11 ms·

Prediction or self-fulfilling prophecy? Sounds like he's determined to force it to happen whether or not the average person wants it. I was disturbed by the no

by bpyne 10y ago

Prediction or self-fulfilling prophecy? Sounds like he's determined to force it to happen whether or not the average person wants it. I was disturbed by the notion of an RFID in my dog. I am even more disturbed by having one in my daughter. Having a brain implant so billionaires can maximize my profitability (for their own gain) - take a hike! I'll go back to hunting and growing before participating in that economy. I wish we'd spend more time trying to get software to work right rather than creating cyborgs. The idea of having a "blue screen of death" happen in my head is terrifying.

solipsism 10y ago
And you'll die one day. No one is talking about the merging of bpyne and machine, no one cares about that. We're talking about the human race as a whole.
- bpyne 10y ago
  Actually, EM was very much talking about the merging of individuals with machines. I can't take the following quote in any other way. "Some high bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem," Musk explained. I find it terrifying that people are out there who are so myopically focused on merging machines and people. The major issues facing humanity aren't going to be solved by quicker analysis of data as EM seems to desire. I'm not saying they won't be helped by data analysis. I am saying that quicker analysis of terabytes more data isn't going to do it.
  - devopsproject 10y ago
    > The major issues facing humanity aren't going to be solved by quicker analysis of data as EM seems to desire You can already see the results of a society where data comes in too quick for the "average" citizen to process. Fake news, hoaxes, Trump, climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers, etc. This technology cannot come soon enough.
    - bpyne 10y ago
      "Fake news, hoaxes, ..., etc." These issues are all symptomatic of people who FEEL increasingly left behind by society. While a small percentage of the population you allude to are probably not capable of separating truth from fiction, far more are fearful of a society shifting any further from what they grew up with. Specific to the US elections, they looked for someone like President Trump to act as a patriarchal figure who would tell them "everything is going to be okay". They WANTED and continue to want the message that they won't be left behind. Moving yet further into a society of "machine-people" is not going to allay fears at all. To the contrary, it will push them further in the opposite direction. Missing from the discussion of AI's integration into society is that people want to feel socially useful, part of the pack if you will. It gives them a connection to their society: the feeling that they have a place in it. Taking away their jobs and leaving them without this connection, I fear the consequences of that backlash. Sorry to stray slightly from the topic, but these thoughts have been ruminating in my head for the past couple of years. While I think AI applied to specific problems will lead to advances in medicine, for example, that will be of great social benefit, I think we need to treat its use in society with kid gloves.
      - devopsproject 10y ago
        My problem is that this has all happened before and we have survived. The printing press alienated non-readers, advances in agriculture killed farming jobs, etc. Its Darwinism, no?
        tnzn 10y ago
        No, it's not Darwinism. Social Darwinism has nothing to do with Darwinism except for its name. Jesus when I see how you dare look down on people who lack basic needs and discard their opinion, yet in another comment state such bullshit as that, I can't help but look down on your, and I feel sort of bad for it. Help yourself, educate yourself on what Darwinism.
        devopsproject 10y ago
  - solipsism 10y ago
    You missed my point. I realize we're talking about merging the individual with the technological. My point was that you reference your preferences about seeing your daughter chipped. Your preferences are 100% irrelevant because they're based on today's norms.
    - bpyne 10y ago
      Individual preferences are at the heart of the matter: machinery inside the human body is creepy. But, I concede wholeheartedly that benefit exists. For example, using robotics to replace a severely damaged limb. It shouldn't be hard to think up more examples. Directly integrating with the human brain is another matter. I can see some possibility of a chip helping people with dementia or stimulating nerves to get paralyzed limbs working again. EM sounds like he wants it to go far past that. Aside from the medical experiments gone wrong in order to learn enough to make integration possible, there are the real possibilities of a computer overriding a human's own thoughts or a bug causing great neural damage. And for what gain? We need to accept, as technologists, that the human race's biggest problems are not going to be solved by technology. Education, cultural exchanges, politics, and time will ultimately bring us to a better point than today. We can assist by providing better tools, but we aren't going to be the heroes coming through with the miracle fix at the eleventh hour.
      - solipsism 10y ago
        We need to accept, as technologists, that the human race's biggest problems are not going to be solved by technology. we aren't going to be the heroes coming through with the miracle fix at the eleventh hour. I really don't know what you're talking about. Technology will continue to progress. Except for temporary pauses, technology has always advanced and always will. If you don't adopt it it doesn't matter. Your children will. I don't know what this stuff about "we aren't going to be the heroes". Who said anything about that? I think you need to read Musk's words again. He isn't saying, "We have to do this because it's good." He's saying, "We'll be forced to do this to keep up." And he's right. If you don't you'll be left in the dust, relatively poor and powerless while alive, and soon dead and irrelevant. It's not about right or wrong and there are no heroes.
marknutter 10y ago
The problem that a lot of people refuse to acknowledge or simply haven't thought of is that a very large portion of the world's population is being left out of the debate about whether or not we should even be moving down these techno-futuristic paths. It's just sort of happening based on the desire of a few million nerds. It's not as though people are universally happy about the technological advancements over the past 20 years. Even people within the tech community debate over the woes of information overload, device overuse, increasing reliance on inherently insecure systems, etc, and even then those are debates about what has already come to pass. Questions that are being answered without the feedback of the world at large: Should we create artificial intelligences and allow them to become integral parts of our most critical systems? Should we become increasingly reliant on the Internet, to the point at which ones survival is predicated upon their access to it? Should we create robots in our image to perform the duties humans used to perform and what should the limit to the abilities and sophistication we imbue them be? Should we be mapping the human genome and creating technologies that alter, categorize, and predetermine our genetic makeup? Should we be dedicating significant resources to inhabiting other planets instead of focusing on maintaining the habitability of our own planet? Should we be trying to eradicate all disease and are we aware of the ecological and evolutionary consequences of doing so? Science is great at helping us figure out how to do these things, but it's useless for figuring out whether or not they should be done. Unfortunately, the virtue of science is so over-emphasized in postmodern western culture (especially in universities) that our ability to wrestle with the ethics of our technological advancements has become severely diminished. The institutions that used to provide a significant counterweight to scientific thought are being squeezed out of a world that is becoming increasingly reliant on the systems that scientific endeavors have helped to establish. The wealth, influence, and power in the world is shifting rapidly from religious institutions to scientific ones. The assumption is that this shift is universally good – a move from ignorance to enlightenment – and in a lot of ways this is true. Nobody can deny the benefits the enlightenment has brought to the world. But we're simply trading one set of problems for another. We better able to understand what the physical world is and to be able to bend it to our will, but we are less able to understand the metaphysical world and properly define the way in which we ought to live. We're swinging too far in the other direction when we should be trying to figure out the correct balance between the two.

by bpyne 10y ago

solipsism 10y ago

And you'll die one day. No one is talking about the merging of bpyne and machine, no one cares about that. We're talking about the human race as a whole.

bpyne 10y ago
Actually, EM was very much talking about the merging of individuals with machines. I can't take the following quote in any other way. "Some high bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem," Musk explained. I find it terrifying that people are out there who are so myopically focused on merging machines and people. The major issues facing humanity aren't going to be solved by quicker analysis of data as EM seems to desire. I'm not saying they won't be helped by data analysis. I am saying that quicker analysis of terabytes more data isn't going to do it.
- devopsproject 10y ago
  > The major issues facing humanity aren't going to be solved by quicker analysis of data as EM seems to desire You can already see the results of a society where data comes in too quick for the "average" citizen to process. Fake news, hoaxes, Trump, climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers, etc. This technology cannot come soon enough.
  - bpyne 10y ago
    "Fake news, hoaxes, ..., etc." These issues are all symptomatic of people who FEEL increasingly left behind by society. While a small percentage of the population you allude to are probably not capable of separating truth from fiction, far more are fearful of a society shifting any further from what they grew up with. Specific to the US elections, they looked for someone like President Trump to act as a patriarchal figure who would tell them "everything is going to be okay". They WANTED and continue to want the message that they won't be left behind. Moving yet further into a society of "machine-people" is not going to allay fears at all. To the contrary, it will push them further in the opposite direction. Missing from the discussion of AI's integration into society is that people want to feel socially useful, part of the pack if you will. It gives them a connection to their society: the feeling that they have a place in it. Taking away their jobs and leaving them without this connection, I fear the consequences of that backlash. Sorry to stray slightly from the topic, but these thoughts have been ruminating in my head for the past couple of years. While I think AI applied to specific problems will lead to advances in medicine, for example, that will be of great social benefit, I think we need to treat its use in society with kid gloves.
    - devopsproject 10y ago
      My problem is that this has all happened before and we have survived. The printing press alienated non-readers, advances in agriculture killed farming jobs, etc. Its Darwinism, no?
      - tnzn 10y ago
        No, it's not Darwinism. Social Darwinism has nothing to do with Darwinism except for its name. Jesus when I see how you dare look down on people who lack basic needs and discard their opinion, yet in another comment state such bullshit as that, I can't help but look down on your, and I feel sort of bad for it. Help yourself, educate yourself on what Darwinism.
        devopsproject 10y ago
- solipsism 10y ago
  You missed my point. I realize we're talking about merging the individual with the technological. My point was that you reference your preferences about seeing your daughter chipped. Your preferences are 100% irrelevant because they're based on today's norms.
  - bpyne 10y ago
    Individual preferences are at the heart of the matter: machinery inside the human body is creepy. But, I concede wholeheartedly that benefit exists. For example, using robotics to replace a severely damaged limb. It shouldn't be hard to think up more examples. Directly integrating with the human brain is another matter. I can see some possibility of a chip helping people with dementia or stimulating nerves to get paralyzed limbs working again. EM sounds like he wants it to go far past that. Aside from the medical experiments gone wrong in order to learn enough to make integration possible, there are the real possibilities of a computer overriding a human's own thoughts or a bug causing great neural damage. And for what gain? We need to accept, as technologists, that the human race's biggest problems are not going to be solved by technology. Education, cultural exchanges, politics, and time will ultimately bring us to a better point than today. We can assist by providing better tools, but we aren't going to be the heroes coming through with the miracle fix at the eleventh hour.
    - solipsism 10y ago
      We need to accept, as technologists, that the human race's biggest problems are not going to be solved by technology. we aren't going to be the heroes coming through with the miracle fix at the eleventh hour. I really don't know what you're talking about. Technology will continue to progress. Except for temporary pauses, technology has always advanced and always will. If you don't adopt it it doesn't matter. Your children will. I don't know what this stuff about "we aren't going to be the heroes". Who said anything about that? I think you need to read Musk's words again. He isn't saying, "We have to do this because it's good." He's saying, "We'll be forced to do this to keep up." And he's right. If you don't you'll be left in the dust, relatively poor and powerless while alive, and soon dead and irrelevant. It's not about right or wrong and there are no heroes.

marknutter 10y ago

The problem that a lot of people refuse to acknowledge or simply haven't thought of is that a very large portion of the world's population is being left out of the debate about whether or not we should even be moving down these techno-futuristic paths. It's just sort of happening based on the desire of a few million nerds. It's not as though people are universally happy about the technological advancements over the past 20 years. Even people within the tech community debate over the woes of information overload, device overuse, increasing reliance on inherently insecure systems, etc, and even then those are debates about what has already come to pass. Questions that are being answered without the feedback of the world at large: Should we create artificial intelligences and allow them to become integral parts of our most critical systems? Should we become increasingly reliant on the Internet, to the point at which ones survival is predicated upon their access to it? Should we create robots in our image to perform the duties humans used to perform and what should the limit to the abilities and sophistication we imbue them be? Should we be mapping the human genome and creating technologies that alter, categorize, and predetermine our genetic makeup? Should we be dedicating significant resources to inhabiting other planets instead of focusing on maintaining the habitability of our own planet? Should we be trying to eradicate all disease and are we aware of the ecological and evolutionary consequences of doing so? Science is great at helping us figure out how to do these things, but it's useless for figuring out whether or not they should be done. Unfortunately, the virtue of science is so over-emphasized in postmodern western culture (especially in universities) that our ability to wrestle with the ethics of our technological advancements has become severely diminished. The institutions that used to provide a significant counterweight to scientific thought are being squeezed out of a world that is becoming increasingly reliant on the systems that scientific endeavors have helped to establish. The wealth, influence, and power in the world is shifting rapidly from religious institutions to scientific ones. The assumption is that this shift is universally good – a move from ignorance to enlightenment – and in a lot of ways this is true. Nobody can deny the benefits the enlightenment has brought to the world. But we're simply trading one set of problems for another. We better able to understand what the physical world is and to be able to bend it to our will, but we are less able to understand the metaphysical world and properly define the way in which we ought to live. We're swinging too far in the other direction when we should be trying to figure out the correct balance between the two.