Ran Prieur

March 7.

2016-03-07T19:10:40Z

March 7. From last week on Reddit, What's the next "big thing" that most people aren't even semi-aware of yet? Well, you're probably aware of most of this stuff, but it's a good compilation of potential high tech, plus some culture and politics and doom.

When a new technology appears, at first we tend to think of it as acting on humans who are static and passive. So either it's a fad and we'll go back to living like we did before, or it will replace us. In practice we integrate technologies into our culture and consciousness, but that's harder to imagine.

One little example is this article I've posted before, The Departed Queen. It's by a chess player who beat a much better player in a tournament by spending two years playing against a computer to find a winning sequence of moves from an early queen sacrifice, and it wasn't just a gimmick -- he was using the computer as a coach to gain deep understanding that the computer could never have:

Somewhere between the machine as adversary and the machine as oracle, and somewhere above Ferrucci's vision of the machine as a tool, lies an elusive fourth possibility: the machine as a partner.

March 4.

2016-03-04T16:40:16Z

March 4. Going to the subreddit again for ideas, the other day Ian made a post about Creativity vs Genius, pointing out that there are completely different things that we might call "creativity", and there's a new computer tool that's better than humans at discovering equations from data.

When I think about it more, artificial intelligence will never be creative in quite the same way that humans are. Even if we can reverse engineer the human brain and build something that works exactly the same way, but somehow better, it would still be missing the intelligence of the body, which learns from actions in the physical world. The only way to upgrade human-like intelligence is to upgrade humans, which is in the realm of biotech or psychology or social philosophy or brain chemistry, but not information tech.

At the same time, computers are already smarter than humans in their own way, on their own path, and now this path can generate complex and beautiful virtual worlds that previously would have taken a legion of artists. It's still something humans could do, but computers can do it much faster. Inevitably, computers will be able to generate experience that humans can't. The deeper question is whether this has any value. This leads to an even deeper question: what is the source of value, or what is the meaning of life?

I don't think life is meaningless -- if I did, I would spend the rest of it in pure hedonism. The other day I made this comment about my Taoist-like belief in an objective source of meaning. And now I'm wondering, if AI can come up with laws of physics, maybe eventually it can help us with metaphysical insights. But how would we know?

March 2.

2016-03-02T14:20:15Z

March 2. Last week I mentioned global emotional illness related to economic decline, and that link goes to a subreddit post with a careful explanation of an idea that sounds right to me: a slow economic decline is more painful than a fast one. This fits a general rule of happiness, that chronic pain is worse than acute pain. (That's why I'm against insurance, because the ongoing loss of insurance payments makes me more unhappy than a sudden big loss.) And if you doubt that anyone would really enjoy a hard crash, read A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit, or at least the first hundred pages.

Anyway, the idea is that Trump is drawing support from people who, consciously or subconsciously, want the system to collapse already instead of slowly grinding us down. I confess that Trump's wins yesterday felt good to me, even though the emotional vibe of him and his supporters will keep me from voting for him. But here's what I was going to say about emotional illness and economic decline:

There are two kinds of human systems, one with top-down or hierarchical power and one with bottom-up or shared power. Shared power is really hard to do, even in small systems, so our big systems are mostly top-down. The problem is that positions of power become entrenched, and the people who hold them become sort of evil. What I mean is, almost nobody thinks "I give thanks every day for my power over others and remember to use it responsibly, and if I lose it, well, it was a nice ride." Instead people come to think of their power over others as normal and fair, and losing it feels like an injustice.

In an economic decline, almost everyone loses power. The highest class holds onto it and the lowest class never had it in the first place, but the middle class is like, "I used to hire peasants to mow my lawn, and now they're living off the government when their labor is rightfully mine!" It's usually more subtle, with higher prices for products and services that require unseen human labor. My long-term answer is a utopia where tedious labor is automated, everyone is guaranteed basic survival, and money is decoupled from work. But in the near future we're going to see a lot of people beating down on anyone weaker to try to hold on to their feeling of power-over, and hopefully we'll see some new bottom-up systems where people can feel powerful in a healthy way.

While I'm writing about politics, I have one side comment: the Republican congress will bitterly regret their decision to not let Obama appoint a bland moderate Supreme Court justice, when they see the crazy destabilizing justices appointed by Trump, or the more liberal justices Hillary appoints with four years to keep trying.