Carrico on “Science, Not Sales” Friday, Apr 3 2009
transhumanism 7:55 pm
As some of you may know, my favorite anti-transhumanist blog is Amor Mundi by Berkeley Professor of Rhetoric Dale Carrico. At first, the writing may seem dense, mean-spirited, and difficult to understand, but it’s grown on me over the years, partially because I take it less seriously than I used to, and partially because I am a sucker for complex rhetoric for its own sake. The site is a gathering spot for those disillusioned with movement transhumanism, like James Fehlinger, Anne Corwin, Nato Welch, et al. There are also a few transhumanists, serious futurists, and scientists (mostly very liberal, of course — not that that’s a bad thing) like Mike Treder, Jamais Cascio, and Dr. Richard Jones that read this stuff, so even if the blog is relatively unpopular in absolute terms, it has its high-profile readers.
For the definitive compilation of Dale’s central criticisms, see the superlative summary. This is a short book-length criticism, and I’ve been through the whole thing.
What particularly caught my eye lately was a post titled “Science Not Sales”, which criticizes a salesperson mentality among futurists. Unlike most of Dale’s posts, this one is less about bombastic cultural criticism and more about useful advice. My favorite part is the last two paragraphs:
I think that most non-crackpots who are strong champions of presently marginal notions will concede that their views do not yet represent consensus science even if they rightly or wrongly expect them one day to achieve that distinction.
They best not compensate for their marginality by pretending to a certainty that nobody has, they best not handwave about the ignorance or irrationality of their detractors rather than seek to better substantiate their cases the better to persuade them, they will surely be aware and best welcome the custom that it is the extraordinary claim that demands extraordinary evidences and that their marginality puts the onus on them, they will best reasonably qualify their claims in the face of objections rather than hyperbolize and make to bulldoze them over, they best behave like scientists rather than salesmen (or futurologists, all of whom are salesmen).
All good advice. If only more transhumanists would take it to heart!
April 3rd, 2009 at 9:01 pm
Someone has to be the watchman at the door, to prevent the barbarian hordes of politicians from impeding the sweet, sweet, nectar born of the fruit of Science from flowing.
April 3rd, 2009 at 10:41 pm
Dale is lovely, his turn of phrase impeccable, even though his arguments are so often so broad as to lack any force unless you already know who he’s railing against.
The quote, for example, might as well be about scientists trying to sell the currently “marginal” notion of evolution in the US, or of climate science, or private aerospace, quite aside from Dale’s traditional enemies of transhumanists, transsexuals and cyborgs.
April 4th, 2009 at 1:13 am
The quote, for example, might as well be about scientists trying to sell the currently “marginal” notion of evolution in the US,
How is evolution a marginal notion?
Dale’s traditional enemies of transhumanists, transsexuals and cyborgs.
There are few non-cyborgs in our thoroughly prostheticized world today, certainly I am one myself, and so I cannot make sense of the idea that cyborgs would be my enemies in general, although I suppose I will cop to being the enemy of, you know, eeevil cyborgs. I am especially flabbergasted to hear you declare me an enemy of transsexuals, given my decades-long advocacy of queer politics (as a queer), very much including transsex an intersex activism and advocacy. Consensual prosthetic self-determination (access to safe abortion, ARTs, consensual recreational drugs, body-art, informed nonduressed recourse to non-normalizing genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive therapies, and so on) is pretty much my political bedrock. As for transhumanists, yeah, I guess enemy is the right word. I consider organized transhumanism a reductive, techno-determinist, corporate-futurological superlative (secularized would-be transcendentalizing quasi-religious) ideology peddling pseudo-science, hype, and eugenics. Obviously, ymmv.
April 4th, 2009 at 5:48 am
Michael, only through the dark glass of Bay area libertarianism could Jamais Cascio or Mike Treder be called “far left.” In a global political context they certainly are not. I think “technoprogressive” is more descriptive. As to the utility of advice that we be cautious about the certainty of our technical predictions, that is good advice, although I’m not sure occasional nuggets like that warrants mastering the head-butts, logorhea and retching glottal stops of Carrico-ese.
April 4th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
James, the part of the Bay Area where I live (SF) is extremely liberal and not very libertarian at all. If you look at an electoral map there are only like three districts (out of about 15) that aren’t overwhelmingly liberal. I call Mike Treder and Jamais far left because I thought they called themselves “very liberal” on their Facebook profiles. I don’t mean “far left” in any negative way, I thought they self-defined as such. Silicon Valley may be libertarian, but San Francisco is not.
April 4th, 2009 at 9:50 pm
I read Dale’s blog once in a while. He definitely has an intelligent writing style and says some interesting things. Honestly, though, he’s one of those people I have a hard time figuring out. His thinking style is just so different than mine and I’m not sure why. I’m not really a fan of his extreme leftist viewpoints. Whenever I read his blog I sort of feel like alice in wonderland, its like one big LSD trip. No offense to him, but he seems to have an extremely odd personality. Not saying my personality is normal, though. Its like Dale has the same odd brain has many transhumanists, yet he rails against their influence. The amount of strange/extreme ideas he propagates is way above what a normal person would (of course he claim that none of them are extreme in an overly verbose yet well written statement). I think my own general pattern of thinking would fall into the category of people that he really dislikes.
April 4th, 2009 at 9:53 pm
3rd line from the bottom above should say “of course he would claim that none of them are extreme”. I suck at writing.
April 4th, 2009 at 10:16 pm
I’d like to see what actual science says about the possibilities, not just some transhumanist prophets or naysayers.
So, according to Dale transhumanism is just utopistic hyperbole and practically none of it’s gonna happen (so all this fuss about accelerating future is just pointless daydreaming, and this blog in particular is a major offender, and should be shut down immediately). Perhaps we’ll have speedier calculators with bigger memory but that’s about it. But not too much better, and besides speed or storage ain’t gonna change the game anyway. Do I read Mr. Dale “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logorrhoea” Carrico right? Where does he stand? What’s his point in a news talking point format? Is there any kind of futurims he agrees with? Is there a different, better future in his mind? There’s such an overabundance, no make that superabundance of wordiness that reading it is exasperating to the aaaaarrrrggghhhstreme. I’d like to have a distillation. Try saying it on Twitter.
April 5th, 2009 at 3:05 am
Distillation in Twitterese for DevNull: C is a clown, not 2 b tkn seriously
April 5th, 2009 at 6:08 am
Dale: “There are few non-cyborgs in our thoroughly prostheticized world today, certainly I am one myself, and so I cannot make sense of the idea that cyborgs would be my enemies in general, although I suppose I will cop to being the enemy of, you know, eeevil cyborgs. I am especially flabbergasted to hear you declare me an enemy of transsexuals, given my decades-long advocacy of queer politics (as a queer), very much including transsex an intersex activism and advocacy. Consensual prosthetic self-determination (access to safe abortion, ARTs, consensual recreational drugs, body-art, informed nonduressed recourse to non-normalizing genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive therapies, and so on) is pretty much my political bedrock.”
Dale, you *are* a de-facto transhumanist. Get over it. I’m less transhumanist than you are: e.g. I find “intersex” advocacy creepy and not to be encouraged (though not to be persecuted either).
April 5th, 2009 at 6:10 am
By the way, Dale: have you considered honing your rationality skillz at LessWrong?
April 5th, 2009 at 6:16 am
Giulio Prisco Says:
“Distillation in Twitterese for DevNull: C is a clown, not 2 b tkn seriously”
- I largely agree. For example, I spent a long time debating him on the possibility of technological immortality. I would present rational argument X, he would call me names. Repeat x20 and I started to see a pattern: he doesn’t know how to seek the truth, he only knows how to debate. Then I realized that, with a title of “professor of rhetoric”, this is not exactly surprising.
I’d be excited to see Dale coming up with some fact based, non-ad-hominem criticism. But I’m really not holding my breath.
April 5th, 2009 at 9:42 am
Roko: Do you even know what “intersex” means? Essentially when people are intersexed, it means they were born with “indeterminate” physical sex characteristics. Meaning they can’t easily be classified into binary male/female categories. Intersex advocacy is simply the assertion that such individuals should (a) be respected as whole, complete individuals rather than broken males or females, and (b) not be forced into a particular role on the basis of what their parents, etc., would prefer.
I can’t even imagine what the heck anyone could find creepy about that! It’s about assuring civil rights and morphological freedom for people with minority configurations. So I am guessing maybe you misunderstood the word “intersex”?
April 5th, 2009 at 10:24 am
Oh wow, something just occurred to me - did you (Roko) think “intersex” had something to do with “interSPECIES coupling”? Because if so, I am pretty sure Dale has never advocated that. I think Peter Singer has, though, at least in theory.
April 5th, 2009 at 10:50 am
As someone who has witnessed the accelerating developments of the last decades (infotech in particular, particularly the last decade), I think this is the worst time possible in the history of humanity to be saying the future isn’t going to be something to write home about. If Dale is not impressed by anything, that’s ok - he’s probably past SL5 (Shock Level 5) - but I am, and I expect to be a lot more impressed in the coming decades. Superlatives are there for a reason. Some things are undeniably super.
April 5th, 2009 at 11:27 am
Who said anything about the future being uninteresting, or continuing to look forever like it looks today? As far as I can tell, Dale has never made such an assertion. The critique tends to, rather, fall along the lines of opposing the Utter Certainty with which some futurist types espouse *particular* outcomes, and the timescales of those outcomes. That, and the way some futurists muddle reality and metaphor on a consistent basis, acting as if it is trivial to consider “copying thoughts” when there are many many many layers of handwaving inherent in such a consideration.
If half the energy people spent defending their certainty about superlative marginal notions were instead spent trying to actually gather concrete data in support of these assertions, I think there would be less arguments of the kind I keep seeing. And people really need to learn the difference between “concrete data” and “thought experiment”.
April 5th, 2009 at 11:35 am
The data is there, “superlative” possibilities of superlongevity, superintelligence, and superabundance are granted substantial apparent probabilities of occurring through arguments found in dozens if not hundreds of books and thousands of academic papers and reports. If none of these happen: fine. I can enjoy life perfectly as I live it now. But these intriguing possibilities seem well-supported enough that they demand attention, at least from my perspective.
I do not espouse particular outcomes, or specific timescales of those outcomes (just fuzzy subjective probability distributions), but I am still often accused by Dale of being a deluded fanatic. By seeming to support Dale’s accusations, you are implying that I do fall into that category (or maybe your critique is somewhat kinder), but I assert that I do not.
Marginal, shmarginal. I have enough confidence in my own intelligence to believe what I feel is supported by the evidence and not worry about whether it is “marginal” or not. I have lots of other “marginal” notions, like that gays should be allowed to marry and that sentient animals should not be murdered for food.
April 5th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
superlongevity, superintelligence, and superabundance are granted substantial apparent probabilities of occurring through arguments found in dozens if not hundreds of books and thousands of academic papers and reports. If none of these happen: fine.
To my way of thinking this is almost exactly like saying that “when I die I will go to heaven transformed into an angel — the Bible tells me so. If it doesn’t happen: fine.”
“Superlativity” as I use the term very specifically in my critique isn’t a synonym for “really big epochal technodevelopmental changes” (I expect those, too, assuming we don’t destroy ourselves). Instead, it names the effort to reductively redefine emancipation in instrumental terms and then expansively reorient the project of that emancipation to the pursuit of personal “transcendence” through hyperbolic misconstruals of technoscientific possibility. That is to say, this personal transcendence is conceived in terms that translate the customary omnipredicates of the judeochrislamic deity into superpredicates that the faithful personally identify with but proselytize in the form of “predictions” of imaginary technodevelopmental outcomes.
Marginal, shmarginal. I have enough confidence in my own intelligence to believe what I feel is supported by the evidence and not worry about whether it is “marginal” or not. I have lots of other “marginal” notions, like that gays should be allowed to marry and that sentient animals should not be murdered for food.
Your self-image as a superior intellect and your “feelings” that you have enough evidence to support your superlative aspirations despite their conceptual confusion and pseudo-scientific marginality (their marginality, by definition, indicates that there is not “enough” evidence) is, of course, irrelevant to the extent that the claims you are making really are essentially scientific claims as you seem to want to insist they are.
Questions whether gays should be able to marry or whether we should murder animals for food are moral, ethical, political questions, and their present marginality or not is not what most matters for those who espouse these beliefs as good ones. Consensus science on the other hand is far from indifferent to issues of marginality.
Although we know well that many warranted scientific beliefs began as marginal notions themselves, and so we cherish iconoclasts and stubborn fringe notions as one of the motors of technoscientific progress, we cannot fail to distinguish actually marginal notions from actually warranted scientific consensus else we risk the loss of the actual usefulness of science as the mode of reasonable belief-description that affords of powers of prediction and control.
Other modes of reasonable belief-ascription answer to different sorts of wants. But to the extent that you want to sell superlativity as science you really can’t get away with that sort of thing. Of course, I for one have never fallen for ruse of futurologists who want to sell their superlativity as science rather than faith.
April 5th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
If exploring human enhancement in detail is good enough for the U.S. National Science Foundation and investigating molecular nanotechnology is good enough for the National Research Council of the U.S. National Academies, then it’s good enough for me. Are transhumanist ideas really as marginal as all that?
April 5th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
You don’t have to join a Robot Cult to believe in healthcare or to advocate medical research or consensus science as a guide to public policy. Transhumanists like to commandeer secular progressive mainstream commitments to sell their faith-based initiative to the rubes, but once mainstream secular progressives actually join the company of superlative techno-utopians they discover soon enough that the talk turns to friendly Robot Gods, uploading, techno-immortality, drextech post-scarcity, and similar silliness that wasn’t in the sanity brochure. It’s a scam and few are fooled.
As for “enhancement” — as a conceptual matter, “enhancement” is always, properly so-called, “enhancement” according to whom, “enhancement” in the service of what end? To pretend agreement already exists as to what kinds of humans there should be and what kind of lifeways are flourishing ones, especially in the areas that are inevitably the focus of discussions of “enhancement medicine” is to substitute eugenic efforts to facilitate parochial conceptions of “optimality” for proper democratic efforts to expand the scene of informed, nonduressed consent in matters of prosthetic self-determination, whether normalizing or not. I agree that transhumanist discourse has contributed to this terrible way of eugenic framing questions of non-normalizing therapeutic intervention. It’s not a contribution any democratic-minded person should be crowing about in my view.
April 5th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
What percentage of transhumanist tech has actually been through some sort of scientific feasibility study? All of it?
Let’s say a non-academic small startup proposes a tech no one in the scientific world (or in the crackpot world) today is familiar with or knows any way of actually achieving, and this tech looks like it requires Deep Science and Deep Pockets to be solved (say, femtotech), so there’s the perception that there’s No Way a small startup outside big academia and big business could even begin to consider touching it. Does the lack of credentials/resources automatically disqualify it from being considered as something that may happen? Does it automatically end up on the list of superlative vaportech to be derided by the likes of Mr. Carrico? Should it come from the established science to be considered worth considering? Of course they should be able to offer solid proof with perhaps a sprinkling (or a ton) of theory. Can transhumanists offer proof for their wildest predictions or is it all unsubstantiated, no better than science fiction?
Where are the roadmaps to transhumanist technologies? AGI roadmap? Nano roadmap? Longevity roadmap?
April 5th, 2009 at 10:14 pm
Much of it. Unless you get into the more speculative stuff like Jupiter Brains. Of course, no scientific feasibility study can give a binary answer like, “yes, this is feasible“, it’s all shades of grey. Many scientists are becoming convinced that this stuff is a big deal. In Dale’s language, those scientists are “rubes” being fooled by “gurus”, presumably such as myself, though I may also be a rube. It’s kind of confusing.
You have to actually build the tech for “proof”. Basically, Dale wants us all to drop everything and focus on ultra-liberal causes. But if he actually believed that, wouldn’t he use arguments that appeal to the mainstream and actually have a likelihood of converting people to his view instead of focusing on a marginal subculture like transhumanism? I guess he does that by teaching rhetoric and critical theory to his students. Sometime I ought to hop on BART and go see what Dale is teaching all those impressionable young minds. Probably how to be ultra-liberal and alienate swing voters so that the Democrats can start losing to the Republicans again, putting the world’s most powerful weapons into the hands of America’s craziest and dumbest people. (Palin comes to mind.)
Great questions, they are strewn across several papers and books and of course are in incomplete form. There is a productive nanosystems roadmap, a nanofactory collaboration project led by two thinkers with extensive roadmaps in their heads if not on paper, and a whole brain emulation roadmap in particular that have come out only in the last few years and are technically detailed. There is a pretty extensive literature on the SENS side of things. For MNT the definitive work is Nanosystems followed by “A Design for a Primitive Nanofactory” by Chris Phoenix.
April 5th, 2009 at 11:02 pm
Many scientists are becoming convinced that this stuff is a big deal.
I regard this utterance as the most flabbergasting imaginable nonsense. “Many” as compared to how overabundantly many who don’t?
Do you want to get into citation indexes, Michael? To the extent that citations are mounting a bit (they had nowhere to go but up after all), how many citations outside a small circle that keep citing each other do these citers garner themselves? How often do these citations occur outside the in-group as throwaways in intros and conclusion — connected to statements to the effect of, “some nutters go so far as to say blah blah, cite Moravek, Kurzweil, etc, whereas this paper sticks to more conventional assumptions, and so on”?
The whole point of the archipelago of Robot Cult think tanks as far as I can see is to cough up a hairball of apparent respectability for these formulations for media outlets to hook onto, to help your membership organizations get more bottoms in the pews and eyeballs on the webpages, what you call “getting out the message,” very much in the way neocons whomp up faux respectability for their scams via Heritage and AEI.
Basically, Dale wants us all to drop everything and focus on ultra-liberal causes. But if he actually believed that, wouldn’t he use arguments that appeal to the mainstream and actually have a likelihood of converting people to his view instead of focusing on a marginal subculture like transhumanism?
Ultra liberal causes. Anybody can look at exactly where I am coming from and what I advocate for: http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2007/11/amor-mundi-and-technoprogressive.html I certainly make no secret of it at all and never have done.
Technodevelopmental social struggle is my area of interest, progressive democratic variations of this social struggle are what I hope to facilitate. As I have said many times, transhumanism interests me as an extreme symptom and expression of more prevailing frames and aspirations in corporate-militarist futurology, which I see as the quintessential discourse of neoliberalism. I am primarily interested in understanding, not in “converting people.” I wouldn’t expect a Robot Cultist to get that.
I guess he does that by teaching rhetoric and critical theory to his students. Sometime I ought to hop on BART and go see what Dale is teaching all those impressionable young minds. Probably how to be ultra-liberal and alienate swing voters so that the Democrats can start losing to the Republicans again, putting the world’s most powerful weapons into the hands of America’s craziest and dumbest people.
It’s hard to keep up with you Michael, whining to me about how unfair I am to mistrust your protestations to liberalism half the time and then deriding “ultra leftists” the other half. For heaven’s sake, most ultra leftists would regard me as a naive liberal capitulationist, if it weren’t for the whole queer thing, thank heavens. You know, America is a secular multicultural center-left country, and those who read my blog and hear me defending the relevance of Obama’s centrist politics against those to his left who decry this as capitulation rather than progressive pragmatism would be a little perplexed to hear this weird new line of yours, in which I am decried as a commie-nazi presumably warping fragile little minds in UC Berkeley by teaching them Aristotle, Kant, and Hannah Arendt. Don’t worry — Republicans show little sign of adapted into a party that wins elections any time soon. Even as a fighting liberal and solid Democrat, I happen to wish they would, frankly, since I think everybody including Democrats would benefit from a sane opposition to keep them open to ideas, sharp minded, noncomplacent, and less prone to corruption.
