Nell Watson
Engineer · Educator · Tech Philosopher
AI, Cognitive Science, Cryptomics, Human Society
From a universal perspective, life itself is merely an information set that happens to possesses a degree of agency. We are self-propelled gatherers and processors of data, flung forward by time's arrow and a trillion iterations.
For eons this was the status quo; the gene was the most robust means of storing, processing, and propagating information. It was the development of the neo-cortex that enabled a shift to new forms of information, such as Dawkins' meme. Meme's are much less robust in geological terms, but vastly more rapid in their ability to shift and iterate, and influence entire populations - even the ecosystem itself.
We are facing a machine-driven moral singularity in the near future. Surprisingly, amoral machines are less of a problem than supermoral ones.
We have checking mechanisms in our society that aim to discover and prevent sociopathic activity. Most of it is rather primitive, but it works reasonably well after the fact. Amoral machines may have watchdogs and safeguards to monitor activity for actions that stray far from given norms.
However, the emergence of supermoral thought patterns will be very difficult to detect. Just as we can scarcely imagine how one might perceive the word with an IQ of 200, it is very challenging to predict the actions of machines with objectively better universal morals than we ourselves possess.
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It's easy to be cynical, and to sneer at exuberance and deride it as irrational.
We don't have flying cars, but we have something better. We don't have moon bases yet, but we have developed the means access to space at 100th the cost. Our robotic butlers are extant, if ethereal in the Cloud.
Even ten years ago it would have been conceivable to write such developments off as infeasible. If the engineers behind such great chains of innovation had abandoned the hope of accomplishing these feats, we would be robbed of them.