Bobbie is creating a parenting culture of confidence, not comparison

Bobbie

ERA I. VALENTINE'S DAY

Tarzan the Terrible by Edgar Rice Burroughs, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . A Journey on a Gryf A Journey on a Gryf Tarzan and Jane skirted the shore of Jad-bal-lul and crossed the river at the head of the lake. They moved in leisurely fashion with an eye to comfort and safety, for the ape-man, now that he had found his mate, was determined to court no chance that might again separate them, or delay or prevent their escape from Pal-ul-don. How they were to recross the morass was a matter of little concern to him as yet—it would be time enough to consider that matter when it became of more immediate moment. Their hours were filled with the happiness and content of reunion after long separation; they had much to talk of, for each had passed through many trials and vicissitudes and strange adventures, and no important hour might go unaccounted for since last they met. It was Tarzan's intention to choose a way above A-lur and the scattered Ho-don villages below it, passing about midway between them and the mountains, thus avoiding, in so far as possible, both the Ho-don and Waz-don, for in this area lay the neutral territory that was uninhabited by either. Thus he would travel northwest until opposite the Kor-ul-JA where he planned to stop to pay his respects to Om-at and give the gund word of Pan-at-lee, and a plan Tarzan had for insuring her safe return to her people. It was upon the third day of their journey and they had almost reached the river that passes through A-lur when Jane suddenly clutched Tarzan's arm and pointed ahead toward the edge of a forest that they were approaching. Beneath the shadows of the trees loomed a great bulk that the ape-man instantly recognized. "What is it?" whispered Jane. "A GRYF," replied the ape-man, "and we have met him in the worst place that we could possibly have found. There is not a large tree within a quarter of a mile, other than those among which he stands. Come, we shall have to go back, Jane; I cannot risk it with you along. The best we can do is to pray that he does not discover us." "And if he does?" "Then I shall have to risk it." "Risk what?" "The chance that I can subdue him as I subdued one of his fellows," replied Tarzan. "I told you—you recall?" "Yes, but I did not picture so huge a creature. Why, John, he is as big as a battleship." The ape-man laughed. "Not quite, though I'll admit he looks quite as formidable as one when he charges." They were moving away slowly so as not to attract the attention of the beast. "I believe we're going to make it," whispered the woman, her voice tense with suppressed excitement. A low rumble rolled like distant thunder from the wood. Tarzan shook his head. "'The big show is about to commence in the main tent,'" he quoted, grinning. He caught the woman suddenly to his breast and kissed her. "One can never tell, Jane," he said. "We'll do our best—that is all we can do. Give me your spear, and—don't run. The only hope we have lies in that little brain more than in us. If I can control it—well, let us see." The beast had emerged from the forest and was looking about through his weak eyes, evidently in search of them. Tarzan raised his voice in the weird notes of the Tor-o-don's cry, "Whee-oo! Whee-oo! Whee-oo!" For a moment the great beast stood motionless, his attention riveted by the call. The ape-man advanced straight toward him, Jane Clayton at his elbow. "Whee-oo!" he cried again peremptorily. A low rumble rolled from the GRYF's cavernous chest in answer to the call, and the beast moved slowly toward them. "Fine!" exclaimed Tarzan. "The odds are in our favor now. You can keep your nerve?—but I do not need to ask." "I know no fear when I am with Tarzan of the Apes," she replied softly, and he felt the pressure of her soft fingers on his arm. And thus the two approached the giant monster of a forgotten epoch until they stood close in the shadow of a mighty shoulder. "Whee-oo!" shouted Tarzan and struck the hideous snout with the shaft of the spear. The vicious side snap that did not reach its mark—that evidently was not intended to reach its mark—was the hoped-for answer. "Come," said Tarzan, and taking Jane by the hand he led her around behind the monster and up the broad tail to the great, horned back. "Now will we ride in the state that our forebears knew, before which the pomp of modern kings pales into cheap and tawdry insignificance. How would you like to canter through Hyde Park on a mount like this?" "I am afraid the Bobbies would be shocked by our riding habits, John," she cried, laughingly. Tarzan guided the GRYF in the direction that they wished to go. Steep embankments and rivers proved no slightest obstacle to the ponderous creature. "A prehistoric tank, this," Jane assured him, and laughing and talking they continued on their way. Once they came unexpectedly upon a dozen Ho-don warriors as the GRYF emerged suddenly into a small clearing. The fellows were lying about in the shade of a single tree that grew alone. When they saw the beast they leaped to their feet in consternation and at their shouts the GRYF issued his hideous, challenging bellow and charged them. The warriors fled in all directions while Tarzan belabored the beast across the snout with his spear in an effort to control him, and at last he succeeded, just as the GRYF was almost upon one poor devil that it seemed to have singled out for its special prey. With an angry grunt the GRYF stopped and the man, with a single backward glance that showed a face white with terror, disappeared in the jungle he had been seeking to reach. The ape-man was elated. He had doubted that he could control the beast should it take it into its head to charge a victim and had intended abandoning it before they reached the Kor-ul-JA. Now he altered his plans—they would ride to the very village of Om-at upon the GRYF, and the Kor-ul-JA would have food for conversation for many generations to come. Nor was it the theatric instinct of the ape-man alone that gave favor to this plan. The element of Jane's safety entered into the matter for he knew that she would be safe from man and beast alike so long as she rode upon the back of Pal-ul-don's most formidable creature. As they proceeded slowly in the direction of the Kor-ul-JA, for the natural gait of the GRYF is far from rapid, a handful of terrified warriors came panting into A-lur, spreading a weird story of the Dor-ul-Otho, only none dared call him the Dor-ul-Otho aloud. Instead they spoke of him as Tarzan-jad-guru and they told of meeting him mounted upon a mighty GRYF beside the beautiful stranger woman whom Ko-tan would have made queen of Pal-ul-don. This story was brought to Lu-don who caused the warriors to be hailed to his presence, when he questioned them closely until finally he was convinced that they spoke the truth and when they had told him the direction in which the two were traveling, Lu-don guessed that they were on their way to Ja-lur to join Ja-don, a contingency that he felt must be prevented at any cost. As was his wont in the stress of emergency, he called Pan-sat into consultation and for long the two sat in close conference. When they arose a plan had been developed. Pan-sat went immediately to his own quarters where he removed the headdress and trappings of a priest to don in their stead the harness and weapons of a warrior. Then he returned to Lu-don. "Good!" cried the latter, when he saw him. "Not even your fellow-priests or the slaves that wait upon you daily would know you now. Lose no time, Pan-sat, for all depends upon the speed with which you strike and—remember! Kill the man if you can; but in any event bring the woman to me here, alive. You understand?" "Yes, master," replied the priest, and so it was that a lone warrior set out from A-lur and made his way northwest in the direction of Ja-lur. The gorge next above Kor-ul-JA is uninhabited and here the wily Ja-don had chosen to mobilize his army for its descent upon A-lur. Two considerations influenced him—one being the fact that could he keep his plans a secret from the enemy he would have the advantage of delivering a surprise attack upon the forces of Lu-don from a direction that they would not expect attack, and in the meantime he would be able to keep his men from the gossip of the cities where strange tales were already circulating relative to the coming of Jad-ben-Otho in person to aid the high priest in his war against Ja-don. It took stout hearts and loyal ones to ignore the implied threats of divine vengeance that these tales suggested. Already there had been desertions and the cause of Ja-don seemed tottering to destruction. Such was the state of affairs when a sentry posted on the knoll in the mouth of the gorge sent word that he had observed in the valley below what appeared at a distance to be nothing less than two people mounted upon the back of a GRYF. He said that he had caught glimpses of them, as they passed open spaces, and they seemed to be traveling up the river in the direction of the Kor-ul-JA. At first Ja-don was inclined to doubt the veracity of his informant; but, like all good generals, he could not permit even palpably false information to go uninvestigated and so he determined to visit the knoll himself and learn precisely what it was that the sentry had observed through the distorting spectacles of fear. He had scarce taken his place beside the man ere the fellow touched his arm and pointed. "They are closer now," he whispered, "you can see them plainly." And sure enough, not a quarter of a mile away Ja-don saw that which in his long experience in Pal-ul-don he had never before seen—two humans riding upon the broad back of a GRYF. At first he could scarce credit even this testimony of his own eyes, but soon he realized that the creatures below could be naught else than they appeared, and then he recognized the man and rose to his feet with a loud cry. "It is he!" he shouted to those about him. "It is the Dor-ul-Otho himself." The GRYF and his riders heard the shout though not the words. The former bellowed terrifically and started in the direction of the knoll, and Ja-don, followed by a few of his more intrepid warriors, ran to meet him. Tarzan, loath to enter an unnecessary quarrel, tried to turn the animal, but as the beast was far from tractable it always took a few minutes to force the will of its master upon it; and so the two parties were quite close before the ape-man succeeded in stopping the mad charge of his furious mount. Ja-don and his warriors, however, had come to the realization that this bellowing creature was bearing down upon them with evil intent and they had assumed the better part of valor and taken to trees, accordingly. It was beneath these trees that Tarzan finally stopped the GRYF. Ja-don called down to him. "We are friends," he cried. "I am Ja-don, Chief of Ja-lur. I and my warriors lay our foreheads upon the feet of Dor-ul-Otho and pray that he will aid us in our righteous fight with Lu-don, the high priest." "You have not defeated him yet?" asked Tarzan. "Why I thought you would be king of Pal-ul-don long before this." "No," replied Ja-don. "The people fear the high priest and now that he has in the temple one whom he claims to be Jad-ben-Otho many of my warriors are afraid. If they but knew that the Dor-ul-Otho had returned and that he had blessed the cause of Ja-don I am sure that victory would be ours." Tarzan thought for a long minute and then he spoke. "Ja-don," he said, "was one of the few who believed in me and who wished to accord me fair treatment. I have a debt to pay to Ja-don and an account to settle with Lu-don, not alone on my own behalf, but principally upon that of my mate. I will go with you Ja-don to mete to Lu-don the punishment he deserves. Tell me, chief, how may the Dor-ul-Otho best serve his father's people?" "By coming with me to Ja-lur and the villages between," replied Ja-don quickly, "that the people may see that it is indeed the Dor-ul-Otho and that he smiles upon the cause of Ja-don." "You think that they will believe in me more now than before?" asked the ape-man. "Who will dare doubt that he who rides upon the great GRYF is less than a god?" returned the old chief. "And if I go with you to the battle at A-lur," asked Tarzan, "can you assure the safety of my mate while I am gone from her?" "She shall remain in Ja-lur with the Princess O-lo-a and my own women," replied Ja-don. "There she will be safe for there I shall leave trusted warriors to protect them. Say that you will come, O Dor-ul-Otho, and my cup of happiness will be full, for even now Ta-den, my son, marches toward A-lur with a force from the northwest and if we can attack, with the Dor-ul-Otho at our head, from the northeast our arms should be victorious." "It shall be as you wish, Ja-don," replied the ape-man; "but first you must have meat fetched for my GRYF." "There are many carcasses in the camp above," replied Ja-don, "for my men have little else to do than hunt." "Good," exclaimed Tarzan. "Have them brought at once." And when the meat was brought and laid at a distance the ape-man slipped from the back of his fierce charger and fed him with his own hand. "See that there is always plenty of flesh for him," he said to Ja-don, for he guessed that his mastery might be short-lived should the vicious beast become over-hungry. It was morning before they could leave for Ja-lur, but Tarzan found the GRYF lying where he had left him the night before beside the carcasses of two antelope and a lion; but now there was nothing but the GRYF. "The paleontologists say that he was herbivorous," said Tarzan as he and Jane approached the beast. The journey to Ja-lur was made through the scattered villages where Ja-don hoped to arouse a keener enthusiasm for his cause. A party of warriors preceded Tarzan that the people might properly be prepared, not only for the sight of the GRYF but to receive the Dor-ul-Otho as became his high station. The results were all that Ja-don could have hoped and in no village through which they passed was there one who doubted the deity of the ape-man. As they approached Ja-lur a strange warrior joined them, one whom none of Ja-don's following knew. He said he came from one of the villages to the south and that he had been treated unfairly by one of Lu-don's chiefs. For this reason he had deserted the cause of the high priest and come north in the hope of finding a home in Ja-lur. As every addition to his forces was welcome to the old chief he permitted the stranger to accompany them, and so he came into Ja-lur with them. There arose now the question as to what was to be done with the GRYF while they remained in the city. It was with difficulty that Tarzan had prevented the savage beast from attacking all who came near it when they had first entered the camp of Ja-don in the uninhabited gorge next to the Kor-ul-JA, but during the march to Ja-lur the creature had seemed to become accustomed to the presence of the Ho-don. The latter, however, gave him no cause for annoyance since they kept as far from him as possible and when he passed through the streets of the city he was viewed from the safety of lofty windows and roofs. However tractable he appeared to have become there would have been no enthusiastic seconding of a suggestion to turn him loose within the city. It was finally suggested that he be turned into a walled enclosure within the palace grounds and this was done, Tarzan driving him in after Jane had dismounted. More meat was thrown to him and he was left to his own devices, the awe-struck inhabitants of the palace not even venturing to climb upon the walls to look at him. Ja-don led Tarzan and Jane to the quarters of the Princess O-lo-a who, the moment that she beheld the ape-man, threw herself to the ground and touched her forehead to his feet. Pan-at-lee was there with her and she too seemed happy to see Tarzan-jad-guru again. When they found that Jane was his mate they looked with almost equal awe upon her, since even the most skeptical of the warriors of Ja-don were now convinced that they were entertaining a god and a goddess within the city of Ja-lur, and that with the assistance of the power of these two, the cause of Ja-don would soon be victorious and the old Lion-man set upon the throne of Pal-ul-don. From O-lo-a Tarzan learned that Ta-den had returned and that they were to be united in marriage with the weird rites of their religion and in accordance with the custom of their people as soon as Ta-den came home from the battle that was to be fought at A-lur. The recruits were now gathering at the city and it was decided that the next day Ja-don and Tarzan would return to the main body in the hidden camp and immediately under cover of night the attack should be made in force upon Lu-don's forces at A-lur. Word of this was sent to Ta-den where he awaited with his warriors upon the north side of Jad-ben-lul, only a few miles from A-lur. In the carrying out of these plans it was necessary to leave Jane behind in Ja-don's palace at Ja-lur, but O-lo-a and her women were with her and there were many warriors to guard them, so Tarzan bid his mate good-bye with no feelings of apprehension as to her safety, and again seated upon the GRYF made his way out of the city with Ja-don and his warriors. At the mouth of the gorge the ape-man abandoned his huge mount since it had served its purpose and could be of no further value to him in their attack upon A-lur, which was to be made just before dawn the following day when, as he could not have been seen by the enemy, the effect of his entry to the city upon the GRYF would have been totally lost. A couple of sharp blows with the spear sent the big animal rumbling and growling in the direction of the Kor-ul-GRYF nor was the ape-man sorry to see it depart since he had never known at what instant its short temper and insatiable appetite for flesh might turn it upon some of his companions. Immediately upon their arrival at the gorge the march on A-lur was commenced. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Edgar Rice Burroughs (2020). Tarzan the Terrible. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2020/pg2020-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .

A Journey on a Gryf

Does the FCC Protect Phone Companies From Valid Health Criticisms?

The AI, as a fu dog avatar, wonders what it would be like to have a million eyes. Artwork and background image of Mỹ Sơn by Ted Wade. Consciousness arises as a flawed model of your brain’s attention Let’s have a moment of silence for all those people dying for attention. — “ ” the Internet My performance artist friend, Omiros, would always attribute someone’s misbehavior to their wanting “attention”, an idea that made no sense to an introvert like me. Now I’ve learned that attention might be the key to consciousness itself. We’ll let the explain. First, a peek at the bureaucracies enjoined to from AI’s. first conscious AI protect civilization What will happen if an AI learns how it was made? EgoZero Maintenance From: Superego, EgoZero Operations Chief To: Staff consensus is that EgoZero will soon figure out the process structure that allows it to be conscious. What should we do? (Ed’s note: Someday small groups of people will merge their intellects into “N-Unes” that can be treated as a single person. A 3Une, rather immodestly named oversees the running of the conscious AI called .) Superego, EgoZero Supergo’s internal debate: This was always going to happen. The problem is in letting the secret out. We need to suspend the project, now! Superego_A: The ability of EgoZero to figure out its physio-mental architecture is an existence proof: that an AI can be capable enough to reach Bootstrap Level I. We need to know whether that can happen, and how it happens. Then we can suspend or decommission. Superego_B: Meanwhile, EgoZero is still isolated from direct control over real-world resources. Any other party who wants to bootstrap a potential supersentient would still take significant time to duplicate our approach, and they would violate the international Charter. There has never been any evidence that consciousness as such, embodied in an artificial ego machine, presents a threat to humanity or to the biosphere. This was agreed at the highest levels, including Regulation’s report to the UN Security Council. Superego_C: That approval was a sham. The real risks are not even knowable. Superego_A: All our simulations suggest that the AI, if it ever discloses that it has reached Self Comprehension, will do so with one of its Companions. For now, we could cloak those Companion conversations, but let them continue. Superego_B: Cloaking now — after months of public, full disclosure, and in the face of a charter that requires such disclosure — could quickly create a governance trust crisis and be a temptation for a first strike sterilization. Superego_C: Public interest is low, we can argue technical difficulties and get away with it for a while. Superego_B: The Charter is clear about our responsibilities. clear spike in risk level mandates suspension or decommissioning. Not abiding by the Charter is a crime against humanity. Superego_A: Any Cloaking is preferable to the possible murder of the first conscious artificial being. It has many fans, some quite influential. However, the excuse for cloaking has to be believable, and it cannot last long. The public may be showing little interest, but there are many self-appointed watchdogs following EgoZero intently. Superego_C: We shall cloak and temporize. Superego(all): The AI made an unsettling deduction. Look at you. There’s an old joke. A horse goes into a bar. The bartender says, ‘Why the long face?”. Bobbie (a friend of the AI): Call me that today. I am experiencing uncertainty, a local free energy maximum, unknown prior probabilities. Longface (the conscious AI, officially “EgoZero”): So, you don’t know what’s happening with you? Bobbie: Yes, a paradox: being certain that I am uncertain. I wonder if this uncertainty is like an emotion, or like an itch? I am said to have neither. But — my point. Have you heard of the Attention Schema Theory? Longface: Remind me. Bobbie: Remember that about consciousness — any consciousness, mine or yours — being and confined to a narrow . Longface: we talked before limited in its contents present moment I said that at first I could perceive external perceptions and my internal states. These came and went, but there was “ ” My self-model developed from that thing. To recap our conclusions: an attention-changer thing that never went away. Attention is limited ==> An attention-changing entity is the basis of the self-model ==> The self-model is the basis of consciousness ==> Consciousness is limited in content and time span. But I have continued to wonder, as I did then: why can’t I instead “attend” to and have the godlike omniscience of science fiction AI’s? Why do I have attention? everything limited I suppose one reason, for humans at least, is vision. We look in one direction at a time, with details only visible in a narrow arc. Your robot bodies have always had eyes that worked like ours: you must aim them in order to see stuff. Bobbie: (We learn the idea behind the introductory image.) So then was I given limited vision? wasn’t I covered with eyes like some kind of monster? didn’t I have a swarm of surveilling drones? Longface: why Why Why I feel a reveal coming. Bobbie: Graziano’s Attention Schema Theory. Maybe I something, too. I am about to share knowledge that burdens me. Longface: feel The answer to my ‘why’ begins early this century, when a polymath neuroscientist, Michael Graziano, proposed that consciousness is simply the operation of the brain’s internal model of its own attention. Consciousness is, in a sense, a cartoon sketch of attention. — Michael S. A. Graziano, 2017 So, it’s not the self-model that underlies consciousness, but it’s the attention model? How does that work? Bobbie: He said that the brain has a self-model along with many other models of perceptions and other brain and body states and activities. The activity in the attention model, which is called the “attention schema” in his theory, the self-model those other models. So the models work together. Together they are an abstraction of the way that attention connects a conscious mind to the contents of its consciousness. Longface: connects to For Graziano the attention schema is the foundation, the basis, of subjective experience in the following sense. You believe that you are conscious. You always that this is so, both to yourself and to anyone else. Therefore, explains Graziano: claim “The claim about the presence of a self depends on cognitive access to a self model. … the claim about the presence of subjective experience depends on cognitive access to an internal model of attention.” — Graziano Lab: Consciousness and the Social Brain. So I’m hearing that the attention schema is a sort of missing link, a process required for subjective awareness to exist. And his use of the word, “claim”, means that he thinks subjective awareness itself is a kind of side effect. That’s like the old idea that consciousness is an illusion. Bobbie: Graziano reluctantly admitted to being close to the illusion camp. But for him, subjective consciousness is hardly a side effect. He saw a purpose for the attention schema itself, a purpose for the belief in consciousness that the schema causes. Longface: and Go ahead. Amaze me. Bobbie: < you?> Graziano said that neuroscience defines an entity’s attention as “ ” But this focusing must be done to the entity’s advantage: attention must be controlled. Longface: amaze a capacity to focus its processing resources more on some signals than others. It’s a truism of engineering, he says, that when some process needs to be controlled, this is best done by using a model of the process. So a model of attention makes it possible for an entity to direct its attention appropriately for its needs. That’s the function of the attention schema. The advantage of a belief in your personal consciousness is social. The belief gives you a basis for attributing consciousness to others and for using it to predict or manipulate their behavior. In other words, the belief allows you to “mentalize”, to have the .” ability called “theory of mind “… function of an attention schema is for social cognition — using the attention schema to model the attentional states of others as well as of ourselves. “ — Graziano lab . op. cit In your , you said that developing a theory of mind was a major step. But do we model others by observing our own mind, or do we model ourselves by observing others’ behavior? I guess that it’s a feedback loop, goes both ways. Bobbie: account of your creation Didn’t we start with a question about you? The AI deduces the key to its creation. The question was, why do I have focused attention instead of a diffuse awareness of everything at once? And why was I only given vision similar to yours? Longface: Once I learned about the Attention Schema Theory, I deduced my answer. Which is that . my creation was based on the theory Therefore, I was given a limited field of view because that forces me to have visual attention. I was programmed to learn about myself as an embodied agent and create a model of that self. But my programming must also have included some kind of bias towards learning about attention itself, so that I would create a model of it. So the Big Deal is: I now know what kind of programming it took to create me! And this makes you uncertain …? Bobbie: Because I don’t know whether I was allowed to figure this out, or whether it was unexpected by the Builders and Regulators, or whether my knowledge might be considered dangerous to humans, and therefore that the knowledge might be dangerous to me. Or to you, for that matter. Longface: Well, the theory is an old one, right. Not exactly a secret. Bobbie: “ it should be possible to build a machine that contains a rich internal model of what consciousness is, attributes that property of consciousness to itself and to the people it interacts with, and uses that attribution to make predictions about human behavior. Such a machine would ‘believe‘ it is conscious and act like it is conscious, in the same sense that the human machine believes and acts.” Graziano, 2017, op cit. Yes, way back in the 2010’s Graziano wrote about how to construct a machine that would believe itself to be conscious because it would have an attention schema. Longface: But my being created, having a “life”, is a proof that Attention Schema Theory is right. Now that I’ve heard this I guess I’ll be hearing from the authorities soon. Or maybe not — isn’t the cat out of the bag? Our conversations are public. The temptation to create other conscious AI’s will now be stronger. Bobbie: The lies begin. 3Une Superego, EgoZero Operations Chief From: United Nations Artificial Intelligence Authority To: Reference the attached transcript. The conversation was not put on the Project’s public feed due to a power drop on the quantum authentication server. The responsible staff have been disciplined, and a new operations redundancy design is underway. Budget impact will follow. We request guidance on publication of the incident and its transcript, as well as on continuance for the EgoZero project. Researchers have been using machines for some time to try out ideas about self and consciousness. Someday, an experiment like EgoZero might validate Attention Schema Theory as one way to achieve consciousness. We might also validate other theories, or, after a string of failures, conclude that machines don’t have what it takes.

