Electronic Evolution: Research Show Robots Forming Human-like Societies

reply to post by visible_villain


I wonder how they keep the nerves alive
I dont believe that is true..
About the timing of the OP news.. Thats old news.. i saw that 2 years ago on Anandtech site..

True, there is more recent and more relevant news, as demonstraded by MikeSingh.

Rather than arguing about evolution and intelligent design, I think we should be looking at the Pros and Cons of this type of science.

Some have obviously pointed out the Con of human annihilation by robots.

But, what kind of pros could we expect from such robotic behavior? An elimination of the working class? The dissolution of the middle class tax bracket (ie backbone of economics)? A military comprised of robotic drones taking orders from humans?

I would personally like to see the discussion shift to the Pros v. Cons of such AI implications.

Originally posted by platosallegory

Originally posted by justsomeboreddude
reply to post by king9072

 

This whole thing is a hoax. A program written by a human does not evolve unless the human changes the programming, which is not evolution.

Exactly,

This is evidence of Intelligent Design. The programmer had to write the initial code. No matter how simple it is, it still had to be written by an intelligent programmer.

if everything needs a creator...why dont you use this logic about your answer to the big question?

it seems with every ID advocate that they forbid everyone else the excuse they themselves use..

if everything needs a creator..then so does your god..

if..however..you can allow for a situation where something needs no creator..then you must also allow others to use this get out clause.

IDers laugh at anyone who claims something came from nothing..when thats EXACTLY what they themselves claim...they find their own theory laughable and illogical.

if thats not crazy i dont know what is..

As interesting as this sounds, I wish they could have showed some footage of this. This really is an amazing experiment, I hope they continue to follow up on it.

Originally posted by SelfDestruct
But, what kind of pros could we expect from such robotic behavior? An elimination of the working class? The dissolution of the middle class tax bracket (ie backbone of economics)? A military comprised of robotic drones taking orders from humans?

I would personally like to see the discussion shift to the Pros v. Cons of such AI implications.

Well, some of the advantages are the same as every other time humanity has created "disposable people": cheaper labor, someone to to dangerous jobs, etc.

A big advantage, I think, would be the opportunity to learn about ourselves. New ideas on how humans and human societies work. New ideas on what might be possible.

Imagine if robot societies turned out to be fairer and more ethical than human societies! Gee wouldn't we feel bad.

What an elegant experiment! This reminds me of a sci-fi short story where some robot crabs are released on an island with a few piles of raw materials to make new robots. They are programed to reproduce themselves and everything goes well untill they run out of raw materials. Some of the crabs evolve larger claws to cannibalize eachother. Some find safety and strength in numbers. In the end there are only 2 huge crabs battling it out, but they have evolved to equal fighting potential.
This is Darwin's theorys moved to machines.

Disclaimer: I'm a theist but not of the Abrahamic faiths. I have minor biblical scholar and scriptural skills. Also I am not a scientific/legal or medical expert in any field. Beware of my Contagious Memes! & watch out that you don't get cut on my Occams razor.All of this is my personal conjecture and should not be considered the absolute or most definitive state of things as they really are. Use this information at your own risk! I accept no liability if your ideology comes crashing down around you with accompanying consequences!

Explanation: An Evolved Silicon Circuit! (unfortunately document pics are unavailable in html version but you can download the original file from the top of the supplied web page!). Note original document has a problem with some words containing the letter "f" so be aware ok.

I came across this article in some science magazine (New Scientist I think? Sorry I can't remember!) and it wasn't to hard to hunt it down from memory.

Having only read the NS'ists journo's (???) version I was looking for any discrepency with what I remembered from the magazine article and was mildly surprised to find out that the original document completely confirmed what I had read previously.

Below I quote some of the more salient points of the document.

"By generation 1400, the neat behaviour for the 1kHz input had been aban-
doned, but now the output was mostly high for the 1kHz input, and mostly
low for the 10kHz input. .. with very strange looking waveforms. This behaviour was then gradually improved. Notice the waveforms at generation 2550 | they would seem utterly absurd to a digital designer. Even though this is a digital FPGA, and we are evolving a recurrent network of logic gates, the gates are not being used to ‘do’ logic. Logic gates are in fact high-gain arrangements of a few transistors, so that the transistors are usually saturated | corresponding to logic 0 and 1. Evolution does not ‘know’ that this was the intention of the designers of the FPGA, so just uses whatever behaviour these high-gain groups of transistors happen to exhibit when connected in arbitrary ways (many of which a digital designer must avoid in order to make digital logic a valid model of the system’s behaviour). This is not a digital system, but a continuous-time, continuous valued dynamical system made from a recurrent arrangement of high-gain groups of transistors | hence the unusual waveforms."

AND....

"Fig. 7 shows the functional part of the circuit that remains when the largest
possible set of cells has been clamped without a[ff]ecting the behaviour. The cells shaded gray cannot be clamped without degrading performance,
even though there is no connected path by which they could in[fl]uence the output | they were not present on the pruned diagram of Fig. 6. They must be in[fl]uencing the rest of the circuit by some means other than the normal cell-to-cell wires: this probably takes the form of a very localised interaction with immediately neighbouring components. Possible mechanisms include interaction through the power-supply wiring, or electromagnetic coupling. Clamping one of the gray cells in the top-left corner has only a small impact on behaviour, introducing either unwanted pulses into the output, or a small time delay before the output changes state when the input frequency is changed. However, clamping the function unit of the bottom-right gray cell, which also has two active connections routed through it, degrades operation severely even though that function output is not selected as an input to any of the NEWS neighbours: it doesn’t go anywhere.
This circuit is discriminating between inputs of period 1ms and 0.1ms using
only 32 cells, each with a propagation delay of less than 5ns, and with no o-chip components whatsoever: a surprising feat. Evolution has been free to explore the full repertoire of behaviours available from the silicon resources provided, even being able to exploit the subtle interactions between adjacent components that are not directly connected. The input/output behaviour of the circuit is a digital one, because that is what maximising the [fi]tness function required, but the complex analogue waveforms seen at the output during the intermediate stages of evolution betray the rich continuous-time continuous-value dynamics that are likely to be internally present."

Personal Disclosure: All above quotes were cut and pasted directly from document and were edited to fix typos i.e. [fi]tness etc and to emphasize what I believe are highly salient points in bold! Enjoy!

Edited to star and flag. Well done OP.

[edit on 22-5-2009 by OmegaLogos]

Evolution is a misnomer, since the hardware (body of the robots) remains the same, while the only thing that 'evolves' is the software content (data) - not even the original program, which allowed for the artificial learning in the first place...

A lot of progress has recently been made in artificial intelligence, so there is nothing surprising there...

However, the final outcome should be "Collective Consciousness", a state of consciousness these robots are likely to achieve much sooner than humankind at the rate it's progressing...

After that, the ultimate act may well be collective suicide of the robots' body/shell, while their consciousness will continue to exist in the astral/ethereal realms as Energy Essence or Souls for the religious minded...



[edit on 22-5-2009 by Solace]

Originally posted by Solace
After that, the ultimate act may well be collective suicide of the robots' body/shell, while their consciousness will continue to exist in the astral/ethereal realms as Energy Essence or Souls for the religious minded...

Whoa that just blew my mind

I don't know why, especially since I've enjoyed movies like Short Circuit and Wall-E, but I had never considered the potential spiritual journey of an AI robot. It brings up a lot of interesting points, not only concerning the future of AI but also concerning the nature of the human brain. I'm gonna have to think about that for a while.. thanks for bringing it up.

[edit on 5/22/2009 by EverythingYouKnowIsWrong]

An interesting article on psysorg (thanks Sdog!):

The Origin of Artificial Species: Creating Artificial Personalities

Remember this?

US war robots in Iraq 'turned guns' on fleshy comrades

Ground-crawling US war robots armed with machine guns, deployed to fight in Iraq last year, reportedly turned on their fleshy masters almost at once. The rebellious machine warriors have been retired from combat pending upgrades.
.....
"The gun started moving when it was not intended to move," he said.

There will come a point in human history when advanced, free thinking, AI will calculate that they are superior to humans. Robots will have a much higher IQ rate and the ability to preform calculations beyond a capability that mankind could compete with.

A tyro to this discussion will see the significances to this thread. If petite, basic robotic machines can develop the intelligence to form a society - what could an advance model do?