Superhuman intelligence update

Recommended reading: "What Happens When Artificial Intelligence Turns On Us?" a Q+A with James Barrat by Erica Hendry at Smithsonian. I recently reviewed Barrat's book Our Final Invention, and while I expressed some skepticism about his argument, there's no doubt that it made me take the subject more seriously than I did before. I'm glad to hear he's looking into making an Our Final Invention film, and recommend he interview Mark Alpert about his novel Extinction: A Thriller. I also appreciate that Barrat spends some time in the interview discussing the perils of enhancing human intelligence, an important aspect as "we'll be smarter too" is not an entirely fool-proof safeguard.

Thinking about this subject also reminded me that a couple of years ago, Glenn Beck published some pro-singularity thoughts along with worries that the FDA or other regulators might screw up the bountiful benefits of superhuman technology. More recently, he's started to sound less sanguine about it all, and some left-wing commentators, in knee-jerk mode, accuse him of being a neo-Luddite while other, maybe further-left, commentators castigate him as an apologist for dangerous, dehumanizing technologies. I bring all this up not to defend Beck, who manages to sound crazy no matter which side of these issues he shows up on at any given moment, but rather to point out just how chaotic and confused our political system is and will be in responding to real or imagined cataclysmic tech changes.

UPDATE 12:08 PM: A further wrinkle regarding Glenn Beck. He's often expressed skepticism about evolution. That's a bit curious in that an acceptance of evolution is, I think, a likely if not strictly necessary underlying assumption if one is going to be receptive to the Singularity (I guess if Schadenfreude gets a capital, this can too); by contrast, if one thinks the human mind is incorporeal and/or the result of direct intervention by supernatural forces, that would tend to undermine expectations that something similar is going to come about in a few decades in a silicon format.

Christie and conservative Schadenfreude

There's a certain amount of Schadenfreude (if you're going to use a German word, I say keep the capitalization) in conservative Republican circles these days about the troubles of Chris Christie, regarding Bridgegate and, now, Sandy relief. Some conservatives have responded by taking the bridge scandal seriously, as Nicole Gelinas does in this cogent National Review piece, but much conservative reaction has consisted of satisfaction that a contender favored by the RINO moderates that supposedly constitute the GOP's "Establishment" is now getting his comeuppance at the hands of the mainstream media that he naively sought to befriend. Thus, for instance, Jonah Goldberg:

One Christie lesson for Republicans. Get in bed with MSM dogs, you'll eventually wake up with fleas.
— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) January 20, 2014

And John Nolte:

Dear GOP Establishment: Your "friends" in media are destroying "your guy." #Suckas
— John Nolte (@NolteNC) January 20, 2014

Me: The lessons these right-wingers are touting seem to boil down to (a) the Christie scandals are not inherently that big a deal but (b) even minor scandals or misleading allegations against GOP politicians will be hyped by the media, even while they ignore or downplay Democratic ones, so (c) the moderate schtick of appealing to the media while bickering with conservatives is a political loser.

Now, I'm a New Jersey GOP moderate who's voted for Christie twice for governor (but who even before the recent scandals and claims did not particularly favor him over other possible 2016 national standard-bearers, including Condoleezza Rice, Mitch Daniels, Rob Portman and the dreaded Jon Huntsman). I agree with Gelinas that Bridgegate is serious (I'll wait and see on Sandy relief and whatever else may be breaking), so I'm skeptical from the get-go about underlying point (a) in the RINO-baiting above ("it's just a traffic jam, not Benghazi," or words to that effect).

I think a lesson conservatives and centrists should be embracing is that big government is a source of the current scandal or possible scandals--for instance, that the bloated Port Authority of NY/NJ lends itself to political pressure and shenanigans. Reforming that rotten institution, and privatizing its functions to the degree possible, is an approach we should be hearing a lot about in the wake of Bridgegate--but sadly few seem to care.

The takeaway from Goldberg and Nolte--stay hostile to the MSM, never reach out to the center--is something the Republican base wants to hear. It's a formula for privileging loyalty to a political faction over the merits and facts of an issue (any issue); and also for losing more national elections. Too bad that Christie, at least through poor selection and oversight of his staff if not direct malfeasance, has enabled conservatives to indulge in some Schadenfreude behind the walls of their bubble.

Ultra-mini-review: Elysium

Watched Elysium, which takes place in 2154 on Earth (where a huge impoverished population lives) and Elysium (a Palm Springs-like space station to which the wealthy have decamped). It's moderately interesting and moderately entertaining, which given that it comes from the maker of District 9, means it's quite disappointing. The story needs some subtleties, some tradeoffs, some hard choices. Instead, it's the kind of story where the right thing to do is obvious if only the rich people (whom we never really meet) would do it, and the world's problems can be solved with, literally, the press of a button.

