AI and the financial crisis, from the Huffington Post
[Via The Singularity Institute]
Some days ago, I wrote about our shrinking prediction horizon — what some people call The Singularity — and its role in the current financial crisis.
I am not the only one who thought about it. The Huffington Post interviewed some leading AI people on the matter. Their positions are different, but most if not all agree that computers enabled the crisis.
The article quotes Alan Greenspan on his testimony to the congress, who said basically: shit in, shit out. We based our models on the last two decades of economic data, a period of euphoria, so they could only understand that. When things started to go down the drain, our models — over-fitted to good times — couldn’t make sense of it.
Jaron Lanier tooks the ball further warning in his Edge’s article about “cybernetic totalists” and that “treating technology as if it were autonomous is the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy. There is no difference between machine autonomy and the abdication of human responsibility [...] Cybernetic eschatology shares with some of history’s worst ideologies a doctrine of historical predestination. There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than a life lived inside the confines of a theory. Let us hope that the cybernetic totalists learn humility before their day in the sun arrives.“
I tend to agree with Jaron Lanier on this particular theme. Some fringes of Transhumanist movements — particularly the more visionary, less scientifically-grounded ones — make me recall quite a lot some areas of Futurism in the past century and its cheerleading role in the ascension of nazism and fascism in Europe and communism in Russia.
In times when people see cracks in their idea of an overarching world order, they fall prey of populist leaders… among them, the worst ones are psychopaths who know how to play with people’s fears and needs.
Is a luddite position the right one? No quite the opposite in my humble opinion. I agree with George Dyson that “the solution to the present crisis is more computerization of the banking system, not less.” We need to have a better control and more understanding of coming innovations. This can only happen through more computers, but we should not abdicate the driving seat. We will eventually develop autopilots for some predictable aspects of our journey, but we will ultimately be the ones who turn them on and off at the appropriate times.
Ray Kurzweil explains it better than I ever could: “…If we can combine strong AI, nanotechnology and other exponential trends, technology will appear to tear the fabric of human understanding by around the mid 2040s by my estimation. However, the event horizon of the Singularity can be compared to the concept of Singularity in physics. As one gets near a black hole, what appears to be an event horizon from outside the black hole appears differently from inside. The same will be true of this historical Singularity.
Once we get there, if one is not crushed by it (which will require merging with the technology), then it will not appear to be a rip in the fabric; one will be able to keep up with it.“
The difficult part is managing this transition. We have an increasingly outstanding power, but we lack comparable wisdom. We have to build that right into our machines.
As Cassio Pennachin argues, we will soon be at “a point at which technology becomes self-improving, bringing extremely rapid advances. Obviously, such an inflection point would imply many serious risks. This means that research in AI, nanotech, and other fields with similarly risky outcomes should be coupled with research on safety and what Eliezer Yudkowsky calls ‘friendly AI’ — technology that’s mathematically guaranteed to be well-motivated and well-behaved toward humans and other species. I’m not convinced this level of safety is even possible, but I’m convinced safety should play an increasingly larger role as we get closer and closer to human level AI, autonomous nanobots and such.“.
I think he’s right, we will have to eventually merge technology with ourselves as much as we merged the telephone into our lives.
The increasing rate of innovation is not a meme that is restricted to transhumanist circles. I was talking with my grandma a couple of days ago, she’s over 80 years old and an avid internet user. Wikipedia and Google Earth seems to be her preferred past times just after gardening. She was telling me exactly how amazed she feels by the advancements since her youth.
Transhumanism is going to be quite soon an important theme in politics.
