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Re51: Sprinkle Some AI on It

Retraice^1

WAAIT Part 2: Mixing AI with things that were separate.

Air date: Tuesday, 15th Nov. 2022, 11:00 PM Eastern/US.

For better and for worse,
AI and ...

Here is an attempt to mix AI with aspects of the world that are not obviously related--because everything is related to AI. We'll look for the bad and the good results of the mixture.

(Side note: see Retraice (2022/11/14) note 3 on how smartphones, as used to mediate what would otherwise be direct human-to-human socializing, are the main way that AI is `at parties'.)

Intelligence

See Retraice (2020/09/07).
o strategic intelligence: It used to be that SI entities connected directly to the copper wires, and before wires it was all human-to-human.^2 But now, oceans of information are vacuumed up digitally,^3 and AI is used to sift and sort and search it all. This is an ominous change, but if it leads to better results for citizens, and more stable global relations by avoiding misunderstandings and miscalculations, it's good. o natural intelligence: Already, via the phone, we are being changed for the better (smarter, faster) and for the worse (less patient, less circumspect), by AI.^4 o artificial intelligence: Programs writing programs--AlphaCode.^5 This could be good (we can do difficult things more easily) or bad (too much autonomy in the systems).

Hypotheses:

See Retraice (2022/03/07), Retraice (2022/10/19).

These eleven hypotheses do, in a sense, roll up into the twelfth. AI, therefore, mixes with all of them, for better and for worse.
* H1. Space: `Humans are now technologically capable of living in space.'
* H2. Technology: `Human technology risks are growing faster than their mitigation.'
* H3. Death: `Human lifespan is being prolonged by new technologies.'
* H4. China: `The U.S. is no longer the only superpower; war is likely.'
* H5. Civil War: `The U.S. seems vulnerable to a civil war this decade.'
* H6. Environments: `Humans can change environments faster than they can adapt.'
* H7. Betterment: `Some things make the future better than the past.'
* H8. Intelligence: `There are intelligence differences.'
* H9. Darkness: `There is a pervasive darkness in humans, even amongst the good guys.'
* H10. Wealth: `The current trend toward concentration of wealth is making human life worse.'
* H11. Wildcards: `New technologies, discoveries and deception regularly cause historic changes.'
* H12. Computers: `Some humans now control others better, but machinery could take control.'

On H12, and how AI mixes with human control of other humans, and perhaps machine control of humans, see Wiener (1954) and Wiener (1961).

Omniscience

See Retraice (2020/11/13).
* physical omniscience: AI works well with sensors.
* animate omniscience: AI is good at classifying objects, including creatures.
* mental omniscience: AI can enable humans to know you better than you know yourself.
Side note: Electrons are becoming more important than photons: Both have always been important, but now thoughts (in humans and machines?) matter more than the photon-absorbing-re-emitting vehicles that house them. We see people (via photons) on their phones, and think whatever we think about them; but what really matters is what's happening in their brains, the electrons (and chemicals), which can be completely uncorrelated with anything accessible via photons.

Other stuff

We can keep mixing AI with things and get surprising results. Use your imagination:
* China model (Re47-49);
* WM5 (Re31): What is, What is happening, What matters;
* Sex (regular, and Dawkins/McLuhan's);
* Re30: I.J. Good's paradox: To survive, we must build them; if they're built, we won't survive. And what's being done? Could AI help get the word out?
* Good model (Re28): RTFM;^6
* WM4 (Re27): threat modeleing, selection, game theory, Turing machine cybernetics;
* WM3 (Re26): meh;
* WM2 (Re25): Computer control is suffusing GNRGCRB&R and NIAISI; to check we need info from trusted and integrated sources.
* WM1 (Re24): NINFA, GNRGCRB&R, NIAISI, sources and tests and integration; computer control (H12) is What's GOOT.

And why do we `sprinkle' `some AI' on things?

Kelly: "Because here is the other thing the graybeards in 2050 will tell you: Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an innovator in 2016? It was a wide-open frontier! You could pick almost any category and add some AI to it, put it on the cloud. Few devices had more than one or two sensors in them, unlike the hundreds now. Expectations and barriers were low. It was easy to be the first. And then they would sigh. `Oh, if only we realized how possible everything was back then!' "^7

Kaplan:"Strong AI is basically a concept that intelligence is some kind of magic pixie dust that you sprinkle on a machine and it suddenly becomes conscious and aware, and that what we're trying to do in AI is to duplicate this magical quality. Now, weak AI is just a disparaging name for what we really see today, which is an engineering approach to artificial intelligence. It's solving specific problems. That might be driving or playing chess. So strong AI is really for the sci-fi freaks, and weak AI is really for the engineers."^8

_

References

Andrew, C. (2018). The Secret World: A History of Intelligence. Yale University Press. ISBN in paperback edition printed as "978-0-300-23844-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)". Searches:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=978-0300238440
https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+978-0300238440
https://lccn.loc.gov/2018947154

Bamford, J. (1982). The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America's Most Secret Agency. Penguin. ISBN: 0140067485. Searches:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=0140067485
https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+0140067485
https://lccn.loc.gov/82024608

Brockman, J. (Ed.) (2019). Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI. Penguin. ISBN: 978-0525557999. Searches:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=978-0525557999
https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+978-0525557999
https://lccn.loc.gov/2018032888

Goodfellow, I., Bengio, Y., & Courville, A. (2016). Deep Learning. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0262035613. Ebook available at:
https://www.deeplearningbook.org/ Searches:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=978-0262035613
https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+978-0262035613
https://lccn.loc.gov/2016022992

Greenwald, G. (2014). No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. Penguin. ISBN: 978-0241968987. Searches:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780241968987
https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780241968987
https://lccn.loc.gov/2014932888

Kelly, K. (2017). The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. Penguin Books. ISBN: 978-0143110378. Searches:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780143110378
https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780143110378
https://lccn.loc.gov/2017394116

Kissinger, H. A., Schmidt, E., & Huttenlocher, D. (2021). The Age of AI. Little, Brown and Company. ISBN: 978-0316273800. Searches:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780316273800
https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780316273800
https://lccn.loc.gov/2021943914

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Gingko Press. ISBN: 1584230738. Originally published 1964. This ed. 2003.
https://archive.org/details/understandingmed0000mclu_n3p7 Searches:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=1584230738
https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+1584230738
https://lccn.loc.gov/2003012174

Retraice (2020/09/07). Re1: Three Kinds of Intelligence. retraice.com.
https://www.retraice.com/segments/re1 Retrieved 22nd Sep. 2020.

Retraice (2020/11/13). Re14: Omniscience in Three Domains. retraice.com.
https://www.retraice.com/segments/re14 Retrieved 14th Nov. 2020.

Retraice (2022/03/07). Re17: Hypotheses to Eleven. retraice.com.
https://www.retraice.com/segments/re17 Retrieved 17th Mar. 2022.

Retraice (2022/10/19). Re22: Computer Control. retraice.com.
https://www.retraice.com/segments/re22 Retrieved 19th Oct. 2022.

Retraice (2022/10/27). Re31: What's Happening That Matters - WM5. retraice.com.
https://www.retraice.com/segments/re31 Retrieved 28th Oct. 2022.

Retraice (2022/11/14). Re50: What About AI Though? (WAAIT). retraice.com.
https://www.retraice.com/segments/re50 Retrieved 15th Nov. 2022.

Russell, S., & Norvig, P. (2020). Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Pearson, 4th ed. ISBN: 978-0134610993. Searches:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=978-0134610993
https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+978-0134610993
https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047498

Wiener, N. (1954). The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Da Capo, 2nd ed. ISBN: 978-0306803208. This 1954 ed. missing `The Voices of Rigidity' chapter of the original 1950 ed. See 1st ed.:
https://archive.org/details/humanuseofhumanb00wien/page/n11/mode/2up. See also Brockman (2019) p. xviii. Searches for the 2nd ed.:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780306803208
https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780306803208
https://lccn.loc.gov/87037102

Wiener, N. (1961). Cybernetics: Or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. MIT, 2nd ed. ISBN: 978-1614275022. Searches:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9781614275022
https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9781614275022
https://lccn.loc.gov/61013034

Footnotes

^1 https://www.retraice.com/retraice

^2 Bamford (1982) pp. 229-230; Andrew (2018).

^3 Greenwald (2014) pp 92-95.

^4 McLuhan (1964) pp. 68-69; Retraice (2022/10/27). Examples of the potential for direct, physical connection of AI to our nervous systems: Neuralink, wikipedia.org, retrieved Nov. 16th, 2022; Kevin Warwick, wikipedia.org, retrieved Nov. 16th, 2022. Even reading AI textbooks, e.g. Russell & Norvig (2020), Goodfellow et al. (2016), changes a reader by giving him handy models for thinking more tractably about the world in all its complexity.

^5 Google's DeepMind says its AI coding bot is 'competitive' with humans, theregister.com, Simon Sharwood, Feb 3rd, 2022.

^6 See Kissinger et al. (2021) pp. 13-19 on AI detecting aspects of reality beyond our capacities, which speaks to the `true' part of RTFM.

^7 Kelly (2017) pp. 26-27. Emphasis added.

^8 Engineering Intelligence, On The Media, Jerry Kaplan being interviewed by Brooke Gladstone, Apr 18th, 2014. Emphasis added.