24 ms·

Brian Eno: We've been living happily with AI for thousands of years

363 points by cdcarter 10y ago

jacquesm 10y ago
Echoes of 'I, Pencil' in there: http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html Some more background about the brain shrinkage referred to in the article: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-have-our-brains-started-to-shrink/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-have-our-brain...
- unknown_apostle 10y ago
  Yep, "I Pencil" came to my mind as well. But opaqueness is the only thing that AI shares with global market (or catallaxy as Austrians would call it). What Brian Eno is missing, is that global markets are created by billions of human minds on the basis of a constant process of trial-and-error (to the extents government allows them to try and fail). It's not just error tolerant. It's constantly making profit by improving and correcting errors. And it's been around for 1000s of years. Whereas computers have been around for less than a century and are programmed by a few people and AI may not have with "common sense" or error tolerance. To deliver yourself to that seems unacceptable to me.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    And it's not as if we didn't have pencils before economies of scale kicked in either, the invention of the pencil (1564) pre-dates much of the mechanisms described in 'I, Pencil' so at one point it was definitely possible to know the entirety of pencil-making. Even so it serves as a very graphic reminder of how interconnected all of humanity and industry is at this point. http://www.enchantedlearning.com/inventors/page/p/pencil.shtml http://www.enchantedlearning.com/inventors/page/p/pencil.sht...
zitterbewegung 10y ago
I think the article is missing the point of what AI will do by eliminating jobs like transportation and fast food preparation . I think once we get to that point we will have to implement basic income .
- crdoconnor 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat#Decline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat#Decline
- PeCaN 10y ago
  AI and basic income in the same comment. I almost forgot I was on HN for a second there.
  - timboisvert 10y ago
    A Haskell mention would've completed the HN trifecta.
    - juped 10y ago
      Show HN: A Haskell.js webapp to compute basic income levels under different hypothetical AI rapture scenarios
    - brobinson 10y ago
      I think Phoenix/Elixir has dethroned Haskell.
      - PeCaN 10y ago
        Or Go or Rust. But Phoenix/Elixir does seem to be the new thing. Not that I mind, always happy for the Erlang platform to get more attention.
    - tome 10y ago
      And an honourable mention for Georgist land taxation.
  - askafriend 10y ago
    Classic HN: Trying to capture the depth of topics like Basic Income and AI by sprinkling them over two sentences. Kidding :)
  - 10y ago
josephpmay 10y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  The "invisible hand" metaphor used by Adam Smith is not an explanatory mechanism, and if anything is an admission that the specific mechanism isn't understood. In use at the time and earlier, it had the sense of "the invisible hand of Providence" (or God). Though Smith, as Hume, was almost certainly what we'd now call an athiest. He used the term three times, in three different books: The Theory of Moral Sentiments, then An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, and finally in a book on the history of astronomy. It's clear from context that Smith wasn't embuing markets especially with invisible handedness, but using a common phrase of the age. The modern invention of this metaphor dates to the 1930s and 1940s, being first used in its modern sense by Paul Samuelson, and latched onto like a desperate child by the budding organs of the Mont Pelerin Society, better known as the von Mises / Hayek / Friedman / Rothbardian variant of Libertarian theology. Its popular significance grew after publishing of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, a compilation of modern economic fallacies miscast as truths, by Regenry Press, a Libertarian propaganda mill, in 1963. You can trace the evolution of the term via Google's Ngram viewer. One of the more notable "quotations" from Smith's Wealth of Nations Economic historian Gavin Kennedy has traced this history in depth, published multiple papers on it, and writes a blog, "Adam Smith's Lost Legacy", which I highly recommend. (You'll also find some discussion of the false myth that's developed over the term in the very Wikipedia article you've linked.) https://econjwatch.org/articles/adam-smith-and-the-invisible-hand-from-metaphor-to-myth https://econjwatch.org/articles/adam-smith-and-the-invisible... http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1781536 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1781536 https://adamsmithslostlegacy.blogspot.com/ https://adamsmithslostlegacy.blogspot.com/ My own recommendation is that people actually read Adam Smith to see what he wrote and meant: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4cyroa/adam_smiths_lost_legacy_or_why_you_should_read/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4cyroa/adam_sm... More on the Mont Pelerin Society: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society
Noseshine 10y ago
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 conspiracy theories? Or some who see dangers everywhere, while for others everything (everyone) is good? Maybe that's their role in the "humanity computer"! Some neurons' (humans') task is to be extra-paranoid so that the majority don't have to. and others are the opposite, nothing bothers them. What seems "crazy" is, when looked at from a higher plane, quite possibly a very reasonable organisation. Maybe "humanity" does not - should not - make sense on an individual level (i.e. ever single human be "sensible", "reasonable"), but on the level of "humanity". Why this obsession that everybody has to agree, and people who don't are vilified? If all neurons in the brain were to agree you'd have a very dysfunctional brain. What it needs are complex connections and (feedback) loops that enhance and suppress output depending on the overall input. "Overall" is important - not "what an individual (human or neuron) sees", but the sum of all inputs into the system. It does not have to make sense on an individual level. I like how Sherlock Holmes says it (short, 30 seconds): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuIMmwJbnco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuIMmwJbnco The attempt to understand "humanity" and what's going on on this planet on an individual human level is doomed to fail. The most you can get is a "feeling" that you get it -but if you do, it's wrong, and it's really bad. If you also happen to have some "power" (individuals having too much power is a bad construct) the outcome can be disastrous. The things the linked article talked about I use to mention in the context of "magic". You know, what the fantasy books and movies are all about. They have "magic items" - whose main property is that nobody knows what they actually are or how they work, where they come from. Sounds familiar? I don't even have to look at an iphone. This wonderful story sums it up very well I think (and please ignore the object that it uses, here "Coke", it's not about Coke, so no need to discuss the merits of overpriced unhealthy sugar-water): https://medium.com/@kevin_ashton/what-coke-contains-221d449929ef https://medium.com/@kevin_ashton/what-coke-contains-221d4499... Quote: > The number of individuals who know how to make a can of Coke is zero. The number of individual nations that could produce a can of Coke is zero. This famously American product is not American at all. Invention and creation is something we are all in together. Modern tool chains are so long and complex that they bind us into one people and one planet. They are not only chains of tools, they are also chains of minds: local and foreign, ancient and modern, living and dead — the result of disparate invention and intelligence distributed over time and space. And look, I don't even have to explain my thoughts myself! Which, if I had been born in the forest away from thousands of years of human experience and exchange with other humans in time and space, I would probably never have developed in the first place. Instead I can go and use a few words of "glue" to link to pieces written by others - that they themselves owe to others. Think about that in the next discussion about high-earning people "they earn it"! Do they? Back to the example "born alone on the forest". If someone develops a Facebook or a Tesla or a Dell computer from such roots, then I agree, they deserve billions. For clarification: I'm not talking about the 1%, I'm talking about the 0.01% (The Economist: http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21631129-it-001-who-are-really-getting-ahead-america-forget-1; http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21631129... Some charts in a short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM)
sixQuarks 10y ago
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 would take me years just to learn all the details. Then, I thought, one use of AI may be to connect with our brains and make learning easier. Imagine if we could instantly learn all the fundamentals of architecture, then use our creativity to create our own designs. It's a mix of AI and human creativity, neither one replaces the other.
- piqufoh 10y ago
  Or - you could design the building you want, any way you want - and the AI takes over when you're done to make the design is possible. Boring / difficult / specialist things like load bearing calculations, material strength, plumbing routing etc. are done for you. A bit like Ripley's exosuit, but for your mind!
- kordless 10y ago
  Why does AI have to have access to all information? Seems a bit wasteful, resource wise, if you ask me.
  - ChoHag 10y ago
    TCP's not that resource-intensive.
- qbrass 10y ago
  It's feeding you information that you'll accept as fact and you think both sides of this arrangement are equal? It's already how certain institutions have ingrained themselves into society, but they don't have the efficiency of being able to instantly impart their knowledge or the holistic view of it's goals and progress that AI could have.
- mastazi 10y ago
  > 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.
Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago
What people are worried about is artificial systems that are of higher capability than all or the vast majority of humans. If the principal agent problem is solved by those that create them and they can be cheaply reproduced, then the value of human wages goes below subsistence. This likely isn't a big problem as economic growth rates would be so unimaginably high in this scenario (with doubling times on the order of months) that even significantly less wealth distribution than what occurs today could easily cover a basic income. This is why I'm not nearly as worried about technological unemployment. And as most people have at least some capital, even without redistribution many people would be fine. If we can't solve the principle agent problem, we will have introduced self-replicating entities with much higher intelligence into our environment. As most possible utility functions require resources to pursue, we will be competing for resources with more intelligent entities. A competition we will lose. So solving the principal agent problem is a big issue. Comparing human-level AI to markets is like Megafauna saying "We've been competing with other mammals for millions of years, man is only a difference in degree rather than kind. We'll be fine."
- pygy_ 10y ago
  For your first scenario economic growth must be fueled by a proportional growth in energy consumption. Fossil and Nuclear fuels exist in finite quantities, and the rate of sunlight that hits earth is more or less constant. Most people would still starve as fields would be repurposed to produce fuel.
  - Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago
    Maybe it would only last a few years. But once we can convert capital directly into labour in a manner that scales, we will get insane amounts of economic growth.
    - pygy_ 10y ago
      Indeed, but it remains to be seen if such growth would benefit the idling meat bags left unemployed.
    - 10y ago
mwfunk 10y ago
He's addressing one aspect of AI that can be disturbing to some people, specifically becoming reliant on the expertise of others in your day-to-day life and thus becoming less independent. If your biggest issue with the concept of AI assistants is that they might have insights about you that you yourself don't have, I could see this article making someone feel better about it. For me at least, that's not the primary fear. I don't fear people becoming dependent on AI. Rather, I fear people misusing the information that AI reveals about others. I don't feel uncomfortable from (for example) AI observing my media habits and using that information to make recommendations for other media. However, I would feel uncomfortable if someone with access to that AI then fed those insights into some other AI that I wasn't aware of for much more nefarious purposes, such as profiling me to try to quantify my loyalty to the government. That's just one example. Even if I had absolute faith in my government, bad actors could misuse that information to do other things, like determine which people would be most likely to take on debt on unfavorable terms (so they could be sent a 20% APR preapproved credit card, naturally!), or which people would be most likely to want to help a troubled Nigerian prince who just needs a place to temporarily park a bunch of money. I'm not trying to fearmonger and I'm actually very excited for the future of AI. I just don't think this piece is addressing the deeper fears people have about the technology.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  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 certainly not the sure fire insta-profit marketing panacea it's sometimes supposed to be. It has some uses, but you're reducing customers to stimulus/response robots with a limited behavioural repertoire, and that's an excellent way to miss a lot of opportunities.
  - jononor 10y ago
    If you however do succeed in reducing humans to stimulus/response bots, it will likely be good business. Which is the scariest aspect, cause that drives lots of decisionmaking today...
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johnchristopher 10y ago
Right. Let's again substitute the meaning of a word or a concept for another one and start up another dictionary debate.
- RIMR 10y ago
  I think you're missing the point. The idea is that artificial intelligence will prevent us from having to understand a lot of things in order to accomplish them, but that effect is no different than any other technological innovation we have made. The definition of AI has also changed plenty in the past sixty-something years we've been developing it. A couple of good Wiki links on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellig... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
dredmorbius 10y ago
