tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post1608375024566329462..comments2023-11-22T01:14:54.298-08:00Comments on amor mundi: Very Serious Futurology With Robin HansonDale Carricohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-35002760112774171722013-08-05T12:30:49.159-07:002013-08-05T12:30:49.159-07:00Saying global warming might lead to disaster is us...<i>Saying global warming might lead to disaster is using trends to create a scenario or at least prediction. We measure the temperatures over many years and the UN makes its models.</i><br /><br />I actually disagree with this. This is something I mean to elaborate in a more systematic fashion when I eventually find the time to manage it. I believe the climate model is a false analogy on which contemporary futurology especially depends to pretend it is a legitimate quasi-scientific methodology rather than a rather derivative clumsy kind of science fiction literature conjoined to hyperbolic marketing forms even more than usually akin to active deceptions. <br /><br />Given the complexity of ecosystems -- and their complex interactions from idiosyncratic local to planetary scales -- climate science provides a good fudge factor for futurologists to exploit in this way. It isn't accidental that climate change denialists are able to undermine scientific consensus in the field by displacing the debate onto a culture war terrain. Nor is it accidental that the scale of interventions futurological pretend feasibly to propose in their geo-engineering yackety-yack would be less predictable in their actual effects -- apart from the obvious profits that would accrue to the polluting plutocrats for whom these proposals are actually made -- than the state of the weather already is.<br /><br />Every legibly constituted discipline produces models of phenomena, every legibly constituted discipline has a foresight dimension. This is because knowing better how phenomena behave under various conditions facilitates more practically useful interactions with them, and leads us to form expectations and make plans accordingly. <br /><br />But "trends" are **narratives** more than models, strictly speaking, it is not scientists but English lit majors and PR muckety-mucks who can explain how they operate: they solicit identification the better to peddle forms of consumption. <br /><br />Futurological scenarios inevitably circumvent historical situated social, cultural, and political dynamisms while purporting to model these dynamisms in relation to physical phenomena. Scenario spinning superficially skims the objects of a host of disciplines without the least mastery or often even grasp of the specificities of those disciplines -- it is an anti-disciplinarian pretense of inter-disciplinarity (a very slippery but indispensable academic aim futurology isn't remotely fit for). <br /><br />The fact that you think it may actually be interesting that Hanson is pretending "GDP" (look, just pause over what the actual letters stand for, embed them in their institutional historical context, and you will be appalled at yourself for entertaining this idiocy) provides an actually real analytic vantage over a million years of history reveals you have allowed futurology to lead you profoundly astray. <br /><br />I don't disagree that anything can be "trendified" and that you can "pick your trend" and then spit out talk that is legible for others you indulge this nonsense, but that is far from saying that it makes the least sense to make this methodological move if one wants to actually understand the world or facilitate sustainable equitable outcomes. <br /><br />And, no, scenario spinning doesn't become better or more useful (except of course as a sales pitch) if you entertain and invest in four fantastically impoverished alternative "futures" rather than one. There are better ways of interesting people in a topic that actually affects them, but I agree with you that extended metaphors, little thought experiments, and anecdotal sketches have their place in mobilizing affect and concretizing abstractions. I teach rhetoric, after all. But I know better than to pretend rhetoric a way to grasp the substance and stakes of research or policy outcomes -- rather than effectively communicate those stakes and change conduct to facilitate ends once they have been determined by other, better means.Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-72072606209307010322013-08-05T11:23:28.363-07:002013-08-05T11:23:28.363-07:00Saying global warming might lead to disaster is us...Saying global warming might lead to disaster is using <em>trends</em> to create a scenario or at least prediction. We measure the temperatures over many years and the UN makes its models.<br /><br />It's all about which trends you pick.<br /><br />The question that interests me is whether Hanson's choice of using world GDP (maybe along with the evolution of animal brains) is somehow an arbitrary choice of trend or whether there is some specific, compelling and more recent phenomenon that allows better predictions. <br /><br />I <em>hope</em> there is, because I think a singularity is likely to turn out badly, unlike Hanson. <br /><br />I worry that your faith-based technophiles are actually not interested in the same problems as you. <br /><br />Detailed scenarios do seem pretty useful as showy displays to interest people in a topic. Or marketing PR as you say. The abstract is difficult to grasp but concrete scenarios are easier, though more arbitrary. <br /><br />I would agree that people putting too much stock in just one scenario seems a common distortion of thinking. <br /><br /><em>If Alex is whom I think he is</em><br /><br />I'm not.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-28172160574928221522013-08-05T08:27:04.788-07:002013-08-05T08:27:04.788-07:00And C. S. Lewis recognized that the religious impu...And C. S. Lewis recognized that the religious impulse embodied<br />today in the notion of the Singularity has its roots as far back<br />as the 19th century:<br /><br />"The central idea of the Myth is what its believers would call 'Evolution'<br />or 'Development' or 'Emergence'. . . I do not mean that the doctrine<br />of Evolution as held by practising biologists is a Myth. . . It is<br />a genuine scientific hypothesis. But we must sharply distinguish between<br />Evolution as a biological theorem and popular Evolutionism or<br />Developmentalism which is certainly a Myth. . .<br /><br />The clearest and finest poetical expressions of the Myth come before<br />_The Origin of Species_ was published (1859) and long before it had<br />established itself as scientific orthodoxy. . . Almost before the<br />scientists spoke, certainly before they spoke clearly, imagination<br />was ripe for it."<br /><br />See the comments at<br />http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2010/05/robot-cultists-have-won.html<br />(the two segments I posted there got reversed).<br /><br />BTW, after you've had a taste of contemporary transhumanism,<br />C. S. Lewis's _That Hideous Strength_ (published in -- what --<br />1948?) is an absolute hoot to re-read. There are some<br />choice quotes at:<br /><br />http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2009/02/robot-cultists-getting-too-nice-by-half.htmljimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-62308450526231248032013-08-05T08:10:53.545-07:002013-08-05T08:10:53.545-07:00From Jaron Lanier's _Who Owns the Future?_
---...From Jaron Lanier's _Who Owns the Future?_<br />-----------------<br />Many of the top scientists, politicians, and entrepreneurs attended<br />est or similar happenings. Terms like _self-actualization_ became<br />ubiquitous. You'd develop yourself, and your success would be<br />manifest in societal status, material rewards, and spiritual<br />attainment. All these would be of a piece.<br /><br />It's hard to overstate how influential this movement was in Silicon<br />Valley. Not est specifically, for there were hundreds more like<br />it. In the 1980s the Silicon Valley elite were often found at<br />a successor institution called simply "the Forum."<br /><br />The Global Business Network was a key, highly influential institution<br />in the history of Silicon Valley. It has advised almost all the<br />companies, and almost everyone who was anyone had something to<br />do with it. Stewart Brand, who coined the phrases "personal<br />computer" and "information wants to be free," was one of the<br />founders. Now Stewart is a genuinely no-nonsense kind of guy.<br />So is Peter Schwartz, who was the driving force behind GBN<br />and wrote _The Art of the Long View_. And yet the ambience of<br />the New Age was so thick that it helped define GBN. It was<br />inescapable. . .<br /><br />Meanwhile, the world of marketing was being reinvented at the<br />Stanford Research Institute. This is the same SRI that employed<br />Doug Engelbart, who first demonstrated the basis of person-oriented<br />computing in the 1960s. More recently SRI spawned Siri, the<br />voice interface used in Apple products.<br /><br />SRI had a unit called VALS, for Values, Attitudes, and Lifestyles,<br />which was for a while the guiding light of a transformation<br />in corporate marketing. (The use of the term _transformation_<br />was long a signal of the technocratic/spiritual New Age.<br />It has been mostly replaced by _disruption_ since the Singularity<br />replaced Gurdjieff as the spiritual North Star.) . . .<br /><br />Around the turn of the century, with the rise of Google, a new<br />merger of the techie and the New Age streams of Bay Area<br />culture appeared.<br /><br />For some time, at least since those dinners at Marvin Minsky's<br />house, there had been talk of every manner of amazing<br />future tech revolution. Maybe we'll disassemble our bodies<br />temporarily into small parts that will be easier to launch<br />into space, where we'll be reassembled and then float naked<br />except for a golden bubble to shield us from radiation.<br /><br />This was an utterly typical idea. But if there were anything<br />actionable, it would be in the realm of engineering. Could you<br />really sever and then reattach a head?<br /><br />After the rise of Google, the tenor of these speculations<br />changed in Silicon Valley. Now the top-priority action item<br />was perfecting one's mentality, one's perspective and self-confidence.<br />Are you really enlightened enough to "get" accelerating change?<br />Are you really awake and aware, preparing for the Singularity?<br /><br />The engineering will come about automatically, after all.<br />Remember, the new attitude is that technology is self-determined,<br />that it is a giant supernatural creature growing on its own,<br />soon to overtake people. The new cliché is that today's<br />"disruptions" will deterministically lead to tomorrow's<br />"Singularity."jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-12002160993078150632013-08-05T08:10:21.037-07:002013-08-05T08:10:21.037-07:00> [R]eally, the people who care about these thi...> [R]eally, the people who care about these things is sort of<br />> like a web-ring; you just keep seeing the same names and people. . .<br /><br />This is certainly true, and it's been going on (not just on the Web,<br />of course) for many decades.<br /><br />George Dvorsky, in his letter of complaint to John Bruce in 2006<br />(quoted at<br />http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2010/01/transhumanists-are-not-just-wrong-they.html )<br />acknowledges this, and adds:<br /><br />"A short list of highly respected scientists who agree that a<br />posthuman future awaits us include Steven Hawking, Sir Martin Rees,<br />Michio Kaku, Nick Bostrom, Hans Moravec, Marvin Minsky, and James Watson.<br />And there are many, many others; I urge you take a look at the citations<br />in Kurzweil's Singularity book to see how broadly these ideas have disseminated<br />throughout academia and research labs around the world."<br /><br />This is true too, but it's not about the **science** (if any) that<br />these people do, it's a modern religion, or religion substitute.<br /><br />Jaron Lanier (who has rubbed shoulders with many of these people)<br />writes amusingly about this in his latest book<br />_Who Owns the Future?_ (and particularly in the section<br />"Fourth Interlude -- Limits Are for Muggles").<br />He also talks about the strong influence on Silicon Valley of<br />"Eastern spirituality", est (and its successor "the Forum"),<br />and George Gurdjieff.jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-76977661618355697232013-08-04T20:33:25.360-07:002013-08-04T20:33:25.360-07:00If Alex is whom I think he is (and really, the peo...If Alex is whom I think he is (and really, the people who care about these things is sort of like a web-ring; you just keep seeing the same names and people), then you're arguing with someone who is professionally invested in transhumanism being real and the singularity being likely.<br /><br />So you might as well be arguing with a priest about theism. But I will say this--- I am open to arguments about singularitarianism and transhumanism both if I see them in mainstream peer-reviewed journals. Anyone reading this who aspires to such, I say that I certainly have much more sympathy for you than, say, the cranks at Lesswrong.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17213606256602264458noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-24948686642931210032013-08-04T18:27:24.493-07:002013-08-04T18:27:24.493-07:00In other words, things being equal we should expec...<i>In other words, things being equal we should expect past patterns to continue.</i><br /><br />For example the human pattern of would be gurus bamboozling people by telling reassuringly simple tales that give them a false sense of purchase on incomparably more complicated realities -- especially with the pay off that buying the false narrative makes it seem as though great profit or even personal transcendence happens to be justified by the narrative?<br /><br /><i>Sure, there are many challenges today such as global warming, nuclear proliferation, biodiversity loss, and so forth... But I don't see why these counter the overall historical growth trend.</i><br /><br />You're right, dead people in a dead world, or scattered settlements in holes eating fungus and warming themselves by burning their own poop will have plenty of time to keep the techno-transcendence program online.<br /><br /><i>It's also true that US productivity growth was lower during the last forty years than in the previous century, as Robert Gordon says. I don't know, however, why we would focus mainly on the past forty years when we have data for the past million.</i><br /><br />What you are calling "data" about a million years of GDP growth is the wooliest imaginative retroactive construction in the service of a wish-fulfillment fantasy.<br /><br />You should note, by the way, that the "acceleration of acceleration unto techno-transcendence" talk originated in the very period you now admit was contra-indicated by factual reality -- although its cheerleaders always pretending to be describing ongoing accelerating progress rather than prescribing it. <br /><br />Why, one might almost describe the whole discourse as a desperate compensation for faith-based technophiles deeply invested in an ideology of brute-force technodevelopmental solutions to what are in fact political problems for which more democracy and more equitable redistribution are the only real solutions, solutions disapproved by elite-incumbent corporate-militarists who always preferred techno-triumphalism that cost them nothing.<br /><br /><i>I'd say the best way to prepare for the longer-term future is adopting policies that would help many different widely ranging scenarios.</i><br /><br />The best way to prepare for the longer-term future is to junk the scenario spinning which is just a form of marketing PR for incumbents anyway, and apply our intelligence and resources to actually shared problems in the most equitable way to the diversity of stakeholders to change. In my view, futurological methodologies -- at their BEST, I'm not even talking about their pathological expressions in the Robot Cult archipelago at their extreme edges -- are profoundly distortive of the deliberative forms actually equal to our problems.Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-47034859746077353832013-08-04T18:27:11.571-07:002013-08-04T18:27:11.571-07:00Hanson means by "singularity" a period w...<i>Hanson means by "singularity" a period where world growth rates jump at the largest historical scales.</i><br /><br />Hanson is writing on a futurological topic using a futurological term but then defining it in a way no futurologist does -- nobody needs the word "singularity" to talk about large scale growth. He seems to want to make sloppy conventional analysis seem more interesting than it is by aping futurology, but then seems to want to make futurological analysis seem more reasonable than it is by aping more conventional political economy. It's sleight of hand.<br /><br /><i>His argument is that maybe another jump will happen. This doesn't depend on any specific technology like non-biological superintelligence, greater-than-human prosthetic-assisted intelligence, and so forth. You can plug in whatever feels best.</i><br /><br />"Maybe something will happen" actually isn't an argument. Indifference to the actual causal agent of this change would make it even less of an argument. <br /><br />He writes about AI and I took him at his word. You say it is your own best guess. <br /><br />But I'm afraid that before you put the cart before the horse claiming strong AI is going to change history your going to have to come to terms with the fact that there is no strong AI and that everybody who expects otherwise is always wrong and always perfectly confident despite always being wrong and that AI theory is suffused with facile algorithmic/computational metaphors and somewhere between indifference to hostility to the biologically incarnated and socially situated exercises of actually existing intelligence in the world. Marketing and popular culture may be full of "smart" artifacts and robot persons -- but reality isn't. This matters.<br /><br /><i>He is extrapolating a very small series. The doubling times of the world economy during the three "growth modes" of hunting and gathering, agriculture, and industry were 200,000 years, 900 years, and (today) 18 years. That is why his confidence level is 50-75%. With such a small series your confidence is not high but it's not zero either. If I understand you right, your objection is that there is no causal mechanism that would allow you to extrapolate this series--that it is just playing with numbers or "loosely conceived." And that's not a bad objection. But I agree with Hanson that: "We would be fools if we confidently expected all patterns to continue. But it strikes me as pretty foolish to ignore the patterns we see."</i><br /><br />These are the alternatives? Either NO CHANGE when history is obviously endlessly dynamic or SINGULARITY on the construal of a handful of Robot Cultists who can't get their own definition straight and who presume to know what the effects of not-existing and very possibly never-existing sooper-devices will be? You'll forgive me, but the alternative is patently false and frankly stupid. <br /><br />Like Kurzweillian "Laws of Accelerating Returns" this is an absurdly lightweight accounting of a synoptic sweep of thousands of years of complex history reduced to a ridiculous just so story. <br /><br />I disagree that the phrase "growth modes" presumably referencing "productivity doublings" (do you even know what substantiating such a claim would LOOK LIKE?) associated with glib fables of duration "hunting and gathering" (a thing "lasting" 200,000 years presumably) "agriculture" (another one thing, this time lasting 900 years) "industry" (a couple centuries) then "singularity" (the blink of the Robot God's eye declare some of the cybernetic faithful) -- not one of which is usefully characterized or periodized at this level of generality. This is all perfectly silly.Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-3390840026131401592013-08-04T17:30:05.444-07:002013-08-04T17:30:05.444-07:00Hanson means by "singularity" a period w...Hanson means by "singularity" a period where world growth rates jump at the largest historical scales. According to him there are at least two previous jumps, agriculture and the industrial revolution. <br /><br />His argument is that maybe another jump will happen. This doesn't depend on any specific technology like nonbiological superintelligence, greater-than-human prosthetic-assisted intelligence, and so forth. You can plug in whatever feels best. He does pick artificial intelligence and that seems like the best guess to me, just because I can't think of anything else that could possibly drive growth rates at the required levels. <br /><br />He is extrapolating a very small series. The doubling times of the world economy during the three "growth modes" of hunting and gathering, agriculture, and industry were 200,000 years, 900 years, and (today) 18 years. That is why his confidence level is 50-75%. With such a small series your confidence is not high but it's not zero either. <br /><br />If I understand you right, your objection is that there is no causal mechanism that would allow you to extrapolate this series--that it is just playing with numbers or "loosely conceived." And that's not a bad objection. But I agree with Hanson that: <br /><br />"We would be fools if we confidently expected all patterns to continue. But it strikes me as pretty foolish to ignore the patterns we see."<br /><br />In other words, things being equal we should expect past patterns to continue. This is true for individual technologies too. Past technologies have always plateaued eventually. This is why Kurzweil's arguments based on simply extending Moore's Law are suspect. He extrapolates a lesser pattern, the growth of an individual technology, without accounting for the larger pattern that individual technologies level off. Hanson's argument seems better because there is no larger pattern than world GDP over all human history. That's all the data we have.<br /><br />Now maybe we know some specific reasons why this pattern won't continue. Since we don't know much about why this pattern exists, I agree we should pay attention to such reasons if they're convincing. <br /><br />I just don't think they are.<br /><br />Sure, there are many challenges today such as global warming, nuclear proliferation, biodiversity loss, and so forth. Global warming is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_Review" rel="nofollow">predicted</a> to reduce GDP by 5-20% in the Stern Review. But I don't see why these counter the overall historical growth trend. Population growth and more technology increased GDP 3700% in the 20th century. Nuclear war I worry more about but the risk is down since the Cold War. <br /><br />It's also true that US productivity growth was lower during the last forty years than in the previous century, as Robert Gordon <a href="http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/988/print" rel="nofollow">says</a>. I don't know, however, why we would focus mainly on the past forty years when we have data for the past million.<br /><br />Futurism can get pretty bad, I'd agree. I actually sometimes worry that we can't know <em>anything</em> about the world in say 2050. That's about what David Friedman thinks: radical uncertainty. I'm not ready to concede that though. My impression is that you aren't either. True? <br /><br />I'd say the best way to prepare for the longer-term future is adopting policies that would help many different widely ranging scenarios. My favored catch-all policy is global coordination or internationalism. That seems likely to help with many problems.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-13457791344809046792013-08-04T13:29:47.659-07:002013-08-04T13:29:47.659-07:00If these trends continue...
http://i.imgur.com/OH...If these trends continue...<br /><br />http://i.imgur.com/OHPSy.jpgerickingsleyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15782878667594739997noreply@blogger.com