Archive for the ‘Singularity’ Category
Some kind suggestions from our friend to the Singularitarians
Note: Many of these people are the kind who rooted for Arnold in the first Terminator, so they can be difficult to reach.
My friend tried here, though, by way of advising them on how to talk to a fearful public about the future:
You could just play clips from the Jetsons.
What the general public (or nonscientists, at any rate) wish Scientists understood.
The passions
From correspondence between a friend and the Singularitarians, on the question of life, non-life and Deutsch’s Computation reductionism
“If we cannot really know [if machines are alive], then we can’t assume that they aren’t alive any more easily than we can assume they are sentient. But how can we act without assumption of one or the other and still proceed?”
The burden of proof here is on the machines, you could say, and it should be a high burden. I’ve seen no evidence of humans having created any kind of mechanical life, let alone mechanical life having the potential to become superhuman in intelligence. It could be that we can’t do that, that all we can ever do is create really fast machines with a lot of memory, and maybe that’s fine, maybe that’s better.
“If you don’t know if [Shrodinger’s] cat is dead or alive, it seems to me you still have limited options as to how you can proceed. What is better – to assume that it’s more likely the cat is dead and light the box on fire, or to assume it’s more likely alive and open the box so you can at least check before doing something destructive?”
“The question comes down to one of greater harm – which has more dire consequences not just for humans, but for all life? That we assume machines are incapable of reaching a sentient status and continuing to treat them like machines (in other words, assume they can’t possibly be slaves, potentially enslaving something sentient) or to assume that they could be sentient and do everything in our power to figure it out before we get to the point of doing something destructive?”
For all of that, of course I think we should monitor it closely and not do anything avoidable that is destructive. But why would we want to create machines that are alive, let alone a synthetic superintelligence?
Deutsch and “Artificial Intelligence”
http://www.aeonmagazine.com/being-human/david-deutsch-artificial-intelligence/
I also don’t accept the “Universality of Computation.”
Sorry. I don’t think everything can be reduced to calculation, information retrieval, processing. I do think there is a qualitative difference, further, between life and non-life (which would be “racist” as the author says, though he never says that something “racist” is therefore “not true”; I suppose we are all simply supposed to know this, since “racist” things are, by definition, “bad” and “bad” things can not be “true”.)
Nonsense.
A machine that fools you into thinking it’s not a machine is still a machine. You’ve just been fooled. The Turing test, for all of Turing’s obvious genius and accomplishments, is silly; more importantly, it’s epistemic, not physical/ontologic (it is a statement about conclusions we as humans have come to about the identity of a thing, our knowledge, or seeming knowledge, of that identity, not the identity itself.)
You can say whatever you’d like, but thinking something is alive or human or conscious or whatever does not make it so. I suppose it is fairer to say we simply cannot know, ultimately, whether something is alive in the same way that we are ourselves alive (conscious, sentient, however you’d like to describe it); saying, because we cannot really know, and the thing seems to be alive (sentient, conscious whatever) therefore it is, or may as well be, strikes me as wrong.
(Similarly, you may not know whether or not the cat in the box is dead or alive, but it is either dead or alive, not both, or neither; you simply don’t know. That is to say, it has properties in itself independent of your understanding or observation. A person is alive, sentient, intelligent, conscious, however you want to describe it in himself, not because you think he is.)
I simply do not accept the reductionist idea that life is just non-life that can compute and act with apparent volition, and that the only difference between a person and a software program is computing power and clever enough coding. (I also think it a monstrous idea; but that’s a moral/aesthetic judgment, not an argument against the validity of the concept, so I’ll leave it be).
What is it that drives your computations? (what makes a person want to go left rather than right, decide to write an essay rather than go skiing, etc.) Only living things have desire (as one of their characteristics), volition, drive; these things cannot be reduced to the product of “computation” however complex; they are qualitatively different from that.
Life is not just problem solving (something makes the living creature [not “entity;” a cat or a person is not a rock, a corporation or an iPad] decide to solve or attempt to solve one problem and not some other problem, experience something, abandon something else, etc.
A Letter from a friend to the Singularitarians
Good day.
I would describe myself as a qualified technology enthusiast (which is to say, someone excited about certain intermediate term technological possibilities [regenerative medicine, genomics, robotics, etc.], while skeptical about others [AI, the singularity, the Internet as it has evolved {post Web 2.0}, the surveillance state, etc.]).
So I’m neither a Luddite nor an extropian. I have all of the rectangles (Plasma, LCD, Mac Pro [with dual widescreens!] MacBook Pro, iPad, iPhone, iPod, etc.), and I’ve been online one way or another since the BBS days, but I don’t watch commercial television; I don’t post on Facebook, Tweet, pass around YouTube clips, or otherwise spend my days playing with my telephone.
I also don’t believe that the Singularity will bring about abundance, the withering away of the state, or the peaceful ascension of humans into physical immortality (as indefinitely young post-humans) (most of that would be just fine, I just don’t think any of it will happen, not all at once, and if at all, not for a long time).
Technology is used by people (who seem intent on reducing it to its most moronic or destructive possible applications, like the blubbery infantile post humans chattering away at each other from their motorized chairs in Wall-E); I don’t believe people become magically transformed from the vapid, annoying, myopic, grasping clods they tend to be as individuals into some kind of wise superhuman force by stacking them on top of each other either (whether you call that stacking the market or democracy or state or metastate) (so I’m not receptive to arguments about market process [unhindered, of course, by the State] just solving all of our problems for us) I’m not anti-market (I was an Austrian!), I just don’t sacrifice to the Market God, just as I’m not anti-Machine, but believe:
The machines were created to serve us, not replace us.
As a lifelong anti-Marxist, I never believed in the labor theory of value (and think the closest thing we can get to a social ideal would be having the machines do all of the [non-creative] work, freeing humans to do more interesting things with their time; rather like Athens or the Roman Republic (with machines standing in for the slaves).
Until recently, nobody really cared about “jobs” (work was for slaves), what they cared about was wealth.
A Note on Population
Any discussion about economics or the environment that ignores population growth is a waste of time. The trillions spent and technology applied thus far to the problem (of what is called global development) have all too often worsened it by making possible a population explosion that could never have happened in their absence.
It won’t do either to assume that population will stabilize in the “developing” world as it has in the “developed” once economic conditions improve; thus far, this has not proven universally true, nor is there any particular reason why it should prove true (unless you think that everybody everywhere is the same, that people are just little units of production and consumption differing only in input variables like education and net worth).
I’m not one to call for “death squads”, of course, but I do think people should be held responsible, to the extent possible, for the decisions they make. If they have more children then they can support, they should not be privileged to export or otherwise impose the consequences of their irresponsibility on the rest of us. Any humanitarian aid/technology we may offer to mitigate the otherwise inevitable consequences of such choices (such as famine), should be contingent upon their adopting policies that will lessen their future likelihood.
And no, the market won’t “provide,” either. The market “provides” whatever people want, if they can pay for it. When the population of Africa doubles again to 2 Billion in a few decades, if those 2 billion can not produce or otherwise acquire enough in value to trade for, say, the food they want (to stay alive), the market will provide them with starvation (absent exogenous intervention, of course).
As to why any of that is our problem (in the “West” or the “North” or whatever you’d like to call the places that have developed themselves),the idea that if we have something or build something we are somehow obliged to share it with teeming masses everywhere (who lack it and/or could never create it for themselves), well, that’s another goopy headed post-Christian bit of egalitarian blather.
The filthy hordes out there you pretend to care so much about, whose lack of (uninfected) water or food or clothes or the wheel or fire or anything else you want to lay on my head,
Those people hate you and want you dead. Well to the extent they are aware of you at all, of course. By all means, hop a plane to the Congo or Bangladesh or Libya or wherever, just don’t pretend any of it has anything to do with me.
Automation and the supposed end of Manual labor
“…we need to create a world where people are equally valuable; we need to create a world where people cannot be forced into any terrible bargains. We need to aim for a world where no one makes choices that are hard and heartbreaking. This is a structural problem. It’s a societal problem.”
Further, there will always be terrible bargains and choices that are hard and heartbreaking. Even if all of this supposedly wondrous upcoming technology allows us to Immanentize the latest Eschaton and bring about a post human era of perfect abundance, this writer’s affected demands could never be realized without essentially denying humanity completely (transforming it into something very different; inequality, difficult choices, and all of the rest of it are simply part of what it means to have individual humans, and not something else, like, say, an insect colony, or the Borg).
A Note to the Enlightened
All of this talk about “enlightenment” is ontological trash.
Responding most immediately to this interview:
http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/08/08/engineering-enlightenment-part-one/
http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/08/10/engineering-enlightenment-part-two/
http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/08/13/engineering-enlightenment-part-three/
You cannot erase the distinction between the self and the other without ceasing to be. (A wheel is a wheel; it may also part of a car, if attached to the car; if the “wheel” only exists as part of the car [as in a wood carving of a “car” with “wheels”, then it’s no longer a wheel, or rather it never was a wheel, it was only a wheel like portion of a wood carving of a car. Analogously, a word only means something to the extent it means that and not everything else; red is red and not blue; if red were red and blue, it would no longer be red; it might be contained within the abstraction color, which would be color to the extent it was color and not also sound; etc.)
Being is being something.
Being (a sentient creature) is being someone, some place, in the world. It is particular.
Whether or not you believe in the reality of the self, it is you; without it, you are nothing. Maybe some larger thing that you are, or believe yourself to be, a part of, is, but you yourself are nothing (if we were to truly erase the distinction between you and various others in your immediate vicinity, by say, dropping a hydrogen bomb on you, the matter and energy that had until that moment might still be, but you would be gone).
The illusion is not that there is a self and an other. (Keep telling yourself there is no spoon or no brick or no chair; when somebody throws that brick through your windshield, the brick won’t care if you believe in it; nor will the coroner.)
The illusion, or rather, the lie, is that the universe is some great cosmic oneness, some totality of being which everything is a “manifestation” of, into which the “enlightened” think themselves reabsorbed.
The universe is actually comprised of a finite but very large number of beings (conscious and unconscious) which exist only to the extent they are not other beings (they are discrete points of organization); to “eliminate” the “boundaries” between these beings and reabsorb them into the great totality, would be to destroy them (convert them into “pure” unstructured energy… the enlightened ideal here would seem to be a supernova, followed by a black hole).
Those things you think of as barriers to your absorption into the great cosmic totality of being are YOU.
The people who want you to do this are trying to kill you.
Further, the other great “eastern” idea:
1. That life is suffering caused by unfulfilled desire, and therefore
2. The only way to end suffering (or transcend it) is to negate desire (I suppose by accepting that it is futile/meaningless, in the larger context of the great oneness, and thus no longer experiencing it)
is WRONG.
It is a pose.
People are always posing, it’s all part of the Great Game, Status (who controls Afghanistan is a very, very small game compared to this).
1. How much better they are (morally) and/or
2. How much smarter they are
These days, being better usually involves a ritualized denunciation/demonization of somebody worse (some person or people held up as an example of inferiority or evil, to demonstrate, by contrast, the superiority or goodness of whoever is posing).
But is doesn’t have to, directly. The poser can simply point to himself and revel in the seemingly inherent superiority of his moral/intellectual position (we see this with the Kantian/post-Kantian human rights crowd, a topic for another day).
In this case, we have a set of grand sounding statements designed to sound like the speaker has penetrated the Essence of All Things, and Understands; they are so abstruse and seem so complete, they have to reflect something wise, something better.
No.
They are just wrong.
Wrong on every point
Let’s examine:
1. Life is suffering caused by unfulfilled desire,
Life is not just suffering.
(Nobody believes that it is, that’s part of the pose of “Enlightened” profundity; other poses come to mind [such as the existentialist pose (that we are totally “free” to choose to be anything, and what we are is strictly the product of choice) or the equality pose (that everyone is the equal or everyone else)]. etc.
Nobody, nobody, believes any of them, not really. )
Further, not all suffering is caused by unfulfilled desire, and not all unfulfilled desire causes suffering.
(Yes, there is suffering in life and some of it is caused by unfulfilled desire, but these are pieces of a much larger whole; the statements as presented are not profound, they are mindless; they can only be defended by torturing the words unfulfilled, desire and suffering to the point they mean everything, and thus nothing).
The absence of desire also causes suffering (I suppose they would say it is the desire to experience desire, unfulfilled, that is causing the suffering, but this is clearly nonsense; further, if all suffering really were caused by unfulfilled desire, or even if all unfulfilled desire caused suffering, why would we desire desire?)
We want to want, not just what we want, but to want in the abstract. (We are constantly provoking desire, seeking out things that will make us want, even if we know we can’t have them;
women look at shoes, men look at women,
both are happier being around women and shoes,
even if they can’t posses them,
then they would be if there were no shoes or women at all.
It will not do to say men look at women, or women look at shoes, because they want to look (they enjoy looking), and so the desire is being fulfilled, etc.; That’s not true, and misses the point; a man can enjoy looking at a woman, want to possess her, know that “this desire will never be fulfilled”, and still not “suffer;” he may even enjoy the idea of wanting someone he cannot possess. Whether women enjoy the idea of wanting shoes they can’t possess is a different question (the same principles apply, but I can’t really say, and
to fulfill the desire of looking at women, or women l
To say the desire to see the women or shoes is being fulfilled here is not e
2. The only way to end suffering (or transcend it) is to negate desire (I suppose by accepting that it is futile/meaningless, in the larger context of the great oneness, and thus no longer experiencing it)
is WRONG.
Life is not all suffering.
Clickety Clack: A note to the Rectangle Crowd
Those of you who divide your time between:
1. Streaming YouTube clips
2. Tweeting
3. ReTweeting
4. Texting strings of letters and little smiley face pictures
5. Posting incisive, though ungrammatical, status updates about the weather and/or whoever you just saw on television
Go away.
Nobody cares what you think. Most of what you think you think was probably inserted by some marketer using the noise stream to get you to buy something.
Clack clack, stare, ca-clack, stare, clack clack clack.
Planet Ulrich 