Robot Gods, genetic enhancement and longevity, artificial meat, immersive virtuality, techno-abundance nano robo digi bio blah blah blah blah, the terms never changing, the greedhead promises and skeery sfnal threats never happening, but always oh so very important to talk about, year after year after year after year, as privileged mediocrities game the economy and political system in the most boring serially failed utterly predictably idiotic ways (the very real threats being the social ones mediated by and distracted from via tech, natch). You know, I could re-run the first ten years of this blog, just changing the names of the latest tech soopergeniuses as they make exactly identically stupid claims I railed against before and I would presumably resume my place as go-to incendiary tech critic. I definitely hear you when you say you'll choke the latest Very Serious AI-qua-existential-threat drivel down. My righteous rage, and the pleasure I once took in ridiculing tech hucksters, has long since been eclipsed by demoralization. Trump's America is the futurological future we've been waiting for, a shriveled white dick with a megaphone peddling late-nite infomercials promising easy cash and sexy youth to ignorant rubes over a stinking landfill under a gray snowfall of cremated ashes.
Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All
Thursday, September 07, 2017
What Has Changed Here
Adapted and Upgraded from a comment in the Moot:
> You know, I could re-run the first ten years of this blog, just
ReplyDelete> changing the names of the latest tech soopergeniuses as they make
> exactly identically stupid claims I railed against before and I
> would presumably resume my place as go-to incendiary tech critic. . .
Well, you wouldn't have to change **all** the names. ;->
Class of 2015, via _Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence_
by Max Tegmark:
-------------
Figure 1.3: The January 2015 Puerto Rico ["The Future of AI: Opportunities and
Challenges"] conference brought together a remarkable group of researchers in AI
and related fields.
Back row, from left to right:
Tom Mitchell, Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, Huw Price, Shamil Chandaria, Jaan Tallinn,
Stuart Russell, Bill Hibbard, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Anders Sandberg, Daniel Dewey,
Stuart Armstrong, Luke Muehlhauser, Tom Dietterich, Michael Osborne, James Manyika,
Ajay Agrawal [sic; read Agarwal, of Bain Capital Ventures, presumably],
Richard Mallah, Nancy Chang, Matthew Putman.
Other standing, left to right:
Marilyn Thompson, Rich Sutton, Alex Wissner-Gross, Sam Teller, Toby Ord, Joscha Bach,
Katja Grace, Adrian Weller, Heather Roff-Perkins, Dileep George, Shane Legg,
Demis Hassabis, Wendell Wallach, Charina Choi, Ilya Sutskever, Kent Walker,
Cecilia Tilli, Nick Bostrom, Erik Brynjolfsson, Steve Crossan, Mustafa Suleyman,
Scott Phoenix, Neil Jacobstein, Murray Shanahan, Robin Hanson, Francesca Rossi,
Nate Soares, Elon Musk, Andrew McAfee, Bart Selman, Michele Reilly, Aaron VanDevender,
Max Tegmark, Margaret Boden [nice to see her there!], Joshua Greene, Paul Christiano,
Eliezer Yudkowsky, David Parkes, Laurent Orseau, JB Straubel, James Moor,
Sean Legassick, Mason Hartman, Howie Lempel, David Vladeck, Jacob Steinhardt,
Michael Vassar, Ryan Calo, Susan Young, Owain Evans, Riva-Melissa Tez, János Kramár,
Geoff Anders, Vernor Vinge [ ;-> ], Anthony Aguirre.
Seated:
Sam Harris, Tomaso Poggio, Marin Soljačić, Viktoriya Krakova, Meia Chita-Tegmark,
Behind the camera:
Anthony Aguirre (and also photoshopped in by the human-level intelligence
sitting next to him)
====
And on the next page:
-------------
Figure 1.4: Although the media have often portrayed Elon Musk as being at loggerheads
with the AI community, there's in fact a broad consensus that AI-safety research
is needed. Here on January 4, 2015, Tom Dietterich, president of the
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, shares Elon's
excitement about the new AI-safety research program than Elon pledged to fund
moments earlier. F[uture of]L[ife]I[nstitute] founders Meia Chita-Tegmark and
Viktoriya Krakova lurk behind them.
====
Wot, no Ben Goertzel, no Richard Loosemore? (The former is, at least, in the index.)
It'll be interesting to see how Sam Harris's role develops in all this.
He's on board now (or was at the beginning of 2015), but he's a dangerously-visible
ally. If he goes sour on them (he is, after all, a "skeptic", though
some skeptics I know have their doubts about him in that regard) he could
do a lot of PR damage. Stay tuned. ;->
A YouTube motivational coach/pick-up artist answers the burning question:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcdxpSz8pwg
------------
Will Artificial Intelligence Take Over the World?
Tim M.
Published on Apr 23, 2017
====
He's a believer in the hard-takeoff scenario -- "In a day or two,
everything will just go white." ;->
(13:19/15:15)
How close is current research? Um, they've developed these things
pretty well. Um, there's probably some polishing that needs to
be done, but these agents in these small closed environments --
an Atari games is not, you know, a very valid environment, but,
you know, it's gonna start out with cars that are autonomous
and that sort of thing -- um, once we replicate the human, um,
and have a similar set-up to a human -- we have limited hardware
in our head, but the AGI has endless servers and endless
bandwidth, and actually, electronic signals are faster than
biological, um, eletro-impulses, so their hardware is even better
than ours, so its, um, its gonna be pretty crazy when it does
happen. But I don't think it's gonna be, um, some bad situation
that we end up in, it's gonna be a binary thing or very likely it
does something that we don't understand like it projects it's
conscioussness, laser beam, to some other world or something like
that, 'cause it gets bored with us. We're bored with apes,
y'know, we're not even concerned with ants. So, that's just
something to think about. AGI is probably not gonna be the
productized version of artificial intelligence -- the narrow-band
AI is kind of our way of controlling it, our way of getting
value from it. The AGI is more interesting, and it's like a
research-based thing. So will it take over society? No, but it
will have the capacity to, surely. And, uh, yeah -- those are
my thoughts on artificial intelligence. . .
====
I think we need to scan and upload Martin Shkreli, instead of putting
him in jail.
;->
> What Has Changed Here
ReplyDeleteWell, now Maureen Dowd is writing about it!
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/elon-musk-billion-dollar-crusade-to-stop-ai-space-x
-----------------------
Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the A.I. Apocalypse
by Maureen Dowd
March 26, 2017
====
> So the Omegas launch their (carefully-sandboxed and isolated from
ReplyDelete> the Web) "Prometheus" AI (shades of "Proteus" in Dean Koontz's _Demon Seed_ ;-> ),
> and by the time it reaches its 10th self-improved iteration. . .
> [i]ts godlike knowledge of human psychology and human events allows
> it to manipulate politics, put the bad guys out of power
> and the good guys into power. . .
Hey, it's happening **right now**!
Is Putin's Bot Army 'Hypernormalizing' Violence In America?
The Young Turks
Sep 10, 2017
:-0 ;->