None of the Above ([info]artis) rakstīja,
@ 2017-03-02 18:29:00

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i'm useless, let's play some minecraft
Ancient hunter-gatherers mastered a very wide variety of skills in order to survive, which is why it would be immensely difficult to design a robotic hunter-gatherer. Such a robot would have to know how to prepare spear points from flint stones, find edible mushrooms in a forest, track down a mammoth, coordinate a charge with a dozen other hunters and use medicinal herbs to bandage any wounds. However, a taxi driver or a cardiologist specializes in a much narrower niche than a hunter-gatherer, which makes it easier to replace them with AI.

As algorithms push humans out of the job market, wealth and power might become concentrated in the hands of the tiny elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms, creating unprecedented social and political inequality.

Human law already recognizes intersubjective entities like corporations and nations as “legal persons.” Though Toyota or Argentina has neither a body nor a mind, they are subject to international laws, they can own land and money, and they can sue and be sued in court. We might soon grant similar status to algorithms. An algorithm could then own a transportation empire or a venture-capital fund without having to obey the wishes of any human master.

Before dismissing the idea, remember that most of our planet is already legally owned by non-human intersubjective entities, namely nations and corporations.

In the 21st century we might witness the creation of a massive new unworking class: people devoid of any economic, political or even artistic value, who contribute nothing to the prosperity, power and glory of society.

The crucial problem isn’t creating new jobs. The crucial problem is creating new jobs that humans perform better than algorithms.

Since we do not know how the job market would look in 2030 or 2040, today we have no idea what to teach our kids. Most of what they currently learn at school will probably be irrelevant by the time they are 40. Traditionally, life has been divided into two main parts: a period of learning, followed by a period of working. Very soon this traditional model will become utterly obsolete, and the only way for humans to stay in the game will be to keep learning throughout their lives and to reinvent themselves repeatedly. Many, if not most, humans may be unable to do so. [This has already been the case for a while]

The coming technological bonanza will probably make it feasible to feed and support people even without any effort from their side. But what will keep them occupied and content? One answer might be drugs and computer games. Unnecessary people might spend increasing amounts of time within 3D virtual-reality worlds that would provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the drab reality outside. Yet such a development would deal a mortal blow to the liberal belief in the sacredness of human life and of human experiences. What’s so sacred about useless bums who pass their days devouring artificial experiences?


http://ideas.ted.com/the-rise-of-the-useless-class/


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[info]mindbound
2017-03-02 20:22 (saite)
  1. Why assume there is anything "sacred" to these things in the first place?
  2. What makes artificial experiences less "sacred" than those of any other kind?
Aside from that, sure, it's either augmentation or obsolescence.

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[info]brookings
2017-03-02 21:31 (saite)
2: They just are. I don't need to think about it. Okay.. birth of a real live baby - for example. Poetry of a last kiss etcetera etcetera. Were those examples in bad taste?

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[info]mindbound
2017-03-02 21:44 (saite)
They aren't universally so, even among current, unmodified humans (e.g., not for me, not for many people I know on different levels, not for many people whose books, papers, and articles I've read, etc.), which is more or less my point. Not all of this can be realistically discounted as selection bias.

Or, to put it another way, the life of a human would hold equal weight for me regardless of whether their birth had been natural, surgically aided or some other value of "artificial".

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[info]brookings
2017-03-02 21:47 (saite)
I think the article is alluding to virtual experiences. You could blow up that term, expanding it seemingly endless nuance, I am sure - but for me, it is clear: interaction with a world that is constructed and so has meaning just in itself.

Okay, I suppose this is true of societal constructions that we encounter in real life - physical life, but I think there is always something more in the interactions. For me, there is a sense that there is some gravity - some weight pulling us to unrecognised truths in real situations.

I don't know why - I can't elucidate it in a convincing rational way. It is just how I feel - I probably shouldn't conflate the analogue and the digital with someone who like yourself, who has given a lot of thought to this topic, but the nuance seems to reside in the gaps between the binary blocks.. too much bollocks? Probably.

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[info]mindbound
2017-03-02 21:56 (saite)
Since I don't believe the real world has any external, observer-independent meaning or purpose, this, for me, puts it on equal grounds with virtual or constructed worlds. The real world holds more unknowns than constructed ones, therefore it's a more valuable place for doing science but in terms of the rest of everyday life, I'd be ready to migrate to a comfortable simulated reality at any given point.

I think that "for me" might actually be the key phrase in this case, i.e., the comparison here is not of things themselves but of our respective value orderings and the position of the aforementioned things therein.

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[info]brookings
2017-03-02 21:59 (saite)
Fair enough - for me it is the reverse - but then, hah hah, I believe in a soul (LSD revelation after a period of studying hard science for three years - reading about the death of a bear in Norman Mailer's 'Why are we in Vietnam?' to my girlfriend of the time).

I am a pretty messy person :)

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[info]mindbound
2017-03-02 22:04 (saite)
As a neuroscientist and an aspiring rationalist, I've long since learned to not believe everything I might experience. :> But fair enough, at least this provides a perspective to your point of view.

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[info]brookings
2017-03-02 22:08 (saite)
What is your take on supernatural experiences? I ask because I have had these experiences - once with a witness (my cat woke me up with a gentle tap of the cheek to see it).

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[info]mindbound
2017-03-02 22:14 (saite)
My take – they are on the same level of real-ness as hallucinations, i.e. I do believe that the individual experiences these things, just not that they have a supernatural basis in the surrounding environment. This is a special case of my general position, which at this point is strictly reductionist-materialist (or "physicalist", as some call it). Of course, I'm willing to update my beliefs if confronted with enough evidence.

Furthermore, for many of these experiences (OBE, NDE, etc.) there are already concrete, testable neurological explanations and they can be induced in the individual's brain in a controlled setting.

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[info]brookings
2017-03-02 22:22 (saite)
okay - I might look into these acronyms. I would be fully in agreement it hadn't been for the cat waking me up to see it (something it never did before or after). It struck me as a sign that it wasn't just a hallucination of mine or something somehow just I was generating - though of course I could be wrong about that

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[info]mindbound
2017-03-02 22:29 (saite)
OBE, NDE.

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[info]gnidrologs
2017-03-03 00:31 (saite)
''I'm willing to update my beliefs if confronted with enough evidence.''

And for all these years you've never given definition of what would comprise ''enough evidences''. You simply shrugg off and rationalize away anything that is thrown at you. You would weasel your way out to convince yourself of ''rational explanation'' even if God smacked you in the noggin. This isn't about evidences, it's about how you (wish to) interpret them.

''there are already concrete, testable neurological explanations''

Which explain nothing, really. What would be the evidence of supernatural (don't like this word though) experience being real, when only thing you can do is observe meat in one's skull? How do you know if one's vision is real or fake just bu looking at how brain reacts to it?

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[info]mindbound
2017-03-03 04:08 (saite)
My interpretation of evidence is based on parsimony – if I can fit the data with just neurons, I'm not going to try to do it with neurons and ghosts. Occam's razor, shortest strings, all that. Meanwhile, observations that couldn't be fit like that would provide bits of evidence that, at large enough values, would convince me that ghosts are probably real.

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[info]gnidrologs
2017-03-03 08:37 (saite)
Neurons aren't granted immutable benefit of occam's razor, it's just your own conjecture. Fact that brain activity correlates with reaction to stimulus doesn't show what the source of stimulus is.
You never tell what observations wouldn't fit your theory so the point is moot as ever.

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[info]mindbound
2017-03-03 08:41 (saite)
Nothing is exempt of Occam's razor, it's just that biology (and, by reduction, physics) is simpler than biology plus magic. Also, it kind of does show that. You can tell reasonably well by looking at the brain activity if the subject is seeing things or "seeing things".

Anyway, we've been through this enough times that I don't see the point of another round.

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[info]gnidrologs
2017-03-03 09:00 (saite)
Just one last remark. Certitude of rational explanation as only means to knowledge is also ''seeing things''. You can't rationally prove rationalism.

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[info]brookings
2017-03-03 09:46 (saite)
And so we waltz into the brave new world - though Mr Mindbound, forgive my nervous glances over your shoulder: I thought I caught a glimpse of a ghost in the machine - ah probably nothing..1 2 3, 1 2 3..

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[info]mindbound
2017-03-03 11:36 (saite)
I'd argue one actually can do that, especially rationality in the precise technical sense of the word I'm using. Cox's theorem derives probability theory from ordinary logic under very minimalistic assumptions; utility maximisation is provably optimal as an economic and behavioural strategy; the universal prior is a provably optimal formalism of the Occam's razor; etc.

Furthermore and perhaps more importantly, rationality is empirically justified: probability theory as "the logic of science", the demonstrable detrimental effects of cognitive biases on prediction- and decision-making, etc.

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