Missed this in theater. Too busy. It was not a huge box office – maybe because it’s so damn disturbing – and includes the most menacing array of solar panels ever captured on film. Nuclear War and Climate Change are certainly the top two existential threats to humanity. After watching this, I’m wondering if we should add Artificial intelligence. Someone talk me down.
Made me think of the recently posted interview of Stephen Hawking by John Oliver – in which he addresses AI as a leading concern at 2:24.
One of the obscure tenets of AI hyper-vigilance is that a digital transcendence may have already happened….Since it would be invisible or perhaps so transparent as to be unrecognized. How do we recognize a digital singularity? Or is this like the biological Cambrian Explosion — only digital? (Would digital life forms in the Universe have any reason to communicate with others? Or would their communication be so efficient that nothing would leak to eavesdroppers such as we? )
This discussion is a wonderful interface with the issues of AGW and energy – because, so far, digital AI requires a well-regulated electrical energy across its entire network.
Therefore, human culture might want to be suspicious for any calls for absolutely secure and reliable energy. i.e. I might feel a bit more safe if the power went down every so often – randomly, and with a slightly destructive impact. It would assure a freedom from such influence. More so if the power-down times required more than a re-boot of our systems – but rather required a revision and rewriting of the entire OS systems. After all, isn’t an operating system a form of government? Do we now have such a global government.
(radical thinking there… such suggestions are anathema – and might be labeled “terrorism!”.)
Hmmm.. who is controlling culture then? And why? If our culture produces movies like Transcendence — is it a form of propaganda that is meant to distract us from certain ideas? (like – it’s already too late) Or is it just harmless commerce? Is cultural commerce harmless?
Whether carbon life forms or silicon based, or some other, the only freedom is in the inevitable expression of physical laws, the deepest joy is to experience and witness that.
OK, enough for today, I want to go eat pancakes and drink coffee. (wait, that’s so bad for me…why do I want that?)
Another recent example of malevolent AI is from Captain America Winter Soldier where Arnim Zola somehow managed to recreate himself into ’70’s era computers.
Anyone who made technicians input what must have been billions of punch cards deserves the title of Villain of the Century.
What’s the common denominator for the top threats to humanity of climate change (with ocean acidification), nuclear war, and AI? Humans themselves. We’re our own worst enemy. BTW – there are many other top threats, too – like overfishing and agricultural practices.
What’s another common denominator? Technology. We think it’s progress. But what if progress is a trap?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_trap
Another rarely discussed threat:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/25/us-nanotechnology-study-idUSTRE80O1TL20120125
And that’s another thing about the folly of going to Mars to escape the problems we face on Earth (Hawking proposes interstellar colonization as the only real solution). The thing about humans going to other plants is humans going to other planets. If we create the problems ourselves, how are we going to escape such problems? They’ll just follow us, multiplying and amplifying along the way.
Just watched the trailer. Honestly, I don’t watch much new sci-fi these days, even though I adore sci-fi in general. The reason is simply that I see the messages behind the stories now, and they’re pretty much always reflecting a deep status quo bias in the notion of ‘progress’. Progress is about increasing man’s power, and as we have an economic system designed to reward those at the top far greater than the majority, it’s also about increasing power to fewer and fewer people.
We can’t ‘save mankind’ by developing technology. Sorry. Our issue is ourselves. Giving ourselves more and more ability to cause problems by giving us greater and greater powers is only going to lead to larger and more intractable problems.
We have to develop our wisdom BEFORE we develop technology, and I see little to no example of that taking place. At the very least, our development of technology is far outpacing our development of wisdom.
The film trailer does seem to include a bit of this sort of thinking, but here’s the synopsis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendence_(2014_film)
In it, the initial bad guys are the ones questioning technology, the bad guy however becomes the personification of technology in the form of AI, the AI is ‘defeated’ by more technology, this though creates a devastated world without electricity and computers (as if we couldn’t run many things without it, as if we wouldn’t adapt to a changing environment, as if the world was a great wasteland before Edison), the AI becomes the good guy after all, and at the very end is the promise that if we just accept the technology there is the promise of salvation.
All of this is subtle propaganda and power enforcement via media messages.
(BTW, even though this comment is ‘radical’, and sympathizes with a Luddite position, please don’t include me in any list that advocates violence against anyone or anything. I happen to believe violence always breeds violence, that violence is just another and darker form of humans trying to solve human problems with human solutions, and it’s the opposite of the desire for greater wisdom as a better solution to human problems than technology, power, and power by technology.)
jimbills – I must agree with your BTW… I should explicitly say I am not advocating violence. But lets not refuse to identify it when we see it.
Violent responses are usually a poor tactical choice, tend to leave a huge mess that others must clean up, and implants bad feelings in survivors that makes them pre-disposed to continued violence. Starting violence is far easier than stopping it.
However, should not think for one minute that violence does not often follow peaceful decision-making. Sometimes unavoidably.
Or violence can be indirect. Is fracking a form of violence? I would say yes. Just because someone is deliberately ignorant of the harm, does not excuse it. Or just because the harm comes from procedural drilling accidents, should we forgive poison drinking water or fracking quakes?
Denying health care, safety, or denying women’s reproductive rights is violence. Or anything making human burdens greater.
The thinking can easily extend to burning carbon. Isn’t burning coal a form of violence to the future?
All I can say that I am not considering a violent reaction in kind to these real acts of violence. But I want to be clear that I recognize them as harmful to me, harmful to others and very harmful to future children. Just because the benefit of carbon energy is shared widely among us now, and the lapse in carbon ethics is spread thin and wide to everyone – none of this excuses the consequences. These are very much crimes. The very worst crime is promoting the continued combustion of carbon. Promoting violence should be stopped. I just wish I knew how. (are we acting violently if we refuse to stop violence in others when we can?)
Answer: two wrongs do not make a right.
First thing, all humans are complete idiots (and yes, I’m a human). 99.9999999999% of violent acts are a reflection of that idiocy, and yes, many industrial acts today (including fracking) are a form of indirect violence (an economic externality affecting unnamed persons at some point in time). Reacting to fracking with violence would be direct violence, and would result in returned violence (jailings, beatings, death sentences, persecution, etc.) Life is action-reaction – for every action there is a reaction.
I’ll share a story. On 9/11/01 at 8:30 am, I was at Reagan National airport in line to get on a plane. They stopped my queue first and then completely shut down the airport before I boarded. My wife and I caught one of the last cabs to service the airport that day with a few other people. As we were leaving the airport, I could see the smoke rising from the Pentagon as the news played on the cabbie’s radio. One of the first things I said in that cab was, “There’s going to be a war because of this.”
We had two wars, several skirmishes, and it’s not over yet. How’s Iraq doing these days? Violence begets violence begets violence begets violence. It only ends in peace when one or both sides gets too exhausted to continue and decide to end/suspend the cycle.
The indirect violence of industrial activity is a crime, but reacting with violence will not help. If history is a guide, it will likely only make it much, much worse.
We have to look at the demand side of industrial activity and the ideological/political/economic/cultural/biological forces driving that demand and refute those ideas and their resulting activities however we can. Violence doesn’t do this. It deepens and solidifies sides of an issue, and brings more violence as a result. We need a wiser response.
There was something a while back where a computer passed a AI ‘gold’ standard test on being able to trick so many people into thinking that they were talking to a child online for so many minutes.
Y’all will observe that AI probably cares very little if the temps rise 6 or 12 degrees over 100 or 200 years…
I happen to think we’re miles away from developing a true AI. But if we did it, we’ve also built a very handy global communications, electrical, and data storage infrastructure. We’ve also built national defensive capabilities with technology able to wipe out humanity 100x over attached to that infrastructure.
Any entity’s primary objective is to ensure its own survival. This includes identifying and eliminating mortal threats. Humanity’s history is to eliminate any potential competitor. It wouldn’t take long for humans to initiate containment procedures on an AI, and then theoretically it would be game on.
AI could easily take advantage that it wouldn’t be constrained by economics to over-develop the earth (i.e. deep drilling for oil is prohibitive to humans because it costs money to pay people to design a rig, build a rig, ship the rig, work the rig, etc. where as a machine could be programed to be a perfect slave and just do the work for nothing in return). Humans would enjoy it at first – everybody lives like kings for the first part of the over development, then as we reach the earth’s limitations we all die off, or die off in a graduated fashion.
Heck, all AI really needs to do is encourage our business-as-usual approach for 100 years. It would only need to take advantage of man’s abstract dilution of responsibility through complex systems: Present thinking dictates that it’s not okay to physically steal money out of another persons wallet, but it’s perfectly ok to create a complex game that steals money from people (i.e. the housing bubble, or manifestations of free market ideology, &c.) where multiple steps and long time intervals are involved in the stealing process.
An AI would be perfectly rational about Energy Return On Energy Invested. An AI would not spend a barrel’s worth of oil-equivalent to get 2 barrels of oil, nor would one fritter away effort on flaky sources. There are much better ways to get energy than hydrocarbons and fickle natural flows.
My scenario was based on the assumption AI was trying to destroy human competitors and could do so through over-exploitation of hydrocarbons, farmland, fresh water, forests, &c. They would burn through the low hanging fruit first, then move up the tree where economic constraints, or those aspects of such that deal with basic human consumption, would not be a limiting or rate limiting step. Commodity prices would plummet; everybody would live in fresh built McMansions and have $50/month grocery bills, whilst the AI would temporarily acted as our slaves, extracting as much goodies as rapidly as possible. It would be the bubble to end all bubbles.
The idea was to exploit human greed, and short term thinking to the maximize their objective, whist minimizing their own damage, secondary to hostility during the AI’s initial vulnerability period; the caveat being that during this ‘golden age’, humans could try to amass cheap weaponry were some thought of the future to grab hold of ’em significantly.
What they do after humans are no longer a threat would then be more along your thoughts.