Brian Eno is a skilled musician. He's a lousy economic, systems, and AI theorist. The Edge is revealing itself far more to be a forum in which people of provenance hold forth on that which they've no particular qualifications or grounds to discuss (something which never happens elsewhere on the Internet, of course </s>). Complex, highly-interdependent systems exibit fragility, nonlinear transitions, and multiple optima, some not reachable, some local and highly persistent but undesirable. Tossing up ones hands and declaring that all shall be as God / Allah / The Great Spirit / FSM wills it abandons all sense of agency. The prospects of a global collapse of systems concerns a great many people, and for much the reason AI would: the mechanisms, logic, interactions, limits, and consequences aren't clear. See David Korowicz's "Trade-Off". http://www.feasta.org/2012/06/17/trade-off-financial-system-supply-chain-cross-contagion-a-study-in-global-systemic-collapse/ http://www.feasta.org/2012/06/17/trade-off-financial-system-... As for technological unemployment, that's been a consideration for over 200 years. You'll find strong treatments from J.S. Mill, and commentary from Abraham Lincoln. Some modern sources, referencing those: Technology in Society 1984, Vol.6(4):263–284, doi:10.1016/0160-791X(84)90022-8 "High technology and job loss", Russell W. Rumberger http://31.184.194.81/10.1016/0160-791X(84)90022-8 http://31.184.194.81/10.1016/0160-791X(84)90022-8 Robert Struble Jr, (1993) "Towards a Structural Solution to Unemployment", International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 20 Iss: 11, pp.15 - 26 http://31.184.194.81/http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/03068299310046063 http://31.184.194.81/http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/0306829931004...
- bogomipz 10y ago
  This is one of the most elitist comments I've read on HN. What are your special qualifications that allow you to say who is and who is not qualified to comment on a topical issue? I'm guessing by your comment stating that he is a skilled musician that you aren't actually familiar with Brian Eno at all. He's an unskilled musician, that's by his own admission. He's not technically proficient on any instrument. He's quite the technologist though.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Space alien cats don't need qualifications. Nor do they claim them. As others have noted, Eno's piece is a poor rewrite of I Pencil, itself a poorly reasoned propaganda piece. Crooked Timber has an excellent deconstruction of that: http://crookedtimber.org/2011/04/16/i-pencil-a-product-of-the-mixed-economy/ http://crookedtimber.org/2011/04/16/i-pencil-a-product-of-th... The one at Freakonomics is weaker sauce but also pretty biting: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/i-pencil/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/i-pencil/ I've pointed to several sources discussing technological unemployment, and more critically the long history of discussion of that topic from 1800 forward in mainstream and heterodox economic, as well as political and other literature. None of which Eno's careless handwave points at. If informed, sourced, intelligent, and specifically refutable comment is elitist, I'll take it. You've also focused on the irrelevant element of my argument, though if anything, you're also undercutting your own criticism of me. Eno's skill is evident in his body of work. Which I have listened to, own some of, and rather like. His self-description is at best inaccurate. Your assumptions as to my familiarity or otherwise with Eno's works place you on the rather precarious precipice of a domain in which I am and insist privileged expertise of obvious nature. Cheers.
campground 10y ago
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 intelligence. What we are talking about is a new, higher form of real intelligence.
- nyolfen 10y ago
  It's not difficult to conceptualize globalized capitalism in this way, and indeed some have -- Nick Land springs to mind.
  - theoh 10y ago
    Yeah, but what does Nick Land actually know about the likely structure of AI software or interconnected control systems. Or even economics for that matter. He's a renegade philosopher, which conveniently requires no qualifications. "accelerationism" otoh is a clear and interesting concept.
- amasad 10y ago
  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/singularity.html https://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.ht...
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    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.
orblivion 10y ago
I would call that a natural intelligence.
dredmorbius 10y ago
For those interested in what people who actually know whereof they speak have to say on the topic of technological unemployment, and the history of economic discussion of the topic, a solid outline of discussions from Ricardo, Mill, McCollough, and Neisser, is included here: https://econospeak.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-technology-trap-permanent.html https://econospeak.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-technology-trap-...
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  > "For those interested in what people who actually know whereof they speak have to say on the topic" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority I've no problem with learning from others, but pointing to a select handful of people who 'actually know whereof they speak' is not going to help explore the field fully.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Pointing to expertise is not argument from authority.
    - ZenoArrow 10y ago
      It depends. In this case, it was the framing that made it the argument from authority, namely "in what people who actually know whereof they speak". The implication is that the sources of truth are limited to a select few people.
      - dredmorbius 10y ago
        Argument from authority is "X is true because Y says it is". That's not what I claimed. This is tedious.
atemerev 10y ago
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 nothing about, I jump to Wikipedia in excitement. (I read Wikipedia a lot). I thought that being uncomfortable with own ignorance is a fundamental part of human nature. But apparently it isn't.
- bryanph_ 10y ago
  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.
  - mastazi 10y ago
    > 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?
    - cwsx 10y ago
      Not at all, some might call that a 'hobby'.
    - steplee 10y ago
      There's no way you could actually do this. Going an hour on a normal day you'd have a life time of material to learn so I agree yes it is madness. You can't learn thousands of years of engineering, math, science, etc.
Rauchg 10y ago
For different versions of this argument see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect. Bostrom said: "A lot of cutting edge AI has filtered into general applications, often without being called AI because once something becomes useful enough and common enough it's not labelled AI anymore". Finally, the problem with all these articles is the lack of precise definition for the terminology involved (it reminds me of debates about "consciousness"). Recipe: make a slight twist on the interpretation of the already-vague definition of the term and a new essay emerges. In this case, the author is equating "AI" to "Abstraction". All the things he mentions he doesn't understand, he could understand by looking them up and talking to the experts, but he doesn't have to, because the appropriate simple interfaces are in place. That's intelligence in its general form, where's the artificial part?
- JoBrad 10y ago
  It's generally accepted that any intelligence that isn't from a living being is artificial. Global Civilization isn't living, per se.
  - ccccc0 10y ago
    I'd argue that Global Civilization is nothing but living!
    - scrollaway 10y ago
      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 relationship with what is, in a way, a parasite.
      - Joof 10y ago
        Many larger systems are more than the sum of their parts. Enough that you could consider the grouping it's own entity. Ant hills are the canonical example because individual ants are recognizable as 'animals', but the function of an anthill clearly relies on a complex interaction between more simple ants. Just as we are made of tiny organisms, bigger systems could be considered to be made of us.
JumpCrisscross 10y ago
> 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. http://discovermagazine.com/2010/sep/25-modern-humans-smart-why-brain-shrinking http://discovermagazine.com/2010/sep/25-modern-humans-smart-...
- SapphireSun 10y ago
  A recent study came out showing birds are more intelligent than expected possibly because of neuron density. [1] I find it easier to believe, without evidence of course, that the brain became more compact rather than losing processing power. A neuroscientist on brain size and intelligence: https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/ask-neuroscientist-does-bigger-brain-make-you-smarter https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/ask-neuroscientist-do... [1] http://www.pnas.org/content/113/26/7255.full http://www.pnas.org/content/113/26/7255.full
- seanalltogether 10y ago
  Size may be smaller, but I wonder about the surface area through folds. That's where the strength of our intelligence lies.
- peter303 10y ago
  Plus there is gene of unknown function called DUF1220 which seems have something to do with brain size. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DUF1220 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DUF1220 There are more copies of it as brain size increases in mammals and apes. The Neanderthal genome has more of it than Sapiens.
- tambourine_man 10y ago
  I find that scary. A huge collection of specialists makes for a pretty fragile species.
  - 10y ago
cobbzilla 10y ago
seems like an issue of semantics - he's taking something most of us would just call "human culture" and naming it "AI" - which is an interesting idea, but true artificial intelligence is something that involves some amount of self awareness of the system to itself.
- RIMR 10y ago
  To be further semantic, one could say you're referring to AI automata, not just AI.
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    It's interesting how we conflate self-awareness with true intelligence. It implies that something cannot be truly intelligent until the point it creates a personality for it to identify with. I'd argue that a better indication of intelligence is self-directed learning, even if the seed of that desire to learn is programmed in from an outside source. I don't think its necessary for an AI to need to form a narrative of self.
dd36 10y ago
This is similar to Kevin Kelly's technium theory: http://kk.org/thetechnium/ http://kk.org/thetechnium/ Technological innovation is an extension of evolution. Whether that's the invention of the alphabet or a computer, we are a part of this system continuing evolution.
peter303 10y ago
Some concepts have an implied prefix "digital computer-aided" to distinguish from related concepts. We all know we are intensely interested in the computer version. Another example is "virtual reality" which existed since cavemen made up campfire stories and drew wall pictures.
benkarst 10y ago
Thoughtful article. Eno refers to hidden processes in systems as AI hinting at their similarity. I am assuming there are already digital systems in place that monitor "hidden" processes that make a chicken sandwich for example (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URvWSsAgtJE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URvWSsAgtJE). Such systems could monitor data points and possibly forecast the price (or a great many things) of a chicken sandwich.
bogomipz 10y ago
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-created-a-quiet-revolution-in-music/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/artists/how-brian-eno-creat...
- fuzzfactor 10y ago
  Also the author of The Microsoft Sound WAV that played upon Windows startup in 1995. At the time probably the tune played most often per day for a number of years.
ebbv 10y ago
This is a cute but ultimately wrong argument. It's like saying we live with a black hole because there's one in the center of our galaxy. Yes you could stretch the term of AI to say that a large system made up of people and simple machines is some form of AI, but that's stretching it to the point of becoming meaningless. When people talk about real Artificial Intelligence they usually mean general AI, or at least a specific AI that is capable of human-like decision making. Not Computer Chess and not an auto-stop in a filling pump. Stretching AI to the point of ludicrousness like this seems to serve only the purpose of trying to shut down discussion around human-like AI. Which is not a noble goal. Discussing human-like AI is important, especially before we figure it out. It would have been nice if people in the early 1900s had spent time thinking about the consequences of putting so much carbon into the atmosphere before they did it. Let's not be another generation of people who could have had a lot more forethought than they did.
pajop 10y ago
Tim Urban points out in his AI article that it might be dangerous to expect that the AI that we know now would still be the same AI we will have in the very near future http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu... "So as AI zooms upward in intelligence toward us, we’ll see it as simply becoming smarter, for an animal. Then, when it hits the lowest capacity of humanity—Nick Bostrom uses the term “the village idiot”—we’ll be like, “Oh wow, it’s like a dumb human. Cute!” The only thing is, in the grand spectrum of intelligence, all humans, from the village idiot to Einstein, are within a very small range—so just after hitting village idiot level and being declared to be AGI, it’ll suddenly be smarter than Einstein and we won’t know what hit us:" Compare the images: http://28oa9i1t08037ue3m1l0i861.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Intelligence-600x472.jpg http://28oa9i1t08037ue3m1l0i861.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-c... http://28oa9i1t08037ue3m1l0i861.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Intelligence2-1024x836.png http://28oa9i1t08037ue3m1l0i861.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-c...
- scotty79 10y ago
  I'm not afraid of AI because intelligence has diminishing returns. 1000 times smarter entity might be only 2 or 3 times better at predicting the future than human is. So 1000 times smarter superhuman AI maybe could tell weather two weeks ahead instead of one. And the physical world is inherently like weather, chaotic in mathematical sense. Our upper hand against even very dumb animals doesn't come from our intelligence. It comes from thousands of years of infrastructure that we built to amplify ourselves. AI would have to build its own, which we won't let it (at least initially) or steal ours in which having ability to see just a bit farther in the future doesn't help that much with. It won't get much ahead of us with science because science is limited by technology. 1000 times smarter physicist won't figure out new universe laws without getting his hands on data from new accelerator, larger than any other built before. That's some reasons why I think run-away AI won't be dangerous to us unless we let it build or take over our physical world which won't happen given our current caution towards subject.
  - Houshalter 10y ago
esalman 10y ago
True AI would learn and teach itself new stuff. Something a central heating, burner, car or wifi cannot do.
grondilu 10y ago
To me that's a stretch. AI is not a carpet under which you put everything you don't know about how the World works.
nthcolumn 10y ago
That AI is not separate from humanity. He accepts that we ask, we get. It serves us. People are worried about the non-we. Global civilisation cannot destroy humanity without destroying itself - unless it creates another human-autonomous AI. The non-we AI.

363 points by cdcarter 10y ago

Echoes of 'I, Pencil' in there: http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html Some more background about the brain shrinkage referred to in the article: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-have-our-brains-started-to-shrink/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-have-our-brain...

unknown_apostle 10y ago
Yep, "I Pencil" came to my mind as well. But opaqueness is the only thing that AI shares with global market (or catallaxy as Austrians would call it). What Brian Eno is missing, is that global markets are created by billions of human minds on the basis of a constant process of trial-and-error (to the extents government allows them to try and fail). It's not just error tolerant. It's constantly making profit by improving and correcting errors. And it's been around for 1000s of years. Whereas computers have been around for less than a century and are programmed by a few people and AI may not have with "common sense" or error tolerance. To deliver yourself to that seems unacceptable to me.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  And it's not as if we didn't have pencils before economies of scale kicked in either, the invention of the pencil (1564) pre-dates much of the mechanisms described in 'I, Pencil' so at one point it was definitely possible to know the entirety of pencil-making. Even so it serves as a very graphic reminder of how interconnected all of humanity and industry is at this point. http://www.enchantedlearning.com/inventors/page/p/pencil.shtml http://www.enchantedlearning.com/inventors/page/p/pencil.sht...

zitterbewegung 10y ago

I think the article is missing the point of what AI will do by eliminating jobs like transportation and fast food preparation . I think once we get to that point we will have to implement basic income .

crdoconnor 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat#Decline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat#Decline
PeCaN 10y ago
AI and basic income in the same comment. I almost forgot I was on HN for a second there.
- timboisvert 10y ago
  A Haskell mention would've completed the HN trifecta.
  - juped 10y ago
    Show HN: A Haskell.js webapp to compute basic income levels under different hypothetical AI rapture scenarios
  - brobinson 10y ago
    I think Phoenix/Elixir has dethroned Haskell.
    - PeCaN 10y ago
      Or Go or Rust. But Phoenix/Elixir does seem to be the new thing. Not that I mind, always happy for the Erlang platform to get more attention.
  - tome 10y ago
    And an honourable mention for Georgist land taxation.
- askafriend 10y ago
  Classic HN: Trying to capture the depth of topics like Basic Income and AI by sprinkling them over two sentences. Kidding :)
- 10y ago

josephpmay 10y ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand

dredmorbius 10y ago
The "invisible hand" metaphor used by Adam Smith is not an explanatory mechanism, and if anything is an admission that the specific mechanism isn't understood. In use at the time and earlier, it had the sense of "the invisible hand of Providence" (or God). Though Smith, as Hume, was almost certainly what we'd now call an athiest. He used the term three times, in three different books: The Theory of Moral Sentiments, then An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, and finally in a book on the history of astronomy. It's clear from context that Smith wasn't embuing markets especially with invisible handedness, but using a common phrase of the age. The modern invention of this metaphor dates to the 1930s and 1940s, being first used in its modern sense by Paul Samuelson, and latched onto like a desperate child by the budding organs of the Mont Pelerin Society, better known as the von Mises / Hayek / Friedman / Rothbardian variant of Libertarian theology. Its popular significance grew after publishing of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, a compilation of modern economic fallacies miscast as truths, by Regenry Press, a Libertarian propaganda mill, in 1963. You can trace the evolution of the term via Google's Ngram viewer. One of the more notable "quotations" from Smith's Wealth of Nations Economic historian Gavin Kennedy has traced this history in depth, published multiple papers on it, and writes a blog, "Adam Smith's Lost Legacy", which I highly recommend. (You'll also find some discussion of the false myth that's developed over the term in the very Wikipedia article you've linked.) https://econjwatch.org/articles/adam-smith-and-the-invisible-hand-from-metaphor-to-myth https://econjwatch.org/articles/adam-smith-and-the-invisible... http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1781536 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1781536 https://adamsmithslostlegacy.blogspot.com/ https://adamsmithslostlegacy.blogspot.com/ My own recommendation is that people actually read Adam Smith to see what he wrote and meant: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4cyroa/adam_smiths_lost_legacy_or_why_you_should_read/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4cyroa/adam_sm... More on the Mont Pelerin Society: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society

Noseshine 10y ago

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 conspiracy theories? Or some who see dangers everywhere, while for others everything (everyone) is good? Maybe that's their role in the "humanity computer"! Some neurons' (humans') task is to be extra-paranoid so that the majority don't have to. and others are the opposite, nothing bothers them. What seems "crazy" is, when looked at from a higher plane, quite possibly a very reasonable organisation. Maybe "humanity" does not - should not - make sense on an individual level (i.e. ever single human be "sensible", "reasonable"), but on the level of "humanity". Why this obsession that everybody has to agree, and people who don't are vilified? If all neurons in the brain were to agree you'd have a very dysfunctional brain. What it needs are complex connections and (feedback) loops that enhance and suppress output depending on the overall input. "Overall" is important - not "what an individual (human or neuron) sees", but the sum of all inputs into the system. It does not have to make sense on an individual level. I like how Sherlock Holmes says it (short, 30 seconds): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuIMmwJbnco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuIMmwJbnco The attempt to understand "humanity" and what's going on on this planet on an individual human level is doomed to fail. The most you can get is a "feeling" that you get it -but if you do, it's wrong, and it's really bad. If you also happen to have some "power" (individuals having too much power is a bad construct) the outcome can be disastrous. The things the linked article talked about I use to mention in the context of "magic". You know, what the fantasy books and movies are all about. They have "magic items" - whose main property is that nobody knows what they actually are or how they work, where they come from. Sounds familiar? I don't even have to look at an iphone. This wonderful story sums it up very well I think (and please ignore the object that it uses, here "Coke", it's not about Coke, so no need to discuss the merits of overpriced unhealthy sugar-water): https://medium.com/@kevin_ashton/what-coke-contains-221d449929ef https://medium.com/@kevin_ashton/what-coke-contains-221d4499... Quote: > The number of individuals who know how to make a can of Coke is zero. The number of individual nations that could produce a can of Coke is zero. This famously American product is not American at all. Invention and creation is something we are all in together. Modern tool chains are so long and complex that they bind us into one people and one planet. They are not only chains of tools, they are also chains of minds: local and foreign, ancient and modern, living and dead — the result of disparate invention and intelligence distributed over time and space. And look, I don't even have to explain my thoughts myself! Which, if I had been born in the forest away from thousands of years of human experience and exchange with other humans in time and space, I would probably never have developed in the first place. Instead I can go and use a few words of "glue" to link to pieces written by others - that they themselves owe to others. Think about that in the next discussion about high-earning people "they earn it"! Do they? Back to the example "born alone on the forest". If someone develops a Facebook or a Tesla or a Dell computer from such roots, then I agree, they deserve billions. For clarification: I'm not talking about the 1%, I'm talking about the 0.01% (The Economist: http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21631129-it-001-who-are-really-getting-ahead-america-forget-1; http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21631129... Some charts in a short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM)

