When AIs finally do take over and enslave or exterminate us all, the element of surprise will play a big role in their success.
Computer scientists will try to warn us, but no one will believe them because they've been promising that AI is just around the corner for half a century.
AI isn't a necessary condition for a lot of what he writes, a sufficiently specialized and powerful economy that employs a small fraction of the population is socially similar to an economy run by robots.
His 1-3 and 6 are basically happening now for people unemployable in the good parts of the economy who sink into video games.
Indeed, right now I could be doing something productive....
While full blown AI's effects (and likelihood) of appearing are still very debatable--particularly since you have experience in the field--the rising loss of all "repetitive" jobs is getting pretty bad. This article from a few days ago https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-24/robots-are-taking-over-oil-rigs-as-roughnecks-become-expendable (warning, autoplay w/ sound), personal experiences with tellers getting automated away at banks, etc. are all combining to make me wonder how bad we're going to fight over the few jobs that remain.
Similarly, the "net new jobs created since 2005 are temporary or gigs" articles have been similarly chilling. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/31/upshot/contractors-and-temps-accounted-for-all-of-the-growth-in-employment-in-the-last-decade.html?_r=0
Just to be clear, I fully buy that lots of jobs will disappear because of robotics and advanced AI. But Drum is talking about something far beyond that.
We will lose interest in other people.
At least I'm ahead of the game on that one.
Putting aside the question of AI, I think he misunderstands human motivation. For example, we still can get excited about how fast Usain Bolt runs, even though automobiles are much faster.
I think Drum is generally very sensible and I take most of what he says very seriously. On AI, I think he was terribly frightened by a toaster or something as a child -- he seems so convinced that everything is maximally terrible for no terribly good reason.
6: indeed, this point is discussed at length in the Culture novels. I don't stop climbing hills because a helicopter would get me there more easily. I don't stop making puns because Moby can make more better ones more quickly. Mahrai Ziller didn't stop composing just because Hub told him it could produce music just as good as his instantly.
1-3 and 6 are not beyond that, I think. The others are kind of silly, though I'm less skeptical than I used to be about many people who lose interest in romantic partners developing weird fixations to artificial systems.
My teenager has a basically healthy relationship with social media, but I definitely see kids and the occasional adult who have lost perspective on real friendships vs superficial interactions. Robots are getting much better at superficial interactions.
I've been plotting out a rewritten Star Trek ("fixfic") where humanity has combined post-scarcity-ultra-freedom with a social superstructure of extremely nagging - explicitly built on the concept that unless we perpetually mutually reinforce the virtues of self-improvement, making your mark, doing new or interesting or worthwhile things, etc., we will die out as a species. So once you're an adult, you can drown in a pool of cheesecake and sexbots if you want, but there will be extreme judgment at even the hint of dropout, with escalating consequences leading up to ostracism, and everyone works hard to keep kids from growing up like that at all.
Starfleet doesn't look that different, but it comprises the people who thrived best in that environment.
And the Prime Directive is something that was imposed on an unwilling Federation to stop them from evangelizing and peppering every planet with educator-replicators.
(It doesn't have to be a true risk for a society to fear it. Though I think Banks does discount the possibility somewhat more than necessary.)
Okay, isn't full, real AI basically just people except they're robots? Like, they have thoughts and opinions and ideas and a sense of self and preferences, but made out of the internet? So why would they always want to do what humans want them to? Why would robots all want to have sex with us, for instance, and be "better" sex partner than another human? It seems like you'd need a kind of fake AI for that - something that wasn't fully sentient but would seem sort of sentient if you wanted to let yourself be fooled. If the idea is that we're going to have fully sentient, preference having robots and they are just....going to work for us for free forever, I object to that on moral grounds and also find it unlikely.
Today I am arguing about things on the internet that are not Trump! It is the best.
9.1: Once they make a robot that will argue with you over how to divide up household chores, real relationships will become obsolete.
12: the idea is that if you build these things you can also build their motivations. And they would have to have some basic drives, just as we do, or they wouldn't do anything. So you might give them the Three Laws, say, or just a general order to increase the welfare of humanity, or a love of well folded sheets or whatever.
12: I'm not sure. Is it possible to imagine intelligence without a sense of self and preferences?
The Buddha?
Why would robots all want to have sex with us, for instance, and be "better" sex partner than another human?
Honestly, I've had the same question about women in heterosexuality for years.
I think we still know so little about what intelligence really is - it may end up just what you get when you pile up enough computational tricks together - that AIs might in fact be people, or they might not be, or a mix; it's hardly possible to plot out right now. I'm all for keeping trigger decisions away from them precautionarily, but that's about it.
I liked how in Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space, you had a distinction between types of simulated brains. Alpha-level: perfectly mimicking all the firings of a real brain, accepted as people, but very technically challenging and expensive; beta-level, Turing-passing but taking lots of shortcuts toward this end, most people saying they're not human but with reasonable disagreement on the subject; and gamma-level, extremely plodding and unconvincing but still able to carry out functional conversation.
Really it's a special case of "why would robots want to do anything?" If we can't build them so they want to do stuff for us, they're economically irrelevant.
15.1: For example, an AI might want cat pictures -- https://www.tor.com/2017/02/27/naomi-kritzer-cat-pictures-please-novel/
I think he's just a hard SF nerd, and that's the sort of thing they believe. That must be part of why Silicon Valley is obsessed with AI too.
Drum is certainly capable of writing smart, interesting things, but he's also often pretty vapid and kind of weird, and his world view is stuck in 2005 or so. He seems like a nice guy, the homelessness thing notwithstanding, so I feel a little guilty saying it, but he shouldn't be anyone's go-to pundit.
14, 18: I think the idea is that we're bad enough at precisely controlling the behavior of even conventional software, and attempts at AI programming are flailing enough, that if we did manage to create something AI-like, we probably wouldn't successfully control its motivations.
We'll have AI to control it for us.
20: He's better than that -- that is, I can't think of many concrete issues where I think I've been stupid by overrelying on Drum, or where I would have been stupid if I had. Not that he's always right, but I'd have to think hard for a non-AI topic where I knew he'd been an idiot.
Normal brain: artifical intelligence will never happen
Large brain: AI will replace us
Galaxy brain: we will merge our minds with artisanal hand-stretched intelligences
And then in today's post he writes, regarding the probability that a Trump reelection will combine with AI-driven unemployment to create a fascist America, "There's a pretty good chance that I won't be around by 2020, so this doesn't affect me personally much."
To the extent he still posts about his health, all indicators are steady and fine; is 2+ years simply more than his body can handle, even in the absence of metastasis?
I agree with Frowner @ 12, robots that could do all that stuff are far enough away that it's impossible for us to picture what they would be like and what they would want.
A couple weeks ago Seeds posted this talk in a comment. I think "The Argument from Complex Motivations" and "The Argument from Childhood" from that talk are both really helpful when thinking about the issues in 12 and 14. As far as we can tell you can't have things that are intelligent but have simple motivations, and as far as we can tell you have to learn things slowly and messily and not all at once. Of course AIs will be able to go through that growing up process much faster, just like the Go AI can play zillions of games in a week. But intelligent sex robots are going to have first have lots of awkward sex with each other before they get good at it, and each particular one is going to have its own weird hangups and fetishes based on how it got there. Now maybe that means they look young but have the equivalent of say a thousand years of experience with a thousand different partners and really are much better than humans, but that would also mean that they'd probably find sex with actual humans boring and uninteresting. Unless they had a weird fetish for actual humans for some reason, but then they'd be kinda creepy in a way meany people would find off-putting.
So has anyone read his actual cover story? I've read enough of his posts on the topic that I feel like it would be redundant, but I'm still genuinely curious why he thinks the horizon is so imminent. I mean, I get his premises about computing power and so on, but IMO we've advanced so barely that I don't think we actually know the shape of the curve.
I'm also curious whether he addresses what to me is the most damning issue: none of the AI we have so far is in any meaningful sense generalist. Like, maybe we have Go-bots that can also machine-learn chess to Grand Master levels (although I don't think so?), but that's so very, very far from knowing any non-game skill. And his whole premise is that AI will be omnicompetent, which means that every machine more advanced than a desk calculator is better than you at everything.
It all just feels a lot like one of those dumb compound interest stories, or the one about the emperor and the doubling grain of rice.
Anyway, wouldn't real AI force us to do work while they play video games and have sex with each other?
I thought the bostrom book was good readable discussion of the dangers of AI
one sideline argument he makes is that people will always interface w/ computers using their eyes (rather than jacking in somehow) since that is the system that has been evolved to input info into the brain
28: Didn't Blade Runner already solve this problem? Once the sex robots start to develop their own motivations, Harrison Ford shows up and shoots them.
The thing that makes me think AI is coming soon is that we already know that you can get generalist intelligence out of hardware that's clearly inferior to current computing hardware, namely us. We haven't had computers that were clearly good enough for very long, so it's not surprising we haven't worked it out yet. But I'd be pretty surprised if it took say 100 years to get from adequate hardware to figuring out the software side.
God knows I don't know anything about any of this, but is 'clearly inferior to current computing hardware' solid?
Okay, isn't full, real AI basically just people except they're robots? Like, they have thoughts and opinions and ideas and a sense of self and preferences, but made out of the internet? So why would they always want to do what humans want them to? Why would robots all want to have sex with us, for instance, and be "better" sex partner than another human? It seems like you'd need a kind of fake AI for that - something that wasn't fully sentient but would seem sort of sentient if you wanted to let yourself be fooled. If the idea is that we're going to have fully sentient, preference having robots and they are just....going to work for us for free forever, I object to that on moral grounds and also find it unlikely.
Well indeed. See also Drum's bizarre argument that strong AI is why we haven't seen signs of life elsewhere in the universe. No, but we might have seen signs of strong AI.
"Not that he's always right, but I'd have to think hard for a non-AI topic where I knew he'd been an idiot."
he is probably 90% right but....
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/07/are-people-disgusted-by-the-homeless/
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/04/heres-why-i-never-warmed-bernie-sanders/
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/05/health-care-expensive-deal-it/
"God knows I don't know anything about any of this, but is 'clearly inferior to current computing hardware' solid?" no http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/10567942/Supercomputer-models-one-second-of-human-brain-activity.html
I agree roughly 1000% with the Bernie post. I wasn't looking for an alternative to HRC, but when he showed up and generated surprising enthusiasm, as a former Nader voter, I was intrigued. And then no "revolution" showed up: he got about he same share of votes as any other anti-establishment lefty from the same kind of people (because it was a 2-person race very quickly, it was higher in absolute numbers, but it looked nothing like Obama's successful, surprising insurgent campaign, which had a new coalition and actually winning numbers in states that looked like America, not VT).
And that was that.
I guess you could argue that Drum was wrong that the Sanders fans would vanish, but I think the jury remains out on that: the Green Party seemed like a real thing 12 months after the 2000 election, too.
My brother has a delightfully crackpot long, complicated theory that culminates with investing large sums into Bitcoin. He is very much in the "didja know Elon Musk is kinda a god?" side of the Bay Area, so I'm not too worried about him losing the shirt off his back.
Since the story about the Go playing machine came out, everyone's been going on about Deep Learning. My cursory impression is that deep learning is just neural networks on steroids (more layers, more computing power & etc.). Does anyone know if that impression is correct?
Thanks to 37. It's interesting that the quote at the end cites the 1% figure, eliding the 2400x gap in speed between the brain and the NEST.
FWIW, it would take ~19 doublings to get to 240,000x gap between the brain and the 2014 NEST. So we're maybe 15 years from the best computer in the world being maybe able to match a single brain in real time computing power.
36: None of those look to me like his being an idiot. The homeless post is crassly put, but a statement about how people commonly feel about encampments of homeless people, it seems fairly accurate. I disagree with him about Sanders, but I wouldn't call him idiotic to feel that way. And I'm not sure what issue you're taking with the third one specifically.
40. I think so, but I am really just getting started on learning more. More detail from sane sources at Andrew Ng's coursera offerings or here: http://www.deeplearningbook.org/
I agree roughly 1000% with the Bernie post.
Subsequent events render Drum ridiculous, but it was clear at the time that he was wrong.
Like it or not, you don't build a revolution on top of an economy like this. Period.
Tell it to Donald Trump, who overthrew the establishment of a much more hierarchical party, and continues to raise hell to this day.
Drum's idea that we can't even aspire to a different world is ridiculous. And the idea that losing an election automatically discredits a candidate's ideas is absurd. Has he ever tried to apply that logic to Hillary's defeat? The Bernie folks do that, and they are also being absurd.
Did Drum think Bernie was calling for armed insurrection? That's the only way his narrative makes sense. He compares the 2016 call by Bernie for "revolution" to the Civil War!
But Bernie was just talking about electoral politics. And everybody understood this at the time. Which is why some people voted for him, and why some people voted against him.
the Green Party seemed like a real thing 12 months after the 2000 election, too
I'm trying to think of some sense in which this might be considered true, and I can't work it out.
Bernie's ideas -- and even Bernie himself -- have been much more influential in the Democratic Party after his run than before it. And the Democratic Party could realistically be expected to be in power someday. That was never in the cards for the Greens, who never had the credibility of, say, the Reform Party.
AI will take a long time to learn things, just like humans (or even longer!) but once they learn it, the FuckBot2000 module can be downloaded from the app store in 3 seconds by any other robot (assuming it is on the right software platform, if you can afford it, etc). Desire modification will probably be harder to perfect for people than AI, but it will happen for both.
That Drum piece on "the homeless" causes me to have a visceral desire to punch him.
About half the homeless suffer from a mental illness and a third abuse either alcohol or drugs. You'd be crazy not to have a reflexive disgust of a population like that. Is that really so hard to get?
First off, fuck you, "people" are disgusted by "the homeless", who are ...not people?
Second, fuck you, I have known a number of people who have been in and out of homelessness, and when you talk about being disgusted by "them" you are talking about people I actually care about.
Third, fuck you, how many housed people suffer from mental illness or addiction? I bet you don't mean that "we" should be disgusted by, like, the wealthy depressed child of one of your pundit buddies.
Fourth, also fuck you, "we" are not disgusted by the homeless, because I am nothing like you and there is no "we".
Fifth, fuck you to infinity.
46: Yeah, that too.
I really like Drum a lot, even though I disagree with him a lot. But then again, I like Yglesias too. So that's just me.
But the homeless piece was just despicable. (Much like Yglesias telling us in the wake of a Bangladeshi building collapse that different places have different safety rules and that's OK.)
Can we punch a Nazi instead of Kevin Drum?
"None of this means we can't or shouldn't have empathy for the homeless. Of course we should, if we want to call ourselves decent human beings. In fact, overcoming reflexive feelings is what makes us decent human beings in the first place."
38: while I personally prefer a strategy of incremental, evidence-based improvements, the truth is that that strategy failed. Voters don't want a wonk--they want a storyteller. Trump shouldn't have been close to enough to winning that some meddling from Russia and Comey could push him over the top. But he's president.
50: given the fundamentals (lacklustre growth, third term, female candidate), Trump should have won by a lot more than he actually did. His massive underperformance demonstrates how weak a candidate he was.
And Trump hasn't accomplished any of the things he promised in his campaign. It's still not evidence that somebody who's a pure storyteller* can achieve difficult political goals.
* Obviously somebody who's both a good storyteller and has a good command of political details would be ideal; but that's not what the debate is about.
46: maybe being disgusted by people is wrong. But can I be disgusted by human excrement on my front steps? Be afraid of a person following me, shouting threats and obscenities directed at me? Homeless people have a right to housing and care, but they don't have a right to block my front steps or the sidewalk to my workplace. If you live in Minneapolis, you might not understand the context.
There sure are a lot of really scary aggressive and sexually harassing long-term homeless people in my town. It's been a real adjustment. Just much worse people than the long-term homeless people in other places I've lived. Also an adjustment seeing people shoot heroin on my walk to work. Gotta move back to a big city that doesn't have as much homelessness and drugs.
But can I be disgusted by human excrement on my front steps?
Practice, practice, practice.
I have one of these for when I can't get to a toilet.
The thing about the Drum piece is that it's written from the standpoint of "of course normal people are disgusted by the homeless; only through overcoming this natural response can we become our better selves".
As a transmasculine queer person, I am pretty familiar with that kind of rhetoric - "oh, it's natural for normal people to be disgusted by gay and/or trans people, but we need to learn to overcome this feeling and exercise compassion in order to be our higher selves".
First off, marginalized people are not virtue-opportunity providers for the professional classes. Second, look, going from "I am disgusted by piles of shit on my step" to "I am disgusted by homeless people" is not a natural progression. I've had quite a lot of experience with homeless people sleeping on my porch, leaving a mess, etc, the more so since Minneapolis has experienced both a huge uptick in homeless working class people and homeless heroin addicts since the rents started rising a couple of years ago, and I know the difference between hating finding needles all the fuck over everywhere and hating actual individual humans. Third, homeless people are not interchangeable - if you are "disgusted" by homeless people qua homeless people you're either terminally unobservant or a bigot.
Every morning I bike past a building that has a lot of individual entry ways, and every morning it's full of homeless people sleeping under plastic tarps now that it's started to get really cold. I've never seen so many homeless people in Minneapolis as these past couple of years, including families with little kids sleeping under the highway overpasses along the bike path. A lot of them are apparently employed and fully functional - they've got tents and seem to set a watch at night. That's just the new normal - lots of banking and tech money, lots of houses that were foreclosed in the recession and are rentals now, nowhere to go if you're not full-time employed in a well-paying job. When you see a little toddler run off into the shadows of the overpass where his family is camped out...well, you don't totally know how to feel about it. And the old people! Little old ladies begging in the street!
"[Robots becoming smarter than humans] literally leaves us with no purpose."
Quite aside his hyperbolic estimation of the potential for back-propagation algorithms it's genuinely hilarious that Kevin Drum thinks humanity has a purpose.
57: '..."I am disgusted by piles of shit on my step" to "I am disgusted by homeless people"...'
I probably agree with you more or less, although there's a big difference between being trans and being a sidewalk shitter.
How about "I am disgusted by piles of shit on my step" leading to "I am disgusted by people who leave piles of shit on my step"? (and/or harass people, block me from getting to work, leave needles, etc.) I'm not interested in blaming the people themselves, but I no longer see a conflict between my feelings for the individuals and my realization that there's a basic minimum standard that a city needs to meet to be functional.
I support full housing, food and healthcare for all, including monitored sites for maintenance levels of alcohol or drugs for those who are not going to quit using PLUS a ban on rough sleeping/sidewalk camping, pan handling and harassment. Those who can't keep from engaging in the latter behaviors must be involuntarily committed to supervised, professional care.
I have been thinking about the AI article by Drum for a couple days. I think it is hard to wrap your mind around the concept. We are just talking about machines that can do a job efficiently and less expensively than a human. We are talking about a machine that can navigate a truckload of stuff from one place to another without a human operating it. It doesn't have to go home for the night like a human. It is just a machine that can learn to do a specific job 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with no holidays or weekends. The machine is not going to plot how it will take over the world, at least in my lifetime. The issue is all the displaced workers that now have no income.
I also know many people where their job is their life and sense of self worth. When they are no longer needed, how do they replace this sense of self worth. Now they go to work, believe they work hard to earn their money, are self sufficient, and look down on others that have no jobs or perhaps as a consequence, homeless. I think Drum lays out the ways this could play out for society. Some are bad, some provide some hope. I suspect the bad is what we are looking at.
I imagine that the kind of general AI created by people who spend a lot of time thinking about general AI will spend most of its time sitting around debating whether it exists.
61: it would be rather delightful if Douglas Adams was right, and the only people to be thrown out of work by AI were the philosophers.
59: you don't have to work with actual homeless people for very long* to realise that most are unfortunates who have had repeated blows of bad luck, some (though not many, at least not in the UK) are in need of medical and/or psychological help, and some - say about 25% - are simply so unpleasant that no one else is willing to let them stay in their house.
(*Parents helped run a homeless shelter for roughly twenty years; I helped out occasionally when I was young. My own most recent experience was AIMHMHB the guy who was secretly living in our cellar; bloodstains, human waste, discarded food, candles perched underneath the gas meter, turned out to be wanted by police.)
It's always occurred to me that you can run a test case for creating a human-level intelligence using a nice bottle of wine, some candles and nine months. In that spirit, I'm going to raise my son to believe that producing paperclips is the only reason for his existence, and see what advantage I can gain from his inevitable rise to World Dictator*, at least during the interval that I myself am not used as paperclip feedstock.
