Presentation on theme: "The Space of Possible Mind Designs"— Presentation transcript:

1 The Space of Possible Mind Designs

Roman V. Yampolskiy, PhD Computer Engineering and Computer Science University of Louisville

2 Talk Outline Space of Possible Minds A Survey of Taxonomies

Infinitude of Minds Size, Complexity and Properties of Minds Space of Mind Designs Mind Equivalence Testing

3 The Structure of the Space of Possible Minds

In 1984 Aaron Sloman published “The Structure of the Space of Possible Minds” task of providing an interdisciplinary description of that structure. Sloman wanted to see two levels of exploration namely: Descriptive: surveying things different minds can do Exploratory: looking at how different virtual machines and their properties may explain results of the descriptive study. In this work we attempt to make another step towards this important goal. 3

4 Aaron Sloman’s Space of Possible Minds

Quantitative VS Structural Continuous VS Discrete Complexity of stored instructions Serial VS Parallel Distributed VS Fundamentally Parallel Connected to External Environment VS Not Connected Moving VS Stationary Capable of modeling others VS Not capable Capable of logical inference VS Not Capable Fixed VS Re-programmable Goal consistency VS Goal Selection Meta-Motives VS Motives Able to delay goals VS Immediate goal following Statics Plan VS Dynamic Plan Self-aware VS Not Self-Aware 4

5 Ben Goertzel’s Classification of Kinds of Minds

Singly Embodied – control a single physical or simulated system. Multiply Embodied - control a number of disconnected physical or simulated systems. Flexibly Embodied – control a changing number of physical or simulated systems. Non-Embodied – resides in a physical substrate but doesn’t utilize the body in a traditional way. Body-Centered – consists of patterns emergent between physical system and the environment. Mindplex – a set of collaborating units each of which is itself a mind. Quantum – an embodiment based on properties of quantum physics. Classical - an embodiment based on properties of classical physics. 5

6 J. Storrs Hall’s Classification of Kinds of Minds

Hypohuman - infrahuman, less-than-human capacity. Diahuman - human-level capacities in some areas, but still not a general intelligence. Parahuman - similar but not identical to humans, as for example, augmented humans. Allohuman - as capable as humans, but in different areas. Epihuman - slightly beyond the human level. Hyperhuman - much more powerful than human, superintelligent. 6

7 Kevin Kelly’s Taxonomy of Minds

Super fast human mind. Mind with operational access to its source code. Any mind capable of general intelligence and self-awareness. General intelligence without self-awareness. Self-awareness without general intelligence. Super logic machine without emotion. Mind capable of imagining greater mind. Mind capable of creating greater mind. (M2) Self-aware mind incapable of creating a greater mind. Mind capable of creating greater mind which creates greater mind. etc. (M3, and Mn) Mind requiring protector while it develops. Very slow "invisible" mind over large physical distance. Mind capable of cloning itself and remaining in unity with clones. Mind capable of immortality. Rapid dynamic mind able to change its mind-space-type sectors (think different) Global mind -- large supercritical mind of subcritical brains. Hive mind -- large super critical mind made of smaller minds each of which is supercritical. Low count hive mind with few critical minds making it up. Borg -- supercritical mind of smaller minds supercritical but not self-aware Nano mind -- smallest (size and energy profile) possible super critical mind. Storebit -- Mind based primarily on vast storage and memory. Anticipators -- Minds specializing in scenario and prediction making. Guardian angels -- Minds trained and dedicated to enhancing your mind, useless to anyone else. Mind with communication access to all known "facts." (F1) Mind which retains all known "facts," never erasing. (F2) Symbiont, half machine half animal mind. Cyborg, half human half machine mind. Q-mind, using quantum computing Vast mind employing faster-than-light communications 7

8 The Universe of Possible Minds

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9 Space of Minds = Space of Programs

If we accept materialism, we have to also accept that accurate software simulations of animal and human minds are possible. Those are known as uploads and they belong to a class comprised of computer programs no different from that to which AI software agents belong. Consequently, we can treat the space of all minds as the space of programs with the specific property of exhibiting intelligence if properly embodied. All programs could be represented as strings of binary numbers each mind can be represented by a unique number. The embodiment requirement is necessary since a string is not mind. 9