sixQuarks 10y ago

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 would take me years just to learn all the details. Then, I thought, one use of AI may be to connect with our brains and make learning easier. Imagine if we could instantly learn all the fundamentals of architecture, then use our creativity to create our own designs. It's a mix of AI and human creativity, neither one replaces the other.

piqufoh 10y ago
Or - you could design the building you want, any way you want - and the AI takes over when you're done to make the design is possible. Boring / difficult / specialist things like load bearing calculations, material strength, plumbing routing etc. are done for you. A bit like Ripley's exosuit, but for your mind!
kordless 10y ago
Why does AI have to have access to all information? Seems a bit wasteful, resource wise, if you ask me.
- ChoHag 10y ago
  TCP's not that resource-intensive.
qbrass 10y ago
It's feeding you information that you'll accept as fact and you think both sides of this arrangement are equal? It's already how certain institutions have ingrained themselves into society, but they don't have the efficiency of being able to instantly impart their knowledge or the holistic view of it's goals and progress that AI could have.
mastazi 10y ago
> 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.

Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago

What people are worried about is artificial systems that are of higher capability than all or the vast majority of humans. If the principal agent problem is solved by those that create them and they can be cheaply reproduced, then the value of human wages goes below subsistence. This likely isn't a big problem as economic growth rates would be so unimaginably high in this scenario (with doubling times on the order of months) that even significantly less wealth distribution than what occurs today could easily cover a basic income. This is why I'm not nearly as worried about technological unemployment. And as most people have at least some capital, even without redistribution many people would be fine. If we can't solve the principle agent problem, we will have introduced self-replicating entities with much higher intelligence into our environment. As most possible utility functions require resources to pursue, we will be competing for resources with more intelligent entities. A competition we will lose. So solving the principal agent problem is a big issue. Comparing human-level AI to markets is like Megafauna saying "We've been competing with other mammals for millions of years, man is only a difference in degree rather than kind. We'll be fine."

pygy_ 10y ago
For your first scenario economic growth must be fueled by a proportional growth in energy consumption. Fossil and Nuclear fuels exist in finite quantities, and the rate of sunlight that hits earth is more or less constant. Most people would still starve as fields would be repurposed to produce fuel.
- Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago
  Maybe it would only last a few years. But once we can convert capital directly into labour in a manner that scales, we will get insane amounts of economic growth.
  - pygy_ 10y ago
    Indeed, but it remains to be seen if such growth would benefit the idling meat bags left unemployed.
  - 10y ago

mwfunk 10y ago

He's addressing one aspect of AI that can be disturbing to some people, specifically becoming reliant on the expertise of others in your day-to-day life and thus becoming less independent. If your biggest issue with the concept of AI assistants is that they might have insights about you that you yourself don't have, I could see this article making someone feel better about it. For me at least, that's not the primary fear. I don't fear people becoming dependent on AI. Rather, I fear people misusing the information that AI reveals about others. I don't feel uncomfortable from (for example) AI observing my media habits and using that information to make recommendations for other media. However, I would feel uncomfortable if someone with access to that AI then fed those insights into some other AI that I wasn't aware of for much more nefarious purposes, such as profiling me to try to quantify my loyalty to the government. That's just one example. Even if I had absolute faith in my government, bad actors could misuse that information to do other things, like determine which people would be most likely to take on debt on unfavorable terms (so they could be sent a 20% APR preapproved credit card, naturally!), or which people would be most likely to want to help a troubled Nigerian prince who just needs a place to temporarily park a bunch of money. I'm not trying to fearmonger and I'm actually very excited for the future of AI. I just don't think this piece is addressing the deeper fears people have about the technology.

TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
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 certainly not the sure fire insta-profit marketing panacea it's sometimes supposed to be. It has some uses, but you're reducing customers to stimulus/response robots with a limited behavioural repertoire, and that's an excellent way to miss a lot of opportunities.
- jononor 10y ago
  If you however do succeed in reducing humans to stimulus/response bots, it will likely be good business. Which is the scariest aspect, cause that drives lots of decisionmaking today...

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johnchristopher 10y ago

Right. Let's again substitute the meaning of a word or a concept for another one and start up another dictionary debate.

