Artifictional Intelligence: Against Humanity’s Surrender to Computers

194 Pages·2018·1.97 MB·English

by  Harry Collins

Contents
Cover
Copyright
Acknowledgements
1. Computers in Social Life and the Danger of the Surrender
Language, intelligence and embedding in society
Two principles of AI: rules, patterns and precedents
Artifictional intelligence
Notes
2. Expertise and Writing about AI: Some Reflections on the Project
What do I mean by ‘cannot’?
Expertises and academics
Artificial intelligence belief
AI expertise
The future and points of principle
Notes
3. Language and ‘Repair’
How misspellings and the like are dealt with by humans
The centrality of language
Getting language into computers and the Chinese Room
Have the problems been solved?
The Turing Test and its complexities
Notes
4. Humans, Social Contexts and Bodies
How do humans come to understand context?
The problem of a non-embedded sociology
The Imitation Game and interactional expertise
Mimeomorphic and polimorphic actions
The body and artificial intelligence
Notes
5. Six Levels of Artificial Intelligence
Level I of artificial intelligence: Engineered intelligence
Level II of artificial intelligence: Asymmetrical prostheses
Level III of artificial intelligence: Symmetrical culture-consumers
Level IV of artificial intelligence: Humanity-challenging culture-
consumers
Level V of artificial intelligence: Autonomous human-like societies
Level VI of artificial intelligence: Autonomous alien societies
Concluding remarks
Notes
6. Deep Learning: Precedent-Based, Pattern-Recognizing Computers
Extended Moore’s Law
Neural nets and their successors
Pattern recognition: Bottom-up, top-down and the sociology of
knowledge
Elements of pattern recognition
More on bottom-up and top-down
Notes
7. Kurzweil’s Brain and the Sociology of Knowledge
Notes
8. How Humans Learn What Computers Can’t
A human learns from human culture
Interim conclusion: What this study of human interaction means for AI
The stubborn but strangely overlooked problem of AI
Small groups, trust and the body
Notes
9. Two Models of Artificial Intelligence and the Way Forward
The body revisited
The internet and human culture formation
The new artificial intelligence and a new relationship
Notes
10. The Editing Test and Other New Versions of the Turing Test
The editing test and its advantages
Notes
Appendix 1: How the Internet Works Today
Notes
Appendix 2: Little Dogs
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Figures
3.1 The Chinese Rooms
6.1 Four ways to represent a house
7.1 Sam’s brain as a hierarchically arranged series of pattern recognizers
7.2 The big neural net and Social Sam
8.1 The fractal model of society
10.1 Three-dimensional model of expertise
Tables
2.1 Some types and examples of impossibility claim
2.2 The peculiar range of expertises that contribute to the AI belief question
4.1 Back-translations of sports terms using Google Translate (February
2017)
5.1 Six levels of artificial intelligence
5.2 Phrases from the ‘Cmabrigde Uinervtisy’ passage
8.1 How humans learn from each other and develop new knowledge
Artifictional Intelligence
Against Humanity’s Surrender to Computers
Harry Collins
polity
Copyright © Harry Collins 2018
The right of Harry Collins to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the
UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2018 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
101 Station Landing
Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no
part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the
publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-50950415-2
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Collins, H. M. (Harry M.), 1943-author.
Title: Artifictional intelligence : against humanity’s surrender to computers / Harry Collins.
Description: Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017059139 (print) | LCCN 2018002923 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509504152 (Epub) | ISBN
9781509504114 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509504121 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Artificial intelligence--Philosophy. | Artificial intelligence--Social aspects. | Artificial
intelligence--Moral and ethical aspects.
Classification: LCC Q334.7 (ebook) | LCC Q334.7 .C65 2018 (print) | DDC 006.301--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017059139
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this
book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for
the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain
appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the
publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
I thank my wife, Susan, for inventing the main title – Artifictional Intelligence –
and for drawing my attention to ‘computer says no’. Tammy Boyce helped with
locating relevant films. I thank those who were willing to spend time on talking
with me about the current state of artificial intelligence research. Steven
Schockaert, who works at the frontiers of the science and engineering of AI at
Cardiff University, was a generous conversational partner over a series of
lunches, and also read the first draft of the manuscript and provided many
valuable comments. I thank the members of the Cardiff University computing
department’s ‘Deep Learning Reading Group’ for allowing me to sit in on and
occasionally mess up their weekly meetings. Michael Bolton, Arthur Reber,
Edgar Whitley and various of my colleagues in Cardiff University also read the
text and offered me valuable advice. Readers from the frontiers of the AI or
computing research community included three anonymous readers recruited by
Polity Press and, as a result of my approaches, Ernest Davis, Hector Levesque
and Alan Blackwell, who also engaged in generous discussions, mostly by email
but in one case face-to-face. They each also made extensive and sometimes
critical comments on the text, which have been invaluable in helping me to
eliminate some mistakes and add various subtleties. Crucially, they encouraged
me in respect of the question of whether my technical abilities were sufficient
for the task I had set myself. All remaining lacunae, mistakes and infelicities
remain entirely my responsibility. I also thank those cited in the book, such as
Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, for invaluable discussions about the
frontiers of deep learning. From Polity Press, Emma Longstaff read an early
version of the draft, while Jonathan Skerrett read a penultimate draft; both
provided enormously helpful feedback which resulted in significant
improvements. I also thank Polity Press for encouraging me to write the book,
and thank Neil de Cort for handling all aspects of its production in a speedy and
stressfree way, with special thanks to Helen Gray for sympathetic and
imaginative copy-editing which places her in the top 0.1 per cent of copy-
editors.
The work on gravitational-wave detection reported here was supported by a
series of grants over many years: 1975, SSRC £893 ‘Further Exploration of the
Sociology of Scientific Phenomena’; 1995–96, ESRC (R000235603) £39,927
‘The Life After Death of Scientific Ideas: Gravity Waves and Networks’; 1996–
2001, ESRC (R000236826) £140,000 ‘Physics in Transition’; 2002–06, ESRC
(R000239414) £177,718 ‘Founding a New Astronomy’; 2007–09, ESRC (RES-
000-22-2384) £48,698 ‘The Sociology of Discovery’; 2010–ongoing, US
National Science Foundation grant PHY-0854812 to Syracuse University
‘Toward Detection of Gravitational Waves with Enhanced LIGO and Advanced
LIGO’, P.I.: Peter Saulson, Open-ended, ‘To complete the sociological history
of gravitational wave detection’. Work on the Imitation Game relevant to this
book was supported by, 2011–16, European Research Council Advanced Grant
(269463 IMGAME) €2,260,083 ‘A new method for cross-cultural and cross-
temporal comparison of societies’. Work on the relationship between fringe and
mainstream science was supported by 2014–16, ESRC (RES/K006401/1)
£277,184 ‘What Is Scientific Consensus for Policy? Heartlands and Hinterlands
of Physics’.