Topic: Economic Devastation - page 148. (Read 504776 times)

Interesting and quite ahead of its time if a bit long.

For those without time to read it all the author Erwin Schrödinger (one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics) wrote this in 1944.
The first half pages 1-23 are a basic description of entropy and a complete coverage of genetics as it was understood in 1944
Essentially they knew that chromosomes somehow determined physical traits but did not know how.

Schrödinger postulated that the genetic information must be carried on a stable molecule of some kind and that mutation and evolution was the result of changes in the quantum state of this molecule to another form. This is pretty impressive and was later proved correct. We did not know DNA was that stable molecule until The Hershey–Chase experiment in 1952. It's structure was not known until Crick and Watson proved the structure of DNA was a double helix in 1953

Schrödinger argued that life feeds on negative entropy aka "it directs a stream of negative entropy upon itself, to compensate the entropy increase it produces by living and thus to
maintain itself on a stationary and fairly low entropy level." He argues that life is a process of creating order from order different from the 'statistical mechanism' which produce order from disorder (things like Brownian motion and diffusion) and that life is essentially a purely mechanical event. Consciousness he argues is therefore the mind/individual/operating system that runs the individual and controls the 'motion of the atoms'.

Now the theory that life is a purely mechanical event cannot be completely true because there is disorder in life both in random mutations and in the infinite variations that are produced via reproduction. Life without enough variation/entropy is deterministic (like the clones produced by simple cellular division) and prone to be wiped out by changing environment or threat. However excessive disorder/mutations/chaos also leads to tumors/death/extinction of the organism.

Perhaps there is a happy medium?

 

Just to spice the things up, some of my thoughts back on 2007 seem relevant, notice how cryptos can cut in and save the day


Concerning the tech singularity yes that is in my mind irrelevant as there are already "Organisms" that use humans as a cell substrate, having their own collective inteligence and plans, that we poor cells cannot fathom.

Here is a treat that can give you a diffrent perspective
http://whatislife.stanford.edu/LoCo_files/What-is-Life.pdf

glendall, conceptually (not sure about the 6% specifics, etc) yes I agree but unless we incorporate a systemic understanding, we won't achieve a solution. Again I refer readers to the following post in a related thread:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.4701370

Try to follow the discussion about M and P and all that Quantity Theory of Money discussion and the links to the posts I made in the Peter Schiff thread, etc..

It is a lot to absorb but the basic point is that without bottom-up (i.e. locally annealed) fitness we don't have a solution. And without anonymity, we can't eliminate the power vacuum that gives the rich the ability to control taxation and take over Bitcoin and central banking. And thus without anonymity we can't get bottom-up fitness, we won't have a solution and we stay on the same hamster treadmill.

I have explained in my archives how Bitcoin can be easily subverted by taxation. So the elite are still in control. I even believe they created Bitcoin (but that is irrelevant to my point herein).

AnonyMint thanks for your documents and your thoughts.

I agree with much of it.

Regarding economic devastation particularly though, I think you may be over-complicating things.  Not to say you incorrect. Just saying our global financial environment has so many fundamental fabrications and flaws that it isn't even necessary to go beneath the surface of them much to prove that devastation is coming.

The fractional reserve banking system, and the fact that our currency is not backed by anything, added to the fact that a private investment bank run by a dozen people creates the American 'reserve note'  -- and that every country's own currency is pegged to this currency -- just alone shows how bad things are.

Hardly anyone even knows that the Federal Reserve private bank gets a 6% profit from all the money they make out thin air.  Think about that for a second. Let that sink in. The strongest currency, the world's most dominate currency, is printed by a private company whoser member bank [owners] automatically profits 6% on whatever they print. Think of much money that is. It is beyond illegitimate; it is treasonous, but has been going on so long that it is just accepted as 'the way things are'.  It's even almost a state-secret who even runs the private bank that prints the country's money supply. Red flags anyone?

Then you just look at the charts of much money is being printed, and at the ever-increasing rate it is.   This cycle is not new at all, its happened hundreds , thousands of times since the creation of the concept of money. And it never once has ended without the currency collapsing.

Basically it's a house of cards just waiting for a strong wind, and analysis of the charts and history shows this.  

tl:dr    :   Good stuff, but I don't think anyone really needs to look beyond simple, basic economics to realize that the world economy is built upon on a poor design that'll inevitably and unavoidably collapse.  NONE of the stuff that made 2008 Great Recession have been fixed, and in fact, the situation is even worse now from all the funny money being printed. We are 'quantitatively' easing one step close to the Great Collapse.  Not trying to be a doomsayer, I'm just applying logic. 

I urge readers to click the following link and read my post at the related thread as I make some relevant points there:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.4701370

---

Great discussion which I can't address fully at this time. I quote something I wrote at another blog:

http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/01/will-the-reforms-speed-growth-in-china/#comment-12371


I want to reiterate the critical point I made in my prior post:


Let me quote again from my blog article:

http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html#Knowledge_Anneals


Thus there can never exist a perpetual top-down control or superiority.

Creativity is diversity. Period. Technology has nothing to do with it.

So unless robots are designed to fail often as humans do, they will never be producing creativity. And if they do fail often, they won't be ubiquitously superior. It follows that superiority can never be a ubiquitous quality, rather fitness is always granular to the level of diversity. To visualize how fitness applies to diverse needs of real life, imagine an infinite number of uniquely shaped objects and finding matching shapes that interlock. There is no superior shape, rather most shapes fail to interlock and only those which are well matched achieve fitness. You can imagine the failure of attempting to place a government regulator every where to make decisions for billions of unique events (situations) happening all over the world each minute. Rather the local actors (whether they be people or atoms, etc) need to make the decisions in real-time. This threat of failure in the free market of local actors is what drives fitness and resilience.

We are alive because we are diverse. Period.

Entropy is existence. The game needs ever increasing entropy else it ends. If the universe has a bound, we would eventually know everything and there could be no more failure, friction would be eliminated and past and present would collapse into each other and we would cease to exist.

Definitely one of the better threads on this site, I wish I could contribute but at this time Im content to sit back, read as much as possible and learn.

Keep it up gentlemen.

Popper stated that falsifiability is both a necessary and a sufficient criterion for demarcation.

The inability to perform empiric experiments on the brain (lack of volunteers in this area) means there is definitely a demarcation problem in all current medical theories of consciousness. Most of these theories acknowledge this deficiency.


Very broad statement there. Although the ancient philosophical conflict of idealism vs materialism has been brewing for some time I would dispute your assertion that materialism has been proven "wrong".

I agree that both AnonyMint's work and first-order representationalism have their roots in materialism. The entropic theory of knowledge may or may not be correct. However, as it stands it is compatible with the current leading medical theory of consciousness.
 

I've got nothing to contribute on entropy (not my area) but with regards to consciousness the leading theories in the medical literature are

first-order representationalism
biological theory
higher-order representationalism
recurrent processing theory
information integration theory
global workspace theory

Of these first-order representationalism appears to have the best evidence currently


First-order representationalism can account for qualia


As far as I can tell first-order representationalism is not incompatible with Anonymint's work and may be synergistic.

A nice summary of all of these theories and the evidence in favor of First-order representationalism can be found in the following paper

General and specific consciousness: a first-order representationalist approach

No no that won't do at all. Supposed to be fun.

What happened to the corruption of AI by porn tangent.
Dang it where is Rassah when you need him  


Seems we agree that at least to some degree factors 1-5 and 7 will slow or limit mass adoption of robot labor ln the short term.

You are correct that #6 is wrong currently. I should have clarified that #6 will be true in the future as governments respond to ever increasing unemployment due to automation. Government response in this area is sadly predictable.

Long term is harder to predict. Will technological advancement eventually be able to overcome those human advantages above?
Sure but to do so you may have to build a robot that is self replicating, energy efficient, preprogrammed to function well in most terrestrial environments, multipurpose, and capable of dynamic learning.



In the short term I agree with you. That looks exactly were we are headed. In the long term I am optimistic that the coming Rise of Knowledge will break us out of that futile cycle.

 


 

"Aw, you're no fun anymore."  I don't see it as argument so much as a dialectic pursuit of a more accurate predictive model.


Most of these seem to be temporary conditions, technologically determined (most obviously 2,4,5).  Some are arguable either on relevance (1,7) or math (3). 

(6) seems wrong.  In the developed world, the cost of adding a human is quite remarkable, in regulatory terms.  It's like science:  Human experiments are absurdly difficult to do.  You hire in France at your own risk.  Technological unemployment spreads from centers of technological advancement.

On (1,2): In the under-developed world, the material conditions are often pre-industrial, and of course most of these technological considerations don't apply strongly at  present, but as China has shown, focused management can push the clock forward by centuries in a decade or two (or backward).  It has also illustrated limits to sustainable population growth.  These don't apply to robots.  Some dissimilar limits do apply.


For the immediate future, yes.  For the long-term, this is where we appear to disagree most sharply.


And capital will do much better than either, apparently.  Welcome to Elysium.

"Computer says NO."

I don't have time to develop a well articulated post. I will quickly add that as I argued in my blog article Information Is Alive!, the creativity of humans is both locally annealed and systemic globally over space, time, and (historical) consciousness, so humans will always be needed to advance the entropy towards maximum per the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Unless the robots are fully integrated into that systemic process of life, they will always be slaves of human creativity not vice versa. If fully integrated, they would need to be individually unique in which case, they wouldn't collectively attain superiority, rather excel and fail individually. It is crucial to note that without (granular, e.g. individual) risk of failure, there can't exist excellence (i.e. fitness). A uniform distribution allows no fitness, no change, no adaption, and is thus the antithesis of life.

Note what entropy is. It means maximizing the orthogonal probabilities, i.e. maximizing degrees-of-freedom which is potential energy and is the antithesis of top-down organization.

As always, there are many human slaves. We have a 1/3 of billion of them at least in India where you can still buy a child.

P.S. Apologies for the ego. It really doesn't help relay the information. Its frustration, which is a failure mode. Vacation recharged my batteries.

Are you arguing

1) That in the near future it will be possible to build a robot capable of doing most jobs better then a human can.

Or

2) That in the future most of humanity will be unable to find any form of employment at all because machines will do all work.

If your argument is #1 then I probably agree with you.

If you are arguing for #2 however consider the following factors in favor of human workers.

Human Advantages
1) Cheep labor $100-$200 a month currently in many countries
2) Self replicating (minimal initial capital costs)
3) Energy efficient...(just add food)
4) Replaceable (large surplus labor pool to draw from if someone dies)
5) Evolved (preprogrammed to function reasonably well in most terrestrial environments)
6) Tax Advantaged. (Governments are going to tax robotic production at a higher rate.)
7) Multipurpose (Can be transitioned from one activity to another with reasonable ease)

Just because a job can be done better by a robot does not mean all jobs will be cheaper for a robot to do. Robots are expensive and require expensive knowledge workers to build and maintain them.

Labor is likely to bifurcate in the near future. The high skilled knowledge workers will do very well. The rest will be left to compete for the low knowledge labor work with the machines. Their future is not so bright.

I should rephrase.  I mean 99.99% of all humans will have no occupation which is not better fulfilled by a machine.

One could argue that a large proportion of current employment would be done better by a machine.  Graeber, an LSE anthropologist, argues that most "bullshit" jobs exist to control the population.

It's nowhere near 99.99% however.

I'm looking forward very much to the rumored Penrose Hammerof paper.

99.99% of the jobs from 4000 B.C. have been technologically obsoleted already. I expect this process to continue and accelerate for the foreseeable future.

I'm a working practitioner of medicine specializing in the supression of consciousness so our backgrounds are somewhat different.

Ah, you're claiming that a deterministic algorithm cannot be creative.  That's an entirely different matter.  If it were true it would be a consequence of the definition of creativity, and as such a semantic issue, not interesting from the point of view of economic understanding.

I'm not arguing for any technological singularity, merely that all jobs as we know them today (where all means perhaps 99.99%) can be technologically obsoleted.  I care nothing for "creativity" as pixie dust, or whether the machines are "sentient", personally. 

I'm a working practitioner of machine learning applications in natural language understanding, risk analysis, model generation, and financial control optimization, and I've a pretty good grasp on how difficult it is to make a machine do a given intelligent behaviour.  Many of those behaviours are "creative" in the ordinary language sense.  That kind of creativity is simple conceptual synthesis, and stochastic algorithms of a very simple form often suffice to produce intelligent creative behaviour which satisfies a need.  At the moment at which part of this creativity is applied to adapting the mechanisms of the creative process themselves, i.e. to self-improvement, such that sources of entropy are self-selected, the system is (1) no longer predictable deterministically, (2) no longer recursively computable, (3) has no known limits in its ability to adapt or learn.  Such systems are not generally practical for complex uses at this time, but progress is steady.  They may not incorporate your sparkle magic creativity or sentience, but they are qualitatively different from finite-state automata.

Despite starting to feel like the junior disciple of another programmer... one with a big ego  ... I will quote him once again to reply to your error here. You argue that the sum of human creativity can be duplicated by a simple metric function implemented in algorithms. This is not correct.

Nothing wrong with a little derailment now and then. We are all here on our free time to learn a little and hopefully have a little fun too =)
I must have mised the corruption of AI with porn conversation.  

Personally I think we are far far away from anything remotely resembling true computer self aware AI. Millions of years of optimization through natural selection are going to be very difficult to reproduce.

Medical understanding of the human brain remains very limited. We know broadly what areas control what functions. We also know the basic chemistry of how an individual neuron works.

How does that all fit together to form consciousness? We have a lot of unanswered questions in that area.

Maybe not - but what it does mean is that the algorthm may (or may not) lack the ability to ever discern which new surgical technique should be brought about/undertaken, due in large part to its inability/ability to ascertain value in regards to the social world/human beings.