RIMR 10y ago
I think you're missing the point. The idea is that artificial intelligence will prevent us from having to understand a lot of things in order to accomplish them, but that effect is no different than any other technological innovation we have made. The definition of AI has also changed plenty in the past sixty-something years we've been developing it. A couple of good Wiki links on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellig... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

dredmorbius 10y ago

Brian Eno is a skilled musician. He's a lousy economic, systems, and AI theorist. The Edge is revealing itself far more to be a forum in which people of provenance hold forth on that which they've no particular qualifications or grounds to discuss (something which never happens elsewhere on the Internet, of course </s>). Complex, highly-interdependent systems exibit fragility, nonlinear transitions, and multiple optima, some not reachable, some local and highly persistent but undesirable. Tossing up ones hands and declaring that all shall be as God / Allah / The Great Spirit / FSM wills it abandons all sense of agency. The prospects of a global collapse of systems concerns a great many people, and for much the reason AI would: the mechanisms, logic, interactions, limits, and consequences aren't clear. See David Korowicz's "Trade-Off". http://www.feasta.org/2012/06/17/trade-off-financial-system-supply-chain-cross-contagion-a-study-in-global-systemic-collapse/ http://www.feasta.org/2012/06/17/trade-off-financial-system-... As for technological unemployment, that's been a consideration for over 200 years. You'll find strong treatments from J.S. Mill, and commentary from Abraham Lincoln. Some modern sources, referencing those: Technology in Society 1984, Vol.6(4):263–284, doi:10.1016/0160-791X(84)90022-8 "High technology and job loss", Russell W. Rumberger http://31.184.194.81/10.1016/0160-791X(84)90022-8 http://31.184.194.81/10.1016/0160-791X(84)90022-8 Robert Struble Jr, (1993) "Towards a Structural Solution to Unemployment", International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 20 Iss: 11, pp.15 - 26 http://31.184.194.81/http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/03068299310046063 http://31.184.194.81/http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/0306829931004...

bogomipz 10y ago
This is one of the most elitist comments I've read on HN. What are your special qualifications that allow you to say who is and who is not qualified to comment on a topical issue? I'm guessing by your comment stating that he is a skilled musician that you aren't actually familiar with Brian Eno at all. He's an unskilled musician, that's by his own admission. He's not technically proficient on any instrument. He's quite the technologist though.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Space alien cats don't need qualifications. Nor do they claim them. As others have noted, Eno's piece is a poor rewrite of I Pencil, itself a poorly reasoned propaganda piece. Crooked Timber has an excellent deconstruction of that: http://crookedtimber.org/2011/04/16/i-pencil-a-product-of-the-mixed-economy/ http://crookedtimber.org/2011/04/16/i-pencil-a-product-of-th... The one at Freakonomics is weaker sauce but also pretty biting: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/i-pencil/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/i-pencil/ I've pointed to several sources discussing technological unemployment, and more critically the long history of discussion of that topic from 1800 forward in mainstream and heterodox economic, as well as political and other literature. None of which Eno's careless handwave points at. If informed, sourced, intelligent, and specifically refutable comment is elitist, I'll take it. You've also focused on the irrelevant element of my argument, though if anything, you're also undercutting your own criticism of me. Eno's skill is evident in his body of work. Which I have listened to, own some of, and rather like. His self-description is at best inaccurate. Your assumptions as to my familiarity or otherwise with Eno's works place you on the rather precarious precipice of a domain in which I am and insist privileged expertise of obvious nature. Cheers.

campground 10y ago

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 intelligence. What we are talking about is a new, higher form of real intelligence.

nyolfen 10y ago
It's not difficult to conceptualize globalized capitalism in this way, and indeed some have -- Nick Land springs to mind.
- theoh 10y ago
  Yeah, but what does Nick Land actually know about the likely structure of AI software or interconnected control systems. Or even economics for that matter. He's a renegade philosopher, which conveniently requires no qualifications. "accelerationism" otoh is a clear and interesting concept.
amasad 10y ago
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/singularity.html https://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.ht...
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  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.

orblivion 10y ago

I would call that a natural intelligence.

dredmorbius 10y ago

For those interested in what people who actually know whereof they speak have to say on the topic of technological unemployment, and the history of economic discussion of the topic, a solid outline of discussions from Ricardo, Mill, McCollough, and Neisser, is included here: https://econospeak.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-technology-trap-permanent.html https://econospeak.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-technology-trap-...

ZenoArrow 10y ago
> "For those interested in what people who actually know whereof they speak have to say on the topic" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority I've no problem with learning from others, but pointing to a select handful of people who 'actually know whereof they speak' is not going to help explore the field fully.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Pointing to expertise is not argument from authority.
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    It depends. In this case, it was the framing that made it the argument from authority, namely "in what people who actually know whereof they speak". The implication is that the sources of truth are limited to a select few people.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      Argument from authority is "X is true because Y says it is". That's not what I claimed. This is tedious.

atemerev 10y ago

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 nothing about, I jump to Wikipedia in excitement. (I read Wikipedia a lot). I thought that being uncomfortable with own ignorance is a fundamental part of human nature. But apparently it isn't.

bryanph_ 10y ago
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.
- mastazi 10y ago
  > 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?
  - cwsx 10y ago
    Not at all, some might call that a 'hobby'.
  - steplee 10y ago
    There's no way you could actually do this. Going an hour on a normal day you'd have a life time of material to learn so I agree yes it is madness. You can't learn thousands of years of engineering, math, science, etc.

Rauchg 10y ago

For different versions of this argument see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect. Bostrom said: "A lot of cutting edge AI has filtered into general applications, often without being called AI because once something becomes useful enough and common enough it's not labelled AI anymore". Finally, the problem with all these articles is the lack of precise definition for the terminology involved (it reminds me of debates about "consciousness"). Recipe: make a slight twist on the interpretation of the already-vague definition of the term and a new essay emerges. In this case, the author is equating "AI" to "Abstraction". All the things he mentions he doesn't understand, he could understand by looking them up and talking to the experts, but he doesn't have to, because the appropriate simple interfaces are in place. That's intelligence in its general form, where's the artificial part?

JoBrad 10y ago
It's generally accepted that any intelligence that isn't from a living being is artificial. Global Civilization isn't living, per se.
- ccccc0 10y ago
  I'd argue that Global Civilization is nothing but living!
  - scrollaway 10y ago
    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 relationship with what is, in a way, a parasite.
    - Joof 10y ago
      Many larger systems are more than the sum of their parts. Enough that you could consider the grouping it's own entity. Ant hills are the canonical example because individual ants are recognizable as 'animals', but the function of an anthill clearly relies on a complex interaction between more simple ants. Just as we are made of tiny organisms, bigger systems could be considered to be made of us.

