@Lex Tenebris I think you also need to acknowledge that there are real social problems that do need to be addressed. Lets look at beliefs, from one extreme to another extreme. On the nutty side of things, we've got flat earth, chemtrails, 9/11 conspiracy, moon-landing denialism ... these are just nutty. They would be obscure-nutty, fringe, crank theories, if it were not for youtube, which has caused them to become wildly popular. So, you have to ask, from the sociology viewpoint: what is it about youtube, the youtube technology, the youtube policy, that has caused an explosive growth in popularity? (Flat earth has gone from effectively zero gatherings to 50 organized conferences annually, each one with hundreds of people attending, and paying not just door fees, but driving hundreds of miles, renting hotel rooms to stay for the weekend, to attend multiple days of lectures on flat earth. This is what I mean by "explosive"). Before youtube, before social media, this was impossible. So something about the technology caused a shift.

And its not just "technology": its specifically: the user interface. The buttons you press. The like buttons, the hate buttons. On slashdot, you can rate "five stars informative" "five stars funny", "five stars you're a crank", "five stars you're a troll". So ssb doesn't have this, but maybe it should? What about hate buttons? what about subscriptions to block lists? What about spam removal? Maybe child-porn removal? Getting my laptop searched at an airport, and finding out some ahole posted child-porn on ssb and it got mirrored on my laptop, and Homeland Security found it, that would be bad. These are design and implementation decisions that software designers can make, they can actually control this stuff, and they should ponder them a bit. Having "five stars you're an asshole" in a pull-down menu is a conscious design choice. It's not an accident. It doesn't show up in the GUI because of market forces or popular demand. Some coder has to put it there.

These decisions alter social reality. They alter how people interact, they alter what they do, what they say, and what they think in a very literal sense: the youtube GUI literally amplifies beliefs in flat earth. It is literally a thought-amplifier. A thought-spreader, a thought promoter. And maybe some of the thoughts it is amplifying and spreading should not be amplified and spread. And I think you damn well know exactly which kinds of thoughts one might not want to amplify and spread.

There's a thin line between reality, between truth, and indoctrination and propaganda. Asking where that line is is not a waste of time. Designing technology so you don't fall over that line is a good idea. Think of it like a cover over some gears in machinery -- so you don't stick your fingers in there and get them mangled. Like that, but for your brain. Because, uhhh, yeah, certain kinds of thoughts really are a mental disease. Literally.

So, when you say "people are not the problem", you might want to study some history -- Jim Jones and Jonestown is a good place to start. Jim was a real nice guy who was making the world a better place for everyone. Seriously, that's the truth. But then things went sideways, and then it all ended badly. Like, very badly. Shit happens. And he was the nice guy. Maybe not so nice is the Islamic State. And just to be clear, domestic terrorism is right up there next to ISIS. You don't get a free pass/virgins-in-heaven because you're an American redneck.

what are your thoughts on computer "consciousness" or "sentience" or "self-awareness" i am not sure you agree with goertzel , but from what ive read it seems like he is pretty confident along with quite a few others that we will achieve agi in the not to distant future (5-10 years or sooner).

I agree w/ Ben on a lot of issues, but the 5-10 time-frame seems too soon. Mostly because I kind-of back-of-the-envelop sketched a "road to machine sentience" some 5 years ago, and it has 10 or 15 or steps on the road, and "it doesn't seem that hard", and here I am 5 years later, and have taken a quarter step of the first step. Successfully, but golly, for something "not that hard" it sure is taking a long time.

There's a way to put it in perspective: ordinary "big science" takes decades. Want to built a telescope? Prepare to spend a few decades. Want to launch a science satellite? a few decades ... oh, and raise the many millions needed, and assemble the staff of dozens, hundreds needed to develop and test the instruments. Examples: look at timeline of LSST, or the Thirty-Meter-Telescope, or CERN, or the Event Horizon Telescope, SKA, the gravitational wave detectors, or any satellites or spacecraft missions to Jupiter or Mars or Pluto. Decades is the norm.

And this is, in a sense "known knowns" - "known science" ... AGI still has at least a few "unknowns" -- likely roadblocks that haven't even been encountered yet. Oh, and I'm working as a lone wolf. As is most everybody; there's no consensus, no collaboration, no organization, no funding. And then random crap happening behind closed corporate walls, which, from all indications, is funded but chaotic.

I think deep in his gut Ben might sense this is the case, but his optimism and natural promotional talents get the better of him. :-)

but what about Artificial Consciousness? is there narrow vs general, or what do you think?

My current favorite theory of consciousness is basically that we as humans are entities that observe the world and locate/identify patterns, our consciousness is essentially that mechanism observing itself and locating identifying patterns of itself. this coupled with theory that computation is really just a simpler form of thinking (at specific complexity levels the two become indistinguishable) and you could theorize that creating consciousness is doable and something that could be able to scale up..

Yes, that is an entirely valid and reasonable "theory" of (self-) consciousness. And that variant might actually be buildable in a decade(s?) time frame, maybe, if there was actual, sustained, coordinated effort (on the scale of other "big science" projects) The problems:

• Combinatoric explosion remains a challenge. Neural nets perform a kind of "dimensional reduction" but they reduce too much, and there's this .. well, extracting the "right" patterns is still a problem of threading-the-eye-of-the-needle, but we can't really see quite where the eye is, so its confusion-prone. Easy to get mislead.

• Early "sentient" systems are likely to be utterly psychotic, and nothing at all like humans. So like Star Trek Next Gen had episodes where the writers tried to imagine completely alien life-forms, like the sentient sand-pile, or the binarians, or Q or even Moriarty. So think of that, but even more alien and non-humanistic in values.

• Speaking of humans, we have an invertebrate "gut brain" that controls, heart, breathing, digestion, its a billion years old. And a sympathetic nervous system, from the vertebrates, that controls/organizes the gut brain. And a mammalian neocortex that gives us rationality and language. But the vagus nerve still connects our gut to our facial expressions, which is why we wear our heart on our sleeves, which is why Star Trek's Spock or Data had trouble understanding humans... We are literally ruled by gut emotions, when we are not ruled by neuro/bio/hormonal cycles that control addiction (drug addiction, gambling addiction, sex addiction, video-game addiction, addiction/desire to be in the "flow state" -- intellectuals are addicted to erm.. the brute pleasure of thinking. The flow state.)

• So this is what makes us human, and the first sentient machine is going to be so utterly different from that, that it will be psychotic by any and every human definition. And as AGI researchers, we're not prepared for that.

• Currently existing examples of proto-AGI, "almost-AGI" are ... corporations. Self-aware, with super-human powers, working 24x7, doing .. things. Nominally controlled by humans, but not really. Once a corporation gets going, every human in it is replaceable. They exists as entities, not just legally, but in reality.

• But following this same line of reasoning, WWI was a kind-of industrial machine that produced dead bodies, and only halted when it ran out of raw materials (young men to kill). I'm using WWI as an example of a near-AGI-level machine that was utterly alien, and completely hostile to humans, and it ran out of control: politicians could not stop it, generals could not stop it. Now, it ran partly as a brain-virus -- it was a memetic structure, a meme, that entrained entire economic systems, a memetic viral infection that could not be shaken off.

• Compare the psychological state of European humans in 1915 to the psychological state of humans on facebook in 2019, and then realize that the modern proto-AGI's are not going to be like Star Trek's Data, created in some isolated laboratory, having a simple mechanical body, and a video camera for an eye, and a microphone for ears --- no -- its going to be getting sensory input from a firehose of petabytes per second of facebook feeds and google searches and youtube views. It will be a kind-of nervous-system, like the gut-brain, but instead of being attached to the heart and lungs and intestines, its attached to social media, i.e. to society-at-large. That's where, how, what the shape of the first AGI will be. The wiring of it is already being laid down. The higher-function intelligence is still missing, but its already gaining an IQ point or two per year. (and yes, this variant is not open-source; its corporate-controlled. Or in the case of China, controlled by the CCP.) We will all become a part of the Borg, and willingly, and joyfully, and probably not quite even aware that it is even happening.

Phew, I was going to post a short reply, but whatever.

#agi #opencog

@mix yes, technology opens new spaces, but part of what McLuhan is saying (and is perhaps the part that @dan hassan is most interested in, is how the new media is pervasive, subconscious, and acts on society unawares. It's in the background, it defines what is "normal", and is so thoroughly "normal" that it's unnoticable and hard to talk about. No one ever says "oh hey, there's air in this room, and I can breath it!". It just is. The "technology" of an oxidative atmosphere shaped microbial life billions of years ago, and here we are, taking it for granted.

Fast-forward and go meta more than a few times, and you get to the topics that Dan likes to talk about: white fragility and SJW and identity politics -- this is coming to the fore because the air is changing in the room. Topics like institutional #racism are so hard to talk about because, like air, its very nearly invisible, its hard to become consciously aware of it. (and thus, it's existence is denied ...) In a sense, it was invisible, until the invention of social media forced it into awareness. (conscious social, sociological awareness) This "change in the air we breathe" is what is currently roiling society: its no longer culture wars of right vs. left, liberal vs. conservative, but a meelee between a hundred different tribes and world-views and perceptions of reality.

To bridge back to technology: so crypto and cryptocurrency has brought back into (social/sociological) awareness of money and monetary systems, and the pervasive background effects that it has. Now, bitcoin has turned out to be a kind of really bad idea, but it has opened up social awareness that there are indeed other possibilities.

This is the media, the sensory media: literally, as that thing the sits between external "reality" and the inner brain: it is the device through which we perceive. So maybe "air" is a bad example; I should have said skin or ears or eyes. It's not what you see, its the fact that you can see. And the question: how does society change, when we have a new way of perceiving things?