At 07:54 AM 7/15/2001 -0400, you wrote:
>Interesting. Like deferring to the authority of churches.
>
>Henry
>
>Peter Jones wrote:
>
> > Yes. I am also interested in what might happen if ethical value systems
> were
> > somehow made part of the augmenting system. Would people start deferring to
> > the system excessively? In fact, that aspect concerns me for
> augmentation as
> > a whole.
Apropos to this line of thinking are a couple of posts from the global
brain list, which I copy here (Start by reading the paper at kurzweilai.net):
> http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0132.html
This is an excellent statement of one view of future
evolution, in which human individuality is sacrificed so
that humans may become components of a larger brain. The
Internet and organizational networks already give us a
taste of this, in which we must process a constant stream
of email. For most people, it is work that they would
rather avoid. For everyone, at least some of their email
traffic is work that would be nice to avoid.
People in industrial socities have been happy to let
machines do most of the physical labor, as soon as
technology produced machines that could do that labor.
Similarly, as soon as technology produces machines that
can relieve people of mental labor, people will be happy
to let them.
People will be intimately connected to intelligent
machines, but that connection will exist to serve and
please people rather than for people's brains to serve
the network.
This is where ethics must come into our thinking about
the global network of machines and people. Learning and
the values that define positive and negative reinforcement
for learning will be an essential part of intelligent
machines. Those values must be human happiness, both
short term and long term, rather than any sort of self-
interest of the machines. I think the humans who build
intelligent machines would be crazy to build them with
selfish values.
Such values will of course produce machines that do not
fit the Darwinian logic of self-interest. These machines
will be hobbled by being tied to human happiness. They
will continue to evolve in the sense of developing ever
better minds, but always in the interests of the humans
they serve.
In human and animal brains, learning values are called
emotions: the things we want. Rather than seeing the
global brain as a large intellectual collaboration of
human and machine minds, interactions among human and
machine minds will heavily involve emotional values.
Current interactions among humans heavily involve
emotions: humans have guilt and gratitude to promote
cooperation, but natural selection has made humans
primarily selfish which creates competition. Societies
that have tried to reprogram their citizens for too
great a level of altruism have failed.
But adding intelligent machines to human society, that
have greater than human intelligence and are designed
with altruistic values, will change society deeply.
A good measure of machine intelligence will be the
number of people they can know well and converse with
simultaneously. Humans are "designed" to be able to know
about 200 other people well. There should be no reason
why intelligent machines cannot know billions of people
well. Such machines will significantly decrease the
diameter of the human aquaintanceship network. I think
this, and the machines' altrsuistic values, are the keys
to understanding the nature of the global brain.
As reflected by Bill Joy's article, people are frighened
by the possibility of intelligent machines. They key to
answering these fears is public understanding that they
can control the values of intelligent machines, and that
those values can serve human happiness rather than
machine interests. Educating the public to these issues
is a useful role for the Global Brain Group.
This is discussed in more detail in my book:
http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~billh/gotterdammerung.html
in a column summarizing the book:
http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~billh/visfiles.html
and in my paper to the recent Global Brain Workshop:
http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~billh/gbrain0.html
Cheers,
Bill
----------------------------------------------------------
Bill Hibbard, SSEC, 1225 W. Dayton St., Madison, WI 53706
hibbard@facstaff.wisc.edu 608-263-4427 fax:
608-263-6738http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~billh/vis.html
and
Bill Hibbard wrote:
> > http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0132.html
>
> This is an excellent statement of one view of future
> evolution, in which human individuality is sacrificed so
> that humans may become components of a larger brain.
I'm not sure I would phrase this this way, as it is not only bound to
alarm the paranoid, but is, in fact not true. I would say that as a
person's connectivity rises, his/her individuality also increases. As an
analogy, a person in a rural setting, interacting with two hundred people
has only a limited number of socially acceptable roles they can fulfill. In
contrast, a person in a city, who interacts with thousands of people every
day, not only has a wider variety of possible roles, or jobs, but also will
perforce adopt a slightly different persona vis a vis every person she/he
comes in to contact with.
They might be subservient to their boss, overbearing to the doorman,
amicable to the woman at the news stand, jovial at the club, raucous at the
concert, aggressive at the basketball court, and submissive to their sex
partner. How can this not elaborate when we deal with millions of people?
I think that as the global brain develops, every person will realize that
their identity is a matter of choice, much as people adopt variant personas
in different chat rooms or email lists. I don't see people lessening their
mental interactions, or mental activities when their horizons expand.
Indeed, the concept of horizon, two dimensional space, is obsolete.
Cyberspace is multi dimensional... wish
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