Excellent. That's exactly the message I wanted you to receive.You should be bothered by it, just like I was when durrr asserted without justification the argument I quoted. My argument is the minimum rebuttal needed to deflate that assertion. It's not convincing or substantial because it doesn't need to be.
The reason I keep saying these things (and most likely will continue to say them) is because so frequently, we project our hopes and beliefs without even minimum justification for them. I understand why and I occasionally get caught doing it as well, but wishful thinking is harmful thinking.
I think in the long run, AI will be one of the most challenging and dangerous things we ever do. It also has the potential for being one of the most noble things we ever do.
Perhaps, this is just a Western bias, but I think it's not enough that I have a place in humanity, but that I should strive to improve myself as I see fit even to the moment of my death - not just for my own benefit but for those around me. I believe AI could be a crucial stepping stone to new ways for humanity to improve itself.
Do the world a favour: kill yourself now. Get it over with. No need to wait for the mythical AI. While you're at it, kill all your offspring. You wouldn't want them to suffer the future of your diseased mind, would you?
How about instead of being a dumbshit, you read what I wrote and think a bit? I didn't say that AI would be bad, I merely deflated some ridiculous expectations. For example, it's ridiculous to assume that AI won't have certain broad motivations because those motivations have human cooties.
Consider our origins. After all, we are descended from a billion or more year sea of animals whose highest thought, for the ones who could think, was getting the next meal or breeding. To go from that to an animal capable of making something smarter than itself and speculating on what that smarter thing will be like, is astounding and indicates a fundamental change in our thought and behavior beyond our less developed ancestors. We aren't just smart animals - something else is going on.
That intellectual chasm between what we were and are leads me to believe that a lot of high level human behavior, thought, and motivation which we consider "anthropogenic" is rather intelligence, sentient, or sapient based. And we should expect to see some manifestation of many of these behaviors, thoughts, and motivations in our AIs, minus the human cooties, of course.
It's a non sequitor - we're talking about hypotheticals which feature entirely different physical structures, or similar physical structures composed of physically distinct sets of atoms, not single spatiotemporally connected sets of atoms. We are talking about instance identity (the "same" mind), not categorization.
Of course, it's not a non sequitur. We already know that the human brain changes substantially and structurally over time (and that we can change it further by meddling). Similarly, experiences and connections with other people radically change the human mind. Meanwhile there is considerable flow of atoms in and out of the brain just due to normal biological processes. I believe the mind and brain are just an example of the Ship of Theseus (a mythical ship which was supposedly kept sea-worthy over many centuries by replacing it piece by piece so that at some point, it no longer had any piece of the original ship in it).
The brain and mind changes, hence, it is relevant, especially in a thread on humanity's future capabilities in AI on how far we can push that ability to change in order to improve the current versions of intelligence.
Also, it's worth noting that if one is to speculate about future human or AI capabilities or traits, it is very natural and useful to speak of hypothetical situations, not because they are likely to occur, but because they illuminate possible general concepts, outcomes, or problems. Sure, this particular hypothetical might be unlikely to occur, but I believe sooner or later we will be speaking of actual transformations of the human brain and mind rather than hypothetical ones. And I believe such transforms may become quite radical. So it is interesting to consider just how much can you change the brain without changing the mind it implements or whatever.
Moving on, "instance identity" is a categorization by you. In fact, categorization is by definition a coarse identification which when applied to instances or representations of some abstract thing becomes by definition an instance identity. Sure, normally, we think of identity as the minimum unit of distinguishability. But we can distinguish bodies, brains, and minds even over the course of minutes. By reading this post, you have a different brain and mind than you did before you read the post (should I apologize for that?).
You are begging the question, by simply assuming that human mental processes are exactly representable in entirely different physical structures.
Which is not a serious problem here. After all, we already have a working instance of human mental processes, the human brain with no obvious connection to what materials the underlying machinery is composed of. It's like claiming that a car won't drive, if we make it out of aluminum instead of out of steel or the wheels of wood not rubber. Sure, if we have a ridiculous amount of failed effort put into the problem of changing the structure of the brain and mind at some very distant future date, then maybe you're right. But I don't think that will happen (especially given how easy it is to change the human mind now with education and experience).
I think rather the real difficulty will be that the human body, due to its evolved nature, is extremely difficult to reverse engineer and a key direction of effort will be refactoring of the structure of the body and mind on somewhat more manageable directions.
