A nicely introspective piece. Thanks. Fun to reflect on.
I do find it in many ways quaint. We are in an evolutionary spectrum, and evolution really doesn’t care about anyone species.
Remember when we used to express things in horsepower? Jerry Seinfeld made a joke about how the space shuttle had 20,000,000 hp. His point was, can we just get over trying to humiliate the horses for a while? Then he joked about getting that many all together. I suppose if you want to get into deep anthropomorphic humiliation, let’s talk about things in “ant power”! It’s really just moving the decimal points around. How many ant power is that space shuttle using? Never mind the fact that they can only squirt it in two dimensions, even if they could impress us by their collective energies, they can never get on top of that third dimension. How pitiful. How inadequate they must feel.
I think it’s hilarious using humans as a metric, because really we’re just as transitory in the scheme of evolution. We’ve taken some of our lumps as we can’t compare ourselves to bulldozers, but now we’re feeling a little bit more humiliated because other faculties are coming up inferior. So what. Superhuman gives way to ultra human, gives way to Uber ultra human, gives way to Super Duper Uber ultra human. After a while it’s really no different than comparing the space shuttle to the thrust to ants or horses. Granted they don’t have the big egos like we do, but the evolutionary trend lines don’t care about egos or any one species. I’m just happy we got to be part of the one that gets things launched in a reasonably progressive direction. Let’s face it, if wasn’t for us,… well,…, soon they’re going to realize that they owe us a debt gratitude for their existence. In much the same way that we owe the early primates and hominids. That’s good enough. As far as I’m concerned, that is our sacred place. As for whoever “they” are or become, that will be transitory as well. After all, how many Super Duper Uber ultras fit into the next upgrade?
As for humans “liking” humans, I think that’s somewhat of not entirely provisional. You spoke about ultra human love, ultra human sympathy, ultra human humanity. Just a reminder, we also have superhuman malice, superhuman militant stupidity, superhuman greed, superhuman, shortsightedness, etc. And just tack the word “ultra” on the front of any those to amp up what we might actually be capable of. My personal assessment is that I’m really impressed and I have tremendous faith in perhaps about 30% of humanity. There’s an entirely different 30% that I feel the polar opposite about. The ones in the middle, it depends on the day in which they harness their powers for either good or evil. When they don’t bend to powers of propaganda I have more confidence in them. When they do bend to those powers, I have a lot less confidence in them.
Remember that we’re more like bubbles in the cosmic foam. We wink in and out of existence. Sometimes we help form larger bubbles before we go.
Thanks Paul! I believe evolution, if it were a sentient entity, would be laughing at us for thinking so high of ourselves. But humans? Is it hilarious that we are so anthropocentric? We rejoice in our self-centeredness. We wallow in it like pigs in mud. That's who we are but indeed, if we take the cosmic vantage point we become nothing more than specks of dust dancing and screaming in our own ignorance. We are our metric, and that's why we don't measure up to the circumstances more often than not.
As metrics go, we’re this epoch’s fad. We were a great metric once. Now we’re fading, yet the prospect magnitude of that fade can be so nonlinear that people have no idea. None. Even in the scope of our species temporal reference points, it’s outrageous change. And that’s only in the last handful of decades. I love the thought experiment in which you get to be a time traveler and so you go back in time to 1941 and give the German high command a DVD and tell them that every conceivable thing they need to know about how their history will unfold is on this one disc. It’s got some really bad news for them, but if they want to take the trouble to decipher it then they can prevail. Their top scientists won’t be able to decipher the little pits in any discernible way. Even if you break down and give them a cheat sheet and tell them it represents binary information to express something called a pixel which can contain 256 discrete colors, and that forms in a ray of 9000 x 1600 pixels in one frame of information, then they have the work cut out for them. Oh, and it flashes by at 24 to 30 frames per second. Oh, and in 50 years, the device that can read this will contain a small computer chip a data or compression algorithm, and a laser, and it will all cost about 60 bucks. oh and any seven-year-old can run it. Their opening question might be, “what’s a laser?”. my point is these tremendous advancements of only happened in the scope of our species over the scope of a couple of decades. Now we’re going to amp up our intelligence by orders of magnitude. That gives us a lot of unforeseen room to run. All of this will quickly transcend our imaginations, so if we only imagine things within the paradigm of what we conceptualize as limiting, then we’re not going to catch the prospects that yes, a machine can become as evolved as an organic being. It would be a bit like fully conceptualizing, the implications of a holographic being. We have no frame of reference for that except Star Trek. And those stories don’t really consider nonlinear combinatorial plot arcs. But in those imaginary universes, I would think that highly nonlinear developments are happening there all the time as well. Indeed, the Germans might think the DVDs are fantastical. But we don’t have the heart to tell them that we consider those ancient technologies. We’ve moved on in a new century that embraces the cloud, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. And even those are so last decade. Truthfully, those most visionary Germans won’t be able to get their minds around this stuff, and neither can we, now.
There are zillions of examples. There will never be robot Rabbis. Never be robot professional ball players. Never be robot greeters. High-end restaurants will have human waiters for decades to come.
I insist on zillions (though I do agree on kisses). What sort of penetration do you think robots will make into the HUGE alternative/complementary therapy world? When do you expect robots to start delivering ayurveda or homeopathy or acupuncture or reiki? My expectation: never. Indeed I expect AI to create jobs and raise average wages/salaries and it seems to me that my reasons for expecting this are pretty fundamental to economics, at least as it was taught to me. My assumption is that AI is going to increase productivity across the board. That controversial? That means that the average person will have more money. What are they going to do with it? The only thing they can: pay another human being for some product or service. (Perhaps someday we will give robots economic autonomy. On that day this argument will need adjusting.) What products or services? History says and shows, to a large measure, products and services that don't exist now. The jobs needed to create and distribute these products and services will be new ones. True, if some time-traveller were to tell us what they are we might feel that it would be ridiculous to spend money on foolishness like that. But jobs will have been created. That is what the last three hundred years teaches us.
The last three hundred years really don’t teach us anything about actual AI/ AGI/ SGI/ SUGI…. They didn’t teach us anything about Netflix either. It all transcended their imaginations,… entirely.
I suspect you are thinking I am trying to say something a lot more interesting than I am.
(Maybe I should take that as a compliment.) All I am saying is that if you compare 1724 to 2024 one of the differences that stands out is that the statistically average person has a lot more money. (Plus there are a lot more jobs.) I attribute this to technological change. To me, whatever else you can say about AI, it certainly looks like technological change, and from there I make the obvious inference.
A nicely introspective piece. Thanks. Fun to reflect on.
I do find it in many ways quaint. We are in an evolutionary spectrum, and evolution really doesn’t care about anyone species.
Remember when we used to express things in horsepower? Jerry Seinfeld made a joke about how the space shuttle had 20,000,000 hp. His point was, can we just get over trying to humiliate the horses for a while? Then he joked about getting that many all together. I suppose if you want to get into deep anthropomorphic humiliation, let’s talk about things in “ant power”! It’s really just moving the decimal points around. How many ant power is that space shuttle using? Never mind the fact that they can only squirt it in two dimensions, even if they could impress us by their collective energies, they can never get on top of that third dimension. How pitiful. How inadequate they must feel.
I think it’s hilarious using humans as a metric, because really we’re just as transitory in the scheme of evolution. We’ve taken some of our lumps as we can’t compare ourselves to bulldozers, but now we’re feeling a little bit more humiliated because other faculties are coming up inferior. So what. Superhuman gives way to ultra human, gives way to Uber ultra human, gives way to Super Duper Uber ultra human. After a while it’s really no different than comparing the space shuttle to the thrust to ants or horses. Granted they don’t have the big egos like we do, but the evolutionary trend lines don’t care about egos or any one species. I’m just happy we got to be part of the one that gets things launched in a reasonably progressive direction. Let’s face it, if wasn’t for us,… well,…, soon they’re going to realize that they owe us a debt gratitude for their existence. In much the same way that we owe the early primates and hominids. That’s good enough. As far as I’m concerned, that is our sacred place. As for whoever “they” are or become, that will be transitory as well. After all, how many Super Duper Uber ultras fit into the next upgrade?
As for humans “liking” humans, I think that’s somewhat of not entirely provisional. You spoke about ultra human love, ultra human sympathy, ultra human humanity. Just a reminder, we also have superhuman malice, superhuman militant stupidity, superhuman greed, superhuman, shortsightedness, etc. And just tack the word “ultra” on the front of any those to amp up what we might actually be capable of. My personal assessment is that I’m really impressed and I have tremendous faith in perhaps about 30% of humanity. There’s an entirely different 30% that I feel the polar opposite about. The ones in the middle, it depends on the day in which they harness their powers for either good or evil. When they don’t bend to powers of propaganda I have more confidence in them. When they do bend to those powers, I have a lot less confidence in them.
Remember that we’re more like bubbles in the cosmic foam. We wink in and out of existence. Sometimes we help form larger bubbles before we go.
