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Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

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Re: Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

#81

Post by emmelaich »

scrollaway wrote: post #74
ccccc0 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that Global Civilization is nothing but living!

I read a comment on HN a while back arguing that today's companies are essentially human-powered AIs. It made me think quite a lot -- large companies especially take a lifeform of their own. They tend to mostly care for themselves. Actions are taken "for the company" without any one person being actively aware of why. Higher-ups have some form of backdoor access to the direction the company takes; a symbiotic relatio…

You can argue that that's true of all large enough or complex enough organisations. The emergent behaviour deviates from any one individual.

Reminds of my favourite law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy

Re: Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

#82

Post by TeMPOraL »

amasad wrote: post #38
campground wrote: post #33

This is similar to a thought I've had for some time now; That artificial intelligence is most likely to emerge - rather than be explicitly designed - from our increasingly complex, interconnected, self-regulating systems and institutions. We will be no more aware of, or able to converse with it, than the bacteria in our guts are aware of us. Also, artificial intelligence is the wrong term. We have artificial intellig…

In the paper coining the term 'Singularity'[1], Verner Vinge describes that one way superintelligence could emerge is that large computer networks may "wake up" as a "superhumanly intelligent entity". I personally find any argument that relies on our lack of understanding of complex systems and emergence to be on shaky grounds at best and a fallacy at worst. [1]: https://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singular…

An important thing about intelligence is that it doesn't have to be like the one we have. An intelligence that "wake up" won't say "hello" to us. Assuming we survive its birth, we may just recognize it as things slipping more and more out of anyone's control, ignoring our inputs and doing whatever.

One could wonder if it didn't already happen with the economy.

In a way, talking about these kinds of "meta-intelligences" is kind of a point-of-view thing. It depends on the abstraction level you use. You can look at an ant and think about it as an individual insect, or realize that it's just a tiny, specialized cog in an intricate machinery of a colony - a colony that kind of behaves like an individual animal. Similarly, at what point our day-to-day interactions with other people, aggregated over the entire population of the planet, start to resemble a planet-sized organism doing weird self-regulation stuff? What's the difference between saying that "the market decided" and saying that a low-level decision was made in a part of the planet's brain?

Abstractions are weird this way.

Re: Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

#83

Post by jonknee »

tambourine_man wrote: post #80
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #47

> I read once that human brains began shrinking about 10 thousand years ago and are now as much as 15% smaller than they were then. Timeline's a bit off, but the science is still a shocker: > Over the past 20,000 years, the average volume of the human male brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimeters to 1,350 cc, losing a chunk the size of a tennis ball. The female brain has shrunk by about the same proportion. h…

I find that scary. A huge collection of specialists makes for a pretty fragile species.

Specializing enabled huge advances, everyone having to do everything is actually quite fragile because it can only support a small population.

Re: Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

#84

Post by bogomipz »

I love Eno. Such an influential composer and yet he doesn't consider himself a musician in the least. He's used his own ignorance of music to spectacular effect. This a piece the Telegraph did on him a while ago. It's worth reading:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/artists/how-brian-eno-creat...

Re: Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

#85

Post by mastazi »

bryanph_ wrote: post #61
atemerev wrote: post #39

As a curious software engineer, I have a basic familiarity on where heating oil comes from (I remember my first sci-pop book with a section on basics of oil processing), where nuts are grown, basics of food industry supply chains, and every other example covered. My knowledge might be rudimentary and without much detail, but I try to cover all bases, and when I discover some area of human knowledge I genuinely know n…

This is a road to madness. If every time you wouldn't understand something you would just plunge into the material and get familiarized you would do nothing else for the rest of your life. I think Eno means managing ignorance in the way of making a decision on when to stay ignorant (whilst being aware of your ignorance) and when to learn and hence "fix" this ignorance.

> This is a road to madness

How so?

> If every time you wouldn't understand something you would just plunge into the material and get familiarized you would do nothing else for the rest of your life

That's how I've been spending a significant part of my out-of-work time, for most of my adult life. Is there anything wrong with being a curiosity-driven person?

Re: Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

#86

Post by pimlottc »

Noseshine wrote: post #9

While taking neuroscience it occurred to me that one could make an argument - depending on what one wants to show, the usefulness of a model is always limited by the intended use - to see a similarity between neurons and humans: The system outcome is not the sum of what each neuron "knows", and each neuron is really "ignorant" and "stupid". For example, why are people bothered that there are people who are into consp…

I read something similar positing a positive role for aberrant behavior due to mental illness - if everyone eats the strange mushroom, the entire village might die, but if it's just Crazy Darrell then the rest of us can benefit by seeing what happens to him.

Re: Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

#87

Post by mastazi »

sixQuarks wrote: post #10

I don't see the correlation. The author is talking more about systems. The difference with AI is that it will have all of the knowledge within a system and thus be able to make incredible connections between disparate fields of knowledge. On a separate note, I had an interesting thought about AI as I was looking at a cool architectural photo. I would love to design a building, but I don't know a thing about it. It wo…

> The difference with AI is that it will have all of the knowledge within a system

If you asked me to come up with 5 different definitions of AI, the concept of "all of the knowledge" wouldn't really be there. I agree on the "incredible connections" part, though.

Re: Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

#88

Post by e12e »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #77
e12e wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think your examples are more of the "powerful tools" kind of AI. And I think the general argument about "hard AI problems, when solved, cease to be AI" is also along those lines. I think we've proven by example that what we thought of as things that require "real" intelligence, like chess, go, jeopardy - really don't. They're not a good yardstick for intelligence. Or intelligence is not as closely tied to (se…

> Indeed. I fear AI that stops being dependent on people. Such systems are still far off, I believe. But I don't see why we couldn't intentionally or by accident create a new form of life that could out-compete us, and in the end make us extinct. Since the line between AI realized in a machine and systems in general is kind of thin and blurry, one could argue that the economy is about to become such a system. If auto…

Absolutely. Just as we are (in my opinion) a result of emergent systems (evolution) - the systems we build should be expected to have emergent properties. And there are other systems we are beholden to (and impact) such as the biosphere and the climate.

Criticism of capitalism is often misunderstood, or misconstrued as "conspiracy theory" - while what it often is, is just pointing out the most likely and apparent emergent properties of capitalism - and likely follow-on effects of that. Examples are concentration of capital and power, ignoring "external costs" like environmental damage etc.

Re: Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

#89

Post by tempestn »

grahamburger wrote: post #50
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with habit reinforcement is that you've simply created a feedback loop. "You like [music type]? Here are more bands/artists of [music type]." It looks like an innocent service. But it's devastating to real exploration, because it makes it much less likely you'll ever discover Band/Artist Z whom you'd never normally listen to but love anyway. This is why thoughtless customer profiling is a dumb idea, and c…

> The problem with habit reinforcement is that you've simply created a feedback loop. > "You like [music type]? Here are more bands/artists of [music type]." So far I've found the opposite. Pandora has exposed me to music that I never would have sought out on my own. In fact I can think of several artists that I would have judged by their cover, so to speak, and never given a chance even if I had stumbled on them on…

And more generally, I would say it just depends on the quality of the AI. There is no fundamental reason why such a system would have to recommend only similar music. It could try contrasting music, and build a picture of what aspects of the music you like. It could draw conclusions to recommend seemingly different genres which nonetheless share some commonality that might make them appeal to you. It could also occasionally try out completely different things, to broaden your horizons (and give you more of that if you react favourably). And that's just scratching the surface. You could do all that without AI. An AI could potentially do all that, plus other interesting things that we wouldn't even think to try.

Re: Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

#90

Post by TeMPOraL »

josephpmay wrote: post #8

This is closely related to the economic concept of the "Invisible Hand"[0] and also explains why planned economies never seem to work, no matter how well-intentioned they are (see the current state of Venezuela - although in their case, as in almost every case of central planned economies, greed and corruption were the prevailing forces of the ruling agency) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand

"Invisible Hand" turns out to be just another word for a feedback loop. Something we've learned quite a lot about in the past century. Feedback control is not magic. It does some things right, and it dumbly fails in some other cases. It's more resilient and tamper-proof - it's close to impossible for a single individual to control this system. That's why people like it. But it's also much less efficient than central-planned economies could be. In a way, running economy by self-cancelling feedback loops is outsourcing computation to the physical world. Instead of figuring out - using brains or computers - how much widgets a factory should make, you just let people buy and sell and get rich and go bankrupt, until the system spits out a stable state. Very resilient, but very wasteful.

I think central planning is much too fragile for today's world. But who knows, it may be ok for tomorrow's. I believe that prerequisites for successful central planning are having a benevolent planner backed up by huge computing power, so that the planner can respond to changes everywhere promptly enough. A friendly AI, if you like.

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