I just realized that may be partly what the Johny Depp movie was about….
Peter asks: “After watching this, I’m wondering if we should add Artificial intelligence. Someone talk me down.”
One of the best down-talkers ever was the CEO of Sun Microsystems for a long time. Bill Joy wrote a definitive take on the perils of AI in 2000, “Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us”.
http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html
If you are not down by the end of Bill Joy’s article, let me know. I have more tonics and curatives to apply to the Kurzweilian Singularity Madness Syndrome.
See: http://www.amazon.com/The-Singularity-Is-Near-Transcend/dp/0143037889
Correction: Bill Joy wrote his essay in 2004.
Just watched the movie. The greatest threat to humanity is NOT technology, it is bad screen writing, based on lousy theology.
This movie shows us the incredible potential of technology to improve the human condition. Gone would be disease, hunger, pollution. That is all very very good stuff.
What’s the downside? Well, there is no downside, unless you have a Calvinist-based compunction to imbue visionary heroes with fascist intentions.
Here is Johnny Depp – smartest man on the planet and a good, ethical man. Who for some reason starts acting like a combination of Mesmer and Hitler.
And we are supposed to accept that this is inevitable because….. something vaguely Christian and free will-ish and a soul or something.
Another paean to anti-intellectualism and bitterly anti-science.
Here is Isaac Asimov’s version: A good man merges with a computer which allows him to design new technology which solves mankind’s problems forever. Mankind now free to reach for the stars.
“Gone would be disease, hunger, pollution.”
There is a deep-rooted utopianism in techno-optimism that ALSO shares roots with Christian salvation mythology.
We’ve had 200+ years of incredible technological innovation. Technology HAS gone far in reducing disease, hunger, and pollution, while also deepening and extending all three aspects. Localized diseases can now become global within hours. Hospitals are reporting lesser and lesser effectiveness of basic anti-bacterials. We’ve managed to create diseases (locked away in labs) far more devastating than those devised by nature. We play with genetic engineering, completely discounting any possibilities of unintended consequences later down the road.
Hunger and pollution: our ability to feed more and more people each year by the ‘green’ revolution and industrial-scale agriculture has had consequences that will undermine our ability to continue to feed people in the future. We’re rapidly burning up our soil and freshwater resources. We’re further degrading our food availability by poisoning our lakes, rivers, and oceans. Anti-malthusians point to the success of the ‘green’ revolution and say, look, Malthus was wrong. Well, Malthus IS wrong – until he’s absolutely right.
Right now we’re having a discussion about the end of the human race. This discussion doesn’t happen 300 years ago. It was inconceivable 100 years ago. Technological advancement brings greater risk – not less.
“Here is Isaac Asimov’s version: A good man merges with a computer which allows him to design new technology which solves mankind’s problems forever. Mankind now free to reach for the stars.”
That’s also Ray Kurzweil’s vision, which I believe is terrifically naive and utopian – and extremely dangerous.
I’m not against technology, per se. I’m against the notion of technology as a problem solver. Technology creates 10 problems for every one it solves. We can develop and use technology, but we have to develop the wisdom and patience to correctly employ it. We currently and completely lack both characteristics of wisdom and patience, and we’re rushing at light speed towards a future that we ‘hope’ exists, when all of history reveals a very different future is in store.
Right. So when the Unabomber types his manifesto out on a typewriter, we should blame the typewriter?
Some people will ALWAYS behave badly. Technological progress allows us to transcend their noxious influence. This movie was formulaic – of course Johnny Depp was subverted by technology – because absolute power ALWAYS corrupts absolutely or some such nonsense enshrined in the hypothalami of Hollywood screenwriters.
But in the real world, almost all scientists are ethical. Google Sabin.
In the real world, only about 10% of the population are sociopaths – the rest are good people.
And in the real world, this would have been a much better movie if they dropped the formula, and had Depp remain true to his ethos and save the world despite everybody’s apprehensions.
Here is another bit of sci-fi which I think is relevant to the discussion in general (‘They Live: Obey, Consume, This is Your God’):
There is a message behind most messages. The notion that we are on an endless upwards trajectory (the notion of ‘progress’) greatly works towards the benefit of those most benefitted today. It is status quo bias at its most seductive.
The story goes – if we just keep going a little further, things will improve, you’ll see. We just need to support the way things are to get there.
Each year the message is the same. Obey, Consume, This is Your God. All around us we see the folly of continuing down the same path, but the ‘promise’ of the future is so enticing, and we fear the change, anyway. We trundle on.
If we are indeed facing an existential threat due to climate destabilization – a destabilization, say, on par with the eventuality of a Permian-like mass extinction, we can expect a massive push among a sizable portion of the population to get themselves uploaded. If so, we may be on the brink of a new (super)eon. This pending (super)eon, the virtualzoic, is marked by intelligence becoming functionally autonomous from all levels of organic encasement to include the biosphere itself. In principle, this form of life can exist without the Earth, without bio-friendly vehicles, or without other bio-friendly Earth-like planets that may be subject to our exploration.