Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-2P3MSZrBM

186 76 6 years ago

uxcolumbo3• 6 years ago

What a coincidence - I was just watching this month old interview a few hours before it was posted here. Maybe Youtube's algo is pushing it...

Anyway, the way Joscha explained various concepts was very interesting - the phrases he used kept me hooked. At the very least it's entertaining.

For example:

"Social media is the world's brain hooked on dopamine - creating a permanent seizure"

"Entropic Abyss"

"Closed Cooling Chain"

Interesting guy with an interesting upbringing (grew up in Eastern Germany - his site http://bach.ai).

It's a long interview - but here is the breakdown of topics being discussed (time stamps taken from the comments section)

0:00 - Introduction

3:14 - Reverse engineering Joscha Bach

10:38 - Nature of truth

18:47 - Original thinking

23:14 - Sentience vs intelligence

31:45 - Mind vs Reality

46:51 - Hard problem of consciousness

51:09 - Connection between the mind and the universe

56:29 - What is consciousness

1:02:32 - Language and concepts

1:09:02 - Meta-learning

1:16:35 - Spirit

1:18:10 - Our civilization may not exist for long

1:37:48 - Twitter and social media

1:44:52 - What systems of government might work well?

1:47:12 - The way out of self-destruction with AI

1:55:18 - AI simulating humans to understand its own nature

2:04:32 - Reinforcement learning

2:09:12 - Commonsense reasoning

2:15:47 - Would AGI need to have a body?

2:22:34 - Neuralink

2:27:01 - Reasoning at the scale of neurons and societies

2:37:16 - Role of emotion

2:48:03 - Happiness is a cookie that your brain bakes for itself

EDIT: clarity

agigao• 6 years ago

Thank you!

08-153• 6 years ago

I noticed the same thing and had the opposite reaction.

"Social media is the world's brain hooked on dopamine - creating a permanent seizure"

Wow, what an insightful statement! Except it isn't. It's not even a statement. It's just different metaphors piled on top of each other until they nothing at all anymore.

"Entropic Abyss"

Lex Fridman actually asked for clarification here, but none came. Joscha fixed the mispronunciation, that's all. The phrase is completely meaningless.

"Closed Cooling Chain"

And that one is a bad translation from German "geschlossene Kuehlkette", meaning that your convenience food is frozen once at the factory and never warms up until it's in your microwave oven. It translates to "uninterrupted", not "closed".

I'm pretty disappointed by the onslaught of empty phrases and the dearth of insight or arguments.

uxcolumbo3• 6 years ago

That social media statement - doesn't necessarily have to be super insightful.

The mental image triggered by that sentence is funny and there is some truth to it.

"Entropic Abyss" ... The phrase is completely meaningless.

Well, it wasn't meaningless to the interviewer - he actually found it poetic.

And for me it triggered an interesting mental image.

bad translation from German... It translates to "uninterrupted", not "closed".

I just looked up the words. 'Geschlossene' comes from schliessen, which means to close.

Uninterrupted in German seems to be 'ununterbrochen'.

So Closed Cooling Chain actually seems to be a good translation and it nicely rolls off the tongue - CCC.

I'm pretty disappointed by the onslaught of empty phrases and the dearth of insight or arguments.

I realized some might not get much out of it - hence why I said that at the very least Joscha is entertaining to listen to (subjective - I know).

I got something out of it - what Joscha says makes me think - even if at the end I won't get enlightened, I look forward to check out his other work.

ExcavateGrandMa2• 6 years ago

The day a machine is gonna try to have a conversation with me I'm gonna smash it the concrete way! keep dreaming about the perfect creature/slave/SEXBOT :D

dane-pgp• 6 years ago

ELIZA: That is interesting. Please continue.

ExcavateGrandMa2• 6 years ago

ELIZA??? all been already said... humanity isn't complex just ashamed by its own moves :D

and yea we are speaking about consciousnesss OH MY HEAD...

That's too much for me, can't comment much... but keep doing I'm watching... and guess what it's fun! :D

maze-le• 6 years ago

He is definitely one of the most interesting people to listen to when it comes to AI, Intelligence and Philosophy. I've seen him in Leipzig on CCC events in the past, here are some of his other talks:

* Computational Meta-Intelligence (32C3): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRdJCFEqFTU

* Machine Dreams (33C3): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5nJ5l6dl2s

* The Ghost in the Machine (35C3): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3K5UxWRRuY&t=2516s

He also did a very interesting podcast episode with Fefe and Frank from alternativlos! (in German): https://alternativlos.org/42/

pantalaimon2• 6 years ago

I'm happy to get my annual Joscha Bach fix seeing that CCC is probably cancelled this year.

