Re: the arc of ai (was Re: Whew!)

Posted by Roger Critchlow-2 on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Whew-tp7589583p7589629.html

Harking back to an earlier complaint from Marcus about blatant and lazy appeals to authority, which may have been in another thread altogether, this

  http://andrewgelman.com/2017/05/07/discussion-lee-jussim-simine-vazire-eminence-junk-science-blind-reviewing/

introduced me to the formulation "eminence based reasoning".  There's also a bit in there about the existential terror of blind reviewing.

But it also recalls my earlier life as a random tenant in a house of Harvard seniors living off campus in 1969, the first year Harvard undergraduates were allowed to live off campus.  They were mostly members of the Students for a Democratic Society, but they thought the Weatherman faction was a joke.  So they made up their own faction of SDS, Juiced In It, from the immortal Dylan lyric "Sure you went to the finest schools all right but all you ever used to do was get juiced in it."  Which has forever since echoed in my mind when I find myself scanning for eminent scholarly affiliations.

-- rec --

On Mon, May 8, 2017 at 10:55 AM, ┣glen┫ <[hidden email]> wrote:

Coincidentally, given the topic of [SG]AI and the semantic grounding of rhetorical terms:

The meaning of life in a world without work
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/08/virtual-reality-religion-robots-sapiens-book?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+USA+-+Collections+2017&utm_term=225051&subid=22800997&CMP=GT_US_collection

> What is a religion if not a big virtual reality game played by millions of people together? Religions like Islam and Christianity invent imaginary laws, such as “don’t eat pork”, “repeat the same prayers a set number of times each day”, “don’t have sex with somebody from your own gender”, and so forth. These laws exist only in the human imagination.

I've had several friends suggest they'd like to start their own cult.  I even inducted 2 of them into my Discordian charter.  That wasn't good enough, though, because as Episkopos, I don't care what my priests do.  It also happens that these friends are programmers, even if not professionally.  So, there's more to Harari's analogy than meets the eye, I think.

I've long believed, when managing people, the single critical attribute is "tolerance of ambiguity".  Those of us who get too hung up on definite axiomatic approaches are, I think, at the most risk of losing their jobs to an SAI.  Those of us who tolerate (especially drastic) semantic shifts, on the fly, may survive through any Singularity.

--
␦glen?

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove