I am a big Bostrom fan, but I am not sure why brain-computer interfaces were downgraded so much in this chapter.
The text seems to overestimate the risks of brain implants today. Given another twenty or more years to work out the issues, these risks will fall even more.
It also seems to underestimate the benefits of some rather boring upgrades. Having a direct link to several ordinary software tools like MS Excel would make us a lot more intelligent. We would also gain a lot of ability by being able to directly control machinery.
Just having the equivalent of the Notepad application in there would permit me to ace many tests, remember people’s names and stop forgetting where I parked my car and how many calories I’ve eaten today.
I second this. Just being able to remember what I’ve read would amplify my intelligence by at least one order of magnitude. I appreciate the argument that a brain-computer interface wouldn’t give you much beyond what you’d get by sitting down at a computer, but
(A) being able to google with my cell phone made me significantly smarter than only being able to google at my computer,
(B) being forced to state questions in formal language would GREATLY clarify peoples’ thinking,
(C) expanding my short-term memory store might greatly enhance my intelligence, and
(D) if the BCI is able to use pattern-recognition on my memory’s current contents versus the entire knowledge of humanity, pointing out analogies to systems described in books I haven’t even read, that would be tremendously useful.
(A) being able to google with my cell phone made me significantly smarter than only being able to google at my computer,
An easier way to deal with that is by improving VR to the point that people can spend virtually their entire waking lives at (probably stationary) computers with high-end I/O devices. Interface mobility is only an advantage if /physically moving around/ is worth doing, and we can probably remove a lot of the draw of that a lot easier than we can make BCIs work well.
(B) being forced to state questions in formal language would GREATLY clarify peoples’ thinking,
How are BCIs a major help with this?
Re. (C) and (D):
Agreed, but:
You can already get a non-crappy approximation to (C) at a computer, for instance by keeping open a window with some facts you’re trying to keep in mind.
If I understand Bostrom correctly, his contention is that going much beyond this level of convenience with BCIs would be hard; you’d need to do some very tricky interfacing (since it isn’t a usual I/O channel), and the tech to pull that off is likely to be AI-complete or close to it, itself.
Having a direct link to several ordinary software tools like MS Excel would make us a lot more intelligent. We would also gain a lot of ability by being able to directly control machinery.
This seems right, but nevertheless the gains are relatively small compared to bread-and-butter improvements in the design of tools like spreadsheets.
Just having the equivalent of the Notepad application in there would permit me to ace many tests, remember people’s names and stop forgetting where I parked my car and how many calories I’ve eaten today.
The overhead for doing any of these is rather small at the moment (perhaps 30s a day each?) and you only don’t it because respectively (1) it’s disallowed because that’s the point of tests, (2) it’s bad signaling, which largely defeats the point of remembering names, (3) the benefits are very small and/or you are unaware of how cheap it is for normal use cases (4) the benefits are very small and the main difficulties are measurement issues.
I think it’s not a coincidence that none of these are very important to your economic productivity (though I understand that this may in part just be because you wanted to choose generalizable examples).
Sorry, Paul, but Excel gives the ability to able to remember millions of arbitrary facts and make vast arbitrary calculations without putting pen to paper.
It’s clearly economically beneficial and, if used properly, is probably enough to ace any standardized test.
I don’t think so. Take someone stupid, give him a laptop with Excel full of whatever data she wants to put into it, and let her take a standardized test with more relaxed timing (to account for searching in that spreadsheet). I don’t think she’ll ace the test, in particular things like reading comprehension or logical puzzles would not be made easier by having large tables full of data available.
Always good to have skeptics to stretch your creativity!
So, the counterfactual as it stands right now is that we’re giving somebody additional mental powers through high-speed access to software hooked directly into the brain.
We’re not assuming this technology includes advanced AI that does not presently exist. We’re sticking for the most part with software that we have now, but we would be safe to give x1000 of existing hardware capabilities.
We could give them an internet connection, but let’s say that’s cheating. We will not allow them to utilize anybody else’s genius or just any available database. For now let’s say that they can download large, structured data sets which others have built into their brain-interfaced computers in advance, but they cannot access outside sources in real-time.
OK, so someone like this is going to study for a test. They can study in an ordinary fashion, but we can also build dozens of spreadsheets for them to use during the process.
First of all, any time any question relies on vocabulary, they are going to have that piece in place. They will have a definition of every word or unusual phrase at their immediate beckon call. That solves a lot of reading comprehension problems, but maybe not all of them.
What about those questions where there is a passage to read and, for instance, she has to discern something about the author’s intentions?
Here, we get to give whatever kind of custom solver we might choose to provide. For example, we can give her an ability to accumulate a score all of the emotional words in the passage.
It’s a standardized test, not a general test of problem-solving ability. Therefore, she gets to include a lot of previous test questions and templates for answers in her data. How much of an advantage will this provide?
She is never going to make an error in arithmetic or algebra, and she will be able to perform these functions very rapidly.
She gets to immediately convert different kinds of units, one to another. She gets to use any formula that can be recorded.
On these tests, there are a rather limited number of kinds of logic problems. She has to somehow recognize which kind she is dealing with in order to answer them correctly, but I think we can build her some kind of classifier in Excel.
The incorrect answers on these tests also fall into some discernable patterns. There is nothing to stop us from including rules of thumb in these spreadsheets, and she can use these rules of thumb to winnow out many of the fakes.
The counterfactual is not complete unless we decide how much time she has to practice for the exam, and how many practice tests she can do in advance. I think that her ability to upload many tests and practice them without using her hands to write is going to give her more benefit from practice than most people get.
We also can presume that she has years of practice using her inbuilt software.
I’ll grant you this: The ability to extract critical information from a word problem or a passage, and the ability to translate words into algebraic or logical expressions-these things seem a bit trickier. It’s hard to say how much canned computer programs can aid the brain in that realm without actually trying to build them.
Excel permits programming, so the scenario does seem to allow us to give her some Watson-like powers in addition to everything else.
I would really like to know exactly how well a version of Watson can extract meaning from passages of text. My understanding is that is how it answered a lot of the history questions on Jeopardy.
Her special skills may not increase her attention span, though. If she does not care about the test, or if here mind wanders and she starts playing mental video games, then no.
Increased mental capacity is not going to help someone who does not want to use it.
So, the counterfactual as it stands right now is that we’re giving somebody additional mental powers through high-speed access to software hooked directly into the brain.
Um, no. That’s part of the issue—we’re not giving her access to additional mental powers. We’re giving her easy, fast, and convenient access to some information tools. Her mental powers remain the same—if her working memory is limited, it remains limited. Being able to look up things in a second does not imply a large working memory. If she gets confused with longish logical chains, direct access to Excel isn’t going to help. Etc., etc.
She is never going to make an error in arithmetic or algebra
Oh, but she will. Go talk to, say, accountants—people who professionally use Excel and have been doing it for a while. Ask them if they ever make an arithmetic error :-)
Excel permits programming, so the scenario does seem to allow us to give her some Watson-like powers in addition to everything else.
Well, Excel includes VB which is Turing-complete. So you could treat Excel as a general-purpose computing environment and provide her with an narrow AI which, basically, solves the test for her. But I don’t think that’s what we are talking about :-/
I am a big Bostrom fan, but I am not sure why brain-computer interfaces were downgraded so much in this chapter.
The text seems to overestimate the risks of brain implants today. Given another twenty or more years to work out the issues, these risks will fall even more.
It also seems to underestimate the benefits of some rather boring upgrades. Having a direct link to several ordinary software tools like MS Excel would make us a lot more intelligent. We would also gain a lot of ability by being able to directly control machinery.
Just having the equivalent of the Notepad application in there would permit me to ace many tests, remember people’s names and stop forgetting where I parked my car and how many calories I’ve eaten today.
I second this. Just being able to remember what I’ve read would amplify my intelligence by at least one order of magnitude. I appreciate the argument that a brain-computer interface wouldn’t give you much beyond what you’d get by sitting down at a computer, but
(A) being able to google with my cell phone made me significantly smarter than only being able to google at my computer,
(B) being forced to state questions in formal language would GREATLY clarify peoples’ thinking,
(C) expanding my short-term memory store might greatly enhance my intelligence, and
(D) if the BCI is able to use pattern-recognition on my memory’s current contents versus the entire knowledge of humanity, pointing out analogies to systems described in books I haven’t even read, that would be tremendously useful.
An easier way to deal with that is by improving VR to the point that people can spend virtually their entire waking lives at (probably stationary) computers with high-end I/O devices. Interface mobility is only an advantage if /physically moving around/ is worth doing, and we can probably remove a lot of the draw of that a lot easier than we can make BCIs work well.
How are BCIs a major help with this?
Re. (C) and (D): Agreed, but:
You can already get a non-crappy approximation to (C) at a computer, for instance by keeping open a window with some facts you’re trying to keep in mind.
If I understand Bostrom correctly, his contention is that going much beyond this level of convenience with BCIs would be hard; you’d need to do some very tricky interfacing (since it isn’t a usual I/O channel), and the tech to pull that off is likely to be AI-complete or close to it, itself.
This seems right, but nevertheless the gains are relatively small compared to bread-and-butter improvements in the design of tools like spreadsheets.
The overhead for doing any of these is rather small at the moment (perhaps 30s a day each?) and you only don’t it because respectively (1) it’s disallowed because that’s the point of tests, (2) it’s bad signaling, which largely defeats the point of remembering names, (3) the benefits are very small and/or you are unaware of how cheap it is for normal use cases (4) the benefits are very small and the main difficulties are measurement issues.
I think it’s not a coincidence that none of these are very important to your economic productivity (though I understand that this may in part just be because you wanted to choose generalizable examples).
Sorry, Paul, but Excel gives the ability to able to remember millions of arbitrary facts and make vast arbitrary calculations without putting pen to paper.
It’s clearly economically beneficial and, if used properly, is probably enough to ace any standardized test.
I don’t think so. Take someone stupid, give him a laptop with Excel full of whatever data she wants to put into it, and let her take a standardized test with more relaxed timing (to account for searching in that spreadsheet). I don’t think she’ll ace the test, in particular things like reading comprehension or logical puzzles would not be made easier by having large tables full of data available.
Always good to have skeptics to stretch your creativity!
So, the counterfactual as it stands right now is that we’re giving somebody additional mental powers through high-speed access to software hooked directly into the brain.
We’re not assuming this technology includes advanced AI that does not presently exist. We’re sticking for the most part with software that we have now, but we would be safe to give x1000 of existing hardware capabilities.
We could give them an internet connection, but let’s say that’s cheating. We will not allow them to utilize anybody else’s genius or just any available database. For now let’s say that they can download large, structured data sets which others have built into their brain-interfaced computers in advance, but they cannot access outside sources in real-time.
OK, so someone like this is going to study for a test. They can study in an ordinary fashion, but we can also build dozens of spreadsheets for them to use during the process.
First of all, any time any question relies on vocabulary, they are going to have that piece in place. They will have a definition of every word or unusual phrase at their immediate beckon call. That solves a lot of reading comprehension problems, but maybe not all of them.
What about those questions where there is a passage to read and, for instance, she has to discern something about the author’s intentions?
Here, we get to give whatever kind of custom solver we might choose to provide. For example, we can give her an ability to accumulate a score all of the emotional words in the passage.
It’s a standardized test, not a general test of problem-solving ability. Therefore, she gets to include a lot of previous test questions and templates for answers in her data. How much of an advantage will this provide?
She is never going to make an error in arithmetic or algebra, and she will be able to perform these functions very rapidly.
She gets to immediately convert different kinds of units, one to another. She gets to use any formula that can be recorded.
On these tests, there are a rather limited number of kinds of logic problems. She has to somehow recognize which kind she is dealing with in order to answer them correctly, but I think we can build her some kind of classifier in Excel.
The incorrect answers on these tests also fall into some discernable patterns. There is nothing to stop us from including rules of thumb in these spreadsheets, and she can use these rules of thumb to winnow out many of the fakes.
The counterfactual is not complete unless we decide how much time she has to practice for the exam, and how many practice tests she can do in advance. I think that her ability to upload many tests and practice them without using her hands to write is going to give her more benefit from practice than most people get.
We also can presume that she has years of practice using her inbuilt software.
I’ll grant you this: The ability to extract critical information from a word problem or a passage, and the ability to translate words into algebraic or logical expressions-these things seem a bit trickier. It’s hard to say how much canned computer programs can aid the brain in that realm without actually trying to build them.
Excel permits programming, so the scenario does seem to allow us to give her some Watson-like powers in addition to everything else.
I would really like to know exactly how well a version of Watson can extract meaning from passages of text. My understanding is that is how it answered a lot of the history questions on Jeopardy.
Her special skills may not increase her attention span, though. If she does not care about the test, or if here mind wanders and she starts playing mental video games, then no.
Increased mental capacity is not going to help someone who does not want to use it.
Um, no. That’s part of the issue—we’re not giving her access to additional mental powers. We’re giving her easy, fast, and convenient access to some information tools. Her mental powers remain the same—if her working memory is limited, it remains limited. Being able to look up things in a second does not imply a large working memory. If she gets confused with longish logical chains, direct access to Excel isn’t going to help. Etc., etc.
Oh, but she will. Go talk to, say, accountants—people who professionally use Excel and have been doing it for a while. Ask them if they ever make an arithmetic error :-)
Well, Excel includes VB which is Turing-complete. So you could treat Excel as a general-purpose computing environment and provide her with an narrow AI which, basically, solves the test for her. But I don’t think that’s what we are talking about :-/