exratione
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Comment · 8 years ago
I think the basic premise is correct, that suffering is by far the most important determinant in where utilitarianism takes us in the long term. Adding the good has far fewer world-changing requirements and consequences than removing the bad, which might say something about the raw deal that evolution hands to all individual entities. A short sketch is here, the pertinent part reproduced below:
https://www.exratione.com/2016/06/the-hedonistic-imperative-...
Suffering is not only human, however. The natural world from which we evolved continues to be as bloody, terrible, and rife with disease as it ever was. Higher animal species are certainly just as capable of experiencing anguish and pain as are we humans, and the same is true far further down into the lower orders of life than we'd like to think is the case. We ourselves are responsible for inflicting great suffering upon animals as we harvest them for protein - an industry that is now entirely unnecessary given the technologies that exist today. We do not need to farm animals to live: the engineering of agriculture has seen to that. The future of paradise engineering could, were we so minded, start very soon with an end to the farming and harvesting of animals. That would be followed by a growing control over all wild animal populations, starting with the lesser numbers of larger species, in order to provide them with same absolute control of health and aging that will emerge in human medicine. Taken to its conclusions, this also means stepping in to remove the normal course of predator-prey relationships, as well as manage population size by controlling births in the absence of aging, disease, and predation.
Removing suffering from the animal world is a project of massive scope, as where is the line drawn? At what point is a lower species determined to be a form of biological machinery without the capacity to suffer? Ants, perhaps? Even with ants as a dividing line, consider the types of technology required, and the level of effort to distribute the net of medicine and control across every living thing in every ecosystem. Or consider for a moment the level of technological intervention required to ensure a sea full of fish that do not prey upon one another, and that are all individually maintained in good health indefinitely, able to have fulfilling lives insofar as it is possible for fish. General artificial intelligences and robust molecular manufacturing technologies, creating self-replicating machinery to live alongside and inside every living individual in a vast network of oversight and enhancement might be the least of what is required.
At some point, and especially in the control of predators, the animal world will become so very managed that we will in essence be curating a park, creating animals for the sake of creating animals, simply because they existed in the past - the conservative impulse in human nature that sees us trying to turn back any number of tides in the changing world. It seems clear that the terrible and largely hidden suffering of the animal world must be addressed, but why should we follow this path of maintaining what is? What good comes from creating limited beings for our own amusement, when that same impulse could go towards creating intelligences with a capacity equal or greater than our own? Creating animals, lesser and limited entities that will be entirely dependent on us, to be used as little more than scenery, seems a form of evil in a world in which better can be done.
Given this, my suspicion is that when it comes to the animal kingdom, the distant future of paradise engineering will have much in common with the goals of past religious movements and today's environmentalist nihilists, those who preach ethical extinction as the best way to end suffering. Animals will slowly vanish, their patterns recorded, but no longer used. If animals are needed as a part of the world in order to make the human descendants of the era feel better, then that need can be filled through simulations, unfeeling machinery that plays the role well enough for our needs. The resources presently used by that part of a living biosphere will instead be directed to other projects.
Comment · 8 years ago
It is interesting to compare this interpretation of Aristotle on happiness with the transhumanist take on happiness, pleasure, and suffering known as the Hedonistic Imperative. When doing so, Aristotle starts to look a lot closer to stoicism, in sense of acceptance of the human condition as it is, planning a strategy within established limits that cannot be changed. The spectrum of philosophy expands, with most of the ancients sitting quite close to one another in a much larger state space than they had access to.
Comment · 8 years ago
A lens to look at this through is the struggle for control over the population. The competing factions in the Middle Ages were very different from those now - so the manifestations of authoritarianism naturally differed in the Middle Ages. Large numbers of holy days (holidays) went hand in hand with simony and temporal power emanating from Rome. The church was just as rapacious and self-interested as the lords who claimed ownership over the peasantry.
So then, a fractious feudal nobility, the ruler, and the church, now fractious corporate powers and a more unified state, with the church faded to irrelevance in temporal matters. The only constant is the undiminished desire to order the lives of others in order to farm them for profit, to be the stationary bandit.
Even if matters were the same, however, the march of technology would still make the present a far better place to live than the past. It is technology, not politics, that is the greatest driver of quality of life.
Comment · 9 years ago
This manages to get lost in its own trees. From a reductionist perspective:
- Intelligence greater than human is possible
- Intelligence is the operation of a machine; it can be reverse engineered
- Intelligence can be built
- Better intelligences will be better at improving the state of the art in building better, more cost-effective intelligences
Intelligence explosion on some timescale will result the moment you can emulate a human brain, coupled with a continued increase in processing power per unit cost. Massive parallelism to start with, followed by some process to produce smarter intelligences.
All arguments against this sound somewhat silly, as they have to refute one of the hard to refute points above. Do we live in a universe in which, somehow, we can't emulate humans in silico, or we can't advance any further towards the limits of computation, or N intelligences of capacity X when it comes to building better intelligences cannot reverse engineer and tinker themselves to build an intelligence of capacity X+1 at building better intelligences? All of these seem pretty unlikely on the face of it.
Comment · 9 years ago
Related topic: could the Romans have usefully practiced public key encryption, say for very small key sizes?
Comment · 9 years ago
I just wrote up some thoughts on the topic:
https://www.exratione.com/2017/10/in-search-of-the-spark-whe...
Essentially, the question asked is just the setup to watch someone approach a novel experience. If the candidate is not in a natural environment, i.e. working with a comfortable IDE and with access to Stack Overflow, it is kind of pointless. You want to see what they do in a situation fairly close to the mundane daily example of "how do I do this new thing."
So don't ask standard related to business challenges that have answers online: find novel exercises. Write a sort function that sorts everything except for at least two items. Write a linked list node that sabotages the user in the most subtle way possible. And so on. Fortunately these are easy to create, as there is an infinite space of engineering exercises that no-one would carry out in reality as they are self-defeating, or pointlessly destructive, or otherwise non-productive. But they still serve to illustrate how someone thinks their way around a new concept, and that is the important thing.
Comment · 9 years ago
I feel that those who argue that any approach other than running human brain emulations and then reverse engineering them or speculatively modifying them is the most likely way to get to AGI has a pretty steep hill to climb in order to justify that point of view.
Nothing else that is going on now or even on the agenda or even foreseeable offers a plausible, definitive plan to get to AGI. Whereas brain emulation is clearly going to achieve that goal fairly shortly after the maps are good enough and the computational capacity large enough, and the following experimentation is a far more reliable way to determine the underpinnings of intelligence than present efforts at de novo construction.
Comment · 9 years ago
Some humans are likely to become more powerful than other humans some day. Most such humans will by default develop instrumental subgoals that conflict with other human interests. This could have catastrophic consequences. If we don't actively work on control mechanisms and safety of human behavior, this will most likely pose an existential risk to humanity.
Compare and contrast.
I think people make too much of the wrong things in the matter of general artificial intelligence.
Comment · 9 years ago
Worrying about lack of variability in the human condition, as the author does here, seems like a strange fear in the face of the future ability to edit, copy, and amend the function of the mind. Once human minds are emulated, those capabilities follow, and emulation should happen fairly rapidly after the computing power to do it emerges, since there are already well established research establishments working on the predecessor simulations.
https://www.exratione.com/2017/04/blind-upon-the-eve-of-apot...
"The pace of progress today bumps up against the limits imposed by organization of efforts, in that it takes a few years for humans to digest new information, talk to one another about it, decide on a course of action, gather together a group, raise funds, and start working. There is no necessary reason for any of these parts of the process to take more than a few seconds, however: consider a world in which human minds run far faster, because they run on something other than biological neurons, because they run hundreds of distinct streams of consciousness simultaneously, and because they are augmented by forms of artificial intelligence that take on some of the cognitive load for task assignment and decision making.
"It is, frankly, hard to even speculate about the potential forms taken by society in such an environment. Technology clearly drives human organizational strategies and struggles, for all that the minds of prehistory, of Ur, and of our modern times are all the same. In the past, evolution of society was largely shaped by the ability to communicate over distances and by the size of the population. In the future it will be shaped to a far greater extent by the way in which intelligences think and feel, and the way in which their minds depart from the present standard for human nature. We struggle to model human action in the broadest sense of economic studies, and I suspect that this will be true for any society of minds, no matter how capable they are. The complexity of the group always exceeds the capabilities of any individual or research effort within that group. We can do little more than point out incentives and suggest trends that are likely to emerge from those incentives."
