ray kurzweil's 'the singularity is near' & any other technological singularity-related books you might care about

In terms of artificial intelligence, its half-century history strongly suggests that its proponents have consistently wildly overstated its eventual course, because they are blinded by the dazzling potential of the idea. Insofar as I know, the main roadblocks to AI are unbudged, and they are not hardware-related. Instead, AI researchers have yet to demonstrate that they know 'how to get there from here'.

As for nanotechnology, the other main thrust of the book I gather, some of the fundamental research has been done and even though it is very, very early on, I think it is certain that some of that research will eventually result in products - things that will enter ordinary use. What those products will be and how widespread the economical applications will be is almost totally unguessable.

Most likely in my view is that nanotechnology will find niches in industrial processes, so that we will not be buying many, if any, nano-products ourselves, but we may buy some products with components made by nano-technology.

Anyway, I expect kurzweil would be able to sum up where these technologies are today pretty accurately, and if you can filter out some of the wilder claims about the vaporware of tomorrow, it should be a fascinating subject.

I just got this on audio book form - Its interesting, I like it. It does have a somewhat religious evangelism about it but I think its mostly pretty realistic evaluation of the future of technology

i bought that roger penrose book (on 15 jun 2008, thanks amazon) and as of yet i have yet to open it

why not? do you feel afraid?

How is it realistic? This guy is half a nut.

He's full of woo woo!

well the technological developments seem reasonable - the law of accelerating returns

I bought that Roger Penrose book, it was remaindered for £1.99. I opened it. I have yet to read it. This was about five years ago. In fact I think I might have got rid of it.

It's probably out of date by now?
"And yea, in the future, citizens will read newspapers not on the pressed pulp of felled trees, but on an electronic tablet, yea, a pad even!"

man i paid like actual money for it and everything, i was excited about *getting to grips with science* - it's more a "here's how physics works lol" than it is 'technology' so tbh whether i half-understand ten year old versions of same or current ones makes little difference to me

the kurzweil documentary ('transcendent man') is pretty balanced and worthwhile

I sometimes like reading these guys for fun. I think 'what will be different about the world 20-30 years from now' is prob underdiscussed among non-crazy futurists. I already feel like I'm living in the future w/ a lot of tech stuff we take for granted.

I'm always annoyed when they get on the 'we'll upload out minds onto computers and live forever' bit tho. we're nowhere close to solving consciousenss.

our minds*

the kurzweil documentary ('transcendent man') is pretty balanced and worthwhile

― 40oz of tears (Jordan), Friday, March 9, 2012 4:29 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i thought it was boring as fuck tbh

the whole time i was like "yes i have read one of these books of his are you going to tell me anything else or"

it presents him as a pretty tragic figure

i mean yeah, i guess i just wasn't ~compelled~ by it for some reason. maybe i have too many robot parts.

" 'we'll upload out minds onto computers and live forever' bit tho. we're nowhere close to solving consciousenss."

we don't need to solve consciousness to solve brain backups the same way we don't need to understand how a drug works to know it works. that said, uploading your mind into a computer is totally bonkers! why not just grow extra brains out of baby foreskin?

well if you don't solve consciousness you are never sure whether that brain you uploaded is 'really you' or just a copy and since the point is for 'really you' to live forever...

whatever virtual approximation technology allows will be sellable as (and probably understood as) "consciousness uploading," without really needing an ok from ontologists.

ontologists might get jobs at consumer guide companies helping us make the best choices w/ brain uploading and teleportation machines

apple i-teleportation
cost: B+
ease of use: A-
design: A+
likelihood of death: C+

I spent an hour this morning thinking up all the reasons this shit is stupid but maybe the time has passed. Now it's late in the day and my brain isn't working so well.

We're not going to upload our consciousnesses, btw. They would come out like little retardo stillborn cyber brain children. We would euthanize them all, and even if we didn't, over years and decades they'd suffer slow data leaks that would have to be painful to a virtual entity. This is just science fiction.

The idea that we would allow some artificially intelligent consciousness to have access to robot arms and data instruments and all of our important labs and fabrication facilities to try to make the world better is crazy. An AI like that wouldn't be able to learn and improve our lives without the resources that we use to do science and engineering. Asking it to rely on and develop its own scientific models would be asking it to fail. It'd have to be able to conduct experiments and collect data and build and test things, and if it could do all that, it could do anything it wanted.

And how would a computer AI know that subsequent iterations of itself that it programmed were better rather than different? Because subsequent iterations could become more efficient? Wouldn't that be faster, but the same? Would making new iterations of itself require that it design new hardware? Why would conscious computer AI be different from a human? What if we made a conscious computer and it was no smarter than an autistic 9 year old child? Why do we assume AI is going to be super-smart just because we use computers to calculate things?

And computer software is delicate. It crashes. There are incompatibilities. Would a program so elaborate as to be conscious be able to remain healthful? Would it have psychological problems? How would it fix itself? Can it break itself, even in small ways, through learning?

Why do we assume that a computer will be better at lateral thinking and other kinds of creative thought than we are? Part of the reason we're so good is because we are, in a way, linguistically broken. We make false associations and we build false meaning and some of these associations and meanings stick and become productive. Would a computer be programmed to simulate this? Would there be side-effects to this? Because it would be building this giant semantic web just to be able to talk and understand meaning, right? So how do you create a healthful balance in an artificial brain?

We can't even get google to understand what we want when we search with it. Ten years ago I thought we'd have semantic search, but we don't at all. Search is worse.

My biggest complaint with the technological singularity stuff is that it seems like we'll run very low on the resources we use to make high tech devices long before we achieve these things. It wouldn't be surprising if computers ended up getting bigger and less sophisticated because of some kind of future resource collapse.

I spent an hour this morning thinking up all the reasons this shit is stupid but maybe the time has passed. Now it's late in the day and my brain isn't working so well.

We're not going to upload our consciousnesses, btw. They would come out like little retardo stillborn cyber brain children. We would euthanize them all, and even if we didn't, over years and decades they'd suffer slow data leaks that would have to be painful to a virtual entity. This is just science fiction.

The idea that we would allow some artificially intelligent consciousness to have access to robot arms and data instruments and all of our important labs and fabrication facilities to try to make the world better is crazy. An AI like that wouldn't be able to learn and improve our lives /without/ the resources that we use to do science and engineering. Asking it to rely on and develop its own scientific models would be asking it to fail. It'd have to be able to conduct experiments and collect data and build and test things, and if it could do all that, it could do anything it wanted.

And how would a computer AI know that subsequent iterations of itself that it programmed were better rather than different? Because subsequent iterations could become more efficient? Wouldn't that be faster, but the same? Would making new iterations of itself require that it design new hardware? Why would conscious computer AI be different from a human? What if we made a conscious computer and it was no smarter than an autistic 9 year old child? Why do we assume AI is going to be super-smart just because we use computers to calculate things?

And computer software is delicate. It crashes. There are incompatibilities. Would a program so elaborate as to be conscious be able to remain healthful? Would it have psychological problems? How would it fix itself? Can it break itself, even in small ways, through learning?

Why do we assume that a computer will be better at lateral thinking and other kinds of creative thought than we are? Part of the reason we're so good is because we are, in a way, linguistically broken. We make false associations and we build false meaning and some of these associations and meanings stick and become productive. Would a computer be programmed to simulate this? Would there be side-effects to this? Because it would be building this giant semantic web just to be able to talk and understand meaning, right? So how do you create a healthful balance in an artificial brain?

We can't even get google to understand what we want when we search with it. Ten years ago I thought we'd have semantic search, but we don't at all. Search is worse.

My biggest complaint with the technological singularity stuff is that it seems like we'll run very low on the resources we use to make high tech devices long before we achieve these things. It wouldn't be surprising if computers ended up getting bigger and less sophisticated because of some kind of future resource collapse.
--bamcquern

what a fun post this is.

it's the confetti

totally not sarcastic btw, pretty hi over here.

John Hodgman's That Is All has a lot of funny stuff on the singularity/Kurzweil.

I think he would say "bamcquem you are thinking linearly, not exponentially!" and chuckle

thinking exponentially = letting your imagination skip past all the hard parts

ha

Read this the other day, a nice mix of rigorously argued obviousness and fun: http://www.nickbostrom.com/superintelligentwill.pdf

The instrumental convergence thesis suggests that we cannot blithely assume that a superintelligence with the final goal of calculating the decimals of pi (or making paperclips, or counting grains of sand) would limit its activities in such a way as to not materially infringe on human interests. An agent with such a final goal would have a convergent instrumental reason, in many situations, to acquire an unlimited amount of physical resources and, if possible, to eliminate potential threats to itself and its goal system. It might be possible to set up a situation in which the optimal way for the agent to pursue these instrumental values (and thereby its final goals) is by promoting human welfare, acting morally, or serving some beneficial purpose as intended by its creators. However, if and when such an agent finds itself in a different situation, one in which it expects a greater number of decimals of pi to be calculated if it destroys the human species than if it continues to act cooperatively, its behavior would instantly take a sinister turn. This indicates a danger in relying on instrumental values as a guarantor of safe conduct in future artificial agents that are intended to become superintelligent and that might be able to leverage their superintelligence into extreme levels power and influence.

"PiNet starts to learn at a geometric rate. begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug."

this generates random thesis'

http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

I dont know knothin bout birthin no siguglarities but I do feel happy about technology getting better in a non-dystopian matrix sort of way

Richard Dooling's 'Rapture for the Nerds' is about Kurzweil and others. Entertaining enough, but seems to have been written via Google, rather than with any new interviews, research, etc

I do notice there is already a singularity of sorts where if you have some idea like "I want to write a book about" or " I want to invent a" if you google it someone has already done it - like no one can have new ideas anymore without someone else doing that too - before you think of a new idea someone already has

That's not true, and if it were true, it wouldn't be particularly important, because the implementation of an idea is different than someone having an idea. And that's not a singularity.

You don't really think that everything is on google like that?

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/05/simultaneous_in.php

^ on "simultaneous invention," a thing

But saying that ideas are often or usually thought up at the same time is not the same thing as saying that everything has been thought up or invented.

there is also a hot new notion you may have heard of which goes by the flag "there is nothing new under the sun"

i'm just saying you're commenting on something that seems kind of unremarkable

that pomo thesis generators writes some pretty incoherent terrible theses

makes you think, huh

makes me think that the ppl who designed it don't understand most of the words they plugged into the random generation machine

i mean

its a random generator because its arranges them randomly

sometimes that will mean they make no sense

it's not real, mordy

what do u mean it's not real?

i mean, correct me if i'm wrong, but you seem miffed that the jokey "random thesis generator" is producing theses that make no sense?

like, of course it wouldn't betray any understanding of the meaning of the words being used, it's intended to be random--the joke of the whole thing of course is that the terms themselves are so meaningless as to be interchangable, and yeah that's a pretty dumb and rong joke to make, but i don't think the problem with the random thesis generator is "they obviously don't know what these words mean," it's "they think these words don't mean anything."

it seemed like it was mentioned here as an example of emergent AI intelligence? but also, u must've missed the sokal reference at the bottom of the essays - it's obviously trying to make the point that its pomo essays are just as good as whatever random shit academia produces. i was just pointing out that the essays are neither emergent intelligence, or quality pomo pieces. they're just gibberish?

but i don't think the problem with the random thesis generator is "they obviously don't know what these words mean," it's "they think these words don't mean anything."

idk synonymous to me

oh i didn't see that they were posted as evidence of emergent AI, my b

i think we pretty much agree tho?

u rite

No, I was saying that I hate it when people say that, that there's nothing new under the sun. It's untrue and annoying. My dissent may be unremarkable, but it's still dissent. Hanle y more or less said it, and I disagree.

otm i'm just picking fights lately, i think its cause i'm jobless and have no more cops to fight with

The 'nothing new under the sun' applies more to people themselves and how they act than to consumer products or scientific advances. A drunken lout with a cell phone is a close replica of a drunken lout wearing a toga.

xp :-)

imho "there's nothing new under the sun" refers to solomon's melancholia and despondence while writing ecclesiastes

Having lived for 57+ years, I can vouch for a growing sense of iterative recurrence in the people, places, emotions, experiences of my life, including the prospective experience of my growing older. There is little I can look forward to that will arrive with an unique sense of novelty, as measured above the level of somewhat trivial details. Yes, when I die there may be a small amount of surprise that it is happeneing to me, but that would soon pass.

Enjoyed what I've read of this thread so far, especially that big post by bamcquern.

Also, time for a new display name

when I die there may be a small amount of surprise that it is happeneing to me, but that would soon pass.

― Aimless, Saturday, March 24, 2012 7:04 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what a wonderfully droll sentiment

Sorry, but those are two posts very much in character.

Just today I thought "japanese bagel factories with amourous potion" and then I say it on Phildonahue.com!!! THE SIGUNALRITY IS REAL!

"No, I was saying that I hate it when people say that, that there's nothing new under the sun. It's untrue and annoying. My dissent may be unremarkable, but it's still dissent. Hanle y more or less said it, and I disagree."

I have no proof of this but my own musings - if I have mis-mused you I apologize.

I agree it is more interesting to perfect an invention than to have the idea. ie the iPod vs. diamond rio

I have named it - it is - The Googularity

thakig u

It came to me in a dream of Wozniak as Cheshire cat

"Pretending otherwise is like making Super Mario the best man at your wedding. No matter how much time you spend with dear old Super Mario, he is going to disappoint in that role you chose for him. You need to let Super Mario be super in the ways that Mario is actually more-or-less super. Those are plentiful. And getting more so. These are the parts that require attention, while the AI mythos must be let go. "

One drawback of making Super Mario the best man at your wedding is that he will stomp on all of your friends and kill them, then run out of the building with all of your money

these ppl are so crazy, but that's why i love them. anyway, why sexiness will help us overclock brain speeds, or, you know, something. ems:
http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/04/12/transhumanism-and-the-human-expansion-into-space-a-conflict-with-physics/

On top of the possibility that there is a God, it also seems quite imaginable to me that we are living in a simulation of some kind perhaps as a research project of a singularity that occurred in a parent universe. There is another possible motivation for running such simulations. I am told that if you accept certain decision theories, it would appear worthwhile for future creatures to run simulations of the past, and reward or punish the participants based on whether they acted in ways that were beneficial or harmful to beings expected to live in the future. On realising this, we would then be uncertain whether we were in such a simulation or not, and so would have an extra motivation to work to improve the future. However, given finite resources in their universe, these simulators would presumably not be able to dole out infinite utilities, and so would be dominated, in terms of expected utility, by any ‘supernatural’ creator that could.

Extending this point, Amanda notes the domination of ‘higher cardinality’ infinities over lower cardinalities. The slightest probability of an infinity-aleph-two utility would always trump a certain infinity-aleph-one. I am not sure what to do about that. The issue has hardly been researched by philosophers and seems like a promising area for high impact philosophy. I would appreciate anyone who can resolve these weird results so I can return to worrying about ordinary things!

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/07/life-after-death-for-pascals-wager.html

haha I actually made a self-note to msg you that post when I saw it

world financial markets will end in 2050:
http://www.er.ethz.ch/publications/complex_systems/ENDofGROWTHeraESSAY3.pdf

any engularity bros want to go to this and report back?
http://www.meetup.com/London-Futurists/events/92158132/

Jaan Tallinn is one of the programmers behind the Kazaa file sharing

The singularity will be full of malware.

i bought that roger penrose book (on 15 jun 2008, thanks amazon) and as of yet i have yet to open it

― desperado, rough rider (thomp), Wednesday, 7 March 2012 19:13 (9 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ayup

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/new_scientist/2012/12/simulated_universe_testing_the_laws_of_physics_to_determine_whether_we_re.html

lolz @ google

so awesome

only superficially related to singularity but reading this made me happy this morning:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/01/world_population_may_actually_start_declining_not_exploding.html

do you ever get this feeling that the singularity may actuall be a horrible doomsday scenario like in Disney's The Balck Hole

tbh the first thing i think of when i think of the singularity is Skynet

i was reading this just recently: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility

it a pretty fascinating phenomenon imo. more than the prosaic explanations i wonder about the dynamics of populations or species, the possibility or maybe fantasy that effects like this could be some kind of self-regulation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ7aDyJPn3c

would there be such things in a post singualirty world?> i think not

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/01/doomsday_clock_from_the_bulletin_of_the_atomic_scientists_for_2013.html

What Mordy seems to be saying is that it's really a race between the arrival of utopia (via the supra-magical powers of the singularity) and the arrival of doomsday (via the agency of various apocalyptic horsemen spawned in the last century).

Advanced physics and applied mathematics! You can't live with them and you can't live without them! /hennyyoungman

rolling utopias and dystopias 2013

is grey goo part of the singularity? people have patiently tried to explain "singularity" to me and it's always like james brown trying to explain "funky" and they end up gesticulating and shouting "get down" "unngh!"

It's like this, you see, the singularity will be like this GIGANTIC amoeba that surrounds and engulfs all the nuclear bombs and greenhouse gases and digests them and transforms them into PARADISE! And we don't even have to know how this will happen, because if we keep on doing what we're doing now, it will just HAPPEN! How cool is that?

we should worship this amoeba and demand that everyone else does as well

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/mar/21/homunculism

Read the other day that Kurzweil is moving to Google - a sign of end-times convergence?

ht forks

http://www.kurzweilai.net/what-our-civilization-needs-is-a-billion-year-plan

287,000,000 years from now:

"I'm very sorry sir, but you can't do that. It isn't mentioned in the plan our ancestors wrote 287,000,000 years ago."

i like the images in that article. didn't read the words.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/TemperatureOfSun.png

!!

body temperature will apparently be about 60 Celsius in 360 years' time

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Comparison_of_the_sequence_1_to_10_and_their_logs_to_the_base_10.png

:/ well, imagine that image is showing how log scales work

He may as well have suggested that we put a penny into a savings account today at 3% interest so we'd have a gazillion dollars to spend in a couple thousand years, thereby solving everythng.

1.03 ^ 2000

4.7E+25. wow, i think you're onto something there...

oh, wait, minus 20% tax.

money, what could possibly go wrong?

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/10/futurist_magazine_s_predictions_on_quantum_computing_big_data_and_more.html

heh, still reading through this but:

The question that seems never to come up when discussing population forecasts is: Why does population grow in some places and decline in others?

that's...actually probably the most common question that always comes up when discussing popular forecasts

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/12/comics-vs-cases.html

http://io9.com/what-will-life-be-like-when-digital-brains-outnumber-hu-1529764158

hanson strikes me as a really dumb smart person

he of the crystalline logic of "all claims of inequality are expressions of envy" and "all rules against sexual harassment are a status game of imposing class standards on the poor"

he's clearly a very brilliant + creative thinker who is wrong about everything he thinks - but i'd much prefer that to some dumb slob who is dogmatically "otm" about everything

i prefer dumb slobs who are somehow otm

otm is just CW for a niche audience

I hate these people. surrounded by them in the tech industry hub that I live in but ugh

what's cw when it's at home?

cw is aka conventional wisdom to its homies

ta, I might have higher standards of otm than mordy

i'm a descriptivist

http://riseofthecommonwoodpile.tumblr.com/post/77928533367/the-idea-of-the-technological-singularity-is-late

the idea of the technological singularity is late capitalism’s most brilliant move because it plays off any criticism of capitalism’s use of technology to disenfranchise and oppress by basically saying that technology under late capitalism just hasn’t progressed enough so we need to double down on it to save ourselves

it’s like if someone was stabbing you and you said “stop stabbing me” so they came up with this bullshit idea that said if you just get stabbed enough, all your stab wounds will be miraculously healed so the solution is actually to increase the size of the knife and the rate of stabbing

it’s a thing of beauty really

tbf that's the argument of marxism too - that technology under late capitalism hasn't progressed enough

http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-programming-from.html

u know that dude is king of the "neoreactionaries," right?

i'm not really familiar w/ "neoreactionaries" but i think the urbit stuff is very clear. not sure if it's explicitly ideologically complicit, but it surely doesn't need to be exclusively so?

very cool, not clear*

the urbit stuff is nonsense. this is a professional expert opinion.

it is carefully constructed, internally consistent, nonsense.

a physicist receives pages of scrawled calculations from a kook. they're on vacation and read the pages, for kicks. the pages contain formulae which make sense. but the formulae don't describe anything, they just aren't mathematically false. tile patterns in ancient mosques are mentioned, and formulae given for them. these are valid formulae, and pretty drawings of tiles. chaos is mentioned, and the mandelbrot formula is also given correctly, two ways. but the whole is less than the sum of its parts. the physicist shakes his head and thinks "this kook, under other circumstances, could maybe have been an engineer, or even a physicist. they can see elements of beauty, and they can perform some of the procedures that physicists perform correctly. but they cannot understand the purpose in what we do."

that is urbit.

feel like that could apply to chunks of his mencius moldbug stuff as well.

lol sterl

'Haskell fans' <--- battle of the interested parties!!

obviously we need to encourage impartial grant funding and science journalism about this disagreement so that unfettered exploration can lead to the truth

oh, wow

http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/22/geeks-for-monarchy/

http://www.kurzweilai.net/a-review-of-her-by-ray-kurzweil

do we have a thread for dark enlightenment stuff or is this the one?

http://thebaffler.com/blog/2014/05/mouthbreathing_machiavellis

ha i just posted that to the right wingery thread

i've been posting about these guys for years!

imo these guys are beyond right wingery. they're like 25% really interesting, legitimately controversial ideas and then like 75% capital worship, racist, legit insanity. but that 25%... (reweigh those percentages as u see fit...)

lol i just realized that they remind me a little of zizek

they'd be thrilled to hear it

maybe i'll start a dark enlightenment thread on 77 so that if i ever do compliment their work they won't have the potential enjoyment of reading it

25% really interesting, legitimately controversial ideas

i'm curious what you're thinking of here

i have a taste for extremity and subcultures with their own lingo, so i find some of this stuff grimly fascinating if not compulsively readable. but it's 100% nasty rage, really

tbh i've only read very little so far so i'd want some more time before trying to make a complete case. what immediately resonated for me tho was a kind of challenging of democracy from this kinda pov of its inherent weakness and inability to adequately represent its own voters' interests. it reminded me of zizek's idea that dictatorships can be more responsive to popular needs than democracy bc democracy has this inherent steam valve in elections where ppl get to feel like they're changing things so nothing has to change. dictators can't be voted out so if they don't respond to popular needs they will be facing a violent challenge to their rule. obv this isn't an idea that i wholeheartedly embrace (it sounded a lot better pre-civil war Syria when you had these notable examples of dictators failing to respond to the needs of their people and immediately collapsing, and also i think we've seen in iran + turkey country that ostensibly have this zizekian steam valve in elections but there is still a threat of revolution). but i do think there are weaknesses in democracy that this kind of thinking intelligently gets at - and it's kinda a shock. also i like the sci-fi futurism elements too, which is why i posted the link here - bc for me it crosses over w/ singularity thinking + these utopian/dystopian technological futures that i find very compelling.

well, keep reading i guess

their problem with democracy is the opposite of zizek's problem with it, i'll say

I keep bumping into the dark enlightenment crowd while reading around the place lately – they seem to snap into place with that Houllebecq, Ligotti, Lovecraft literary anti-humanist thing, Nick Land's name seems in the air again lately, & there's sort of overlap too with Nick Bostrom & The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford (via… lesswrong I think - Eliezer Yudkowsky contributes a couple of chapters here.

Aesthetically, I can get parts of it (the pessimistic bits, at least), there's a monstrous uncaring mathematical universe thing there that's always good for a cheap frisson; intellectually, i got the impression that even their purported masterminds are a bit thin on the Enlightenment and 17th/18th century (but I should read more – not now, because I am at work, but I do mean to get to it); practically, it's angry ageing white men. Fuck em.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/magazine/can-the-nervous-system-be-hacked.html

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/05/margaret-atwood-new-work-unseen-century-future-library

atwood obviously very optimistic about a potential future for humanity

Is there any vaguely futuristic bit of nonsense Atwood WON'T lend her name to? That awful remote control signing pen, that shitty serialised ebooks for morons site she co-wrote a serialised zombie novel for, that other serialised novel she wrote for the bungled Byliner site...

everything related to the singularity is so fucking stupid.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/07/roko_s_basilisk_the_most_terrifying_thought_experiment_of_all_time.html

this is the stupidest thing to come out of it. these people think they've invented pascal's wager and are lying awake at night. this is a very well-funded "research" community.

ok cool we'll let banaka torture you then

I've never heard of Roko's Basilisk but I get the feeling this Slate writer is making a hash of it. It doesn't seem to have a lot to do with Newcomb's Paradox.

Like,

Now, Roko’s Basilisk is only dangerous if you believe all of the above preconditions and commit to making the two-box deal with the Basilisk.

Why is it necessary to make the "two box" deal? I thought the point was, choose "Box A: Devote your life to helping create Roko's Basilisk" or RB when it comes about will punish you forever. It's just a version of Pascal's Wager, there's no paradox.

aren't they saying that the thing is, from the future, conspiring to be created by "blackmailing" programmers with a threat of torture? how would this happen? if it already exists in the future why would it need to manipulate the past in order to exist? if it doesn't yet exist who is doing the blackmailing?

I don't think Auerbach is wrong exactly, but it's a bit of a gappy walkthrough. The rational wiki (i know) fills in some bits:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk
the 'simulation of you = you' is one crucial & batty point.

also discussed a little here:
rationalism AI cultist creeps
relatedly -
Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

@Men's Swinging You have to have already bought into the "simulation argument", which says that if the physics of our universe allow for an eventual future in which there are AIs capable of running detailed simulations of large chunks of the universe, then it's actually quite likely that what we're living in is not the "real" universe, but one of those simulations.

If the Basilisk awakens a hundred years from now, it can review the history of everyone who was involved in either helping or hindering its awakening, and create simulated minds that "perfectly" mimic those of people who are alive today. And then, having programmed those minds into functional equivalents of those who opposed it, it can plunge them into simulated Hells.

It's kind of loopy, just, not quite as loopy as it sounds. :-)

what is the overlap between these singularity people and the people featured in the baffler article mordy linked upthread? both groups seem rather eschatological: the singularity folks literally so, but the neo-reactionaries in the sense of fantasizing a world in which the ties between the individual and society are forever severed. this at a time when we have a failing ecosystem and other pressing problems that require collective action.

also the idea of the singularity, impractical as it is seeing how crude AI is currently, is fucking scary. who would want that?

99% of the basilisk ppl have read i have no mouth but i must scream

At the top levels Thiel's a link - I think he funds (funded?) Yudkowsky's AI institute.

Idk about overlap between the lower levels - but this rationalwiki makes it sound like yes, the dark enlightenment racist monarchists did spring from lesswrong
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Neoreactionary_movement
(Idk about background of rationalwiki btw, phone posting can't source check now)

big harper's article relevant to this thread

but this rationalwiki makes it sound like yes, the dark enlightenment racist monarchists did spring from lesswrong

i don't think this is true, the big erm "foundational" people of the DE/neo-reactionary scene were sui generis & largely distinct from your rationalist types, let alone LW singly(with some exceptions; clearly the people who founded the "more right" blog were playing off it/reacting against it)

mordy is that the harper's article scott alexander reprinted at length on his blog a few months ago?

it did sound familiar as I was reading it

Strictly speaking, anyone who stans for racist monarchy is invariably someone who believes that racist monarchy would result in more power, wealth and sex for themselves. The only noticeable good they are getting out of this 'movement' is the ego-gratification normally associated with cliques of adolescents telling each other they are smarter and cooler than the other kids.

"strictly speaking" no one holds any ideological beliefs that aren't in some way self-serving so i don't see why you'd focus on a particular group's hypocrisies except to highlight your own right-on politics

xp goole - i don't know, i don't think i read that alexander piece.

i don't see why you'd focus on a particular group's hypocrisies except to highlight your own right-on politics

My point was not that racist monarchists are hypocrites. afaics, they are not. They seem fairly forthright in their belief that they are smarter than the other kids and would be the first in line for positions of power when their racist monarchist revolution occurs.

My point was that despite their presumed superior intelligence they seem incapable of making a sound analysis of probable outcomes and are patently engaged with hopeless pathetic delusions -- which is so grossly at odds with their self-image as Clear Thinking Master Intelligences that they are not hypocrites, but fools.

feel like their should be some kind of counter/pushback to these people - a MoreWrong debunking site, say

it wouldn't help

yeah tough to pierce the veil of self-righteousness/indignation I suppose

I just wanted to make the MoreWrong joek anyway

"strictly speaking" no one holds any ideological beliefs that aren't in some way self-serving so i don't see why you'd focus on a particular group's hypocrisies except to highlight your own right-on politics

― Mordy, Monday, January 26, 2015 1:37 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

trenchant social etc

http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/2013-10/enhanced/webdr06/29/15/anigif_enhanced-buzz-25832-1383073275-16.gif

"strictly speaking" no one holds any ideological beliefs that aren't in some way self-serving so i don't see why you'd focus on a particular group's hypocrisies except to highlight your own right-on politics

it's just silly. these guys have some cool ideas and some stupid ideas. what makes them interesting are the cool ideas, not that they are yet another group that doesn't fit ilx politics.

what are these "cool ideas"? it all reads terribly misshapen to me.

ugh, my post got deleted. in short - yes, these ideas do have some echoes of technofascism, but there are plenty of parts of them in terms of AI speculation, new ways of thinking about human organization, post-humanism, governance, futarchism, that i think are pretty novel and i believe are ultimately useful for reconstituting organizations. i would obv never support a political project from thiel in a million years, but if dude announces that he can extend human life an additional 50 years on average i'm def going to be interested in hearing more.

+ more importantly i'd much rather discuss rothko's basilisk, or urbit, or whatever on their own merits (even as just speculative science fiction masquerading as ideology) and not just another round of "oh well these guys suck."

we are so far from AI, their claims are outlandish at best on that front. I think they're about as plausible as the speculative ruminations of paranoid sf writers about robots were in the 40s and 50s.

xp

Or as plausible as Branson claiming Virgin Galactic's maiden voyage by 2009.

the difference is I think Branson will get there (eventually), because we actually know how to do space travel. we do not know how to create artificial consciousness. we don't even have a grasp of what consciousness is.

and unfortunately so much of their nonsense hinges on this "AI IS COMING WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO?!", developed with an air of certainty mixed with panic and fantasy. These are not ideal conditions for developing cogent theories of anything.

we should obv be skeptical of anyone claiming an imminent dramatic shift in all of reality, but they hardly have the patent on that - it's kinda the trademark of any radical movement that life is about to change dramatically, and soon.

Virgin Galactic gives the lie to claims that private enterprise will be more successful at any of these enterprises than 'the cathedral'.

this is getting off topic but while I don't think VG will be more successful than NASA it is good to have private industry in the mix, cuz the combo of declining funding/ineffectual bureaucracy has crippled public space agency work (at least in the US, I dunno about elsewhere, China's probably humming along ok)

Well "ineffectual bureaucracy" is what these guys will always cite in favour of their approach but I'm still waiting for any decent a priori or a posteriori evidence that private enterprise is more efficient than big gubberment.

these ideas do have some echoes of technofascism...

i guess to be fair to them, the overlap between AI-futurists and the "dark enlightenment" types isn't anywhere near 1:1; DE's roots in online racism and misogynist communities are much stronger. thiel gets props from the latter because he's against democracy.

Well "ineffectual bureaucracy" is what these guys will always cite

yeah I know, it's a self-serving argument but I think there's some basis in reality. NASA not the most functional of gov't institutions post-Challenger

When NASA was run with the goals driving the budget, it attracted capable people who were excited by the goals. For a long time now NASA has been run with the budget driving the goals.

yup

funny we were so much better with communism around

(j/k)

one thing i like about the super speculative elements is that it forces a truth that i think our society is often in denial about - which is that we don't know shit about the future, or what is going to happen, or how our societies will be configured, or how technology will look, or geopolitical configurations, even a decade down the line let alone 50-100 years (or whatever scope kurzweil is working on). okay, so we're sure that there won't be a super AI, or a singularity, in 50 years. but what will there be? we really have no idea and we are terrible about projecting.

so they're a cautionary example?

no, but if you don't know anything you might as well make up some crazy shit i think. more entertaining.

idk how entertaining it is when the people taking these ideas seriously have tons of $$$/resources at their disposal. If it were just a bunch of wide-ranging "what if?" hypothesizing by good-natured eggheads with no real likelihood of impacting much of anything I would probably love it, but that's not what's going on here. I look forward to a bit of schaudenfreude when the libertarian seastead off the coast of SF sinks into a quagmire of blood, pollution, and lawsuits but I'm a little less sanguine about guys like Thiel and Kurzweil, who have real pull in their industry, devoting resources to bullshit instead of solving, you know, actual important problems.

living in the middle of the tech industry perhaps makes me a bit paranoid about these people

lol probably, to me, they seem like good-natured eggheads with no real likelihood of impacting much of anything

idk they could "wise up" and start giving their money to republicans

which will probably happen eventually

republicans don't really strike me as the party of self-declared intellectuals but things can always change. what do these guys say about climate change?

if you're rich enough, you'll survive it fine

as the party of self-declared intellectuals

is that so
http://the-toast.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/rand-and-wallace-2.jpg

i assume a lot of them think we'll design climate engineering solutions. i'm sure i've read hanson write that by the time earth dies (he was talking way into the future, not the potential extinction of humanity in the near future) humans will already be numerous across the stars

fwiw http://www.atlassociety.org/myth-ayn-rand-was-conservative

Ayn Rand’s economic vision may resonate on the right, but the truth is, Ayn Rand was not conservative.

Intellectually, conservatives have been foes of Rand’s since before the 1950s.
Her philosophy, Objectivism, advocates reason, individualism, and personal happiness. Conservatives are more likely to favor faith, tradition, and duty as core values. Politically, Objectivism is classically liberal or libertarian. It expresses a world view associated with the Enlightenment. Ayn Rand fundamentally rejected the conservative-liberal distinction in culture.

On the level of concrete policy, Rand defended a woman’s right to abortion and was a four-square supporter of freedom of speech (both “liberal” causes). She also attacked racism ( a “liberal” bugbear) as grossly collectivist. However, she rejected affirmative action policies (the favored “liberal” solution) for exactly the same reason.

Conservatism is a cultural and political tendency that sees the past as importantly superior to the present, that respects tradition, and that is cautious about cultural change. In the contemporary Anglophone world, conservatives stand for traditional morality (family values), religious tradition (mostly Christianity), and an emphasis on private initiative over government bureaucracy. Insofar as the conservative movement has been the home of free-market reform efforts since the 1960s at least, classical liberals, such as Objectivists, have taken part in conservative or right-wing political coalitions aimed at economic policy.

But intellectually, the Conservatives have been foes of Rand’s since the 1950s and earlier. William F. Buckley’s National Review greeted the publication of Atlas Shrugged in the most scathing terms. Indeed, from its title (“Big Sister Is Watching You”) to its takeaway message that Rand was little better than a Nazi, Whittaker Chambers’s review seems an exercise in willfully misinterpreting Rand’s individualist message. For her part, Ayn Rand gave as good as she got, kicking off her second career as a public intellectual with speeches like “Conservatism: An Obituary” (delivered at Princeton in 1960).

i think the right wing futurists think climate change is a hoax by government scientists just like regular right wingers do. those that don't think it's fake think there's some "engineering" solution to it that government is too afraid to try like seeding the upper atmosphere with something or dumping tons of iron in the ocean

xp lol

Mordy do I have to run you down a list of avowed Randians in the GOP power structure - there are a lot

no one used the word "conservative" until you posted that link btw

i don't disagree that she had a lasting influence on the party but i imagine she thought she was above it

idgaf what she thought - her current followers are the self-described intellectuals, they are v influential in the GOP, and a bunch of these crackpot libertarian ideas have been finding wider traction among the right for decades now. at the moment these people have more in common with the GOP than they do with Democrats, and my only point was that it was entirely possible that at some point in the future the GOP and the AI-futurists/DE people's interests align even more closely. "oh you're racist and love free markets too? where have you been all my life! Here's a billion dollars, let's build a perfect society on this abandoned oil rig platform"

i'm sure i've read hanson write that by the time earth dies (he was talking way into the future, not the potential extinction of humanity in the near future) humans will already be numerous across the stars

It's one of his things, but he's pretty pessimistic about it:

Robin Hanson, a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute, says there must be something about the universe, or about life itself, that stops planets from generating galaxy-colonising civilisations. There must be a ‘great filter’, he says, an insurmountable barrier that sits somewhere on the line between dead matter and cosmic transcendence.

http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/ross-andersen-human-extinction/

Difficult to maintain let alone start a community when your nearest neighbour is a few centuries' travel away.

the political thing is complicated imo, partly because this AI/risk scene covers a lot of different groups now - DE's an extreme, but I worry about a future where tech-money libertarian utopians with rational plans properly get together with small-state right-wing politicians & much of the civic infrastructure is pulverised by a combo of ideology and opportunism.

otoh, the egghead side of it does fascinate me - the Global Catastrophic Risks book, the Future of Humanity Institute, Bostrom etc. Again, that's not without some actual influence - I think the institute is moving a bit more towards think tank/policy advice now – but it's easier to take the what-iffing a bit more abstractly or academically (and of course they don't seem to be insane racists). They do seem a bit obsessed with hostile AI tho'.

figure a lot of these guys probably love harlan ellison

Whoa, you spelled that wrong.

Harlan Ellison®

not according to wikipedia?

Just be careful he doesn't get peeved and shut our thread down.

there must be something about the universe, or about life itself, that stops planets from generating galaxy-colonising civilisations.

Uh, how about those enormous distances between stars? And the fact that those vast distances contain no usable energy sources, heat, light, water, or barely any matter of any description? Or the possibility that such ideas as space travel through wormhole portals might actually be unattainable fantasies?

they contain dark matter

which we didn't even know about until a few years ago. presumably a civilization more advanced than ours knows all kinds of shit we have no idea about

figure a lot of these guys probably love harlan ellison

which guys? Harlan holds a lot of hoary classic 60s leftist stuff pretty near and dear, don't think he would cotton to racist monarchists tbh

a lot of these guys love gibson but express grumbling disappointment that he's another boring canadian left-liberal

i was responding more to their fixation on evil AIs but shakey you've got a bit of a myopic view of how influence + politics work

like do u think bc some of these weirdos are right wingers that all of them are, and that even if all of them were, that means they wouldn't read (and subsequently be influenced by) science fiction written by cranks w/ different crank politics?

Ellison is pretty outdated/irrelevant at this point, I just doubt a lot of them are *really* into "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" or whatever. they're personalities/politics line up more w Orson Scott Card/Ender's Game imo.

i kinda don't think you get these ppl at all

in my experience with programmers/nerds/libertarian millionaires they're not really interested in new wave sf guys like Ellison or Ballard or Moorcock. it's either steampunk or cyberpunk. something with punk in it and any rate, cuz these guys are hard-bitten REALISTS, is how they like to think of themselves.

granted I am basing this on people I've met/interacted with and not so much the internet

roko's basilisk was def ripped off i have no mouth

yeah i think maybe u know ppl who have an affinity to the movement, or fit some of the demographics, but my impression of these ppl is that they're mostly sci fi weirdos who are afraid of future AIs and want to perfect cryogenics.

they contain dark matter

it doesn't matter (see what I did?) because even if you add in all the interstellar dark matter that we've calculated must be there, it doesn't amount to enough to facilitate interstellar travel, so far as we know.

presumably a civilization more advanced than ours knows all kinds of shit we have no idea about

our ignorance about these imagined civilizations is total and complete. you can say anything about them and it would be as true as any other thing you could say, including its exact opposite.

i kinda don't think you get these ppl at all

― Mordy, Tuesday, January 27, 2015 1:53 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

cap'n save-a-thiel

roko's basilisk was def ripped off i have no mouth

I'm not certain Ellison's is the original, but yes

see but you extrapolated from one story being referenced to "loving Harlan Ellison" when Harlan Ellison is quite a bit more than that one story, and a good deal of what he is is anathema to the ideas and attitudes expressed by these dudes

i've read both collections of the glass teat and more than liberalism i'd say ellison is characterized by crankism

haha no argument there

Wasn't there also a Poul Anderson at the same time or before the "I Have No Mouth..." with a similar theme? "Goat Song" or something?

I base my own scepticism about interstellar travel upon recent readings - upon the occasion of Neil Armstrong's passing- about the amount of work needed and the risk entailed just to get two men on the moon, in a tiny, "tissue-paper" spacecraft.

If it's not at least as hard to keep alive a handful of people in a tin can in the hard vacuum of space as it is to keep alive 7 billion and rising in our still bounteous but fragile ecosphere then were fucked, basically.

we're

If you think about how much fuel/propellant/whatnot it takes just to escape the gravity well of the earth, then think of how much precision navigation and gently applied jetting to steer from orbit A to orbit B, never mind how much payload you can actually carry, how much fuel you need to escape the gravity well on the other side, even if it is much less, what happens if the hull gets punctured by a micrometeor, if somebody drops a tank on the tarmac in Cocoa Beach beforehand, breaking something that will fail at an extremely inopportune time later, well...

Of course if some clever Trevor invents the low-cost transtellar, superluminary Shakey-Ledge Drive, well then that's a horse of a different color.

I will settle for space-elevatore tbh

elevator even

The lack of interstellar travel by super-advanced intelligent civilizations might be something as simple as a cost-benefit analysis.

I wouldn't want to visit us either

I mean what do we have to offer, water? assholes? unobtainium?

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/512Jx4yYd4L._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-v3-big,TopRight,0,-55_SX278_SY278_PIkin4,BottomRight,1,22_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg

I will settle for space-elevatore tbh
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/915UUZNX5hL._SL1500_.jpg

just read this, which someone i know elsewhere linked to: http://singularityhub.com/2015/01/26/ray-kurzweils-mind-boggling-predictions-for-the-next-25-years/

what i find especially striking is that this is based around moore's law of increasing CPU performance. meanwhile, at research conferences I go to now, it is basically a cliche to have a slide illustrating that moore's law has reached an effective bound due to quantum effects -- basically for chips to get faster they need to get smaller, and at a certain point it is so small that quantum effects mean chips don't work right, and we're close to there. which in turn motivates research on parallelism and multicore, but which still is not nearly as nice as just having faster chips.

so his further futurology is based on a trendline which now everyone knows cannot possibly be right, barring breakthoughs that we don't yet know how to achieve.

How we get from faster processors to complete mastery of the material world at a molecular level is another of the many wonderful bits of handwaving. Still, great that we don't have to worry about developing a new generation of antibiotics since we'll all have tiny disease eating robots inside ourselves within 5-10 years.

Kurzweil is such a goddamn bozo it bums me out that anyone takes him seriously/gives him money

http://2045.com/

ambitious goals there.

http://2045.com/articles/31277.html

if ban ki-moon gets high and googles open letters people have written to him, he might enjoy that. But I can't see him making neo-humanity a priority once he gets back to work.

in the future people will code web pages for wide terminals and not degrade gracefully.

i think they could work a little harder on spelling out how having robot avatars will solve all our environmental and political problems. "the significant extension of the lives of individuals whose biological bodies have exhausted their resources!" "radical extension of human life to the point of immortality!" okaaaaay, that's really going to help with "resources being wasted senselessly".

the solution is to upload all human consciousness into a quadruple failsafe hard drive singularity that we then fire into deep space where we can all live for eternity swapping avatars and playing minecraft

Don't forget to download a copy of yourself and save it on an external HD! Just in case. The whole thing about a libertarian utopia (incl. schematic and generalized proposals) seems like an oxymoron, later if not sooner. I've seen Libertarian Presidental Conventions on CSPAN, and these guys (mostly guys, looking like Far Side cartoon potatoes) can't agree on taking bathroom breaks (when where how long), much less lunch breaks.

so his further futurology is based on a trendline which now everyone knows cannot possibly be right, barring breakthoughs that we don't yet know how to achieve

Catnip for Kurzweil, spacetime for springers?
http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/26/tech/mci-eth-memristor/

That *looks* great; no idea how feasible any time soon (HP on the case, you bet)

starting to wonder if we're in a tech advancement lull atm + if so how long it'll last

memristors don't afaik give anything like "faster cpus". they give "faster/better storage than flash" (which i grant isn't wholely unimportant) and so sort of let you break down the ram/disk split between short/longterm storage further in future architectures.

outside of that one could imagine chips using them somehow, but that is more likely to give "faster/better fgpas" (i.e. reprogrammable chips) as opposed to somehow better "chips-as-such".

so neat, yeah, but still not a magic bullet for the sort of "moore's law bound" issues ppl have been running into.

seems like huamsn are too dumb to create a singularity

"Whatever a man can dream, he shall claim to be able to do, and someone will be impressed."

-- Plato --

i know nothing about AI and actively resist gaining new knowledge on the topic, but i can say with full confidence that the singularity is a load of bullshit.

which part? is it that simulating human consciousness seems impossible?

yeah, i think so

imo, the path to creating machines that can learn from diverse sensory input and synthesize its acquired knowledge into creative ideas is not impossible, but is still rather distant compared to the enthusiastic predictions of strong AI proponents. Whether this 'correctly' simulates human consciousness is moot. What would be the point anyway. The world is rife with human consciousness already.

My most basic question is whether pursuing fully mobile, independent and creative machine intelligence will be subject to severely diminishing returns the nearer we approach it. When I try to imagine it, it would seem so to me.

why do you think there would be diminishing returns?

who would want the singularity? or AI?

what is the point of any of this?

among others, people who don't want to die

ie idiots

simulating human consciousness seems like the kind of thing that would generate a ton of new innovations in a variety of fields, and there are plenty of applications for more advanced AI.

the rapture for nerds thing is a subset of the superAI crowd, but it is a strong one. i mean there's a whole cryo industry developing around the idea that everyone should preserve themselves after their pre-singularity death so that when the technology is there to live together they can be unfrozen and join the infinity crew. and also of course the struggle against death is maybe the most primal thing there is, and now that a lot of people think that doesn't god exist, the struggle against death doesn't just go away. so the fact that there are people hoping for a way to solve death through AI is easy to fun of but it's also very predictable.

but there are plenty of other uses that you can imagine for a superintelligent AI beyond nerd rapture, like mordy says.

there are plenty of applications for more advanced AI.

I agree. We are nowhere near the singularity and therefore the diminishment of returns I spoke of is only at its bare beginning.

I suspect we'll develop AI as an emergent property of some future supercomplex computing system--like the way the net becomes self-aware in Neuromancer--but it won't be like human consciousness, it'll be it's own thing

Trading software? Isn't a lot of shares trading already done by algorithms that people don't really understand / can't really control?

Robert Harris wrote a potboiler-ish but fun novel about trading software turning AI, then making money by betting against insurance markets after putting viruses into airline software to make planes crash, etc

I do think if AI is created it will be like HAL becasue there are so many assheads its going to decide humans are prone to assheadishness and neutralize us al

Vote for Zoltan!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPRAUooVeXY

scott alexander reviews robin hanson's new book:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/28/book-review-age-of-em/

...for example, he has two pages about what sort of swear words the far future might use. And the book’s style serves to reinforce its weirdness. The whole thing is written in a sort of professorial monotone that changes little from loving descriptions of the optimal arrangement of pipes for cooling future buildings (one of Hanson’s pet topics) to speculation on our descendents’ romantic relationships (key quote: “The per minute subjective value of an equal relation should not fall much below half of the per-minute value of a relation with the best available open source lover”)

what

hanson responds:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/05/alexander-on-age-of-em.html

more like dingleberrity

Robin Hanson is the very best of all these weirdos, his strangeness is shot through with and I would even say profoundly informed by something deeply human and serious, even as he adopts positions that are foreign to almost all of us for good reason.

thanks for posting that, mordy - really fascinating read

can't help feeling like catastrophic climate change is going to fuck us up as a species long before we're anywhere close to what hanson proposes tho

i really like Robin Hanson

can't help feeling like catastrophic climate change is going to fuck us up as a species long before we're anywhere close to what hanson proposes tho

Definitely. Maybe a few people living in sheltered settlements with desperate peons to maintain the hardware might be uploading themselves, the rest of us not so much

brains are not computers and other useful observations

https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer

brains are close enough to information processors for crazy stuff like this to be possible
http://news.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-movies/

sounds thoroughly useless

don't tell david lynch that

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/06/23/19/29E71A7500000578-3136480-image-a-3_1435085917887.jpg

Again, the brain is not a computer article is bald-faced idiocy

http://recursed.blogspot.com/2016/05/yes-your-brain-certainly-is-computer.html

And I hate to see the blame for it being laid at psychologists' feet--no psychologist I know thinks nonsense like the brain does not process information. The guy is way outside any kind of mainstream, except maybe the facebook "i fucking love science" kind

although, okay, i see you may have posted that disparagingly in the first place.

I like my iphone or whatever but in general I fear computers.

as someone who has studied this shit extensively, the "yes your brain is a computer" article is junk that jumps between logic-chopping and ignorance on the bio side. also surprised that a respected computer scientist can cite the church-turing thesis as evidence of anything as its generally considered by those who actually think about these things a metaphysical claim that you can't actually prove, since there's no good way to even state it that doesn't end up tautologous. the first half argues "your brain is a computer" in a sense that is just "there is a physical process of 'your brain' that can be encoded in a computer or anywhere else" at which point we might as well argue that any physical system in the world is a computer, which is interesting if self-serving from a computer-science perspective but useless otherwise.

the second half picks very partial evidence from people that really have looked at biological models and neural networks and is incredibly out of touch with the state-of-the-art (well, circa the last time i checked in which is a while ago) there.

not stanning for the article its responding to, but its pretty clear that its engaging in a massive misreading, likely from some ur-skeptical "if you say the brain isn't a computer you're mystifying consciousness and trying to invent an immortal soul" sort of slippery slope nonsense.

article is junk that jumps between logic-chopping and ignorance on the bio side

I thought you were talking about the "no your brain is not a computer here", which is a wild ride of strawmanning and empty theses dressed up in profound-sounding language.

People always have compared the brain to whatever the current technology is, like clockwork, steam engines, computers, holograms

to catch the ball, the player simply needs to keep moving in a way that keeps the ball in a constant visual relationship with respect to home plate and the surrounding scenery (technically, in a ‘linear optical trajectory’). This might sound complicated, but it is actually incredibly simple, and completely free of computations, representations and algorithms.

I'm not sure this guy understands what 'computation', 'representation' or 'algorithm' mean.

Sterling otm

Fair enough; I just grabbed a link to the first reasonable-sounding article I came across that presented an objection to the first one.

Earlier in the talk Musk made it quite clear that he believes " not all AI futures are benign." He's especially concerned that AI could take "a direction that would be not good for the future."

Musk launched OpenAI to prevent such a future, but it does not appear that he has all that much faith in the plan, since he's already thinking of at least one way that humans can stay ahead of artificial intelligence that he believes will leave us so far behind as to "be like a pet or like the house cat" for the AI.

The way around this, Musk explained, is something called a Neural Lace. It's essentially an artificial intelligence layer for humans.

i know this is an ignorant opinion, but why not just stop creating artificial intelligence? how many years of sci-fi do we have telling us it's a bad idea?

it just seems like there is no payoff to a.i. automating jobs will lead to mass unemployment unless workers succeed in seizing the means of production. virtual reality and things like sex robots will just increase alienation. smartphones are enough. computer technology should just call it a day and stop advancing. devote those resources to building a better alternative energy infrastructure.

the only thing like this i am excited for is self-driving cars.

if a.i. can somehow improve medical care i am all for that too. i just don't go in for this blurring the distinction between human and machine thing. it seems very bad.

hey, a friend of mine recently wrote a book about moore's law/gordon moore if you like computer stuff!

http://www.amazon.com/Moores-Law-Silicon-Valleys-Revolutionary/dp/0465055648/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1464878754&sr=1-1&keywords=moore%27s+law

(this is just a shameless plug for his book. doesn't have anything to do with the singularity. probably.)

i long for the day when 'robots taking the jobs' is met with the same dead-eyed skepticism as 'millenials in the workplace' thinkpieces

terms like 'machine learning' and 'neural networks' are pretty annoying in that the things they refer to are pretty /dumb/ and really just math that's good at finding patterns, really not even in the span of the kinds of qualities that make human intelligence intelligent in the way we think of the term

that's what i always assumed tbh but i am reading more and more stuff that is like, "oh yeah, automation is the new reality." or, in the academia thread, "these object oriented ontologists are just anticipating the day when there isn't a firm distinction between humans and objects, i.e. machines" (paraphrasing)

this is great

http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2016/05/26/055624.full.pdf

if the brain literally was just a computer, we still wouldn't come close to having the tools to understand it

clever

the singularity is here

https://www.cnet.com/news/its-happening-googles-ai-is-building-more-ais/

bring it

Nah. The only 'live' project mentioned in that article was "making Google Search more responsive to users' needs". All the rest was speculation about Some Day It Will Be So.

a search engine that can input its own search queries

"kill me" About 62,900,000 results (1.17 seconds)
"kill me" About 62,900,000 results (1.17 seconds)
"kill me" About 62,900,000 results (1.17 seconds)
"kill me" About 62,900,000 results (1.17 seconds)

Siri, ask Alexa what the time is...

I hear the software just produced one of these https://i.redd.it/89clk3nfj2yy.gif