Hugo de Garis (1947–) is an expert in genetic algorithms, artificial
intelligence, and topological quantum computing.
He is the creator of the concept of evolvable hardware,
which uses evolutionary algorithms to produce customized electronics that can
alter structural design and performance dynamically and autonomously in
response to their surroundings.
De Garis is most known for his 2005 book The Artilect
Battle, in which he describes what he thinks will be an unavoidable
twenty-first-century worldwide war between mankind and ultraintelligent robots.
In the 1980s, De Garis got fascinated in genetic algorithms,
neural networks, and the idea of artificial brains.
In artificial intelligence, genetic algorithms include the
use of software to model and apply Darwinian evolutionary ideas to search and
optimization issues.
The "fittest" candidate simulations of axons,
dendrites, signals, and synapses in artificial neural networks were evolved
using evolutionary algorithms developed by de Garis.
De Garis developed artificial neural systems that resembled
those seen in organic brains.
In the 1990s, his work with a new type of programmable
computer chips spawned the subject of computer science known as evolvable
hardware.
The use of programmable circuits allowed neural networks to
grow and evolve at high rates.
De Garis also started playing around with cellular automata,
which are mathematical models of complex systems that emerge generatively from
basic units and rules.
The coding of around 11,000 fundamental rules was required
in an early version of his modeling of cellular automata that acted like brain
networks.
About 60,000 such rules were encoded in a subsequent
version.
De Garis called his neural networks-on-a-chip a Cellular
Automata Machine in the 2000s.
De Garis started to hypothesize that the period of
"Brain Building on the Cheap" had come as the price of chips dropped
(de Garis 2005, 45).
He started referring to himself as the "Father of
Artificial Intelligence." He claims that in the future decades, whole
artificial brains with billions of neurons will be built utilizing information
acquired from molecular scale robot probes of human brain tissues and the
advent of new path breaking brain imaging tools.
Topological quantum computing is another enabling technology
that de Garis thinks will accelerate the creation of artificial brains.
He claims that once the physical boundaries of standard
silicon chip manufacturing are approached, quantum mechanical phenomena must be
harnessed.
Inventions in reversible heatless computing will also be
significant in dissipating the harmful temperature effects of tightly packed
circuits.
De Garis also supports the development of artificial
embryology, often known as "embryofacture," which involves the use of
evolutionary engineering and self-assembly methods to mimic the development of
fully aware beings from single fertilized eggs.
According to De Garis, because to fast breakthroughs in
artificial intelligence technology, a conflict over our last innovation will be
unavoidable before the end of the twenty-first century.
He thinks the battle will finish with a catastrophic human
extinction catastrophe he refers to as "gigadeath." De Garis
speculates in his book The Artilect War that continued Moore's Law doubling of
transistors packed on computer chips, accompanied by the development of new
technologies such as femtotechnology (the achievement of femtometer-scale struc
turing of matter), quantum computing, and neuroengineering, will almost
certainly lead to gigadeath.
De Garis felt compelled to create The Artilect War as a
cautionary tale and as a self-admitted architect of the impending calamity.
The Cosmists and the Terrans are two antagonistic worldwide
political parties that De Garis uses to frame his discussion of an impending
Artilect War.
The Cosmists will be apprehensive of the immense power of
future superintelligent machines, but they will regard their labor in creating
them with such veneration that they will experience a near-messianic enthusiasm
in inventing and unleashing them into the world.
Regardless of the hazards to mankind, the Cosmists will
strongly encourage the development and nurturing of ever-more sophisticated and
powerful artificial minds.
The Terrans, on the other hand, will fight against the
creation of artificial minds once they realize they represent a danger to human
civilization.
They will feel compelled to fight these artificial
intelligences because they constitute an existential danger to humanity.
De Garis dismisses a Cyborgian compromise in which humans
and their technological creations blend.
He thinks that robots will grow so powerful and intelligent
that only a small percentage of humanity would survive the confrontation.
China and the United States, geopolitical adversaries, will
be forced to exploit these technology to develop more complex and autonomous
economies, defense systems, and military robots.
Artificial intelligence's dominance in the world will be
welcomed by the Cosmists, who will come to see them as near-gods deserving of
worship.
The Terrans, on the other hand, will fight the transfer of
global economic, social, and military dominance to our machine overlords.
They will see the new situation as a terrible tragedy that
has befallen humanity.
His case for a future battle over superintelligent robots
has sparked a lot of discussion and controversy among scientific and
engineering specialists, as well as a lot of criticism in popular science
journals.
In his 2005 book, de Garis implicates himself as a cause of
the approaching conflict and as a hidden Cosmist, prompting some opponents to
question his intentions.
De Garis has answered that he feels compelled to issue a
warning now because he thinks there will be enough time for the public to
understand the full magnitude of the danger and react when they begin to
discover substantial intelligence hidden in household equipment.
If De Garis' warning is taken seriously, he presents a
variety of eventualities.
