No-one cares about your digital clone

 From the Revelation Space Wiki:

“Beta-level simulations were sophisticated computer programs designed to mimic a person in appearance, mannerisms, and thought-patterns. While capable of successfully impersonating a human mind down to their most minute idiosyncrasies, they were not in fact self-aware -- they were just near-perfect imitations of life. As such, they enjoyed no legal rights or protections.

… it was considered a most egregious social faux pas to allow someone to believe a beta-level simulation was in fact alpha-level; however, mistaking someone for their beta-level was itself an insult …”

Alastair Reynolds’ digitised-human concept is fast approaching reality. 

Today I read about a company which will set up your digital clone (with avatar) if you simply submit as few as four pages of notes, penned by yourself.

Better results are expected if you grant delphi.ai access to your entire corpus of Google Docs and hopefully your memoirs too.

In pitching to your vanity, no-one mentions the use-case. How often will your grandchild (or generic loved one) choose to chat with a shallow personality model - without emotions or empathy - formed from a dataset fossilised in deep time?

Forget about it. In 10-15 years there will be an unbounded collection of Internet friends and advisors, all a lot smarter, more empathic and wiser than you or I could ever be. 

Hope to be remembered fondly, if only dimly.

The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

"The rain lashed down on the cobblestones, a cold, insistent lullaby against the slick flagstones. Jacques huddled deeper into his threadbare overcoat, its collar a damp cage against a wind whispering secrets of the Seine. Beside him, the hulking silhouette of Pierre was an impassive monolith, the silence that clung to him as thick as the Parisian smog. Lutte Ouvrière's newest recruit was draped in shadows, shadows which whispered under flickering street lights - tonight the shadows seemed to writhe with a life of their own.

It all went to hell faster than a bar brawl on Bastille Day. One minute they were hauling crates into a grimy Parisian cellar, the musty air heavy with the ghosts of revolutions past, the next, the cobblestones were erupting in blue flashing strobes, steel claws of spotlights ripping through the night. Sirens wailed a mournful aria as armoured vans disgorged gendarmes, their faces like gargoyles in the harsh neon glare.

The interrogation suite was a slap in the face. Pastel walls, plush carpeting, armchairs that swallowed you whole like overstuffed confessionals. Jacques felt like a stray, an alley cat catapulted into Versailles, his knuckles white against the polished veneer of the interrogation table. The video screen on the wall flickered to life, displaying Pierre in all his granite-faced glory, shackled to a chair in a cell that wouldn't have looked out of place in a mediaeval oubliette. Yet, even under the harsh fluorescents, Pierre's eyes were unwavering, a stoic statue in a concrete landscape.

Then she walked in. Céline. A whisper of smoke and ink, wrapped in a dress the colour of midnight, her dark hair a cascading waterfall against skin like alabaster. She smiled, a flash of white teeth against crimson lips, and Jacques's pulse skipped a beat. This was no gendarme in sheep's clothing, no gruff inspector with a dossier smelling of stale Gauloises. This was a femme fatale straight out of a Simenon novel, and she was playing him like a Stradivarius.

She slid into the chair opposite him, the scent of vanilla and expensive perfume hanging in the air like a promise. Instead of barking orders, she spread documents on the table, the top his long-forgotten university thesis, "The Reconstruction of the Standard Model from Loop Quantum Gravity." Céline, a goddess of intelligence fluent in the arcane language of physics? It was enough to make a man question reality.

Her questions were velvet-coated barbs, her flirtations calculated manoeuvres. She spoke of his research, his dreams, her gaze lingering on his exposed chest. He found himself drowning in her eyes, those emerald depths promising secrets, his guard slowly dissolving like salt in seawater.

Then, the revelation, sharp and sudden. 

"You're on our side, Jacques," she purred, the controller in her hand a tiny silver sceptre. 

Memories, dammed for months, burst through the sluice gates of his mind. He wasn't Jacques, the idealistic firebrand of Lutte Ouvrière. He was Agent Duval, deep cover, tasked with monitoring Pierre, a viper in the folds of the French Left, a serpent working for a foreign intelligence service with his fangs already sunk into the nation's security.

The flood of memories was agonising, a kaleidoscope of clandestine meetings, whispered codewords, the ever-present fear of exposure. And Pierre, ever the stoic mask, his loyalty as impenetrable as the granite of the Alps.

Céline's smile was bittersweet. Relief, triumph, and a tinge of sadness that made her eyes even more luminous. Tonight, they would celebrate a stolen moment of normalcy in the quicksand of espionage. Tomorrow, Duval would vanish, another layer of memories carefully excised, leaving behind a bruised and bewildered Jacques, convinced he had withstood brutal interrogation by the very forces he secretly served.

