Category: Automation Impact on Jobs

DeepDream – Visualizing Neural Networks

DeepDream - a code example for visualizing Neural Networks

Neural networks are not procedural code.  They’ve been treated as a black box where we can’t really learn anything from looking at the internal values or weights.  This article, and the post in the link of the excerpted text below, shows that there is a lot of information embedded in these networks.

If a consciousness were to emerge in a very complex neural net, might it somehow manifest in the inner workings of the black box?  Maybe patterns of activation that shift more than expected?  Maybe a changing of weights and feedback even when not in training mode?

It seems we would need to think about looking for some sort of awareness, and make tools such as this visualizer to detect it.

Two weeks ago we blogged about a visualization tool designed to help us understand how neural networks work and what each layer has learned. In addition to gaining some insight on how these networks carry out classification tasks, we found that this process also generated some beautiful art.

Robots Unplugged: Will We Face a Man-Machine Conflict?

Man makes robots. Now, a robot has killed a man. Though not the first time, the tragic incident that involved an assembly robot reportedly grabbing a young worker at a Volkswagen plant in Germany and crushing him to death between metal recently has been labelled in some quarters as “a man-machine” conflict (as opposed to the age-old man-animal one). In this context, it is pertinent to reflect on the idea of a possible apocalypse that may be unleashed, if all the science fiction stories we read and movies we watch are to come alive some day.

If we create a conscious robot and copy its brain, there are going to be two brains. Will they have different consciousnesses?

This is a question of individuation and the answer will entirely depend upon the given theory of consciousness. I will answer in the context of the theory I have developed over the past ~12 years and to appear in my book On The Origin Of Experience the first draft chapter of which can be found here: On The Origin Of Experience .

I begin by dismissal of the idea that you can construct an electronic brain for reasons given in the following answer: Steven Ericsson-Zenith’s answer to What is the computing power of the average human brain, including all […]