[Ben Mulvey]

I’m much more worried about what humans will do with A.I. & how they might program any harmful algorithms that any Terminator self-sentience scenario.

I often come across the idea of mind uploading & modelling the human brain in silicon – often people straightaway assume such a model would have consciousness & that there would straightaway be two copies of the person being modelled.

I’m sure much of human intelligence will be modelled & bettered in silicon (or it’s predecessors) – but stop & think, in this scenario – we are still very much left with the ‘hard problem of consciousness’.

Minute to minute my consciousness is something more than my brain.  The touch of human skin makes me remember a line from a Charles Bukowski poem, that makes me feel sad, but a glance at sunlight through a windows changes that emotion to hope.  Coffee & sugar change me again, not to mention a host of other chemicals & hormones in my blood that have been acting on me all day, I could go on ….

No modeled brain in silicon or indeed no constructed AI – that is JUST a model of our intelligence could be anything like this – or anything like a human.

A.I. will be what we build it to be.

More than anything we should look to our previous efforts with weapons & how we have handled this issue as a guide to our future.  Our ability to limit the use of nuclear, biological & chemical weapons, should give us hope.

But we should be clearer about the danger.  It’s not Terminator we should fear, but ourselves.

 

 

 

[Ben Mulvey]

I’ve been fascinated by technology and futurology since my teens.  A copy of Alvin Toffler’s “FutureShock” I stumbled across in the library started that off.  Over the years writers & thinkers like Ray Kurzweil, Stanislaw Lem, Eric Drexler, Robert Anton Wilson, William Gibson & Kevin Kelly have helped grow & deepen this fascination.

We have so much changing now & so much more accelerating change just ahead of us and I find myself frustrated with most people’s lack of imagination when it comes to dealing with all of this.

I help moderate a group on Reddit –  r/futurology – which is a busy place (by default anyone who signs up to Reddit gets it as one of their default subscriptions & that’s currently over 3.5 million people subscribed & potentially exposed to it), but even there the lack of imagination & foreknowledge is telling.

The marriage of nano-tech & 3d printing, the decentralization of currencies, augmenting of humans both physically & intellectually – many, many potentials are there – opportunities & challenges, just waiting to be grasped.

But their stories are not being told.  I’m attracted to Hieroglyph as this seems a place where people who recognize this challenge are meeting and planning.

Me too!

 

 

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