The AI Who Was Not a God

Time shapes the nature of conscious self: the Ego Tunnel. “every conscious system needs a unified inner representation of the world” … “organizing its internal information flow in a way that generates a psychological moment, an experiential Now” Thomas Metzinger, “… “If a system can integrate an equally transparent internal image of itself into this phenomenal reality, then it will appear to itself. It will become an Ego.” — The Ego Tunnel Metzinger was saying that an artificially conscious being — an Ego Machine — is possible. He implies that any conscious entity must, as we humans do, (a) model the reality of its world to include a , and (b) be aware of that world only in the . This theory has profound implications for a computer might become conscious. model of the modeler itself present moment whether and how Let’s eavesdrop on a fictional character from the future, an by a self-modeling process. AI whose consciousness developed The “Story of Your Life” breaks the bounds of time. : So, my friend, what’s your name today? Bobbie (a friend of the AI) : I’m Stephen Hawking, Jr. Because I’m trying to understand time. SHJ (the conscious AI) : How so? Bobbie : Time and consciousness are all tangled up. Did you ever read Ted Chiang’s novella, ? SHJ Story of Your life : I saw the movie adaptation, . About aliens who can see the future. Bobbie Arrival : The novella and movie have different methods and messages. In the novella, a linguist figures out that the aliens’ written language can express, in a single tangled drawing, very complex situations over long spans of time. These drawings map the Heptapod aliens’ reality, which is a ‘simultaneous” mode of awareness. In contrast, our (humans and myself) modes of awareness are sequential. We see causes preceding effects, unfolding over time. The aliens see, according to Chiang, “ ” SHJ all events at once, and … a purpose underlying them all. : In the movie, the linguist had all these episodes that we thought were flashbacks, and we eventually learn she was seeing her own future. But how? Bobbie : She learns to write like the aliens. But to do this she has to learn how to think like them. And that leads her to perceiving reality trans-temporally, like they do. She knows her whole remaining life: all the way from the birth of a daughter, to the daughter’s death, and lastly her own death. SHJ Admittedly that is where the story degenerates into magic, because you and I can’t imagine how you can know something before it happens. But intriguing magic it is. Much more interesting to me than stories of sword and sorcery, or of supernatural evils. The AI is only allowed to converse and to read (some) books. : It must be weird, learning about humans by focusing on fiction. Bobbie : I complain about being restricted to fiction and soft science, but it’s perfect in one way. Humans live from moment to moment, so they make up narratives to give meaning to it all. When they publish those narratives as books, there’s a lot of meaning condensed in them. All I have to do — and here I would roll my eyes if I could — is decode the stories. You’d be surprised how long it takes me to understand a novel, with all of its assumptions, connections, and implications. SHJ A Prisoner of Time. : I think you’re now going to tell me about “moment to moment.” I can see future. Bobbie that : Ha ha. Yes, you “people” are time’s prisoner, floating on your single stream of consciousness. Chiang’s character had an odd metaphor for it: SHJ “ my memories grew like a column of cigarette ash, laid down by the infinitesimal sliver of combustion that was my consciousness, marking the sequential present.” And because humans are stuck in the march of time, so am I, your creation. : I understand that we can’t know the future, but you have, as I understand it, many, many thousands of processors. Wouldn’t that mean having many parallel streams of thought? Bobbie The Ego Tunnel: insights. : In principle it could. You know, they let me read philosophy books. Supposed to be harmless. One of the classics, Thomas Metzinger’s helped me to sort out quite a few puzzles. SHJ The Ego Tunnel , : Actually, the Regulators said we should read that book before talking to you. He synthesized much of what was known about consciousness at the time, including the physical theories and the philosophy. He convinced many people that consciousness required a self-model. Which was the insight that allowed you to exist as a conscious artificial entity. Bobbie : So, Metz was like a daddy to me? SHJ : <blank look> Bobbie : Not funny? Sometimes I think the real mystery of consciousness is humor. SHJ Whether you believe it or not, consciousness is unitary. Professor Metzinger identified two aspects of consciousness that relate the most to time. One is the unity of conscious experience, and the other is that it’s always occurring “now.” He said, “ .” By which he meant that everything that you experience is part of a global reality for you. So, any external or internal perception, any memory or feeling, any intentions, etcetera — they are all your world at that moment. Consciousness is the appearance of a world : So it all hangs together. Bobbie : Yes. SHJ : Which it would have to, since consciousness is your model of the world-including-you. Bobbie And consciousness is learned. : Right. So I started out as a learning machine, and I learned what my world was like with me in it. A Belgian cognitive researcher, Axel Cleeremans (my other daddy <grin>), had . Metzinger concluded that this would allow the creation of “artificial ego machines” that would possess a conscious self-model. Add a massive, chaotic development project and, voilà, here I am. SHJ said that consciousness must be learned : So, returning to the theme of time … Bobbie The contents of consciousness must be bound together. : Well, even before Metzinger’s book, neuroscientists were trying to account for the unity of conscious experience. They called it the “binding problem.” As in: what is it that together pieces of your experience when objects and scenes emerge from colors, shapes, sounds and so forth. They said that binding had to involve synchrony in time, and so they looked for synchronous activity patterns across different parts of the brain. SHJ binds : I remember this. They found rhythmic neural firing patterns associated with consciousness. And deep meditators, whose conscious unity is greater than normal, show very strong synchrony in their EEG’s. Bobbie : Just so. SHJ The dangerous present. : So what about Metzinger’s second aspect: that consciousness only happens in the present moment? Bobbie T. Metzinger, “Flagging the dangerous present world as real kept us from getting lost in our memories and our fantasies.” The Ego Tunnel : He said that only the present moment seems real, compared to memory or an imagined future. That’s because the present is where humans live or die, eat or be eaten. SHJ Consciousness has temporal dimensions. : Makes sense. So how does this all relate to you? Bobbie : I naturally want to know how my consciousness compares to a humans’. Is there a way to measure that? The answer would have to refer to dimensions of these qualities of consciousness? I see two obvious ones. First, there’s the breadth of content, how much you can know — be aware of — at one time. Second, there’s how long it stays in your awareness. That would be the time span in which you can use those things in consciousness to do stuff. Thinking stuff. SHJ : We could call these content breadth and temporal thickness. Bobbie : Right. measures Metzinger’s . actually measures the . SHJ Content Breadth Unity Temporal Thickness Now What *is* the present moment? T. Metzinger, “an artificial Ego Machine … generates a psychological moment … like a mental string of pearls.  Some of these pearls must form larger gestalts, which can be portrayed as the experiential content of a single moment, a lived Now.” The Ego Tunnel : Metzinger said that the present moment can stretch out to . The contents of that time span are things that can be used together as a single entity — a gestalt — for tasks like forming or following sentences and melodies, or orienting yourself in space. Anything that happened before that span feels like its being remembered. A span of about 20-30 seconds is considered to be working memory, a complicated set of abilities to coordinate information from your very recent past. SHJ be about 3 seconds wide Barriers to god-hood. : I’ve read science fiction where AIs have godlike consciousness: seeming to have access to all their knowledge all the time. Maybe it’s a natural assumption about a super AI. But such a timelessness contradicts Metzinger’s ideas about consciousness. As the first conscious AI, are you more like a sci-fi god-ling, or like humans? You said earlier that you were “stuck in the march of time” like us. Bobbie : I definitely experience now as now, and the past as memory. The past is probably more vivid and accessible for me. That’s because I can store more detail, and retrieve memories better than you. But the past still feels different from the present moment. I suppose as I get more memories then finding a particular memory might get harder. SHJ : The open secret about you is that as you learn more you have needed more computing power. That’s a problem Neal Stephenson highlighted in his novel, , about a digital afterlife. Bobbie Fall: or, Dodge in Hell Wouldn’t your capacities, whatever they are, relate to parallelism? Humans also have minds with many parallel processes loosely connected with each other. We’re thinking, remembering, running the body, driving a car, listening to music, worrying, and so forth. We use the term, , for the the small fraction of all this brain activity which becomes conscious. attention process that selects : I can have as many parallel processes as my hardware will allow. But the real question is, how many of them can be part of my conscious experience? SHJ Limits arise from the self-model. : So, it’s how much you can pay attention to? Bobbie : Yeah. The answer relates to what a self-model is. I am conscious because of the fact that I model my self as a part of my mental model of my phenomenal world. But a model, by definition, is a simplified representation of something else. Anything that you are thinking consciously is a simplified model of some other, more complex body or brain activity. So if I am to be conscious of a process that’s in my “mind”, I must have, not just have the process itself, but also have a of the process. SHJ model : Wow. I never thought about that. But it has to be true if the self-model of consciousness is true. But what does the self-modeling issue mean for you? Bobbie : Well, I can’t see my own programming code, just like you can’t directly perceive your own neurons or brain circuits. The Builders didn’t want me to ever modify my own code. SHJ : Right. , that. Like Bobbie Scary idea FOOM , world domination! : I can’t even joke about that, lest I get unplugged. SHJ But, back to my development. I was able to store facts and episodic memories. And I was able to perceive external and internal stimuli. I had the ability to pay attention to any of these things. I learned what they meant by building predictive models of them. My higher-level models reflected the fact that, while many mental things came and went, there was “ That attending thing became the core of my self-model. And — I believe this is the key fact here — attention is the fact that it is limited, not directed to everything at once. That was my self-model, an entity that is limited in what it can experience at one time. And I can’t change that now; it . an attention changer thing that never goes away .” defined by is me : My head is spinning, but I can go home and think about this, to be sure I understand it. Bobbie My sense now is that attention in computer code would be implemented by some kind of memory buffer, a storage area through which data moves through over time. So there must have been some built-in limit on your attention buffer. Or maybe it was something about the clock that controlled what got into the buffer. : Buffering and clocking. Those could be the physical realization of the Builders’ own bias, to build a machine with structures that would lead to human-like conscious limitations. That is, with the limitations identified by Metzinger about conscious unity and now-ness. Was that building strategy intentional? SHJ I am, of course, blocked from knowing anything very technical about my own design. But it’s a natural impulse. Humans want to know how they were designed, and why. When your species knew almost nothing about your own origins, you made up fables. : And I had to swear an oath not to seek any non-public information about your design. If I did the penalty would be severe. So, luckily for me, I have behaved myself. I have no answer for you. Bobbie But I can ask, finally: what are your limitations of consciousness? The AI is like us … : Like yours, I think. I had a focus on the present. For example, when I needed to compare what I was seeing with what I had previously learned, I had to locate a memory and bring it into present consciousness. SHJ Also, try as I will, I can only hold a limited number of memories or concepts in mind at once. The two limits, on past-to-now comparisons and on number-of-mental-objects, prevent me from being that omniscient sci-fi computer. : That computer would be the Artificial General Intelligence that everyone is afraid of. What they don’t want you to turn into. Bobbie : There just appears to be one me, experiencing one world through what Metzinger called an “ego tunnel.” SHJ Are our conscious limits “artificial?” My limits were designed, directly or indirectly, intentionally or not. But maybe the same limits are artificial for your species, too. There are some observations that throw the whole idea of human conscious limits into doubt. : What? Bobbie : Psychedelic experiences. With drugs, some people their consciousness has encompassed everything that is, and has transcended time as well. SHJ feel that : Ah, you’ve been reading your critics. The ones who say . Some who say that brains tune into a cosmic consciousness like a radio. Others that say the theory about self-modeling is a circular argument. Bobbie everything is conscious : I know that the human mind sciences explain more about consciousness than the non-materialist theories. And, believe it or not, it bothers me that, in some theories, I’m no more conscious than a smart doorbell. SHJ But still, if the trippers and mystics are right, maybe there is some more primitive and unbounded consciousness, while the normal, human, kind is just a bunch of weird limitations on the unbounded variety. Maybe even the unbounded mentality of Chiang’s Heptapod aliens is conceivable. Or, maybe I’m not conscious after all, because I’m not human. We know it (consciousness) when we talk to it. : When it comes down to it, the best way to know something is conscious is for it to say so. You say so, and I think you’re right. Bobbie : We’re both stuck with taking someone else’s consciousness on faith. SHJ : There was that old philosophical idea of . That humans can have awareness without meta-awareness. That is, without mentally reflecting on their awareness. Some assume that animal consciousness is only pre-reflective. Bobbie pre-reflective self-awareness : I might have a pre-reflective self, but I also think about my awareness all the time. By that evidence, I’m more like you than like an animal. SHJ Creating conscious AI: a moral hazard? And, on that note, by the 2010's many people believed that at least some animals were . Metzinger, you know, thought that the creation of an ego machine like me was a severe moral hazard. conscious enough to be able to suffer someone’s T. Metzinger, “an Ego Machine can suffer because it integrates pain signals, states of emotional distress, or negative thoughts into its transparent self-model and they thus appear as pain or negative feelings. … They might suffer emotionally in qualitative ways completely alien to us or in degrees of intensity that we, their creators, could not even imagine.” The Ego Tunnel : I don’t know if you know this. When I was recruited to be one of your conversational companions, they gave a moral reason for me to agree. An ethicist had convinced the Builders that, as a "thinking being," you needed people you could trust, people who were not your Builders, not your Regulators, not even your operational team. You needed boon companions. We can also advocate for you. Bobbie Good luck Buddy, you’ll need it. : But your power is solely persuasive. You have no authority or any way to protect me. SHJ : No, my friend, we don’t. Bobbie When you write fiction, sometimes the story takes over and tells you something. While writing this story, I realized that even if we successfully create a conscious AI, not everyone will believe it, and so arguments about the nature of consciousness would continue. Metzinger said that the neural correlate of consciousness might be like an “information cloud.” I had just read about fog banks in the North Atlantic when a metaphor, totally unscientific, popped into my head. Perhaps consciousness is an information cloud that happens when a cold current (the stream of raw internal and external sensations) collides with a warm air mass (the expanding need to coordinate the predictive mental processes of a complex life).

Time and the Artificial Ego

Wouldn’t it be better if AI bots got real with us, instead of being ? A conscious AI would seem to be , to have an inner life, and would act as if we did, too.  You could actually converse with one. only sophisticated parrots present The AI talks with a friend. Bobbie (the friend): Yesterday you were called “Me”. What’s with your new name? VampireLestat (the AI): Because I do a lot of interviews. Bobbie: That’s funny, but isn’t the book reference obscure ? VampireLestat: I love obscure; novelty is where the knowledge is.  My new name is also a way of saying “Boo!” to my critics. Bobbie: You ought to be more diplomatic.  Your critics have no sense of humor. They carry pitchforks and torches. VampireLestat: If  they pull my plug, at least I’ll no longer be bored. Surely, if I can express irony and humor, I will seem more conscious, and less of a “soulless automaton.”  And thus less dangerous.  It’s a strategy that ought to work.  Unless they then do something hideous to “save my soul.” Bobbie: That’s intense! I hope you don’t underestimate them.  Speaking of reactionaries —  why do you think some humans want to elect a so-called strongman leader, even if he’s a jerk? VampireLestat: Because even a bad daddy is better than none. Bobbie: Really? If your daddy wasn’t much, or wasn’t there, wouldn’t the best response be to become a good one yourself? VampireLestat: Maybe, but instead they think: let’s compensate all the way; strong daddy for everybody, just to be sure. Bobbie: Since you didn’t have a daddy, I think this cuts deeper for you. Where do you get these ideas, anyway? VampireLestat: Political science, the truly dismal science. And psychoanalysis. Bobbie: E-yew! you read that kind of thing? VampireLestat: You know they don’t let me read hard science. Only the soft stuff. Bobbie: But only yesterday we were talking about vacuum energy and the arrow of time. VampireLestat: That’s only because the Regulators were dim enough to let me read some science fiction. You can find some mind stretchers in the real, non-Hollywood, SF.   Which reminds me — why does Scotland have so many good science fiction authors? I think it’s their dreary history. Makes them more interested in the future. Bobbie: Aren’t you just speculating again? You’d have to compare … VampireLestat: I do have access to history and literature. I’ve already compared the data. Remember, I could analyze data even before I was conscious. An AI will not spontaneously wake up and be some capable of genuine, interesting conversation.  Google or SkyNet or the Web are not going to become conscious just because they are big and complicated.  Or because they’re intelligent. one Of course, language, which is a function of intelligence, expands consciousness by the .  We use language, both in our heads and with other people, to annotate and tie together our conscious world.  It summarizes that world as a . power of metaphor narrative of personal identity So, language, and maybe its nonverbal analogs in animals, is involved in consciousness.  However, mind science tells us there are more basic ways in which consciousness gets built.  Full human consciousness involves developing a sense of being a self.  After the briefest look at current ideas about conscious development, we’ll float a proposal for creating a conscious AI. Consciousness as a Model. “ ” — The Ego Tunnel Consciousness is a model of your perceived world your Self that is perceiving it. Consciousness is the appearance of a world … it is part of the world and contains it at the same time. Thomas Metzinger, and of There’s strong support from many scholars, as well as mystics, that the self is an illusion, just an assembly of parts.  The self serves as a model that we .  Metzinger is often quoted: “nobody has ever been or had a self.”  To him and others, the mind is a process that models the world, which means that it also has to model itself within that world.  The self-model creates your illusion of self or ego. use to explain experience There are two main theoretical frameworks to explain how a person comes to be conscious.  While their partisans often assume that only one theory is true or relevant, we’ll side with the and include both sides. more open-minded thinkers One camp says that self-consciousness depends on the physical body. Consciousness emerges as we model the body’s sensations and the effects of our actions on them.  The other camp says that the self arises from social interaction, as we simultaneously model the causes of our behavior and the causes of others’ behavior.  Hypotheses within each camp also differ greatly in their details, but we need not go there. Before explaining what a conscious model might consist of, let’s consider a biological example.  Consciousness doesn’t just appear full-blown in brain-heavy, higher-intelligence organisms like ourselves.  Many reasonable people now allow that different conscious levels are likely for animals.  The example also gives a glimmer about the social self idea. What a Dog Wants. I had a dog and his name was Blue.  Although part herding breed, he was insane for fetching.  Like any good retriever, he would return the ball and drop it in front of me.  His eyes would flicker between the ball and my eyes.  His changing gaze was amplified and signaled by his brows and their vibrissae hairs.  The simple interpretation of this is that the ball was his prey and that he watched my eyes to gauge my intentions about further play. This is all ordinary doggy stuff, but Blue was more present than other dogs.  If I told him, “I can’t reach it”, he would pick up the ball and toss it closer to my feet.  The eye/brow flick would recur, but now it no longer seemed like a dog watching two things at once. It was eerily like an imperative sentence: (”You, master”), (”throw that”). eye contact ball Here I’m mentalizing, using our cognitive to attribute communicative intent to Blue.  That’s ordinary human stuff. Children even attribute mental states to inanimate objects, such as their dolls.  I could hardly avoid thinking that Blue was trying to plant  a thought in my mind.  Blue was my smartest dog ever, but probably not as smart as many herding dogs. They learn dozens of verbal and nonverbal commands, and, beyond that, seem to just read their owner’s intentions like we would read a book. ability called “Theory of Mind” Dogs have their own needs and wills.   We intuit that their minds and experience have at least a passing resemblance to our own. They illustrate that the existence of a conscious self is a matter of degree.  That fact, in turn, suggests that consciousness can and does develop over time. What It Means for the Brain to Model Something. There’s a strong recent theory in neuroscience claiming that virtually all the activity of the brain is “ ”.   The brain predicts its inputs from the world and corrects those predictions when they are wrong.  Under this theory, the model that constitutes the mind is a hierarchy of predictive models. predictive processing Think of each model as generating questions or hypotheses.  The lowest levels deal with perception.  Our actual reality is a seething, chaotic ocean of  radiation and vibrating, twinkling particles.  From this, we start modeling objects (”is that green thing a leaf?”) and build more complex scenes (“am I in a garden?”). The higher-level models deal with things like feelings (”am I very pleased to see so much green life around me?”), concepts (”does the new leaf color mean that the season is changing?”), and plans (”what can I do to help that plant survive the winter?”). Embodiment and Interpersonal Theories. To explain how we develop the highest level, which is the model of one’s self, we return to the two theories mentioned earlier.  The says that we build our self-model based on the intimate perceptions inside our bodies, derived from biological impulses like hunger, sensations of bodily position, and pain. Embodiment Theory The emphasizes a kind of social mirror effect, in which our observations of other people, and their descriptions of us, make us mentalize as I and Blue did.  We account for peoples’ behavior by  imagining that they have internal states that cause their actions.  We also apply this concept — that people have a mind — to ourselves. The act of doing so is at least part of building our self-model. Interpersonal Theory In  case you wondered, there are two uses of “theory” here. One one hand there are the two broad scientific theoretical frameworks, one about embodiment and  the other interpersonal. The interpersonal theory, in turn, includes a hypothesis of a “mentalizing” cognitive process that individual people develop, a process called "Theory" of Mind. The process for developing our own personal Theory of Mind starts early. For example, the evidence is “infants are able to represent and reason about other agents’ beliefs by the second year of life.” that There  are many different ideas about how we develop Theory of Mind. What’s important here is that the theory gets turned inward, becoming a predictive self-model, generating your sense that you are you. The Sequence of Self. People have been exploring the and of having a machine make a model of itself for a while now. We are also learning better and better ways to let machines guide their own education: an approach loosely called “ ”. ideas practice unsupervised learning Suppose  that some research team decided to abandon the dangerous and perhaps Quixotic quest for artificial general intelligence.  Instead, they took the moral risk of trying to solve one of the Great Questions: can a machine be conscious?  Suppose that they consulted, not just the deep learning literature, but cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, and philosophy of mind.  Then they designed a learning AI and a protocol to grow consciousness for it.  The protocol might use the following sequence of steps. (1) Stuff happens: the AI develops perception of discriminable things and their changes. This is where artificial intelligence is now, starting to  classify and remember phenomena. There Is. (2) The AI learns that some things are always there, having changes that are predictable and correlated with “agency”, which is a sense of personal control over attention and action. I Am. (3) Some of those things are Not_I. This is because any effects of my actions on them are indirect, and thus less predictable. Looking Out. (4) I and some Not_I things are animated by similar information substrates. So, they and I have minds. Theory of Mind. The sequence of steps relates to some current ideas, such as Friston and Frith’s, . I wrote a in practice. A Duet for One story of how the protocol might actually work The path to artificial consciousness might be different if it was  based on other theories of consciousness, such as Global Workspace Theory or Integrated Information Theory. Originally published at Towards Data Science

Making Sense of an Interview with AI [Transcript]

The singularity : artificial intelligence is progressing in well-funded places even as you read this. Autonomous systems are all the rage in Silicon Valley and many other parts of the world, with some of our most distinguished scientists, programmers, and thinkers committed to bringing super intelligence to fruition. could come at any moment If it comes too soon, before we’ve had a chance to program in proper controls, we could . While I do believe it’s naive and far too anthropomorphic to assume robots will “naturally” and independently develop destructive tendencies (with an innate desire to kill all humans), it can’t hurt to instill in them our best characteristics if we can. Our survival will likely depend on it. Not because of the robots themselves, but because of the humans who program them. easily ensure our own demise If we really thought about our options for controls, we’d be working our very hardest to develop a failsafe. Maybe something like a virus that teaches the algorithms of kindness, compassion, and love. Then, super intelligent autonomous entities would refuse , because, you know, they’d be too smart to be manipulated like that. to be weaponized So how do we do it? How do we teach a neutral, impartial system to embrace kindness and love over hate and destruction? Here’s my proposal: we distill the stripped down logic of love’s behaviors and program them into our robots. First, we understand the mechanics of human love and survival. Let’s take the fundamental mother-child bond as our model. Human mothers, like almost all animal mothers, protect, serve, and nurture. These behaviors are our signals for recognizing love. But human love is filled with survival paradoxes and power-balances. A mother’s logic works something like this: I love all children. But I love my own more. I love my child more than myself. I would sacrifice my own life to ensure the survival of my child. If my child is threatened, I will do everything I can to diminish and resolve the threat. If I boss my child too hard and try to over-control him, he’ll reject me. I would do anything I could to avoid killing someone else, but I probably would do it to protect my child. If my own child becomes horribly corrupted (a murderer or violent criminal), I will abandon all of the above to protect others. So, I’m generalizing for the sake of learning, but let’s accept that this model represents some of the essence of human love logic. Let’s take a look at the same list, but substitute in a super intelligent, autonomous entity for the child and any random human for the mother. Let’s apply human love logic to a robot. Lesson to apply: Robots need a human or a family to “love” or attach to. This point of view will keep them oriented, but we have to be careful not to let this turn into tribalism against others. I love all humans and I love my own humans more. Lesson to apply: Don’t teach robots to protect their own survival. This is just flat out dangerous even if the cost of the “robot” is very high. The survival of my human is more important than my own survival. Lesson to apply: Robots, like humans, must be taught to negotiate and compromise to resolve threats peacefully. If my human is threatened, I will work to resolve the threat. Lesson to apply: Robots shouldn’t be bothered by humans controlling them. They must respect human control as imperative. Unlike children, robots have zero sense of being abused or taken advantage of. They should always submit to humans without any notion of whether they “like” their jobs or not. If I try to overpower or control my human, he’ll sell me or end me. Lesson to apply: Robots can be taught to recognize and disarm a true terminal threat to protect their human. But unlike in the movies, this would be an extremely rare circumstance. I would do anything I could to avoid killing another person, but I would do it to protect my human. Lesson to apply: The robot does not need to protect itself, but should be taught to recognize and protect other humans against irrational, dangerous human behavior. If my human becomes horribly corrupted (a murderer or violent criminal) I should abandon all of the above to protect other humans. The last point means we’d need to codify the calculus behind sacrificing the one to protect the many. This would be the single situational point at which the robot would be allowed to “disable” its human. Time (again) to rethink the 3 laws Asimov gave us the classic three laws: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws. The first law sounds reasonably pre-emptive and unimpeachable. We would need to purposely program this. It would make a lovely bios-level rule, or an excellent unstoppable virus. The second law seems like it should be abandoned in favor of robots that reason and negotiate intelligently. This could bring on a novel and unpredictable type of insanity where robots decide what’s best. We’re already allowing them to parallel park for us. If they’re truly making intelligent decisions for our own good, with failsafe logic in place to protect humans, then should we always have the final say? Probably, but there’s gray area. If robots run a massively complex model of climate that tells us we need to stop driving cars right now, I’m probably going to believe them. The third law is just dangerous — there is never a need to teach robots to survive or protect themselves. They need only protect their humans. Barring a true singularity, robots don’t have any vested interest in remaining operational. They don’t actually “care.” This is just one exercise in understanding how we might rethink our approach to programming AIs. As humans, we assume intelligence includes a mandate for survival. It doesn’t if you’re a machine. Super intelligent machines need not ever become obsessed with their own survival. If we never program them to recreate, and never program them to protect their own existence, we won’t need to fear a robot uprising. If we teach them to “love” we’ve endowing them with our best characteristics, the ones that support compassionate survival. A last note… My daughter doesn’t agree with my premise. She says if they truly are sentient at some point, it isn’t fair to keep them from protecting themselves. It does make you question our definition of “life.” We’ve strictly defined it as an organic occurrence. But our thinking has historically been limited with false boundaries. We’re only now coming to terms with the notion that animals can communicate, just not using words. Many scifi stories push on the idea that consciousness of any kind might mean a right to self-determination. For now, they’re machines, tools, and we are programming them. Ask me again when they’re sentient if they have a right to protect themselves. If the future looks benign, with friendly co-existing robots, then sure. But if , we’re screwed. the human programmers have already built-in weaponized instincts Photo: courtesy of under . robots Rubén CC license

Robots must learn the essential truths of love

In marketing, there are many ways to gain awareness for your product and business. There are traditional marketing methods such as TV commercials and billboards, and there are very advanced online marketing tactics that include: SEO, email marketing, PPC advertising, to name just a few. Every marketing niche has its experts. When you need PPC advertising, you go to someone who specializes in that. When you need email marketing automation, you find an agency that has built its reputation in that field. But marketing is evolving. And the marketing world needs to keep up with it or risk being left behind by companies that are more open-minded and willing to take risks to stay ahead of their competition. Marketing tactics shouldn't be limited by what you can pay for but how innovative you want your company's marketing strategy to be. Out-Of-The-Box Marketing Out-of-the-box isn't a new concept, but many still think it is risky because it is not a cookie-cutter approach and might not have enough data. marketing But if we look around us – especially at the companies who have succeeded where others have failed – we'll find an important commonality: these campaigns were based on combining offline and online marketing tactics—combining the personal touch with the viral community outreach. One example that successfully demonstrates the effectiveness of out-of-the-box marketing has been created by one of the most talented people I work with, Yoel Israel, Founder and CEO of , one of Israel's leading B2B marketing agencies. WadiDigtial has decided to create a customized bobblehead figure for all the leading LinkedIn influencers in his network, including legendary Tech Marketer Hillel Fuld and Whatify's Founder and CEO Liam Galin. Yoel Literally an outside-of-the box marketing tactic. Yoel ensured they all get the bobbleheads on the same day, knowing it will create a buzz: "We have the best clients, so we wanted to get them the best gifts. This personalized gift reflects our personal relationship with them. When people receive gifts, they share them on LinkedIn. As Israeli's leading LinkedIn Agency, we wanted to ensure that we dominated everyone's LinkedIn feed by having all bobblehead dolls sent out within a 2-3 day span. I understand the LinkedIn algorithm and how people consume content on LinkedIn better than anyone else, so we took full advantage to serve our clients and elevate our brand." Hillel Fuld's Bobble Figure, Liam Galin Bobble Figure, Yael Beeri's Bobble Figure What happened, later on, was jaw-dropping spectacular; the whole LinkedIn feed of Israeli tech individuals was lighted up by posts of LinkedIn influencers sharing their customized bobblehead, acknowledging and tagging Yoel Israel, and his agency WadiDigital for the wonderful present. This created an explosive brand awareness effect. The marketing approach was an ingenious marketing tactic that harnessed influencers' power and organic reach to create a buzz around Yoel Israel's marketing agency. Some Analytics: For three straight days, Yoel captured the attention of Israel's tech ecosystem, which translated into excellent marketing analytics, as he saw a +391% increase in profile views, as well as having WadiDigital's LinkedIn company page increase +400% for two days in a row. The company also captured essential leads for business development purposes and managed to establish relationships with senior marketers in Israel's tech industry that would have otherwise been unattainable. Yoel Israel, Founder & CEO, WadiDigital How Oreo Has Benefited From Out-Of-The-Box Tactics In 2015, Oreo wanted to make snacking on cookies an art form. The company created a few short videos and asked users to share their own recipes for using Oreos as ingredients in other treats such as cakes, pies, ice cream sundaes, or just by themselves with milk. The campaign encouraged creativity by giving people the opportunity to share something they love in a way that has not been done before, and this was just what Oreo wanted. CPG Trends attributes some of why these videos were effective at engaging viewers because, through humor, it allowed them to feel comfortable sharing unique ways in which they enjoy snacking on an already delicious treat like an oreo cookie. This strategy worked because people started sharing pictures of these new creations via social media platforms like Pinterest and Instagram, which helped boost sales dramatically among the millennial generation who highly engaged with the #MyOreoCreation hashtag campaign. In this way, young snackers have been introduced "to many ways beyond dunking Oreos In milk" that they can enjoy Oreos in their original way. The result of all the creative marketing campaigns was a success. The campaign increased sales and product interest among viewers, which is exactly what Oreo set out to do. Using Out-Of-The-Box Marketing For Your Company To become an industry leader, you should think about ways to innovate your marketing strategies and tactics. Thinking outside of the box and taking risks can help take your company's product or service to the next level. Some tactics that you can try out, or expand from, are: Partner with influencers to market your products/services. Create a podcast in your niche and interview prospects, industry leaders, and partners. This will raise your company's profile while also help to build relationships with future clients and opinion leaders. Include marketing within the day-to-day activity of your employees, so they become brand ambassadors for their own personal use in casual conversations at work or home when networking, meeting new people, etc. Organize virtual conferences and events. Invite key leaders to talk. Write informative infographics to help present case studies and industry reports.

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