Tag

neurobiology Archives - Eve Poole

Is AI playing chess, or playing me?

By | Business, Theology | No Comments

Blitz Chess is a chess game where each players has to complete the whole game in under 10 minutes. There is an even faster version, called Bullet Chess, which reduces the time limit to 3 minutes. It is mesmerising to watch, as the players seemingly make moves instantaneously, in a game where we are used to seeing long pauses for deep thought. Often those who succeed at fast chess are also expert at classical chess: the top-ranked rapid players in both the male and female categories at the moment are also the top-ranked classical chess players.

Blitz Chess is a great case study for looking at AI and intuition, because chess is one of the games that AI has already become better at playing than humans. AI has no problem with fast chess. But Blitz Chess as a human experience is an intriguing way to interrogate intuition. Books like Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow tend to portray intuition as lightning-quick processing, the fruits of years of learning and experience (and bias). Intuition happens so fast that we are not aware of our own processing, so we tend to ascribe a kind of magic to it; a magic that the sceptics would argue simply is not there. They would see it in the same light as the immediacy of AI: excellent programming with sped-up processing. And there is certainly neuroscience research which attests that those who have become expert at chess have created these kinds of efficiencies in their brains through years of practice.

In the studies, those playing rapid chess are also particularly using their sight to process patterns at speed, both in computer chess and in physical chess games. This shows up as evidence of ‘theta power’ which is what the brain mobilises for navigational tasks as well as for memory retrieval. For Queen’s Gambit fans this might explain Beth’s addiction to the tranquillizers that seemingly enable her to visualise chess moves, because being in theta is associated with an enhanced capacity for daydreaming, imagery, and visualization.

This is in contrast to blindfold chess, where the player compensates for the lack of visual data by intensive internal data-mining, indicated by evidence of what is called alpha power, in the same way that an AI playing chess is also only using ‘internal’ resources. Interestingly, it has been argued that while the human capacity for mapping physical space has been vital in their evolution, this capacity in the brain has evolved such that now the same neurological processes are used for both physical mapping and for the navigation of mental space. An AI programmed with our evolved abilities benefits from this progression without now needing the physical experience which helped to develop it. And in spite of this interesting history and the data from neuroscience, competition results suggest that humans no longer have any advantage over AI when playing chess.

But is there anything in the act of playing a physical chess game with a human opponent that cannot be reduced to just the data of the game? I think there is. Because the person sitting on the other side of the board is not playing chess, they are playing me. Have you ever cheated by solving a maze backwards? Mazes are solvable because, while there are apparently many routes through, only one reaches the destination, so you can identify which it is by starting from the end. This makes a maze a solvable puzzle. In philosophy, there was a famous argument about puzzles, and whether they were the same as problems. It took place one October evening in 1946 at a meeting of the Cambridge Moral Science Club, between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. Tempers were so frayed by it that Wittgenstein reportedly threatened Popper with a poker. Popper’s essential point was that there are solvable things, like mathematical problems, and there are un-solvable things, which are the proper concern of philosophy. To muddle a solvable puzzle with an unsolvable problem is to commit a category error which encourages wasted effort, like using a screwdriver on a nail. This is the essential distinction between computer chess and in-person chess. Reducing chess to a puzzle – which is what AI does – allows it to zoom ahead of human chess players by becoming ever more efficient at solving the puzzle. With the rules as they are, a set board and specified pieces, there are only so many permutations that are possible, and an artificial brain will eventually be able to exhaust all of these possibilities, rendering it unbeatable. Eventually it will be like asking a calculator a sum, which is not a game but a calculation. However, humans play games as though they were problems. There is always the hope that there might be victory, because while humans are involved, the outcome can never be a foregone conclusion.

AI could be used to train a human so that they had the full range of possible solutions to hand, but an in-person game between two humans will always be unpredictable, because humans do not always follow the rules in the way that a computer is programmed to do, and humans make mistakes. Through their consciousness, they also have access to data other than their own memory bank of moves – and their knowledge of their opponent’s previous games – and they pick this data up through their senses. Did their opponent just pause? Are their eye movements unusual? Do they appear to be nervous or distracted? Perhaps an AI could be trained to detect this kind of data, but it would still lack the sixth sense to combine these qualia into action. A case in point is a recent story about the game Go. The AI AlphaGo having beaten the reigning world champion, it was thought that a human would never again be able to prevail. But a human used a competitor AI to analyse AlphaGo for weaknesses. The person used this information to devise a winning strategy, which involved slowly looping stones around one of the opponent’s own groups, while distracting the AI by making moves in other corners of the board. A human person’s intuition would have flagged this incursion, but the AI missed it. In terms of how humans evolved an ability to data-mine, because this grew out of our ability to read physical spatial information in our external environment, the folk memory of why we need this ability, encoded into our intuition, seems to be salient in such situations.

So what? Stop regarding the AI as the competition. It is not – it is your trainer. People are your competition, and to beat them you will need to be as good as AI, but better at humanity. Because it is not only your technical problem-solving skills that are at play in this game when you play it with a person, but your emotions, your intuition, and your sixth sense; and mastering them will give you the edge you need to win.

Robot Souls is due out 1 August 2023 and is available for pre-order here.

Leadersmithing TEDx

By | Business | No Comments

Here is my script for the TEDx I gave about Leadersmithing on 11 March 2017. You can also watch it here.

Hello. You’re probably wondering what’s with the pearls. Well, pearls have a dirty secret, and I’m here to tell you about it. It’s all about the pearls. So if you only remember 1 thing about this talk, remember the pearls.

Pearls are associated with such glamour, aren’t they? I inherited my first set, from a great grandmother who had been brought up at Hampton Court Palace. My second set were from Hatton Garden, given to me by my boyfriend when we worked next door at Deloitte Consulting. I bought my third set in Beijing when I took our Ashridge MBA students out there on a study trip.

But their glamour is hard-won. They have grit in their hearts. Their beauty and lustre is the result of a defence mechanism, designed to protect the oyster against a threatening irritant. I’m from Scotland, and in Scotland they don’t say ‘pearls’: they say ‘perils.’ And perils is exactly what the beauty of a pearl is bearing witness to – it owes its very existence to the oyster being in peril. Read More

Robot Dread

By | Business, Theology | No Comments

I sense a morbid fear behind our catastrophizing about androids, which I reckon is to do with a loss of autonomy. It’s true that for periods in history tribes and people have assumed they have no autonomy, life being driven by the fates or by a predetermined design or creator, so this could be a particularly modern malady in an era that luxuriates in free will. But concern about the creep of cyborgism through the increasing use of technology in and around our bodies seems to produce a frisson of existential dread that I have been struggling to diagnose. Technology has always attracted its naysayers, from the early saboteurs to the Luddites and the Swing Rioters, and all the movements that opposed the Industrial Revolution, but this feels less about livelihoods and more about personhood. Read More

Leadersmithing – TEDx Durham University

By | Business | One Comment

Speech at TEDx, Durham, 11th March 2017 (watch here)

Hello. You’re probably wondering what’s with the pearls. Well, pearls have a dirty secret, and I’m here to tell you about it. It’s all about the pearls. So if you only remember one thing about this talk, remember the pearls.

Pearls are associated with such glamour, aren’t they? I inherited my first set, from a great grandmother who had been brought up at Hampton Court Palace. My second set were from Hatton Garden, given to me by my boyfriend when we worked next door at Deloitte Consulting. I bought my third set in Beijing when I took our Ashridge MBA students out there on a study trip.

But their glamour is hard-won. They have grit in their hearts. Their beauty and lustre is the result of a defence mechanism, designed to protect the oyster against a threatening irritant. I’m from Scotland, and in Scotland they don’t say ‘pearls’: they say ‘perils.’ And perils is exactly what the beauty of a pearl is bearing witness to – it owes its very existence to the oyster being in peril. Read More

The Ridley Lecture

By | Theology | No Comments

As well as Chairing Faith in Business here at Ridley, I teach leadership at Ashridge Business School. Over the last 10 years or so I’ve been lucky enough to help quite a wide range of leaders work out how to get better at what they do. I’ve taught the Head of Clouds at the Met Office, the Head of Killing at Bernard Matthews, and the Administrator of Tristan da Cunha. Read More

qui ambulant in lege domini

By | Theology | No Comments

Sermon preached at Portsmouth Cathedral, Sunday 29 January 2012

The anthem for today is Beati Quorum Via by Charles Villiers Stanford. The choir might be interested to know that, while he was an undergraduate in the 1870s, Stanford was so cross with the Cambridge University Musical Society for refusing to allow female singers that he founded his own mixed voice choir. It was so much better than theirs, that the Musical Society gave in and agreed to a merger, so it is a particularly apt choice today. Read More

Am I choosing to write this blog?

By | Business, Theology | No Comments

You may recall that a chapter on Corporate Psychopaths was included in the 2010 book I co-edited on Ethical Leadership. Its primary author, Clive Boddy, has been attracting some recent press attention on the subject, following publication of an extended version of the chapter in the Journal of Business Ethics. One of my longstanding worries about this very useful identification of a potential boardroom problem is whether the said psychopaths could then use this diagnosis to plead diminished responsibility for any perceived wrongdoing. Read More

How to Learn

By | Business | No Comments

I recently wrote a leaflet for Ashridge on how to learn, based on a combination of Ashridge’s 50 years’ experience in executive education and our recent research into the neurobiology of learning. Here are my Learning Basics and Top 10 Tips. Read More

Turbo-charging Leadership – the ‘Google’ Project

By | Business | No Comments

I love google. All that data out there. One click and the google elves trot about the web fetching it for you. Wheelbarrows of the stuff. At Ashridge I have decided our next generation 3Rs for learning are Receptiveness, Retention and Retrieval: how can we optimise a leader’s receptiveness to learning, to what extent can we help them retain in their memory what they have learned, and how effectively will they be able to retrieve this knowledge when they need to use it. These 3Rs are now defining our agenda for the Centre for Research in Executive Development (CRED). Read More