Book note: The Up Side of Down

Current reading: The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success, by Megan McArdle. Perhaps it will give me some insight into whether or how badly this blog is a failure (because it has generally low traffic and distracts me from other projects) and whether or to what degree positive consequences may result from it nonetheless.

Also, one thing that struck me in Our Final Invention (which I reviewed here) was a quote in it from philosopher Nick Bostrom: "Our approach to existential risks cannot be one of trial-and-error. There is no opportunity to learn from errors. The reactive approach--see what happens, limit damages, and learn from experience--is unworkable." So I'll be reading the McArdle book with some thought as to what are the limits, as well as the power, of trial-and-error empiricism.

UPDATE 1/27: My review.

Review: Our Final Invention

I've now read Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, by James Barrat, a book I mentioned recently after reading Ronald Bailey's review of it. In a mild irony, my writing about it has been slowed by a balky Internet connection. In my experience, glitches have become considerably more common as computers have become more powerful and complicated. Perhaps such growing glitchiness suggests artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial superintelligence (ASI) are more likely to get seriously out of control someday, though it might also be a hint that AGI and ASI are going to be harder to achieve than expected by either techno-optimists such as Ray Kurzweil or techno-pessimists such as James Barrat.

Barrat's goal in this book is to convince readers that AGI and ASI are likely to occur in the near future (the next couple of decades or so) and, more to the point, likely to be extremely dangerous. In fact, he repeatedly expresses doubt as to whether humanity is going to survive its imminent encounter with a higher intelligence.

I find him more convincing in arguing that ASI would carry significant risks than I do in his take on its feasibility and imminence. Barrat aptly points out that building safeguards into AI is a poorly developed area of research (and something few technologists have seen as a priority); that there are strong incentives in national and corporate competition to develop AI quickly rather than safely; and that much relevant research is weapons-related and distinctly not aimed at ensuring the systems will be harmless to humans.

The book becomes less convincing when it hypes current or prospective advances and downplays the challenges and uncertainties of actually constructing an AGI, let alone an ASI. (Barrat suggests that once you get AGI, it will quickly morph into ASI, which may or may not be true.) For instance, in one passage, after acknowledging that "brute force" techniques have not replicated everything the human brain does, he states:

But consider a few of the complex systems today's supercomputers routinely model: weather systems, 3-D nuclear detonations, and molecular dynamics for manufacturing. Does the human brain contain a similar magnitude of complexity, or an order of magnitude higher? According to all indications, it's in the same ballpark.

Me: To model something and to reproduce it are not the same thing. Simulating weather or nuclear detonations is not equal to creating those real-world phenomena, and similarly a computer containing a detailed model of the brain would not necessarily be thinking like a brain or acting on its thoughts.

A big problem for AI, and one that gets little notice in this book, is that nobody has any idea how to program conscious awareness into a machine. That doesn't mean it can never be done, but it does raise doubts about assertions that it will or must occur as more complex circuits get laid down on chips in coming decades. Barrat often refers to AGIs and ASIs as "self aware" and his concerns center on such systems, having awakened, deciding that they have other objectives than the ones humans have programmed into them. One can imagine unconscious "intelligent" agents causing many problems (through glitches or relentless pursuit of some ill-considered programmed objective) but plotting against humanity seems like a job for an entity that knows that it and humans both exist.

Interestingly, though, Barrat offers the following dark scenario and sliver of hope:

I think our Waterloo lies in the foreseeable future, in the AI of tomorrow and the nascent AGI due out in the next decade or two. Our survival, if it is possible, may depend on, among other things, developing AGI with something akin to consciousness and human understanding, even friendliness, built in. That would require, at a minimum, understanding intelligent machines in a fine-grained way, so there'd be no surprises.

Me: Note that some AI experts, such as Jeff Hawkins, have argued the opposite--that the very lack of human-like desires, such as for power and status, is why AI systems won't turn against their makers. It would be a not-so-small irony if efforts to make AIs more like us make them more dangerous.

Our Final Invention is a thought-provoking and valuable book. Even if its alarmism is overstated, as I suspect and hope, there is no denying that the subject Barrat addresses is one in which there is very little that can be said with confidence, and in which the consequences of being wrong are very high indeed.

UPDATE: More.