But as they slipped into the Parisian night, hand in hand, Jacques couldn't shake the feeling that somewhere, beneath the fabricated memories, a shard of truth remained. A whisper in the dark, a ghost at the corner of his vision, reminding him of the man he once had been, the life he had led, and the choices he had made in the cold embrace of shadows. And he knew, with a chilling certainty, that the shadows would always be there, waiting, ready to reclaim him the moment his guard slipped. For in the labyrinthine world of espionage, loyalty was a fickle flame, easily extinguished by the coldest of winds.”

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The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind written by Bard from this...

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Bard Prompt: Write a short story of around 2,000 words in a breathless, pulp-noir style based on the following synopsis.

“The setting is the dark, rainy street in an ancient, run-down arrondissement of Paris. The hero is a young man, Jacques, who is a political activist. His left wing organisation, Lutte Ouvrière, has sent him out this late night with a new comrade, a large taciturn man whom Jacques has never met before. The comrade takes charge and directs Jacques to help set up a mysterious assignment. However, the mission is quickly interrupted: lights, police vans. The two of them are arrested.

“The scene shifts to an interview room, which to Jacques’s surprise is very pleasantly furnished with pastel walls and stuffed upholstery with sumptuous cushions. Jacques is seated at a small table in the centre of the room, expecting a rough interrogation to come. He notices a video screen on the wall to his right. It shows an image of his large comrade shackled to a steel chair in a filthy cell. The large man sits as impassively as ever.

“Jacques doesn't know it but he's in a special DGSI interrogation suite. The DGSI is France's interior intelligence agency.

“A charming, petite, dark haired woman about his own age enters the room. She introduces herself as Céline. She pulls a chair up beside him and puts some papers on the table. Jacques recognises the top paper as his university thesis, ‘The reconstruction of the Standard Model from Loop Quantum Gravity’.

“Céline’s manner is respectful and flirtatious. She seems to want to talk about his scientific research, not about his political activism. Jacques finds himself attracted to Céline, hé can't help noticing her bare arms, her enticing outfit. Soon he's letting her steer the conversation as she wishes. Suddenly he realises the truth: she's just flattering him, getting under his guard. ‘You’ll get nothing from me,’ he says, ‘I’m telling you nothing!’

“Céline smiles at him and tells him he is completely wrong. Jacques is actually on her side although he doesn't know it. His bulky companion, still visible on the wall screen, is an agent of a foreign intelligence service, infiltrated into the French Left. Jacques has been keeping him under surveillance. ‘Now do you remember?’ she asks, as she does something with a small controller in her hand. Jacques's memories come flooding back. He is a deep cover DGSI agent.

"Céline is really Jacques's girlfriend and tonight they are going to celebrate a brief but joyous reunion. Tomorrow though, Jacques will have all these memories erased and will be released with a cover story of a brutal police interrogation which he successfully resisted, believing he is a true revolutionary and a loyal member of Lutte Ouvrière.”

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Coming along, isn’t it, this drafting of stories by LLMs? A fifty percent word count expansion here from my outline-prompt. The short-range narrative cohesion is good, the long-range story cohesion still not quite there for me. But for a pedestrian pulp tale, not bad at all. AC.

The End of History and the Last Man

Reading Francis Fukuyama's book (in the 2020 reissue of this 1992 published book) is an exercise in head-scratching perplexity and fist-on-wall-banging frustration.

Making Hegel's thymos (the Homeric/Platonic quest for status and recognition) a motor for historical change is certainly an improvement over basing your theories of history on that poor, selfish, solitary creature, homo economicus, with its purely consumerist motivations.

But that's like going from crass to merely poor.

In his 1975 book, "Sociobiology: The New Synthesis", Edward O. Wilson expressed a strong belief that the future of social sciences lay in their integration with evolutionary biology, specifically through the lens of sociobiology. Surely Fukuyama might have noticed this? We have advanced our understanding of human nature quite a bit since Hegel, who was writing only twenty years after the French Revolution of 1789.

Still, as a clear and coherent philosophical introduction to Kant, Hobbes, Locke, Nietzsche and Hegel, Fukuyama's chosen intellectual resources, this book could hardly be bettered.

Such a clever man, Mr Fukuyama. One could almost believe his attempts to stay Overton Window-adjacent might be… Straussian?

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Substantively, Fukuyama argues that capitalism - in its ‘bourgeois democratic‘ form - is truly the stable endpoint in human social organisation (an attractor in dynamical systems jargon). In his 2020 afterword he observes that militant Islam and system-busting populism have, despite widespread fears, not proven to be existential threats to the democratic order.

I am sure he is correct: a strong civil society composed of decentralised and fragmented economic elites welcomes a relatively weak, malleable centre of governance - one which won't get out of control.

Russia and China are examples of strongly-autonomous state structures pursuing nationalistic (thymos-driven?) projects to the detriment of their economic interests. It's tough being an entrepreneur in such countries: avoiding being 'disappeared' or worse.

The real (and long-term) threats to Fukuyama’s somewhat optimistic trajectory are twofold: (i) the massive expulsion of the mass of the population from social and economic life by elite-owned total automation; (ii) the entrenchment of a hereditary elite class by genomic engineering - a tech-constructed version of India's caste system (still covertly operational).

I would like to know more about Fukuyama's views on total automation. Meanwhile, his take on bioengineering, “Our Posthuman Future”, is on my reading stack.

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The short-term stability of 'liberal democracy' has its limits. It is worth emphasising just how ultimately fearful capitalist elites are of the masses - and how little they really care for their welfare. Unlike the lords of feudalism, economic and state-apparatus elites are not armed and are relatively few in numbers.

The military, not recruited from the elite in their mass, is not necessarily to be relied upon.

Fukuyama observes in the final chapters of his book just how much degradation and contempt politicians have to suck up in managing and defusing disgruntled mass movements and their cynical demagogue leaders.

It's therefore often the case that key government figures are not themselves socially or economically members of the top elite. No recent British leaders have been scions of the billionaire class; Trump is viewed with disdain by the truly well-off.

As in Tom Wolfe's essay, "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers", politics is theatre and the real stuff happens elsewhere. That's what Fukuyama's ideal of liberal democracy ultimately comes down to.

A Ukrainian Soldier (via Le Monde)

 « A force de franchir tous les paliers de la peur, j’ai compris que je ne suis rien, juste un corps en vie. »

 “By pushing through all the levels of fear, I finally understood that I am nothing, just a corpse in motion.”

Thought for the Day

 Some arguments have visceral force because they are true; others because large numbers of people believe in them.

How to design an exterminator AI

From OpenArt.ai

Posted here as a service to those misanthropists who wish to exterminate the human race, but lack the necessary strategic vision.

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First, don't go the pure AI route. You'll find that it's orders of magnitude easier to engineer a bunch of gain-of-function viral pathogens and let them loose. In fact, lose the idea of the dangers of high-intelligence entirely. Plenty of highly-intelligent people died in prison cells or death camps. An enhanced capacity for abstract thought only takes you so far.

To make humanity, or any species, extinct, you have to change the parameters of that species’ environment to ensure subsequent reproduction tends to zero.

A simple approach is to drop a sufficiently large rock on the planet. But sometimes the introduction of a new, invasive species is enough to do the trick - rats introduced onto a hitherto-pristine island is a well-known case study. 

Could you use advanced AI to enable a lethal threat to humanity? Create a new species to occupy our human niche, preventing humans in their totality from continuing?

Some of you will say that the TFR data shows that capitalism and contraception are already taking us way down that path. But not all humans will be affected: those who disdain such will inherit the Earth - a future paradise for the Amish (h/t Robin Hanson).

Putting both viruses and progressive antinatalism to one side, what people really want to hear about, it seems, are killer robots.

They're hard. 

It's easy to design a substantial point-threat: AI autonomous weapons for example. It's another thing to design a universal, all-consuming threat which prevails over any and all human countermeasures.

All existing AI systems - all our technological products - are strictly parasitic on our existing human global economy. Without that they can't power themselves, repair themselves or reproduce themselves. 

In principle, we can imagine a totally self-reproducing robot community-economy. If it had sufficient means of military aggression and defence, then we're simply positing a species like ourselves (in some possibly improved variant) implemented in metal/silicon or protoplasm depending on the engineering pros and cons.

Since we would be competing in-niche for land, resources and sources of energy, we would have to fight these aliens for our survival. But defeat is not foredoomed, not if we were paying attention all along.

In any case, I say to the misanthropes out there, we are centuries away from that future. You won't live to conceptualise, let alone design, that possible road to human extinction.

My advice? Stick to the viruses. 

Or go design the irresistible (but sterile) android life-partners - trust me, no one will stop you there.

What we think of when we think of death

The soldier: the first one can be hard; after that it's pretty easy.

The dualist: there may be some connection between the person I feel myself to be and the squidgy mass of cells-in-soup inside my skull - but the same thing?!

The neuroscientist: it's process - the mind is what the brain does; I concede we don't know how that could work.

The evolutionary biologist: natural selection has favoured the complex human nervous system. It supports sophisticated social behaviour in challenging, dynamic but mostly predictable environments. What's the problem?

The philosopher: to explain consciousness is categorically different to experiencing it. We both know you're in pain and why, but you're the one screaming.

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Me:

Sometimes when I think of dying I feel that a complex organ (my brain) will stop functioning and its constituents disperse into the biosphere. No big deal.

Sometimes I think that human subjective experiences are extraordinarily similar. Millions of people have sensations, feelings, thoughts and consciousness just like mine. My personal deletion in death is not dissimilar to me falling asleep and waking up next morning as a… slightly different person: someone very like me who is not me.

The human race (or successor conscious beings) may advance in times to come - or may become extinct. We all feel that to secure the former is worth any sacrifice (most of us!) but there is no evidence the universe is the kind of entity which could care either way.

The process of evolution ensures that we have to care - selection bias - so that's really no surprise. We each live within our individual consciousnesses, so structured that we have to care about ourselves and those others we take to constitute our mutually supportive community. If you like, those are the boundary conditions for being a socially adjusted human (not sociopathic, schizophrenic, psychotic, etc).

When we die, a universe may die with us and within us, but let's not be precious. The flow, the continuity of the collective consciousness of humanity gives me reassurance. Just like I'll not be too concerned about falling asleep tonight - as someone will likely awaken tomorrow morning with whom I identify.

Like most people trained in physics, I happen to accept the block universe concept in which the passage of time is a psychological construct, a product of local spacetime interaction between our bodies and the environment. In this sense the past and the future are equally existent and our lives exist in entirety - just as a DVD contains the whole movie, all at once.

(Maybe the universe is really some complex multiverse structure in Hilbert space - who knows?).

Anyway, because I'm a reasonably adjusted human being, I'm a fan of sensual, emotional, smart, prosocial consciousnesses having an indefinite, fulfilling future. I'm reassured by progress so far - at least in this branch of the universal wavefunction. These emotions are conditioned by my future-ignorance, of course.

And for reasons mentioned, I'm not too scared about the eventual unavoidable extinction of the personal consciousness of this author.

You, dear reader, will take up the torch.

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Greg Egan's short story "The Walk" in his collection "Axiomatic" uses this approach as setting. 

Roger Scruton in his book "On Human Nature" makes the distinction between being conscious and having a theory of consciousness.

And I wrote a short piece about this - 'Live Forever' - at sciencefiction.com.

See also Adam Carlton's short story, "Doppelgänger": memory discontinuity hangs heavy.

My 'Talk' with the Karate Sensei

Sensei: “Welcome. You wanted this meeting, so what did you want to talk about?”

Me: “Traditional Shotokan Karate: I think you have an identity crisis.”

Sensei: “Why?”

Me: “Focus first on the 'Traditional'. You don't like competitive sports karate. You think it distorts the art, moves it away from combat effectiveness.”

Sensei (gruffly): “That's right. It's all about dancing up and down, high-kicking, lightness of touch and fast, instant withdrawal for point scoring. And so they lose true lethality.”

Me: “Your own classes are quite kinetic though. Plenty of technique (kihon), and kata. But looking at the class, the students seem overwhelmed by the number of techniques and kata they have to learn. And they don't do much sparring (kumite).”

Sensei: “That's because it takes at least two to three years to get technique into automatic muscle memory so that sparring practice is useful.”

Me: “Yet surely a disinterested observer would conclude that sports such as boxing and MMA, which make sparring central, are more effective on the street. You get what you train for. And you get to be effective within the first year.”

Sensei: “Karate isn't just fighting skills: it comes with a cultural tradition of personal development, honour, self-discipline and spirituality.”

Me: “That is mostly anchored in the kata, 26 in all, which could take a lifetime to learn well - and that's not at all a criticism. Yet the combat application of kata, the bunkai, isn't well integrated with sparring and seems ill-understood, even controversial?”

Sensei: “Yet the essence of karate is to be found in the kata.”

Me: “It seems to me that if you want to be an effective street fighter then boxing or MMA are the ways to go. Motobu Choki pointed out that kata are almost irrelevant. The martial values of self-control, self-discipline and honour are present in all the formalised fighting traditions.

“If, on the other hand, you want the health benefits of balance, flexibility, suppleness, mental calmness and spirituality, then the T’ai Chi Ch’uan form, which is equivalent to kata, has exactly those objectives.

“Surely Traditional Shotokan Karate is simply trapped between these two poles, neither one thing or the other?”

Sensei: “The two aspects you point out are indeed dimensions within karate. Different masters emphasise one more than the other perhaps, depending upon their interests and inclinations. 

