Questions Oct 19-21

W 21 - F 19-23, Epilogue (-p.256)

• Is resistance futile? Is it necessary, futile or not? What form(s) of resistance to climate indifference do you express?
• Is there in fact a "native conservatism in human beings..."? Should we trust it? 192
• Why is Scandinavia happy? 193
• Do "humans continue to believe in humanity"? 
• What's your forecast for the prevalence and success of solar panels and nonviolent movements in the years ahead?
• Does Ray Kurzweil's posthuman vision (178) strike you as meaningless? 195

Ray Kurzweil on "I've Got a Secret"-

 

• "Our job is to keep the human game going...and to pass it on." 199 Are you confident that your generation will do its job?
• "We romanticize humanity." 200 Does Kurzweil have a point? Should we romanticize post-humanity instead? Or should we not romanticize, period?
• Does the Trump era make you "deeply pessimistic about human nature"? 
• Should we genetically alter humans to make them more altruistic and communitarian, if we can? 201 Or just go after the "unbelievably small percentage" of greedy oligarchs "at the top of the energy heap" (Kochs, Exxon...)? 202
• Have you heard of Southwestern Publishing?  206
• If embracing renewable energy is our easiest task, what will it take to make that happen? 211
• How do we "reshape the zeitgeist" 217 and "shift culture"? 219
• Can we replicate the conditions that compelled Nixon to sign the Clean Air Act et al? 220
• Does the mere act of gathering activists begin to defeat despair? 221
• Is "maturity" a condition of success, in the climate fight? 226
• If "far more young people tell pollsters that they identify with socialism," does that herald the eventual end of capitalism (at least in its present form) in America? 231 Has it "run its course"? 240
• Do "libertarians" misunderstand J.S. Mill"? 237
• Are there better reasons to go to space than McKibben considers? 247
• Is the dream of colonizing Mars "pernicious"? 250
• Do you agree that "most of us, most of the time, are pretty wonderful"? 256

Nick Bostrom:

Bill McKibben on Falter:

Why the Future Doesn't Need Us, by Bill Joy

FROM THE MOMENT I became involved in the creation of new technologies, their ethical dimensions have concerned me, but it was only in the autumn of 1998 that I became anxiously aware of how great are the dangers facing us in the 21st century. I can date the onset of my unease to the day I met Ray Kurzweil, the deservedly famous inventor of the first reading machine for the blind and many other amazing things.

Ray and I were both speakers at George Gilder's Telecosm conference, and I encountered him by chance in the bar of the hotel after both our sessions were over. I was sitting with John Searle, a Berkeley philosopher who studies consciousness. While we were talking, Ray approached and a conversation began, the subject of which haunts me to this day.

I had missed Ray's talk and the subsequent panel that Ray and John had been on, and they now picked right up where they'd left off, with Ray saying that the rate of improvement of technology was going to accelerate and that we were going to become robots or fuse with robots or something like that, and John countering that this couldn't happen, because the robots couldn't be conscious.

While I had heard such talk before, I had always felt sentient robots were in the realm of science fiction. But now, from someone I respected, I was hearing a strong argument that they were a near-term possibility. I was taken aback, especially given Ray's proven ability to imagine and create the future. I already knew that new technologies like genetic engineering and nanotechnology were giving us the power to remake the world, but a realistic and imminent scenario for intelligent robots surprised me.

It's easy to get jaded about such breakthroughs. We hear in the news almost every day of some kind of technological or scientific advance. Yet this was no ordinary prediction. In the hotel bar, Ray gave me a partial preprint of his then-forthcoming book The Age of Spiritual Machines, which outlined a utopia he foresaw—one in which humans gained near immortality by becoming one with robotic technology. On reading it, my sense of unease only intensified; I felt sure he had to be understating the dangers, understating the probability of a bad outcome along this path.

I found myself most troubled by a passage detailing a dystopian scenario:

THE NEW LUDDITE CHALLENGE

First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained... (continues)

==
Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Survive to the Singularity

Ray Kurzweil, the famous inventor, is trim, balding, and not very tall. With his perfect posture and narrow black glasses, he would look at home in an old documentary about Cape Canaveral, but his mission is bolder than any mere voyage into space. He is attempting to travel across a frontier in time, to pass through the border between our era and a future so different as to be unrecognizable. He calls this border the singularity. Kurzweil is 60, but he intends to be no more than 40 when the singularity arrives.

Kurzweil's notion of a singularity is taken from cosmology, in which it signifies a border in spacetime beyond which normal rules of measurement do not apply (the edge of a black hole, for example). The word was first used to describe a crucial moment in the evolution of humanity by the great mathematician John von Neumann. One day in the 1950s, while talking with his colleague Stanislaw Ulam, von Neumann began discussing the ever-accelerating pace of technological change, which, he said, "gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs as we know them could not continue."

Many years later, this idea was picked up by another mathematician, the professor and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, who added an additional twist. Vinge linked the singularity directly with improvements in computer hardware. This put the future on a schedule. He could look at how quickly computers were improving and make an educated guess about when the singularity would arrive. "Within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence," Vinge wrote at the beginning of his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era. "Shortly after, the human era will be ended." According to Vinge, superintelligent machines will take charge of their own evolution, creating ever smarter successors. Humans will become bystanders in history, too dull in comparison with their devices to make any decisions that matter.

Kurzweil transformed the singularity from an interesting speculation into a social movement. His best-selling books The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity Is Near cover everything from unsolved problems in neuroscience to the question of whether intelligent machines should have legal rights. But the crucial thing that Kurzweil did was to make the end of the human era seem actionable: He argues that while artificial intelligence will render biological humans obsolete, it will not make human consciousness irrelevant. The first AIs will be created, he says, as add-ons to human intelligence, modeled on our actual brains and used to extend our human reach. AIs will help us see and hear better. They will give us better memories and help us fight disease. Eventually, AIs will allow us to conquer death itself. The singularity won't destroy us, Kurzweil says. Instead, it will immortalize us.

There are singularity conferences now, and singularity journals. There has been a congressional report about confronting the challenges of the singularity, and late last year there was a meeting at the NASA Ames Research Center to explore the establishment of a singularity university. The meeting was called by Peter Diamandis, who established the X Prize. Attendees included senior government researchers from NASA, a noted Silicon Valley venture capitalist, a pioneer of private space exploration, and two computer scientists from Google... (continues)

...

...To press his case, Kurzweil is writing and producing an autobiographical movie, with walk-ons by Alan Dershowitz and Tony Robbins. Kurzweil appears in two guises, as himself and as an intelligent computer named Ramona, played by an actress. Ramona has long been the inventor's virtual alter ego and the expression of his most personal goals. "Women are more interesting than men," he says, "and if it's more interesting to be with a woman, it is probably more interesting to be a woman." He hopes one day to bring Ramona to life, and to have genuine human experiences, both with her and as her. Kurzweil has been married for 32 years to his wife, Sonya Kurzweil. They have two children — one at Stanford University, one at Harvard Business School. "I don't necessarily only want to be Ramona," he says. "It's not necessarily about gender confusion, it's just about freedom to express yourself."

Kurzweil's movie offers a taste of the drama such a future will bring. Ramona is on a quest to attain full legal rights as a person. She agrees to take a Turing test, the classic proof of artificial intelligence, but although Ramona does her best to masquerade as human, she falls victim to one of the test's subtle flaws: Humans have limited intelligence. A computer that appears too smart will fail just as definitively as one that seems too dumb. "She loses because she is too clever!" Kurzweil says.

The inventor's sympathy with his robot heroine is heartfelt. "If you're just very good at doing mathematical theorems and making stock market investments, you're not going to pass the Turing test," Kurzweil acknowledged in 2006 during a public debate with noted computer scientist David Gelernter. Kurzweil himself is brilliant at math, and pretty good at stock market investments. The great benefits of the singularity, for him, do not lie here. "Human emotion is really the cutting edge of human intelligence," he says. "Being funny, expressing a loving sentiment — these are very complex behaviors."

One day, sitting in his office overlooking the suburban parking lot, I ask Kurzweil if being a singularitarian makes him happy. "If you took a poll of primitive man, happiness would be getting a fire to light more easily," he says. "But we've expanded our horizon, and that kind of happiness is now the wrong thing to focus on. Extending our knowledge and casting a wider net of consciousness is the purpose of life." Kurzweil expects that the world will soon be entirely saturated by thought. Even the stones may compute, he says, within 200 years.

Every day he stays alive brings him closer to this climax in intelligence, and to the time when Ramona will be real. Kurzweil is a technical person, but his goal is not technical in this respect. Yes, he wants to become a robot. But the robots of his dreams are complex, funny, loving machines. They are as human as he hopes to be. --Gary Wolf, Wired, 2008

==
M 19 - 13-18 (-p.188)

• Will we ever get "backups for our version-one biological bodies"? 133
• Is Ray Kurzweil a crank? 134
• Will we get a "synthetic neocortex in the cloud"? (Would it be ours?) Do you hope we will?  135
• Are you impressed by Smart Reply, or just annoyed?136
• Are there really no limits to the exponential acceleration of computing power? Is computing power the same (in principle) as evolv(-ed/-ing) human-level intelligence?
• Will 2099 be anything like Kurzweil predicts? 136
• Is it an insuperable objection to any technology that it "challenges" human nature? 
• Are we sure that smart cars (machines) won't be capable of participating in interesting discussions? 137 Is the world of Her implausible?

• If smart AI is supposed to be "smart as a human across the board," what does smart mean?
• Will CRISPR "usher in a new age of genetic engineering and biological mastery"? 141

• How would you distinguish objectionable from acceptable attempts to "alter future humans"? Is it simply the somatic/germ line distinction? 142-3
• Is the prospect of our possessing the "power to direct the evolution of our own species" frightening, exhilarating, both, or something else? 
• Is Dr. Fauci right about Dr. He? 144
• What would be wrong with "setting your child's happiness rheostat," or at least setting a floor? 147
• How could genetic engineering be prevented from exacerbating social inequality and stratification, and introducing GenRich and Natural classes? 152-3
• Hari is right, isn't he, about the best way to "engineer better humans"? 154
• Are you concerned about automation and the future of work? 155
• Is Bill Joy right about the future? 157
• Is Elon Musk right about AI? 158 Nick Bostrom? 159 Jaron Lanier? 160
• Do we need to pull the plug on 3D printers? 159
• Is it how you play the game, or how you tell the story of the game, that matters most? 164
• Do you feel sympathy (or anything) for Lance Armstrong, Barry Bonds, et al? 165
• What is the value of the artificial/natural distinction? 166
• Is CRISPR antilibertarian (or anti-liberty)? 168
• Will CRISPR-designed children feel disconnected? 170
• Will CRISPR-designed humans be incapable of achieving "flow"? 172
• Does the prospect that "we could devote our lives to playing ever-more-immersive video games" appeal to you? 176
• Is Ray Kurzweil's vision attractive? Realistic?178
• Do you want your brain to be turned into a computer simulation after you're gone? Why or why not? 185
• Is McKibben right about "what human civilization is"? 187