April 6th, 2009 at 1:21 am
Good Lord, I am glad that Dale Carrico is considering TH as BS.
This way a part of the ultraleft will not interfere, as the ultraright will not, since the Pope is also saying how impossible this crap is.
The far right an the far left are cut off on the basis of “it’s marginal”.
April 6th, 2009 at 2:46 am
More and more all the time. The Intel CTO making his keynote speech at the Intel Developers Conference about the Singularity and Kurzweil last year is just one example among dozens.
Not commie-nazi, ultra liberal.
April 6th, 2009 at 3:03 am
Roadmaps in the sense that Intel has roadmaps, like: When we next accomplish A, then B, and then C, we’ll get to D - from there on we are pretty blind, but we’ll see the fog clearing as we approach D.
““Many” as compared to how overabundantly many who don’t?”
This was my point in the paragraph about non-academic startups being derided and sidelined by the big academia/industry. If you have a thousand scientists and industry experts saying A and just a handful (outside academia and big respectable industry) saying B, I’m sure the Carrico types will be flabbergasted by whatever that B is, however well-researched and proven its feasibility is. It’s not the actual science, not the actual papers, it’s the number of proponents and citations.
April 6th, 2009 at 3:07 am
These are freakin’ revolutionary technologies we’re talking about here, so it’s no wonder the number of citations is small compared to the overabundance of mundane tech citations.
April 6th, 2009 at 3:28 am
Is there or could you give a short list of the leaders in transhumanist technologies, so that folks sitting on top of piles or oceans of money could promptly relieve them of their financial frustrations? If all it takes is funding, provide it and let them prove their case. I see very little point in arguing who’s a crackpot and who’s not.
April 6th, 2009 at 4:26 am
For MNT the definitive work is Nanosystems followed by “A Design for a Primitive Nanofactory” by Chris Phoenix.
I can perhaps amplify Dale’s comments above. The paper “A Design for a Primitive Nanofactory” was published in a transhumanist journal which is not indexed by the major scientific databases. According to “Web of Science”, which tracks citations in the mainstream science journals that are in its database, the paper has been cited three times since 2003, by two papers authored by Phoenix himself and another by Drexler and Allis.
Plenty of mainstream scientists are excited by the many possibilities that our increasing control of matter on the nanoscale open up, many of them are developing increasingly sophisticated nanoscale machines and devices. But very few of them, in my experience, give any credence to the superlative claims of “nanofactories” and “superabundance”. “Superlative discourse”, as Dale calls it, pollutes the discussions we should be having about the many potential or possible impacts of developing technoscience; instead talking, as AnneC says, in terms of Utter Certainty about particular (ideologically favoured) outcomes on well-defined timescales that to mainstream science seem fantastic.
April 6th, 2009 at 6:25 am
@Anne: yes, I misunderstood the term, but I still find the concept of intersex people creepy. I am more axiologically conservative than both you and Dale, it seems.
It seems that Dale’s primary argument is a factual one not an axiological one: he is arguing that all this technology stuff is hyperbolae, that it ain’t gonna happen.
Such an argument needs to be prosecuted in a more rigorous way than Dale is capable of. I challenge Dale to post to Less Wrong an argument whose conclusion is that the probability of smarter than human AI within the next 100 years is less than 0.1%. He will be ripped to pieces.
April 6th, 2009 at 9:03 am
Roko:
I still find the concept of intersex people creepy. I am more axiologically conservative than both you and Dale, it seems.
Intersex people are people, not a “concept,” and they are used to being considered “creepy” and subjected to intolerable violences in consequence. Educate yourself, especially given your investment in endlessly declaring yourself such a superior intellect to the likes of muzzy-headed lie-brul leets like me.
It seems that Dale’s primary argument is a factual one not an axiological one: he is arguing that all this technology stuff is hyperbolae, that it ain’t gonna happen.
My primary argument is that superlative aspirations are conceptually confused to the point of illegibility, and that their advocacy amounts to a faith-based initiative. One would expect in consequence that, despite their protestations to the contrary that they are consummate scientists, superlative futurists would have little empirical evidence to show of being taken seriously by actual scientists (citations in scholarly journals, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, and nano-cornucopiasts in a competing diversity of academic labs with real grants, and so on). And precisely this is the case.
Marginality matters where one wants to claim the mantle of consensus science for one’s advocacy, as it does not necessarily matter where one wants to defend, say, the validity of an unpopular aesthetic judgment or political position.
Such an argument needs to be prosecuted in a more rigorous way than Dale is capable of.
This is laugh out loud funny to me. My whole point is that you people don’t even grasp the genre of argument you are making, let alone the criteria of warrant properly associated with it. You don’t grasp that your perpetual motion machines and square the circle pamphlets don’t constitute science at all in their essential claims (that is to say the claims that are their unique contribution, as against the scientific and policy claims they nibble at the edges of, the claims nobody needs to join a Robot Cult to make contact with). Superlative claims seem to me to be essentially theological, aesthetic, and moral(istic), and those are the terms in which I seek to understand them and critique them.
I challenge Dale to post to Less Wrong an argument whose conclusion is that the probability of smarter than human AI within the next 100 years is less than 0.1%. He will be ripped to pieces.
I challenge you all to stop writing checks you can’t cash and just go burrow off to your secret genius labs in the asteroid belt and code your superintelligent postbiological Robot God or your drextechian genie in a bottle or your sooper immortal cyborg shell, whereupon I’ll genuflect to your quasi-deified super-predicated post-self all the livelong day in the most edifying fashion imaginable, if you like. The same goes to fundamentalists who can gloat from their perches on heavenly clouds as I roast after death in some hell-nook for my atheism or the gay thing or whatever.
April 6th, 2009 at 9:29 am
I think Dave Carrico is a genuine super intelligence way beyond mere run-of-the-mill rationalist comprehension. More than a glimpse of his measurement-defying mental powers is too much to bear for us puny humans. I think we should all genuflect in his general direction.
April 6th, 2009 at 9:33 am
Sorry, Dale, when I was thinking of you I thought of the movie where your next of kin, HAL, says something about Dave and that slipped through.
April 6th, 2009 at 9:52 am
Don’t project your superlative aspirations onto me. I’m not a computer, I don’t want to be a computer, and I don’t regard myself as a sooper-genius like some people I know. My interest is technodevelopment, it is true, but I am quite content to be a run of the mill liberal arts teacher exhibiting quotidian intelligence who talks mostly about poetry and film and the history of post-Nietzschean continental and pragmatic philosophy with colleagues. I’m one of those effete elites hard-nosed would-be scientists like to rail against for our fashionable nonsense and menacing relativism and cool haircuts without brains beneath them and dot-eyed far left sensibilities and so on. No doubt the Robot God will know what to do with the likes of us, or at any rate the eugenicists can therapize negative nellies and losers like us into oblivion in the fullness of time, and then you can all live in a virtual paradise of Vegas style McMansions and strip malls for all eternity.
April 6th, 2009 at 10:04 am
I’m sorry for misrepresenting you, Dale. I’m afraid I haven’t read anything like a representative sample of your writings.
As I mentioned before, I find your arguments extremely broad and I must have read a more generic rejection of transformative choices for the self into what I have read.
Evolution is marginal(as we seem to be using the word in this conversation) as a minority of people in the US believe in it.
I’d like to suggest that everybody involved in this conversation may be a little smarter than they are coming off. It seems that Mike and friends have retreated to scoffing, and Dale has begun using phrases that seem more aimed at Republican suburban boobousie.
April 6th, 2009 at 10:09 am
Hey, no prob.
April 6th, 2009 at 11:11 am
Richard, to contradict your comments, a 2006 U.S. National Academies study that was a Triennial Review of the National Nanotechnology Initiative primarily referenced Nanosystems while reviewing the basis of molecular manufacturing, and recommended further funding to explore the avenue. Drexler is giving a keynote address at the Berkeley Nanotechnology Forum, “a cross-disciplinary meeting organized by the Berkeley Nanotechnology Club and sponsored by the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Berkeley Nanosciences & Nanoengineering Institute, and the Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems”. He was also invited to give a keynote talk for the opening plenary session of WORLDCOMP’09, the 2009 World Congress in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Applied Computing. These are hardly marginal venues.
I’ve spoken to representatives from the US Navy, Congress, and Society for Police Futurists who were concerned about MNT risk and nanofactories.
Yes, Phoenix’s paper isn’t cited nearly as much as it should be, but Drexler’s basic ideas are very widely known. Instead of regarding them as impossible, many just believe they’re further down the line or that their feasibility is uncertain, awaiting more experimental evidence.
April 6th, 2009 at 11:48 am
Since the birth of transhumanism, what transhumanist technologies have actually come to fruition? None? Are any on the verge of a breakthrough - becoming mainstream?
April 6th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
DevNull, it depends a lot on what you call a ‘transhumanist’ technology. Back in the day on the extropy chat list all kinds of things were predicted, I got on there late, around 2000, but digging around the archives you see predictions of private aerospace, commercially successful persistent virtual worlds, entirely virtual companies(whose members would never meet face to face), darknets threatening conventional business(although usually it was thought cryptography would play a larger role, old-time cypherpunks would be horrified at how in-the-clear most p2p tech is), narrow AI successes, and many other technowizardry that’s come true.
Whether these predictions count as “transhumanist” or not isn’t as clear. They were predictions by transhumanists, but they aren’t really the core ‘transhuman’ technologies the movement coalesced around anticipating.
Those technologies are neccesarily slower to come around (Some would say unlikely, perhaps). But there are early advances now available, advanced prosthetics, artificial vision, extra senses, haptic interfaces, genetic engineering of adult subjects, wireless internet HUDs, RepRaps, and so on.
These are technologies that old-time transhumanists predicted, and expect to lead to greater things.
April 6th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
DevNull, I could answer your question, but it would take too long and this isn’t really a transhumanism 101 blog, more like transhumanism 102. It all depends on what you call transhumanist technologies, which is at least 50% subjective. You should read all of the transhumanism Wikipedia article, Transhumanist FAQ, etc. From one perspective, anything involving gene therapy/IVF is transhumanist, so is rapid prototyping, AI, etc., but I think many would object to that characterization, but they would object to ANY technology being defined as H+, so really it’s an eternal argument and you kind of have to sift through it yourself. Read The Singularity is Near with a critical eye, it overviews a lot of technologies. There are hundreds of other books but it’s kind of hard to say where to start.
April 6th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Michael, what you say doesn’t contradict me at all - the fact that you think it does betrays the essential misunderstanding. Let me illustrate my reply by reference to the UK’s nanotechnology program, which I know best, having some responsibility for it. We have a category in the program for “Extreme and Molecular Nanotechnology”, in which there are projects on atomically precise molecular machines based on rotaxanes, on STM based positionally controlled mechanosynthesis, on molecular motors and machines based on DNA (it’s interesting to note in passing that DNA nanotechnology is where Drexler himself is concentrating his efforts at the moment). I think these are all hugely exciting projects, as do the people who are carrying them out, and the scientists who peer-reviewed the proposals. What no-one thinks, though, is that these are going to lead inevitably to nanofactories and nanoabundance. Maybe they’ll lead to new, precise metamaterials of the kind that might make quantum computing possible, maybe they’ll lead to new constructs for nanomedicine, able to sense their environment and compute the appropriate course of action. The point is we just don’t know which if any of these many possible futures will ensue.
Are things different on your side of the Atlantic? I don’t think so - I was in DC in November for a workshop organised by NSF with the Woodrow Wilson centre to consider where so-called 3rd generation nanotechnologies might be going. It involved about a dozen of the leading US nanotechnology researchers from academia and industry, together with NNI and NSF officials; the ideas of Drexler received virtually no mention at all (in fact, I suspect I may have been the only person who actually mentioned his name).
April 6th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
So transhumanist predicted tech if not actually transhumanist tech is chugging along just fine. What’s your gut feeling: will this be a Kurzweilian century or something much much less impressive? Have we missed many of his predictions yet? I think that some, perhaps major, unforeseen developments are going to take place and some predicted ones never materialize (at least on time) - just like in the past.
April 6th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
James Hughes: “…head-butts, logorrhoea and retching glottal stops of Carrico-ese.”
In other words, there won’t be any time soon a follow-up to James’ interview with Dale from 2005*?
That’s a pity because I enjoyed it very much and hoped, with all the constant back and forth between the two camps outlined above by Michael, for a direct, real-time exchange of arguments.
* JHughes/DCarrico conversation part one & part two (Source: Changesurfer Radio 2005)
April 6th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Richard, what I said does contradict you to some extent, not “not at all”. I don’t think that limited diamondoid mechanosynthesis would lead inevitably to nanofactories, and it’s a strawman to imply I do. While MM discussion may be absent from the UK’s nanotechnology program and last November’s NSF workshop, it is not absent from, for instance, the Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology NSF workshop back in 2001. Yes, obviously many scientists are not hugely interested in mentioning MM because mechanosynthesis is not their research focus.
Anyway, I can concede the point if you like, it’s obvious that MNT is not mainstream science and will never be until it has more experimental support. But, the idea is hardly in danger of dying, due to the way it has tremendous vigor in the public sphere. If rigid molecular machines turn out to be impossible, then the idea will eventually deservedly die. Meanwhile, it looks like scientists will be creating increasingly more sophisticated rigid molecular machines. The question is, how far along the way to an assembler will we need to be before you concede your skepticism was in error? (If it is indeed an error and not completely warranted.)
In Dale’s world, I am pretending to be reasonable and not take MNT too seriously as a PR strategy. (Crafty, those Robot Cultists~!) But in my very own head it seems very much that I am not fanatically devoted to the Drexler-1986 vision of MNT and would be just as interested to see it be proved wrong as right.
April 6th, 2009 at 7:37 pm
I’d like to see what actual science says about the possibilities, not just some transhumanist prophets or naysayers.
A couple of years ago Technology Review commissioned several biogerontologists to review Aubrey de Grey’s SENS program. Their conclusion was that SENS was speculative and not enough data existed to support his claims. That’s as close as you’re going to get to a formal scientific vetting of transhumanist ideas rigth now.
April 6th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
DevNull: Let’s say a non-academic small startup proposes a tech no one in the scientific world… is familiar with or knows any way of actually achieving… Does the lack of credentials/resources automatically disqualify it from being considered as something that may happen?
If you were a venture capitalist, would you fund them? Statistically speaking, they are very likely to fail.
AnneC: Oh wow, something just occurred to me - did you (Roko) think “intersex” had something to do with “interSPECIES coupling”?
I believe “interspecies erotica” is the preferred nomenclature.
April 6th, 2009 at 11:41 pm
Martin: Well, yeah, but I was trying to be somewhat marginally (heh) considerate to Michael as I don’t know if he’s looking for blog traffic from people searching for “interspecies erotica”.
April 7th, 2009 at 3:06 am
@ dale: my challenge stands. If you have a fact-based argument as to why smarter than human AI is not possible then please tell me.
Calling me names helps neither of us.
April 7th, 2009 at 3:10 am
@ justin corwin: “everybody in this conversation may be coming off … ”
- I see your point. Let’s all try to truth-seek rather than score points. Myself included.
April 7th, 2009 at 4:14 am
It’s called bestiality.
April 7th, 2009 at 8:15 am
If you have a fact-based argument as to why smarter than human AI is not possible then please tell me.
The usual premature dismissal.
Just what assumptions and frames are embedded in your notion of “smarter” here, and are the implications of those assumptions matters of fact, are differences arising from these assumptions open to adjudication on the basis of what you consider to be facts? People who have trouble distinguishing science fiction from science should be less cocksure that they always have the facts on their side, and that skeptics are always ignorant or irrational.
Is “smartness” a matter of instrumental or formulaic calculation, are sensitivity, imagination, improvisation, criticism, expressivity dimensions contained in your notion of “smarter than human AI”?
Does it matter or not to your visions of post-biological smartness that intelligence has always only been materialized in brains, does it matter that performances of intelligence are always social, and that in some construals collaboration is already a form of greater-than-personal intelligence?
If not, why not? At what point is the trait you claim to be so palpably possible sufficiently remote from the actual phenomena denoted by the term that you might properly be compelled (by the demands of sense, I mean) to find some other word for what you are talking about?
What are the stakes of your attribution of “possibility” to the “arrival” of this smartness, whatever you happen to mean by it? Is it logical possibility, is it theoretical possibility, however well-substantiated or not, however remote or not, is it proximate practical possibility capable of attracting investment capital or demanding immediate regulation, or what? Do these distinctions figure at all in your determination of whether or not this question of engineering “smarter than human AI” is worthy of serious consideration?
If not, why not? Wouldn’t these sorts of distinctions figure in most practical considerations of the kind you seem to think you are engaging in?
If you want to sell what looks to me like a faith-based initiative concerning the arrival of post-biological “superintelligence” you’ll discover that skeptics you want to persuade don’t have to meet your terms, you have to meet ours. It’s the extraordinary claim that demands the extraordinary substantiation.
Your personal challenge is finally irrelevant, of course, since the challenge of scientific consensus is the one that confronts your claim and so far you have failed to attract that consensus. You may be able to find a cul-de-sac in which your claim passes muster for a marginal minority, and you are surely able to best me or at any rate bamboozle me in some exchange on some technical matter I have neither the training nor the temperament to address the proper significance of, but all that is neither here nor there.
I pose my own challenge on the terms I am fit for, and those terms are relevant even if they are not the only relevant ones in a question like this, and even if you choose to demote them as not “fact based” and hence, apparently, unworthy of consideration. You’ll discover that you live in a world with sufficiently many people in it who differ with you on the question of which concerns are the ones worthy of consideration that dismissals only ensure that you are dismissed. That, too, is a fact.
April 7th, 2009 at 9:28 am
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/newtonai.html
Just for Dale, again, here.
Superlatives are apparently doing much better than your French phylosophy.
April 7th, 2009 at 10:38 am
Thomas: “Superlatives are apparently doing much better than your French phylosophy.”
“In just over a day, a powerful computer program accomplished a feat that took physicists centuries to complete: extrapolating the laws of motion from a pendulum’s swings.”
I love the whooshing sound reality makes as it rushes past Dale’s Rhetoric.
April 7th, 2009 at 11:10 am
I was going to write a long reply, but I accidentally reloaded the page.
Suffice it to say that there is one good point Dale makes: Extraordinary claims like smarter than human AI can be decision-theoretically problematic when they have extraordinarily large payoffs involved.
April 7th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
I love the whooshing sound reality makes as it rushes past Dale’s Rhetoric.
I guess I find it rather perplexing that anybody here would think I would find this development surprising, or that superlative futurologists see this sort of thing as a “vindication” of their faith-based perspective. Of course, for True Believers there are only vindications when all is said and done, after all.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but there is nothing about this development that is clarified by treating it as an episode in a narrative that will eventuate in a Robot God or any other superlative aspiration. I suspect all this just means that Robot Cultists will indulge in pointless deranging sensationalism to the cost of sense as usual.
To the extent that what is wanted in this occasion is to ensure that results are trustworthy and security problems addressed and so on, you will forgive me if I say that pretending this is the embryo of a post-biological superintelligence rather than a complex piece of code directed to a complex task will make no contribution whatsoever to a single practical consideration that besets us.
And it probably wouldn’t hurt to remind you that there is nothing about assuming such a hackneyed comic-book science fictional vantage that would have put any of you people in a position to contribute to the creation of this program you are now crowing about as though your fanboy handwaving somehow brought it into being.
I will say that I have enjoyed the robotic predictability with which some of you are now expressing hostility for the effete elite French philosophy I so dastardly represent : anti-intellectual arguments from would be sooper-intellectuals is par for the course where the futurological congress is concerned. It is amusing to imagine how flabbergasting you people would be upon confrontation with a true superintelligence, given the hysteria and revulsion with which you greet intellectual enterprises from quotidian intelligences like my own just because they differ from your own the least itty bit. Honestly, just a little pathetic, really, not that it isn’t perfectly expected. This ain’t my first time at the futurological rodeo.
April 8th, 2009 at 1:05 am
Personally, I’m alright with your “effete elite French philosophy” when you make a specific effort to be clear and concise (as you seem to have been deliberately more often in recent weeks), but if you actually look at the Wikipedia page for “rhetoric”, you’ll see that we’re hardly alone and that events such as the Sokal Affair have cast great suspicion and laughter on to your genre of writing. People can be forgiven for thinking that Rhetoric often serves to obscure more than illuminate, in fact I’d consider it a “mainstream” position. Many of your supporters have pointed out that your language is often very dense and explicitly difficult to understand.
Lots of smart people (including very liberal smart people) in SF make fun of Berkeley professors, so this derision is hardly limited to the “futurological rodeo”.
April 8th, 2009 at 2:24 am
Dale: “There is nothing about this development that is clarified by treating it as an episode in a narrative that will eventuate in a Robot God or any other superlative aspiration.”
Aha. That’s an interesting *opinion*. Do you have a *rigorous argument* to back it up?
I’m not dismissing you. If you do have a rigorous argument that concludes that SI is unlikely or impossible, then I really really need to hear it. If SI is not possible it is in my interest to know this as soon as possible, so that I don’t waste my entire career working on trying to achieve the impossible.
Yes, really, I want to seek the facts. Even if the facts are the opposite of my current beliefs.
April 8th, 2009 at 2:31 am
In fact, I can even make you an offer: Write a comment that makes purely factual arguments as to why smarter than human intelligence is impossible or highly unlikely in the next 100 years, an I will publish it on my blog, verbatim. But it has to contain no ad-hominem attacks [that means you can’t critique the idea of smarter than human AI by criticizing the character or intelligence or certain people who happen to believe it at present], no name-calling.
April 8th, 2009 at 4:59 am
EVERYTHING you say, everywhere I look, is exactly that. Something like deducing physics from raw data by a computer - “is just a superlative fantasy example”.
As far as I understand you.
If not, what is your point then?
April 8th, 2009 at 7:51 am
Thom: “EVERYTHING you say, everywhere I look, is exactly that. Something like deducing physics from raw data by a computer - “is just a superlative fantasy example.” As far as I understand you. If not, what is your point then?”
What, you think readers of poetry have never seen a calculator? Look, you quite palpably don’t understand me. And I honestly don’t think you are really interested in understanding me, or in grasping the point at hand. Even if you didn’t read any of the thousands upon thousands of words in which I’ve elaborated my superlativity critique (Michael, to his credit, linked to it from the beginning — even if he remains unconvinced he understands there is a context out of which my present comments arise) I’ve already provided plenty of arguments that complicate the facile gloss you attribute to me here.
“Roko” keeps on demanding from me what he is calling “the facts” and “rigorous arguments” over and over again. He seems to be quite bolstered through this joyless ritual, which no doubt is its primary objective. Needless to say, the demand for facts here actually looks to me to constitute a radical circumscription of the kinds of attention one can usefully and intelligently pay to the discourses he identifies with as a way of insulating himself from discomfiting criticism.
Not that any of you will listen or care, any more than you ever do, but once again, this time with feeling: Superlativity in my view is a discourse not a research program, it relies for its force and intelligibility on the citation of other, specificially theological/ transcendentalizing discourses, it is a way of framing a constellation of descriptions taken for facts, embedding them into a narrative that solicits personal identification, and forms the basis for moralizing advocacy.
I don’t think there is any way of talking about this sort of thing that Roko would regard as “fact-based” “rigorous” and not “name calling” according to his reckoning, not so much because the critique is counter-factual, sloppy, or essentially name-calling but because it is pitched at a level pf generality and attuned to concerns he has swept off the field of consideration from the get-go. This circumscription, by my lights, is an indictment of “Roko” and not me.
Lots of intelligent people care and attend to the world differently than you superlative futurologists do, and this matters for you people in at least two ways that you don’t seem to grasp. First, since even technoscientific progress is not just a matter of a socially-culturally-politically indifferent accumulation of inventions but a process fueled by and distributed by norms, laws, expectations, and vicissitudes in social struggles, you simply won’t get what you want unless you gain more understanding of and sensitivity to the sorts of issues I raise and which you seem to think you can simply define or ignore out of existence. Second, given your apparent faith that technoscience is about to nudge you all into something Utterly Other, and you think you pine to be rubbing elbows with post-biological superintelligences and so on, surely you should find some pause in the fact that you are suffused with revulsion and incomprehension at the confrontation with a conventional intelligence that differs from your own in a handful of assumptions and aspirations and matters of style.
Michael, I’m a bit surprised that you want to cast a net of derision over the whole cohort of Berkeley professors, or even over the whole cohort of Berkeley professors in the humanities, given how many of them are incomparably more accomplished in the eyes of the world than I am. But, yes, it’s true, certain rather embarrassingly ignorant people like to laugh at Berkeley, as they do educated elites more generally.
So too certain rather embarrassingly ignorant misguided people, caught up in the storm-churn of disruptive technoscientific change seem to have gotten the idea that software is going to spit out a Robot God either to solve all their problems for them or end the world, that either a perfectly efficacious medicine or a brain scan that is somehow the same thing as them rather than a snapshot of them is going to spit out an invulverable immortalization of them, and that nanoscale technique is going to spit out a superabundance through which we can circumvent the impasse of stakeholder politics in a still-finite world we share with an ineradicable diversity of peers.
I am quite content to count myself among the number who laugh at the latter and not the former. So are many of the people on whom superlative futurologists depend for the actual scientific and political progress you go on to sensationalize and hyperbolize in order to sell your scam or cope with you fear of death and contingency or indulge your social or bodily alienation or whatever it is that made you become a silly Robot Cultist in the first place.
April 8th, 2009 at 10:30 am
Dale: Needless to say, the demand for facts here actually looks to me to constitute a radical circumscription of the kinds of attention one can usefully and intelligently pay to the discourses he identifies with as a way of insulating himself from discomfiting criticism.
If anyone else still reading this can parse that sentence, then do please let me know.
April 8th, 2009 at 10:33 am
Dale: I don’t think there is any way of talking about this sort of thing that Roko would regard as “fact-based” “rigorous”
How do you know? You haven’t even tried yet!
April 8th, 2009 at 10:54 am
Ok, so I’ll ask again. Dale, please present me with an argument whose conclusion is “smarter than human AI is impossible” or “smarter than human AI is extremely unlikely to be developed within the next 100 years”.
I’ll give you an example of the sort of thing I am looking for:
1. The human brain is extremely complex
2. Software is really hard to write
3. Any smarter than human AI must be as complex (or more) than the human brain
4. Therefore, no-one will write software that clever in the next 100 years
5. Therefore, smarter than human AI is extremely unlikely to be developed within the next 100 years
April 8th, 2009 at 11:17 am
Dale: I don’t think there is any way of talking about this sort of thing that Roko would regard as “fact-based” “rigorous”
Roko: How do you know? You haven’t even tried yet!
You have literally just proved my point.
April 8th, 2009 at 11:29 am
Ok, so I’ll ask again. Dale, please present me with an argument whose conclusion is “smarter than human AI is impossible” or “smarter than human AI is extremely unlikely to be developed within the next 100 years”.
I’ll give you an example of the sort of thing I am looking for:
1. The human brain is extremely complex
2. Software is really hard to write
3. Any smarter than human AI must be as complex (or more) than the human brain
4. Therefore, no-one will write software that clever in the next 100 years
5. Therefore, smarter than human AI is extremely unlikely to be developed within the next 100 years.
I have no doubt that this is what you are looking for, inasmuch as there is no answer to this question that does not confirm the very prejudices at issue. The primary weight in your formulation is borne by the metaphorical usage of the word “smarter” in both 3 and 5 to describe what you take to be on offer when computer programs grow more complex. That’s not a fact, that’s a figure. The argument relies on framing, not evidence. I disagree that there is anything in the facts to justify the analogy and I believe all the other business about timelines and so on actually functions to distract True Believers from noticing what thin ice you are on when you try to extrapolate from this sort of development to a grand narrative eventuating in a post-biological superintelligence or Robot God.
If I may anticipate your next objection, this concern of mine is not at all equivalent to declaring consciousness supernatural, but just my insisting that the actual materialization of human consciousness is non-negligible in ways superlative futurologists seem ill-disposed to take into account in ways that empower most of their glib and deranging talk on this subject. A pile of gravel may be as complex as a skyscraper, but one hardly is indulging in mysticism to note that they are different nor to express skepticism that even a growing gravel pile is sure to crystallize into a skyscraper in the fullness of time.
April 8th, 2009 at 11:30 am
As a matter of fact, there is a way of talking that I would regard as both fact-based rather than ad-hominem. I gave you an example above. It’s very simple: write a comment whose last line is “therefore smarter than human AI is not possible or is extremely unlikely in the next 100 years”, and write a justification of that statement above it. Finally, delete from your comment any personal attacks on people who believe the negation of your conclusion.
So, I ask you for the fifth(?) time: will you present a logical argument supporting the conclusion that smarter than human AI is not possible or is extremely unlikely in the next 100 years.
April 8th, 2009 at 11:32 am
Or, if you think you have already presented such an argument, copy and paste it into your next comment.
April 8th, 2009 at 11:34 am
Rather than “no answer to this question” I probably should have said “no version of this sort of formulation,” but I assume you know what I mean. Although, I suppose that’s never safe here as an assumption.
April 8th, 2009 at 11:36 am
Michael would surely disapprove my pasting the whole of my writings hitherto in this exchange into yet another post. The punchline? I don’t agree with your apparent premise that I haven’t been rigorous or factual up to now.
April 8th, 2009 at 11:39 am
So, I ask you for the fifth(?) time: will you present a logical argument supporting the conclusion that smarter than human AI is not possible or is extremely unlikely in the next 100 years.
Endlessly failing, and loudly, to get my point that we disagree on premises and at the level of definitions isn’t exactly the stirring demonstration of your superior rationality o and scientificity that you seem to think it is.
April 8th, 2009 at 11:45 am
Dale: there is no answer to this question that does not confirm the very prejudices at issue
What are the prejudices at issue? The use of the word “intelligence” to describe certain computer programs?
Dale: The primary weight in your formulation is borne by the metaphorical usage of the word “smarter” in both 3 and 5 to describe what you take to be on offer when computer programs grow more complex.
- I am not claiming that all complex computer programs are smart. I am claiming that there is a significant chance that some human team of software engineers and AI researchers might create a particular computer program that has a greater intellectual ability than any human.
all the other business about timelines and so on actually functions to distract True Believers from noticing what thin ice you are on when you try to extrapolate from this sort of development to a grand narrative eventuating in a post-biological superintelligence or Robot God.
Well, you too are on thin ice. You claim that smarter than human intelligence is a nonsensical concept, right? But reality doesn’t care about your confusion! If it is the case that smarter than human intelligence can be built (and I am by no means certain), then you will be just as much at risk from it if you think that the concept of smarter than human intelligence is nonsense.
I am (and so are the rest of the singularitarian community) erring on the side of caution: we are like insurance against Superintelligent AI actually making sense and posing a real threat. It might not… but it just might.
April 8th, 2009 at 11:48 am
@Dale: our comments are crossing over here. I’m going to wait 15 minutes to prevent this.
April 8th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Dale: we disagree on premises and at the level of definitions
- so you disagree that the concept of “a computer that is more intelligent than a human” makes any sense?
If not, what premises and definitions do you disagree with me on?
April 9th, 2009 at 12:19 am
I wonder that too. What is AI defined by Dale? We only know it is not possible.
April 9th, 2009 at 1:42 am
Yes Dale, facts have this unpleasant habit of getting in the way of the serious business of hair-splitting and mental masturbation. I am sure when you will meet a superintelligent AI at the pub, assuming you ever visit such mundane places, you will argue his non-existence with him based on the same nebulous empty pseudo-arguments that you use now. Perhaps he will disappear in a puff after your “proof” of his own non-existence, but somehow I doubt it.
Note this (I mean the other readers, Dale is a lost case): The Wright brothers did not invent aerodynamics and perhaps they did not even understand the complex mathematics of fluid dynamics with its loooong equations etc. But these things were well known at the time and explained on the best textbooks. The Wright brothers just did what the best scientists of the time considered doable. Of course there were imbeciles who still argued that flying was impossible, with pseudo-arguments that said nothing more that flying is not God’s will — and of course their grandchildren fly on cheap commercial flights now.
April 9th, 2009 at 4:54 am
Giulio: “you will argue his non-existence with him based on the same nebulous empty pseudo-arguments that you use now”
I’d *love* it if Dale would give me an argument as to why superintelligent AI can’t exist! That’s what I’ve been asking him for for the last 50 comments!
I hereby repeat my request to Dale: please tell me exactly which premises and definitions you disagree with me on. I really want to engage in a productive debate with you. If I am wrong about the possibility of AGI, I want to know about it. If you think I am a member of a “Cult”, then you are acting in an extremely unethical way if you don’t respond to my requests for a clear explanation of what exactly is wrong with the Cult’s doctrine.
April 9th, 2009 at 7:29 am
Roko: “What are the prejudices at issue? The use of the word ‘intelligence’ to describe certain computer programs?”
In a word, yes. Given what computers are and given what intelligence is, it’s actually problematic to glibly associate them. When in the 50s people referred to room-sized computers as “electronic brains,” it was, you know, a metaphor. I think the metaphor was not an illuminating one.
I am not claiming that all complex computer programs are smart.
“Are”? Well, that’s a mercy. After all, such a claim would be obviously crazy.
I am claiming that there is a significant chance that some human team of software engineers and AI researchers might create a particular computer program that has a greater intellectual ability than any human.
Despite the fact that the locution “there is a significant chance that” sounds superficially sciency (the stock in trade of Robot Cultism) there are no actual empirical instances from which you are determining these odds. Your utterance is essentially an expression of faith, unless you mean it, you know, figuratively, as a kind of bad poetry.
You claim that smarter than human intelligence is a nonsensical concept, right? But reality doesn’t care about your confusion!
Moments like these are my favorites! First of all, as an atheist I don’t attribute consciousness to “reality” any more than I do to software, and so I don’t think reality “cares” about what either of us are saying. But more to the point, it cracks me up that you are so cocksure that you have “reality” on your side in the first place. Given that literally no actually-existing computer exhibits intelligence and given that literally every exhibition of intelligence in the world has always been organismically embodied, you’ll forgive me if I don’t concede your faithful utterances to the contrary the force of “reality.” Indeed, the only reality I can associate with your performance is the long line of AI-ideologues speaking with exactly your certainty about the imminent arrival of AI, every year on the year for literally decades, and never once being anything but endlessly absolutely wrong about everything.
I am (and so are the rest of the singularitarian community) erring on the side of caution: we are like insurance against Superintelligent AI actually making sense and posing a real threat. It might not… but it just might.
There is no “it” in the terms on which your discourse depends. Your frames are confused and hence confusing. The singularitarian “community” (note the glancing admission there that singularitarianism isn’t an argument but a sub(cult)ure) is erring, but not in anything like a useful way. There are many problems, among them security threats, associated with complex software and dynamic coding, and there are many intelligent people working on these problems. Nobody needs a fandom of boys-with-toys who cannot distinguish science from science fiction to arrive on the scene and save us from ourselves. To my mind, the larger more proximate threat by far is not so much the imminent arrival of the unfriendly Robot God, but the deranging discourse of singularitarianism itself that sensationalizes and hyperbolizes technical questions in ways that make sensible deliberation less easy by far, investing code with the utterly irrelevant cadences of hysterical apocalypse and wish-fulfillment fantasies of personal transcendence.
Giulio Prisco, briefly appears on the scene to contribute the comment: Yes Dale, facts have this unpleasant habit of getting in the way of the serious business of hair-splitting and mental masturbation. I am sure when you will meet a superintelligent AI at the pub, assuming you ever visit such mundane places, you will argue his non-existence with him based on the same nebulous empty pseudo-arguments that you use now. Perhaps he will disappear in a puff after your “proof” of his own non-existence, but somehow I doubt it.
I cannot distinguish this from the rantings of a literal lunatic. Yes, “facts,” yes, I’ll pull up a barstool and have a beer with the Robot God, and that’ll show me. Mm-kay… I leave aside the inevitable turn to the Wright Brothers, a move I lampoon repeatedly on my blog. The long and the short of it: you are not the Wright Brothers. You are not Einstein. You are somebody’s crazy uncle building a perpetual motion machine in the garage out of milk bottles and popsickle sticks.
But “Roko” is apparently inspired by Giulio’s comment to demand of me “an argument as to why superintelligent AI can’t exist! That’s what I’ve been asking him for for the last 50 comments!” I wonder if there are any logicians in the house who can name the fallacy “Roko” is indulging in through this gambit? Anybody who has had the misfortune of trying to have a conversation with a frothing True Believer in God or UFOs or the Hollow Earth or fairies or Nessie will know what I am talking about.
If you think I am a member of a “Cult”, then you are acting in an extremely unethical way if you don’t respond to my requests for a clear explanation of what exactly is wrong with the Cult’s doctrine.
Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha! If ridiculing the ridiculous is wrong I don’t wanna be right! What critique of a cult will count as “clear” to the cultist that doesn’t concede the organizing assumptions of the cult? C’mon, “Roko,” surely you can do better than this! We’ve arrived at diminishing return, I fear (Giulio Prisco’s arrival on the scene is a sure-fire signal of that, if nothing else). I’ve been as clear as your provocation warrants, and I’m satisfied my point is made. I leave it to the peanut gallery to make their own assessments from here on out. Best to all.
April 9th, 2009 at 7:39 am
@ Dale:
Just as we get to the meat of the debate, you decide to leave!
I politely request that we continue this for a little longer. Post a comment saying “yes” if you wish to do so.
April 9th, 2009 at 7:51 am
@ Roko - even if Dale says “yes” and continues to participate in the discussion, don’t expect from him any actual argument. He knows that many experts much more knowledgeable than him think superintelligent AIs will exist someday soon, and he doesn’t like it. You cannot persuade someone who does not want to be persuaded.
April 9th, 2009 at 7:54 am
@ Prisco:
I still hold out hope that Dale has a killer argument that he’s not telling us about, which proves beyond reasonable doubt that superintelligent AI is nonsense.
Since my entire career depends upon the feasibility of SAI, I am incentivized to try extremely hard to find flaws in it.
I’ll keep trying.
April 9th, 2009 at 7:57 am
By the way, I have no interest in persuading Dale that SAI is feasible. It matters little to me whether his beliefs are correct.
I am interested in persuading Dale to persuade me that SAI is impossible. I care a lot about whether I have a faulty belief in my head. If Dale can help me to excise a falsehood from my mind, then I’ll be extremely grateful to him.
April 9th, 2009 at 8:43 am
@Roko
What Dale knows what we don’t?
April 9th, 2009 at 10:01 am
Vitalism? It’s like you want to pretend that noticing the actually salient facts connected to the materialization of consciousness in brains is tantamount to believing in phlogiston in this day and age. I am a materialist in matters of mind and that means, among other things, that I don’t discount the logical possibility that something enough akin to intelligence to deserve the description might be materialized on a different substrate. But logical possibility gives us no reasons to find ponies where there aren’t any, and there is nothing in computer science or in actual computers on offer to justify analogies between them and intelligence, consciousness, and so on. That’s all just bad poetry and media sensationalism and futurological salesmanship. When Robot Cultists start fulminating about smarter-than-human-AI the first thing I notice is that they tend to have reduced human intelligence to something like a glandular calculator before going on to glorify calculators into Robot Gods. I disapprove of both the reductionist impoverishment of human intelligence on which this vision depends as well as the faith-based unqualified handwaving idealizations and hyperbolizations that follow thereafter. The implications of the embodied materialization of human intelligence is even more devastating to superlative futurological wish-fulfillment fantasies of techno-immortalization via “uploading” into the cyberspatial sprawl, inasmuch as the metaphor of “migration” (yes, that’s all it is, a metaphor) from brain-embodied mind to digital-materialized mind is by no means a sure thing if we accept, as materialists would seem to do, that the actual materialization is non-negligible after all.
April 9th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Dale: “I don’t discount the logical possibility that something enough akin to intelligence to deserve the description might be materialized on a different substrate”
- So let me get this straight: you think it is possible to build a computer that would deserve the name “intelligent”. From this I presume that you think it is possible to build a computer that is intelligent and smarter than any human - as in, it can do any mental task as well as any human can, and it can do certain mental tasks that humans cannot do.
Am I correct here?
April 9th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
I said nothing about building a computer. I get it that this is all you care about since you get to find your pony if computers get treated as people. But computers are actually-existing things in the word, and they aren’t smart and they aren’t getting smart. You are hearing what you want to hear. Being a materialist about mind doesn’t give me or you permission to pretend to find a pony where there isn’t one. I can’t say that you are “correct” when all that has happened is that you have leaped off the deep end into spastic handwaving about computers being intelligent and smarter and acting this or that way, just because I pointed out that I don’t attribute mind to some mysterious supernatural force. I think the words “smart” “intelligent” “act” can’t be used literally to describe mechanical behavior, that these are only metaphors when so applied, and indeed metaphors that have clearly utterly bewitched and derailed you (and your “community,” as you put it) to the cost of sense. Who knows what beasts or aliens or what have you we might come upon who might be intelligent or not, however differently incarnated or materialized? But when you are talking about code and computers and intelligence you are talking about things that actually exist, and to attribute the traits we associate with intelligence with the things we call computers or the behaviors of software is to play fast and loose with language in ways that suggest either confusion or deception or both.
April 9th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
Sigh.
Poor, dear transhumanists. Dale has thought more about you than you have thought about yourselves.
The Superlativity Critique, if successful, is lodged in just the right place to rob you transhumanists of whatever force you might have. And this is not a coincidence.
Consider: If it weren’t for the prospect of superintelligence, few people would give a rat’s ass about AGI. If it weren’t for the prospect of superlongevity, few people would give a rat’s ass about SENS. If it weren’t for the prospect of superabundance, few people would give a rat’s ass about nanotechnology.
For transhumanism to propogate itself among the masses, you all have to convince the world that the future is full of Superpotential. Superintelligence, superlongevity, superabundance, without them, the future is just as bland and boring a slog as the present: full of dumbasses, death, and scarcity. And this sure doesn’t make for a Burgeoning Movement.
Have you ever noticed how much venom Dale can muster at the drop of a hat for futurists and futurologists — these people he calls ’salesmen’? Did any of you stop to ask what he thinks these salesmen are selling?
He thinks they’re out there selling a SuperFuture, a SuperFuture that doesn’t even need to materialize to have important effects in the present. It’s this SuperFuture, sold by futurists, that gives you transhumanists your force.
Since Dale believes you all must be stopped, he works against you in the best way he knows how (a way in which he is something of an expert). He writes. He writes volumes of reams of thousands upon thousands of words in essays, long and short, stilted to the Heavens. He writes and writes, and laughs, and ridicules, and pokes and prods, and in the end, when you read the material most damaging to transhumanists, all of it boils down to a single, solitary claim:
The future will be pretty much like the present.
If more people believe him on this than believe you all, your movement is finished. I hope you see why. Nobody needs transhumanism when the future is just going to be more of same goddamn BS we’re used to.
If you’re smart, and if you want to see transhumanist ideas take over the world (or at least that part of the world where people aren’t picking maggots off their dinner), you’ll support your local Superfuturist and drown Dale out with ever-more Superscenarios.
I mean, seriously, he’s only one guy. And there’s, like, 6 of you or something. You can do it! Don’t cede this key terrain!
Fight back!
April 9th, 2009 at 10:48 pm
So, the thinking process isn’t limited to only biological organisms, but the thinking process isn’t a mechanical computing either? It’s something we can’t imitate with any kind of a machine?
Do I understand you correctly?
April 10th, 2009 at 2:27 am
Dale: I think the word “act” can’t be used literally to describe mechanical behavior”
- you are directly contradicting literally the whole field of artificial intelligence. From the wikipedia article on AI:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science which aims to create it. Major AI textbooks define the field as “the study and design of intelligent agents,”[1] where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximize its chances of success.
April 10th, 2009 at 7:01 am
Thom: So, the thinking process isn’t limited to only biological organisms, but the thinking process isn’t a mechanical computing either?
The thinking process is limited to biological organisms except in science fiction in ways that actually matter to people who care about science as much as you claim to do, and it is true that the term “thought” is indeed one that encompasses more than just reckoning with consequences in my view.
Roko: you are directly contradicting literally the whole field of artificial intelligence
That field is a pseudo-science based on conceptual confusions and ill-digested metaphors. [1] Shade-aversive plants are no more intelligent than machines that also satisfy your cited definition, and [2] it is a matter of some controversy to impute “success” to the behavior of a system that has no personal stake in its accomplishment, and [3] I used the word “behavior” because I distinguish acting as a political term from behavior as a more conventionally causal one.
April 10th, 2009 at 7:13 am
Maxine:
Although your portrait isn’t exactly flattering, I enjoyed it very much, and laughed out loud at the last lines even as the arrow penetrated. It was such a pleasure to read someone here who can actually craft a sentence even when at my own expense. I disagree with the rather arid either-or you seem to be settling for, though: Why on earth would stasis be the only alternative to superlativity?
One can struggle for and appreciate very much the ongoing democratization of public institutions and consensualization of the terms of prosthetic self-determination in a world where new technoscientific discoveries and creative expressions in planetary multiculture offer us ever richer opportunities for pleasure, danger, capacity, and meaning. Conventional technoscientifically-literate secular democracy provides a capacious mainstream discourse for progress and human flourishing. Who needs either defeatism or Robot Cultism, for heaven’s sake?
April 10th, 2009 at 7:23 am
Those who can, create, those who can’t, criticize.
To me Dale seems to say: There is none now, therefore there shall never be any. That’s no argument. It’s difficult yes, but not impossible. Even super super super difficult doesn’t mean impossible. What Einstein did was not super super super difficult but actually impossible to most people. But not to him. What’s clearly impossible to Dale (as it seems), may be rather obvious to some super super super smart scientist. I’ve existed in a world where technologies I now use daily didn’t exist. And tomorrow, I shall exist in a world where new technologies exist. One of them might be AGI. It’s just a machine (like us) with capabilities we call “intelligence”. Intelligence is the most powerful force in the universe. So what? Big deal.
April 10th, 2009 at 7:35 am
You’re right, DevNull. Just a little bit ‘o stick-to-it-iveness and you’ll have that perpetual motion machine licked! Who cares what some whiny pomo Berzerkeley humanities types say. Accentuate the positive, sooper-scientists, you’ll get that circle squared, pull yourselves up by the bootstraps, extreme to max, dood!
April 10th, 2009 at 7:45 am
There is none now, therefore there shall never be any. That’s no argument.
Angels, demons, fairies, genies, ghosts, perpetual motion machines, immortality elixers, love potions.
Your terms are not “difficult” or even “super difficult” — this isn’t a problem of having a “can-do” attitude — your terms are deeply confused. The actually-existing intelligence from which you have formed the idea of engineering its like is actually non-negligibly materialized and socialized and multidimensional in ways that are not accommodated in the facile formulations you accept as representing its “accomplishment.” You can’t achieve it on your terms because in achieving what you are actually seeking you would discover something other than intelligence because you don’t understand what you are looking for in flabbergastingly basic ways.
April 10th, 2009 at 7:55 am
@DevNull: Those who can, create, those who can’t, criticize.
I have nothing against rational, well thought through criticism. The h+ movement desperately needs good critics to weed out bad ideas. Then we move on to Dale’s criticism:
@Dale: The field of artificial intelligence is a pseudo-science based on conceptual confusions and ill-digested metaphors.
Further up the comments you said:
“the challenge of scientific consensus is the one that confronts your claim and so far you have failed to attract that consensus”
- which science - if not artificial intelligence, which you claim is a pseudoscience, - were you suggesting that singularitarians seek consensus with?
April 10th, 2009 at 8:04 am
And whilst I’m at it, I might as well ask (since I really wasn’t expecting you to deride as a pseudo-science a major field of modern science with tens of thousands of researchers, major conferences and journals and billions of pounds worth of commercial applications - Google alone grosses over £1 billion… ):
Do you think that the whole of computer science is a pseudoscience, or just artificial intelligence? What about results in artificial intelligence that are mathematically proved, such as the AIXI and AIXItl algorithms from algorithmic information theory and results about computability and complexity? What about mathematically provable results relating to probabilistic logics and Bayesian networks? Do you dispute the validity of mathematical proof as well as one of the largest fields of scientific endeavour of our times?
What about computational neuroscience? Is that pseudo-science too?
April 10th, 2009 at 8:07 am
Computer science; robotics; systems, network, and information theory (all of which are, properly speaking, less sciences than engineering disciplines, some even edging in the direction of the humanities at their edges), cognitive science, brain and nervous system research and medicine. The actual science, where it is afoot, and not the pop-sci glosses.
April 10th, 2009 at 8:20 am
I don’t agree that there are millions of researchers working on artificial intelligence, even if many would accept the convention of using that confused locution to describe what they are up to, I do agree that there are millions of researchers coding and improving software. I don’t agree that Google has anything to do with artificial intelligence — except in the sense of using a terribly inapt metaphor to describe useful technique that might be more useful if it cast off such confusions.
Do you think that the whole of computer science is a pseudoscience, or just artificial intelligence?
Yes, that’s right, I distinguish these, and think the latter not the former is pseudo-scientific — and needless to say there is surely quite a lot of legitimate work that happens under the auspices of the unfortunately monikered AI as well.
My point is that Aritificial Intelligence, as it is playing out in the actual world, is not intelligence, and that this matters. As for probability maths and complexity theory — of course these are legitimate fields. But, no, the Robot God is not going to leap out of an equation and reward you for your faith.
April 10th, 2009 at 8:51 am
Dale: “Aritificial Intelligence, as it is playing out in the actual world, is not intelligence, and that this matters”
Right. Artificial intelligence is not intelligence. Dale, this is a *logical* contradiction. When you apply an adjective to a noun, you refer to a subset of what that noun referred to. And tens of thousands of scientists are wrong and Dale Carrico is right. And the founders of Google are wrong. And Russell and Norvig’s “AI a modern approach” is pseudo-science.
And, reading the wikipedia article on robotics, we find:
“At longer time scales or with more sophisticated tasks, the robot may need to build and reason with a “cognitive” model. Cognitive models try to represent the robot, the world, and how they interact. Pattern recognition and computer vision can be used to track objects. Mapping techniques can be used to build maps of the world. Finally, motion planning and other artificial intelligence techniques may be used to figure out how to act. For example, a planner may figure out how to achieve a task without hitting obstacles, falling over, etc.”
So, Robotics makes heavy use of AI, robotics is not a pseudoscience, but AI is.
From the Birmingham university page on the “Intelligent Robotics” Course:
“Artificial Intelligence is concerned with mechanisms for generating intelligent behaviour. When this behaviour occurs in the everyday physical world, with its uncertainty and rapid change, we find that all kinds of new problems and opportunities arise. We will try to understand some of these in the context of robotics. In a series of lectures we will look at some theories of how to sense the real world, and act intelligently in it.”
So, according to the university of Birmingham’s computer science department, robots can act intelligently in the world. Tell me, is the university of Birmingham teaching pseudo-science, or are you going to start retracting some of your claims?
April 10th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
Dale:”Just a little bit ‘o stick-to-it-iveness and you’ll have that perpetual motion machine licked!”
One type of intelligence is obviously possible, the one occurring in nature. So why not Another Type of Intelligence, AToI. No one’s claiming that we’re going to be creating something similar to natural intelligence, just like powered flight isn’t about flapping wings (at least not at the moment).
Your answer seems to imply that AI is the same as something that can’t even in theory exist, such as a PMM. How does an AI break any known law of nature?
And not just a little bit ‘o stick-to-it-iveness, but usually a couple of decades is needed to produce anything worthwhile in any field. I’m not sure you need that kind of long-term commitment in your line of work. I’m not sure your own line of work is capable of producing any lasting contributions to humanity. Which is why you could try doing something else for a change with that razor-sharp mind of yours, perhaps have a stab at creating AGI, if just to prove you can’t do it - you’ve already got so good at reliably providing verbal diarrhea that you’ve clearly run into diminishing returns. No one needs to excel at it more than that, Dale, no one. You’ve reached the pinnacle of your profession. There’s nowhere to go. Dale, wouldn’t that be a fitting legacy of a maverick mind: from Robot God denialist, to the creator of one. Time to join the ranks, I say.
April 10th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
Dale, my point is not to disagree with either you or the transhumanists about how accurate your respective divinations about the future might be.
Rather, I hoped to cut through the Two Cultures silliness going on here and identify in non-pomo, non-Berzerkely humanities mumbo-jumbo where you are hitting them, and why.
Having done that, with no effect, of course, I thought I might also point out that the transhumanist gambit is not so much different from that of any one of a thousand different ideologies pushing an agenda. True, if there is no SuperStuff coming SuperSoon, the transhumanists are nothing but a flaccid gaggle of beat-up-in-high-school SF geeks wishing really, really hard for just ten measly minutes in a Vinge novel. But this basic structure (as a critique) is extensible in many directions.
For example, environmentalist discourse sometimes tends toward the very same frothing din of panicked prognostication: SuperCatastrophe coming SuperSoon! Need Money! Need Attention! It wouldn’t be hard to apply a kind of superlativity critique to this subculture. After all, the environmentalists are selling us the kind of future that keeps their movement alive in the present: a future full of terrible, horrible, very-bad-day kinds of risks. If we believe them we have no choice but to join them. If we don’t believe them, we must be ignoring the ‘facts’, irrationally, selectively, unscientifically denying (as they are sure to riposte).
All factions need to sell a particular kind of future to gain present force. Winning factions, factions that eventually become powerful, exert disproportionate control over our imaginations, over how we expect the future to play out. They delude us into certainty about events that are necessarily probabilistic, and offer safe paths through the perceived hazards. And so we follow the path laid before us.
Transhumanism, has a path for us. So do the environmentalists. You do too, Dale. The path we take will depend in large part on who gets to define and describe the shared consensual delusion known as The Future.
April 10th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. The people we should be listening to - exclusively, some say - are the ones inventing it, at this very moment. That’s why, when an engineer or a scientist speaks, I listen. Even better, when a company speaks, there may be reason to adjust your views about the future. When a transhumanist speaks, I take it more like when fans talk about their favorite musician - informative and entertaining often, but only the musician knows what’s on the next record.
Has the unashamedly singularitarianistic agenda of Intel of late changed your mind at all, Dale? Or have you just lost your respect for them?
April 10th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
LOL. Did you get this from a cereal box? Oh, wait. I know. It was one of those Bits o’ Wisdom written in 10pt Monotype Corsiva on a Starbucks latte cup.
What other wisdom hath the cup granted us?
April 10th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
@Dale:
I am still interested in getting to the bottom of any factual disagreements we may have. At the moment, your position is self-contradictory: you will either have to admit that robots can act intelligently in the world, or you will have to denounce the entire field of robotics as pseudo-science, like you did with AI.
Now, which will it be?
April 10th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Roko –
Right. Artificial intelligence is not intelligence. Dale, this is a *logical* contradiction.
To point out the misapplication by my lights of the term “intelligence” to denote things that either aren’t intelligent or don’t actually exist is far from a contradiction on my part, it is the exposure of an error.
And tens of thousands of scientists are wrong and Dale Carrico is right.
Reality check — how many of these “thousands” of scientists you suddenly seem to imagine you speak for would actually share your superlative futurological interpretation of their work?
Singularitarians, transhumanists, techno-immortalists are a marginal minority of Robot Cultists who go to one another’s conferences and cite one another’s papers and make a lot of sensationalist claims to attract media attention to themselves.
But consensus science will never spit out the ponies the singularitarians are actually looking for, the aspirations that actually make singularitarians singularitarians — the superintelligent post-biological Robot God, the mind uploading that immortalizes you into cyberspace, and so on.
Superlativity is not science, and to repudiate it is not to repudiate science. Superlativity is a discourse through which selected scientific results are rendered meaningful to the futurological faithful and those they would cajole by connecting these results to congenial narratives, frames, assumptions, aspirations. Discourse analysis and cultural criticism is what I do — it isn’t science, but it needn’t be science to be relevant to what you superlative futurologists are up to, indeed it is far more relevant as such.
As it happens, although I am a reasonably technoscientifically literate person, and definitely a great champion of science education, funding, and progress, I am definitely not a scientist myself. Like most people in my position (including many Robot Cultists who apparently lack my modesty in this admission but who have scarcely more knowledge to justify immodesty on this score) I can only assess the proximity to consensus of would-be candidate descriptions for scientific warrant beyond my knowledge and judge them accordingly. On those grounds every superlative futurological claim fails to pass muster as warrantedly assertible as a reasonable belief where matters of prediction and control are concerned.
But this is far from the end of the story. I can also grasp the ways in which scientific descriptions are taken up by aesthetic, moral, ethical, and political discourses that are not scientific in themselves and are deployed in efforts to make meaning, reconcile hopes and histories, mobilize collective efforts, and so on. The strategies and conventions of these sorts of efforts differ from those of science, and here my training puts me on much more solid ground. And here superlative discourses reveal themselves to be unwarranted in many more ways and far more outrageously. Hence the Superlativity critique.
Tell me, is the university of Birmingham teaching pseudo-science, or are you going to start retracting some of your claims?
I would describe their attribution of intelligence to their robots as bad poetry at best and pseudo-science at worst. The misapplication of the word “intelligence” to the complexity of behavior governed by a program is not itself an act of science or coding, it is a rhetorical choice made in an effort to communicate the salience of those results to an audience by connecting them to experiences in the world. As evidenced by the pathological extreme variations of this discourse one finds among Robot Cultists, this rhetoric, as it turns out, was incomparably more trouble than it was worth.
DevNull –
One type of intelligence is obviously possible, the one occurring in nature. So why not Another Type of Intelligence
While it may indeed be true that intelligence might be differently incarnated or materialized, it would still have to exhibit sufficient similarity to actually-existing intelligence to justify the application of the term in the first place. I believe that the “intelligence” the singularitarians imagine they are pursuing disregards the embodiment, the sociality, and any number of the indispensable capacities that accompany actually existing intelligence in the world.
Rather than facilitating the construction of artificial intelligence the discourse of AI in your hands functions primarily to impoverish to the point of complete insensitivity our grasp of intelligence as it actually exists, an insensitivity that renders us ever more likely to neglect, misconstrue, and destroy it. That is not a desirable outcome in my view.
How does an AI break any known law of nature?
There aren’t any AIs in the world to break the laws of nature. I’m saying that the words you are using betray deep confusions in your aspirations.
I’m curious, what would you lose were you to describe what you think you want in AI in terms that require no bedeviling anthropomorphisms — no conjurations of intelligence, smartness, friendliness, ethics, personality, the status of actor, and so on? I’m not saying this to reduce our dispute to a terminological squabble (I personally don’t think that it is), I’m not saying that tweaking your language to make it more “politically correct” would end my objections. I am asking you how the loss of these terms would disconnect you with what it is you think you are onto in this quest for superintelligent AI?
You might find it an immensely clarifying exercise to drain your quest of its rhetorical anthropomorphisms for a change — especially since your present discourse functions to drain actually-existing exhibitions of intelligence of these dimensions anyhow, leading you to misconstrue your peers as glandular calculators crunching numbers rather than passionate precarious story tellers as concerned with making sense of things as reckoning with consequences.
No one’s claiming that we’re going to be creating something similar to natural intelligence
That claim of similarity is included in the very use of the term — and a whole host of terms that accompany it in the discourse. At any rate so it seems to me.
I’m not sure you need that kind of long-term commitment in your line of work.
For most weirdos who fall in love with philosophy and criticism as I have done, it is indeed a life-long vocation.
I’m not sure your own line of work is capable of producing any lasting contributions to humanity. Which is why you could try doing something else for a change with that razor-sharp mind of yours
I do not share your apparent preference for the so-called “getters-of-results” over the thinkers and poets who “never get anywhere.” I wouldn’t want to choose between them, respecting both in their proper precincts (and most people are mixes of both anyway), but if I had to choose, it would be the ones you dismiss as wastes of mind without lasting contributions to make I would choose every time (unless he’s hot).
providing verbal diarrhea
The regularity with which my way of talking is identified with shit just because I pay attention to different things than you do and apply different assumptions and have a different style of expression really is a bit odd. There is something hysterical about it.
You’ve reached the pinnacle of your profession. There’s nowhere to go.
I have no idea what you are talking about. My work, my profession, my position, my peers, and my place in the world suit me perfectly.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. The people we should be listening to - exclusively, some say - are the ones inventing it, at this very moment.
Prediction is indispensable to a good life but it is far from the whole of intelligence and far from enough to provide for human flourishing. Perfect prediction without meaning is a desolation, and however high your pile of facts you’ll never find any values or stories in it to find meaning in. It is a dreadful thing to substitute the openness of the present (including that present that will be tomorrow when it actually arrives) which is our freedom in the company of the diversity of our peers, for a closed idealized instrumental outcome with which you identify personally and to which you give your whole heart called The Future and which you seem to have mistaken for freedom. It is almost as if your discourse would turn you into a Robot in the present, when you fancy it will provide you an army of robot slaves to command in The Future for which you would give up the frustrating substance of your freedom.
when an engineer or a scientist speaks, I listen. Even better, when a company speaks
Welcome to the joyous prison-planet of the Robot Cult — engineers, scientists, and company men and their dance of death. I guess Singularitarian is a more apt designation for your community than I even knew — cheerleaders for the future as a endlessly prolonged boring black hole of go-getters.
Has the unashamedly singularitarianistic agenda of Intel of late changed your mind at all, Dale?
They’re all closeted singularitarians over there at Intel, are they? Oh, I see. It just looks like the Robot Cult consists of a few thousand privileged North Atlantic boys with toys who can’t distinguish science from science fiction and pine for robotic transcendence, when instead you throng consensus science and high-tech companies thousands upon thousands strong. Well, you guys are all set, then.
April 10th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
my point is not to disagree with either you or the transhumanists about how accurate your respective divinations about the future might be
But I have no idea what “the future” will look like. I’m not in the divination business. I’m analyzing a discourse, what look to me to be its conventional gestures, figures, premises, values, and their many problems. I am trying to make sense of things, I am not trying to impersonate a prophet. In fact: yuck!
the transhumanist gambit is not so much different from that of any one of a thousand different ideologies pushing an agenda
That’s certainly true. The Superlativity Critique is a form of ideologiekritik (if I may genuflect to my pomo berzerkeley mumbo-jumbo affiliates). It’s mostly it’s abiding marginality that makes “transhumanism’s” ideological moves take on the especially defensive coloration of cultism.
I don’t agree with your apparent assessment of the dangers and demands of human-caused catastrophic climate change arising out of some environmentalist discourses as comparable in their likelihood and seriousness to superlative discourse’s concerns with unfriendly Robot Gods on the rampage, upload population explosions turning people to computroniium feedstock, finding ourselves in simulations, and so on. But I do take your point.
April 10th, 2009 at 7:50 pm
Minimizing the usage of the word “you,” or even the referring to other individuals might be a step in the right direction. You know, testing ideas, not each other..
Otherwise, it brings to mind a classic Christopher Walken scene where he says: “You’re talkin to my guy all wrong. It’s the wrong tone. You do it again, I’ll stab you in the face with a soldering iron.”
April 10th, 2009 at 9:05 pm
Minimizing the usage of the word “you,” or even the referring to other individuals might be a step in the right direction. You know, testing ideas, not each other.
Or even better, we could have two random word generators take turns broadcasting factual statements from middle school science textbooks at each other in a barren desert.
I like it that people offer up their opinions to a public hearing and stand behind them, even if only pseudonymously.
As I said, superlativity isn’t science, it’s a matter of aesthetic, moral, and political discourses provoked by science. The clash of personal opinions among people who care enough about them to own them is a beautiful thing, though no doubt it too will be a thing of the past come Robotopia.
April 10th, 2009 at 10:11 pm
lol, I wasn’t pointing anyone out (sorry for the confusion).
I too like the scenario described.
Though the concept of owning an idea does seem sort of odd to me. In any case, I was talking about the way the discussion was constantly being diverted away from legitimate arguments to mud slinging (and no doubt the potential of some lines of thinking were lost). And also, the way the arguments were framed. Instead of saying, “You’re idea is stupid,” one could just as easily say “That idea is stupid.” And so on..
I do not wish to continue this point (or change the subject). I just wanted to clarify.
April 10th, 2009 at 10:24 pm
*your* (semi-ironic oops)
April 11th, 2009 at 3:47 am
From all this crap I only see, that Dale is a kind of vitalist.
He has no fresh arguments for his cause.
April 11th, 2009 at 4:40 am
Thomas > “From all this crap I only see, that Dale is a kind of vitalist.”
He seems to be using the word “intelligence” in non-standard way. Dale, this is a standard definition of intelligence, taken from Wikipedia:
Intelligence (also called intellect) is an umbrella term used to describe a property of the mind that encompasses many related abilities, such as the capacities to reason, to plan, to solve problems, to think abstractly, to comprehend ideas, to use language, and to learn.
No mention of “metaphor”.
According to this definition, standard AI programs and robots who can plan, reason, solve problems, speak and understand (to a limited degree) in natural language and learn and *intelligent*. If you are using a different definition of “intelligence”, perhaps we should stop using that word, and instead refer to entities as planner-reasoner-problem_solver-speaker-learners. It’s a bit of a mouthful, but I think it will cure our misunderstanding.
So, you concede, I presume, that computer science researchers have built planner-reasoner-problem_solver-speaker-learners. You also concede that the human mind is a planner-reasoner-problem_solver-speaker-learner, and that the property of being a planner-reasoner-problem_solver-speaker-learner is a purely algorithmic property which is substrate independent
Do we agree here?
April 11th, 2009 at 4:44 am
“you concede that the human mind is a planner-reasoner-problem_solver-speaker-learner”
- replace this with
“you concede that the human mind is a planner-reasoner-problem_solver-speaker-learner, albeit a more effective one than any currently existing computer program in most domains”
April 11th, 2009 at 9:23 am
From all this crap I only see, that Dale is a kind of vitalist.
He has no fresh arguments for his cause.
From all this crap I only see that Singularitarians are reductionists. They have no fresh arguments for their cause.
I’m not positing any kind of mysterious supernatural force in the way that the vitalists did. I’m pointing out that for so-called materialists you sure have an odd way of discounting the non-negligible material incarnation of actually-existing intelligences (on the basis of which alone you can have formed the notion of an emulable intelligence in the first place, given that they are the only actual game in town), and an odd way of discounting many dimensions associated with the actual exhibition of intelligence in the world (which include the more cognitive reckoning with consequences but also sensitivity, imagination, empathy, emotionality, expressivity, savvy, instinct, improvisation, and a conscience that cannot be reduced only to calculation).
You can discount this objection as woo-woo mysticism if you like, but it looks to me like pointing out errors, one materialist to another. I daresay that dead-enders in the always only endlessly failed predictive powerhouse of the Strong Program might wonder what they keep on missing on these years to account for the interminable flummoxing of their certainties.
It’s hard to resist the overwhelming sense that at least some Robot Cultists are willing so to substitute a vision of mere amplified calculation for actual intelligence because that reduction enables them to tell a more plausible story that would connect current technoscientific knowledge with the technodevelopmental accomplishment of the outcomes with which they identify so fervently as a community: Namely, first, the arrival of the superintelligent post-biological Robot God who either is Friendly enough to solve all their problems or Unfriendly enough to end the world altogether, as well as, second, the arrival of a “mind-uploading technique” through which their mortal vulnerable error-prone bodily selves can “migrate” into an imperishable digitality in which superintelligence, superlongevity, and superabundance is finally theirs.
Needless to say, whatever the actual sensible programming and science onto which they are glomming in crafting these formulations, this discourse is not itself a scientific one at all, but a discourse connecting selective experience to moral, aesthetic, and political hopes and calling upon older mythic archetypes and theological discourses. This is why it is sometimes handy to have a rhetorician in the house, amidst the breezing buzzing confusions of fixated coders.
April 11th, 2009 at 9:40 am
He seems to be using the word “intelligence” in non-standard way.
I’m using it in a way that captures the way you use it and experience it in your actual life. There is more to intelligence than reckoning with consequences.
you concede that the human mind is a planner-reasoner-problem-solver-speaker-learner,
Among other things.
albeit a more effective one than any currently existing computer program in most domains
“Effectiveness” isn’t all intelligence is up to. It also is up to “meaningfulness.” And some of the ways in which it finds its way to “effectiveness” connect up to the ways in which it finds its way to “meaningfulness.”
Whatever Wikipedia says at the moment on the subject, however fervently you might deny the salience or substance of the dimensions of intelligence to which I refer, I can no more deny them myself than I could deny the pressure that deforms the surface of my fingertips and the slick contact with surface that meets each strike of the keyboard out of which this reply is forming on the screen before my eyes right here, right now.
April 11th, 2009 at 9:54 am
and that the property of being a planner-reasoner-problem_solver-speaker-learner is a purely algorithmic property which is substrate independent
I don’t think we know that at all yet. To what extent are what are entailed at least in part by what you mean by “planner” “problem solver” and so on not incarnated in the squishy organismic brain through evolutionary processes having to do with vicissitudes in the environmental idiosyncrasies threatening the survival or enabling the flourishing of the organisms to which we are indebted for the intelligent brains we actually have? I definitely don’t reduce the word “reasoner” to number crunching, reason is a far more capacious word in my book. For heaven’s sake, humanity is the Aristotelian rational, that is also to say, political animal!
April 11th, 2009 at 11:39 am
I wonder what the deep underlying reason is for some people to deny the obviously plausible as implausible, such as what Dale is doing here. It really makes no sense when you look at it from an engineering point of view. If every engineer and scientist on the planet adopted Dale’s denialist-defeatist views, we’d see progress grinding to a halt. We need to be thinking “yes, it’s going to happen, and if not, it’s not because we didn’t try!”. Because we’ve seen that kind of (unreasonable, to Dale) thinking dominate the human mind for millenia I don’t fear it ending soon, despite the clever arguments of the Dales of the world.
It either happens or it doesn’t but the only thing we can do is try or waste our life repeating, no it won’t no it won’t.
The denialist-defeatism of Dale is just self-fulfilling prophesying - if only the unreasonable engineers and scientists would listen to him. See, nothing happened, because nothing was attempted!
Let’s try to achieve the unreasonable until the trying becomes unreasonable. We’re nowhere there yet. We haven’t even started and already Dale is saying “sirs, in my educated opinion, you shouldn’t waste your time.”
April 11th, 2009 at 11:40 am
I wonder what the deep underlying reason is for some people to deny the obviously plausible as implausible, such as what Dale is doing here. It really makes no sense when you look at it from an engineering point of view. If every engineer and scientist on the planet adopted Dale’s denialist-defeatist views, we’d see progress grinding to a halt. We need to be thinking “yes, it’s going to happen, and if not, it’s not because we didn’t try!”. Because we’ve seen that kind of (unreasonable, to Dale) thinking dominate the human mind for millenia I don’t fear it ending soon, despite the clever arguments of the Dales of the world.
It either happens or it doesn’t but the only thing we can do is try or waste our life repeating, no it won’t no it won’t.
The denialist-defeatism of Dale is just self-fulfilling prophesying - if only the unreasonable engineers and scientists would listen to him. See, nothing happened, because nothing was attempted!
Let’s try to achieve the unreasonable until the trying becomes unreasonable. We’re nowhere close to there yet. We haven’t even started and already Dale is saying “sirs, in my educated opinion, you shouldn’t waste your time.”
April 11th, 2009 at 11:54 am
Dale, I wonder if you’re familiar with the concept of mind design space. It is vast. Not only can we create one kind of mind but an infinite number of different kinds of minds with different capabilities - all intelligent to varying degrees, just like nature has, from protozoa to you - and arguably beyond, given enough time - or do you think we’re the best minds possible?
April 11th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Dale: “I only see that Singularitarians are reductionists”
- Could you please tell us what you mean by the word “reductionism”, such that you think it is false? If you disagree with us on this, no wonder you think we’re Robot-Cultists. Not getting reductionism would place you in such a wildly different (and, as it happens, incorrect) mental frame of reference from me that we’ve probably been talking past each other for the past 100 comments.
From Wikipedia on “Reductionism and science”:
Reductionist thinking and methods are the basis for many of the well-developed areas of modern science, including much of physics, chemistry and cell biology. Classical mechanics in particular is seen as a reductionist framework, and statistical mechanics can be viewed as a reconciliation of macroscopic thermodynamic laws with the reductionist approach of explaining macroscopic properties in terms of microscopic components.
In science, reductionism can be understood to imply that certain fields of study are based on areas that study smaller spatial scales or organizational units. It is commonly accepted that all aspects of chemistry are based on physics, and similarly many aspects of microbiology are based on chemistry.
Both Dennett and Steven Pinker argue that too many people who are opposed to science use the words “reductionism” and “reductionist” less to make coherent claims about science than to convey a general distaste for the endeavor, saying the opponents often use the words in a rather slippery way, to refer to whatever they dislike most about science.
April 11th, 2009 at 12:17 pm
DevNull: I wonder what the deep underlying reason is for some people to deny the obviously plausible as implausible, such as what Dale is doing here
- he denies scientific reductionism. Somehow, Dale has missed out on the last 150 years of science. Unless and until we can tell him about this stuff and get him up to speed on modern science, we’ll just keep talking past each other.
April 11th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Setting aside the claim that superlative outcomes seem “obviously plausible” outside of the highly marginal Robot Cult clubhouse in which you are spending your time… You’re confusing what I am calling errors that render us insensitive to realities that matter in the present, with what you imagine to be predictions about “the future” that differ from yours.
But this isn’t about my decadent denialism against your rugged can-do go-getterism, it’s about awareness of material differences that make a difference.
This is not a matter of let’s try something and see what happens as against an advocacy of stasis — it’s a matter of pointing out that to imagine and find desirable the “it” you want to try is already to re-imagine humanity in ways that risk insensitivity to and obliterative lifeways and values in the world. Sometimes, trying one thing happens at the expense of trying other things. The singularitarian aspiration to superintelligence involves a prior reduction of intelligence to instrumentality that impoverish our grasp of the substance of freedom as it is lived, whereupon it then pines for an amplification of that freedom-drained instrumentality into what it mistakes as freedom. Even superpowerful robots on your terms would be unfit for the freedoms already available to us that we should cherish rather than disdain. This isn’t a denigration of creativity, or passion, or imagination, or perversion. You people sometimes seem to me among these most relentlessly unimaginative I have ever encountered in my life.
And, finally, there is no such thing as “the future.” There is futurity as a measure of openness in the present and tomorrow, too, once it’s present. I care about open futurity as I care about the human freedom it marks. But I don’t care about that funhouse mirror of present dreams and nightmares endlessly amplified and prolonged, the reassuring closure of wish-fulfillment fantasy the futurological salesmen sell in the name of “the future.”
April 11th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
Dale: “The singularitarian aspiration to superintelligence involves a prior reduction of intelligence to instrumentality that impoverish our grasp of the substance of freedom as it is lived, whereupon it then pines for an amplification of that freedom-drained instrumentality into what it mistakes as freedom. Even superpowerful robots on your terms would be unfit for the freedoms already available to us that we should cherish rather than disdain.”
- Dale, have you been following Overcoming Bias and Eliezer’s human values series? I think you have got the wrong end of the stick.
Singularitarians don’t want to create a benevolent but dull, personality-free instrumental-only superintelligence because we like being boring and instrumental. We want to create one so that we can use it to prevent someone else from creating a dull, personality-free instrumental-only superintelligence that is human indifferent and kills us all.
Dale, I repeat, from what you have said in this last comment, you have seriously misunderstood the singularitarian position
April 11th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Say, X is a problem that the denialist-defeatist-Dales of the world say is unsolvable. Like, well, a lot of things were back in the day before anyone actually knew much about anything. Even if it were solvable, it shouldn’t be solved because it would impoverish our sense of freedom we have when we’re on top or behind a horse. Everyone knows it’s impossible, not just the Dales; it’s common sense. Horseless carriages are nonsense. Superhorses, haha. Nothing can replicate the natural means of movement of the muscle. Downhill is the only other option and even there it’s clear that god is giving you a hand.
Ignoring the denialist-defeatist-Dales, someone has dedicated his/her life to solving it.
Lo and behold, one day someone solves it.
X is no longer a problem. The world is a heck of a lot better place. And people find that actually instead of impoverishing them, horseless carriages give them so much more freedom that no DD-Dale could have even begun to imagine it. And the horses are set free. (Like our minds will be when the superhorses, um, superminds arrive.)
What do the DD-Dales say and do? Oops? Not even that. Unfazed, acting as if nothing happened, they continue their noisy negativism, pointing out other “impossible” feats.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
-Henry Ford
April 11th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Roko, Thom, DevNull, et al.,
It’s possible there’s nothing special going on in human wetware making us ‘intelligent,’ and I suppose it’s also possible a computer might be designed with the ‘right stuff’ to be intelligent as well. From there, sure, it’s possible that a computer might figure out ways to make itself more intelligent or whatever. And once it does, it’s possible that it will get really, really intelligent and turn into some kind of Vingean Power or something. And along the way, I suppose it’s possible it will want to kill us all.
This is all possible, in my mind, and unlike Dale, I don’t see any reason to fight you on it. But, come out of this ‘advocacy’ mindset for a moment, and riddle me this: why have you all selected this particular series of possibilities as one worthy of ‘advocacy’? Aren’t there other possibilities, too?
I mean, it’s also possible that computers just can’t be programmed with the ‘right stuff’ at all and AI is just a pipe dream. Right? Can anyone here say for absolutely certain that the impossibility of AI is impossible? And while were trafficking in possibilities, it’s certainly possible that intelligence caps out somewhere, say, caps out at the Einstein-Bach-Da Vinci-Newton-Goethe bound. Right? I mean, it’s possible.
The point is, for all of the science being cited hereabouts, you don’t seem to me to be approaching your advocacy scientifically at all. It has a sort of ‘Intelligent Design’ feel to it. Have you ever had the misfortune of chatting with one of those ID advocates? They can talk circles around you when it comes to science. They have data points for everything.
What I mean is, hypothesizing that a chain of events is possible seems harmless to me. But when you’re armed with your hypothesis and whole volumes of observations that confirm the hypothesis and you start running around trying to get everyone all excited about it, starting Singularity Universities and AGI start-ups and Singularity Institutes and running PR campaigns and designing logos and hiring Executive Directors and Boards of Advisors and printing t-shirts and raising matching grants and endlessly yammering-on about the odds, why don’t you start trying to find ways to falsify your hypothesis?
I mean, isn’t that the scientific thing to do?
If you were really interested in doing something useful and good, you wouldn’t be carrying around those volumes of confirming observations and wagging them under the noses of impoverished humanities lecturers. You would be wanting to listen to anyone who thinks you’re wrong. You would seek them out. In short, your whole program of advocacy would look very different — if you were really as scientific as you say.
As you know, Dale calls you people cultists. I don’t think you’re remotely like cultists, and I have spent some time arguing this point with him. What you’re doing is not insidious, but Dale is quite right about one thing: you all seem to be doing more selling than science.
April 11th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
Queen Maxine: You would be wanting to listen to anyone who thinks you’re wrong
- and what, pray tell, am I doing here if not exactly that? in fact, I even said so a while ago:
81. Roko By the way, I have no interest in persuading Dale that SAI is feasible. It matters little to me whether his beliefs are correct.
I am interested in persuading Dale to persuade me that SAI is impossible. I care a lot about whether I have a faulty belief in my head. If Dale can help me to excise a falsehood from my mind, then I’ll be extremely grateful to him.
Maxine, did you just not see that comment?
April 11th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
@Queen Maxine: why don’t you start trying to find ways to falsify your hypothesis?
- falsifying the hypothesis that smarter than human AI is possible may, of course, be impossible, because the hypothesis is probably true. However, you are correct that before I base my entire career upon the hypothesis being true, it is worth me expending effort trying to find out if anyone has a serious falsification. Dale claims to have. I think I have seen enough in this comment thread - his outright dismissal of an entire field of science, his probable vitalist position, to not bother for much longer. As I said above, I AM TRYING TO GET DALE TO FALSIFY MY POSITION. YOU CAN TRY TOO!
By the way, the mere probability of smarter than human AI is enough to warrant doing something about it. No real-world actionable risk is ever known with 100% certainty. Science doesn’t work like that. We won’t be 100% certain that smarter than human AI is possible until we have built one. And by then, we’ve already either won or lost.
Similarly, we won’t be 100% certain that anthropogenic global warming will cause massive flooding until it happens. At which point it will be too late.
April 11th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Roko — Nobody has to join a Robot Cult to care about software security issues. I’ve been following the twists and turns of singularitarianism since 1993, and I doubt I have so much “misunderstood” it as read more of it far longer and more skeptically than you. If, as you say, the consensus among the “upper echelons” of the Robot Cult is moving away from the facile monster movie scenarisms of friendly entitative superintelligent AI, that’s nice. One wonders if the discourse has been fumigated of terms like “friendly” and “intelligent,” then (what, no?), or whether once so fumigated anybody would actually be interested in singularitarianism in the first place rather than simply giving up the superlative futurology altogether and becoming a conventional software engineer after all rather than fancying themselves a cross between Ayn Rand, Dr. Frankenstein, and Pham Nuwen.
DevNull — This isn’t about horseless carriages, you poor thing, you aren’t even playing chess on the same board as the rest of us. You’re in danger of blundering into full-on blithering Giulio Prisco territory here.
Maxine — I don’t agree with everything you say here, of course, but you seem much more congenial and interesting to me than the last time we were exchanging barbs.
April 11th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
“It’s possible there’s nothing special going on in human wetware making us ‘intelligent,’ ”
It’s possible? We’re machines created by a big machine, the universe. We’re just a naturally occurring feature of the machine - we’re things that happen within it when it runs.
There’s nothing special about *anything* in the universe. Not one mysterious, special thing has ever occurred in the universe. Everything’s absotely mundane, the same everyday bs, or rather everyPlankTime bs, from T-zero to T+infinity.
“ID advocates…They have data points for everything.”
I take it by ‘data points’ you mean confusion, factual and logical errors, but primarily outright lies and brainfarts our lower primate cousins would laugh at if they were capable of wasting their time on such dumb memes.
“I mean, it’s also possible that computers just can’t be programmed with the ‘right stuff’ at all and AI is just a pipe dream. Right?”
To me it seems obvious that any logical operation can be represented by nonexistence and existence, 0 and 1. The universe couldn’t exist without those two features of existence existing.
We live in a big machine with unmodifiable rules like all good machines have. I don’t see any reason why my thoughts couldn’t be represented by logical operations. To me computationalism is obviously correct. It’s a duh with a sigh. Why would it not be? Because it’s all so fuzzy, complex and chaotic and there are all these quantum effects being so indeterminate and weird? There are definite states that the universe, and my brain assumes from Plank Time to another, and all of these states can be represented by patterns of 1s and 0s, one pattern for each discrete state.
April 11th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
“DevNull — This isn’t about horseless carriages”
I don’t see how anyone could construe my point as being about horseless carriages. But you seem to have done just that, seemingly willingly ignoring my point. Perhaps I need to point out: point missed, expertly.
April 11th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
“DevNull — This isn’t about horseless carriages”
I don’t see how anyone could construe my point as being about horseless carriages. But you seem to have done just that, seemingly willfully ignoring my point. Perhaps I need to point out: ‘point missed, expertly’ so you can’t misunderstand what I’m saying here.
April 11th, 2009 at 8:50 pm
DevNull, hon, stop digging.
April 12th, 2009 at 12:40 am
I’m finished. I have no arguments against poor-thing-ing and hon-ing, those Weapons of Mass Derision. Or do I read you wrong? Perhaps you employ them compassionately for Hugging to Death?
April 12th, 2009 at 8:04 am
Dale: I must be doing something very wrong then — congenial, indeed! That will no doubt change shortly, I sense. But, say what you want about these transhumanists, they don’t seem rude.
Roko: Since you bring it up, let’s explore this example of your scientific detachment. You’re clearly proud of it, and rightly so. Anyone who can genuflect in the approximate direction of objectivity deserves our respect.
I am interested in persuading Dale to persuade me that SAI is impossible. I care a lot about whether I have a faulty belief in my head. If Dale can help me to excise a falsehood from my mind, then I’ll be extremely grateful to him.
Despite their obscurity among the 130 or so comments on this page, no, I didn’t miss these lines the first time. As a matter of fact these obscure lines (among others) are the reason for my recent criticism in the first place.
That they also happen to be your rebuttal to said criticism is — in a word — fortuitous.
First, as others have said, it seems that transhumanists are generally in the business of emphasizing some possible futures to the exclusion of others so as to better gain support for their program of activities in the present. This isn’t scientific, really, as Dale has argued, it’s a sales strategy.
Second, personally, I don’t have much of a problem with this strategy. This is how movements gain momentum. But, if we’re being honest, there’s not much difference structurally between this and, say, mall-walking with a sheaf of Jesus tracts. Oh, we’re able to split hairs over odds and probabilities and whatnot – more on this in a second, but in both examples the end of the world is coming soon, and we need to be saved today or else.
Third, as to the odds, the singularitarian movement in particular gains its present force from a long chain of conditional future possibilities. Each link in this chain is conditional upon a previous claim being settled just-so and each is also an empirical claim which is presumably subject to vanilla Popperian falsifiability. Yet, despite the scientific mien of your organizations, your movement is not organizing to facilitate the scientific process of falsifying these claims which are central to your existence as movement. Rather it organizes to popularize the chain of possibilities itself, to promote them to some end, to gather confirming observations, supportive arguments, sympathetic patrons, and discretionary resources.
In this sense, your activities are aimed at a socio-cultural goal rather than a scientific one, as Dale is at great pains to point out. So, though you, Roko, make much of your desire to ‘excise falsehood from your mind,’ your organizations are working on a different project altogether, a project which amounts to gaining as much present socio-cultural force as can be gained. This, in fairness, opens you to many different kinds of criticisms that have absolutely nothing to do with the possibility or impossibility of SuperStuff itself. In the end, you’re demanding attention and resources, and if you’re successful in your demands, that’s attention and resources that may have been put to better use elsewhere. Of course, it’s possible that the very best use of our attention and resources is to give them to you, but the moment you said it, you joined a street fight, not a symposium, and it’s just not science anymore.
Finally, as you’ve shown Roko, when confronted on the socio-cultural aspects of your movements and organizations, your immediate reaction is to dive for cover behind one or more of the untested claims making up your Grand Theory of the Future. You seem to think that until someone else falsifies them, it’s okay for you to believe them, and build a career on them, and proselytize for converts to them, and mall-walk with tracts about them. But perish the thought that you would actually try to falsify your own theories, as is your scientific duty.
So, forgive me if I’m not impressed by your willingness to listen to a humanities lecturer try to prove the impossibility of Superintelligent Artificial Intelligence.
DevNull: There’s nothing special about *anything* in the universe. Not one mysterious, special thing has ever occurred in the universe. Everything’s absotely mundane, the same everyday bs, or rather everyPlankTime bs, from T-zero to T+infinity.
So how do you get from this rather bland observation to “give us your money and attention so we can try to build a Friendly AI”?
Oh, wait, I know, go read Overcoming Bias.
April 12th, 2009 at 9:46 am
Queen Maxine: Finally, as you’ve shown Roko, when confronted on the socio-cultural aspects of your movements and organizations, your immediate reaction is to dive for cover behind one or more of the untested claims making up your Grand Theory of the Future. You seem to think that until someone else falsifies them, it’s okay for you to believe them, and build a career on them, and proselytize for converts to them, and mall-walk with tracts about them. But perish the thought that you would actually try to falsify your own theories, as is your scientific duty.
Now, which of the claims I have made here do you think are untested?
Let’s look at my claims:
1. It is possible today to build computer programs that plan, reason, think abstractly, understand natural language to some degree, etc. These properties are properties of algorithms, and are substrate independent.
2. The universe operates according to the laws of physics (Reductionism/materialism)
Neither of these claims are untested. I haven’t yet argued the more controversial claims of singularitarianism:
3. It is possible to build a computer program which performs mental tasks strictly better than humans in all domains.
4. Such a computer program would potentially be very dangerous unless special attention is paid to its goals.
Claim 3 is impossible to falsify, because in general one could always claim that “with just a little bit more effort”, it could be accomplished. Claim 3 is, however, verifiable. Build a turing-test passing AI, and you’ve verified it. This is the “AI is always 30 years away” argument. Claim 4 is falsifiable, once you have superintelligent computers. Let them loose on the world, and if you survive, you’ve falsified the claim.
I will concede the point that I have focussed on discussing the factual aspects rather than the sociocultural aspects. I am a scientist, after all.
But I am interested, what can I gain by discussing the sociocultural aspects of the singularitarian movement? You say:
Queen Maxine: there’s not much difference structurally between this and, say, mall-walking with a sheaf of Jesus tracts.
To which I say “and…?” What conclusion am I supposed to draw from this? Perhaps I am being a bit slow here. As I said, I am a *scientist*, I am used to thinking about science.
What useful debate can we have about the sociocultural aspect of the singularitarian movement? What information can we exchange?
April 12th, 2009 at 9:55 am
Queen Maxine: You seem to think that until someone else falsifies them, it’s okay for you to believe them, and build a career on them, and proselytize for converts to them, and mall-walk with tracts about them. But perish the thought that you would actually try to falsify your own theories, as is your scientific duty.
- this confuses me, in two different ways. Firstly, the whole point of popperian falsifiability is that you hold on to a belief until it gets falsified. But I see the point you’re making: one should actively expend effort trying to falsify one’s beliefs, rather than just letting them languish in your head undisturbed. But how am I supposed to falsify my belief the building smarter than human AI is possible and, indeed quite likely within the next 100 years?
There are two good ways I can think of. One of them is to talk to people who think that these beliefs are false, and get them to explain why they are false. The other is to spend a career researching the problem.
But… these are exactly the two things you’re telling me not to do. I’m very confused!
April 12th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Roko:
I’ve made my point, and it’s not my job to teach you scientific method. If you feel like contradicting or countering in some fashion, by all means feel free.
Until that time, may everywhere you look be confirmation of your beliefs.
April 13th, 2009 at 1:39 am
Roko, since you seem genuinely to want to understand where Dale is coming from, let me see if I can help. First, let’s just remember that metaphorical thinking is central to much of the way we think about the world. There’s always been a very strong tendency for humans to impute agency to inanimate objects; we all slip into anthropomorphism very easily. Thus it isn’t a surprise that scientific discourse itself is shot through with anthropomorphic metaphors - think of a physicist talking about an atom being in an “excited state” or a spin-glass being “frustrated” - and there’s nothing wrong with this when one is conscious (as is obvious in those cases) that one isn’t being literal. In the field of computer science, there’s more of a slippery slope; because computers are so much part of everyday life the traffic between literal meaning and metaphor is two-way. It’s sobering to remember that in the early days of computer science people would talk about computer “memory” thus - in quotes - to remind themselves that it was a metaphor, because machines don’t remember in any human sense. As time went on the quotes slipped away and the everyday meaning of the word changed too.
And so to artificial “intelligence”. Before computers, there wasn’t any question that intelligence was a characteristic of human beings, extended anthropomorphically to other animals, on the one hand, and putative supernatural beings like gods and demons on the other. Then people applied the term metaphorically to the properties of machine systems. So we have the metaphor of “artificial intelligence” applied to, for example, that property of robot vacuum cleaners that stops them getting stuck under the coffee table, or the ability of automatic telephone answering machines to replay a synthesised spoken message appropriate to a natural language enquiry. It would be obvious to anyone focused on the original human centred definition of intelligence that calling these properties “intelligence” is metaphorical; the most one can say about them is that you could argue that they display in some minimal form some features that are abstracted from a hugely richer set of characteristics implied by the term as applied to humans.
So what happens when we forget, or fail to realise in the first place, that using the term in this sense is indeed a metaphor, rather than a literal meaning? We end up devaluing in a sense the original term. Imagine saying about someone, “gosh, he’s intelligent, he can vacuum the living room without getting stuck under the coffee table” - it would be absurd, because you’re misapplying a metaphorical meaning in a context where only the literal meaning makes sense. Of course, there are times when it’s convenient to blur this distinction - in advertising, for example. Yesterday I saw a TV advert for the “intelligent stain removing power” of a detergent, and in a similar vein if you’re selling a machine system for detecting credit card fraud, say, it’s going to be helpful to you in a business sense if you can associate what you’re doing with expansive extrapolations of superhuman machine intelligence coming soon. This represents a particularly pernicious sleight of hand, whether done consciously or unconsciously. By redefining intelligence as what you do with the machine, you make it easy to succeed in your project of making “machine intelligence”. And then, you use your success at meeting this self-defined goal, which relies on a new and impoverished meaning of “intelligence”, to lend credibility to the idea that you will soon be able to achieve intelligence in the original literal sense.
There’s nothing wrong with the field of “artificial intelligence” when one measures its accomplishments in terms of the things it has actually succeeded in doing, on their own terms - after all, a robot vacuum cleaner is something pretty useful, as is a natural language interface to a big database (I’m not sure about the answering machine, though). What’s more problematic is the idea that AI might reveal something useful about the way human intelligence works, let alone allow us to duplicate or surpass that. AI is essentially an engineering discipline, so rather than testing some hypothesis about intelligence, it operates by making something, and then looking at the results the artefact produces. There’s a huge danger here of anthropomorphism - from the early days of Eliza, people’s tendency to impute agency and intention to inanimate things habitually leads them to judge an artefact to be much more human-like than it actually is. Of course, if you make robots it’s all too tempting to give it anthropoid features, making it even easier for onlookers to make these misattributions.
This doesn’t mean that human intelligence isn’t susceptible to scientific study - of course it is. But since currently we only know one instantiation of human level intelligence, the starting point must be the study of the human nervous system in all its particulars, together with those simpler systems that evolution suggests will have features in common with this, like C. elegans, Aplysia etc. I don’t think anyone who has seriously looked into what we know about the biophysics of computation in the nervous system would be under any illusions that it’s going to be possible to simulate one at the right level of detail any time soon.
April 13th, 2009 at 7:26 am
Some thoughts:
http://transumanar.com/index.php/site/one_of_the_most_idiotic_people_alive_on_the_holy_squishy_body/
April 13th, 2009 at 7:53 am
Richard: “I don’t think anyone who has seriously looked into what we know about the biophysics of computation in the nervous system would be under any illusions that it’s going to be possible to simulate one at the right level of detail any time soon.”
Richard, we are not discussing “soon” here, but the feasibility in principle of AI. Vitalists like Dale say that AI is impossible in principle, and others like Roko and I try to defende science against mysticiam. Let’s clear this point first, then we can discuss how soon.
April 13th, 2009 at 8:44 am
Let me be clear then - by “soon”, I mean on a timescale to make it an issue for you or I personally. It seems obvious to me that you don’t treat this as a matter of science; you have a personal stake in this.
April 13th, 2009 at 9:02 am
Richard: “Let me be clear then - by “soon”, I mean on a timescale to make it an issue for you or I personally. It seems obvious to me that you don’t treat this as a matter of science; you have a personal stake in this.”
You may be surprised to hear this, but I don’t think I will see these things happening. I am 51, in a reasonably good health but I don’t make special efforts to avoid risks and adopt a “healthy” lifestyle. I think sentient AI and mind uploading may be developed in the second half of the century, but sadly I know that I will not last that long.
So what? I think these will be wonderful things, which will open so many new wonderful options, and I feel happy for our children and grandchildren.
Richard, I do have a pesronal stake in this, but as a matter of science. Only a few centuries ago bigots burned scientists for saying that we have the power of understanding and changing external reality. I don’t want to see bigots back in power.
April 13th, 2009 at 9:41 am
Richard Jones: “Let me be clear then - by “soon”, I mean on a timescale to make it an issue for you or I personally.”
Giulio is a fair bit older than I am. I am 24, in good health and expect (based on a very pedestrian projection of progress in medical science) to live until I am 85, which would be 2069. So when you say “soon” to me, you must mean something different than when you say “soon” to Giulio. Also, there is the consideration that both I and Giulio will probably be cryopreserved. This makes questions of what will eventually happen important ones.
