Positive Intelligent Technologies

Self-Aware Systems is a Palo Alto think tank working to ensure that intelligent technologies are beneficial for humanity. We are in the midst of an AI and Robotics revolution. IBM, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Baidu, and others are spending billions of dollars per year to develop these technologies. Why? McKinsey predicts that 50 trillion dollars of value will be created by automation before 2025. If this is even partially true, expect a lot more investment in coming years. And Gartner predicts that one-third of jobs will be automated by 2025 causing huge social dislocations.

There are likely to be three phases: The “AI Economy” will increase productivity and automate many jobs. The “AI Military” will involve arms races in drones, robot soldiers, swarm boats, and autonomous military vehicles. The “AI Society” will expand our legal and political institutions to manage these systems. Each phase will introduce its own challenges.

Popular shows like “2001“, “Terminator”, “Her”, “Person of Interest”, “Transcendence”, “Ex Machina”, “Humans”, and “Extant” portray dystopian futures in which machines turn on us in various ways. Ancient myths of golems, tulpas, and genies, and stories like “Pygmalion“, “The Sorcerer’s apprentice”, and “Frankenstein” explore similar themes. We have a fascination with the idea of breathing life into inanimate objects and a deep fear of the consequences. Almost daily news articles reporting advances in AI and robotics are being met with increasing uneasiness. In response, a spate of defensive articles by researchers and CEOs are now appearing that essentially say: “All is well! Move along people, nothing to see here.”

But are there reasons to proceed cautiously? Of course there are! This is likely to be the largest technological transformation in human history. We must approach it carefully and deliberately and make choices with great care. Anyone who is even vaguely aware has an intuitive sense that there are risks. Is fear and “doomsaying” a useful response? Of course not! We are building these systems. We can build them however we want as long as we have the scientific understanding and the will to do so. This is a time for resolve, not for fear.

A system’s goals may be chosen independently from its intelligence and can lead to either harm or good. Simplistic goals give rise to unintended drives that can be anti-social. But even “superintelligences” are limited by the laws of mathematics, physics, and cryptography. Mathematical proof can be used to constrain systems with a high confidence of safety. New cryptographic techniques can be used to create a trusted computation and communication infrastructure. Cryptocurrency technology can enable decentralized systems to cooperate. The “Safe-AI Scaffolding Strategy” can leverage this infrastructure to create a path to human thriving.

This website contains our talks and papers on these topics over the past 10 years. Our recent paper “Autonomous technology and the greater human good” was downloaded 10,000 times in its first week and is the most downloaded paper ever published by the Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence. James Barrat’s book “Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era” is a popular account of some of the issues and is based in part on our work. For a one-hour summary of the issues, watch this March 2015 talk at IBM Research:

AI, Robotics, and Smart Contracts

For a quick introduction, watch the 18 minute TEDx video from May 2012:

Smart Technology for the Greater Good.

For more detail, watch this December 2012 talk at Oxford University:

Autonomous Technologies and the Greater Human Good,

this July 2011 talk at Monash University:

Rationally-Shaped Minds: A Framework for Analyzing Self-Improving AI,

or this October 2007 talk at Stanford University:

Self-Improving Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Computing.

For more depth, read the papers:

Autonomous Technology and the Greater Human Good

Cryptocurrencies, Smart Contracts, and Artificial Intelligence