IEET

Those that can 'defer to the machine' are going to do better in many jobs (that will remain) in the future. This is a big part of Cowen's "Average is Over." Here's a good review of it which goes into that aspect of it:

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/searle20150109

Excerpt:

'The moral Cowen draws from freestyle chess is that the winners of these games, and he extrapolates, the economic “games” of the future, are those human beings who are most willing to defer to the decisions of the machine. I find this conclusion more than a little chilling given we’re talk about real people here rather than Knight or Pawns, but Cowen seems to think it’s just common sense.

In its simplest form Cowen’s argument boils down to the prediction that an increasing amount of human work in the future will come in the form of these AI-human teams. Some of this, he admits, will amount to no workers at all with the human part of the “team” reduced to an unpaid customer. I now almost always scan and bag my own goods at the grocery store, just as I can’t remember the last time I actually spoke to a bank teller who wasn’t my mom. Cowen also admits that the rise of AI might mean the world actually gets “dumber” our interactions with our environment simplified to foster smooth integration with machines and compressed to meet their limits.

In his vision intelligent machines will revolutionize everything from medicine to education to business management and negotiation to love. The human beings who…

I am reminded of James Hughes, a transhumanist but also a proper sociologist, who wrote about the change in transhumanism from democratic left-leaning people, whose vision of technology was for the good of all, to libertarians (and thence singularitarians and neoreactionaries): http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/hughes20130501

>
In 2009 the libertarians and Singularitarians launched a campaign to take over the World Transhumanist Association Board of Directors, pushing out the Left in favor of allies like Milton Friedman’s grandson and Seasteader leader Patri Friedman. Since then the libertarians and Singularitarians, backed by Thiel’s philanthropy, have secured extensive hegemony in the transhumanist community. As the global capitalist system spiraled into the crisis in which it remains, partly created by the speculation of hedge fund managers like Thiel, the left-leaning majority of transhumanists around the world have increasingly seen the contradiction between the millennialist escapism of the Singularitarians and practical concerns of ensuring that technological innovation is safe and its benefits universally enjoyed. While the alliance of Left and libertarian transhumanists held together until 2008 in the belief that the new biopolitical alignments were as important as the older alignments around political economy, the global economic crisis has given new life to the technoprogressive tendency, those who want to organize for a more egalitarian world and…

Consider this simple sentence:

"Jane grew up in an idyllic rural area."

No current AI implementation, to my knowledge, can understand such a sentence nearly as well as humans do. A competent chatbot judge could suggest a novel situation, say a broken-winged black Pegasus appeared in Jane's hometown when she was seven, and ask pointed questions to find out if the interlocutor is a human or a bot.

The issue with almost all current approaches to AI is that it is either purely symbolic or sub-symbolic. The current symbolic approaches cannot completely capture preconceptual experience human use to make sense of the world. When we hear "idyllic rural area", humans use our mental imagery and sensory experiences to help us understand the sentence much more deeply than the list of words suggests.

The subsymbolic approach could potentially solve this issue, but it raises the problem of integrating all those complex, interacting parts, vision, auditory, motor control, conceptual thoughts, etc. into a unifying whole. More importantly, would we be able to control and direct the beast sufficiently well once it becomes reality?

There is now some AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) research on integrating the two paradigms. If anyone is interested, a presentation is available here: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/goertzel20130531

It's kind of out there, but there's a related scene in the film `Waking Life'.

"What is interesting here is that evolution now becomes an individually centered process, emanating from the needs and desires of the individual, and not an external process, a passive process where the individual is just at the whim of the collective. So, you produce a neo-human, okay, with a new individuality and a new consciousness. But that’s only the beginning of the evolutionary cycle because as the next cycle proceeds, the input is now this new intelligence. As intelligence piles on intelligence, as ability piles on ability, the speed changes. Until what? Until we reach a crescendo in a way could be imagined as an enormous instantaneous fulfillment of human, human and neo-human potential. It could be something totally different. It could be the amplification of the individual, the multiplication of individual existences. Parallel existences now with the individual no longer restricted by time and space."

For the full excerpt and a clip:
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/waklifeex/

Thus, ironically, the problem for both the right and the left is the same one- that governments today are too weak. The right needs an at least temporarily strong government to effect the dismantling of the state, whereas the left needs a strong government not merely to respond to the grinding conditions of the economic “recovery”, but to overturn previous policies, put in new protections and find some alternative to the current political and economic order. Dark enlightenment types and progressives are confronting the same frustration while having diametrically opposed goals. It is not so much that Washington is too powerful as it is that the power it has is embedded in a system, which, as Mark Leibovich portrays brilliantly, is feckless and corrupt.

https://ieet.org/index.php/IEET2/more/searle20131202

Excellent podcast on the ethics of automated systems deployed by military, LEOs, etc. featuring Noel Sharkey:

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/print/6600

From the teaser:

"Noel Sharkey is Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, and Professor of Public Engagement at the University of Sheffield. He holds a Doctorate in Experimental Psychology and a Doctorate of Science, and lectures extensively across academic disciplines, including engineering, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, artificial intelligence and computer science. In addition to having published well over a hundred academic articles and books, Sharkey has worked closely with policy makers and the military to create awareness about the limitations of AI and the dangers of automated warfare."