[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2017/03/08/the-demise-... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Barbarians
You're falsely assuming that these "national" data sets are inaccessible to anyone outside the nation. Hackers, advertising companies, ISPs etc will gladly sell you a copy, which can in turn be duplicated and resold across the world ad infinitum.
But I agree that China so far seems to have little wish to dominate anyone else. Of course, when you have your population under control so much that they will build any sort of robots in any quantities for you, that might be reconsidered. Hannah Arendt wrote:
> If the totalitarian conqueror conducts himself everywhere as though he were at home, by the same token he must treat his own population as though he were a foreign conqueror.
Maybe this goes the other way, too? I don't know, but when the only thing between your resources is the mercy of organizations that know no mercy, it might.
Of course, the trouble with China is.. "us". "The" West, if you will. We have little moral standing to point fingers, no alternative vision. We have the dictum of the dollar rather than the dictum of the party, but that's not a meaningful enough difference IMO. I'm not saying we're just as totalitarian, but that we're not sufficiently non-totalitarian. China and Russia, for all valid criticism there is to make, are first and foremost awesome scapegoats that keep our side of the machinery humming.
This may well change once the Chinese economy is bigger than the US economy. It already is at PPP, but at current exchange rates China will likely surpass the USA within 10 years.
I have to disagree on this point. The dollar leads to objectivism. The party leads to collectivism.
It depends on your definition of morality. Do you value the individual or the society? Would you see the outliers, both good & bad, purged or preserved?
> Do you value the individual or the society?
.. or the dollar, which is entirely different from valuing people? Just one of a trillion examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkgFA9q7w0w
It leads to treating people like objects, and it makes it "rational" to destroy others for profit and "irrational" to care about them.
> It depends on your definition of morality.
It depends on your humanity, on the strength of your backbone. Do you have your "values", your experiences inside you, or do you have external measures, like dollars or party approval or a "definition of morality"?
Still not sure what idols you're claiming are being worshiped. Fromm is discussing that there is misplaced mysticism that is imbued onto material "things." Not sure how that is conflated with my point - however I suppose it's an easy conclusion to make with a trivial discussion on the topic. Glad to see that my point has made impact, now it's about how to refine expressing it.
Also I didn't advocate building it in the shadows and in fact I don't think that's really possible anyway. Google doesn't explain to the public how it gets your search results, but experts are well aware of how it works. That's really all I'm saying. Simply that you don't need to tell everyone everything all the time because it's unnecessary.
You literally are intending to build something that you then consider "higher" or "better". A bunch of circuits and algorithms humans made. Or even just words, like talking about how it's the "logical next step in evolution". That's abstract ideas we're making up, and then pretending that's some sort of reality we have to adapt to. Erich Fromm's quote continues on like this:
> Among the many forms of alienation, the most frequent one is alienation in language. If I express a feeling with a word, let us say, if I say "I love you," the word is meant to be an indication of the reality which exists within myself, the power of my loving. The word "love" is meant to be a symbol of the fact love, but as soon as it is spoken it tends to assume a life of its own, it becomes a reality. I am under the illusion that the saying of the word is the equivalent of the experience, and soon I say the word and feel nothing, except the thought of love which the word expresses. The alienation of language shows the whole complexity of alienation. Language is one of the most precious human achievements; to avoid alienation by not speaking would be foolish -- yet one must be always aware of the danger of the spoken word, that it threatens to substitute itself for the living experience. The same holds true for all other achievements of man; ideas, art, any kind of man-made objects. They are man's creations; they are valuable aids for life, yet each one of them is also a trap, a temptation to confuse life with things, experience with artifacts, feeling with surrender and submission.
It's not so much misplaced mysticism as misplaced self.
> Also I didn't advocate building it in the shadows
No, you said you sadly "have" to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15002805
> I'm hesitant to write it all out because I expect such a document would just be the source of opposition to implementation. Like putting war plans on the internet. If we make the progress we want I expect heavy opposition. However it's hard to build a movement in the shadows. I'd rather just be building things, and making progress toward the goal like I am now, than doing the politics of creating a movement before we have significant powers.
Okay, a charitable reading of "significant powers" might just mean "a working prototype, something more than nothing". But another way to read it would be to "not declare war until you ensured you have the bigger army".
The proof of the reality you need to adapt to is in the work, the output. If a machine can do everything you do practically, but in a way people would agree is more optimal - including being empathetic, just and kind with it's resources, then that's a reality you need to adapt to.
Okay, a charitable reading of "significant powers" might just mean "a working prototype, something more than nothing".
Effectively. What I mean is something that is interwoven into the fabric of our lives that can't just be shut off, like electricity. Something that brought so much progress that it would be irresponsible to remove it.
You don't build them on a drawing board, do you? edit: also, I think a lot of people would take issue with this. I'm no parent, but I know that when and if I'll be one, yeah, I hope my kid is bright and friendly and whatnot. But if they're disabled or have other issues, I'd still love them. I'd even love them if they were worse than me in every respect, and try to raise them as good as I can, but even then them being "more evolved and better" doesn't really strike me as something primary or even very important. I guess that's a nice thought until you actually see your child, then it goes out of the window. But I'm guessing here.
And sadly, many people do (worship their kids). They call it love, but confusing oneself with another, being fused with them, is not love.
> These are, born out of selfishness, the two methods of education of parents: tyranny and slavery in all gradiations, though tyranny can be very tender ("you have to believe me, I am your mother!"), and slavery very proud ("you are my son, therefore I will make you my saviour"), but they are two horrible methods of education, methods of anti-education, fit to stamp the child back into the ground from whence it came.
