Technological singularity: the modern myth about the end of the world under the guise of a progress hypothesis
Reflections on technological singularity outside, in fact, attempts to advance in understanding the processes behind this term are hidden - that is, in fact, reflections on the attitude to technological singularity - this is a kind of real Kobayashi Maru test for people of the early 21st century, meaning to realize what the idea of ​​the unknowable means, the idea of ​​losing control and the idea of ​​the inevitability of this on the scale of all mankind.
In theory, this is a simple psychotherapeutic practice: to find inside a point on which conscious recognition of the conditions of the game will catch balance with acceptance by the subconscious - without stalling in denial, anger, bargaining, or despair.
')
And this test, which, judging by the most part of the reasoning about it, people exclusively feil.
And the author of the post “To be a technophobe is meaningless, even if technophobia is justified,” despite the promising title, does not seem to be an exception, having come to bargaining, that is, at a stage when people try to make sense of the meaning of this concept in their circumstances that deny the very possibility of this, by rationalization. arttom bargained on the idea of ​​a “black box”, under the terms of which:
That is, too, have not yet coped with this exercise. And it's very bad.
That is, on the one hand, this is generally an optional lesson: you can, with varying degrees of justification, not at all believe in the concept of technological singularity, that this is a correct projection of processes into the future — or, trivially, not to know about it.
But people who know and share this view put themselves in the condition of the inevitability of psychological and rational choice, in which all other options, except full acceptance, are worse, because in the event of a real turn of events in this way, these will be hot spots of increasing tension hotbeds of growing emotional pressure, taking over the mind with unpredictable consequences, to the point that the distracted part of humanity will bring a catastrophic end to the entire civilization according to a scenario of self-fulfilling Minorities.
And to avoid this ridiculous, monti-paintedon absurd end is possible all the same by accepting the inevitability of the unknowable, which includes the unknowability and whether this will be the end at all. (A nightmare for neurotics who find it easier to take guaranteed death than to lose the illusion of control to that extent).
That is, whatever one may say, Kobayashi Maru.
Effective for me personally, by searching for harmony, it turned out to be one of the most frightening scenarios for events: that people themselves create a successor for themselves, a replacement, executioners.
Let us suppose.
Then everything is simple: appreciate the beauty of the game while it lasts.
However, honestly going through this mental scenario right up to the threshold of the giant human beings of SkyNet, I took a step - and, finding myself “on the other side” of the technological singularity, I turned around ... and saw nothing behind. There was simply no technological singularity behind - and there was no ahead, and there was nowhere.
No, to predict or even just expect some definite future is a thankless task. Another thing is to assume what to expect, most likely, should not be. With a certain soundness of judgment, this can be quite successful.
And I am quite sure that there is no need in the technological singularity of anything at least remotely resembling anything from the entire range of possible scenarios invented by people of this moment or its analogs.
Having lost one of the most sensitive, in my opinion, possible scenarios, I saw his indecent human centricity with clarity, which now does not allow me to see it.
The whole concept of technological singularity is not about AI, not about technology, not about singularity, but about man, because this imaginary point itself is where humankind is supposed to lose control over the developing technologies.
I. What a horror, humanity, and so not controlling, and never controlling millions of things in today's, not hypothetical reality, each of which threatens death both to people individually and to civilization as a whole: from the contents of their own insides, the microflora of their own intestines, the dynamics of dividing one's own cells — until a pandemic resistant to antibiotics, gonorrhea, climate change, the chain reaction of the Pacific volcanic ring of fire — can no longer be controlled by one more phenomenon reality more without being able to assess even the relative risk increase because people will never know how many of them anyway.
