Category: technology

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The religious qualities of Singularitarianism

Aeon has a good article about the religious undertones to Singularitarianism. (FYI, “Singularitarianism” is the belief that the Technological Singularity will happen in the future. While Singularitarians can’t agree if it will be good or bad for humans, they do agree that we should do whatever we can until then to nudge it towards a positive outcome.) This passage sums up the article’s key points:

‘A god-like being of infinite knowing (the singularity); an escape of the flesh and this limited world (uploading our minds); a moment of transfiguration or ‘end of days’ (the singularity as a moment of rapture); prophets (even if they work for Google); demons and hell (even if it’s an eternal computer simulation of suffering), and evangelists who wear smart suits (just like the religious ones do). Consciously and unconsciously, religious ideas are at work in the narratives of those discussing, planning, and hoping for a future shaped by AI.’

Having spent years reading futurist books, interacting with futurists on social media, and even going to futurist conferences, I’ve come to view Singularitarians as a subcategory of futurists, who are defined by their belief in the coming Singularity and by the religious qualities of their beliefs. Not only do they indulge in fantastical ruminations about what the future will be like thanks to the Singularity, but they use rhetorical hand-waving–usually by invoking “exponential acceleration of technology” or something like that–to explain how we’ll get there from our present state. This sharply contrasts with other futurists who are rigidly scientific and make predictions by carefully identifying and extrapolating existing trends, which in turn almost always results in slower growth future scenarios.

A sizable minority of Singularitarians I’ve encountered also seem to be mentally ill and/or poor, and the thought of an upending of daily life and of the existing socioeconomic order, and the thought of an end to human suffering thanks to advanced technologies appeal to them for obvious reasons. Their belief in the Singularity truly is like the psychological salve of religion, so challenge them at your own risk.

Singularitarians could also be thought of as a subcategory of Transhumanists, the latter being people who believe in using technology to upgrade human beings past their natural limitations (such as intelligence, lifespan, physical strength, etc.). If you believe that the Singularity will bring with it the ability for humans to upload their minds into computers and live forever, then you are by default a Transhumanist. And you’re a doubleplus Transhumanist if you go a step farther and make a value judgement that such an “upgrade” will be good for humans.

With those distinctions made clear, let me say that I am a futurist and a Transhumanist, but I am not a Singularitarian. I plan to explain my reasons in depth in a future blog post, but for now let me summarize by saying I don’t see evidence of exponential improvement in artificial intelligence or nanomachines, which are the two pillars upon which the Singularity hypothesis rests. And even if an artificial intelligence became smarter than humans and gained the ability to rapidly improve itself, something called the “complexity brake” would slow its progress enough for humans to have some control over it or to at least comprehend what it was doing. Many Singularitarians believe in scenarios where the Singularity unfolds over the course of literally a few days, with a machine exceeding human intelligence at the beginning, and all of planet Earth being transformed into a wonderland of carbon nanotube structures, robots, humans sleeping in Matrix pods, and perhaps some kind of weird spiritual transcendence by the end. The transformation is predicted to be so abrupt that humans will have no time to react or to even fully understand what’s happening around them.

Links

  1. https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-the-language-of-transhumanists-and-religion-so-similar
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularitarianism
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The scary future of fake news: Perfect-quality CGI audio and video

The Economist has a rather disturbing article about how advances in “generative adversarial networks” will soon make it possible to create computer-generated audio and video footage that is indistinguishable from the real thing. The potential for spreading misinformation is obvious. The article offers some ways that such fakes could be spotted:

‘Yet even as technology drives new forms of artifice, it also offers new ways to combat it. One form of verification is to demand that recordings come with their metadata, which show when, where and how they were captured. Knowing such things makes it possible to eliminate a photograph as a fake on the basis, for example, of a mismatch with known local conditions at the time.

…Amnesty International is already grappling with some of these issues. Its Citizen Evidence Lab verifies videos and images of alleged human-rights abuses. It uses Google Earth to examine background landscapes and to test whether a video or image was captured when and where it claims. It uses Wolfram Alpha, a search engine, to cross-reference historical weather conditions against those claimed in the video. Amnesty’s work mostly catches old videos that are being labelled as a new atrocity, but it will have to watch out for generated video, too. Cryptography could also help to verify that content has come from a trusted organisation. Media could be signed with a unique key that only the signing organisation—or the originating device—possesses.’

However, it would be naive to think that these methods couldn’t be defeated with better CGI algorithms and through hacking file metadata and cryptographic keys.

And even if the “good guys” manage to forever stay one step ahead, we’re still rapidly approaching an era where the forgeries will be so good that unaided human eyesight and hearing won’t be sensitive enough to detect them, and humans will have to rely on machines to tell them what is real and what is fake (which is itself an interesting state of affairs from a philosophical standpoint, but that’s a talk for a different time). Something like a few fragments of aberrant computer code embedded in an otherwise perfect-looking fake video might be the only thing that reveals the lie. Considering the short attention span and low level of scientific and technological literacy in most countries, how could the computer forensic findings in such a case ever be explained to average people?

They couldn’t, which means belief or disbelief in accusations of forgery will twist in the winds of whatever preexisting biases each person has, which is how it is now. Americans will believe it when their government tells them a video originating in Russia is fake, and Russians who mistrust America will reflexively disagree and believe their own government’s claims it is genuine. The truth will of course be out in the open, but so abstruse that only a small minority will be able to see it clearly on their own.

Moreover, the ability to make perfect computer generated audio and video imitations of people could lead to disaster in crisis situations where the intended target lacks either the ability or the time to verify their authenticity using their own technology: Imagine a military battle where one side transmits false orders to the other, in the voice of the latter’s commander, or a situation where a hacker posing as a rich investor calls his stock broker and insistently tells him to trade some massive number of shares.

*Update (7/13/2017): Computer scientists at the University of Washington have developed a way to merge audio recordings of someone speaking with video footage of them, so their mouth appears to be moving in sync with the words, even though the audio and video are from two different sources. Here’s a sample of them manipulating a speech by Barack Obama:

Links

https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21724370-generating-convincing-audio-and-video-fake-events-fake-news-you-aint-seen

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The iPhone is 10 years old

The iPhone made its debut exactly 10 years ago. Here’s how the original model compares to the 2017 “Blu R1 Plus,” perhaps the cheapest new-manufactured smartphone available in America today:

Screen size: 1) iPhone 3.5″ 2) Blu R1 5.5″
Screen resolution: 1) iPhone 320×480 2) Blu R1 720×1280
RAM: 1) iPhone 128 MB 2) Blu R1 3 GB
Storage: 1) iPhone 4 GB 2) Blu R1 32 GB
Camera: 1) iPhone 2 MP (only has one camera) 2) Blu R1 13 MP (main camera) and 5 MP (secondary camera)
Price: 1) iPhone $586 (inflation adjusted) 2) Blu R1 $160

I know it’s impossible to do a true quality comparison (i.e. – How much “better” is a phone with two cameras vs. a phone with only one?), but I’d approximate that today you could buy a smartphone that is five times “better” than the original iPhone overall, but it would cost you 75% less money than the iPhone cost ten years ago. That’s an overall cost-performance increase of 20x.

We take rapid advances in computing devices for granted, but this iPhone anniversary might be a good occasion to to put it into perspective. The peculiarity of this rate of improvement–which is made possible by Moore’s Law–is clear if we imagine it applied to other types of technology and other sectors of industry. For example, Motor Trend’s Car of the Year at the time the iPhone 1 went on sale was the 2007 Toyota Camry. At the time, a fully-loaded car of that type had an MSRP of $25,435. If Moore’s Law applied to cars, such a vehicle would be sold new today for $1,272–the same amount that someone getting paid the federal minimum wage earns in a month. (Note: In reality, the average price for a used 2007 Camry with typical mileage is $7,000)

Alternatively, we could imagine improvements happening in the inverse manner, with the Camry’s price staying fixed (perhaps increasing only with monetary inflation), but its performance specs improving by a factor of 20 (prepare for Tongue-In-Cheek Mode). In that case, a 2017 Camry would cost $29,876, get 5,360 horsepower (equivalent to a larger-than-average turboprop airplane engine), have a max speed of Mach 3.64, and get 440 – 620 mpg (depending on your driving habits, of course). Getting into accidents at Mach speeds would be devastating, though if a way were found to also make the Camry 20 times safer, it might even out.

And there are other possibilities still. What if the cost of building structures today were 1/20th what it was in 2007? How many more skyscrapers and mansions would there be? What if the cost of clean energy had declined by the same? What if planes had gotten 20 times faster? What if the cost of sending humans into space had tanked?

The iPhone and smartphones more broadly speaking have been one of the most important technologies of the last 50 years, and they have massively improved over the last ten. These thought experiments are meant to illustrate the magnitude of that improvement, but to also show that–however great they were–there any number of ways the world would have been better off had that same rate of cost-performance increase happened to other technologies. You may love your iPhone, but would you be better off with a 2006 clamshell phone plus a mansion, or plus almost free ground transportation, or plus the ability to fly anywhere on Earth in less than an hour?

Links

  1. http://www.pwc.ca/en/engines/pw100-pw150
  2. http://www.techradar.com/news/iphone-1-vs-iphone-7-plus-this-is-how-far-weve-come-in-10-years