The idea that form communicates to us more strongly than function is particularly strong and resonant. We have moved into an era of fashion in hardware and software: look and style sells more than underlying functionality. Apple have rode this particular wave most noticably and successfully out of the tech giants, but the entire marketplace has shifted into this niche.
"We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race.
...
Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question."
What he seems to have missed is that no matter how complex the machine, it always has a creator and a master. Even the most sophisticated AI was designed someone who, deliberately or not, encoded that AI with biases likely mirroring that of its creator (e.g. racial bias in facial recognition software). Even if we achieve the singularity and have software making other software ad infinitum, the biases are there in the original program.
I dont think we need the singularity for machines to take over. The systems that run society are bigger than any of us and nobody can hold every single one of them in their head. If some emergent property or bug cropped up, most people would keep doing what the computer says, because theyre a small fish and we do what the system tells us. Whos the master now?
We already see the beginning of it. Some support person tells you "the computer won't let me do that" to rectify some harm done by the programming. I've run into it all the time. I've read about it happening (recently Google Pixel support completely f'ing up an order and it taking a post on HN to fix).
The weird thing is that big organizations just seem to give up when trying to fix these types of things.
Imagine what it will be like when ML is feeding the software values that are broken, wrong, or dangerous. How will they fix those problems? Especially when corporations often lose the people that wrote the applications, and the people behind them have little knowledge or skill.
The Machine Fired Me[0] is the best written account on how people do not question the systems. Even though nominally the machine has (collective)human masters, they are hard to find when needed; the individuals will do as instructed by "the system".
What human bias would a knowledge seeking AIXI ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIXI ) agent have? AIXI is incomputable but that doesn't mean unbiased approximations would have any resemblance to any human-provided/designed priors after some years/centuries.
True. The issue IMHO is that the number of people who are, or are simply able to be, the master of the machine trends to very low numbers.
One, slightly off topic example, is Amazon compared to other companies I know. Amazon is doing with pretty sophisticated processes, systems and, say, 5 FTEs what others are doing with four times the number. This is not covering warehouse stuff like picking, packing, stowing and such. And the other companies are using the mist up-to-date version of SAP incl. APO. Yet, all but max. a handful of people are simply biological extensions of SAP pushing buttons because they were told to. They won't be able to function in an Amazon like environment because there is ni need for them. I only see this trend to speed up. Not sure where it will end an whether that place will be a good one so.
The Internet and economy are both not machines, but networks of machines interacting by some agreed-upon protocol (Internet Protocol in the internet's case, lots of tangled multinational foreign legislation in the economy's case).
Break the networks down far enough and you'll find the individual component's owners/creators. Even the protocols were created by specific people (and for specific reasons! The design philosophy of the internet protocol is pretty interesting reading) even if those people are no longer involved in the operation of the networks.
Sure, things are composed out of smaller things, but composition doesn't mean that the higher level thing doesn't act like it is its own system. The whole is more than the sum of the parts.
Humans and other animals were created by a process of nature which encoded certain biases into them, too. Isn't this just a carry-over of that same effect?
I see the larger point is not that the overarching goal of the work being done may not be directly or indirectly influenced by a human. It’s not a reflection I think on who may ultimately be pulling the strings. In that sense, it does not require singularity to be meaningfully true.
But the idea that 10 billion people ultimately spending their lives dedicated to machines. Dedicated in the sense of it’s the first thing you touch in the morning and the last thing you touch at night. It tells you how to conduct your day, and mediates every human interaction you have meanwhile. The machine “masters” life like a mastering a record. It lays down the track of your days in concentric circles.
Superior/inferior story is a very misleading starting point. There are 10^7 billion ants crawling around the earth, doing robotic mindless things for reasons no human can understand, without any machines controlling them. What's up with that? Does Samuel Butler sit around wondering what comes after the ants?
Superior means superior in power, i.e. the ability to act constructively or destructively to further their existence.
The power of the industry grows faster than the power of humans, and while humans are more than ever reliant on the industry to survive, the industry is busy stripping out its meaty bits and destroying ecosystems (bye ants).
Whats interesting is exploring what natural forces encourage some species of ant to variate between more loner styles vs hive/communal super organism. Then seeing if the same forces are acting on humans, and where.
The horseman serves the horse,
The neatherd serves the neat,
The merchant serves the purse,
The eater serves his meat;
'T is the day of the chattel,
Web to weave, and corn to grind;
Things are in the saddle,
And ride mankind.
There are two laws discrete,
Not reconciled,--
Law for man, and law for thing;
The last builds town and fleet,
But it runs wild,
And doth the man unking.
-- excerpt from "Ode Inscribed to W. H. Channing" by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Perhaps humans wont end up being inferior instead we will just end up being part of the system that creates the next level of life.
When I was a kid, and learned about the billions of cells and bacteria making up my body, and how they communicated with molecules and worked together in immensely complex ways. Specializing and signaling and coming into existence and dying, and so on... I wondered if they were aware that they were part of a huge complex organism, or if they were just "doing their thing" oblivious to my existence.
Ofcourse, cells aren't conscious so they aren't aware of anything, but wouldn't it be interesting, if we humans end up acting like these cells and bacteria, completely unaware of the next level of life we were creating. We could just be "doing our thing" building our networks, and computers and machines, and going through our lives and such.. meanwhile it is all to sustain a level of life that we, like our own cells, do not realize we are a part of.
Smart contracts, and distributed value networks in general are the gateway to this vision. It will be attained once one of these contracts/DAO/AI/whatever becomes self-sustaining.
The DAO will "employ" people in exchange for cryptocurrency, interact with other DAOs, and influence the lives of millions of humans. All the while most individual participants will have no agency against the Dao. We're already used to this with the government-citizen relationship so the transition shouldn't be too painful. The crucial difference will be that, for trust purposes, no human will have absolute control over the DAO.
Some humans will be incentivized to accomplish primary tasks for the DAOs, other humans will keep watch and make sure the reported results are correct (oracles).
I would question the self sustaining part depending on the company and the timescale. For the infinite timescale I doubt any currently existing companies, or groups of, can self sustain indefinitely.
Yes, what I'm talking about is definitely an evolution of corporations. But corporations are more easily influenced, taken down, and are bound by laws. Bitcoin can't be forcibly shutdown.
This is, I believe, similar to what Richard Dawkins had in mind when he coined the term, meme, in The Selfish Gene (1976). Now meme has taken on a more degenerate meaning.
I read it 10 years ago, and Dawkins' book remains modern even today. Genetic evolutionary science hasn't surpassed it, we've just developed a richer understanding of the chemistry.
To paraphrase TFA's title, "human beings are the sex organs of the human genome".
To borrow the terminology used for plants and algae, we are the diploid sporophyte phase. And our gonads are the haploid gametophyte phase, which trigger development of sex organs. That is, flowers.
I like this quote because my research into the spread of information systems speeding up and accelerating the decline of man goes back to the 1700s. It suggests others have been seeing the pace of change in how society is structured and noticing the patterns.
I've always been interested in notional "starting points" like the appearance of writing representing the beginning of "history."
Since reading "Sapiens" I buy into YNH's definition of the beginning as the point where culture takes over from genetics as the driver of progress. He attributes this to the paleolithic revolution, and supports the hypothesis that this poit represents a breakthrough in language, enabling cultural concepts like tribalism, money, priesthood or whatnot and leading to much more sophisticated group and intergroup behaviours. That resulted in a creature that was no longer an animal a meaningful sense.
From that point on, human behaviour evolves so much faster than genetics that natural selection is replaced, as the meaningful driver of change. Biology becomes a legacy and a platform, but the culture grafted onto biology is what matters historically.
It's hard, with our biases, to put younger events like the industrial revolution into context alongside palaeolithic events... but it certainly seems like a revolution on that scale.
In any case, speculating about the present... It seems plausible we are currently at a point where technological advancement is (a) driving change rather than culture and (b) cultural institutions can't keep up.
The wild card is that technology can influence biology (and culture) in ways that culture could not. But. whether technology replaces us or subsumes us doesn't seem that different to the eye-in-sky perspective. It is technological progress that dictates progress from now on...
Hah, that’s what Sapiens is about? That idea about social/culture vs. biology is almost straight out of Lila, by Robert Pirsig. He sets it up as a progression of giant leaps. Inorganic > Biology > Social > Intellectual, with each level being justified in its own priority over the patterns of the ones below it. (The community is more important than the cows — idea of ending slavery / freedom is more important than the social status quo)
Not exactly what the book is about, more a foundational assumption in the big narrative. Most of the book is about the subsequent examples driving history.
Machines can eat petroleum and electricity like cows can eat grass. That's why we have symbiotic coexistence with both of them.
If machines could only eat human food, there would be a lot less of them. For example, it takes two acres worth of land to make enough biodiesel annually to fill up an suv gas tank. Properly cultivated, that could feed a significant number of people.
That's about to become a problem once a sufficiently large share of humanity is economically obsolete and not worth feeding by the industry.
With an automated agriculture and seed production in the hands of a few companies (among which Monsanto/Bayer), it becomes trivially easy to start producing GMO seeds that are toxic to humans in massive amounts.
Machines will not value humans, and they will be in power.
Even before that, many among the very rich consider the poor as sub-human, but few do it in public. Do you remember the PG tweet where he equated unions with potential energy ripe for startups to tap into, rejoicing at the idea of burning down people's life to get richer (edit, here: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/663456748494127104)?
What if we could power people with electricity though? I am sure they would be far more energy efficient vs. machines. 1888 calories = 2.95kw hours per day. So less than $1/day of electricity. Someone just has to figure that one out. We could probably live indefinitely off of a big enough solar array.
Distributing said energy to cells would be non-trivial, and you'd still need nutrients.
Also humans need rest and unlike machines, the range of environmental conditions in which they can rest is narrower than their operational conditions (all of which are rather narrow and non-existent beyond the biosphere). Also, you can't suspend or reboot humans. Once they crash, they must be recycled.
This would of course put a much higher value on proximity to renewable hydroelectric power, e.g., “Florida Man Becomes the Sex Organs of the Machine World“.
Rich people are only rich because there are poorer people that are economically relevant. We all use dollars to buy food, money gives you the ability to have others do your bidding. It is just a social construct though, a convention.
Once humans are economically obsolete (Sam Altman plans to have OpenAI make super-human investment decisions, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Alpha Zero take an executive seat at Google in the coming years), human money becomes worthless to the industry, and even rich folks will be powerless.
No, rich people are rich because money is fungible. It is a medium of exchange and readily convertible to other mediums of exchange. And the rich have a lot of it. So whatever medium of value exchange is used by computers, money can be exchanged for it. Now, it can be that computers (or those with computers) will be able to attract more and more money, as we have had with the speculation bubble in cryptocurrencies, and before that with the Web bubble, there may be new stuff with AI like that. It will attract tons of money and maybe make trillionaires.
Ultimately, though, we may have a new phenomenon: autonomous programs earning cryptocurrency endlessly, at all parts of society, for generating content / doing useful computation / facilitating tons of things. At that point they will have most of the money. What will the money the robots earn be used for then?
We need UBI to redistribute money back to people continuously, while the robots don’t have an AGI to spend the money on stuff they want :)
> So whatever medium of value exchange is used by computers, money can be exchanged for it.
Money is, quite literally, the power to have others act for you within the rules of society (i.e. laws, for the plebs, and nought for the very rich).
Why would computers value human money in a world where human work is worthless (to computers)? There goes fungibility.
Provided they don't have the command of the industry, the power of the very rich disappears as well.
> What will the money the robots earn be used for then?
Making more robots.
> We need UBI [...]
UBI is lubricant. If we were to take in an even larger dick, it would be humane, but it's a chainsaw that's coming up our collective butt. Lube will only make it spin faster.
Less figuratively, UBI is the acceptance of humanity's obsolescence. A large population with UBI is completely powerless and can be unplugged at will.
> Provided they don't have the command of the industry, the power of the very rich disappears as well.
Whoever has control of the industry will be the very rich. If the computers have control of themselves (why would we set them that way?) then we are already toast.
By the way, UBI is a form of avoiding some dangerous concentration of power. In a world with escalating automation everything gets cheaper and cheaper, so any money distributed to the masses is enough to avoid making them irrelevant.
Growth? Short-term profit? Whatever, we don't even have to set them up that way, they could also end up accidentally in control. This would be all the more easier now that resource extraction (farming and mining), logistics, resource transformation and firepower are all being automated away.
Re. UBI: There are two prongs to power: construction (economy) and destruction (military). The latter is necessary to secure resources to power the former.