10 Infinitude of Minds If we accept that knowledge of a single unique fact distinguishes one mind from another we can prove that the space of minds is infinite. Suppose we have a mind M and it has a favorite number N. A new mind could be created by copying M and replacing its favorite number with a new favorite number N+1. This process could be repeated infinitely giving us an infinite set of unique minds. Given that a string of binary numbers represents an integer we can deduce that the set of mind designs is an infinite and countable set since it is an infinite subset of integers. It is not the same as set of integers since not all integers encode for a mind. 10

11 Smallest and Largest Minds

Given that minds are countable they could be arranged in an ordered list, for example in order of numerical value of the representing string. This means that some mind will have the interesting property of being the smallest. If we accept that a Universal Turing Machine (UTM) is a type of mind, if we denote by (m, n) the class of UTMs with m states and n symbols, the following UTMs have been discovered: (9, 3), (4, 6), (5, 5), and (2, 18). The (4, 6)-UTM uses only 22 instructions, and no standard machine of lesser complexity has been found. Alternatively, we may ask about the largest mind. Given that we have already shown that the set of minds is infinite, such an entity theoretically does not exist. However, if we take into account our embodiment requirement the largest mind may in fact correspond to the design at the physical limits of computation. 11

12 Generating All Minds Another interesting property of the minds is that they all can be generated by a simple deterministic algorithm, a variant of Levin Search: start with an integer, check to see if the number encodes a mind, if not, we discard the number, otherwise we add it to the set of mind designs and proceed to examine the next integer. Every mind will eventually appear on our list of minds after a predetermined number of steps. However, checking to see if something is in fact a mind is not a trivial procedure. Rice’s theorem explicitly forbids determination of non-trivial properties of random programs. One way to overcome this limitation is to introduce an arbitrary time limit on the mind-or-not-mind determination. 12

13 Incomprehensibility of Greater Minds

Each mind design corresponds to an integer and so is finite, but since the number of minds is infinite some have a much greater number of states compared to others. This property holds for all minds. Since a human mind has only a finite number of possible states, there are minds which can never be fully understood by a human mind such mind designs have a much greater number of states, making their understanding impossible as can be demonstrated by the pigeonhole principle. 13

14 Permanence of Minds Given our algorithm for sequentially generating minds, one can see that a mind could never be completely destroyed, making minds theoretically immortal. A particular mind may not be embodied at a given time, but the idea of it is always present. In fact it was present even before the material universe came into existence. So, given sufficient computational resources any mind design could be regenerated. 14

15 Nested Minds Lastly a possibility remains that some minds are physically or informationally recursively nested within other minds. With respect to the physical nesting we can consider a type of mind suggested by Kelly who talks about “a very slow invisible mind over large physical distances”. It is possible that the physical universe as a whole or a significant part of it comprises such a mega-mind. In that case all the other minds we can consider are nested within such larger mind. With respect to the informational nesting a powerful mind can generate a less powerful mind as an idea. 15

16 Knowledge Acquisition in Minds

With respect to their knowledgebases minds could be separated into those without an initial knowledgebase, and which are expected to acquire their knowledge from the environment, minds which are given a large set of universal knowledge from the inception those minds which are given specialized knowledge only in one or more domains. 16

17 Intelligence of Minds The notion of intelligence only makes sense in the context of problems to which said intelligence can be applied. Computational complexity theory is devoted to studying and classifying different problems with respect to computational resources necessary to solve them. For every class of problem complexity theory defines a class of machines capable of solving such problems. We can apply similar ideas to classifying minds, for example all minds capable of efficiently solving problems in the class P or a more difficult class of NP-complete problems. Similarly we can talk about minds with general intelligence belonging to the class of AI-Complete minds, such as humans. 17

