If there are untapped human cognitive-emotive-apperceptive potentials (and I believe there are plenty), then all the more openness to undiscovered realms of “value” knowledge, or experience, when designing a new mind architecture, is called for. To me, that is what makes HLAI (and above) worth doing.
But to step back from this wondrous, limitless potential, and suggest some kind of metric based on the values of the “accounting department”, those who are famous for knowing the cost of everything but the value of nothing, and even more famous for, by default, often derisively calling their venal, bottom-line, unimaginative dollars and cents worldview a “realistic” viewpoint (usually a constraint based on lack of vision) -- when faced with pleas for SETI grants, or (originally) money for the National Supercomputing Grid, …, or any of dozen of other projects that represent human aspiration at its best—seems, to me, to be shocking.
I found myself wondering if the moderator was saying that with a straight face, or (hopefully) putting on the hat of a good interlocutor and firestarter, trying to flush out some good comments, because this week had a diminished activity post level.
Irrespective of that, another defect, as I mentioned, is that economics as we know it will prove to be relevant for an eyeblink, in the history of the human species (assuming we endure.) We are closer to the end of this kind of scarcity-based economics, than the beginning (assuming even one or more singularity style scenarios come to pass, like nano.)
It reminds me of the ancient TV series Star Treck New Gen, in an episode wherein someone from our time ends up aboard the Enterprise of the future, and is walking down a corridor speaking with Picard. The visitor asks Picard something like “who pays for all this”, as the visitor is taking in the impressive technology of the 23rd century vessel.
Picard replys something like, “The economics of the 23 century are somewhat different from your time. People no longer arrange their lives around the constraint of amassing material goods....”
I think it will be amazing if even in 50 years, economics as we know it, has much relevance. Still less so in future centuries, if we—or our post-human selves are still here.
Thus, economic measures of “value” or “success” are about the least relevant metric we ought to be using, to assess what possible critaris we might give to track evolving “intelligence”, in the applicable, open-ended, future-oriented sense of the term.
Economic—i.e. marketplace-assigned “value” or “success” is already pretty evidently a very limiting, exclusionary way to evaluate achievement.
Remember: economic value is assigned mostly by the center standard deviation of the intelligence bell curve.
This world, is designed BY, and FOR, largely, ordinary people, and they set the economic value of goods and services, to a large extent.
Interventions in free market assignment of value are mostly made by even “worse” agents… greed-based folks who are trying to game the system.
Any older people in here might remember former Senator William Proxmire’s “Golden Fleece” award in the United States. The idea was to ridicule any spending that he thought was impractical and wasteful, or stupid.
He was famous for assigning it to NASA probes to Mars, the Hubble Telescope (in its several incarnations), the early NSF grants for the Human Genome project..… National Institute for Mental Health programs, studies of power grid reliability—anything that was of real value in science, art, medicine… or human life.
He even wanted to close the National Library of Congress, at one point.
THAT, is what you get when you have ECONOMIC measures to define the metric of “value”, intelligence or otherwise.
So, it is a bad idea, in my judgement, any way you look at it.
Ability to generate economic “successfulness” in inventions, organization restructuring… branding yourself of your skills, whatever? I don’t find that compelling.
Again, look at professional sports, one of the most “successful” economic engines in the world. A bunch of narcissistic, girl-friend beating pricks, racist team owners… but by economic standards, they are alphas.
Do we want to attach any criterion—even indirect—of intellectual evolution, to this kind of amoral morass and way of looking at the universe?
Back to how I opened this long post. If our intuitions start running thin, that should tell us we are making progress toward the front lines of new thinking. When our reflexive answers stop coming, that is when we should wake up and start working harder.
That’s because this—intelligence, mind augmentation or redesign, is such a new thing. The ultimate opening-up of horizons. Why bring the most idealistically-blind, suffocatingly concrete worldview, along into the picture, when we have a chance at transcendence, a chance to pursue infinity?
To continue:
If there are untapped human cognitive-emotive-apperceptive potentials (and I believe there are plenty), then all the more openness to undiscovered realms of “value” knowledge, or experience, when designing a new mind architecture, is called for. To me, that is what makes HLAI (and above) worth doing.
But to step back from this wondrous, limitless potential, and suggest some kind of metric based on the values of the “accounting department”, those who are famous for knowing the cost of everything but the value of nothing, and even more famous for, by default, often derisively calling their venal, bottom-line, unimaginative dollars and cents worldview a “realistic” viewpoint (usually a constraint based on lack of vision) -- when faced with pleas for SETI grants, or (originally) money for the National Supercomputing Grid, …, or any of dozen of other projects that represent human aspiration at its best—seems, to me, to be shocking.
I found myself wondering if the moderator was saying that with a straight face, or (hopefully) putting on the hat of a good interlocutor and firestarter, trying to flush out some good comments, because this week had a diminished activity post level.
Irrespective of that, another defect, as I mentioned, is that economics as we know it will prove to be relevant for an eyeblink, in the history of the human species (assuming we endure.) We are closer to the end of this kind of scarcity-based economics, than the beginning (assuming even one or more singularity style scenarios come to pass, like nano.)
It reminds me of the ancient TV series Star Treck New Gen, in an episode wherein someone from our time ends up aboard the Enterprise of the future, and is walking down a corridor speaking with Picard. The visitor asks Picard something like “who pays for all this”, as the visitor is taking in the impressive technology of the 23rd century vessel.
Picard replys something like, “The economics of the 23 century are somewhat different from your time. People no longer arrange their lives around the constraint of amassing material goods....”
I think it will be amazing if even in 50 years, economics as we know it, has much relevance. Still less so in future centuries, if we—or our post-human selves are still here.
Thus, economic measures of “value” or “success” are about the least relevant metric we ought to be using, to assess what possible critaris we might give to track evolving “intelligence”, in the applicable, open-ended, future-oriented sense of the term.
Economic—i.e. marketplace-assigned “value” or “success” is already pretty evidently a very limiting, exclusionary way to evaluate achievement.
Remember: economic value is assigned mostly by the center standard deviation of the intelligence bell curve. This world, is designed BY, and FOR, largely, ordinary people, and they set the economic value of goods and services, to a large extent.
Interventions in free market assignment of value are mostly made by even “worse” agents… greed-based folks who are trying to game the system.
Any older people in here might remember former Senator William Proxmire’s “Golden Fleece” award in the United States. The idea was to ridicule any spending that he thought was impractical and wasteful, or stupid.
He was famous for assigning it to NASA probes to Mars, the Hubble Telescope (in its several incarnations), the early NSF grants for the Human Genome project..… National Institute for Mental Health programs, studies of power grid reliability—anything that was of real value in science, art, medicine… or human life.
He even wanted to close the National Library of Congress, at one point.
THAT, is what you get when you have ECONOMIC measures to define the metric of “value”, intelligence or otherwise.
So, it is a bad idea, in my judgement, any way you look at it.
Ability to generate economic “successfulness” in inventions, organization restructuring… branding yourself of your skills, whatever? I don’t find that compelling.
Again, look at professional sports, one of the most “successful” economic engines in the world. A bunch of narcissistic, girl-friend beating pricks, racist team owners… but by economic standards, they are alphas.
Do we want to attach any criterion—even indirect—of intellectual evolution, to this kind of amoral morass and way of looking at the universe?
Back to how I opened this long post. If our intuitions start running thin, that should tell us we are making progress toward the front lines of new thinking. When our reflexive answers stop coming, that is when we should wake up and start working harder.
That’s because this—intelligence, mind augmentation or redesign, is such a new thing. The ultimate opening-up of horizons. Why bring the most idealistically-blind, suffocatingly concrete worldview, along into the picture, when we have a chance at transcendence, a chance to pursue infinity?
We need new paradigms, and several of them.