Author: Byron Reese / Source: Gigaom
Today’s leading minds talk AI with host Byron Reese
In this episode, Byron and Ali discuss AI’s impact on business and jobs.
Today’s leading minds talk AI with host Byron Reese
Byron Reese: This is Voices in AI, brought to you by GigaOm. I’m Byron Reese. Today my guest is Ali Azarbayejani. He is the CTO and Co-founder of Cogito. He has 18 years of commercial experience as a scientist, an entrepreneur, and designer of world-class computational technologies. His pioneering doctoral research at MIT Media Labs in Probabilistic Modeling for 3-D Vision was the basis for his first startup company Alchemy 3-D Technology, which created a market in the film and video post-production industry for camera matchmoving software. Welcome to the show Ali.
Ali Azarbayejani: Thank you, Byron.
I’d like to start off with the question: what is artificial intelligence?
I’m glad we’re starting with some definitions. I think I have two answers to that question. The original definition of artificial intelligence I believe in a scholarly context is about creating a machine that operates like a human. Part of the problem with defining what that means is that we don’t really understand human intelligence very well. We have a pretty good understanding now about how the brain functions physiologically, and we understand that’s an important part of how we provide cognitive function, but we don’t have a really good understanding of mind or consciousness or how people actually represent information.
I think the first answer is that we really don’t know what artificial or machine intelligence is other than the desire to replicate human-like function in computers. The second answer I have is how AI is being used in industry. I think that that is a little bit easier to define because I believe almost all of what we call AI in industry is based on building input/output systems that are framed and engineered using machine learning. That’s really at the essence of what we refer to in the industry as AI.
So, you have a high concept definition and a bread and butter work-a-day working definition, and that’s how you’re bifurcating that world?
Yeah, I mean, a lot of people talk about we’re in the midst of an AI revolution. I don’t believe, at least in the first sense of the term, that we’re in an AI revolution at all. I think we’re in the midst of a machine learning revolution which is really important and it’s really powerful, but I guess what I take issue is with the term intelligence, because most of these things that we call artificial intelligence don’t really exhibit the properties of intelligence that we would normally think are required for human intelligence.
These systems are largely trained in the lab and then deployed. When they’re deployed, they typically operate as a simple static input/output system. You put in audio and you get out words. So, you put in video and you get out locations of faces. That’s really at the core of what we’re calling AI now. I think it’s really the result of advances in technology that’s made machine learning possible at large scale, and it’s not really a scientific revolution about intelligence or artificial intelligence.
All right, let’s explore that some, because I think you’re right. I have a book coming out in the Spring of 2018 which is 20,000 words and it’s dedicated to the brain, the mind and consciousness. It really tries to wrap around those three concepts. So, let’s go through them if you don’t mind for just a minute. You started out by saying with the brain we understand how it functions. I would love to go into that, but as far as I understand it, we don’t know how a thought is encoded. We don’t know how the memory of your 10th birthday party or what pineapple tastes like or any of that. We don’t know how any of that is actually encoded. We can’t write to it. We can’t read from it, except in the most very rudimentary sense. So do you think we really do understand the brain?
I think that’s the point I was actually making is that we understand the brain at some level physiologically. We understand that there’s neurons and gray matter. We understand a little bit of physiology of the brain, but we don’t understand those things that you just mentioned, which I refer to as the “mind.” We don’t really understand how data is stored. We don’t understand how it’s recalled exactly. We don’t really understand other human functions like consciousness and feelings and emotions and how those are related to cognitive function. So, that’s really what I was saying is, we don’t understand how intelligence evolves from it, although really where we’re at is we just understand a little bit of the physiology.
Yeah, it’s interesting. There’s no consensus definition on what intelligence is, and that’s why you can point at anything and say, “well that’s intelligent.” “My sprinkler that comes on when my grass is dry, that’s intelligent.” The mind is of course a very, shall we say, controversial concept, but I think there is a consensus definition of it that everybody can agree to, which is it’s all the stuff the brain does that doesn’t seem, emphasis on seem, like something an organ should be able to do. Your liver doesn’t have a sense of humor. Your liver doesn’t have an imagination. All of these things. So, based on that definition of creativity and not even getting to consciousness, not even experiencing the world, just these abilities. These raw abilities like to write a poem, or paint a great painting or what have you. You were saying we actually have not made any real progress towards any of that. That’s gotten mixed up in this whole machine learning thing. Am I right that you think we’re still at square one with that whole building artificial mind?
Yeah, I mean, I don’t see a lot of difference intellectually [between] where we are now from when I was in school in the late 80s and 90s in terms of theories about the mind and theories about how we think and reason. The basis for the current machine learning revolution is largely based on neural networks which were invented in the 1960s. Really what is fueling the revolution is technology. The fact that we have the CPU power, the memory, the storage and the networking — and the data — and we can put all that together and train large networks at scale. That’s really what is fueling the amazing advances that we have right now, not really any philosophical new insights into how human intelligence works.
Putting it out there for just a minute, is it possible that an AGI, a general intelligence, that an artificial mind, is it possible that that cannot be instantiated in machinery?
That’s a really good question. I think that’s another philosophical question that we need to wrestle with. I think that there are at least two schools of thought on this that I’m aware of. I think the prevailing notion, which is I think a big assumption, is that it’s just a matter of scale. I think that people look at what we’ve been able to do with machine learning and we’ve been able to do incredible things with machine learning so far. I think people think of well, a human sitting in a chair can sit and observe the world and understand what’s going on in the world and communicate with other people. So, if you just took that head and you could replicate what that head was doing, which would require a scale much larger than what we’re doing right now with artificial neural networks, then embody that into a machine, then you could set this machine on the table there or on the chair and have that machine do the same thing.
I think one school of thought is that the human brain is an existence proof that a machine can exist to do the operations of a human intelligence. So, all we have to do is figure out how to put that into a machine. I think there’s a lot of assumptions involved in that train of thought. The other train of thought, which is more along the lines of where I land philosophically, is that it’s not clear to me that intelligence can exist without ego, without the notion of an embodied self that exists in the world, that interacts in the world, that has a reason to live and a drive to survive. It’s not clear to me that it can’t exist, and obviously we can do tasks that are similar to what human intelligence does, but I’m not entirely sure that… because we don’t understand how human intelligence works, it’s not clear to me that you can create an intelligence in a disembodied way.
I’ve had 60-something guests on the show, and I keep track of the number that don’t believe we can actually build a general intelligence, and it’s I think 5. They are Deep Varma, Esther Dyson, people who have similar… more so I think they’re even more explicitly saying they don’t think we can do it. The other 60 guests have the same line of logic, which is we don’t know how the brain works. We don’t know how the mind works. We don’t know how consciousness works, but we do have one underlying assumption that we are machines, and if we are machines, then we can build a mechanical us. Any argument against that or any way to engage it, the word that’s often offered is magic. The only way to get around that is to appeal to magic, to appeal to something supernatural, to appeal to something unscientific. So, my question to you is: is that true? Do you have to appeal to something unscientific for that logic to break down, or are there maybe scientific reasons completely causal, system-y kind of systems by which we cannot build a conscious machine?
I don’t believe in magic. I don’t think that’s my argument. My argument is more around what is the role that the body around the brain plays, in intelligence? I think we make the assumption sometimes that the entire consciousness of a person, entire cognition, everything is happening from the neck up, but the way that people exist in the world and learn from simply existing in the world and interacting with the world, I think plays a huge part in intelligence and consciousness. Being attached to a body that the brain identifies with as “self,” and that the mind has a self-interest in, I think may be an essential part of it.
So, I guess my point of view on this is I don’t know what the key ingredients are that go into intelligence, but I think that we need to understand… Let me put it this way, I think without understanding how human consciousness and human feelings and human empathy works, what the mechanisms are behind that, I mean, it may be simply mechanical, but without understanding how that works, it’s unclear how you would build a machine intelligence. In fact, scientists have struggled from the beginning of AI even to define it, and it’s really hard to say you can build something until you can actually define it, until you actually understand what it is.
The philosophical argument against that would be like “Look, you got a finite number of senses and those that are giving input to your brain, and you know the old philosophical thought experiment you’re just a brain in a vat somewhere and that’s all you are, and you’re being fed these signals and your brain is reacting to them,” but there really isn’t even an external world that you’re experiencing. So, they would say you can build a machine and give it these senses, but you’re saying there’s something more than that that we don’t even understand, that is beyond even the five senses.
I suppose if you had a machine that could replicate atom for atom a human body, then you would be able to create an intelligence. But, how practical would it be?
There are easier ways to create a person than that?
Yeah, that’s true too, but how practical is a human as a computing machine? I mean, one of the advantages of the computer systems that we have, the machine learning-based systems that we call AI is that we know how we represent data. Then we can access the data. As we were talking about before, with human intelligence you can’t just plug in and download people’s thoughts or emotions. So, it may be that in order to achieve intelligence, you have to create this machine that is not very practical as a machine. So you might just come full circle to well, “is that really the powerful thing that we think it’s going to be?”
I think people entertain the question because this question of “are people simply machines? Is there anything that happens? Are you just a big bag of chemicals with electrical pulses going through you?” I think people have… emotionally engaging that question is why they do it, not because they want to necessarily build a replicant. I could be wrong. Let me ask you this. Let’s talk about consciousness for a minute. To be clear, people say we don’t know what consciousness is. This is of course wrong. Everybody agrees on what it is. It is the experiencing of things. It is the difference between a computer being able to sense temperature and a person being able to feel heat. It’s like that difference.
It’s been described as the last scientific question we don’t really know how to ask, and we don’t know what the answer would look like. I put eight theories together in this book I wrote. Do you have a theory, just even a gut reaction? Is it an emergent property? Is it a quantum property? Is it a fundamental law of the universe? Do you have a gut feel of what direction you would look to explain consciousness?
I really don’t know. I think that my instinct is along the lines of what I talked about recently with embodiment. My gut feel is that a disembodied brain is not something that can develop a consciousness. I think consciousness fundamentally requires a self. Beyond that, I don’t really have any great theories about consciousness. I’m not an expert there. My gut feel is we tend to separate, when we talk about artificial intelligence, we tend to separate the function of mind from the body, and I think that may be a huge assumption that we can do that and still have self and consciousness and intelligence.
I think it’s a fascinating question. About half of the guests on the show just don’t want to talk about it. They just do not want to talk about consciousness, because they say it’s not a scientific question and it’s a distraction. Half of them, very much, it is the thing, it’s the only thing that makes living worthwhile. It’s why you feel love…
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