Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Daily Mail has claimed that the super intelligence of a new race of cybernetic enhanced humans will be able to solve wicked problems such as Climate Change.
‘Superintellingence’ of AI and humans working together could solve climate change and end wars, researchers claim
‘Wicked’ problems are difficult to solve due to many interacting systems
These types of problems include climate change and geopolitical conflict
Human computation merges human intelligence and AI to solve problems
In the fight against ‘wicked’ problems, computers may be humans’ best allies. Researchers from the Human Computation Institute and Cornell University say that the combination would create a superintelligence, and it could take on growing issues like climate change and geopolitical conflict.
New technologies use crowd-sourced input and interactive tools to produce collaborative results that go beyond traditional problem-solving, they claim.
Wicked problems are those which are difficult to solve because of the complexity of the underlying issues.
They involve many interacting systems which are always changing, and the solutions have unforeseen consequences, according to the Human Computation Institute.
By joining with computer intelligence, humans could expand upon their own abilities to create ‘multidimensional collaborative networks,’ the researchers say.
This could more effectively produce solutions.
In general I’m a fan of human augmentation; Cochlear implants to restore hearing to the profoundly deaf, and soon retinal implants to restore sight to the blind, what’s not to like. Even brain implants, say to give the recipient perfect recall of people’s names, or instant mastery of physical skills or a foreign language, or health implants which maintain balance and warn of problems – well we’ve already got heart pacemakers.
But the science has its dark side. Some of the early experiments into neural implants were ethically dubious, for example there were attempts to change the sexual orientation of homosexuals, and rather dodgy experiments to help people with severe depression, by giving them the ability to ping their own pleasure centres.
As society’s traumatic experience with addictive drugs has shown, it only takes a small push to tip a normal person into insanity. The people who had the pleasure implants mostly had to be physically restrained, when doctors took the buzz button away from them. A woman who had an experimental libido implant demanded it be removed.
As an IT expert who has taken a keen interest in artificial intelligence, I have no doubt artificial enhancements to intelligence will become possible, maybe even routine, within my lifetime. But lets just say I would be nervous about the consequences of abruptly giving a normal human volunteer superhuman intellectual abilities, without a lot of preliminary research, to establish what effect such brain modifications have on someone’s emotional stability.
We will eradicate climate change in our lifetime!-Cyberdyne Systems
Surely “we will terminate climate change in our lifetime!”? 🙂
Why would climate change matter to a machine?
Rust? Corrosion? All that nasty oxygen messing up the structure…
….and no oil for lubrication!
No problem for a hyper-alloy combat chassis.
The climate is the system of weather systems and has not changed, and needs no “solution”. The hybrids may be smart enough to ignore the issue.
Please Sir,
Why the hell would we machinbots give a hoot about climate; or whether it changes ??
What your so-called “super intelligence” beings will determine is that humans do not and cannot control climate…natural variation drives climate.
End wars thru more intelligence? That’s quite funny. Well, at least these new brains will have more than the Daily Mail
The Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse will still be riding rings round us!
April 1st comes earlier every year…
Artificial Intelligence will never be a match for natural stupidity.
Natural intelligence has a hard enough time.
Well it can screw up so much faster.
To err is human. To really F things up, requires a computer.
My name is Robbie the Robot and I am your God.
Marvin…with a brain the size of a planet!
Putting two people together, each with an IQ of 80, does not give them an IQ of 160 !!!
Enhancing stupidity is not the answer.
Brilliant!
Remainds me of “Flowers for Algernon”.
It is ancient wisdom that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. There will be the power of those who control the technology. There will the power of some people with enhancements over those without. There will be the power of the artificial intelligence making decisions for the “substandard” humans. A planetary artificial super intelligence? What could go wrong with that?
We have generations of dystopian novels warning of what technology is coming down the pike as I write these words. Will we listen? Of course not, we are humans after all — monkeys with tools.
~ Mark
Programming an AI to “fix” a non-existent condition
will just get you a nutty AI. Don’ t give it nukes.
Good point. But remember the AI would be programmed by BHO / HRC appointees. (If programmed by normal people it would on its first day analyse unadjusted temps and remind everyone that AGW presents no threat at all.)
Ya, we ready tried this. AI invented the internet and tried to fix CAGW. If Al Gore is the example of combining artificial intelligence with humans I say ” let’s call the whole thing off.”
Artificial wisdom is probably even further away than the AI dream.
There is a big difference between intelligence and wisdom. Something most people forget too easily.
Guess these guys never heard of mathematical chaos. It figures.
We’ve already experienced the total failure of the climate-predicting super-computer models.
God help us if we try to use AI to keep world peace.
I’m certain intelligence augmentation would go a long way towards solving the climate change problem since it’s difficult to understand how a person of even high/normal human intelligence could consider it a physical problem to begin with, but I wouldn’t be so sanguine about that happening in your lifetime. After many years being active in the AI research community I came to believe there’s far more we don’t understand about intelligence than we do, and I absolutely don’t believe AI will “just happen” someday by accident.
For now, I think the closest we’ll get anytime soon to computer assisted human intelligence is Google, and very few people are smart enough to make good use of it so it’s sort of self-limiting. Actually, I believe Google peaked about 10 years ago and is progressively deteriorating as a useful tool, failing under the weight of the massive amounts of pure junk published on the web that seems to be expanding exponentially.
“After many years being active in the AI research community I came to believe there’s far more we don’t understand about intelligence than we do, …”
And I would add the contention that “intelligence” is not the same thing as “wisdom”.
That’s true, some of the most ‘intelligent’ people I know couldn’t be trusted with anything requiring the use of tools!
“Intelligence” is a collection of knowledge. Wisdom is putting knowledge to good use with little as possible negative effects. Knowledge is the tools, while wisdom is the craftsman.
Exactly, Roy. Wisdom is putting one’s education to its most beneficial philanthropic use.
There’s not a shred of evidence that “intelligence” as defined by us the intelligent ones, provides us with enhanced survivability.
The tube worms and such feeding on the black smoker fumaroles, will still be around long after we are absent in the fossil records of the future.
And they are pretty much immune to anything we might try to do to them.
The dinosaurs survived at least 1,000 times as long as we have; just by being big and mean and ugly.
“george e smith
January 2, 2016 at 6:30 pm
…just by being big and mean and ugly.”
Ah! So I have a future!
Richerson & Boyd 2005 “All animals are under stringent selection pressure to be as stupid as they can get away with”
AI’s may well be our evolutionary descendants .. but assuming we cobble something together that’s not as limited and biased by the same wiring and brain faults as ourselves, why on earth would such an AI bother to ‘help’ us? I’m not a follower of the Terminator doomsday scenario, but many spider species evolved to eat mum after they are born.
What climate change problem?
Exactly; intelligent enough to ignore it.
Perhaps they mean the problem humanity has developed adapting to it?
If augmentation solves any climate change problems, it will do so by exposing AGW as the hoax that it is.
If we (WUWT readers) generally agree we can neither predict nor control climate, what basis is there to to believe we understand human intelligence well enough to augment it? Even without super-brains, we should be producing a more informed, better educated general public simply through the natural accretion of knowledge. Instead, we seem to be moving in the opposite direction. Education, which we thought would be our salvation, may be our doom.
Your right, but it’s no longer ” education ” being taught in schools, it’s liberal indoctrination !!
I recently upset a young lady studying for a degree in Conflict Resolution, by asking whether her curriculum included Dueling. She was not amused. If AI is for real does that mean we won’t need to fund SETI anymore?
After thinking just a bit more about this subject, I can see one good reason for AI researcher to suggest the field “could” solve the cAGW problem; why let climateologists suck up all the government research funding?
Precisely. This is a blatant attempt to secure funding.
Even if the technology was feasible, the notion that it could solve war is laughable. If such a thing was ever built, the only purpose it would serve would be to establish a military advantage in waging and winning wars for whoever got it first.
Of course you’re right David, this is nothing other than an attempt to tap into the billions available for climate research. I think its funny that in doing so they effectively admit that the ‘wicked’ problem of climate change is unsolvable without their proposed ‘Superintellingence’.
They (i.e., the researchers from the Human Computation Institute and Cornell University) also imply that the climate system is “too complex” and “always changing” and that without their ‘multidimensional collaborative networks,’ we mere mortals are incapable of understanding the climate system enough to model it. (Might I add, incapable of defining ‘climate change’ as a problem.)
Among the smart things that Albert Einstein is reputed to have said:
“God does not care about our math problems.”
That was a clue in a science crossword puzzle, either in Physics Today, or in Optics and Photonics News. But I can’t verify it.
But it points to the real problem in modeling climate.
We dreamed up ALL of our math in our heads. Often as solutions to simple differential equations, which describe our equally fictional MODELS of what we think the Universe looks like.
Well the real world differential equations, are far too complex and non linear to yield simple closed form solutions; so we have to try numerical computer methods; which are far too slow, and still only an approximation.
“God does not care about our math problems.”
Maybe Einstein was right.
g
This is a childishly transparent attempt at yet another version of “appeal to authority” fallacy. Someone could write a book on all the ways Greens manifest that particular fallacy. We have all the intellect we need to solve our problems. People who want to “solve climate change” already know what solutions they want, they don’t need any superior intellect to echo their foregone conclusions back to them. They want their newly created intellectual authority to echo them to us, with greater intellectual weight or something. What nonsense.
But what if the robots turned out to be deniers? That would be a laugh. With their superior intelligence and reasoning they might see climate change as the scam it is.
Why do we even need the AI to “solve climate change?” The science is “settled.” All we have to do is go to negative carbon emissions. There. And the only thing enhancing my brain is ethanol!
I thought ‘Al’ Gore was doing it for us
It depends on two factors.
Firstly how much time we have before civilised society fragments and each fragment fends for itself.
Implants may not change the nature of man and make him more considerate and caring and less competitive.
I can see a senario where the super intelligent decide ordinary mortals are best disposed of or stopped from breeding. The aim being to cut off the waste and advance as quick as possible.
It’s already here, see Agenda 21…
That scenario has already started, see The Club of Rome and Agenda 21 !
Thnkyou for bringing the Club of Rome to my attention it is an extensive resource.
If I was an AI, I would begin to solve the “problem of climate change” by removing the defective organic units who programmed me with the task of solving a non-problem.
“Computer intelligence”, of course, is an oxymoron. They are only as “smart” as those who program them. And the idea that the combination of computers, no matter how powerfyl, and crowdsourcing can solve human problems, real or imagined is frankly retarded.
AI development is different to normal programming. There is something eerie about watching an AI crawl towards a solution – its like watching something living, like watching a tree grow, rather than watching a normal program execute.
This applies especially to when you are dealing with advanced algorithms such as NEAT, which are not limited in terms of topology as previous efforts such as Perceptrons were. NEAT networks mostly simply grow until they find a solution, or run out of computer power.
@ur momisugly Eric Worral , I looked up NEAT and wondered. If this is already knowledge available to the general public I wonder how much is going on behind closed doors?
“They are only as “smart” as those who program them?” A popular idea, but is it actually true? As a PhD student, I sometimes helped to work on a program (PRESS) for solving equations symbolically. It was a brute to debug, for an interesting reason. You would add a new rule to help solve a kind of equation, and the program would solve it another way without using that rule. You would discover by accident that a rule had always been wrong, but the program had been solving equations without it. We are actually pretty bad at understanding, let alone predicting, the interactions between rules, so even programs that are not intended as AI can act in ways surprising to their authors. And then there’s the whole area of machine learning, and learning from *massive* data sets that no human being could possibly even peruse, let alone learn from. I don’t want to push this too far, but it’s definitely the case that adaptive computer programs can come to exhibit useful behaviours that their authors did not expect and do not understand.
“God does not care about our math problems.”
Who cares if AI can solve equations or not. It’s the equations themselves that do not mimic reality.
g
Like oil, we will never reach peak stupid on Global Warming, will we?
So the Borg will stop climate change? I guess that’s OK, but it’s didn’t work out very well for those in the Star Trek universe. 🙂
Seriously though, these so called wicked problems have their own nature. The closer one examines a wicked problem, the more one realizes the problem is (wickedly) more complex than first expected. Nature loves to hide. I’m not convinced hybrids will make much progress here.
Will we ever know enough about what the causes of our weather are?
If so, could we ever control the weather?
Maybe, maybe not.
There is no need to control the weather in order to solve the ” climate change ” problem…All we need to do is put the Eco-terrorists back in the loony bins and the non existent problem would be solved!!
Nothing is scarier than trying to deal with or stop a very intelligent person who is bent on ‘solving a problem’ when they decide this problem is to be eliminated via killing everyone.
And this WILL happen, convince some high intelligence that humans are destroying the earth and…it will bend its will to kill all humans! Duh!
‘Wicked’ problems are difficult to solve I remember when ‘wicked’, ‘pisser’ and ‘cool’, were synonyms.
There is a very interesting series of sci-fi books by Neal Asher (The Polity Series) that deal with AI’s running things for the human race. Very good if you like pure sci-fi.
As for climate change it seems like the Warmistas already use their own brand of ‘Artificial’ Intelligence to apply to climate modeling and prediction.
Also, wouldn’t an AI recommend eliminating all religion to get rid of wars ? I bet that wouldn’t go over to well with a a large part of the human population.
Why would it recommend any such thing? There is no reason to believe that eliminating religion (if possible) would get rid of wars. Chimpanzees have nothing we can recognise as religion, yet engage in war-like behaviour http://news.discovery.com/animals/zoo-animals/chimp-war-behavior.htm. Officially atheist societies in the 20th century were not notably peaceful. And how do you eliminate religion without warring against the religious people? (As if there were one single thing called “religion” anyway.)