/sci/ - Science & Math

>>15157553
>socio-economic analysis
Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How has an entire chapter on how chaos theory implies that it's impossible for society to be subject to rational control.

>>15124855
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-the-techies-wet-dreams

> The techies' belief-system can best be explained as a religious phenomenon,[30] to which we may give the name "Technianity." It's true that Technianity at this point is not strictly speaking a religion, because it has not yet developed anything resembling a uniform body of doctrine; the techies' beliefs are widely varied.[31] In this respect Technianity probably resembles the inceptive stages of many other religions.[32] Nevertheless, Technianity already has the earmarks of an apocalyptic and millenarian cult: In most versions it anticipates a cataclysmic event, the Singularity,[33] which is the point at which technological progress is supposed to become so rapid as to resemble an explosion. This is analogous to the Judgment Day[34] of Christian mythology or the Revolution of Marxist mythology. The cataclysmic event is supposed to be followed by the arrival of techno-utopia (analogous to the Kingdom of God or the Worker's Paradise). Technianity has a favored minority—the Elect—consisting of the techies (equivalent to the True Believers of Christianity or the Proletariat of the Marxists[35]). The Elect of Technianity, like that of Christianity, is destined to Eternal Life; though this element is missing from Marxism.[36]

> Historically, millenarian cults have tended to emerge at "times of great social change or crisis."[37] This suggests that the techies' beliefs reflect not a genuine confidence in technology, but rather their own anxieties about the future of the technological society—anxieties from which they try to escape by creating a quasi-religious myth.

>>12340065
>But when all people have become useless, self-prop systems will find no advantage in taking care of anyone. The techies themselves insist that machines will soon surpass humans in intelligence. When that happens, people will be superfluous and natural selection will favor systems that eliminate them-if not abruptly, then in a series of stages so that the risk of rebellion will be minimized.

>Even though the technological world-system still needs large numbers of people for the present, there are now more superfluous humans than there have been in the past because technology has replaced people in many jobs and is making inroads even into occupations formerly thought to require human intelligence. Consequently, under the pressure of economic competition, the world's dominant self-prop systems are already allowing a certain degree of callousness to creep into their treatment of superfluous individuals. In the United States and Europe, pensions and other benefits for retired, disabled, unemployed, and other unproductive persons are being substantially reduced; at least in the U. S., poverty is increasing; and these facts may well indicate the general trend of the future, though there will doubtless be ups and downs.

>>12087177
>But man-machine hybrids will retain a biological component derived from human beings only as long as the human-derived biological component remains useful. When purely artificial components become available that provide a better cost-versus-benefit balance than human-derived biological components do, the latter will be discarded and the man-machine hybrids will lose their human aspect to become wholly artificial. Even if the human-derived biological components are retained they will be purged, step by step, of the human qualities that detract from their usefulness. The self-prop systems to which the man-machine hybrids belong will have no need for such human weaknesses as love, compassion, ethical feelings, esthetic appreciation, or desire for freedom. Human emotions in general will get in the way of the self-prop systems' utilization of the man-machine hybrids, so if the latter are to remain competitive they will have to be altered to remove their human emotions and replace these with other motivating forces. In short, even in the unlikely event that some biological remnants of the human race are preserved in the form of man-machine hybrids, these will be transformed into something totally alien to human beings as we know them today.

>The same applies to the hypothesized survival of human minds in "uploaded" form inside machines. The uploaded minds will not be tolerated indefinitely unless they remain useful (that is, more useful than any substitutes not derived from human beings), and in order to remain useful they will have to be transformed until they no longer have anything in common with the human minds that exist today.

>>11943896
>Even if we make the wildly improbable assumption that the behavior of our society could be predicted through the manipulation of, say, a million trillion simultaneous equations and that sufficient computing power to conduct such manipulation were available, collection of the data necessary for insertion of the appropriate numbers into the equations would be impracticable, especially since the data would have to meet impossibly high standards of precision if the predictions were expected to remain valid over any considerable interval of time. Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist, was the first to call widespread attention to the fact that even the most minute inaccuracy in the data provided can totally invalidate a prediction about the behavior of a complex system. This fact came to be called the "butterfly effect" because in 1972, at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Lorenz gave a talk that he titled "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?" Lorenz's work is said to have been the inspiration for the development of what is called "chaos theory" -the butterfly effect being an example of "chaotic" behavior.

>>11914972
>Proposition 6. In modern times, natural selection tends to produce some self-propagating human groups whose operations span the entire globe. Moreover, even if human beings are some day replaced by machines or other entities, natural selection will still tend to produce some self-propagating systems whose operations span the entire globe.

>Proposition 7. Where (as today) problems of transportation and communication do not constitute effective limitations on the size of the geographical regions over which self-propagating systems operate, natural selection tends to create a world in which power is mostly concentrated in the possession of a relatively small number of global self-propagating systems.

>>11696279
>Singularity University, which we discussed in Part VI of Chapter One of this book, purportedly was created to help technophiles "guide research" and "shape the advances" so that technology would "improve society." We pointed out that Singularity University served in practice to promote the interests of technology-orientated businessmen, and we expressed doubt that the majority of technophiles fully believed in the drivel about "shaping the advances" to "improve society." It does seem, however, that the techies -the subset of the technophiles that we specified at the beginning of this Part V of the present chapter-are entirely sincere in their belief that organizations like Singularity University will help them to "shape the advances" of technology and keep the technological society on the road to a utopian future. A utopian future will have to exclude the competitive processes that would deprive the techies of their thousand-year life-span. But we showed in Chapter One that the development of our society can never be subject to rational control: The techies won't be able to "shape the advances" of technology, guide the course of technological progress, or exclude the intense competition that will eliminate nearly all techies in short order.

>>11645220
>Singularity University, which we discussed in Part VI of Chapter One of this book, purportedly was created to help technophiles "guide research" and "shape the advances" so that technology would "improve society." We pointed out that Singularity University served in practice to promote the interests of technology-orientated businessmen, and we expressed doubt that the majority of technophiles fully believed in the drivel about "shaping the advances" to "improve society." It does seem, however, that the techies -the subset of the technophiles that we specified at the beginning of this Part V of the present chapter-are entirely sincere in their belief that organizations like Singularity University will help them to "shape the advances" of technology and keep the technological society on the road to a utopian future. A utopian future will have to exclude the competitive processes that would deprive the techies of their thousand-year life-span. But we showed in Chapter One that the development of our society can never be subject to rational control: The techies won't be able to "shape the advances" of technology, guide the course of technological progress, or exclude the intense competition that will eliminate nearly all techies in short order.

>>11573465
>But once self-propagating systems have attained global scale, two crucial differences emerge. The first difference is in the number of individuals from among which the "fittest" are selected. Self-prop systems sufficiently big and powerful to be plausible contenders for global dominance will probably number in the dozens, or possibly in the hundreds; they certainly will not number in the millions. With so few individuals from among which to select the "fittest," it seems safe to say that the process of natural selection will be inefficient in promoting the fitness for survival of the dominant global self-prop systems. It should also be noted that among biological organisms, species that consist of a relatively small number of large individuals are more vulnerable to extinction than species that consist of a large number of small individuals. Though the analogy between biological organisms and self-propagating systems of human beings is far from perfect, still the prospect for viability of a world-system based on the dominance of a few global self-prop systems does not look encouraging.

There is a current of thought that appears to be carrying many technophiles out of the realm of science and into that of science fiction. For convenience, let's refer to those who ride this current as "the techies." The current runs through several channels; not all techies think alike. What they have in common is that they take highly speculative ideas about the future of technology as near certainties, and on that basis predict the arrival within the next few decades of a kind of technological utopia. Some of the techies' fantasies are astonishingly grandiose. For example, Ray Kurzweil believes that " [w]ithin a matter of centuries, human intelligence will have re-engineered and saturated all the matter in the universe." The writing of Kevin Kelly, another techie, is often so vague as to border on the meaningless, but he seems to say much the same thing that Kurzweil does about human conquest of the universe: "The universe is mostly empty because it is waiting to be filled with the products of life and the technium... " "The technium" is Kelly's name for the technological world-system that humans have created here on Earth.

Most versions of the technological utopia include immortality (at least for techies) among their other marvels. The immortality to which the techies believe themselves destined is conceived in any one of three forms:

(i) the indefinite preservation of the living human body as it exists today;
(ii) the merging of humans with machines and the indefinite survival of the resulting man-machine hybrids;
(iii) the "uploading" of minds from human brains into robots or computers, after which the uploaded minds are to live forever within the machines.

>>11514312
But when all people have become useless, self-prop systems will find no advantage in taking care of anyone. The techies themselves insist that machines will soon surpass humans in intelligence. When that happens, people will be superfluous and natural selection will favor systems that eliminate them-if not abruptly, then in a series of stages so that the risk of rebellion will be minimized.

Even though the technological world-system still needs large numbers of people for the present, there are now more superfluous humans than there have been in the past because technology has replaced people in many jobs and is making inroads even into occupations formerly thought to require human intelligence. Consequently, under the pressure of economic competition, the world's dominant self-prop systems are already allowing a certain degree of callousness to creep into their treatment of superfluous individuals. In the United States and Europe, pensions and other benefits for retired, disabled, unemployed, and other unproductive persons are being substantially reduced; at least in the U. S., poverty is increasing; and these facts may well indicate the general trend of the future, though there will doubtless be ups and downs.

The techies may answer that even if almost all biological species are eliminated eventually, many species survive for thousands or millions of years, so maybe techies too can survive for thousands or millions of years. But when large, rapid changes occur in the environment of biological species, both the rate of appearance of new species and the rate of extinction of existing species are greatly increased. Technological progress constantly accelerates, and techies like Ray Kurzweil insist that it will soon become virtually explosive; consequently, changes come more and more rapidly, everything happens faster and faster, competition among self-prop systems becomes more and more intense, and as the process gathers speed the losers in the struggle for survival will be eliminated ever more quickly. So, on the basis of the techies' own beliefs about the exponential acceleration of technological development, it's safe to say that the life-expectancies of human-derived entities, such as man-machine hybrids and human minds uploaded into machines, will actually be quite short. The seven-hundred year or thousand-year life-span to which some techies aspire is nothing but a pipe-dream.

>>11431038
AI

>But when all people have become useless, self-prop systems will find no advantage in taking care of anyone. The techies themselves insist that machines will soon surpass humans in intelligence. When that happens, people will be superfluous and natural selection will favor systems that eliminate them-if not abruptly, then in a series of stages so that the risk of rebellion will be minimized.
>Even though the technological world-system still needs large numbers of people for the present, there are now more superfluous humans than there have been in the past because technology has replaced people in many jobs and is making inroads even into occupations formerly thought to require human intelligence. Consequently, under the pressure of economic competition, the world's dominant self-prop systems are already allowing a certain degree of callousness to creep into their treatment of superfluous individuals. In the United States and Europe, pensions and other benefits for retired, disabled, unemployed, and other unproductive persons are being substantially reduced; at least in the U. S., poverty is increasing; and these facts may well indicate the general trend of the future, though there will doubtless be ups and downs.

>>11419799
It's important to understand that in order to make people superfluous, machines will not have to surpass them in general intelligence but only in certain specialized kinds of intelligence. For example, the machines will not have to create or understand art, music, or literature, they will not need the ability to carry on an intelligent, non-technical conversation (the "Turing test"), they will not have to exercise tact or understand human nature, because these skills will have no application if humans are to be eliminated anyway. To make humans superfluous, the machines will only need to outperform them in making the technical decisions that have to be made for the purpose of promoting the short-term survival and propagation of the dominant self-prop systems. So, even without going as far as the techies themselves do in assuming intelligence on the part of future machines, we still have to conclude that humans will become obsolete. Immortality in the form (i)-the indefinite preservation of the human body as it exits today-is highly improbable.

The techies of course will argue that even if the human body and brain as we know them become obsolete, immortality in the form (ii) can still be achieved: Man-machine hybrids will permanently retain their usefulness, because by linking themselves with ever-more-powerful machines human beings (or what is left of them) will be able to remain competitive with pure machines.

>>11409753

>>11350516
Destroying industrial civilization is the only solution.

>But when all people have become useless, self-prop systems will find no advantage in taking care of anyone. The techies themselves insist that machines will soon surpass humans in intelligence. When that happens, people will be superfluous and natural selection will favor systems that eliminate them-if not abruptly, then in a series of stages so that the risk of rebellion will be minimized.

>Even though the technological world-system still needs large numbers of people for the present, there are now more superfluous humans than there have been in the past because technology has replaced people in many jobs and is making inroads even into occupations formerly thought to require human intelligence. Consequently, under the pressure of economic competition, the world's dominant self-prop systems are already allowing a certain degree of callousness to creep into their treatment of superfluous individuals. In the United States and Europe, pensions and other benefits for retired, disabled, unemployed, and other unproductive persons are being substantially reduced; at least in the U. S., poverty is increasing; and these facts may well indicate the general trend of the future, though there will doubtless be ups and downs.

>>11324867

But man-machine hybrids will retain a biological component derived from human beings only as long as the human-derived biological component remains useful. When purely artificial components become available that provide a better cost-versus-benefit balance than human-derived biological components do, the latter will be discarded and the man-machine hybrids will lose their human aspect to become wholly artificial. Even if the human-derived biological components are retained they will be purged, step by step, of the human qualities that detract from their usefulness. The self-prop systems to which the man-machine hybrids belong will have no need for such human weaknesses as love, compassion, ethical feelings, esthetic appreciation, or desire for freedom. Human emotions in general will get in the way of the self-prop systems' utilization of the man-machine hybrids, so if the latter are to remain competitive they will have to be altered to remove their human emotions and replace these with other motivating forces. In short, even in the unlikely event that some biological remnants of the human race are preserved in the form of man-machine hybrids, these will be transformed into something totally alien to human beings as we know them today.

The same applies to the hypothesized survival of human minds in "uploaded" form inside machines. The uploaded minds will not be tolerated indefinitely unless they remain useful (that is, more useful than any substitutes not derived from human beings), and in order to remain useful they will have to be transformed until they no longer have anything in common with the human minds that exist today.

>>11315221
It's important to understand that in order to make people superfluous, machines will not have to surpass them in general intelligence but only in certain specialized kinds of intelligence. For example, the machines will not have to create or understand art, music, or literature, they will not need the ability to carry on an intelligent, non-technical conversation (the "Turing test"), they will not have to exercise tact or understand human nature, because these skills will have no application if humans are to be eliminated anyway. To make humans superfluous, the machines will only need to outperform them in making the technical decisions that have to be made for the purpose of promoting the short-term survival and propagation of the dominant self-prop systems. So, even without going as far as the techies themselves do in assuming intelligence on the part of future machines, we still have to conclude that humans will become obsolete.

>>11309842
There is a current of thought that appears to be carrying many technophiles out of the realm of science and into that of science fiction. For convenience, let's refer to those who ride this current as "the techies." The current runs through several channels; not all techies think alike. What they have in common is that they take highly speculative ideas about the future of technology as near certainties, and on that basis predict the arrival within the next few decades of a kind of technological utopia. Some of the techies' fantasies are astonishingly grandiose. For example, Ray Kurzweil believes that " [w]ithin a matter of centuries, human intelligence will have re-engineered and saturated all the matter in the universe." The writing of Kevin Kelly, another techie, is often so vague as to border on the meaningless, but he seems to say much the same thing that Kurzweil does about human conquest of the universe: "The universe is mostly empty because it is waiting to be filled with the products of life and the technium... " "The technium" is Kelly's name for the technological world-system that humans have created here on Earth.

Most versions of the technological utopia include immortality (at least for techies) among their other marvels. The immortality to which the techies believe themselves destined is conceived in any one of three forms:

(i) the indefinite preservation of the living human body as it exists today;
(ii) the merging of humans with machines and the indefinite survival of the resulting man-machine hybrids;
(iii) the "uploading" of minds from human brains into robots or computers, after which the uploaded minds are to live forever within the machines.

>>11281368
But once self-propagating systems have attained global scale, two crucial differences emerge. The first difference is in the number of individuals from among which the "fittest" are selected. Self-prop systems sufficiently big and powerful to be plausible contenders for global dominance will probably number in the dozens, or possibly in the hundreds; they certainly will not number in the millions. With so few individuals from among which to select the "fittest," it seems safe to say that the process of natural selection will be inefficient in promoting the fitness for survival of the dominant global self-prop systems. It should also be noted that among biological organisms, species that consist of a relatively small number of large individuals are more vulnerable to extinction than species that consist of a large number of small individuals. Though the analogy between biological organisms and self-propagating systems of human beings is far from perfect, still the prospect for viability of a world-system based on the dominance of a few global self-prop systems does not look encouraging.

Most versions of the technological utopia include immortality (at least for techies) among their other marvels. The immortality to which the techies believe themselves destined is conceived in any one of three forms:

(i) the indefinite preservation of the living human body as it exists today;
(ii) the merging of humans with machines and the indefinite survival of the resulting man-machine hybrids;
(iii) the "uploading" of minds from human brains into robots or computers, after which the uploaded minds are to live forever within the machines.

Of course, if the technological world-system is going to collapse in the not-too-distant future, as we've argued it must, then no one is going to achieve immortality in any form. But even assuming that we're wrong and that the technological world-system will survive indefinitely, the techies' dream of an unlimited life-span is still illusory. We need not doubt that it will be technically feasible in the future to keep a human body, or a man-machine hybrid, alive indefinitely. It is seriously to be doubted that it will ever be feasible to "upload" a human brain into electronic form with sufficient accuracy so that the uploaded entity can reasonably be regarded as a functioning duplicate of the original brain. Nevertheless, we will assume in what follows that each of the solutions (i), (ii), and (iii) will become technically feasible at some time within the next several decades.

>>11090271
The same applies to the hypothesized survival of human minds in "uploaded" form inside machines. The uploaded minds will not be tolerated indefinitely unless they remain useful (that is, more useful than any substitutes not derived from human beings), and in order to remain useful they will have to be transformed until they no longer have anything in common with the human minds that exist today.

Some techies may consider this acceptable. But their dream of immortality is illusory nonetheless. Competition for survival among entities derived from human beings (whether man-machine hybrids, purely artificial entities evolved from such hybrids, or human minds uploaded into machines), as well as competition between human-derived entities and those machines or other entities that are not derived from human beings, will lead to the elimination of all but some minute percentage of all the entities involved. This has nothing to do with any specific traits of human beings or of their machines; it is a general principle of evolution through natural selection. Look at biological evolution: Of all the species that have ever existed on Earth, only some tiny percentage have direct descendants that are still alive today. On the basis of this principle alone, and even discounting everything else we've said in this chapter, the chances that any given techie will survive indefinitely are minute.

>>10976024
The techies may answer that even if almost all biological species are eliminated eventually, many species survive for thousands or millions of years, so maybe techies too can survive for thousands or millions of years. But when large, rapid changes occur in the environment of biological species, both the rate of appearance of new species and the rate of extinction of existing species are greatly increased. Technological progress constantly accelerates, and techies like Ray Kurzweil insist that it will soon become virtually explosive; consequently, changes come more and more rapidly, everything happens faster and faster, competition among self-prop systems becomes more and more intense, and as the process gathers speed the losers in the struggle for survival will be eliminated ever more quickly. So, on the basis of the techies' own beliefs about the exponential acceleration of technological development, it's safe to say that the life-expectancies of human-derived entities, such as man-machine hybrids and human minds uploaded into machines, will actually be quite short. The seven-hundred year or thousand-year life-span to which some techies aspire is nothing but a pipe-dream.