently tend to think of consciousness as massive spreading activation in the human brain from certain sets of patterns (those in the mind theater's spotlight) to parts much of the subconscious the mind theater's audience). In this mind theater the audience is interactive. Different audience member had different things in their heads and respond to different activations and successions of activations in different ways. Certain activations might cause one or more audience members to shout out, and the system controlling the spot light might then put a spot on them. I think of consciousness and subconsciousness in an AGI in a similar manner, but I do not know how much and in exactly which ways being inside such a machine consciousness would be like being inside my own. It would have self awareness and grounding for its qualia, but I don't know how these things would seem like on the inside. (Their "red" would be something that filed areas in a 2D visual representations in a way that was similar for the strips on American flags, Campbell soup cans, and blood, but would it be my "red"? That is a question we humans have been asking about each other for a long time.) In any case, other than having certain number of electrical links between nodes and links in a superintelligence and neurons in the brain, it is not clears how the two could meaningfully share their consciousnesses, and it is not clear what the bandwidth of such links could be, how much bandwidth the human brain is capable of making sense of (how much we currently can make sense of is perhaps the best current indicator), and how much of the human brain should be given over to such links. The questions is, how much better than a good video monitor and speaker system on the input side could such links be. Presumably they could communicate semantic knowledge much faster, but how much, I haven't a clue. The improvement in bandwidth could be much greater in the reverse direction, from the brain out. Since speech, gestures, mouse, and keyboard, are about our only current output links. It seems to me that some of the future options for better human intelligent augmentation might include" ---personal AGIs connected to global AGI moderated net ---(early case) retinal scanning glasses with eye tracking, headphones, video cameras, microphones, and pickups for sub-vocalization, heart rate, skin conductivity, etc. that let humans selectively see computers screens and hear computer output an any time and let the human control the AGI by eye pointing and blinking guestures, sub-vocalization, emotional responses, etc. ---biogenetic modification of the brain and smart drugs ---Kurzweil's little nanobots navigating into cortical columns and wirelessly receiving inputs allowing them to provided equivalent, say a gigabit a second of input to the brain, ---nanowires through brain's circulatory system to provide high bandwidth I/O (somebody is actually specing out such a system) ---A nano/bio engineered lining wrapped around the top level of surface of the layer one of the cortex that could read output from and supply input to that, the important level of neural interconnect. But would such systems keep us close enough in power to superintelligences to keep human interests well represented among the minds that dominate this and close by worlds? Could a billion such augmented minds be networked to help increase the relevance of human minds? Could we keep any such network itself from conspiring against us? I WOULD BE INTERESTING IN OTHER PEOPLE'S THOUGHTS ON THESE ISSUES, BECAUSE THEY SEEMS TO BE IMPORTANT ONES IN DETERMINING HOW IMPORTANT HUMAN WETWARE AND HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS CAN CONTINUE TO BE IN THE SUPERINTELLIGENT FUTURE. Ed Porter P.S. This is a slight re-write of the end of my long Fri 11/2/2007 2:07 PM post that started the thread titled "Can humans keep superintelligences under control -- can superintelligence-augmented humans compete". The end of the post was focused on the "can superintelligence-augmented humans compete" part. No one has responded to this part of my text, but perhaps that is because it only came after a long rebuttal to the argument that it was "nonsense" to think AGI goal systems might not remain stably loyal to humans until the end of history. Anyway, I am resubmitting this text it by itself to see if it peaks any interest, or is considered too speculative, too sci-fi-y, to been-there-dune-that, or too boring to be of any interest to this list. EWP _____ This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/? <http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&; > & ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=60787233-2c359c
