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Jaron Lanier Takes On "Cybernetic Totalists"
Stefan Jones writes: "VR pioneer Jaron Lanier has written "Half a Manifesto" -- a long and considered rant taking on notions favored by Extropians, Singularity fans and others -- on the exclusive salon for long-hairs, 'Edge.'
Lanier believes that the totalists are not only promulgating an irresponsible and inhuman ideology, but indulging in bad science.
The site also features fascinating and spirited reactions by a slew of luminaries, including George and Freeman Dyson, Bruce Sterling, Lee Smolin, Rodney Brooks and Kevin Kelly. Good stuff, no matter where you stand on this issue." Oh c'mon -- no one around here would fetishize technology per se, would they?
But then we won't be human any more. We are defined by both our capabilities and our limitations, and any attempt at altering the mechanisms of our conscioussness is invarably going to alter the very nature of who we are and how we think.
So what if we do things to ourselves that make us cease to be human? That would only be a bad thing if "human" were the best we could be. I have this doubt that human beings are the optimum form of life, and if we are, then that's pretty sad.
And should people start making changes to themselves, it doesn't mean they'll be alone afterwards. If nothing else, you'll have groups making the same changes to contine to be together as that group, to make sure there isn't the problem of being alone.
Look, if any of you biological fundamentalists feel that changing to something other than what would be called "human" is negative, then you don't have to do it, should the opportunity ever arise. If you think that it's the equivalent of "sailing off the edge of the world", then don't get in the boat. Just don't prevent anyone else from exploring what may be out there.
---
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Read the article. Apparently he's learned from his utopian-fantasy mistakes. The article questions the transhumanist theories/fantasies.
In a nutshell: Computers aren't going to change the world that radically because we don't know how to write the required software.
I'm kind of undecided on that one. Most of the extropian/transhumanist/singulatarian ideas assume strong AI. It's obviously possible to produce intelligence- we are living examples (Aren't we? Aren't we?!?! :). But there there is no clear path from what we have now to strong AI.
I'll take the wait-and-see approach. :)
I never said the world was going to end.
.co m/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=eschatology )
eschatology
n.
1.The branch of theology that is concerned with the end of the world or of humankind.
2.A belief or a doctrine concerning the ultimate or final things, such as death, the destiny of humanity, the Second Coming, or the Last Judgment.
(from http://www.dictionary
Read the post replying to the post above yours. Humanity is defined by what we can and can't do, and these parameters are what shape our consciouss and unconsciouss minds in the way we call "humanity". By altering these parameters we alter how we think, and thus become something other than human.
My fault for not reading all your drivel, but I disagree. I don't think that defines humanity. I also think that even if it did, anything we do to alter our own course can't possibly be argued as diverging from humanity.
Moreover, hasn't this been going on since the discovery of cannibis? Probably further back than that. People have been entering altered states of conciousness through asphyxiation, starvation, meditation, and whatever else they can do to adjust their alpha waves since well before biblical times.
That we continue to advance without trying to throw away that which we are and that which has gotten us this far? Not too much to ask IMHO.
I think it's foolish to assume that anything is being thrown away. It's being built upon.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
> kinds of possible religions might be created by sentient machines capable of 'experience,' but the
> rest knows that this is beyond any forseeable event horizon.
From Red Dwarf:
"No Silicon Heaven? Preposterous! If there were no Silicon Heaven, where would all the calculators go?"
> if you think that any amount of modelling, branch prediction, and
> hypotheses can ever actually 'know' something, especially something as individual as experience, then perhaps you've forgot about the cat.
If you're talking about Schroedinger's Cat, I'd say that's a bad example - quantum mechanics is probably the best-tested model we have going. Just because it conflicts with "common sense" doesn't mean it conflicts with observed behavior. The experiments are pretty conclusive proof that, yes, particles do exist in superpositions of states, the state vector collapsing upon observation.
Manipulating the superpositions of states and building quantum computers is a difficult - and possibly insurmountable - problem, but the reason people are interested in quantum computers is precisely because we have the mathematical understanding to talk about what sorts of things we could do with such a system if one existed.
Even if we never develop the technology to build a quantum computer, the theory's fascinating. (If I were 20 years younger, I'd forget all about learning about transistors and figuring out truth tables and just start trying to wrap my head around how to do useful computation with qubits.)
I'll segue out to an earlier "does [spoken] language affect the design of computer languages" Slashdot thread... I don't find that particular issue terribly interesting, but the I do think that design of computer languages is strongly affected by the type of machine you're programming.
Functional programing is a big jump from strictly procedural languages. You have to change the way you think, not the way you code. If someone develops a "usable" quantum computer, I can guarantee you that most of us are out of a job. Our generation has too much Von Neumann on the brain.
And I'll bet the hard AI folks will have a field day with it. "The brain's not a VN machine, it's a quantum computer! That's why the first attempts at hard AI failed!". ;-)
Back to subjective experience and consciousness again. My personal belief is that while Godel may well stop us from understanding (at the level of "run this code to get this result") conscious experience, it's no barrier to creating machines which have it.
I'll even go so far as to live down to Jaron's bit about how cybernetic totalists like to annoy people on the other side of the debate by saying. "Proof: Humans have been creating machines that have experience consciousness without understanding the mechanism by which consciousness arises by mating with each other for about a million years. Other species have been creating similar machines by similar means for possibly much longer periods of times".
that was what the (at least) was supposed to convey. I totally agree with you. I wish you'd responded to a little more of the comment, perhaps read a little more of the stuff that I've written (like my background info) to realize that I very well know its here and it has been here for a very long time...
Please, at least take the letter as a whole - taking that comment alone completely misses the point, and only serves as a poorly constructed flame.
You say you want a revolution?
You're right, the Act of Supremecy was passed in 1534, three years before the Pope's Sublimis Deus. Prior to that however, the Henry VII refused to acknowledge Spanish and Portuguese claims to the New World, under the papal bull of 1493. In 1530 Las Casas started writing De Unico Vocationis Modo denouncing violent conversion.
So, yes, Henry didn't create the Church of England directly in response to the Pope's Sublimis Deus. That's a factual mistake on my part. However, England did have previous grievences with Catholic Church for the Pope's partitioning of land, and for the most part everybody ignored Sublimis Deus anyway.
Whether the Moors where driven out by the time Columbus set sail, the point is that Spain desperately needed to refill its coffers to recover from, if not fund, its wars with the Moors.
And I believe the black plaque was still around for a while. At this point Europe had not known life without the plague. That is the mindset I was trying to establish: both centuries of war with the Moors coupled with random and meaningless death, which caused Europe to be very jaded and cynical by the time they discovered the new world.
It still seems we are trying to conquer something.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Don't let them immantenize the eschaton!
Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
"Information wants to be paid"
Since this is "regular english", people do not realise that the fancy words used there form a jargon of their own. In a tech manual, you know how to handle this. But in this context it is easy to blank out, and watch your eyes glaze over. Snap out of it and grab yourself a philosophy tech manual so that you can at least get a hold on the jargon. [smile]
- - - - - - - -
"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Our boundries have only been expanding with any velocity for a brief period - perhaps a few dozen millenia. This is not a stable state, and will probably lead to real problems not too far down the line.
Luddite.
You heard me. You're just a slightly more up to date version of the folks who speak out against ATM machines, electro-magnetic radiation from home appliances, and the Evil Internet, yet accept technologies like refrigeration and internal combustion engines, because we've had that technology "forever".
Why is it so common to predict the end of the world (what do you think Escatology is about?) based on a pretty graph that shows steadily increasing technology?
How do you define this "Humanity" that you propose we are abandoning in favor of technology? How, exactly, are we going to go about abandoning it?
What humanity is doesn't change, and hasn't changed. We are still the same race, with the same problems, the same hopes, and the same daily social trials as humanity had one thousand years ago.
You people love to propose that as a whole we are less than we were because we can do something differently. I say we are not.
I mean, what do you expect?
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
I used to read Wired magazine some years ago, and I used to take it seriously. After some time, I began to notice a trend in its articles.
There's this clique of "digerati" who keep popping up on its pages and in similar forums/magazines/books, explaining the future in all its robotic nanotech cybernetic glory. The same names keep appearing over and over, repeating visions of a future so vague and full of popcorn sci-fi visions that you can't quite pin down anything specific, but can debate about it for weeks.
You may have seen these names before, waving hands and talking about the amazing future - Nicholas Negroponte, Marc Andreesen (even makes the cover of wired recently, all for having co-written mosaic w/ eric bina), Lanier, Kurzweil, Ted Nelson, Gelertner, etc. Most or all of these have been "has beens", who never quite produce anything useful, except visions of the future that are lapped up by journalists and viewed as the gospel.
Sure, it was interesting to read about futuristic visions of tomorrow, but after 5 years of this crap, and hardly any progress in bandwidth, usability, AI, speech rec, home automation, etc., I have had enough of reading about this thing. Anybody can write vague gee whiz stuff, full of buzzwords that nobody quite agrees upon.
Trust me, after you're read this sort of stuff for a while, it begins to enter the territory of the social sciences - it's always full of controversy, you can never prove anything wrong with it, but its proponents can always make their point with something so vague that it sounds profound.
Give it a rest. It's not even as entertaining as campy 70s futurism.
w/m
PS - Funny how REAL contributors to technology of the future never write articles like this, maybe because they have something at stake? For instance, you don't see crap like this from Drexler, peter shor, or seth lloyd.
And for all the people falling over themselves trying to write serious posts. If you think you're l33t at using buzzwords, try Alan Sokal
I will say something for this article - it made me think. It made me question what I believe will happen. It made me step away and consider other alternatives.
For that alone, the article has merit.
However, other things Jaron writes about seem to infer on his part a lack of knowledge of certain subjects. One instance that I know of is his questioning why nature hasn't come up with the wheel in the course of evolution. My answer would be it probably has something to do with the disconnect between the wheel and what it rotates on. Being able to supply the chemical nourishment to the "moving" part is difficult - the best you could hope for in a bio-wheel would be some form of membrane transfer (like that which occurs in our lungs, to get oxygen into the blood cells), however, the wheel would have to rotate slowly enough for this to actually work (now, if I am wrong about all of this, someone please correct me). But we do have "almost wheels" in nature - certain bacteria flaggella, and of course the ball and socket joints used throughout the body.
I don't know - what Lanier writes about seems to make sense and non-sense - but at least it will keep me thinking...
I support the EFF - do you?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Nope, we don't understand conservation of momentum because we can't build frictionless surfaces. The pucks on the air-hockey table aren't good enough.
Nope, we don't understand Newtonian gravity because we can describe it by an inverse square law.
Nope, we don't understand special relativity because we can describe how clocks slow down when put into accelerating frames of reference.
Nope, we don't understand consciousness when we can model it and build a machine that passes the Turing test.
The first two statements ring hollow because we developed the technology to test our models. The third statement is untested because we have neither the models nor the technology.
I said untested, not untestable.
To make a long story short, a cybernetic totalist believes that at some point, we will develop models of consciousness that allow us to describe machines that posess it, and that we will also develop technology that will allow us to build said machines.
I'm one of 'em. At present, I take that last paragraph on faith - I'm on the Minsky side of things; a brain is a computer made of meat. It should be possible to build one.
Where I take issue with Jaron Lanier (aside from his IMHO preposterous assertion that not being able to build "ideal" computers equates to our not understanding computer science!) is that he believes that CTs see the eschaton as immanent. I don't. I see it as a possibility, but we have so many serious technological hurdles to jump over between "here" and "there" that I don't worry about it. Building nanopaste is highly nontrivial.
(I do agree with him that the blind acceptance of criticality is a problem - I'm also one of those people who "looks forward to it" - but even I acknowledge that criticality might not be as good a thing as I think it will be.)
So finally on to subjective experience.
I have never seen a credible argument that subjective experience doesn't exist. I believe it exists. I experience it 24/7.
But likewise - I have never seen a credible argument that subjective experience requires anything other than a sufficiently complex network of inputs, outputs, and some sort of feedback going on in the middle.
I can't explain how that works. Lanier would call it "soul". I call it "mind", and view it as an epiphenomenon of "brain". The fact that it is an epiphenomenon of "brain" doesn't make it any less real.
When Jaron says "But don't you experience your life? Isn't experience something apart from what you could measure in a computer?", I'd counter with:
"Yes I do, but as for the second question, I don't know, because I lack the tools to measure experience. It may be, as suggested in Godel, Escher, Bach, that my brain lacks the capability to understand said measurements, owing to some Godelian "loopiness" in that it's hard to emulate a brainputer on a brianputer. But at present, that hypothesis is untested, and I have to proceed as though it were measured.
As for ad hominem arguments, the notion that Turing developed the notion of machine sentience in order to deal with his own personal anguish is almost beneath contempt (I say "almost" because on Edge, "where ideas come from" is a legitimate topic for discussion), and I won't dignify it with a reply. Whatever the origin of the idea, the idea is IMHO valid, and Lanier does himself a disservice when attempting to criticize it on the grounds of its origins, not its merits.
Feh. A long rambling rant from Tackhead.
LionKimbro, regardless of our agreement or disagreement about Lanier's paper (I, too, found it a wonderful read; while I've taken a few slices out of him here, it's an excellent articulation of the non-CT point of view, contains much that is of merit that I've ignored in this post, and provides lots of food for thought), we're in solid agreement on one thing:
Those of you taking pride in not understanding the paper should seriously reconsider your position. Ignorance is not something to take pride in.
To those saying that Edge is "just a load of intellectual crap", would you also agree with some skript kiddie saying "That RMS guy at gnu.org, hes stupid, all he duz is write lots of stupid essays talking big intellectual crap about free beer versus free speech! Wut da fuk he talking about? N-E-1 with cl00 know that free software means #warez, d00d!!!"
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Nope, we don't understand conservation of momentum because we can't build frictionless surfaces. The pucks on the air-hockey table aren't good enough.
Nope, we don't understand Newtonian gravity because we can describe it by an inverse square law.
Nope, we don't understand special relativity because we can describe how clocks slow down when put into accelerating frames of reference.
Nope, we don't understand consciousness when we can model it and build a machine that passes the Turing test.
The first two statements ring hollow because we developed the technology to test our models. The third statement is untested because we have neither the models nor the technology.
I said untested, not untestable.
To make a long story short, a cybernetic totalist believes that at some point, we will develop models of consciousness that allow us to describe machines that posess it, and that we will also develop technology that will allow us to build said machines.
I'm one of 'em. At present, I take that last paragraph on faith - I'm on the Minsky side of things; a brain is a computer made of meat. It should be possible to build one.
Where I take issue with Jaron Lanier (aside from his IMHO preposterous assertion that not being able to build "ideal" computers equates to our not understanding computer science!) is that he believes that CTs see the eschaton as immanent. I don't. I see it as a possibility, but we have so many serious technological hurdles to jump over between "here" and "there" that I don't worry about it. Building nanopaste is highly nontrivial.
(I do agree with him that the blind acceptance of criticality is a problem - I'm also one of those people who "looks forward to it" - but even I acknowledge that criticality might not be as good a thing as I think it will be.)
So finally on to subjective experience.
I have never seen a credible argument that subjective experience doesn't exist. I believe it exists. I experience it 24/7.
But likewise - I have never seen a credible argument that subjective experience requires anything other than a sufficiently complex network of inputs, outputs, and some sort of feedback going on in the middle.
I can't explain how that works. Lanier would call it "soul". I call it "mind", and view it as an epiphenomenon of "brain". The fact that it is an epiphenomenon of "brain" doesn't make it any less real.
When Jaron says "But don't you experience your life? Isn't experience something apart from what you could measure in a computer?", I'd counter with:
"Yes I do, but as for the second question, I don't know, because I lack the tools to measure experience. It may be, as suggested in Godel, Escher, Bach, that my brain lacks the capability to understand said measurements, owing to some Godelian "loopiness" in that it's hard to emulate a brainputer on a brianputer. But at present, that hypothesis is untested, and I have to proceed as though it were measured.
