The Core
Why We Are Here => Water Cooler => Topic started by: Mackin USA on August 23, 2014, 07:59:40 PM
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Robots could murder us out of KINDNESS
'The most important work of our lifetime is to ensure that machines are capable of understanding human value,'
http://tinyurl.com/n9fkuub
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Of course, depending on your perspective, perhaps the most dangerous thing we can do is to teach machines to understand human value. Clearly for most other species, and these machines would be another species, humans have little value and great detriment.... news like this makes me glad I'm not 5 years old with a 100-year life-expectancy. I'm an optimist by nature, but I think things are going to get really weird for the youngest generation
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> I think things are going to get really weird for the youngest generation
Hasn't that been the case for almost every generation since the industrial revolution, or are things moving so quickly now it's beyond precedence?
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Isaac Asimov dealt with these issues a lot.
Anybody see the move Her? Its an interesting take on AI, particularly the ending.
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We're not going to need robots to off us...
http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/20/health/suicide-tourism-switzerland/
20% from UK
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/aug/20/one-in-five-visitors-swiss-suicide-clinics-britain-uk-germany
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http://phys.org/news/2014-08-robo-brain-robots-internet.html
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> I think things are going to get really weird for the youngest generation
Hasn't that been the case for almost every generation since the industrial revolution, or are things moving so quickly now it's beyond precedence?
To some extent, but many system dynamics people think we're headed toward unique crisis in coming years - more Dark Ages than Great Depression.
Things are happening that haven't happened in many centuries, like our youngest will probably see falling population and with it some sort of deflation across the entire globe (first time since the 14th Century when the Plague hit Asia and Europe, though not Africa and America as far as I know). And of course, we are living through the fastest extinction of species on the planet and the most widespread since the disappearance of the dinosaurs. We are seeing global temperatures changing faster than any time since the beginning of human civilization. The latter will have huge economic effects, but also major cultural effects - 70% of Austrian ski areas are expected to stop being viable sometime between 2050 and 2100. The place I grew up defines itself by skiing and maple syrup. Barring some serious genetic modification of sugar maples, the latter will almost certainly be gone and the former likely so.
And on the "advancement" side, we're soon to have machines that will simply have more neural connections than humans and will beat us not just at "simple" problems like chess, but perhaps complex problems, like poetry and fiction.
Humans have not generally conceived of themselves as unique because of their ability to move earth and cut trees, so the development of chain saws and bulldozers don't change things conceptually in the same way machines as write better poetry than we do.
Could be that it's just more change and we've always had change, but I think the speed, breadth and scale of the changes that will come in the next 100 years is going to significantly overshadow that of the 20th century, and already that pace of change was difficult for people.
In prior centuries you might have a political or religious revolution that would leave the older generation behind, but I don't think those people saw the economy, technology, climate, botany and zoology change around them in such visible ways.
I'm an overwhelming optimist in general, but I do find things have gotten pretty scary.
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economy, technology, climate, botany and zoology
We should probably add "energy" to that list, although perhaps it could be considered a subset of technology.
In particular, fossil fuels. What sorts of adjustments will we need to make as petroleum products become more costly, both scarcer and more in demand? We're not running out of oil yet but it's within the foreseeable future and we're nowhere near ready.
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>religious
That's another thing that we haven't added to the mix here. Eric Kaufmann puts together a strong argument that the insular religious fundamentalist groups are going to inherit the Earth. Basically, fundamentalists are out birthing religious moderates and secular people. He goes so far as saying that the enlightenment may be an aberration.
The lecture is a bit long but if you are interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYEyv5a_3LM
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>>economy, technology, climate, botany and zoology
>We should probably add "energy" to that list, although perhaps it could be considered a subset of technology.
I think learning to manipulate weather -with the idea of managing climate change- will be the next big thing.
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I think learning to manipulate weather -with the idea of managing climate change- will be the next big thing.
As a friend says, paraphrasing Aldo Leopold: If you're going to tamper with nature, remember to keep all the parts.
I think we're still quite a ways off from understanding planetary climate systems to "manage climate change" in any way other than trying to limit the damage. I hope I'm wrong about that.... crap, when did I get so pessimistic!
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>remember to keep all the parts
Note that I did not say that we wouldn't f### it up.
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>remember to keep all the parts
Note that I did not say that we wouldn't f### it up.
I sometimes wish there was a "like" button on this site
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This article is basically arguing that the only way through the coming age of automation is socialism:
http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/the-future-of-robot-labour-has-everything-to-do-with-capitalism
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"Marx wrote. Humans, once freed from the bonds of soul-crushing capitalist labour, will develop new means of social thought and cooperation outside of the wage relation that frames most of our interactions under capitalism. In short, Marx claimed that automation would bring about the end of capitalism."
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Marx was big on making leaps of faith without explaining exactly how things would unfold. Lets say in 25 years we have virtually all labor done by machines, there are still property rights and supply chains which will be owned by somebody.
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Google said it is working on a super-fast "quantum" computer chip as part a vision to one day have machines think like humans.
http://news.yahoo.com/google-working-super-fast-quantum-computer-chip-020341883.html
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There were cover articles on the so-called quantum computer in both Time and Wired in the last year. Some researchers deny it's a quantum computer at all. Currently the quantum computer is the nuclear fusion of the computing world. But, like reliable fusion energy, if it happens, it will be huge - all current encryption will be obsolete overnight, for example.
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http://tinyurl.com/m7f4w8a
Stephen Hawking: 'Transcendence looks at the implications of artificial intelligence - but are we taking AI seriously enough?'