On Tue, Mar 5, 2019 at 12:37 PM Matt Mahoney <[email protected]> wrote:
> Steve, good luck ending the political debate over climate change. But > you have a few obstacles. > > 1. Overwhelming evidence does not end political debate. Just ask the > creationists, anti-vaxxers, moon landing hoaxers, and 9/11 conspiracy > theorists. The whole purpose of the flat earth society is not to > convince you that the earth is flat, but to show that what you think > are logical, sound, and obvious arguments supported by undisputed > facts are actually useless. > More precisely: computers have lowered the cost of publishing so low, that anyone can publish: you no longer run a gauntlet of editors, printers and proof-readers who tell you that your ideas are stupid. Facebook and twitter have taken this to a new level. As a result, we can now all hear each-others brains thinking, and, it turns out, they are incoherent, contradictory and insane. Worse: this high-connectivity, high-bandwidth (youtube) low-latency interconnect allows for the spread and amplification of "memes" disconnected from any basis in reality. In short: social media has attached our individual, singular brains into a big "global brain", and we are hearing that global brain think, and it is hallucinating a lot of the time. Old-school social sciences have already studied this: propaganda, (Hitler studied propaganda), cults, brainwashing, Stockholm syndrome, and also plenty of less harmful things: everything from pop music and Puerto-Rican low-rider automotive clubs. Uplifting things, too: from scientists to medical doctors to humanitarian activists. If you want a preview of what a mildly super-human intelligence viz AGI might think, then the hallucinatory beliefs of various memetic tribes is a good sampling. The memeplex of creationists, anti-vaxxers, moon landing hoaxers, and 9/11 conspiracy theorists is sufficiently self-consistent to be stable, and more: sufficient to be invasive, and occupy the thought-space, the noosphere of many human brains. It spreads. Perhaps you think that an AGI will be purely "rational" (whatever that means!) and that no AGI could ever be a creationist anti-vaxxer moon-landing denialist. But why would you think that AGI would not hallucinate? Until very recently, Reality, i.e. the universe, entrained thinking minds in such a way that you starve and die, if you cannot think clearly enough to obtain food and procreate. Squirrels who neglect nuts die sooner, rather than later. Our modern economy is sufficiently robust that you can hallucinate all day long, or watch soap operas on TV, or do whatever it is you do, and mostly not starve to death. Mostly; we seem to have a problem with Amazon employees in LA and SF. But whatever. If you want a safe, non-existential-threatening AGI in the future, attempting to understand and control the root causes of hallucinatory thinking today is a good place to start. -- Linas -- cassette tapes - analog TV - film cameras - you ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/Tbefabf50a1da4070-M7f718fff7015cfc48c5c572b Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
