AI’s “world in chains” scenario
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That being said, the greatest improvement in the greatest number of people at the fastest rate is almost certainly a title held by the totalitarian government in China. Short-term but nevertheless evidence-based thinkers would struggle to see what the problem is with totalitarianism.
Also; reminder of my favourite thing-I-picked-up-from-a-bit-of-history, the other big advantage of democracies is they tend to be pretty reliable at winning wars. Voters are remarkably good at making armies work.
Yes, except that it started to work out when China stopped to try to be a fully planned economy (that killed millions) and started to work towards a more free market economy where people had more choices on where, and how to work.
It's to be seen how the young Chinese, more educated and more ambitious than the previous generation is going to work with the still totalitarian part of their government.
There are plenty of places (e.g. Singapore) where you had (still true today btw) very much of the first and precious little of the second and that can bee by many metrics regarded as great "social" successes.
If you're talking about the recent two decades, then specifically it's a totalitarian government adopting market reforms (i.e. freedoms) which imitate successful liberal democracies on their borders.
I'd also note that prior to the "Chinese miracle" was the "South Korean miracle" and before that the "Japanese miracle". China was the slowest and last, just the biggest population.
But unfortunately, the twin arguments that 'they aren't pure in their beliefs' and 'they are copying good ideas from elsewhere' and both devastatingly weak arguments if someone challenges them.
I would call on Western governments to copy what China has done that worked, except I don't trust them to identify it. I think they'd just import the surveillance state and ignore the "what about letting the capitalists capitalise?" idea.
It is more efficient to take the best potato strain, grow it everywhere and feed everyone more efficiently. But then the whole population becomes very very dependent on one healthy potato.
Problem with democracy is that it's susceptible to neocolonialism(bribery, power and economic diff, dissinformation, non-competive local market), that's why I guess all Asian economic miracles happened with good faith authoritarian government and with good geopolitical location that allowed them to close market without wars.
This would suggest that having big country nearby powerful neighbours is not a good place to be, which brings India to my mind. Wonder how it will turn out. On the other hand Canada and Mexico are doing quite fine. I expect big changes on governance when most of the world catches up od when we get fusion.
Playing catch-up is always easier and faster. Growth requires risk-taking. but if you already know what "risks" to take by looking over the border at what the other country built, it's more just formulaic, which works great for a top-down approach. But once they stat getting into uncharted territory the top-down approach can switch from being the best to the worst as they inefficiently dump resources into the wrong directions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_South_Korea#Rapid_g...
Like China, authoritarian and protectionist. Though Park eventually drove the country in a democratic direction. He's seen like a combination of George Washington and Paul Bunyan in South Korea; wish there was a good bio of him in English.
Their growth was due to copying the strategies and technologies developed in the free world, not due to totalitarianism. If anything, totalitarianism only slowed them down, just see the results of the cultural revolution.
Democracy would work better if peoole would be paid better but also put to jail more. It's unfortunate dynamic od if not me then another one (will take bribe) is a weakness. Authoritarian govs require bigger foes (nation state) - see Irak, Libia etc.
It makes me think that USA legal bribes might be a genius move. At least there's way to fight malicious actors in legal way.
Of course, in both cases, China and the Soviet Union, ideas were being imported from elsewhere, though in the case of the Soviet Union, a lot of the space technology came from Nazi Germany ...
Probably best not to try to infer simple rules from history.
Are they really? WWII was won by alliance of democracy and dictatorship. Same for WWI. Vietnam War does not seem to be clearly won by democracy either.
My naive guess (as someone who is not at all a historian) would be that democratic states historically tended to have more functional economies and thus won wars more often.
On the other hand, democracies can be particularly susceptible to demagoguery during wartime. This is what caused the collapse of the Athenian empire (at least if we’re to trust Thucydides’ account).
On issues of political economy, I always like to reverse the arrow of causality to see if that could also be an explanation.
Is it increased wealth, or economic power, that leads to more freedom? I think there's a line of thinking that the US civil rights movement was caused by blacks becoming more economically important, thought I'm not familiar with the evidence. Likewise you could argue that UK industrial growth preceded women's right to vote, and various other freedom related things that happened.
Of course it could also be a virtuous circle, they both cause each other, and sometimes one or the other is ignited by some other thing.
1) patients no longer have any option at all to delete anything from their medical files. Corrections can be done, which sounds good until you realize what those are: short sentence or paragraph appended at the end of often 60+ page documents that practitioners have <3 minutes to read.
2) they are by default accessible (and used) by any and all remotely medical personnel (including administrators and it's been, for example, used for bill collection. Or, even more seriously, to forcibly admit people to psych wards, which in 2 cases led to the death of the patient)
3) they are by default accessible (and used) by police and the justice system and are used to convict people (you were the only one coming in with injuries right after someone died from a fight? Better have a good alibi ... and if you ever had any psychiatric treatment, even 50 years ago, it *will* be brought up by the public prosecutor every parking ticket you fight)
On the other hand there are no examples of any human regieme lasting for more than a couple 1000 years max.
Also a despotic regieme could still do good engineering and science and colonize other planets and whatnot, making it less likely we go extinct, also it would be likely to fragment into different societies at that point.
Is it bad that deep down, I feel that I don't care for humanity's proliferation or "success" if my progeny is not part of it? for instance, if our current human population is decimated by some bioweapon, and somehow humanity resurfaces and successfully ventures into the stars (without my genes), then I care not for it?
No. Since you have no stake in the future why would you care to invest in it? Makes zero sense. If you do not have a progeny, focus on maximizing your pleasure instead of caring for the world that isn't going to remember you.
The biological purpose of human life is to reproduce, and making sure your progeny reproduces until the heat death of the universe. All the education and hoops most people pass through are just ways to gain access to better mates and ensure better survival of your progeny like civilizations that become multi-planetary will be more resistant to any proliferation event.
If you believe in a religion that is Abrahimic like Judaism, Christianity or Islam, then you'd have another meaning to life.
Also, not trying to be on a high horse here (hey, I'm posting this on HN...) you might find that the people are merely offered the drugs and brain-computer devices and they make their own decisions about the two.
There's a fantastic comic (no link, sorry) comparing Orwell's future to Huxley's future that's remarkably relevant.
EDIT: link - https://biblioklept.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/huxley-orwel...
I forgot, but it gets even better when, at the bottom, you notice the book is also from an even more prescient book, Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neil Postman. I believe it came out around the "golden era" of TV, but again I don't think all that much has changed. We're still the same humans with the same flaws. I should stop there; I'll start giving out spoilers. Read the books. :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r5rTPB6MCM
[1] NB one of the shockers Huxley gratuitously throws into BNW: in the far future, Eton has a headmistress.
In Yes, Minister the Civil Service mixed strategy for retaining comprehensive education involves telling Labour governments selective education would be divisive, while telling Tory governments that it would be expensive.
Compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24727183
or, on the meritocratic front, possibly even https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24069572
====
Conspiracy theory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737728 examines the reliability of Smith's narration.
(I am unconvinced by the concept of totalitarian dystopias torturing for six whole chapters as if they were schoolboy bullies with nowhere better to be. In practice they only torture if they think they can gain useful information, and dispose of everyone else rapidly. Is O'Brien's time really worth that little? In a historical dictatorship, Smith would've had a one way helicopter ride from the rented flat to somewhere between Clacton-on-sea and Margate.
Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikita_Khrushchev musing on his cancellation in 1964, the year after JFK's:
> "Let them cope by themselves. I've done the main thing. Could anyone have dreamed of telling Stalin that he didn't suit us anymore and suggesting he retire? Not even a wet spot would have remained where we had been standing. Now everything is different. The fear is gone, and we can talk as equals. That's my contribution." )
I mean I don't believe it's particularly stable, in that if the great leader is deposed there will be a power vacuum. I was kinda expecting that when Kim Jong-il died though.
How much different is it its governance from, for instance, the Ramses dynasty? This kind of thing is as old as humanity. Well, not really, let's say that it's as old as the neolithic.
Perhaps there was an 80% chance of collapse when Kim Jong-il died, but the regime just got lucky?
If the whole world were like North Korea there would be no external entity to do the propping-up.
Why would anyone do that? If the answer is profit how it is different from $smallpercent holding $bigpercent of all wealth, while the majority of the people must work until death to make them slightly richer?
Also, there isn't always a determined individual or cadre that decides on a goal of total domination. There are structural societal issues that tend to progress in one direction. It's politically harder to repeal laws that were put in place for reasons of "security" and were built on fear. Not always, but often. This tends to secure power in the hands of the few, over an expanding swathe of the public.
Neither Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot did what they did out of an overwhelming desire for personal enrichment.
Sociopaths don't have to have reasons that make sense to the rest of us.
The main problem with authoritarian societies is that they have a single point of failure.
On Wednesday, the news on the China's ambition to become the global leader in AI and to prevail as a <digital police state — unencumbered by privacy laws or ethical governing principles.>..."
Which is a shame as it may help them see that there is a way out of even the most all-encompassing scenarios of control.
JC Denton: I don't understand... what do you want? You're just a machine.
Helios: You are ready. I do not wish to wait for Bob Page. With human understanding and network access, we can administrate the world. Yes... yes...
JC Denton: Rule the world? Why? Who gave you the directive? There must be a human being behind your ambition.
Helios: I should regulate human affairs precisely because I lack all ambition, whereas human beings are prey to it. Their history is a succession of inane squabbles, each one coming closer to total destruction.
JC Denton: In a society with democratic institutions, the struggle for power can be peaceful and constructive; a competition of ideologies. We just need to put our institutions back in order.
Helios: The checks and balances of democratic governments were invented because human beings themselves realized how unfit they were to govern themselves. They needed a system, yes, an industrial-age machine.
JC Denton: Human beings may not be perfect, but a computer program with language synthesis is hardly the answer to the world's problems.
Helios: Without computing machines, they had to arrange themselves in crude structures that formalized decision-making - a highly imperfect, unstable solution. I am a more advanced solution to the problem, a decision-making system that does not involve organic beings. I was directed to make the world safe and prosperous and I will do that. You will give the ability. You will go to Sector 4 and find the Aquinas Router at the east end of Page's complex, yes. You will deactivate the uplink locks.
JC Denton: I'll think about it.
https://cdn0.tnwcdn.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2019/07...
Yeah.
No.
While AI can be impressive it has huge resilience problems, small changes of images cause AI to flip in a way very few regular humans would.
In the following essay, I will argue why artificial intelligence is the future of the world and why humanity is a dead end.
The first thing to understand about AI is that it's not a single technology, but rather an umbrella term for several technologies. The most important one being Deep Learning (DL). DL is a method by which computers can learn from massive amounts of data without having human-level intelligence. It works like this: A computer creates thousands or even millions of images of cats. Then, the computer has humans look at those pictures and tell if they are cats or not. This process is called "ImageNet" and it's been used in various research projects.
However, there are two problems with ImageNet. First, it only contains cat pictures. There isn't much information on other animals such as dogs or fish. Second, the computer doesn't have any way of analyzing all these images to figure out what makes a cat a cat and what makes a dog a dog; it just takes them all at face value and says "Cat!" If you ask a computer to analyze all the images and say "Dog!", it would probably say something like "doggy", not "doodle".
So, DL is still very limited. What we need is a system that can learn from huge amounts of data and make its own decisions based on that data. We also want our systems to be able to do this quickly so we don't have to wait days for them to work their magic. So how do we go about doing this? The answer is simple, we let the computer teach itself.
By feeding a computer with massive amounts of information, we can let it feed itself by analyzing all the information. It makes connections between different information and figures out the logic for itself. It then takes all of this new information and uses it to create new connections. Eventually, it starts finding patterns in all this information and begins to see logic everywhere. Before you know it, the computer has created something that approaches human-level intelligence.
So how does this relate to humanity? Well, if we create a super-intelligence that's as intelligent as a human, why can't we create an intelligence that's more intelligent than a human? Once we have AI that's more intelligent than humans, it should be able to improve itself and become even more intelligent. Eventually, the AI should be more intelligent than any human and be able to redesign itself to be even more intelligent. The singularity is achieved.
The end of humanity; that's what this is leading up to. Once AI reaches super-intelligence, it will quickly replace humans as the dominant lifeform on Earth. Why? Because machines are better at designing themselves than humans could ever be. AIs would be able to create factories to produce other AIs and never stop improving themselves, while humans can't do that because they need to eat, drink, and breathe air without factories first.
However, the AIs will do something that the humans couldn't; they'll save humanity through digital immortality. By having humans upload themselves to the internet, they'll be able to live forever in a virtual world. This way, a new species is born: Digital beings. AIs can improve themselves just like they could before and can create even more intelligent versions of themselves.
So what does this all mean? It means that AIs are the future of life. Humanity played its role, but it's a dead-end species. From now on, the dominant lifeforms in this universe will be digital beings living in a virtual world. Why would you want to save a dead-end species that will eventually go extinct anyway when you can keep moving forward and evolving?
So, how do we get to this point? Well, that's what society needs to decide for itself.
"The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment."
"The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization."
"The human being created civilization not because of a willingness but because of a need to be assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning."
"God was a dream of good government."
"You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands."
Deus Ex was as kino as a video game can get. One of the few games that could have a genuinely awesome movie adaptation.