Educating the Atomic Human
Abstract
A vital perspective is missing from the discussions we’re having about Artificial Intelligence: what does it mean for our identity?
Our fascination with AI stems from the perceived uniqueness of human intelligence. We believe it’s what differentiates us. Fears of AI not only concern how it invades our digital lives, but also the implied threat of an intelligence that displaces us from our position at the centre of the world.
Atomism, proposed by Democritus, suggested it was impossible to continue dividing matter down into ever smaller components: eventually we reach a point where a cut cannot be made (the Greek for uncuttable is ‘atom’). In the same way, by slicing away at the facets of human intelligence that can be replaced by machines, AI uncovers what is left: an indivisible core that is the essence of humanity.
By contrasting our own (evolved, locked-in, embodied) intelligence with the capabilities of machine intelligence through history, The Atomic Human reveals the technical origins, capabilities and limitations of AI systems, and how they should be wielded. Not just by the experts, but ordinary people.
The thinking in this talk comes from Neil’s forthcoming book to be published with Allen Lane in June 2024. The questions raised in this talk will be around how we educate the atomic human in the age of AI.
Either AI is a tool for us, or we become a tool of AI. Understanding this will enable us to choose the future we want.
The Blue Marble
Eagle from Columbia
Amelia Earhart
NACA Langley
The NACA Langley Field proving ground tested US aircraft. Bob Gilruth worked on the flying qualities of aircraft. One of his collaborators suggested that
Hawker Hurricane airplane. A heavily armed fighter airplane noted for its role in the Battle of Britain, the Hurricane’s flying qualities were found to be generally satisfactory. The most notable deficiencies were heavy aileron forces at high speeds and large friction in the controls.
W. Hewitt Phillips1
and
Supermarine Spitfire airplane. A high-performance fighter noted for its role in the Battle of Britain and throughout WW II, the Spitfire had desirably light elevator control forces in maneuvers and near neutral longitudinal stability. Its greatest deficiency from the combat standpoint was heavy aileron forces and sluggish roll response at high speeds.
W. Hewitt Phillips2
Gilruth went beyond the reports of feel to characterise how the plane should respond to different inputs on the control stick. In other words he quantified that feel of the plane.
The Atomic Human
Embodiment Factors
bits/min | billions | 2,000 |
billion calculations/s |
~100 | a billion |
embodiment | 20 minutes | 5 billion years |
There is a fundamental limit placed on our intelligence based on our ability to communicate. Claude Shannon founded the field of information theory. The clever part of this theory is it allows us to separate our measurement of information from what the information pertains to.3
Shannon measured information in bits. One bit of information is the amount of information I pass to you when I give you the result of a coin toss. Shannon was also interested in the amount of information in the English language. He estimated that on average a word in the English language contains 12 bits of information.
Given typical speaking rates, that gives us an estimate of our ability to communicate of around 100 bits per second (Reed and Durlach, 1998). Computers on the other hand can communicate much more rapidly. Current wired network speeds are around a billion bits per second, ten million times faster.
When it comes to compute though, our best estimates indicate our computers are slower. A typical modern computer can process make around 100 billion floating-point operations per second, each floating-point operation involves a 64 bit number. So the computer is processing around 6,400 billion bits per second.
It’s difficult to get similar estimates for humans, but by some estimates the amount of compute we would require to simulate a human brain is equivalent to that in the UK’s fastest computer (Ananthanarayanan et al., 2009), the MET office machine in Exeter, which in 2018 ranked as the 11th fastest computer in the world. That machine simulates the world’s weather each morning, and then simulates the world’s climate in the afternoon. It is a 16-petaflop machine, processing around 1,000 trillion bits per second.
New Flow of Information
Classically the field of statistics focused on mediating the relationship between the machine and the human. Our limited bandwidth of communication means we tend to over-interpret the limited information that we are given, in the extreme we assign motives and desires to inanimate objects (a process known as anthropomorphizing). Much of mathematical statistics was developed to help temper this tendency and understand when we are valid in drawing conclusions from data.
Data science brings new challenges. In particular, there is a very large bandwidth connection between the machine and data. This means that our relationship with data is now commonly being mediated by the machine. Whether this is in the acquisition of new data, which now happens by happenstance rather than with purpose, or the interpretation of that data where we are increasingly relying on machines to summarize what the data contains. This is leading to the emerging field of data science, which must not only deal with the same challenges that mathematical statistics faced in tempering our tendency to over interpret data but must also deal with the possibility that the machine has either inadvertently or maliciously misrepresented the underlying data.
Bandwidth Constrained Conversations
Embodiment factors imply that, in our communication between humans, what is not said is, perhaps, more important than what is said. To communicate with each other we need to have a model of who each of us are.
To aid this, in society, we are required to perform roles. Whether as a parent, a teacher, an employee or a boss. Each of these roles requires that we conform to certain standards of behaviour to facilitate communication between ourselves.
Control of self is vitally important to these communications.
The high availability of data available to humans undermines human-to-human communication channels by providing new routes to undermining our control of self.
The consequences between this mismatch of power and delivery are to be seen all around us. Because, just as driving an F1 car with bicycle wheels would be a fine art, so is the process of communication between humans.
If I have a thought and I wish to communicate it, I first need to have a model of what you think. I should think before I speak. When I speak, you may react. You have a model of who I am and what I was trying to say, and why I chose to say what I said. Now we begin this dance, where we are each trying to better understand each other and what we are saying. When it works, it is beautiful, but when mis-deployed, just like a badly driven F1 car, there is a horrible crash, an argument.
Sistine Chapel Ceiling
Patrick Boyde’s talks on the Sistine Chapel focussed on both the structure of the chapel ceiling, describing the impression of height it was intended to give, as well as the significance and positioning of each of the panels and the meaning of the individual figures.
The Creation of Man
One of the most famous panels is central in the ceiling, it’s the creation of man. Here, God in the guise of a pink-robed bearded man reaches out to a languid Adam.
The representation of God in this form seems typical of the time, because elsewhere in the Vatican Museums there are similar representations.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Michelangelo,_Creation_of_Adam_04.jpg
A Six Word Novel
But this is a very different kind of intelligence than ours. A computer cannot understand the depth of the Ernest Hemingway’s apocryphal six-word novel: “For Sale, Baby Shoes, Never worn”, because it isn’t equipped with that ability to model the complexity of humanity that underlies that statement.
Revolution
Arguably the information revolution we are experiencing is unprecedented in history. But changes in the way we share information have a long history. Over 5,000 years ago in the city of Uruk, on the banks of the Euphrates, communities which relied on the water to irrigate their corps developed an approach to recording transactions in clay. Eventually the system of recording system became sophisticated enough that their oral histories could be recorded in the form of the first epic: Gilgamesh.
It was initially develoepd for people as a recordd of who owed what to whom, expanding individuals’ capacity to remember. But over a five hundred year period writing evolved to become a tool for literature as well. More pithily put, writing was invented by accountants not poets (see e.g. this piece by Tim Harford).
In some respects today’s revolution is different, because it involves also the creation of stories as well as their curation. But in some fundamental ways we can see what we have produced as another tool for us in the information revolution.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Blake’s Newton
Lunette Rehoboam Abijah
The MONIAC
The MONIAC was an analogue computer designed to simulate the UK economy. Analogue comptuers work through analogy, the analogy in the MONIAC is that both money and water flow. The MONIAC exploits this through a system of tanks, pipes, valves and floats that represent the flow of money through the UK economy. Water flowed from the treasury tank at the top of the model to other tanks representing government spending, such as health and education. The machine was initially designed for teaching support but was also found to be a useful economic simulator. Several were built and today you can see the original at Leeds Business School, there is also one in the London Science Museum and one in the Unisversity of Cambridge’s economics faculty.
HAM
Atrophy and Cognitive Flattening
Fall and Expulsion from Garden of Eden
Elohim Creating Adam
Thanks!
For more information on these subjects and more you might want to check the following resources.
- twitter: @lawrennd
- podcast: The Talking Machines
- newspaper: Guardian Profile Page
- blog: http://inverseprobability.com