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Steve Bosserman

Opinion | It's Westworld. What's Wrong With Cruelty to Robots? - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...conscious-robots-morality.html

ethics robotics human behavior morality artificial intelligence

shared by Steve Bosserman on 23 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • The biggest concern is that we might one day create conscious machines: sentient beings with beliefs, desires and, most morally pressing, the capacity to suffer. Nothing seems to be stopping us from doing this. Philosophers and scientists remain uncertain about how consciousness emerges from the material world, but few doubt that it does. This suggests that the creation of conscious machines is possible.
  • If we did create conscious beings, conventional morality tells us that it would be wrong to harm them — precisely to the degree that they are conscious, and can suffer or be deprived of happiness. Just as it would be wrong to breed animals for the sake of torturing them, or to have children only to enslave them, it would be wrong to mistreat the conscious machines of the future.
  • Anything that looks and acts like the hosts on “Westworld” will appear conscious to us, whether or not we understand how consciousness emerges in physical systems. Indeed, experiments with AI and robotics have already shown how quick we are to attribute feelings to machines that look and behave like independent agents.
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  • This is where actually watching “Westworld” matters. The pleasure of entertainment aside, the makers of the series have produced a powerful work of philosophy. It’s one thing to sit in a seminar and argue about what it would mean, morally, if robots were conscious. It’s quite another to witness the torments of such creatures, as portrayed by actors such as Evan Rachel Wood and Thandie Newton. You may still raise the question intellectually, but in your heart and your gut, you already know the answer.
  • But the prospect of building a place like “Westworld” is much more troubling, because the experience of harming a host isn’t merely similar to that of harming a person; it’s identical. We have no idea what repeatedly indulging such fantasies would do to us, ethically or psychologically — but there seems little reason to think that it would be good.
  • For the first time in our history, then, we run the risk of building machines that only monsters would use as they please.
Bill Fulkerson

Anatomy of an AI System - 1 views

anatomyof.ai

AI amazon

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 14 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 14 Sep 18
     
    "With each interaction, Alexa is training to hear better, to interpret more precisely, to trigger actions that map to the user's commands more accurately, and to build a more complete model of their preferences, habits and desires. What is required to make this possible? Put simply: each small moment of convenience - be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song - requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. The scale of resources required is many magnitudes greater than the energy and labor it would take a human to operate a household appliance or flick a switch. A full accounting for these costs is almost impossible, but it is increasingly important that we grasp the scale and scope if we are to understand and govern the technical infrastructures that thread through our lives. III The Salar, the world's largest flat surface, is located in southwest Bolivia at an altitude of 3,656 meters above sea level. It is a high plateau, covered by a few meters of salt crust which are exceptionally rich in lithium, containing 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves. 4 The Salar, alongside the neighboring Atacama regions in Chile and Argentina, are major sites for lithium extraction. This soft, silvery metal is currently used to power mobile connected devices, as a crucial material used for the production of lithium-Ion batteries. It is known as 'grey gold.' Smartphone batteries, for example, usually have less than eight grams of this material. 5 Each Tesla car needs approximately seven kilograms of lithium for its battery pack. 6 All these batteries have a limited lifespan, and once consumed they are thrown away as waste. Amazon reminds users that they cannot open up and repair their Echo, because this will void the warranty. The Amazon Echo is wall-powered, and also has a mobile battery base. This also has a limited lifespan and then must be thrown away as waste. According to the Ay
Steve Bosserman

