Interview with Francis Heylighen
Questions by Sander Olson. Answers by Francis Heylighen.
Francis Heylighen is a Professor at the Free University of Brussels. He has been working on the evolution of knowledge and the evolution of society. He is currently working on making computer networks more intelligent and responsive.
Question 1: Tell us about yourself. What is your background, and what
projects are you currently working on?
My background is in mathematical physics, and I got my Ph.D. in 1987
from the Free University of Brussels (VUB). I am presently a Research
Professor and a co-director of the transdisciplinary research Center
"Leo Apostel" at the VUB.
I have been working at the VUB since 1982 first on the foundations of
physics (quantum mechanics and relativity theory). The focus of my
research then turned to the evolution of complexity, which I study
from a cybernetic viewpoint. I have worked in particular on the
evolution of knowledge (including memes), and the creation of new
concepts and models. More recently, I have extended the underlying
principles to understand the evolution of society, and its
implications for the future of humanity. The theoretical framework I
am developing intends to integrate knowledge from different
disciplines into an encompassing "world view".
Together with my collaborator Johan Bollen I have applied this
framework by implementing a self-organizing knowledge web, that
"learns" new concepts and associations from the way it is used, and
"thinks" ahead of its users. As such, it forms a simple model for a
future intelligent computer network, the "global brain".
To study the technological and social implications of this vision, in
1996 I co-founded the "Global Brain Group", an international
discussion forum that groups most of the scientists who have worked
on this issue. Since 1990, I am also an editor of the "Principia
Cybernetica Project" (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/), an international
organization which attempts to consensually develop a cybernetic
philosophical system, with the help of computer technologies for the
communication and integration of knowledge.
At the moment, I am focusing on developing what I call "evolutionary
cybernetics", an encompassing theory of how intelligent, purposeful
organization can originate and develop through the mechanism of blind
variation and natural selection. One of the applications of this
theory is the emergence and development of intelligence in the web. I
am therefore further researching algorithms that would allow the web
to self-organize so as to become more intelligent.
Question 2: Describe your concept of a Global Brain.
The "Global Brain" is a metaphor for the emerging collectively
intelligent network formed by the people of this planet together with
the computers, knowledge bases, and communication links that connect
them together. This network is an immensely complex, self-organizing
system that not only processes information, but increasingly can be
seen to play the role of a brain: making decisions, solving problems,
learning new connections and discovering new ideas. No individual,
organization or computer is in control of this system: its knowledge
and intelligence are distributed over all its components. They emerge
from the collective interactions between all the human and machine
subsystems. Such a system may be able to tackle current and emerging
global problems that have eluded more traditional approaches, but at
the same time it will create new technological and social challenges
which are still difficult to imagine.
Without doubt, the most important technological, economic and social
development of the past decade is the emergence of a global
computer-based communication network. This network has been growing
at an explosive rate, affecting--directly or indirectly--ever more
aspects of the daily lives of the people on this planet. Amidst this
growing complexity, we need to look ahead, and try to understand
where all these changes are leading to.
A general trend is that the information network becomes ever more
global, more encompassing, more tightly linked to the individuals and
groups that use it, and more intelligent in the way it supports them.
The web doesn't just passively provide information, it now also
actively alerts and guides people to the best options for them
personally. To support this, the web increasingly builds on the
knowledge and intelligence of all its users and information providers
collectively, thanks to technologies such as collaborative filtering,
agents, and online markets. It appears as though the net is turning
into a collective nervous system for humanity: a global brain.
Question 3: How does the concept of a Global Brain differ from conventional
theories of Intelligence Amplification? How related are the two concepts?
I didn't know there were "conventional" theories of Intelligence
Amplification ;-). I just know that several people have proposed that
concept to emphasize that computer technology should be used not so
much to build independently intelligent programs (Artificial
Intelligence, AI), but to develop support systems that would enhance
our own human intelligence (Intelligence Amplification, IA), but
these people never became part of the mainstream. Two pioneers that
come to mind are Ross Ashby, one of the founders of cybernetics,
whose contribution was mainly theoretical, and Doug Englebart, the
computing pioneer who was the first to experiment with such basic
interface elements as the mouse, windows and hypertext.
I believe both of these pioneers would basically agree with the way I
envisage IA as supported by an intelligent web. The difference is
rather one of emphasis: while "conventional" IA might imagine the
amplification of individual intelligence by an individual computer
system (e.g. a PC), I emphasize the amplification of individual and
collective intelligence by means of a shared information network (the
web). The power of the web is something that early pioneers would
have found hard to imagine, although Englebart in his later work
seems very much aware of it.
Question 4: How much longer do you believe that the internet will continue
growing? Can one truly claim that beyond a certain point the Internet will
become sentient?
"Growth" is for me not the main issue. More and more people will use
the net for longer and longer times, using ever faster processors and
communication links. Up to the point where every person and every
appliance will be connected to the net full-time, I don't see
anything that will stop this growth.
More important than quantitative growth is qualitative development:
will the net be organized in a more intelligent way, so that it can
e.g. autonomously learn, reorganize, make decisions, solve
problems... If this deep qualitative reorganization takes off, then
perhaps something like "sentience" will emerge, but this will be a
very difficult process, fraught with technical, scientific, political
and social problems.
Question 5: Vernor Vinge argues that a group of PhDs with an Internet
connected workstation could ace any intelligence test ever devised. Ray
Kurzweil argues that as soon as computers reach parity with human
intelligence they will necessarily soar past it. Which opinion do you think
is more accurate?
I'd rather side with Vinge here. Kurzweil's view neglects the
important lessons that have been learned from AI: to build real
intelligence into a computer, you don't just need a powerful
processor, you need a huge mass of common-sense knowledge and
intuition, which you can only accumulate through a life-time of
experience interacting with a truly complex environment (this
requirement is sometimes called "situatedness" or "embodiment").
