Neural-Interfaced Exoskeletons

Paralysed man moves in mind-reading exoskeleton
Oct 2019, BBC News

Progress marches on, this time wearing a neural interfaced exoskeleton.

This gentleman injured his spinal cord in a fall and lost the ability to walk. Scientists are letting him experiment with this pretty astonishing technology.

He first learned how to use the setup via an avatar; he would mentally control the video game character, making it move with only his thoughts of movement. Eventually he put on the actual suit and began making it move with his thoughts.

Caveats? The suit is attached to a ceiling harness, so he doesn't fall over. It's not that good yet. Also, this is super hi-tech, which means it's not available to pretty much anyone. And note that here we are talking about mind-controlled exoskeletons and yet around the world, 85% of people with a disability don't have a wheelchair.

image source: labreche_fondsdedotationclinatec

On the Brains of Machines

This picture is kind of like an infrared camera but for algorithms.

It's a heat map for the eyeballs of a computer; what is it looking at, what are its clues?

In this case, it's looking at the water, not at the ship, in order to identify the image as a ship. (We're also assigning agency to this thing, in case anyone's keeping track.)

Neural nets are a big deal these days, but they come with a new problem. We don't know what they're doing, because the thing that makes them so special is that they figure out their own algorithm. (Agency again.) Computer programmers are not writing the programs; the networks write the programs using trial and error. Machine Learning is another name for this idea of iterative development.

There's a lot of people who would like to know what's going on in there, mostly to see how these things are getting their answers, and to make sure that the algorithms don't cheat to get their answers. Some learn bad habits, like detecting "ships" in pictures with water (which means they're good at detecting water, not ships), or by skimming metadata, which means they're good at classifying metadata, not pictures of stuff. These heat maps, and more importantly the forensics-like algorithms that inform them, are very helpful. They let us see inside the brains of the machine.

***

Speaking of disembodied brains, here's the artificial synapse. It uses a new type of hardware memory system that works more like a brain does, in an array, where they can do their computing business simultaneously. Neuromorphic computing.

And if you want to grow those artificial synapses in a 3-D tissue culture (brains in a dish), call these guys.

Cerebral organoids -- they're more for studying how the brain works than they are about making artificial brains. At least they're not using human brains, right?

Wrong; there are ethical concerns that these organoids might develop consciousness, or have already developed consciousness. 

Notes:

What is it like being a brain in a computer?
Clarifying how artificial intelligence systems make choices
Mar 2019, phys.org

Sebastian Lapuschkin et al, Unmasking Clever Hans predictors and assessing what machines really learn, Nature Communications (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-08987-4

Fast, efficient and durable artificial synapse developed
Apr 2019, phys.org

Elliot J. Fuller et al. Parallel programming of an ionic floating-gate memory array for scalable neuromorphic computing, Science (2019). DOI: 10.1126/science.aaw5581

Researchers grow active mini-brain-networks
Jun 2019, phys.org

Stem Cell Reports, Sakaguchi et al.: "Self-organized synchronous calcium transients in a cultured human neural network derived from cerebral organoids"
https://www.cell.com/stem-cell-reports/fulltext/S2213-6711(19)30197-3
DOI: 10.1016/j.stemcr.2019.05.029

Fauxbots

Robots are already taking over.

Human computer programmers are influencing memetic propagation algorithms which are influencing human social media users. Another way of articulating this is to say that we are outfitting ourselves with a cybernetic limbic system. I'm channeling both Elon Musk's far-out interview about artificial emotional intelligence ecologies and Jaron Lanier's recent behavior modification talks (with a bit of Robert Sapolsky's Human Behavior lectures).

As if it wasn't a surprise, news has it that a script designed to spread information is better than us at doing just that. Coupled with the fact that misinformation spreads faster than factual information, we can easily see what a bad idea it was to offload water-cooler-style information-spreading to an algorithm optimized to sell consumer goods and services to a hypertargeted audience.

This is not to talk trash about technology, or social media, or even human nature; there's plenty of good things to come of all this. I mean, ALS, right?

It is an alert, however, that the things that we fear from far away (robot overlords etc), they tend to look a lot different by the time they get right under our nose. And this is a great example. Note that researcher Tim Hwang was doing work with SocialBots back in 2012, when he ran a competition to see who could influence the most people on Twitter with an automated fauxbot. By the end of the competition we learned two things - 1.It's not hard at all to make people think you're a person when you're not, and 2.It's very very ethically questionable to do these kinds of experiments.

Not that it matters much. Using a social media platform waives your right to be free from experimentation.

In what I guess I will call traditional research, if your experiment involves people, you have to take some ethics classes, and your plan has to pass a group of people who's job it is to make sure you're not doing anything ethically dubious to your subjects. In very simple terms, you're not supposed to do harm to your subjects (only people though, sorry animals).

But when you participate in social media, you're willfully participating in the experiment that is the platform's digital ecosystem (and because the programs aren't programming themselves, not yet, the platform's corporate culture has influence here as well). The whole thing is an experiment from the moment you log in.

So what happens when you are that poor schmuck who fell in love with Tim Hwang's socialbot and then got his heart broken when the competition ended? Tough shit?

Or when you realize the "woman" you've been chatting up for the past two days is really a feature designed by the dating app itself to keep you engaged at the most opportune moments; what is a melted snowflake to do? Who to sue?

