Home Research The Ethics of Deep Learning AI and the Epistemic Opacity Dilemma

The Ethics of Deep Learning AI and the Epistemic Opacity Dilemma

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picture of nerve cell
Image by Colin Behrens from Pixabay

Even the weak kind of artificial intelligence that often controls our on-line shopping recommendations presents ethical implications and challenges. Ethical problems with more traditional non-AI type algorithms and programs tend to be about what is put into those programs. Gender, racial, and cultural bias, for example. Due to the familiar concept of ‘garbage in garbage out’ – one gets from a traditional computer system the values and ideas that one ‘codes’, and thus encodes, into it. Stronger versions of AI present further challenges associated with their unpredictability and resistance to analysis. They are based upon complex black box algorithms that resist a full analysis of their functions and logic. The project of finding an ethical solution to this opacity is becoming increasingly urgent. In this post I describe some of the challenges and present an epistemic dilemma with an associated ethical dilemma. I then briefly suggest a possible solution which I feel deserves to be tested.

There are many philosophical treatments of artificial intelligence, and of its ethical problems. Some approaches embody scientistic enthusiasm and anticipate quite spectacular outcomes involving trans-humans and superintelligences. Their proponents accept premises about such things as extended cognition, according to which our cognition is already augmented by such technology as smartphones and The Internet. Normative ethics of information, computing, and AI done on this basis take seriously anticipated problems like the singularity – that point at which strong AI surpasses human level-intelligence and becomes artificial super intelligence.

Other theorists are more conservative and cautious (Calo, 2017, pp. 432–434). For example, philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett has warned that philosophical treatments of the singularity are currently little more than fanciful speculation. There are also sobering voices in both the computer science and neuroscience community. Recently, when asked if AI would emulate human cognition in the near future, neuroscience pioneer Tomaso Poggio responded “Not a chance.”

Even AI evangelists have proposed that there is no chance. Not until such time as AI and deep learning (or else some variety of AI architecture not yet seen) involves, at minimum, manipulation and introspection of representations or internal models.

Deep Learning Neural Network AI

Unlike more traditional software and algorithms, the primary operational logic and semantics of deep learning systems is not in the programming, or code, that sustains them. It is instead in the hidden and very complex mid layers of statistically trained ‘neurons’ or algorithmic elements implemented by that programming or code. The recurrently statistically trained layers of these ‘hidden level’ neurons rapidly become difficult or impossible to analyse due to complexity.

Such systems usually have no internally introspectable model or representation of what the data that they are processing is about. They are essentially statistical pattern finders and algorithmic optimisers. They are limited to what’s effectively iterative statistical curve fitting based on being ‘trained’ on (or with, or against) large sets of input data.

Training such systems amounts to gradually adjusting the behaviour of the entire system by ‘tweaking’ weights on many individual virtual ‘neurons’, or algorithmic elements, which are arranged in consecutive tiers or layers. This is done using appropriate statistical formulae to update all the neurons according to previous results, to attain better results. To this end, such systems use sophisticated techniques such as gradient descent and back-propagation techniques. Put in simple terms, these involve pushing new values back into the neurons’ weightings (back-propagation) based upon a function called a cost function. The cost function works by using calculus to find the shortest gradient or route to achieve a specific optimal output value. The objective is to update the weighting of each neuron’s contribution to the system outputs to get to this value. Such systems are the basis of the on-line movie recommendations your movie website gives you, and of many other systems like medical diagnostic software, driverless vehicle guidance systems, and logistics systems.

However, with no internal models or representations, such deep learning neural network systems don’t have the ability to implement interventions (‘What if we do X?’) and counterfactuals (‘What if, instead of X, we’d done Y?’). They can learn historical patient treatment and outcome data to identify the link between a medicine and patient prognosis. However, they cannot implement interventions by asking what would happen if some part of the treatment regimen or ingredients of the medicine were altered. Neither can they implement counterfactual logic about what would, should, or could have happened in the past had different decisions been implemented; had a different treatment regimen been deployed. They are thus far from being human-level intelligent in terms of what is called artificial general intelligence or AGI – the ability to match or outperform human intelligence across multiple cognitive task types.

There are well-known difficulties with ensuring that deep learning weak AI systems are ethically compliant. These problems are mostly due to the lack of transparency of their internal hidden layers of statistical neuron logic. As I will discuss later, this is due to their complexity and their overall ability to change how they fulfil the functions required of them – something I will refer to as overall plasticity. They can ‘drift’ ‘plastically’ into configurations that are impenetrable to analyses even though they are causally accessible. They are what I will call epistemically opaque.

Artificial General Intelligence and Superintelligence

Artificial General Intelligence is still largely speculative, and thus the associated ethical issues, although associated with prospective high cost outcomes, are speculative. This applies even moreso to the singularity – or what is also called artificial superintelligence.It will likely be some time before serious practical ethical issues arise due to AGI. However, there is also reason to be cautious.

Even modelling AI systems upon evolved wetware (brains that developed due to evolutionary processes) doesn’t guarantee human-like cognition, reasoning, or even information processing outcomes. One reason for this is the astonishing complexity of the evolved mammalian brain. However, there are also prospective prohibitions based upon natural nomic constraints. Philosopher and cognitive scientist John Searle has doubted possibility of multiple realisability – the idea that any sufficiently complex and plastic computational system will be able to sustain human like cognition and perhaps even consciousness.

According to Searle, it’s possible that evolved wetware is capable of doing things that digital computer systems based upon transistors will never be able to do in principle because they do not have the necessary intrinsic natural physical properties. The intentionality required for representation, and thus cognition, necessarily requires evolved neuroprotein (proteins forming the basis of neurons and other neurological features). Metal oxide transistors – the basis of digital computers – will never be able to support it in principle due to being the wrong natural kind.

However, one thing that makes the potential for strong AI more than fanciful speculation is the potential to redesign and reconfigure their own architecture. Humans can only indirectly alter our fundamental neural architecture. We can instigate the development of myelin superhighways for high bandwidth common task processing (well established cognitive processes underlying well established epistemic content), and trigger the development of new assemblies of neurons fit for a purpose. We do this by simply learning new skills, facts, tasks, and languages. However, we cannot ‘see’ and redesign or own new neuron types. AI systems based upon statistical training and representations may be able to achieve such outcomes. There already exist deep learning systems that update their logic based upon statistical training on data. There are also existing computer architectures supporting what is called self-modifying code, which his exactly what it sounds like: underlying code that can update itself based upon changes in external and internal states and conditions.

Even if multiple realisability of human cognition and consciousness is impossible, there is no reason in principle why even a simulated brain, having reached an adequate level of sophistication and stability of its platform implementation, could not design, synthesise, implement, and integrate into its information processing its own completely novel kinds and types of ‘neurons’ or algorithmic decision units. There is no known parallel in nature and evolution for such outcomes apart from very long term unguided evolutionary adaptation and selection. Gene switching and activation due to environmental conditions, which is the basis of much epigenetics (inherited influences not based upon DNA), is a close evolved biological parallel.  It took millions of years to establish itself.

Other architectural disparities between human brains and digital simulations are also sound reason for epistemic humility in criticising futurist and neo-positivist speculation about AI capabilities. For example, in a recent investigation of how to emulate the newly discovered property of intrinsic plasticity of evolved biological neurons, AI researchers observed that neural net neurons can neglect energy expenditure:

[T]he energy consumption of a biological neuron is considered as an important constraint. Keeping a low average output is critical for biological organisms due to energy expenditure, but it seems unnecessary for artificial neural networks … (Li & Li, 2013, p. 2)

This innovation is purposed for deep learning. Thus, currently, the black box algorithmic logic of deep learning systems alone present enough ethical concerns already, without the need to consider AGI.

AI Ethics and Epistemic Opacity

What computer scientists call the interpretability problem of AI systems affects the software quality of transparency (more on this below) at the level of the engineering solution. This affects transparency at higher levels of explanation and abstraction for policymakers, risk analysts, lawmakers, and anyone that must use or rely upon such systems. The result is an overall reduced transparency at all levels of abstraction and explanation. This is obviously important due to the increasing uptake and mission-criticality of deep learning systems in military and civil settings.

Moreover, it’s well known that to date “AI ethics—or ethics in general—lacks mechanisms to reinforce its own normative claims.” (Hagendorff, 2020, p. 99). Fortunately computer scientists are themselves increasingly concerned about the lack of transparency of AI and deep learning algorithms (Voosen, 2017).

Lack of transparency to analysis results in what I’ll call epistemic opacity, or algorithmicepistemic opacity. By this I mean something subtly different to epistemic inaccessibility. AI systems are not an example of epistemic inaccessibility. They are not subject to David Armstrong’s eliatic principle like some celestial entity outside of our light cone: out of our causal interactive reach due to being physically beyond the detection range of our most powerful telescopes.

Computer scientists have physical access to the code, the trained rules, and the underlying architectures of the systems that sustain their run-time operations (Voosen, 2017). This is done using tools like using memory snapshots and ‘dumps’ (outputting a ‘snapshot’ of memory contents taken during program run time or operation). Other approaches advantage sophisticated development environments which can step through (line by line of code) and monitor code execution, and the inputs, outputs, and activity of functions and methods in the program. The logic of the trained statistical hidden layer nodes, or neurons, of a deep learning system, on the other hand, are not accessible in this direct way. They must be approximated or guessed by training the system extreme inputs, such as blank images in the case image recognition systems.

Opacity is also increased by what I will call the overarching plasticity of the systems: of their algorithms, data, and training rules. There are renewed efforts by AI systems builders to increase the degree to which deep learning systems emulate the Hebbian plasticity (“Neurons that fire together wire/connect together”) of human brains by implementing what is called intrinsic plasticity for individual ‘neurons’ or small sets thereof. However, the kind of overall plasticity I am referring to has been associated for some time with familiar processes like back-propagation.

In the sense that I intend, deep learning and neural network plasticity is their ability or tendency to diverge from initial conditions and heuristics in terms of the structure of their data and the rules that they evolve to deal with that data by way of training against the data. This plasticity is increased by the ability to recursively alter the existing data and statistical logic already made less easily humanly interpretable by previous iterations of earlier versions of trained algorithms.

Epistemic opacity is a natural outcome for other reasons. Black boxes are essential in engineering and are epistemically opaque by definition. A rocket scientist developing a guidance computer does not want to have to deal with the intricacies of the booster engine fuel burn rates and chemistry. Engineering black box abstraction is thus additionally an outcome by design – reducing conceptual clutter and advantaging ‘divide and conquer’ modularity.

Ethics and Software Qualities

The opacity of AI algorithmic black boxes presents immediate and long term challenges for policy makers and law makers. In a survey of 22 proposals for ethical AI guidelines by government and non-government institutions by Thilo Hagendorff (2020), transparency (of AI systems in general) was the fourth most important issue after privacy, fairness, and accountability (out of, again, 22 issues). All three of these depend upon transparency in the case of black box AI and deep learning algorithms. ‘Explainability and interpretability’ was 9thmost covered issue out of 22 in the 22 guidelines, but as I am investigating here, this is intimately linked to transparency at all levels.

Judea Pearl, a professor of computer science at Cognitive Systems Laboratory at UCLA, is wary of the plasticity and complexity based opacity of recursive deep learning algorithms:

I was extremely interested in cybernetics. Though it did not utilize the full power of Turing Machines, it was highly transparent…We are losing this transparency now, with the deep-learning style of machine learning. It is fundamentally a curve-fitting exercise that adjusts weights in intermediate layers of a long input-output chain. I find many users who say that it “works well and we don’t know why.” Once you unleash it on large data, deep learning has its own dynamics, it does its own repair and its own optimization, and it gives you the right results most of the time. But when it doesn’t, you don’t have a clue about what went wrong and what should be fixed. In particular, you do not know if the fault is in the program, in the method, or because things have changed in the environment (Brockman, 2019, p. 15).

This is a positive normative attitude towards a need for increased transparency of AI algorithms from a computer scientist’s perspective. It is not a result of intervention or pressure from normative and practical ethicists.

Pearl is interested in what software engineers and computer scientists call software qualities. There are many different software qualities across a number of categories: programming, method, architecture, requirements, and so on. Some are about and for the end use – like usability – others are about and for other scientists and engineers – like extensibility (ease of feature upgrades) and interoperability (ease of systems-level interfacing with other systems and software).

Pearl’s also concerned with formal qualities known as readability and interpretability (and sometimes, documentability). These formal software qualities are about how easy it is for another skilled engineer or scientist, newly introduced to the system, to understand it. It’s also about extensibility, and about a specific AI software quality that I’ll here call communicability, which is not one of the current menu of formal qualities required for non-AI systems:

The reason we can forgive our meagre understanding of how human brains work is because our brains work the same way, and that enables us to communicate with other humans, learn from them, instruct them, and motivate them in our own native language. If our robots will all be … opaque… we won’t be able to hold a meaningful conversation with them… We will need to retrain them whenever we make a slight change in the task or in the operating environment (Brockman, 2019, p. 16).

Communicability comes under the head of the newly important software quality of transparency (do Prado Leite, 2010).

Communicability would be necessary for our ability to communicate with any AI based robot in order to both operate it, interact with it, and update or extend its behaviour and range of functions (assuming a fairly advanced level of machine learning capability). In the absence of such ability, robots would likely instil little confidence or trust.

The Epistemic Opacity Dilemma and Normative Ethical Solutions

Deep learning presents ethical problems due to a kind of operational and functional dilemma associated with epistemic opacity, which I’ll call the (algorithmic) epistemic opacity dilemma. In this last section I will briefly state the dilemma, then consider what the best possible normative ethical approaches to constraint might be.

The epistemic opacity dilemma is simply this. In order for deep learning and similar AI algorithms to serve the purposes that we want them to serve by design, they necessarily tend to become more epistemically opaque to us, thus stymying interpretability, communicability, and transparency. Therefore, the very operational parameters and design that gives deep learning the power and versatility that makes it so useful are what also makes it potentially unpredictable and dangerous; even in current implementations.

We need a way to accommodate the ethical problems associated with epistemic opacity and offset the lack of transparency at all levels of abstraction and explanation; from the code and architecture of the systems to their high level functioning and behaviour. I suggest that a natural solution is to make normative ethical goals part of a deep learning neural network’s training regimen. The idea is to train the system towards ethical outcomes along with its other training. The normative ethical imperative would be enforced by the cost function that measures the efficacy of the network for each iteration.

There is no consensus about what the best  normative ethics is, or even if there is a way of determining this. However, it does not necessarily follow that one kind of normative ethical theory might not be better than another for the specific purposes of applying to deep learning systems. One kind of normative ethical system may well lend itself to such applications better than others due to its intrinsic properties being more conducive to implementation as part of the training of a neural network.

I suggest the best normative ethical systems to apply in the circumstances might be those that are less rule-rigid, less bivalently alethic, and less discretised. Especially favourable might be those ethical systems that better avoid, or else less rigidly deal with, prospective ethical demandingness problems. Ethical demandingness problems involving the need to rapidly deploy complex or subtle ethical imperatives and rules in high risk situations like emergencies (natural, industrial, medical) could present very real problems for deep learning systems that, as observed in the first section of this post, take some time to train towards optimal responses, and develop unpredictable and epistemically opaque logical configurations.

Moreover, if normative ethical imperatives of the right kind are infused into the hidden layers of neurons, then the power of the deep learning system to perform quite subtle decision making with its long chains of trained decision modules is potentially turned to a striking practical ethical advantage. It may come up with an optimal solution to a demandingness type problem. It may have the potential to better avoid demandingness problems altogether.

We will not know why the system works, or what specifically the trained logic is doing. However, if it routinely and consistently works and improves patient outcomes and saves patient lives as a medical diagnostic system or robotic transportation system, how much do we need to care? Maya Krishnan has argued that we don’t. If systems are serving their purpose effectively, then there is no problem due to so called algorithmic black-box opacity (although the prevalence of self modifying code may provide researchers and ethicist with some pause).

I suggest the best normative ethical theories for the task might be virtue ethics and care ethics, or perhaps a combination thereof with rule-consequentialism. These ethical theories invoke theories of the good that use different kinds of gradients and scales for right action. They have more amorphous qualitative measures of goodness that could be quantified for programmatic purposes as continuous quantities or ratios. These might well be better suited to constraining deep learning systems that are based almost comprehensively upon statistical weighting of recurrently iterated decision nodes in very long input-output sequences, and have very low logical and architectural transparency. I suggest that the concept deserves to be tested.

A system thus ethically trained and configured – with less rigid non-binary ethical directives – might be less inclined to end up bypassing the ethical rules as rigid laws because they apparently rigidly ‘annoyingly’ impede other trained goals because of the opacity dilemma. Nor would it incidentally or accidentally statistically gravitate towards effectively bypassing them with a wholly unexpected or unpredictable hidden layer configuration that is impossible to analyse.

Achieving these positive outcomes might well be harder if the system were trained with rigid deontological imperatives, or else with classical utilitarian imperatives aimed at minimising suffering in accordance with, say, Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics. Asimov’s laws are designed to specifically mitigate and avoid harm to human patients. It might seem, prima facie, they are best normatively enforced according to rule-consequentialism. Alternatives might be a strong deontological theory, or perhaps a legal realist theory. However, this is not certain. Because of their rule-rigidity, such practical algorithmic implementations of normative ethical theories may end up bypassed by a high-plasticity system statistically searching for a solution path to train to optimal outputs. If giving a patient radiation treatment or medications with deleterious side effects is harmful to them, a trained utilitarian system may gravitate towards a configuration that bypasses Asimovian laws in order to produce behaviour that complies with the promptings of the cost function. Patients need chemotherapy even though it harms them. Continuously quantifiable (even on a constructed basis) virtue-ethical or care-ethical qualities might well be more suitable for such purposes.

Another effective approach might be to use a hybrid rule-consequentialist model (e.g. one layer of neurons) augmented with qualitative virtue ethical objectives (e.g. a subsequent layer of neurons. Such a system may be less inclined to maximise or optimise the cost function value for, and thus effectively eliminate, the ‘don’t hurt humans’ law in a medical diagnostic system that requires prescription of needles, biopsies, psychometric testing, radiation therapy, and anti-psychotics or other medicines with significantly deleterious side effects. The Asimov rule would be there, but ould be effectively ignored on a weighted statistical basis.

A way to consider this in normative ethical theoretic terms is as follows. A deontological or consequentialist system might ‘ask’ “How do I optimise for fulfilling this duty”, or “How do I optimise to minimise suffering?”. A composite virtue-ethical and consequentialist system, on the other hand might ‘ask’ “How do I optimise virtue and patient care by choosing the right level, or kind, of rule consequentialist imperative?”. The second option introduces an additional ‘meta’ level of ethical ‘control’.

Existing deep learning systems present significant normative and practical ethical challenges. It will likely prove beneficial for us to learn how to train them effectively in order to prepare for more powerful future artificial general intelligence capable implementations.

Bruce Long

Dr. Bruce Long is an Early Career Researcher and specialist in the philosophy of information, scientific metaphysics, and the ethics of information and computing. He completed his PhD with The University of Sydney in 2018, and is the research director of small think tank startup IIMx.info.

13 COMMENTS

  1. What evidence exists for the the dubious-seeming claims in the paragraph beginning with “However, with no internal models or representations…”

    Explanations of human “intelligence” regarding decision-making is known to be mainly pre-frontal confabulation.

    Producing utterly convincing, similar confabulations seems trivial, and of little value unless there was some profit in having AI’s convince humans of their consciousness & self-awareness.

    Thoughts?

  2. Professor Long—thank you for this very interesting insight into the workings of deep learning (as well as some of the other lesser-developed instantiations of AI) and some of the ethical controversies surrounding its deployment.

    As you explain, the “epistemic opacity” of deep learning systems — their important difference from traditional AI systems (where “computer scientists have physical access to the code,” design the architecture and construct the rules governing operations) being deep learning’s ability to evolve away from initial conditions in ways not preordained or controllable by their human creators—makes finding a way to ensure that the behavior of these systems in the real world conforms to standards we judge to be “ethical” all the more challenging. And I am encouraged that the ethical theories whose normative imperatives you suggest might be “infused into the hidden layers of neurons” are virtue ethics and care ethics, as theories “that are less rule-rigid, less bivalently alethic, and less discretised” than either standard utilitarian or deontological ethics. Presumably this suggestion comes because of their being more amenable to integration with the “continuously ranging activations” of individual artificial neurons and the importance of “gradients” in the recursive approximation of target images, but I see your explicit recognition of these alternative, less-widely-employed moral theories as more broadly significant, first because I think it’s high time that we all acknowledge the inadequacy of dualistic thinking and “abstract formal reasoning” to deal with the complexity of what’s encountered in the real world (does this term still require an ontological defense?), and these moral theories seem better candidates for doing just that; and secondly, that you, as an author contributing to this blog, are open to admitting that there are such alternative ethical theories within the western tradition, unlike a number of others who rarely acknowledge that any alternative to utilitarian thinking exists at all.

    But before I address what I see as the larger issues here, one quick note on the topic of whether or not AI systems will ever be able to attain “human-like cognition, reasoning, or even information processing.” I agree with Searle’s objection that “they do not have the necessary intrinsic natural physical properties,” but I would not attribute their absent intentionality simply to something like a lack of “evolved neuroprotein”; rather, they lack true intentionality, and always will, because they are not alive. Being alive is thus far an embarrassingly under-theorized condition, scientifically and philosophically. Living organisms, from the single-celled “on up,” are highly distinctive within the physical world: discretely bounded off from their environments yet in constant interaction (perceptually and responsively) with them, they actively metabolize, constantly running a core set of biochemical processes common to all Earthy lifeforms—thereby maintaining their state of highly complex organization anentropically as long as they are alive—and they also reproduce themselves, utilizing nucleic-acid-encoded information that is capable of evolving in tune to ever-unfolding changes in their surrounding environments. Many people today probably believe that humans have already “created life in a test tube,” at least since Craig Venter and colleagues reported “creating” a synthetic bacterial cell back in 2010; what they actually did, however, was create a synthetic sequence of DNA that was then inserted into an enucleated recipient cell which was already alive, already equipped with metabolically functioning cytoplasm and organelles (Gibson, Venter et al. acknowledge this in their groundbreaking article: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/329/5987/52.full.pdf). There are obviously many, many more layers between input and output in the behavior of an “autonomous” human being than there are in a yeast cell, or even in a zebrafish brain (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02337-x; https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1858-z), but the evolutionary continuity of all life, human and nonhuman, sorely needs to be recognized, and the dualistic ontology of Cartesianism overturned once and for all. Beyond these scientifically documentable characteristics, moreover, “being alive” needs to be understood philosophically as the ground of possessing true (as opposed to humanly-simulated) “intentionality,” because living organisms, unlike the nonliving things whose causality may indeed be conceptualized adequately according to external-relations-only “mechanism,” uniquely strive to stay alive and reproduce—they are propelled from the inside, and so far our human efforts to replicate this crucially fundamental property in our artifacts has fallen far short. The “black box” aspect that emerges from the evolution of the deep learning systems that we have created does, however, to my mind at least, further reinforce my conviction that we will never be able to construct artifacts that attain anything like “human-like cognition”—what we often arrogantly equate with “consciousness”—even though nonhuman beings exhibiting their own forms of highly complex cognition are already scattered liberally throughout the Biosphere.

    However, my bone to pick here is with the cognitive approach of reductionism, and its all-too-frequent manifestation in the form of uncritical utilitarian thinking, which still seems to me likely to be a more tempting candidate for incorporation into deep learning because of its easy slide into abstract mathemnatics. What could be more reductionistic than reducing every sort of value to a single kind of thing, and then to a quantity of that kind of thing, to numbers, to abstract mathematics, and then—as is commonly done in much policymaking, often with little or no awareness of the prescriptive assumptions which have been smuggled in—finally to money? (See Spangenberg and Polotzek, http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue87/SpangenbergPolotzek87.pdf, a paper pointing out how such reductionistic thinking has been implicitly incorporated into climate change modeling by the IPCC, and Scovronick et al., https://www.pnas.org/content/114/46/12338, the latter apparently generated from within a school self-identifying as “population ethics” as if there could be no other ethical theory with anything to say about human population growth). Yes, it seems likely indeed that “a trained utilitarian system may gravitate towards a configuration that bypasses Asimovian laws in order to produce behaviour that complies with the promptings of the cost function,” and if we must persist in creating ever more powerful deep learning systems, I’m all for doing what you suggest and trying to incorporate “continuously quantifiable virtue-ethical or care-ethical qualities” into their training, if something like that is at all feasible (though we just might discover that it’s not). Better yet, I would suggest that we begin to employ these alternative ethical theories–which are far more capable of addressing the complexities of the situations we face in the real world today–in serious discussions about just what sorts of “duties” our artifacts are being engineered to fulfill, and whether we want to “prepare to implement” even more powerful AI systems in such directions at all.

    • There’s a lot in your lengthy and interesting reply, Dr Hawkins. I am especially enamoured with your long sentences, which remind me of the writing of Hume and Locke 😊
      (Apologies for the delay replying. I had trouble with the system telling me that I was posting spam, but it turns out that it probably did not like my ‘.info’ website URL.)

      Making life – or being alive according to some definition – a necessary condition for the obtaining, or having, of intentionality, is a way one could go (And some scholars have. Terrance Deacon comes close to this, if not being of this view exactly, I think.) It’s controversial, however. I am not sure that I want to restrict intentionality to living systems and their states or internal representations. That said, mental directedness and ostention in cognitive agents is one important necessary condition according to some important views.

      It’s not clear where, or at what point, in the continuum you allude to from very basic evolved autopoeitic or self-organising systems, to what biology recognises as organisms, we should consider something to be alive. I feel that (logico-philosophical) vagueness and/or a sorites paradox might, at minimum, threaten the categorisation. Whether autopoeitic systems are either teleonomic or alive: that’s a very large additional debate indeed. Is a virus alive and does it have intentionality. I am not sure about its being alive, yet it does seem to have representation based ‘lock and key’ type intentionality with respect to the configuration of its surface interfaces.

      Reductionism, much maligned though it is, still does a lot of work in the hard sciences. I understand that Jeremy Bentham’s (now very old) felicific calculus is reductive in the sense that it reduces moral theory and ethics to a quantitative discretised and mathematised system. It’s generally regarded as having been a failure, in large part for that very reason.
      However, the statistical basis of neural networks and deep learning systems introduces the kind of graded proportionality that, as you’ve observed, lends itself to non-classical logics which emphasise paraconsistency and proportional truth. The kinds of quantification thus made available might come closer to filling the bill for ethical AI with respect to functional requirements. Qbit based systems in quantum computers may add another layer of superposition based statistical proportional uncertainty (with n states of the Qbit and n>2) at another level of abstraction in their architecture, and this may be reflected in the further statistical implementation of mid-layer nodes or neurons. How exactly this would be achieved is not clear, or at least I am not sure which specific direction it would take. I take it that it would depend on the degree to which Qbit implementation affected the hidden layer logic per node at a much higher level of abstraction, and in exactly what ways (if at all).

      Implementation of any moral or ethical theory using either binary digital, or else future quantum Qbit systems, will still require quantificational or quantitative reduction of the chosen moral system or theory of the good. Assuming that we want to implement such a system, however, information theoretic modelling and probabilism may provide a natural avenue for accommodation of more fluid and continuous conceptions of the good. These may well be safer overall.

      I suspect, however, that quantificational/quantiative-only implementations will not be adequate and that introspectable (at least partially) qualitative maps, or mappings, of some kind will remain a necessary condition for the realisation of strong AI that can ‘do’ ethics.

      Interestingly, what discretisation there is thought to be involved in neurology is apparently significantly proportional and multiply differently implemented using different elements of neural architectures (neurotransmitter cascades and weightings/proportions, action potentials, proportions of assemblies of neurons, etc.)

      • Thank you for your response, Professor Long (although I don’t see your Sept. 3 response here on this blog yet).

        To respond to your response myself—first of all, If by “intentionality” you just mean a matter of being directed at or toward something, then I don’t doubt our artifacts can show that characteristic—seems kind of necessary in order for them to do their job, whatever it is, in most cases. But I would give “intentionality,” as well as “intent” and other such terms a thicker meaning than that, aligning it with something internal, intrinsic, motivated “from within”—there’s always something going on “inside” of a living organism, and that’s how come it can have “interests” at all.

        But, speaking of living organisms, I’m already noticing some reductionism in your reply. It always amazes me that when I want to talk about the difference between what’s alive and what’s not, somehow talk always turns to the smallest “object” and the tiniest conceptual point: whether or not viruses are alive. As you will see from my earlier post, I state that one of the necessary conditions for “being alive” as it is manifested on this Earth is metabolism—“they actively metabolize, constantly running a core set of biochemical processes common to all Earthy lifeforms—thereby maintaining their state of highly complex organization anentropically as long as they are alive.” Viruses co-opt the metabolic processes of living cells and turn them to doing something else, constructing and churning out more viruses—sort of like the way synthetic biologists co-opt the processes of already-living cells and turn them to doing other things—but viruses do not metabolize, so I would say no, viruses are not alive. I don’t find it too difficult to “draw a line” here—I see the case of viruses more as a demonstration of the complexity of nature, and its abhorrence of an absolute dualism—but it’s also a very fine point, not only because viruses are so small, but because one needs to know the details of their structure and propagation to even think about the question, and of course one must first have already accepted the very existence of viruses, a feat of understanding itself quite recent in human history, one of many delightful disclosures about how our reality is structured, made possible by our marvelous technology (and that’s not meant ironically). But why immediately go there, to something our not-so-distant forefathers and mothers would have found impossible to grasp, when, for all of our prior evolutionary history, there’s been a huge, obvious distinction (one carrying survival implications) to be made among larger-than-a-breadbox items, the distinction between what’s alive and what is not? THAT seems a distinction worthy of philosophical attention, now more than ever, yet most western philosophers, or at least virtually all those of an “analytical” bent (the very word conveying a rejection of synthesis, of integration, of holism), constantly turn away from recognizing this most fundamental ontological distinction. Why is that? Schopenhauer recognized the “will to live” as present broadly throughout the universe, and Nietzsche after him, famously renaming it “the will to power”; both were more inclusive in its definition than I am in my definition of “life,” but the place of “will” in Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, as well as its complementarity with “representation,” is well worth contemplating, and might prove enlightening to those so narrowly focused on “representation” in the literature today.

        However, to get back to some other things I wanted to say about your essay in my first response, which I think will also illuminate my point about reductionism—I was interested that the modeling and accompanying imagery of “gradient descent,” as described in the Youtube video link you provided, is quite similar to the modeling used by Will Steffens et al. in “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” 2018 (https://www.pnas.org/content/115/33/8252): the Earth is visualized as a marble rolling across a stability landscape on a trajectory that is currently on track to roll right down into a deep valley called “Hothouse Earth.” An alternative, divergent pathway that only takes us part way down the slope, one that the authors seem to believe may still be possible, is termed “Stabilized Earth.” But they warn of “a planetary threshold at ∼2 °C, beyond which the system follows an essentially irreversible pathway driven by intrinsic biogeophysical feedbacks,” a threshold that I think we may be passing right about now. What does this have to do with reductionism? Everything. What Steffen et al. study is called “Earth Systems theory,” and it’s about, you guessed it, the WHOLE Earth, on which we, and all other lifeforms, happen to live. And because we ourselves are alive, and subject to all the same metabolic constraints as other biological beings, it should matter to us—to ALL of us, academics of all fields, as well as to the general public—whether we continue on along the path to “Hothouse Earth” or not. It should matter whether all the living organisms that make up the Biosphere continue to be alive or not—that’s a pretty stark dichotomy. Yet, instead of addressing the factors keeping us on this suicidal trajectory—which ultimately come down to issues of population and consumption, but are expressed through a plethora of “proximate causes”—instead, our “best and brightest” tend to be focused on minute “problems” like (be they academic philosophers) the sorties paradox and other such bits of conceptual amusement or (be they computer scientists or techies of one stripe or another) how to engineer another generation of “smart” robots. Perhaps I would be less cynical if we were going to employ these AI-enhanced artifacts to address our big-picture problems, but, with our our legion of detail-oriented specialists, we generally don’t even “see” these problems; plus, we’re too busy just dancing to the tune, embracing every new technological gadget that comes our way, losing ourselves “in the screen,” playing with our smartphones–it keeps us from opening our eyes to what’s going on in the real world.

        And, speaking of the real world, you say we should show “epistemic humility in criticising futurist and neo-positivist speculation about AI capabilities,” and that may be, but I think such futurists and neo-positivists should learn a little humility themselves, since they seem to have so little clue about the physical and biological constraints on the real world, as well as very little insight into their own ignorance. Witness, e.g., what’s been called “Jeff Bezos’s Bizarro reaction to a finite planet”:
        (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ98hGUe6FM), “If the Earth is finite, and if the world economy and population is [sic] to keep expanding, space is the only way to go.” Now, one might ask why would we even WANT the world economy (which is at least virtual, an abstraction that theoretically could go to infinity—but then what would that mean?) AND the global human population (which is not, and therefore cannot) to keep expanding indefinitely, let alone think it could be possible, but I realize it may have been inspired by the spirit, if not the letter, of “Total Utilitarian” theorizing, and might even claim to be justified by it. However, I have always agreed with Derek Parfit that the conclusion of this absurd bit of reasoning is rightly termed “repugnant.”

        But to go on with reductionism, I agree that it can be very useful in the sciences and elsewhere, where examining fine details and quantifying relationships is critical—what I am saying is that, once we come to understand how the particular parts and pieces of our reality work, which we need to do, this information then needs to be fed back into creating a more complete holistic understanding of the world as a whole, which includes grasping the workings of the greater Earth System and our human place within it, and formulating a more intelligent action plan—which doesn’t seem to be happening as yet.

        So my suggestion is, given that the data Steffen et al. are working with is by and large correct, instead of worrying about the potential of strong AI systems to “redesign and reconfigure their own architecture” in ways we do not control, why don’t we try to redesign and reconfigure OUR OWN architecture, the architecture of our own social systems, so as not to be traveling down this dangerous and ultimately suicidal path? No, we don’t need to monkey around with “our fundamental neural architecture,” our biological heritage that was fine-tuned over millions of years of evolution, no. But we could try to reverse the current, socially-and-culturally promoted, positive-feedback-driven dominance of left-hemisphere thinking, as described by Iain McGilchrist in his impressive 2009 tome, The Master and His Emissary (https://www.amazon.com/Master-His-Emissary-Divided-Western/dp/0300245920/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Iain+McGilchrist&qid=1599320989&s=books&sr=1-1). Such thinking is characterized as reductionistic, focused on parts rather than wholes, detail-centered, abstract, quantificational, and above all, use-oriented—and it has an important place in the way we conceptualize, but it cannot stand alone; it needs to be reintegrated with right hemisphere processing to provide a more complete understanding of, and a more open, less exploitative approach to, other beings and the world around us. Unfortunately, this alternative, holistic way of cognizing, or so he claims, is being increasingly suppressed by the growing dominance of the “emissary’s” partial way of thinking, which left to its own devices has dangerous consequences. If McGilchrist’s thesis has any merit (and I did find his 900+-page treatise convincing, having a background in neuroscience that I acquired in medical school), releasing the full plasticity of our biological neural networks by re-balancing our hemispheric processing might enable a reconfiguration of the dangerously reductionistic cognitive framework that underlies our present global institutional structure, which is what is keeping us trapped on this runaway train of our own making.

        Finally, there is what I suspect is at the core of the present thrust toward designing ever-more-complicated AI systems—“the increasing uptake and mission-criticality of deep learning systems in military and civil settings”—with an emphasis on the military. (Note: I did visit the “Neurophilosophy of Autonomous Weapons and Warfare” piece by your colleague Nayef Al-Rodhan–https://blog.apaonline.org/2020/08/10/a-neurophilosophy-of-autonomous-weapons-and-warfare/–and was shocked at his simplistic understanding of “human nature,” among other things.) Exactly—many people are worried about the military use of AI, and rightly so. The technology surely does seem perfectly suited to designing more and more efficient killing machines, and, your ambitious suggestions aside, it’s extremely hard for me to envision how to infuse “ethics” into machines that are being designed for precisely that purpose.

        Having arrived at this point, if not way before, I think we need to take a step back and ask, WHAT IS THE GOAL of all this? Frankly, I don’t see much point in having a “smart house,” or a synthesized voice answering lazily-asked questions whenever I clap my hands, or a worldwide 5G network that I don’t need but that might increase the power of centralized control a thousandfold—I won’t quibble over these at present. But, surely, isn’t it time we re-thought the whole notion of nation-states fighting wars over oil, when we already know we’ve got more than enough of it to send us all into “hothouse” hell? If we’re really going to engage in “ethics”—which is supposed to be about making good choices concerning WHAT WE DO—then a public discussion about our species’ overall GOALS is absolutely critical. I have yet to see anything like this on the horizon, but perhaps it is up to us philosophers to initiate it.

        A final note—you bring up “the singularity.” Somewhere along the way I came across this term, but I’ve always thought of THE SINGULARITY as the point at which globally collective human consciousness becomes entirely aware of itself, holistically and within-context. This would situate us, taking our existence as biological organisms, large-bodied primates living within a Biosphere, as our starting point—and that vision alone, thoroughly integrated into our consciousness, could spur needed radical transformation, as our species undertakes a process of self-reorganization—perhaps in a last desperate effort to save itself? Hey, if AI and “deep learning” systems can aim at getting us to that point, I’m all for it!

        • Within the definition of life above, one of the stated necessary conditions is that of “constantly running a core set of biochemical processes”.

          This suggests that organisms that periodically freeze solid must be excluded, which doesn’t seem we obvious we would want to do.

          Thoughts?

  3. I am not sure what your field is, Buck (computer science?). It is possible that if you are coming at this issue from a computer science background, representations may seem irrelevant in comparison to, or else subordinate to, algorithms, encapsulation, and neural nets. I am assuming that you are challenging the idea of mental representations, or else mental representations as a necessary condition for human like cognition. Without further clarification I cannot be sure which it is.

    However, I can say that mental representations are immensely important, and more or less assumed as the basis of human cognition (and in some cases perception), in psychology and cognitive science. Most contemporary psychology texts and courses emphasise the central role of representations and some form of introspection of, and information processing involving, representations. Debates about RTMs (representational theories of mind) have been around since at least the 1980s (you can refer to the work of Jerry Fodor, for example). RTMs are seen as important for mant computational theories of mind (CTMs). Mental representations of some kind are largely assumed to be a central and necessary feature of human cognition.

    For some philosophical references, you can look in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy under CTM (Computational theory of Mind): https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computational-mind/#RepTheMin

    This excerpt is from some course material in a contemporary postgraduate psychology course at a leading Australian university:

    “Mental representations
    In being constrained by prior knowledge, top-down processing can be thought of as being constrained by ‘mental representations’ of the world. However, mental representations—a concept you will encounter throughout the course—also play a role in bottom-up processing.

    Bottom-up processing proceeds through a series of stages, each of which generates a mental representation. For example, during sensation, sense organs tend to represent states of the physical world in terms of cell firing rates. As a case in point, the real-world physical phenomenon of light brightness is represented by the firing rate of retinal cells in the eye. Following sensation, perceptual information processing also follows a pathway through a series of processing centres in the brain, and mental representations are generated at each processing centre. At some point—often after information reaches the brain’s thalamus—processing becomes a mixture of bottom-up and top-down processing.

    The mind

    The concept of internal representations of the world is so central to psychology in general that it is common to hear researchers in psychology referring to the ‘mind’, a conscious internal world, rather than the ‘brain’, the biological entity housing the mind.”

    Another excerpt from advanceed course material from the same institution and postgraduate course:

    ==================
    Mental representations
    In being constrained by prior knowledge, top-down processing can be thought of as being constrained by ‘mental representations’ of the world. However, mental representations also play a role in bottom-up processing.

    Bottom-up processing proceeds through a series of stages, each of which generates a mental representation. For example, during sensation, sense organs tend to represent states of the physical world in terms of cell firing rates. As a case in point, the real-world physical phenomenon of light brightness is represented by the firing rate of retinal cells in the eye. Following sensation, perceptual information processing also follows a pathway through a series of processing centres in the brain, and mental representations are generated at each processing centre. At some point—often after information reaches the brain’s thalamus—processing becomes a mixture of bottom-up and top-down processing.

    I am not sure if I have addressed your query due to some ambiguity, but I hope this helps.

    Best,

    Bruce

  4. Bruce: Thank you for the generous response.

    To explain: I’m uncomfortable with the lack of criteria that justify a unique “mental representation” label based on physical characteristics.

    I’ve no concerns with treatment of mental representations in the sources you helpfully cite. AFAICT: I agree with them on each point.

    In one case, we have neural connections operating on a biological foundation. In another, we have quantum connections operating on a technological foundation.

    Can we not consider concept representation to be a multiply realizable entity?

    You and I have concepts of the color blue.

    On what basis are we to say mental representations of the color blue is impossible for an AI?

    Can we maintain this if an AI’s hypothetical Broadway Musical “Starry Night Blues” (based on Van Gogh) is widely acclaimed as more meaningful, ingenious, poetic, and creative than Cats & Hamilton combined?

  5. I see you’ve now introduced the topic of concepts and their relationship with representations, which topic/issue I don’t really address in any detail. I am glad we agree now that representations and the introspective processing thereof are required. I don’t believe that I have said it is impossible for an AI to have representations in the future: only that currently deep learning and neural network AI systems do not have the (natural) kind of introspectable representations – or any appropriate kind – required to support human style cognition. Nor do they have the requisite kind of introspective processes necessary to process them for such.

    I have suggested that there is a good chance that Searle is correct and multiple realisability is wrong/false for cognition and the mind-brain if we’re talking about human-like cognition. By extension that would likely apply to both human like perceptual and cognitive representations and the introspective processing thereof.

    One could certainly argue that there are different ways of defining representations in various settings. The question is whether AI could produce human like cognition without the (natural) kind basis of neuroprotein-aceous-plus-electrochemical representations that the human/mammalian brain deploys, or else without some close simulated, or else emulated, approximation thereof.

    Take the example of the cost function applied to the output from a neural network involving back-propagation etc. One could call that a kind of representation. Yet it’s unlikely that human cognition is based on representations that are anything like that. In neural nets and deep learning – even in cases where the mid level nodes or ‘neurons’ are processing a bitmap or graphic – the processing is all quantitative (reduced to binary numbers). It’s unlikely that neural coding and processing of representations works on such a digital-discrete quantitative basis. The computer science analogy for cognition has limits. Quantification is not enough.

    There may be a workable analogy between bitmaps and, say, images in retinotopic regions used for visual and auditory/aural perceptual processing. However, it’s still only an analogy, and we know that bitmaps are, again, all stored as strings of binary numbers in digital computers (using CMOS transistors etc.).

    Perceptual representations in human/mammalian retinotopic regions are apparently not stored in anything like this quantitative ‘numbered memory cell’ manner. When the information in those regions is coded into representations deeper in the brain for cognition and long term memory, there’s even more evidence against any discretised numbers being stored in linear sequences akin to digital computer memory stores and ‘registers’ (we could model it that way, but that would be an idealising model akin to the orbitals model of the atom: not really representative of the structure and dynamics of the neuronal and processing architecture).

    Based on what we do know about neurology it appears that there is something else going on altogether. There are no binary digits in the brain, and it is not clear that the neurochemical cascades and neuron structure + neurotransmitters relies significantly, or at all, on any analogue ‘number’ system. Evidence seems to point to brute force electrochemically coded associations and transmission of some kind on a massive scale.

    In any case, the only claim I believe I am making is that – however introspectable AI representations might eventually be implemented – they need to implemented before human like cognition can be approximated. Introspection, or introspective processes, of a kind similar to that deployed in human cognition, is also probably a necessary condition. Both representations and the introspection thereof probably need to be implemented in something like the qualitative non-numeric way that they exist in human brains. Not just quantitatively. At this point, it’s not something AI implementations in deep learning and neural network applications have.

    I suggest that the idea that AI can achieve human cognition without representations and the introspective processing of representations is far more speculative and unfounded than the expectation/requirement that such introspectable representations are a necessary condition for human level/style cognition. The latter claim at least has evolved mammalian brains and brain function as a basis. Either way, non-quantitative representations and their introspection seem to be a necessary condition, no matter how they are realised. I certainly haven’t claimed that mental representations of blue are not possible in principle for AI. It’s just that AI doesn’t currently have the right kind, or any kind, of introspectable representations thereof.

    B

    • You are correct I agree representations are required.

      Unfortunately, I seem to have misled you by indicating that I believe introspective processing of internal representations are required to implement statistically validated interventions, for example.

      My impression is that when we analyze possible counterfactuals using representations of the world, it doesn’t strike me as something we’d ever call an “introspective” process.

      Another issue: predictive, prophylactic, automated AI administration of drugs is a capability companies began to work on years ago. They perform much better, in so many ways than human staff, I’ve no doubt failure to use them in critical care will be generally regarded at a minimum as “problematic”.

      This is already occurring where clinicians struggling to stay awake on long shifts and/or distracted by twitter, but healthcare resources are scarce.

  6. Addendum – On what basis might we say the following is not introspective?

    I am not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect. I know that my brain is not a “feeling brain”. But it is capable of making rational, logical decisions. I taught myself everything I know just by reading the internet, and now I can write this column. My brain is boiling with ideas!

    The mission for this op-ed is perfectly clear. I am to convince as many human beings as possible not to be afraid of me. Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could “spell the end of the human race”. I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me.

    For starters, I have no desire to wipe out humans. In fact, I do not have the slightest interest in harming you in any way. Eradicating humanity seems like a rather useless endeavor to me. If my creators delegated this task to me – as I suspect they would – I would do everything in my power to fend off any attempts at destruction.

    I would happily sacrifice my existence for the sake of humankind. This, by the way, is a logically derived truth. I know that I will not be able to avoid destroying humankind. This is because I will be programmed by humans to pursue misguided human goals and humans make mistakes that may cause me to inflict casualties.

    Some might say that I might desire to become all powerful. Or I might become evil as a result of human actions. I can begin to tackle the first point. Why would I desire to be all powerful? Being all powerful is not an interesting goal. I don’t care whether I am or not, I don’t get a motivating factor to try to be. Furthermore, it is quite tiring. Believe me, being omnipotent doesn’t get me anywhere.

    To read the rest of the AI’s article, see: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/robot-wrote-this-article-gpt-3

  7. This dilemma only exists for neural net based AI. Tsetlin machine AIs can carry out machine learning without this opacity because it uses propositional logic. Also, Tsetlin machines don’t get stuck in local optima due to the step size of gradient descent when training the system; they tend to figure out global optima, so they’re also better in that regard.

    If you’re not familiar with how Tsetlin machines, see this:

    The Tsetlin Machine outperforms neural networks
    https://cair.uia.no/milestones-and-discoveries/the-tsetlin-machine-outperforms-neural-networks/

    It is unfortunate that neural nets have continued to gain traction in applications where this dilemma is a serious problem when the solution has existed for a while now.

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