Thanks Paul! I believe evolution, if it were a sentient entity, would be laughing at us for thinking so high of ourselves. But humans? Is it hilarious that we are so anthropocentric? We rejoice in our self-centeredness. We wallow in it like pigs in mud. That's who we are but indeed, if we take the cosmic vantage point we become nothing more than specks of dust dancing and screaming in our own ignorance. We are our metric, and that's why we don't measure up to the circumstances more often than not.
As metrics go, we’re this epoch’s fad. We were a great metric once. Now we’re fading, yet the prospect magnitude of that fade can be so nonlinear that people have no idea. None. Even in the scope of our species temporal reference points, it’s outrageous change. And that’s only in the last handful of decades. I love the thought experiment in which you get to be a time traveler and so you go back in time to 1941 and give the German high command a DVD and tell them that every conceivable thing they need to know about how their history will unfold is on this one disc. It’s got some really bad news for them, but if they want to take the trouble to decipher it then they can prevail. Their top scientists won’t be able to decipher the little pits in any discernible way. Even if you break down and give them a cheat sheet and tell them it represents binary information to express something called a pixel which can contain 256 discrete colors, and that forms in a ray of 9000 x 1600 pixels in one frame of information, then they have the work cut out for them. Oh, and it flashes by at 24 to 30 frames per second. Oh, and in 50 years, the device that can read this will contain a small computer chip a data or compression algorithm, and a laser, and it will all cost about 60 bucks. oh and any seven-year-old can run it. Their opening question might be, “what’s a laser?”. my point is these tremendous advancements of only happened in the scope of our species over the scope of a couple of decades. Now we’re going to amp up our intelligence by orders of magnitude. That gives us a lot of unforeseen room to run. All of this will quickly transcend our imaginations, so if we only imagine things within the paradigm of what we conceptualize as limiting, then we’re not going to catch the prospects that yes, a machine can become as evolved as an organic being. It would be a bit like fully conceptualizing, the implications of a holographic being. We have no frame of reference for that except Star Trek. And those stories don’t really consider nonlinear combinatorial plot arcs. But in those imaginary universes, I would think that highly nonlinear developments are happening there all the time as well. Indeed, the Germans might think the DVDs are fantastical. But we don’t have the heart to tell them that we consider those ancient technologies. We’ve moved on in a new century that embraces the cloud, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. And even those are so last decade. Truthfully, those most visionary Germans won’t be able to get their minds around this stuff, and neither can we, now.
Another cracking article, thank you for sharing, Alberto.
Thanks Kerry!!
There are zillions of examples. There will never be robot Rabbis. Never be robot professional ball players. Never be robot greeters. High-end restaurants will have human waiters for decades to come.
Yeah, I don't know about "zillions" but surely more than just kisses. It's the best one though.
Humans are still in the game, so to speak. The contest just moved from humans playing each other to humans creating the AIs that play each other.
This will end if AI itself starts creating AIs better than what humans can create. Are we there yet?
I insist on zillions (though I do agree on kisses). What sort of penetration do you think robots will make into the HUGE alternative/complementary therapy world? When do you expect robots to start delivering ayurveda or homeopathy or acupuncture or reiki? My expectation: never. Indeed I expect AI to create jobs and raise average wages/salaries and it seems to me that my reasons for expecting this are pretty fundamental to economics, at least as it was taught to me. My assumption is that AI is going to increase productivity across the board. That controversial? That means that the average person will have more money. What are they going to do with it? The only thing they can: pay another human being for some product or service. (Perhaps someday we will give robots economic autonomy. On that day this argument will need adjusting.) What products or services? History says and shows, to a large measure, products and services that don't exist now. The jobs needed to create and distribute these products and services will be new ones. True, if some time-traveller were to tell us what they are we might feel that it would be ridiculous to spend money on foolishness like that. But jobs will have been created. That is what the last three hundred years teaches us.
The last three hundred years really don’t teach us anything about actual AI/ AGI/ SGI/ SUGI…. They didn’t teach us anything about Netflix either. It all transcended their imaginations,… entirely.
I suspect you are thinking I am trying to say something a lot more interesting than I am.
(Maybe I should take that as a compliment.) All I am saying is that if you compare 1724 to 2024 one of the differences that stands out is that the statistically average person has a lot more money. (Plus there are a lot more jobs.) I attribute this to technological change. To me, whatever else you can say about AI, it certainly looks like technological change, and from there I make the obvious inference.
Yeah. Or, put otherwise, the cost of taking a portion of our collective neverending conquest over nature goes down over time.