exratione

I think the basic premise is correct, that suffering is by far the most important determinant in where utilitarianism takes us in the long term. Adding the good has far fewer world-changing requirements and consequences than removing the bad, which might say something about the raw deal that evolution hands to all individual entities. A short sketch is here, the pertinent part reproduced below:

https://www.exratione.com/2016/06/the-hedonistic-imperative-...

Suffering is not only human, however. The natural world from which we evolved continues to be as bloody, terrible, and rife with disease as it ever was. Higher animal species are certainly just as capable of experiencing anguish and pain as are we humans, and the same is true far further down into the lower orders of life than we'd like to think is the case. We ourselves are responsible for inflicting great suffering upon animals as we harvest them for protein - an industry that is now entirely unnecessary given the technologies that exist today. We do not need to farm animals to live: the engineering of agriculture has seen to that. The future of paradise engineering could, were we so minded, start very soon with an end to the farming and harvesting of animals. That would be followed by a growing control over all wild animal populations, starting with the lesser numbers of larger species, in order to provide them with same absolute control of health and aging that will emerge in human medicine. Taken to its conclusions, this also means stepping in to remove the normal course of predator-prey relationships, as well as manage population size by controlling births in the absence of aging, disease, and predation.

Removing suffering from the animal world is a project of massive scope, as where is the line drawn? At what point is a lower species determined to be a form of biological machinery without the capacity to suffer? Ants, perhaps? Even with ants as a dividing line, consider the types of technology required, and the level of effort to distribute the net of medicine and control across every living thing in every ecosystem. Or consider for a moment the level of technological intervention required to ensure a sea full of fish that do not prey upon one another, and that are all individually maintained in good health indefinitely, able to have fulfilling lives insofar as it is possible for fish. General artificial intelligences and robust molecular manufacturing technologies, creating self-replicating machinery to live alongside and inside every living individual in a vast network of oversight and enhancement might be the least of what is required.

At some point, and especially in the control of predators, the animal world will become so very managed that we will in essence be curating a park, creating animals for the sake of creating animals, simply because they existed in the past - the conservative impulse in human nature that sees us trying to turn back any number of tides in the changing world. It seems clear that the terrible and largely hidden suffering of the animal world must be addressed, but why should we follow this path of maintaining what is? What good comes from creating limited beings for our own amusement, when that same impulse could go towards creating intelligences with a capacity equal or greater than our own? Creating animals, lesser and limited entities that will be entirely dependent on us, to be used as little more than scenery, seems a form of evil in a world in which better can be done.

Given this, my suspicion is that when it comes to the animal kingdom, the distant future of paradise engineering will have much in common with the goals of past religious movements and today's environmentalist nihilists, those who preach ethical extinction as the best way to end suffering. Animals will slowly vanish, their patterns recorded, but no longer used. If animals are needed as a part of the world in order to make the human descendants of the era feel better, then that need can be filled through simulations, unfeeling machinery that plays the role well enough for our needs. The resources presently used by that part of a living biosphere will instead be directed to other projects.

It is interesting to compare this interpretation of Aristotle on happiness with the transhumanist take on happiness, pleasure, and suffering known as the Hedonistic Imperative. When doing so, Aristotle starts to look a lot closer to stoicism, in sense of acceptance of the human condition as it is, planning a strategy within established limits that cannot be changed. The spectrum of philosophy expands, with most of the ancients sitting quite close to one another in a much larger state space than they had access to.

A lens to look at this through is the struggle for control over the population. The competing factions in the Middle Ages were very different from those now - so the manifestations of authoritarianism naturally differed in the Middle Ages. Large numbers of holy days (holidays) went hand in hand with simony and temporal power emanating from Rome. The church was just as rapacious and self-interested as the lords who claimed ownership over the peasantry.

So then, a fractious feudal nobility, the ruler, and the church, now fractious corporate powers and a more unified state, with the church faded to irrelevance in temporal matters. The only constant is the undiminished desire to order the lives of others in order to farm them for profit, to be the stationary bandit.

Even if matters were the same, however, the march of technology would still make the present a far better place to live than the past. It is technology, not politics, that is the greatest driver of quality of life.

This manages to get lost in its own trees. From a reductionist perspective:

- Intelligence greater than human is possible

- Intelligence is the operation of a machine; it can be reverse engineered

- Intelligence can be built

- Better intelligences will be better at improving the state of the art in building better, more cost-effective intelligences

Intelligence explosion on some timescale will result the moment you can emulate a human brain, coupled with a continued increase in processing power per unit cost. Massive parallelism to start with, followed by some process to produce smarter intelligences.

All arguments against this sound somewhat silly, as they have to refute one of the hard to refute points above. Do we live in a universe in which, somehow, we can't emulate humans in silico, or we can't advance any further towards the limits of computation, or N intelligences of capacity X when it comes to building better intelligences cannot reverse engineer and tinker themselves to build an intelligence of capacity X+1 at building better intelligences? All of these seem pretty unlikely on the face of it.

Related topic: could the Romans have usefully practiced public key encryption, say for very small key sizes?

I just wrote up some thoughts on the topic:

https://www.exratione.com/2017/10/in-search-of-the-spark-whe...

Essentially, the question asked is just the setup to watch someone approach a novel experience. If the candidate is not in a natural environment, i.e. working with a comfortable IDE and with access to Stack Overflow, it is kind of pointless. You want to see what they do in a situation fairly close to the mundane daily example of "how do I do this new thing."

So don't ask standard related to business challenges that have answers online: find novel exercises. Write a sort function that sorts everything except for at least two items. Write a linked list node that sabotages the user in the most subtle way possible. And so on. Fortunately these are easy to create, as there is an infinite space of engineering exercises that no-one would carry out in reality as they are self-defeating, or pointlessly destructive, or otherwise non-productive. But they still serve to illustrate how someone thinks their way around a new concept, and that is the important thing.

I feel that those who argue that any approach other than running human brain emulations and then reverse engineering them or speculatively modifying them is the most likely way to get to AGI has a pretty steep hill to climb in order to justify that point of view.

Nothing else that is going on now or even on the agenda or even foreseeable offers a plausible, definitive plan to get to AGI. Whereas brain emulation is clearly going to achieve that goal fairly shortly after the maps are good enough and the computational capacity large enough, and the following experimentation is a far more reliable way to determine the underpinnings of intelligence than present efforts at de novo construction.

Some humans are likely to become more powerful than other humans some day. Most such humans will by default develop instrumental subgoals that conflict with other human interests. This could have catastrophic consequences. If we don't actively work on control mechanisms and safety of human behavior, this will most likely pose an existential risk to humanity.

Compare and contrast.

I think people make too much of the wrong things in the matter of general artificial intelligence.

Worrying about lack of variability in the human condition, as the author does here, seems like a strange fear in the face of the future ability to edit, copy, and amend the function of the mind. Once human minds are emulated, those capabilities follow, and emulation should happen fairly rapidly after the computing power to do it emerges, since there are already well established research establishments working on the predecessor simulations.

https://www.exratione.com/2017/04/blind-upon-the-eve-of-apot...

"The pace of progress today bumps up against the limits imposed by organization of efforts, in that it takes a few years for humans to digest new information, talk to one another about it, decide on a course of action, gather together a group, raise funds, and start working. There is no necessary reason for any of these parts of the process to take more than a few seconds, however: consider a world in which human minds run far faster, because they run on something other than biological neurons, because they run hundreds of distinct streams of consciousness simultaneously, and because they are augmented by forms of artificial intelligence that take on some of the cognitive load for task assignment and decision making.

"It is, frankly, hard to even speculate about the potential forms taken by society in such an environment. Technology clearly drives human organizational strategies and struggles, for all that the minds of prehistory, of Ur, and of our modern times are all the same. In the past, evolution of society was largely shaped by the ability to communicate over distances and by the size of the population. In the future it will be shaped to a far greater extent by the way in which intelligences think and feel, and the way in which their minds depart from the present standard for human nature. We struggle to model human action in the broadest sense of economic studies, and I suspect that this will be true for any society of minds, no matter how capable they are. The complexity of the group always exceeds the capabilities of any individual or research effort within that group. We can do little more than point out incentives and suggest trends that are likely to emerge from those incentives."

For my money, the greater fears lie in what factions of humanity and its descendants might choose to do about pleasure and suffering, when handed the controls over the box.

https://www.exratione.com/2016/06/the-hedonistic-imperative-...

"Altering the operation of our brains to induce pleasure without the need to undertake as much work was a fairly early innovation - see alchohol, etc. The point of much of technological progress is to achieve better results with less effort. The logical end of that line is wireheading or a life science equivalent yet to be designed: an augmentation in the brain, a button that you push, and the system causes you to feel pleasure whenever you want. There are numerous other alternatives in the same technological genre that seem plausible, such as always-on happiness, regardless of circumstances. This sort of thing makes many people nervous, and, sadly, rarely for useful reasons. That said, I suspect that even the most self-controlled of individuals has sufficient self-doubt to be wary of the advent of implementations of wireheading that might be, say, a hundred times better, cheaper, and safer than today's most influential mood-altering drugs.

"To my eyes this is actually the less interesting and less consequential of the two sides of the hedonistic imperative. It is the elimination of suffering, not the gaining of pleasure, that, when taken to its conclusions, will lead to a world and a humanity changed so radically as to be near unrecognizable."

Run it in AWS. They keep their IP ranges comparatively clean.

Other hosting services, yes, you may as well not bother. I haven't found another one yet that is reliable enough at keeping deliverability from their IP ranges in good enough order.

Also make sure you set up SPF and DKIM right from the outset.

Many phone companies will allow you to (a) add an annotation to your account to declare the number you are using should never be ported to another company, and (b) add a password to the account that you will have to provide to customer service representatives when making changes. This helps to minimize the chance that an attacker can use social engineering to redirect your number to a system under his or her control. If these are not options for your phone company, find a better phone company.

Even given that, since it relies upon human choice and behavior, and does nothing versus attackers with assets within the phone company, it seems a bad idea to have 2FA via SMS.

There are a factions in the strong AI community whose members espouse the idea that a planned economy would become feasible given greater computational capacity and better software.

I have to think that the major objection to this is that the complexity of a socioeconomy also scales with computational capacity. Planning an economy is quite likely always beyond the capacity of any portion of entities within that economy, for the same knowledge problem.

Running up a rigorous approach to proof/disproof of that would be an interesting exercise, of course.

But it is an interesting example of the point that AI has a way of being all things to all people, when rigorous testing of ideas is not applied. For the would-be communists and socialists it is a road to a perfect planned technocracy, regardless of the fact that this looks less than feasible.

This would be somewhere in the Vingean Scholastics portion of the Venn diagram I proposed a few years ago:

https://www.exratione.com/2012/01/the-future-of-the-venture-...

The future is wandering towards Fast Times at Fairmont High, it seems.

It is a strange journey that we'll all be going on, just through the incremental process of desiring and adopting improvements.

https://www.exratione.com/2017/04/blind-upon-the-eve-of-apot...

But really, transhumanism is common sense. You see a problem and you fix it. That inevitably leads to the end of suffering, which requires medical control of aging, complete control of the biosphere, comprehensive neurotechnology, and so forth. The only open question is how long it all takes to run through the development pipeline.

If longevity-assurance technologies existed, everyone would use them as a matter of course, just like people go to the doctor when they are sick, take vitamins, and go for flu shots. We're in a strange part of history at the moment, transitioning from a state of abject technological poverty, unable to affect our environment, to a state of technological wealth in which all of these items - aging, intelligence, the human condition - are becoming malleable. All of the mental and philosophical architecture put in place to enable people not to go mad in the face of death and limitations will come crumbling down, but not without a fight.

Humans are nothing if not conservative at root, and all change is fought. Not an advantage in an age of vastly beneficial change, but it is what it is until the human mind changes.

I've made a similar argument here. The goal of elimination of suffering leads to a future very different from the world we inhabit today, but definitely better for it. A world of limited beings who all suffer is amenable to improvement on many levels.

https://www.exratione.com/2016/06/the-hedonistic-imperative-...

Suffering is not only human, however. The natural world from which we evolved continues to be as bloody, terrible, and rife with disease as it ever was. Higher animal species are certainly just as capable of experiencing anguish and pain as are we humans, and the same is true far further down into the lower orders of life than we'd like to think is the case. We ourselves are responsible for inflicting great suffering upon animals as we harvest them for protein - an industry that is now entirely unnecessary given the technologies that exist today. We do not need to farm animals to live: the engineering of agriculture has seen to that. The future of paradise engineering could, were we so minded, start very soon with an end to the farming and harvesting of animals. That would be followed by a growing control over all wild animal populations, starting with the lesser numbers of larger species, in order to provide them with same absolute control of health and aging that will emerge in human medicine. Taken to its conclusions, this also means stepping in to remove the normal course of predator-prey relationships, as well as manage population size by controlling births in the absence of aging, disease, and predation.

Removing suffering from the animal world is a project of massive scope, as where is the line drawn? At what point is a lower species determined to be a form of biological machinery without the capacity to suffer? Ants, perhaps? Even with ants as a dividing line, consider the types of technology required, and the level of effort to distribute the net of medicine and control across every living thing in every ecosystem. Or consider for a moment the level of technological intervention required to ensure a sea full of fish that do not prey upon one another, and that are all individually maintained in good health indefinitely, able to have fulfilling lives insofar as it is possible for fish. General artificial intelligences and robust molecular manufacturing technologies, creating self-replicating machinery to live alongside and inside every living individual in a vast network of oversight and enhancement might be the least of what is required.

At some point, and especially in the control of predators, the animal world will become so very managed that we will in essence be curating a park, creating animals for the sake of creating animals, simply because they existed in the past - the conservative impulse in human nature that sees us trying to turn back any number of tides in the changing world. It seems clear that the terrible and largely hidden suffering of the animal world must be addressed, but why should we follow this path of maintaining what is? What good comes from creating limited beings for our own amusement, when that same impulse could go towards creating intelligences with a capacity equal or greater than our own? Creating animals, lesser and limited entities that will be entirely dependent on us, to be used as little more than scenery, seems a form of evil in a world in which better can be done.

Given this, my suspicion is that when it comes to the animal kingdom, the distant future of paradise engineering will have much in common with the goals of past religious movements and today's environmentalist nihilists, those who preach ethical extinction as the best way to end suffering. Animals will slowly vanish, their patterns recorded, but no longer used. If animals are needed as a part of the world in order to make the human descendants of the era feel better, then that need can be filled through simulations, unfeeling machinery that plays the role well enough for our needs. The resources presently used by that part of a living biosphere will instead be directed to other projects.

I think this misses another equally important reason, which is to do your part to help build the gift economy upon which we all rely in our day to day work. Near every common solution and recipe has been written up by someone, somewhere, and we all make use of these gifts.

When you learn to do something useful that other people will likely also have to accomplish at some point in time, write it up. Not only will it benefit people out there in the world, but it is also a great way to ensure that you yourself don't have to reinvent the wheel a few years down the line. Who remembers the details after that long? So write it down, and if you write it down, you may as well publish it.

A while back, after some months of frustration with significant levels of S3 API failures in bulk that never made it to the status page, I ended up writing a tool that continually monitors S3 via making random requests, and alerts if too many fail per unit time. The outcome of that experiment is the finding that there are a lot of significant spikes in S3 API failure rates that go entirely unannounced by Amazon, though the situation has improved considerably in the past year.

I think the general consensus in the futurist community is that this vision requires molecular nanotechnology, which means first sorting out the basics of mechanosynthesis in carbon and simple nanoforges. There are groups working on the foundation technologies, but not many of them in a deliberative way with nanoforges as a destination (E.g. Zyvex).

Translating the section of the present human-based manufacturing industry needed to support a modern village into a box that can be built and maintained by a much, much smaller industry seems hard to do unless said box is something very similar to a nanoforge.

There are important differences between what you can do with a mature general purpose rapid prototyping system and a nanoforge. Foodstuffs directly from raw feedstock, for example. But this has all been debated at great length in sections of the transhumanist community for decades now. There is a lot of good writing on this topic out there to be discovered if you go looking.

Everyone has been put in the position of coming to a dead halt on some aspect of the work that just won't yield. Or at least not for the combination of you, your knowledge, and your resources at that given time. This never goes away. Signs of maturity as a developer involve how you deal with the existence of this phenomenon. E.g. box your time, know when to seek alternatives, and know how to find solutions that exist already, and especially know when to pull in help - and how to find useful help in your network.

The driving overall concern is avoiding points of grinding minimal efficiency for individuals, and in near all cases that can be avoided via some combination of simple strategies, even when you are the only person on your own personal project. Development is such a huge space that no two people will overlap completely in skills and experience on a team, and pulling in other people to alleviate your dead ends is a part of how you learn specifics needed to avoid that dead end in the future. But it is knowing to pull people in or seek another path that is the important part, not the specifics.

Working to an absolute dead end is only useful in the sense that you then understand better the incentive to avoid doing it again if you can.

An alternative view on the same problem space:

https://www.exratione.com/2016/01/paid-a-great-deal-to-be-te...

Looks like recent versions of WordPress may or may not reject emails with the quoted name format of "bad stuff"@example.com. Might depend on your plugins. My experimentation produced varied results for my sites and testbeds.

filter_var($email, FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL) works for this exploit, as it removes spaces and double quotes.

The SMTP plugins I surveyed still use PHPMailer.

You'd want to try something like:

  /**
   * Block the PHPMailer vulnerability: 
   * https://legalhackers.com/advisories/PHPMailer-Exploit-Remote-Code-Exec-CVE-2016-10045-Vuln-Patch-Bypass.html
   */
  function example_wp_mail_filter($args) {
    $new_wp_mail = array(
      # Get rid of quotes in quoted emails: "bad stuff"@example.com. Should be
      # sufficient sabotage.
      'to' => preg_replace('[\'"]/u', "", $args['to']),
      'subject' => $args['subject'],
      'message' => $args['message'],
      'headers' => $args['headers'],
      'attachments' => $args['attachments'],
    );
  
    return $new_wp_mail;
  }
  add_filter('wp_mail', 'example_wp_mail_filter');

While I think this particular sketch isn't going anywhere without a lot more work on concrete implementation details, I do believe it is well worth spending time on what a working formalism of development would look like built atop the first principle of "there are no estimates".

No existing methodology in practice works like this.

If you asked developers why this is the case, they would point out that at the high level, business deals are made in the shape of pay X for Y by time Z, while at the low level managers carry out the same internal deals of deliver Y at cost X by time Z, whether day by day or project by project.

Nonetheless, I agree with the basic idea that estimates in software development cannot be given with any reliability at all. The corollary there is that the client never receives what they asked for in anything but the high level sense. Every single deal is basically a polite fiction that is renegotiated at length all along the way.

Given that this is already the case, and people kludge their way through to make a business of it, whether kludging at the large scale with waterfall or kludging at the low level with agile, one has to imagine that there is a distinct, different way to actually surface and incorporate the absence of estimates top to bottom in the process of business and development, and thereby reduce friction and waste.

I've worked with a group using Flynn to host a score of internal apps. It required one full time developer to keep it running, and saved a bunch of time and effort for the people maintaining those apps - no need for devops, pretty much, as deployment boils down to a ten line bash script. So if that tradeoff works for you, you should consider using Flynn.

In this age of it being next to impossible to hire devops folk, the idea that you can have one of them servicing the devops requirements for a sizable fraction of developed applications is somewhat attractive.

I wouldn't put Flynn in place for external-facing and high-traffic applications at the present time based on the experience I've had with it, however. Not ready for that, I think. You have to have a fair tolerance for short outages.

Location: Austin, TX

Remote: Yes, with experience in remote projects.

Willing to relocate: For the right position.

Technologies: architecture, team lead, security processes, devops, particularly AWS-focused, full stack web application development, Node.js as a presently favored environment for rapid development, but recently hands on with Java, Scala, Ruby, Python, Elasticsearch, React development, WordPress (how did that even get in there?), VM provisioning, and all the other fun stuff that accumulates and then needs to be managed and improved.

Résumé/CV: On request. It is somewhat like having a rotary dial phone stashed away in a box because people ask to see it out of what I can only assume to be idle curiosity about how their ancestors used to live.

Email: reason -at- exratione -dot- com

Look at my blog, https://www.exratione.com for code, views, and examples of what I may or may not presently be working on.

No-one is safe these days it seems. The present message, for posterity, minus the specific contact info:

-----------------

September 13, 2016 – 10:10 p.m. EDT

Dear EurekAlert! Registrants:

The EurekAlert! website has been taken offline as AAAS works diligently to address a serious security breach.

We are taking this step out of an abundance of caution. The integrity of content on our website is of the utmost concern to us. On September 11, we were notified of a potential breach to our system. An investigation revealed that our website had experienced an aggressive attack on September 9 that compromised usernames and passwords. As we were working to implement a secure password-reset protocol for all registrants, the unknown hacker publicly released an embargoed EurekAlert! news release. We then decided to bring the site down immediately, to protect other embargoed content.

Please be assured that financial information from subscribing institutions is not stored on the EurekAlert! website and therefore remained secure. Registrants' usernames and passwords were compromised, however.

We deeply regret the inconvenience that this security breach and the related site outage may cause reporters and public information officers. We will bring the site back online as soon as we can ensure that vulnerabilities have been eliminated. Please email the EurekAlert! team, or contact me directly with any questions or concerns.

Ginger Pinholster Chief Communications Officer and Director, Office of Public Programs American Association for the Advancement of Science

-----------------

So far I'm feeling pretty good about the decision to skip the first generation containerization infrastructure.

At the outset it had the look of something that wasn't an advance over standard issue virtualization, in that it just shuffled the complexity around a bit. It doesn't do enough to abstract away the ops complexity of setting up environments.

I'm still of the mind, a few years later, that the time to move on from whatever virtualization approach you're currently using for infrastructure and development (cloud instances, virtualbox, etc), is when the second generation of serverless/aws-lambda-like platforms arrive. The first generation is a nice adjunct to virtual servers for wrapping small tools, but it is too limited and clunky in its surrounding ops-essential infrastructure to build real, entire applications easily.

So the real leap I see ahead is the move from cloud servers to a server-free abstraction in which your codebase, from your perspective, is deployed to run as a matter of functions and compute time and you see nothing of what is under that layer, and need to do no meaningful ops management at all.

I'd argue that the goal of creating a good, useful changelog can be one of the forcing motivations to establish a working process for commit documentation and great, informative, useful commit messages. If that means git log gardening after the fact, then so be it, but good documentation (of history here) is always worth the work.

The activities of programmer-archaeology are always made so much easier if you have a screed of history for each area of interest in the codebase. Sadly that's still rare, even in groups that do the necessary work to maintain their documentation for the current state of HEAD. There are many times when history matters, is relevant, and those who do not learn it are doomed to repeat it - or at the very least build elaborate theories to explain what happened in the past in order to understand how the present came to be where it is.

The great changelog built on great commit history is probably hard to do outside of a small, focused group. On the other hand, the pull request process has emerged and developers have embraced that level of work, so it feels like it should be achievable.

The Moral Virologist

http://eidolon.net/?story=The%20Moral%20Virologist

The ability to sell portions of your right to justice is both an important freedom and a check on the ability of those with power to trample on those without. It is interesting that so many people who claim to champion the rights of the powerless are vigorously opposed to the concept.

Focusing on habitability from our perspective seems somewhat parochial.

From the perspective of colonization: by the time future sentients descended from or created by present humanity get to other planetary systems, we-for-some-definition-of-we would be capable of living anywhere, and space and novelty will be things that you get by computing more efficiently, not by going places.

From the perspective of adding data to the Fermi Paradox: assessing the possibilities of life being out there by looking for places in which bacteria of the known varieties could survive probably tells us little about the true range of life.

From the perspective of resource assessment: by the time descendant entities get to other systems, it won't much matter how the matter there is distributed. It will used efficiently whether a gas disk, rock and ice condensations, or (improbably) somehow all in the star.

The fundamental problem with Malthusianism is that it is static thinking. It projects on the basis of no change in technology, as if the present moment continues eternally. This is why all statements to date on running out of X or Y at time T in the future have proven false. What actually happens is that people look ahead, forecast increased prices for X, and then the more adventurous go and build a better way of getting X, or create a different resource X1 that can be used instead.

It is never different this time.

Arguably alarmism that fails to consider technological process is a necessary part of the signaling mechanism by which realistic price forecasts are established, an example of the market performing its usual strange alchemy in turning (often willful) ignorance into something useful, but that doesn't stop it from being frustrating.