IEET

Thus, ironically, the problem for both the right and the left is the same one- that governments today are too weak. The right needs an at least temporarily strong government to effect the dismantling of the state, whereas the left needs a strong government not merely to respond to the grinding conditions of the economic “recovery”, but to overturn previous policies, put in new protections and find some alternative to the current political and economic order. Dark enlightenment types and progressives are confronting the same frustration while having diametrically opposed goals. It is not so much that Washington is too powerful as it is that the power it has is embedded in a system, which, as Mark Leibovich portrays brilliantly, is feckless and corrupt. https://ieet.org/index.php/IEET2/more/searle20131202

> To me it sounds like yet another attempt by materialism to get to grips with a non materialist view. I actually commend that. Opening up to the idea that physical reality is something far stranger than we've imagined is a great way to open oneself to the possibility that "physical reality" isn't at all the sort of thing we've long imagined it to be. Same with the simulation hypothesis. There was this article recently: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/Edge20161030 And it contained this gem, which may actually get the right wheels turning in some minds: "If the universe is a computer simulation then we should look at the player, not the level."

This is another facet of the "amplified-teams" trend that's been happening over the past few years. This book review of 'Average is over' has some good information about it: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/searle20150109 "In his vision intelligent machines will revolutionize everything from medicine to education to business management and negotiation to love. The human beings who will best thrive in this new environment will be those whose work best complements that of intelligent machines, and this will be the case all the way from the factory floor to the classroom." Very interesting times ahead.

Excellent podcast on the ethics of automated systems deployed by military, LEOs, etc. featuring Noel Sharkey: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/print/6600 From the teaser: "Noel Sharkey is Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, and Professor of Public Engagement at the University of Sheffield. He holds a Doctorate in Experimental Psychology and a Doctorate of Science, and lectures extensively across academic disciplines, including engineering, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, artificial intelligence and computer science. In addition to having published well over a hundred academic articles and books, Sharkey has worked closely with policy makers and the military to create awareness about the limitations of AI and the dangers of automated warfare."

Those that can 'defer to the machine' are going to do better in many jobs (that will remain) in the future. This is a big part of Cowen's "Average is Over." Here's a good review of it which goes into that aspect of it: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/searle20150109 Excerpt: 'The moral Cowen draws from freestyle chess is that the winners of these games, and he extrapolates, the economic “games” of the future, are those human beings who are most willing to defer to the decisions of the machine. I find this conclusion more than a little chilling given we’re talk about real people here rather than Knight or Pawns, but Cowen seems to think it’s just common sense. In its simplest form Cowen’s argument boils down to the prediction that an increasing amount of human work in the future will come in the form of these AI-human teams. Some of this, he admits, will amount to no workers at all with the human part of the “team” reduced to an unpaid customer. I now almost always scan and bag my own goods at the grocery store, just as I can’t remember the last time I actually spoke to a bank teller who wasn’t my mom. Cowen also admits that the rise of AI might mean the world actually gets “dumber” our interactions with our environment simplified to foster smooth integration with machines and compressed to meet their limits. In his vision intelligent machines will revolutionize everything from medicine to education to business management and negotiation to love. The human beings who…

Honestly its things like this which remind me of the "telemarketer singularity." https://ieet.org/index.php/IEET2/more/rinesi20150806 "The future isn’t a robot boot stamping on a human face forever. It’s a world where everything you see has a little telemarketer inside them, one that knows everything about you and never, ever, stops selling things to you." Template conversations intended to convince the mark they are heard and understood. Scripts designed to simulate a real human interaction and conversation. Sure this is int he context of "support" rather than "telemarketing" but the feel is the same. Substitute real human interaction with scripted simulated interaction, designed and optimized to evoke the desired emotional reaction to the target.

> Peter Thiel See also: his dark revolution aka "The Dark Enlightenment". Examples: https://ieet.org/index.php/IEET2/more/Searle20160815

oh there's all sorts of things you can call people http://ieet.org/index.php/tpwiki/bioconservative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techno-progressivism

The Basic Income doesn't address the systemic issues which we usually lump under the category of "inflation," although by that what we're really talking about is power and privilege. http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/miller20120327

seems like there's a lot we are just discovery, and there's more room to learn from what we don't know reminds me this: " Google's chief engineer, Ray Kurzweil, recently told MIT Technology Review that he envisions a cybernetic friend* based on deep learning that listens in on your phone conversation, reads your emails and tracks your every move so that it can tell you things you want to know even before you ask." site: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/pelletier201412281 *I'd like an Einstein like cybernetic friend

The comments section of the main article (http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/treder20120318) mentions people trying to do that.

A lot of people can be very creative and able to execute projects, but still not have what it takes to run a startup. Consider all the regular Joes and Janes being highly creative and structured in leading World of Warcraft guilds, for instance. What is needed is some kind of gamified meta-startup, a giant sandbox for economic activity to take place with the low-level stuff of startups abstracted away. The day MMORPGs start to have real economic effects (outside of currency exchange) is the day the economic system will be radically transformed. For the record, I didn't think of this myself. Credit goes to John Robb: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/robb20100318

Seems like a logical conclusion is that the homophobe is worried that a homosexual will want to sleep with them and that the homophobe will find that situation irresistible. See also: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/2246 On that note, one should be able to easily Google up studies that have shown correlation between homophobia and being aroused by gay porn...

This is in a similar vein to an earlier essay by the same author: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/print/2181/ In the aforelinked one, he skeptically critiques the idea of evolution into hominids from the perspective of a primate. It's an enjoyable read, if not exactly the soundest case for a Kurzweilian singularity.

I think the point is that they're all training for years and doing so with insane dedication. In that situation it is largely a question of genetics. There are plenty of swimmers who put in 15 years of intense effort under world-class coaches, but still couldn't even come close to beating a less experienced guy with a 6'7" wingspan, size 14 feet, huge hands, short legs, and muscles that produce 50% less lactic acid than the normal human. http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/dvorsky20080818/

Jamais Cascio has termed it 'Aspirational Apocophilia': http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/cascio20090103

I am reminded of James Hughes, a transhumanist but also a proper sociologist, who wrote about the change in transhumanism from democratic left-leaning people, whose vision of technology was for the good of all, to libertarians (and thence singularitarians and neoreactionaries): http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/hughes20130501 > In 2009 the libertarians and Singularitarians launched a campaign to take over the World Transhumanist Association Board of Directors, pushing out the Left in favor of allies like Milton Friedman’s grandson and Seasteader leader Patri Friedman. Since then the libertarians and Singularitarians, backed by Thiel’s philanthropy, have secured extensive hegemony in the transhumanist community. As the global capitalist system spiraled into the crisis in which it remains, partly created by the speculation of hedge fund managers like Thiel, the left-leaning majority of transhumanists around the world have increasingly seen the contradiction between the millennialist escapism of the Singularitarians and practical concerns of ensuring that technological innovation is safe and its benefits universally enjoyed. While the alliance of Left and libertarian transhumanists held together until 2008 in the belief that the new biopolitical alignments were as important as the older alignments around political economy, the global economic crisis has given new life to the technoprogressive tendency, those who want to organize for a more egalitarian world and…

Consider this simple sentence: "Jane grew up in an idyllic rural area." No current AI implementation, to my knowledge, can understand such a sentence nearly as well as humans do. A competent chatbot judge could suggest a novel situation, say a broken-winged black Pegasus appeared in Jane's hometown when she was seven, and ask pointed questions to find out if the interlocutor is a human or a bot. The issue with almost all current approaches to AI is that it is either purely symbolic or sub-symbolic. The current symbolic approaches cannot completely capture preconceptual experience human use to make sense of the world. When we hear "idyllic rural area", humans use our mental imagery and sensory experiences to help us understand the sentence much more deeply than the list of words suggests. The subsymbolic approach could potentially solve this issue, but it raises the problem of integrating all those complex, interacting parts, vision, auditory, motor control, conceptual thoughts, etc. into a unifying whole. More importantly, would we be able to control and direct the beast sufficiently well once it becomes reality? There is now some AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) research on integrating the two paradigms. If anyone is interested, a presentation is available here: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/goertzel20130531

It's kind of out there, but there's a related scene in the film `Waking Life'. "What is interesting here is that evolution now becomes an individually centered process, emanating from the needs and desires of the individual, and not an external process, a passive process where the individual is just at the whim of the collective. So, you produce a neo-human, okay, with a new individuality and a new consciousness. But that’s only the beginning of the evolutionary cycle because as the next cycle proceeds, the input is now this new intelligence. As intelligence piles on intelligence, as ability piles on ability, the speed changes. Until what? Until we reach a crescendo in a way could be imagined as an enormous instantaneous fulfillment of human, human and neo-human potential. It could be something totally different. It could be the amplification of the individual, the multiplication of individual existences. Parallel existences now with the individual no longer restricted by time and space." For the full excerpt and a clip: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/waklifeex/