spodi wrote:Read Ray Kurzweil, he's got very interesting ideas. I think his idea is we won't be taken over my machines but will merge. Its in its infant stages now. Smart phones are human's new significant others, wearables are on the rise, virtual and augmented realities are coming. I think Ray has it right stating that we're mergining.
Kurzweil is the end-product of techno-fetishism, and man finally succumbing to his tools rather than mastering them. I'm not positing a rejection of technology, merely a separation of "machine" and "man" for mans own good. A man who is master of his machines and rather than being enfeebled by them, can use the machine as a force multiplier - is the one we should aspire to.
The distinction should be made between technology that makes life "easier" and comfortable, (consumer tech, let's say) and technology that allows empowers humans to explore, to fight and to hone their spiritual and physical resistances in feats of human endurance. To illustrate the difference, a paraplegic who is able to walk again and uses his new legs to conquer everest versus an obese person who acquires mechanicallly-assisted leg-braces to allow him to continue his unhealthy lifestyle.
quetzalcoatl wrote:The potential for autonomous self-replicating intelligences won't be realized anytime soon. Like fusion energy and nanotech, the practical roadblocks that stand in the way are not surmountable with currently available technology.
Machine intelligence will continue to be dependent on human support into the foreseeable future.
A far more troubling aspect of automation is its fragility. Technological evolution is not reversible even if we should desire it. We no longer have the skill or infrastructure to back away from computerized monetary transactions (one of many examples) - this would not be so bad if it weren't for the system's vulnerabilities and its ability to transmit failure to many nodes at lightning speed. Increasing complexity leads to increasing instability, and each successive technological advance cumulatively magnifies the system instability. Another example: a major solar flare could fry enough transformers to leave half of the US in the dark. Transformers are a long lead-time item, requiring months to build. We only inventory enough to replace a normal failure rate - there is no allowance for system wide failures. Such examples could be multiplied ad infinitum.
The result is a society that appears advanced on the surface, but is vulnerable at its core.
We have been far too nonchalant about designing robustness into our automated systems.
Great point.A frail society also creates frailer and frailer people - not just physically, but mentally (as more and more "menial" activity is passed onto machines, so too are the professions that involve degrees of hazard, risk and danger) - these areas that responsible for creating trials to build spiritually resilient people. As techno fetishism increases, lives get more and more comfortable and atomized to the point where people in the society simply do not go under character-building, or social-bond building travails. This makes itself felt in the moral and spiritual character of the leadership of said society, who almost invariably place self-interest over the collective-interest they were elected to represent. After all, with desires being sated and dangerous or mundane work banished to machines, where is the need for political activity. Apathy reigns.
Linking to your original point, the vulnerability of such a society to low-technology terrorism from societies that have much more difficult environments should not be understated. It's really not hard to foresee a point where such a society creates individuals who are so averse to conflict by virtue of the satiation of senses that increased levels of consumer tech supply, that they cannot fight for their own interests.
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