Will Artificial Intelligence Use Sex To Improve Itself?

 Evolving Machines  

Writing a recent piece in The Telegraph, science writer and AI engineer George Zarkadakis looks at the possibility that future artificial intelligence may use sex to improve itself — not only with machines, but possibly with us too.

In the excellent recent movie, Her, we witness a lonely man falling in love with and even having "sex" with an artificial intelligence system that calls herself Samantha.  Now writing a recent piece in The Telegraph, science writer and AI engineer George Zarkadakis poses an interesting situation — namely that in the future, machines will not only self-assemble and reproduce on their own, but may also use a derivative of sex thrown into the mix.

Zarkadakis cites numerous classic science fiction forerunners that predict the coming self-reproducing machine age, including Stanislaw Lem's The Invincible, where a distant planet is found to be occupied by a mechanical life form that has undergone it's own evolution.  In this case the encounter is a fundamentally incomprehensible civilization that is completely foreign to the human characters — a trademark of a post-Singularity environment.

According to Zarkadakis, self-replicating evolving machines may already be here. Since 1949, the mathematician John von Neumann demonstrated how a machine could replicate itself with the “universal constructor.” In theory, the machine was both an active component of the construction and the target of the copying process.  "Von Neumann’s big idea allowed open-ended complexity, and therefore errors in the replication – in other words, it opened up self-replicating non-biological systems to the laws of evolution," writes Zarkadakis.

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3D printing represents one area where von Neumann's work has jumped off the mathematician's chalk board to the physical world for Zarkadakis.

The next logical step would be to apply these principles in robot reproduction. For instance, we could have a robotic factory with three classes of robots: one for mining and transporting raw material, one for assembling raw materials into finished robots and one for designing processes and products.

He writes that the last class of the system would be the artificial intelligence brains.  Referencing the Victorian novelist Samuel Butler's conclusion that “it was the race of the intelligent machines and not the race of men which would be the next step in evolution,” Zarkadakis points that the potential for conflict is strong between humans and thinking machines.

For this to occur though, artificial intelligence must first self-improve.  According to Zarkadakis, this is already underway in numerous fields.  Machine learning and artificial intelligence are progressing very markedly now, entering the knee of the exponential curve according to many.  For Zarkadakis, self improvement may be part of this development.  As in Her, the OS's upgrade themselves, not-to-distant AI's may also find out how to do the same.

Perhaps by exploring and learning about human evolution, intelligent machines will come to the conclusion that sex is the best way for them to evolve. Rather than self-replicating, like amoebas, they may opt to simulate sexual reproduction with two, or indeed innumerable, sexes. 

Sex would defend them from computer viruses (just as biological sex may have evolved to defend organisms from parasitical attack), make them more robust and accelerate their evolution. Software engineers already use so-called “genetic algorithms” that mimic evolution.

Zarkadakis also suggests that he situation may not be an us and them situation.  "Perhaps the future of artificial intelligence will be both silicon-and carbon-based: digital brains directing complex molecular structures to copulate at the nanometre level and reproduce," he writes. "Perhaps the cyborgs of the future may involve human participation in robot sexual reproduction, and the creation of new, hybrid species."


SOURCE  The Telegraph

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