Comment Re:Human purpose and "Challenge to Abundance" (Score 1) 315
You're welcome. And thanks for your kind words (and also those from "Chrontius" in reply to you). It makes me glad to hear them.
Agreed, the Culture novels are another interesting perspective on humanoid/AI coexistence.
James P. Hogan's "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" is another good novel about the emergence of AI (and a "hard sci-fi" one on I which is rarer), and it shaped some of my thinking on such things. Even though it was mainly about AI in conflict with humans -- and now I am more concerned (in the short term) about humans using AI to dominate other humans.
Interesting post by "WaffleMonster" mentioning that theme:
https://news.slashdot.org/comm...
"AI is today being leveraged on an industrial scale to judge, influence and psychologically addict billions for simple commercial gain. As technology improves thing will only become worse especially as corporations pursuit global propaganda campaigns to scare the shit out of people in order to make them compliant to legislative agendas that favor the very same corporations leveraging AI against them today."
I raised that issue with Ray Kurzweil via emails circa 2000-2010 when he (unwisely in my opinion) suggested that developing AI through the vehicle of capitalistic venture-funded hyper-competitive corporations emphasizing artificial scarcity would produce all sorts of wonderful results for humanity. I suggested he may have had trouble seeing that because he have been financially rewarded in the past for his AI-related successes done in corporate settings.
From one of those emails by me to Kurzweil that someone else put up on their website:
"Subject: Review of Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near"
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
"... Kurzweil's perspective on life and politics presumably derives from being
a self-made captain of industry in the capitalist USA -- having made a
fortune producing sophisticated computer equipment and related software no
doubt through a lot of cleverness and hard work. In the USA, historically
that position in society generally implies adopting a
Republican/Libertarian militaristic and market-driven perspective, if for
no other reason than to get along easily with peers and to do well in the
marketplace. But also, for the few percent who succeed at the American
dream (unlike the masses of failures) he can look back at his experience,
and perhaps ignoring luck or help from others, claim his success was due
to his own choices, and if others just made similar good choices, they too
would be successful. It is like a millionaire lottery winner exhorting
everyone to play the lottery. As an expert in statistics though, Kurzweil
should, if self-reflective, be able to see some statistical problems with
this viewpoint. Who would be the workers to be bossed around if everyone
was a successful as him? And how would his products command a price
premium if everyone was making such things? Clearly such a society of
universal success would need to be fundamentally different than the one
which produced his own personal success.
Also, Kurzweil made his money in control of patents and copyrights and
must presumably strongly believe in the value of their role in controlling
resources to create artificial scarcity to justify his own financial
success. Thus, for example, he laments the problems of the commercial
music industry in the USA in enforcing scarcity of the product of
musicians they control under contract, while he ignores the rise of
uncontracted individuals more easily producing their own garage band music
and the blossoming of a world of personal and private media production.
One would expect anyone's personal experience to color his or her
projections for the future and what the best public policy would be in
relation to those projections. That is a given. But it is the failure to
acknowledge this that the most harm can be done.
To grossly simplify a complex subject, the elite political and economic
culture Kurzweil finds himself in as a success in the USA now centers
around maintaining an empire through military preparedness and preventive
first strikes, coupled with a strong police state to protect accumulated
wealth of the financially obese. This culture supports market driven
approaches to supporting the innovations needed to support this
militarily-driven police-state-trending economy, where entrepreneurs are
kept on very short leashes, where consumers are dumbed down via compulsory
schooling, and where dissent is easily managed by removing profitable
employment opportunities from dissenters, leading to self-censorship.
Kurzweil is a person now embedded in the culture of the upper crust
economically of the USA's military and economic leadership. So, one might
expect Kurzweil to write from that perspective, and he does. His solutions
to problems the singularity pose reflect all these trends -- from
promoting first strike use of nanobots, to design and implementation
facilitated through greed, to widespread one-way surveillance of the
populace by a controlling elite.
But the biggest problem with the book _The Singularity Is Near: When
Humans Transcend Biology_ is Kurzweil seems unaware that he is doing so.
He takes all those things as given, like a fish ignoring water, ignoring
the substance of authors like Zinn, Chomsky, Domhoff, Gatto, Holt, and so
on. And that shows a lack of self-reflection on the part of the book's
author. And it is is a lack of self-reflection which seems dangerously
reckless for a person of Kurzweil's power (financially, politically,
intellectually, and persuasively). Of course, the same thing could be said
of many other leaders in the USA, so that he is not alone there. But one
expects more from someone like Ray Kurzweil for some reason, given his
incredible intelligence. With great power comes great responsibility, and
one of those responsibilities is to be reasonably self-aware of ones own
history and biases and limitations. He has not yet joined the small but
growing camp of the elite who realize that accompanying the phase change
the information age is bringing on must be a phase change in power
relationships, if anyone is to survive and prosper. And ultimately, that
means not a move to new ways of being human, but instead a return to old
ways of being human, as I shall illustrate below drawing on work by
Marshall Sahlins.
Anyway, there is always a reason for hope -- and I am glad I could encourage some more of that -- even as you are right that there are also always reasons for despair. Courage involves choosing hope in the face of despair and fear -- including for all the reasons Howard Zinn mentioned on future unpredictability.
I personally hope that using AI to support Dialogue Mapping with IBIS to visualize discussions could help small groups make better decisions together and get at least some positive benefits from AI (as I suggested in 2019):
https://cognitive-science.info...
https://issip.org/issip-cognit...