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Olvasónapló 15 #bookblogger #könyvesblog #könyvesblogger #olvasónapló #olvasonaplo.net

[kakitunder]

In 1907, when he was in his thirties, Bertrand Russel penned a gushing tribute to the glories of mathematics. "Rightly viewed", Russel wrote, mathematics "possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show". These lines, which play up the transcendent image of mathematics, are often quoted in mathematical popularizations. What one seldom encounters in such books, however, is the rather different view that Russel expressed in his late eighties, when he dismissed his youthful rhapsodizing as "largely nonsense". Mathematics, the aged Russel writes, "has ceased to seem to me non-human in its subject matter. I have come to believe, though very reluctantly, that it consists of tautologies. I fear that, to a mind of sufficient intellectual power, the whole of mathematics would appear trivial, as trivial as the statement that a four-footed animal is an animal." So, in the course of his life, Russel underwent an evolution in his thinking about mathematics. I think our civilization will have undergone a similar evolution by the Year Million. [...] Our descendants will view mathematics merely as an elaborate network of tautologies, of strictly local import, that has proved expeditious as a bookkeeping scheme for coping with the world. [...] Mathematicians like Hardy acknowledged two motives. One is the sheer pleasure of doing mathematics. The other is the sense that mathematicians are like astronomers peering out at a Platonic cosmos of numbers, a cosmos that transcends human culture and any other civilizations there might be, either now or in the future. Hardy adds, "317 is a prime, not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped in one way rather than another, but because it is so, because mathematical reality is built that way". Alain Connes, a French mathematician who is widely deemed to be a leading candidate to prove the Riemann hypothesis, is also unabashed in his Platonism. "For me", Connes has said, "the sequence of prime numbers ... has a reality that is far more permanent than the physical reality surrounding us." But will this remain true in the Year Million? Prime numbers will probably retain this transhuman reputation only until we come to understand them more completely. Then we will see that, like the rest of mathematics (or like religion, for that matter), they are man-made, a terrestrial artifact. [...] My prediction, then, is that long before the Year Million, mathematicians will awaken from their collective Platonist dream. No one will give a thought to beaming prime numbers throughout the cosmos. Our descendants will dismiss them in the manner of the hero of Bertrand Russel's story, "The Mathematician's Nightmare", by saying, "Avaunt! You are only Symbolic Conveniences!"

Jim Holt: The Laughter of Copernicus (Year Million)

[kakitunder]

A few hundred thousand years ago, in early human (or hominid) prehistory, growth was so slow that it took on the order of one million years for human productive capacity to increase sufficiently to sustain an additional one million individuals living at subsistence level. By 5000 bc, following the Agricultural Revolution, the rate of growth had increased to the point where the same amount of growth took just two centuries. Today, following the Industrial Revolution, the world economy grows on average by that amount every ninety minutes. Even the present rate of growth will produce impressive results if maintained for a moderately long time. If the world economy continues to grow at the same pace as it has over the past fifty years, then the world will be some 4.8 times richer by 2050 and about 34 times richer by 2100 than it is today. Yet the prospect of continuing on a steady exponential growth path pales in comparison to what would happen if the world were to experience another step change in the rate of growth comparable in magnitude to those associated with the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. The economist Robin Hanson estimates, based on historical economic and population data, a characteristic world economy doubling time for Pleistocene hunter–gatherer society of 224,000 years; for farming society, 909 years; and for industrial society, 6.3 years. (In Hanson’s model, the present epoch is a mixture of the farming and the industrial growth modes—the world economy as a whole is not yet growing at the 6.3-year doubling rate.) If another such transition to a different growth mode were to occur, and it were of similar magnitude to the previous two, it would result in a new growth regime in which the world economy would double in size about every two weeks. Such a growth rate seems fantastic by current lights. Observers in earlier epochs might have found it equally preposterous to suppose that the world economy would one day be doubling several times within a single lifespan. Yet that is the extraordinary condition we now take to be ordinary.

Nick Bostrom: Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

[kakitunder]

Five hundred million years ago brains appeared, and then doubled in size every thirty million years. About two million years ago, protohumans began to double in number every quarter million years, until ten thousand years ago, when with the advent of farming, our population began to double each millennium. With the Industrial Revolution about two hundred years ago, we began to double our economy every fifteen years. Statistics of prior transitions suggest that within this century we might somehow transition again, and then double (incredible as it might seem) every two weeks.

Robin Hanson: The Rapacious Hardscrapple Frontier (Year Million)

[kakitunder]

Most of the misunderstandings regarding science and religion result from faulty definitions of religion. All too often, people confuse religion with superstition, spirituality, belief in supernatural powers or belief in gods. Religion is none of these things. Religion cannot be equated with superstition, because most people are unlikely to call their cherished beliefs ‘superstitions’. We always believe in ‘the truth’. It’s only other people who believe in superstitions. Similarly, few people put their faith in supernatural powers. For those who believe in demons, demons aren’t supernatural. They are an integral part of nature, just like porcupines, scorpions and germs. Modern physicians blame disease on invisible germs, and voodoo priests blame disease on invisible demons. There’s nothing supernatural about it: you make some demon angry, so the demon enters your body and causes you pain. What could be more natural than that? Only those who don’t believe in demons think of them as standing apart from the natural order of things. [...] Defining religion as ‘belief in gods’ is also problematic. We tend to say that a devout Christian is religious because she believes in God, whereas a fervent communist isn’t religious, because communism has no gods. However, religion is created by humans rather than by gods, and it is defined by its social function rather than by the existence of deities. Religion is anything that confers superhuman legitimacy on human social structures. It legitimises human norms and values by arguing that they reflect superhuman laws. Religion asserts that we humans are subject to a system of moral laws that we did not invent and that we cannot change. A devout Jew would say that this is the system of moral laws created by God and revealed in the Bible. A Hindu would say that Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva created the laws, which were revealed to us humans in the Vedas. Other religions, from Buddhism and Daoism to Nazism, communism and liberalism, argue that the superhuman laws are natural laws, and not the creation of this or that god. Of course, each believes in a different set of natural laws discovered and revealed by different seers and prophets, from Buddha and Laozi to Hitler and Lenin. [...] Liberals, communists and followers of other modern creeds dislike describing their own system as a ‘religion’, because they identify religion with superstitions and supernatural powers. If you tell communists or liberals that they are religious, they think you accuse them of blindly believing in groundless pipe dreams. In fact, it means only that they believe in some system of moral laws that wasn’t invented by humans, but which humans must nevertheless obey. As far as we know, all human societies believe in this. Every society tells its members that they must obey some superhuman moral law, and that breaking this law will result in catastrophe. [...] The assertion that religion is a tool for preserving social order and for organising large-scale cooperation may vex many people for whom it represents first and foremost a spiritual path. However, just as the gap between religion and science is smaller than we commonly think, so the gap between religion and spirituality is much bigger. Religion is a deal, whereas spirituality is a journey. Religion gives a complete description of the world, and offers us a well-defined contract with predetermined goals. ‘God exists. He told us to behave in certain ways. If you obey God, you’ll be admitted to heaven. If you disobey Him, you’ll burn in hell.’ The very clarity of this deal allows society to define common norms and values that regulate human behaviour. Spiritual journeys are nothing like that. They usually take people in mysterious ways towards unknown destinations. [...] Such journeys are fundamentally different from religions, because religions seek to cement the worldly order whereas spirituality seeks to escape it. Often enough, the most important demand from spiritual wanderers is to challenge the beliefs and conventions of dominant religions. [...] For religions, spirituality is a dangerous threat. Religions typically strive to rein in the spiritual quests of their followers, and many religious systems were challenged not by laypeople preoccupied with food, sex and power, but rather by spiritual truth-seekers who wanted more than platitudes. [...] From a historical perspective, the spiritual journey is always tragic, for it is a lonely path fit for individuals rather than for entire societies. Human cooperation requires firm answers rather than just questions, and those who foam against stultified religious structures end up forging new structures in their place. It happened to the dualists, whose spiritual journeys became religious establishments. It happened to Martin Luther, who after challenging the laws, institutions and rituals of the Catholic Church found himself writing new law books, founding new institutions and inventing new ceremonies. It happened even to Buddha and Jesus. In their uncompromising quest for the truth they subverted the laws, rituals and structures of traditional Hinduism and Judaism. But eventually more laws, more rituals and more structures were created in their name than in the name of any other person in history.

Yuval Noah Harari: Homo Deus

[kakitunder]

Collective superintelligence could be either loosely or tightly integrated. To illustrate a case of loosely integrated collective superintelligence, imagine a planet, MegaEarth, which has the same level of communication and coordination technologies that we currently have on the real Earth but with a population one million times as large. With such a huge population, the total intellectual workforce on MegaEarth would be correspondingly larger than on our planet. Suppose that a scientific genius of the caliber of a Newton or an Einstein arises at least once for every 10 billion people: then on MegaEarth there would be 700,000 such geniuses living contemporaneously, alongside proportionally vast multitudes of slightly lesser talents. New ideas and technologies would be developed at a furious pace, and global civilization on MegaEarth would constitute a loosely integrated collective superintelligence. [...] In some domains, quantity is a poor substitute for quality. One solitary genius working out of a cork-lined bedroom can write In Search of Lost Time. Could an equivalent masterpiece be produced by recruiting an office building full of literary hacks? [...] There might thus be some problems that are solvable by a quality superintelligence, and perhaps by a speed superintelligence, yet which a loosely integrated collective superintelligence cannot solve (other than by first amplifying its own intelligence). We cannot clearly see what all these problems are, but we can characterize them in general terms. They would tend to be problems involving multiple complex interdependencies that do not permit of independently verifiable solution steps: problems that therefore cannot be solved in a piecemeal fashion, and that might require qualitatively new kinds of understanding or new representational frameworks that are too deep or too complicated for the current edition of mortals to discover or use effectively. Some types of artistic creation and strategic cognition might fall into this category. Some types of scientific breakthrough, perhaps, likewise. And one can speculate that the tardiness and wobbliness of humanity’s progress on many of the “eternal problems” of philosophy are due to the unsuitability of the human cortex for philosophical work. On this view, our most celebrated philosophers are like dogs walking on their hind legs—just barely attaining the threshold level of performance required for engaging in the activity at all.