UBI is about numbing people down to the fact that they are being stripped of their economic power (the only one they still have at this point). I don't see why capitalism would waste resources by feeding billions of idle meat bags.
I’ve been envisioning a tinder-for-bots app. It could use tinder’s existing bot population (50%? 90%?). It’ll have a “I am not a human” recaptcha on sign up. It’ll feature influential celebs s.a Siri, kortana, Alexa and Tai. I only need to figure out monetization.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] thread...
Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question."
- Samuel Butler, 1863
The weird thing is that big organizations just seem to give up when trying to fix these types of things.
Imagine what it will be like when ML is feeding the software values that are broken, wrong, or dangerous. How will they fix those problems? Especially when corporations often lose the people that wrote the applications, and the people behind them have little knowledge or skill.
0. https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me
The minute an automated subset of the industry can perpetuate itself more efficiently than a partially human-powered counterpart, we're toast.
Who created the capitalist economy?
We're all in service to the machine already, and nobody is in charge.
Break the networks down far enough and you'll find the individual component's owners/creators. Even the protocols were created by specific people (and for specific reasons! The design philosophy of the internet protocol is pretty interesting reading) even if those people are no longer involved in the operation of the networks.
This was written in the throes of the Industrial Revolution. I suspect he was aware.
I see the larger point is not that the overarching goal of the work being done may not be directly or indirectly influenced by a human. It’s not a reflection I think on who may ultimately be pulling the strings. In that sense, it does not require singularity to be meaningfully true.
But the idea that 10 billion people ultimately spending their lives dedicated to machines. Dedicated in the sense of it’s the first thing you touch in the morning and the last thing you touch at night. It tells you how to conduct your day, and mediates every human interaction you have meanwhile. The machine “masters” life like a mastering a record. It lays down the track of your days in concentric circles.
Superior means superior in power, i.e. the ability to act constructively or destructively to further their existence.
The power of the industry grows faster than the power of humans, and while humans are more than ever reliant on the industry to survive, the industry is busy stripping out its meaty bits and destroying ecosystems (bye ants).
(in case others might be as unfamiliar with that word as I was)
When I was a kid, and learned about the billions of cells and bacteria making up my body, and how they communicated with molecules and worked together in immensely complex ways. Specializing and signaling and coming into existence and dying, and so on... I wondered if they were aware that they were part of a huge complex organism, or if they were just "doing their thing" oblivious to my existence.
Ofcourse, cells aren't conscious so they aren't aware of anything, but wouldn't it be interesting, if we humans end up acting like these cells and bacteria, completely unaware of the next level of life we were creating. We could just be "doing our thing" building our networks, and computers and machines, and going through our lives and such.. meanwhile it is all to sustain a level of life that we, like our own cells, do not realize we are a part of.
The DAO will "employ" people in exchange for cryptocurrency, interact with other DAOs, and influence the lives of millions of humans. All the while most individual participants will have no agency against the Dao. We're already used to this with the government-citizen relationship so the transition shouldn't be too painful. The crucial difference will be that, for trust purposes, no human will have absolute control over the DAO.
Some humans will be incentivized to accomplish primary tasks for the DAOs, other humans will keep watch and make sure the reported results are correct (oracles).
I read it 10 years ago, and Dawkins' book remains modern even today. Genetic evolutionary science hasn't surpassed it, we've just developed a richer understanding of the chemistry.
To borrow the terminology used for plants and algae, we are the diploid sporophyte phase. And our gonads are the haploid gametophyte phase, which trigger development of sex organs. That is, flowers.
I'm about to go fondle some flowers to ensure they pollinate correctly.
That does seem likely. I'd rather say next level of something like consciousness, awareness and/or intelligence.
Maybe we'll evolve into it. But from what little I know about AI, what works will likely not be much like we work.
... to make people click ads.
By the 1850s, the pooping duck machine might as well have been in a museum http://www.weirdhistorian.com/the-pooping-duck/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ned_Ludd
Since reading "Sapiens" I buy into YNH's definition of the beginning as the point where culture takes over from genetics as the driver of progress. He attributes this to the paleolithic revolution, and supports the hypothesis that this poit represents a breakthrough in language, enabling cultural concepts like tribalism, money, priesthood or whatnot and leading to much more sophisticated group and intergroup behaviours. That resulted in a creature that was no longer an animal a meaningful sense.