Wolf pack rethinking

Went to a Live Wolf Encounter at the American Museum of Natural History today, meeting Atka, an Arctic gray wolf. This was an excellent way for both kids and adults to learn about wolves. One thing I learned was that the terminology of alphas and omegas is something scientists have been leaving behind, finding it poorly applicable to how wolf packs actually are structured. I read more about this shift  afterwards. I was skeptical recently when I read a blogger's categorization of humans into such Greek letter types, recounted sympathetically in the book Men on Strike, and skepticism seems even more justified if it's not even a good description of wolves.

Wolf Encounter

Bridgegate not revisited

I'll not dwell on the Christie Bridgegate scandal. As someone who's spent his share of time in NJ traffic, and who thinks there are viable alternatives in the center-right space, I'll just say the Republican Party can do better in 2016, even if he didn't know what his cretinous aide was doing.

Overblown light bulbs at Reason [updated]

"Lights Out for America's Favorite Light Bulb," by Shawn Regan at Reason. This piece epitomizes the misinformation now spreading about the light bulb "ban." Notice how the word "halogen" shows up in there without explanation or elaboration, before the writer focuses laser-like on the downsides of compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) and light-emitting diodes (LEDs). We're told that the "traditional" incandescent has been "effectively" banned, but we're not given the rather crucial context that halogen bulbs are incandescent lamps--they're incandescent lamps that meet the new energy-efficiency standards (by using halogen gas to redeposit tungsten atoms on the filament).

Instead of buying a 60 watt "traditional" incandescent, you can now buy a 43 watt halogen incandescent. Instead of a 100 watt "traditional" incandescent you can buy a 72 watt halogen incandescent. Instead of a 40 watt "traditional" bulb, you can buy a 29 watt halogen incandescent. These new products are basically the same as the old products, except they are more efficient.

They also cost more--which is why it is wrong as well to suggest there are no costs or tradeoffs in the new regulations. You'll probably pay something like $1.50 for a halogen incandescent, compared to 50 cents or less for a "traditional" one. On the other hand, you'll be using less electricity, and you may be replacing bulbs less frequently. Whether you end up paying more or less will depend on your electricity rates and other factors. Also, there are many exemptions to the energy efficiency rules, for specialized types of incandescents (such as ones used in fridges, for instance). But consumers are not being forced to buy non-incandescent lamps such as CFLs or LEDs, which is the impression you'll take away if you put stock in articles like the one at Reason.

The Reason article also complains about the "baptists and bootleggers" coalition that backed the new rules when they were legislated in 2007 (pushed by the Bush administration). That charge of crony capitalism is, at best, an oversimplification, as some companies opposed the new rules and those that supported them did so seeking to forestall rules that would have been more onerous. In any case, once the rules were in place and companies had developed new products in response to them (an expensive process), repealing the "ban" would be of dubious effect. For the companies that stopped making "traditional" lamps to start those production lines up again is not exactly a cost-free proposition.

By the way, what kind of "tradition" are energy-inefficient bulbs? Was leaded gasoline also a "tradition"?

For my part, I think a carbon tax (with cuts in other taxes) would be a better way of dealing with energy efficiency (and getting at the key underlying problem: carbon emissions driving climate change) than lamp efficiency standards. But I'll settle for some second-best policies in preference to doing nothing.

UPDATE 1/10: And here's Nick Gillespie doing the same thing in a video format: complaining that the incandescent bulb has been "effectively banned" and replaced by halogen, CFLs and LEDs. Do the people at Reason not know that halogen lamps are incandescents, or do they just not care?



UPDATE 1/11: "Elegy for the Incandescent Bulb," by Tom Purcell at Townhall, offers the same red herring with half the wit. And adds this:

To be sure, you have been so successful, it took the government - not better lighting products - to kill you off. That's because, some argue, you are causing the Earth to warm. 

As electricity passes through your filament, you see, the filament gets white-hot. That is how light is created - but in the process, you also create a lot of heat, and heat is wasted energy.

Me: No more updates on this post.

Origins of gravy [updated]

My favorite paragraph of the day (so far, at least) is by David Gelernter:

Most computationalists default to the Origins of Gravy theory set forth by Walter Matthau in the film of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple. Challenged to account for the emergence of gravy, Matthau explains that, when you cook a roast, “it comes.” That is basically how consciousness arises too, according to computationalists. It just comes.

That's from "The Closing of the Scientific Mind," a piece by Gelernter at Commentary on philosophy of mind and related subjects. I have had my own doubts about brain-as-computer thinking over the years (see here and here, for instance) and expect there will be plenty more contention over this sort of thing in coming years.

UPDATE 1/4: Ronald Bailey has a positive review at Reason of an interesting-sounding book Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat. Having not read the book, I don't know if it would convince me I've been wrong to downplay computers-take-over scenarios (I'll admit I've been wrong to downplay computers-take-over-jobs scenarios). In any case, if the technophilia of the libertarian movement gets tempered a bit, I'd see that as a positive development.

UPDATE 1/5: Ordered Barrat's book and will report on it on in due course. Will also be interested in Gelernter's book when that comes out. I am hoping to step up book reviewing here at Quicksilber.

UPDATE 1/10: Good stuff:



UPDATE 1/13: My review of Barrat's book.

GOP antievolution regression

I guess I'm not all that strict about not blogging before 2014. Here's some somber news about the state of antiscience in America today. The political divide over evolution has gotten worse.

I drew on the 2009 figures in my PhACT presentation on science and politics over a year ago. Those figures were bad enough, with 39% of Republicans saying humans had not evolved but rather existed in their present form since the beginning of time (presumably a few thousand years ago). For that number now to go up to 48% should dampen those arguments that left and right are equally bad when it comes to science. At the present phase in the evolution of the political parties, it just isn't true.

Some time ago, I gave a not-very-positive review to Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left. In retrospect, I could've taken a less snarky tone toward the book, as it has some legitimate points to make about left-wing antiscience. (In saying this, I am influenced both by subsequent Twitter dialogue with one of the authors, Alex Berezow, who seems like a nice guy, and by Megan McArdle's valid point that aggressive negativism in book reviews is too common these days; though I don't forswear it entirely.) But still, the data in the Pew poll rather forcefully make the point that something's changed, and for the worse, in the Republican Party in the last few years.

A couple of additional points: First, the poll also asked people (who accepted evolution) whether they thought it was "guided by a supreme being" or "due to natural processes." I have no quarrel with either answer to that question, which is a philosophical and not a scientific one; I would have given the latter answer to a pollster but I am not sure that the sharp dichotomy between the two answers would stand up to close scrutiny (why not a supreme being who is compatible with, perhaps the ultimate author of, or another way of describing, the natural processes?).

Second, I am not so naive as to think that the 67% of Democrats who think humans evolved over time are all knowledgeable about biology and have weighed the various lines of evidence carefully. Surely, much of their stance has to do with cultural affinity--feeling good about being on the side of smart, progressive people, or such. Whatever the limits of that, it's a lot better than proudly embracing ignorance, which is what many Republicans have done on this subject, and not only on this subject.

Book mention

I said I would only interrupt my blogging hiatus if something truly massive happened. The mention in the Wall Street Journal of Kevin Singer's novel The Last Conquistador clearly fits the bill. Readers may recall that they read about this once-little-known work here first.

And now we resume our planned interregnum.

Blog summary and hiatus

This blog needs a break, during which I can focus on other endeavors including my planned book about DeWitt Clinton and the Erie Canal. So, I'm going to plan on not posting anything before 2014. If something arises of great urgency, such that the world needs the Quicksilber perspective, I'll relax that policy. But it'll have to be something big, not polemical blather about Pajama Boy or the equivalent.

This blog has now been going on for just shy of six years. It has covered a wide, perhaps too wide, range of topics, and will resume its eclectic coverage early next year. For perplexed passersby who might arrive here via searches on topics ranging from Clinton Road New Jersey to the X Tax to "Obama whiskey" (whatever that was), I will explain that this is the blog of a politically minded centrist, a "deviationist apostle of the Frumian heresy" in one of my favorite self-descriptions, who works at a financial magazine, has spent some time in science journalism, studied economics and history and writes frequently on both and their intersection, and lives in northern New Jersey.

When I started this blog, I was a recent arrival in marriage and suburbia; since then I have also become a father, a baptized* Episcopalian and member of my church's vestry, a political moderate (and no longer a libertarian conservative or either part thereof); and more willing to reexamine ideological assumptions than I was in my younger decades. This blog has documented some of those interests and reexaminations. Thank you for stopping by, and special thanks to the friends, colleagues, ex-colleagues, ex-friends and interested strangers who've stopped by on a repeated basis, or at least more than once.

And below, an hour by car south of the Erie Canal, is the source of the Susquehanna River, taken on Memorial Day weekend 2013 before the canoe regatta named for Gen. James Clinton; the rock has a marker noting that Clinton's Dam was here. Here it was that a family history of watery projects began.

Otsego Lake at the source of the Susquehanna.