Such interaction requires very sophisticated sensors, effectors and
neural-type circuits connecting the two. These are extremely
difficult to build into any artificial, robot-like creature, but are
inexpensively available in any human being. It is much easier to tap
into that human experience and augment it with computer memory and
processing, than to build a computer intelligence from scrap. Even if
such a computer with human-level intelligence would be built, there
is no reason why its intelligence would grow faster than the
intelligence of a synergetic system consisting of intelligent humans
and intelligent computers intimately working together.
Question 6: What is your opinion of Molecular Nanotechnology? Do you believe
that molecular assemblers will ever be feasible?
I don't know enough about nanotechnology to have firm opinions about
it. In principle, I don't see any physical obstacles to building
molecular assemblers, but the issue that seems to be neglected is
control: how do you make an army of microscopic machines do precisely
what you want? For simple machine-like functions, such as cogs and
wheels, that may not seem too difficult. But then you don't gain such
a great deal by building a microscopic lever. You'd rather have
nanosystems that can tackle complex problems, like building living
cells from scratch. But that will require either an unmanageably
complex problem of programming the "software" to execute these tasks,
or give the system a large measure of autonomy and self-organization.
The latter seems most realistic to me, but the danger is that you
lose control, and your nanodevice will not do exactly what you want.
Yet, I am not afraid of "gray goo" scenarios in which nanorobots run
amock and destroy everything in their wake. I think we can get the
best inspiration for what may happen from existing molecular devices,
namely those developed by biological systems, such as enzymes and
DNA. Biological self-organization is obviously quite efficient, but
it has taken billions of years for evolution to get there, and
organisms are still rather unreliable as machine-like "assemblers".
Now and then something runs amock and a new killer virus appears
(e.g. AIDS), but until now this has never happened on a scale even
remotely similar to the "gray goo scenario". The best way forward to
me seems that we should better understand biological
self-organization, and support or augment it in a way similar to the
way computers may augment human intelligence.
Question 7: What is your opinion of a technological singularity? If you
think it is likely, when do you think it will happen?
The more I think about the singularity, the less I believe it is a
realistic description of what will happen. It is true that most
parameters of technological progress have been showing a spectacular
acceleration over the past century, but this doesn't mean that the
speed of progress will ever become infinite, as the mathematical
definition of a singularity would imply. I have rather the feeling
that we can already see the first signs of a *deceleration*.
The spectacular wave of innovation unleashed by the first
user-friendly PCs in the 1980's and of the Web in the 1990's seems to
have gotten drowned in complexity and confusion, as software
developers are scrambling to keep their systems up-to-date with all
the new standards, plugins and extensions, while merely adding
esthetic improvements to the existing GUI-Web interface. While we
constantly hear announcements of the most spectacular innovations, in
practice most of these never reach maturity, because the developers
underestimated the complexity of the task environment.
I believe we are confronted with a complexity bottleneck, which will
significantly dampen the speed of further progress. The human mind
simply is no longer able to cope with the information overload. This
also means that all the big software projects that require a lot of
coordination between different people and sources of information
(e.g. the present "Semantic Web" efforts) either will get seriously
delayed or end up with buggy products.
The only way to overcome this will be a shift to a radically
different way of tackling problems, where the main burden is no
longer on individuals or teams, but on the distributed,
self-organizing, synergetic system that I call the global brain. This
shift will require a lot of time and effort, and won't just happen
instantaneously.
A better model of this transition is not the singularity (hyperbolic
function into infinity) but a logistic curve (exponential growth
which slows down until it is practically linear, and then slows down
further, stabilizing at a new plateau). We are now probably somewhere
in the middle, linear part of the curve. Seen from a distance (say
with a million year scale), a logistic curve may look like a step
function, which implies a singularity or discontinuous jump between
plateaus. In that sense, the singularity is not such a bad model, but
in our present, year by year, time scale, the singularity view doen't
make much sense.
If you would ask me when the singularity would take place in the
million year view, then I would answer that we are right in the
middle of it. But it may take another 50 years or so to come to an
end, unlike a real singularity which is by definition instantaneous.
Question 8: Speaking of the Singularity, how much longer do you believe that
Moore's law will continue? Do you think that we will ever have molecular
electronics?
As you may have guessed by now, I'm not much preoccupied by Moore's
law. The real bottleneck will be organizational: how will we cope
with the complexity involved in programming the powerful processors
promised by Moore's law to do more than number-crunching? I believe
Moore's law, or advances in processing speed more generally, will
continue long enough to give us more than sufficient computing power
for the tasks we would like to achieve.
Question 9: Do you believe that the barriers to machine intelligence are
more hardware related or software related? Can we truly have either AI or IA
without a software breakthrough?
As I already indicated, the real challenge will be software rather
than hardware, and breakthroughs are necessary to achieve both AI and
IA. I have no doubts that these are possible, and a lot of good
theoretical ideas are floating around. The biggest problem is to
integrate all of these into an elegant and encompassing system, that
would have the power to self-organize and adapt to the problems that
are posed to it.
Question 10: What are your plans for the future?
As I said, my main focus now is the development of evolutionary
cybernetics, a theoretical framework that would hopefully give us a
solid foundation for the integration of all these promising ideas
about self-organization, autonomy, distributed knowledge systems,
etc. I plan to give lectures on this subject, write a textbook, and a
number of papers. At the same time, I plan to test my algorithms for
a learning and "thinking" web in a more realistic environment, to
demonstrate their practical usefulness. I further want to continue
developing and spreading the global brain vision together with my
colleagues in the Global Brain Group, through lectures, conferences,
publications and websites.