As for ad hominem arguments, the notion that Turing developed the notion of machine sentience in order to deal with his own personal anguish is almost beneath contempt (I say "almost" because on Edge, "where ideas come from" is a legitimate topic for discussion), and I won't dignify it with a reply. Whatever the origin of the idea, the idea is IMHO valid, and Lanier does himself a disservice when attempting to criticize it on the grounds of its origins, not its merits.
Feh. A long rambling rant from Tackhead.
LionKimbro, regardless of our agreement or disagreement about Lanier's paper (I, too, found it a wonderful read; while I've taken a few slices out of him here, it's an excellent articulation of the non-CT point of view, contains much that is of merit that I've ignored in this post, and provides lots of food for thought), we're in solid agreement on one thing:
Those of you taking pride in not understanding the paper should seriously reconsider your position. Ignorance is not something to take pride in.
To those saying that Edge is "just a load of intellectual crap", would you also agree with some skript kiddie saying "That RMS guy at gnu.org, hes stupid, all he duz is write lots of stupid essays talking big intellectual crap about free beer versus free speech! Wut da fuk he talking about? N-E-1 with cl00 know that free software means #warez, d00d!!!"
You say that as a fact, and yet it remains an open question to this day and has been fiercely debated for centuries. That's one of the reasons people study the history of culture, literature, art, technology, etc.: to try to get glimpses into how people used to think and feel, to try to take their measure as humans.
While it is possible to assert (as people do) that "we're as we have always been", or "we are more advanced than our ancestors", or "we are degenerate", there simply isn't enough extant evidence to propose a conclusive proof one way or the other.
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
I think Lanier's whole discussion of subjective experience is a red herring. Personally, I do think I have subjective experience, but I don't see why a computer -- or some other evolved-partly-by-us creation -- couldn't also have subjective experience. Arguing the point seems to be a fundamental distraction from the deeper issue: what kind of impact ever-evolving technology will have on human society, and whether we will (eventually) create beings comparable or superior to ourselves.
I tend to agree with Lanier that one of the worst risks we face is increasing social inequity. Think about some of the nightmare totalistic scenarios -- that we will create a race of super-beings that will look down on us and use us as fodder. Now, put on a very cynical hat, and think about the world we live in now, where the "first world" consumes most resources; where the richest 1% of the population has over 30% of the wealth; where entire social classes are disenfranchised and economically shut out. Seems to me we already live in the technological dystopia people like Joy and Lanier are afraid of! (I think Lanier acknowledges this, on some level.)
I am still an associate of the Foresight Institute, because it is a good resource for tracking developments in advanced technology. But I haven't been to one of their functions in some time, largely because the prevailing meme pool there doesn't contain enough skepticism for my taste. (Cryonics in particular seems to me to be substituting overwhelming technological optimism for a real confrontation with issues of life and death.)
Putting the optimist hat on, I would hope that newer, smaller, greener technology will eventually reduce humanity's ecological impact on the planet, and that as we do start to evolve creations (creatures) that have greater independence and autonomy, that it helps us widen the "circle of empathy" Lanier mentions. You could take an almost Buddhistic view -- that compassion is the essence of the universe -- and realize that it's our moral responsibility, as creative and intelligent beings, to evolve creatures that are themselves compassionate. Whether we can do this when we are so often lacking in compassion ourselves is another question... in fact (finishing off by wearing the theist hat), that may be the question that God created us to answer.
I think there is a real problem here: Our social progress is not keeping pace with our technological and intellectual progress.
You guys know this already. You call it 'shitty management'. Well, guess what? All management is shitty.
So, what is 'good management'? Well, it's not called 'management'. It's called 'collaboration'. You see, collaboration is something that you actively do, while management is something that is done to you. I hope you recognize the difference, and the importance of the distinction. After all, what is our democracy if not a collaboration?
Why is our education system based on a model of top-down coercion? Why do our schools emphasize rote-momorization and behavioural compliance? Why don't they emphasize conceptualization, raw experience and collaboration? A large majority of research supports the second approach, yet most of our schools fail to reflect this research.
Have you ever known a guy who after being promoted to manager, starts acting like a prick? That's because he's trying to manage you. He's wearing his 'teachers hat', as many teachers like to call their presumption of authority.
Good teaching is collaborative, good managing is collaborative, and good government is collaborative (ie democracy). But what if our government, in charge of education, decides not to teach children how to collaborate? Instead they focus children on competition. Doesn't intellectual competition encourage people to horde the 'secrets of their success', breaking down communication, an essential element of collaboration? Does this approach nurture a childs ability to govern effectively as a citizen in a democracy? Does he become more dependent upon his elected leaders as a result of this ommission?
Do you ever wonder where apathy comes from?
The prospect of extreme technological power scares people: like the prospect of a child playing with a machine-gun in a schoolyard.
Lets solve our social problems. It takes only one thing: collaboration. Collaboration IS the solution. Just make sure it's REAL collaboration:
Collaborators don't reward or punish each other.
Collaborators don't win or lose.
Collaborators don't organize themselves hierarchically.
Collaborators don't impose ideas or rules on people.
Collaborators choose to collaborate.
James.
I can't stand these retarded pseudo-intellectuals that invent ideology to disagree with. The intro duction to his paper requires the reader to agree with his assumption that Marxism is a totally flawed ideology. well his assumption there is wrong undermining his entire piece. not to mention the fact that he is a little paranoid and not exactly clear on what he would like to condemn. Please the next time one of these so called intellectuals goes on a rant can some one have them rant on something relevant ?
This is a wonderful article. I remember my first experience with "Extropians" was at a dinner with some of the members of a large, international Extropian mailing list. I think that I realized exactly how far off the ideology was when I sat there and watch three men badger another man to sign a "Cryogenics Contract" where he would agree to be frozen when he died. Not only was it bad science, but it was the same kind of groupthink atmosphere that permiates the type of movements I was trying desperatly to get away from.
On a related note, you might wat to check out The Guy I Almost Was by Patrick S. Farley. I think that it gives one of the best descriptions of techno-fetishism among geeks, and the ways that we are being manipulated by it... (Also, it's a damn good story.)
--
Feminism is the wild notion that women are human beings.
MacLeod and Vinge both got the terminology from elsewhere. I think the extropians may have invented the term.
I'm not sure Lanier thinks the singularity is a Bad Thing as much as he thinks its silly. As he says in the article (you have read the article ?), the requirements for it to happen have not been verified. The idea that a mind can exist in a computer has been mooted but never proven. The broader conception that the mind can be moved into some kind of machine is almost certainly correct, but its possible such a machine would not be capable of the self-enhancing explosive growth that a computer might. And on and on. Read the first 5 points of the article.
As to whether its good or bad, if its possible, its rather beyond that, no ? What's certainly true is that posthuman entities, where they to emerge quickly enough, will not have much time for humans, any more than we have for ants.
And no. I don't want my mind in a computer. Not if it means sacrificing my current brain and body, as initially it almost certainly would.
We want to learn new things; we want to improve our bodies; we want to change elements of our personality and emotional makeup. That's why people go to school, read books (or even /.), go to the gym, try different diets, see therapists, take anti-depressants, whatever. Many of these means are misguided, and one might even argue that the goal itself is a mistake (after all, you are already a Buddha), but there's no dening that part of the human condition is the desire for personal transformation.
This doesn't have to be some Faustian bargain. Using nanotechnology to augment my physiology doesn't take away any of my "humanity"; nor would providing me with an AI butler/manservant/gal friday.However, the techoskeptics are right about at least one thing: it isn't a given that such technology will be sued wisely. The example given about people borrowing money they don't need in order to give good inputs to a credit rating algorithm is an excellent one. OTOH, that's not so much an issue of technology as of bureaucracy - the algorithm could just as well be implemented by men with ledgers and quill pens as by big iron.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I'm willing to bet life expectancy during the industrial age was much lower than in the glory days of, say, the Chinese civilization, or the Mayan civilization, or the Iroquois civilization, or Arab civilizations. Our life expectancies are only now coming back *UP* because we have high tech medicine to fix our broken parts. MOST of modern medicine is reparative, NOT preventative. Do you run your car until it breaks down THEN get everything changed? No, you check your oil, you check your fluids, you get it inspected, etc.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I'm not talking about cave people here. I'm talking about past civilizations which existed in harmony quite happily for eons. These weren't people who lived in caves and threw stones at rabbits. The Chinese civilization, the Egyption civilization, Mesopotamian civilizations, American civilizations. They people didn't have *all* that hard a life - certainly not in the proportion that people in third world countries have today, largely due to pressures exerted by Western countries. Life was pretty damn good (unless you were a slave I suppose, and even then it's not like wild animals were just roaming around waiting to eat you). Sure, we can say life is good in Western countries due to all this "progress"...but look at the countries we call under developed. That got shafted. On the whole, I think we really need to question where we are actually trying to go. In many cases, for every great new solution and marvel of Western progress we come up with, we come up with many more problems.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
"Fact: Machines don't and can't think. Existence precedes essence. Computers pass voltages. Period. They don't remember anything. They don't think about anything. Everything we discuss or sense about them is secondary and something we bring to it. Saying that computers think is like discussing the political persuasions of rock formations.
Once we see the Turing Test for what it really is, the real CT/Turing Test project is now revealed:
Can we make machines operate in such a way that we can - deceive - ourselves into thinking there's actually a sentient human in it? And can we deceive/bludgeon others into agreeing with us?
The Turing Testers know that machines aren't sentient, as they wait for the next rev of some machine to trick them. And once "tricked" - what makes them think they or anyone else wouldn't know it's a trick - everytime?
"Gee - last week, the HAL 9000 passed the Turing test. Well wuddya know - that last algorithm really did the trick. Let's check it out now. UhOh. Today it's not passing the Turing test...so I guess it isn't sentient anymore..."
That we so deceive ourselves does not mean the condition of sentience is or ever was actually present - it simply means that the required conditions to our test have been met at a particular historical juncture - on a given day, the machine has "fooled" us into thinking it can think. It's been programmed in such a way that we are led to believe it has a mind. This doesn't mean it actually has one. With the Turing Test, the machine must simply be able to do what we expect of a human within a certain range of activity. But is it Sentient? Hell No. It doesn't take Albert Einstein to see how nekkid that Emperor is."
I think the turing test is really neat milestone but not really a test of anything but ability in a typical clerk job. I recently saw an AOL commercial touting AIM in which the perky actress said, "AOL instant messaging is better than talking on the phone!"
How thoughtless do you have to be to believe that?
People forget that when they talk on the phone or in person to someone that they are collecting FAR more information than just the words, the spelling, grammar, and the speed with which they are typed. Or maybe a person who would believe that is just very unobservant.
Unlike AOL's fictional character most people I know collect enormous amounts of information during a analog (perhaps digitally carried) converstion. For important decisions I may dwell on the information obtained from just one conversation for days. Every facial muscule, every breath, arm gestures, tone and waver of voice and so on.
I have a friend who will remain nameless who keeps going on dates with girls he meets online. Meeting people online is no problem, but baseing a friendship on typed converstions with little or no analog interation is flawed. Needless to say he keeps getting hurt, even more so than he did in purely meatspace endevors.
I propose a new test. Create a human voice and/or form and if I or someone else who isn't asleep can remain friends with said robot for a year and not know, give their creators the prize.
There is a reason that trust in a good friendship is earned over time. Friendships are far more complex than beauty parlor chatter held through a teletype. We don't need computers to talk about the weather or how bad politics suck. If AI is to be usefull is must be trusted... like a friend.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I think Lanier makes some good points. Yes, this is a rant rather than an well thought out refutation, but as the Communist Manifesto shows, you can go a long way with a rant.
The case against AI is pretty good these days. We are beginning to understadn how intelligence emerges from systems, and one of the conclusions we can make is that human-like intelligence seems unlikely to emerge from anything that isn't human. Johnson and Lakoff's exposé of embodied intelligence makes that case convincingly.
The real clue here should be our inability to define intelligence in a way that distinguishes it from being human. Quite possibly we will never be able to identify anything non-human as intelligent.
Belief #3 is interesting. I though only the looney corner of the libertarian movement still stuck to objective semantics. Putnam convincingly dismantled objectivism in the 70's by showing that it is a contradictory system which is incapable of providing a theory of meaning.
Embodied semantics are the rage these days. Perhaps that won't last forever, but I don't see any other solutions that makes sense in light of what we know about biology and computers.
Belief #4 is true of too many of today's technocrats. However, I think the power of darwinian thinking is very strong and very real. What I reject are the conclusions many amateur darwinists draw from it. Cyberselfish, for example, takes the bionomics people to task for their poor economic thinking. Darwinism is increasingly used to justify the worst aspects of capitalism, ignoring the obvious Darwinian analysis of government. The great failure of Darwinian social thinkers is to view their domain in isolation. Just as no responsible ecologist describes the lifecycle of a single animal without considering the other organisms that share its environment, it is stupid to try to understand economics without considering government, society, culture and environment.
A good Darwinian analysis would show that regulatory action and environmental effects form a part of the economic ecosystem. It's never just survival of the fittest organism, even in nature.
Belief #5 is an admission that faster CPU's won't solve any problems. I'm glad to hear it. Commercial computing is still rooted in the 1970's and we need to move on.
And that brings us to belief #6. Millenialist thinking. Things have changed before, and they'll change in the future. But I have seen nothing to lead me to believe that nanotechnology or any other kind of technology will solve any fundammental human problems. Computers have done a great deal for us, but have they really brought any kind of millenial change? No, not really. We had machines before to help do things, we have machines now. Sometimes they still don't work. We still can't take the human out of the loop. We don't appear to be on the verge of uncovering immortality, we can't transfer our brains into computers and may never be able to. Computers can do a lot for us, including making us more intelligent and more adaptable, but this is the same trend that's been in place for millenia.
The year 2000 has come and will soon be gone. And nothing big happened. It's nice to see the technical class getting back to reality.
seriously, most of what he says makes so much sense that it's scary. there have been documented cases of end of the world theorists since at least 2000 years ago, and people still believe it when new ones come along with new and shiny "singularity" scenarios...
> I agree, but we've never had the chance to alter the way we think before.
;)
I assume you didn't go to university then. Altering the way I thought was what I spent most of my time doing
> It's an entirely new situation in our history.
right...
best wishes,
Mike.
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
As I see it, Lanier doesn't say that transforming ourselves into trans-humans by 2020 is immoral. Rather, he says that it's unlikely to happen, because just throwing more MIPS at these technical problems is not going to solve them.
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Luddite.
... how I've missed you.
You heard me. You're just a slightly more up to date version of the folks who speak out against ATM machines, electro-magnetic radiation from home appliances, and the Evil Internet, yet accept technologies like refrigeration and internal combustion engines, because we've had that technology "forever".
Eh? Technology has been in most respects a positive driving force in our society for the last five hundred years or so. And whilst it has had a lot of negative side effects, these are due to us using technology excessively or before we understood the consequences. Tecnology in itself has the potential to offer us exciting new vistas, and is the only way we'll ever survive beyond the lifespan of the Sun.
Why is it so common to predict the end of the world (what do you think Escatology is about?) based on a pretty graph that shows steadily increasing technology?
I never said the world was going to end.
How do you define this "Humanity" that you propose we are abandoning in favor of technology? How, exactly, are we going to go about abandoning it?
Read the post replying to the post above yours. Humanity is defined by what we can and can't do, and these parameters are what shape our consciouss and unconsciouss minds in the way we call "humanity". By altering these parameters we alter how we think, and thus become something other than human.
What humanity is doesn't change, and hasn't changed. We are still the same race, with the same problems, the same hopes, and the same daily social trials as humanity had one thousand years ago.
I agree, but we've never had the chance to alter the way we think before. It's an entirely new situation in our history.
I mean, what do you expect?
That we continue to advance without trying to throw away that which we are and that which has gotten us this far? Not too much to ask IMHO.
Extropy is my favorite joke ideology. People who coin the name of their ideology because it "sounds good, kinda like the opposite of entropy, but not really" instead of its literal meaning are rather hard to take seriously.
ex- : out of; away from.
-tropy : indicates condition of turning.
So, "Away-turning", not as the self-named extropians claim, "the extent of a system's intelligence, information, order, vitality, and capacity for improvement".
Steven E. Ehrbar
When the revolution comes - who will be the first against the wall?
As horrid as it sounds, what future do you think we are really working towards?
Star Trek? I'd say ideallistically yes. People make money being merchants and such in that future, but I've never seen anyone ever pay for something, there's no indication that a captain or an ensign earns a salary or goes to the bank. Its communistic at best, but probably unreallistic as we can't even get along for five minutes with ourselves - let alone our neighbors.
Car Wars? Well, road rage is high enough - and there was that stint in the 80's where guns were being fired on the California highway system.
Blade Runner/Cyberpunk? Dark dismal and cold - run by mega corps... sounds more realistic as the MPAA and other big companies are (at least) beginning to run the government.
The Running Man? Heck, we'll watch Survivor (a piss poor example of surviving - let them kill and eat whatever they want, including eachother. Don't tell them how long they'll be stuck there. Loose them ONLY when they are dead, eaten, or in a medical emrgency. Last man standing sort of thing -that is survival... they are "living uncomfortably" - and yes, I'd put my money where my mouth is on that one.) anyways... back to the Running Man... We had the short lived American Gladiators, Roller Jam is getting big - and Professional Wrestling (right up there with extreeme violence) is huge now. America eats up voilence... this is becoming a viable form of entertainment.
Do you want to talk about pattent laws or the MPAA or the DMCA and their effect as to outlawing technology? The recent suck.com article about geeks not understanding politics and law? We're screwed.
We still have race riots (Rodney King), we have gone to war once over oil (Gulf War) - we can't get along. As Midnight Oil sang "The rich get richer and the poor get the picture."
Now anyone here wants to even propose that nannite or cybernetic technology is a going to be a good thing? Folks - its only a good thing if we are ourselves as the whole human race are good. We're not. Period. At best we'll ruin ourselves, at worst - we kill everybody.
The revolution is here folks...on a local scale it looks small, on a global scale - we're there - and we're all against the wall.
You say you want a revolution?
As enamoured as we all are with the state and progress of modern computing I think we need to take a step back and really examine the underpinnings of our beliefs about computers and the very paradigm of computing that has pervaded so much of our cultural and scientific thinking over the last few decades. This article raises some excellent points about the things that many of us hold to be self-evident, even when we don't conscioussly think about them in these terms, and these beliefs affect the way we think and act in everyday life.
The "eschatological cataclysm" that Lanier talks about occurring in the near future is truly a bleak picture for mankind as a whole, and yet it is one that I see talked about as if it were inevitable and a good thing. Just because we like computers are we really ready to throw away our humanity for a set of perceived benefits? We are what we are, and any gross changes in the state of our existance cannot help but fundamentally alter who we, as a species, are. There is no "intangible transition" between what we are and what we will be.
I personally am rather fond of the current modality of human existance, and I see anyone that believes in or even worse desires such a dramatic and unnecessary change as being at best a foolish idealist and at worst someone unable to accept the reality of their own existance. What other reasons can there be for what amounts to turning yourself into some(one|thing) else? No combination of bio/nano/computing technology is ever going to be me for the simple reason that it will have different boundaries from me, and our idea of self is shaped from these boundaries.
It's a scary prospect for the future, one in which people will willingly rush wholesale into abandoning their humanity for the promise of an artificial dream. I truly hope that I won't be around to see the fragmentation and then the end of humanity's promise.
...that this guy thinks we're aliready computers and can easily scan 4-point text on a 21 inch monitor, and still comprehent what we're reading...
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
OOh, -1 penalty for not mentioning "The Well" or "Abbie Hoffman". C'mon, there's about 8 words here I have never seen before. Does ANYBDOY understand this? If so, please post a translation.
....
Stefan Jones writes: "VR pioneer Jaron Lanier has written "Half a Manifesto" -- a long and considered rant taking on notions favored by Extropians, Singularity fans and others -- on the exclusive salon for long-hairs, 'Edge.' Lanier
I think the author has a point. Computers are getting faster exponentially but not being improved (exponentially) in exception handling. For instance, one would like to like together all elements everyone knows about you to build every single web page you view. That way the page wouldn't waste your time with trivialities you aren't interested in, unless it was necessary to the page's format.
But his thesis seems to be: programming is very hard, getting harder, and evolves slowly. Even faster and faster computers (assuming they can be built) can't do the job well enough. I couldn't agree more.
Still, whatever campy sci-fi future we're heading to, I'll bet it will eerily resemble the present. After all, the present is the future of the past.
And people are sh*t's way of making more sh*t.
And we're talking about a planet of help desks.
-Ben
Does anyone think that Lanier and the luminaries on the edge may have overlooked the innate factor that it is simpler to destroy than create? While nanotech is not at a self-replicating, harvesting level, if that is the ultimate evolution, not molecular assembly, is that not the real thread Bill Joy asserts?
If a small robot of some variation could be imparted a simple capability to create itself from sugars and other simple biological molecules, and rapidly reproduce, why is the concern of their "perception" or "experience" an issue? Like a plague, this scenario would be devastating and quick, and the vector would not know of its actions any more than a viral strain.
There is a middle ground between Lanier's socialist optimism and eliteism, and Bill Joy's doom-inducing Moore's Law extrapolation. The next generation of the computer viruses becoming physical is the hybrid.
