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One of the most annoying things about Bostrom, Tegmark and other amateur sci-fi authors is that they have chosen parables as their medium. Bostrom likes his spa

by vonnik 9y ago

One of the most annoying things about Bostrom, Tegmark and other amateur sci-fi authors is that they have chosen parables as their medium. Bostrom likes his sparrows and owls[0], Tegmark likes thinly veiled references to DeepMind with Team Omega.[1] Parables are for children and religious flocks. They are also irrefutable. Which makes them a perfect tool for Bostrom/Tegmark, but an inappropriate interjection into more mature conversations about the state and possible futures of AI. In a sense, they are propaganda, meant to generate feelings of animosity much like an ugly picture of the vicious Hun. The central, gaping hole in their fear-mongering, as Maciej has pointed out, is that they do not define or quantify intelligence, but they're very free with language when they talk about AI surpassing human intelligence. That is, their projections imply a measurement which they are incapable of making. I do like the idea that Omega decided to launch a media company, though. Let's call it Interlace. Maybe the only thing David Foster Wallace was missing was a rogue AI capable of creating addictions. This is, in a sense, the same plot as Ex Machina: a machine that knows how to seduce us. [0] https://blog.oup.com/2014/08/unfinished-fable-sparrows-superintelligence/ https://blog.oup.com/2014/08/unfinished-fable-sparrows-super... [1] https://deepmind.com/applied/deepmind-ethics-society/ https://deepmind.com/applied/deepmind-ethics-society/

edanm 9y ago
Parables are one of the best ways to get a message across to a lot of people. It's a message worth spreading. If you want more "technical" thoughts on the project, there are those things too, but most people would never have been exposed to them without the less-technical people making noise. "The central, gaping hole in their fear-mongering, as Maciej has pointed out, is that they do not define or quantify intelligence, but they're very free with language when they talk about AI surpassing human intelligence." IMO, this is less of a problem than most people assume. It's usually defined in broad terms as "ability to achieve goals", and that's enough for almost all practical purposes. To insist on a stricter definition is simply unnecessary for their arguments. Just because we don't understand something, doesn't mean we can't use it or reason about it.
- vonnik 9y ago
  Parables are a good way to get a message across to lots of people if you're God, or pretending to speak for God. They are a religious form of communication that relies on analogous thinking and appeals to authority, the wisdom of the speaker. But Bostrom and Tegmark don't know any more about the future than you or me, and I could write a parable about sparrows and Omegas that spins a different narrative. It would be just as powerful, and mean just as little. Bostrom and Tegmark have chosen to promote fear. They have chosen to disseminate a powerful feeling in a discussion that would benefit from facts. That is, like fake news and Donald Trump, they opted for asymmetric appeals to emotion, which should be an indication to all of us that a) they don't know what's really going on with AI and b) they don't care. They just want us to operate on fear.

by vonnik 9y ago

edanm 9y ago

Parables are one of the best ways to get a message across to a lot of people. It's a message worth spreading. If you want more "technical" thoughts on the project, there are those things too, but most people would never have been exposed to them without the less-technical people making noise. "The central, gaping hole in their fear-mongering, as Maciej has pointed out, is that they do not define or quantify intelligence, but they're very free with language when they talk about AI surpassing human intelligence." IMO, this is less of a problem than most people assume. It's usually defined in broad terms as "ability to achieve goals", and that's enough for almost all practical purposes. To insist on a stricter definition is simply unnecessary for their arguments. Just because we don't understand something, doesn't mean we can't use it or reason about it.

vonnik 9y ago
Parables are a good way to get a message across to lots of people if you're God, or pretending to speak for God. They are a religious form of communication that relies on analogous thinking and appeals to authority, the wisdom of the speaker. But Bostrom and Tegmark don't know any more about the future than you or me, and I could write a parable about sparrows and Omegas that spins a different narrative. It would be just as powerful, and mean just as little. Bostrom and Tegmark have chosen to promote fear. They have chosen to disseminate a powerful feeling in a discussion that would benefit from facts. That is, like fake news and Donald Trump, they opted for asymmetric appeals to emotion, which should be an indication to all of us that a) they don't know what's really going on with AI and b) they don't care. They just want us to operate on fear.