His talks are always a firehose of fresh ideas and new combinations of known concepts.

All of his previous talks can be found at

https://media.ccc.de/search?p=Joscha

andybak2• 6 years ago

I can't absorb complex ideas very well from speech. Any good links for written materials that offer good bite-sized introductions to his ideas?

moobsen• 6 years ago

I'd recommending digging through his website: http://bach.ai/

Depending on what interests you, maybe also look at the abstracts of his research papers?

http://bach.ai/publications/

alexshortt• 6 years ago

I really love his emphasis on modelling as a skill. Its obviously great applied to technical skills like computer science, but he seems to apply it to everything else in the human experience so well.

"everything that we sense is part of the same object ... we learn it all into one model ... we call this model the universe" https://youtu.be/P-2P3MSZrBM?t=1796

arethuza• 6 years ago

Reminds me of "the world is its own best model" and the subsumption architecture of Rodney Brooks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsumption_architecture

callesgg• 6 years ago

Everything is a model. The only thing that exists to the mind And actually in the world is models.

calebm• 6 years ago

As above, so below

jmiskovic• 6 years ago

I was quite intrigued by semi-proposal of building a meta social network (it starts around 1:37:45). He proposes a service where anyone can start a social network using any features of existing ones (Facebook feed, Twitter conversation, Reddit threads...), with each network cultivating its own rules and reward function (criteria for what content is reshared or upvoted).

On one hand it's over-ambitious and doomed to fail, and yet it could lead to more coherent and constructive hive mind.

yetihehe• 6 years ago

with each network cultivating its own rules and reward function (criteria for what content is reshared or upvoted).

Yeah, that sounds like trying to evolve even more addicting social networks. Those networks which are more rewarding will have more users, regardless if they are good or bad in long term.

cblconfederate• 6 years ago

It has been tried so many times -- evolving variations of social networks. The end result is facebook bought them all. It's what we call survival of the richest.

rnd_74367843• 6 years ago

I tried to do that 10 years ago. Didn't gain traction. Too complex an idea for most to want http://babblingbrook.net/

cosmojg• 6 years ago

Isn't that kinda what's already unfolding with ActivityPub? You've got Friendica for Facebook, Mastodon and Pleroma for Twitter, Lemmy for Reddit, WriteFreely and Plume for Medium, Funkwhale for SoundCloud, Peertube for YouTube, Pixelfed for Instagram, and so much more[1]! Not only can anyone spin up their own instance of any one or more of these services with whatever rules and customs they want, but all of these different services can talk to each other since they're all built on the same underlying protocol. It's cool stuff, and it's already happening today!

[1] https://fediverse.party/en/miscellaneous

jagrsw8• 6 years ago

I've seen the interview in June, and was following Joscha's twitter feed since.

Although a lot of good stuff, some of his views are a bit perplexing:

* If his offspring would turn homosexual, he'd be sad about them being "evolutionary dead-end" (tho, he'd still support them in any way possible) - cannot find the tweet now, he probably deleted it

* He expresses a dim view of US' future (its institutions) esp. in the light of current events. It's sometimes visible in his tweets and speeches. But he's so vague in his predictions, that 10 years down the road I wouldn't be able to tell if he have been right or wrong no matter what the situation will be

tangent point: the company he currently works for - AI Foundation - had some deal/interaction with our dear Deepak Chopra - who is as anti-intellectual as a public persona can be - so my question is 'why' - tho this could be before Joscha's tenure there... but still it feels bad (https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20191205005164/en/Dee...) (https://aifoundation.com/author/lars_butler/)

But he loves Stanislaw Lem, and according to the interview he was the first author that he felt was worth reading his books had profound impact on him when he was young, so that's nice, b/c Lem is a genius - who is also a bit underrated in the western world - as opposed to the former eastern block :)

throwaway69123• 6 years ago

Why do you find him expressing sadness about him not being able to pass on his genetics, perplexing? Its a primal evolutionary imperative. While possible the rate of child having is very low in same sex relationships in comparrison to the hetro relationships is higher.

jagrsw8• 6 years ago

Mostly because he the object which creates the ideas and interacting with us is not his genes/body/brain but on the most abstract level it's his neural system, and the imperative you're talking about is imposed by his genes on his neural system (via brain wiring + hormones).

