TheGoodFuture Blog (Futurist Gerd Leonhard)

“Here’s how Chalmers describes this vision (starting at 22:27 in Youtube video below):

“For me, that raising the possibility of a massive failure mode in the future, the possibility that we create human or super human level AGI and we’ve got a whole world populated by super human level AGIs, none of whom is conscious. And that would be a world, could potentially be a world of great intelligence, no consciousness no subjective experience at all. Now, I think many many people, with a wide variety of views, take the view that basically subjective experience or consciousness is required in order to have any meaning or value in your life at all. So therefore, a world without consciousness could not possibly a positive outcome. maybe it wouldn’t be a terribly negative outcome, it would just be a 0 outcome, and among the worst possible outcomes.”

Chalmers is known for his work on the philosophy of mind and has delved particularly into the nature of consciousness. He famously formulated the idea of a “hard problem of consciousness” which he describes in his 1995 paper “Facing up to the problem of consciousness” as the question of ”why does the feeling which accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all?””

Automation Nightmare: Philosopher Warns We Are Creating a World Without Consciousness
https://bigthink.com/the-future/automation-nightmare-we-might-be-headed-for-a-world-without-consciousness/
via Instapaper

“But between the start of the Industrial Revolution and current times, four great forces began to transform our food system: (1) the Bosch-Haber process for the production of synthetic fertilizers; (2) high-yielding crop varieties pioneered by Norman Borlaug; (3) increased globalization and trade; and (4) mass agricultural industrialization and mechanization.”

9 astonishing ways that living standards have improved around the world
https://bigthink.com/the-present/9-ways-living-standards-improved-world/
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“But these examples are not statistical outliers. Over the same period, countries across the economic spectrum, from low-income to high-income, experienced a dramatic improvement in life expectancy. As the Industrial Revolution gathered momentum, circa 1800, virtually all countries had a life expectancy at or below 40 years; today, just six countries have a life expectancy below 60 years. Put another way, a daughter born into a family in Lesotho or the Central African Republic — the countries with the lowest life expectancy today, each at around 53 years — can expect to live a longer and healthier life than the newborn daughter of an Englishman or American in the year 1800.

Global improvements in life expectancy have not been limited to the early industrial past. Much progress has been made, particularly in developing countries in the greater Asia region, in just the last 30 years. Between 1991 and 2020, China, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan gained life expectancy improvements from 5 years (Pakistan, from 61 to 66) to 11 years (India, from 60 to 71).”

9 astonishing ways that living standards have improved around the world
https://bigthink.com/the-present/9-ways-living-standards-improved-world/
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“White House Office of Science and Technology Policy that outlines five principles designed to “protect the American public in the age of artificial intelligence.”

You should be protected from unsafe or ineffective systems.
You should not face discrimination by algorithms and systems should be used and designed in an equitable way.
You should be protected from abusive data practices via built-in protections and you should have agency over how data about you is used.
You should know that an automated system is being used and understand how and why it contributes to outcomes that impact you.
You should be able to opt out, where appropriate, and have access to a person who can quickly consider and remedy problems you encounter.”

Do we need an AI Bill of Rights?
https://email.unfinished.com/ai-bill-of-rights
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“What is even more remarkable, though, is how the tech companies’ claim to be the sole masters of “innovation” has been taken at its face value for so long. But now two eminent competition lawyers, Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice Stucke, have called the companies’ bluff. In a remarkable new book, How Big-Tech Barons Smash Innovation – And How to Strike Back, they explain how the only kinds of innovation tech companies tolerate is that which aligns with their own interests. They reveal how tech firms are ruthless in stifling disruptive or threatening innovations, either by pre-emptive acquisition or naked copycatting, and that their dominance of search engines and social media platforms restricts the visibility of promising innovations that might be competitively or societally useful. As an antidote to tech puffery, the book will be hard to beat. It should be required reading for everyone at Ofcom, the Competition and Markets Authority and the DCMS. And from now on “innovation for whom?” should be the first question to any tech booster lecturing you about innovation.”

Tech firms say laws to protect us from bad AI will limit ‘innovation’. Well, good | John Naughton
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/08/tech-firms-artificial-intelligence-ai-liability-directive-act-eu-ccia
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“Yuval Noah Harari wrote about a timeline in which the higher class of society effectively become superhuman through advances in cybernetics, bioengineering and healthcare. According to Harari, this new class of superhumans would possess superintelligence and extended lifespans thereby allowing them to act as the ruling elite.”

The Technological Singularity
https://medium.com/synergy-publication/the-technological-singularity-4086a8953ac7
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“In mathematics, a point which is not well-defined and behaves unpredictably is called a singularity. Indeed, mathematician and computer scientist John von Neumann hypothesised a point in time where technology would advance to such a level that society would become completely unrecognisable.

“The ever accelerating progress of technology… give the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the (human) race beyond which human affairs… could not continue.”

~ Von Neumann paraphrased by Stanislav Ulam (1957)”

The Technological Singularity
https://medium.com/synergy-publication/the-technological-singularity-4086a8953ac7
via Instapaper