Tag: singularity

Mind posting/reading

This new Mindmeister feature looks interesting:

Except for two things:

  • It will create a bucketload of ‘Tourettists’ at all sorts of public venues (coffee shops, terraces, the beach, side walks, etc.) when all sorts of, mostly, self-inflated hipsterlaggerds start recording their every doodle out loud instead of just clicketing it to Kik / Tele- / Instagram / WeChat / Line / Viber / Wicker / Threema / surespot et al. Yapping out somewhat loud will be even more annoying…
  • Who reads your doodles at the back side ..? Yes this is already an issue with like programs, in particular if (not when) one would use them to sketch outlines and content ideas for concepts / posts / columns / articles / books that might be construed to reflect a societal(ly -) or political(ly less wanted) opinion of sorts.
    Already now, of course, who reads what you’re working on, even when stored off-line ..? But this will become an even greater issue when even the slightest of your mind’s burps might get captured immediately by your own doing.
    How far till this turns into actual mind reading?
    Would someone (AI (yes, being someone), or human if you’re still in old school thinking mode) be able to immediately present you with position-changing tweets etc.?

Well, we’ll see… Singularity, here we come! We want you! After that, we’re done.

Book by Quote: Smarter Than You. Think.

Yet another ‘Book By Quote’ then. A full of … wisdom one again, for once.
An attempt to subjectively summarise a book by the quotes I found worthwhile to mark, to remember. Be aware that the quotes as such, aren’t a real unbiased ‘objective’ summary; most often I heartily advise to read the book yourself. This one, for sure – though don’t be uncritical while going through the many bends in not-so-water-tight logic ..!

So, this time: Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think, Williams Collins 2013, ISBN 978000742777-2.

“Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer,” Kasparov concluded, “was overwhelming.” (p.5)

We’re all playing advanced chess these days. We just haven’t learned to appreciate it. (p.6)

Harold Innis – the lesser-known but arguably more interesting intellectual midwife of Marshall McLuhan – called this the bias of a new tool. Living with new technologies means understanding how they bias everyday life. (p.8)

As electricity became cheap and ubiquitous in the West, its role expanded from things you’d expect – like nighttime lighting – to the unexpected and seemingly trivial: battery-driven toy trains, electric blenders, vibrators. (p.8)

… scanned the brains of new mothers and fathers as they listened to recordings of their babies’ cries. They found brain circuit activity similar to that in people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. (pp.14-15)

Marcel Proust regarded the recollection of your life as a defining task of humanity; meditating on what you’ve done is an act of recovering, … Vladimir Nabokov saw it a bit differently … “I confess I do not believe in time.” (As Faulkner put it, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”) (p.23)

We face an intriguing inversion point in human memory. We’re moving from a period in which most of the details of our lives were forgotten to one in which many, perhaps most of them, will be captured. (p.28)

OK, first a pic, than a moar tag; and the rest – a long rest.
DSCN0057
[Yup, Fiorentina.]
Continue reading “Book by Quote: Smarter Than You. Think.”

Is ID you?


[Guess the location]

Your digital ID becomes your pseudo-identity becomes who you are (considered to be), more than your actual you.
Your actual you, your innate identity, the one you discovered when only a couple of years old, will no longer be of interest to the world once your digital identity has all that the world cares about. Then, it can get stolen, lost, manipulated and altered, without you actually needing to notice. But who cares? Your digital ID is, you are just the carbon-based remnants of an outdated world. Just make sure there’s a fallback scenario that you can (or wouldn’t need to) prove you are you, your digital ID isn’t you.
The singularity may do away with you because you only use up scarce resource. You are not productive, your digital identity is. So you should care. Or?

If social media use ‘you’ as a resource, uses your apparent digital ID (ID and all posts, tweets, etc., turned into a persona, sold to all bidders) to operate, can you not deploy some artificial intelligence mechanism to do the socmed postings on your behalf ..? What’s the difference to the socmed companies that not your brain, but an artificial brain is used ..? Or do they already have their own farms of AI personas, to beef up traffic and sellable ‘user’ generated content ..?

Their AI personas may create a world separate from yours, a virtual world where they make money, not needing actual users anymore.
Your personal self may deploy AI to detach from their abusive, you-usurping world.
Case closed?

Interlude: Sing ularity / along

The thought just popped up: What if we’re all already beyond the singularity point, and the transient intelligence of human life has already taken over ..?
No-one is capable of changing the world’s affairs anymore, and it would take all people together to get that done, but getting all people together (including motivating them to band together, to their advantage) will result in all people just doing what they already do.
Since the first 90% of human behaviour is already determined by ultimately (!) self-interest, uncosciously deciding what’s best as fits with the world’s turning as it is today, and the last 10% would then also be captured in conscious deliberation towards rational contribution towards whatever purpose the world’s turning leaves us – which is exactly the play room that the autonomous transient intelligence would leave us.
Just look at how we behave in society; following rules that put us down, queueing up in traffic, standing in line at the shops, working in offices, etc., all tagging along stuck in a rut.
Now, we let algorithms take over the boring work stuff, leaving ever less for us to do or excel in. Even ‘creative’ work is cornered by developments of understanding creativity and shrinking it ever more.

[Ronda, Spain]

So, the current world can already be interpreted as going along its own course and direction, only leaving some wiggle room for the sully us. At least there we have a semi-happy scenario for past the Singularity – but the transient intelligence might improve itself unnoticably to a state where humans are no longer required and (as they already are: l’enfer, c’est les autres; les humains) a nuisance to be gotten rid of. Be warned. Be creative or offed.

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord