Pigs with human kidneys? Brain-powered computer chips? Science is creating new kinds of living things – and our moral understanding needs to catch up fast.
Category: ethics – Page 13
A blog by the company’s chief trust officer, Dana Rao, highlighted the importance of ethics while developing new AI tools. Generative AI has come much more into mainstream awareness in recent months with the launch of ChatGPT and DALL-E systems, which can understand written and verbal requests to generate convincingly human-like text and images.
Artists have complained that generative AIs being trained on their work is tantamount to ‘ripping off’ their styles or creating discriminatory or explicit content from harmless inputs. Others have called into question the ease with which humans can pass off AI-generated prose as their own work.
Read more: Schools ban ChatGPT.
Every day we encounter circumstances we consider wrong: a starving child, a corrupt politician, an unfaithful partner, a fraudulent scientist. These examples highlight several moral issues, including matters of care, fairness and betrayal. But does anything unite them all?
Philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists have passionately argued whether moral judgments share something distinctive that separates them from non-moral matters. Moral monists claim that morality is unified by a common characteristic and that all moral issues involve concerns about harm. Pluralists, in contrast, argue that moral judgments are more diverse in nature.
Fascinated by this centuries-old debate, a team of researchers set out to probe the nature of morality using one of moral psychology’s most prolific theories. The group, led by UC Santa Barbara’s René Weber, intensively studied 64 individuals via surveys, interviews and brain imaging on the wrongness of various behaviors.
How brain enhancements can correct disabilities is an important question. But not a Closer To Truth question. What happens to personal identity? Would “I” still be me? What about moral standing? Would it change? Could my mind be uploaded? Would “I” live on?
Featuring interviews with Michio Kaku, Antonio Damasio, Leonard Mlodinow, V.S. Ramachandran and David Chalmers.
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The Death of Death is an international bestseller by José Cordeiro and David Wood that claims that “death will be optional by 2045” – or even earlier, if more public and private funds are invested in rejuvenation technologies.
Longevity. Technology: Already available in more than 10 languages, the book provides insight into recent exponential advances in AI, tissue regeneration, stem cell treatment, organ printing, cryopreservation and genetic therapies that, say the authors, offer a realistic chance to solve the problem of the aging of the human body for the first time in human history. In fact, the book’s subtitle is The Scientific Possibility of Physical Immortality and its Moral Defense.
Given that until relatively recently, just mentioning the concept of ‘biological immortality’ was enough to raise eyebrows and with most of the opinion that it should be filed away under ‘science fiction’ or ‘charlatanism’. However, longevity science is advancing at an incredible pace and today there are people who no longer wonder if immortality is possible, but when it will be a reality. We sat down with José Luis Corderio PhD to find out more.
Michael Levin discusses his 2022 paper “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds” and his 2023 paper with Joshua Bongard, “There’s Plenty of Room Right Here: Biological Systems as Evolved, Overloaded, Multi-scale Machines.” Links to papers flagged 🚩below.
Michael Levin is a scientist at Tufts University; his lab studies anatomical and behavioral decision-making at multiple scales of biological, artificial, and hybrid systems. He works at the intersection of developmental biology, artificial life, bioengineering, synthetic morphology, and cognitive science.
❶ Polycomputing (observer-dependent)
1:59 Outlining the discussion.
3:50 My favorite comment from round 1 interview.
5:00 What is polycomputing?
8:50 An ode to Richard Feynman’s “There’s plenty of room at the bottom“
11:10 How/when was this discovered? Reductionism, causal power…
14:40 “It’s a view that steps away from prediction.“
16:20 From abstract: Polycomputing is the ability of the same substrate to simultaneously compute different things *but emphasis on the observer(s)*
17:05 What’s an example of polycomputing?
19:40 They took a different approach and actually did experiments with gene regulatory networks (GRNs)
23:18 Different observers extract different utility from the exact same system.
26:35 Spatial causal emergence graphs (determinism, degeneracy) | Erik Hoel’s micro/macro & effective information.
29:25 Inventiveness of John Conway’s Game of Life.
❷ Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere.
34:20 Tell me 3 things to determine intelligence (ball vs mouse on a hill)
39:50 Jeff Hawkins’ Thousand Brains Theory.
41:05 Agency is not binary, continuum of persuadability.
44:50 Where’s the bottom of agency? Plants & insects far off from 0
46:55 What is the absolute minimum amount of agency? Some degree of goal directed behavior & indeterminacy…
51:05 Life is a system good at scaling.
51:41 “To me, our world doesn’t have 0 agency anywhere.“
53:50 As an engineer, what can I take advantage of?
55:00 Surely you don’t think the weather has any intelligence to it…
❸ Attractor Landscapes.
58:35 Homeostatic loops, morphological spaces, attractor landscapes.
1:00:35 “Of course we’re living in a simulation!“
1:06:45 Attractor landscapes, topography, anatomical morphous space (D’Arcy Thompson)
1:12:28 Planaria stochastic, probability of head shape proportional to evolutionary distance between species.
1:15:15 What is the secret of the universe? Attractor landscapes, quantum fields, black holes.
1:19:05 We need a new system of ethics for unconventional minds.
🚾 Works Cited.
Michael Levin talk for the Mind, Technology, and Society (MTS) talk series at UC Merced on January 23, 2023. Abstract: Each of us makes the remarkable journey from the physics and chemistry of a quiescentunfertilized egg to that of a complex human being. How can we understand the continuousprocesses that scale up minds from the tiny physiological competencies of single cells to the large-scale metacognitive capacities of large brains? Here, I will describe a framework known as TAME-Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere — which enables identifying, understanding, andrelating to unconventional cognitive agents. I will use the example of the collective intelligence ofcells during morphogenesis to illustrate how we can begin to widen the lessons of multiscale neuroscience well beyond neurons. This will be essential as we head into a future that will bepopulated by a wide range of evolved, designed, and hybrid beings with novel bodies and novelminds. I will conclude with a case study of our new synthetic biorobot (Xenobots) and a discussionof the implications of these ideas for evolution, biomedicine, and ethics.
That was fast.
The Columbus Dispatch, a newspaper serving the Columbus, Ohio area, has suspended its AI efforts after its AI-powered sports writing bot was caught churning out horrible, robotic articles about local sports, Axios reports.
The Dispatch — which is notably owned by USA Today publisher Gannett — only started publishing the AI-generated sports pieces on August 18, using the bot to drum up quick-hit stories about the winners and losers in regional high school football and soccer matches. And though the paper’s ethics disclosure states that all AI-spun content featured in its reporting “must be verified for accuracy and factuality before being used in reporting,” we’d be surprised if a single human eye was laid on these articles before publishing.
“A major highlight of the work is our approach to achieve longevity: using computers to simulate the natural aging system and guide the design and rational engineering of the system to extend lifespan,” Hao told Motherboard. “This is the first time this computationally-guided engineering-based approach has been used in aging research. Our model simulations actually predicted that an oscillator can double the lifespan of the cell, but we were happily surprised that it actually did in experiments.”
The study is part of a growing corpus of mind-boggling research that may ultimately stave off some of the unpleasant byproducts of aging until later in life, while boosting life expectancy in humans overall. Though countless hurdles have to be cleared before these treatments become a reality, Hao thinks his team’s approach could eventually be applied to humans.
“I don’t see why it cannot be applied to more complex organisms,” Hao said. “If it is to be introduced to humans, then it will be a certain form of gene therapy. Of course it is still a long way ahead and the major concerns are on ethics and safety.”
Artificial intelligence has such a potential for good not only would it make humans closer becoming God like but also it could manifest God through Artificial intelligence that why the ethics of the world depends on its success towards AI for good. It could create peace across the world and a brighter tomorrow.
It’s unusual for tech executives and religious leaders to get together to discuss their shared interests and goals for the future of humanity and the planet. It’s even more extraordinary for the world’s three largest monotheistic religions to be represented.
When the Pope joins the meeting, it’s basically unprecedented.
That’s what happened at Vatican City this week as the Catholic Church hosted leaders of the Jewish and Islamic faiths, new signatories to the Rome Call for AI Ethics, in a meeting that included executives from Microsoft and IBM.