Since Joscha says that being adult means taking control of your emotions (I guess, to a point), so they serve your goals, and you're not at their whim, I wonder why he succumbs so easily to this specific emotion. Since having offspring has nothing to do with goals of his neural system (say... discovering the nature, advancing knowledge, exchanging ideas).

Goals of your genes != goals of your neural system (brain), and for the purpose of this conversation you are for me the latter.

Barrin923• 6 years ago

something being a primal evolutionary imperative doesn't make it any more meaningful. In fact it's kind of a stupid thing to care about because reproduction in that sense is truly mindless and circular.

Raising a kid is a meaningful experience, but the kids haircolor doesn't matter much.

andyjohnson03• 6 years ago

He did pass on his "genetics" - he had children.

If he feels sad about them not having children, which is not really something a parent has a say in.

honzzz• 6 years ago

What is perplexing about it? Genuine curiosity - where I live those views would probably be considered mundane mainstream.

jagrsw8• 6 years ago

I replied on this in another subthread, a minute ago or so.

But as for the 'mainstream', Joscha exactly doesn't want to be mainstream - see his TT stream: :)

"In a playground where most people can neither come up with ideas of their own.." and various other tweets and presos related to the harm of conforming to societal norms of thinking.

longtom2• 6 years ago

In one tweet he suggested the rise of social justice was in part fabricated to demolish the political left in light of Occupy Wall Street,[0] and that much of U.S. politics is about hiding who is actually in control. Funnily, he was indirectly funded by Harvey Weinstein.[1] Overall I think, he is extremely courageous and has perfected the virtue of telling the truth, like telling entire established buildings of philosophy that they are full of it. In my opinion, we need more of guys like him who simply tell the truth instead of chasing the latest political applause light.

[0] http://archive.is/wip/kvjGp

[1] https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=14814

masterproc2• 6 years ago

Given my comment above, I would completely disagree in this point. I agreed however, it seemed similar to me before the funding stories were published.

NotUsingLinux• 6 years ago

Thank you for sharing! Great interview and perspectives

deeplearning0• 6 years ago

do they discuss also AI ethics? Wondering about funding ethics for research ...

magnusmagnusson• 6 years ago

AI 'ethics' is how you get China dominating AI research eventually.

All these OpenAI spooks are either doing it intentionally or accidentally and at stake like this, what does it matter when the end result is a convincing loss.

yboris2• 6 years ago

I think you misunderstand what AI ethics is.

Do you want facial recognition cameras on every street? That's what no ethics oversight gets you.

motohagiography4• 6 years ago

I'm such a fan after the 33C3 Machine Dreams talk.

The podcast host, either he has a way of speaking that seems affectedly slow, or maybe he has a speech impediment or neurological issue? Ordinarily I would just set the speed of the video up, but Bach's normal speed of speech becomes too fast. A few minutes in, the host seems to adapt to his guests speed a bit, but is there some kind of trend among millennials to do some weird slo-mo lazy talking pace? Bach seems to sense it as well and interrupts him when he starts to wind up his mental drone.

therufa• 6 years ago

His first language is Russian, but grew up in the US.

From first hand experience as a person who grew up in a household with two completely different languages, this seems to come from having trouble of finding the right language to speak in for a little time until I can finally settle in on a language which makes most sense.

This or something absolutely different.

motohagiography4• 6 years ago

It would be surprising if it were a language issue, given Bach speaks accented english much more rapidly than the host speaking mostly unaccented english. It seems received or an personality/attitude thing, or maybe it's a substance use issue. Anyway, Bach is interesting enough I'm putting up with it, but I rarely feel so irritated and resentful of a person, so if someone else is repelled by it, stick with the podcast as Bach makes it worth while.

skovorodkin• 6 years ago

For recording it's much better to speak slowly. You can always speed up slow speech, but doing the opposite (slowing down fast speech) does not bring you a good result yet.

ilaksh• 6 years ago

Bach is rapidly firing out intriguing statements.

Lex is just trying to come up with worthy follow-up questions that also sometimes align with his plan for the podcast. And his default is to speak carefully because he knows that the topics are complex and algorithms are transcribing them etc. So he is starting at a fairly slow normal just for clarity and the high level of Bach's comments requires him to think more.

I would bet that you would not be able to do better. Actually I bet that you would pause just as long and then often reply with something barely relevant to what was just said, such as "wow that was deep".

Seriously, you think that Bach hasn't spent years preparing that elegant information and philosophy? And Lex was trying to adapt on the fly. But you casually suggest that you could have a rapid-fire intelligent back-and-forth with Joshua Bach as he lays that stuff on you.

I would like to see it. Go ahead, record a conversation with Bach on a topic that is slightly different from the existing podcasts/talks.

keeganpoppen• 6 years ago

why does OP's interviewing skill have to do with anything? i actually agree that stilted non-conversational speech like that in interviews and speeches sounds bad (talking in particular about the beginning). no need to say all that live if it's not contingent on the interviewee in any way. just watch the video: he is sitting there staring at a piece of paper reading, and then the first question the interviewer asks is essentially "what are some of the foundational inspirational ideas of your work?", which for anyone who isn't brilliant and hyperrational like the interviewee would be difficult to answer after being warmed up for an hour, much less before even seeing the eyes of the interlocutor. yes, interviews are not the same thing as normal conversation, but i don't think it's that crazy to suggest (like OP) that priming people in a more conversational way can be a nice way to smooth the edges around a conversation that will already be difficult for everyone to grasp (including Bach, who has to articulate all these things).

all of this is independent of how good of work lex does as an interviewer, which seems like it's pretty good given his ability to engage with the ideas presented (in this context idea empathy (ie understanding what Bach's saying) > interpersonal/conversational empathy).

motohagiography4• 6 years ago

Sounds like I should do a podcast, thank you, I will seriously consider it. I think Bach is one of the funniest and most entertaining people I can remember listening to, as he's one of the few examples I know of who could meet the definition of a stand-up philosopher.

My ideal first episode would have Bach and Daniel Dennett together talking about whether or not they have dogs, and what they might perceive that relationship to be like, given their respective views of consciousness and language, and what their dogs might think of them.

masterproc2• 6 years ago

FYI, Bach accepted money by Epstein after conviction. To me, someone who does not help Science, MIT and Harvard in fact finding about money by a convicted sex offender, is maybe not the best to read the future.

Sources: “The researcher Minsky had flagged for Epstein, Joscha Bach, declined repeated requests from me to discuss his ties to Epstein. But a 2018 paper on his theory of consciousness acknowledges support from the Jeffrey Epstein Foundation, and Bach has been listed in media tallies of Epstein grantees.” Science, At https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/what-kind-researcher...

“From 2014 to 2016, Bach’s primary affiliation was with MIT’s Media Lab. Harvard never paid Bach or provided funds to support his research, and no funds donated to Harvard supported Bach’s work. We understand that in 2014 and 2015, Bach’s work at MIT received fi- nancial support from Epstein.” (...)

“Though Harvard never paid Bach, PED’s website listed Bach as a PED research scientist beginning in 2014. We understand that Bach left MIT in 2016, but PED continued to list him as a PED research scientist until 2019. During that time, Nowak continued to give Bach access to office space at PED, which he used intermittently, and Bach often met with Epstein at PED when Epstein visited. PED has no records of Bach’s executing a Visitor Participation Agreement. Bach did not respond to our voice mail or email asking to speak with him, and we were unable to determine whether Epstein provided financial support to Bach after Bach left MIT and while he was associated with PED.”

REPORT CONCERNING JEFFREY E. EPSTEIN’S CONNECTIONS TO HARVARD UNIVERSITY. At https://ogc.harvard.edu/files/ogc/files/report_concerning_je...

“Epstein’s $100,000 donation in May 2013 was intended to be used at Ito’s discretion. His donations in November 2013 and in July and September 2014, totaling $300,000 (40% of Epstein’s post-conviction donations), were made to support research by Joscha Bach, a former Media Lab research fellow from Germany whom Epstein introduced to Ito in 2013. The Media Lab hired Bach in large part because Epstein subsidized the cost.“

* Bach declined to be interviewed in connection with Goodwin Procter’s fact-finding.

REPORT CONCERNING JEFFREY EPSTEIN’S INTERACTIONS WITH THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY. At http://factfindingjan2020.mit.edu/files/MIT-report.pdf?20011...

Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality [video]

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