Category: Ethics

Singularities as Child’s Play

Mark DavisLeave a comment

Dystopian literature is mostly about the unintended consequences of technological change.  Cory Doctorow expands on this theme related to technological singularities on Boing Boing:

Indeed, it seems to me that in literature, the Singularity’s role is to serve as a straw-man for critiquing technology as a one-sided panacea.

Fair enough. Literature and drama are all about conflicts and Man vs. Technology is at least one of the primary conflicts of the modern age.

Heaven stuffBut why is it that we are drawn to this notion of some kind of transcendent mechanism that alleviates us of the struggles of everyday existence? It’s a central theme of Hinduism (get off the wheel of existence), Buddhism (existence is void; free the mind of your very desire of it), Christianity and Islam (post-life existence is better and more perfect). I think it arises from the same predisposition for magical thinking combined with hope that is part of imaginative play among children. In play, the child creates an imagined and utopian existence where their alter egos typically overcome all obstacles. There are a few sex differences that are part conditioning and likely partly biological, but the patterns are remarkably utopian in terms of the dispositions of the children’s play avatars.

The translation of this into adult formulations of heavens filled with inchoate goodness and light (or many virgins), or even an emptiness that defies ordinary characterization, is just an extension of this urge to play. In a technological world, singularities are the secular equivalent, but with the additional propellant of observed technological change that surrounds all of us.… Read the rest

Evolution, Rationality, and Artificial Intelligence

Mark DavisLeave a comment

We now know that our cognitive facilities are not perfectly rational. Indeed, our cultural memory has regularly reflected that fact. But we often thought we might be getting a handle on what it means to be rational by developing models for what good thinking might be like and using it in political, philosophical, and scientific discourse. The models were based on nascent ideas like the logical coherence of arguments, internal consistency, few tautologies, and the consistency with empirical data.

But an interesting and quite basic question is why should we be able to formulate logical rules and create increasingly impressive systems of theory and observations given a complex evolutionary history. We have big brains, sure, but they evolved to manage social relationships and find resources–not to understand the algebraic topology of prime numbers or the statistical oddities of quantum mechanics–yet they seem well suited for these newer and more abstract tasks.

Alvin Plantinga, a theist and modern philosopher whose work has touched everything from epistemology to philosophy of religion, formulated his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EANN) as a kind of complaint that the likelihood of rationality arising from evolutionary processes is very low (really he is most concerned with the probability of “reliability,” by which means that most conclusions and observations are true, but I am substituting rationality for this with an additional Bayesian overlay).

Plantinga mostly wants to advocate that maybe our faculties are rational because God made them rather than a natural process. The response to this from an evolutionary perspective is fairly simple: evolution is an adaptive process and adaptation to a series of niche signals involves not getting those signals wrong. There are technical issues that arise here concerning how specific adaptation can result in more general rational facilities but we can, at least in principle, imagine (and investigate) bridge rules that extend out from complex socialization to encompass the deep complexities of modern morality and the Leviathan state, and the extension of optimizing spear throwing to shooting rockets into orbit.… Read the rest