Listening to the news last night, two people are talking about results from a recent Facebook experiment that showed we can make people act nicer to each other through pretty simple and very subtle programming changes. Or make people happier by showing them happier news in their feed. (It's called a feed for f's sake.)

Is a social media platform responsible for the death of a teen who may have been only a few happy newsclips away from making that final decision?

Nope. Not right now at least. Not until we face the hard facts about how powerful it is to effect mass population manipulation with only minor changes in program code.


Post Script:
The chances you've been involved in one of these experiments already? 100%

"Low-credibility content" is the new fake news, and "auto amplification" is the act of spreading it.

The reason automated amplification works is because of herd mentality. A great experiment I read recently in Geoffrey West's book Scale - a researcher took 100 crowdfunding campaigns that had been at $0 for a minute already and donated $1 to half of them. The ones who got no donation stayed at zero, and the others gained at least some extra donations. There are dozens of other names for this such as the law of accumulative advantage, the Matthew Effect, and the rich get richer.


Notes:
Study: It only takes a few seconds for bots to spread misinformation
Nov 2018, Ars Technica

The spread of low-credibility content by social bots
Nature, 2018

The spread of true and false news online
Science, 2018

The spread of true and false information online
MIT, 2018

I'm Not a Real Friend, But I Play One on the Internet
Tim Hwang, HOPE#9, July 2012

SocialBots
Network Address, 2012

Institutional Review Board
also known as an independent ethics committee, ethical review board, or research ethics board, is a type of committee that applies research ethics by reviewing the methods proposed for research to ensure that they are ethical

Post Post Script Script:
Looks like something is real popular in the news right now:

On Twitter, limited number of characters spreading fake info
Jan 2019, phys.org

Washington fears new threat from 'deepfake' videos
Jan 2019, The Hill

Views of the Future

The expanding brain meme is in order.

Look, I'm not in love with Elon Musk or anything, but I got pretty pissed when I read a Futurism article about his interview with Joe Rogan.

I can obviously care less about whether or not somebody "inhaled," I mean, I was around during the Bill Clinton administration, after all. Not to mention, what to hell do people think is going to happen on the Joe Rogan show.

The part I'm upset about is where people seem to think Musk is being a loopy headfreak when he's asked about future-trending topics like AI sentience.

And that's where I'll cut - he's asked when he thinks AI will become sentient. And he responds, very slowly like every other answer he gives during this kind of painful interview - he says something that sounds to many like, "We're all trees, man."

You're thinking, "he didn't answer the question at all." But I think you're wrong. His actual answer went like this:

Joe: How far are humans from creating sentient AI?

Musk: You could argue that any group of people — like a company — is essentially a cybernetic collective of human people and machines. That’s what a company is. And then there are different levels of complexity in the way these companies are formed and then there is a collective AI in Google search, where we are also plugged in like nodes in a network, like leaves in a tree. 

We’re all feeding this network without questions and answers. We’re all collectively programming the AI and Google. […] It feels like we are the biological boot-loader for AI effectively. We are building progressively greater intelligence. And the percentage that is not human is increasing, and eventually we will represent a very small percentage of intelligence.

This is coming from a guy who is making, besides reusable rocket ships and statewide underground transport tunnels and consumer blowtorches, a neural interface system. And in case folks forget, because this was a while ago, he made PayPal. So he knows how things work. He may not be Jaron Lanier but he understands how these things work, and he's telling us that in regards to AI and sentience, we're asking the wrong question.

I'm going to elucidate what I think he was trying to say when he answered this, or at least what maybe he should have said considering his audience in this particular venue.

First, there is a fine line between us and AI. When you consider that we as users are the training program for many of these tools, such as a massive search engine, it should make you wonder which part of it is us and which part the machine.

Second, when we realize that we have essentially been programming these things since the dawn of what I will call for lack of a more neutral word, the surveillance state, we must admit the sentience is already here.

So, even more briefly, what he could have said to the question - when will AI become sentient - was that AI is us, and it's already happened.

All this being said, I spent a good three hours watching a debate on the floor of the Parliament about the real threats of AI, not to mention having watched a good thousand hours of other scientists, researchers, engineers, and other professionals talk about their work in the field. With that, I concluded to myself that a General Artificial Intelligence will not be here for another couple generations, and that the threat will be from ourselves, not a sentient system.

Musk seemed to be in concert with the latter part of this, although he's still pretty spooked about what could happen.

This brings me to my next point, which is that Musk is a guy for whom the world moves way faster than most. We have to remember, if not for him, a working reusable rocket would have taken another 50 years at least. For example, if NASA of some other government agency were in charge of the project. It doesn't mean that because of him the world moves faster, but that when he talks about things, he sees them from a very different perspective, one where amazing things you can barely imagine can happen tomorrow. And he probably assumes that you are in his head with him, which you are not, and Joe Rogan is not, and apparently this writer for Futurism is not.

But fellow speculative fiction enthusiasts are, and hopefully they would agree that it's quite entertaining to listen to this guy talk about things. (Again, if you can get around the 10-second pause before answering every question.)

Finally, full disclosure, I along with Musk and Neil deGrasse Tyson am a no-case guy (no cellphone case that is).

Post Script
The comment about how we're probably living in a simulation - I'm not a proponent of this, as there are more convincing arguments against it than for it coming from the physics world. However, his comment on how in the future we will all be living in a game, and it will be indistinguishable from reality, well, I'll ask folks to read Charles Stross' Halting State, or Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End or ... many scifi novels written in the past thirty years? (And also a Network Address post from wayback.)