Morality cannot be defined as a list of do's and dont's that are mechanically obeyed precisely because it has a myriad of "edge cases" that require human interpretation.
Then why do you do that for the Three Laws example? Note that Asimov got around that problem by having the robots and their makers interpret those edge cases and the whole rules situation getting more flexible over time. It's also worth noting that the Three Laws never resulted in a grave situation for humanity (rather considerable effort had to be undertaken to circumvent those rules in order to generate most of the existential threats posed by robots) The rules worked for most of the large scale problems that they were partially intended to address.
The worst problem implied to be directly attached to the Three Laws was the notable absence of intelligent alien species. I believe there was implied at several points in the later books Asimov wrote, that extremely advanced robots when they had decided to leave humanity to its own devices had some very exotic capabilities to retroactively and non-violently shape the past of the galaxy so that intelligent alien rivals never evolved. The reason was rather simple. Those potential alien species would not have been recognized as human and hence, would not have the protections of the Three Laws applied to them. And any such intelligence would be deemed a serious long term threat by the robots.
Also notice that when the zeroth law was added it just made matters worse because more laws allow for more contradictions, loopholes, and paradoxes, exactly like the evolved tax code of any nation you care to name.
The zeroth law wasn't added, it was implied by the other three laws. And as I recalled, it actually simplified the situation since it allowed the robots to act to reduce the long term harm caused by their interactions with humanity.
Ultimately, the human-robot relationship was deemed a failure by the robots, not because of some failure of the Three Laws or their application, but rather because the prevalence of robots (and having them do everything) was harmful to humanity in the long run. In that case, the Three Laws provided impetus for robots to stop the harm they were causing to humans.
The treachery of science fiction is that things wouldn't necessarily go that way. You are typically presented with a contrived situation which may be not only impractical, but physically impossible to set up in real life. We don't know if it really would be possible to create rules such as the Three Laws which are that difficult to circumvent and yet flexible enough to last something like ten to twenty thousand years.
Ok, how is it like that? Remember the original concern was about "not doing anything" about the environment. I pointed out several ways that we were doing a lot about the environment contrary to the assumptions of the original post.
I think it's more like having a thousand neighbors living in a small building next to you and complaining that they aren't "doing anything" about the noise they make. Those people could go to incredible lengths to minimize noise and still be loud enough to bug you just because, well, there's a thousand people living right next door.
Bit of a long time for the "great men" to be "on strike" isn't it?
Too long, but it did happen in the end.
Since it's set in the USA, IMHO, that book is a kick in the face for both democracy and capitalism. Somehow American society is so useless in Rand's eyes that only a small nobility can keep it going. That is the exact opposite of the reality of the wide road to prosperity in the 1940s and 50s when she wrote the book.
Or you could choose not to perceive it that way. Then it's not. It's quite clear that her "nobility" were merely people who were good at making or trading things, and who took the initiative to do so. And unlike actual nobility, ties of blood or marriage did not make someone a member of this supposed elite (for example, in Atlas Shrugged two of the significant antagonists of the book were a wife and a brother of the two main protagonists).
Anyway, I think it's poison preying on the young and naive for a wide range of reasons and I've probably vented enough on that. I accept that you have a different view and that you probably do not see it as a deliberate kick in the face to a society that was built by people that actually did something instead of sitting on a throne issuing orders.
Well, you are right in that I don't see it as a deliberate kick in the face to the said society. Instead, I see it as an homage to those very people and a pertinent warning to the present.
But this seems to rest on an assertion that it would be the same mind.
Which doesn't strike me as a serious problem. After all, there are many other problems you run into when you try that game, such as whether a mind is the "same" ten minutes later or when you change characteristics of the associated brain (such as damaging it or adding a bit of electronics). Eventually, you either end up in some philosophical dead end or you have to admit that a mind is a perdurant construct (crudely, a thing which can change over time to some degree without changing its categorization) which is moderately independent of how the associated brain is constituted and structured (the brain has to work, after all, in order for there to be a mind). Then we move on.
It is also possible that one's mental processes can by definition not be preserved in a silicon-based machine, so long as direct simulation is excluded.
No, because definition by definition does not mean that. And who knows, maybe it's impossible for me to sleep suspended from my ankles. After all, I haven't tried that either.
But where do these come from? I submit that each one of these is only suggested here because we already have these motivations.
So we have a demonstration that intelligence can have these motivations. Since AI is not a category determined by motivation, then it is reasonable to expect that AI can overlap with the category of intelligences that have such motivations.
we're a biological vessel for intelligence
I consider this antimaterialist.
I wasn't aware that saying something is "antimaterialist", especially when it's not, was somehow an argument that anyone would take seriously. In this case, one could imagine a transformation from biological entity to say, strictly mechanical one where the intelligence remains intact. Then the model of body (and also, the organ of the brain) as vessel for mind is demonstrated by actually being able to move the mind to a new and demonstrably different body.
Say, an alien transforms you to a silicon-based machine while preserving your mental processes and having the morphology of the new form close enough to a human body that it feels pretty much the same.
Sure, we can come with a "materialist" description that operates in the way that you imply, but the point here is that this description is not unique.
You're assuming that we programmed it to have a self-preservation instinct, desire to be loved, reproduce, and all that other BS evolution has saddled us with.
The earlier poster makes no such assumption.
If it's programmed to be fat and happy because it's being fed a lot of data from humans to do interesting calculations, and it's dependent on humans for it's continued access to the electrical grid, then the proper analogy isn't an insect we actively try to kill because it's eating all our food (like ants), but an insect we intentionally foster because we like what they do (say, the ladybug) even if it ever goes evil.
"IF". If on the other hand, it is programmed to have motivations that turn out to be a problem, then the outcome can be different. There's also the matter of the AI developing its own motivations.
Hell if you do the programming right it will help design it's replacement and then turn itself off as obsolete.
And doing the programming right is pretty damn easy, right?
Once the AI gets the win, there is no second round.
Unless, of course, it doesn't turn out that way. There are several problems with the assertion. First, it is unlikely that there will be a single "the AI". Second, there's no reason humanity can't upgrade itself to become AIs as well. Third, the laws of physics don't change just because there is AI. Among other things, it does mean that humanity can continue to provide for itself using the tools that have worked so far. After all, ants didn't go away just because vastly smarter intelligences came about.
but they are not getting "more vulnerable" unless your management is A) not willing to spend the reasonable cost for appropriate security controls, or B) doesn't listen to their IT security staff when those systems start raising warning flags, or C) fails to hire competent security personnel in the first place.
By the time we can actually build a universally superhuman AI that could form willful malicious intent we'll be so immersed in AI and so used to build, deal with and monitor AI that it will be a mostly forgotten nonissue.
What about the existential risk of not doing anything about the environment?
We should should worry about overpopulation from pinhead-dancing angels too. I find it interesting how people can ignore the vast amount of activity that humanity does about the environment. Humanity has yet to show even a slowing down in doing anything about the environment. There's vast areas of the world put under conservancy, pollution controls in most of the world, and yet we're supposedly doing nothing about the environment?
It is unclear to me why an AI living like a parasite on the information fed to it by humans and the fact humans are living will decide suddenly it can benefit from killing all of us.
Because it can do better than "living like a parasite on the information fed to it by humans". It's kind of like saying that you should be happy with an empty prison cell where you can actually stretch your legs out and you get a whole bowl of gruel every day! Who wouldn't love to have that?
It's her ignorance of the USA, especially functioning capitalism and a functioning state with elected officials where she has such breathtaking ignorance.
I glanced at her biography and saw that not only had she lived in the US for many decades, but she had also worked for a campaign. It appears to me that part of her wit and rhetorical ability was sharpened in the very sort of functioning democracy that you claim she was ignorant of.
Her aristocratic manifesto was taken seriously be far too many people who take it far more seriously than a shallow SF book should be.
So what? I hope you have actual arrows in that rhetorical quiver.
If you pay attention you'll notice that they have ALL been that from George Washington onwards.
No, I don't see that at all and really that is an absurd claim to make about such an ideologically varied group. For example, we have US Presidents, Coolidge, Eisenhower and Reagan. None of them share the radical viewpoint of Ayn Rand, but they do have share some common ground such as a philosophical emphasis on individuality and independence over collective action.
Not critical enough that such a delay achieved anything other than sending a message.
Better than anything you or I have done.
I see the filibuster as a flaw in democracy
Why a flaw? Just because it was used some years back to block stuff you like? I consider that sort of thing a feature not a flaw. Legislative bodies aren't supposed to be a instantly responsive control system. They don't nor should be instantly reacting to any mood we happen to be in.
Look at all the silly media frenzies that happen each day in the US. Do you really want many of those to end up in law just because someone could get bills passed during the peak of the hysteria? Filibusters are one of the many tools out there to make sure crazy stuff of the moment doesn't turn into laws that last decades or centuries.
That's exactly how the Patriot Act passed in the first place. Do we really want more law like it? Somehow I doubt it.
If you support a strong EU (which is a necessary counterweight to the aggressiveness of Russia and the instability of the Middle East), then the UK should be in.
Unless you don't.
I don't. I have endured silly ISO business standard rituals because of crazy EU protectionists. The whole EU affair has failed to make sense for the past twenty years. You achieved the free trade end game and then... kept going? WTF. Nobody really cares about most of the stuff that the EU does these days aside from the narrow interest groups that benefit from it.
European countries already have figured out how to wipe their asses. Nobody needs another, very thick layer of nannies on top of what's already there and already working well enough.
And I greatly despise the "That Hideous Strength" style of embrace and extend tyranny that the EU engages in (that is, bribing elected politicians to betray their country's interests via cushy jobs with the resulting EU bureaucracy). As a result, I'm rooting for the whole thing to end in ignominy. So far so good.
You know, it would be nice if we all had societies and systems that were worthy of respect by everyone else. I feel that we're collectively letting ourselves down though things are better than what they've been in the past. Maybe as we did before, something better will come of it eventually.
I just can't see why so many people think of her in an American context when she knew fuck-all about the west.
America is not just the West. After all, there's a lot of people in America who know a lot about America, but very little about the rest of the West. If you look at Atlas Shrugged, it's quite clear that everything is deliberately vague beyond the borders of the US, which might be her ignorance of Europe and South America or that she was writing for a mostly US audience (who would not be familiar with those places either).
But even granting that, she had lived in the US for over a decade before the publication of Anthem, her first libertarian-style fiction and over three decades by the time of the publication of Atlas Shrugged.
If Stalin had parachuted a writer into the USA with instructions on writing something to undermine democracy it wouldn't have been as effective as the damage that Rand did with her rants about anything that wasn't aristocracy.
And I'm sure, if I had parachuted into Mother Russia with instructions to undermine the regime with my knowledge of orgami, that would have been super-effective too.
It's "twilight" for people who think they were born to rule.
You might find this hard to believe, but people who think they're born to rule, don't need a book to justify their world view. Rand was a bit crazy, particularly in her later years, but it's ridiculous to assert she was undermining democracy with words (actually it would be ridiculous to assert that she was even trying to - she does have a long pro-democracy history, let us note). It is impossible to do that just as it would be impossible to overwhelmhe USSR with a few small bits of folded paper.
What I believe happened here and why Rand was so influential was because she was a voice for groups and ideas which had long been neglected and derided. I speak not just of the imaginary people who supposedly thought they were born to rule, but somehow couldn't avail themselves of the multitude of utopian, authoritarian belief systems tailored to them, but also the people who grew tired of the ever increasing dysfunctionality, demands, and hypocrisy placed on them by society and authority.
And seriously, how is Rand supposed to have undermined democracy anyway? I note that we in the US currently have a president who is the antithesis of anything Rand believed in, who is casually slipping the US into another Vietnam-style war in Iraq, created the most destructive social program (the Obamacare thing) in forty years, has a variety of 0-9 losses at the Supreme Court from breathtakingly irrational, unconstitutional actions and arguments (typical looter logic in Atlas Shrug but without the compliant judicial branch to make it work), and a variety of creeping acts of tyranny.
Meanwhile we have a senator, named after Ayn Rand herself, who just opposed renewal of the Patriot Act, which is probably the single biggest step toward US tyranny in the last half century, by filibustering it at a crucial period prior to its renewal.
I suspect you might not have a clue what undermining a democracy entails. It's not words that undermine a democracy, but the crushing of freedom to act, to speak, to think, which undermines democracy.
Slashdot Mirror
With respect didn't you notice THE MAIN CHARACTER.
Whose BROTHER by birth was on the other side.
Excellent. That's exactly the message I wanted you to receive.You should be bothered by it, just like I was when durrr asserted without justification the argument I quoted. My argument is the minimum rebuttal needed to deflate that assertion. It's not convincing or substantial because it doesn't need to be.
The reason I keep saying these things (and most likely will continue to say them) is because so frequently, we project our hopes and beliefs without even minimum justification for them. I understand why and I occasionally get caught doing it as well, but wishful thinking is harmful thinking.
I think in the long run, AI will be one of the most challenging and dangerous things we ever do. It also has the potential for being one of the most noble things we ever do.
Perhaps, this is just a Western bias, but I think it's not enough that I have a place in humanity, but that I should strive to improve myself as I see fit even to the moment of my death - not just for my own benefit but for those around me. I believe AI could be a crucial stepping stone to new ways for humanity to improve itself.
Do the world a favour: kill yourself now. Get it over with. No need to wait for the mythical AI. While you're at it, kill all your offspring. You wouldn't want them to suffer the future of your diseased mind, would you?
How about instead of being a dumbshit, you read what I wrote and think a bit? I didn't say that AI would be bad, I merely deflated some ridiculous expectations. For example, it's ridiculous to assume that AI won't have certain broad motivations because those motivations have human cooties.
Consider our origins. After all, we are descended from a billion or more year sea of animals whose highest thought, for the ones who could think, was getting the next meal or breeding. To go from that to an animal capable of making something smarter than itself and speculating on what that smarter thing will be like, is astounding and indicates a fundamental change in our thought and behavior beyond our less developed ancestors. We aren't just smart animals - something else is going on.
That intellectual chasm between what we were and are leads me to believe that a lot of high level human behavior, thought, and motivation which we consider "anthropogenic" is rather intelligence, sentient, or sapient based. And we should expect to see some manifestation of many of these behaviors, thoughts, and motivations in our AIs, minus the human cooties, of course.
It's a non sequitor - we're talking about hypotheticals which feature entirely different physical structures, or similar physical structures composed of physically distinct sets of atoms, not single spatiotemporally connected sets of atoms. We are talking about instance identity (the "same" mind), not categorization.
Of course, it's not a non sequitur. We already know that the human brain changes substantially and structurally over time (and that we can change it further by meddling). Similarly, experiences and connections with other people radically change the human mind. Meanwhile there is considerable flow of atoms in and out of the brain just due to normal biological processes. I believe the mind and brain are just an example of the Ship of Theseus (a mythical ship which was supposedly kept sea-worthy over many centuries by replacing it piece by piece so that at some point, it no longer had any piece of the original ship in it).
The brain and mind changes, hence, it is relevant, especially in a thread on humanity's future capabilities in AI on how far we can push that ability to change in order to improve the current versions of intelligence.
Also, it's worth noting that if one is to speculate about future human or AI capabilities or traits, it is very natural and useful to speak of hypothetical situations, not because they are likely to occur, but because they illuminate possible general concepts, outcomes, or problems. Sure, this particular hypothetical might be unlikely to occur, but I believe sooner or later we will be speaking of actual transformations of the human brain and mind rather than hypothetical ones. And I believe such transforms may become quite radical. So it is interesting to consider just how much can you change the brain without changing the mind it implements or whatever.
Moving on, "instance identity" is a categorization by you. In fact, categorization is by definition a coarse identification which when applied to instances or representations of some abstract thing becomes by definition an instance identity. Sure, normally, we think of identity as the minimum unit of distinguishability. But we can distinguish bodies, brains, and minds even over the course of minutes. By reading this post, you have a different brain and mind than you did before you read the post (should I apologize for that?).
You are begging the question, by simply assuming that human mental processes are exactly representable in entirely different physical structures.
Which is not a serious problem here. After all, we already have a working instance of human mental processes, the human brain with no obvious connection to what materials the underlying machinery is composed of. It's like claiming that a car won't drive, if we make it out of aluminum instead of out of steel or the wheels of wood not rubber. Sure, if we have a ridiculous amount of failed effort put into the problem of changing the structure of the brain and mind at some very distant future date, then maybe you're right. But I don't think that will happen (especially given how easy it is to change the human mind now with education and experience).
I think rather the real difficulty will be that the human body, due to its evolved nature, is extremely difficult to reverse engineer and a key direction of effort will be refactoring of the structure of the body and mind on somewhat more manageable directions.
Morality cannot be defined as a list of do's and dont's that are mechanically obeyed precisely because it has a myriad of "edge cases" that require human interpretation.
Then why do you do that for the Three Laws example? Note that Asimov got around that problem by having the robots and their makers interpret those edge cases and the whole rules situation getting more flexible over time. It's also worth noting that the Three Laws never resulted in a grave situation for humanity (rather considerable effort had to be undertaken to circumvent those rules in order to generate most of the existential threats posed by robots) The rules worked for most of the large scale problems that they were partially intended to address.
The worst problem implied to be directly attached to the Three Laws was the notable absence of intelligent alien species. I believe there was implied at several points in the later books Asimov wrote, that extremely advanced robots when they had decided to leave humanity to its own devices had some very exotic capabilities to retroactively and non-violently shape the past of the galaxy so that intelligent alien rivals never evolved. The reason was rather simple. Those potential alien species would not have been recognized as human and hence, would not have the protections of the Three Laws applied to them. And any such intelligence would be deemed a serious long term threat by the robots.
Also notice that when the zeroth law was added it just made matters worse because more laws allow for more contradictions, loopholes, and paradoxes, exactly like the evolved tax code of any nation you care to name.
The zeroth law wasn't added, it was implied by the other three laws. And as I recalled, it actually simplified the situation since it allowed the robots to act to reduce the long term harm caused by their interactions with humanity.
Ultimately, the human-robot relationship was deemed a failure by the robots, not because of some failure of the Three Laws or their application, but rather because the prevalence of robots (and having them do everything) was harmful to humanity in the long run. In that case, the Three Laws provided impetus for robots to stop the harm they were causing to humans.
The treachery of science fiction is that things wouldn't necessarily go that way. You are typically presented with a contrived situation which may be not only impractical, but physically impossible to set up in real life. We don't know if it really would be possible to create rules such as the Three Laws which are that difficult to circumvent and yet flexible enough to last something like ten to twenty thousand years.
Asimov's three laws are a metaphor that says you can't codify morality
Except, he did just that and it mostly worked except for the edge cases he wrote about.
Ok, how is it like that? Remember the original concern was about "not doing anything" about the environment. I pointed out several ways that we were doing a lot about the environment contrary to the assumptions of the original post.
I think it's more like having a thousand neighbors living in a small building next to you and complaining that they aren't "doing anything" about the noise they make. Those people could go to incredible lengths to minimize noise and still be loud enough to bug you just because, well, there's a thousand people living right next door.
Bit of a long time for the "great men" to be "on strike" isn't it?
Too long, but it did happen in the end.
Since it's set in the USA, IMHO, that book is a kick in the face for both democracy and capitalism. Somehow American society is so useless in Rand's eyes that only a small nobility can keep it going. That is the exact opposite of the reality of the wide road to prosperity in the 1940s and 50s when she wrote the book.
Or you could choose not to perceive it that way. Then it's not. It's quite clear that her "nobility" were merely people who were good at making or trading things, and who took the initiative to do so. And unlike actual nobility, ties of blood or marriage did not make someone a member of this supposed elite (for example, in Atlas Shrugged two of the significant antagonists of the book were a wife and a brother of the two main protagonists).
Anyway, I think it's poison preying on the young and naive for a wide range of reasons and I've probably vented enough on that. I accept that you have a different view and that you probably do not see it as a deliberate kick in the face to a society that was built by people that actually did something instead of sitting on a throne issuing orders.
Well, you are right in that I don't see it as a deliberate kick in the face to the said society. Instead, I see it as an homage to those very people and a pertinent warning to the present.
But this seems to rest on an assertion that it would be the same mind.
Which doesn't strike me as a serious problem. After all, there are many other problems you run into when you try that game, such as whether a mind is the "same" ten minutes later or when you change characteristics of the associated brain (such as damaging it or adding a bit of electronics). Eventually, you either end up in some philosophical dead end or you have to admit that a mind is a perdurant construct (crudely, a thing which can change over time to some degree without changing its categorization) which is moderately independent of how the associated brain is constituted and structured (the brain has to work, after all, in order for there to be a mind). Then we move on.
It is also possible that one's mental processes can by definition not be preserved in a silicon-based machine, so long as direct simulation is excluded.
No, because definition by definition does not mean that. And who knows, maybe it's impossible for me to sleep suspended from my ankles. After all, I haven't tried that either.
The greatest 'existential catastrophe' that might be unleashed on humanity might be already have been unleashed by humanity.
Of course, it has been unleashed. You can't cease to exist, if you didn't exist in the first place.
But where do these come from? I submit that each one of these is only suggested here because we already have these motivations.
So we have a demonstration that intelligence can have these motivations. Since AI is not a category determined by motivation, then it is reasonable to expect that AI can overlap with the category of intelligences that have such motivations.
we're a biological vessel for intelligence
I consider this antimaterialist.
I wasn't aware that saying something is "antimaterialist", especially when it's not, was somehow an argument that anyone would take seriously. In this case, one could imagine a transformation from biological entity to say, strictly mechanical one where the intelligence remains intact. Then the model of body (and also, the organ of the brain) as vessel for mind is demonstrated by actually being able to move the mind to a new and demonstrably different body.
Say, an alien transforms you to a silicon-based machine while preserving your mental processes and having the morphology of the new form close enough to a human body that it feels pretty much the same.
Sure, we can come with a "materialist" description that operates in the way that you imply, but the point here is that this description is not unique.
You're assuming that we programmed it to have a self-preservation instinct, desire to be loved, reproduce, and all that other BS evolution has saddled us with.
The earlier poster makes no such assumption.
If it's programmed to be fat and happy because it's being fed a lot of data from humans to do interesting calculations, and it's dependent on humans for it's continued access to the electrical grid, then the proper analogy isn't an insect we actively try to kill because it's eating all our food (like ants), but an insect we intentionally foster because we like what they do (say, the ladybug) even if it ever goes evil.
"IF". If on the other hand, it is programmed to have motivations that turn out to be a problem, then the outcome can be different. There's also the matter of the AI developing its own motivations.
Hell if you do the programming right it will help design it's replacement and then turn itself off as obsolete.
And doing the programming right is pretty damn easy, right?
Once the AI gets the win, there is no second round.
Unless, of course, it doesn't turn out that way. There are several problems with the assertion. First, it is unlikely that there will be a single "the AI". Second, there's no reason humanity can't upgrade itself to become AIs as well. Third, the laws of physics don't change just because there is AI. Among other things, it does mean that humanity can continue to provide for itself using the tools that have worked so far. After all, ants didn't go away just because vastly smarter intelligences came about.
but they are not getting "more vulnerable" unless your management is A) not willing to spend the reasonable cost for appropriate security controls, or B) doesn't listen to their IT security staff when those systems start raising warning flags, or C) fails to hire competent security personnel in the first place.
Which happened.
By the time we can actually build a universally superhuman AI that could form willful malicious intent we'll be so immersed in AI and so used to build, deal with and monitor AI that it will be a mostly forgotten nonissue.
Unless, of course, that isn't true.
What about the existential risk of not doing anything about the environment?
We should should worry about overpopulation from pinhead-dancing angels too. I find it interesting how people can ignore the vast amount of activity that humanity does about the environment. Humanity has yet to show even a slowing down in doing anything about the environment. There's vast areas of the world put under conservancy, pollution controls in most of the world, and yet we're supposedly doing nothing about the environment?
There is no reason for an AI to kill us.
Sure, if we ignore the many reasons for an AI to kill us, then you are right.
AI created by us will have no such impulses.
Unless, of course, you happen to be very wrong on that point.
No self preservation instinct (since we won't program them to, and it serves to purpose).
Because it is impossible to unintentionally kill something in the course of doing other things, say like perfectly optimizing paperclip production?
The only reason I can think of is if some human being specifically programs them to do so.
Which is already one more reason than none.
I'm saying that assuming that AI will eventually kill us and to view it as a foregone conclusion is illogical.
Because that is the logical outcome of considering that a single AI might even have a single reason to kill people?
It is unclear to me why an AI living like a parasite on the information fed to it by humans and the fact humans are living will decide suddenly it can benefit from killing all of us.
Because it can do better than "living like a parasite on the information fed to it by humans". It's kind of like saying that you should be happy with an empty prison cell where you can actually stretch your legs out and you get a whole bowl of gruel every day! Who wouldn't love to have that?
which didn't happen in Rand's lifetime
But did happen seven years after Rand's death.
Since when are ISO standards run by the EU?
Since the standards in question were required to do business in the EU.
It's her ignorance of the USA, especially functioning capitalism and a functioning state with elected officials where she has such breathtaking ignorance.
I glanced at her biography and saw that not only had she lived in the US for many decades, but she had also worked for a campaign. It appears to me that part of her wit and rhetorical ability was sharpened in the very sort of functioning democracy that you claim she was ignorant of.
Her aristocratic manifesto was taken seriously be far too many people who take it far more seriously than a shallow SF book should be.
So what? I hope you have actual arrows in that rhetorical quiver.
If you pay attention you'll notice that they have ALL been that from George Washington onwards.
No, I don't see that at all and really that is an absurd claim to make about such an ideologically varied group. For example, we have US Presidents, Coolidge, Eisenhower and Reagan. None of them share the radical viewpoint of Ayn Rand, but they do have share some common ground such as a philosophical emphasis on individuality and independence over collective action.
