Jersey Shore is better than cat burning.

Posted on November 4, 2012 by Scott Jackisch

I met a friend for a chat this evening and we walked down Piedmont avenue having the aristocrat vs commoner argument. I am not sure I fully understood his position, but it seemed to be that something was lost as the European landed aristocracy was supplanted by democracy. Sophisticated statescraft honed across centuries was cast aside and replaced with what? (cough – there used to be two new wars a year there, for 600 years) Democrats are nothing but unwashed merchants and tradesmen with no sense of decorum. I have had a similar argument at the Less Wrong party before the Singularity Summit. One fellow there was arguing that democracies have led to a spiritual decay. I get confused when these hard rationalists start throwing the word “spiritual” around so I asked for clarification. Another participant supplied this example: Spirituality is the idea that Wagner is in some way superior to Britney Spears.

Ah, these reactionaries, they do strike a chord don’t they? This recollection recalls to mind the great Moldbug-Hanson debate of Foresight 2010. Moldbug said bring back the monarchs (Steve Jobs for Dictator!) and Hanson said let the markets rule us. I guess I have to side with Hanson’s markets though my heart more truly lies with the democrats throughout history who have distributed the decision making power beyond the elites. But I digress from my digression.

As we walked down Piedmont avenue this evening, the topic turned to Culture. “Surely no artist today could match the majesty of the Sistine Chapel?” my friend asked. So we have lost something. Well I guess that’s true, but the sponsors of this wondrous propaganda piece also gave us the charming Inquisition:

for punishment does not take place primarily and per se for the correction and good of the person punished, but for the public good in order that others may become terrified and weaned away from the evils they would commit

Good stuff. Besides, I haven’t seen it in person, but that Sistine Chapel art doesn’t really speak to me. I don’t much go for that tacky Italian stuff with panel mushed upon panel and every nook and cranny bursting with cherubs and whatnot. And I have some reservations about this God fellow that plays a prominent role. What about us humans down here? I can’t get into classical music much either, certainly not that overblown Wagner stuff. I might literally prefer Britney. I can handle a nice mellow Brahms sonata here and there, but since we can still access classical culture, what have we really lost?

Art should give expression to those things we are feeling but cannot express. “Are we so stunted emotionally?” asked my friend? Yes! Those of us who cannot paint or dance or write literature or play music are all stunted. We cannot express ourselves in these media, so the artist that shows us something we can relate to in film or music or art has given a new voice to our yearning and suffering and joy. This is a gift of illumination. Damn, it makes me want to go look at art or something.

That’s when a bunch of Mills College students butted into the conversation. Some lamented this loss of culture, others saw a paternalistic threat in this yearning (justified or not.) One young woman (who I will call the Liberal) brought up the good point that great art is certainly being made now, but we can’t see which of it is timeless until it’s been tested by time. She did mention Coltrane as a likely candidate. Certainly some scribblers worthy of note have emerged in this uncouth age.

The Liberal’s sparring partner (the Conservative) countered that we are isolated from one another and distracted by trivialities like “Jersey Shore.” So we can’t talk to one another and our attention spans have decayed to 140 characters. The Liberal defended the great pluralism of the USA and pointed out that she saw the Conservative take part in the community of a music show. I agree with this. At one time no peasant could travel more than 20 miles from their place of birth. They had no choice but to accept the religion and culture of their village. But today we have the freedom to go and find our own intentional communities or just Futurist meetups as the case may be. Sure the old culture offered comfort, and freedom is hard but the old cultures mostly sucked actually.

Take genital mutilation. That’s cultural. I place it right along side of the Sistine Chapel as an example of culture. Most of the Mills Students agreed that we need to take the good and leave the bad behind in regard to the old cultures. But I wonder how divisible cultural artifacts truly are. Is the Sistine Chapel integrally linked to oppression and Inquisition? Can the beauty really be expunged of the horrors that funded it and the message it inheres? Some things were lost with the passing of Culture. Some horrible things along with the great.

No, things are not perfect now. I am not thrilled that half the world still lives on less than $1,225 a year. Call me a Whig, but I am with Pinker on the whole progress thing. Sure Jersey Shore plays on our primate need to determine the status of others, but it’s a hell of a lot better than burning cats for entertainment.

Future Salon – Future of Health: Adam Bosworth, Christine Peterson, and Faheem Ahmed

Posted on November 2, 2012 by Scott Jackisch

I attended my first Future Salon this evening and heard Adam Bosworth, Christine Peterson, and Faheem Ahmed give presentations. The salon was held at the SAP campus in Mountain View.

Christine Peterson started out the talks with a presentation on Quantified Self, life extension, and personalized medicine. The audience was mostly aware of QS already, but some expressed disdain for the life extension idea during the Q&A. One audience member complained that the fountain of youth has been sought for centuries but no one has delivered on the promise of extended life span. I thought that this was a bit ironic given the steady increase in life span over time and the fact that QS and modern life extension techniques haven’t really been in use long enough to show a longevity effect. However, Peterson responded with sympathy and actually said that she was more interested in health extension. She mentioned concierge doctors as a good resource to help with this.

Bosworth talked about his new startup Keas which is a corporate wellness app that uses gamefication to achieve captology. He pointed out that personalization is unhelpful in a team environment. Having just a few core health goals gives everyone a common experience to share. He listed four activities to achieve better heath: eat less food overall, eat more greens, reduce stress, and exercise more. He dismissed QS as being for Silicon Valley data geeks who were mostly healthy already. His focus is on the average American who is overweight, stressed, eats a poor diet, and neglects exercise because that is where he feels he can do the most good. He mentioned that he wanted to set aside his work on “legos for adults” and do something to help humanity.

Ahmed talked about his own experience as a care giver for older members of his family as well as his son. He presented an app he led the development of at SAP called Care Circles. This app helps care givers manage their care plans and team members. It provides assistance in building care strategies as well as journals and customizable data trackers. The social elements allow care givers to share medical data with anyone they want which bypasses HIPAA barriers to social apps that most health providers face. Ahmed mentioned that generation X was a sandwich generation having a larger population of baby boomers to care for as well as a large generation Y. I sympathized with this, having had to help with the care giving my girlfriend did during her sister’s cancer. This tool would have been really useful to keep track of progress and tasklists.

How unlikely is safe AI? Questioning the doomsday scenarios.

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Scott Jackisch

I have always been dubious of the assumption that unfriendly AI is the most likely outcome for our future. The Singularity Institute refers skeptics like myself to Eliezer Yudkowsky’s paper: Complex Value Systems are Required to Realize Valuable Futures. I just reread Yudkowsky’s argument and contrasted it with Alexander Kruel’s counterpoint in H+ magazine. H+ seems to have several articles that take exception with SI’s positions. The 2012 H+ conference in San Francisco should be interesing. I wonder how it much it will contrast with the Singularity Summit.

One thing that bothers me about Yudkowsky’s argument is that on the one hand he insists that AI will always do exactly what we tell it to do, not what we mean for it to do, but somehow this rigid instruction set could be flexible enough to outsmart all of humanity and tile the solar system with smiley faces. There is something inconsistent in this position. How can something be so smart that it can figure out nanotechnology but so stupid that it thinks smiley faces are a good outcome? It’s sort of a grey goo argument.

It seems ridiculous to even try constraining something with superhuman intelligence. Consider this Nutrient Gradient analogy:

Bacteria value nutrient gradients.
Humans evolved from bacteria achieving a comparable IQ increase to that which a superhuman AI might achieve as it evolves.
A superhuman AI might look upon human values the same way we view bacterial interest in nutrient gradients. The AI would understand why we think human values are important, but it would see a much broader picture of reality.

Of course this sets aside the problem that humans don’t really have many universally shared values. Only Western values are cool. All the rest suck.

And this entire premise that an algorithm can maximize for X doesn’t really hold water when applied to a complex reflexive system like a human smile. I mean how do you code that? There is a vigorous amount of hand waving involved there. I can see detecting a smile, but how to you code for all the stuff needed to create change in the world? A program that can create molecular smiley faces by spraying bits out to the internet? Really? But then I just don’t buy recursively self-improving AI in the first place.

Not that I am against the Singularity Institute like some people are, far from it. Givewell.org doesn’t think that SI is a good charity to invest in, but I agree with my friend David S. that they are poorly equipped to even evaluate existential risk (Karnofsky admits existential risk analysis is only a GiveWell Lab project). I for one am very happy that the Singularity Institute exists. I disagree that their action might be more dangerous than their inaction. I would much rather live in the universe where their benevolent AI God rules than one where the DARPA funded AI God rules. Worse yet would be a Chinese AI implementing a galaxy wide police state.

This friendliness question is in some ways a political question. How should we be ruled? I was talking with one of the SI related people at Foresight a couple of years ago and they were commenting about how much respect they were developing for the US Constitution. The balance of powers between the Executive, Legislative, and Judiciary is cool. It might actually serve as good blueprint for friendly AI. Monarchists (and AI singleton subscribers) rightly point out that a good dictator can achieve more good than a democracy can with all it’s bickering. But a democracy is more fault tolerant, at least to the degree that it avoids the problem of one bad dictator screwing things up. Of course Lessig would point out our other problems. But politics is messy, similar to all human cultural artifacts. So again, good luck coding for that.