Giulio Prisco: “I am a Singularitian who does not believe in the Singularity” Wednesday, Sep 30 2009
singularity 5:42 am
See Guilio Prisco’s general response to my and Jamais’ recent writings here. Here is an excerpt:
As I say above I think politics is important, and I agree with Jamais Cascio: it is important to talk about he truly important issues surrounding the possibility of a Singularity: political power, social responsibility, and the role of human agency. Too bad Jamais describes his forthcoming talk in New York as counter-programming for the Singularity Summit, happening that same weekend, with the alternative title If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Singularity. This is very similar to the title of the article If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution!. by Athena Andreadis, a very mistaken bioluddite apology of our current Human1.0 condition against unPC Singularitian imagination. This article is one of many recent articles dedicated to bashing Singularitians, Ray Kurzweil and transhumanist imagination in name of the dullest left-feminist-flavored political correctness. I think I will skip Jamais’ talk (too bad, because he is a brilliant thinker and speaker). See also Michael Anissimov’s Response to Jamais Cascio.
This is sad. Jamais has named his talk after a post on uploading that assumes to upload would mean leaving behind any kind of body and that Singularitarians are soulless nerd zombies. (Updated: Jamais wrote to Guilio saying that this is wrong, and he named his talk about Emma Goldman’s quote. Unfortunate that he emailed Guilio but not me! Therefore I retract my earlier sentence and leave it there only as evidence of my misinterpretation.) This name is especially silly in context of the fact that I privately named my first few years of Singularity activism and planning “Waltz Towards the Singularity”. If you think it’s silly to name a few years of activism something so flowery, well… maybe you are just a zombie.
The problem with choosing or not choosing to be a part of our “revolution” is that, for better or for worse, there probably is no choice. When superintelligence is created, it will impact everyone on Earth, whether we like it or not, just like the rise of Homo sapiens impacted every species on Earth. Don’t blame us — blame God, or blame the laws of physics for setting the universe up in such a way that smarter-than-human, faster-than-human thinkers are physically possible. Of course, there’s always a chance that smarter-than-human intelligence is impossible (there’s more of that dogmatic Singularitarian absolutist certainty!), but given that tens of thousands of extremely smart people believe that the brain could theoretically be improved (and you’ll see a lot more on that topic if you attend the Singularity Summit this weekend), the possibility ought to at least be seriously entertained.
Actually Guilio is worng, the quote is from Emma Goldman.
It’s attributed to her, but she probably didn’t say it. And it’s likely Jamais is referencing the post, rather than the original quote.
Also, just a tiny note, a little dissonance on the fact that you so strenuously denied you or anyone else had ever said that we had no choice about the Singularity in the very last post on this blog.
Also, I can’t really imagine a comprehensive reply to Guilio, who seems to have missed a lot of formative info on the Singularity, FAI theory, the arguments against IA and gradualism, and so on. Which is odd, because I have a vague memory that he’s been a member of sl4 or other groups for a while.
The swipes at what he calls left-feminism are bizarre, and I have no comment.
Regarding dissonance: I read Michael as having said humanity has control over when and how the intelligence explosion goes down, but an individual probably doesn’t, and it would take amazing will on the part of humanity to have it not happen soon, much less at all.
Oh there will be some sort of singularity. I regard the current timeframe as something akin to “a very wide river – and ahead of us is a waterfall”. And in tumbling down the river just a minor bit of steerage will give us access to a wide range of eventualities with regards to the waterfall.
Do I see some massive rocks ahead we might fall on? Better avoid those…
Having no choice we WILL have something of a singularity is not saying we don’t have a choice in the type of waterfall – we may even have a choice to head on out to the shore and wait a while, have a good look at all this, and maybe look for another route around it. We WILL eventually find the river again, but we may take a slow scenic route doing it. As in – we may opt to take a safe route towards superhuman AI suspending the dehumanizing societal paradigms we have right now.
But let’s not spaghettify the metaphor…
What G is saying is that singularitarians are idealizing THE singularity, presenting it is a big undiffentiated glob of celestial mystery, marketing potential, diffuse risks, all of it we’ll get a handle on in time and then it’ll be christmas.
I say, for every benevolent eventuality any singularitarian dare marketize I can show them ten massive blind spots that are immediate implications of what he or she is predicting. Show me some glassy eyed idealist spouting diffuse visions of a singularity, and I’ll show you yet another range of blind spots. As in – ways to die horribly. No one ever seems to have the imagination to discuss diversity in singularities? IS there actually a list of analysis of possible singularities (and how some singularity morphologies exclude one another?) published anywhere …? Or is that “too speculative” ?
