Hugo de Garis

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Hugo de Garis (born 1947, Sydney, Australia) became an associate professor of computer science at Utah State University. He is one of the more notable researchers in the sub-field of artificial intelligence known as evolvable hardware which involves evolving neural net circuits directly in hardware to build artificial brains.

He is more recently notorious for his view of the eventual dominance of Artificial Intelligence over human intelligence, which has sparked debate and criticism, particularly among the more media-friendly members of the AI research community.

De Garis's early studies were on theoretical physics, but he abandoned this field of research in favour of AI and artificial life. He received his PhD at Brussels University, Belgium. He recently joined Novamente a commercial company aimed at Strong AI.

1 Evolvable Hardware
2 Employment History
3 Cosmists and Terrans
4 Quotes
5 References
6 See also
7 External links

[edit] Evolvable Hardware

This technique, involving development and use of neurons using a 3D cellular automaton, seems to have been used with success to build simple functionalities like the xor function, but, up to now, failed to evolve anything that could be considered as a brain, or even a serious robot control system. His current project is to assemble thousands of these 'brains' into a larger artificial intelligence architecture to make a functioning AI.

The original aim of de Garis' work was to establish the field of "brain building" (a term of his invention) and to create a trillion dollar industry within 20 years. Throughout the 90s his papers claimed that by 2001 the ATR project would develop a billion-neuron brain capable of simulating a cat brain. De Garis received a US$1.4 million grant to develop this. The first "CAM-Brain" was delivered to ATR in 1999; it appears that no intelligent system was ever created with it. After receiving a further US$1 million grant at Starlab de Garis failed to deliver a working "brain" before Starlab's bankruptcy. As head of USUs "Brain Builder" group de Garis has announced his intention to create a 2nd generation "CAM-Brain", but no progress appears to have been made towards this goal.

Critics find that de Garis tends towards "quantity not quality" in asserting that the degree of complexity displayed within his evolved hardware is a breakthrough in itself, without acknowledging that the harder problem is to create systems whose complexity is actually functional and fit for its purpose.

[edit] Employment History

De Garis original work on the CAM-Brain machines started in the early 1990s and was carried out at the ATR Human Information Processing Research Laboratories (ATR-HIP) in Kyoto, Japan. De Garis left in 2000, and ATR-HIP was closed on 28th of February, 2001. De Garis then moved to Starlab in Brussels, where he received several million dollars in funding from the government of Belgium ("over a third of the Brussels government's total budget for scientific research", according to de Garis). Starlab went bankrupt in June 2001. De Garis then became head of the Brain Builder Group at the Computer Science Department of Utah State University.

[edit] Cosmists and Terrans

De Garis predicts that one day intelligent machines (or 'artilects', as he calls them, after 'artificial intellects' to distinguish them from current forms of AI) will be far more intelligent than humans and threaten to dominate the world, resulting in a conflict between 'cosmists', or supporters of the artilects, and 'terrans', those who oppose the artilects (both of these are terms of his invention). He describes this conflict as the 'gigadeath war'. This scenario is very similar to common science fiction themes, such as found in the hit 1984 movie "Terminator". He has recently authored a book describing his views on this topic titled The Artilect War.

Cosmism, according to de Garis, is a moral philosophy that favors building or growing artificial intelligence and ultimately leaving the planet Earth to the Terrans, e.g. Kevin Warwick and Bill Joy, who oppose this path for humanity. In his essay "The Artilect War", De Garis predicts that the factions will war to the death as the Terrans, terrified of becoming extinct, or simply of being left behind as relics of the past, will attempt to violently re-assert domination, which the Cosmists will rabidly oppose on the grounds that it is nothing more than chattel slavery, motivated purely out of ignorance or malice.

De Garis relates that "just out of curiosity, I asked Kevin (Warwick) whether he was a Terran or a Cosmist. He said he was against the idea of artilects being built (i.e., he is Terran). I was surprised, and felt a shiver go up my spine. That moment reminded me of a biography of Lenin that I had read in my 20s in which the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks first started debating the future government of Russia. What began as an intellectual difference ended up as a Russian civil war after 1917 between the white and the red Russians."

It should actually be noted, however, that Warwick is really not a Terran at all, but would in fact be a member of a smaller third party de Garis predicts will emerge between the two. He colloquially refers to this third-party bridge as "Cyborgians", because they will not be opposed to artilects as such, but will not want to be made personally obsolete, either. They will, he predicts, seek to become artilects by gradually merging themselves with machines, which is the main focus of Professor Warwick's cybernetics research.

Accordingly, the war might be said to have begun at a debate in Zurich on March 22, 2000.^[1] Some technologists, such as Bill Joy, Ray Kurzweil, and Hans Moravec;^[2] a few physicists and mathematicians, such as humanist Roger Penrose, have taken positions in this "war".^[3]