Thursday, July 21, 2016

Every Futurism Is A Retro-Futurism

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4 comments:

  1. jimf3:26 PM

    > Every Futurism Is A Retro-Futurism

    Just ask Noam Chomsky:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qLXEqBfluA
    --------------
    Noam Chomsky - The Threat of Supercomputers
    Chomsky's Philosophy
    Jul 3, 2016

    [excerpted from
    In Conversation with Noam Chomsky - A British Academy event
    The British Academy
    Nov 28, 2014
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OGIJE8AzqM ]

    Questioner: . . .[Y]ou've written quite extensively [that] the two
    dominant threats to human survival [are] climate change and nuclear
    war. I was just wondering to what extent you've considered a
    third possibility. . . [the threat of Silicon Valley firms working
    secretively on projects] which are purported to create a kind of superintellgence
    that will render humanity obsolete. I was just wondering what your
    thoughts are on that, and whether that's in fact
    a bad thing at all.

    Chomsky: Well, so what about the development of supercomputers that'll
    be more intelligent than humans, and Singularity, you know, they'll
    take over everything, and we'll be superfluous, and so on?

    I've been listening to this. . . I've been at MIT for 60 years,
    since 1950, and I've been **listening** to this for 60 years.
    [laughs from the audience]
    The line has always been "In six months we will have computers
    which will do X, Y, and Z." Uh, we don't have 'em. There's
    a famous paper by Alan Turing called "How To Make Machines Think"
    or some title like that -- it's a short paper, eight pages, around 1950.
    It's the basis for all of this work on what's called the
    Turing Test, trying to develop machine which will think. You know, a
    machine that'll defeat the grandmaster in chess, that'll win
    a prize in a television program, and so on. All of this work --
    and you can win a hundred thousand dollars if you develop what
    they call a "machine" -- a machine means a program, it's not the
    machine -- if you develop a program that will pass the so-called
    Turing Test, you know -- to fool a human and fool a jury of humans
    into thinking it's a person and not a machine. All of this work
    overlooks the brief sentence in Turing's paper, namely --
    "The question whether machines 'think' is too meaningless to
    deserve discussion." OK?
    [laughs from the audience]
    He didn't bother explaining it, but it's pretty obvious.
    I mean, you can develop -- again, it's kind of sexy to talk about
    a "machine", but remember -- a machine, in itself, it's kind of like
    a paperweight, doesn't do anything. It's the program that's
    doing something. And the program is just some kind of theory,
    complicated theory. So you can develop theories that will do
    specific tasks. Like, it was obvious in 1950 that if you put
    enough time and energy into it, you could develop a program that
    would win a chess game against a grandmaster. How? By getting
    a hundred grandmasters to sit around for years and years
    figuring out what to do in all possible circumstances and so on
    and so forth, and program it, and it'll do better than a grand
    master who has a half an hour to think about the next move.
    OK. It's completely uninteresting. Intellectually, of zero
    interest. It's good for IBM -- they sell a lot of computers that way,
    [laughs from the audience]
    but it has no intellectual interest. The same is true of winning
    in a quiz show. You know, you toss a lot of data into the machine
    and it'll do better than a person. But getting a machine to do --
    a program, again -- to do anything that's at all like the creative
    activities that every four-year-old child can carry out -- that's
    quite different. And I don't think there's -- we have any grasp
    even on how to go ahead to do that. And so I think one can have
    a fair degree of skepticism about the PR on superintelligent machines
    and the Singularity and so on.
    ====

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  2. jimf3:43 PM

    > Just ask Noam Chomsky:

    Just one more thing for Chomsky and Sam Harris to disagree
    about. ;->

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4S86TkNbvo
    --------
    Sam Harris - On Artificial Intelligence
    Jul 8, 2015
    Sam Harris discussing artificial intelligence from
    Joe Rogan Experience Podcast #641. Podcast edited to
    include portions on AI.
    ====


    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgqP9WHo6bw
    --------
    Sam Harris - On Artificial Intelligence II
    May 3, 2016
    Waking Up Podcast
    Featuring David Chalmers
    ====


    Sam Harris says he's only become aware of the "problem" in
    the last year or so, because he's "not a sci-fi geek".
    But he's been "drinking the kool-aid" (as he calls it himself)
    since public pronouncements by Elon Musk on the dangers
    of superintelligence ("and Elon Musk is a friend of mine,
    and he wouldn't be saying these things if there wasn't something
    in it").

    And Nick Bostrom.

    ReplyDelete
  3. jimf7:25 AM

    http://www.metafilter.com/149748/Trying-to-reduce-the-odds-of-a-catastrophe-by-0001
    ---------------
    Trying to reduce the odds of a catastrophe by .0001%
    May 18, 2015

    The academic study of existential risk is being taken seriously.
    The University of Cambridge has the CSER. . . Oxford has the
    Future of Humanity Institute, headed by Nick Bostrom. . ., which
    has produced this taxonomy of threats. . . In the US, work is
    done in thinktanks like the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute
    and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which is focused
    on trying to tame AI, and predict when it will arrive.
    Though climate change gets a nod, the main concerns appear to be
    largely AI (which they are really worried about), nuclear war
    (chance of happening: between 7% and .0001% a year), threats from
    technological innovation like biotech or nanotech.
    ====

    From the comment thread:

    ---------------
    Existential Dread
    May 18, 2015

    I've heard that anecdote about the early atomic bomb developers
    wondering if they could trigger fusion of atmospheric nitrogen
    (essentially turning the entire atmosphere into an uncontrolled
    fusion reaction), although I've heard it accredited to Teller,
    not Oppenheimer.

    Amusing perspective from Wikipedia:

    > Teller also raised the speculative possibility that an atomic
    > bomb might "ignite" the atmosphere because of a hypothetical fusion
    > reaction of nitrogen nuclei. . . Oppenheimer mentioned it to
    > Arthur Compton, who "didn't have enough sense to shut up about it.
    > It somehow got into a document that went to Washington" and was
    > "never laid to rest".
    ====

    That kind of speculation must have a long history, because that's
    basically how the First Human Species meets its final end in
    Olaf Stapledon's _Last and First Men_ (1930). After the fall of the
    American World State 5000 years in the future (as a result of
    running out of fossil fuels), after a period of some tens of thousands
    of years of savagery, the Patagonians of 100,000 years in the future
    rediscover "sub-atomic power" (which had been discovered near
    our own time but had been suppressed as too dangerous by a cabal
    of scientists, who persuaded the Chinese guy who demonstrated it
    to them to destroy his work and commit suicide). So the Patagonian
    world state has "sub-atomic power" generators, but social dissidents
    get hold of one of them and manage to set off a chain reaction in the
    crust of the earth involving all deposits of the element involved
    in the "sub-atomic disintegration" process, causing wide-spread
    vulcanism and extinction of the human race (except for a handful
    of survivors aboard an exploratory ship in the Arctic, whereby
    hangs the rest of the two-billion-year story ;-> ).


    From the same comment thread:

    ---------------
    mhoye
    May 18, 2015

    > I have a hard time getting too riled up about the AI concern.

    Being frightened of AI is roughly like worrying that if your
    grocery list gets long enough and complicated enough, eventually
    it will go do the shopping itself.

    People who do not have careers in IT: "omg AI is coming and
    it's going to destroy us all omg omg".

    People with careers in IT: "Why doesn't the printer work? Why
    won't Linux talk to the projector this morning?"

    ---

    SpacemanStix
    May 18, 2015

    > People who do not have careers in IT: . . .

    I feel like people who make a career out of these concerns are
    often taking advantage of people who watch too many movies. Or
    they watch too many movies themselves with just a smattering
    of philosophy-of-mind thrown in to make dangerous speculations
    sound interesting.
    ====


    As the Dowager Countess would say, "She reads too many novels. . ."

    ;->

    ReplyDelete
  4. jimf10:56 AM

    > Noam Chomsky:
    > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qLXEqBfluA
    >
    > All of this work overlooks the brief sentence
    > in Turing's paper, namely -- "The question whether
    > machines 'think' is too meaningless to
    > deserve discussion." OK? . . .
    >
    > It's good for IBM -- they sell a lot of computers
    > that way. . .


    Ya gotta love this ad:

    https://www.w3.org/2010/Talks/01-08-steven-ten-euro-computer/univac.jpg


    Plugboards and vacuum tubes.

    Does Univac 120 really **think**?

    I dunno -- whaddya **you** think? ;->


    SPOCK: If only I could tie this tricorder in with the
    ship's computers for just a few moments.

    KIRK: Couldn't you build some form of computer aid here?

    SPOCK: In this zinc-plated vacuum-tubed culture?

    KIRK: Yes, well, it would pose an extremely complex problem
    in logic, Mr. Spock. Excuse me. I sometimes expect too much of you.

    ---

    SPOCK: Captain, I must have some platinum. A small block would
    be sufficient, five or six pounds. By passing certain circuits
    through there to be used as a duodynetic field core. . .

    KIRK: Mr. Spock, I've brought you some assorted vegetables,
    baloney in a hard roll for myself, and I've spent the other
    nine tenths of our combined salaries for the last three days
    on filling this order for you. Mr. Spock, this bag doesn't
    contain platinum, silver or gold, nor is it likely to in the
    near future.

    SPOCK: Captain, you're asking me to work with equipment which
    hardly very far ahead of stone knives and bearskins. . .
    [I]n three weeks at this rate, possibly a month, I might reach
    the first mnemonic memory circuits. . .

    EDITH: . . . What on Earth is that?

    SPOCK: I am endeavoring, ma'am, to construct a
    mnemonic memory circuit using stone knives and bearskins.

    ReplyDelete