About Surfing Samurai Robots
Posted on March 28, 2008
Filed Under General |
Surfing Samurai Robots is a company building artificial general intelligence (AGI) systems of a new and unusual sort.
Rather than employ an architecture that has little in common with the way that thinking and reasoning occurs in the human mind, as most AI researchers tend to do, we are trying to stay as close as possible to the design of the human cognitive system.
There is a reason for this. We believe that a strong case can be made that all intelligent systems (natural and artificial) must contain a significant degree of complexity in them - where the term ‘complexity’ is used in the sense of ‘complex system’, rather than just ‘complicated’.
If this is correct then the methodology of both artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology is flawed. Specifically, the methods traditionally used by AI and cognitive psychology researchers will eventually get them into a diminishing-returns trap, with more and more effort being expended to make less and less progress, and with a serious possibility of never being able to reach the goal of building a human-level AI or developing a complete theory of the human mind.
This is a strong claim, but we believe it to be valid. The methods used in all other sciences depend for their effectiveness on the fact that most natural systems are not dominated by complexity. There is a strong probability that intelligent systems are indeed dominated by complexity, but this would mean that the AI/cognitive psychology field is in the unique position of being the only science or engineering domain in which complexity is dominant. This leads to a conclusion that is hard to swallow: some of the most fundamental methods of science and engineering may not work in this area.
What to do about this problem?
Well, solving this problem is what Surfing Samurai Robots is all about. SSR is developing a radical alternative to the methodologies currently used in AI and cognitive psychology. The new approach is referred to here as ‘theoretical psychology’, and one of its main components is the idea that AI can only succeed if it stays as close as possible to the design of the human mind. So our decision to build human-like AI systems is not just driven by an urge to explore a new avenue, it is driven by necessity: if the complex systems problem is real then this is the only way to build a complete, human-level artificial intelligence.
The Possibility of Rapid Progress
We also believe that theoretical psychology will be the start of a new era of rapid progress in AI.
The reason for this optimism is that something similar to the TP approach has been tried before, when cognitive scientists and AI researchers embraced the new philosophy known as ‘connectionism’ or ‘parallel distributed processing’ (PDP) back in the mid-1980s. At that time there was a sudden burst of rapid progress, which then flattened out as the new ideas became more mature. From the point of view of theoretical psychology this sudden burst of progress would make sense: the elements in common between PDP/connectionism and theoretical psychology were strong in the early days, but these common elements were then weakened and diluted as those doing the research tried to push the field away from complex systems and back toward conventional, non-complex science.
If the progress made in the early days of the PDP/connectionist revolution was an indication of what happens when complexity is allowed to play a role in the construction of cognitive models and AI systems, then what we need is a more wholehearted and comprehensive move toward more complexity. This is exactly what theoretical psychology is all about. One reason we are exploring this new approach so vigorously is that we believe it could unlock the floodgates and bring a new period of rapid progress in AI.
In fact, it may turn out that the goal of building a complete, human-level AI is not, after all, an extremely difficult problem that will take decades or centuries to solve. Perhaps it only looked difficult for as long as we were using methods and techniques that could never have worked.
It could be that a viable human-level AI is within easy reach, but located around a corner where nobody ever thought to look before.
Safe and Friendly Artificial Intelligence
One of the other implications of the theoretical psychology approach is that it opens up the real possibility that AI systems can be built in such a way that there will be virtually no danger that they will ever get out of control.
The meaning of this statement may not be altogether clear, so here is a more specific version. Imagine that you have just collected together every science fiction story in which the robots get out of control, or have some kind of accident, or commit some act that goes against the wishes of the majority of ‘reasonable’ people. Now add to this collection all of the nonfiction articles and documentaries in which people have described the many ways in which artificial intelligence could go wrong. Now imagine that the chance of anything resembling one of these nightmare scenarios is reduced to such a low level that even if these AI systems were to stay around for billions of years, the probability would be so low as to be insignificant. That is the meaning of ‘virtually no danger that they would get ever out of control’.
From now on, any phrase that says something like “This type of AI will not do X…” should be taken to mean the same as “The probability that this type of AI will do X is so low that it is not worth bothering with…”. The word ‘will’ in these contexts is just being used as a shorthand for the long and cumbersome (but more accurate) phrasing that talks about vanishingly small probabilities.
This is not to be confused with the idea of proving that the AI will not do anything dangerous, where ‘prove’ means reducing the probability to a strict zero. Nothing in the real world is provable at that level. Even a provably correct algorithm has to be run on a real computer which could get hit by an inconvenient cosmic ray.
There are two aspects to the idea of not posing a danger: safety and friendliness. An AI is safe if it will not commit accidental damage. An AI is friendly if it will not intentionally do anything to harm or seriously annoy us. The two concepts are orthogonal: in theory an AI could be friendly but accident-prone, or it could be immune to accidents but unfriendly. What we want, of course, is a way to build AI systems that are both safe and friendly.