For my money, the greater fears lie in what factions of humanity and its descendants might choose to do about pleasure and suffering, when handed the controls over the box.
https://www.exratione.com/2016/06/the-hedonistic-imperative-...
"Altering the operation of our brains to induce pleasure without the need to undertake as much work was a fairly early innovation - see alchohol, etc. The point of much of technological progress is to achieve better results with less effort. The logical end of that line is wireheading or a life science equivalent yet to be designed: an augmentation in the brain, a button that you push, and the system causes you to feel pleasure whenever you want. There are numerous other alternatives in the same technological genre that seem plausible, such as always-on happiness, regardless of circumstances. This sort of thing makes many people nervous, and, sadly, rarely for useful reasons. That said, I suspect that even the most self-controlled of individuals has sufficient self-doubt to be wary of the advent of implementations of wireheading that might be, say, a hundred times better, cheaper, and safer than today's most influential mood-altering drugs.
"To my eyes this is actually the less interesting and less consequential of the two sides of the hedonistic imperative. It is the elimination of suffering, not the gaining of pleasure, that, when taken to its conclusions, will lead to a world and a humanity changed so radically as to be near unrecognizable."
Comment · 9 years ago
Run it in AWS. They keep their IP ranges comparatively clean.
Other hosting services, yes, you may as well not bother. I haven't found another one yet that is reliable enough at keeping deliverability from their IP ranges in good enough order.
Also make sure you set up SPF and DKIM right from the outset.
Comment · 9 years ago
Many phone companies will allow you to (a) add an annotation to your account to declare the number you are using should never be ported to another company, and (b) add a password to the account that you will have to provide to customer service representatives when making changes. This helps to minimize the chance that an attacker can use social engineering to redirect your number to a system under his or her control. If these are not options for your phone company, find a better phone company.
Even given that, since it relies upon human choice and behavior, and does nothing versus attackers with assets within the phone company, it seems a bad idea to have 2FA via SMS.
Comment · 9 years ago
There are a factions in the strong AI community whose members espouse the idea that a planned economy would become feasible given greater computational capacity and better software.
I have to think that the major objection to this is that the complexity of a socioeconomy also scales with computational capacity. Planning an economy is quite likely always beyond the capacity of any portion of entities within that economy, for the same knowledge problem.
Running up a rigorous approach to proof/disproof of that would be an interesting exercise, of course.
But it is an interesting example of the point that AI has a way of being all things to all people, when rigorous testing of ideas is not applied. For the would-be communists and socialists it is a road to a perfect planned technocracy, regardless of the fact that this looks less than feasible.
Comment · 9 years ago
This would be somewhere in the Vingean Scholastics portion of the Venn diagram I proposed a few years ago:
https://www.exratione.com/2012/01/the-future-of-the-venture-...
The future is wandering towards Fast Times at Fairmont High, it seems.
Comment · 9 years ago
It is a strange journey that we'll all be going on, just through the incremental process of desiring and adopting improvements.
https://www.exratione.com/2017/04/blind-upon-the-eve-of-apot...
But really, transhumanism is common sense. You see a problem and you fix it. That inevitably leads to the end of suffering, which requires medical control of aging, complete control of the biosphere, comprehensive neurotechnology, and so forth. The only open question is how long it all takes to run through the development pipeline.
If longevity-assurance technologies existed, everyone would use them as a matter of course, just like people go to the doctor when they are sick, take vitamins, and go for flu shots. We're in a strange part of history at the moment, transitioning from a state of abject technological poverty, unable to affect our environment, to a state of technological wealth in which all of these items - aging, intelligence, the human condition - are becoming malleable. All of the mental and philosophical architecture put in place to enable people not to go mad in the face of death and limitations will come crumbling down, but not without a fight.
Humans are nothing if not conservative at root, and all change is fought. Not an advantage in an age of vastly beneficial change, but it is what it is until the human mind changes.
reason [at] exratione [dot] com