Still More Odds and Ends

I try to maintain a minimum length for my posts of about two pages in Word, 12 point single spaced. Sometimes I have something I feel like talking about that is shorter than that, hence this post. (from my first odds and ends post)

Maps, Costs and Bigotry

The world is a complicated place. Human beings — in law, language, and thought — deal with the complication by constructing models of reality simple enough to think through, accurate enough to be of use. People are alive or dead, married or not married, male or female, adult or child. Things are either people or not people.

From time to time the misfit between model and reality makes itself painfully obvious. The transition from fertilized egg to adult is continuous, with a not-person at one end, an adult person at the other, a child in the middle and no sharp dividing lines. When we try to deal with that fact, the intellectual tools with which we deal with the world, tools based on those simplifications, stop working, which most of us find confusing and unpleasant.

Another example is our ambiguous attitude to animals. My cat is a person. A pig, at least as intelligent as a cat, is pork. Cows, sheep, goats are food. Eating horse meat, like eating cat or dog, would feel to many people, probably a majority of my fellow Americans, a little like cannibalism.

Consider attitudes towards transsexuals. Interacting with them is difficult, may be uncomfortable, because they do not fit one of the sharpest patterns in our model of the world, are not unambiguously male or female. A similar problem occurs with same sex marriage. A same-sex couple does not fit the template most people have for either a married or unmarried couple, so our precomputed calculation of how to deal with couples in social situations do not quite fit. An older version of the same problem occurred when people started openly living together, sometimes having and rearing children, without being formally married. Should you think of them, interact with then, refer to them, as husband and wife, acknowledged lovers, or living in sin?

When people do things that make the models of the world with which I run my daily life, stop working, it is natural for me to be irritated. I may even try to stop them from doing those things, in order to get the real world closer to my mental model.

Which suggests a rational explanation for at least some bigotry.

Yes or Maybe

They give you a choice.

I am told that in Microsoft’s offer of choice for upgrades, “now” means the computer starts doing it, “later” means the computer will ask you the question again from time to time until you click “now”.

“No” is not in its vocabulary.

Apple too.

Butterflies, AI, World Conquest and Gods

in 1963, Lorenz published a theoretical study of this effect in a highly cited, seminal paper called Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow … . Elsewhere he stated:

One meteorologist remarked that if the theory were correct, one flap of a sea gull's wings would be enough to alter the course of the weather forever. The controversy has not yet been settled, but the most recent evidence seems to favor the sea gulls.

Following proposals from colleagues, in later speeches and papers, Lorenz used the more poetic butterfly. (Butterfly Effect, Wikipedia)

The central idea of Chaos Theory is that small causes can have large and unpredictable effects, that in some causal systems, such as weather, the mapping from initial conditions to subsequent state may be discontinuous or very nearly so. That suggests that a sufficiently intelligent AI might use its ability to predict such effects to take over the world. Call a phone number in Tbilisi, hang up when it is answered, and the result, through a series of effects beyond human calculation, is that Putin’s cook makes a careless mistake, takes the wrong bottle off a shelf, feeds his employer something to which he is allergic, and the result of that … . Do the trick enough times and the world settles into the desired pattern.

Looking at the past decade or two, it is easy to believe that the state of the world is radically uncertain, that a few minor and apparently irrelevant changes in Wuhan or Mar-a-Lago might have put us in a very different place.

I encountered a fictional version of the idea in threads on my favorite fanfic site. The gods of Velgarth achieve their ends by convenient accidents. The explanation is foresight, the ability to see the alternative futures that branch off at every instant, choose among them.

For the superintelligent AI, the critical question for is just how unpredictable chaos is. Lorenz originally spotted the effect in computer modeling of weather, when he found that rounding an input variable from 0.506127 to 0.506 produced a completely changed result, more changed the longer he waited. If the result is sensitive to the value in the fourth decimal place but not to the fifth or sixth, a sufficiently intelligent mind could predict it. If the effect in four days is sensitive to the fourth decimal place, in five days to the fifth, in a month to the twentieth, he might still be able to predict it for long enough for his purposes.

If, on the other hand, it is sensitive to the fifth, sixth, twentieth, if any change however small in the initial conditions can cause a large change in the final state, it is hard to see how any AI however superintelligent could use the effect.

Maybe a god.