Preserving Human Voices and Faces

What AI Threatens, and What It Cannot Touch

Neil D. Lawrence

International Conference “Preserving Human Voices and Faces,” Pontifical Urbaniana University, Rome

Information Overload and the Algal Bloom

  • Algae are the organisms best placed to exploit nitrogen
  • When nitrogen floods in (agricultural runoff etc.) they bloom rapidly
  • The bloom is catastrophic — it consumes oxygen and crowds out all other life
  • The very success of the algae destroys the ecosystem

A Wealth of Information Creates a Poverty of Attention

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention …

Herbert Simon, 1971

The Attention Economy

  • Human intelligence is locked-in
  • This makes it a bottleneck

Herbert Simon on Information

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention …

Simon (1971)

Bauby and Shannon

Embodiment Factors

bits/min billions 2,000
billion
calculations/s 		~100 a billion
embodiment 20 minutes 5 billion years

For sale: baby shoes, never worn

New Flow of Information

New Flow of Information

Evolved Relationship

Evolved Relationship

Human Analogue Machine

Bandwidth vs Complexity
bits/min \(100 \times 10^{-9}\) \(2,000\) \(600 \times 10^9\)

The Atomic Human

Conclusion

Preserving the Ecology of the Human

  • Human culture is an ecology — complex, slow, irreplaceable
  • The information bloom threatens its diversity
  • Preserving human voices and faces means preserving what machines cannot replicate:
    • shared vulnerability
    • conscience
    • the knowledge that comes from being mortal
  • The atomic human is indivisible — there is a kernel the machine cannot take

Thanks!

  • company: Trent AI
  • book: The Atomic Human
  • twitter: @lawrennd
  • The Atomic Human pages Simon, Herbert 140 , Bauby, Jean Dominique 9–11, 18, 90, 99-101, 133, 186, 212–218, 234, 240, 251–257, 318, 368–369, Shannon, Claude 10, 30, 61, 74, 98, 126, 134, 140, 143, 149, 260, 264, 269, 277, 315, 358, 363, embodiment factor 13, 29, 35, 79, 87, 105, 197, 216-217, 249, 269, 353, 369, baby shoes 368, topography, information 34-9, 43-8, 57, 62, 104, 115-16, 127, 140, 192, 196, 199, 291, 334, 354-5, anthropomorphization (‘anthrox’) 30-31, 90-91, 93-4, 100, 132, 148, 153, 163, 216-17, 239, 276, 326, 342, ignorance: HAMs 347, test pilot 163-8, 189, 190, 192-3, 196, 197, 200, 211, 245, Human evolution rates 98-99, Psychological representation of Ecologies 323-327, atomic human, the 13.
  • newspaper: Guardian Profile Page
  • blog: http://inverseprobability.com

References

Lawrence, N.D., 2017. Living together: Mind and machine intelligence. arXiv.
Scally, A., 2016. Mutation rates and the evolution of germline structure. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 371. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0137
Simon, H.A., 1971. Designing organizations for an information-rich world. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD.