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AR 22:16 - Expecting "a single massive communal intelligence?"
In this issue:
HUMANISM 2.0 - denigrating religion for not having the "profusion of innovations" seen in human technological progress
+ "merging with future superintelligent AI" as "our best strategy"
+ the futurists who anticipate the eventual merging of "a single massive communal intelligence"
Apologia Report 22:16 (1,336)
April 19, 2017
HUMANISM 2.0
Here's a bit more of interest since AR 22:9 <www.goo.gl/m6BF1I> regarding Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, by Yuval Noah Harari [1]. Siddhartha Mukherjeemarch opens his New York Times Book Review piece (Mar 19 '17, p12) with this quotation from Homo Deus: "Organisms are algorithms. ... Every animal - including Homo sapiens - is an assemblage of organic algorithms shaped by natural selection over millions of years of evolution. ... There is no reason to think that organic algorithms can do things that nonorganic algorithms will never be able to replicate or surpass." Later, Mukherjeemarch adds: "Editing every disease-linked gene in the human genome is not as easy, or as technically feasible, as Harari might wish it - in part, because many diseases, we now know, are the consequences of dozens of gene variants, and of gene-environment and gene-chance interactions. ...
"Harari lists a profusion of technological innovations created in the last century - antibiotics, computers, the list goes on - and then challenges the reader to come up with similarly powerful innovations in religion. ...
"Chance plays such a crucial role in the development of certain illnesses that genes, although important, may still be relegated to the background. [T]he interventions that preoccupy Harari's fantasies will be dominated by few, highly penetrant genes that influence fates and futures in an autonomous manner. Several such genes do exist - but it would be premature to extrapolate this idea to the whole genome." <www.goo.gl/pc95MU>
The same publication (p13) offers Ray Kurzweil <www.kurzweilai.net> on "How We’ll End Up Merging With Our Technology" which reviews the two new books Thinking Machines: The Quest for Artificial Intelligence - and Where It’s Taking Us Next, by Luke Dormehl [2]; and Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence, by Richard Yonck [3].
Kurzweil, an inventor and futurist (and no stranger <www.goo.gl/Nf8ERC> to AR) introduces the first title thus: "Luke Dormehl is the rare lay person - a journalist and filmmaker - who actually understands the science (and even the math) and is able to parse it in an edifying and exciting way. He is also a gifted storyteller who interweaves the personal stories with the broad history of artificial intelligence. I found myself turning the pages of Thinking Machines to find out what happens, even though I was there for much of it, and often in the very room. ...
"Dormehl examines the pending social and economic impact of artificial intelligence....
"Many observers of A.I. and the other 21st-century exponential technologies like biotechnology and nanotechnology attempt to peer into the continuing accelerating gains and fall off the horse. Dormehl ends his book still in the saddle, discussing the prospect of conscious A.I.s that will demand and/or deserve rights, and the possibility of 'uploadin' our brains to the cloud. I recommend this book to anyone with a lay scientific background who wants to understand what I would argue is today's most important revolution, where it came from, how it works and what is on the horizon.
"Heart of the Machine, the futurist Richard Yonck's new book, contains its important insight in the title. People often think of feelings as secondary or as a sideshow to intellect, as if the essence of human intelligence is the ability to think logically. If that were true, then machines are already ahead of us. ...
"Yonck provides a compelling and thorough history of the interaction between our emotional lives and our technology. ...
"Yonck is a sure-footed guide and is not without a sense of humor. He imagines, for example, a scenario a few decades from now with a spirited exchange at the dinner table. 'No daughter of mine is marrying a robot and that's final!' a father exclaims.
"His daughter angrily replies: 'Michael is a cybernetic person with the same rights you and I have! We're getting married and there's nothing you can do to change that!' She storms out of the room.
"Yonck concludes that we will merge with our technology - a position I agree with - and that we have been doing so for a long time. He argues, as have I, that merging with future superintelligent A.I.s is our best strategy for ensuring a beneficial outcome. Achieving this requires creating technology that can understand and master human emotion. To those who would argue that such a quest is arrogantly playing God, he says simply: 'This is what we do.'"
POSTSCRIPT (Jul 7 '18): The June '17 Smithonian ran the cover story "Are We Being Seduced by Robots?" which is not so much about robotic relationships as described above. Instead, the feature, "A visit to the world capital of intelligent machines," is titled: "Thinking Outside the Bots" by Gary Shteyngart.
Early on we read: "Korea’s top Go champion - Go is a mind-bendingly complex strategic board game played in East Asia - has been roundly beaten by a computer program called AlphaGo, designed by Google DeepMind, based in London, one of the world’s leading developers of artificial intelligence.
"The country I encounter is in a mild state of shock. The tournament is shown endlessly on monitors in the Seoul subway. Few had expected the software to win, but what surprised people most was the program’s bold originality and unpredictable, unorthodox play. AlphaGo wasn’t just mining the play of past Go masters -it was inventing a strategy of its own. ...
"I have come to meet Hubo, a charming humanoid robot that blew away international competition at the last Robotics Challenge hosted by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, or Darpa, the high-tech U.S. military research agency....
"The automation of society seems to feed directly into the longing for perfection....
"Despite all [Korea's technological] perfection, though, the mood is not one of luxury and happy success but of exhaustion and insecurity."
Shteyngart moves on to describe Korea's success in the 2015 Darpa challenge, a "competition, which was designed to simulate a disaster scenario like the meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant in 2011. ...
"Darpa hoped to drive innovation to improve robot capabilities in that kind of scenario, and operated on the premise that robots with some measure of human-like facility for movement and autonomous problem-solving would best be able to do work that humans couldn’t, saving lives. 'We believe that the humanoid robot is the best option to work in the human’s living environment,' [Korea's famed roboticist Jun-ho] Oh says."
Shteyngart asks: "[W]hat will our world look like a generation or two from now?... The cult of perfection [shown in the example of Korea] will extend to every part of us, and the cosmetic-surgery bots will chisel us and suck out our fat and give us as many eyelids as we desire. Our grandchildren will be born perfect; all the criteria for their genetic makeup will be determined in utero. We will look perfect, but inside we will be completely stressed out and worried about our place (and our children’s place) in the pecking order, because even our belt buckles will come equipped with the kind of AI that could beat us at three-dimensional chess while reciting Shakespeare’s sonnets and singing the blues in perfect pitch. And so our beautiful selves will be constantly worried about what contributions we will make to society, given that all cognitive tasks will already be distributed to devices small enough to perch at the edge of our fingernails. ...
"[S]uccessive generations of post-humans, all-knowing, all-seeing, ... cyborgs will make us feel like we’ve encountered a new superior, if highly depressed, civilization, creatures whose benevolence or lack thereof may well determine the future of our race in the flash of an algorithm, if not the blast of an atom. Or maybe they’ll be us."
Shteyngart visits Inwangsan Mountain, which rises to the west of Seoul with its "eclectic group of free-range shamans, known as mudangs, who predate Buddhism and Christianity and act as intermediaries between humans and the spirit world and for steep prices will invoke spirits who may foretell the future, cure disease and increase prosperity. ...
"The GPS on the newest smartphone tells us where we are, but not who we are.
"The Seonbawi, or 'Zen rock,' is a spectacular weather-eroded rock formation that looks like two robed monks, who are said to guard the city. Seonbawi is also where women come to pray for fertility, often laden with food offerings for the spirits. ...
"[One] young lady journeys out from her city of 25 million plugged-in residents to spend hours on a mountaintop in the cold, promoting her friend’s dreams, hands clasped tightly in the act of prayer. In front of her, a giant and timeless weather-beaten rock and a small electronic device perched on a prayer mat steer her gently into the imperfect world to come." <www.bit.ly/2L12x9i>
"Beyond Human" by T.D. Max -- includes Kurzweil predicting that "We will transcend all of the limits of biology." Max agrees when he reports that technology has superseded genetic evolution's cumbersome protocols: "Technology now does much of the same work and does it far faster. ...
"'People get hung up on Darwin and DNA,' says George Church, a molecular engineer with a joint appointment at Harvard and MIT. 'But most of the selection today is occurring in culture and language, computers and clothing.' ...
"As the cyberpunk writer William Gibson has pointed out: 'The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed yet.' ...
"Over hundreds of thousands of years, our genes have evolved to devote more and more resources to our brains, but the truth is, we can never be smart enough. (Sounds prophetic. - RP)
"Unlike our forebears, we may soon not need to wait for evolution to fix the problem." An example is given from the field of in-vitro fertilization [IVF] where "choosing the 'most intelligent embryo' out of any given 10 would increase a baby's IQ roughly 11.5 points above chance. ...
"After 10 generations ... a descendant might enjoy an IQ as much as 115 points higher.... Using embryonic stem cells, which could be converted into sperm or ova in just six months ... might yield far faster results. [However, in] 10 generations there will likely be computer programs that outperform even the most enhanced human across the board.'
"There's a more immediate objection to this scenario, though: We don't yet know enough about the genetic basis for intelligence to select for it." (The operative word being "yet." - RP)
Another pause is briefly mentioned: Linda MacDonald Glenn, a bioethicist at California State University <www.goo.gl/rdErGS> opposes the suggestion that "evolution has been benign. That it somehow has been a positive. Oh Lord, it has not been! When you think of the pain and suffering that has come from so many [IVF] mistakes, it boggles the mind." (See <www.goo.gl/TAKozh> for example, and ask yourself if anyone is listening.)
Max moves on to gene tweaking machines. "CRISPR <www.goo.gl/0ZoUjB> is vastly more powerful technology than IVF, with a far greater risk of abuse, including the temptation to try to engineer some sort of genetically perfect race. One of its discoverers, Jennifer Doudna, a professor of chemistry and molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, recounted to an interviewer a dream she'd had in which Adolf Hitler came to learn the technique from her, wearing a pig's face. She ... hoped the [international moratorium on human gene experimentation] would last. ...
"Church thinks this still misses the point: The floodgates are already open to genetic reengineering - [and] CRISPR's but one more drop in the river. ...
"Our bodies, our brains, and their machines around us may all one day merge, as Kurzweil predicts, into a single massive communal intelligence." Max ends with this ominous observation: "We may not know yet where we're going, but we've already left where we've been." Cover story. National Geographic, Apr '17, pp40-63. <www.goo.gl/ShlpnZ>
POSTSCRIPT (Jul 4 '18): Doudna's new book A Crack in Creation, is found by Kirkus to be technically challenging for non-specialists. Publishers Weekly (Apr '18 #2) notes that "The second half of the book delves into the ethical implications arising from this difference [between manipulating reproductive and non-reproductive cells], thoughtfully covering effects on both human and non-human species."
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SOURCES: Monographs
1 - Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, by Yuval Noah Harari (Harper, 2017, hardcover, 464 pages) <www.goo.gl/El4sdX>
2 - Thinking Machines: The Quest for Artificial Intelligence - and Where It’s Taking Us Next, by Luke Dormehl (TarcherPerigee, 2017, paperback, 288 pages) <www.goo.gl/T9TJd6>
3 - Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence, by Richard Yonck (Arcade, 2017, hardcover, 328 pages) <www.goo.gl/GYpsZv>
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