Rediscovering Our Nature Instinct - 0 views

undark.org/...iscovering-our-nature-instinct

perception existentialism instinct nature insight

shared by Steve Bosserman on 08 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • humans have a special capacity for perceiving and even anticipating natural phenomena and its patterns.
  • This innate sense has been largely forgotten, according to Gooley, because modern lifestyles demand we engage in mostly logical, deductive thinking, rather than using our intuition. Our ability to extract meaning from interrelated phenomena such as bird behavior, wind direction, plant growth, and sunlight has atrophied. By searching out these relationships and patterns in nature, Gooley writes, he has rediscovered a manner of experiencing the outdoors through intuition. With some practice, he assures us that we can, too.
  • Gooley describes the nature instinct as an awareness of the outdoors that allows him to observe and understand before conscious thought. He can sense direction from a tree or predict the behavior of animals, and only afterwards analyzes how he knew these things to be true. While he uses gut feeling or the sixth sense (a common but debunked theory of navigational aptitude in the 19th century and early 20th century), he settles instead on the term “fast thinking.”
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  • What makes us unique as a species — in ancient and modern form — seems to be the complexity of thought and diversity of cultural practices we use to accomplish highly-skilled tasks such as navigation or problem solving. Whether we grow up tracking animals in the Kalahari or riding subways to school, humans seem able to switch quickly between intuitive and analytical modes, to both directly experience and step out of that experience and employ logic.
  • Through deciphering nature, he ventures that we can develop a more metaphysical understanding of the world: the ability to discern the big picture from many parts. “God,” he writes, “is only shorthand for the belief that there is some deeper meaning behind the things we sense and beneath the universe as a whole.”
Steve Bosserman

Bernard Lietaer, A Financial Justice Warrior Who Fought for Freedom of Currency - 0 views

blog.bancor.network/eedom-of-currency-25123ca599dd

complementary currencies monetary system

shared by Steve Bosserman on 08 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • “I sometimes feel like a flying fish who has had the opportunity to take a ‘bird’s eye view’ of the water in which we swim, and is now trying to report back to its fellow fish and explain what it has learned about what we usually cannot see.”
  • “The real issue is not whether widespread changes will happen or not, but how much awareness there will be about where these changes are leading us. The real question is whether we are even conscious that we have a choice in the matter.”
  • “The urgent message for economics from nature is that the monoculture of national currencies, justified on the basis of market efficiency, generates structural instability in our global financial system. Complementary currencies of diverse types of money enable the economy to flow back towards greater sustainability. While this process clearly reduces efficiency, that is the price to pay for increased resilience of the whole.”
Steve Bosserman

How Neuroscience Can Help Us Treat Trafficked Youth - Pacific Standard - 0 views

psmag.com/...help-us-treat-trafficked-youth

neuroscience youth "human trafficking"

shared by Steve Bosserman on 04 May 18 - No Cached
  • A common misconception is that these youths are choosing to engage in the commercial sex trade. But as recent advances in neuroimaging techniques help scientists unravel the myriad ways that trauma affects the brain, emerging evidence suggests that brain changes resulting from trauma could make young people more vulnerable to exploiters and less receptive to people trying to help. Rather than making a conscious decision to rebel, these kids are simply doing their best to survive, using the adaptive strategies that their brains developed in response to a perilous world.
  • Though the human brain is adaptable throughout life, adaptability is greatest during childhood, as the developing brain responds to the surrounding environment. Survival is the brain's top priority. Young people growing up in dangerous environments will develop brains that are highly responsive to threat cues. In particular, recent studies show that children who have experienced trauma exhibit drastic changes in their amygdala, an area of the brain wired to identify signs of danger.
  • Besides the amygdala, another brain region affected by trauma is the hippocampus, an area involved with contextual learning and memory. The hippocampus takes context into account, so that a person can appropriately respond to the same cues in different situations. For instance, most people would respond differently to hearing gunfire in a shooting range than they would to hearing gunfire in an airport.
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  • McLaughlin's research shows that youth who have experienced trauma have a smaller hippocampus than those who haven't, and are less able to take context into account when they detect a threat cue. When McLaughlin presented images of faces embedded in real-world scenes to kids, those with a history of trauma exhibited less activity in their hippocampus while viewing angry facial expressions. And when given a memory test afterward, they were less able to remember scenes in which they'd identified people displaying anger.
  • Because the brain remains malleable throughout life, it's never too late to mitigate the effects of trauma, McLaughlin says. There are a variety of evidence-based treatments that have proven effective in alleviating the mental-health consequences of trauma. For example, the technique of cognitive reappraisal, a cornerstone of Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, can help victims better regulate their emotions by changing the way they view a distressing situation. They can try to imagine that the situation is occurring far away from them, or that they are viewing the event from a removed perspective, as though watching a movie screen. When McLaughlin taught such techniques to young people in her lab, they were able to decrease their emotional reactivity as well as their amygdala response to negative stimuli.
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