vetta project

It’s Singularity Summit time again. This year the venue will be the San Francisco Hyatt Regency on the 14th and 15th of August. I’ll be talking about how systems neuroscience can inform AGI development efforts, and maybe a little about my current work to measure machine intelligence. Cheap registration ends in a few days.

UPDATE: after a little reorganisation, a colleague of mine here at the Gatsby Unit, Demis Hassabis will be talking about how systems neuroscience can inform AGI design. I’ll then give a follow up talk on measuring machine intelligence.

“In 2008, the National Academy of Engineering chose as one of its grand challenges to reverse-engineer the human brain. When will this happen? Some are predicting that the first wave of results will arrive within the decade, propelled by rapid advances in both brain science and computer science. This sounds astonishing, but it’s becoming increasingly plausible. So plausible, in fact, that the great race to reverse-engineer the brain is already triggering a dispute over historic firsts. The backdrop for the debate is one of dramatic progress.”

You can find the whole article here. For those who don’t know, Sejnowski is one of the most respected neuroscientists in the world.

AGI 10, Lugano

It’s certainly been quite a week. Last Friday I headed back to my old home town of Lugano in Switzerland for the AGI 10 conference. I had a great time. In a way it was a bit like the Singularity Summit for me in that the talks were not where the interesting stuff was going on — all the action was taking place in the coffee breaks, over lunch and over dinner. That’s when you get to see what people really think!

Overall, my (biased) summary is that there seemed to be a greater sense of focus among the community than I’ve picked up before, plenty of passion and even a tiny touch of excitement creeping in there. That said, there also seemed to be some significant disconnections in the community, with instances of people being shocked to discover than what they thought was a discredited minority view wasn’t a minority view at all. To me that’s a good sign that the conference is working. Another theme that I picked up was how central Hutter’s AIXI and my work on the universal intelligence measure has become: Marcus and I were being cited in presentations so often that by the last day many of the speakers were simply using our first names. As usual there were plenty of people who disagree with our approach, however it was clear that our work has become a major landmark in the area.

I think the most important missing ingredient of the conference was a lack of discussion about AGI safety issues. From what I recall, during the main conference presentations Mark Waser was the only person to directly take on the topic. During the final workshop session Roko Mijic appeared out of the blue and gave a talk on Yudkowsky style Friendly AI. A show of hands revealed that while half the audience had heard of SIAI, few had heard of CEV. Roko then kicked off his talk by describing the creation of an AGI as likely being worse than the Sicilian mafia combined with grey goo. It’s hard to say what the audience who’d never encountered CEV etc. were thinking at this point, but I’d hazard a guess that they’d written him off as some kind of paranoid crackpot. In any case, what did become clear is that a sizable part of the AGI community is not familiar with FAI thinking.

FHI, Oxford

On Wednesday I gave a talk at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, along with Robin Hanson. My talk was on what neuroscience can teach us about how to build an AGI. Going by all the praise afterwards, it seems that my talk went over very well indeed. I have to say that it was a real pleasure for me too: the topic is a passion of mine and getting to visit Oxford, meet everybody there and stay in one of the colleges was great fun. I often complain when visiting churches (to admire the building and art) that it’s a pity that researchers don’t get such nice buildings. Oxford seems to be one of the exceptions in this regard.

The other day a group of Gatsby PhD students were debating whether machine learning existed before the mid 90′s. Clearly it did, even if you want to take a restricted view of what belongs to this category. Nevertheless, the fact that this was being discussed at all, and by people who spend the majority of their working days studying the subject, highlights how much the field has developed over the last 15 years.

I’m a bit busy for blogging at the moment, but I will be at AGI 2010 this weekend. I’ll also be giving a talk at Oxford next week on how developments in theoretical neuroscience are giving us significant insights into AGI design.