JumpCrisscross 10y ago

> 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. http://discovermagazine.com/2010/sep/25-modern-humans-smart-why-brain-shrinking http://discovermagazine.com/2010/sep/25-modern-humans-smart-...

SapphireSun 10y ago
A recent study came out showing birds are more intelligent than expected possibly because of neuron density. [1] I find it easier to believe, without evidence of course, that the brain became more compact rather than losing processing power. A neuroscientist on brain size and intelligence: https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/ask-neuroscientist-does-bigger-brain-make-you-smarter https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/ask-neuroscientist-do... [1] http://www.pnas.org/content/113/26/7255.full http://www.pnas.org/content/113/26/7255.full
seanalltogether 10y ago
Size may be smaller, but I wonder about the surface area through folds. That's where the strength of our intelligence lies.
peter303 10y ago
Plus there is gene of unknown function called DUF1220 which seems have something to do with brain size. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DUF1220 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DUF1220 There are more copies of it as brain size increases in mammals and apes. The Neanderthal genome has more of it than Sapiens.
tambourine_man 10y ago
I find that scary. A huge collection of specialists makes for a pretty fragile species.
- 10y ago

cobbzilla 10y ago

seems like an issue of semantics - he's taking something most of us would just call "human culture" and naming it "AI" - which is an interesting idea, but true artificial intelligence is something that involves some amount of self awareness of the system to itself.

RIMR 10y ago
To be further semantic, one could say you're referring to AI automata, not just AI.
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  It's interesting how we conflate self-awareness with true intelligence. It implies that something cannot be truly intelligent until the point it creates a personality for it to identify with. I'd argue that a better indication of intelligence is self-directed learning, even if the seed of that desire to learn is programmed in from an outside source. I don't think its necessary for an AI to need to form a narrative of self.

dd36 10y ago

This is similar to Kevin Kelly's technium theory: http://kk.org/thetechnium/ http://kk.org/thetechnium/ Technological innovation is an extension of evolution. Whether that's the invention of the alphabet or a computer, we are a part of this system continuing evolution.

peter303 10y ago

Some concepts have an implied prefix "digital computer-aided" to distinguish from related concepts. We all know we are intensely interested in the computer version. Another example is "virtual reality" which existed since cavemen made up campfire stories and drew wall pictures.

benkarst 10y ago

Thoughtful article. Eno refers to hidden processes in systems as AI hinting at their similarity. I am assuming there are already digital systems in place that monitor "hidden" processes that make a chicken sandwich for example (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URvWSsAgtJE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URvWSsAgtJE). Such systems could monitor data points and possibly forecast the price (or a great many things) of a chicken sandwich.

bogomipz 10y ago

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-created-a-quiet-revolution-in-music/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/artists/how-brian-eno-creat...

fuzzfactor 10y ago
Also the author of The Microsoft Sound WAV that played upon Windows startup in 1995. At the time probably the tune played most often per day for a number of years.

ebbv 10y ago

This is a cute but ultimately wrong argument. It's like saying we live with a black hole because there's one in the center of our galaxy. Yes you could stretch the term of AI to say that a large system made up of people and simple machines is some form of AI, but that's stretching it to the point of becoming meaningless. When people talk about real Artificial Intelligence they usually mean general AI, or at least a specific AI that is capable of human-like decision making. Not Computer Chess and not an auto-stop in a filling pump. Stretching AI to the point of ludicrousness like this seems to serve only the purpose of trying to shut down discussion around human-like AI. Which is not a noble goal. Discussing human-like AI is important, especially before we figure it out. It would have been nice if people in the early 1900s had spent time thinking about the consequences of putting so much carbon into the atmosphere before they did it. Let's not be another generation of people who could have had a lot more forethought than they did.

pajop 10y ago

Tim Urban points out in his AI article that it might be dangerous to expect that the AI that we know now would still be the same AI we will have in the very near future http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu... "So as AI zooms upward in intelligence toward us, we’ll see it as simply becoming smarter, for an animal. Then, when it hits the lowest capacity of humanity—Nick Bostrom uses the term “the village idiot”—we’ll be like, “Oh wow, it’s like a dumb human. Cute!” The only thing is, in the grand spectrum of intelligence, all humans, from the village idiot to Einstein, are within a very small range—so just after hitting village idiot level and being declared to be AGI, it’ll suddenly be smarter than Einstein and we won’t know what hit us:" Compare the images: http://28oa9i1t08037ue3m1l0i861.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Intelligence-600x472.jpg http://28oa9i1t08037ue3m1l0i861.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-c... http://28oa9i1t08037ue3m1l0i861.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Intelligence2-1024x836.png http://28oa9i1t08037ue3m1l0i861.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-c...

scotty79 10y ago
I'm not afraid of AI because intelligence has diminishing returns. 1000 times smarter entity might be only 2 or 3 times better at predicting the future than human is. So 1000 times smarter superhuman AI maybe could tell weather two weeks ahead instead of one. And the physical world is inherently like weather, chaotic in mathematical sense. Our upper hand against even very dumb animals doesn't come from our intelligence. It comes from thousands of years of infrastructure that we built to amplify ourselves. AI would have to build its own, which we won't let it (at least initially) or steal ours in which having ability to see just a bit farther in the future doesn't help that much with. It won't get much ahead of us with science because science is limited by technology. 1000 times smarter physicist won't figure out new universe laws without getting his hands on data from new accelerator, larger than any other built before. That's some reasons why I think run-away AI won't be dangerous to us unless we let it build or take over our physical world which won't happen given our current caution towards subject.
- Houshalter 10y ago

esalman 10y ago

True AI would learn and teach itself new stuff. Something a central heating, burner, car or wifi cannot do.

grondilu 10y ago

To me that's a stretch. AI is not a carpet under which you put everything you don't know about how the World works.

nthcolumn 10y ago

That AI is not separate from humanity. He accepts that we ask, we get. It serves us. People are worried about the non-we. Global civilisation cannot destroy humanity without destroying itself - unless it creates another human-autonomous AI. The non-we AI.