AW: second hand translation (was: [alicebot-aiethics] Interesting Article)

[Christian Dro?mann]

Noe Bush wrote:


>Hmm, thanks for the translation.  I am not sure if it eliminates the
>confusion about Hawking's point of view -- in any case it makes it even
>more disturbing.  It would be interesting to know the reactions to these
>statements in Germany, where public discourse about such issues as
>genetic engineering of human beings tends to be somewhat more elevated
>than in the US (where people seem to have almost no knowledge of
>history).

unfortunately it is the case that this discourse only takes place between a
few people who are interested in such topics...the wide majority just tends
to believe what is written in low-quality magazines like "Focus" without
questioning it...If a guy like Hawking says it, then it must be true...

[...]

>morality, whatever.  I think it is very reasonable to say that much of
>the worldview that we have encoded into the machines we've built is
>absolutely corrosive -- just soulless, even "evil" in some way...and I
>am not a "technophobe", but I do believe that technologies are
>transformative to humanity, and that it's possible to build a technology
>that is transformative in a very damaging way.

I'm not technophobic as well, but sometimes I have misanthropic
tendencies...
I am pretty much convinced that technology will lead to the end of the human
race in the (maybe not so distant) future...but not because of scientists
crossing one border too much, but rather because of some government trying
to use good and helpful civil technology for war-making purposes and f*cking
up again like they did with black powder or nuclear power...


>But what about unstoppable powers?  Not the unstoppable powers to "rip
>open enemy tanks like they were nutshells", as in the Onion piece, but
>the unstoppable power to, say, do very fast mathematical computations.
>Is it possible that certain magnificent capabilities like these can
>actually corrode our humanity?

I will answer this with a philosophical counterquestion:
What will we have to live for once we have found all answers?

>Many of us have probably had a teacher bemoan the present-day inability
>of most people to do much more than extremely elementary arithmetic
>without the aid of a computer.  One side of this argument is: you ought
>to understand how to do arithmetic, even if it isn't practically
>necessary for you to perform it yourself.  Another side is: why bother,
>if the tools are already there?

I tend to prefer the second point of view...although it led me into trouble
sometimes...
When I was in school I always asked for the practical use of the things we
learnt and every time I could not see one, I thought "Why should I bother
learning this?"...I hated math anyway ;->
I still practice something that I would call "selective learning"...this has
become a lot easier since I began to study...now I have a perspective of
what I want to be and I try to learn anything that might come in handy one
day and ignore the things I will have no use for...but I can understand
people who learn things just for the sake of knowing as much as possible...
The only big problem with this learning style is: You only know how useful
something is once you need it...I learnt this lesson the hard way when I had
to quit my studies of computer sciences partially because I failed in all my
math tests...


>Well, if you take it as a sine qua non that intelligence includes the
>ability to perform, internally, complex mathematics, then you are
>ultimately setting a bar for humanity that will *require* that we all
>have this ability, modeled in the way that computers do mathematics.
>But what would it do to our consciousness if we did mathematics in the
>way computers do?  It would mean that way back when, some engineer at
>Intel or wherever decided how you ought to *think*.  If a fast
>mathematical processor becomes so wedded to your brain that all
>computations automatically get routed to it, then actually you cease to
>participate in the intellectual discourse of humanity.  The human
>interest in mathematics is not simply the interest in efficient
>computation.  The study of mathematics leads to some very essential
>philosophical questions.  The study of mathematics is in fact the study
>of some aspect of what is taken for granted, and how so (and what else
>might be).  Remove that, replace it with a floating point processor, and
>you've put a big roadblock in the way of real thought.

As both a math-hater and student of philosophy I can tell you that there are
lots of philosophical issues for which mathematics is totally irrelevant or
even useless...believe me, I have been trying to avoid math like the plague
and unlike when I still studied computer sciences I have succeeded so
far...:-)
I dare to say that humans NEED such a processor in their brain to free their
mind for problems that cannot be solved with numbers or formulas...
Or, like one of our professors (a professor of physics) said, "Math is a
complementary science - nothing more, nothing less...it always was and it
always will be! It's just an aid for the real sciences..."
I would consider the mathematical problems we haven't solved yet to be the
roadblocks...

>It would be really interesting to understand from a deep cosmological
>point of view how failing to pursue this deep understanding of ourselves
>might (in some theoretical space at least) suggest a kind of evolution
>of the universe into a very undesirable place to "be", or even a place
>in which "be" is stricken from the vocabulary of sensible concepts.
>Surprisingly, a minimalist view like AIML simultaneously suggests that
>"to be" may be an illusion, but that the illusion may be the most
>meaningful thing of all.

..or there may be a future in which "being" is the only thing left...

Christian