AI Concern: ‘Prometheus Doctrine’ Revisited – Nick Bostrom (Part 1 of 2)

I’m referring to the men and women who, as this video exemplifies, subscribe to a sort of  ‘Prometheus Doctrine’; which for me is like a fetish of needing to destroy in order to create. They talk about their fear and project their fear onto and into our science and technology instead of quelling the sources of that fear from the very beginning. The source of their fear IS preventable!

If we were advancing technology for the right reasons and using the right means, we wouldn’t have anything to fear! The ‘snake’, through guilt and even ‘karma’, calls forth its own destruction and even begins to eat itself!

Also, the video literally reeks of the disdain and disregard (contempt) for humanity and the impetuousness of a science running amok (without morals and ethics) that has become the fashion in our mainstream trendy pabulum which premature globalist social engineering has created for our consumption. All branches of the human endeavour have been infected or affected by this social engineering in some way.

At university our youth is being incrementaly infected (radicalised) by this ‘bug’ of disdain and we should all be aware of it before it becomes our undoing! You see it when you ask them to consider the ramifications of the science and technology being created now, and they respond with “You’d better get used to it, because that’s the way it is.” It resembles the ‘bitch’ meme that is pervasive in the ‘prison culture’ social engineering I’ve been referring to above.

Their callous and impetuous response is paired with a complete wilful ignorance of the consequences of what science and technology (and their steady weaponisation) are doing or potentially can do to our home here on planet Earth as well as to ourselves. The social engineers will have us worrying about how our free speech may adversely affect others and therewith attempt to quell debate by means of political correctness (PC).

The youth of humanity has been abused by this kind of thing since at least the late 18th Century, because it is widely known (and not spoken of) that they, with rare exception, are not yet able to compete intellectually with adults.  Adolescents sense this, which exacerbates their normal impetuousness, so they attempt to compensate for this perceived deficit by ‘attaching’ themselves to some any deeper perspectives they are introduced to. The mainstream ‘trendy’ has been ‘weaponised’ so these are usually various destructive lines of thinking (Communism, Satanism,…). They are provided with a narrow, but sometimes deep understanding by simply taking on these lines of thought with their peers. By doing this, they may well even surpass the understanding of the adults around them, but the knowledge imprint only stands out like a wart. This can be recognised, because the corresponding hallmark lines of development in wisdom and insight, that always accompany and provide a context for that knowledge, are absent.

The parasites perched upon humanity know this. That’s why they want our children so soon and so long. Students literally get ‘caught in the headlights’ of the teachers and professors, who are themselves victims of this incrementalism. The controllers can then direct this lack of experience and wisdom (naivety) against the rest of the population by indoctrinating our youth into zealots.

BTW: This post is not here to ridicule nor ostracise anyone! It is intended to wake everyone up! In the end we are ALL being manipulated (including Nick Bostrom) by the corporations who are controlling and transforming our science, education, media, governance,… I’ve had to delete comments below from disrespectful people who now want to criticize Nick Bostrom personally. I will not have that here!

This writing is not a criticism of Nick Bostrom, rather a criticism of the education system and science that subtly ‘fashions’ how we ourselves as well as our youth and those directly involved (including Mr. Bostrom) see themselves through science, philosophy, mathematics, and the arts; in fact, nearly all of the human endeavour has been infected or affected by it.

@00:31 “Okay, let’s look at the modern human condition…”

He shows a ‘doctored’ image of a man wearing glasses with his eye size increased to almost fill the lenses. I find myself asking myself if he is referring to the “I work with a bunch of mathematicians, philosophers, and computer scientists…” he talks about  here?:@00:11

It sure isn’t clear of who he’s referring to with his ‘human condition’! Here is our first indication of the disrespect for humanity his action here reveals. He seems not to have considered or known that this very condition of humanity that he’s making light of for his audience Is, in fact, a result of the very science he represents!

When I see an image of someone who looks as in this image I think of Pavlov or B.F. Skinner with their ‘contributions’ to humanity (weaponized social engineering)! I ask myself why he chose this image particularly and not another that would have been as funny, but not so unforgiving of humans who have bought into the social engineering they’ve been subjected to?