Ii. The argument about the unimaginable acceleration of machine learning is also quite ludicrous, if you think about it. I will not even say that the current level of computation is already unattainable and, for most of humanity, incomprehensible in any case. Even before calculations, people lived in a reality that consisted of processes that were inconceivably fast, indistinguishably small — or simply indistinguishable, like most sound frequencies, like most of the radiation — and many other processes, all of which are enormous, like the Universe and the ancients, like the Universe. All the noise around achieving such a speed of computation, beyond which people will lose the ability to even roughly understand how they occur - nothing more than the fear of losing yet another illusion of control. Suppose, tomorrow, all engineers, mathematicians and programmers in the world who have an idea of ​​how to build the most complex existing computational algorithms, will be killed by antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea - and ... what, on Monday, is the singularity, ahead of time? People will still retain the possibility, to a certain extent, to be aware of what is happening - the laws of physics will not have to change, it seems. And people still, to a certain extent, never had a complete idea about anything and did not have - for example, about processes at the quantum level or beyond the event horizon (in the "other" singularity).
Iii. “But ... the robots will start thinking something incomprehensible!” This makes it harder to complicate the reality, in which there are 7 billion other people for each person - and each of them thinks something incomprehensible. And the human predictability is not particularly expected in reality, where it is quite possible that a tumor in his head could be killed by a husband or a son . And after all, people live somehow among their potential killers, who do not know what is on their mind - but they are already afraid of robots. Although just the robots deserved here the benefit of the doubt - so far they are not something that did not show human-like inclinations in the smallest shares even of such manifestations among the people themselves, they also actively contribute to reducing human mortality. Waiting for the fact that, having felt very clever, the robots suddenly would behave as if their tumor had formed, too obvious a projection.
Fantasy is a dream come true, and robots are fantastic characters.
Iv. Not a part, not the majority, but literally, every single muck that people have ever imagined in the performance of robots - exclusively projections of the muck that people have been doing to each other and all other life forms throughout their known and forgotten history .
I would even be able to understand the rebel robots, destroying humanity simply from offended feelings caused by so unjust and wild slander of their intentions, denigrating their image and intimidation by the very fact of their existence in principle - if it hadn’t been my projection either.
V. Although the only rational explanation for the fear that robots, AI and all-all-all in general will give some special attention to people is based only on the fact that people assess the likelihood of this. Given that the people themselves somehow do not particularly express a desire to get together and cut out, if not their ancestors, then their evolutionary cousins ​​- chimpanzees. Although, again, the human record in organizing mass and meaningless slaughter is again not in favor of humans - and, dry.
In addition, hacking the next, tediously self-centered and sultry bias in these arguments is even simpler: it is enough to shift the focus specifically from homo sapiens to any other sample of living creatures. Suppose robots kill all people - no question. You don’t even have to ask why - people themselves know.
The question is: why will robots kill only humans? Nonsense about the terrible John Connor in the direction of delay, because we agreed that we are talking about this technological singularity?
Why don't robots kill all primates? Or all mammals? Or the whole fauna? Or the whole biological life on Earth? Of course, we cannot, under the terms of the problem, know what these robots will have on their mind, but we can do something else: by weighing all existing fears that humanity will not survive the dawn of the era of robots and artificial intelligence with a completely arbitrary, taste of each, probability coefficient of the similar - repeat the same operation, but for dogs and coyotes. Then the dolphins. Then cockroaches. And rodents, just in case.
I dare to suggest that for many people, regardless of the degree of their technofatalism, the chances of coyotes and dolphins to survive the beginning of the kingdom of robots, and even, perhaps, not really noticing that something had changed, might have seemed higher than the chances of the people themselves. Even chimpanzees do not seem to be a valid target for the bloody harvest of four-legged walking barrels from Boston Dynamics, tortured by kicks, if you expect anything from them, they are more likely to equip chimpanzees with automatic weapons, sit on horses and hunt surviving people.
True, it is not at all surprising that the expected preference of future bloodthirsty robots to the human bloodstream, which is clearly present in the mass consciousness, is not at all surprising?
Perhaps, of course, the robots will decide that for some reason they are not satisfied with all their life forms. But, again, the change of focus produces a "human factor": it makes sense to expect that, being born on Earth, the silicon form of life would suddenly destroy the entire biosphere - as much as assume that, if the race of robots were born on Mars - they would immediately repaint Red planet's surface in a giant Polish flag.
I am sure that the deconstruction of this monument of human egocentrism, not disturbed by the attention of common sense, logic and skepticism can go on and on. But, for clarity, I will sum up a small intermediate result.
