Posted on 04/27/2018 6:05:56 AM PDT by Kaslin
In Frank Herbert's "Dune" series (my favorite-science fiction books), he made a bold writerly decision. In a genre famous for robots and computers (particularly in the 1960s), Herbert imagined a futuristic universe with neither. In his telling, some 10,000 years prior to the story of the book, there was galactic revolt called the Butlerian Jihad. This is where I first learned the word "Jihad" -- the Arabic term for Islamic holy war.
It can all get fairly nerdy, but the gist is that artificially intelligent computers and androids were banned. In one explanation, the Butlerian Jihad was named after a woman, Jehanne Butler, whose baby had been aborted without her permission because an artificially intelligent computer deemed the child unworthy of life. The resulting outrage led to a mass revolt, the banning of thinking machines and a new religious commandment: "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
This idea has always stuck with me because of the fresh venues it opened in the genre and also for political and sociological reasons.
The phrase "moral panic" is almost always used derisively, to suggest an irrational overreaction by people giving over to the mentality of the mob. When the media agrees with a moral panic -- say, on guns -- the last thing they do is call it one. Moral panics are always something those other people do. It's a bit like "censorship," a word people only use for the censorship they don't like.
But whether you call it a moral panic, a righteous people-powered movement or some other term of art, such visceral mass reactions are inevitable and perhaps necessary.
I got to thinking about this as two stories from Britain and one from China made waves here in the U.S.
A driver in North Yorkshire, England, fitted his car with a laser jammer that blocked speed cameras from giving him a ticket. He also showed the traffic camera his middle finger in a gesture that means the same thing on both sides of the Atlantic. The North Yorkshire police tracked him down, and he was charged with "perverting the course of justice." The jammer was illegal, of course, and he probably deserved a fine. But because he flipped Big Brother the bird, he got eight months in jail.
As outrageous as that story is, it pales in comparison to the story of Alfie Evans, a 23-month-old British boy with a rare neurodegenerative disorder. His doctors and the National Health Service concluded they couldn't do anything more for him and, against his parents' wishes, took him off life support. A Vatican hospital was eager to take him, and his parents were even more eager to transfer him there. The state refused, essentially kidnapping the child. The British courts support the NHS, offering not legal or moral rationales but sickening pabulum about the desirability of euthanasia or in this case infanticide. There's also much talk about how the NHS works with finite resources and is compelled by economic math to make hard decisions. The story is actually much more cruel in the specifics, but you get the point.
And that leads me to the third story. China made it official: By 2020, the government will fully implement a "social credit score" system that will use artificial intelligence and facial recognition technology to monitor, reward and punish virtually every kind of activity based upon ideological criteria -- chiefly, loyalty to the state.
It doesn't take a science-fiction writer to imagine where these trends can go. Right now, the decisions made about the rebellious driver and little Alfie are being made by humans. But will that always be the case? AI systems can send people to jail and make decisions about withholding care quite easily. Just ask the Chinese. Indeed, the humans making these decisions are just following the legal and bureaucratic equivalent of algorithms anyway.
In other words, they're thinking like machines already. Why object to letting better machines take over?
In the fourth installment of the "Dune" series, one of the characters explains why the Butlerian Jihad was necessary. "The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines," Leto Atreides explains. "Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments."
That process seems well underway already, and I wonder what it will take before we get the moral panic we need.
As an engineer, I’ve seen the latest learning machines and the possibilities are terrifying. I would support a true worldwide ban on “thinking machines” but it will be as ineffective as a ban on nuclear weapons.
If you take a “moral” stand and don’t build them yourself, your enemies will build them anyway and rule you...
Ping.
Secular humanists believe in evolution and perfectibility of man. They believe that man will evolve into a man-machine hybrid that will be perfect enough to be able to form the perfect society.
I haven’t got this all fleshed out, but it seems to me that this dovetails with questions of Free Will.
If God wanted us to be perfect and obedient to His will, he would have made us more like robots. But instead He gave us Free Will, and if we were without sin, we would be obedient to His will by choice. Unfortunately, our Free Will often drives us to make poor, selfish decisions. That’s what makes us human.
If we develop computers that are “perfect”, then they could make all the tough decisions for us. The machines could run the world, and we would just be along for the ride. But that’s not the point. That’s not what we’re here for.
In the future, machines could possibly make a perfect world. But we’re probably better off just being human and making mistakes.
there have been omens to the thinking machines, like the one that learned to be racist from social media... so, as a precursor, we have been warned.
Christians and observant Jews have been pronouncing the consequences were coming as a result of flaunting God’s laws but only the faithful were listening.
Secularists, agnostics, and so-called humanists either laughed at our “ignorance” or shouted down the “simpletons” or took to the courts to make certain, only they, our betters, were in control!
Get to the back of the line Jonah and quit thinking you are leading this parade!
Then there’s Roko’s basilisk...
“As an engineer, I’ve seen the latest learning machines and the possibilities are terrifying”
Please tells us of a thinking machine and why it terrifies you.
Still in the realm of science fiction, but not that far in. Would be possible in a few years at most.
https://youtu.be/HipTO_7mUOw
Man cannot make a perfect world. But neither can machines. Imperfect man makes them. And,so it seems to me, that man has made for himself computerized idols that contribute to the further dehumanization of society, a process begun by statist utopians. Welcome to “paradise”.
This, in and of itself is a serious issue. We see the same thing in "zero tolerance" policies at schools and other government locations.
Why object to letting better machines take over?
Because some decisions need to be made by actual human beings.
Last year at the International DOTA2 Championships, an AI computer was brought in to play DOTA2 against a player named Dendi. Of course the AI computer clobbered poor Dendi. But I thought, what’s the point? We watch to see who is the best DOTA2 team, not to watch two computers battle each other.
Man cannot make a perfect world. But neither can machines.
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I have wondered how AI an simulate the meta-cognition that humans have. I.e. not just thinking about solving problems which they have been programmed to solve, but actually reflecting on those problems in ALL THE WAYS that human beings can step back and reflect on a problem. Namely things like: Why should this be done? Is this the right thing to do? Is doing this meaningful?
These questions could only be “answered” by a machine if they were somehow programmed with a narrow set of criteria. Even then the machine could never reflect or have insights OUTSIDE these “answers”.
Interesting!
Jon Rappoport recently did articles similar but on pigs, guns, and brains! ;)
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No compassion in UK government. Under Democratic party this will come to the USA, right Nancy and Bernie!
I like machine gun like thinking more.
“Still in the realm of science fiction but not that far in”
How will I recognize a thinking machine? What will it do that today’s computers + sensors + actuators don’t already do?
One way to recognize a “thinking machine” will be that it will exercise authority that cannot be questioned. Kind of like a red-light-camera on steroids.
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