Nature’s Nicola Jones asked me to comment on Singularity University for an article she was putting together; that article is now available. She included a couple of brief observations of mine, but I thought it would be useful to show the full context of my thoughts.
We are in for a time of major decision-making as the Moore’s Law of Cameras (sometimes called “Brin’s Corollary to Moore’s Law”) takes hold and elites of all kinds are tempted to utilize surveillance in Orwellian/controlling ways, often with rationalized good intentions.
(by Milan M Cirković, Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom) We describe a significant practical consequence of taking anthropic biases into account in deriving predictions for rare stochastic catastrophic events. The risks associated with catastrophes such as asteroidal/cometary impacts, supervolcanic episodes, and explosions of supernovae/gamma-ray bursts are based on their observed frequencies. As a result, the frequencies of catastrophes that destroy or are otherwise incompatible with the existence of observers are systematically underestimated. We describe the consequences of this anthropic bias for estimation of catastrophic risks, and suggest some directions for future work. DOI: 10.1111/j.1539-6924.2010.01460.x
Internet pioneer David Gelernter explores the ethereal fuzziness of cognition in his Edge.org article, “Dream-logic, the internet and artificial consciousness.” He’s right about the imperfect and dream-like nature of cognition and conscious thought; AI theorists should certainly take notice.
“The antiscience tendency in anarchism, which does exist, is completely self-defeating on this score [questions of technology and revolution]. I mean, it is going to take, it is going to require sophisticated technology and scientific discoveries to create the possibility for human society to survive—I mean, unless we decide, well, it just shouldn’t survive, we should get down to, you know, 100,000 hunter-gatherers or something. Okay, except for that, if you’re serious about, you know, the billions of people in the world who—and their children and grandchildren, it’s going to require scientific and technological advances.” – Noam Chomsky
Ordinary citizens today have access to much greater destructive power than ever before, and this may force the evolution of democracy, which has turned somewhat into dogma.
There is good reason for thinking that posthumans will, on the whole, be atheists. And there is good reason for thinking that widespread apostasy would, on the whole, be desirable.
Stephen Hawking is arguing that humanity may be putting itself in mortal peril by actively trying to contact aliens (an approach that is referred to as Active SETI). I’ve got five reasons why he is wrong.
In this third installment of the 2020 Visionaries series [Part1] [Part2], we look at the future of the global environment and of democracy — two areas of concern that will increasingly intertwine in the next 10 years.
Transhumanism spans a huge swath of intellectual territory, straddling bioethics, philosophy, science fiction, engineering, and computer science. Throw in conspiracy theories and cyberpunk nihilism and you have all the ingredients for Deus Ex.
Transhumanists, like Enlightenment partisans in general, believe that human nature can be improved but are conflicted about whether liberal democracy is the best path to betterment. The liberal tradition within the Enlightenment has argued that individuals are best at finding their own interests and should be left to improve themselves in self-determined ways. But many people are mistaken about their own best interests, and more rational elites may have a better understanding of the general good. Enlightenment partisans have often made a case for modernizing monarchs and scientific dictatorships. Transhumanists need to confront this tendency to disparage liberal democracy in favor of the rule by dei ex machina and technocratic elites.
Today I gave a brief invited talk at the National Defense University, in Washington DC, about the ethics of autonomous robot missiles and war vehicles and “battlebots” (my word, not theirs!) in general. The talk came about as a consequence of my role in the IEET, but I wound up bringing in a number of explicitly H+ themes.
Wielded by an expert, the sharp sword of rationality cuts deep, exposing underlying layers of confusion, intellectual laziness, or willful misunderstanding in what might on the surface appear to be logical arguments.
Fear is a great motivator. Throughout history, successful leaders have known how to use fear to unite and to manipulate their followers. Usually this fear is of “the other,” a group that looks different, talks different, or worships a different god.
Here’s a startling vision for the next decade: two familiar online phenomena converge in an emerging technological arena to strike a fatal blow to American civil society.
One day away from the Singularity Summit in NYC! I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be posting reports to this blog from the Summit on behalf of the IEET.
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