The Business Man
“Jack! How are you today, old sport?” Julius, Jack’s neighbor was out pacing the sidewalk again in his custom Valentino power suit, briefcase handle squeezed firmly by black gloved fingers. Eternally five minutes away from a 100th floor business meeting with corporate warlords and Saudi Arabian moguls, a meeting that would never come.
“Early day today. Lots of SNAFU at the office.” Jack winced. Julius Wagner’s was an apotheosis of the AI revolution tragedy story, the twenty first century death of a salesman. In ten years, Julius would be fossilized in a virtual museum exhibit, narrated by a neuromanced holograph of William H. Macy. “The white collar worker, one of 20th century American capitalism’s finest achievements. Here we see him during the throes of the early 21st century mass-extinction event, The Great Automation.” Julius was VP of marketing for Totech, one of Gnossis’ rival search company-turned-megaglomerates. A grey haired august veteran of 25 years, Julius had weathered the storms of corporate "right sizing" during the Great Recession of 2009, and the first wave of middle-management automation half a decade later. Till the CEOs discovered that statistical algorithm-based taste-prediction and creation along with other knowledge work automation, made Julius’ eight years of Harvard and twenty five years of experience obsolete. Two beautiful kids, 8 and 14, whom he'd no doubt kept in the dark, kept up the illusion of normalcy, until they'd realized their father was cracking. Until they'd realize that there was no hope, no promise of The Good Life, even with college, they would probably still wind up scrounging tooth and nail for the scraps doled out by the dwindling remains of government welfare, being chiseled away one 'austerity measure' at a time by the Plutocrat enclaves.
How did one explain the concept of hoplessness to a child? That their life would be one of bitter struggle for a grimly basic day-to-day survival, with no hope of ever achieving anything greater. No possibility of becoming an astronaut or a fireman or an invetor, because you are a useless human, outmoded by machines. You are not important, not a valuable member of society, not a unique and beautiful snowflake but just another purposeless parasitic nuisance, another mouth to feed, another widget of red on the balance sheet, another freeloading draining Deadweight. Your life would be forever on the cruel edge between begging and insurgency. In this light, perhaps insanity was the better option. Julius was just lucky his wife hadn’t filed for divorce after she discovered the fountain of youth, diamonds, Prada, and Carribean cruises would soon be drying up along with her husband’s high six figure salary, like so many others.
“Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Julius split a smile that could’ve sold a kitten-burning Humvee to an Olympia Treehugger, revealing an impervious wall of ivory teeth, bone-white from decades of nanite bleaching, now showing the first yellow-brown omens of decay. “I’ve got quite a full schedule today, myself. A big meeting with potential Tehran and Johannesburg partners, we really need to hit this one out of the park. Then it’s golfing with the Silverman and Barclay’s investment representatives in the afternoon, they need an extreme branding makeover after the fourth government bailout durig the alternative energy crash. I can pencil you in if you like, old sport.” Jack was asked each day, and each day Jack declined. The countries, corporations, and titles changed, but the armature of mad-libbed meetings and golf session remained the same. Like some fantasy football for has-been MBAs, drifting down into the trough of obsolesence on the other side of peak-humanity. Maybe Julius had had a schizophrenic break, maybe he was still there but just too scared to deal with the reality that his job had been taken over by a distributed Cloud intelligence, some unembodied nightmare spirit in cyberspace that he couldn’t even see. At least if you lost your primary care physician job to a robot doctor, you could attach your feelings of anger and hatred to a visual entity, instead of wallowing in a swamp of undirected Freudian hostility, slowly digesting yourself until nothing remained but a ball of bitter bile. Whatever it was, it wasn’t like he was alone. More than half the country had been let go too. Jack’s West-Coarst suburban street was slowly checkerboarding with black-windowed vacancies, like the gaps in Julius’ deteriorating photo-op smile.
“So Julius, you’re not going down to the layed off marketing sector demonstrations?”
Julius looked up with shocked disgust, as if Jack had just spat in his face. “Why would I even want to associate with those whining plebians, those children throwing tantrums just because they couldn’t hack it in the business world? If you were let go, it is because you deserved it. You do not have the right to ask that the rest of society to pay for your laziness and lack of skill. ‘You’ve got to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps,’ a great man once said. I, meanwhile, have important business to attend to. Good day, Jackson.” Julius snorted, opened his briefcase, withdrawing a stack of white-papers and spreadsheets, the edges frayed and brown from constant handling, reshuffling; not far divorced from what his now archaic “businessman? niche once entailed. The old man armed a vintage Montblanc fountain pen, apparently marking corrections to his files. But Jack could see the papers were an illegible sphagetti-like mess of ink from countless futile revisions to a document which would obviously never see the bright fluorescent light of a corporate meeting.
“Right, see you, Julius.” Jack’s Xinjao Phasma steered itself out of the driveway, and drove Jack away.
Reality checking The Future since 2027.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Refraining From Celebrating Osama's Belated Death-Day
So now we're hangwringing about whether we should be handwringing or celebrating the death of the late OBL. I'd call it a victory, however one symbolic and more than a little bittersweet. But in the words of annoyingly over-successful SNL alumnus Adam Sandler: "This is someone who could have been assassinated YESTERDAY!!!"
It's almost like they took him out cause he was no longer useful or necessary as a tulpa for terrorism, no longer a necessary boogeyman to continue fighting pointless wars costing billions of dollars and millions of destroyed lives, no longer a pre-requisite for war profiteering or 'securing oil resources'. Bin Laden is too last-decade, suffering brand-rot. Hell, he was likely to become another liability like any of the other monsters we've created, become another Saddam. The trash had to be taken out before it started collecting flies.
That's probably not exactly what it is, but that's what it feels like. Empty. Like taking out the villain in the ER room after he's already wrecked the city, spent all the vault money on Caribbean vacations, lived a good long life, and is now 90 and just about to die of pneumonia.
"But it's ok - we got'em!" Clap, clap.
Bin Laden's death may, if nothing else, help shift the "window" of the conversation a bit. Put a damper on the hysteria and nuttiness, one less bucket of gasoline on the freakshow that is American political discourse. We can only hope the trend continues.
Perhaps it went something like this.
Obama: "Damn, releasing my long form birth certificate really fucked up the right wing birthtards shit!"
Non-corrupt remnants of Obama's cabinet: "You're totally right, that's one less sideshow distracting the country!"
Obama: "Do you think -- I mean hypothetically speaking -- do you think we could, like, just take that approach to the terrorism thing? Just, like, eliminate these nutter-Republican issues altogether? Kick the soapbox right out from under them?"
Cabinet: "You may be on to something, Mr. President."
Obama: *snaps* "Let's start with this 'War on Terrorism' bullshit. Let's finish what could've been done in 2003, take out the OBL. How soon can we have him dead?"
Cabinet: "We've got his location like everyone else since he bought an iPhone in 2008 at a Pakistani Wal-Mart. Also have a record of all his credit card transactions from an "interrogated" Chinese national who hacked Sony and stole the VISA Bin Laden's son was using with his PS3 for Call of Duty..."
Obama: "I think I just came a little. Ok, have the Seals take him out."
Cabinet: "Done."
Obama: "Ok, let's see what we can do about this whole 'defecit' nonsense the GOP keeps blabbering about. Let's triple the rich's taxes back to 1960 levels, double the capital gains tax and tag those revenues for medicare and social security. Check. Ok, next, revoke all the bailout money we gave to banks and use it to re-imburse all the lost pensions and 401ks, and pay for all the lost wages due to "austerity measures", nullification of bargaining rights, etc. Immediately shut-down all insolvent banks, put'em in receivership, chop'em up, and use the profits to pay for finance classes in public schools. Oh yeah, and pull all our troops out of these stupid fucking Lockheed-Haliburton-Blackwater cashcows wars."
Cabinet: "We're already out sir. You killed Osama Bin Laden, remember?"
Obama: "Oh, right! Two birds with one stone. See, now this is how you run a country."
One can hope, anyway.
It's almost like they took him out cause he was no longer useful or necessary as a tulpa for terrorism, no longer a necessary boogeyman to continue fighting pointless wars costing billions of dollars and millions of destroyed lives, no longer a pre-requisite for war profiteering or 'securing oil resources'. Bin Laden is too last-decade, suffering brand-rot. Hell, he was likely to become another liability like any of the other monsters we've created, become another Saddam. The trash had to be taken out before it started collecting flies.
That's probably not exactly what it is, but that's what it feels like. Empty. Like taking out the villain in the ER room after he's already wrecked the city, spent all the vault money on Caribbean vacations, lived a good long life, and is now 90 and just about to die of pneumonia.
"But it's ok - we got'em!" Clap, clap.
Bin Laden's death may, if nothing else, help shift the "window" of the conversation a bit. Put a damper on the hysteria and nuttiness, one less bucket of gasoline on the freakshow that is American political discourse. We can only hope the trend continues.
Perhaps it went something like this.
Obama: "Damn, releasing my long form birth certificate really fucked up the right wing birthtards shit!"
Non-corrupt remnants of Obama's cabinet: "You're totally right, that's one less sideshow distracting the country!"
Obama: "Do you think -- I mean hypothetically speaking -- do you think we could, like, just take that approach to the terrorism thing? Just, like, eliminate these nutter-Republican issues altogether? Kick the soapbox right out from under them?"
Cabinet: "You may be on to something, Mr. President."
Obama: *snaps* "Let's start with this 'War on Terrorism' bullshit. Let's finish what could've been done in 2003, take out the OBL. How soon can we have him dead?"
Cabinet: "We've got his location like everyone else since he bought an iPhone in 2008 at a Pakistani Wal-Mart. Also have a record of all his credit card transactions from an "interrogated" Chinese national who hacked Sony and stole the VISA Bin Laden's son was using with his PS3 for Call of Duty..."
Obama: "I think I just came a little. Ok, have the Seals take him out."
Cabinet: "Done."
Obama: "Ok, let's see what we can do about this whole 'defecit' nonsense the GOP keeps blabbering about. Let's triple the rich's taxes back to 1960 levels, double the capital gains tax and tag those revenues for medicare and social security. Check. Ok, next, revoke all the bailout money we gave to banks and use it to re-imburse all the lost pensions and 401ks, and pay for all the lost wages due to "austerity measures", nullification of bargaining rights, etc. Immediately shut-down all insolvent banks, put'em in receivership, chop'em up, and use the profits to pay for finance classes in public schools. Oh yeah, and pull all our troops out of these stupid fucking Lockheed-Haliburton-Blackwater cashcows wars."
Cabinet: "We're already out sir. You killed Osama Bin Laden, remember?"
Obama: "Oh, right! Two birds with one stone. See, now this is how you run a country."
One can hope, anyway.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Terminus Machina: "The Troubleshooter"
It started out a statistically average day.
Jack Newman shuddered awake to a cliché post-nu-folk track piped in through a cochlear implant, autotuned Dylan croak squeezed into the skinny jeans of bit-rotted Atari music nostalgia. “Yes and how many times must the times go a-changing, before the last will be first, and first be last? The answer is blowing in the wind.” It reminded him of playing Tweetcasted meat-gigs in a San Francisco Chinatown club with Diego back in college. Singing hope and change to young eyes glassed up from the buzz of GMO-free weed and the superheroic thrill of tech startups. Joy, his then-parkour partner and cybercriminology studymate weaving fractals in the incense mist as she danced to the honest rasp of his song, falling incrementally in love with her future husband.
Some dusty old stack of neurons in Jack’s groggy mind considered looking up the artist. But then he woke out of the remaining film of dream-logic to remember that only holograms and androids played gigs anymore. That this 60’s-gothic chipcore he was hearing was being generated algorithmically by mediadata-mining software in realtime from the archived and recycled chords and croaks and melodies and lyrics of a thousand human musicians, long-starved on discarded dumb-couches in alleys behind bankrupted LA soup kitchens. No inefficiently expensive human singers songwriters producers or marketing departments involved: only batteries required. Computationally distilled folk guitarsmanship automashed-up with Nintendo anthems, lead by the ghost of a deceased Bob Dylan neuromanced within a pocket-Blue Gene supercomputer, his lobotomized brainstem limbics and larynx enslaved to sing endless Un-Markov Chained melodies with stochastically permutated lyrics scrubbed of all meaning and context. “Yes and how many watchtowers must the sea bird cross, before the answer blows in the wind?” groaned the bourbon-n-gravel voice. As Lenin was famously quoted, “A lie told enough becomes truth,” he had apparently forgotten the corollary; A truth mashed up a thousand times erases it.
But such deep and un-automatable searches for truth and meaning were de-emphasized in the page-rank algorithm of the Brave Regurgitating World which Jack found himself in. A post-paper post-book world whose ubiquitous answer-engines excelled at addressing easily-indexed well-defined questions and thus unintentionally encouraged them over questions requiring more than a few keystrokes, buzzed in by Jeopardy-playing AI, searches ending at the Wikipedia soundbyte.
Jack’s MyMusic app had tailored the tune to his “interests” in Dylan, Iron-n-Wine, and Lo-Fi, which hadn’t changed in decades; a self-reinforcing recommendation engine stagnation. He had been listening to essentially the same song on repeat every day for half his life, the McMusic rearranged just a little different each time, like daily thirty year old fantasies of the high school prom queen. Some other atrophied little husk of neocortex once would’ve connected the synapse dots, seen this musical emptiness as a grand arching metaphor that absolutely nailed the direction of Jack’s entire life. It would have caused a sudden and irrevocable mid-life epiphany, inspired a rash of midnight songwriting sessions in a blanket-soundproofed bathroom so as not to wake his wife. From the fertile soil of a life wrecked and decomposed by the unforeseen hurricanes of techno-cultural change would blossom illuminating lyrics, reveal the mono-no-aware in crumbling Detroit skyscrapers of the psyche. This would’ve been followed by a rejuvenatingly reckless return to open-mic meat-performing.
But the spark petered out, starved of air like a defunded University, and the moment was lost forever. Instead Jack just laughed to himself, “I don’t know how anyone ever found good music before, having to go out and listen to stuff would take forever!”
And Jack continued his day, statistically average.
As soon as his dVice sensed the beta brainwaves of awakeness, a cabinet of news sites, blood pressure readouts, and social streams jostled into the oval offices of Jack’s eyes through his iris-mounted Oracle displays. “Dis vid iz teh kuteness - android kitten booting up”, “Mass nurse, management, and lawyer layoffs continue as Gnossis robots replace knowledge workers”, “Bladder: 95% full, Blood sugar: low, Intestinal nanoflora report: new colon polyps detected”, “In lieu of economic crisis and job loss, President cuts taxes for ultrarich to negative five percent to stimulate growth.”, “ “Baltimore falls to Pleb protesters as unemployment spikes to 65% after illegalization of unions, thousands dead in urban skirmishes,” “CEO of megabank enclave Silverman and Barclay’s beheaded after UK budget cut rioters breach paramilitary droid-guarded blast doors, storm corporate tower,”
Jack wiped the infobombardment from his eyes like sleep. Only flashing loud-colored malware windows remained, to be quarantined documented and deleted by his dVice’s antiviral subroutines, like curious and vaguely threatening deep sea creatures left by receding tsunami. Jack followed a glowing green arrow overlayed on meat-ality through retinal projection, directing him to the bathroom.
“Jack, we need you at HQ a half hour early, Farhad is out sick, neural Trojan virus.” The audio message from Jack’s boss cut through the colorful infonoise with its biometric voice-recog VIP pass.
“Just drop a Sherlock 4.0 AI superroutine to handle Farhad’s protocols till I get in,” Jack morning-voiced to his headset.
“I know Jack, you wrote us the Wiki entry on the contingency. But the Sherlock’s going Fukushima on us here, bit-meltdown. The layed-off marketing directors and biotech researcher demonstrations heated up this morning, so we dispatched a few squads. One of our roboagent fired on a school autobus thinking there was a hostile inside, pretty sure it was due to bugs in the Sherlock’s facial-rec and data crossmining algorithms. Wounded the son of an Owner whom it thought was a Jobless insurgent. I’ve got the brass chewing out my Oracles here, Jack.”
Nothing like bugs in the android-cop software to brighten a dull morning. But he reveled in it: this was Jack’s job, that final fortress of human value and employability holding out against the unending economic massacre of the AI-Revolution. Jack was a Troubleshooter. Part tech support, part grey-hat computer hacker, part FBI agent, the Troubleshooters kept the monkey wrenches out of the AI-run machine cogwork of robots that supported the surviving plutarchic pockets of 1st world living standard, and kept the 60% of the country now unemployed “Plebs” at bay from the Owner Class gated city-states, through private security firms like Cybersec.
“Ok, Ethan, set your mood regulators to chill for a cycle. I’ll get you a temp patch right now and be in office ASAP. It’s probably just some rogue algos or botnet barbs left in the Google rank code that was recycled into Sherlock’s neural net kernel. I told’em it would be best to just grind out some clean programming, but you know the Owners aren’t going to pay for any coding salary hours they can steal, automate, or ‘source to Africa.”
“Thanks, Jack.”
Jack’s wife was in the kitchen, stirring herself some Earl Grey with one eye on a news aggregator site projected onto a section of smart wall; a looping collage of angry picket lines, fires, tear gas, gunshots, confused commentary, like NPR video feeds from a comfortably distant populist uprising in the Middle East or China bleeding into the local 6 O’clock news. She was fully dressed in her scrubs and ventilated clogs, as if about to head out for her shift. Again. Jack frowned.
Jack’s arms and hands flailed like a ‘netjunkie in withdrawal as he got to work in his augmented reality virtual headspace. He summoned an evo-alg search hound with each finger, fanned hands and sent them backdooring through the Lvl 7 Premium Internet with the forged IDs of a hedge fund CEO, a senator, and an Indian Water Baron. Index and thumb plucked choice needles from the piling haystacks returned by the hounds, spliced together the ribbons into a bandage of patch code, wrapped it up into a .Exe pill and fastball-pitched the stopgap fixes to Cybersec HQ for the malfunctioning knowledge-worker AI. Then he got lost in android lolcat videos and gadget pr0n.
When the Babblon VISO (Virtu-Spatial Operating Environment) hit the market, every drooling geek and their network was camping out around a Mega Mart, clawing tooth and nail to try the uber-epic 3D touchscreen interface. Including Jack, despite his wife’s confused protests against his expensive otaku fervor. But eventually the future-gloss of re-enacting the Minority Report virtual CSI “conducting scene” wore off, his daughter’s shits and giggles of swimming through swamps of drunken facebomb party pics with her friends stopped being funny, and the honeymoon phase ended. Gadget mundanity set in, as always, and people discovered, much to Babblon’s shareholders’ horror, that the spastic handwaving mostly just made you look deeply batshit, like you were shadow boxing imaginary daemons. Sent people walking off diagonal at parties. The VISO headsets receded back into the long-tail margins of techspert powertools, as the lay population favored more discrete user interfaces. Joy still called him a mad daemon boxer in spite of Jack’s repeated and rigorous arguments for their necessity in his line of work. He really was fighting invisible malicious Loa.
Joy noticed the peripheral motion, uttered some non-commital vocalization of acknowledgement of Jack’s presence, not bothering to even make a snarky comment about the VISO. Jack and his wife hadn’t exactly been on speaking terms since the big fight after she was let go by the medical center. She’d taken it hard. Their finances had taken it hard, too, as they joined the single-income ranks. They were getting daily calls from an AI mortgage officer’s voice synthesizer requesting delinquent payments on the house, three months deep. Taking Evvy out of St. Luke’s had come up in conversation more than once. Enrolling their daughter in public school was out of the question, since the “austerity measure” budget cuts that payed for bank CEO bonuses had slashed education funding 80% leaving public schools little more than feeder farms for the ballooning prison-industrial complex. But options were running thin.
Jack was still sorting through work protocols and Joy was still stirring her tea, now engrossed in an idie blog called “Cooking on Zero Budget” and this minute’s hottest news clip of a robot factory bombing. Closeups of a Starbeans android-barista’s smile melting off grotesquely in vermillion flames, plastic renditions of The Scream.
Jack made an attempt at reaching across the digital divide.
“You know there’s an App for that,” Jack said, glancing at the tea cup.
“Yeah, I like making my own tea,” Joy looked up briefly at the kitchen helper bot, giving the Jetsons rip-off “Rosie” clone a dirty eye. Errrrr, wrong answer. Thank you for playing, Jack.
“Kayla told me there might’ve been some breakthroughs in the negotiations at the clinic. There’s nothing set in stone yet, but I’ve got a good feeling about this. One of the EMT teams got called in to work for a couple hours last night. Seems the robots can’t do everything after all.”
“That’s good news. Real good.” Jack autoresponsed, whilst incessantly refreshing email and social media feeds with one hand. In the other he grabbed the uneaten half of a McDenny’s double cheeseburger out of the fridge, poured himself a cup of coffee-flavored Five Hour Energy. He popped the burger in its congealed puddle of grease into the micro. Normally Jack would’ve just thrown it out, but he’d feel guilty given the new normal of a tightly constrained budget. That’s when he noticed he’d never seen the cup before, which looked like designer-ware, like a miniature of a 50’s spaceship. Come to think of it, he didn’t recognize any of the plates in the myoelectric arms of the robotic washer/dryer/tablesetter.
“Nice cup there. New?” Jack asked.
“That’s printed bone china, made from ossein rattan. It’s local. I got it down at the barter market at Lilith community center yesterday. We needed some new dishes.” Joy shrugged.
“Yeah. Think you might have let me in on it first? I thought we agreed on full budget-disclosure, given our new circumstances.” Jack said around a mouthful of hot bun and cold meat-cheese-substitute lardiness, thermally uneven from the microwave.
“Jeeze, end of the world, huh? Sorry.” Joy turned to watch a video-article on the smart-cabinet about a new 90% efficient solar panel invented in Brazil after Big Agro copyrighted genes infiltrated all their ethanol corn strains.
“You know, maybe we should get into algae. Kayla’s getting half her groceries from her balcony farm. And biofuels. I was thinking maybe I could go back to e-Uni, get my enviroscience degree.” Joy said.
“Maybe. We’ll talk about it, later.” Jack shoveled the rest of the burger, flooded it down with energy drink, while throwing on his Cybersec clothes, hopping into shoes, whipping off a last few email responses. On the wall-screen, the tension was ratcheting up at a construction site which turned into a standoff between construction robots and protesting teamster union workers who refused to leave bulldozers, tree-hugged i-beams, as Owner suits shouted threats through megaphones.
“There's a battle outside ragin'. It'll soon shake your windows And rattle your walls For the times they are a-changin'.” Zombie-Dylan sang the next iteration of MyMusic App rehash into Jack’s auditory nerve. The serendipitous significance of the lyrics in light of current events again completely soared over Jack’s headspace.
“Honey could you please drop Kara off at school today?” Joy said.
“Why? The Kidpool will self-drive her there just fine, and I’ve put a parental lock on its GPS nav, so there’s no possibility of her pushing buttons and getting lost downtown again-”
“Look, Jack, there’s just a lot of upheaval going on right now. Have you ever read ‘The Black Swan’? An unexpected event we can’t understand except in hingsight. Everything is up in the air with the strikes and protests and violence, and who knows what else might happen. I’d just feel a lot better if you personally, physically drove our daughter to school.” Joy closed, opened her eyes, fiddling idle thumbs unconsciously as if typing on one of those old smart phones, a something she did when she was really nervous. A childhood talisman of muscle memory.
“I would, honey, but I just got messaged by Cybersec, they need me in the office ASAP.”
“Jack, I need you to do this for me, please-“
“A roboagent went haywire this morning, nearly killed an innocent. Lives are at stake here, Joy.”
“Maybe your daughter’s life is at stake here, Jack, did you ever think of that? While you were waving your hands around playing reality like some video game?” Joy turned away. Her micropore palm sensors detected elevated anger endorphins, triggering a therapist App. A flickering cyan holograph of a bearded Bill Murray look-alike in an armchair asked in accentless English for Jack and his wife to count to ten, breathe, then to describe their feelings in the first person to virtual ducks as if they each’s spouse. Joy force-terminated the App with a sharp stab of a finger.
Jack felt a mixing magma of shock and hurt flare, then harden into a hard lump in his chest before it could burst through the bedrock of verbalization.
“Joy, listen to me. Things will be fine. The turmoil is happening out there, in the city, where the freeloaders who lived on the social safety net are angry cause they’re not getting their ‘entitlement’ pensions and bargaining rights and medicare and public education and public law enforcement. Buy we’re in Blue County, a gated Enclave; we’re safe in the Owner Class domain. Evvy is safe. These news feeds are messing with your sense of perspective, pure sensationalism to score viewer eyeballs. You’re blowing this out of proportion. Trust me, the car’s autopilot is as safe as if I was driving her myself. The trouble is going to simmer down after the vote, and if we just keep the security drones and agents up and running, things will get back to normal in no time. You’ll see.
"Damn it Jack, you treat everything like it’s a ‘problem’ with a ‘solution’ you can just find a patch for, like a bug in a program, and it’s all going to work out, as long as the programs are running smoothly. But machines don't magically solve all our problems, they just create whole new categories of problems, and make us blind to them. I mean look at us, what happened?" Joy crossed her arms, rubbed her creasing forehead. Jack edged his way past the now awake and vacuuming Rosie bot, snuck an arm around the cool cotton scrubs of his wife’s waist.
“I know it’s been hard since they let you go, I get it. You’re reeling out of misplaced maternal guilt. Suffering oxytocin withdrawals from the sudden absence of fictive primate attachment bonds you had at the clinic, and all the grooming rituals and social reward-loops that came with being a caregiver. But maybe you need to stop doing this to yourself, with the uniform, everyday-“ Jack began, Joy pulled away. Jack quickly retreated from the no-fly zone of the kitchen, before being shot down by a cruise missile glare; kissing rights were obviously still sanctioned away.
“Jack, you are in no position to be pop-evolutionary psychoanalyzing me. You don’t know what I do and do not need. What I need is to be out there doing what I’m good at, helping people, not lying around like some useless house cat.” The viral clip of Lucky-Robo-Neko waking up, stretching its carbon fiber fluidic muscles played on the wall screen as if on queue. The edges of Joy’s mouth wobbled for a moment, then she steeled them, swallowing the urge to unravel. She refused again Jack’s attempt at consolation.
“Just go, Jack,” she pointed to the door, “Go do your job.”
Jack opened, closed his mouth, then left in silence, the only sound the re-formanted voice of a dead legend, narrating to deaf ears like some tireless musical Sisyphus:
“…And admit that the waters around you have grown / And accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone / For the times they are a-changing.”
Jack Newman shuddered awake to a cliché post-nu-folk track piped in through a cochlear implant, autotuned Dylan croak squeezed into the skinny jeans of bit-rotted Atari music nostalgia. “Yes and how many times must the times go a-changing, before the last will be first, and first be last? The answer is blowing in the wind.” It reminded him of playing Tweetcasted meat-gigs in a San Francisco Chinatown club with Diego back in college. Singing hope and change to young eyes glassed up from the buzz of GMO-free weed and the superheroic thrill of tech startups. Joy, his then-parkour partner and cybercriminology studymate weaving fractals in the incense mist as she danced to the honest rasp of his song, falling incrementally in love with her future husband.
Some dusty old stack of neurons in Jack’s groggy mind considered looking up the artist. But then he woke out of the remaining film of dream-logic to remember that only holograms and androids played gigs anymore. That this 60’s-gothic chipcore he was hearing was being generated algorithmically by mediadata-mining software in realtime from the archived and recycled chords and croaks and melodies and lyrics of a thousand human musicians, long-starved on discarded dumb-couches in alleys behind bankrupted LA soup kitchens. No inefficiently expensive human singers songwriters producers or marketing departments involved: only batteries required. Computationally distilled folk guitarsmanship automashed-up with Nintendo anthems, lead by the ghost of a deceased Bob Dylan neuromanced within a pocket-Blue Gene supercomputer, his lobotomized brainstem limbics and larynx enslaved to sing endless Un-Markov Chained melodies with stochastically permutated lyrics scrubbed of all meaning and context. “Yes and how many watchtowers must the sea bird cross, before the answer blows in the wind?” groaned the bourbon-n-gravel voice. As Lenin was famously quoted, “A lie told enough becomes truth,” he had apparently forgotten the corollary; A truth mashed up a thousand times erases it.
But such deep and un-automatable searches for truth and meaning were de-emphasized in the page-rank algorithm of the Brave Regurgitating World which Jack found himself in. A post-paper post-book world whose ubiquitous answer-engines excelled at addressing easily-indexed well-defined questions and thus unintentionally encouraged them over questions requiring more than a few keystrokes, buzzed in by Jeopardy-playing AI, searches ending at the Wikipedia soundbyte.
Jack’s MyMusic app had tailored the tune to his “interests” in Dylan, Iron-n-Wine, and Lo-Fi, which hadn’t changed in decades; a self-reinforcing recommendation engine stagnation. He had been listening to essentially the same song on repeat every day for half his life, the McMusic rearranged just a little different each time, like daily thirty year old fantasies of the high school prom queen. Some other atrophied little husk of neocortex once would’ve connected the synapse dots, seen this musical emptiness as a grand arching metaphor that absolutely nailed the direction of Jack’s entire life. It would have caused a sudden and irrevocable mid-life epiphany, inspired a rash of midnight songwriting sessions in a blanket-soundproofed bathroom so as not to wake his wife. From the fertile soil of a life wrecked and decomposed by the unforeseen hurricanes of techno-cultural change would blossom illuminating lyrics, reveal the mono-no-aware in crumbling Detroit skyscrapers of the psyche. This would’ve been followed by a rejuvenatingly reckless return to open-mic meat-performing.
But the spark petered out, starved of air like a defunded University, and the moment was lost forever. Instead Jack just laughed to himself, “I don’t know how anyone ever found good music before, having to go out and listen to stuff would take forever!”
And Jack continued his day, statistically average.
As soon as his dVice sensed the beta brainwaves of awakeness, a cabinet of news sites, blood pressure readouts, and social streams jostled into the oval offices of Jack’s eyes through his iris-mounted Oracle displays. “Dis vid iz teh kuteness - android kitten booting up”, “Mass nurse, management, and lawyer layoffs continue as Gnossis robots replace knowledge workers”, “Bladder: 95% full, Blood sugar: low, Intestinal nanoflora report: new colon polyps detected”, “In lieu of economic crisis and job loss, President cuts taxes for ultrarich to negative five percent to stimulate growth.”, “ “Baltimore falls to Pleb protesters as unemployment spikes to 65% after illegalization of unions, thousands dead in urban skirmishes,” “CEO of megabank enclave Silverman and Barclay’s beheaded after UK budget cut rioters breach paramilitary droid-guarded blast doors, storm corporate tower,”
Jack wiped the infobombardment from his eyes like sleep. Only flashing loud-colored malware windows remained, to be quarantined documented and deleted by his dVice’s antiviral subroutines, like curious and vaguely threatening deep sea creatures left by receding tsunami. Jack followed a glowing green arrow overlayed on meat-ality through retinal projection, directing him to the bathroom.
“Jack, we need you at HQ a half hour early, Farhad is out sick, neural Trojan virus.” The audio message from Jack’s boss cut through the colorful infonoise with its biometric voice-recog VIP pass.
“Just drop a Sherlock 4.0 AI superroutine to handle Farhad’s protocols till I get in,” Jack morning-voiced to his headset.
“I know Jack, you wrote us the Wiki entry on the contingency. But the Sherlock’s going Fukushima on us here, bit-meltdown. The layed-off marketing directors and biotech researcher demonstrations heated up this morning, so we dispatched a few squads. One of our roboagent fired on a school autobus thinking there was a hostile inside, pretty sure it was due to bugs in the Sherlock’s facial-rec and data crossmining algorithms. Wounded the son of an Owner whom it thought was a Jobless insurgent. I’ve got the brass chewing out my Oracles here, Jack.”
Nothing like bugs in the android-cop software to brighten a dull morning. But he reveled in it: this was Jack’s job, that final fortress of human value and employability holding out against the unending economic massacre of the AI-Revolution. Jack was a Troubleshooter. Part tech support, part grey-hat computer hacker, part FBI agent, the Troubleshooters kept the monkey wrenches out of the AI-run machine cogwork of robots that supported the surviving plutarchic pockets of 1st world living standard, and kept the 60% of the country now unemployed “Plebs” at bay from the Owner Class gated city-states, through private security firms like Cybersec.
“Ok, Ethan, set your mood regulators to chill for a cycle. I’ll get you a temp patch right now and be in office ASAP. It’s probably just some rogue algos or botnet barbs left in the Google rank code that was recycled into Sherlock’s neural net kernel. I told’em it would be best to just grind out some clean programming, but you know the Owners aren’t going to pay for any coding salary hours they can steal, automate, or ‘source to Africa.”
“Thanks, Jack.”
Jack’s wife was in the kitchen, stirring herself some Earl Grey with one eye on a news aggregator site projected onto a section of smart wall; a looping collage of angry picket lines, fires, tear gas, gunshots, confused commentary, like NPR video feeds from a comfortably distant populist uprising in the Middle East or China bleeding into the local 6 O’clock news. She was fully dressed in her scrubs and ventilated clogs, as if about to head out for her shift. Again. Jack frowned.
Jack’s arms and hands flailed like a ‘netjunkie in withdrawal as he got to work in his augmented reality virtual headspace. He summoned an evo-alg search hound with each finger, fanned hands and sent them backdooring through the Lvl 7 Premium Internet with the forged IDs of a hedge fund CEO, a senator, and an Indian Water Baron. Index and thumb plucked choice needles from the piling haystacks returned by the hounds, spliced together the ribbons into a bandage of patch code, wrapped it up into a .Exe pill and fastball-pitched the stopgap fixes to Cybersec HQ for the malfunctioning knowledge-worker AI. Then he got lost in android lolcat videos and gadget pr0n.
When the Babblon VISO (Virtu-Spatial Operating Environment) hit the market, every drooling geek and their network was camping out around a Mega Mart, clawing tooth and nail to try the uber-epic 3D touchscreen interface. Including Jack, despite his wife’s confused protests against his expensive otaku fervor. But eventually the future-gloss of re-enacting the Minority Report virtual CSI “conducting scene” wore off, his daughter’s shits and giggles of swimming through swamps of drunken facebomb party pics with her friends stopped being funny, and the honeymoon phase ended. Gadget mundanity set in, as always, and people discovered, much to Babblon’s shareholders’ horror, that the spastic handwaving mostly just made you look deeply batshit, like you were shadow boxing imaginary daemons. Sent people walking off diagonal at parties. The VISO headsets receded back into the long-tail margins of techspert powertools, as the lay population favored more discrete user interfaces. Joy still called him a mad daemon boxer in spite of Jack’s repeated and rigorous arguments for their necessity in his line of work. He really was fighting invisible malicious Loa.
Joy noticed the peripheral motion, uttered some non-commital vocalization of acknowledgement of Jack’s presence, not bothering to even make a snarky comment about the VISO. Jack and his wife hadn’t exactly been on speaking terms since the big fight after she was let go by the medical center. She’d taken it hard. Their finances had taken it hard, too, as they joined the single-income ranks. They were getting daily calls from an AI mortgage officer’s voice synthesizer requesting delinquent payments on the house, three months deep. Taking Evvy out of St. Luke’s had come up in conversation more than once. Enrolling their daughter in public school was out of the question, since the “austerity measure” budget cuts that payed for bank CEO bonuses had slashed education funding 80% leaving public schools little more than feeder farms for the ballooning prison-industrial complex. But options were running thin.
Jack was still sorting through work protocols and Joy was still stirring her tea, now engrossed in an idie blog called “Cooking on Zero Budget” and this minute’s hottest news clip of a robot factory bombing. Closeups of a Starbeans android-barista’s smile melting off grotesquely in vermillion flames, plastic renditions of The Scream.
Jack made an attempt at reaching across the digital divide.
“You know there’s an App for that,” Jack said, glancing at the tea cup.
“Yeah, I like making my own tea,” Joy looked up briefly at the kitchen helper bot, giving the Jetsons rip-off “Rosie” clone a dirty eye. Errrrr, wrong answer. Thank you for playing, Jack.
“Kayla told me there might’ve been some breakthroughs in the negotiations at the clinic. There’s nothing set in stone yet, but I’ve got a good feeling about this. One of the EMT teams got called in to work for a couple hours last night. Seems the robots can’t do everything after all.”
“That’s good news. Real good.” Jack autoresponsed, whilst incessantly refreshing email and social media feeds with one hand. In the other he grabbed the uneaten half of a McDenny’s double cheeseburger out of the fridge, poured himself a cup of coffee-flavored Five Hour Energy. He popped the burger in its congealed puddle of grease into the micro. Normally Jack would’ve just thrown it out, but he’d feel guilty given the new normal of a tightly constrained budget. That’s when he noticed he’d never seen the cup before, which looked like designer-ware, like a miniature of a 50’s spaceship. Come to think of it, he didn’t recognize any of the plates in the myoelectric arms of the robotic washer/dryer/tablesetter.
“Nice cup there. New?” Jack asked.
“That’s printed bone china, made from ossein rattan. It’s local. I got it down at the barter market at Lilith community center yesterday. We needed some new dishes.” Joy shrugged.
“Yeah. Think you might have let me in on it first? I thought we agreed on full budget-disclosure, given our new circumstances.” Jack said around a mouthful of hot bun and cold meat-cheese-substitute lardiness, thermally uneven from the microwave.
“Jeeze, end of the world, huh? Sorry.” Joy turned to watch a video-article on the smart-cabinet about a new 90% efficient solar panel invented in Brazil after Big Agro copyrighted genes infiltrated all their ethanol corn strains.
“You know, maybe we should get into algae. Kayla’s getting half her groceries from her balcony farm. And biofuels. I was thinking maybe I could go back to e-Uni, get my enviroscience degree.” Joy said.
“Maybe. We’ll talk about it, later.” Jack shoveled the rest of the burger, flooded it down with energy drink, while throwing on his Cybersec clothes, hopping into shoes, whipping off a last few email responses. On the wall-screen, the tension was ratcheting up at a construction site which turned into a standoff between construction robots and protesting teamster union workers who refused to leave bulldozers, tree-hugged i-beams, as Owner suits shouted threats through megaphones.
“There's a battle outside ragin'. It'll soon shake your windows And rattle your walls For the times they are a-changin'.” Zombie-Dylan sang the next iteration of MyMusic App rehash into Jack’s auditory nerve. The serendipitous significance of the lyrics in light of current events again completely soared over Jack’s headspace.
“Honey could you please drop Kara off at school today?” Joy said.
“Why? The Kidpool will self-drive her there just fine, and I’ve put a parental lock on its GPS nav, so there’s no possibility of her pushing buttons and getting lost downtown again-”
“Look, Jack, there’s just a lot of upheaval going on right now. Have you ever read ‘The Black Swan’? An unexpected event we can’t understand except in hingsight. Everything is up in the air with the strikes and protests and violence, and who knows what else might happen. I’d just feel a lot better if you personally, physically drove our daughter to school.” Joy closed, opened her eyes, fiddling idle thumbs unconsciously as if typing on one of those old smart phones, a something she did when she was really nervous. A childhood talisman of muscle memory.
“I would, honey, but I just got messaged by Cybersec, they need me in the office ASAP.”
“Jack, I need you to do this for me, please-“
“A roboagent went haywire this morning, nearly killed an innocent. Lives are at stake here, Joy.”
“Maybe your daughter’s life is at stake here, Jack, did you ever think of that? While you were waving your hands around playing reality like some video game?” Joy turned away. Her micropore palm sensors detected elevated anger endorphins, triggering a therapist App. A flickering cyan holograph of a bearded Bill Murray look-alike in an armchair asked in accentless English for Jack and his wife to count to ten, breathe, then to describe their feelings in the first person to virtual ducks as if they each’s spouse. Joy force-terminated the App with a sharp stab of a finger.
Jack felt a mixing magma of shock and hurt flare, then harden into a hard lump in his chest before it could burst through the bedrock of verbalization.
“Joy, listen to me. Things will be fine. The turmoil is happening out there, in the city, where the freeloaders who lived on the social safety net are angry cause they’re not getting their ‘entitlement’ pensions and bargaining rights and medicare and public education and public law enforcement. Buy we’re in Blue County, a gated Enclave; we’re safe in the Owner Class domain. Evvy is safe. These news feeds are messing with your sense of perspective, pure sensationalism to score viewer eyeballs. You’re blowing this out of proportion. Trust me, the car’s autopilot is as safe as if I was driving her myself. The trouble is going to simmer down after the vote, and if we just keep the security drones and agents up and running, things will get back to normal in no time. You’ll see.
"Damn it Jack, you treat everything like it’s a ‘problem’ with a ‘solution’ you can just find a patch for, like a bug in a program, and it’s all going to work out, as long as the programs are running smoothly. But machines don't magically solve all our problems, they just create whole new categories of problems, and make us blind to them. I mean look at us, what happened?" Joy crossed her arms, rubbed her creasing forehead. Jack edged his way past the now awake and vacuuming Rosie bot, snuck an arm around the cool cotton scrubs of his wife’s waist.
“I know it’s been hard since they let you go, I get it. You’re reeling out of misplaced maternal guilt. Suffering oxytocin withdrawals from the sudden absence of fictive primate attachment bonds you had at the clinic, and all the grooming rituals and social reward-loops that came with being a caregiver. But maybe you need to stop doing this to yourself, with the uniform, everyday-“ Jack began, Joy pulled away. Jack quickly retreated from the no-fly zone of the kitchen, before being shot down by a cruise missile glare; kissing rights were obviously still sanctioned away.
“Jack, you are in no position to be pop-evolutionary psychoanalyzing me. You don’t know what I do and do not need. What I need is to be out there doing what I’m good at, helping people, not lying around like some useless house cat.” The viral clip of Lucky-Robo-Neko waking up, stretching its carbon fiber fluidic muscles played on the wall screen as if on queue. The edges of Joy’s mouth wobbled for a moment, then she steeled them, swallowing the urge to unravel. She refused again Jack’s attempt at consolation.
“Just go, Jack,” she pointed to the door, “Go do your job.”
Jack opened, closed his mouth, then left in silence, the only sound the re-formanted voice of a dead legend, narrating to deaf ears like some tireless musical Sisyphus:
“…And admit that the waters around you have grown / And accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone / For the times they are a-changing.”
Thursday, March 31, 2011
The Global Brain Is Stupid
There is a common and oft-refrained motif in AI and Singularity related thought, the most recent incarnation being "The Global Brain (via H+). The Global Brain is generally defined as some sort of super gestalt entity consisting of the entirety of the internet, humanity, and/or both containing "distributed intelligence, one facilitated by communication and the meaningful interconnections between billions of humans, via technology."
Complexity does not automatically equal intelligence. Transmission of “information” does not necessarily equal intelligence. Human telegraph and phone networks transmitted great deals of information, and simply increasing the amount and even complexity of information transmission does not automatically make the system as a whole an intelligent gestalt with its own agency. Pure complexity is in fact selected against in evolution, as is illustrated in digital evolution simulations such as Polyworld, where the most complex-brained organisms wound up dying off. A brain's thought processes can be very complex, such as a paranoid schizophrenic's intractably intricate conspiracy theories of Illuminati-driven Area 51 cover-ups. We do not give these people Nobel Prizes and let them run nations precisely because they are spewing complex yet *unintelligent* gibberish.
Evolution does not “like” any given trait, traits only persist if they are selected for in a competitive environment, and it just so happens that intelligence worked out well in some — not all — environments in the history of Earth. The human brain evolved not simply complexity, but intelligence over millions or of years because of an arms race; that is, humans who failed to outsmart giant cats on the savanna died out, and so the most intelligent survived. I don’t see the “global brain” competing for survival against the ‘net gestalt of Jupiter, Saturn, the Kuiper Belt in a race to dodge black wholes or some such selective evolutionary environment. The global brain is not complex in order to make decisions to preserve itself, it is complex because it is beneficial for *humans* to transmit higher definition seasons of Lost on Netflix and sell penis enlargement pills to each other. If the global brain exists, its brain is literally made of 90% spam and junk mail. Can’t say I see much evidence of intelligence there.
"The wisdom of the crowd", Google's insta-answers, social media - these are not intelligent, despite the hype to pump the tech bubble 2.0 and appease nerd's sci-fi wish fulfillment or desire to attribute greater importance to their work than is really there. And the effects of these brave new technologies on our own intelligence are debatable. With a few keystrokes you can learn instantly the date of the invention of electricity, the barrel length of a Colt M4A1 Carbine, where the best tandoori chicken can be had in your area code, how to remove that pesky Disqus botnet trojan that's been using your computer to sock-puppet distort the tandoori chicken ratings and generally revise consensus reality under your nose. But how much smarter does instant question gratification actually make you? Basically, you're getting answers lightning-fast that you could've gotten with a bit more time if you went out and read actual books, talked to actual human beings, interacted with the actual world instead of just your touchscreen and Google's redirect to Wikipedia. A calculator can do math faster than any human mathematician, that does not make it *smarter* than even the dumbest human being. At the same time, if we over-believe the GB hype, we may become more like those quick-arithmetic'in gadgets; very fast at getting simple shallow answers, not so good at deeper complex analysis.
Author and polemicist Nicholas Carr points out that if you have a trivia hammer, you only look for trivia nails, and avoid deeper questions. His response to a recent study that showed college students answered questions three times faster with Google than using a campus library:
And let's not forget that Google, Twitter, these sites are not just "made of us", some benevolent, non-biased collective answer engine sourcing every human equally. These are corporations with bottom lines and shareholders who sell off reality to the highest bidder in the form of keyword auctions, "premium hit placement", and "promoted content" in order to make their money. The answers given to you by the "Global Brain" may not be the smartest answers but the ones which make the Network Owners the most money.
Complexity does not automatically equal intelligence. Transmission of “information” does not necessarily equal intelligence. Human telegraph and phone networks transmitted great deals of information, and simply increasing the amount and even complexity of information transmission does not automatically make the system as a whole an intelligent gestalt with its own agency. Pure complexity is in fact selected against in evolution, as is illustrated in digital evolution simulations such as Polyworld, where the most complex-brained organisms wound up dying off. A brain's thought processes can be very complex, such as a paranoid schizophrenic's intractably intricate conspiracy theories of Illuminati-driven Area 51 cover-ups. We do not give these people Nobel Prizes and let them run nations precisely because they are spewing complex yet *unintelligent* gibberish.
Evolution does not “like” any given trait, traits only persist if they are selected for in a competitive environment, and it just so happens that intelligence worked out well in some — not all — environments in the history of Earth. The human brain evolved not simply complexity, but intelligence over millions or of years because of an arms race; that is, humans who failed to outsmart giant cats on the savanna died out, and so the most intelligent survived. I don’t see the “global brain” competing for survival against the ‘net gestalt of Jupiter, Saturn, the Kuiper Belt in a race to dodge black wholes or some such selective evolutionary environment. The global brain is not complex in order to make decisions to preserve itself, it is complex because it is beneficial for *humans* to transmit higher definition seasons of Lost on Netflix and sell penis enlargement pills to each other. If the global brain exists, its brain is literally made of 90% spam and junk mail. Can’t say I see much evidence of intelligence there.
"The wisdom of the crowd", Google's insta-answers, social media - these are not intelligent, despite the hype to pump the tech bubble 2.0 and appease nerd's sci-fi wish fulfillment or desire to attribute greater importance to their work than is really there. And the effects of these brave new technologies on our own intelligence are debatable. With a few keystrokes you can learn instantly the date of the invention of electricity, the barrel length of a Colt M4A1 Carbine, where the best tandoori chicken can be had in your area code, how to remove that pesky Disqus botnet trojan that's been using your computer to sock-puppet distort the tandoori chicken ratings and generally revise consensus reality under your nose. But how much smarter does instant question gratification actually make you? Basically, you're getting answers lightning-fast that you could've gotten with a bit more time if you went out and read actual books, talked to actual human beings, interacted with the actual world instead of just your touchscreen and Google's redirect to Wikipedia. A calculator can do math faster than any human mathematician, that does not make it *smarter* than even the dumbest human being. At the same time, if we over-believe the GB hype, we may become more like those quick-arithmetic'in gadgets; very fast at getting simple shallow answers, not so good at deeper complex analysis.
Author and polemicist Nicholas Carr points out that if you have a trivia hammer, you only look for trivia nails, and avoid deeper questions. His response to a recent study that showed college students answered questions three times faster with Google than using a campus library:
Lord knows it's great that we can answer well-defined questions a lot more quickly today than we could 20 years ago, and that that allows us to ask more, and more-trivial, questions in the course of a day than we could before, but Varian's desire to apply measures of productivity to the life of the mind also testifies to the narrowness of Google's view. It values the measurable over the nonmeasurable, and what it values most of all are those measurable variables that are increasing thanks to recent technological advances. In other words, it stacks history's deck. How did the University of Michigan researchers come up with the questions that they had their subjects find answers to? They "obtained a random sample of 2515 queries from a major search engine."
And let's not forget that Google, Twitter, these sites are not just "made of us", some benevolent, non-biased collective answer engine sourcing every human equally. These are corporations with bottom lines and shareholders who sell off reality to the highest bidder in the form of keyword auctions, "premium hit placement", and "promoted content" in order to make their money. The answers given to you by the "Global Brain" may not be the smartest answers but the ones which make the Network Owners the most money.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
The Future Is Our New Country
Before I get all cylinders firing on another rant, feel I should disclaimer the fact that I do not disbelieve in the possibility of artificial or otherwise non-human intelligences which meet or exceed our human system specs. I do not disbelieve a priori in the possibility that one day cancer might be as irrelevant as small pox, that people might enjoy much longer lifespans than they do now, that the human race may be transformed into something very different, possibly unrecognizable. I am not the fetally positioned Luddite reeling in Post-Futureshock-Stress-Disorder, throwing mute tantrums in fear of getting my brains sucked out of my head by The Matrix Architect. I am not indiscriminately killing robot puppies in protest to the tsunamis of machine automation looming on the horizon. I am not jerking off to Rousseau-esque sermons by anti-tech pundits in a tin-foiled cave in a Montana backwater. (Though I will confess to Like!ing Jaron Lanier's stuff: also a non-Luddite thinker)
I simply see what looks to me like a disturbing confluence of trends in discourse and culture with respect to the future in general and things like AI and Singularity in particular that appears to be charging ahead, unfunctioning brainjacks and all, into a mythical future embedded in our collective brainpans by science fiction and half-century old science that turned out to be fiction, but whose legacy continues to color our understanding to this day.
My goal is not to make human beings in their current evolutionary iteration out to be the Eschatological be-all-and-all, or that we'll never get really frickin smart robots up and running and dry cleaning and doing our cross-multiplication homework for us. It's not about “defending human specialness” or “salvaging human egos”.
On the contrary: my goal is to highlight in red the human *problems*, the weaknesses, as well as those in machines and the complex system of humans and machines and the natural world called reality. It's about not just rushing in with a manifesto and some cool idea you picked up from the sf/f bookshelf, waving it around gaining followers and speeding towards imagined Utopia -- we've seen what can happen when people get ideas for "the perfect system" in their head, even justified by science, and race to create that system. Somewhere in central Europe, I think it was. It's like the young Jeff Bridges in Tron, naively trying to "program" in all the rules and structure of the model in his head of a perfect digital utopia, a mathematical masterpiece of harmony. Then... everything goes to hell as reality kicks in. Now, more than ever, we need to start talking about not just how tomorrow's technology, digital, nano, bio, neural, do lots of cool stuff and give us immortality, but what the real effects of the technologies will be on the human race.
This is not just fun and space opera entertainment anymore: this is serious non-fictional business. Serious as a post-tsunami multi-plant nuclear meltdown. Serious as the loss of the worker's bargaining rights. Serious as an AI-run economy systematically destroying the lives of millions of homeowners and working citizens to profit the few Sys Admins. Serious as loss of half the job *sectors* in the first world due to machine automation and intelligence displacing even knowledge workers. Serious as a bit-sized, 140 character, mindsphere of Continuous Partial Attention, a collective screen-refreshing existence lurching from #trend to #trend, from endless streaming updates of natural disaster to crisis to celebrity car-crash, without ever really stopping, turning off the firehose stream of soundbyte-sized input and really deeply thinking and talking about what is going on. Serious as our minds devolving through misuse ("Just Google it") and homeostasis ("Just Recommend My Tastes To Me") into pawns in The Money People's "Global Brain" that tells us via our omnipresent smartphones where to go, what to do, what to buy, who to vote for, and The Truth as written by the highest bidder for Google-Amazon-Wikipedia's systematic auctioning of reality. Serious as brain-modifications permanently causing a feedback-loop of wealth creating more intelligence-upgrades creating more wealth till we have impassible *biological* chasms between the ultra-rich who can afford to make themselves smarter, and the poor left behind with their obsolete DNA-endowed wetware. You think class division and unfair wealth distribution is bad now? Think again, while your brain still has the same thinking power as the CEO of Goldman Sachs.
We can't afford to just stick our heads in the sand, read Walden's pond, and ignore the technologists, tech-evangelists, Singularity-ists, Kurzweil groupies, computer nerds, the people who are actually trying to build their own vision of Utopia right NOW. A Utopia that will inevitably have to meet hard reality where we live, pay mortgages, compete for jobs, put food on the table, unionize. A reality full of greedy, weak, power-hungry, tribalistic, mob-mentality, short-sighted, humans.
Reality may have become stranger than science fiction, but make no mistake: this is as real as it gets.
British Novelist P. J. Hartley famously said in the opening line of The Go-Betweener, "The past is a foreign country." I believe the corollary to this epithet is that the future is also a foreign country. But it is a country, a real place which we are moving to, migrating one and all, smartphone passports in hand, which we will soon call home: with all the mundanity, ugliness, and beauty that home entails. It is not a theme park full of rocket ship space opera and computer-rendered cyberspace techno-thriller rides. It is not a "Build It And They Will Come (Upload Us)" automatic stairway to heaven/utopia. It is not a science fiction story, but good science fiction can help draw up some working-progress maps of the pathways to the new world, direct the trajectory of conversations towards issues that must be examined in order to arrive at a better, less fucked up country than the one we're migrating from.
I simply see what looks to me like a disturbing confluence of trends in discourse and culture with respect to the future in general and things like AI and Singularity in particular that appears to be charging ahead, unfunctioning brainjacks and all, into a mythical future embedded in our collective brainpans by science fiction and half-century old science that turned out to be fiction, but whose legacy continues to color our understanding to this day.
My goal is not to make human beings in their current evolutionary iteration out to be the Eschatological be-all-and-all, or that we'll never get really frickin smart robots up and running and dry cleaning and doing our cross-multiplication homework for us. It's not about “defending human specialness” or “salvaging human egos”.
On the contrary: my goal is to highlight in red the human *problems*, the weaknesses, as well as those in machines and the complex system of humans and machines and the natural world called reality. It's about not just rushing in with a manifesto and some cool idea you picked up from the sf/f bookshelf, waving it around gaining followers and speeding towards imagined Utopia -- we've seen what can happen when people get ideas for "the perfect system" in their head, even justified by science, and race to create that system. Somewhere in central Europe, I think it was. It's like the young Jeff Bridges in Tron, naively trying to "program" in all the rules and structure of the model in his head of a perfect digital utopia, a mathematical masterpiece of harmony. Then... everything goes to hell as reality kicks in. Now, more than ever, we need to start talking about not just how tomorrow's technology, digital, nano, bio, neural, do lots of cool stuff and give us immortality, but what the real effects of the technologies will be on the human race.
