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@jstewartmobile wrote: "Augmenting human intelligence, while leaving the hearts as they are, is a loss, not a gain." That is a brilliant insight that more inte

@jstewartmobile wrote: "Augmenting human intelligence, while leaving the hearts as they are, is a loss, not a gain." That is a brilliant insight that more intelligence may be a bad thing if your heart is in the wrong place. Sorry to see your comment being downmodded and greyed out. At the risk of the same happening to me, here is support for your point on "heart". Albert Einstein said in the 1940s: "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker." More by Einstein: http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm "But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly." And Lewis Mumford said in the 1930s: "As a civilization, we have not yet entered the neotechnic phase: we are still living between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, in a cultural pseudomorph.... Paleotechnic purposes with neotechnic means, that is the most obvious characteristic of the present order." (Technics and Civilization pp. 265-267) Thus my own sig standing on the shoulders of giants: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity." I participated in Doug Engelbart's Unfinished Revolution II Colloquium run by Stanford. I brought up some similar ideas there as well. Like in this email thread I started: "[unrev-II] Is 'bootstrapping' part of the problem?" http://www.dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/2168.html http://www.dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/216... "This is one reason why I think just stating the Bootstrap's Institute's (or the colloquium's) goal of "bootstrapping" human or organizational ability as a goal is not adequate. It has to be a question of bootstrapping towards what end? There has to be an accompanying statement of human value." I've continued to develop that theme elsewhere, like: "Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism (2010)" http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-tran... "The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream." The dangers of increasing intellect unmatched by increasing heart was also a underlying theme in my book-length essay "Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease (2008)" http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html A lengthy extract from there: """ Let's flip back to the beginning of PAW and try again to find a more challenging article that explains PU mythology. Perhaps the president's letter on page 2, "A Library for Scientists" will do. PU President Shirley Tilghman describes a new library that will replace several "isolated" departmental science libraries with one "scientific" library. According to her letter, the new library "will symbolize the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of the work in these fields on our campus". The question is, where do you even begin to tell a university president so obviously proud of her new library that making science and engineering studies even more isolated from the humanities is the opposite of what Princeton University needs to do to survive as an ethically viable institution? And that splitting ethics from innovation was at the root cause of a lot of evil in the world in the past? There is a lot of talk of facilitating "interdisciplinary" work in her letter, but if you read between the lines, you'll see that the implication is it will be between different branches of science and engineering, not say, between biologists and sociologists, or mechanical engineers and historians. In case Professor Tilghman has not noticed, there is a picture on page 21 of that same issue of PAW of a shark about to eat a Princetonian floating in DeNunzio Pool [...] Maybe she had better look into that? It can't be good PR under any circumstances, can it? I had not known PU's scientists had got that far in their shark breeding experiments as they are sometimes hard to keep in captivity (real scientists, not sharks. OK, that's just a joke, both are hard to keep in captivity. :-) [...] Still, are those PU scientists and engineers doing a good thing? Wouldn't it make it harder to recruit prospective talent for the PU swim team? Or are the sharks in DeNunzio part of some new training regime? Unless that is supposed to be a visiting Yalie about to get eaten? That seems a little harsh, even by intercollegiate competitive standards. :-( Still, maybe rather that "make the world a better place through advances in scientific understanding", perhaps when you make an anti-social shark "smarter" (with or without the laser beam :-), what do you have except a bigger problem? :-( For example from a review of "Deep Blue Sea": "So, in an effort to save their funding, they want to take one really good go at making this...serum? I don't remember, brain activating protein...stuff. So, they conduct their test on the shark. And it WORKS! Yay! Congratulations all around! These guys f--ing rule! And it's all parties and cupcakes until someone's arm gets eaten." Also [from another review]: "Some scientists are out in the middle of the ocean, trying to reproduce proteins in shark's brains. These proteins are the cure for Alzheimer's, and one character even gives a half-assed speech about how she's driven by memories of her father's mental illness. Well, to harvest more protein, that scientist makes the shark's brains four times bigger than normal and now the shark's are super-smart and eat all the scientists. Hooray." I'm sorry to say that the internet consensus on PU's smarter sharks is that they are not a good idea. :-( Or maybe "Deep Blue Sea" was just a poorly made horror film. :-) """ To be clear, I feel Doug's heart was in the right place -- even if he maybe took that for granted in others.

jstewartmobile 8y ago
This is why I post comments on hackernews. Love it! I'm going to have to read all of the posts on your website now. Thank you pdfernhout. I am absolutely certain Doug was a fantastic human being, and completely agree that is probably why he didn't get an acute sense that most of our work--as fun as it is--often ends up like the passing of handguns to toddlers.
BuuQu9hu 8y ago
I disagree with nearly all of this post and its parent. It has much conflation of ideas, but I will argue that this is the thrust: "When bad actors are made more capable they are made more destructive, therefore, no one should be made more capable." This idea represents stagnation and fear of one's fellow man. We prevent ourselves from improving our understanding because we worry someone will use it against us. Today's society as an example, this is almost an inevitability! The comments above focus exclusively on the potential negatives. This is not a useful way of conceptualizing the problem. Albert Einstein said in the 1940s: "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker." The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. These are examples of intellectual augmentation by collaboration of scientists and engineers. However, the resulting destructive technology is made available by the concentration of material resources and therefore is wielded by a select few in powerful positions. Note that the former cannot easily create such technologies without the latter. Note that the former are nearly always NOT the ones operating the technology! PU President Shirley Tilghman describes a new library that will replace several "isolated" departmental science libraries with one "scientific" library. Well, to harvest more protein, that scientist makes the shark's brains four times bigger than normal and now the shark's are super-smart and eat all the scientists. These are simply good intentions and unintended consequences. In the example of shark scientists, augmenting their intelligence by collaboration result in them getting eaten. However, in both examples, a sufficiently augmented intellect could have recognized and avoided the unintended consequences altogether. . Critically: do not conflate the consequences of acting on knowledge, with intellect or the augmentation thereof. The material results CAN be negative. The phenomenon of intellectual augmentation itself is only of positive consequence: problems CAN be solved more effectively. Problems can be solved poorly and have unintended consequences but this is unrelated. The wrong problems can be solved and this is also unrelated. The problems solved can be for the sole purpose of killing and this is also unrelated. The sentiment is that intellectual augmentation should be discouraged in general because The Few that have the resources to produce destructive results will be made that much more dangerous, by intent or by mistake. This is FEAR, not certainty. The far more dire consequence is that your fellowman, who wishes to collaborate and solve all sorts problems for the greater good and otherwise, is DENIED the tools to facilitate his problem solving. And subsequently, humanity is DENIED all the good that could arise from such a scenario. I don't intend to deny those who are pessimistic about the overall effect of augmentation tools in the hands of present-day humanity, nor am I an optimist on the subject. But to state confidently about net loss or gain to humanity from such tools is FOLLY. I would say: make intellectual augmentation tools and have them available to everyone. Not because bad things won't happen, but because good things WILL happen. This is where the heart lies and where it GROWS. And don't we agree it's this that is lacking?

jstewartmobile 8y ago

This is why I post comments on hackernews. Love it! I'm going to have to read all of the posts on your website now. Thank you pdfernhout. I am absolutely certain Doug was a fantastic human being, and completely agree that is probably why he didn't get an acute sense that most of our work--as fun as it is--often ends up like the passing of handguns to toddlers.

BuuQu9hu 8y ago

I disagree with nearly all of this post and its parent. It has much conflation of ideas, but I will argue that this is the thrust: "When bad actors are made more capable they are made more destructive, therefore, no one should be made more capable." This idea represents stagnation and fear of one's fellow man. We prevent ourselves from improving our understanding because we worry someone will use it against us. Today's society as an example, this is almost an inevitability! The comments above focus exclusively on the potential negatives. This is not a useful way of conceptualizing the problem. Albert Einstein said in the 1940s: "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker." The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. These are examples of intellectual augmentation by collaboration of scientists and engineers. However, the resulting destructive technology is made available by the concentration of material resources and therefore is wielded by a select few in powerful positions. Note that the former cannot easily create such technologies without the latter. Note that the former are nearly always NOT the ones operating the technology! PU President Shirley Tilghman describes a new library that will replace several "isolated" departmental science libraries with one "scientific" library. Well, to harvest more protein, that scientist makes the shark's brains four times bigger than normal and now the shark's are super-smart and eat all the scientists. These are simply good intentions and unintended consequences. In the example of shark scientists, augmenting their intelligence by collaboration result in them getting eaten. However, in both examples, a sufficiently augmented intellect could have recognized and avoided the unintended consequences altogether. . Critically: do not conflate the consequences of acting on knowledge, with intellect or the augmentation thereof. The material results CAN be negative. The phenomenon of intellectual augmentation itself is only of positive consequence: problems CAN be solved more effectively. Problems can be solved poorly and have unintended consequences but this is unrelated. The wrong problems can be solved and this is also unrelated. The problems solved can be for the sole purpose of killing and this is also unrelated. The sentiment is that intellectual augmentation should be discouraged in general because The Few that have the resources to produce destructive results will be made that much more dangerous, by intent or by mistake. This is FEAR, not certainty. The far more dire consequence is that your fellowman, who wishes to collaborate and solve all sorts problems for the greater good and otherwise, is DENIED the tools to facilitate his problem solving. And subsequently, humanity is DENIED all the good that could arise from such a scenario. I don't intend to deny those who are pessimistic about the overall effect of augmentation tools in the hands of present-day humanity, nor am I an optimist on the subject. But to state confidently about net loss or gain to humanity from such tools is FOLLY. I would say: make intellectual augmentation tools and have them available to everyone. Not because bad things won't happen, but because good things WILL happen. This is where the heart lies and where it GROWS. And don't we agree it's this that is lacking?