18 Goals of Great Minds Steve Omohundro used micro-economic theory to speculate about the driving forces in the behavior of superintelligent machines. He argues that intelligent machines will want to self-improve, be rational, preserve their utility functions, prevent counterfeit utility, acquire resources and use them efficiently, protect themselves. While it is commonly assumed that minds with high intelligence will converge on a common goal, Nick Bostrom via his orthogonality thesis has argued that that a system can have any combination of intelligence and goals. 18

19 Mind to Mind Communication

In order to be social, two minds need to be able to communicate which might be difficult if the two minds don’t share a common communication protocol, common culture or even common environment. In other words, if they have no common grounding they don’t understand each other. We can say that two minds understand each other if given the same set of inputs they produce similar outputs. In sequence prediction tasks two minds have an understanding if their predictions are the same regarding the future numbers of the sequence based on the same observed subsequence. We can say that a mind can understand another mind’s function if it can predict the other’s output with high accuracy. Interestingly, a perfect ability by two minds to predict each other would imply that they are identical. 19

20 Testing Minds for Equivalence

If your mind is cloned and if a copy is instantiated in a different substrate from the original one (or on the same substrate), how can it be verified that the copy is indeed an identical mind? For that purpose I propose a variant of a Turing Test (TT) The test proceeds by having the examiner (original mind) ask questions of the copy (cloned mind), questions which supposedly only the original mind would know answers to (testing should be done in a way which preserves privacy). Good questions would relate to personal preferences, secrets (passwords, etc.). Only a perfect copy should be able to answers all such questions in the same way as the original mind. Another variant of the same test may have a 3rd party test the original and cloned mind by seeing if they always provide the same answer to any question. 20

21 The Universe of Minds Science periodically experiences a discovery of a whole new area of investigation. For example: observations made by Galileo Galilei lead to the birth of observational astronomy, aka study of our universe; Watson and Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA lead to the birth of the field of genetics, which studies the universe of blueprints for organisms; Stephen Wolfram’s work with cellular automata has resulted in “a new kind of science” which investigates the universe of computational processes. I believe that we are about to discover yet another universe – the universe of minds. 21

22 References can be found in …

Yampolskiy, R.V., B. Klare, and A.K. Jain. Face recognition in the virtual world: Recognizing Avatar faces. in Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA), th International Conference on IEEE. Yampolskiy, R.V., Leakproofing Singularity - Artificial Intelligence Confinement Problem. Journal of Consciousness Studies (JCS), (1-2): p. 194–214. Yampolskiy, R.V., Efficiency Theory: a Unifying Theory for Information, Computation and Intelligence. Journal of Discrete Mathematical Sciences & Cryptography, (4-5): p Yampolskiy, R.V. and J. Fox, Artificial General Intelligence and the Human Mental Model, in Singularity Hypotheses2012, Springer Berlin Heidelberg. p Yampolskiy, R.V., L. Ashby, and L. Hassan, Wisdom of Artificial Crowds—A Metaheuristic Algorithm for Optimization. Journal of Intelligent Learning Systems and Applications, (2): p Yampolskiy, R.V., Turing Test as a Defining Feature of AI-Completeness, in Artificial Intelligence, Evolutionary Computation and Metaheuristics - In the footsteps of Alan Turing. Xin-She Yang (Ed.)2013, Springer. p Yampolskiy, R.V., AI-Complete, AI-Hard, or AI-Easy–Classification of Problems in AI. The 23rd Midwest Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Conference, Cincinnati, OH, USA, 2012. Yampolskiy, R.V., AI-Complete CAPTCHAs as Zero Knowledge Proofs of Access to an Artificially Intelligent System. ISRN Artificial Intelligence, Yampolskiy, R.V., Utility Function Security in Artificially Intelligent Agents. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence (JETAI), 2014. Yampolskiy, R.V., Artificial intelligence safety engineering: Why machine ethics is a wrong approach, in Philosophy and Theory of Artificial Intelligence2013, Springer Berlin Heidelberg. p Yampolskiy, R.V., What to Do with the Singularity Paradox?, in Philosophy and Theory of Artificial Intelligence2013, Springer Berlin Heidelberg. p

23 Thank yoU! All images used in this presentation are copyrighted to their respective owners and are used for educational purposes only.