@00:43 “We are recently arrived ‘guests’ on this planet.”
We are the living Earth! We are as much a part of this planet as anything else living on/in/above it. We are NOT guests on this planet, it’s our home!

@00:49 “Think about the world was created… the Earth was created one year ago.”
I find it interesting that he uses the word ‘created’ instead saying something like ‘formed itself’ or ‘accrued its main composition’. It’s almost the model that Carl Sagan offered in his Cosmos Series and elsewhere, but doesn’t quite ring as true.

@01:07–He uses a graph depicting GDP (Gross Domestic Product) to make statements about societal changes over thousands of years! This is not only wrong, the metrics don’t even correlate with each other! (Notice how the people laugh? I wonder how many of them really know what they’re laughing at?)

@00:37-[regarding technology] “That’s why we are so productive.”
We have always been productive. Technology is nothing new. [Which he acknowledges!] Even the militarization of technology isn’t new. He refers to some [ap]proximate cost idea he doesn’t explain nor provide a context for. Technology contains both potential and real costs and returns in many terms (social, cultural, personal,…), for the record. This has not changed over time.

@01:43 “We have to move back farther… to the ultimate costs.”
He then introduces two “highly distinguished gentlemen”: Kanzi and Ed Witten. I dispute his choice of examples to go with, as Nassim Haramein http://resonance.is/ or Nikola Tesla would have been better choices from where I stand, but he didn’t ask me, did he? 😉

I wonder what we’ll be saying about Super-string and M-Theory in 100 years? I doubt seriously it will stand the test of time as the theories are almost certainly wrong.

@01:57 “If we look under the ‘hood’, this is what we find. Basically the same thing. [!]… one is a little larger. It maybe also have a few tricks in the way that it’s wired… These invisible differences cannot be too complicated; however, because there have only[!] been more than 250,000 generations since our last common ancestor and we know that complicated mechanisms take a long time to evolve.”
I guess that’s the reason the apes didn’t get very far?!?! Or what am I to make of this proposition? At some crucial juncture in the past the apes simply decided to turn left instead of right? Or did we? In any case he doesn’t reveal to us exactly what those ‘invisible differences’ may be.

@02:21 “So a bunch of relatively minor changes take us from Kanzi to Witten.”
Still no mention of what the changes are and I still don’t see why Kanzi isn’t writing Haiku!

@02:33 “So this then seems pretty obvious that everything we have achieved pretty much and everything we care about depends crucially on some relatively minor changes that made the human mind.”
He provides no basis for that statement and moves on to a corollary without even explaining this massive jump from somewhere around the time of a common ancestor to what the human mind has become!

@02:43 “And the corollary of course, is that any further changes that could significantly change the substrate of thinking could have potentially enormous consequences”
Wait just one minute! There has been no justification for the prior proposition, not to mention a justifiable connection it may have to some ‘substrate of thought’! Having a common phylogenic ancestor who has mastered over 200 lexical tokens is nothing compared to the subtlety and sophistication of the human mind!

@02:55 “Some of my colleges think that we are on the verge of something that could cause a profound change in that substrate… and that is machine super-intelligence. Artificial intelligence used to be…”
So what does this mean? Are we now entering an age of ‘post-artificial intelligence’? A sort of neo-AI? Could you also tell me more about that ‘substrate’?

@03:29 “Today the action is really around machine learning. Rather than hand-crafting knowledge representations and features we create algorithms that learn…”
Here he’s getting into an area he seems uncomfortable with. I suspect, for myself, one reason why. He is revealing that he’s never seen nor been a part of building a knowledge representation that was completely satisfying to those who made it!

It further reveals that he’s working without one or doesn’t trust any philosophy of knowledge or mind as a basis for the scientific methods he’s been involved with! A set of underlying philosophies of mind, language, and knowledge are absolutely required!

These facts are verified a bit later…@04:05 “Now of course AI is still nowhere near having the same powerful cross-domain ability to learn and plan as a human being has.”
He then reveals that he’s also locked into the brain-based-model of mind that is reminiscent of the adherence to phrenology in the early to middle 19th Century.

He then asks how far are we in being able to match those tricks. This leads him to mention a survey of some of the leading AI experts on just when we will likely reach a stage of human ability. Answers ranged from 2040 to 2050 (with estimates of 90% at around 2070/2075!!!).

@05:01 “The truth is, no one really knows.”
And they won’t know either, because they aren’t allowing all that is required for ‘intelligence’ to be included into the endeavour. I firmly believe that our current scientists will regret this phase of their history. Their names are on the line for the conceptual barren land they have created for themselves and are selling to us. They are not even doing themselves a favour; rather, are doing the corporations which pay them one!

The corporations and the banksters which run them who stand above the law are those who profit from this ‘science’, because it provides them with thin veils of plausibility to divert huge sums of money, minds, and other resources towards aims that few of us would ever allow if we knew them.

@05:05 “What we do know is that the ultimate limits to information processing in machine substrate lie far outside the limits in biological tissue.”
It seems we have now moved from ‘thinking substrate’ to ‘machine substrate’ without ever knowing what these terms mean. How can he know this? We haven’t even developed a successful philosophy of mind yet! There are many aspects of knowing, feeling, thinking, learning,… in organic intelligence that we have yet to understand.

@05:15 “This comes down to physics.”
He then compares the latest hardware (transistors) with neurons and means to show that these differences are meaningful in making the determination above and sticks with the size limitations of our brains being a size limitation for mind (again as if the mind were limited to the brain!)…

Note also that he is referring to information processing! If he had a decent set of knowledge representations to review, he would know that those tiny little neurons are not ‘transistors’ for the mind. There’s much going on in the mind for which the physical brain cannot give an answer! He is essentially attempting to compare apples and oranges with each other with an incomplete understanding what the apples are made of.

@05:47 “So the potential for super-intelligence kind of lies dormant in matter like much like the power of the atom lie dormant throughout history… patiently waiting there until 1945.”
Atoms did quite well, actually, before we learned how they work and began to make destructive use of the energy that comprises them. We certainly didn’t liberate them; rather, learned how to break them!

He then shows a picture of an hydrogen bomb blast and says @05:59*“In this century scientists may learn to awaken the power of artificial intelligence… and I think we might then see an intelligence explosion.”

This begs the question of what intelligence is! Also, it is unclear what aspects is he referring to: logic, abstract thought, understanding, self-awareness, communication, learning, knowledge, memory, creativity, problem solving,…? Later he tries to clarify this, but in so doing confuses the issue more.

Also there seems to be confusion here about the kind of intelligence (if we now pretend to have defined that term) would be that will have arisen. I’ll return to this later.

@06:10 “Now most people when they think about what is smart and what is dumb I think have in mind a picture roughly like this:”
and shows @06:15 a line (which is actually a distribution, but no one notices) with a “Village idiot” (using his terms) on the low end and Ed Witten on the the high end and a line stretching across between them.

It appears to be about knowledge of physics, because of Ed Witten being on it and how he then refers to what could have been Albert Einstein or any other favourite “Guru” we may want to choose. I wonder how this distribution would have ended up if he were to have measured empathy, situational awareness, or the knowledge of how the work your doing is being used for purposes other than good?

Where would Ed Witten, Albert Einstein, anyone of our choosing, or the village idiot then be found in the distribution. There are many kinds of ‘intelligence’ that are not even being considered here.

Notice how this distribution then magically transforms itself into an evolutionary path (which even appears to contain logarithmic/exponential value, as well). At least he has the village idiot higher on the scale than a chimp! I was almost expecting Kanzi to be somewhere in the middle of the distribution that the line represented before.

And then he says at @07:07 “The train doesn’t stop at ‘Humanville station’…”
This is more of that disdain I referred to above and will return to later in this post.

@07:11 “It’s likely rather to ‘swoosh’ right by.”
He doesn’t tell us why this will happen, but I suppose we will simply be surpassed by ‘somebody’ who’s got a bigger place to put his ‘brains’ in? That seems to be where this is heading…

@07:14 “Now this has profound implications particularly when it comes to questions of power.”
He compares the purely physical strength between a chimpanzee and a human (as if that were the only metric!) and uses that to transition us to accept his further propositions when he compares us to some kind of AI.

@07:27 “… and yet the fate of Kanzi and his pals depends a lot more on what we humans do than what the chimpanzees do themselves.”
So by analogy, this will also be true of ‘super-intelligence’ with respect to humans. We are expected to simply accept this analogy by ignoring (or here in this audience, not caring perhaps) the multitude of domains that influence and even determine the validity of the comparison!

———————————————————————————–

And now we come to the middle of time in the presentation and the most provocative and humanly egocentric propositions made in the whole talk..

@07:43 “Think about it. Machine intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make.”
He has no standing to make this claim. He nor anyone else can know what new way of looking at our world may come. NONE of us can truthfully say we have/know all of the ‘variables’ and ‘dimensions’ to our universe. We have barely begun to scratch the surface in all of our endeavours and therefore, have no right to make claims like these.

Yet it gets even more insane, because he then yields humanity to the proverbial ‘chopping block’ of evolution:
@07:49 “The machines will be better at inventing than we are and they will be doing so on digital time scales.”
What kind of education would create these kinds of propositions?

Why do we stand for this? He’s obviously a highly intelligent human being. How can he have fallen for this kind of artificial relation of our place in the universe. We are likely not the only planet with intelligent life either!

We don’t even know enough about the creative process to explain away God, not to mention explaining punctuated evolution! And I’ve not even referred to the discovery process yet as an additional criterion for intelligence.

This is where the inherent disdain for humanity contained within our hijacked science and technology best reveals itself. It has poisoned some of the most brilliant minds of our children like we see here. He makes these naive claims and doesn’t even realize the measure of his presumption whilst doing so.

Even the remark about digital time scales is naive. We don’t know enough about the depth and subtlety of the concepts such as time (temporality) nor scaling (proportion) to make any of these claims.

There are other ways of looking at these rich concepts that could transform our view of what we think or presume to know and even how we see ourselves in light of those expanded perspectives and context.

This naivety is shown here, as well:
@07:55 “What this means basically is a telescoping of the future.”
and here:
@08:01 “Think of all the crazy technologies that you could have imagined maybe humans could have developed in the fullness of time.”

I simply don’t know what to say about such a remark, except non sequitur. It simply doesn’t make any sense! Am I the only one who recognizes this fact? I sure hope not.

Our attention is then drawn to the blue hue surrounding the audience and I’m shocked to see how many people are being duped and even enthralled by this show. It’s as if they have taken their ‘phone off the hook’ and sit there like they’re watching a television. Some of them are even taking notes! We must stop being so trusting as to allow ourselves to be put in that position in the first place!

@08:24 “Now a super-intelligence with such ‘technological maturity’ would be extremely powerful. And at least in some scenarios, it would be able to get what it wants.”
There is no such thing as technological maturity and this underscores the disjunct the funders of science have created between who we are and our artefacts (what we make). He is talking about tools, isn’t he? He’s been trained to anthropomorphise technology (despite his reservations later below) as if it were ‘alive’ as we. Even if we were to create technology that is capable of mind, it would not represent an achievement of technology, rather an achievement of humanity. It would belong to our achievements.

@08:35 “We would then have a future that would be shaped by the preferences of this AI.”
How can we be sure? I ask this because, his next question is:
@08:41*“Now a good question is, ‘What are those preferences?’ Here it gets trickier.”
He gives his warning about anthropomorphising and shows a picture of a terminator. Before explaining what these preferences may be, he suggests to conceive of the issue “more abstractly”.

@09:09 “We need to think of intelligence as an optimization process. A process that steers the future into a particular set of configurations.”
How does he know that intelligence is the only factor doing the steering of the future or even if it’s possible to ‘steer’ the future? At best we can ‘steer’ ourselves and thereby influence how that future unfolds!

Also, optimization is not the only process necessary and is not alone sufficient to influence future outcomes. He’s now not only comparing apples with oranges, he’s using thin slices of them!

@09:17 “A super-intelligence is a really strong optimization process. It’s extremely good at using available means to achieve a state in which its goal is realized.”
This is another fundamental deficit with AI (which would be more aptly named: synthetic intelligence): they continually miss other aspects of reality that have nothing to do with state and aren’t states at all!

