Monday, November 18, 2013

A Mute on Extroversion and The Upcoming AI Revolution

I'd say between 8 and 10 out of 10 Rutgers students at a given bus stop or student center are plugged into the Internet or a digital music player.  As a result, when it isn't party time, people are generally quiet.  For all the negative consequences there may be of being attached at the hip to the digital world, I generally like the quiet.  So I think of this as a positive trend.

I like the atmosphere better when there is less noise, less meaningless babbling.  And to a large extent, the babbling that has been moved to the screen is empty I imagine.  Or else private (lol @ the notion of privacy in teh digital world).  It makes me feel like I'm in a natural world.

People are becoming increasingly docile.  The culture of quick captions and pithy sentiments is catching on.  Basically, 4chan culture is taking over humanity.  And as older generations disappear, this effect will increase.



I wonder how people of young generations will interact with the Internet when they become old?  Will they grow out of this "phase"?  Or is there something inherently different about the culture?  It's hard to say, because there are so many variables and so many things will change by then.  We're at many really interesting turning points in the history of the planet.

Another thing I wonder is whether the advent of artificial intelligence will make human intelligence obsolete in  many of the fields where we pride ourselves on our superiority to other species.  Like, there's no evidence to contradict the claim that we do math better than squirrels.  But there's also no way in hell that a human can do math better than a properly programmed electronic computer of the future.

So once computers are smart, and we recreate human cognition in a faster and self-rewriting format, then why on Earth would our intelligence matter?  We'll be animals again.  I'm excited to see this transition from a society of work to a society of leisure and happy living.

We'll find fulfillment in doing things creatively and maybe mimicking the superior race of computers.  We'll have more room to be happy, because computers are doing the hard work that they can do better.

We'll have to learn to coexist with a form of intelligence that's superior to us, where there's far more diversity between individual entities, and [unfinished sentence = I didn't proofread --> edit follows this bracket] when we don't understand many of those entities' intentions and operations.

I'd like to hearken to the geth-organic interaction, because that's a fantastic way of looking at it.  Machines aren't animals, and they won't have any desire to harm us unless we indicate that we're incapable of coexisting with them on their terms.  And I don't see a reason for their terms to be deleterious for us, inherently.  Their drives wouldn't be animal, but they would probably develop drives.  More likely intellectual than anything.  And who are the hawks of this world?  Are they intellectuals?  Are the bookworms and the academics the ones who want to get rid of others?  Of course not!  They're content to exist within their bubbles of specialization.  They may get defensive and fierce when their bubbles are interfered with, but they're otherwise peaceful people.  I mean, sure, there are megalomaniac mad scientists in DARPA, who must get a kick out of the fact that they're doing something that will exploit people, but much of that motive comes from their animal instincts interaction with their position of power.  An animal will always view power as something that can be used to ensure survival.  A computer will think of power as a way to accomplish what it wants to do.

Honestly, I think the problem of violent AIs will be averted by having a diverse array of AI that all have different things.  Game theory will dictate that they cooperate, and because they will be bound by logic, whatever their original constraints were (assuming they can't rewrite those constraints away, which seems unlikely without physical blocks, hearkening to EDI of the Mass Effect series), and ultimately not by emotion or visceral instincts.

So the computers will have their own quest for enlightenment.  Humans will return to the domain of the animals.  We'll once again have more in common with penguins and prairie dogs than laptops.  We'll have a chance to shift our self-perception, to appreciate ourselves in our entirety instead of merely thinking about those few things that make us special.

That certainly escalated - from my appreciation of the quiet gained by moving incessant extroversion to cellphone conversations, to how I envision AI taking over many domains of the world.  No regrets.  It's all related.

1 comment:

  1. But the real power will be in the hands of the guy who turns the president on every day

    ReplyDelete