Nick Bostrom: Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

[kakitunder]

Note that the threshold for collective superintelligence is indexed to the performance levels of the present — that is, the early twenty-first century. Over the course of human prehistory, and again over the course of human history, humanity’s collective intelligence has grown by very large factors. World population, for example, has increased by at least a factor of a thousand since the Pleistocene. On this basis alone, current levels of human collective intelligence could be regarded as approaching superintelligence relative to a Pleistocene baseline. Some improvements in communications technologies — especially spoken language, but perhaps also cities, writing, and printing — could also be argued to have, individually or in combination, provided super-sized boosts, in the sense that if another innovation of comparable impact to our collective intellectual problem-solving capacity were to happen, it would result in collective superintelligence. A certain kind of reader will be tempted at this point to interject that modern society does not seem so particularly intelligent. Perhaps some unwelcome political decision has just been made in the reader’s home country, and the apparent unwisdom of that decision now looms large in the reader’s mind as evidence of the mental incapacity of the modern era. And is it not the case that contemporary humanity is idolizing material consumption, depleting natural resources, polluting the environment, decimating species diversity, all the while failing to remedy screaming global injustices and neglecting paramount humanistic or spiritual values? However, setting aside the question of how modernity’s shortcomings stack up against the not-so-inconsiderable failings of earlier epochs, nothing in our definition of collective superintelligence implies that a society with greater collective intelligence is necessarily better off. The definition does not even imply that the more collectively intelligent society is wiser. We can think of wisdom as the ability to get the important things approximately right. It is then possible to imagine an organization composed of a very large cadre of very efficiently coordinated knowledge workers, who collectively can solve intellectual problems across many very general domains. This organization, let us suppose, can operate most kinds of businesses, invent most kinds of technologies, and optimize most kinds of processes. Even so, it might get a few key big-picture issues entirely wrong — for instance, it may fail to take proper precautions against existential risks — and as a result pursue a short explosive growth spurt that ends ingloriously in total collapse. Such an organization could have a very high degree of collective intelligence; if sufficiently high, the organization is a collective superintelligence. We should resist the temptation to roll every normatively desirable attribute into one giant amorphous concept of mental functioning, as though one could never find one admirable trait without all the others being equally present. Instead, we should recognize that there can exist instrumentally powerful information processing systems — intelligent systems — that are neither inherently good nor reliably wise.

Nick Bostrom: Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

[kakitunder]

Humanity has gained enormously in collective intelligence over the course of history and prehistory. The gains come from many sources, including innovations in communications technology, such as writing and printing, and above all the introduction of language itself; increases in the size of the world population and the density of habitation; various improvements in organizational techniques and epistemic norms; and a gradual accumulation of institutional capital. In general terms, a system’s collective intelligence is limited by the abilities of its member minds, the overheads in communicating relevant information between them, and the various distortions and inefficiencies that pervade human organizations. If communication overheads are reduced (including not only equipment costs but also response latencies, time and attention burdens, and other factors), then larger and more densely connected organizations become feasible. The same could happen if fixes are found for some of the bureaucratic deformations that warp organizational life — wasteful status games, mission creep, concealment or falsification of information, and other agency problems. Even partial solutions to these problems could pay hefty dividends for collective intelligence. The technological and institutional innovations that could contribute to the growth of our collective intelligence are many and various. For example, subsidized prediction markets might foster truth-seeking norms and improve forecasting on contentious scientific and social issues. Lie detectors (should it prove feasible to make ones that are reliable and easy to use) could reduce the scope for deception in human affairs. Self-deception detectors might be even more powerful. Even without newfangled brain technologies, some forms of deception might become harder to practice thanks to increased availability of many kinds of data, including reputations and track records, or the promulgation of strong epistemic norms and rationality culture. Voluntary and involuntary surveillance will amass vast amounts of information about human behavior. Social networking sites are already used by over a billion people to share personal details: soon, these people might begin uploading continuous life recordings from microphones and video cameras embedded in their smart phones or eyeglass frames. Automated analysis of such data streams will enable many new applications (sinister as well as benign, of course).

Nick Bostrom: Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies