Music: Erik Truffaz Quartet feat. Anna Aaron — ‘Blue Movie’
Author Archives: Attention to the Unseen
To what extent might Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk be right about the dangers of artificial intelligence?
Suzanne Sadedin, an evolutionary biologist, writes: I think they are right that AI is dangerous, and they are dangerously wrong about why. I see two fairly likely futures.
Future 1: AI destroys itself, humanity and most or all life on earth, probably a lot sooner than in 1000 years.
Future 2: Humanity radically restructures its institutions to empower individuals, probably via transhumanist modification that effectively merges us with AI. We go to the stars.
Right now, we are headed for Future 1, but we could change this. Much as I admire Elon Musk, his plan to democratise AI actually makes Future 1 more, not less, likely.
Here’s why:
There’s a sense in which humans are already building a specific kind of AI; indeed, we’ve been gradually building it for centuries. This kind of AI consists of systems that we construct and endow with legal, real-world power. These systems create their own internal structures of rules and traditions, while humans perform fuzzy brain-based tasks specified by the system. The system as a whole can act with an appearance of purpose, intelligence and values entirely distinct from anything exhibited by its human components.
All nations, corporations and organisations can be considered as this kind of AI. I realise at this point it may seem like I’m bending the definition of AI. To be clear, I’m not suggesting organisations are sentient, self-aware or conscious, but simply that they show emergent, purpose-driven behaviour equivalent to that of autonomous intelligent agents. For example, we talk very naturally about how “the US did X”, and that means something entirely different from “the people of the US did X” or “the president of the US did X”, or even “the US government did X”.
These systems can be entirely ruthless toward individuals (just check the answers to What are some horrifying examples of corporate evil/greed? and What are the best examples of actions that are moral, even uplifting, but illegal? if you don’t believe me). Such ruthlessness is often advantageous — even necessary, because these systems exist in a competitive environment. They compete for human effort, involvement and commitment. Money and power. That’s how they survive and grow. New organisations, and less successful ones, copy the features of dominant organisations in order to compete. This places them under Darwinian selection, as Milton Friedman noted long ago.
Until recently, however, organisations have always relied upon human consent and participation; human brains always ultimately made the decisions, whether it was a decision to manufacture 600 rubber duckies or drop a nuclear bomb. So their competitive success has been somewhat constrained by human values and morals; there are not enough Martin Shkrelis to go around.
With the advent of machine learning, this changes. We now have algorithms that can make complex decisions better and faster than any human, about practically any specific domain. They are being applied to big data problems far beyond human comprehension. Yet these algorithms are still stupid in some ways. They are designed to optimise specific parameters for specific datasets, but they’re oblivious to the complexity of the real-world, long-term ramifications of their choices. [Continue reading…]
Music: Erik Truffaz Quartet — ‘El tiempo de la Revolución’
Music: Bill Laurance — ‘Ready Wednesday’
Stress amplifies the illusion of control
Bob Henderson writes: I’d lost almost $200 million in October. November wasn’t looking any better.
It was 2008, after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. Markets were in turmoil. Banks were failing left and right. I worked at a major investment bank, and while I didn’t think the disastrous deal I’d done would cause its collapse, my losses were quickly decimating its commodities profits for the year, along with the potential pay of my more profitable colleagues. I thought my career could be over. I’d already started to feel those other traders and salespeople keeping their distance, as if I’d contracted a disease.
I landed in London on the morning of November 4, having flown overnight from New York. I was a derivatives trader, but also the supervisor of the bank’s oil options trading team, about a dozen guys split between Singapore, London, and New York. Until this point I’d managed the deal almost entirely on my own, making the decisions that led to where I … we … were now. But after a black cab ride from Heathrow to our Canary Wharf office, I got the guys off the trading floor and into a windowless conference room and confessed: I’d tried everything, but the deal was still hemorrhaging cash. Even worse, it was sprouting new and thorny risks outside my area of expertise. In any case, the world was changing so quickly that my area of expertise was fast becoming obsolete. I pleaded for everyone to pitch in. I said I was open to any ideas.
As I spoke, I noticed that one of the guys had tears welling up in his eyes. I paused for a second, stunned. Then my own eyes started to fill from a sudden wash of gratitude and relief that came, I think, from no longer being alone.
Stress testing is a standard technique derivatives traders use to test how their portfolio will perform in an imagined “worst-case” scenario. The problem is that “worst-case” is subjective, making stress testing as much of an art as a science, and exposing the trader doing the testing to something called the “illusion of control.” [Continue reading…]
Music: Snarky Puppy & The Metropole Orkest — ‘The Clearing’
The magical Solar System discoveries we made in 2015
By Monica Grady, The Open University
It has been a busy year for Solar System exploration – and particularly our galactic neighbourhood’s small icy bodies. Comets, asteroids, Kuiper Belt Objects and planetary satellites have all been in the news – from stunning images of comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko at the start of the year, to the recent close-up of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, via Ceres and Pluto.
Early January was a continuation of the stream of data from Rosetta, as comet 67P drew closer to the sun. Images were released of jets emanating from the sun-facing surface, from which it could be seen that sublimation of water-ice increased during the daytime, and died down at night. But because the dark surface of the comet retained some heat, the comet was not completely inactive at night – it was possible that fluid might exist for very short periods, leading to sub-surface hydrous activity.
ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA, CC BY-SA
One of the other significant results from Rosetta was recognition from magnetic measurements that the two lobes of the comet had been separate bodies, presumably brought together by collision.
Closest approach to the sun was in mid-August, a few weeks after the Philae lander signalled that it had woken up after its enforced hibernation. Unfortunately, communication between Rosetta and Philae could not be established reliably, leaving a certain amount of frustration that additional data could not be acquired from the surface.
The holly and the ivy: How pagan practices found their way into Christmas
By Peter Glaves, Northumbria University, Newcastle
Every year, almost without thinking about it, we incorporate certain plant species into out Christmas celebrations. The most obvious is the Christmas tree, linked historically in England to Prince Albert – but its use in British homes goes back to at least 1761 when Charlotte wife of George III put up a tree at the royal court.
(It’s probably worth noting here that the first artificial-brush Christmas tree was produced using the same machinery that was originally designed to produce toilet brushes.)
Three other plants are intimately associated with Christmas: holly, ivy and mistletoe – and in all cases their ecology is closely linked to their cultural uses.
‘Critical slowing down’ — nature’s early warning signal of system failure
Natalie Wolchover writes: Nestled in the northern Wisconsin woods, Peter Lake once brimmed with golden shiners, fatheads, and other minnows, which plucked algae-eating fleas from the murky water. Then, seven years ago, a crew of ecologists began stepping up the lake’s population of predatory largemouth bass. To the 39 bass already present, they added 12, then 15 more a year later, and another 15 a month after that. The bass hunted down the minnows and drove survivors to the rocky shoreline, which gave fleas free rein to multiply and pick the water clean. Meanwhile, bass hatchlings — formerly gobbled up by the minnows — flourished, and in 2010, the bass population exploded to more than 1,000. The original algae-laced, minnow-dominated ecosystem was gone, and the reign of bass in clear water began.
Today, largemouth bass still swim rampant. “Once that top predator is dominant, it’s very hard to dislodge,” said Stephen Carpenter, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who led the experiment. “You could do it, but it’s gonna cost you.”
The Peter Lake experiment demonstrated a well-known problem with complex systems: They are sensitive beasts. Just as when the Earth periodically plunges into an ice age, or when grasslands turn to desert, fisheries suddenly collapse, or a person slumps into a deep depression, systems can drift toward an invisible edge, where only a small change is needed to touch off a dramatic and often disastrous transformation. But systems that exhibit such “critical transitions” tend to be so complicated and riddled with feedback loops that experts cannot hope to calculate in advance where their tipping points lie — or how much additional tampering they can withstand before snapping irrevocably into a new state.
At Peter Lake, though, Carpenter and his team saw the critical transition coming. Rowing from trap to trap counting wriggling minnows and harvesting other data every day for three summers, the researchers captured the first field evidence of an early-warning signal that is theorized to arise in many complex systems as they drift toward their unknown points of no return.
The signal, a phenomenon called “critical slowing down,” is a lengthening of the time that a system takes to recover from small disturbances, such as a disease that reduces the minnow population, in the vicinity of a critical transition. It occurs because a system’s internal stabilizing forces — whatever they might be — become weaker near the point at which they suddenly propel the system toward a different state. [Continue reading…]
Music: Snarky Puppy — ‘Thing of Gold’
Music: Snarky Puppy — ‘Shofukan’
Music: Snarky Puppy — ‘Skate U’
The more you look for planets like Earth, the more you appreciate Earth
Connections aren’t conversations – while technology enables, it can also interfere
By Daria Kuss, Nottingham Trent University
A prisoner was in the US was recently released after 44 years of incarceration for the attempted murder of a police officer. Emerging onto the streets of New York City, Otis Johnson, now 69, found himself bewildered by the world before him. Seeing people apparently talking to themselves on the street, futuristic headphones dangling from their ears, reminded him of CIA agents. People barely paid attention to their surroundings, and instead studied their smartphones while crossing the street, engrossed in their own personal bubbles.
Technology had delivered Johnson a massive culture shock, the shock of a world where technology has quickly changed the way we live and the way we relate to one another.
In 2013 Sherry Turkle, a clinical psychologist and esteemed professor at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote Alone Together, in which she questioned the extent to which social media is bringing people together. Following decades of research on the profound impact of modern technology on human relationships, Turkle concluded that with the omnipresence of technology “we’re moving from conversation to connection”.
Connection, it seems, denotes a very different quality of social interaction in comparison to conversation, as it refers to continuous streams of little titbits of information, such as those neatly packaged into 140 characters on Twitter.
Conversation, on the other hand, refers to listening and empathic understanding, actively attending to another person, rather than fleetingly commenting on their status updates online while simultaneously talking on the phone, doing the laundry, or preparing the children’s dinner.
Music: Snarky Puppy — ‘Bring us the Bright’
Humans sleep less but more deeply than any other primate
Carl Zimmer writes: Over the past few million years, the ancestors of modern humans became dramatically different from other primates. Our forebears began walking upright, and they lost much of their body hair; they gained precision-grip fingers and developed gigantic brains.
But early humans also may have evolved a less obvious but equally important advantage: a peculiar sleep pattern. “It’s really weird, compared to other primates,” said Dr. David R. Samson, a senior research scientist at Duke University.
In the journal Evolutionary Anthropology, Dr. Samson and Dr. Charles L. Nunn, an evolutionary biologist at Duke, reported that human sleep is exceptionally short and deep, a pattern that may have helped give rise to our powerful minds. [Continue reading…]
Music: Neil Cowley Trio — ‘Rooster Was A Witness’
Music: Kurt Elling — ‘Steppin’ Out’