Infinite Quack

Imagine there's no heaven It's easy if you try No hell below us Above us, only sky  - Lennon Trigger warning: If you're a religious person, you may perceive what I'm about to write as an affront. It's for you to decide whether to keep reading, or skip to something else. There is plenty of other material out there to focus on. I’ve debated whether I should put this material out there, as some of it is inherently depressing and/or scary to contemplate. They’re not thoughts unique to me, though (I lay claim to no special insights), and thinking these matters through as a species may be therapeutic as well as necessary. And it’s not all bad. This post has been brewing in my head for some time. It could be emerging now as an extremely introspective person's version of a midlife crisis. I did turn 45 in February, after all. I've held a variety of beliefs over those years. Growing up, I believed there was an all-knowing, all-seeing God who could directly perceive m...

Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two Still beating this drum. People need to understand this dynamic because Trump and his followers either don't have that understanding, or are deflecting, when they blame it all on immigrants. John Oliver recently did a piece on automation -- also worth watching. Let me try and explain what I'm doing in my current job. I work for Amazon (standard disclaimer: I don't speak for them). Amazon used to make all its money from selling to customers, but now makes billions from AWS, Amazon Web Services. This is a tech company leasing its tech to other companies. What for? So those companies can do their own buying and selling online, and whatever else they do. It's safe to assume that part of what they're doing is automating their own processes. Netflix is a well-known AWS customer. If you're on  Netflix, go find Hasan Minhaj's excellent show Patriot Act . There's an episode about Amazon, in which--to turn the whole thi...

  A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics Offers a Troubling Look Into Our Values Good article, and a very real problem. I raised my eyebrows a bit at the end though: If billions of machines are all programmed to make the same judgement call, it may be a lot more dangerous to cross the street as, say, an overweight man than as a fit woman. This is probably wrong. "A lot" more dangerous presumes that the trolley problem comes up a lot. It's rare, and should be much rarer when all the cars are far better at avoiding accidents altogether than even a sober, well-rested, experienced human driver. Machine driven cars can exhibit superhuman reaction time. They can receive input about hazards instantly from other such cars nearby, from regional and global monitoring systems, from cell phone signals emitted by devices in pedestrians' pockets. They can pass all this data through predictive algorithms. They can act in concert: an entire stretch of highway can see every car show down s...

  Transcribed image contents, a tweet by @JoshuaACNewman: I don't know why this is hard to understand. Toxic toads are toads that are toxic. Most toads are not toxic. But the ones that are, are a real doozy. Toxic masculinity is masculinity that is toxic. Most masculinities are not toxic. But the ones that are, are a real doozy. I think I know why it's hard for some to understand. Masculinity is like one's religion or one's political affiliation: it's part of one's identity. Attacks on those ideas are difficult to consider in a detached, rational way. They become personal attacks; they feel like an attack on the person. They inspire a fight-or-flight response. The person feels they must win at all costs, and out come the flimsy counter-arguments, the slanted evidence. If someone believes being a "Real Man" is crucial to their perceived worth, and that this necessitates treating women like objects to be dominated, well, they're going to freak out wh...

One Giant Step for a Chess-Playing Machine In this quote, Stockfish is a devastatingly effective, but traditional, chess-playing program that easily beats humans: Most unnerving was that AlphaZero seemed to express insight. It played like no computer ever has, intuitively and beautifully, with a romantic, attacking style. It played gambits and took risks. In some games it paralyzed Stockfish and toyed with it. ... Grandmasters had never seen anything like it. AlphaZero had the finesse of a virtuoso and the power of a machine. It was humankind’s first glimpse of an awesome new kind of intelligence. Coincidentally, this article also dovetails with Homo Deus by Yuval Harari, which I mentioned in my last post. We are used to thinking of consciousness and intelligence as inseparable, because in humans, they do go together. Though there's now lots of evidence that machines can be intelligent, there is no evidence as yet that they are conscious. Lacking that, it's meaningless to talk...