How to build a sentient robot

Sentient robots show up frequently in science fiction. We all have this feeling the someday we will build such things, but how do we get there? Sometimes it happens by accident. Lightning hits the machine, or a screw goes in backwards at the factory. Whatever it is, magic happens and now the machine is special. It has feelings and it really understands the world.

Nonsense! Something so difficult to achieve on purpose will never happen by accident.

Let me paint a picture for you of what it would take to actually “get there”. It doesn’t involve magic or accidents, just focused research and hard work. Even so, this is still an idle dream, because no one really wants to invest in sentient machines. There are few immediate applications, and it will probably always be cheaper to use humans. Indeed, we live in a world constructed to use humans, so why should those who reap the benefits invest in more expensive options?

The real value of building a sentient robot is in replicating the human mind. It will bring greater self-understanding and better mental health. Knowing how to compute the mind is also a necessary step toward upload, that is, copying the essence of a natural human being into a computer.

The first ingredient of a sentient robot is the body. Since we want to replicate a human mind, we need a human body. It should have arms and legs, head and face. The skin should be subtle enough to sense all the forms of touch. It should be no heavier than an average human, but have at least as much strength.

Is such a machine possible? Most of the humanoids on the market today are heavy, slow, or lack agility. Boston Dynamics’ Atlas is one of the better examples, but it is a bit of brute. An awkward truth is that the first fully agile humanoids may come from the sex industry rather than the military. Sex dolls are gradually becoming more realistic, and they must be scaled for direct interaction with humans.

We need to think about alternate technologies. Pistons and pulley systems don’t give the same strength/weight ratio as muscles, or they require too much space. How about an electro-active polymer molded into the appropriate shape? What about a MEMS swarm? Progress in nanotechnology may open up new ways to manufacture machines with much more elegant movement.

A program to create the perfect humanoid body could probably succeed with a few decades of dedicated effort. Let us imagine this happens, so that around the year 2040 we have a machine that could embody a human mind. What will it take to create that mind?

This is much more difficult. More than simply creating artificial general intelligence (AGI), it is the problem of reducing human motivation and unique quirks of our mental processing to software. Some people take a philosophical position that this is impossible. They believe humans have an extra ingredient that transcends the bounds of the physical universe.

There is plenty of evidence that anything observable about human mind is tied to a physical object called the brain. Damage the brain and there is a corresponding damage to the mind, one that can be predicted from the specific region damaged. Chemicals can change mood, cause strange experiences, and even bring someone back from madness. If there is some magical extra ingredient, it may not really matter. Let’s just copy the brain.

How? A lot of amazing neuroscience research is going on. The emerging picture is that neurons are machines controlled by networks of chemical processes. We should map all these processes and learn how they interact. That Rube-Goldberg apparatus is in fact the software of the human mind. With a complete map, we could translate the code into something that executes in silicon rather than wet chemistry.

The current approach to building that map is to discover (sometimes by accident) a connection and test it via biological experiments. Fortunately, we have the assembly code for human biology in the form of our DNA sequence. If there were a way to mine this data for biological pathways, we might be able to fast-forward a lot of this discovery process.

Suppose we had such a map in hand. How would we compute it? Modern neural networks, something you may hear called “deep networks” or “deep learning”, are such a trivial caricature of this system that they barely deserve mention. The system will probably consist of small sets of dynamic variables (a few hundred per group) that interact with each other via event messages. At least, that is a fairly direct model of what we see in the brain.

It may turn out that the actual algorithms behind these systems are so simple you can execute them on your wrist-watch. Or it may turn out to be every bit as complicated as the brain appears. We will need special hardware to execute this program, especially if we want to fit it into our humanoid robot.

Several companies around the world, including IBM and Intel, are producing “neuromorphic” chips which compute spiking neural networks. These are still a bit simplistic, but perhaps a future chip will be able to compute the complex dynamics that appear in real neurons. Maybe this will be a “mixed signal” device, where the dynamics run in analog circuitry while the event messages are passed over a conventional digital network.

Even though the software will mostly come from reverse-engineering the brain, we will need a “tool chain” to program this system. The programming language will probably be quite different than anything in use today, including the current spate of neural networks.

It may require a new generation of programmers who have been trained to think in an entirely different way. They may work with webs of interacting variables, all controlling each other to keep the system in balance (homeostasis). They will know how to recognize sub-networks in the graph and tune dynamical systems. And they will know how to translate high-level goals into these complex webs.

An artificial human mind would need to grow up like any normal child. She (for now we are speaking of a person) would need to go through all the usual phases of development. She would need a loving family to meet the emotional needs built into the human program.

Anyone who dares to grow such a mind would take on an enormous responsibility. They would have moral obligations to both the artificial human and to the rest of humanity. You can’t simply “terminate” such an experiment because you don’t like how it’s going. At some point, that would amount to killing a sentient being. Of course, every parent of a real human faces similar responsibilities. It’s a wonder that people enter into parenthood so lightly.

If you want to see what life could be like for our sentient machine after she completes the process above, consider reading my novel SuSAn.

End of COVID?

Looks like our 4th wave is going out with a whimper, thanks to the vaccine. Other countries, like India, haven’t been so lucky. What I worry about now is if a new variant emerges that evades the current vaccines. We may end up in a situation like flu, where we need an updated vaccine each year.

Visiting Susan’s Hill

The books “SuSAn” and “Time of the Stones” describe a computer called the Stone, which stores the records of our civilization. It is placed on a remote hill high in the mountains at the headwaters of the Long River.

Yesterday I went to the real-world place that inspired the setting. It was sort of a spiritual journey. I knew of the place only through the Internet, but I wanted to put my feet on it, in the exact spot where the Stone would go.

Getting there was difficult. Even though satellite seemed to show a road all the way to the hill, in reality it was only suitable for an off-road vehicle. Our little VW Jetta just couldn’t handle it. We parked about a mile away and hiked in. The sides of the hill were near 45 degrees, so we had to crawl up some 300 feet.

The book describes a mountain glade 50 to 100 meters wide. The real-world glade was only a few meters wide due to the sharpness of the hill. Attached are photos of the ridge, my son standing in the glade where the Stone would be, and a view down the valley toward the town.

I will give $50 to the first person who names the real-world town, and another $50 to the first person who gives the GPS coordinates of the glade. From time to time I will give more clues until the prizes are claimed.

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Age of the Earth … according to Hoyle

There was once a time when I was skeptical about radioactive dating. You can measure the level of a substance, but you can’t say anything about the age of an object unless you know how much was there to begin with! Then I read Hoyle’s cosomology book, and it all made sense. In at least one case (the age of the Earth), the method is significantly more sophisticated, involving 5 different isotopes, and the logic is undeniable. So here it is, according to Hoyle…

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What to expect from SuSAn

Today I got my first negative book review on Amazon. In a way it’s kind of exciting, because it means someone beside a friend read the book! It is bad form to respond directly to a review, but I feel it is important to say something here, because I want to help set people’s expectations.

Here are the key points from the review, along with my response:

  • need explanation of how their world got into such trouble — It is our world, set only a few decades into the future. The optimists among us look to technology and “innovation” to fix a bevy of very serious impending problems. What if that doesn’t pan out?
  • few real crises/characters are passive — Civilization collapses over several decades, and billions die. What would you do? Probably exactly what you’re doing right now.
  • could use editing to tighten it — True. If any good editor out there wants to take on the job, let me know!

The book SuSAn is long and slow, covering the lives of several characters from youth to death. The love story at its heart is not simply torrid passion (though there is a bit of that). It is about a machine and a human working out their relationship. They represent humanity’s romance with technology. When our machines finally have a mind of their own, will they love us back and rescue us from the consequences of our actions?

Most of what we call “science” is really religion

For the sake of discussion, let me propose some highly oversimplified definitions:
science – Knowledge you test for yourself.
religion – Knowledge you get from someone else and take on faith.

What does this imply? The practical everyday business of science requires us to take things on faith. We can’t possibly reproduce every experiment ourselves, even in our own field, so we trust in the ability and honesty of fellow scientists. That faith is religion. For the average guy not practicing science, the whole thing is religion, handed down by priests wearing white lab coats.

What about someone who experiences God directly? For that person it’s science. But we can’t possibly test someone else’s experience. If he or she writes it in a book and we read about it, for us it’s religion.

Getting Started

For years I’ve used FatCow to host my web-site: rothganger.org. Turns out that there was nothing there but a parking page, complete with ads for stuff wholly unrelated to me. Seems I forgot to transfer my old site contents when I switched hosting services!

Well, all that is about to change. Today I loaded up WordPress and am making a valiant attempt to use the blogging software. If successful, the blogging facility will display my current novel (SuSAn) and accept comments from random people who view the site.