To wrap all of this up, the term ‘Safe and Friendly AI’ (or SAFAI) will henceforth signify a type of AI that conforms to the strict standards of non-dangerousness described above, including both the safety and the friendliness aspects.
Of course it is one thing to define the meaning of SAFAI, quite another to show that such a thing is possible. There is not enough space in this introductory post to explain the mechanics of achieving SAFAI, but it is nevertheless important to declare that this is one of the most important features of the theoretical psychology approach to AI.
The reason that SAFAI is possible is that the behavior of this type of AI is governed by large numbers of distributed constraints, rather than by the localized (and vulnerable) control system that is usually assumed to be the controller of a conventional AI system. Any system governed by large numbers of constraints is more stable, other things being equal, and the safety and friendliness of our preferred type of AI is, at root, derived from this same general principle.
What is Surfing Samurai Robots Up To?
At the moment, the primary goal of SSR is to build a software development environment to explore the properties of AGI systems that follow the theoretical psychology approach.
This development environment goes by the name of SAFAIRE (which stands for ‘Safe and Friendly AI Research Environment’, and is pronounced sapphire).
SAFAIRE is currently scheduled for general release in 2010.
Although the easiest way to describe SAFAIRE is to call it a software tool, it is also an AGI system in its own right. The distinction between tool and actual AGI is sufficiently blurred that it makes no sense to have two names. In the future, of course, other AGI instantiations will be built using SAFAIRE, but for the time being the one term will be used for both tool and (initial) target system.
The SSR Blog
The function of this blog will be to describe aspects of the work done at SSR, and to answer questions and comments about topics related to this work.
Comments and questions are welcome, within the usual limits of constructive engagement 
.
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7 Responses to “About Surfing Samurai Robots”
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Thanks Richard for publishing your ideas in blog form. Your writings, especially those on the AGI list, have influenced my own approach to be what I think is cognitively plausible.
Will your software be open source? If so, can you open your development code repository (e.g. subversion) to the public so we watch your progress more closely and perhaps reuse some of the components that you create before the 2010 release?
-Steve
Stephen L. Reed
Artificial Intelligence Researcher
http://texai.org/blog
http://texai.org
3008 Oak Crest Ave.
Austin, Texas, USA 78704
512.791.7860
> The new approach is referred to here as ‘theoretical psychology’,
> and one of its main components is the idea that AI can only
> succeed if it stays as close as possible to the design of the
> human mind. . .
Ouch ouch ouch. Two extremely fraught words — “design” and “mind”.
If you substituted “architecture” (or something like that),
and “brain”, then I’d be less alarmed.
As it is, I fear you’ll be attempting (as the cognitive psychologists
have done before you) to abstract out something you’ll call “mind”
that you hope will be more tractable than the actual
physical brain, and which will leave you free to ignore the latter and
concentrate on refining the former, in more or less the
usual vacuum.
Well, best of luck.
It’s nice to see something actually starting for a change.
The link to this SuSaRo weblog is going into one of the
Mentifex mind-module pages.
Best of luck, especially with the 2010 deadline.
Well-done and wishing you both good luck & strength/perseverance - it’s an ambitious goal but IMHO you have a much higher probability than most AGIers of coming anywhere close of succeeding.
BTW: re “SAFAIRE” - a possible different french pronounciation would translate into [je] “sais-faire” i.e. [I] “know-how-to-make”
Thanks Stephen for the generous words.
For the time being the SAFAIRE project will have to remain closed-source. Although in general I am very sensitive to the push toward open-source software, in this case I am still unsure of the potential applications of this technology, so until we have a better handle on its scope it will remain in-house.
Some of the spinoffs from the main project may well be able to go open, however, and you can be assured that I will open them up if and when this becomes feasible.
Jim,
Okay, I plead guilty to the use of “design” - I only meant this as an innocent synonym for ‘architecture’ (no teleology should be inferred).
As for ‘mind’ I guess what you are referring to is the tendency of some psychologists to ignore lower levels and pretend that just because they are operating at an abstract level (e.g. the ’symbol’ level) it would be okay to appropriate the term ‘mind’. When this simplistic use of ‘mind’ occurs, I am completely in sympathy with you.
However, when I use the term I am not trying to do anything so simplistic. I do not completely ignore the lower levels, for one thing, and I would also link my work to a theory of consciousness that does, I believe, enable me to cash out the concept of ‘mind’ in a satisfying way. So I really do think I can defend the use of that word.
Having said all that, it is true that in the sentence you quote above I was again using a bit of shorthand, meaning nothing more than “architecture of the human cognitive system” when I said “design of the human mind”.
Cool. I like the french play-on-words twist!