- 19 Jan 2018 22:16
#14880724
If you're interested in such topics as "the singularity" or "AI", I can't think of a more informative and entertaining interlocutor than Charles Stross. (Stross, the author of Accelerando and Singularity Sky invented many of the futurist memes many of us take for granted.)
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-st ... .html#more
Stross maintains that a human-like AI-in-a-box is not in our foreseeable future. Instead he believe that corporations are emerging as trans-human AI collective hive minds. He identifies people like Kurzweil as religious leaders, not futurists.
On the subject of AI, modern science is barking up the wrong trees. AI has been around longer than we think, in a guise we can't recognize:
In other words, they are artificial entities operating in pursuit of independent goals: AI's. And as the last sentence above hints, they are gradually dispensing with the necessity of employing humans as agents. The evolution of these AIs enabled them to begin supplanting human agency at the beginning of the last century. We now see them evolving out of human direct control.
So we are literally evolving into a corporocracy, but it's not the traditional conception of human-directed corporations forming just another interest block. Instead we have unwittingly enabled a form of governance that transcends states and whose interests are defined by nonhuman entities.
This interacts with strictly human politics in some really uncomfortable ways.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-st ... .html#more
Stross maintains that a human-like AI-in-a-box is not in our foreseeable future. Instead he believe that corporations are emerging as trans-human AI collective hive minds. He identifies people like Kurzweil as religious leaders, not futurists.
...transhumanism is a warmed-over Christian heresy. While its adherents tend to be vehement atheists, they can't quite escape from the history that gave rise to our current western civilization. Many of you are familiar with design patterns, an approach to software engineering that focusses on abstraction and simplification in order to promote reusable code. When you look at the AI singularity as a narrative, and identify the numerous places in the story where the phrase "... and then a miracle happens" occurs, it becomes apparent pretty quickly that they've reinvented Christianity.
Indeed, the wellsprings of today's transhumanists draw on a long, rich history of Russian Cosmist philosophy exemplified by the Russian Orthodox theologian Nikolai Fyodorvitch Federov, by way of his disciple Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, whose derivation of the rocket equation makes him essentially the father of modern spaceflight. And once you start probing the nether regions of transhumanist thought and run into concepts like Roko's Basilisk—by the way, any of you who didn't know about the Basilisk before are now doomed to an eternity in AI hell—you realize they've mangled it to match some of the nastiest ideas in Presybterian Protestantism.
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck.
On the subject of AI, modern science is barking up the wrong trees. AI has been around longer than we think, in a guise we can't recognize:
...looking in particular at the history of the past 200-400 years—the age of increasingly rapid change—one glaringly obvious deviation from the norm of the preceding three thousand centuries—is the development of Artificial Intelligence, which happened no earlier than 1553 and no later than 1844.
I'm talking about the very old, very slow AIs we call corporations, of course...
...Here's the thing about corporations: they're clearly artificial, but legally they're people. They have goals, and operate in pursuit of these goals. And they have a natural life cycle. In the 1950s, a typical US corporation on the S&P 500 index had a lifespan of 60 years, but today it's down to less than 20 years.
Corporations are cannibals; they consume one another. They are also hive superorganisms, like bees or ants. For their first century and a half they relied entirely on human employees for their internal operation, although they are automating their business processes increasingly rapidly this century. Each human is only retained so long as they can perform their assigned tasks, and can be replaced with another human, much as the cells in our own bodies are functionally interchangeable (and a group of cells can, in extremis, often be replaced by a prosthesis).
In other words, they are artificial entities operating in pursuit of independent goals: AI's. And as the last sentence above hints, they are gradually dispensing with the necessity of employing humans as agents. The evolution of these AIs enabled them to begin supplanting human agency at the beginning of the last century. We now see them evolving out of human direct control.
...our current political upheavals are best understood as arising from the capture of post-1917 democratic institutions by large-scale AIs. Everywhere I look I see voters protesting angrily against an entrenched establishment that seems determined to ignore the wants and needs of their human voters in favour of the machines...Our major political parties are led by people who are compatible with the system as it exists—a system that has been shaped over decades by corporations distorting our government and regulatory environments. We humans are living in a world shaped by the desires and needs of AIs, forced to live on their terms, and we are taught that we are valuable only insofar as we contribute to the rule of the machines.
...If we look at our historical very slow AIs, what lessons can we learn from them about modern AI—the flash flood of unprecedented deep learning and big data technologies that have overtaken us in the past decade?
So we are literally evolving into a corporocracy, but it's not the traditional conception of human-directed corporations forming just another interest block. Instead we have unwittingly enabled a form of governance that transcends states and whose interests are defined by nonhuman entities.
This interacts with strictly human politics in some really uncomfortable ways.
Imagine you're young, female, and a supermarket has figured out you're pregnant by analysing the pattern of your recent purchases, like Target back in 2012.
Now imagine that all the anti-abortion campaigners in your town have an app called "babies at risk" on their phones. Someone has paid for the analytics feed from the supermarket and the result is that every time you go near a family planning clinic a group of unfriendly anti-abortion protesters engulfs you.
Or imagine you're male and gay, and the "God Hates Fags" crowd has invented a 100% reliable Gaydar app (based on your Grindr profile) and is getting their fellow travellers to queer bash gay men only when they're alone or out-numbered 10:1. (That's the special horror of precise geolocation.)...
...Someone out there is working on it: a geolocation-aware social media scraping deep learning application, that uses a gamified, competitive interface to reward its "players" for joining in acts of mob violence against whoever the app developer hates. Probably it has an inoccuous-seeming but highly addictive training mode to get the users accustomed to working in teams and obeying the app's instructions—think Ingress or Pokemon Go. Then, at some pre-planned zero hour, it switches mode and starts rewarding players for violence—players who have been primed to think of their targets as vermin, by a steady drip-feed of micro-targeted dehumanizing propaganda delivered over a period of months.
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters. -Antonio Gramsci