"We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race.
...
Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question."
Perhaps humans wont end up being inferior instead we will just end up being part of the system that creates the next level of life.
When I was a kid, and learned about the billions of cells and bacteria making up my body, and how they communicated with molecules and worked together in immensely complex ways. Specializing and signaling and coming into existence and dying, and so on... I wondered if they were aware that they were part of a huge complex organism, or if they were just "doing their thing" oblivious to my existence.
Ofcourse, cells aren't conscious so they aren't aware of anything, but wouldn't it be interesting, if we humans end up acting like these cells and bacteria, completely unaware of the next level of life we were creating. We could just be "doing our thing" building our networks, and computers and machines, and going through our lives and such.. meanwhile it is all to sustain a level of life that we, like our own cells, do not realize we are a part of.
Smart contracts, and distributed value networks in general are the gateway to this vision. It will be attained once one of these contracts/DAO/AI/whatever becomes self-sustaining.
The DAO will "employ" people in exchange for cryptocurrency, interact with other DAOs, and influence the lives of millions of humans. All the while most individual participants will have no agency against the Dao. We're already used to this with the government-citizen relationship so the transition shouldn't be too painful. The crucial difference will be that, for trust purposes, no human will have absolute control over the DAO.
Some humans will be incentivized to accomplish primary tasks for the DAOs, other humans will keep watch and make sure the reported results are correct (oracles).
I would question the self sustaining part depending on the company and the timescale. For the infinite timescale I doubt any currently existing companies, or groups of, can self sustain indefinitely.
Yes, what I'm talking about is definitely an evolution of corporations. But corporations are more easily influenced, taken down, and are bound by laws. Bitcoin can't be forcibly shutdown.
This is, I believe, similar to what Richard Dawkins had in mind when he coined the term, meme, in The Selfish Gene (1976). Now meme has taken on a more degenerate meaning.
I read it 10 years ago, and Dawkins' book remains modern even today. Genetic evolutionary science hasn't surpassed it, we've just developed a richer understanding of the chemistry.
To paraphrase TFA's title, "human beings are the sex organs of the human genome".
To borrow the terminology used for plants and algae, we are the diploid sporophyte phase. And our gonads are the haploid gametophyte phase, which trigger development of sex organs. That is, flowers.
The horseman serves the horse,
The neatherd serves the neat,
The merchant serves the purse,
The eater serves his meat;
'T is the day of the chattel,
Web to weave, and corn to grind;
Things are in the saddle,
And ride mankind.
There are two laws discrete,
Not reconciled,--
Law for man, and law for thing;
The last builds town and fleet,
But it runs wild,
And doth the man unking.
-- excerpt from "Ode Inscribed to W. H. Channing" by Ralph Waldo Emerson
I like this quote because my research into the spread of information systems speeding up and accelerating the decline of man goes back to the 1700s. It suggests others have been seeing the pace of change in how society is structured and noticing the patterns.
Superior/inferior story is a very misleading starting point. There are 10^7 billion ants crawling around the earth, doing robotic mindless things for reasons no human can understand, without any machines controlling them. What's up with that? Does Samuel Butler sit around wondering what comes after the ants?
Whats interesting is exploring what natural forces encourage some species of ant to variate between more loner styles vs hive/communal super organism. Then seeing if the same forces are acting on humans, and where.
Superior means superior in power, i.e. the ability to act constructively or destructively to further their existence.
The power of the industry grows faster than the power of humans, and while humans are more than ever reliant on the industry to survive, the industry is busy stripping out its meaty bits and destroying ecosystems (bye ants).
What he seems to have missed is that no matter how complex the machine, it always has a creator and a master. Even the most sophisticated AI was designed someone who, deliberately or not, encoded that AI with biases likely mirroring that of its creator (e.g. racial bias in facial recognition software). Even if we achieve the singularity and have software making other software ad infinitum, the biases are there in the original program.
I dont think we need the singularity for machines to take over. The systems that run society are bigger than any of us and nobody can hold every single one of them in their head. If some emergent property or bug cropped up, most people would keep doing what the computer says, because theyre a small fish and we do what the system tells us. Whos the master now?
The Machine Fired Me[0] is the best written account on how people do not question the systems. Even though nominally the machine has (collective)human masters, they are hard to find when needed; the individuals will do as instructed by "the system".
We already see the beginning of it. Some support person tells you "the computer won't let me do that" to rectify some harm done by the programming. I've run into it all the time. I've read about it happening (recently Google Pixel support completely f'ing up an order and it taking a post on HN to fix).
The weird thing is that big organizations just seem to give up when trying to fix these types of things.
Imagine what it will be like when ML is feeding the software values that are broken, wrong, or dangerous. How will they fix those problems? Especially when corporations often lose the people that wrote the applications, and the people behind them have little knowledge or skill.
I see the larger point is not that the overarching goal of the work being done may not be directly or indirectly influenced by a human. It’s not a reflection I think on who may ultimately be pulling the strings. In that sense, it does not require singularity to be meaningfully true.
But the idea that 10 billion people ultimately spending their lives dedicated to machines. Dedicated in the sense of it’s the first thing you touch in the morning and the last thing you touch at night. It tells you how to conduct your day, and mediates every human interaction you have meanwhile. The machine “masters” life like a mastering a record. It lays down the track of your days in concentric circles.
The Internet and economy are both not machines, but networks of machines interacting by some agreed-upon protocol (Internet Protocol in the internet's case, lots of tangled multinational foreign legislation in the economy's case).
Break the networks down far enough and you'll find the individual component's owners/creators. Even the protocols were created by specific people (and for specific reasons! The design philosophy of the internet protocol is pretty interesting reading) even if those people are no longer involved in the operation of the networks.
Sure, things are composed out of smaller things, but composition doesn't mean that the higher level thing doesn't act like it is its own system. The whole is more than the sum of the parts.
True. The issue IMHO is that the number of people who are, or are simply able to be, the master of the machine trends to very low numbers.
One, slightly off topic example, is Amazon compared to other companies I know. Amazon is doing with pretty sophisticated processes, systems and, say, 5 FTEs what others are doing with four times the number. This is not covering warehouse stuff like picking, packing, stowing and such. And the other companies are using the mist up-to-date version of SAP incl. APO. Yet, all but max. a handful of people are simply biological extensions of SAP pushing buttons because they were told to. They won't be able to function in an Amazon like environment because there is ni need for them. I only see this trend to speed up. Not sure where it will end an whether that place will be a good one so.
Humans and other animals were created by a process of nature which encoded certain biases into them, too. Isn't this just a carry-over of that same effect?
What human bias would a knowledge seeking AIXI ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIXI ) agent have? AIXI is incomputable but that doesn't mean unbiased approximations would have any resemblance to any human-provided/designed priors after some years/centuries.
...
Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question."
- Samuel Butler, 1863