April 13th, 2009 at 10:09 am
How neat, I’m exactly twice your age, Roko. Nonetheless, I don’t think it will be “soon” for you, either, but good luck in your quest.
Let me quote someone who really does know this biology - Christof Koch:
“Consider this sobering lesson: the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans is a tiny creature whose brain has 302 nerve cells. Back in 1986, scientists used electron microscopy to painstakingly map its roughly 6000 chemical synapses and its complete wiring diagram. Yet more than two decades later, there is still no working model of how this minimal nervous system functions.
Now scale that up to a human brain with its 100 billion or so neurons and a couple hundred trillion synapses. Tracing all those synapses one by one is close to impossible, and it is not even clear whether it would be particularly useful, because the brain is astoundingly plastic, and the connection strengths of synapses are in constant flux. Simulating such a gigantic neural network model in the hope of seeing consciousness emerge, with millions of parameters whose values are only vaguely known, will not happen in the foreseeable future.”
April 13th, 2009 at 10:11 am
Re “Also, there is the consideration that both I and Giulio will probably be cryopreserved.”
Don’t count on cryopreservation too much. They will certainly try, and perhaps manage, to throw our frozen corpses away.
April 13th, 2009 at 10:31 am
@Richard Jones:
I’m glad you’ve arrived here. I think talking to you will get me what I want much much more quickly than talking to Dale, as I can talk to you as a fellow scientist and be pretty sure that we won’t waste 100 comments insulting each other.
On to business.
What’s more problematic is the idea that AI might reveal something useful about the way human intelligence works, let alone allow us to duplicate or surpass that
So, let me state clearly the weak version of the singularitarian claim:
It may be possible to build a computer program that has:
an ability to learn from experience and from reading books and webpages, plan, represent knowledge and reason abstractly, formulate and test hypotheses, revise its plans and knowledge in light of lessons learned from failures of partial failures, allocate cognitive resources in an efficient way, and pursue goals in the physical world using any effectors that it was built with (such as a robotic body) or may have acquired (such as your computer screen)
in a way that
is superior to the human ability to do these tasks in almost all domains which humans currently perform them.
(note: no mention of “intelligence”. I have tabooed the word as it is clearly causing us trouble)
The corollary of this is that;
Such a computer program would potentially be able to pursue and achieve goals so effectively that it would pose a risk to individual human beings (by being able and likely to kill or seriously injure them) and, in the extreme case, to our society as a whole
Richard Jones: Do you agree or disagree with the above, and if so, why?
April 13th, 2009 at 11:04 am
Roko, I’ll answer your questions when you show some evidence of having thought about what I wrote above.
April 13th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
If AI takes a very long time, that would be marvelous, as it gives us much more time to spread ideas of Friendliness and hope others come to the same conclusions.
If advanced AI, when it finally is built, doesn’t have the tremendous powers we fear, then humanity won’t be at risk from it. Great. The benefits we wanted from AI will just be obtained via human intelligence enhancement, then.
I hope that Singularity advocates are all wrong about AI being created before 2050 and it being a huge danger. If that were the case, I could chill and relax instead of being slightly on edge.
April 13th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
This is an interesting discussion.
It seems like, finally, we have gotten to the core of Dales criticism.
I may not have been the most thorough reader of ”The superlative summary” but I do not recall previously to have seen behind all the rhetoric rhetoric, down to the technical core of the AI/singularity criticism, like in this thread. It seems to me like this core focuses on the definition of a word, rather than on the phenomenon this word is trying to describe, but let’s leave that aside.
Most transhumanists thinks of AI as one of the tools that may be usable for creating a better future, just like nanotechnology, ”drextech”, mind uploading, genetics, cryonics, etc.
These technologies can be criticised, and who knows, maybe none of them will ever bring the results wished for by transhumanists. That would, indeed, be a hard blow in the face of the transhumanists, but it would not hit transhumanism at its core.
Paraphrasing one of Dale’s ”elite French philosophers”: Transhumanism is a Humanism!
It is a wish for the preservation of human values for as long as possible. It is a wish for mankind’s flourishing in a universe full of dangers. It is a wish for the end of all the unnecessary misery going on on earth anno 2009. It is, as a wise man once said, simplified humanism.
In the absence of gods, angels, demons, and magical aliens in UFOs, one must turn the hopes to science and technology. And that is exactly what the transhumanists have done.
I would like to see Dales ”idelologiekritk” directed at this, the core of the ”ideologie” in question here. It is, after all, a little too easy to criticise not-existing technologies, one of their major faults is their lack of existence.
I repeat:
Transhumanism is a Humanism
April 13th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
@Richard: Sorry, didn’t see your Koch comment before I posted.
Nonetheless, I don’t think it will be “soon” for you, either,
Right, but can we move beyond unquantified opinions and into probabilities if we’re going to discuss personal prospects for life extension? Otherwise it becomes
Skeptic: You’ll all die you silly superlative people
Transhumanists: No we won’t
Skeptic: Yes you will
etc, like a pantomime, and nobody learns anything. For example, can you place bounds on the probability of life extension therapies working? On friendly AI working by 2069? On cyronics working? As I said before, I have no desire to walk around believing falsehoods, I’d much rather “lose” this debate than lose the truth.
On to Koch:
Let me quote someone who really does know this biology - Christof Koch:
“Consider this sobering lesson: the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans is a tiny creature whose brain has 302 nerve cells. Back in 1986, scientists used electron microscopy to painstakingly map its roughly 6000 chemical synapses and its complete wiring diagram. Yet more than two decades later, there is still no working model of how this minimal nervous system functions.
Now scale that up to a human brain with its 100 billion or so neurons and a couple hundred trillion synapses. Tracing all those synapses one by one is close to impossible,
Well, the FHI has done a roadmap tracing out various possibilities of the technology. We can now do better than “close to impossible”, we can provide a range of estimated times based upon various technology trajectories.
and it is not even clear whether it would be particularly useful, because the brain is astoundingly plastic, and the connection strengths of synapses are in constant flux. Simulating such a gigantic neural network model in the hope of seeing consciousness emerge,
My post detailing the “weak singularitarian position” doesn’t say anything about “consciousness”, whatever Koch means by that. It merely talks about functional abilities such as “the ability to form plans”.
with millions of parameters whose values are only vaguely known, will not happen in the foreseeable future.”
Simulating the human brain will, according to the FHI roadmap, take quite a long time, with the conservative projections taking until *at least* 2100, and the middling projections until at least 2060. You can probably add 30 years to these to account for the fact that real world research goes slower than the maximum theoretical speed.
But… emulating/simulating the human brain isn’t the only path to smarter than human AI.
So, I repeat, do you, or do you not, agree with the “weak singuaritarian position” as I have defined it? If you disagree, we can start taking it to pieces and examining it.
April 13th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Transhumanism… is a wish for the preservation of human values for as long as possible. It is a wish for mankind’s flourishing in a universe full of dangers. It is a wish for the end of all the unnecessary misery going on on earth anno 2009. It is, as a wise man once said, simplified humanism.
Well, gosh, no, I really don’t agree that this is what transhumanism amounts to at all, nor do I agree that I am saying anything like what you seem to be attributing to me, although I think you may be honestly trying to understand on terms that are familiar to you. Still, I am rather flabbergasted that you have managed to ignore pretty much both everything transhumanists themsevles explicitly say (they endlessly pine after post-humanity, after all, the overcoming all limits, man! and so on) as well as everything I explicitly say when I oppose superlative futurology so as to advocate instead straightforward technoscientifically literate, well-regulated, well-funded equitable progress in the midst of a lifeway diversity of peers engaging in actually informed, nonduressed consensual prosthetic self-determination (which is, when all is said and done, a kinda sorta boring secular democratic humanist project, which is why Maxine accused me of defending stasis, presumably).
I don’t happen to agree that the man who said “transhumanism is simplified humanism” was the least bit wise, in fact I think he is something of a charlatan (I daresay he thinks the same of me, and in this room he’ll find a lot of company in that assessment), but one of the reasons I think he is not at all wise is because while it may be true in a way to describe the hollowing out of human experience and then the wished-for amplification of the mutilated remains as a kind of “simplification,” there are better words on offer that the actually wise would use to describe such a devastatingly wrongheaded vision.
Neither do I agree that in the absence of god or aliens or magical UFOs that one must turn to faith-based misconstruals and wish-fulfillment fantasies of technodevelopment. Indeed, I think that when we grow up and grow out of foolish faiths we turn to the worldly diversity of our fellows, to the extent that they are open to collaboration and contestation as peers… not as priests, not as moralizers, not as fundamentalists, not as avatars of future beings not “yet” among us, but as peers.
April 13th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
Literally every person reading these words will indeed die. For heaven’s sake, grow up.
April 13th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
@ Michael Annisimov:
“If that were the case, I could chill and relax instead of being slightly on edge.”
- being absolutely honest, I have mixed feelings about the likelihood of smarter than human AI in my lifetime. On the one hand, it marginally increases my probability of living forever, and gives me an unprecedented opportunity to prove myself, etc.
On the other hand, the idea of the whole of humanity being wiped out is not a comforting one.
April 13th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
@Dale: Literally every person reading these words will indeed die. For heaven’s sake, grow up.
- question begging
April 13th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
@Dale: Well, gosh, no, I really don’t agree that this is what transhumanism amounts to at all
- You are creating a straw man to attack.
Yudkowsky is a transhumanist. You are not. He gets to define what trahshumanism is, not you. Moreover, “transhumanism as simplfied humanism” is merely reiterating the standard transhumanist position, as contained in the transhumanist declaration, from which I quote:
Transhumanism …. encompasses many principles of modern humanism.
April 13th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
Pointing out your mortality is question begging? Why, because your Robot Cult has declared techno-immortalization to be a going concern? Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! The major premise of the categorical syllogism through which almost everybody has learned Aristotelian logic for over a century (”All humans are mortal.”) is begging the question because a handful of boys with toys who cannot distinguish science from science fiction now say so? You guys really do crack me up.
Your next claim that would-be guru Yudkowsky gets to define transhumanism because he is one is especially rich, given the preceding. Of course, what I took issue with was the ascription to him of “wisdom” and the description of his view as “simplified.” You guys have control of the words “wisdom” and “simplified” too, do you?
Even zeroing in on your specific claim, “Expresses many principles” hardly “contains” the implication of “simplified,” but what’s the point of even trying with you people?
April 13th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Dale, what Roko is saying is very simple: All we know for sure is that 95% of the people that have ever lived were mortal. Obviously, this leaves 5%, the people alive right now, for whom the jury is still out. Or shorter Roko: cemetaries don’t prove anything!
Seriously though, if Roko is really trying to excise falsehoods from his mind, and if at the same time he really thinks he has a fightin’ chance at immortality, he has a little work to do.
The prior probability of Roko dying is at least 95% — actually the prior for Roko dying is probably so close to 100% as to be indistinguishable from absolutely certain, but let’s be generous.
With such a high prior probability of dying, for Roko to even have a fightin’ chance at immortality (say around 1 in 5), he has to put very, very high odds on someone leading him to the Fountain of Youth in his lifetime. By my reckoning, Roko would have to be around 80% certain that he will be granted immortality within the next 60 years in order to give himself right now a posterior 18% chance of living forever.
In the first place, I don’t see how *anyone* could possibly be so deluded as to put 80% odds on being granted immortality within the next 60 years. This is an incredibly high probability for such an extraordinary, unprecedented claim.
But even worse than that, if you agree with my prior, the final tally is that you still only have an 18% chance of immortality even if you can justify your 80% immortality prediction in some way (you can’t, BTW). Why anyone would emphasize this belief of theirs, and proudly, is quite beyond me.
I know there’s a geek or two here that’s about to split hairs over this, but for Heaven’s sake, you’re out of your mind if you don’t see your belief in your future immortality as a falsehood to be excised.
I’m keeping a lid on my usual cheekiness, but it’s getting warm in here, and I’m just about to turn on the charm.
April 13th, 2009 at 7:55 pm
Where are these “odds” coming from anyway, that declare anything other than mortality a certainty? This doesn’t even take us to questions of the same kind I find myself asking about superlative claims about an “artificial” intelligence that doesn’t seem enough like anything else in the world we describe as “intelligence” to warrant the description even in the abstract, quite apart from questions of actual technoscientific implausibility connected with these claims…
Namely, what might it even mean to say of a self so prolonged as to look “immortal” that it was also narratively coherent enough to seem the same life in any meaningful sense? And given the centrality of digitization and roboticization in so many of these scenarios (very much continuous with the dis-embodying of “intelligence” in the “superintelligence” claims) is a life “lived” in a digitized pseudo-body or virtual body “alive” in a relevant sense of the term?
These aren’t actually claims about the plausibility of interestingly different imagined versions of complex future software, but claims about whether we here and now can use language that means something in particular here and now to describe radically different sorts of things that don’t exist, to which claims are attributed despite their non-existence based in part on the things these things mean here and now, but based at other times on refusals of what these things mean here and now?
How does the importation of such terms do the heavy lifting of plausibility production for the wish-fulfillment fantasies of superlative futurology without exhibiting much willingness to pay the price of the ticket in the way of actual consistency with the terms themselves? How coherent are these discourses conceptually speaking, quite apart from their obvious marginality to the science they like to themselves as the consummation of?
And whatever their incoherence on their own terms how does the work of these discourses actual function in the present to enact a kind of brutalization of terms like “intelligence,” and “life,” and “scarcity,” and “freedom” on which we depend to communicate fragile experiences that actually need testimony to remain secure in the world, and all in exchange for selling hyperbolic wish-fulfillment crap that won’t happen and wouldn’t deliver quite what it promises anyway and actually doesn’t even make sense on its own term if it’s submitted to anything like critical scrutiny?
I’ll admit I still can’t for the life of me understand why people won’t just participate in the secular democratic politics of increasing public funding for and ensuring equitable access to the results of well-regulated public education and research and development to improve healthcare and widen flourishing lifeway diversity, improving materials or energy provision, work on actual security problems of weapons proliferation and network security and so on. The superlative shifts into robo-immortalization and Friendly Robot Gods are in many cases clearly symptomatic of problems that are better dealt with in therapeutic settings and manage only to sensationalize policy discourse to the cost of sense at the worst possible historical moment for it.
April 14th, 2009 at 12:16 am
You can call them never-say-die-fantasies of science fiction fans unable to face their mortality. But fantasies aren’t necessarily a bad thing: new things get done when people aren’t discouraged and blinded by “the facts”. Science fiction has a history of turning into science fact. That’s what transhumanism has on its side. The fantasies today are greater than ever before but so is our technological prowess. The more fantastic a technology is the less probable it is. In the case of transhumanist technologies, everything about them is maximally fantastic, thus maximally improbable. Despite this, I find transhumanism’s claims well-argued and reasonable, even the most distant future scenarios of Jupiter Brains and Apotheosis. I don’t consider them certainties, but non-ignorable, non-zero probabilities. It’s unreasonable and foolish to think that nothing truly Super will be realized in the coming decades when we are only at the very beginning of the information technological age. The future is just starting to accelerate. If not Superlongevity, it looks like we’ll get to at least enjoy some Superfun.
April 14th, 2009 at 12:48 am
You know what?
This technology should come about tomorrow, if you ask me. It’s not that dangerous as SIAI says and it’s a good chance we will have it before 2020. Dale’s talk is just irrelevant.
April 14th, 2009 at 4:30 am
@Dale: “Expresses many principles” hardly “contains” the implication of “simplified,”
These two statements are compatible, i.e. a simplified version of humanism would indeed express many principles of humanism.
The WTA FAQ and Declaration should be taken as definitive for this discussion.
April 14th, 2009 at 4:33 am
The superlative shifts into robo-immortalization and Friendly Robot Gods are in many cases clearly symptomatic of problems that are better dealt with in therapeutic settings
Question Begging, yet again. Do you know what “question begging” means?
April 14th, 2009 at 4:38 am
Superfun: Science fiction has a history of turning into science fact.
In 1932, Szilárd had read about the fictional “atomic bombs” described in H. G. Wells’s science fiction novel The World Set Free. This inspired him to be the first scientist to seriously examine the science behind the creation of nuclear weapons. As a scientist, he was the first person to conceive of a device that, using a nuclear chain reaction as fuel, could be used as a bomb.
In 1933 Szilárd fled to London to escape Nazi persecution, where he read an article written by Ernest Rutherford in The Times which rejected the possibility of using atomic energy for practical purposes. Although nuclear fission had not yet been discovered, Szilárd was reportedly so annoyed at this dismissal that he conceived of the idea of the nuclear chain reaction while walking to work at St Bartholomew’s Hospital waiting for traffic lights to change on Southampton Row in Bloomsbury, though his friend Jacob Bronowski notes that he never knew Szilárd to wait for traffic lights.[1] The following year he filed for a patent on the concept
Source
April 14th, 2009 at 4:47 am
@Dale: I’ll admit I still can’t for the life of me understand why people won’t just participate in the secular democratic politics of…
- because there are tens of millions of other people doing that already, the marginal benefit of adding one more advocate for secular democratic stuff is almost zero. I have nothing against these worthy goals.
April 14th, 2009 at 4:55 am
@Thomas: It’s not that dangerous as SIAI says
- I think you’re engaging in wishful thinking now.
Dale - see this? This is an incorrect position! Attack it!!!
April 14th, 2009 at 5:14 am
Dale is just another rhetor.
But we may still find an argument, why SAI is not doable in the next several decades, or ever.
I don’t see how that could be, and I am also (like Roko) eager to hear it from somebody, but it will not come from Dale.
Meanwhile, (a)friendliness is a relevant discussion topic. I would prefer not a Friendly Robot God, but a controlled one.
April 14th, 2009 at 6:58 am
Thomas: I don’t see how that could be, and I am also (like Roko) eager to hear it from somebody, but it will not come from Dale.
- agreed. I was hoping Richard Jones might provide an argument as to why SAI is impossible, but he hasn’t said anything ;-(
April 14th, 2009 at 8:03 am
These two statements are compatible, i.e. a simplified version of humanism would indeed express many principles of humanism.
Compatible? Fine. This cereal box and this soup can label are also compatible. I thought you were implying something stronger, like entailment. My bad, I guess.
The WTA FAQ and Declaration should be taken as definitive for this discussion.
Yeah, if as an atheist (like I am) you argue with Christians about the content and implications of their faith they say things like this, too. “The New Testament is the revealed word of God. End of story.” They’re wrong, too.
Dale — see this? This [ie, “It’s not that dangerous as SIAI says”] is an incorrect position! Attack it!!!
“AI” doesn’t make sense on its own terms, handwaving about how dangerous this non-existing “it” “is” or “is not” are equally incoherent, and indulging in angels on pinheads wish-fulfillment discussions of this kind functions, whatever “side” the “experts” assume within them, to evacuate the terms misappropriated for this nonsense of their actual content to the cost of sense and dignity. I know this isn’t going to count with you as an “argument” because I’m not a scientist who can pat you on the heads and make you feel like grown ups, but superlativity is not science, it is a discourse rendering highly selective and superficial appropriations of science into narratives of personal transcendental aspiration. What is unique and definitive in your talk is happening at the level of rhetoric, not science. Scientists can poke holes in what you’re doing, too, of course, but the substance of your difficulties is happening in a different arena, like it or not.
I would prefer not a Friendly Robot God, but a controlled one.
When I go to Heaven I would prefer my angelic sex-slaves to look more like Roger Huerta than John Malkovich. Look! I’m a “scientist”!
I was hoping Richard Jones might provide an argument as to why SAI is impossible, but he hasn’t said anything ;-(
Hours of laugh out loud funny, you guys are. I am a big fan of Richard Jones, and I am personally awaiting his knock down drag out argument as to why leprechauns are impossible at the nanoscale first.
April 14th, 2009 at 8:50 am
Reading this thread, it is finally clear to me why the folk at SIAI stopped talking about intelligence and started talking about a “Really powerful optimization process” about a year or so ago.
April 14th, 2009 at 9:20 am
Indeed, Roko. But the singularitarians still depend on the facile metaphorization of “intelligence” to sell the line, though. It’s still the same Robot God they’re on about. The “sensible” transhumanists have shifted into comparable weaseling — it’s not outright techno-immortalization or superlongevity anymore but the “liberal eugenicism” of “enhancement,” and for the sensible-shoed singularitarians not superintelligence so much as “optimizing processes.” The move doesn’t cost much and it’s as sensible as donning a power tie for the cameras — the rubes still talk in the superlative terms that keep the Robot Cult in motion amongst themselves (in the comments here, for example), and the ones “in the know” still talk about the superlative outcomes they really “know to expect” over cocktails when the mics get turned off at their ever-more technically fumigated talks. That “enhancement” and “optimization” are normative propositions and therefore subject to the interminable clash of diverse opinions rather than factual terms that aspire to consensus, however provisional, is very interesting, since these tend to get deployed as though they were factual anyway, as if the ends in question are already agreed on, a discursive sleight of hand replicating the initial reductionism inhering in the original superlative figures they pretend to replace, in which intelligences and lives and plurality are drained of their actual brains and bodies and lifeway diversity the better to be doubly brutalized, first reduced to robots then offered up a fantastic brute-force amplification of this roboticization mistaken for emancipation.
April 14th, 2009 at 10:52 am
in which intelligences and lives and plurality are drained of their actual brains and bodies and lifeway diversity the better to be doubly brutalized, first reduced to robots then offered up a fantastic brute-force amplification of this roboticization mistaken for emancipation.
Strawman
April 14th, 2009 at 11:12 am
You wish.
April 14th, 2009 at 11:57 am
““optimization” are normative propositions”
- No! No! Dammit this is like a *nightmare*
You misunderstand everything I say! Optimization is NOT being used in a normative sense here. It just means “steers the physical configuration of atoms in the universe towards a certain subset of the phase space” i.e. “it tries hard to make the world conform to some specification”
A “Really Powerful Optimization Process” is a very dangerous thing. Most RPOPs would kill us all.
April 14th, 2009 at 11:59 am
Dale: in which intelligences and lives and plurality are drained of their actual brains and bodies and lifeway diversity the better to be doubly brutalized, first reduced to robots then offered up a fantastic brute-force amplification of this roboticization mistaken for emancipation.
Dale, we (the singularitarians) are on your side. Really, we are.
We’re just trying to stop an RPOP killing the entire human race. It really is that simple.
April 14th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
I’ll admit I still can’t for the life of me understand why people won’t just participate in the secular democratic politics of increasing public funding for and ensuring equitable access to the results of well-regulated public education and research and development improving healthcare and widening flourishing lifeway diversity, improving materials and renewable energy provision, working on actual security problems of weapons proliferation and network security and so on
Voter participation is at about 50% in the USA. I did vote in the last election.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout
So I participated in the process. However, in California clearly at the national and state level things are skewed toward Democrats. The increased funding for X,Y and Z while increasing various restrictions that reduce possbible tax revenue and growth have created the constant budget crisis. The coastal oil that California has turned its nose up at is about equal to the oil in Alaska. Developing that oil would help the nation as a whole and improve California’s finances by 1-2 billion immediately with land right sales and by 5-10 billion in a few years when developed.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/02/california-oil-and-nuclear-power-could.html
My article on this was linked from Instapundit and had a few thousand page views.
So I am working the process Dale. I am just not working with you.
And being able to do more than one thing at a time, I also write about and predict future technology.
I would note that all of Dale’s efforts are for public funds for development of health, better materials etc… and working the system to get shares of public funds. No personal or private efforts. He also wrote about corruption and problems in the system when the Bush administration was in. Public funding manipulation is best done through a critical mass of money into the right politicians. Lobbying money.
Only big enough websites and newspapers get funding back from the parties in power. The recent complaint from Daily Kos, moveon etc… that the Democrats got free publicity but only bought advertising on the newspapers.
So I think 1-5 million page views per month is on the minimal end of some influence for a website. 5-20 million page view per month for a moderate amount of influence. Then a few thousand dollars per month to have some minimal impact on some lobbying if you can pick winners early in their political career or emergence. Far better for a few million to spread around. Have to pick a less competitive issue where the lobbying dollars and influence are not drowned out.
In terms of affecting the state and national healthcare allocation and plans. There the competition vying for influence is multi-billion HMOs, medical groups, medical malpractice lawyers etc…
The big issues on the Dale list are not going to be effected by a few thousand technologists or transhumanists jumping on different sides. It is like the idea that a few thousand more bodies would effect the trench warfare in World War I when tens of millions were already deployed.
What had some effect on trench warfare ? The invention of an early tank. But there was already a lot of momentum to set compromises. The treaties that ended the war. (Paused it until World War part 2).
Yes, join the political grid lock and political trench warfare. Put different people in so the bribes go elsewhere. Why doesn’t everyone love it ?
April 14th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
Dale, we (the singularitarians) are on your side. Really, we are.
Every day is opposite day in the Robot Cult.
We’re just trying to stop an RPOP killing the entire human race.
That’s nice, dear.
April 14th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Brian Wang points out that right-wingnut Instapundit totally, like, hooked him up. He also points out that the Robot Cultists are going to use technology to circumvent the impasse of stakeholder politics — precisely as I accuse superlativity of aspiring to do, usually only to be greeted with howls about the unfairness and cluelessness of my critique from the Robot Cultists themselves. Libertopian Wang reduces governance in essence to grid lock and bribes, rather like a fulminating Fox spokesmodel. All very predictable. But do keep the faiths, Brian, that futurological tide will turn, Ayn Rand and Robot Cultism will prevail one day, markets will spontaneous order themselves and you’ll be marvelously robotized into invulnerability and immeasurable wealth, just clap louder and longer and that Superlative sun surely will shine for those like you who remain true.
April 15th, 2009 at 12:10 am
Secular democratic politics.
Republican/Democrats/Libertarians/Green
conservatives/liberals
right/left
“right-wing nut”/”left-wing loonies”
use knowledge and resources (including existing or new technology) to be more effective and achieve desired results or use only methods with very low probability. If one could choose to be more effective, why would one choose not to be ? But the best strategy may not be to place only one bet (although sometimes there is a time for concentrated effort on a single focus like making a successful startup company).
wealth like everything else is always measurable. One of the ways to keep score.
Just like page views and inbound links are a way to keep score for websites to measure reach and impact. Just like predictions and determining how many predictions were correct can provide a track record for who tends to be more right about the future as time passes and catches up to the events predicted. There are also metrics to measure success and degree of influence and effectiveness. I am doing fine on the measures that I care about and I am working to improve on those measures and work towards my goals. Where it is possible to publicly compare where we both stand and where are websites are, it is obvious who is more effective.
It would be a rare and difficult thing to have a significant hand in bringing about major technological/societal change. Clearly a better chance would be possible with more wealth and influence personally or in an organization. But correctly understanding and correctly anticipating what is happening or will happen could allow one to spot and pre-position for optimal opportunities.
Links from more popular websites are a good thing. It is an important aspect of building web traffic. I appreciate it when I get a link from Instapundit. Just like you should appreciate when your usually ignored site gets a link from Accelerating Future.
Futurists can sometimes inspire a goal and effort toward realization of it. Science Fiction has inspired people to bring about some of the technology described in it.
A more common situation is to more accurately describe where things are clearly going when closely examined. For the tide metaphor, marking the ebb and flow of the tide and where currents are and the speed etc… If one studies it and sees that a big rock has hit the water then a scientist can say how big the waves will be and where they will hit on land and when they will hit. This is similar to what a futurist can do. Note that something big has impacted or is impacting and that over a certain amount of time the effect will spread and the size of the effect can be fairly clearly determined based on past similar events. For my predictions, the tide does not have to turn. I am looking at the direction it is going and saying that the waves of such and such size and based on current speed will hit land with a force estimate and effect based on past similar waves.
You are the one who chooses to ignore facts and to not look at the way things really are. You let your ideology bias everything in your world view. This is what leads you to the wrong conclusions.
For instance the effect of money on politics. These are obvious effects and people track fairly closely the details. I was being cute with the bribe phrasing but the importance of money to gain influence is clear. Straight up bribes or giving big salary jobs later (delayed bribing) does happen as well.
http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/mems.php?party=D&cycle=2008
In terms of gridlock, how many years between the healthcare bill that the Clintons put forward and the Barack Obama bill. How much has changed in the meantime ? Democrats in control of executive branch and congress. How much change from the new legislation in spite of weak opposition ?
It does not seem that you even understand the actual secular democratic processes and system which we are currently operating in. You would think since you are talking about these things so much you would take the time to figure out how the system really works.
April 15th, 2009 at 5:23 am
Links from more popular websites are a good thing. It is an important aspect of building web traffic. I appreciate it when I get a link from Instapundit. Just like you should appreciate when your usually ignored site gets a link from Accelerating Future.
I love it how these people are continuously at pains to remind you that nobody reads your blog. They go on and on about all of your logical fallacies (strawmen, question begging, ad hominem, yadda-yadda) and then, five seconds later, imply that your lack of popularity indicates how wrong you are.
Dale, if you want links to your website from Brian Wang’s oh-so popular website, you better be nicer to his ideology!
Dale’s blog has, like, a filter on it. It tends to keep people out who don’t like reading and effort to occur at the same time. I mean, contrast Dale’s website with yours, Brian Wang, whoever you are. Your website clearly has no filter on it whatsoever. Its about as advanced as Popular Mechanics, and about as important.
Really anyone can cobble together link lists. But one thing about Dale’s blog, he does generate an awful lot of original content.
April 15th, 2009 at 9:37 am
one thing about Dale’s blog, he does generate an awful lot of original content
So does Nostradamus
April 15th, 2009 at 10:14 am
Richard Jones: are you still reading? If so I’d be interested to hear your view on the singularitarian position I outlined…
April 15th, 2009 at 11:14 am
Queen Maxine. I know that Dale will spew his baseless insults irregardless of what I say. However, I pointed out where he is wrong so that those with less bias can better judge.
Dale has the stated aim of advancing his causes within the reality of the current political system. My main assertion is that he refuses to accept facts and the real situation in regards to the present as it relates to US politics. The areas where it is more clearly possible to prove who is right and who is wrong.
By showing that he is wrong about the present it will also show that his projections into the future carry the same bias and starting errors.
There are impartial ways to measure the reach of a message and the authority of a website.
Ideology: The body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual, group, class, or culture.
My body of ideas are my own. There are times where I do agree and have commonality with others but I do not agree on new points just because there was past agreement on other issues.
I will not bother describing the value of my site and its content to you or Dale as I know this would be pointless. You like Dale’s content and Dale is Dale.
I have clearly stated and public predictions of what I think will happen. It is not whether someone has an ideology that will make a correct prediction. The judgement as to whether a prediction is correct is whether it proves to be so based on what happens in the predicted timeframe. Many predictions are so general as to be unfalsifiable. They do not have a timeframe or date by which they can be determined to have been correct. Or they are so vague as to be useless. I have made more specific predictions that have been and will be possible to independently judge as to whether they are correct.
Actual events will be used to measure whether I am right or wrong.
April 15th, 2009 at 11:47 am
Queen Maxine/Dale: I am curious though how does the process work for affecting policy in a democratic society where you craft a “filtered message” that is primarily read by a few who already agree and would vote and act the same way.
Queen Maxine: You are new to interaction that I have with Dale. He knows that I am not trying to defend Transhumanism or technology from his statements. That is playing the game on his terms. It is a game because these internet feuds/debates do have any impact broader impact. I am taking things to the facts and present and history where I can take his beliefs and show where it separates from reality and where he gets it wrong. Things like Dale’s intense support of the admitted adulterer John Edwards.
April 16th, 2009 at 9:31 am
I appreciate Dale’s criticism of techno scientific hyperbole, but I don’t think there is a limit on technological development should our knowledge of the physical laws governing the universe continue to progress.
Humans might come to live for a very long time with continuing progress in biotechnology. But certainly not forever, as this would violate the second law of thermodynamics.
Molecular manufacturing is likely with continuing progress in nanotechnology. This is being driven by a tendency in the economic system towards the most precise form of manufacturing, in order to obtain the highest output at the least cost.
It is this same tendency that is driving the need for machine intelligence, which is also likely with continuing progress in the fields of artificial intelligence, neuroscience, physics and biotechnology, creating a positive feedback loop.
Humans are complex biological systems evolved through millions of years of evolution. As our knowledge of physics and chemistry progresses, it is inevitable that similar systems will be reproduced for economic goals.
Human intelligence, as Dale pointed out, evolved based on our social environment. This can be duplicated in a manmade system (a machine or new form of life?) if we are able to understand the electrical and chemical signals in our brains that developed in response to our social environment.
This new form of intelligence will be the basis for an automated society, freeing humans eventually from work. This is a process that has already been occurring with increasing unemployment and the growth of service industries with increased productivity resulting from new technology.
It is the economic imperatives of capitalism that is driving these technological developments, and preparing the way for a higher level of existence or a darker future, depending on the outcomes of the necessary social struggles surrounding the direction of these technological developments.
April 17th, 2009 at 11:44 am
Oh, I forgot to mention that Transhumanism and Dale’s opposition to it is a manifestation of the beginnings of this social struggle.
April 19th, 2009 at 10:59 am
@mark: Oh, I forgot to mention that Transhumanism and Dale’s opposition to it is a manifestation of the beginnings of this social struggle.
- not really. Dale doesn’t oppose the construction of smarter than human AI. He thinks it is impossible. So, if someone were to start a really serious project aiming at constructing AGI, and it became obvious that the project was going to succeed, Dale would have to change his position. Perhaps he would oppose it? Perhaps he would come to his senses and argue for friendliness?
April 20th, 2009 at 9:20 am
Dale’s argument is a philosophical one, not technical.
He is not qualified, I am sure he would admit, to say whether a particular technical project is feasible or not.
April 20th, 2009 at 9:36 am
Dale makes frequent reference to “consensus science,” which does not share the goals of Transhumanism or agree with the predicted outcomes.
Most scientists are working in their “neck of the woods” and for the most part do not have the time or interest to connect the dots and see the big picture.
Transhumanists have tried to connect the dots and predict where all this is leading. They would like to direct technology policy along a certain path.
The trouble with Transhumanism is that it is divested of a political analysis.
Transhumanism looks at technology in a depoliticized, abstract and autonomous way, and does not fully understand or acknowledge the dialectical relationship between the balance of social forces and the impact on technological development.
April 21st, 2009 at 11:14 am
Mark, if you read the Transhumanist FAQ, you’ll see that there’s quite a bit of political analysis in there.
April 28th, 2009 at 8:17 am
mark Says: He is not qualified, I am sure he would admit, to say whether a particular technical project is feasible or not.
I Dale comes out and admits, in this comment thread, that he is not qualified to make statements about the technical feasibility and likely timescale for constructing a computer that has:
an ability to learn from experience and from data sources, plan, represent knowledge and reason abstractly, formulate and test hypotheses, revise its plans and knowledge in light of lessons learned from failures or partial failures, allocate cognitive resources in an efficient way, and pursue goals in the physical world using any effectors that has) or may have acquired, in a way that is superior to the human ability to do these tasks in almost all domains which humans currently perform them.
then I will send him a thank you card at my own expense from the UK.
April 28th, 2009 at 8:18 am
typo there:
an ability to learn from experience and from data sources, plan, represent knowledge and reason abstractly, formulate and test hypotheses, revise its plans and knowledge in light of lessons learned from failures or partial failures, allocate cognitive resources in an efficient way, and pursue goals in the physical world using any effectors that it has or may have acquired, in a way that is superior to the human ability to do these tasks in almost all domains which humans currently perform them.
April 28th, 2009 at 8:45 am
mark: Dale makes frequent reference to “consensus science,” which does not share the goals of Transhumanism or agree with the predicted outcomes.
- whilst at the same time, Dale disagrees with over 10,000 AI scientists around the world. He thinks that the entire field of AI is pseudoscience. Dale is the one who disagrees with consensus science.
August 9th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
The thing is, even Dale’s most “substantive” arguments against transhumanism are based entirely around common logical fallacies.
“Marginality”: Argumentum ad populum, to the MAX. What is true is not determined by how many people believe it is true, period. You know that, Dale. You even admitted it before directly contradicting yourself. You mentioned that many important, modernly accepted scientific principles started out as marginal ideas, but you also say that does not mean we shouldn’t attempt to dismiss a new idea solely based on its marginality?
You say that the lack of consensus is due to a lack of evidence…while the lack of evidence part is sort of subjective, the part I’d like to adress is the implied causation of “evidence = consensus”.
Evidence /=/ consensus. The amount of evidence is not in some mathematical proportion to the number of people who believe it. People believe what they choose to believe. People can easily choose to ignore evidence or create it out of wholecloth.
When Galileo proposed the heliocentric model, despite staggeringly overwhelming evidence that the Earth revolved around the sun, he was not only disbelieved, but harshly punished and forced to admit he was “lying”.
Though Transhumanism admittedly does NOT yet have that kind of concrete evidence to stand on (so do not even try to claim I’m saying that), there IS a quite substantial amount of evidence to show that it is at the very least plausible, theoretically feasible. That does not neccessarily correlate with how many people agree with it.
Superlativity: First off, the idea itself is silly, that simply because an idea is extreme it is therefore incorrect.
More importantly, you’ve been moving the goal posts. What is superlative or hyperbolic is entirely subjective. You can define and redefine it on the fly to defend your argument.
You say an idea is hyperbolic nonsense, then someone provides an example of that idea in practical use, then suddenly whatever comes AFTER that in transhumanist progress is hyperbolic nonsense.
You seem (I’m not sure though, since you’ve refused to be direct) to believe that SAI is unfeasible, that machines are incapable of acting in any intelligent way (without providing any sort of argument beyond your opinion, and flat out refusing to do so when asked).
Then someone shows you an example of progress in teaching machines to perform intelligently, and you shrug it off and say “That’s not surprising at all, besides it’s not what I meant”. Every time someone provides evidence to contradict you, you have moved the goal posts until they are “wrong” again.
Keep in mind, to avoid a “fallacy fallacy” where I assume you’re wrong because of a bad argument, I’m not saying that Transhumanism is definitively true or that the evidence suggests that. I’m saying that you have failed to make any compelling or logical case against it.
August 9th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
There is one thing I agree with you on though…everybody will die. Even if the tranhumanist movement succeeds at its goals and in the process we end up indefinitely extending the human lifespan, people will still ultimately die.
A person might be able to live for thousands of years or even longer, but ways of being destroyed will still exist. Nothing is indestructible. Not steel, not stars or planets. There is always the possibility of being destroyed. Sooner or later, everyone dies, because even if they live to be hundreds of millenia old, death will claim them.