Give me a break.
Hey I adore idealism, but it isn’t because of idealism I am a transhumanist. It is because I distrust me fellow human beings, and it is because I am REALLY PISSED by income disparities. Plus I loathe this human libertarian tribal pleistocene tendency to say “for me to win, some freeloaders MUST be punished”….
I am now pretty sure that without exponential growth producing solutions, humanity is more or less destined to gigadeath before 2100. Yah that includes all the old horses I love beating (off), such as income disparities, asshole governments (with either ideologe, kleptocrat, corporate, MIC or bureaucrat parasite castes) or entitlement crazy ideologies or Zee Enviroment. Or resource depletion. And then some.
OF COURSE the initial objection of Andrea was asinine and unimaginative – my (pole)dancing has increased exponentially since my personal trajectory towards ‘Ze Zingularity’ has commenced as of the early 2000s. (All puns are intentional) … My list of personally preferred Singularities are saturated with art, epicurianism, hiltonian fun and musical theme tracks.
Andreas objections were just objections of the same general lameness as a christian blaming an athetist of being a communist, ‘since stalin was an atheist too’. It’s all superficial prejudice. Plus Andrea TOTALLY ignored transhumanists who have neurological issues (there are a few) who can look forward to being a societal outcast without as long as we don’t have means to fix gross neurological problems. The latter being acutely transhumanist technologies – as soon as we can *really* fix psychosis, depression, migraines, ADHD, amnesia, as opposed to “crudely hammering it with a pharmacological hammer” we’ll be years removed from real AI.
As for Jamais, he is just being PR-conscious. I am sure Jamais sees very well that given technological ascendancy, ‘something’ weird will happen eventually. But jamais, unlike Giulio, is in a business where “bold predictions” don’t score him any paying customers. Jamais has no motive to start predicting singularities – his business is the 20 fruitfull years BEFORE a real singularity.
Emailtoid, Giulio knows what he is talking about, sorry. When person C quotes person B quoting something derived from person A, it’s still person C quoting B. Congratulations for knowing A, but in this context, it doesn’t really matter.
Justin, see what Raelfin said. I don’t think the comments about left-feminism are very bizarre, did you witness Athena Andreais’ recent tirades against SIAI?
Khannea, your contempt for income inequality is ridiculous. You are so worked up about it, it is bizarre. If people want more income, they need to produce economic value. I believe in a social safety net, but completely leveling the playing field has already been tried dozens of times in history and the result was always utter disaster. Learn from history.
Utter disaster because violent bosses either got in the way or conducted the leveling themselves. And I would consider some, such as communes in the Spanish Civil War, just as inspiring as tragic. We socialist transhumanists need not succumb to the same pitfalls. I must say I’m rather amused to see you using this argument. To use another example, quests for immortality haven’t fared particularly well in the past either. I don’t know about you, but that hardly convinces me to abandon SENS.
As you can see, I mirror Khannea’s feelings about income inequality. In a society of plenty, it’s absurd for people to want in order to maintain privilege for the few. Consumption needs only be balanced with production overall. Economic value reflects the preferences of the ruling class rather than physical reality.
“Ruling class”, that’s constantly looking for a reason to blame someone else. I want everyone to eventually enjoy some basic guaranteed income, but I doubt it will be that much beyond a baseline. I can understand a safety net, I can understand helping the poor, but I do NOT understand trying to completely level all income. That is absurd and far more ridiculous than my proposal.
” Khannea, your contempt for income inequality is ridiculous. You are so worked up about it, it is bizarre. If people want more income, they need to produce economic value. I believe in a social safety net, but completely leveling the playing field has already been tried dozens of times in history and the result was always utter disaster. Learn from history. ”
How can you say such a thing, Mike? Are you blind? Where have I ever implies something as stupid as “levelling” ?
I’ll go on the record that in any society, my ideal state of income equality would be about 100:1, in that the richest persons should make no more than 100 times the poorest. That is quite another story isn’t it? I means that if someone in mexico not far from where you live, or someone in Romania, not far from where I live, who makes 10 euro or dollar a month, NOBODY in the same area would be *allowed* to earn more than 1000 dollar a month – make sure the poor guy makes 100 euro a month, and the richer members of society could be condoned making 10.000 a month. I am in favor of taxing them, and yes I hold inequality in complete contempt. Why, because anywhere, everywhere in history, inequality will never resolve itself ‘naturally’, and those who consolidated their grasp on society will dedicate effort to not just make sure they stay “rich”, they will also make sure a big slice of society is poor. If you think that is statist, or repressive, or “contrived”, don’t worry – you already live in a statist, represstive and contrived society that commits far worse sins.
We live in a world where some make several million an HOUR whereas others make several dollars a YEAR. Your objections in this regard are well.. Scandalous? Callous? Unworldly?
Russian style Communism, the overquoted example, failed, because a small minority made themselves rich, at the expense (and lives) of those they predated upon. To confuse that with actual egalitarianism is akin to sodomizing a straw man.
I can imagine that an attractive young man, such as you, for whom all things turned out amazing in life, can feel threatened by all those disheveled, homely, malodorious and dumb poor people. But bear in mind that a portion of society (of the world) will never produce much in terms of “economic value”, even IF they sell they kidneys.
My point in (being) transhumanist is not get entitlement-crazy white anglosaxons attain some kind of escape velocity (and you are closer to such a thing than you appreciate) – it is to make sure that all those disheveld, homely, malodorious, dumb people are able to go in a store or clinic, get fixed up, and exit like a steady stream of micheal-annisimov equivalent human beings – confident, empowered, proud, attractive, smart, healthy.
And society will pay for this – because it makes sense.
The water ISN’T rising for everyone in the current system mike. There is more slavery now than ever in human history. Likewise there is more people now “with something to lose” agitating against income equality.
Capitalism has FAILed and produced nothing resembling added economic value. THAT is what I hold in contempt most of all – a small “elite” (what else to call them?) conjuring money out of thin air and there inflating their power to push anyone else into the goddamn gutter.
But I will reiterate – my issue isn’t about income inequality even. It is with ‘irreconcilable’ income disparity – the moment in history where a category of the poor experiences a kind of poverty that can never be squared by the take-off of wealth by “a small elite”. What if a billion human beings gets richer so fast that ‘the other half’ never gets a chance to keep up.
What’s enough mike? 1000:1? 10.000:1? a million to one? WHEN IS IT ENOUGH?
Well, Michael, then you can count on continued agitation from me and my comrades. I do advocate leveling. I want to destroy privilege. Even with today’s technology, we could all live quite well under an equable consumption scheme. With AI and molecular manufacturing, you couldn’t possibly argue that economic hierarchy sustained production. Human organization would no longer matter; the machines could produce on their own. Why keep the artifact of income inequality after an unambiguous end to scarcity?
If a ruling superintelligence decides to preserve pernicious competition and distinction between people, then the slogan “No Gods, No Masters” should become especially apt.
Abbot: > I want to destroy privilege.
I agree.
Abbot: > Even with today’s technology, we could all live quite well under an equable consumption scheme.
Ah, well in a certain sense of the word “could” that is true. We could *if* human nature were such that people didn’t have an innate urge to organize ourselves into primate-like hierarchies, with the most powerful at the top and the least powerful at the bottom.
Regrettably, the premise is false.
So the technology required to get rid of privilege is actually rather advanced: you would need to change human nature in a way that you didn’t regret afterwards.
You can all argue about this, back and forth – in fact you all *should* argue about it back and forth.
In a years time, when someone asks “arew you a bunch of ‘militant liberatarian maniacal elitists’ you can all point to these forum posts and say ‘no no we have crackpot leftists who believe in the illuminati too’.
This movement is not a scientology-like pyramidal hivemind. This movement is one of really annoying, unsatisfactory and conflicting discussions about topics pertaining to the actual future – and discussing threats and opportunities.
@outlawpoet: yes, I have been on the SL4 list for many years and know all the arguments you mention. But I still don’t see a fast, hard takeoff Singularity on the horizon, rather a slower and much more entropic process. Having said this, the end result may well be the same, and this is a friendly disagreement: I will be happy to be proven wrong.
“the swipes at what he calls left-feminism”: see
http://cosmi2le.com/index.php?/site/women_and_biologists_are_not_infallible/
@Michael – “I want everyone to eventually enjoy some basic guaranteed income, but I doubt it will be that much beyond a baseline. I can understand a safety net, I can understand helping the poor, but I do NOT understand trying to completely level all income.”. Agree.
@Khannea: you are not one of “those disheveld, homely, malodorious, dumb people”. You are one of the most intellectually alive persons I know. Thanks for being part of this community.
Congratulations to Michael and the other SIAI folks for organizing the Summit. I am having a lot of fun.