-- Franz Kafka, letter to Elli Hermann
> If a machine can do everything you do practically, but in a way people would agree is more optimal - including being empathetic, just and kind with it's resources, then that's a reality you need to adapt to.
The keyword being "if". As things are going, I see this as a carrot to keep people going; the carrot isn't actually where the road leads.
> Something that brought so much progress that it would be irresponsible to remove it.
And how does that go together with "fade into oblivion"? How would something that doesn't require us, but can afford to have empathy with us, diminish us in any way? What fabric of our lives are you talking about? The ones that faded into oblivion? Do you see no double think there?
Yea actually we (collectively) kind of do. I mean the massive institutional educational system, secondary, post secondary, neonatal care, preschool, faber, Montessori, Parenting books, videos blogs etc... are all systems and mechanisms and processes etc that are prescriptive for how to produce a positive, healthy functioning adult in [insert] society.
I guess that's a nice thought until you actually see your child, then it goes out of the window. But I'm guessing here.
Almost across the board, parents say the best thing they have ever done is to raise children. That their kids are smarter and kinder and better etc...than they were and on and on. Millions of words have been spilled for these legacies. Especially parents with disabled children, frequently laud how much more grounded and spiritual and "in the now" their children are. Whether they believe it, or it's objectively true or not is certainly up for debate, however it is true that people get pleasure in seeing their children grow up and are generally ok dying knowing their children will take on their legacy.
You're too focused on the fade into oblivion part. I'm hoping and AGI will help us figure out our existential problems - but maybe it can't or wont. Maybe it can help is figure out how to keep us all in a state of bliss forever, or upload us to computer paradise (ahem, matrix) or cure all of our diseases, or help us merge with it. Who knows, all I know is that we can't get past any kind of "singularity" level of technology with the slow pace of biological evolution.
It's simply a philosophical point that with a superhuman AGI we need not worry about what our fate as a human species is anymore because something else is taking the top spot in the food chain. It's a much more passive statement than you're interpreting it as.
These processes do not produce babies, they come way after the sperm fertilizing the egg.
And there is no top spot in "the" food chain. There are food chains that are separate from ours. And even assuming that's wrong: Do you see all the species of plants and animals just give up because humans exist? It has no bearing on their "aspirations" if you will. If I made a copy of you, a 100% exact clone, would you die peacefully? Or would it change nothing about your desire to live? My answer would be the latter.
> however it is true that people get pleasure in seeing their children grow up and are generally ok dying knowing their children will take on their legacy.
I don't actually believe this. People make their peace with their mortality -- or fail to do so -- on their own. Everybody dies alone. Actually, worrying about the future, and the gulags or world wars one's child might end up in, can have the opposite effect, people being fine about dying but worried about their children suffering.
I don't see a problem with that. I have actually expressed the same idea multiple times here on HN.
Obviously eliminating humans by violent means would be immoral, but I don't see the problem with individuals deciding not to sustain humanity as it exists now.
For example, if you want to replace all human labor by robots, a lot of people would be against that, because they fear being unemployed. But if you don't intend to leave those unemployed people without food and shelter, I don't see anything wrong with still pursuing that goal.
Taking away peoples' roles and turning them into welfare recipients is not universally seen as a good thing. Many people get fulfillment from the work they do because feel like they contribute to society. Taking away their job and providing them food and shelter does not solve that problem.
Many people got fulfillment from playing Chess, or Go, or weaving, or tilling a field with their own hands. Many, but fewer people, still enjoy doing these things today, although machines are better at it than them. Others have moved on to other ways of self-fulfillment.
If you oppose automation of activities people find fulfillment in, you should oppose game-playing AI much more than jobs being automated away. There are much fewer people that hate playing board games but have to do it anyway because it's the one skill they have that will put bread on the table.
An interesting hobby like Chess or Go by definition can't replace the need to be depended on and feel like you are contributing.
You don't feel like you contribute to society when your job is easily obsolete/easily automated.
> If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.
-- Stephen Hawking in a very lucid moment, https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science_ama...
Those who don't address that first, who cannot ENSURE that they're building a nuclear power plant and not an atom bomb, have no excuse.
> The whole concept of alienation found its first expression in Western thought in the Old Testament concept of idolatry. The essence of what the prophets call "idolatry" is not that man worships many gods instead of only one. It is that the idols are the work of man's own hands -- they are things, and man bows down and worships things; worships that which he has created himself. In doing so he transforms himself into a thing. He transfers to the things of his creation the attributes of his own life, and instead of experiencing himself as the creating person, he is in touch with himself only by the worship of the idol. He has become estranged from his own life forces, from the wealth of his own potentialities, and is in touch with himself only in the indirect way of submission to life frozen in the idols. The deadness and emptiness of the idol is expressed in the Old Testament: "Eyes they have and they do not see, ears they have and they do not hear," etc. The more man transfers his own powers to the idols, the poorer he himself becomes, and the more dependent on the idols, so that they permit him to redeem a small part of what was originally his. The idols can be a godlike figure, the state, the church, a person, possessions. Idolatry changes its objects; it is by no means to be found only in those forms in which the idol has a so-called religious meaning. Idolatry is always the worship of something into which man has put his own creative powers, and to which he now submits, instead of experiencing himself in his creative act.
-- Erich Fromm, who also said
> The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane.