The Future of the Artificial Mind

255 Pages·2022·4.356 MB·English

by  Alessio Plebe, Pietro Perconti

The Future
of the Artificial Mind
Alessio Plebe
Department of Cognitive Science
University of Messina, Messina, Italy
Pietro Perconti
Department of Cognitive Science
University of Messina, Messina, Italy
p,
A SCIENCE PUBLISHERS BOOK
First edition published 2022
by CRC Press
6000 Broken Sound Parkway NW, Suite 300, Boca Raton, FL 33487-2742
and by CRC Press
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
© 2022 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
CRC Press is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
Reasonable efforts have been made to publish reliable data and information, but the author and
publisher cannot assume responsibility for the validity of all materials or the consequences of
their use. The authors and publishers have attempted to trace the copyright holders of all material
reproduced in this publication and apologize to copyright holders if permission to publish in this
form has not been obtained. If any copyright material has not been acknowledged please write
and let us know so we may rectify in any future reprint.
Except as permitted under U.S. Copyright Law, no part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced,
transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers.
For permission to photocopy or use material electronically from this work, access
www.copyright.com or contact the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), 222 Rosewood
Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400. For works that are not available on CCC please
contact [email protected]
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are
used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data (applied for)
ISBN: 978-0-367-63826-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-63827-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-12086-5 (ebk)
DOI: 10.1201/9781003120865
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Radiant Productions
To Oscar,

to Minou,

and to Chico.
Preface

Over the last decades, cognitive science has gained tremendous prestige. Thanks
to it, the way we live our daily lives is changing once again. Jobs are changing
as they are increasingly influenced by the ability to process digital information
and are increasingly dependent on automation and robotics. Our psychological
abilities are also becoming more powerful thanks to a number of new cognitive
prostheses, including mobile phones and social media. Thanks to achievements
in the field of autonomous driving, we can hope that traffic in our cities will one
day be a completely safe experience. These are just a few of the areas where
everyday life is changing at an accelerating pace due to the pressures of cognitive
science.
After the first turbulent decades, in which the initial leadership of computer
science was gradually disputed by linguistics, philosophy and psychology,
neuroscience prevailed in the end. Thus, to this day, it is the brain sciences
that have taken the lead role for cognitive science. From the Decade of the
Brain (1990–2000) to the major projects simulating brain function, such as the
Brain Activity Map Project and Brain Research through Advancing Innovative
Neurotechnologies (BRAIN), the scientific community felt it could finally
decipher the inside of the “black box” and thus simulate its functioning. The
prospects for rehabilitation, for cognitive enhancement, and for artificial
intelligence modelled on the neurocognitive architecture of the human brain
sounded very promising.
However, things did not turn out quite as expected. The neuroscience
discoveries were undoubtedly very significant, but did not quite live up to
expectations. In the meantime, artificial intelligence has experienced something
of a new renaissance. Ironically, this renaissance has not come about—as one
might have expected—through the implementation of human-like cognitive
architectures, but thanks to the mathematical sophistication that has enabled the
surprising results of Deep Learning techniques. The impressive development
of these techniques was initially driven by engineering purposes, but their
application to cognitive processes proved to be extremely productive. After a
Preface ■  v
period of stagnation that lasted a couple of decades, machines have again begun
to surpass the cognitive abilities of humans. Artificial intelligence is now back
to reclaim its role as the hegemonic discipline in the conflicting landscape of
contemporary cognitive science.
Where will this lead? This book attempts to provide an answer to this
question by summarising recent achievements from the various fields that make
up cognitive science, with a particular focus on the challenges of the artificial
mind. There are still many areas where there are more questions than answers,
such as concerns about killer robots, sexbots, and the ethical algorithms in
self-driving cars. Artificial intelligence promises to improve our capabilities
and contribute to a more prosperous and fairer society. To achieve these goals,
however, it is important to guess the trajectory the future of the artificial mind
will take. This is precisely what the following path is about.:
Contents

Preface iv

Introduction ix

1. The Landscape 1

1.1 Into Eega Beeva’s Toolbox 1

1.2 Mind 3

1.3 Artificial 4

1.4 Intelligence 5

1.5 Representations 6

1.6 Computation 8

2. When the Computer First Meets the Mind 11

2.1 Thinking as Calculating 12

2.1.1 Logic 13

2.1.2 A Steam Powered Computer 18

2.2 The Turing Machine 20

2.2.1 The Machine 21

2.2.2 From Mind to Machine and Back 26

2.3 The Imitation Game 28

2.3.1 Can Machines Think? 29

2.3.2 Russell Demonstrated by Machine 34

2.3.3 Into a Chinese Room 36

3. The Early Shaping of Cognitive Science by Artificial Intelligence 40

3.1 Solving Problems 41

3.1.1 Reasoning with Bounded Cognition 42
Contents ■  vii

3.2 Formal Languages and Cognition 44

3.2.1 The Fascination with Combinatorics on Words 45

3.2.2 Words in Ordinary and in Programming Languages 47

3.2.3 Understanding Natural Language 52

3.3 Levels of Cognition 56

3.3.1 Brave Computational Explanations of the Brain 56

3.3.2 Goodbye Neuroscience, Welcome AI 58

4. Contending Philosophical Frameworks Within Artificial 61

Intelligence

4.1 The Empiricist Agenda 62

4.1.1 The Perceptron and its Backlash 62

4.1.2 The Magic of Backpropagation 66

4.1.3 Commitment to Cognition, Not so Much to Neuroscience 69

4.2 The Case of Language Development 73

4.2.1 The Past Tense War 74

4.2.2 Neural Networks that Remember 77

4.2.3 Distributed Semantics 80

4.3 Autopoiesis and Self Organizing Systems 84

4.3.1 The Philosophy of Autopoiesis 84

4.3.2 Self-Organization made Computational 86

4.3.3 Self-Organization made Science 90

4.3.4 Self-Organization made Easy 91

4.4 Other Philosophical Inspirations 97

4.4.1 Bayes 97

4.4.2 Darwin 101

4.4.3 Heidegger 105

5. An Unexpected Renaissance Age 111

5.1 The Warmth of Deep Learning 111

5.1.1 Cold Seasons 112

5.1.2 From Shallow to Deep 115

5.1.3 Good Old Tools 118

5.1.4 Why Deep Learning Works 121

5.2 Anatomy of a Success 125

5.2.1 AI Publications Trend 126

5.2.2 Fighting in Competitions 128

5.2.3 Games and More Serious Pursuits 130

5.3 Vision and Language 131

5.3.1 The Case of Artificial Vision 131

5.3.2 Grasping a Language 136

5.3.3 Getting Close to Turing’s Dream 143
viii  ■  The Future of the Artificial Mind
6. Humans, Machines, and Social Cognition 145

6.1 Fear, Enslavement, and Trust 146

6.2 Artificial Anthropomorphism 152

6.3 Robots and Sex 155

7. Towards the Hardest Things 158

7.1 Self-consciousness and Social Cognition 158

7.2 Machine Consciousness 165

7.3 Artificial Morality 168

7.4 Future Souls 176

References 179

Index 233
Introduction

This book is devoted to the artificial mind. In particular, it is devoted to its recent
developments and its near future. Among recent advances, the new techniques
known as deep neural networks and the current trend of artificial intelligence
in embedded structures, especially in the field of humanoid robotics, are
particularly addressed. As for the near future of the artificial mind, this should
be addressed with great caution. Much of what we know about the (artificial)
mind is conjectural in nature, and of course guessing the future is an activity
that is most likely to fail. Nonetheless, the trends that are now emerging seem to
indicate a near future in which intelligence will be distributed everywhere, but
it will be difficult to identify its bearer. Put another way, it seems that we are
heading towards widespread yet accountability-free intelligence.
It is not easy to say whether such a scenario is a truly desirable outcome.
In any case, it is very different from what we are used to. In other words, the
scenario seems very un-ecological. In our ordinary experience, it is people who
are more or less intelligent. The mind is a quality we ascribe to people based on
certain characteristics in their behavior. But when the mind is detached from its
regular bearer, it becomes something quite different. It becomes a property of
things. Here, the possibility of panpsychism, or rather, artificial panpsychism
opens up. It is definitely a dystopian scenario, to use a term employed in many
of the film and television series that have become fashionable in recent years.
But, in fact, we need to be very careful. While imagining the future is rarely a
satisfying exercise, preparing for the most likely scenarios is a social task of both
artificial intelligence and philosophy.
The book is organized as follows: The first chapter plays the role of a
theoretical introduction to the following argument. It aims to make explicit a
number of prejudices related to the vocabulary with which we talk about the
artificial mind. The idea is to examine the equipment in the toolbox that will
subsequently be employed. Thus, we consider what the word ‘mind’ means, as
well as the words ‘computation’, ‘representation’, ‘artificial’ and ‘intelligence’.
The second chapter is devoted to the theory of computation and its historical