Ran Prieurhttp://ranprieur.com/#9a417fe513f58988c3b5b1e84cfc57397194a79b2016-03-11T23:50:08ZRan Prieurhttp://ranprieur.com/ranprieur@gmail.comMarch 11.http://ranprieur.com/#feebb10ed8ca634e027b150e9a254ab6688ecb2f2016-03-11T23:50:08Z
March 11. Random stuff. Someone is trying to revive the Realpolitik subreddit which has been dormant for years, so yesterday I made a comment there to help out. I want it to succeed because I want a place to discuss politics with zero moral subtext. I'm just tired of the emotional reflex of pointing out villains and idiots. Maybe that's why my interests have shifted to altered states of consciousness and speculative technology -- because those subjects, more than politics and society, attract an emotional tone of curiosity and excitement. Well, one exciting political thing is that the Republicans seem to be headed for a floor fight at the convention, which hasn't happened in either party in decades.
Another exciting political event, still decades in the future, is an unconditional basic income, and a reader sends this inspiring blog post, YouTube as an Intrinsic Motivation Window: people are making videos purely for the love of it, and other people are learning difficult skills from videos, all with no money changing hands (except between advertisers and Google).
I've been making a lot of videos lately by using Avidemux to edit Electric Sheep computer animations to fit Big Blood songs, and I assume that no one else is interested, so I was unpleasantly surprised that these are going to my Google+ feed. I forget now why I got a Google+ account, but I never intended to post anything, and I think I've managed to shut off my videos going there but I'm not sure. If you actually want to see my videos, here's my channel.
If you want to hear music you like and haven't heard, you'll have better luck with Papel de arroz. I found that channel a few weeks ago and since then I've been going through it discovering all kinds of great stuff... well, mostly weird folk music. My momentary favorite band is The Sad Bastard Book Club, and here's a good song with a great title: If We Were Half as Clever, We'd Be Twice as Alive. Unless We Got the Math Wrong, In Which Case... Dead]]>
March 9.http://ranprieur.com/#2dc6ce5fdb222a2afc9ce05ba7e96cde84d210d12016-03-09T21:30:24Z
March 9. I like to lie in bed daydreaming, and lately one of my favorite things to think about is how I would live my life differently knowing what I know now. The point is not to dwell on regrets but to imagine possibilities, and my life could have been a hundred times better all the way from my first memory to the end of college, if I had known what I was doing.
The other day I started thinking beyond college... and drew a blank. That's why this society is so depressing: even if you understand what's going on and what's important, even if you're not crippled by poverty, there are still no good options in the adult world. We have to make money, and there is basically no overlap between activities that make money and activities that I enjoy so much that I would do them for free. My first thought would be to use my social connections (which I would have this time from playing college right) to get the easiest job I could find, continue looking for higher paying jobs that are still easy, work 10-20 years while living extremely frugally and saving up money, and then retire. But at this point my incompetent real self would have caught up to my imaginary better self, because of all the crazy stuff I did and the mistakes I learned from in my 20's and 30's. So maybe I would play it the same way but just do a lot of little things better.
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.
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March 4.http://ranprieur.com/#66d4f18e305a7c1ef933c43d1b1022f4d04c8b092016-03-04T16:40:16Z
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.http://ranprieur.com/#916b6b74da2ef0030fb7519f6fd7b9ee5c2d0bd02016-03-02T14:20:15Z
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.]]>