This is an interesting but scary article, because if you are familiar with
some of the events that are described in the Book of Revelation, then you
will know that some of the things that the author discusses here may some
day turn out to be true.

In the article, the author mentions the Singularity University that is
located in Silicon Valley, California, which I believe I have mentioned
before. This super elite university is associated with super brain Ray
Kurzweil -- who I have also mentioned before -- who has some very scary
ideas about the future, and what he personally would like to see happen to
humanity. Look up Kurzweil on the web, and look for some of his books such
as "Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever" and
"The Singularity
Is Near".

Are you ready to upload your consciousness/soul into a machine?


The First Church of Robotics

By JARON LANIER - NYT

August 9, 2010


Berkeley, Calif.

THE news of the day often includes an item about some development in
artificial intelligence: a machine that smiles, a program that can predict
human tastes in mates or music, a robot that teaches foreign languages to
children. This constant stream of stories suggests that machines are
becoming smart and autonomous, a new form of life, and that we should think
of them as fellow creatures instead of as tools. But such conclusions aren't
just changing how we think about computers -- they are reshaping the basic
assumptions of our lives in misguided and ultimately damaging ways.

I myself have worked on projects like machine vision algorithms that can
detect human facial expressions in order to animate avatars or recognize
individuals. Some would say these too are examples of A.I., but I would say
it is research on a specific software problem that shouldn't be confused
with the deeper issues of intelligence or the nature of personhood. Equally
important, my philosophical position has not prevented me from making
progress in my work. (This is not an insignificant distinction: someone who
refused to believe in, say, general relativity would not be able to make a
GPS navigation system.)

In fact, the nuts and bolts of A.I. research can often be more usefully
interpreted without the concept of A.I. at all. For example, I.B.M.
scientists recently unveiled a "question answering" machine that
is designed
to play the TV quiz show "Jeopardy." Suppose I.B.M. had dispensed with the
theatrics, declared it had done Google one better and come up with a new
phrase-based search engine. This framing of exactly the same technology
would have gained I.B.M.'s team as much (deserved) recognition as the claim
of an artificial intelligence, but would also have educated the public about
how such a technology might actually be used most effectively.

Another example is the way in which robot teachers are portrayed. For
starters, these robots aren't all that sophisticated -- miniature robotic
devices used in endoscopic surgeries are infinitely more advanced, but they
don't get the same attention because they aren't presented with the A.I.
spin.

Furthermore, these robots are just a form of high-tech puppetry. The
children are the ones making the transaction take place -- having
conversations and interacting with these machines, but essentially teaching
themselves. This just shows that humans are social creatures, so if a
machine is presented in a social way, people will adapt to it.

What bothers me most about this trend, however, is that by allowing
artificial intelligence to reshape our concept of personhood, we are leaving
ourselves open to the flipside: we think of people more and more as
computers, just as we think of computers as people.

In one recent example, Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University's
Interactive Telecommunications Program, has suggested that when people
engage in seemingly trivial activities like "re-Tweeting," relaying on
Twitter a short message from someone else, something non-trivial -- real
thought and creativity -- takes place on a grand scale, within a global
brain. That is, people perform machine-like activity, copying and relaying
information; the Internet, as a whole, is claimed to perform the creative
thinking, the problem solving, the connection making. This is a devaluation
of human thought.

Consider too the act of scanning a book into digital form. The historian
George Dyson has written that a Google engineer once said to him: "We are
not scanning all those books to be read by people. We are scanning them to
be read by an A.I." While we have yet to see how Google's book scanning will
play out, a machine-centric vision of the project might encourage software
that treats books as grist for the mill, decontextualized snippets in one
big database, rather than separate expressions from individual writers. In
this approach, the contents of books would be atomized into bits of
information to be aggregated, and the authors themselves, the feeling of
their voices, their differing perspectives, would be lost.

What all this comes down to is that the very idea of artificial intelligence
gives us the cover to avoid accountability by pretending that machines can
take on more and more human responsibility. This holds for things that we
don't even think of as artificial intelligence, like the recommendations
made by Netflix and Pandora. Seeing movies and listening to music suggested
to us by algorithms is relatively harmless, I suppose. But I hope that once
in a while the users of those services resist the recommendations; our
exposure to art shouldn't be hemmed in by an algorithm that we merely want
to believe predicts our tastes accurately. These algorithms do not represent
emotion or meaning, only statistics and correlations.

What makes this doubly confounding is that while Silicon Valley might sell
artificial intelligence to consumers, our industry certainly wouldn't apply
the same automated techniques to some of its own work. Choosing design
features in a new smartphone, say, is considered too consequential a game.
Engineers don't seem quite ready to believe in their smart algorithms enough
to put them up against Apple's chief executive, Steve Jobs, or some other
person with a real design sensibility.

But the rest of us, lulled by the concept of ever-more intelligent A.I.'s,
are expected to trust algorithms to assess our aesthetic choices, the
progress of a student, the credit risk of a homeowner or an institution. In
doing so, we only end up misreading the capability of our machines and
distorting our own capabilities as human beings. We must instead take
responsibility for every task undertaken by a machine and double check every
conclusion offered by an algorithm, just as we always look both ways when
crossing an intersection, even though the light has turned green.

WHEN we think of computers as inert, passive tools instead of people, we are
rewarded with a clearer, less ideological view of what is going on -- with
the machines and with ourselves. So, why, aside from the theatrical appeal
to consumers and reporters, must engineering results so often be presented
in Frankensteinian light?

The answer is simply that computer scientists are human, and are as
terrified by the human condition as anyone else. We, the technical elite,
seek some way of thinking that gives us an answer to death, for instance.
This helps explain the allure of a place like the Singularity University.
The influential Silicon Valley institution preaches a story that goes like
this: one day in the not-so-distant future, the Internet will suddenly
coalesce into a super-intelligent A.I., infinitely smarter than any of us
individually and all of us combined; it will become alive in the blink of an
eye, and take over the world before humans even realize what's happening.

Some think the newly sentient Internet would then choose to kill us; others
think it would be generous and digitize us the way Google is digitizing old
books, so that we can live forever as algorithms inside the global brain.
Yes, this sounds like many different science fiction movies. Yes, it sounds
nutty when stated so bluntly. But these are ideas with tremendous currency
in Silicon Valley; these are guiding principles, not just amusements, for
many of the most influential technologists.

It should go without saying that we can't count on the appearance of a
soul-detecting sensor that will verify that a person's consciousness has
been virtualized and immortalized. There is certainly no such sensor with us
today to confirm metaphysical ideas about people, or even to recognize the
contents of the human brain. All thoughts about consciousness, souls and the
like are bound up equally in faith, which suggests something remarkable:
What we are seeing is a new religion, expressed through an engineering
culture.

What I would like to point out, though, is that a great deal of the
confusion and rancor in the world today concerns tension at the boundary
between religion and modernity -- whether it's the distrust among Islamic or
Christian fundamentalists of the scientific worldview, or even the
discomfort that often greets progress in fields like climate change science
or stem-cell research.

If technologists are creating their own ultramodern religion, and it is one
in which people are told to wait politely as their very souls are made
obsolete, we might expect further and worsening tensions. But if technology
were presented without metaphysical baggage, is it possible that modernity
would not make people as uncomfortable?

Technology is essentially a form of service. We work to make the world
better. Our inventions can ease burdens, reduce poverty and suffering, and
sometimes even bring new forms of beauty into the world. We can give people
more options to act morally, because people with medicine, housing and
agriculture can more easily afford to be kind than those who are sick, cold
and starving.

But civility, human improvement, these are still choices. That's why
scientists and engineers should present technology in ways that don't
confound those choices.

We serve people best when we keep our religious ideas out of our work.



Jeff Snyder, SysOp - Armageddon BBS  Visit us at endtimeprophecy.org port 23
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