Cyborgs against AI: how to prepare for the onset of singularity
A little about double standards: when Sergey Stillavin demands that scientists stop the launch of the Large Hadron Collider, because he heard that there is a risk of a black hole, everyone laughs at him . When Stephen Hawking warns that artificial intelligence can enslave humanity - everyone is tense. The result, however, is the same in both cases - the LHC is launched, neural networks develop races with quantum computers. You can blame me for comparing the superstitious horror of the radio host’s average hand with the cautious warning of a world scientist is not entirely correct - but in both cases it is at least an occasion to think about what progress prepares us.
It can be understood why the Hawking warning did not have a significant impact on those interested in developing AI. It is not only a matter of the usual inertia of processes - when goals are set, plans are drawn up and budgets are allocated, something more than a voice of the concerned public is needed to stop the dispersing squad. On the side of researchers and programmers, common sense and all human experience: the predictions of alarmists have never come true, and the fears of the Luddites have made them a laughing stock from a historical perspective. European cities were not covered with horse manure, locomotive smoke didn’t kill crops and poisoned horses, labor migrants didn’t destroy any economy yet, 7 billion people did not die of hunger and didn’t even get bogged down in dirt and total war for resources, nuclear weapons did not lead to the apocalypse, the year 2000 did not destroy computer systems, and the LHC did not lead to the creation of a black hole.
We continue to be frightened: GMOs will infect everyone with cancer, high-quality medicine will lead to the degeneration of humanity, same-sex marriages will also lead to the degeneration of humanity, and artificial intelligence will enslave everyone who survives GMOs, high-quality medicine and same-sex marriages. However, the picture painted by the alarmist is so bleak that I do not exclude that the AI ​​with such initial data simply refuses to enslave us - they say, you know. This is if the alarmists are right. And alarmists are always wrong.
')
People may not fully understand how exactly certain processes take place, even if they are directly involved in them, but they understand the patterns: airplanes fly and do not flap their wings, and progress makes people's lives better. And the faster progress accelerates, the faster the quality of life grows.
Mainly because they always see one side of things, underestimating the fact that any movement leads to consequences not only directly, but also from the opposite, cooling the ardor of extrapolation fans.
Suppose it is more or less obvious that, after getting married, the bride calms down for a while - having one husband cancels the need for new ones. At least at the same time. The system has balanced itself. A less obvious, but nonetheless widely accepted fact is that raising living standards does not lead to endless reproduction. A surge in population growth is observed over a relatively short historical period - 2-3 decades, the life of one generation, after which the increased life expectancy and the decline in mortality are balanced by a drop in the birth rate. Simply put, when assessing the consequences of an event, one must ask not only the question “what will happen when”, but also “what will not happen when.” Like the bride, people understand that they do not need a lot of children if they are confident of the survival of the existing ones.
Evaluating the consequences of an event, one should ask not only the question “what will happen when”, but also “what will not happen when.”
The property of any system is the desire for balance. Without this, the system cannot be a system. No matter what surprises a progress can bring, at one level or another, balance and harmony are always restored - at the level of a person, society, civilization or humanity. However, for any system there is a call, it can only be redeemed a level higher. Suppose it is believed that global warming is a process that cannot be balanced by humanity itself, and therefore we are waited for by balancing at the planetary level — say, the melting of Arctic ice and the flooding of industrial areas and megalopolises that are usually located in the lower coastal areas — like comfortable, yes? - the ardor and the possibilities of mankind to warm up our ball further on will moderate. Whack, and the balance is restored again.
Many believe that climate cycles generally do not depend on human activity, and the problem of emissions will be settled at a civilizational level, without causing interference by the planetary forces. Like it or not - a moot point, but the principle, I think, is clear. Progress can theoretically generate challenges that cannot be balanced at the civilizational level, while preserving the movement of humanity for the better. It is better not to wake Mother Earth if we don’t want to share the fate of dinosaurs. By the way, the same Hawking believes that a global technological catastrophe in the next thousand or ten thousand years is inevitable - so it’s necessary to quickly equip living space outside the home planet. Who would argue, we are all for. But this is still a relatively distant prospect.
Returning to the topic of the article, in order to understand whether we are threatened with enslavement by artificial intelligence, it is necessary to understand whether the AI ​​refers to the challenges that will be counterbalanced by civilization or will it be balanced by civilization?
But before the onset of the singularity, mankind will surely give battle to any chance of the AI ​​finally to save or destroy it. Hawking remarked that humanity is trying to improve itself genetically - but not fast enough. However, this is not the only way of evolution. In addition to the evolution of biological, which sooner or later - rather sooner - will become manageable - is evolution and technological.
Once upon a time, science fiction writers believed that cyborgs could put an end to the human race. But in practice, cyborgization is likely to be the next stage in the development of humanity, something that is described not by the words “introduction”, “breakthrough” or “following a step”, which by definition implies some kind of effort, violence and fracture, but into which humanity will easily slide and happily, as now dived into social networks. Moreover, the wholesale iphoneization and socialization of people creates a demand for cyborgization, the opportunity to become cyborgs is expected to be stronger than the new iphone.
Okay, of course, no focus group will tell you that. As in 2006, she would not say that she needed an iPhone:
However, now you don’t need to look for a new iPhone or even a new Internet: the bottleneck of the entire IT industry is interfaces. The computing power and capabilities of our devices, the ability of the software to process our requests significantly exceed our capabilities for them to communicate these requests. Processing simple data arrays - for example, to collect statistics on all articles on Habré and rank them by views - require programming skills, although even a child can understand what needs to be done, and an average computer can do the work in minutes. But at the stage between “understanding” and “fulfilling” - the overwhelming barrier in the form of the need for programming skills. A bottleneck that prevents us from taking advantage of the opportunities that we have. A popular quote blames us for this:
But access to knowledge has no special value without the ability to use it. Even before any computer, mathematicians were taught that it was important not to remember formulas - they are all in reference books - but to be able to apply them. Now the greatest knowledge of humanity to the bulk of humanity is available in read only mode — they can do nothing with them, not even the simplest categorization and analysis — it cannot do without special knowledge.
The invention of the method of communication with machines without the intermediary of a code - or at least its manual entry - can be a breakthrough for the level of creation of the Internet as such. Mankind will get not just unlimited access to knowledge, but access to the broadest possibilities with this knowledge to operate and generate new knowledge. What is now called big data and feeds a limited number of highly paid specialists should and will be available to everyone - as once a mass education has languished at the root of the scribe profession.
The explosive growth of the intellectual power of humanity will become inevitable. There is another popular joke - about the fact that every cemetery is full of unrecognized geniuses. I do not think this is a joke. Many brilliant ideas, talented books and useful inventions have never seen the light simply because not everyone is able to devote his life to them or sometimes is simply not able to formulate them properly. Motivational articles and books are full of examples of people who have lost arms and learned how to write, code and play music with their feet. Or remember again the same Hawking.
But many people are unable even with both hands to use their full potential. And do not blame them - eyes, hands, voice - these are all interfaces. Powerful, comfortable, but imperfect. In varying degrees, they limit the creative possibilities of the human brain. There are many examples of how these capabilities are actually much wider than they might seem. Most of them are connected with technological progress.
One of the alarmist horror stories associated with it was that people would lose their jobs when machines started doing everything for them. However, as it turns out, with the development of technology, new types of work appear faster than the old ones fade away. And this is not only about the service sector, which used to be considered the lot of future people - they say, as long as cars feed, clothe and treat us, people will only have to provide various services to other people.
The real revolution made by the invention of the iPhone was not a touchscreen smartphone, but an open platform for distributing applications. People were given an interface - and hundreds of thousands, if not already millions, began to fill it with their ideas on how to apply it. Applications are serious business, because they change not only our everyday life, they change the very principles of our life. They could already now take care of our health and safety at a level that is unavailable to the richest people in the world, but everything again comes up against interfaces. We are too alienated from our devices.
Google Glass, Siri, Cortana and Google Now voice assistants and even the concepts of unusual octodon.mobi keyboards try to solve this problem. But these are all add-on add-ons - our hands, eyes and voice with all their limitations. The real and obvious solution on the surface: you need to get closer to the brain.
Mankind is ripe for cyborgization, it craves cyborgization, it needs cyborgization and it will slide into this state as naturally as it now climbs into its smartphone to check email or new likes on Vkontakte.
The most beautiful thing is that people will not even understand how they became cyborg - they just buy another Apple iMind or Google Thoughts, no matter how they look or connect with our nervous system - like another gadget that delays us into the world wide web. In the end, 90% of the capabilities of smart watches - to inform us about notifications from social networks, mail and instant messengers - and only then count the time, steps and pulse. Under this sauce, people will take any brain interface - if only it was packed in a box more beautiful.
Another advantage of cyborgization is that it will remove the growing inequality of generations, which in the future could be more terrible than social inequality - if you think all these “grandmothers” for the older generation - this is simply humiliating. Now imagine yourself in 30 years in the face of future 10-year-olds - are you ready for the “grandfathers”? But the problem is not the difference in intelligence (although intellectual acceleration also exists), but in the need of learning new, ever-changing interfaces of interaction with computers. Calls to teach children to program only remove a part of the problem - those who have already learned something will always be in a position to catch up with those who learn the newest and most relevant from the state of tabula rasa.
It is like learning foreign languages ​​- we all know that they need to be taught, and we learn, as far as possible, one by one - sometimes forgetting that the meaning is not in the knowledge of new languages ​​as such, but in communication and the exchange of knowledge and ideas , feelings and ideas with people of a different culture. From this point of view, language is not a means of communication, but another barrier, another interface that limits the capabilities of man and humanity, and the task of progress is not to learn to ride through this barrier as an exemplary race horse, but to eliminate it entirely. Zero its value in communication.
Neuro interfaces for humans and machines should do the same. And to do it quickly - returning to the theme of the war of man and machines, more precisely, the future man in the reality of the existing and existing AI - perhaps the best guarantee that we will never lose the evolutionary race to machines will become machines themselves. Or at least learn to speak the same language with them.
It can be understood why the Hawking warning did not have a significant impact on those interested in developing AI. It is not only a matter of the usual inertia of processes - when goals are set, plans are drawn up and budgets are allocated, something more than a voice of the concerned public is needed to stop the dispersing squad. On the side of researchers and programmers, common sense and all human experience: the predictions of alarmists have never come true, and the fears of the Luddites have made them a laughing stock from a historical perspective. European cities were not covered with horse manure, locomotive smoke didn’t kill crops and poisoned horses, labor migrants didn’t destroy any economy yet, 7 billion people did not die of hunger and didn’t even get bogged down in dirt and total war for resources, nuclear weapons did not lead to the apocalypse, the year 2000 did not destroy computer systems, and the LHC did not lead to the creation of a black hole.
We continue to be frightened: GMOs will infect everyone with cancer, high-quality medicine will lead to the degeneration of humanity, same-sex marriages will also lead to the degeneration of humanity, and artificial intelligence will enslave everyone who survives GMOs, high-quality medicine and same-sex marriages. However, the picture painted by the alarmist is so bleak that I do not exclude that the AI ​​with such initial data simply refuses to enslave us - they say, you know. This is if the alarmists are right. And alarmists are always wrong.
')
People may not fully understand how exactly certain processes take place, even if they are directly involved in them, but they understand the patterns: airplanes fly and do not flap their wings, and progress makes people's lives better. And the faster progress accelerates, the faster the quality of life grows.
Mainly because they always see one side of things, underestimating the fact that any movement leads to consequences not only directly, but also from the opposite, cooling the ardor of extrapolation fans.
Suppose it is more or less obvious that, after getting married, the bride calms down for a while - having one husband cancels the need for new ones. At least at the same time. The system has balanced itself. A less obvious, but nonetheless widely accepted fact is that raising living standards does not lead to endless reproduction. A surge in population growth is observed over a relatively short historical period - 2-3 decades, the life of one generation, after which the increased life expectancy and the decline in mortality are balanced by a drop in the birth rate. Simply put, when assessing the consequences of an event, one must ask not only the question “what will happen when”, but also “what will not happen when.” Like the bride, people understand that they do not need a lot of children if they are confident of the survival of the existing ones.
Evaluating the consequences of an event, one should ask not only the question “what will happen when”, but also “what will not happen when.”
The property of any system is the desire for balance. Without this, the system cannot be a system. No matter what surprises a progress can bring, at one level or another, balance and harmony are always restored - at the level of a person, society, civilization or humanity. However, for any system there is a call, it can only be redeemed a level higher. Suppose it is believed that global warming is a process that cannot be balanced by humanity itself, and therefore we are waited for by balancing at the planetary level — say, the melting of Arctic ice and the flooding of industrial areas and megalopolises that are usually located in the lower coastal areas — like comfortable, yes? - the ardor and the possibilities of mankind to warm up our ball further on will moderate. Whack, and the balance is restored again.
Many believe that climate cycles generally do not depend on human activity, and the problem of emissions will be settled at a civilizational level, without causing interference by the planetary forces. Like it or not - a moot point, but the principle, I think, is clear. Progress can theoretically generate challenges that cannot be balanced at the civilizational level, while preserving the movement of humanity for the better. It is better not to wake Mother Earth if we don’t want to share the fate of dinosaurs. By the way, the same Hawking believes that a global technological catastrophe in the next thousand or ten thousand years is inevitable - so it’s necessary to quickly equip living space outside the home planet. Who would argue, we are all for. But this is still a relatively distant prospect.
Returning to the topic of the article, in order to understand whether we are threatened with enslavement by artificial intelligence, it is necessary to understand whether the AI ​​refers to the challenges that will be counterbalanced by civilization or will it be balanced by civilization?
Chance to go round the singularity on the goat curve
But before the onset of the singularity, mankind will surely give battle to any chance of the AI ​​finally to save or destroy it. Hawking remarked that humanity is trying to improve itself genetically - but not fast enough. However, this is not the only way of evolution. In addition to the evolution of biological, which sooner or later - rather sooner - will become manageable - is evolution and technological.
Once upon a time, science fiction writers believed that cyborgs could put an end to the human race. But in practice, cyborgization is likely to be the next stage in the development of humanity, something that is described not by the words “introduction”, “breakthrough” or “following a step”, which by definition implies some kind of effort, violence and fracture, but into which humanity will easily slide and happily, as now dived into social networks. Moreover, the wholesale iphoneization and socialization of people creates a demand for cyborgization, the opportunity to become cyborgs is expected to be stronger than the new iphone.
Okay, of course, no focus group will tell you that. As in 2006, she would not say that she needed an iPhone:
Creating a product based on focus groups is truly difficult. Most often, people do not understand what they really need until they themselves show it.
- Steve Jobs, BusinessWeek (May 25, 1998)
However, now you don’t need to look for a new iPhone or even a new Internet: the bottleneck of the entire IT industry is interfaces. The computing power and capabilities of our devices, the ability of the software to process our requests significantly exceed our capabilities for them to communicate these requests. Processing simple data arrays - for example, to collect statistics on all articles on Habré and rank them by views - require programming skills, although even a child can understand what needs to be done, and an average computer can do the work in minutes. But at the stage between “understanding” and “fulfilling” - the overwhelming barrier in the form of the need for programming skills. A bottleneck that prevents us from taking advantage of the opportunities that we have. A popular quote blames us for this:
But access to knowledge has no special value without the ability to use it. Even before any computer, mathematicians were taught that it was important not to remember formulas - they are all in reference books - but to be able to apply them. Now the greatest knowledge of humanity to the bulk of humanity is available in read only mode — they can do nothing with them, not even the simplest categorization and analysis — it cannot do without special knowledge.
The invention of the method of communication with machines without the intermediary of a code - or at least its manual entry - can be a breakthrough for the level of creation of the Internet as such. Mankind will get not just unlimited access to knowledge, but access to the broadest possibilities with this knowledge to operate and generate new knowledge. What is now called big data and feeds a limited number of highly paid specialists should and will be available to everyone - as once a mass education has languished at the root of the scribe profession.
The explosive growth of the intellectual power of humanity will become inevitable. There is another popular joke - about the fact that every cemetery is full of unrecognized geniuses. I do not think this is a joke. Many brilliant ideas, talented books and useful inventions have never seen the light simply because not everyone is able to devote his life to them or sometimes is simply not able to formulate them properly. Motivational articles and books are full of examples of people who have lost arms and learned how to write, code and play music with their feet. Or remember again the same Hawking.
But many people are unable even with both hands to use their full potential. And do not blame them - eyes, hands, voice - these are all interfaces. Powerful, comfortable, but imperfect. In varying degrees, they limit the creative possibilities of the human brain. There are many examples of how these capabilities are actually much wider than they might seem. Most of them are connected with technological progress.
One of the alarmist horror stories associated with it was that people would lose their jobs when machines started doing everything for them. However, as it turns out, with the development of technology, new types of work appear faster than the old ones fade away. And this is not only about the service sector, which used to be considered the lot of future people - they say, as long as cars feed, clothe and treat us, people will only have to provide various services to other people.
The real revolution made by the invention of the iPhone was not a touchscreen smartphone, but an open platform for distributing applications. People were given an interface - and hundreds of thousands, if not already millions, began to fill it with their ideas on how to apply it. Applications are serious business, because they change not only our everyday life, they change the very principles of our life. They could already now take care of our health and safety at a level that is unavailable to the richest people in the world, but everything again comes up against interfaces. We are too alienated from our devices.
Google Glass, Siri, Cortana and Google Now voice assistants and even the concepts of unusual octodon.mobi keyboards try to solve this problem. But these are all add-on add-ons - our hands, eyes and voice with all their limitations. The real and obvious solution on the surface: you need to get closer to the brain.
Mankind is ripe for cyborgization, it craves cyborgization, it needs cyborgization and it will slide into this state as naturally as it now climbs into its smartphone to check email or new likes on Vkontakte.
The most beautiful thing is that people will not even understand how they became cyborg - they just buy another Apple iMind or Google Thoughts, no matter how they look or connect with our nervous system - like another gadget that delays us into the world wide web. In the end, 90% of the capabilities of smart watches - to inform us about notifications from social networks, mail and instant messengers - and only then count the time, steps and pulse. Under this sauce, people will take any brain interface - if only it was packed in a box more beautiful.
Another advantage of cyborgization is that it will remove the growing inequality of generations, which in the future could be more terrible than social inequality - if you think all these “grandmothers” for the older generation - this is simply humiliating. Now imagine yourself in 30 years in the face of future 10-year-olds - are you ready for the “grandfathers”? But the problem is not the difference in intelligence (although intellectual acceleration also exists), but in the need of learning new, ever-changing interfaces of interaction with computers. Calls to teach children to program only remove a part of the problem - those who have already learned something will always be in a position to catch up with those who learn the newest and most relevant from the state of tabula rasa.
It is like learning foreign languages ​​- we all know that they need to be taught, and we learn, as far as possible, one by one - sometimes forgetting that the meaning is not in the knowledge of new languages ​​as such, but in communication and the exchange of knowledge and ideas , feelings and ideas with people of a different culture. From this point of view, language is not a means of communication, but another barrier, another interface that limits the capabilities of man and humanity, and the task of progress is not to learn to ride through this barrier as an exemplary race horse, but to eliminate it entirely. Zero its value in communication.
Neuro interfaces for humans and machines should do the same. And to do it quickly - returning to the theme of the war of man and machines, more precisely, the future man in the reality of the existing and existing AI - perhaps the best guarantee that we will never lose the evolutionary race to machines will become machines themselves. Or at least learn to speak the same language with them.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/369151/
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