Re: Share the A-B-C's of bootstrapping* and support co-evolution of
human organizations and their tools.
Here's an interesting set of high-leverage COncurrent Development,
Integration and Application of Knowledge (CoDIAK) capabilities:
1) The Millennium Project: Globalization Conference <
http://www.millennium-project.org/ >
2) NASA's Strategic Plan: Exploring Our Home Planet <
http://www.earth.nasa.gov/visions/stratplan/ese_strategic_plan.pdf >
3) The Sensor Web: A New Instrument Concept
< http://sensorwebs.jpl.nasa.gov/resources/sensorweb-concept.pdf >
So beyond the open-source OHS/AUGMENT implementation plans, how is the
Global Brain concept as envision by the Principia Cybernetica project <
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be > and strategic plans for applying in
references (1) to (3) going to be incorporated into CoDIAK plans based
on the Bootstrap Institute's mission:"As much as possible, to boost
mankind's collective capability for coping with complex, urgent
problems." ?
Jack Park wrote:
> 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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