Thanks for having this conversation in front of us, I'm pretty invested
in these kinds of issues and they are rarely discussed openly IMO.
Perhaps you can unpack for me a little (or say it another way so I can
gain my own parallax):
/In our capitalist society, is it reasonable for Neuralink to be
less susceptible to the flattening you describe by aggregating (not
summing over) all subjects' projections from a high-dimensional
construct?
/
/
/
On 2/15/22 12:56 PM, glen wrote:
Excellent! Thanks. However, it's also important to note that the
lawsuit is against UC Davis, not Neuralink. So, to whatever extent
that Neuralink funding, mixed with tax payer funding, drives
university research (and possibly other things like overhead or paying
a percentage of salary for some with teaching loads, etc.), those
backseating costs can deeply impact whatever it is we call a research
university.
I'm about halfway into my "evaluation" of
https://consilienceproject.org/. What I've seen so far has a healthy
plating (I was going to say veneer, but that's too thin) of pretty
words. But those pretty words sound a tiny bit like Neuralink's
corporatized strawman/response to these accusations. I bring up
Consilience because it's placed in between a for-profit company and a
research university. On Consilience's About page, you see 2 ethical
commitments:
• collective attribution of authorship, and
• transparency in methodology
These may seem a bit contradictory to some observers. My guess is
that, given some time and effort (maybe even semi-automated NLP
computation), I could ferret out who wrote which featured article.
What I'd like to be transparent is who contributes what to each
article. (This is a professional task I have to some extent with my
clients ... so it's not mere hobby.)
Going back to the lawsuit against UC Davis and the 3 example spectrum
(and perhaps even the political tangent SteveS raised), where does
Neuralink end and UC Davis begin? In our capitalist society, is it
reasonable for Neuralink to be less susceptible to the flattening you
describe by aggregating (not summing over) all subjects' projections
from a high-dimensional construct?
We see a similar thread in the "academic free speech" rhetoric the
alt-right is pushing these days (though there are lefty exceptions)
... aka when is an academic not talking as an academic? And in the
Barret and Gorsuch exhortations that they're not partisan hacks ...
even when talking at a partisan event.
[sigh] I know these fluffy issues aren't interesting to most people.
It's way easier to shut up and calculate. But not only are they
interesting to me, I think they're necessary, then, now, and later.
On 2/15/22 11:30, Marcus Daniels wrote:
For some activity there will be a mesh of consequences, that perhaps
with enough transparency, debate, and observation the facts of the
matter could be quantified as a large graph. Across this graph, one
could apply a subject's function of the utility of each one of those
consequences. If some of the consequences are both illegal and
observable and a node represented a risk to the subject doing the
assessment of the graph, then that node would probably result in a
negative utility for most subjects and perhaps it will overwhelm
other positive evaluations across other nodes. One could perform the
same procedure across all possible subjects. The sum would be a
social evaluation of the mesh of consequences. I think it would not
be very useful, and not even address externalized costs.
Throughout this procedure the subjects' utility functions would all
be subject to advertising, propaganda, religion, blood sugar and
hormones. Measure twice you could get different answer.
If there are externalized costs that need to be recognized for the
survival of humans, then humans will have to create laws with large
risks for those that don't comply with them. (Case-by-case
harassment, vigilantism, or terrorism wouldn't scale as well.) My
guess in this Neuralink case, is that if there were any deviations
from best practices, they will be aware of this risk in the future.
In the cynical view of it being propaganda, well, yes, they'll be
motivated to make the best kind they can and to set things up to
compartmentalize the most sensitive or emotionally charged information.
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