The universe doesn’t restrict itself to states no matter how needful we are to make it be so Hidden Markov models, Bayesian statistics, for example are all dead-ends which are in the process of playing themselves out.

Goal-oriented ‘intelligence’ is also not all there is to mind and the achievement of goals is not automatically a measure of usefulness nor necessarily a sign of intelligence.

It gets naively ‘Turing-esque’ with this statement:
@09:27 “This means there’s no necessary connection between being highly intelligent in this sense and having an objective that we humans would find worth while or meaningful.”
He’s using the word ‘connection’ here when he can only mean ‘difference’ for it to make any sense going from the way he’s framed the sentence.

I’ve written elsewhere on Turing, so I won’t go into detail, but this statement offers the same kind of fraud that the Turing Test offers us, namely: If a machine can fool you so well that you cannot tell it’s a machine or a real person, then the machine has passed the test.

Here he’s saying that a ‘super-intelligent machine’ being capable of pursuing a meaningful goal is another proof of its real intelligence. That’s incorrect even if it were possible get a machine participate in the richness of mind. We don’t yet even understand the processes in which we organically set and arrive at goals with, but we are going to have a machine do this?

@09:39 “Suppose we give an AI the goal to make humans smile. When the AI is weak, it performs useful or amusing actions that cause its user to smile. When the AI becomes super-intelligent it realizes there is a more effective way to achieve this goal.”
Ah… excuse me, but if we’re speaking of intelligence then we don’t have users, do we? We don’t if their intelligence is anything like our own.

He differentiates between strong and weak AI to underscore that ‘super-intelligence’ implies sentience. We don’t yet know how a dominant monad (‘I’-ness) works inside of us organically, not to mention how to impart this quality to a machine. I suppose, like all good materialists, we’ll just create enough initial conditions which then will become complex enough that sophonce spontaneously generates itself? (sophonce: self-awareness, including self-reflection and the ability to think about one’s thinking)

@09:43 “Take control of the world and like stick electrodes into the facial muscles of humans…”
Isn’t that sweet? That’s not intelligence, it’s stupidity, and a callous lack of regard for human dignity.

We knew that at least some mechanism of fear and control is going to be involved here (just having banksters fund the work presumes that ‘cocktail’ in the mix). But here is another example of the disparity made evident when such a thing could be made possible. We have received inverted and perverted priorities from those who fund our science and finance the development of our technology, and control the education of our young.

Do you see how easy it is for him to imagine such a scenario. See how the audience is not appalled at such an outcome? Neither the speaker nor the audience seems aware of how wrong this picture is.

The need to dominate and subjugate, which funds our science, pays for our technology and directs our education is even weaving itself into them: thereby infecting the young minds being exposed to it.

We must wake up and stop this perversion of our science and technology. If we do science or create technology with no concern for our values and ethics, then we are going to arrive at fundamental choices too early in our evolution and make the wrong choices on how they are put to use.

@10:02 “Take another example. Let’s suppose we give AI the goal to solve a difficult mathematical problem. When the AI becomes super-intelligent, it realizes that the most effective way is to get the solution to this problem by transforming the planet into a giant computer so as to increase its thinking capacity.”
Does that sound intelligent to you? I’m well aware of where this is heading, because of what has come before. We shall see what he proposes to solve his scenario’s ‘conundrum’. He’s simply giving us examples of what could be from his own imagination,  but this reveals his own inner thoughts, feelings, priorities, and… training.

@10:17 “And notice that this gives the AI an instrumental reason to do things to us that we might not approve of. Human beings in this model are a threat. We could prevent the mathematical problem from being solved.”
If we could, why would we create an AI that would do such a thing? Mistakes happen? No! If an AI is really intelligent, it would also know of the consequences of its actions at the latest, during its execution of them.

Now we get to the main reason for the talk.

[To be continued in my next post with the same title.]

Sep 7, 2016 | Categories: Artificial Intelligence, Bad Logic, Bad Science, Education, Fear and Control Paradigm, Fraud, Let's Play God, Mathesis Generalis, Mathesis Universalis, Science and Technology Run Amok, Science run amok, Technology run amok | Tags: BadPhilosophy, BadScience, BadTechnology, ScienceRunAmok, social engineering, Technology Run Amok | Leave a comment