From that point on, human behaviour evolves so much faster than genetics that natural selection is replaced, as the meaningful driver of change. Biology becomes a legacy and a platform, but the culture grafted onto biology is what matters historically.
It's hard, with our biases, to put younger events like the industrial revolution into context alongside palaeolithic events... but it certainly seems like a revolution on that scale.
In any case, speculating about the present... It seems plausible we are currently at a point where technological advancement is (a) driving change rather than culture and (b) cultural institutions can't keep up.
The wild card is that technology can influence biology (and culture) in ways that culture could not. But. whether technology replaces us or subsumes us doesn't seem that different to the eye-in-sky perspective. It is technological progress that dictates progress from now on...
Both of his books are incredible.
Not exactly what the book is about, more a foundational assumption in the big narrative. Most of the book is about the subsequent examples driving history.
If machines could only eat human food, there would be a lot less of them. For example, it takes two acres worth of land to make enough biodiesel annually to fill up an suv gas tank. Properly cultivated, that could feed a significant number of people.
With an automated agriculture and seed production in the hands of a few companies (among which Monsanto/Bayer), it becomes trivially easy to start producing GMO seeds that are toxic to humans in massive amounts.
Why make inedible seeds? As a safeguard.
Horses and mules were necessary for plowing the fields. And no matter how they unionized, fields have been turned into parking lots for cars.
But those were animals. Will we value humans?
Machines will not value humans, and they will be in power.
Even before that, many among the very rich consider the poor as sub-human, but few do it in public. Do you remember the PG tweet where he equated unions with potential energy ripe for startups to tap into, rejoicing at the idea of burning down people's life to get richer (edit, here: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/663456748494127104)?
Distributing said energy to cells would be non-trivial, and you'd still need nutrients.
Also humans need rest and unlike machines, the range of environmental conditions in which they can rest is narrower than their operational conditions (all of which are rather narrow and non-existent beyond the biosphere). Also, you can't suspend or reboot humans. Once they crash, they must be recycled.
Rich people are only rich because there are poorer people that are economically relevant. We all use dollars to buy food, money gives you the ability to have others do your bidding. It is just a social construct though, a convention.
Once humans are economically obsolete (Sam Altman plans to have OpenAI make super-human investment decisions, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Alpha Zero take an executive seat at Google in the coming years), human money becomes worthless to the industry, and even rich folks will be powerless.
Ultimately, though, we may have a new phenomenon: autonomous programs earning cryptocurrency endlessly, at all parts of society, for generating content / doing useful computation / facilitating tons of things. At that point they will have most of the money. What will the money the robots earn be used for then?
We need UBI to redistribute money back to people continuously, while the robots don’t have an AGI to spend the money on stuff they want :)
Money is, quite literally, the power to have others act for you within the rules of society (i.e. laws, for the plebs, and nought for the very rich).
Why would computers value human money in a world where human work is worthless (to computers)? There goes fungibility.
Provided they don't have the command of the industry, the power of the very rich disappears as well.
> What will the money the robots earn be used for then?
Making more robots.
> We need UBI [...]
UBI is lubricant. If we were to take in an even larger dick, it would be humane, but it's a chainsaw that's coming up our collective butt. Lube will only make it spin faster.
Less figuratively, UBI is the acceptance of humanity's obsolescence. A large population with UBI is completely powerless and can be unplugged at will.
Whoever has control of the industry will be the very rich. If the computers have control of themselves (why would we set them that way?) then we are already toast.
By the way, UBI is a form of avoiding some dangerous concentration of power. In a world with escalating automation everything gets cheaper and cheaper, so any money distributed to the masses is enough to avoid making them irrelevant.
Growth? Short-term profit? Whatever, we don't even have to set them up that way, they could also end up accidentally in control. This would be all the more easier now that resource extraction (farming and mining), logistics, resource transformation and firepower are all being automated away.
Re. UBI: There are two prongs to power: construction (economy) and destruction (military). The latter is necessary to secure resources to power the former.
UBI is about numbing people down to the fact that they are being stripped of their economic power (the only one they still have at this point). I don't see why capitalism would waste resources by feeding billions of idle meat bags.