
Power and Paranoia in Silicon Valley - clarkm
https://pdf.yt/d/-jQQX6XY9dU0LN4G
======
daly
I love the nonsense people spout. It never ceases to amaze me. I've been
working in AI (robotics, expert systems, etc) most of my life. I'm currently
developing episodic memory for robot-human interaction at CMU. The system
learns from the episode. By "learning" I mean that it self-modifies so that it
will change its behavior in the future.

The people wandering around claiming that AI will take over the world soon
have no idea what they are talking about. What is actually happening is the
second wave of hype in AI. The first wave, in the 80s, ended up as the "AI
Winter" when people realized that AI was not going to take over the world.
This second "AI Winter" is going to end up causing another 30 year research
desert. People have such short memories.

Here is a way to think about AI. The best known systems are actually people.
Imagine you had invented a person for the first time. Would it take over the
world? Probably. But it would likely take tens of thousands of years. And this
new "person" would be prone to faults and failures, such as when it can't
remember where it put the keys, because some of these faults and failures are
inherent in the system.

I don't fear AI. I fear people who have no idea what they are talking about
who "pump up expectations". Get all the funding you can now because a new AI
Winter is coming.

~~~
pron
Like the name of one of the episodes in _Harry Potter and the Methods of
Rationality_ (which I just looked up), I think you are asking the wrong
questions. _Of course_ AI is not going to take over the world and there's no
singularity coming -- at least not any time soon. The singularity is no less a
religious salvation myth than the Second Coming.

The question you should be asking is _why_ do those people believe in the
singularity? The answer -- like so many answers in life -- comes from the
realm of psychology and sociology rather than hard science.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Well, honestly, why _shouldn 't_ people dream big dreams? Since when was
everyone supposed to just _ignore_ the larger issues of life and assume the
real point is to accumulate money, or whatever other shit society holds we're
supposed to do?

~~~
pron
Who says people shouldn't dream big? But singularity isn't a dream, it's a
religious salvation story. There's nothing wrong with religion, either (well,
no more than many other ideas that guide humanity), but the difference between
this religion and other, older ones is that older religions focused on
morality and human nature, while this one is not even about humans at all. The
part about the guy weeping because previous generations didn't have Kahneman
was clearly written to reflect Christian sorrow for the generations prior to
the coming of Christ, but the latter group is sad about those who didn't hear
Jesus's message about kindness and love, while the former was crying about
those who couldn't tweak their minds to be more robot-like (not that he can,
either, but at least he imagines he can).

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>But singularity isn't a dream, it's a religious salvation story.

Ok, as long as we're bothering to make this distinction, I don't think that's
correct. Most singulatarians I've hung out with place the locus-of-control in
their story _internally_ : they believe that, as a group, _they_ will ensure
that The Singularity comes to pass, in all its Charles-Strossian-weirdo-glory.
As detailed in the article, they have actual groups that are _trying to make
this happen_. They can be _incompetent_ at it, but you can't say they're
sitting around waiting for someone else to save them.

They're more like Communists than Christians.

>the difference between this religion and other, older ones is that older
religions focused on morality and human nature, while this one is not even
about humans at all.

If you followed the article, the whole movement we're talking about has a
loud, public component called Effective Altruism who follow Peter Singer's
(noticeably Christlike, for all I'm not at all Christian) idea of giving away
large portions of their personal income to the highest-impact disease-fighting
and antipoverty charities operating in the Third World. Extreme, impersonal
charity might be _inhuman_ , in some degree, but I'd be hard-pressed to call
it either immoral or disconnected from moral concerns.

>The part about the guy weeping because previous generations didn't have
Kahneman was clearly written to reflect Christian sorrow for the generations
prior to the coming of Christ

A guy wept because previous generations didn't have Kahneman and Tversky's
foundational findings in behavioral economics? Excuse the following several
minutes of nonstop giggling.

Sorry, now, you're telling me it's patterned after some Christian thing? I
can't really tell yes-or-no here, since I've got no background in
Christianity.

>but the latter group is sad about those who didn't hear Jesus's message about
kindness and love, while the former was crying about those who couldn't tweak
their minds to be more robot-like (not that he can, either, but at least he
imagines he can).

Well, this provides a good opportunity to sum up, and to mention a couple of
things.

Firstly, I too find it funny that people want to tweak themselves to better
operate as fully, calculatively rational utility maximizers. There's a whole
literature of bounded rationality showing that throwing out one's information
and computation bounds and _just_ trying to approximate unbounded rationality
in finite space is a _very bad idea_ ;-)!

But secondly, just saying, if people once got sad about others not hearing
Jesus's message of kindness and love, well, what of these people and Peter
Singer's message of _realizing kindness and love in the here-and-now_?

Or, to get one level crazier, what of the people going to Secular Solstice and
weeping that mankind has not yet defeated death, and that we will all lose our
loved ones, suffer ourselves, and then die ourselves? I rather imagine that
the single fundamental fact of the human condition as we know it is an
_entirely appropriate_ target for religious yearnings!

The Buddha said, "Existence is suffering." The extropians said, "Let's fix
that." Disagree with their cause, or predict that they'll fail, and we can
converse sensibly about _why_ they're wrong. Making fun of them for falling
into the common psychological modes of religion, and I think you're missing
the big human-condition-shaped elephant in the room that simply isn't going to
go away.

~~~
pron
Oh, I am well aware that their entire mode of operation is part-and-parcel of
the human condition, I'm only noting the irony that this is exactly what they
think they're avoiding.

But there's another issue here. Not only they believe they can escape not only
the fate but the cause of the human condition, they are also, in many ways,
blind to it, and this is what makes them different from other religions and
even Communism. They are privileged, blind to the misery of the under-
privileged, and their persecution story (every religion has to have one)
revolves around intellectual superiority. In fact, they are distinguished by
having led lives somewhat removed from the concerns of most people. So I think
that makes for a pretty lousy religion.

The big question is, are they harmless?

> A guy wept because previous generations didn't have Kahneman and Tversky's
> foundational findings in behavioral economics? Excuse the following several
> minutes of nonstop giggling.

I laughed when I read that, too. That story, as given in the magazine, is
meant to echo Christians lamenting those generations that lived before the
time of Christ and therefore -- by definition -- could not have been saved.

------
davidw
Here is the actual article, rather than the pirated version:

[http://harpers.org/archive/2015/01/come-with-us-if-you-
want-...](http://harpers.org/archive/2015/01/come-with-us-if-you-want-to-
live/)

~~~
ExpiredLink
_" This article is only available to magazine subscribers."_

~~~
davidw
Yes, exactly. If you want to read the article, you should respect their terms.

~~~
ExpiredLink
So you post a fake link only to teach others copyright terms? Internet is a
strange place.

------
icco
He's right though, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is an easy way
to make someone disappear for a few days.

[http://hpmor.com/](http://hpmor.com/)

------
jf22
I thought this was satirical fiction...

------
pron
I am a Harper's subscriber and this is pirated content. But it's so good that
I'm glad people here have the chance to see it. That story is funny, sad and
scary all at the same time.

This is what happens when so much power is held by people who are -- how
should I say it -- left of average on the autism spectrum _and_ with so little
knowledge of politics and history: you get dystopian notions such as
meritocracy[1] being touted as ideals, and sad-crazy-funny-dangerous ideas
such as those mentioned in this article get funded. But I think some powerful
people have always been susceptible to crazy notions or to people peddling
them (see Scientology or Rasputin).

[1]:
[http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment](http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment)

~~~
WhitneyLand
I think you do not have enough evidence to make negative statements about
autistic people and random generalizations about them being "ignorant of
history" and tending toward "dystopian notions". These kind of stereotypes are
at best unproductive and at worst discriminatory and stigmatizing.

~~~
pron
I didn't say that, and besides, that part of my comment was said in humor.
Also, I consider myself among their numbers so I'm allowed to joke about it :)

~~~
davorak
> that part of my comment was said in humor.

I think more will read it seriously than not.

