Future

Not my writing or source. I thought their title was a bit much and rewrote it in Hugh language. This is an intriguing step toward creative innovation in artificial intelligence. To this point AI creativity has been sleight of hand, working within the “variety tolerances” of very complex algorithms. This is an interesting innovation but just the beginning.

And as usual, let’s hope they don’t kill us all.

Computers Evolve a New Path Toward Human Intelligence

Jeff Clune / Quanta Magazine

In 2007, Kenneth Stanley, a computer scientist at the University of Central Florida, was playing with Picbreeder, a website he and his students had created, when an alien became a race car and changed his life. On Picbreeder, users would see an array of 15 similar images, composed of geometric shapes or swirly patterns, all variations on a theme. On occasion, some might resemble a real object, like a butterfly or a face. Users were asked to select one, and they typically clicked on whatever they found most interesting. Once they did, a new set of images, all variations on their choice, would populate the screen. From this playful exploration, a catalog of fanciful designs emerged…

…One day Stanley spotted something resembling an alien face on the site and began evolving it, selecting a child and grandchild and so on. By chance, the round eyes moved lower and began to resemble the wheels of a car. Stanley went with it and evolved a spiffy-looking sports car. He kept thinking about the fact that if he had started trying to evolve a car from scratch, instead of from an alien, he might never have done it, and he wondered what that implied about attacking problems directly. “It had a huge impact on my whole life,” he said. He looked at other interesting images that had emerged on Picbreeder, traced their lineages, and realized that nearly all of them had evolved by way of something that looked completely different. “Once I saw the evidence for that, I was just blown away.”

Read on: Link to the article 

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(with inspiration from the brilliant Robert Anton Wilson)

Add the next term to the series:

  1. Walk
  2. Ride horseback
  3. Fly by jet
  4. ______________

A certain job can be performed either by a human or a machine. We should

  1. Employ the human because “the devil makes work for idle hands.”
  2. Employ the human because otherwise he or she might be bored
  3. Employ the human because there is no way to organize society except by having most people work for wages
  4. Employ the machine because technology has no function other than to free people from toil.

Add the next term to the series:

  1. Hunt and gather
  2. Farm
  3. Industry-commerce
  4. ___________________

There is a magic machine with two buttons, each of which will create equality among humans. You will push

  1. The button that makes everybody equally poor
  2. The button that makes everybody equally rich

Working for wages

  1. Has always existed and always will exist
  2. Is ordained by God
  3. Did not appear on large scale until the Enclosure Acts drove the serfs off the land in the past 300 years
  4. Will become obsolete in the next 100 years
  5. Will become obsolete in the next 10 years

The best way to search for Higher Intelligence is to

  1. Find the right religion
  2. Support the search for radio signals from advanced civilizations in the galaxy;
  3. Investigate UFO’s
  4. Research our own nervous system
  5. Build a starship and go looking.
  6. Other

Add the next term to the series:

  1. Black Pride
  2. Women’s Liberation
  3. Gay Pride
  4. _______________

 

 

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There has never been a Chinese government that didn’t despise individuality and behave with monstrous cruelty. There has never been one that appeared to even recognize cruelty except to want more. Utterly callous and indifferent is only when they aren’t trying. China is a bloodthirsty, heartless oligarchy with an unslakable thirst for absolute social control that keeps them up nights worrying that they’ve missed somebody.

All credit to the makers.

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or: Deconstructing this strange, stupid moment

Have you noticed that humanity seems to have gotten into the bad acid? Or that reality isn’t itself lately? Traditional limits to weirdness have been breached and allowed just about anything to happen. If our recent political history was a spy novel would you keep reading it? Or throw it in the trash for being provokingly unrealistic? Trash, am I right?

You’ll be relieved to know I have a theory.

One of the things I ramble on about here is the idea that the human race is technologically self-mutating. It’s part of our script to wrangle and then embrace new technology and rather than using it to perfect our old lifestyle, we let it alter us and transform that lifestyle.  Throughout our time on earth, this pattern has changed us sometimes in hardly noticeable increments, and sometimes with disorienting speed. While the core of human nature remains constant through history every big technology shift distorts our current culture and creates unexpected “new normals”. These new normals cause stress and static as we try to sort out what the hell is happening to us and how to retain the good part of the new tech without losing the good of the culture.  Since we are in constant flux there is no pure version of ourselves to return to or protect. Many of the normal things we grew up with were new normals to our parents or grandparents. We typically only embrace technology that gives us something we want and then we suffer and struggle over the weird “Goeswiths” we didn’t anticipate. It’s significant that there is no historical example of us adapting to powerful new technology, disliking its effect on our culture and dropping it to resume the old ways. Our way ratchets forward and locks; no take backs. The bad side effects only go away when some still newer technology dissolves them.
Cars redefined teenage freedom and liberated our sexuality. They changed socializing and working and vacations. They changed the layout of every towns and city. The economics of cars created enormous corporations and a unionized middle class. Year in and out, cars kill ~40000 Americans and it appears we’re basically all OK with that. Technology is never just technology. Technology is new organs and altered cultures and unexpected results. Sufficient technological change equals a different species.  Continue reading

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Manufacturing jobs are gone. The only way they could come back is if American workers volunteered to get paid .25/hour.

So, when all these jobs go extinct in the near future…

  • Taxi/limo drivers are gone (Uber already has this as a realistic goal)
  • Truck drivers (every trucking company is testing long haul robots right now)
  • Cashiers (via the “Amazon Go” style technology)

How will the rich continue to get richer?

There are SO many bad outcomes possible from this. The collapse of these jobs won’t occur in a vacuum, it will take much of the economy down with it. All those out of work people won’t go out to eat or buy new clothes. They won’t buy much of anything. This collapses local economies and the big chains will see a steep drop in earnings.

There are other aftershocks: Most likely these folks will lose health insurance. There will be scores of evictions and foreclosures. This orphaned demographic may turn right-wing fascist politically if exploited by devious powers. That’s pretty standard in collapsing economies. Maybe they’ll open leftward but history shows that as less likely.

Since people are complete shit at imagining and preparing for future problems and will even perversely struggle against such preparations (*cough* cough* climate change) I think as many of us as possible should be raising this issue. It won’t help much because politicians are largely paid to safeguard the status of the super-rich. If it comes to a political fight we’ll likely just be locked down and silenced.

Unless we frame it correctly. We must address those most deeply affected.

Who will be the biggest victims of such a collapse? You. The rich! Poor people have nothing, what’s a little more nothing to them? But the people who have nearly everything and whose only wish is for the rest of it as well, suffer deeply at even flattening profit margins.

When the childlike 99% stop buying things, your personal ultra-zeppelin will leak and begin losing altitude. When you finally land, do you know who’ll be waiting to greet you? Correct, the ravening mob.

The only way for you to maintain untouchable, lofty superiority is to support a guaranteed basic income.  And unless you want to tumble down a financial sinkhole for several years first, you’d better face it now. This won’t be easy, it will involve distasteful acts that superficially resemble caring about people and being generous. You will have to give money away, probably in the form of paying taxes. This is repellent, and I know it hurts, but denial ain’t just a maxed-out credit card anymore.

Please, won’t you help support the truly deserving in the post-employment age?

Why we need to plan for a future without jobs.  

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mapsSelf-driving trucks are being tested and refined as a technology and are already understood to be safer and less expensive than human drivers: They’re coming in the near term. Self-driving trucks are inevitable.

Now, look at this image of the most common jobs by state and consider the implications. I’m not against this change, but our political leaders still believe that wealth forms as magical dewdrops on the bodies of the 1% before cascading as a god-ordained blessing onto the far less important people down below.

We have no plan for the unavoidable, transformed near-term future. Worse yet, America has a cold, cold heart towards the poor and unemployed. Worse yet, unemployed lower-middle-class guys like these soon-to-be former truckers vote for pseudo-fascist idiots like Trump.

The problem with the rich is that they believe their own stories about where money comes from. When an unemployed American stops sending money to insurance, medical care, internet providers, etc, and stops buying nearly as many products of all kinds there is a tiny disturbance in the force for the 1%. Multiply that times all these truckers, and you have way less income for the rich. Where is your trickle-down now, assholes?

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Some humans can live as wild and solitary as tigers. Humans can live as isolated families miles from their neighbors. They can live in tribes, villages, clan groups, small towns, cities and mega-cities. Humans are not infinitely adaptable but they are capable of many different modes of existence. It’s well known that these different life styles operate under different rules. Neighborliness and charity for example, are different things when surrounded by ten, ten thousand or ten million people.  

If you live in a town of two hundred people and you see a person broken down beside the road, well first of all, you know them! If you don’t know them directly, they most likely know someone you know. But even if not, it’s likely that they will be approached and given aid. So there is this appearance of a warm generosity. On the downside of course is the famous way that small town folks know each other’s business TOO much…there’s the sense that you can’t reinvent yourself, you can’t break free of everyone’s conclusions about you. Rather like the whole town had become a kind of extended family, uncomfortably defining you. 

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This concept is one of the foundations of what I want to say and I have to succeed in explaining it or much of what follows won’t really be clear. But all by itself, Emergence is a beautiful and fascinating thing and whether or not the rest of my ideas add up, this is a wonderful framework for understanding the world around us. 
 
There are moments in describing it where it seems so simple and straightforward as to be an unnecessary thing to even bring up.  There are other moments of wonder and awe.  Emergence isn’t something I just made up, it’s a technical term from the study of  complex systems. 
 
Complex things are built out of simple things, simple things that gather to a point where something new is revealed by that gathering together. A key point though is that the simple elements individually do not resemble the new thing that exists when they come together. The elements do not suggest the outcome.  

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