First, he suggests that the Terrans may be able to defeat
Cosmist thinking before a superintelligence takes control, though this is
unlikely.
De Garis suggests a second scenario in which artilects quit
the earth as irrelevant, leaving human civilisation more or less intact.
In a third possibility, the Cosmists grow so terrified of
their own innovations that they abandon them.
Again, de Garis believes this is improbable.
In a fourth possibility, he imagines that all Terrans would
transform into Cyborgs.
In a fifth scenario, the Terrans will aggressively seek down
and murder the Cosmists, maybe even in outer space.
The Cosmists will leave Earth, construct artilects, and
ultimately vanish from the solar system to conquer the cosmos in a sixth
scenario.
In a seventh possibility, the Cosmists will flee to space
and construct artilects that will fight each other until none remain.
In the eighth scenario, the artilects will go to space and
be destroyed by an alien super-artilect.
De Garis has been criticized of believing that The
Terminator's nightmarish vision would become a reality, rather than
contemplating that superintelligent computers may just as well bring world
peace.
De Garis answered that there is no way to ensure that
artificial brains operate ethically (humanely).
He also claims that it is difficult to foretell whether or
not a superintelligence would be able to bypass an implanted death switch or
reprogram itself to disobey orders aimed at instilling human respect.
Hugo de Garis was born in 1947 in Sydney, Australia.
In 1970, he graduated from Melbourne University with a
bachelor's degree in Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.
He joined the global electronics corporation Philips as a
software and hardware architect after teaching undergraduate mathematics at
Cambridge University for four years.
He worked at locations in the Netherlands and Belgium.
In 1992, De Garis received a doctorate in Artificial Life
and Artificial Intelligence from the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium.
"Genetic Programming: GenNets, Artificial Nervous
Systems, Artificial Embryos," was the title of his thesis.
De Garis directed the Center for Data Analysis and
Stochastic Processes at the Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life
Research Unit at Brussels as a graduate student, where he explored evolutionary
engineering, which uses genetic algorithms to develop complex systems.
He also worked as a senior research associate at George
Mason University's Artificial Intelligence Center in Northern Virginia, where
he worked with machine learning pioneer Ryszard Michalski.
De Garis did a postdoctoral fellowship at Tsukuba's
Electrotechnical Lab.
He directed the Brain Builder Group at the Advanced
Telecommunications Research Institute International in Kyoto, Japan, for the
following eight years, while they attempted a moon-shot quest to develop a
billion-neuron artificial brain.
De Garis returned to Brussels, Belgium, in 2000 to oversee
Star Lab's Brain Builder Group, which was working on a rival artificial brain
project.
When the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, De Garis' lab went
bankrupt while working on a life-size robot cat.
De Garis then moved on to Utah State University as an
Associate Professor of Computer Science, where he stayed until 2006.
De Garis was the first to teach advanced research courses on
"brain building" and "quantum computing" at Utah State.
He joined Wuhan University's International School of
Software in China as Professor of Computer Science and Mathematical Physics in
2006, where he also served as the leader of the Artificial Intelligence group.
De Garis kept working on artificial brains, but he also
started looking into topological quantum computing.
De Garis joined the advisory board of Novamente, a
commercial business that aims to develop artificial general intelligence, in
the same year.
Two years later, Chinese authorities gave his Wuhan
University Brain Builder Group a significant funding to begin building an
artificial brain.
The China-Brain Project was the name given to the
initiative.
De Garis relocated to Xiamen University in China in 2008,
where he ran the Artificial Brain Lab in the School of Information Science and
Technology's Artificial Intelligence Institute until his retirement in 2010.
~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan
You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.
See also:
Superintelligence; Technological Singularity; The Terminator.
Further Reading:
de Garis, Hugo. 1989. “What If AI Succeeds? The Rise of the Twenty-First Century Artilect.” AI Magazine 10, no. 2 (Summer): 17–22.
de Garis, Hugo. 1990. “Genetic Programming: Modular Evolution for Darwin Machines.” In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, 194–97. Washington, DC: Lawrence Erlbaum.
de Garis, Hugo. 2005. The Artilect War: Cosmists vs. Terrans: A Bitter Controversy Concerning Whether Humanity Should Build Godlike Massively Intelligent Machines. ETC Publications.
de Garis, Hugo. 2007. “Artificial Brains.” In Artificial General Intelligence: Cognitive Technologies, edited by Ben Goertzel and Cassio Pennachin, 159–74. Berlin: Springer.
Geraci, Robert M. 2008. “Apocalyptic AI: Religion and the Promise of Artificial Intelligence.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76, no. 1 (March): 138–66.
Spears, William M., Kenneth A. De Jong, Thomas Bäck, David B. Fogel, and Hugo de Garis. 1993. “An Overview of Evolutionary Computation.” In Machine Learning: ECML-93, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence), vol. 667, 442–59. Berlin: Springer.
