Humans have curated the best of human intelligence to inform AI, with the hopes of creating flawless machines – but could the flaws we left out be the missing pieces needed to ensure robots do not go rogue?

Modern-day society relies intrinsically on automated systems and artificial intelligence. It is embedded into our daily routines and shows no signs of slowing, in fact, the use of robotic and automated assistance is ever-increasing.

Such pervasive use of AI presents technologists and developers with two ethical dilemmas – how do we build robots that behave in line with our values and how do we stop them from going rogue?

One author suggests that one option which is not explored enough is to code more humanity into robots, gifting robots with traits such as empathy and compassion.

Is humanity the answer?

In a new book called Robot Souls, to be published in August, academic Dr. Eve Poole OBE explores the idea that the solution to society’s conundrum about how to make sure AI is ethical lies in human nature.

She argues that in its bid for perfection, humans stripped out the ‘junk code’ including emotions, free will, and a sense of purpose.

She said: “It is this ‘junk’ which is at the heart of humanity. Our junk code consists of human emotions, our propensity for mistakes, our inclination to tell stories, our uncanny sixth sense, our capacity to cope with uncertainty, an unshakeable sense of our own free will, and our ability to see meaning in the world around us.

“This junk code is in fact vital to human flourishing, because behind all of these flaky and whimsical properties lies a coordinated attempt to keep our species safe. Together they act as a range of ameliorators with a common theme: they keep us in the community so that there is safety in numbers.”

Robot souls

With AI increasingly taking up more decision-making roles in our daily lives, along with rising concerns about bias and discrimination in AI, Dr. Poole argues the answer might be in the stuff we tried to strip out of autonomous machines in the first place.

She said: “If we can decipher that code, the part that makes us all want to survive and thrive together as a species, we can share it with the machines. Giving them to all intents and purposes a ‘soul’.”

In the new book, Poole suggests a series of next steps to make this a reality, including agreeing with a rigorous regulation process and an immediate ban on autonomous weapons along with a licensing regime with rules that reserve any final decision over the life and death of a human to a fellow human.

She argues we should also agree on the criteria for legal personhood and a road map for Al toward it.

The human blueprint

“Because humans are flawed we disregarded a lot of characteristics when we built AI,” Poole explains. “It was assumed that robots with features like emotions and intuition, that made mistakes and looked for meaning and purpose, would not work as well.

“But on considering why all these irrational properties are there, it seems that they emerge from the source code of the soul. Because it is actually this ‘junk’ code that makes us human and promotes the kind of reciprocal altruism that keeps humanity alive and thriving.”

Robot Souls looks at developments in AI and reviews the emergence of ideas of consciousness and the soul.

It places our ‘junk code’ in this context and argues that it is time to foreground that code and use it to look again at how we are programming AI.

A new approach to optical communication that can be deployed with conventional technology.

The patterns of light hold tremendous promise for a large encoding alphabet in optical communications, but progress is hindered by their susceptibilities to distortion, such as in atmospheric turbulence or bent optical fiber.  Now researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) have outlined a new optical communication protocol that exploits spatial patterns of light for multi-dimensional encoding in a manner that does not require the patterns to be recognized, thus overcoming the prior limitation of modal distortion in noisy channels.  The result is a new encoding state-of-the-art of over 50 vectorial patterns of light sent virtually noise-free across a turbulent atmosphere, opening a new approach to high-bit-rate optical communication.  

Published this week in Laser & Photonics Reviews, the Wits team from the Structured Light Laboratory in the Wits School of Physics used a new invariant property of vectorial light to encode information.  This quantity, which the team calls “vectorness”, scales from 0 to 1 and remains unchanged when passing through a noisy channel.  Unlike traditional amplitude modulation which is 0 or 1 (only a two-letter alphabet), the team used the invariance to partition the 0 to 1 vectorness range into more than 50 parts (0, 0.02, 0.04, and so on up to 1) for a 50-letter alphabet.  Because the channel over which the information is sent does not distort the vectorness, both sender and received will always agree on the value, hence noise-free information transfer.  

The critical hurdle that the team overcame is to use patterns of light in a manner that does not require them to be “recognized” so that the natural distortion of noisy channels can be ignored.  Instead, the invariant quantity just “adds up” light in specialized measurements, revealing a quantity that doesn’t see distortion at all.

“This is a very exciting advance because we can finally exploit the many patterns of light as an encoding alphabet without worrying about how noisy the channel is,” says Professor Andrew Forbes, from the Wits School of Physics. “In fact, the only limit to how big the alphabet can be is how good the detectors are and not at all influenced by the noise of the channel.”

Lead author and Ph.D. candidate Keshaan Singh added: “To create and detect the vectorness modulation requires nothing more than conventional communications technology, allowing our modal (pattern) based protocol to be deployed immediately in real-world settings.”

The team has already started demonstrations in optical fiber and in fast links across free space and believes that the approach can work in other noisy channels, including underwater.