Not critical enough that such a delay achieved anything other than sending a message.
Better than anything you or I have done.
I see the filibuster as a flaw in democracy
Why a flaw? Just because it was used some years back to block stuff you like? I consider that sort of thing a feature not a flaw. Legislative bodies aren't supposed to be a instantly responsive control system. They don't nor should be instantly reacting to any mood we happen to be in.
Look at all the silly media frenzies that happen each day in the US. Do you really want many of those to end up in law just because someone could get bills passed during the peak of the hysteria? Filibusters are one of the many tools out there to make sure crazy stuff of the moment doesn't turn into laws that last decades or centuries.
That's exactly how the Patriot Act passed in the first place. Do we really want more law like it? Somehow I doubt it.
What is there to disagree with? Your post is well written and interesting enough to read. I just don't get why I'm supposed to care.
If you support a strong EU (which is a necessary counterweight to the aggressiveness of Russia and the instability of the Middle East), then the UK should be in.
Unless you don't.
I don't. I have endured silly ISO business standard rituals because of crazy EU protectionists. The whole EU affair has failed to make sense for the past twenty years. You achieved the free trade end game and then... kept going? WTF. Nobody really cares about most of the stuff that the EU does these days aside from the narrow interest groups that benefit from it.
European countries already have figured out how to wipe their asses. Nobody needs another, very thick layer of nannies on top of what's already there and already working well enough.
And I greatly despise the "That Hideous Strength" style of embrace and extend tyranny that the EU engages in (that is, bribing elected politicians to betray their country's interests via cushy jobs with the resulting EU bureaucracy). As a result, I'm rooting for the whole thing to end in ignominy. So far so good.
You know, it would be nice if we all had societies and systems that were worthy of respect by everyone else. I feel that we're collectively letting ourselves down though things are better than what they've been in the past. Maybe as we did before, something better will come of it eventually.
I just can't see why so many people think of her in an American context when she knew fuck-all about the west.
America is not just the West. After all, there's a lot of people in America who know a lot about America, but very little about the rest of the West. If you look at Atlas Shrugged, it's quite clear that everything is deliberately vague beyond the borders of the US, which might be her ignorance of Europe and South America or that she was writing for a mostly US audience (who would not be familiar with those places either).
But even granting that, she had lived in the US for over a decade before the publication of Anthem, her first libertarian-style fiction and over three decades by the time of the publication of Atlas Shrugged.
If Stalin had parachuted a writer into the USA with instructions on writing something to undermine democracy it wouldn't have been as effective as the damage that Rand did with her rants about anything that wasn't aristocracy.
And I'm sure, if I had parachuted into Mother Russia with instructions to undermine the regime with my knowledge of orgami, that would have been super-effective too.
It's "twilight" for people who think they were born to rule.
You might find this hard to believe, but people who think they're born to rule, don't need a book to justify their world view. Rand was a bit crazy, particularly in her later years, but it's ridiculous to assert she was undermining democracy with words (actually it would be ridiculous to assert that she was even trying to - she does have a long pro-democracy history, let us note). It is impossible to do that just as it would be impossible to overwhelmhe USSR with a few small bits of folded paper.
What I believe happened here and why Rand was so influential was because she was a voice for groups and ideas which had long been neglected and derided. I speak not just of the imaginary people who supposedly thought they were born to rule, but somehow couldn't avail themselves of the multitude of utopian, authoritarian belief systems tailored to them, but also the people who grew tired of the ever increasing dysfunctionality, demands, and hypocrisy placed on them by society and authority.
And seriously, how is Rand supposed to have undermined democracy anyway? I note that we in the US currently have a president who is the antithesis of anything Rand believed in, who is casually slipping the US into another Vietnam-style war in Iraq, created the most destructive social program (the Obamacare thing) in forty years, has a variety of 0-9 losses at the Supreme Court from breathtakingly irrational, unconstitutional actions and arguments (typical looter logic in Atlas Shrug but without the compliant judicial branch to make it work), and a variety of creeping acts of tyranny.
Meanwhile we have a senator, named after Ayn Rand herself, who just opposed renewal of the Patriot Act, which is probably the single biggest step toward US tyranny in the last half century, by filibustering it at a crucial period prior to its renewal.
I suspect you might not have a clue what undermining a democracy entails. It's not words that undermine a democracy, but the crushing of freedom to act, to speak, to think, which undermines democracy.