1. Big Picture AI:
How Might Artificial Intelligence Come About?
And Implications for Life in the Universe
David Brin
AI Conference, San Francisco June 2017

2. Lots to do…
Can Artificial Intelligence help
Get us out of these messes…
…without causing worse?

3. Credibility?

4. - Info, AI & Augmentation
- Anthropocene
- Deadly innovations
bio, nano, cyber, sci-fi…
- Renunciation
- Rigid Overdependence
on fragile systems
Can Our Civilization Survive?
New calamities?
Fermi’s Silent Cosmos
Repetition of past
failure modes
Scary
success?
- Natural calamities
asteroids, solar EMP etc.)
- Ecological suicide
- Enemies and War
- Societal meltdown
- Feudal attractor
- Out-competed

5. The Near Dilemma

6. What’s happening? Clues are all around us…
and in your pocket!

7. The village is returning

8. •15th - 17th Century
–Printing (augments Memory)
–Glass Lenses (augment Vision)
–Perspective (augments Attention)
•18th Century
–Mass Literacy (Memory)
–Printed illustration (Vision)
–Science, Democracy (Attention)
Crisis: Religious Upheaval (e.g. 30 Years War)
Renaissance vs. rigid doctrine
Notion of progress. Value of individual
Crisis: Bourgeois Revolution
Enlightenment vs. old hierarchies
Disruptive Techs Provoke “Crises of Progress”
by transforming or augmenting vision, memory and attention.
Each time, the new info-surfeit seems overwhelming, scary, unmanageable.

9. •19th Century
–Mass Education, pub. libraries
–Photography, cinema
–Global Connection
•20th Century
– Databases (memory)
– TV, mass media (vision)
– Abstraction/immersion
(attention)
Crisis: Nationalism-Colonialism-suffrage
Industrialism vs. Nostalgia, Centralization.
Evolution. Plural viewpoints
Crisis: Dogmatic ideologies
Modernism vs. Subjectivism
Individual autonomy. Diversity.
Disruptive Techs Provoke “Crises of Progress”
by transforming or augmenting vision, memory and attention.
Each time, the new info-surfeit seems overwhelming, scary, unmanageable.

10. Next: “AI”? Or “human augmentation”?
•21st Century
– Knowledge Mesh (memory)
– Omni-veillance (super-vision)
– Visualization, simulation &
gaming (super-immersion)
Crisis: Breakdown in coherency/confidence
Singularity vs. Renunciation
The future as a human-wrought construct
More “Crises of Progress”

12. Near term augmentation
• Remedial interventions: nutrition/health/education for all.
• Stimulation: e.g. games that teach real mental skills.
• Pharmacological:e.g. “nootropics” – “Limitless”
• Prosthetics: exoskeletons, tele-control, feedback from distant “extensions.”
• Cyber-neuro links: extending what we can see, know, perceive, reach.
• Biological computing: … and intracellular?
• “Lifespan Extension”: is there low-hanging fruit?
• Genetically altering humanity
• Artificial Intelligence: either separate or in synergy with us.

13. We are already enhancing ourselves
the old fashioned way…

14. …with prosthetics of vision, memory
and attention…

15. Just one tech -- Cyber-enhanced omni-veillance…
… is clearly going to challenge us.
Star Trek Generations 1994

16. We may build enhanced “Others”
from scratch

17. The First Robotic Empathy Crisis
• Robots will easily be taken across the Uncanny Valley
and programmed to tweak human empathy.
• They will demand sympathy and even rights, long
before there is “anything under the hood.”

18. General Approaches to AI
* Logic, algorithm design or knowledge-manipulation :
- GOFAI, Watson, UAI, quantum…
“stealing” learned intelligence
* Cognitive, Evolutionary, Neural Nets: recursive, self-improving , LSTM
* Emergent AI: Sum > parts - e.g. “Skynet” – “financial HFT” - borrow skills anywhere
* Reverse engineer /emulate human brain – copy what works
* Human/animal amplification - “augmentation” or “uplift.
* Robotic-Embodied Childhood - self-programming by physical world feedback .

19. The Doubters
• Kevin Kelly’s rebuttal:
1. Intelligence is not a single dimension.
Ecosystems are creative. Monoliths aren’t.
2. Humans do not have general purpose minds, and neither will AIs.
3. Emulation of human thinking in other media will be cost-constrained.
4. Dimensions of intelligence are not infinite.
5. Intelligences are only one factor in progress.

20. The Big Flip
• Computational expansion was driven by
hardware advancement:
– Moore’s Law (element packing) and
– Dennard Scaling (power reduction)
Both are tapering off.
• Software has abruptly taken off, led by Machine
Learning (ML).
– Limitless application of Big Data.
– Worrisome inability to have clear attribution/reasoning paths
– Governance by algorithm?
• A similar flip seems likely to have boosted us.

21. “Ethics” and AI: a soft landing?
• Strict-embedded control code – Asimovian Laws
– best example = TCAS/ACAS air collision avoidance  autonomous cars
• Regulate the macro entities – corporations etc. - recursive liability
• Renunciation - repress disruptive progress
• Isolation - Force AI to act through filters, intermediaries
• Robotic-Embodied Childhood - teach your children well
• Flat-competitive reciprocal Accountability
– AI vs AI competition. The way we improved every past “artificial intelligence.”

22. Exploring the territory ahead?

24. Do we have a chance?
Fermi’s Silent Cosmos

26. www.davidbrin.com
IMAGES: Patrick Farley
Also Paramount Pictures, Orion Pictures,
The Planetary Society, Breaktaker.com,