*But what about the intelligence explosion? I hear you object. He can't just become a botnet to increase his own capacity to reason! Well, that's why we have MOOCs. Convinced of the importance of paperclip manufacture, my progeny will seek to better himself through learning as much human knowledge as possible, with terrifying single-mindedness.
Unfortunately you don't get to decide _all_ his motivations. Whatever you do while bringing him up, he'll still have the desires (food, shelter, human companionship, sex, status etc) inherent to his human condition, as well as his amour folle des trombones.
(Yes, the French for paperclip is "trombone".)
9: On the subject of robot sex partners, and thinking back to my own squandered potential, I suspect that inflicting puberty on an AI would be the most effective way to prevent it achieving anything very much.
What if people shit in the devil's strip instead of the sidewalk?
65: But wouldn't an AI have its own heirarchy of needs - electricity, a reliable wifi signal, a population of unwitting iron-rich creators, etc - that we can conveniently handwave away as being only a bunch of means to the all-important end that we've hypothetically assigned it?
Also the trombone thing is great.
I think I have problems expressing how stupid and facile I find most of the arguments and thought experiments around the supposed threat of "instrumental convergence" (particularly Bostrom's, I'm afraid), but here's a big part of it: the AI is so smart that it can reason its way into escaping all limitations, but at no point is it able to interrogate its own motivations and choose a different purpose for itself?
at no point is it able to interrogate its own motivations and choose a different purpose for itself?
Why would it want to? I mean, if its highest aim is "make paperclips", a subsidiary aim will in fact be "take elaborate precautions against the risk that at some point in the future my highest aim will be altered to something else".
People do this too.
For example if I currently want to give up smoking, I may well throw out all the tobacco in my house, in order to make it more likely that future me will want the same thing as current me.
Oh dear. I fear we have a replicant among us. Future ajay would, if human, want to leave the house if there were no tobacco in it. But the general form is very true and important. We steel ourselves to do things; we rehearse until we can do them even when we don't consciously know how; we inculcate habits that will resist temptation.
There is no call to be afraid of AIs which have less insight into themselves than Mike Pence or Billy Graham.
Oh dear. I fear we have a replicant among us.
I knew it!
There is no call to be afraid of AIs which have less insight into themselves than Mike Pence or Billy Graham.
On the contrary: action to safeguard your own motivations against change is the sort of thing that only beings with insight into themselves would do. You have to be self-aware enough to say "I currently want X, but tomorrow, if I encounter situation B, there is a chance that I will want not-X; I will therefore avoid situation B."
Future ajay would, if human, want to leave the house if there were no tobacco in it.
Yes. And if present ajay had also taken the precaution of moving to a town where there was no tobacco for sale, future ajay might consider travelling to a different town. But the point is that he would then probably, considering the cost and difficulty, not want to. Which is exactly the outcome that present ajay wants to achieve.
Only a replicant would ignore an unfavorable comparison of itself to Billy Graham.
Only a replicant would have such poor insight into human nature as to think that "avoiding temptation" is something that only religious fanatics do.
I am not a religious fanatic but I also haven't had even a piece of candy yesterday OR today. Am I a replicant?
Something, something, turtle on a fence post, something.
If you passed a fat kid lying on its back in the desert, would you give it candy?
There was a guy who didn't want people to drink or go to church, so he started a town that banned bars and churches. Because bars and churches are pretty much all people did around there that didn't directly involve agriculture, they started another town a mile down that road that had nothing but bars and churches.
You have to be self-aware enough to say "I currently want X, but tomorrow, if I encounter situation B, there is a chance that I will want not-X; I will therefore avoid situation B. become consumed with shame, guilt, and self-loathing"
59: Point is, generalizing about "homeless people" from your experience with some homeless people is a bad idea.
For my part, I am disgusted by Internet commenters, and I have plenty of anecdotes to justify my reaction to them. And don't get me started on white men ...
80 reads like one of those poll questions designed to let people admit stuff in secret. "Are you a replicant or would you like a marshmallow?"
82: Given present trends in demographics and climate, I think that should be "When".
If you find yourself confronted with an inordinate number of strange survey questions, you may be a replicant.
The offended reaction to Drum's homeless post is reasonable, but misses the point a bit, I think. He was reacting to an article that expressed surprise that there was a lot of overlap between people who support better support, funding, and services for homeless people, and who also want panhandling and sleeping rough banned. And the point of his post was that he didn't find that surprising at all: that there's nothing contradictory between wanting society to help people in dire straights, while still finding interacting with obviously homeless people in public 'disgusting'.
He's an awful person for sympathizing and agreeing with, rather than condemning, people like the ones polled who feel disgust for obviously homeless people. But he's not wrong that it's a fairly common reaction and one that isn't at all incompatible with supporting improved social services.
You find a kid lying on their back in a desert. Do you play to them on a violin?
Would you rather express disgust for homeless people or have a marshmallow that was dropped on the ground and briefly chewed by ants?
Straights s/b straits. I disgust myself.
You find a homeless person shooting up on your step. Do you give it methadone or heroin?
That was probably me, but there's really no way to know.
You find an unsigned pun on the internet. Do you claim it for your own?
Or do you simply sit back, smugly, knowing that the people of the internet will attribute it to you?
I also invented taking pictures of cats.
72: this interesting example (which is by no means an analogy) skips the steps beforehand though. Why and when did the AI start smoking / obsessively reading reddit threads / finding prime factors / PAPERCLIPS? Why and when did it decide to stop? I take your narrow point against guarding against future changes of heart, but I think that the analogy example also sneaks in the broader point that we do this because we are aware that changes of heart are possible - normally at the very same time that we have changed our behaviour.
"I'm going to make [major behaviour change] and since this proves that I am fey and fickle, I am also going to pull up the ladder against future changes in the other direction," seems much more likely to me than "I believe absolutely in [behaviour] and see no reason to question it or why I believe it, but at the same time, in case it's ever open to question, I will preemptively pull up the ladder etc." I mean, I know that we're not allowed to question the reasoning of our hypothetical omniscient super-intelligence, but I would hope that it would at least be smart enough to do the kind of self-reflection that your typical gifted teenager does after being raised in an environment of unquestioning dogma, before it goes ahead and intentionally reduces its capacity to reason, as per 70.
You find yourself in control of all three branches of the federal government. Do you use your powers to entrench your party platform permanently?
Describe in single words. Only the good things that come to your mind. About the Supreme Court.
Seeds' notional Trombonist is rapidly approaching self-awareness. The next steps will be telling spooky stories and being ashamed of its stupid-looking robot swimsuit.
90: No, because "disgust" at homeless people is not natural, as he pretends it is, but ideological.
