Ha elég messzire jutottál, a megoldás a hátad mögött van... :-)
Respektu Tempon. Tiszteld az Időt / Az Időt tiszteld.
International readers, please use the english tag to get a first impression, thank you.
itt a civil szervezetekről van elsősorban szó, nem a "civilekről", mint nem-kormányzati emberekről. És sajnos, a civil szervezetekkel kapcsolatos tudatosság, ma, itthon, nagyon alacsony. Épp ez a célja a kampánynak.
... és oktatnak már megint! Képzeld, felfogom ám, hogy miről szól a kampány, csak azt nem vagyok képes megérteni, hol élnek ezek az emberek???
Én egy olyan országban, amelyet egy saját orránál messzebbre látni képtelen óvodás csoport vezet, minden egyes nap felfoghatatlan károkat okozva. Azt mondogatjuk, a sz*r felúszik, pedig dehogy! Csak ezt emeli a magasba egy felnőni képtelen, hájas agyú, a saját egyéni felelősségétől folyamatosan menekülő bamba tömeg.
Azért menjek le kutyába, alázzam meg magam egy idióta plüssmaci háta mögé bújva, hogy felfigyeljenek rám? Volt ilyen idő, de elmúlt. Ráadásul KÖNYÖRGÖM... óriásplakátok, honlap, kitűzők, "ismert emberek", sajtó... Csapjunk a hasunkra, hány millió ment rá? Facebook eredmény: 2533 követő, bejegyzésenként max 3 (érdektelen) hozzászólás. Üssék fel a kommunikációs szakértők a kedvenc képeskönyveiket a "bukó" címszónál.
Pedig az életünk múlik azon, hogy ezt az egész behin bandát (mindegy, hogy kona vagy kemon) a "civil gondolkodás és hozzáállás" általam ismert fogalmai szerint, szervezetten és még időben deportáljuk mondjuk az ócsai csodafaluba. Ellenkező esetben mind úgy állunk majd a bankautomatánál, mint most Siklóson, esetleg egymást verjük agyon a kezünkbe adott táblákkal, a szánkba rágott szólamokat üvöltözve. És megváltóként fogjuk üdvözölni az éppen most összerakott Állami Közműszolgáltatót, meg a Bözsiutalványt.
Illetve bocs, fogjátok ti, mamlaszok, amíg én remélem az utolsó pillanatban, de még időben lépem át a határt.
Apu Vérben Forgó Szempárja vagyok. Magyar vagyok. Civil vagyok. De nem plüssmackó, hanem a morcosabbik fajta. Tudom, hogy semmi értelme itt hőbörögnöm, macika úgyis törli majd, mert nem fér az édi-bédi lelkecskéjébe. Én viszont karddal álmodtam, és képtelen vagyok dolgozni, amíg ettől a dühtől meg nem szabadulok.
I am quite disappointed that you left the conversation when we left your comfort zone, and only added a new article to your blog, I guess partly inspired by what you read from what I said. Please note the complicated statement, I wrote something else, and as always, I think the conflict is caused by the different definitions to the terms we use.
You define faith as "the illusion of security and certainty". This is what I call superstition, regardless of its source: a misunderstood religion, cult leader, political figure, or its most pathetic version: "science". Oh, My God (pun intended), how many times I have seen this "I believe in science" sentence, to which my obvious answer: "So then you know NOTHING about science or belief". :-)
My definition to faith is the mere acceptance that we cannot "know" or be certain of anything. All we have, including the greatest scientific achievements, are the result of better understanding of the truth, but as history shows, they will be flushed away by new findings, the sooner the better. Faith is a correct word to separate the things we "know": achieved by examining the available facts and deriving idea structures via thorough, checked deduction methods, verified by experiments and guarded by falsification criteria. Faith is the acceptance that even the strongest facts can be wrong at a later time, with better equipment and understanding. Faith is the completely conscious decision that it's OK in this way. Accepting that if you really want to achieve something new, you should be ready to sacrifice your whole life to something that is fundamentally wrong, and be totally honest about the whole path. There must be enough people doing this, to give our global community a chance to improve: to make the 99% failure necessary to have that 1% success.
You simply can't do this, if you are rational - and it is absolutely nonsense in a modern political or business environment, where only the winner counts. This takes faith - whatever the source is. And yes: your description of "reasonable hope" perfectly matches my definition of faith. And (I think quite ironically) it also matches to the following definition too: "To have faith is to be sure of the things we hope for, to be certain of the things we cannot see."
Yes, this is from that "outdated stuff people should believe without questions", the Bible, Hebrews 11:1. However, you are absolutely right: I have intentionally chosen the translation that matches our shared vision of faith, and there are other versions founding your skeptic approach to religion / or with my words, turning religion to superstition.
You also seem to assume that faith means "uncritically adopt the explanatory frameworks that our traditions offer us". Excuse me, this shows a quite shallow knowledge of the tradition you talk about. Please read some Chan Buddhist texts, or stories about the rabbis, Anthony de Mello, check the ancient Greeks, Lao-ce or the old Christian theologians. For example, did you know that the Buddhist monk training was quite similar to the Greek philosophers: they had organized dispute training sessions where they picked sides by chance - without predefined right and wrong? This is definitely not a training to "uncritically adopt" things, but simply to reason your own way out of the previous achievements. No religion could have survived if the top people were unable to apply and adapt the old and dusty statements to their actual problems (means: the rules must be coherent and flexible, the leaders must be wise and pragmatic). This is (as I mentioned earlier) quite perfect analogy to the biological evolution with ruthless fight for survival.
I think your noble aim: "define my own purpose as best as I can" is the best a (not only by age, but mentally) adult human being can set. My personal addition to this is that if you go far enough in this way, you will see that you are not alone, but others walked on this path, and the traces of the best ones are now respected as the foundations of religions. Most people don't understand a single word of their experiment, but it was translated to simpler, coherent pattern set that they can use. Or if you prefer the quite rational Confucius: "Guide the people by law, subdue them by punishment; they may shun crime, but will be void of shame. Guide them by example, subdue them by courtesy; they will learn shame, and come to be good." As only a few people have the ability to become a professional ballet dancer or excellent composer, only a few of us have the mental abilities to emerge coherent patters sets ("meme-structures"). The others should better play from the sheet music to avoid chaos...
I am faithful - but contrary to your assumption, this does not give me any certainty at all, neither do I require that from my faith. But I found faith the only way to train my human brain work reliably outside my comfort zone, deal with facts and consequences completely against its ultimate, wired goals.
To the contrary, it is irrational to assume a person can think beyond the defense protocols of his/her own thinking organ, the human brain, without a properly trained pattern set that resolves them. A bit technical definition of what earlier mind-scientists (philosophers, prophets) called "enlightened".
To summarize: my greatest concern about the current and popular "futurist manifestos" is that they sometimes talk about the fictional exponentially growing grey goo of nanobots, but seems to completely forget about the existing exponentially growing grey goo: the human brain. They assume that we are able to think rationally. NO. A fully parallel, constantly changing network of literally billions of electric switches is absolutely not able to do so, only can get closer to it after years or decades of rigorous training, which seems to be forgotten in our "modern era". They assume that the next step can be explained to "people". NO. If there is one thing sure about the next step, that it is really weird and completely unacceptable for "normal people" who can accept our current crash course, and anyone being popular with ideas about the future knows nothing about it. They assume that AI has critical part in forming our future. NO. At least not more than our current mechanical engineering. We can create weapons to kill each other - or kill our whole civilization simply by creating giant factories that literally produce waste, and transportation infrastructure to cover the planet with it. We can also create smart IT tools to increase the separation among people until all our organized structures collapse.
Another Confucius quote, it seems to apply to our popular futurists (not to be accepted uncritically, but for thinking about):
The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.
Our future depends on this, thousands years old decision, on our individual votes. Religions, politicians, engineering, the internet age and AI only provide the scene around us.
Hi Lorand – Thank you for interesting post. It seems that you got the impression that I intended the post to which you responded (Good Reason For Hope) as a reply to you. I apologize if I inadvertently created that impression, but I was not intending it as a response to any other piece. I simply wanted to convey my view that, although religious teachings fail to adequately equip us for many of the dangers that face humans in the 21st century, there are alternative visions that offer hope. My remarks on the word “faith” are focused on the specific definition of the word “belief that is not based on proof”. I understand that there are several other common usages of the word, I recognize the ambiguities that result, and I acknowledge that I should have been clearer regarding which meaning I intended. My point specifically concerns that aspect of religious faith that accepts received tradition or teaching as inherently authoritative, regardless of how well it accords with current scientific knowledge.
February 25, 2015 at 10:44 pm
Yeah, my bad, I had a seemingly false impression that we have a communication. I my world that means that you reflect to my statements the same way as I reflect to yours (and do not leave without a word).
Now I understand that you only tried to spread your scientific wisdom to a dark person who thinks we have a few things to learn from people who created the world we live in – in order to leave a still habitable planet to our children. Even if that means spending more efforts on Fukushima or Ukraine – and less on LHC. By my opinion, if we don’t urgently and fundamentally change our course, the fairy-tale AI singularity (sorry, I have been working on this field for twenty years literally, not Mr Hawking, Mr. Musk, etc.) will be our last problem in 2020.
It seems we walk on a very different path and no chance to have a reasonable discussion. Thanks for your time, and best wishes. (This is how I used to quit.)
Felemás ez a történet. Pár napja elbúcsúztam MACI-tól, mert...
Loránd Kedves4 napja
Bocs, Maci, ahonnan szó nélkül(!) törlik akár egyetlen hozzászólásomat is, onnan én törlöm az összes többit. Elnézést kérek mindenkitől azért, hogy ezen a felületen kommunikálni próbáltam.
Aztán jött ez a sajtótájékoztató:
Maci, Magyar Civilszervezetek sajtótájékoztatója - 2015.02.19. Budapest, Átrium Film-Színház
Loránd Kedves
Nos, ebből a sajtótájékoztatóból nekem nem teljesen jött át az az üzenet, hogy "a civil nem amatőr". Ha csak egy fájó pontot kéne említenem, "az emberek" a nyerő.
Bizonyára nálam sokkal több kommunikációs tanfolyamon vettek részt az alkotók, mégis... tényleg van olyan ember az országban, aki azonosul azzal a képpel, hogy ő a kampány során felvilágosítandó, vagy tudatosan félretájékoztatott "az emberek" közé tartozik? Amikor bármelyikünk számára létezik olyan tévécsatorna, Facebook közösség, fórum, újság, ahol "ismert szakértők" pontosan ugyanazt mondják, amit mi magunk gondolunk?
Ha már egyszerű üzenetet keres a MACI, miért nem választja azt, hogy a megszokott klisék, meggyőződések, szólamok szintje alatt MI, mindannyian, egyformán civilek: esendő emberi lények vagyunk. A politika már úgyis "lenyúlta" az összes megosztó, határokat kijelölő, összehasonlító szót - civilként beszélhetnénk egyszerűen "rólunk" és közös gondjainkról, céljainkról. Nem a "jó civilekről", az ellenük éppen aktuális érdekeik miatt vallásháborút folytató erőkről és a kettő között éldegélő "emberekről".
Vagy esetleg azt megkérdezni, hogy vajon mi köze a "civil" fogalomnak ahhoz a folyamathoz, amelynek során az egy szólamot ismétlő, egymással harcoló törzsek tagja az állandó hadakozást feladó egyénekké válnak, majd ebből egyetlen egésszé, amelyet úgy hívunk: emberi civilizáció...
Én? Már sokadszor próbálok, de te rám se bagózol, hogy finom legyek, kedves MACI. Tudod, a gondolkodást sem elég ám eljátszani, vagy beszélni róla. Csinálni viszont rohadt nehéz, ha pedig elég sokáig és elég jól csinálod, az eredmény kiábrándító, és már nem takarja el egy "cuki játékmackó". Ezt itt 2013 márciusában írtam, de nem érzem, hogy akár egyetlen szót is vissza kéne vonnom belőle, még annak dacára sem, amit eddig te mutattál...
Ismétlem: ... a medve nem játék! (vagy másként: ami játék, az nem medve)
Ildiko Simon Kedves Kedves Lóránd, ha megnézed, hogy a MACI kampány mivel foglalkozik, akkor megértheted, hogy nincs direkt kapcsolat a kampány céljai és a te blogbejegyzésed között. Köszi, ha azért jössz ide, hogy segíts:) erre most minden civilszervezetnek szüksége van.
Lorand Kedves Sajnos, valóban nincs, ezt én is tudom. Mégis reménykedem abban, hogy a (szerintem) józan gondolkodást és erőt szétforgácsoló színjátszókörök vezetői, esetleg nézői között talán akad gondolkodni is hajlandó ember. Ebben a kampányban segíteni? Bocs ( ;-) ), nem...
A kontraszt kedvéért: több mint tíz éve követem egyre kopó lelkesedéssel (első sorban a környezetvédelmi) civil szervezetek munkáját, önkéntesként részt vettem egy sor rendezvényen, magam is szervező voltam egy "jó üzlet" (a Balaton fölött 500 méter magasban fapados gépeket reptetni vágyó társaság) megfúrásában. 2006 óta tartok fenn egy alapítványt csak azért, hogy ha a húsz éve folyó informatikai kutatásaim végül termőre fordulnak, ne tehessen engem vagy valaki nálam ügyesebbet gazdaggá mások rovására. Nincsenek illúzióim politikával vagy gazdasággal kapcsolatban, évek óta naplózom az előrejelzéseimet, amelyek "jobban teljesítenek", mint vezetőink és elemzőink.
Legjobb tudásom (és elnézést, én nem "ismert ember", színész vagy kommunikációs szakértő vagyok, hanem rendszertervező programozó, sajnos munkámból adódóan pontosan tudom, ez mekkora minőségi különbséget jelent) a túlélésünk múlik azon, amit én civil gondolkodásnak, civilizációnak nevezek, nem a ködös jövőben, hanem ebben a pillanatban.
Ezt képviseli a MACI kampány? Nem. Sajnálom? Igen. Tudok változtatni azon, hogy üres frázisok helyett valós, ám kellemetlen dolgokról beszéljünk? Rajtam nem múlik. De nyilván el kell fogadnom, hogy ennek a kampánynak nem célja az emberi civilizáció életben tartása (valós érdeklődés hiányában ez az én magán hobbim), hanem hogy a Széchenyi terves plakátokhoz hasonlóan mackókkal demonstrálja a civil jelenlétet.
Részemről ennyi volt a brumm, még ha nagyon máshogy is szól, mint Szabó Simoné. Nem is erőltetem, mert nyilvánvalóan nem illeszkedem a kórusba. Sok sikert, és köszönöm a választ!
Én úgy értelmezem, tőle jött az az ötlet, hogy az informatika "atomja" a bit, amely már tovább nem osztható, viszont minden adat ÉS a rajtuk végzett műveletek is ábrázolhatók bitek segítségével. Továbbá az, hogy problémákat megoldó gép helyett azonosítsuk azokat a független komponenseket, amelyek megfelelő összekapcsolásával tetszőleges probléma ellenőrizhető módon megoldható. Szerintem az informatika, mint fogalom létezése, valamint az informatikai eszközök elképesztő sebességű fejlődése és miniatürizálhatósága erre az alapra: az elsőre értelmetlennek és lassúnak tűnő szigorú elhatárolásra és absztrakcióra épül.
Azt pedig halkan teszem hozzá, hogy ez a szintű absztrakció, egyáltalán a felfogásának képessége mintha teljesen eltűnt volna abból, amit ma informatikának és programozásnak hívunk. Ezért tapsoljuk meg például a harmincadik korszakalkotó scriptnyelv, vagy a négyszázadik "legjobb GUI framework" megjelenését :-)
Jé, milyen morcos öregúr lettem... :-D
Mi a véleményed, vagy tapasztalatod a design patternekről / használatukról?
Szerinted érdemes ezekre építkezni, vagy más alapokon hatékonyabb a szoftverek fejlesztése?
"Már vártam ezt a kérdést" :-D
Viccet félretéve: válaszom egyértelmű és határozott IGEN: A GoF Design Patterns egyike azoknak a könyveknek, amelyeket nem lehet megkerülni, ha az ember valóban értékes munkát akar végezni és nem csak kódot lapátolni.
A dolog másik oldala, hogy a DP szerintem nem tankönyv, amit egyetemen el kell olvasni és annak alapján lehet programozni - éppen ellenkezőleg. Ahhoz, hogy az értékén tudd kezelni, évekig kell programozni úgy, hogy folyamatosan elemzed a saját kódodat, motivált vagy arra, hogy átkavard, mert nem tetszik, nyöszörgős, pár hónap fejlesztés után "megbüdösödik" (túl nagy, nehézkes, gányolt lesz). Keresed azokat a pontokat, módszereket, amelyekkel ez elkerülhető, igyekszel jól szegmentálni, tiszta és időtálló kódot készíteni, lassan felismered, hogy egy "jó" rendszernek van egy sajátos meta-szerkezete.
Na ekkor érdemes igazán megtalálni a DP-t, ugyanis olyan, mint mondjuk a rendszertan a biológiában. Ha felismerted, hogy az élővilág nem "csak úgy van", hanem vannak hasonlóságok, kategóriák, "szerepkörök" ; és érdekel, hogy ezek segítségével hogyan írható le egyszerűen egy addig ismeretlen faj (lefordítva: hogyan bontasz "eléggé időtálló" részekre egy új programozási feladatot). Ehhez jól jön egy alaposan végiggondolt struktúra és közösen használható nevezéktan.
Szerintem programozásban erre "elég jó" a GoF DP. A könyv (tapasztalatommal egyező) állítása, hogy a patternek nem kész, újrahasználható elemek, amelyekből építkezni lehet - viszont olyan vezérlési, szerkezeti, stb. minták, amelyeket ha felismersz az előtted álló feladatban, akkor tisztább, szegmentáltabb kódot tudsz létrehozni. Ráadásul egy "meta-nyelv", a fogalmai segítségével könnyebben tudod megbeszélni a szerkezetet, utánanézni mások tapasztalatainak.
[filozófia on, elvégre feladtad a labdát: Coping with infinity ]
Számomra [nagy arc bekapcs] igen komoly megerősítést jelentett a DP, mert "túl későn" találkoztam vele: a leírt minták jelentős részét éles környezetekben, nem kevés kínlódás után kitaláltam már. Így aztán külön öröm volt, hogy független úton lényegében azonos eredményre jutottam a "nagyokkal". Emiatt is mindenképpen ajánlom az átnézését, és örömmel beszélgetnék róla akár veled, akár irodai csacsogás keretében. Továbbá egy kis önreklám, egyszer tartottam egy előadást programozásról, nem kötelező, csak ha érdekel... viszont ha megnézed, érdekelne a véleményed.
thank you for the response, I really don't want this talk to settle down, but there is a human part in it... I could write those long articles because I have flu and could not sleep after 1AM. Your question about religions is absolutely important and deserves a long response, this is just a short note, sorry for that.
I see religions from a completely different point of view: they are meme constructs that survived during the evolution of the human civilization (which is a very close replica to the biological evolution, with dirty fights among rigid rules), and proved to be able to form a community from human individuals. They are like X-Ray images of strongly-bound human groups from different angles, not "obsolete", in fact the opposite: they contain patterns that can build a super-entity from human beings.
This super-entity: a conscious global human race is the true counterpart of the ASI - in fact, they can't live without the other. We, human individuals are only cells of this global organization - but the organization itself can't emerge if we are not conscious about this fact. I used myself as an example describing how much I am integrated into this system, and that my existence is just meaningless without it. This is true for all of us, but most of us "don't like it".
If we create the ASI while we are separated individuals, our childish approach (to life, the planet, to other humans and to ourselves) will not be able to control it, and inevitably destroy ourselves. The human super-entity can't even exist without its nerve system and brain: the ASI that can hold our accumulated knowledge and can support and connect us with it, let us use and make better decisions, do clear and efficient communication (compared to the current info-guano).
We also disagree on the quality of today's civilization.
Yes, we have million times faster and smaller computers, and can count the hair in Shrek's ear - but the world became even less transparent by them.
We learn the rules of geometry, physics (well, most of us quite hardly) - but where is a Thales today who would find them out by himself?
True, today's literature, films, etc are gigantic, we count thousands of years, millions of light years - but does that compare to the wisdom of Tolstoy, Lao-ce, Jesus, or Douglas Adams?
Techno "music" can be computer generated, and with proper "medication" it can give you the "trance" - but does that compare to Mozart who can break your soul into pieces and build it again (if you can listen and are sober), or the meditation techniques and koans of Zen Buddhism?
I have found my favorite statement about this right here on LinkedIn by Patrick Joiner:
"I suppose one way for a machine to pass the Turing test is to wait until the quality of actual human conversation is so bad that a bot could be an improvement. This seems to be happening here."
... but if you excuse me a joke here: if you can really read the Bible, this is the hidden wisdom behind the story of the Tower of Babel. If you read it like a story book: God disturbed the talk of men to stop them reaching the sky.
But if you read it like a cookbook: to reach the sky, you must talk the same language. That "language" is the accumulated knowledge of the human civilization in a globally uniform and usable declarative structure, and "talk" is our current global, simultaneous communication infrastructure.
This is the difference between hordes of isolated ANIs in the hands of selfish, short-visioned individuals, compared to the ASI, in the hands of a strongly-bound human race.
The latter is the only way to reach the sky... or to be honest: essential to survive on this planet that can collapse without help.
Jordan Hughes For a different perspective, see my blog piece in Artificial Times: "There's no cause for alarm - just be quiet and drink your Kool-Aid," written in response to an article by IBM researcher David W. Buchanan published on Feb. 6 in The Washington Post: http://artificialtimes.com/.
Dear Jordan,
I have checked your profile, and saw that we have common interest areas, although different perspectives: I think we (human common sense) have no rational view even for the next 10 years, not for 10000... maybe you would like this lecture of mine.
Regarding AI, congratulations to your very professional blog, it was a great pleasure to see – I hope one day I will appear on it :-) I have checked some of your links, and I think our perspective is not that different.
It seems that we agree on the existence of danger emerging from IT systems. The difference is that I focus on the human side: we should not rely on any ethics from an IT system, we only get back what we put in. This is independent from the speed and performance of the system, and already causes huge problems. With more computer power, it will surely increase, and this is lethal to our civilization unless we change our fundamental motivations and attitude.
We also agree on the fact that the lack of fundamental definitions (intelligence or consciousness) makes objective evaluation and discussions fuzzy. However, I have found practical definitions that I actively use in my system design and programming tasks. I plan to write about them soon.
I still disagree in the “automatic emerging” of a conscious entity by any definition, from the mere performance increase. I think for any improvement it is fundamental to find a different IT representation of our knowledge than the current business-driven approach, separated by the various platforms, languages, formats and toolkits. Without a completely transparent and reusable knowledge store, the more an IT system “knows”, the greater amount of custom source code and configuration is created, therefore the system is less reliable, flexible and interoperable.
I think this is the key step to forget the current hordes of closed ANI systems: when their data structures and messages become transparent, they can form an interacting mesh network. I think this is the base of an ASI, and its “personalized agent”: AGI. No wonder: the focus of my research is a transparent knowledge representation, I have quite advanced working solutions – and not less ambitious plans :-) [acronyms: Artificial Narrow/Generic/Super Intelligence, as explained here]
The other difference is how we see the coming massive power of our global IT infrastructure, and the articles I read show the same fear that I mentioned in the “physical power” analogy. Before the “machine revolution”, people were afraid of their imagined “inhuman” power – today we are not afraid of a crane, an airplane or a power station, although they are much stronger than those people could imagine (the difference between the person from 1750 and 2015). I think the fundamental difference is a paradigm shift: we don't have to compete with machines where they are better, but can form a kind of symbiosis, combining our true human values with their not less true artificial power.
This symbiosis already works for me: a part of my mind is not in my skull, but exists on the Internet and the word processor, design and development tools I use. Without them, I could not do my job at all. A system that I build “has” all my knowledge that I collected in months, but some concepts literally took me decades to achieve. My system contains and uses it all in every single moment, does more in a second than I could do in weeks (but I would make tons of mistakes). Is this system smarter than I am? Of course. Is it dangerous? Maybe, in wrong hands – but not because it is smarter or faster. It is me who adds the “human part”: the roots in ancient philosophy and religions, and the motivation to seek for the benefit to our civilization.
Yet another fundamental difference: immortality. I guess someone envisioning human immortality does not understand the most fundamental aspects of life and human thinking. The very definition of all life forms contains death as the rule of the game – and the most fundamental motivator of human thinking is knowing about and hopelessly struggling against this concept. There is a clean analogy of “biological immortality”: cancer, and this analogy perfectly describe our attitude and its result on our living environment. For human beings, this is the key improvement required to enter the new era: understanding and embracing personal biological mortality – and “memetic”, informatic immortality: our ideas, or practically anything appearing about us in the IT infrastructure will be preserved by it and become “timeless” compared to our limited and time-bound existence. Another example: space is not for human individuals as the current “spacey-tales” suggest, but for the whole human race, through lots of personal sacrifice, pain and death. This is the only way our civilization improved in the past and will improve in the future.
We'd better grow up to this before it gets too late.
Alexandru Grosu It is time to implement the four laws of Asimov into all the AI APIs. Now, it is still safe.
The most fundamental statement regarding the AI is that there is no way to implement ethic concepts in algorithms and no reason to assume that a software can be ethical. By the way, Asimov himself gives a very foggy explanation about how the laws are burnt into the pozitron brain.
I think the explanation is simple: his robots are not "AI previews", but represent human beings with greater power or higher level mission. His stories show psychological effects of coping with greater tasks or fundamental ethical laws, racism, fear. He talks about how our intellectual, political or financial elite should behave, what laws they should follow after they have separated themselves from the simple burdens of human life (the lower section of the Maslow pyramid if you like).
I also think that his laws don't work, because they are negative or conflicting: “may not... except”, just like “don't kill” or “don't be evil”. They freeze a conflict between our motivations, rules and interests: it would be profitable to be evil, but I should not be – but hey, what is evil anyway? and how far can I go without being evil? should I lose if my competitor is evil?
I think positive laws are harder to follow but they focus on the path where you should go instead of walls that you should not break. I see this improvement between the 10 commandments “don't”s and the simple “love your fellow as yourself” (if you love someone on the same level as yourself, there is no motivation to break the commandments...) My actual favorite is the Shotokan Dojo Kun (which is absolutely useful and practical in everyday life as well):
Seek perfection of character
Be Faithful
Endeavor
Respect others
Refrain from violent behavior
And again: this is not for the AI, but us who create and use it. We failed on this mission with the machines (“officially sacred” weapons cause the same suffer), and true: with AI, this failure can easily be our last one on civilization level, but not because of the “evil AI” but our own irresponsible, childish attitude that now meets with Darwin's law.
We are not "too big to fail", but "too big to survive this failure"...
Journalists announce that the greatest minds, like Stephen Hawking (who is a great cosmologist, but considering his story, his intelligence is quite far from human), Bill Gates and Elon Musk (who are great and lucky businessmen with considerable programming skills) or Raymond Kurzweil (who did a lot to have computers behave like human) fear of an uncontrolled artificial intelligence. If at last Morgan Freeman (the Hollywood scientist idol for the masses) starts sharing this fear on Discovery Channel, we should all panic... or should we not?
I have literally spent most of my awaken time of more than 20 years on understanding problems, transforming them to IT structures and write working systems - but not a minute on how this can make me rich. Having this fundamentally different background, it is not a surprise that I have a quite different view on this topic. Do you have a few minutes to read and think about my opinion?
Why fear?
We fear of many things, starting with the bogeyman, then switch to teachers, monsters, ghost, socialism, capitalism, banks, Islam, whatever - with more or less reason. It is a longer story, but in short I think this is because our "modern culture" has no real answer to the most common and simplest fears: our personal vulnerability and inevitable death.
This ultimate fear is very strong and is almost impossible to truly handle for our brains. You should recall: your brain is not a rational computer, but just another organ of your body with the primary objective to keep your individual body alive as long as possible - and knows that it will surely fail! Obviously, we have a very strong motivation to find other fears that we can share and talk about.
So, we are kind of addicted to have common fears regardless of the actual target or its validity, and it is very popular to be an expert of a common bogeyman, especially if it has a "modern" taste. Consequentially, being afraid of an evil AI is a perfect topic, great business, lot of fun.
Is there any true reason to be afraid of an AI? Who cares??? It's showtime!
Films, TV series, great articles, worried scientists, excited chats with colleagues and neighbors, viral topics on Facebook.
So, is it rational to fear of an evil AI?
A child is afraid of the bogeyman because our brain seeks for environments that we can control. The time while we are sleeping, the dark corners where we don't see sets our brain to alarm state, and fills the "unknown" area with monsters to motivate us examine the unknown, make them known to us. To clear up this fear or not question, we should examine the terms first.
As a system analyst, I can say that "evil", and morality as a whole, is a human and social term, and has absolutely nothing to do with computer systems."Intelligence" is a very popular word, but I see no practical definition that could be applied to both human and machine intelligence behind this "fear" area, not only "behaves like a human" or "plays chess better", or "more ethic" than us. (I do have a quite usable definition, but that should go to another article.)
For now it is enough to say that with our current programming tools and concepts, it does not matter how fast the machines will become, our systems will never become "dangerously intelligent". For example, "Skynet" would need a transparent control over all systems - but today we have gigantic amount of incompatible designs, platforms and solutions, generally to the same problems. Only synchronizing the user management within a company is a hard task that requires serious amount of manpower, resulting another heaps of custom codebase and therefore even less transparency. Not an extremely complex "conscious entity", but a simply reliable operation can't emerge from this process - although mysterious errors caused by faulty designs may look like "the spirit in the machine" for less trained minds.
The popular fear-makers say that we will have faster and faster machines all around, and at a critical moment, they will reach consciousness. Ridiculous. Like if we have tons of earthworms, after reaching a critical mass they will transform into a dangerous giant single entity. Or like assuming that if you put stronger and stronger engine into a car, it will eventually fly. Well, it will almost surely crash because you can't control it. But flying requires completely different propulsion (not spinning the wheels), wings and aeronautics knowledge: a paradigm shift.
A better analogy
Until a few centuries ago, physical power was the final argument: each and every person had his/her own experience when forced to do something, knew stories where people were humiliated or killed by stronger ones. Then engineers created machines that were stronger than human beings. It was quite natural that the same fear appeared: there will come those giant machines, they will be like us but stronger and invincible, and they will rule the world soon. I guess there were plenty popular scientists who told smart stories about them to the masses seeking for their daily dose of fear. Luckily enough, others spent years on experimenting with new materials, shapes and combinations, made all the 99% errors that are absolutely required to find that 1% successful innovation.
Creating these machines required understanding the concept of "power", separate it from human strength, transform it to very simple atomic elements like pressure, movement, lift, torque, and then build custom structures from the components: crane, drill, sawmill; then cars, ships, airplanes. Today, we are not afraid of "monster machines": we know that their strength don't mean an inherent danger to us - although it is very important to have trained people to operate them.
The other side of the story that yes, we can attach blades, guns, rockets, mines, chemical, biological and nuclear weapons to these machines, we can and actually do kill other human beings using them every day and night. In fact, we would not kill most of those people by bare hands or swords. We would not mean true danger to the whole planet without these machines, considering not only weapons, but also car or plastic bottle factories, nuclear power plants or industrial agriculture for pollution and the destruction of natural cycles.
Machines really made the human race very powerful, but for how we use this power we should not blame them.
Is there a real danger with using more advanced IT systems?
Yes, surely. But is is not the internal "immorality" of a computer system, however intelligent it may become. It is the immorality of people creating and using these systems, and this is a true and validated danger.
Via information systems, you can see or manipulate the life of other human beings, but you can also separate yourself from the natural empathy that could stop you from doing unfair things. You can very easily be evil in quite simple conditions, if you can alienate the target people, as it is properly proven by Auschwitz, or the Milgram experiment.
... and naturally, you can create IT systems that automatically decide over the fate of human beings, and do "evil" things with them. But that does not need an evil AI at all. It is already here, in the mines of Africa, in sweatshops of India and China, the insurance and health care companies of the western world.
Beware of yourself, my dear fellow human being:
the danger is in the mind and the hand, not the knife.