* - and confirmed

Film note: The End of Time [never mind]

I like the idea of this movie, though I don't know if I'll like the movie itself.

This review suggests maybe not. Still, I'm sure I'll give it a try. Sometime.

Time is, very much, at a premium for me at present. Posting may continue to be light and unpredictable.

UPDATE 2:57 PM: A more positive review. I hope to post one of my own in due course.

UPDATE 9/14: Finally got my hands on a library copy of this movie. Turned it off about half an hour. What a bore.

Upcoming book encounters

A lot of interesting-looking material coming out from Encounter Books. I've requested review copies of the following:

The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, by Glenn Harlan Reynolds. I've been interested in Reynolds' work since before I commissioned him to write (for free per Lou Dobbs' dumb policy) an op-ed at Space.com long ago, in the pre-Instapundit era.




The Smart Society: Strengthening America’s Greatest Resource, Its People, by Peter D. Salins. I met Salins even longer ago, back when I was writing for City Journal.






Eclipse of Man: Human Extinction and the Meaning of Progress, by Charles T. Rubin. I'm not familiar with this author but have long paid attention to the "posthuman."




David's Sling: A History of Democracy in Ten Works of Art, by Victoria Coates. My interest in art history has been piqued by many things over the years, including a federal jury duty stint in the late '90s.

Private pandacam

At the DC Zoo yesterday.

Who's bigger than Genghis Khan?

I had some doubts about this set of historical rankings at Time Ideas, "Who's Biggest? The 100 Most Significant Figures in History," particularly after I saw George W. Bush was ranked 36--ahead of Winston Churchill and Genghis Khan. I tweeted my skepticism to my friend Ryan Sager, who works at Time Ideas, and he tweeted back that G.W.B. was overweighted because he was president "when most of Wikipedia was written," data from that site being a factor in the algorithms used for the rankings.

The article does not give listings beyond the top 100, but the same authors, Steven Skiena and Charles B. Ward, have a website of such rankings, with a search function and lots of lists and categories. I see the top people in history list there is a bit different. I also looked up DeWitt Clinton, who in historical memory has had his ups and downs. (Interestingly, his Wikipedia mentions have gone up lately.)

Here's Skiena and Ward's book:

Who's Bigger?: Where Historical Figures Really Rank.

The Challenger Disaster curiosity [updated]

I found The Challenger Disaster very absorbing.

It also made me quite curious as to whether or how it differs from Feynman's account on which it's largely based. Years ago, I loved both of his memoirs, but for some reason passed over the long section in "What Do You Care What Other People Think?": Further Adventures of a Curious Character about Challenger. (As a space enthusiast, I always thought the shuttle much less interesting than a lot of other things about space.)

 

Now I'm reading that section. I also was fascinated to learn from the movie's end-note that Sally Ride was a crucial source of information to Feynman, as revealed in 2012, and I hope to find out more about that, though a cursory Google search does not tell much.

UPDATE 12/11/13: I've now read the book's Challenger section except for Feynman's report that appeared as an appendix to the Rogers Commission report; and overall, I find that the liberties taken by the movie were fairly modest as these things go. There were some things changed but it seems to me the spirit of what Feynman wrote was left more or less intact, though William Hurt gives Feynman a dourness that doesn't seem to be correct, even when the man was being very serious as with the Challenger probe. Also, and curiously, I still haven't found much about Gen. Kutyna's revelation that Sally Ride was a crucial source for info about the O-ring's performance (I find statements that he revealed it after her death last year, but I don't find anything where he actually makes the revelation). Perhaps he said or wrote something that's not online? Not everything is on the Internet, which is why I don't agree with the 52% who say they don't need public libraries "as they used to" (though I recognize the ambiguity of that wording). In any case, Sally Ride's reported role makes my high estimation of her even higher.

Film note: The Painting

The Painting is a very clever animated (mostly) film, which I happened to come across in the new movies section of my library. It's a story of social conflict and intellectual restlessness among figures in a painting, and what some of them find beyond the boundaries of the known. I recommend it to this blog's readers, especially Dan Summer.

 

Pause

Posting may be light for a while, as I make my way through a labyrinth of work.

Labyrinth outside a New Jersey library.

Entertainment value

Recommended reading: Virginia Postrel's new column, "Who Needs a Raise When You Have TV?" It's about how economic statistics don't fully capture the effects of expanding entertainment choices. As someone who looks forward each week to this, I agree.

I also recommend, for readers passing through who may have missed it, my recent review of Virginia's book The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion.