Interstellar AI: a new paper from Hein and Baxter

Centauri Dreams has a series of posts: "Artificial Intelligence and the Starship" which review "an absorbing new paper called “Artificial Intelligence for Interstellar Travel, now submitted to the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society" by Andreas Hein and Stephen Baxter. Baxter is the well-known science-fiction writer.

I checked out their paper on the arxiv. It's disappointing.

Here's the abstract.

"The large distances involved in interstellar travel require a high degree of spacecraft autonomy, realized by artificial intelligence. The breadth of tasks artificial intelligence could perform on such spacecraft involves maintenance, data collection, designing and constructing an infrastructure using in-situ resources.

Despite its importance, existing publications on artificial intelligence and interstellar travel are limited to cursory descriptions where little detail is given about the nature of the artificial intelligence. This article explores the role of artificial intelligence for interstellar travel by compiling use cases, exploring capabilities, and proposing typologies, system and mission architectures.

Estimations for the required intelligence level for specific types of interstellar probes are given, along with potential system and mission architectures, covering those proposed in the literature but also presenting novel ones.

Finally, a generic design for interstellar probes with an AI payload is proposed. Given current levels of increase in computational power, a spacecraft with a similar computational power as the human brain would have a mass from dozens to hundreds of tons in a 2050-2060 time-frame.

Given that the advent of the first interstellar missions and artificial general intelligence are estimated to be by the mid-21st century, a more in-depth exploration of the relationship between the two should be attempted, focusing on neglected areas such as protecting the artificial intelligence payload from radiation in interstellar space and the role of artificial intelligence in self-replication."

They use some formalisation and present a taxonomy of four different kinds of AI:

"We distinguish between four types of AI probes:

Explorer

• capable of implementing a previously defined science mission in a system with known properties (for instance after remote observation);


• capable of manufacturing predefined spare parts and components; Examples: the Icarus and Daedalus studies.

Philosopher

• capable of devising and implementing a science program in unexplored circumstances; capable of original science: observing unexpected phenomena, drawing up hypotheses and testing them;


• capable of doing this within philosophical parameters such as planetary protection;


• capable of using local resources to a limited extent, e.g. manufacturing sub-probes, or replicas for further exploration at other stars.

Founder

• capable of using local resources on a significant scale, such as for establishing a human-ready habitat;


• capable of setting up a human-ready habitat on a target object such as part of an embryo space colonization programme;


• perhaps modifying conditions on a global scale (terraforming).

Ambassador

• equipped to handle the first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence on behalf of mankind, within philosophical and other parameters: e.g. obeying a Prime Directive and ensuring the safety of humanity."

These are engineering classifications and don't correspond to any sensible theoretical taxonomy of agent types. Perhaps that wasn't the intention but in terms of defining a research program which can dovetail with an interstellar vehicle programme, we do actually need a sensible roadmap for AI in the appropriate terms. Referencing AGI doesn't cut it, because today that term labels the problem only.

I didn't find their mathematical transliteration of their verbal points useful. How can I convey my problem?

∃x.question(me, unspecified-audience, conversation-procedure(x, describes(problem(me, non-utility-of-their-maths), unspecified-audience))).

I trust you are now enlightened in all senses.

I plan to write some more here about a more ecological way of thinking about agent taxonomies. Here's a brief preview.

Agents are discrete entities which exhibit behaviour in their environments. Agents are bound by the laws of physics, which therefore don't per se differentiate between agents which we find boring (lumps of rock) and agents we find interesting (animals, people).

Non-trivial agents are entities whose behaviour deviates from the behaviour of a similarly-sized-and-placed lump of rock - an entity whose behaviour could be predicted from the laws of physics and easily-obtained boundary conditions without too much difficulty. Non-trivial agents have complex and inaccessible internal states which produce enhanced behaviour by use of free-energy.

Agents are characterised by these four intentional parameters: beliefs + goals and perceptions + actions. These also work for rocks but it's a trivial case. An interesting problem is to link the intentional level of description to the input-output behaviourist level and then back to the laws of physics. This can always be done in principle.

Non-trivial agents are always mechanisms, whether biologically-living or fabricated. They do not in general need to be constructed so as to use explicit symbolic manipulation (theorem-provers or planners) as part of their mechanisms, although research scientists may use such concepts to describe and analyse their behaviour.

Agents get a lot more interesting when they're social, and when social objectives and individual goals are contingent, possibly contradictory and need to be dynamically negotiated. It's believed that mutual-modelling, language and conversation, and consciousness are all emergent from that scenario.

It's possible to devise a scale of intellectual competence for agents, linked to the capacity to effectively deploy abstractions to cope with complex and novel situations. It's not too clear how to model this taxonomy in the architecture space apart from such obvious points as "more processors and memory, and cranking up the clock rate" and their neuronal equivalents. Those remedies are not of course wrong but it's not enough.

Now apply this to the design of autonomous interstellar probes.

In almost every respect, the engineering domain of interstellar missions is an application area for AI rather than something which raises fundamentally new theoretical questions.

Conversations en français

My French tutor

My second (weekly) visit with my new French conversation tutor, Annie, in Glastonbury this afternoon. I chose this article from Le Monde to discuss: the reaction of the « foulards rouges » (red scarfs) against the violence and looting associated with a « gilets jaunes » movement which continues to maintain its strength across France into the new year.

We talked about that for quite a bit - I can basically follow her slightly-slowed-down idiomatic French. I mentioned that I had read Michel Houellebecq's novel 'Submission' in translation but I really wished I could read it in the original French, not least because his latest novel, Sérotonine (which is said to accurately diagnose the social malaise underpinning the revolt of 'peripheral France'), won't be available in English until the Autumn.

I reviewed 'Submission' a year ago.

Amazon link

The problem is that with a literary novel, even an accurate translation of the words will fail to capture the wealth of cultural allusions which underpin the essential quality of the work for a native speaker.

Annie agreed, and as homework suggested I order 'Maigret' and read that: several times.

Phew, finally got through Steve Keen .. again!

Amazon link

Finally completed my second (and more successful) reading of Steve Keen's book. An impressive introduction to (and demolition of) neoclassical economics. A tale never told better.

Why isn't Keen a Marxist? He doesn't want to be drawn into a position where one is committed to overthrow capitalism rather than fix it, but also I think because his approach is very .. Australian. A kind of bluff, no-nonsense concrete directness which is a world away from Marx's sophistication of thought. However, you can be a Marxist and not believe capitalism is ripe for overthrow.

Keen's fairly grotesque mischaracterisation of Marxism is addressed by "Left Flank" (on the resources sidebar in the web version): "Steve Keen wrong about Marx".

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I don't of course agree with International Socialism's Leninist aspirations but I thought Alex Callinicos's article, Brexit blues, was a pretty good outline of the dilemmas facing British capitalism.

The SWP was one of the few British left-wing organisations which did not succumb to the neoliberal ideological onslaught and capitulate to  'Remain'.

This blog is now suspended for a while

For the reasons here. So no more posts for a while.

A British Coup?

Over-the-top, copy-selling headline from The Sunday Times today.

It's always interesting watching the elite wrestling with the imperfect levers of governance to bring about the result they really want. The referendum result would have been reversed in a second if not for their inchoate, pervasive fear of the 52%.

Who are these people? We never meet them. No sign of them within the boundaries of the M25.

We know that the left petty-bourgeoisie, the metropolitan bubble-people, lined up for Remain. If the great reversal project progresses during the next weeks through a vote of confidence in May's government (to be lost) and then a general election, what will the Leave-voting working class do? No respectable party speaks to their concerns (Blue Labour, as championed by Rod Liddle, is dead in the water).

A general election with the Tory party in chaos and the Labour Party obfuscating and trying to change the subject - that would be a sight to behold. My tentative projection is that the Tory vote would collapse, the Labour vote would hold up and we would finally get to see what a Corbyn government would do.

No wonder they're cautious.

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It's ironic really. The Theresa May strategy was always to retain the economic benefits of EU membership while continuing to maintain social cohesion by implementing the strict letter of Leave. It was always  'BREXIT in name only'.

The British elite, in its arrogance and short-term greed, has run roughshod over this mildly-intelligent plan. Do they really think a Corbyn government has their neoliberal interests at heart? That rather widespread popular expectations of a new socialist way forward will be so easy to endlessly subvert? They have learned nothing from M. Macron's experiences.

Such hubris: they can be very stupid at times.

The coming recession evokes only Marxist hand-wringing

From Michael Roberts: ASSA 2019 part 2 – the radical: profitability, growth and crises.

"... Those who read my blog regularly know that I would go further or indeed put it differently.   Capitalist economies go into slumps because of a collapse in profits and investment and this leads to a collapse in “effective demand”, not vice versa as the Keynesians (in whatever species) would have it.  So a restoration of profitability is necessary to restore growth under capitalism- this is what I (and G Carchedi) have called the Marxist multiplier compared to the Keynesian multiplier.

What is wrong with Keynesian theory and thus policy is that it denies this determinant role of profitability.  Indeed, in a way, the neoclassical mainstream has a point – that it is necessary (rational?) to drive down wages, weaken labour through unemployment and reduce the burden of the state on capital to revive profits and the economy. Of course, the mainstream cannot explain crises; often deny they can happen; and have no policy for recovery except to make labour pay."

It's another area orthodox Marxists tip-toe around. The focus on changes in profitability as the driver of the economic cycle together with a superior theory of crises makes Marxist economics far more insightful than the neoclassical tradition which Steve Keen so gleefully debunks, or the left-Keynesianism which he so enthusiastically supports.

Amazon link

But if - absent the socialist revolution - the answer to a capitalist recession is always to restore profitability, what would Michael Roberts advise?

That's the difficulty: the point where the theory transitions from positive to normative.

It gets worse: by pursuing Keynesian policies which tend to further wreck the economy and which confuse and demoralise the working class, the eventual reaction can be catastrophic: (Chile, the NSDAP).

I sense a paralysed coyness here from the Marxist left, impotence due to the very lack of illusions. I guess 'fight in the absolute certainty of defeat' doesn't have much of a ring to it.

Not so much here in 2019

Not sure about the level of blogging here this coming year. I notice that my personal stuff has already largely migrated to other platforms. Book reviews should probably just go straight to Amazon while I'm hardly an expert on other things I've written about here. This blog has really served as a kind of notebook to document my attention to and levels of understanding of a diversity of things. I have never believed this would be intrinsically interesting to anyone else.

Plus I'm feeling a lot more Straussian recently. Everything you write leaves a trace which can be used by anyone, anytime. Why go there when things look likely to get worse?

LQG, LSD* and depth psychology

Amazon link

I'm just about glad I read this but the experience was like munching slices of supermarket white bread. The story of Loop Quantum Gravity is told chronologically through the biographies of Lee Smolin and Carlo Rovelli. It's the journey of those who started with General Relativity and tried to quantise spacetime. The nodes and links of LQG are not spacetime quanta, they're precursor objects out of which spacetime, along with its metric field, should emerge in the low-energy limit.

This is the fabrication of reality at the Planck scale, way down from observational data. The models are not without interest (especially the cosmological models) and the approach seems to have its compelling moments .. but .. but .. all the nasty things said about the theological or purely mathematical nature of String Theory also apply here, do they not?

If you're short of cash you could skip the book and read the Wikipedia article, though you are unlikely to understand it without a total familiarity with GR and QFT (not me!). The author had somehow to handwave his way over this cathedral of densely-connected abstractions: the "Quantum Space" reading experience is consequently pretty anaemic.

I'm guessing that Baggott wrote this book because, with the continuing decline in the prospects for String Theory, he's become convinced that there's something to Loop Quantum Gravity and wants to raise its profile for a generation of new physicists wondering what on earth they should be devoting their lives to.

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Amazon link

A few posts ago I said:

"I'm expecting this book to be a bunch of left-Keynesians arguing that an incoming Labour government should put more demand into the economy through deficit spending and increased transfer payments in order to stimulate investment and productivity."

I think I oversold it. This is a bunch of mediocre essays with no new ideas and many mistakes which reminded me of the kind of stuff sixth formers write. It insults the intelligence and bores the unfortunate reader. Give it a miss and read Steve Keen instead.

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Amazon link

Adrian pushed his copy in front of me. As I worked my way through I grew more impressed. It's an easy, folksy read but far from superficial. It puzzled me for a while - how should we think about this book? - and in the end I place it mostly in the Jungian tradition of optimal personal development.

Peterson has read deeply across the disciplines and has melded evolutionary theory, neuroscience and depth psychology into something coherent and new. That is a real achievement.

His blind spot is sociology - he doesn't see how the SJW orthodoxy he confronts is in reality the ideology of the new petty bourgeoisie, conjured into being with the neoliberal transition of the 1970s. He should read Poulantzas.

Still, this omission does not invalidate anything he says since even being conscious of the social dynamics does not suggest any different conclusions.The problem is here regardless.

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"Freud was a genius," Peterson remarks, “you can tell because people still hate him.”

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* Left Social-Democracy.