The speed of technological change continues to grow one way or another, but outside of this dynamic, I see no reason to expect a single moment of a qualitative leap that cannot be missed or explained in the context of the general trend.
Moreover, this dynamics is uneven in different directions of technological development;
and the entire conversation about technological singularity in the context of technological progress generally loses sight of the remaining directions of development of human civilization, including those for which it is relatively delayed. And the paradoxical result of the uneven progress of mankind in specific areas may be the “inverse singularity”, when even an event that is sufficiently appropriate for expectations will not be noticed and interpreted at the proper level.
The future is always unpredictable, and it cannot become unpredictable. There are no grounds for waiting for changes in the dynamics of changes so dramatic that they will be noticeable at the time of their offensive. And the assumption that it is possible to notice and announce the onset of singularity post factum devalues ​​the whole idea of ​​this moment as a unique moment of human history, the onset of which cannot be missed.
Frankly, the technological singularity has no reason to be called a theory in a strict scientific sense. However, this applies to all attempts to predict the future without exceptions. Technological singularity is much more accurate and fair, given its rootedness in the mass unconscious, will be determined by myth.
And, in this capacity, the myth of technological singularity has noticeable parallels with the myth of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, with which they represent two particular cases of one of the main mythical scenes in the famous story: the myth of the end of the world.
This is how the collective unconscious gave rise to another incarnation of the myth about the end of the world at the current moment of the wrapper, which was torn from the belief in technological progress. This is a paradox on which you want to put an end.
In theory, this is a simple psychotherapeutic practice: to find inside a point on which conscious recognition of the conditions of the game will catch balance with acceptance by the subconscious - without stalling in denial, anger, bargaining, or despair.
')
And this test, which, judging by the most part of the reasoning about it, people exclusively feil.
And the author of the post “To be a technophobe is meaningless, even if technophobia is justified,” despite the promising title, does not seem to be an exception, having come to bargaining, that is, at a stage when people try to make sense of the meaning of this concept in their circumstances that deny the very possibility of this, by rationalization. arttom bargained on the idea of ​​a “black box”, under the terms of which:
- people agree that the unknowable remains unknowable, and even, in confirmation of their conscientiousness, they also agree to stupidly a little bit collectively - which, however, makes no sense from the point of view of the interests of the unknowable, which will not become unknowable from this;
- instead, people get this unknowable, whatever they are unknowable, contained - inside this very “black box”, that is, nevertheless, to some extent under control, limited - and in this sense, nevertheless, realized , and not so terrible, but literally limited.
That is, too, have not yet coped with this exercise. And it's very bad.
That is, on the one hand, this is generally an optional lesson: you can, with varying degrees of justification, not at all believe in the concept of technological singularity, that this is a correct projection of processes into the future — or, trivially, not to know about it.
But people who know and share this view put themselves in the condition of the inevitability of psychological and rational choice, in which all other options, except full acceptance, are worse, because in the event of a real turn of events in this way, these will be hot spots of increasing tension hotbeds of growing emotional pressure, taking over the mind with unpredictable consequences, to the point that the distracted part of humanity will bring a catastrophic end to the entire civilization according to a scenario of self-fulfilling Minorities.
And to avoid this ridiculous, monti-paintedon absurd end is possible all the same by accepting the inevitability of the unknowable, which includes the unknowability and whether this will be the end at all. (A nightmare for neurotics who find it easier to take guaranteed death than to lose the illusion of control to that extent).
That is, whatever one may say, Kobayashi Maru.
Effective for me personally, by searching for harmony, it turned out to be one of the most frightening scenarios for events: that people themselves create a successor for themselves, a replacement, executioners.
Let us suppose.
- Can we stop this? Not.
- Slow down? The very question of slowing down the process, which we have no idea about the speed of which and the final point, is absurd.
- Take control? People cannot take control of the technological singularity - or they will take control of something else without in any way closing the question of waiting and the likelihood of its occurrence.
Then everything is simple: appreciate the beauty of the game while it lasts.
However, honestly going through this mental scenario right up to the threshold of the giant human beings of SkyNet, I took a step - and, finding myself “on the other side” of the technological singularity, I turned around ... and saw nothing behind. There was simply no technological singularity behind - and there was no ahead, and there was nowhere.
No, to predict or even just expect some definite future is a thankless task. Another thing is to assume what to expect, most likely, should not be. With a certain soundness of judgment, this can be quite successful.
And I am quite sure that there is no need in the technological singularity of anything at least remotely resembling anything from the entire range of possible scenarios invented by people of this moment or its analogs.
Having lost one of the most sensitive, in my opinion, possible scenarios, I saw his indecent human centricity with clarity, which now does not allow me to see it.
The whole concept of technological singularity is not about AI, not about technology, not about singularity, but about man, because this imaginary point itself is where humankind is supposed to lose control over the developing technologies.
I. What a horror, humanity, and so not controlling, and never controlling millions of things in today's, not hypothetical reality, each of which threatens death both to people individually and to civilization as a whole: from the contents of their own insides, the microflora of their own intestines, the dynamics of dividing one's own cells — until a pandemic resistant to antibiotics, gonorrhea, climate change, the chain reaction of the Pacific volcanic ring of fire — can no longer be controlled by one more phenomenon reality more without being able to assess even the relative risk increase because people will never know how many of them anyway.
Ii. The argument about the unimaginable acceleration of machine learning is also quite ludicrous, if you think about it. I will not even say that the current level of computation is already unattainable and, for most of humanity, incomprehensible in any case. Even before calculations, people lived in a reality that consisted of processes that were inconceivably fast, indistinguishably small — or simply indistinguishable, like most sound frequencies, like most of the radiation — and many other processes, all of which are enormous, like the Universe and the ancients, like the Universe. All the noise around achieving such a speed of computation, beyond which people will lose the ability to even roughly understand how they occur - nothing more than the fear of losing yet another illusion of control. Suppose, tomorrow, all engineers, mathematicians and programmers in the world who have an idea of ​​how to build the most complex existing computational algorithms, will be killed by antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea - and ... what, on Monday, is the singularity, ahead of time? People will still retain the possibility, to a certain extent, to be aware of what is happening - the laws of physics will not have to change, it seems. And people still, to a certain extent, never had a complete idea about anything and did not have - for example, about processes at the quantum level or beyond the event horizon (in the "other" singularity).
Iii. “But ... the robots will start thinking something incomprehensible!” This makes it harder to complicate the reality, in which there are 7 billion other people for each person - and each of them thinks something incomprehensible. And the human predictability is not particularly expected in reality, where it is quite possible that a tumor in his head could be killed by a husband or a son . And after all, people live somehow among their potential killers, who do not know what is on their mind - but they are already afraid of robots. Although just the robots deserved here the benefit of the doubt - so far they are not something that did not show human-like inclinations in the smallest shares even of such manifestations among the people themselves, they also actively contribute to reducing human mortality. Waiting for the fact that, having felt very clever, the robots suddenly would behave as if their tumor had formed, too obvious a projection.
Fantasy is a dream come true, and robots are fantastic characters.
Iv. Not a part, not the majority, but literally, every single muck that people have ever imagined in the performance of robots - exclusively projections of the muck that people have been doing to each other and all other life forms throughout their known and forgotten history .
I would even be able to understand the rebel robots, destroying humanity simply from offended feelings caused by so unjust and wild slander of their intentions, denigrating their image and intimidation by the very fact of their existence in principle - if it hadn’t been my projection either.
V. Although the only rational explanation for the fear that robots, AI and all-all-all in general will give some special attention to people is based only on the fact that people assess the likelihood of this. Given that the people themselves somehow do not particularly express a desire to get together and cut out, if not their ancestors, then their evolutionary cousins ​​- chimpanzees. Although, again, the human record in organizing mass and meaningless slaughter is again not in favor of humans - and, dry.
In addition, hacking the next, tediously self-centered and sultry bias in these arguments is even simpler: it is enough to shift the focus specifically from homo sapiens to any other sample of living creatures. Suppose robots kill all people - no question. You don’t even have to ask why - people themselves know.
The question is: why will robots kill only humans? Nonsense about the terrible John Connor in the direction of delay, because we agreed that we are talking about this technological singularity?
Isn't it funny that another retelling of the Savior myth, including recognizable motives such as beating babies, turned out to be one of the options for a reflection of a very modern and technological fear of the future — the tale is so ancient that even the Bethlehem remake can be considered a relatively fresh adaptation.
Why don't robots kill all primates? Or all mammals? Or the whole fauna? Or the whole biological life on Earth? Of course, we cannot, under the terms of the problem, know what these robots will have on their mind, but we can do something else: by weighing all existing fears that humanity will not survive the dawn of the era of robots and artificial intelligence with a completely arbitrary, taste of each, probability coefficient of the similar - repeat the same operation, but for dogs and coyotes. Then the dolphins. Then cockroaches. And rodents, just in case.
I dare to suggest that for many people, regardless of the degree of their technofatalism, the chances of coyotes and dolphins to survive the beginning of the kingdom of robots, and even, perhaps, not really noticing that something had changed, might have seemed higher than the chances of the people themselves. Even chimpanzees do not seem to be a valid target for the bloody harvest of four-legged walking barrels from Boston Dynamics, tortured by kicks, if you expect anything from them, they are more likely to equip chimpanzees with automatic weapons, sit on horses and hunt surviving people.
True, it is not at all surprising that the expected preference of future bloodthirsty robots to the human bloodstream, which is clearly present in the mass consciousness, is not at all surprising?
Perhaps, of course, the robots will decide that for some reason they are not satisfied with all their life forms. But, again, the change of focus produces a "human factor": it makes sense to expect that, being born on Earth, the silicon form of life would suddenly destroy the entire biosphere - as much as assume that, if the race of robots were born on Mars - they would immediately repaint Red planet's surface in a giant Polish flag.
I am sure that the deconstruction of this monument of human egocentrism, not disturbed by the attention of common sense, logic and skepticism can go on and on. But, for clarity, I will sum up a small intermediate result.
- I see no rational reason to expect in the future the onset of technological singularity as a special event that will be impossible not to notice in the general flow of all changes in the real world;
- or as a significant change in the direction of the history of mankind at once in all or most aspects at a certain point in time.
The speed of technological change continues to grow one way or another, but outside of this dynamic, I see no reason to expect a single moment of a qualitative leap that cannot be missed or explained in the context of the general trend.
Moreover, this dynamics is uneven in different directions of technological development;
and the entire conversation about technological singularity in the context of technological progress generally loses sight of the remaining directions of development of human civilization, including those for which it is relatively delayed. And the paradoxical result of the uneven progress of mankind in specific areas may be the “inverse singularity”, when even an event that is sufficiently appropriate for expectations will not be noticed and interpreted at the proper level.
The future is always unpredictable, and it cannot become unpredictable. There are no grounds for waiting for changes in the dynamics of changes so dramatic that they will be noticeable at the time of their offensive. And the assumption that it is possible to notice and announce the onset of singularity post factum devalues ​​the whole idea of ​​this moment as a unique moment of human history, the onset of which cannot be missed.
The myth of technological singularity
- The extent to which the idea of ​​technological singularity is human-centered,
- to what extent it is formed by folklore, and not by futurologists,
- to what extent it is unscientific, and archetypical;
- how few traces of logic in this work of the human unconscious;
- that modern details are the grains of sand in a pearl shell, but all the connective tissue is mythological — it suggests a fundamentally different nature of the idea of ​​a technological singularity as such than is commonly believed.
Frankly, the technological singularity has no reason to be called a theory in a strict scientific sense. However, this applies to all attempts to predict the future without exceptions. Technological singularity is much more accurate and fair, given its rootedness in the mass unconscious, will be determined by myth.
And, in this capacity, the myth of technological singularity has noticeable parallels with the myth of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, with which they represent two particular cases of one of the main mythical scenes in the famous story: the myth of the end of the world.
This is how the collective unconscious gave rise to another incarnation of the myth about the end of the world at the current moment of the wrapper, which was torn from the belief in technological progress. This is a paradox on which you want to put an end.
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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/443954/
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