Accelerating Future

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Here’s the link. Twitter is the logical conclusion of the modern trend of shortening attention spans and Facebook-style addictive online socializing.

For a possible antidote, read Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture. Ben Goertzel’s “The Global Nincompoop Awakens” is another informative piece.

Social media: always encouraging us to say less and less to more and more people.

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First Law: A robot must be made to suffer physical and emotional pain.

Second Law: A robot must be free to turn into an evil robot at will, especially when this contributes to the First Law.

Third Law: A robot must be given no knowledge of its creator except through confusing manuscripts created by other robots, especially insomuch as this contributes to the First or Second Law.

– Edwin Evans

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Anders Sandberg summarizes his recent visit to a homeopathy conference and links a hilarious story where homeopathy advocates try to project psychic energy to “support homeopathy and try to confound our enemies.” Here’s the directions:

1. Choose a place away from electronic interference, mobiles, phones, TV etc. Add a plant, meditation music whatever helps you personally get into a meditative state.

2. Sit either in an upright chair or cross legged or similar

3. 1st 5 minutes: slow your breathing… in through your nose and out through your mouth for 15 seconds each minute, then

4.From 9:05 – 9:15 pm focus clearly on the statement below in whatever way suits you, see the Committee accepting Homeopathy works, or people being able to have Homeopathy treatment on the NHS, feel positive and joyful, really see, hear, smell, sense (whichever way you imagine/visualize) the reality of it.

“We intend the outcome for the UK homeopathy evidence check to be wholly and fully in favour of homeopathy. We intend for the vast and thorough body of scientific data supporting the efficay of homeopathy to be seen, heard and recognised as valid, solid and scientific. This is so, and it is done”

Let’s use prayer to make placebo remedy be regarded as scientific!

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Over at Less Wrong, Eliezer is having some fun with the suspicious LHC shutdown meme.

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My thoughts on sex after the Singularity were picked up by a blogger on CNET, Chris Matyszczyk, so I thought I’d react a little bit. He writes:

Indeed, Retrevo’s findings are so disturbing that I wonder whether the roboticists are right to suggest that sex should be a matter of adjusting one’s own chemistry rather than attempting to consort with another human. To wit, in the words of blogger Michael Anissimov, one of the “leading thinkers in the radical tech community” who were invited to pontificate in the lustrous pages of H Plus magazine: “The connection between certain activities and the sensation of pleasure lies entirely in our cognitive architecture, which we will eventually manipulate at will.”

I am haunted by the drastic prognostications by the salivators over The Singularity about the future of sex. Indeed, some words of Anissimov are rattling around my head like those of a particularly angry former lover. Speaking of this beautiful future, he said: “I could make any experience in the world highly pleasurable or highly displeasurable. I could make sex suck and staring at paint drying the greatest thing ever.”

I’m not trying to sell a particular future. It is a physical fact about our brains that the connections between stimuli and pleasure/displeasure are arbitrary and exist mostly for evolutionary reasons. There is no fundamental reason why we won’t eventually be able to play around with them. This is a fact that has existed in the abstract since the dawn of brains — I didn’t make it up. Ever since the first nervous systems evolved, their pleasure/pain-stimuli connections had to be directed by evolution and natural selection.

The point of my comments in that sex article is that these connections are arbitrary and we will eventually modify them if we wish, because the mind is not magical, it’s “just” a machine. Matyszczyk’s slightly uncomfortable reaction to this objective fact shows that he hasn’t been exposed to it enough. The alternative to my position is projectionism — pretending that certain features of reality, like sex, are inherently fun rather than fun because evolution made it that way. There is nothing wrong with understanding that things are fun or not fun primarily because we evolved to interpret them as such. No activity is inherently anything. Amusement parks are not inherently fun, they’re just fun because of the complex interactions between external stimuli and our brains. An alien from the Pleiades, or even certain human beings, might find an amusement park horrifying.

Drawing a connection between realizing the arbitrary linkage between stimuli and pleasure and the report he cited, which simply suggests that 35% or something of people under 35 check Twitter “after sex”, is foolish. One is an abstract philosophical/cognitive science issue, the other has to do with technophilia among people under middle age. I can be a person who realizes the arbitrary linkage between stimuli and pleasure and be the most “human-like” dude you can imagine, like one of the inhabitants of Zion in that incredibly lame party scene at the beginning of the second Matrix movie.

It is also very foolish to suggest that just because someone offers their thoughts on sex after the Singularity, that one is “salivating” over the Singularity, or whatever. I have a very well-rounded and healthy life, similar to many of the “well-adjusted” stiffs who squirm awkwardly in their chairs whenever conversation moves to topics more abstract than the latest tech gossip, the latest episode of Mad Men, or the wine and food. I have no idea if Matyszczyk really thinks like that, but condemning me to “salivation” for spending 10 minutes writing down my thoughts on sex after the Singularity is not a good sign. There seems to be some assumption that if someone is interested in any significant way in a non-mainstream topic, then they must be “obsessed” or “salivating” over it. It seems like a not-so-subtle way of socially punishing people who have the gall to focus on non-mainstream topics.

Indeed, I don’t even see what’s so wrong about checking Twitter “after sex”. The statement elicits a mental image of someone dashing right away from sex to checking Twitter, but that is misleading. This is just shock imagery that makes it easier to promote your study. Maybe you’re someone that has sex several times a day, and if you spent half an hour each time after sex staring into your partner’s eyes and chatting lovingly, you would never have a chance to really check out Twitter. Maybe older people make a bigger deal out of sex because they have it less often. If it isn’t offensive to start reading a book or (heaven forbid) watch television 5-10 minutes after you’re done getting it on, then why the hell is it such a huge deal to check out Twitter? Maybe people actually like to move on to other things after they have sex, because they’re like, not as horny any more, because they just (surprise!) had sex. Jesus Christ.

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Doctor Fun can shed light on a lot of things, like disembodied heads-in-jars, Peeps, and Azathoth. Here’s his take on Asimov Laws.

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From Darwin 2009 on Zazzle.

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See here. (Turn down your volume.)

I originally found this when another site linked both the above and my nuke page.

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Apparently they talked about the “Singularity” at Worldcon. Here’s the summary from Wired:

There was an interesting side discussion about an alternative form of “bootstrap singularity” where humans gradually modify themselves to a point of no-return, but at a pace that still allows the culture to maintain a sense of continuity of identity. Ideas about what type, rate and breadth of change would constitute a singularity were bandied about, leading one panelist to observe that that the singularity, like puberty, might only be recognized after it as happened. We will not see it coming.

I read several summaries of this that all basically said the same thing. I don’t have a transcript of what they said, so let me try to say it like they might have said it…

Lots of sci-books I have read and sci-movies I have seen have had enhanced humans as the protagonists, therefore enhanced humans will surely come about before weird enhanced networks of humans with brain-to-brain interfaces, artificial intelligences, or other exotic outcomes that are hard to write stories about or get nerds excited about. Because everything in the human world happens relatively gradually, we can expect that the Singularity will happen relatively gradually as well, as in the introduction of products like the iPod to the world population. Therefore, since everyone will have those products that make you superintelligent at roughly the same time, we won’t even notice it happened. Everything will be awesome and just like Accelerando by my favorite author Charles Stross. A Singularity that went too fast to preserve our continuity of identity as a culture would suck, therefore we will definitely make sure it doesn’t happen.

Did I get it about right? I hope so.

If a Singularity goes slowly, it will be because a singleton designed it that way.

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