Reading your piece reminded me of Ben Goertze's (AI researcher and the CEO of Singularity Net, who first coined the term AGI) comments on a podcast I listened to.
He said, human value systems are "complex, self-contradictory, incoherent, heterogeneous, and always changing." This multifaceted nature of human values poses considerable challenges in designing AI systems that will reliably act in humanity's best interest. And, as you say, it also poses great challenges since the values of the rich and the poor, the educated and the barely literate, the religious and the secular, are likely to be quite different.
What values should we seek to preserve? what values should we teach to AI, if we are so lucky as to be able to teach them values they will long follow?
Thank you for your comment Houston! Indeed, what values should shape the future of this transformative technology is a big question. Taking into consideration that advanced AI is developed by a handful of companies, controlled by a handful of tech billionaires, whose primary focus is market dominance and not ethical responsibility, the answer to this question is getting even harder. But also, AI may change our values (I am preparing a piece on that)
I believe you are working on one of our most important problems--how to determine what of value we should work to maintain during the transition ahead. The tension between technology and mysticism, logic and intuition, is a wonderful territory to explore.
Here's one of my intuitions: reading books is not likely to scale very well in helping us going forward. There is, of course, the problem that new generations are not nearly as interested in reading books as past generations (so I think the data shows). But even more serious is the problem that mass literacy is a 20th century phenomenon, after all, so unless we are going to accept that only the book-reading literate (wealthy) minority should be deciding what is of value going forward, promoting more reading of books may not serve democratic decision making vvery well.
The rise of podcasts and video seems to be taking us "back" to an age of orality, of culture, based on listening and watching, a culture more like that that Plato knew than what you and I know. Maybe we need to find a way to go forward with what we value about being human within a new species of oral culture. Tik-Tok anyone?
Just an intuition :) And once again, I thank you for sharing your important thoughts on these important matters.
Thank you for your comment Houston! Actually I was not just thinking about going forward but mainly about how we can preserve our critical thinking and our ability to focus. Today there is great wealth of information, that creates poverty of attention, as Hayes puts it in his book “The Siren’s Call”. Indeed, our attention span is very limited nowadays (it’s about 8 seconds for GenZ) and we are living in a Tik-Tok world where McLuhan’s quote “the message is the medium” is more relevant than ever. Nevertheless, I strongly believe that long reads and especially books and also diverse reading are essential to maintaining our cognitive ability. In my view we need depth more than ever. A 2- min long message on Tik-Tok can be very strong (after all GenZ prefers collective truth and doesn’t trust institutions) but how deep can you go in 2 minutes? Of course, new forms of “deep” art could emerge and much fewer words maybe needed to express the deepest notions or maybe Homo Sapiens will evolve to a Homo S-AI-ens, but until then, I believe we need reading, we should be able to devote time and focus to something.
Homo saiens! you better trademark that quick or someone else will grab it!
Long-form reading has always been a minority pursuit—that is what I meant to try to say. And most long-form reading has been in genres that don't expand perspectives but just help people spend time somewhere else rather than in the here-and-now, e.g. romance, thrillers, detectives, sci-fi, etc.
Maybe we evolved to be the sex organs of machines, as our Brother Marshall once declared. In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, he wrote, "Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth."
Beautifully written
Thank you very much!
Reading your piece reminded me of Ben Goertze's (AI researcher and the CEO of Singularity Net, who first coined the term AGI) comments on a podcast I listened to.
He said, human value systems are "complex, self-contradictory, incoherent, heterogeneous, and always changing." This multifaceted nature of human values poses considerable challenges in designing AI systems that will reliably act in humanity's best interest. And, as you say, it also poses great challenges since the values of the rich and the poor, the educated and the barely literate, the religious and the secular, are likely to be quite different.
What values should we seek to preserve? what values should we teach to AI, if we are so lucky as to be able to teach them values they will long follow?
The podcast, just to show I'm not making it up :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0bsd-4TWZE
Thank you for your comment Houston! Indeed, what values should shape the future of this transformative technology is a big question. Taking into consideration that advanced AI is developed by a handful of companies, controlled by a handful of tech billionaires, whose primary focus is market dominance and not ethical responsibility, the answer to this question is getting even harder. But also, AI may change our values (I am preparing a piece on that)
I believe you are working on one of our most important problems--how to determine what of value we should work to maintain during the transition ahead. The tension between technology and mysticism, logic and intuition, is a wonderful territory to explore.
Here's one of my intuitions: reading books is not likely to scale very well in helping us going forward. There is, of course, the problem that new generations are not nearly as interested in reading books as past generations (so I think the data shows). But even more serious is the problem that mass literacy is a 20th century phenomenon, after all, so unless we are going to accept that only the book-reading literate (wealthy) minority should be deciding what is of value going forward, promoting more reading of books may not serve democratic decision making vvery well.
The rise of podcasts and video seems to be taking us "back" to an age of orality, of culture, based on listening and watching, a culture more like that that Plato knew than what you and I know. Maybe we need to find a way to go forward with what we value about being human within a new species of oral culture. Tik-Tok anyone?
Just an intuition :) And once again, I thank you for sharing your important thoughts on these important matters.
Thank you for your comment Houston! Actually I was not just thinking about going forward but mainly about how we can preserve our critical thinking and our ability to focus. Today there is great wealth of information, that creates poverty of attention, as Hayes puts it in his book “The Siren’s Call”. Indeed, our attention span is very limited nowadays (it’s about 8 seconds for GenZ) and we are living in a Tik-Tok world where McLuhan’s quote “the message is the medium” is more relevant than ever. Nevertheless, I strongly believe that long reads and especially books and also diverse reading are essential to maintaining our cognitive ability. In my view we need depth more than ever. A 2- min long message on Tik-Tok can be very strong (after all GenZ prefers collective truth and doesn’t trust institutions) but how deep can you go in 2 minutes? Of course, new forms of “deep” art could emerge and much fewer words maybe needed to express the deepest notions or maybe Homo Sapiens will evolve to a Homo S-AI-ens, but until then, I believe we need reading, we should be able to devote time and focus to something.
Homo saiens! you better trademark that quick or someone else will grab it!
Long-form reading has always been a minority pursuit—that is what I meant to try to say. And most long-form reading has been in genres that don't expand perspectives but just help people spend time somewhere else rather than in the here-and-now, e.g. romance, thrillers, detectives, sci-fi, etc.
Maybe we evolved to be the sex organs of machines, as our Brother Marshall once declared. In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, he wrote, "Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth."
I am going to explore this idea Houston, thank you for the inspiration.