Rise of the machines

Today in the news:

google.com/amp/s/futurism.c … doors/amp/

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1LWMk7JB80[/youtube]

Progress made at Boston Dynamics:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGNopwFcz3A[/youtube]

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcV4pgB5QY0[/youtube]

First, they open the doors, and next thing you know they’re on a mission to seek and destroy.


A little too far fetched? I don’t know, but in any case, I’m not seeing any slowing down of this technological arms race any time soon. If you fall behind, then the other guy gets ahead, and we can’t have that, right?
And it’s all for national defense, after all…for our own protection.
What a mad world we live in.

This was pretty interesting.
Still, robots appear to be in their infancy, taking their first baby steps, learning how to crawl, get up, walk and lie down, a long way off from being able to carry a meaningful conversation.

Think about what life can do, each cell in our body is as or more complex than all of these things put together.
Cells can feed, grow, repair and replicate themselves, where as these robots are entirely dependent on us for their ‘survival’.

Robots don’t yet have desires, and they can’t think beyond where to put their foot next.
They can do one or two things pretty well, but humans can do millions of things well, and be taught or teach themselves to do millions of more things.

I’m not sure robots will ever be practical in our lifetimes, if ever, they may not be able to be sufficiently efficient.
I mean I’m still waiting around for my flying car and ray gun, I’m sure inventors could build them, if they haven’t already, but some things just don’t make economic sense.

Why do we assume robots will be superior to us in many, most or all ways?
Why should nuts and bolts be superior to bones and sinew, flesh and blood?
Metal is stronger, more durable, yes, but it’s also less pliable.
There’s probably reasons why organisms arose, sprung up from nonlife (if that is indeed how we got here) and not mechanisms.
Robots are going to have their fair share of problems, just as we do, they’re going to have neurological and physical disorders and dysfunctions, they’re going to break down from wear and tear, they’re going to be infected with viruses, make errors and have slowdown, just as computers do.
The designs themselves are going to be flawed, limited, the created can’t be that much better than the creator, if it can at all.

Might just be a pipedream, and even if it isn’t, still looks as tho we’re light years away from having Rosy cook, clean, take out the trash and help look after the kids.
And then if we do come up with something superior to us centuries from now, well, we’ve all seen Terminator and the Matrix.
Also it seems kind of cowardly sending in the killer robots, or killer drones for that matter.

The moving around, classic in the movie robots are still fairly elementary, but the machines, they are taking over middle class jobs already. Not the whole job, but parts, which means you need to hire less of ALL SORTS OF PROFESSIONS.

That’s true, millions of types of machines each one able to do one or two things really well are replacing us, and I guess computers are too to some extent.
Robots are kind of the merger, the synthesis of computer (brain) and machine (brawn).
Perhaps it is only a matter of time before they get good enough to start replacing us too, making people even more expendable, driving down wages and employment.
Once that happens, the elite will likely start taking steps to permanently phase us out if you catch my drift, I mean they probably already are to some extent.

Yea this arms race, this state of hypercometition humans are in for more power/resources, is in all likelihood mutually assuring our destruction, it’s sad and sickening, if only there was another way.

Yes, this is a similar argument that Bentley has (along with Pinker) when he tries to caution people against indulging in so called “pessimistic fantasies”; in that we are not even close ( and may never even be) to biological complexity that exists in nature. I think both he and Pinker believe in a predetermined maxiumum potential of technology and AI. If that is so, then we can’t really predict how the evolution of technology will play out in the future (like we weren’t able to predict the rise of internet over flying cars)
youtube.com/watch?v=YMNVLr7K73M
(0:42:00-1:01:00)
I think the bigger problems that they are mostly concerned about is putting technology into wrong hands, so their emphasis is in designing safety features.
Its very likely that emerging technology will simply be incorporated with our biology, and the consequences of that are yet to be seen:
transcendentman.com/mind-boggli … y-defined/

Maybe I should have said the rise of the cyborgs, instead. It could be that the humans that will have integrated technology into their biology are themselves that singularity that everyone is talking about, and they are the ones who will destroy the ‘regular’ humans.

The machines are appealing to the machine-like. They have less concerns, because they lack the qualities of humanness that makes others concerned. Of course machines can be useful, but these guys see only bathwater and no baby and they will happily make the world in their own machine image.

I think Gloominary means something different, that organic life has qualities that should be valued, but perhaps are not by those who would replace organisms with machines. We are nuanced and as yet machines are nto as nuanced. But that lack of nuance is exactly waht is appealing to technocrates. An efficient world without feeling is not aproblem to them. I mean, look at the panopticon Amazon aims and uses on its workers. Then don’t have robots yet, but they squeeze humans down into robots as much as they can.

everything has advantages and disadvantages, pros and cons, trade-offs.
Robots are more rigid, less sensitive and holistic/interconnected, more compartmentalized, linear.
Animals are more adaptable, for example, animals can grow their muscles, neurons and genes in different directions on the go when need be.
If I’m using x muscle a lot, it’ll get stronger, if I’m thinking about x problems a lot, I’ll get better at solving them.
If I’m using my muscles and brain in these ways, they’ll change, to make them easier to use in those ways.
Animals can grow and repair themselves from inside, whereas robots have to be repaired from without.
Organic tissue is so interconnected, so sensitive, every cell is meaningfully communicating with every cell, adjusting themselves in big and little ways accordingly, and the brain is the center, the hub of this interconnectivity.
We have this idea that emotions are bad, like they’re our fatal flaw, but that’s just some nerd or geeks opinion.
emotions are vital to our survival.
emotions give us the right kind of energy at the right time.
They prepare the organism for fight, for flight, in all sorts of ways, neurologically and physically, appropriately directing our consciousness, desires and behaviors.
There’s reasons why emotions evolved, and while sometimes they can be too strong, other times they can be too weak.
There’s no such thing as perfection, nothing is perfectly balanced with itself and its environment.

Right, robots are rigid, clunky and cumbersome.
They lack grace, subtlety and sophistication.
This makes them easier to predict.
While predictability can be good in ways, it can be bad, like when your adversary is attempting to ascertain your next move.

There are limits to technology, we just don’t always know what they are.
Some limits are fixed, others can be pushed.

Arguably the turn of the 20th century was more innovative than the turn of the 21st.
While computers, the internet and smart phones have been milestones, we haven’t had many giant leaps in other areas, or at least if we’ve had, the public isn’t privy to them.

For example at the turn of the 20th century, we went from the stagecoach to the automobile, helicopter, aeroplane, and a little later on, the spaceship.
We had all these new appliances: the laundry machine, dishwasher, refrigerator, electric stove, microwave…
They saw huge transformations in communications too, just as we did: the radio, rotary phone, television…
They saw transformations in how we harnessed energy: (hydro)electricity, nuclear power, solar…
In medicine: antibiotics, pharmaceutical drugs, vaccines, supplements, hormones, steroids, advanced surgical equipment and procedures…
Plastic, rubber, I mean it goes on and on.

Other than the internet, all we’ve done is made minor changes to existing technologies where as they gave us brand new ones, never before seen, and scarcely dreamt of.
If someone were to time travel from say 1900 to 1950, they wouldn’t recognize the world, it’d be like traveling to another planet, but if someone were to travel from 1968 to 2018, it’d be basically the same world, except with the internet and more, diversity.

We might not see another technological revolution in our life time, there may be nothing more to invent, or alternatively, all the low hanging fruit have been picked for now, and it could take us centuries or millennia to build a taller ladder (another scientific/consciousness revolution, a necessity, as it’s supposed to be the mother of invention), to pick them.
But, time will tell, perhaps robots, cybernetics, or some other breakthrough, nanotech, genetically modified humans, is on the horizon, we’ll just have to wait and see, my opinion is we’re entering a period of not only scientific and technological stagnation, but economic stagnation, stagnation on so many levels, followed by slow, or sudden decline.
even economically, the west was booming in the early to mid 20th century.
Now it’s slowing down, giving the 3rd world, and China especially a chance to catch up.

We think the scientific method is set in stone, where as technological progress is virtually unlimited, but perhaps the scientific method can be improved upon…100 fold, in ways we can hardly imagine now.
I mean we’ve always had scientific methods, or something like them, it’s just they were improved upon, in many ways, some of them difficult to comprehend, in the early modern era.
Perhaps computers and robots will assist us in improving them, altho I’d hate to see a world where they did all our thinking for us, if such a world is possible, it’d be perilous to be completely reliant on them, not to mention degrading.
If science is further revolutionized, technology may follow, but at what cost?
Climate change threatens to destroy us, what new horrors await us if Pandora decides to open another one of her boxes?

Elon Musk’ s Neural Lace project:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrGPuUQsDjo[/youtube]