Superintellligence

This talk, by Maciej Cegłowski, which reached me through a number of links, is one of the most interesting things I've seen on the web in a long time. I warn you that it's long, but it's not boring. The topic is superintelligence, the idea that computer-based intelligence is growing so fast that it will soon be dominant in our society. The proponents of this idea think this is a wonderful thing. Our author is not so sure.

Here are some short excerpts:

AI Cosplay
The most harmful social effect of AI anxiety is something I call AI cosplay. People who are genuinely persuaded that AI is real and imminent begin behaving like their fantasy of what a hyperintelligent AI would do.
In his book, Bostrom lists six things an AI would have to master to take over the world:

• Intelligence Amplification

• Strategizing

• Social manipulation

• Hacking

• Technology research

• Economic productivity

If you look at AI believers in Silicon Valley, this is the quasi-sociopathic checklist they themselves seem to be working from.
Sam Altman, the man who runs YCombinator, is my favorite example of this archetype. He seems entranced by the idea of reinventing the world from scratch, maximizing impact and personal productivity. He has assigned teams to work on reinventing cities, and is doing secret behind-the-scenes political work to swing the election.
Such skull-and-dagger behavior by the tech elite is going to provoke a backlash by non-technical people who don't like to be manipulated. You can't tug on the levers of power indefinitely before it starts to annoy other people in your democratic society.
I've even seen people in the so-called rationalist community refer to people who they don't think are effective as ‘Non Player Characters’, or NPCs, a term borrowed from video games. This is a horrible way to look at the world.
So I work in an industry where the self-professed rationalists are the craziest ones of all. It's getting me down.,

Incentivizing Crazy This whole field of "study" incentivizes crazy. One of the hallmarks of deep thinking in AI risk is that the more outlandish your ideas, the more credibility it gives you among other enthusiasts. It shows that you have the courage to follow these trains of thought all the way to the last station. Ray Kurzweil, who believes he will never die, has been a Google employee for several years now and is presumably working on that problem. There are a lot of people in Silicon Valley working on truly crazy projects under the cover of money.

Religion 2.0
What it really is is a form of religion. People have called a belief in a technological Singularity the "nerd Apocalypse", and it's true.

It's a clever hack, because instead of believing in God at the outset, you imagine yourself building an entity that is functionally identical with God. This way even committed atheists can rationalize their way into the comforts of faith.
The AI has all the attributes of God: it's omnipotent, omniscient, and either benevolent (if you did your array bounds-checking right), or it is the Devil and you are at its mercy.

Like in any religion, there's even a feeling of urgency. You have to act now! The fate of the world is in the balance!

And of course, they need money!

Because these arguments appeal to religious instincts, once they take hold they are hard to uproot.

IT heroes save the day at Nipissing University

Call it involuntary distance education.  But it all worked out for the best.

This morning I woke to the biggest heaviest snowfall I have seen in a long time.  I have a very long country driveway that can be cleared by hand if the time is available, or plowed if our neighbor is available.   Looking out the window I knew that handscraping was not going to be possible. Certainly not before my 10 o'clock class.  My three-hour seminar starting at 12:30? That would depend upon my neighbor.

By 11 o'clock it was pretty clear that he was not going to show up in time.  (It turns out that he was having tractor trouble.) What to do? Cancel another class? That thought really bugged me. This was the last class before our in-class midterm, and there were things I wanted to get done.

One faint possibility occurred to me. What if I used Skype to communicate with the students? It might not be an ideal way to run  a seminar discussion, but surely it would be better than an unplanned disruption. I called the IT helpdesk. Could they set up a computer in the classroom to be a Skype station? Would they?

No hesitation. I am sure they had plenty of other things to do, but with great willingness and competence they set up my classroom so that I could discuss the upcoming term test and run a discussion on queens and other wives in sixth-century France.  I would not have you think it was perfect, but it was better than the alternative: sitting in front of the fire with a glass of wine… Wait a minute, was that a possibility?

I was glad in any case not to lose the class meeting. Thanks, Marg!  Thanks, Greg!  Thanks, whoever else pitched in (that includes at least one student)!

Sometimes this really is a great place to work.

Image:  hmm...

Charles Babbage's Difference Engine

I am fascinated by early 19th-century technological breakthroughs, so I was really pleased to be referred to this NPR piece on the Babbage Difference Engine, which includes audio, text, photo slideshow, and video.

Here's an excerpt:

Charles Babbage, the man whom many consider to be the father of modern computing, never got to complete any of his life's work. The Victorian gentleman was a brilliant mathematician, but he wasn't very good at politics and fundraising, so he never got the financial backing to finish any of his elaborate machine designs. For decades, even his fans weren't certain whether his computing machines would have worked.

But Doron Swade, a former curator at the Science Museum in London, has proven that Babbage wasn't just an eccentric dreamer. Using nothing but materials that would have been available to Babbage in the 1840s, Swade and a group of engineers successfully built Babbage's Difference Engine — and a version is now on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

The Difference Engine fills half a gallery and stands taller than most men. It's 5 tons of cast iron, steel and bronze woven together from 8,000 distinct parts. Though it looks like it could be a sculpture, the machine is essentially a giant calculator. Tim Robinson, a docent at the museum, says it's "the first automatic calculating machine."

This engine — made from 162-year-old designs — doesn't have a power pack; it has a hand crank. Robinson works up a sweat as he turns it. "As long as you keep turning that crank, it will produce entirely new results," he says.

Most importantly, the machine produces accurate results. In Babbage's time, England reigned over a vast global empire. To navigate the seas, captains used books filled with calculations — but these equations were all done by fallible human minds.

"If the tables had an error," Robinson says, "a ship could either get lost or run aground, so lives and property were thought to be at stake."

The story goes that Babbage was inspired to create the Difference Engine one day when he came across multiple errors in a book of astronomical calculations. "I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam!" he exclaimed.

Of course, this episode inspired one of the first steampunk novels.

P.s. It was designed to have a printer! And has one now!

Image: Wikipedia picture of the American exemplar.