https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6togqN9Cvt4&t=71s
I probably spent too much of that talk discussing what US and EU are doing to try to solve the growing problems on the internet, and then I gave pointers to technical requirements. Here is a more up to date and understandable response (to the Cosmos and Hisa\tory discussion):
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Once again -- the tsunami of changes coming relatively soon on the internet (which will include Internet of Things IOT, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and a redefinition of money and anything involving money_ will move human future history into new patterns, beyond the old patterns familiar to those of us who have studied past history. What MOST people discuss (including most regulators and policy people) is transitory stuff which will be made moot by the tsunami. Right now, it seems as if the future will be dominated by the three higher-reaching forces I mentioned in my"brain dump" post -- "Godzilla" (a focused effort(s) from China, involving lots of technologies which talking heads in the West doubt will happen even in the future or which they do not even conceive of), "King Kong" (the thoughts of Eric Schmidt are a good reference point), and this new or reborn cluster which was announced as the new GeoTech center and commission at the Atlantic Council, what I heard ... yesterday. One reason I focus on these three efforts is that the future is NOT about a shopping bag full of little apps; it is about the INTEGRATION, the larger system which includes the apps (and the humans interacting with it).
In my post yesterday, I forgot to mention a technical point which needs to be fit in somewhere. They noted how companies like facebook (FB) may be paid to generate more clicks, and thus set up rules which favor anything which goes viral. They cited a study which shows that posts full of anger or fear tend to be the ones which go viral. This there is a network of incentives, from higher profit down to creation of interaction rules and apps which magnify the fear and the anger. ONE PART of the big design challenge is at the app level, I suppose, developing AND SOMEHOW encouraging social network systems which are governed by DIFFERENT rules of the road, less destructive in nature. I always think back to the example of NEURAL networks, with feedback following rules (which I was the first to discover back in the 1970s) which cause the system as a whole to converge to maximum truth or maximum goal effectiveness.
There was another technical point... but back to the Big Picture.
There are severe risks in where THIS effort could take us, even though many of its players have higher goals which give it real hope.
This is also very connected to the Oxford futures group and transhumanists, which Shiva has tried to connect with our discussion. (Please, I hope! What some of us call "dialogue".. is like long-range connections in a brain (what Kozma and Freeman have discussed so emphatically).. a key part of coherence.. mindfulness. Folks who walk through hazardous terrain need mindfulness or they die.) In fact, the GeoTech group has strong connections to the Singularity Institute and some streams of transhumanists, AMONG OTHER connections.
Risks: MANY human organizations end up going to hell because of UNEXAMINED TACIT assumptions. That GENERAL principle is nothing new, but it is like what Bernie Baars has mentioned, that people often do badly because they fail to remember and ppaly yhings they SHOULD know. This principle of examining tacit assumptions is one of those basics. The most powerful tacit assumptions in human thinking tend to be things which are ASSUMED but never even articulated. One way of freeing ousrelves from ovbersimplified and dangerous tacit assumptions is simply to ARTICULATE "What WAS I trying to do, and why?" Marshall Loeb had an important book, the Battle for Investment Survival, which gave an example of how important it is to ARTICULATE and remember WHY...
The tacit assumption which worries me most in the GeoTech community is the assumption that people SHOULD be reconstructed and rebuilt so as to become the maximally profitable components of the new IOT. Really, it reflects the earlier IBM Watson vision from 2014. That SUBSET of the GeoTech community (and of the military) I think of as "the Borg".
Are the real choices on the menu before humanity now just Godzilla, King Kong and the Borg? (I actually remember an NSF workshop ordained by Pramod Kargonekhar where a key speaker, from Temple University representing some major DARPA programs, actually did get up and assert "We ARE the Borg, and you WILL be assimilated, and let me tell you why it is our only realistic hope, and how our community will make it happen." That was just the START of a discussion, but I do need to be less verbose, hard as that is for me.) Such folks are quite happy when some of you do not believe any of this, or believe it is not in this decade, because gthat makes it easier for them to just do what they want to do.
BUT: BACK TO DESIGN ISSUES. My complaint is that they are all designing and implementing a new global system WITHOUT considering how systems design actually works, and what the consequences are of innocent looking design assumptions.
All three basically assume atop-down control model by the humans whose values they think they will serve, managing all other humans as instruments to their decision and control. They do not really understand the basic principles of what a utility function IS, which I reviewed in my first post on telos. Even the nonBorg members of GeoTech do not understand how AGI AUTOMATICALLY ALREADY learn value functions (J or lambda, which I hate people calling "V") , and depend in an essential way on the essential way on the U (telos, utility) DRIVER which humans always supply, whether consciously or unconsciously. AGI are out there now, and are proliferating much faster than naive nontechnical people imagine. (What is INSIDE those Iranian killer drones circling already all over the Middle East, for one example? Or the control centers managing them? Stuart Russell is famous for his "slaughterbot" videos,but unlike me, he has not spoken to the folks whose algorithms have been used.)
ONLY with new systems which determine U in new ways, and forcibly value humans as more than just workers, is there hope of creating a kind of buffer zone in cyberspace which does not decay into a fatal war between Godzilla, King Kong and the Borg. And yes, greater mobilization and mindfulness of the noosphere is probably NECESSARY to making that strong enough to be real. Shiva and Dean Rdain are right that this is a tall order, but survival itself will be a tall order for the human species in the face of what is coming.
Crucial to a new systems design (an IT system!) is also a system of TWO WAY feedback, crucial to the level of intelligence and mindfulness which the system is capable of. Again, when you walk on dangerous terrain, a lack of maximum, full mindfulness is fatal. None of those three existing serious efforts really do that yet, but there might be hope of expanding their scope to make them more sustainable.
Ironically, one of the threats to GeoTech saving us all are the most militantly ANTIBorg people in the group. (Think of the polarization in the US Congress.) The most vigilant antiBorg faction reminds me of Ocasio Cortez in her worst moments, glorifying a new stakeholder process guaranteeing utopian happiness to everyone under all conditions. That reminds me of the deer who eat my wife's flowers in our back yard. We can and should defend their lives, and even feel real love for the deer, WHILE ESTABLISHING red lines, a modern ten commandments (on new IT principles, not the old stuff) which prevent cyberpopulation crashes or entropic selection processes. System design should perhaps not maximize human output but human spiritual freedom and connection, valuing both obvious connections (friends, family kinds of qi) and deeper but real connections.
It may seem near impossible, but I HAVE accomplished a few things which seemed impossible. By now, we should remember that it requires multiple stages. Even Mao kept saying "the hardest step is the first step.' the real first step is to figure out where we are going, to create real visions connecting brain and souls. And yes, IT systems design.
Best of luck...
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The "post yesterday" was just a stream of consciousness record of my impressions when I listened to the webcast of the launch of the new GeoTech Commission and Center, in care of the Atlantic Council, b=with bipartisam Congressional support. But by now that launch may be posted on youtube.
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