tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post1383841176330267990..comments2023-11-22T01:14:54.298-08:00Comments on amor mundi: Deep UnlearningDale Carricohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-22543734816549362752015-06-08T03:18:48.113-07:002015-06-08T03:18:48.113-07:00In Richard Jones' latest article on his Soft M...In Richard Jones' latest article on his Soft Machines blog,<br />"Does Transhumanism Matter", he wrote:<br /><br />http://www.softmachines.org/wordpress/?p=1607<br />-------------<br />To many observers with some sort of scientific background. . .<br />the worst one might say about transhumanism is that it is mostly harmless,<br />perhaps over-exuberant in its claims and ambitions, but beneficial<br />in that it promotes a positive image of science and technology. <br /><br />But there is another critique of transhumanism, which emphasises not<br />the distance between transhumanism’s claims and what is technologically<br />plausible,. . . but the continuity between the way transhumanists talk<br />about technology and the future and the way these issues are talked<br />about in the mainstream. In this view, transhumanism matters, not<br />so much for its strange ideological roots and shaky technical foundations,<br />but because it illuminates some much more widely held, but pathological,<br />beliefs about technology.<br />====<br /><br />You can't get more mainstream than Time magazine.<br /><br />That January 23, 1950 issue of Time that Ted Nelson<br />(of hypertext/Computer Lib/Xanadu fame) recalled seeing<br />when he was 12 years old, whose cover contains an<br />artist's rendition of an anthropomorphized Harvard Mark III<br />computer with the caption "Can Man Build a Superman?",<br />contains some passages that are not that dissimilar from some of<br />the articles in the mainstream media today amplifying the frettings<br />of Nick Bostrom, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking,<br />and others.<br /><br />This has been going on for a **long** time.<br /><br />http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=2284<br />-------------<br />"What Is Thinking? Do computers think? Some experts say yes,<br />some say no. Both sides are vehement; but all agree that the answer<br />to the question depends on what you mean by thinking.<br /><br />"The human brain, some computermen explain, thinks by judging present<br />information in the light of past experience. That is roughly what<br />the machines do. They consider figures fed into them (just as<br />information is fed to the human brain by the senses), and measure<br />the figures against information that is "remembered." The machine-radicals<br />ask: 'Isn't this thinking?' . . .<br /><br />"Nearly all the computermen are worried about the effect the machines<br />will have on society. But most of them are not so pessimistic as<br />[Norbert] Wiener. . .<br /><br />"Psychotic Robots.<br /><br />In the larger, "biological" sense, there is room for<br />nervous speculation. Some philosophical worriers suggest that the computers,<br />growing superhumanly intelligent in more & more ways, will develop wills,<br />desires and unpleasant foibles' of their own, as did the famous<br />robots in Capek's R.U.R.<br /><br />"Professor Wiener says that some computers are already "human" enough<br />to suffer from typical psychiatric troubles. Unruly memories, he says,<br />sometimes spread through a machine as fears and fixations spread through<br />a psychotic human brain. Such psychoses may be cured, says Wiener,<br />by rest (shutting down the machine), by electric shock treatment<br />(increasing the voltage in the tubes), or by lobotomy (disconnecting<br />part of the machine).<br /><br />"Some practical computermen scoff at such picturesque talk, but others recall<br />odd behavior in their own machines. Robert SeeberOffsite Link of I.B.M.<br />says that his big computer has a very human foible: it hates to wake<br />up in the morning. . .<br /><br />"Neurotic Exchange.<br /><br />Bell Laboratories' Dr. [Claude] Shannon has a similar story. During<br />World War II, he says, one of the Manhattan dial exchanges (very similar<br />to computers) was overloaded with work. It began to behave queerly,<br />acting with an irrationality that disturbed the company. Flocks of<br />engineers, sent to treat the patient, could find nothing organically<br />wrong. After the war was over, the work load decreased. The ailing<br />exchange recovered and is now entirely normal. Its trouble had been<br />'functional': like other hard-driven war workers, it had suffered<br />a nervous breakdown"<br />====<br /><br />"Picturesque" indeed.jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-63412782917305028782015-06-06T17:31:37.586-07:002015-06-06T17:31:37.586-07:00Well, well. Speaking of supermen, MIRI has a new ...Well, well. Speaking of supermen, MIRI has a new fearless --<br />I was about to say leader, but "nominal chief executive"<br />is probably more accurate.<br /><br />http://lesswrong.com/lw/ma4/taking_the_reins_at_miri/<br />------------------<br />Hello, I'm Nate Soares, and I'm pleased to be taking the reins at<br />MIRI on Monday morning.<br /><br />For those who don't know me, I've been a research fellow at MIRI<br />for a little over a year now. I attended my first MIRI workshop<br />in December of 2013 while I was still working at Google, and was<br />offered a job soon after. Over the last year, I wrote a<br />dozen papers, half as primary author. Six of those papers<br />were written for the MIRI technical agenda. . .<br /><br />I've always had a natural inclination towards leadership: in the past,<br />I've led a F.I.R.S.T. Robotics team, managed two volunteer theaters,<br />served as president of an Entrepreneur's Club, and co-founded<br />a startup or two. . .<br /><br />The last year has been pretty incredible. Discussion of long-term AI<br />risks and benefits has finally hit the mainstream, thanks to the<br />success of Bostrom's _Superintelligence_. . .<br />====<br /><br />http://lesswrong.com/user/so8res/<br />http://mindingourway.com/minding-our-way-to-the-heavens/<br /><br /><br />http://lukemuehlhauser.com/f-a-q-about-my-transition-to-givewell/<br />------------------<br />Why did you take a job at GiveWell?<br /><br />Apparently some people think I must have changed my mind about what<br />I think Earth’s most urgent priorities are. So let me be clear:<br />Nothing has changed about what I think Earth’s most urgent<br />priorities are.<br /><br />I still buy the basic argument in Friendly AI research as<br />effective altruism.<br /><br />I still think that growing a field of technical AI alignment<br />research, one which takes the future seriously, is plausibly<br />the most urgent task for those seeking a desirable long-term<br />future for Earth-originating life.<br /><br />And I still think that MIRI has an incredibly important role<br />to play in growing that field of technical AI alignment research.<br /><br />I decided to take a research position at GiveWell mostly for<br />personal reasons.<br />====<br /><br />YMMV. Holden Karnofsky is less sanguine, about MIRI at<br />any rate.<br />jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-9253666238247675542015-06-06T17:16:22.566-07:002015-06-06T17:16:22.566-07:00> This was the issue of Time magazine for Janua...> This was the issue of Time magazine for January 23, 1950<br /><br />I looked this up. The caption underneath the artist's<br />anthropomorphized rendition of the (Harvard Mark III)<br />computer is<br />"Can man build a superman?". ;-><br /><br />http://img.timeinc.net/time/magazine/archive/covers/1950/1101500123_400.jpg<br />http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=2284<br />http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Mark_IIIjimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-50042922059368700212015-06-06T05:55:27.897-07:002015-06-06T05:55:27.897-07:00Ted Nelson keynotes Homebrew reunion, Dec 2013
htt...Ted Nelson keynotes Homebrew reunion, Dec 2013<br />https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-Ma2MZpUQQ<br />5:26/27:11<br /><br />This was the issue of Time magazine for January 23, 1950 --<br />I was twelve, and I just found the picture on the Web.<br />I was puzzled by the article. Here's how the article started --<br />Time will give you the first couple paragraphs for free.<br />"On Oxford Street in Cambridge, Mass. lives a sibyl.<br />A priestess of science." Skipping a little. "She is a long,<br />slim, glass-sided machine with 760,000 parts, and<br />the riddles that are put to her, and that she unfailingly<br />answers, concern such matters as rocket motors, nuclear<br />physics, and trigonometric functions." I could not fathom<br />how a machine could do all that. A year and a half later,<br />in the fall of 1951, my grandfather and I went to an exhibit<br />of da Vinci models at the IBM showroom on Madison Avenue,<br />and there we walked through the IBM SSEC -- the Selective<br />Sequence Electronic Calculator. As I recall, its ten thousand<br />or twelve thousand vacuum tubes glowed blue. But I still<br />didn't know what the hell it was about. Or that "Selective Sequence"<br />meant that they had just added branching instructions.<br /><br />Nine years later, in graduate school, I took a computer course<br />and went crazy. Everything I'd heard about computers was a<br />**lie**! They weren't mathematical. They weren't scientific.<br />They were electric trains you could run in circles.jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.com