The SSEC Machine Intelligence Project

"It is all too evident that our moral thinking simply has not been able to keep pace with the speed of scientific advancement. Yet the ramifications of this progress are such that it is no longer adequate to say that the choice of what to do with this knowledge should be left in the hands of individuals." - Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, in the New York Times on 12 November 2005, the day he spoke to the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. The technology of mind will have profound consequences for humanity, and humanity must be educated about and exercise collective, democratic control over this technology. The Machine Intelligence Project at the Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) of the University of Wisconsin-Madison focuses on how to create machine intelligence, and on the social consequences of machine intelligence. My approach is to look for connections between neuroscience, the analysis of how human brains work, and computer science, the synthesis of artificial solutions to the problem of intelligence. The understanding of how intelligence works is critical for analyzing the social consequences of machine intelligence.

There are three great scientific questions facing humanity: how does physics work, how does life work, and how does intelligence work? An answer to the question of how intelligence works, and a consequent ability to build intelligent machines, will help answer the other two great questions and help solve many practical problems facing humanity.

Publications

• Self-Modeling Agents and Reward Generator Corruption
  • Bill Hibbard. AAAI-15 Workshop on AI and Ethics. January 2015.
• Ethical Artificial Intelligence
  • Bill Hibbard. Book draft. November 2014.
• Exploratory Engineering in AI
  • Luke Muehlhauser and Bill Hibbard. Communications of the ACM. 7(9) , 32-34. 2014.
• Self-Modeling Agents Evolving in Our Finite Universe
  • Bill Hibbard. The Seventh Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-14). 2014.
• Avoiding Unintended AI Behaviors
  • Bill Hibbard. The Fifth Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-12). 2012.
  • This paper won the Singularity Institute's Turing Prize for the Best AGI Safety Paper at AGI-12 and AGI Impacts.
• Decision Support for Safe AI Design
  • Bill Hibbard. The Fifth Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-12). 2012.
  • Turing Tests with Turing Machines.
  • Jose Hernandez-Orallo, Javier Insa, David Dowe and Bill Hibbard. Turing-100. The Alan Turing Centenary, ed. Andrei Voronkov. 140-156. June 2012.
  • Model-based Utility Functions.
  • Bill Hibbard. The Journal of Artificial General Intelligence. 3 , 1-24. 2012.
• Measuring Agent Intelligence via Hierarchies of Environments
  • Bill Hibbard. The Fourth Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-11). 2011.
• Societies of Intelligent Agents
  • Bill Hibbard. The Fourth Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-11). 2011.
• Nietzsche's Overhuman is an Ideal Whereas Posthumans Will be Real
  • Bill Hibbard. Journal of Evolution & Technology 21 , No. 1, 9-12. 2010.
• Bias and No Free Lunch in Formal Measures of Intelligence
  • Bill Hibbard. The Journal of Artificial General Intelligence. 1 , 54-61. 2009.
• Distribution of Environments in Formal Measures of Intelligence
  • Bill Hibbard. The Second Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-09). 2009.
• Adversarial Sequence Prediction
  • Bill Hibbard. The First Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-08). 2008.
• Open Source AI
  • Bill Hibbard. AGI-08 Workshop on the Sociocultural, Ethical and Futurological Implications of Artificial General Intelligence. 2008.
• The Technology of Mind and a New Social Contract
  • Bill Hibbard. Journal of Evolution & Technology 17 , No. 1, 13-22. 2008.
• Reinforcement Learning as a Context for Integrating AI Research
  • Bill Hibbard. 2004 AAAI Fall Symposium on Achieving Human-Level Intelligence through Integrated Systems and Research.
• Should Standard Oil Own the Roads?
  • Bill Hibbard. Computer Graphics 37 , No. 1, 5-6. 2003.
• Super-Intelligent Machines
  • Bill Hibbard. New York. Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. 2002.
• Emotions Versus Laws as the Keys to the Ethical Design of Intelligent Machines
  • W. L. Hibbard. Proc. 6th World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, Vol. XIII, 469-472. 2002.
• Super-intelligent Machines
  • Bill Hibbard. Computer Graphics 35 , No. 1, 11-13. 2001.

Posters and Presentations

• Distribution of Environments in Formal Measures of Intelligence
  • Bill Hibbard. The Second Conference on Artificial General Intelligence. Washington DC. 2009. A video of my talk.
• Adversarial Sequence Prediction
  • Bill Hibbard. The First Conference on Artificial General Intelligence. Memphis. 2008. A video of my talk.
• AI Politics
  • Bill Hibbard. AGI-08 Workshop on the Sociocultural, Ethical and Futurological Implications of Artificial General Intelligence. Memphis. 2008. A video of my talk.
• The Technology of Mind and a New Social Contract
  • Bill Hibbard. Human Rights for the 21st Century. New York. 2007. An MP3 audio file of my talk.
• The Right Question About Machine Consciousness
  • Bill Hibbard. Towards a Science of Consciousness. Tucson. 2004.
  • Presentation to Charles Dyer's AI Course at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. 2003 .
• Consciousness is a Simulator with a Memory for Solving the Temporal Credit Assignment Problem in Reinforcement Learning
  • Bill Hibbard. Towards a Science of Consciousness. Tucson. 2002.
  • Presentation to Charles Dyer's AI Course at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. 2002 .
• Network Diameter and Emotional Values in the Global Brain
  • Bill Hibbard. First Global Brain Workshop. Brussels. 2001.

On-line Publications

• [Message Contains No Recognizable Symbols]. A story about a technological singularity subject to the constraint that natural human authors are unable to depict the actions and dialog of super-intelligent minds. In particular, the languages of super-intelligent minds will be unintelligible to natural humans. April 2007.
• Values, Simulation and Symbiosis in the Global Brain
  • Bill Hibbard. This was written in response to a request from the organizers of the First Global Brain Workshop for a special edition of Technological Forecasting and Social Change, but it is now clear the special edition will never be for reasons known only to the organizers.
  • Comment on the 2006 Singularity Summit. The Summit should include an advocate of regulating, but not banning, AI.
  • A Review of Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near. A good book, but it fails to adequately address the dangers of AI.
• The Ethics and Politics of Super-Intelligent Machines
  • Bill Hibbard. Rejected by the 2005 AAAI Fall Symposium on Machine Ethics, based on a poor reviewing process (however, the organizers did invite me to present a poster and short abstract). Here are the reviews and my rebuttals, plus a brief assessment of the symposium technical report.
  • Consciousness and Souls, letter to the editor of the New York Times, 12 September 2004.
  • Critique of the SIAI Guidelines on Friendly AI . 2003.
  • Critique of the SIAI Collective Volition Theory . 2005.
• Network Diameter and Emotional Values in the Global Brain
  • Bill Hibbard. First Global Brain Workshop. Brussels. 2001.

More Information

For more information about the SSEC Machine Intelligence Project please contact Bill Hibbard.

Also see my Singularity Notes.