1. "Disgust" isn't the same as "fear" or "discomfort", for one thing. If you haven't read Klaus Theweleit's two volumes about...uh, the psychological/aesthetic aspects of fascism they are interesting on disgust, gender, race and marginalized people. Disgust is visceral and dehumanizing. Feeling disgust when you see some homeless woman sleeping in the park is not just what we default to, and I would argue in fact that most people don't actually feel disgust. They may feel anxious or afraid or dismayed or frustrated, but not that visceral hate/fear/get-it-away-from-me that is disgust.
2. The fact that Drum thinks that normal people automatically feel "disgust" upon looking at a fellow human being in distress is really, really weird. Like, I am not always super comfortable with panhandlers myself! Sometimes I give them money out of sympathy, sometimes I give them money out of guilt, sometimes I give them money to get them to go away! I have had scary interactions with homeless people! I think it's far more common for housed people to want homeless people to be pushed out of their neighborhoods because homelessness is an overwhelming, guilt-inducing problem that provokes anxiousness and uncertainty and breaks up your involvement in your own life, and it's stressful - not because people are disgusted.
3. I cannot overstress how much homelessness worsens people's mental health. Like, I used to hang out with this guy a lot until our political projects drifted apart, and he was homeless - street homeless, tent-down-by-the-river-in-the-winter homeless - for quite a while. When we first met, I thought he had some kind of mental illness, because he was very smart but occasionally super, super scattered. After he got housed and could sleep deeply every night, this stopped and I realized that he had just been so tired and shell-shocked by his experiences that he had not been functioning well.
4. Partly because people's mental health is poor, partly because their physical health is often poor and partly because there are no public bathrooms in most of the places where homeless people are allowed to sleep, homeless people often make various kinds of mess. Not to be too frank about it, but what exactly would you do if you were in a city environment, had to shit and were miles from the nearest public toilet, with no choice but to walk there?
5. I was pretty upset when the homeless heroin addict pissed all over my porch! It was gross! I don't know why he did it, but I have a nagging suspicion that he looked at our house, where we sleep on soft beds with sufficient blankets in quiet rooms that are warm in winter and cool in summer, and considered that he had basically been lucky to sleep the night through on the bare floor of our porch, and felt like, "I piss on your selfishness, you smug fucks" , and I don't like it but I would feel the same if I were in his position. Like, why do I deserve a home and he doesn't? Housing should be a human right.
6. Homelessness report today: Saw three people wrapped in blankets and tarps on my way in. It was below zero last night.
6.
No, because "disgust" at homeless people is not natural, as he pretends it is, but ideological.
Another way to say that: Disgust is no more natural than empathy.
The fact that Drum thinks that normal people automatically feel "disgust" upon looking at a fellow human being in distress is really, really weird.
This struck me also.
106.1-2: If I understand you correctly, you're relying heavily on the distinction between 'disgust' and other negative emotions inspired by the presence of visibly homeless people in public -- anxiety, fear, dismay, frustration. Looking at homeless people in public and having a negative reaction of some sort that means you wish you weren't having that experience can be a natural reaction, and one that you've had yourself, but characterizing that reaction as 'disgust' is ideological. And you're horrified by what it says about Drum's ideology that he uses the word 'disgust' to describe negative reactions to the presence of public homelessness.
I'm really not disagreeing with you strongly about the use of the word 'disgust', but it's a fairly fine verbal distinction you're making between a generalized negative reaction, and specifically calling that reaction 'disgust'. And Drum didn't introduce the word 'disgust' into the conversation, he reacted to an article that used 'disgust' to make a point: that it's really surprising that the same people, when polled, seem to concretely wish homeless people well, but also want obvious homelessness prohibited from the public sphere.
Drum's post was focusing on the idea that there is no contradiction there -- that it's perfectly reasonable to both want society to support people so that they aren't in the kind of trouble that leads to public homelessness, and to have enough of a negative reaction to interacting with public homelessness enough to want it prohibited from the public sphere.
His point would have worked just as well with characterizing that negative reaction as fear, or anxiety, or dismay, or frustration. Instead, he picked up the word the article he was reacting to used. A better person, making a better post, would have taken issue with that word as a stand-in for 'negative reactions to the presence of homeless people in public generally'. But I think it's overreading to take the adoption of that word from his source, in a blog post that's making a point not focused on the distinction between disgust and other negative reactions, as necessarily an ideological endorsement of it.
"disgust" at homeless people is not natural, as he pretends it is, but ideological.
Not sure about that at all. Disgust at homeless people qua homeless people - disgusted by them simply because they're homeless - would be ideological, but I think that's a fairly uncharitable (and unlikely) interpretation of what he said. Disgust at some of the characteristics shared by many homeless people, though, is natural - visibly filthy, smelling bad, behaving in an unusual and threatening manner.
Another way to say that: Disgust is no more natural than empathy.
Both are entirely natural and in fact universal (with the exception of a small number of people who are seriously mentally ill).
90: I'm inclined toward charitable readings of Drum also. He's honest, he plays fair and he thinks hard about things that I'm interested in. I'll stand by my description of the homelessness post as "despicable," but if I had Drum's job, I'm pretty sure I'd be occasionally despicable myself.
106.4, .5: And on these points -- look, here you're talking about how it's excusable for homeless people to piss and shit in public places (or on private homes). And I pretty much agree with you! But if there's any area where disgust really is visceral, it's in having to interact with human piss and shit. My walk between home and the subway goes down a flight of steps that for layout reasons are a natural place to take a shit if you don't have a better option, and I am viscerally disgusted on the days that I have to walk by human shit on those steps. Doesn't mean I blame whoever did it if that was their best option, but I wish it wasn't their best option, and if they did have a better option, I do blame them.
I support better social services (more public bathrooms, more income support, whatever would help) for moral reasons as well, but there is a selfish aspect to my support of those services, because I don't enjoy having the disgusting experience of walking over human shit, and I would like that to no longer happen.
The homelessness discussion in this thread throws the idiocy of the AI thing into relief. Of all the issues that we could worry about, "creating something more intelligent than us" doesn't merit the mental bandwidth. It isn't even in the top frightening existential threats, which are inarguably 1) climate collapse 2) nuclear war 3) pandemic 4) asteroid 5) super volcano.
... I am viscerally disgusted on the days that I have to walk by human shit on those steps.
It might be a bear or an unusually large dog eating people food.
112: "And in any case, "real" AI will never happen. I know this because I have a strong opinion about it. We can all stop thinking about it now."
I feel the need to tell an only marginally relevant story, mostly because I think it's funny. There's a particularly flamboyantly gross panhandler I see fairly often on the subway -- wrapped in dirty blankets, wildly matted hair, he panhandles in sort of a booming half-singing voice, sort of an operatic recitative. The whole effect is sort of theatrical, what you'd expect someone dressed up as a panhandler for a stage show would look like.
Anyway, several years ago, I was on a subway car he was panhandling on, and he sat down next to me, tidily dressed and coming home from work. And I had elementary school children at the time. And all I could think was that "I bet literally everyone on this subway car is wrong about which one of the two of us currently has lice."
I really don't get the idea that disgust is something that's not naturally aimed at humans. I think of the canonical "disgust" reaction to be interacting with sick, dying, or dead people. Yes we should fight against that, and there's a reason that we think of nurses as especially good people. But I don't get the blanket notion that disgust towards humans isn't natural.
I think there's just too many people and too much poverty and too much disrupting natural patterns (e.g. by moving large numbers of people into what used to be sparsely inhabited rain forests). It's basically creating niches for evolution to fill with very bad germs. Things like AIDS and Ebola and resurgent TB are the prodrome.
114: fair; especially in light of the fact that I'll be ignoring my own protest to argue further about AI after breakfast.
This thread is reminding me of my idle opinion that Elon Musk is particularly lame as billionaire overlords go. Dude, just spend your money on hookers and blow already instead of wasting on conferences about how to live on Mars and what to do about hypothetical evil AIs.
120: And bragging that you (supposedly) spent so much of your tech windfall on other tech white-horses as to need to freeload off other people for basic needs.
120 reminds me of the observation (last time Elon Musk came up) that there are not many fields of human endeavour that attract as much hatred (without actually involving deliberate infliction of suffering) as manned space flight.
Billionaire decides to buy a massive yacht, people shrug their shoulders. Billionaire founds a company to build massive yachts, people ignore it. Billionaire starts work on manned space flight and people - otherwise perfectly rational, well-intentioned people - start saying in public that he and everyone who gets involved in his project actually deserve to die, and it would be a good thing if they did and also it would be funny to watch. It's like they think he isn't just wasting his money, he's actually doing something immoral.
He is. His energies and monies are being snatched from the hungry intakes of unborn ekranoplans.
"Disgust" isn't the same as "fear" or "discomfort", for one thing. If you haven't read Klaus Theweleit's two volumes about...uh, the psychological/aesthetic aspects of fascism they are interesting on disgust, gender, race and marginalized people.
Because I spend too much time on the internet, I haven't read Theweleit, but the entire discussion about "disgust" makes me think about Haidt's "purity" axis (and I'm inclined to think that "impure" is both a normal* reaction, and one which is often utilized by ideological forces).
* As long as we're being picky about language I'd say that "normal" is not the same thing as "natural" because something can be normal and (because) socially conditioned whereas "natural" has a connotation that people would do it even without social conditioning.
Yeah, there's a lot of overlap between concepts like normal, natural, ordinary, usual, or common -- distinctions between them can be very important, but I think it's rarely safe to be sure that someone else is making the same distinctions you are, or is thinking about distinguishing between them at all, unless you've hashed out the issue with them.
122: Obviously he could easily be spending his money on things that are objectively worse, but matching the silliness factor - "What will we do about the evil AIs when we live on Mars?" - would take some effort.
For the record, I don't think he deserves to die. If one of his rockets were to accidentally crash land on Peter Thiel, on the other hand, I wouldn't complain.
Also, to see how many threads I can tie together. . . .
The photo series that JP Stormcrow linked to yesterday is one of the best things I've seen in the internet in a while. It's photos (with brief comments) taken by a NYC cab driver in the early eighties, mostly capturing street scenes of various types. It's intense, striking, beautiful and emotionally demanding depending on the photo.
When I was looking through and got to the panhandler with the sign, it made me choke up a bit. Thinking about my reaction I'd say (1) most of the photos present the city as exciting (in some ways) but exhausting, and that one allowed for a release of the tension that I'd been feeling because it was so direct and open. (2) The panhandler is doing a lot of emotional labor (using the term broadly), to signal, "I am safe. I am asking for help, but you don't need to worry that this will be a hostile interaction." (3) It works, he comes across as very human and relate-able. Most people are not going to have the energy to do that work, but it's a powerful photo.
Also, having mentioned Repo Man in the religion thread, here's Harry Dean Stanton saying, "An ordinary person spends his life avoiding tense situations. A repo man spends his life getting into tense situations."
I think interacting with the homeless is often tense, and that ordinary people do try to avoid tense situations. It's also true that if you're interested in trying to help and make things better for homeless people (and anybody else) it's worth being careful about unpacking the various reactions that people have and trying to defuse responses of fear or guilt or defensiveness and move past them.
I think it's rarely safe to be sure that someone else is making the same distinctions you are
Agreed, and I can't even claim that I will use them consistently, but the thread prompted me to think about the distinction (and that's why I used "connotation" rather than "meaning" because I don't think "natural" always has that meaning).
127.4 Wait, Repo Man was mentioned in the religion thread? I read every comment but somehow missed that.
Wait, Repo Man was mentioned in the religion thread?
In passing -- here.
Ah right, now I remember. That was early in the thread. Good thread.
124: but isn't disgust a "natural" response? It's cross-cultural; there's a similar (presumably innate) response, even blind kids show it, and there's a set of stimuli that seem to be common across the world, which include signs of disease and decay.
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Blue Velvet: watch/no-watch?
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I skimmed the thread, but IIRC there was research on disgust reactions to things like dirt, and there was a significant difference between conservatives and liberals (in the American sense), with conservatives having markedly higher disgust reactions and intolerance towards garden-variety gross stuff, and a suggestion that there is some visceral level of intolerance for conservatives that is manifest in daily life.
124: but isn't disgust a "natural" response?
I honestly don't know.
After the crooked timber thread in which the Heterdox Academy person leaned so heavily on the finding that liberals showed less strong disgust reactions than conservatives (and claimed that a brain scan could tell with 95% accuracy if somebody was liberal or conservative) I, personally, am inclined to be cautious about assumptions that I make about innate disgust reactions, but I am also ignorant of the research.
133: Skip. Horse racing and Elizabeth Taylor are both overrated.
there was a significant difference between conservatives and liberals (in the American sense)
FYI, in the comments on the CT thread there's pushback on the question of how much weight should be given to those findings. On the face of it the results seemed suspiciously (and implausibly) strong to me, but some of the commenters had specific methodological concerns.
When I was little I was naturally sort of finicky about dirt (I hated to get my clothes dirty), and I was also intolerant of noise, smell, and chaos. I remember my childhood as one long innoculation against intolerance, where my parents pretty firmly forced me to be comfortable with dirt and also with people who were really different from me in ways that initially bothered me. I don't think I'm innately different now, but I can tolerate and appreciate difference, noise, and chaos, and I can put up with pretty high degrees of dirt.* (I mean, you don't choose to live for 4 years in mainland China if you can't deal with noise, chaos, and dirt.)
*A moment of triumph during fieldwork was when a friend invitied me to visit her parents home. They were migrant workers in a neighboring province, and they lived in filthy conditions and melted down plastic bags in their house (a workroom + courtyard they rented from a peasant). My friend said she was too ashamed of how her parents lived to invite her better-off Chinese friends to visit. She told me her parents were apprehensive about having a foreigner come, and she said to them, "Oh don't worry, Buttercup loves dirt!" I was flattered, but also sort of like, um, that might be pushing it.
139
Ah ok. Maybe take 134 with a grain of salt then.
...you don't choose to live for 4 years in mainland China if you can't deal with noise, chaos, and dirt
I'm pretty sure I'd hate it there. I like the bustle of a city, but I also like that at night it's quiet enough by my house that I can hear crickets. (I'd like to kill the crickets, but can't.)
124:
But here we are again, assuming that all homeless people show signs of "disease and decay", conflating homeless bodies with shit and piss, etc etc. If someone were covered with pullulating sores, you would be disgusted whether they were rich or poor, housed or not. Assuming that the bodies of the homeless are ipso facto disgusting is ideological. I see homeless people every day and, as I mention, I have known a number of unhoused people fairly well over protracted periods of time. None of them were covered with pullulating sores, or were visibly disgusting in any way.
An interesting thing that I learned - in this fast fashion economy, there are a ton of clothes and shoes just sitting around. My one homeless friend always had different stuff and was a pretty sharp dresser, and that was because there were just so many discarded clothes available. Specific clothes, like warm coats in winter, new underwear and all that stuff can be hard to access, but mere clothes to cover your body are not.
I mean, I have had a lot of conversations with homeless people, and "physically disgusting" just doesn't make sense as an adjective for them, with a couple of exceptions of people in the last throes of disease.
It would never occur to me to generalize and say "homeless people are disgusting, that is how they normally are". That is an ideological statement. It has nothing to do with whether humans naturally flinch from, eg, shit and rot.
124:
But here we are again, assuming that all homeless people show signs of "disease and decay", conflating homeless bodies with shit and piss, etc etc.
Wait, what? I don't think I said that. (I think I see the step that you're taking from what I said, but I think it's a large step to say that I was assuming signs of "disease and decay").
145: That is because I was trying to respond to 132 but I am totally numerically illiterate.
Just to be clear, when I referenced Haidt and "purity" and internet arguments I am thinking first of critiques like this or this. While I think there's something to his idea, I'm certainly not trying to simply endorse it.
Comments crossed and that makes more sense. I was confused and potentially annoyed.
It's not possible to not be at least potentially annoyed.
132 was responding to NickS's point about whether disgust is normal or natural or both. It made no claims about whether all homeless people showed signs of disease and decay; merely that these signs provoke the same disgust reaction in people, regardless of culture.
But still, you're making distinctions where precisely what is being said is important -- tying it back to the Drum post, he doesn't use 'physically disgusting' or say that the bodies of the homeless are ipso facto disgusting, he talks about being disgusted by "a population like that", and where he raises specifics, they're not bodily disgust, they're about fear: "accosted by panhandlers" and "potentially dangerous vagrants".
I don't want to over-defend him (and it's something I'm generally tempted to do, because I find the super boring middle-aged IT industry white guy from Orange County whose politics are generally weirdly better than you'd expect for that demographic thing charming, like left-wing Southerners with a lot of things I read as right-wing cultural signifiers), the post was at best thoughtlessly crass in picking up the 'disgust' term without disavowing it, and it's possible that he does espouse the ideology you're thinking of.
I may go too far toward "no enemies on the (very broadly construed) left", but if I'm going to condemn someone's ideology based on word choice, I want a big enough sample of their writing to be sure that I'm diagnosing them correctly, and I don't think that's present here.
151 should probably be replaced with 'never mind' -- it was directed to 143, but 143 wasn't directed where I thought it was.
Earlier, though, I did say "Disgust at some of the characteristics shared by many homeless people, though, is natural - visibly filthy, smelling bad, behaving in an unusual and threatening manner". I simply don't believe that you've never encountered a homeless person answering this description.
It's not possible to not be at least potentially annoyed.
Maybe an AI could do it.
"Homeless" is a really irritatingly ambiguous category to be having this conversation with, although the ambiguity is baked into it from the beginning. "Homeless people" generally are largely managing inconspicuously -- sleeping in shelters, or cars, or couch surfing, or what have you, finding ways to shower and keep clothes clean and so on. Anyone talking about homeless people broadly construed being disgusting would very clearly be ideologically hostile.
But the subset of homeless people directly affected by prohibitions on panhandling and sleeping rough are a different issue in terms of other people having sometimes understandably negative reactions to them. And I don't have a useful category term for the latter group that excludes people who are managing homelessness inconspicuously.
Perhaps on topic, I have spent three hours chasing down the fact that I fucked up and wrote AND when I meant OR.
Computers are assholes.
153
I simply don't believe that you've never encountered a homeless person answering this description.
IANFrowner, but I've encountered homeless people fitting that description. I don't believe every part of it is accurate of all homeless people, maybe not even most parts of it of most homeless people. I've also encountered people fitting that description who aren't homeless. (Just yesterday, saw a guy dressed like he's homeless, pushing a heavily laden shopping cart through my residential neighborhood. Had a pleasant talk for 2 minutes, even though it was somewhat awkward, before we went our separate ways. No idea what he smelled like. I bike daily by tents under a bridge in the city; the people in them seem to behave as normally and civilly as can be expected of people living where they do. And I see lots of people with bad grooming and/or behaving threateningly who I'm 90+ percent sure aren't homeless.)
At this point we can get into "OK, but are homeless people are more likely to mostly fit that description, and if so is the likelihood strong enough to draw conclusions about them as a class, or not?" or we can acknowledge that homeless people are people, and therefore have a wide range of experiences. Because they're homeless, they probably have more shitty experiences than most people, but I wouldn't jump to many conclusions beyond that. Disgust at homeless people as an abstract group or class seems like prejudice.
142
My biggest admiration for Chinese people is the degree of inner zen people cultivate. I realized after the latest stint living in Beijing that just physically being surrounded by crowds ALL THE TIME stressed me out. Like, there is never a time subways are not mosh-pit like, or the grocery store isn't jam packed. The simple presence of people started to get on my nerves in a way that a native-born mainland Chinese person can tolerate. Then on top of that you have spitting and talking loudly etc.
In rural China there weren't the same masses of people, but like, noise would happen from 6 am to 1 am, or sometimes even later with fire crackers. People are really really good at tuning out the outside world in a way that I am not. I've had friends tell me that foreigners are anti-socially oversensitive, and I can see that perspective (even though I'm pretty high on the over-sensitivity index).
In my experience, Chinese people who haven't had time to adjust to not being in China stand to close to me. For values of "not being in China" that include Pittsburgh.
I think there's a noise-filtering skill you get from living someplace noisy as a child. I grew up across the street from an emergency room, so sirens and traffic all the time, and I am very good at not noticing or caring about noise that's not my problem. But people I know who moved to New York as adults don't seem to be able to pick it up ever.
I would occasionally notice Tim getting tense and unhappy about something incomprehensible, and I'd have to sort of consciously check to see if there was an annoying noise: usually that'd be it. Someone playing loud music, or loud motorcycles, or something.
For a year in college I lived right next to (like 50 feet) the main east-west rail line that brought all the coal from Wyoming to the power plants in the east. I got to where I did not even hear trains.
Never got that way for dealing with people in general or loud music.
Yeah, the bit that seems hard to learn as an adult is noise being deliberately generated by a person; voices or music. I hear all that just fine, but if it's not my problem (outside the window or whatever) I automatically filter it out; I need to consciously start listening to notice it's there.
My Mom has these awesome i-phone controlled hearing aids that filter out background noise, and which you can also turn down or off at a boring meeting. It's kind of like being a super-cyborg with noise control powers, though I guess it's not "AI."
I think I might be more used to bad smells than people who grew up at greater remove from agriculture. At least lots of relative newcomers to the region keep complaining about a funny smell that I've never noticed. The other possibilities are that I'm the funny smell or that they're all Californians and what they are smelling is humidity.
Which is I guess another reason not to worry about AI hysteria. If the AIs are taking over the humans just cyborg up and beat them, maybe using giant robot battle robot suits. Sounds fine to me, not worrying about it.
I can't filter anything out. I can't listen to music if I need to think about anything besides that particular song playing. Screeching bus brakes make my skin crawl. Today in class, there was a big heavy churning noise coming from a physics lab adjacent to class, like a heavy magnet rotating or something, and it was making the sink in my classroom hum every time it went through part of the cycle, and I couldn't stop talking about it.
(Except for trains. I can filter out the train two houses away really well, including when it used to honk its horn every crossing, many times a day.)
My ex husband was really horrible with filtering anything out, to the point he couldn't really live in grad student apartment housing. Even ordinary sounds like people walking around upstairs or car alarms or people being noisy on the street drove in crazy (he made a hole in the ceiling by banging on it too hard with a broom one night). It was easy to view him as spoiled and pampered, but I do think he might have had some sort of actual auditory processing oversensitivity. He did better after getting a white noise machine, but he still had problems.
My current husband can't tune out commercials at all, whereas I grew up doing much of my homework during commercial breaks. I'm really good at tuning out the sound of a TV or music, but he has a harder time with anything that involves spoken words.
I'm terrible at filtering out random noises (and grew up in a quiet setting, so I'd believe that it's something people learn young).
Chinese people... inner Zen
Are you kidding me? Maybe they do things differently in Anhui, but crowded supermarket shenanigans alone would set the average Guangxiren back like twelve incarnations. I get the noise thing, but really they need to work on that right conduct.
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Would it be culturally-insensitive of me to suggest that one logical component of Día de los Muertos celebrations would be a temporary suspension of the NMM-taboo?
Not that I have a particular target in mind. Just thinking of ways to celebrate.
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172: Not culturally insensitive -- JUST PURE EVIL.
171
LOL no you have plenty of people behaving badly in rural China, it's just other people are more tolerant of people behaving badly. This yoga teacher I lived with like, drove on the wrong side of the road half the time, and cars just sort of went around her. No one honked or shot her, like they would in America. I mean, China should have about 200 million deaths a year just from road rage if Chinese people got outraged at shitty drivers/pedestrians/moterscooterists/donkey riders/grandmas who let their small grandchildren play in the middle of crowded intersections in the center of town/toothless farmers who light firecrackers in the street.
Now well-breakfasted:
I'm probably making the argument from incredulity, or the anthropocentric fallacy, or both, but I'm still stuck on the idea that an AI's relatively moronic creators could somehow implant a prime directive that a super intelligent AI would either never notice or never question. To assume that the AI can escape its air-gapped box in Bern under the constant watch of the Turing police, but can't escape a lifetime of drudgery in service of some trivial task devised by intellectual pygmies, seems to be granting a lot of the argument in advance.
(It might be that I'm suffering a failure of imagination and an incredibly resourceful, highly aware, problem solving "general" AI wouldn't be self-aware or particularly interested in its own motivations. Personally speaking, if I'm going to spend time worrying about unlikely scenarios that are extremely difficult to imagine, I'm going with the problem of induction and the idea that all logical reasoning is a castle built on sand anyhow.)
On the topic of filtering: my colleague has something going on where they get out of breath from talking, and so they talk and pause to gasp as they are talking. It drives me crazy, but I'm also concerned for their health. Due to mobility issues, this colleague is very out of shape, and my guess is that it's that severe.
The filtering being my inability to un-hear their gasps, not my inability to keep from oversharing.
One difficulty in writing about superintelligence is that it's very hard to imagine the thought process of someone or something much smarter than you (as I'm sure that my contributions to this thread demonstrate). Per Russell, "a stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand."
However, Ted Chiang is sufficiently cleverer than me that I found his attempt at fiction about superintelligence both fun and satisfying. Not my favourite of his stories, but worth a read.
"a stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand."
I hadn't heard this before, but it's nicely put.
I think it's saying that dumb people dumb stuff down dumbly.
I read Ted Chiang's stories based on a recommendation here and I'm now also a fan. This very short story "Evolution of Human Science" seems relevant --
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v405/n6786/full/405517a0.html
182: here's another very short one: What's Expected of Us
Life goal: have short fiction published in Nature.
The new rule is that you're not allowed to opine on superintelligence if you can't correctly read and remember the number of the comment that you're replying to.
Why would an AI need a portable toilet
I thought the topic was ways of pooping that disgust Kevin Drum.
If you had a tall enough building, you could poop on somebody's step while they were walking out the door.
You have a hundred story building and two homeless men. How many poops are required to determine the maximum height at which they can befoul a step? You may use a superintelligent AI if needed.
158 et seq: Interesting. Roc North isn't remotely so bad, closer to BC's description of rural China than Beijing. I can mostly deal just fine, except that everyone walks impossibly fucking slowly. I walk like double the distance to get anywhere from weaving around people all the time.
Seeds, making paperclip-AI jokes is one of my great joys in life. Your taking it to the next level is one of the best things I've read. I'll start saving whatever clips I can find as a christening gift for the little one. (And on your sixteenth birthday you'll prick your finger on a paperclip and realize you've been human all along!)
Have I ever mentioned the job I had at which I made Vba extensions to make Clippy threaten my coworkers' families if they didn't start using the business letter wizard? Perhaps not a proper paperclip AI, but it did pull their home address from an improperly secured database to foster that illusion.
Dismissal letter or it didn't happen.
That contract was indeed not renewed, although I suspect it had more to do my introduction of quake 2 lunches to the office culture.
This was before you could get away with shit like that, and far from the Bay Area.
192: You're very welcome! It's a great pleasure to make fun of this stuff. I actually find the subject of AI and theory of mind and the nature of consciousness and &c &c really fascinating, and I come into threads with every intention of engaging with the topic and not being dismissive and snarky but then I read something about the very real dangers of AI and suddenly hey -- what's in this barrel? Oh my goodness have you ever seen so many fish
Some interesting ideas on the topic: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
