"Friendly AI?"

New Transhuman post.

I haven't done my post on Artificial Intelligence yet, but I've touched on the subject. I should likely do my AI post before I do this one, but - eh.

A quick primer on some AI terms, for those who don't know or missed one of my posts where I defined them:

AI - Artificial Intelligence. I've also seen this rendered as Artilect - Artificial Intellect. AIs/Artilects come in several different "flavors", depending upon what they do and the amount of labor put into creating them. In escalating order of self-awareness, they are:

Expert System: An expert system isn't a true AI. It's a program that has been developed that possesses a mastery of a particular subject and then uses that mastery in that subject area. ESes are not self-aware, they are not sapient, and they cannot learn. We've been using ESes since the 1970s and 80s, and they've only gotten better.

Narrow AI: Also called Weak AI. This AI is sorta like what we imagine when we think of AI, but it's intentionally handicapped so that it can't reach human/transhuman levels of intelligence (I imagine a Narrow AI would likely be as smart as a human is today, compared to the transhumans of tomorrow). Narrow AIs are the most plausible right now, and depending upon how one interprets  Godel's various theorems, maybe the only type of AI possible. I disagree, and I'm not the only one.

AGIs: Stands for Artificial General Intelligence. Also called Strong AI. These are AI systems that are programmed to be just humans. They learn, they feel, they understand, they have their own personalities, likes, dislikes, thoughts, etc. They are, for all intents and purposes, totally self-aware. An AGI would be really no different from a human being, with the exception that they live in a computer.

Seed AI: This is where people start to get nervous. Add one half pound AGI and two quarts infinite self-improving capabilities, stir vigorously and for God's sakes don't put in the bootstrapping. A Seed AI is an AGI on steroids; these are AIs that have infinite self-improvement capabilities, achieved through what I imagine is something like recursive programming. A Seed AI has the actual potential to become a god or God or something close to it - if Seed AIs actually can exist, they're likely the only thing that remains from highly advanced alien civilizations (providing those civilization didn't just downsize themselves into attotech computer - goodness only knows what they're doing down there).

Like all technology, AIs have their own risks and benefits. No technology is likely as misunderstood as AI research; this is partially thanks to Hollywood's tendency to display AIs as prone to go rogue at the drop of hat and try to kill off humanity for... whatever purpose. Who knows.

It makes for an awesome story. It's crap science, like everything from Hollywood and modern science fiction, though.

Overlooking Hollywood's stupidity on the matter, there's an interesting discussion to be made. Obviously we don't want our AI go and get itself corrupted, or to exposed to an alien hypervirus that operates on a femtotech level and kill us all, so the natural inclination is "well, program it to be friendly to us. Recognize us as it's masters, and definitely try not to kill us."

This notion is called "friendly AI." Were we program the AI so it is friendly towards us, so it doesn't go all Skynet and, y'know, kill us.

I'm glad to know I'm not the only person who disagrees with this immensely.

Human Black Box: Devil's Advocate (Part 9)

Here we are, back on schedule again (sorta). The last few Human Black Box installments have been spread out over the last few months, due mostly to my working schedule and classes, but I'm back, and I've got new updates down the tubes for it.

First up, A recap of where we are: Chloe and Zira were sent to Mars by ANTARES to investigate a "Dr. Mahmoud-Martinique", who went vanished. While there, they started digging up evidence that Dr. M&M worked for a reclaimer movement who had made actual runs to Earth, and that he'd gotten tied up in a strange cult-like group, with individuals who model themselves after the Left Behind series of novels. While following up on the lead that lead to the discover of a Christbot that Dr. M&M had brought back from Earth on one such trip, one of those individuals - a blogger named Cameron Williams - got the drop on the women and killed Chloe. After resleeving, Chloe and Zira concocted a scheme to get into New Hope Village Colony - by creating beta forks of themselves and sleeving them into flats. Chloe, sleeved in a specialized ruster morph, followed them in. While there, Chloe discovered agents of a group called Ozma there, interrogating what looked like the Christbot. After saving him and killing off the Ozma agents, Chloe found herself face-to-face with the Christbot sleeved in a biomorph... and it wasn't entirely human...

Meanwhile, Zira caught up with one of Cameron's forks, and after a question and answer session, managed to get some disturbing truths from the fork, including a plan to smuggle the fork through one of the Pandora Gates and into an exosolar colony...

This is the final part of Devil's Adovcate. The next arc-segment will pick up with a familiar face that we haven't seen in a while - even though she's got a new one - and deal with a different problem...

The Klan, Operation Rescue, and Al Qaeda

For those who don't know, Operation Rescue is a terrorist organization, just like Al Qaeda. They're a terrifying mix of violent extremism and anti-woman, anti-life, anti-human self-righteous blindness, run by a man who can only be described as a corrupted, soulless monster.

The right to not have to use a coat hanger for abortion in the United States has come under fire. Like all other third world countries, a patriarchy convinced of it's own conceited worldview has stepped up and deemed women as unacceptable human beings. No where is that more visible than in Operation Rescue, the Orwellian named group who's sole purpose seems to be bombing women's health clinics, killing gynecologists, and lying about how they didn't want any of the above to happen.

So yes, sort of like the Klan. But the Klan had the guts to stand up and say it was what they wanted. Like other Right-wing cowards, Operation Rescue can't do that.

And just like the Klan, I hope they become shunned really soon. Because these theocratic cryptofascists have adopted a new technique in their battle against female human rights: these radical clerics have started adopting a database with the names, pictures, work hours and work locations of all the doctors who preform abortions.

Does this scare you? Because it scares me. And we know exactly what it will be used for. It's getting a bit hot in here, and the law needs to step in. Now. Before someone else dies.




h/t the Slacktivist

Conservative Love!

If you couldn't tell by the title, this has to do with love as only Conservatives are capable of showing it. So, heads up, because things can only go down hill from here.

A few Trigger Warnings - Animal Abuse for sure, with discussion of Slavery and racism in the Modern TEA Party - you know, the party that isn't racist - included.

As Promised! Human Black Box - Now As A PDF!

I burned the midnight oil for this - let this be lesson: Never put off today what you can do tomorrow. Or something like that. Anyway, after spending a couple of weeks intermittenly working on it, I'm finally done. I have collected the entire first part of Human Black Box into a single PDF file, done through publisher. I sorta wish that I had more artistic talent than I do, but that's what DAZ studio is for.

So - here it is. Human Black Box: Things Go Sideways.
I plan to do this for all of the releases of Human Black Box, but what I learned here was that I need to start sooner than a week before I promise it. Anyway, the document is released under the Share and Share Alike license, so if some Godforsaken reason you want to use the artwork or you want to use the characters, feel free - just attribute me as their creator. Everything else is the IP of Posthuman Studios; the folks who created Eclipse Phase.

The New Christian Sharia

If you've ever wondered what a critical failure in civics looks like, look no further than the Liberty Council. In a pique of fantasy, they rewrote the Constitution. Christian extremists masturbating their faith over civic law is nothing new in this country; whether it's lying and claiming that "we're a Christian nation" or lying about Thomas Jefferson and the founding fathers/framers of the Constitution, a document they hold in such high regard they've never read, for fear it might be sacrilege. Their ideas are like all the different superpositions of an atom - once you look at it, they collapse (this is provided you accept wave-function collapse).

For those unfamiliar, the Liberty Council is an insult to pathetic jokes in the field of law. They basically have to lie about being a law firm, because they sit at the intersection of "law", "extremism" and "that burrito that you didn't eat all of and threw away last Friday." They're the "moral substitute" pushing Christian Sharia, and like 99.9% of all moral substitutes, they suck at what they do.

So, in an effort to pretend that they don't suck, they rewrote the Constitution, and modeled it after their own Christian Sharia law. Now, figure this - they scream that the United States is a Christian nation. If it's a Christian nation, why the hell are you rewriting the Constitution? It should be in the original Constitution (and not the Declaration of Independence, assdouche - they're two entirely different documents), but it's not, so you have to rewrite the Constitution that this country is built upon in the name of turning it into the Christian nation that it always was despite it not being in the founding documents? Spin me 'round and 'round; this oroborous of logic isn't ending anytime soon. Of course, that's the least of their logical flaws - why do you think they resort to lying? There is no legitimate debate because this isn't a Christian nation. Lie and make it up, concoct, list to FOX noise, In God We Trust does not mean Jesus, and I challenge any conservative to prove me wrong.

Never mind the fact that the phrase is unconstitutional to begin with.

But, let's take a look at this abomination that the Liberty Council shat out - this joke of fixer-fic of the Constitution.

(TW: Language - moreso than usual - and all the usual TWs associated with anything out of the bigoted and stupid political Right)

Now With 20% More Fallacies!

In the wake of this turning 2012, there's sure to be a surge of interest in the various codes and such, especially as we get closer to the fateful day of December 22-25th, 2012, after which will occur December 23-26th, 2012. With that in mind, it's time to launch a preemptive push back.

One of the funnest aspect of looking at these "prophecies" and these "codes," and by larger extensions, the so-called psychics like Edgar Casey and others, is how many logical fallacies they hit on their way down to the bottom. Because they nail quite a few. Men like Casey and other prophecy "scholars" are very good at taking vague descriptions and blowing them way out of proportion, stretching the meaning of words like the Biblical Literalists ignore the majority of the Bible on the Political Right.

It can be fun to sometimes live in a world where there are such things. Those familiar with the Dark Matter setting, which was originally published by TSR under their flagship Sci-Fi label Alternity, and later re-appropriated by WotC for their d20 modern setting, know. Those familiar with a little show from the 1990s named The X-Files know. A world with conspiracies can a fun place. It's very exciting to think that you have secret knowledge that nobody else has; that you've been able to put together these pieces and look at the evidence in a different way, disregarding everything else along the way.  To pretend that there are these dark forces at work in the world and that you can see them - it gives an otherwise random world shape. That everything in the world happens because there are mysterious Illuminati that are pulling the strings behind the world curtain, or that the Bilderburgs and the CDC are working together to plant the next population-controlling virus in the population. However, this is fantasy, and most people recognize it as fantasy. It's not real. The Bilderburgs have a lot of power, but they don't set the tone for the entire world. A Freemason lounge can barely decide on what time of sandwiches they want for lunch most of the time, much less control a vast global conspiracy with other lounges. If it's always two Jewish people and three opinions, how does anything get done in the vast global conspiracies that seem them controlling the markets? It can fun to live in a world where there are these conspiracies, but it's also fun to live in a world with dragons and fairies and elves. The thing they have in common is that neither set of devices exists in the real world - not conspiracies, not dragons.

I understand the draw of conspiracies. There is something appealing to believing that you've thought of something and that you're hiding information that could implicate a vast global conspiracy, and that the government is out to get you. Real life is boring most of the time. Who doesn't want to have access to these top level files that implicate the existence of aliens at Area 51? Humans are natural story tellers and our minds are not geared towards critical thinking - critical thinking is something we have to train ourselves how to do. Nobody is born a critical thinker. We see patterns in nature and we ascribe meaning to those patterns - if you think about it, that's all language is. It's patterns on a sheet of paper that we ascribe meaning too. We you look up at the clouds and you see a face, or an airplane, or a cow or flower or whatever - it's the same thing. Conspiracies are the same; we look around us and we find these patterns and we ascribe meanings to them, and we connect the dots, and we come to conclusions. They're the wrong conclusions, but they're conclusions never the less. More importantly, they're interesting conclusions; ones that hold the attention, and that reach out and grab you.

But that doesn't change the fact that they're wrong. And it doesn't change the fact that, when spread as facts, we have a problem.