Lanier talks of brittle technology. It is that brittleness that engenders widespread rapid failures induced by viruses. If a small mech-virus, for lack of a more compact moniker, were to be crafted that didn't replicate, but would propogate it's effects along a power grid, by diverting energy into itself as quickly as possible to power the capability to continue to do that, would that not have potential for extreme effects on our society? Possibly, but expand that into any sort of hybrid where the initial vector may be mechanical, and the final is digital, and now many of our barriers drop.
The ideas are not fully developed, but driving to one extreme or the other intellectually moves us in a direction akin to the total cybernetic movement Lanier refutes. We are not exploring the full causal spectrum of the ideas we present.
Especially on Slashdot, which was founded on ideas and discussions. How odd.
I think a lot of flag-wavers for memetics, evolutionary psychology, etc. have fallen into the same trap. It's easy to construct a Just So Story to link your pet idea with the latest scientific trend, and then you can plaster your story all over the Internet and accuse doubters of being trapped by outmoded ways of thinking. It's much harder to do your homework, collect evidence that supports your theory or refutes alternatives, and then convince skeptical and educated peers.
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You hit it right on the head: what started 500 years ago is only shifting gears, right into our collective consciousness.
There are more people on the planet today than EVER before, and, correspondingly, more people live in abject misery than ever before. The underlying racism of this--these poor unfortunates just don't know what's right for them; let US decide what is best--is not even hidden from public airing in the West's so-called "intelligensia". They click their tongues at the backward nature of these people, if only THEY had computers, cell phones, ad nauseum, they would be better off, they would be like US. Rarely over the last 500 years has the question been raised that maybe THEY know what's best for them; no, you have to abide by the Kissinger Rational for command and control.
This elitism is now pervasive in this realm, where "progressivists" justify every little "advance" as the means to godhood and every soul that resists their proclamations as Luddite. The fact that many of us have lived without these modern conveniences--and continue to do so in some "backward" places--is merely a statistical anomaly that will be quickly be corrected once these toys are ubiquitous.
Humans are only more comfortable today than they were 200 years ago, not happier. Just look at all this "extreme sports" crap to see how empty modern life is, to see how desperate people are--even in this, the history's most powerful, most advanced hegemon--for any sensation that will convince them that they are truly alive and not some sleepwalking zombie.
I've lost faith in technology's ability to lift us up. If it cannot make us happier, perhaps we should look elsewhere for the Next Revolution.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, The Histories
Sounds like Jaron saw the attention that Bill Joy got with his article last spring predicting techno-apocalypse, and wanted some for himself. Forecasting the next depression/World War/Judgement Day is often a good way to get some subset of people to pay attention to you. Funny how with all those predictions of doom over the centuries, we're still here.
Imitation may be a form of flattery, but it's not terribly creative.
Why do people project more into technological innovation than may be there?
(1) $$$$$ Money attracts hype. People call themselves prophets. Not all that different than new age religion, health fanatics, etc.
(2) Generational rebelliousness: young guys understand tech and old farts don't. Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah.
(3) Religious instinct: people search for the ultimate beyond themselves. The old religions are dead. Technology has the answer.
a) the greatest thing on earth, or conversely
b) the greatest blight on the earth
It usually means they're either very, very naive or they're selling something.
Natham
If you don't have anything nice to say, say it often.
- Ed the Sock
Extropians: Randists, only
more so.
Singularity: Explained here.
Read all of that and digest. It's fun.
I am elated to finally find a paper that so clearly elucidates my position and observations. I am also saddened to realise that people who would benefit the most from it are also the least likely to read it and understand it.
Item 3 in particular hit home; I have had the exact same conversation and thought process ("Perhaps the person I'm talking with doesn't have a subjective experience?"), for the last five years. The last time I had it was a few days ago while talking with a fellow engineer here at LithTech.
Subjective experience is not an easy problem; in fact, it is a very hard problem, but there is something in too many scientist's minds that makes them want to treat the subject as a superstitious topic, and treat those who find subjective experience difficult to fit within a computational framework as religious or spiritual zealots. Larson has correctly identified the currently popular model of the world, "Cybernetic Totalism."
By the way; Not understanding his paper is not something to be proud of. Ignorance about *anything* is not something to be proud of. Use a dictionary or a search engine, whatever it takes, and understand these words.
I knew my parents were Martians! I knew it!!!!
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
Our boundaries are expanding all the time. Ability to go really fast. Ability to fly. Ability to see and measure distant stars. Ability to leave the earth. Ability to sort through an entire library of information in a second. Ability to send a message at light speed to the other side of the world. Ability to karma whore from thousands of people all over the globe.
These are all external boundaries - things we can do or things we can manipulate. None of them are boundaries in the fundamental structure of our mind, which is a boundary of a wholly new kind. People think in pretty much the same way today as they did when the Ice Age finished, and yet we're coming up to a point where it may be possible to alter this constant.
But, unless you give a strong argument as to why we should force our boundaries to remain static, I don't know why it would be bad to change them arbitrarily.
But then we won't be human any more. We are defined by both our capabilities and our limitations, and any attempt at altering the mechanisms of our conscioussness is invarably going to alter the very nature of who we are and how we think.
Will this be for the better? I doubt it, I think that it will merely be different. But the point is, it won't be human in a very real way. And what's the point of improving yourself if you end up alone and apart from all you knew and believed in?