Accelerating Future

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There’s a lot of productivity blogs on the Internet, I really dislike them. They’re like blogs about blogging. Here’s the best productivity blog I’ve found yet, via Patri Friedman.

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TIME Announces New Version Of Magazine Aimed At Adults

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Here’s an interesting quote I got forwarded… claimed to be the “earliest known expression of the idea of self improving AI” from this tongue-in-cheek article in the Primitive Expounder in 1847:

“A Thinking Machine! Yes, we can now have our thinking done for us by machinery! The Editor of the Common School Advocate says—”

On our way to Cincinnati, a few days since, we stopped over night where a gentleman from the city was introducing a machine which he said was designed to supercede the necessity and labor of thinking. It was highly and respectably recommended, by men too in high places, and is designed for a calculator, to save the trouble of all mathematical labor. By turning the machinery it produces correct results in addition, substraction, multiplication, and division, and the operator assured us that it was equally useful in fractions and the higher mathematics.” The Editor thinks that such machines, by which the scholar may, by turning a crank, grind out the solution of a problem without the fatigue of mental application, would by its introduction into schools, do incalculable injury, But who knows that such machines when brought to greater perfection, may not think of a plan to remedy all their own defects and then grind out ideas beyond the ken of mortal mind!”

Turn the crank, and out comes ideas “beyond the ken of mortal mind!”

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I’m interested in the idea of how mainstream you can make a fringe subject before it loses its essence. Therefore, I really cracked up when I read the following Amazon reviews of Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life, by Neil Strauss, of The Game fame. Emergency is about Strauss’ superficial forays into survivalism. Apparently there are thousands of nerds that love this guy. Here’s one review, titled “A disappointment”:

I am a huge fan of Neil Strauss’ The Game. I expected this book to be an entertaining way to learn about a variety of hardcore survival techniques. It can be better characterized as a little p*ssy city-boy’s attempt to learn how to not die immediately when camping. He essentially just pays for a variety of classes, telling stories about this journey while imparting very little actual survival knowledge. This book will not save your life – I consider the subtitle highly misleading. I recommend instead the US Army Survival Manual (available for free online), the SAS Survival Manual, or anything written by James Wesley Rawles.

Another, “Perpetuating the fantasy of invulnerability”:

If you’ve read Strauss’ other popular book, The Game, this book will look very familiar to you. It is another first-hand story of his immersion into a life-course in survivalism. Like The Game it is filled with a tremendous amount of embellishment and self-aggrandizing statements. Strauss specializes in a kind of narcissistic cult-following. The book builds him up as a super-man and then promises others that feel inadequate that they too can join his unlimited-skills club. Unfortunately, as any intelligent person that doesn’t mindlessly absorb what someone tells them can see, this seeming reality is actually a fantasy. Emergency is interesting in its cursory overview of a variety of survival strategies. Will it save your life? Unlikely. Will it turn you into Jason Bourne? Definitely not. Will it turn you into a Jason Bourne-wannabe? Yes. And that basically is the essence of the book.

To me, this book seems to personify that concept of being enamored with the idea of something while explicitly not caring about its content. I wonder how many people there are who regard the Singularity in such a manner — it appears to be many.

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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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