It’s long been thought that brain oscillations play a key role in short term memory, though there hasn’t been much empirical evidence to support this. That now seems to have changed with the publication of Phase-dependent neuronal coding of objects in short-term memory by Siegal, Warden and Miller. There is the paper as well as a high level commentary. This is quite a step forward for understanding some of the more sophisticated design features of the brain and cognition.

Another interesting paper is Coherence Potentials: Loss-Less All-or-None Network Events in the Cortex by Thiagarajan, Lebedev, Nicolelis and Plenz. They have evidence that above a certain threshold level of activity LFP information is sometimes transmitted across regions of cortex with surprisingly high fidelity.

Another cool recent paper is Rewarded Outcomes Enhance Reactivation of Experience in the Hippocampus by Singer and Frank.  They show that, well, basically what the title says.  This is not surprising, but until now there hasn’t been good evidence to show that this was happening.  If this can be replicated, and some people I know here are considering doing this, it would fill out another part of our understanding of reinforcement driven learning in the brain.

I’m coming across so many interesting neuroscience papers these days I can hardly keep up with reading them, let alone blogging about all of them.  The thing that amazes me is how the architecture of the brain is so logical — it almost looks designed.

This short film, The Third & The Seventh, by Alex Roman, is a great example of cutting edge computer graphics.  The airy elegant style reminds me a bit of Kubrick.  I’m not sure what impressed me the most: the wonderful cinematography, the fact that it’s entirely computer generated, or that one guy did it alone in his spare time — including putting the sound track together.  Be sure to watch it full screen and in high definition.

I’ve decided to christen the next decade the teenies.  Firstly, I’ve still heard no other suggestions; secondly, it’s phonetically consistent with the noughties and the twenties; and thirdly, the name is so downright awfully bad it’s almost quite good.  So the teenies it is.

I’ve been scratching my head about these predictions for the last few days.  By and large, I feel like I’m just predicting the obvious — which is a bit of a let down.  However, when I look at the noughties, while the specific details were not predictable, the general trends were pretty obvious already in 2000.  So perhaps predicting the seemingly obvious is not such a bad idea.  And what seems obvious to me often is anything but obvious to others, indeed many will flatly disagree with my predictions.  So, here goes.  Hopefully these precitions are specific enough that I’ll be able to perform a decent analysis come 2020 to see how well I fared.

First up, things generally will become more energy efficient and we will see more solar power.  But overall not much will change in energy — we’ll keep on using oil and coal and pumping out lots of CO2.

Chinese GDP on a PPP basis will be roughly comparible to that of the US and the EU (i.e. within 25%).  India will be about half their size.  The UK and France won’t be in the top 10 countries anymore, though they will still like to think that they are.  China will become increasingly associated with luxury designer goods.

Computers will become about 50x faster, though I’m a bit nervous about this prediction.  Later in the decade we will have major trouble with silicon chip technology.  We might also see computer power overshoot general consumer demand which would spell serious trouble for the big chip manufactures.  Everything goes very multi-core, even your cell phone.  The graphics card market collapses due to them overshooting consumer demand* and possibly being subsumed by new CPUs.

All things internet and mobile will continue to grow.  Smart “phones” will become fully funcational computers.  You’ll be able to connect your smart phone to a large monitor, keyboard, mouse, projector etc., just like you’d do with a PC today.  It will even become your wallet as you’ll be able to use it to pay for things at the supermarket.  The expanding internet will swallow up most of TV and radio.  High definition video conferencing will become common, making distance collaboration significantly more natural.  High definition matters as it will allow people to have a wider field of view and to more clearly see facial expressions.

Machine learning will grow in importance due to ever increasing quantities of data, computer power, and better algorithms.  It mostly won’t be publically seen, however, much like how it’s heavily used in Google and a few financial and pharmaceutical companies at the moment.

Significant progress will be made in understanding the brain.  We will have a rough high level sketch of how the brain works, and some of its processes we will understand quite well.  We probably still won’t understand cortical function very well, that will take longer.

More groups will start AGI projects, particularly from 2015 onwards.  These groups will become increasingly mainstream, serious and well funded.  This will be driven by faster computers, better machine learning algorithms and a better understanding of the brain’s architecture.  Some of these groups will produce small AGIs that will learn to do some interesting things, but they will be nowhere near human level intelligence.  They will, however, be preparing the way for this.  Concern at the dangers of artificial intelligence will become less fringe but it won’t go mainstream.

In short, I’m predicting a bigger brighter expanded version of the last few years — nothing particularly radical.  I think the real significance of the teenies will be to lay the foundations for more important things to come.

* UPDATE 15/1/2010: I’ve thought a bit about the main criticism of my predictions above, namely that the graphics chip business will collapse.  As a result I’ve decided to soften my prediction.  I’m now thinking that 10 more years probably won’t be enough for it to collapse due to overshooting demand.  Going to 3D creates 2x the computational demand, going to higher resolution can create 5x demand, and better quality and more sophisticated graphics techniques can drive another 10x, maybe a bit more.  Overall this approximately 100x might be enough to drive demand through until the end of the teenies.  If a collapse does come, I think it will more likely be due to somebody like Intel getting aggressive and building cutting edge GPUs into their CPU chips thus making GPUs redundant.

The start of the Noughties for me was Y2K. It was a non-event, thanks, I might add, to people like me making ourselves mentally unwell fixing endless date issues in crappy database code. Next was the massive dot com crash — our wonderful future of super internet everything was an illusion… except, well, the biggest technological development of the decade was in fact the growth of the internet and all its related technologies. The problem existed in the mind of the market, not in the soundness or long term significance of the underlying technology.

It’s hard to believe that almost everybody was on dial-up internet in 2000, broadband existed, but it was slow and not many had it. The rise of blogging was interesting. To start with many more traditional media sources were freaking out about the idea that some 15 year old from his bedroom could get as much exposure as their latest newspaper article. Now blogging is just another part of the information ecosystem. Wikipedia: the encyclopedia’s went through the classic Ghandi stages of ignore, ridicule, attack and then lose. The iPod completely changed the music business, espeically combined with file sharing. Nobody I knew had DVD‘s before 2000, this was the decade they became big. Same for flatscreen monitors and TVs. I got a digital camera in 2000 when they were just coming out and still cost a fortune. During the Noughties they revolutionised photography. Wifi, nobody I knew had it in 2000, now it’s almost everywhere. Same for internet to the phone. Or text messages, that’s been quite a change. I remember when online banking was seen as strange and a bit risky, now it’s how many people do most of their banking. Google existed, but they really only became huge during this decade. Youtube, another big change in how many people used the internet. Same for Facebook. I still remember how people would react to my enthusiasm for open source software, basically it was seen as a hippy movement that wasn’t something that most serious business people would entertain. That certainly has changed. The iPhone revolutionised the smart phone industry.

In a nutshell, I’d say that the Noughties were all about a massive proliferation of digital communication. In a way the dot coms had roughly the right idea, but it took another decade for the vision to mature.

Outside of technology, 9/11, Bush and Iraq feature strongly in my mind. I think the rise of robotic weapons is something that is currently under appreciated. The rise of China and the way in which global warming went from fringe to mainstream were also significant. For me seeing a black man elected president of the US was one of the most surprising, and thrilling, things to happen in the last ten years. If you’d asked me in 2000 about the probability of that happening, I’d have put it at something like 1%. Was I grossly mis-calibrated, or was Obama really a rare event? I’m still not sure. Then finally we have the financial crisis and the continuing repercussions from that now. I can only presume that the next decade is likely to bring a similar amount of change. It should be an interesting time to be alive…

First question, what will we call the next decade? The “teens”? That seems kind of lame to me! Second question, what do you think are likely to be the changes of the coming decade? Are we in for some big surprises, or just a continuation of current trends?