We all dream of making some sort of significant impact on people, discovery, hit song, …the list is too long.
Imagine for a moment that you are in possession of something radical which would change everybody’s life for the better, cancer cure, new energy source, etc. this sort of life-changing thing. Yes, of course, that will get some businesses down but on the whole, humanity will be much better off with it. After you have the know-how you need to make your new thing reach the people. Where do you go for this: to your president/prime minister, to the UN, to the big business, to the academic community? Wherever you go you will meet people and work with people, and nobody is agenda-free. As a result, you have to pick the people with an agenda most aligned to the implementation of your gift to humanity. Once it becomes public you expect a resistance close to civil unrest, from the threatened businesses, from the people which feel that a big change is coming and they hate change because they spend whole their lives fitting into the status quo. Eh, well, you say, you cannot make EVERYBODY happy. You go on with your plan and decide that a little compromise here and there is what we call real life… Even your opponents seem to be satisfied that you “play the game” and then you have a total blast from them. Let’s take as an example — a cure for cancer. Apparently, the creationists think that you are trying to play god or at least mess with god’s plan, how dare you. Evolutionists are in favour of less suffering, but in the long run, they think that we will deteriorate genetically because bad mutations (cancer) won’t be killed and evolution will go backward. Both camps on any division line apparently agree on only one thing, you are the devil! You try to keep it together and think about the gratitude of future generations, but you are only human and sooner or later you surrender to the overwhelming public opinion.
So… if you happened to come across a huge innovation (like from extraterrestrial), patient it, find its biggest opponent, and cash it to be buried and forgotten forever. That’s YOUR happy ending because there is no way you can make everybody happy.
PS Would I follow my own advice, …probably not. If you have something of that sort come to me and we will find out.
Conscious AI has been a goal (and an occasional obsession) for the AI people and a growing worry for the rest of us. Why is it so important to develop conscious AI for some while others are having serious reservations about it?
First, we barely agree on what consciousness is? The main division line is so-called essentialism. We like to encapsulate our gut feeling of uniqueness (and hence — importance) as species into something undeconstructable. If anybody or anything can understand and simulate our consciousness, we would feel inferior to that thing. Not a good feeling! That is why the Turing test — the main point of which is that consciousness (on some level) is a trick we play to ourselves. Joshua Bach puts it more elegantly — Consciousness is the story our mind is telling itself about itself. So if our experiences (another name for consciousness) are just well-elaborated tricks, anything able to play a similar trick to us (e.g. passing the Turing test) must be conscious (or indistinguishable from it). Here comes the essentialism to the rescue: the consciousness is the essence to be human (all the rest are just moving parts), whatever test is constructed, it won’t be enough because it’s just a test, a simulation of a one-sided ability. “My essence cannot be reproduced or simulated by definition.” A society with its moral and legal systems agrees.
Second, we have an intuition that consciousness and intelligence in the case of humans are almost impossible to separate. Our internal monologue seems to be both: the above-water part of the iceberg of our conscious awareness and the hidden power of our intelligence. You cannot have the above-water part without the underwater mass. Our experiences are not what is happening to us now but what we remember about the world around us. When the time lag is very short we feel that experience as present, but it is still a memory. Our self-awareness is always post-factum because our consciousness is a part of the simulation of the world our brain plays in all the time in order to make decisions about our actions. If we define intelligence as the ability to create models of the world around us in order to make short and long-term predictions, we don’t need consciousness to have intelligence. For most purposes, the AI is and will be without consciousness, just modelling and inferring. Only for very specific purposes, like taking care of people, the AI probably will have some consciousness installed (under the motto — the customer is always right). The speculation that consciousness will appear naturally beyond some future point of AI complexity remains to be seen (I have my doubts).
Third, with AI taking a bigger and bigger role in our lives one starts to wonder. If some form of conscious AI enters the public arena, at what point do we have to start to respect and give rights to our little AI helpers. Remember the slavery, millennia of human history slaves were considered with status of animals — to be bought, sold, killed; they were just property. Nowadays, most people are interested in consciousness only in order to reject the idea of conscious AI and not to question the morality of switching their computers off.
Still, AI people say they are about to create a conscious AI, not because they genuinely think so be because it’s a good PR. There are so many pop-culture fantasies and gut feelings that should be exploited for the well-being sake of the same naive people, …or at least, that is the way AI experts sell the conscious AI to themselves.
Philosophy has two usages: educational and personal. First, it provides a good exercise to the mind, mostly useless but as sophisticated as you can get. Second, it arms you with something to say when you have nothing to say but you want to. For many, philosophy looks like science but it is not. The scientific process has 4 stages: observation, explanation (qualitative), creating a model (quantitative), and inference (after that back to the model, etc). The endpoint of any scientific discipline always has been the model-based quantitative forecast. The traditional philosophy never got to the stage of creating a model, only observation and explanation, with no possible falsification (critical in science). Still, that makes us feel better like we understand the world and maybe we can do something, but the second part is an illusion (if you stay within philosophy). One may claim that ethics eventually helps us better coexist, but when you ask for ethical guidelines to be integrated into AI (think trolley problem), the number of opinions are usually more than the people in the room (any room).
… and no, I’m not angry at or dislike philosophy. I’m just trying to verbalize my understanding of philosophy as a particular type of fiction and we should appreciate it as such.
“The American dream”, “The land of the free”, “Equal opportunities” are powerful myths. They work well because they are based on intrinsic (from my liberal perspective) human values as freedom, opportunity and tolerance, and because of the all-mighty propaganda machine behind them. As with most myths, they are based on something real but exaggerated for a specific purpose. The purpose is to glorify the American way of life, to make Americans feel good about themselves and to attract foreigners in order to boost productivity, creativity or whatever is needed to make America great (but mostly rich). Still, greatness is just a feeling, an important and seld-identifying one but feeling. BTW Americans are far from the only ones promoting national greatness for mass manipulation.
Now how to create this feeling? Here are the main components:
Hollywood dream-machine of heroes of all calibres and types. From anti-heroes to superheroes, as long as they are easily recognizable and relatable. The list is really long…
A girl decides to go to Europe just for fun or has won a grant to study in the Sorbonne. Then her sweetheart asks her to stay because why ruin the good thing going between them. She hesitates and then he tells her that he loves her or wants to marry her and she surrenders. She choices her heart and her country, against insecurity, moral ambiguity (we know those Europeans) and ultimately the comfort of non-change.
Distance the mind of the people as much as possible from the world. That means little to no information about the world: geography, politics, lifestyle. The ignorance of common Americans has been a subject of many comedy shows and deservingly so. The world cuisine is probably an exception, but you have to decide in each case, how much is marketing and how much is authentic cuisine.
Make popular sports which nobody else plays: baseball (version of cricket) and American football (version of rugby). Basketball and hokey look the same but they have slightly different rules from the Olimpic ones. Why all this: to prevent disappointment. The first two — not to have (or have very little) competition and the last two — to have an excuse for eventual downfall.
Inch, foot, mile; ounce, pound, short ton, long ton — all Imperial measures, outdated and mostly ridiculous, and Fahrenheit temperatures. All this is partly inertia and conservatism, but mostly another way to keep distance from the world. Even the military and scientific community have gone metric, I don’t think the general public will do the same in the foreseeable future.
…and do let me start on religion: all the denominations, the church belt, the evangelical involvement in politics, etc. The religious mind is always one-sided, and guess which side it is on.
I will not apologise for being unfair or biased, and I am thankful for Americans technological achievements. I’m trying to analyze American myths origin and raison d’être, so we can better understand American values, which are based on these myths.
1. Why are you happy?
2. Why are you unhappy?
3. Is it healthy to be happy all the time or maybe it’s better not to be unhappy?
4. Can you be happy alone?
5. We want things in an attempt to be happier. Then these things become purpose by themselves. Have you felt that process at the moment or always as a memory?
6. Is happiness a physiological/mental condition or a symptom (a side effect of some condition)?
7. Does extreme positiveness lead to happiness? If yes, how far would you go to delude yourself to be positive?
8. Is the feeling different between trained (self-conditioned) happiness and spontaneous one?
9. Is happiness always related to wishful thinking?
10. Is it sustainable to have your happiness be your meaning of life?
11. Happy people are social magnets. Is that social support the evolutionary advantage to be happy?
12. Can you estimate how happy/unhappy I am from these questions?
