Robot Souls

This book brings the reader up to date with developments in the thinking about consciousness in AI, and examines the implications this has for humans as a species.It concludes that we need to start cultivating our junk code, and that it may now be time to give our robots some soul.

Two of the biggest design problems in Artificial Intelligence are how to build robots that behave in line with human values and how to stop them ever going rogue. One under-explored solution to these alignment and control problems might be to examine how these are already addressed in the design of humans.

Looking closely at the human blueprint, it contains a suite of capacities that are so clumsy they have generally been kept away from AI. It was assumed that robots with features like emotions and intuition, that made mistakes and looked for meaning and purpose, would not work as well as robots without this kind of code. But on considering why all these irrational properties are there, it seems that they emerge from the source code of soul. Because it is actually this 'junk' code that makes us human and promotes the kind of reciprocal altruism that keeps humanity alive and thriving.

Robot Souls looks at developments in AI and reviews the emergence of ideas of consciousness and the soul. It places our 'junk code' in this context and argues that it is time to foreground that code, and to use it to look again at how we are programming AI.

The book author Eve Poole received an OBE in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to education and gender equality.

Autorentext

Dr Eve Poole is the Third Church Estates Commissioner, and Chairman of the Board of Governors at Gordonstoun. She has a BA from Durham, an MBA from Edinburgh, and a PhD in Theology and Capitalism from Cambridge.

Inhalt

1. What is AI? 1.1. Is AI Conscious? 1.2. Robots 1.3. Inventing AI 1.4. Deep Learning 1.5. Reinforcement Learning 1.6. Bayesian AI 1.7. The Turing Test 2. How Should We Relate to AI? 2.1. How Should We Treat AI? 2.2. Regulation 2.3. Legal Status 2.4. Audit 2.5. Asimov 2.0 3. Will AI Replace Us? 3.1. Our Obsolescence Problem 3.2. The 12 Dooms 3.3. Distinctiveness 3.4 Materialism 3.5 Free Will and the Rule of Law 4. What Is Consciousness? 4.1. Mind 4.2. Consciousness 4.3. Qualia 5. How Do We Know? 5.1. How We Know Things 5.2. Thinking Styles 5.3 Types of Intelligence 6. The Soul 6.1. History of the Soul 6.2. Mapping Soul to Consciousness 7. Junk Code 7.1 Junk Code? 7.2. Emotions 7.3. Mistakes 7.4. Storytelling 7.5. Sixth Sense 7.6. Uncertainty 7.7. Free Will 7.8. Meaning 7.9. Community 8. Cultivating Soul 8.1. Cultivating Junk Code 8.2. Emotions 8.3. Mistakes 8.4. Storytelling 8.5. Sixth Sense 8.6. Uncertainty 8.7. Free Will 8.8. Meaning 9. Programming in Humanity 9.1. Why Bother? 9.2. Parenting 9.3. Gender 9.4 Coding Soul? 9.5. Emotions 9.6. Mistakes 9.7. Storytelling 9.8. Sixth Sense 9.9. Uncertainty 9.10. Free Will 9.11. Meaning 9.12. Robot Manifesto 10. Eucatastrophe 10.1. Changing Our Minds 10.2. Happily Ever After? Appendix. Glossary. References. Index.