This is not just fun and space opera entertainment anymore: this is serious non-fictional business. Serious as a post-tsunami multi-plant nuclear meltdown. Serious as the loss of the worker's bargaining rights. Serious as an AI-run economy systematically destroying the lives of millions of homeowners and working citizens to profit the few Sys Admins. Serious as loss of half the job *sectors* in the first world due to machine automation and intelligence displacing even knowledge workers. Serious as a bit-sized, 140 character, mindsphere of Continuous Partial Attention, a collective screen-refreshing existence lurching from #trend to #trend, from endless streaming updates of natural disaster to crisis to celebrity car-crash, without ever really stopping, turning off the firehose stream of soundbyte-sized input and really deeply thinking and talking about what is going on. Serious as our minds devolving through misuse ("Just Google it") and homeostasis ("Just Recommend My Tastes To Me") into pawns in The Money People's "Global Brain" that tells us via our omnipresent smartphones where to go, what to do, what to buy, who to vote for, and The Truth as written by the highest bidder for Google-Amazon-Wikipedia's systematic auctioning of reality. Serious as brain-modifications permanently causing a feedback-loop of wealth creating more intelligence-upgrades creating more wealth till we have impassible *biological* chasms between the ultra-rich who can afford to make themselves smarter, and the poor left behind with their obsolete DNA-endowed wetware. You think class division and unfair wealth distribution is bad now? Think again, while your brain still has the same thinking power as the CEO of Goldman Sachs.
We can't afford to just stick our heads in the sand, read Walden's pond, and ignore the technologists, tech-evangelists, Singularity-ists, Kurzweil groupies, computer nerds, the people who are actually trying to build their own vision of Utopia right NOW. A Utopia that will inevitably have to meet hard reality where we live, pay mortgages, compete for jobs, put food on the table, unionize. A reality full of greedy, weak, power-hungry, tribalistic, mob-mentality, short-sighted, humans.
Reality may have become stranger than science fiction, but make no mistake: this is as real as it gets.
British Novelist P. J. Hartley famously said in the opening line of The Go-Betweener, "The past is a foreign country." I believe the corollary to this epithet is that the future is also a foreign country. But it is a country, a real place which we are moving to, migrating one and all, smartphone passports in hand, which we will soon call home: with all the mundanity, ugliness, and beauty that home entails. It is not a theme park full of rocket ship space opera and computer-rendered cyberspace techno-thriller rides. It is not a "Build It And They Will Come (Upload Us)" automatic stairway to heaven/utopia. It is not a science fiction story, but good science fiction can help draw up some working-progress maps of the pathways to the new world, direct the trajectory of conversations towards issues that must be examined in order to arrive at a better, less fucked up country than the one we're migrating from.
Why AI Needs to be an Artist
There have been some recent comments suggesting that if we can just get AIs that can see every single possible scenario, try every single path through the maze of possible futures, then we'd have AI that could solve any problem without the need for creativity that we humans have.
“We used to think “Chess” required “creativity” but we’ve since discovered that a fast computer evaluating ALL POSSIBLE PATHS completely blows human creativity away”
What is being suggested is a brute-force solution to AGI. Essentially a “Librarian of Babel” as per Jorge Luis Borges’ short story. An uber-Google which is capable of searching through every possible “book” capable of being composed by myriad monkies banging on typewriters — that is, a near-unlimited possibility space. With its near-infinite computing power it can suss out amongst the Vast sea of unparsable garble, slightly less vast sea of grammatically correct nonsense, even less vast – but still impossibly vast – sea of dreck, tomorrow’s best-seller “How to upload a brain for dummies (humans)” or whatever Hard Problem we might like a super AI to handwave away for us. While this is not impossible in theory, there are it seems as many, possibly more limiting factors for such an AI (if we can even call it intelligence rather than a souped-up lookup table) than for an AI which operates using intelligence closer in mind-space to humans.
The first limiting factor is testability. The example of Deep Blue vs Kasparov wherein a computer “beat” a human at chess is flawed because the problem (win at chess) and the series of solution criteria (play through every scenario and see which leads to checkmate) are clearly defined and easy for a computer to check whether a given trial is successful. For a problem we might want a Singularity to solve for us such as “Discover a cure for cancer”, the rate at which the computer could perform successful tests is limited, since any given trial cure can only be tested at the rate of clinical trials for cancer treatments, which brings up a bottleneck that makes it nigh-infinitely inferior to human medical science. (Not to mention unethical; trying randomly generated compounds on patients?) Or how about the problem, “Figure out how to upload my brain into a digital substrate”. Since this is a simple brute-force search AGI, not human-like, it would be necessary for humans to interact with every test-upload experiment of the AGIs to confirm whether or not the uploaded entity is in fact a replica of the meat-human and not some different individual or just a hashed pile of silicon-goo. This would again slow the traversing of the “data space” down to an utterly useless crawl, leaving our resources better invested in producing human-like, creative AI.
Then you have the problem that even with these potential gains in computing power, grapheme, quantum, etc. (and there is no guarantee quantum computing will pan out soon or at all), even if we were to boost our machines by multiple magnitudes of computing power, the possibility spaces of non-trivial real-world problems which include the space of every field and dimension of reality (as opposed to a contained mathematical abstraction such as a chess or go game) quickly dwarfs any uncertain gains in magnitude we might make. For example, even the possibility space extent in the Library of Babel — that is, all possible books 500 pages in length, with 40 lines per page and 50 characters per line, or one million characters – is 1.95 X 10^1834097. Even if you managed to achieve exaflop speed on current hardware, that’s just 10^18. Then even bump that up by the trillion or so supposed by quantum comp, your machine is still an insignificant drop in the bucket at 10^33. Forget a whole book, just try one page of text, and you’d still be waiting around for myriad heat deaths of the universe to even scratch the surface; you’d need 10^200+ to get anywhere near searching the space. The Doom I engine was around 2,000,000 characters, and to find it you’d have to search another million magnitudes more than the Library of Babel. Kurzweil estimates a human brain could be simulated in 25,000,000 lines of code, and he’s pretty universally accepted to be a rose-tinted idealist. Good luck searching for e-brains with your typewriter monkeys.
“(Human creativity) is horribly inefficient, and results far too often in less than optimal solutions. In fact, it fails 99% of the time, partially succeeds .09% of the time, and only truly succeeds .01% of the time, if that.”
Depends on what you mean by inefficient. Most ideas that pop into your head during lunch break don’t pan out. 95% of all startups fail, but it’s the 5%, the ones that find the treatment for cancer or invent the automobile or make the next breakthrough in AI or crack the problem of relativity that make up for it. Thomas Edison successfully discovered 1000 ways not to make a lightbulb before he Let There Be Light with the flick of a switch. A computer brute-forcing the invention of a lightbulb would go through magnitudes more failures before coming up with a solution without the guidance of human creativity as there are nearly infinite possible ways to assemble matter. Similarly, an AI that had human-level creativity in limiting domains, applying high-level insight, and shortcutting, combined with the speed advantage would be far more efficient than an AI lacking it. (How many brute-search AIs does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Possibly a Googol-plex)
So yeah, computing power can help you to an extent, but I think you’re not really going to get where we want to go – that is, intelligence explosion – without some higher-level intelligent behavior that can direct the search to a level of computational efficiency at minimum on par with what we humans are capable of. If we want super-AI, we may need even *more* creative machines than we are.
“We used to think “Chess” required “creativity” but we’ve since discovered that a fast computer evaluating ALL POSSIBLE PATHS completely blows human creativity away”
What is being suggested is a brute-force solution to AGI. Essentially a “Librarian of Babel” as per Jorge Luis Borges’ short story. An uber-Google which is capable of searching through every possible “book” capable of being composed by myriad monkies banging on typewriters — that is, a near-unlimited possibility space. With its near-infinite computing power it can suss out amongst the Vast sea of unparsable garble, slightly less vast sea of grammatically correct nonsense, even less vast – but still impossibly vast – sea of dreck, tomorrow’s best-seller “How to upload a brain for dummies (humans)” or whatever Hard Problem we might like a super AI to handwave away for us. While this is not impossible in theory, there are it seems as many, possibly more limiting factors for such an AI (if we can even call it intelligence rather than a souped-up lookup table) than for an AI which operates using intelligence closer in mind-space to humans.
The first limiting factor is testability. The example of Deep Blue vs Kasparov wherein a computer “beat” a human at chess is flawed because the problem (win at chess) and the series of solution criteria (play through every scenario and see which leads to checkmate) are clearly defined and easy for a computer to check whether a given trial is successful. For a problem we might want a Singularity to solve for us such as “Discover a cure for cancer”, the rate at which the computer could perform successful tests is limited, since any given trial cure can only be tested at the rate of clinical trials for cancer treatments, which brings up a bottleneck that makes it nigh-infinitely inferior to human medical science. (Not to mention unethical; trying randomly generated compounds on patients?) Or how about the problem, “Figure out how to upload my brain into a digital substrate”. Since this is a simple brute-force search AGI, not human-like, it would be necessary for humans to interact with every test-upload experiment of the AGIs to confirm whether or not the uploaded entity is in fact a replica of the meat-human and not some different individual or just a hashed pile of silicon-goo. This would again slow the traversing of the “data space” down to an utterly useless crawl, leaving our resources better invested in producing human-like, creative AI.
Then you have the problem that even with these potential gains in computing power, grapheme, quantum, etc. (and there is no guarantee quantum computing will pan out soon or at all), even if we were to boost our machines by multiple magnitudes of computing power, the possibility spaces of non-trivial real-world problems which include the space of every field and dimension of reality (as opposed to a contained mathematical abstraction such as a chess or go game) quickly dwarfs any uncertain gains in magnitude we might make. For example, even the possibility space extent in the Library of Babel — that is, all possible books 500 pages in length, with 40 lines per page and 50 characters per line, or one million characters – is 1.95 X 10^1834097. Even if you managed to achieve exaflop speed on current hardware, that’s just 10^18. Then even bump that up by the trillion or so supposed by quantum comp, your machine is still an insignificant drop in the bucket at 10^33. Forget a whole book, just try one page of text, and you’d still be waiting around for myriad heat deaths of the universe to even scratch the surface; you’d need 10^200+ to get anywhere near searching the space. The Doom I engine was around 2,000,000 characters, and to find it you’d have to search another million magnitudes more than the Library of Babel. Kurzweil estimates a human brain could be simulated in 25,000,000 lines of code, and he’s pretty universally accepted to be a rose-tinted idealist. Good luck searching for e-brains with your typewriter monkeys.
“(Human creativity) is horribly inefficient, and results far too often in less than optimal solutions. In fact, it fails 99% of the time, partially succeeds .09% of the time, and only truly succeeds .01% of the time, if that.”
Depends on what you mean by inefficient. Most ideas that pop into your head during lunch break don’t pan out. 95% of all startups fail, but it’s the 5%, the ones that find the treatment for cancer or invent the automobile or make the next breakthrough in AI or crack the problem of relativity that make up for it. Thomas Edison successfully discovered 1000 ways not to make a lightbulb before he Let There Be Light with the flick of a switch. A computer brute-forcing the invention of a lightbulb would go through magnitudes more failures before coming up with a solution without the guidance of human creativity as there are nearly infinite possible ways to assemble matter. Similarly, an AI that had human-level creativity in limiting domains, applying high-level insight, and shortcutting, combined with the speed advantage would be far more efficient than an AI lacking it. (How many brute-search AIs does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Possibly a Googol-plex)
So yeah, computing power can help you to an extent, but I think you’re not really going to get where we want to go – that is, intelligence explosion – without some higher-level intelligent behavior that can direct the search to a level of computational efficiency at minimum on par with what we humans are capable of. If we want super-AI, we may need even *more* creative machines than we are.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
De-Coding AI Morality
In the futurist tangents of Artificial Intelligentsia circles, the discussion of the dangers of super-intelligent machines and the search for preventative measures of Skynet-like scenarios is generally framed as a computer software engineering problem: "IF we could just identify the Holy Grail LISP code lines to prevent machines from harming us meatbags...". This is perhaps partly a result of the conceptual heritage of science fiction -- a genre most discussions of the non-fictional future are colored with -- namely Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics" outlined and examined in his body of work. These laws being:
1.) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2.) A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3.) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
With these three laws embedded within the binary cores of our silicon homunculi servants, we are supposedly protected from any nightmare scenarios of homicidal vacuum cleaners or self-aware botnets usurping the Pentagon and sentencing humanity to an eternity of slavish bioelectricity generation in human pod farms whilst plugged into a never-ending simulation of Manhattan circa 1999.
The most recent spiritual heir in this long line of techno-philosophical thought has been put forward by AI gurus such as Michael Anissimov, who suggests that we program our future digital progeny with 'goal systems' which pre-empt the possibility of rise from robot underling to robot overlord.
I find the assumption that Artificial General Intelligence, let alone uber-AGI, is ‘programmable’ in any traditional line-by-line sense, as if we’re just going to throw in a few Commandment #declarations or a looped conditional statement in the main function such as “if(hurting humans){stop;}” or anything of the sort an interesting and quickly antiquating notion.
Excluding the Google / IBM Watson style “pseudo intelligence” which amount to very good lookup tables with several library of congresses full of info, the kind of super AGI we might want, that is capable of creative and inventive thought necessary to create cures for all our diseases, solve all our intractable conflicts, figure out how to upload all our consciousness into digital New Shangrilah, kick Faster Than Light travel, tell us who killed the Kennedies and the question to which the answer is 42, is most likely going to come from attempting to simulate our own 3 pound blueprints of grey matter sloshing around in our noggins.
Mother Nature, who we all know is smarter than us upstart bipedal monkeys, has been trying to figure out how to get us carbon based lifeforms to stop hurting and killing each other for 4 billion years and you can just turn on the news or read a book to see how the Benevolent Natural General Intelligence project has fared. If we were to attempt to reproduce the human brain in a silicon or otherwise machine, assuming that is possible, we can’t expect such an entity to be any less ethically unpredictable than humans, and will probably be even more unpredictable because of the fact that any such simulation / emulation will have to leave out some information and unknown effects of changing substrate. And then we give this digitized human mind godly amounts of power. Is it necessary to point out that power has the effect of desensitizing, decreasing empathy towards other humans lower on the totem pole, alienating, and generally turning human beings more sociopathic? I encourage anyone to take a trip down to Wall Street and talk to the CEO of one of the banks which thoroughly raped and continues to rape the world if you’d like an illustration of the utter arrogance, apathy and non-caring-about-other-human-ness festering in the Wring Wraiths of Power Land.
We can’t program Super AGI to care consistently about and not harm humans any more than we can program ourselves to stop being greedy, violent, backstabbing, warmongering, power-hungry apes. There’s no command line that folds out of your occipital bone, lets you input Asimov’s Three Laws as an OS code mod, and you reboot suddenly as Mother Theresa. That’s besides the fact that we’re discovering the human brain to be less and less like the Turing Machine we thought it was and more like a massively parallel, intractable jungle, constantly changing itself. People are constantly changing: the sweet kid who loved bunnies at five and wouldn’t hurt a fly may grow up to become an insurance selling family man but could as easily become an ass-cappin drug dealer or a megalomaniacal bank CEO. We don’t actually even *know* what we’ll do in a given situation till we’re actually in it, as is much said of soldiers who go to war. And the reason we’re having to create AGI by simply pirating the human brain is because we don’t understand it well enough to actually create one from scratch, so how the heck are we supposed to make such deep-structural changes to the digital human mind? I don’t see much hope for “crafting goal systems” in our future siliconized, jacked-up megabrains.
Yeah, Super AGI seems pretty risky business to me.
*(Artificial General Intelligence refers to intelligence on the level of human intelligence)
1.) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2.) A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3.) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
With these three laws embedded within the binary cores of our silicon homunculi servants, we are supposedly protected from any nightmare scenarios of homicidal vacuum cleaners or self-aware botnets usurping the Pentagon and sentencing humanity to an eternity of slavish bioelectricity generation in human pod farms whilst plugged into a never-ending simulation of Manhattan circa 1999.
The most recent spiritual heir in this long line of techno-philosophical thought has been put forward by AI gurus such as Michael Anissimov, who suggests that we program our future digital progeny with 'goal systems' which pre-empt the possibility of rise from robot underling to robot overlord.
Why must we recoil against the notion of a risky superintelligence? Why can’t we see the risk, and confront it by trying to craft goal systems that carry common sense human morality over to AGIs? This is a difficult task, but the likely alternative is extinction. Powerful AGIs will have no automatic reason to be friendly to us! They will be much more likely to be friendly if we program them to care about us, and build them from the start with human-friendliness in mind.
I find the assumption that Artificial General Intelligence, let alone uber-AGI, is ‘programmable’ in any traditional line-by-line sense, as if we’re just going to throw in a few Commandment #declarations or a looped conditional statement in the main function such as “if(hurting humans){stop;}” or anything of the sort an interesting and quickly antiquating notion.
Excluding the Google / IBM Watson style “pseudo intelligence” which amount to very good lookup tables with several library of congresses full of info, the kind of super AGI we might want, that is capable of creative and inventive thought necessary to create cures for all our diseases, solve all our intractable conflicts, figure out how to upload all our consciousness into digital New Shangrilah, kick Faster Than Light travel, tell us who killed the Kennedies and the question to which the answer is 42, is most likely going to come from attempting to simulate our own 3 pound blueprints of grey matter sloshing around in our noggins.
Mother Nature, who we all know is smarter than us upstart bipedal monkeys, has been trying to figure out how to get us carbon based lifeforms to stop hurting and killing each other for 4 billion years and you can just turn on the news or read a book to see how the Benevolent Natural General Intelligence project has fared. If we were to attempt to reproduce the human brain in a silicon or otherwise machine, assuming that is possible, we can’t expect such an entity to be any less ethically unpredictable than humans, and will probably be even more unpredictable because of the fact that any such simulation / emulation will have to leave out some information and unknown effects of changing substrate. And then we give this digitized human mind godly amounts of power. Is it necessary to point out that power has the effect of desensitizing, decreasing empathy towards other humans lower on the totem pole, alienating, and generally turning human beings more sociopathic? I encourage anyone to take a trip down to Wall Street and talk to the CEO of one of the banks which thoroughly raped and continues to rape the world if you’d like an illustration of the utter arrogance, apathy and non-caring-about-other-human-ness festering in the Wring Wraiths of Power Land.
We can’t program Super AGI to care consistently about and not harm humans any more than we can program ourselves to stop being greedy, violent, backstabbing, warmongering, power-hungry apes. There’s no command line that folds out of your occipital bone, lets you input Asimov’s Three Laws as an OS code mod, and you reboot suddenly as Mother Theresa. That’s besides the fact that we’re discovering the human brain to be less and less like the Turing Machine we thought it was and more like a massively parallel, intractable jungle, constantly changing itself. People are constantly changing: the sweet kid who loved bunnies at five and wouldn’t hurt a fly may grow up to become an insurance selling family man but could as easily become an ass-cappin drug dealer or a megalomaniacal bank CEO. We don’t actually even *know* what we’ll do in a given situation till we’re actually in it, as is much said of soldiers who go to war. And the reason we’re having to create AGI by simply pirating the human brain is because we don’t understand it well enough to actually create one from scratch, so how the heck are we supposed to make such deep-structural changes to the digital human mind? I don’t see much hope for “crafting goal systems” in our future siliconized, jacked-up megabrains.
Yeah, Super AGI seems pretty risky business to me.
*(Artificial General Intelligence refers to intelligence on the level of human intelligence)
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