“Yet there is no shallow route to deep understanding of the art. Once their energy goes, people have to retire from the practice of boxing and MMA. T’ai Chi Ch’uan can lose its grounding in brutal combat effectiveness, veering off into the arbitrariness and superficiality of choreography: 'mere dance'. 

“The lifelong study of karate in all its complexity - it's a deep immersion into an ancient warrior culture: one which is absent and even deprecated in modern life.”

Me: “Agreed. But your class really falls between two stools. Many students are middle class and not very aggressive: your focus on power, speed and martial spirit falls upon stony ground. Yet the level of physical engagement in kihon, kata and kumite (when performed with speed and power which is always the end objective) makes the class too strenuous and damaging for seniors like me.

“Perhaps you should have two classes: one focused on the external form of the art, forceful kihon and kumite with kata backing it up; the other inclining to the internal art, centred around mindful, low-adrenalin study of the kata?”

Sensei: “Had we but world enough and time! It won't have escaped your notice that ninety five percent of people who attend karate class want to develop effective combat capability. Those who lose the physicality to train migrate across to T'ai Chi, as do those who are primarily interested in health or spiritual matters.

“So I believe you'll find what you need in T'ai Chi. I regret that I can't run a health and spiritual class founded on karate technique and kata; I simply can't afford the opportunity cost.” 

A psychotherapist intervenes.

Psychotherapist: “Nigel, you are just driven and you aren't even aware of it. You are bereft unless you can latch onto a goal, then focus all your efforts on attaining it. You are too old for karate! Get over it - let it go!

“You know the T'ai Chi form, you know the T'ai Chi sword form. Practise them when you want to, otherwise don't bother. You don't need a schedule, you don't need a plan to continually 'get better', there is nothing to achieve.

“Relax, and enjoy the people in your life. In fact, grow up!”

Me: “Thank you Sensei and wise counsellor. I see now that you are both wholly in the right.”

AI Regulation: what will really happen?

 

In the previous post, I joked about concerned liberals writing anguished prose about vague AI-related dangers: robust regulation is certainly required!

Hmm.

'So what would you do?' is a fair question. I answer thus: meta-regulation.

Two questions: What problem are we addressing? Under what conditions do we regulate?

We are certainly at the start of a multi-year AI revolution, driven by deep learning systems using artificial neural networks. In truth, what we have today are the electronic analogue of a disembodied, dessicated human neocortex. GPT systems induce concepts at increasingly abstract levels and produce relevant-ish output.

This is a platform technology. Think early demonstration steam engines, or petrol engines or electric motors. There is a limited market for concepts-in/concepts-out: although for academic intellectuals it must seem as if these systems are undermining their whole way of life.

In economics, we learn that we regulate when we have a market failure. Externalities occur when providers don't properly internalise costs or benefits; monopolies undersupply; some human market relations (drugs? prostitution?) are held to violate social and/or biological norms. We use the power of the state to redress the balance through regulation. 

What are the market failures attributable to the new AI? Apart for mass-production of text/images (where such falsifications may already constitute possible crimes) we don't have too many examples as yet: just suspicions that with cognitive platforms problems could spring up anywhere.

This may remind you that with smart people who've gone to the bad, crimes can spring up anywhere. Law books consequently bulge.

We're not going to know for ages if 'AI' is the granularity where we need to legislate (I really doubt it). I do understand, however, that politicians need to be seen to be doing something given the general air of panic and hysteria. 

They should take their time and prevaricate. The threat of regulation should be used to prod over-mighty tech companies to consult their corporate consciences a little more. 

The answer is meta-regulation.

AI Regulation - could we get real, please :) ?

The AI Power Paradox: Can States Learn to Govern Artificial Intelligence — Before It’s Too Late? by Ian Bremmer and Mustafa Suleyman, August 16, 2023.

This is the latest heavyweight article in the 'heavyweight' international journal, Foreign Affairs. Like all articles on this topic, it's long on pious concerns and feeble technology extrapolation while offering little to nothing compelling in public policy.

So what's the answer? My first thought was that a prudent military might create a last ditch Fortress on the Moon, in case it all goes pear-shaped back on Earth.

But the out-of-our-control AI adversary would be smarter than that. We would be like Neanderthals holed up in some cave with axes and spears against a fully equipped 21st century military task force.

No: instead this. The military should have its own super-smart combat AI systems, massively funded and massively loyal. Then we'd have a chance. Our AIs would be better than their AIs plus those dangerous wild ones.

Forget regulation, it's for ineffectual wimps. Get that black budget request in now!

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