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Topic: Economic Devastation - page 148. (Read 504813 times)

legendary
Activity: 1946
Merit: 1055
January 26, 2014, 08:24:57 PM
#94
Here is a treat that can give you a diffrent perspective
http://whatislife.stanford.edu/LoCo_files/What-is-Life.pdf

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?

 
sr. member
Activity: 370
Merit: 250
January 25, 2014, 10:38:29 AM
#93
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

Quote
Service Capitalism in Selfdestruction
With the establishment of industrial capitalism the machine was the capital, and it was privately owned. The machine as means of production is for quite some time now -unexpectedly?- replaced by mind!
So in Service/Information Capitalism the capital is now the information and the mind. Mind as the machine, and information the currency (and patent offices the banks), though we could well be already shifting to its financial counterpart, the "Patent" Capitalism.
But these evolutions pose a paradox, what about the individual interest the self pursuit and privacy? the other pilar of capitalistic systems. Are we in for another transformation? Back to the feudal age? keep the capital privately owned? or keep self pursuit and publish the capital? The capitalists of old had never such problems, their machines stayed where they placed them, their machines didn't join the competition, their machines didn't work for free for a third party, and generally their machines had no other agenda.
The third way could be to stage the drive for the privacy of capital and self pursuit in one man shows, ie freelancing as the only way to make bussiness in the service industry, but that would stress the current exchange infrastructure to the point of paralysis.
Either way capitalism is about to retire.

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
hero member
Activity: 518
Merit: 521
January 24, 2014, 01:28:07 AM
#92
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).
legendary
Activity: 2156
Merit: 1018
Buzz App - Spin wheel, farm rewards
January 24, 2014, 12:50:43 AM
#91
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. 
hero member
Activity: 518
Merit: 521
January 24, 2014, 12:06:55 AM
#90
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

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.

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

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.

Let me quote again from my blog article:

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

Quote
The knowledge creation process is opaque to a single top-down perspective of the universe because to be omniscient would require that the transmission of change in the universe would propagate instantly to the top-down observer, i.e. the speed-of-light would need to be infinite. But an infinite speed-of-light would collapse past and future into an infinitesimal point in spacetime— omniscient is the antithesis of existential. In order for anything to exist in the universe, there must be friction-in-time so change must propagate through resistance to change— mass. The non-uniform mass distribution of the universe is mutually causal with oscillation, which is why the universe emerges from the frequency domain. Uniform distribution of mass would be no contrast and nothing would exist.

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.
legendary
Activity: 1946
Merit: 1055
January 21, 2014, 08:35:42 PM
#89
hero member
Activity: 1036
Merit: 500
January 20, 2014, 04:52:28 PM
#88
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.
legendary
Activity: 1946
Merit: 1055
January 19, 2014, 02:14:43 PM
#87
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.

Of course they are both compatible with each other -- they both assume a materialistic world-view as a starting point. In other words, they're both wrong.

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.
 
legendary
Activity: 1946
Merit: 1055
January 19, 2014, 01:45:47 AM
#86
No quibbles that we're all unique Wink
But your only evidence for the rest is your entropic argument. Further, your interpretation of creativity is unsatisfying from a philosophical point of view, because:
-of your reluctance to address the phenomenon of consciousness (and by extension, all that hard-to-explain stuff that goes along with it, like qualia).

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

Quote
The core idea of first-order representationalism is that any conscious state is a representation, and what it’s like to be in a conscious state is wholly determined by the content of that representation. By definition, a representation is about something, and the content of a representation is what the representation is about.

First-order representationalism can account for qualia

Quote
First-order representationalism argues that consciousness consists of sensory representations directly available to the subject for action selection, belief formation, planning, etc.

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

legendary
Activity: 1946
Merit: 1055
January 18, 2014, 12:04:02 PM
#85

"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.


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  Cheesy

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)

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.


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.

"Computer says NO."

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

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.

 


 
legendary
Activity: 1596
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Sine secretum non libertas
January 18, 2014, 11:14:55 AM
#84
1) That in the near future it will be possible to build a robot capable of doing most jobs better then a human can.
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.

"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.

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)

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.

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.

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

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.

And capital will do much better than either, apparently.  Welcome to Elysium.
Xav
member
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January 18, 2014, 04:08:34 AM
#83
"Computer says NO."
hero member
Activity: 518
Merit: 521
January 18, 2014, 01:40:35 AM
#82
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.
legendary
Activity: 1946
Merit: 1055
January 18, 2014, 12:05:35 AM
#81

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

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.
legendary
Activity: 1596
Merit: 1030
Sine secretum non libertas
January 17, 2014, 10:14:05 PM
#80
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.  

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.


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.
legendary
Activity: 1946
Merit: 1055
January 17, 2014, 08:27:54 PM
#79
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.  

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.
legendary
Activity: 1596
Merit: 1030
Sine secretum non libertas
January 17, 2014, 07:46:27 PM
#78
You argue that the sum of human creativity can be duplicated by a simple metric function implemented in algorithms. This is not correct.

Quote
The theory that it would be impossible to predict what computers would contemplate is nonsense because the input entropy of the models of the brain will always be finite and deterministic from the time the input entropy is varied.

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.

legendary
Activity: 1946
Merit: 1055
January 17, 2014, 07:29:41 PM
#77
"pish and tosh.  a pair of dice well interpreted and persistently thrown will exhibit more creativity than all the humans in history combined."
Excuse my ignorance - but what have the dice brought to the table ?
How is a die adapting to circumstances for which there is no precedence ? What are they creating ?
Deep Blue may beat Kasparov (just) - but Kasparov is capable of compassion. And for that there can be no algorithm - can there ?

The dice are introduced only to directly address the bugaboo of entropy.  Creativity boils down to a entropy plus a selective filter, for which there suffices a metric function representing judgments of taste.  You brain has several of these, which vary over time, and tend to be similar to those of other brains, but ultimately they are pretty simple metric functions which can be implemented in algorithms.  The dice do not adapt, but the algorithms do.  

Kasparov may or may not be capable of compassion; I don't know.  He seems like a cool guy to me.  I would have voted for him, were I a Moscovite.  But because compassion is ill defined, it seems unlikely to lead to a fruitful discussion.  The ability or inability of an algorithm to exhibit compassion doesn't bear strongly in an obvious way on it's ability to captain a large economic enterprise, or invent a new surgical technique.


Despite starting to feel like the junior disciple of another programmer... one with a big ego  Wink ... 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.

Quote
The theory that it would be impossible to predict what computers would contemplate is nonsense because the input entropy of the models of the brain will always be finite and deterministic from the time the input entropy is varied.

Pseudo-random number generators are deterministic from the time the seed is changed. Even dynamically capturing entropy from the changing content of the internet would be deterministic from each moment of capture to the next, and the model of capture would be lacking diversity and static (only modified by a human).

For computers to obtain the same entropy of the collective human brainpower, they would need to be human reproducing, contributing to genome and interacting with the environment in the ways humans do. Even if computers could do this, the technological singularity would not occur, because the computers would be equivalent to adding more humans to the population.



legendary
Activity: 1946
Merit: 1055
January 17, 2014, 06:19:34 PM
#76


I think at some point the discussion devolved into the threat of those learning-by-experience AI's being abused in the way they were not intended to be, and the possible fallout from, say, an accounting AI being sexually molested or introduced to porn to screw with its programming (I may have been the instigator of that somewhat-derailment, but I plead the 5th Grin)

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.

hero member
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January 17, 2014, 05:58:42 PM
#75
The ability or inability of an algorithm to exhibit compassion doesn't bear strongly in an obvious way on it's ability to captain a large economic enterprise, or invent a new surgical technique.


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.
 
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