Steve,
[ph] So we see many of the same historic signs of explosive
acceleration, it’s just a fact, and how it’s been accumulative
(till last month anyway… :-) )
Look at how vastly each
generations life experience has been from the last, going back as many
generations as we have any personal knowledge of. People have
declared the “sky is falling” and the “end is near”
endlessly it seems too.
There are plenty of other times
and places when the sky WAS/IS falling compared to today. I am usually in
the position of arguing your point.
[ph] Oh, I’m not saying the ‘sky isn’t falling’,
but observe that when people thought so the real part of it just fell on the half
the world that was replaced by the multiplications of the other. I
think part of that persistent illusion was that it wasn’t an illusion for
the part of the world the rest of us stopped caring about… or something
vaguely like that. I suppose we could now be being fooled the other
way, by trusting that the appearance of danger isn’t dangerous. In
personal terms the continual acceleration of change has just seemed to mean excessive
generation gaps and people with rich life experience not having much to teach
the next generation…whizzing along in somewhat of a daze it seems.
I think when I
set about to find the answer to that question, to see if I could validate some
of feelings of expectation, I asked some of the useful questions and narrowed
it down quite a bit. The question though, is what question would
you ask to tell if a feeling of impending grand transformation was real or not?
There are two key, qualitative
differences having to do with human scale. One is that by having longer
productive periods in life, under accelerated change, most adults have to
endure several important changes in their lifetime. The other is that
much of our technology is becoming life-extending and personal capability
enhancing. There may be thresholds we have already crossed or on
the verge of crossing which are pivotal.
I don’t think
“magic” is what we’re talking about.
One would not have any way of confirming a
“premonition” of magic.
I don't know that "magic" is relevant, if I understand your
point. What I think is important is positive feedback loops and
time constants dropping below certain thresholds.
[ph] right, the time constants, or in my focus, the learning
response lag times
What I don't know I can agree with is the following:
I do think quite
sincerely and confidently that foresight about real complex system
transformations, approaching ‘water shed moments’ is very likely to
be verifiable if they’re real.
I think that precisely the
opposite is true. I think the best we can do is avoid regimes where such
change is likely to be precipitated, not precisely when the system will go
through a phase transition or what the phase it is transitioning to looks like.
[ph]I didn’t mean to suggest that one can’t be
caught by surprise when crossing unobserved and unsuspected thresholds or
‘trip wires’ in a changing world. The main one of those
may be psychological, being fixated on our stereotypes for things and not
paying attention to the independently changing and behaving things of the world
they represent. What I’m saying is that if you do “feel
something coming” it should be possible, using my approach of identifying
developmental continuities anyway, to tell whether you know enough about it to
be referring to something real or not.
At one point I felt that same general acceleration of change and
saw how it gave us the power to decide things with ever more far reaching
effects with ever less thought, and it seemed suspicious. I then
did dig to the bottom of it I think, and found very substantial reason why acceleration
would continue until we were blindsided by errors of judgment resulting in
cascading failures due to faults no one would have thought to look
for. I got it down to continuous growth being a direct
violation of the conservation laws actually, because the complexity of it’s
response demands would naturally exceed the learning lag times of its
unchanging parts, and instantaneous responses require infinite forces. That
our world is now indeed collapsing for essentially that reason isn’t what
proves the theorem. It’s examining the reasoning,
perhaps aided by the example of in happening before our eyes, to see that there
are no other options. It’s a
fascinating puzzle.
Others have seen the same radical acceleration of change and
imagined a sort of ‘convergence’ in other areas like in computing
power, and imagined other previously unimaginable things must be quickly
approaching, like the machines of the world gaining consciousness. In
that case I’d just say, well point to it, and show me where it’s
developing. That’s the *sign* of a valid premonition to me,
being able to point to the substantial leading signs showing where it’s actually
happening, not just some projection or theory. I, myself, don’t
yet see computers becoming very good at learning at all, especially not about things
*they* are interested in. So if someone can show me how the stages
of that are in fact developing, and likely to continue, then maybe I’d
see the premonition of it coming to fruition as real too.
I guess I think humans and all other animals survive on the validity
of what amounts to their ‘premonitions’. They sense
danger, an approaching change in weather or feeling hungry or someone near
looking for fun, all ‘premonitions’ of something abut to happen.
We have hunches and questions about things, and then we go
poke around and look to find something real about them. It’s
just another way to say how it seems the ‘wet ware’ is programmed
to learn, by prompted searches, that may then prompt searches...etc.
That’s one of the characteristics of natural learning perhaps
an ABM might try to emulate.
Phil
- Steve
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