#but he starts changing the code to make Will more susceptible to morality corruption

[psychoticwillgraham]

here's what i have so far for chapter 2 of the AI Will au 'perfect machine' that i should've posted a year ago but didn't actually start working on it until last month. i've got a whole ten chapter outline that's been done for a year but i don't wanna post it yet bc i do intend to actually write and finish it

[mantismatsuri]

Quotes from “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” by Yuval Noah Harari

“Terrorism works by pressing the fear button deep in our minds and hijacking the private imaginations of millions of individuals. Similarly, the crisis of liberal democracy is played out not just in parliaments and polling stations but also in neurons and synapses.”

 “Philosophers are very patient people, but engineers are far less so, and investors are the least patient of all.”

 “Unable to conduct a reality check, the mind latches onto catastrophic scenarios. Like a person imagining that a bad headache signifies a terminal brain tumor, many liberals fear that Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump portend the end of human civilization.”

 “Humans were always far better at inventing tools than using them wisely.”

 “Ordinary people may not understand artificial intelligence and biotechnology, but they can sense that the future is passing them by.”

 “Donald Trump warned voters that the Mexicans and Chinese would take their jobs, and that they should therefore build a wall on the Mexican border. He never warned voters that algorithms would take their jobs, nor did he suggest building a firewall on the border with California.”

 “The liberal story was the story of ordinary people. How can it remain relevant to a world of cyborgs and networked algorithms?”

 “The Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions were made by people who were vital to the economy but who lacked political power; in 2016, Trump and Brexit were supported by many people who still enjoyed political power but who feared that they were losing their economic worth.”

 “It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation.”

 “In the end it was communism that collapsed. The supermarket proved to be far stronger than the gulag.”

 “In particular, the liberal story learned from communism to expand the circle of empathy and to value equality alongside liberty.”

 “Most people who voted for Trump and Brexit didn’t reject the liberal package in its entirety –they lost faith mainly in its globalizing part. They still believe in democracy, free markets, human rights, and social responsibility, but they think these fine ideas can stop at the border.”

 “By manufacturing a never-ending stream of crises, a corrupt oligarchy can prolong its rule indefinitely.”

 “…economic growth will not save the global ecosystem; just the opposite, in fact, for economic growth is the cause of the ecological crisis. And economic growth will not solve technological disruption, for it is predicated on the invention of more and more disruptive technologies.”

 “Panic is a form of hubris. It comes from the smug feeling that one knows exactly where the world is heading: down.”

 “Two particularly important nonhuman abilities that AI possesses are connectivity and updatability.”

 “What we are facing is not the replacement of millions of individual human workers by millions of individual robots and computers; rather, individual humans are likely to be replaced by an integrated network.”

 “Of all forms of art, music is probably the most susceptible to Big Data analysis, because both inputs and outputs lend themselves to precise mathematical depiction. The inputs are the mathematical patterns of sound waves, and the outputs are the electrochemical patterns of neural storms.”

 “Technology is never deterministic, and the fact that something can be done does not mean it must be done.”

 “When people design web pages, they often cater to the taste of the Google search algorithm rather than to the taste of any human being.”

 “It is debatable whether it is better to provide people with universal basic income (the capitalist paradise) or universal basic services (the communist paradise).”

 “If universal basic support is aimed at improving the objective conditions of the average person in 2050, it has a fair chance of succeeding. But if it is aimed at making people subjectively more satisfied with their lot and preventing social discontent, it is likely to fail.”

 “In a famous interview in 1987, Thatcher said ‘There is no such thing as society. There is [a] living tapestry of men and women… and the quality of our lives will depend on how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves.’”

 “Democracy assumes that human feelings reflect a mysterious and profound “free will,” that this “free will” is the ultimate source of authority, and that while some people are more intelligent than others, all humans are equally free.”

 “If the feelings of some ancient ancestor were wrong and as a result that person made a fatal mistake, the genes shaping these feelings did not pass on to the next generation. Feelings are therefore not the opposite of rationality –they embody evolutionary rationality.”

 “We usually fail to realize that feelings are in fact calculations, because the rapid process of calculation occurs far below our threshold of awareness.”

 “Winston Churchill famously said that democracy is the worst political system in the world, except for all the other. Rightly or wrongly, people might reach the same conclusions about Big Data algorithms: they have lots of glitches, but we have no better alternative.”

 “Already today, ‘truth’ is defined by the top results of the Google search.”

 “However, in order to take over from human drivers, the algorithms won’t have to be perfect. They will just have to be better than the humans.”

 “… robots always reflect and amplify the qualities of their code.”

 “Yet autonomous weapon systems are a catastrophe waiting to happen, because too many governments tend to be ethically corrupt, if not downright evil.”

 “In the late twentieth century democracies usually outperformed dictatorships because democracies were better at data processing. A democracy diffuses the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas a dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place.”

 “AI make centralized systems far more efficient than diffused systems, because machine learning works better the more information it can analyze.”

 “Science fiction tends to confuse intelligence with consciousness and assume that in order to match or surpass human intelligence, computers will have to develop consciousness.”

 “The danger is that if we invest too much in developing AI and too little in developing human consciousness, the very sophisticated artificial intelligence of computers might only serve to empower the natural stupidity of humans.”

 “The economic system pressures me to expand and diversify my investment portfolio, but it gives me zero incentive to expand and diversity my compassion.”

 “Property is a prerequisite for long-term inequality.”

 “Globalization will unite the world horizontally by erasing national borders, but it will simultaneously divide humanity vertically.”

 “Mandating governments to nationalize the data will probably curb the power of big corporations, but it might also result in creepy digital dictatorships.”

 “The so-called Facebook and Twitter revolutions in the Arab world started in hopeful online communities, but once they emerged into the messy offline world, they were commandeered by religious fanatics and military juntas.”

 “[Facebook] and the other online giants tend to view humans as audiovisual animals –a pair of eyes and a pair of ears connected to ten fingers, a screen, and a credit card.”

 “For all its glory and impact, Athenian democracy was a halfhearted experiment that survived for barely two hundred years in a small corner of the Balkans.”

 “Human groups are defined more by the changes they undergo than by any community.”

 “We insist that our values are a precious legacy from ancient ancestors. Yet the only thing that allows us to say this is that our ancestors are long dead and cannot speak for themselves.”

 “The heated argument about the true essence of Islam is simply pointless. Islam has no fixed DNA. Islam is whatever Muslims make of it.”

 “The process of human unification has taken two distinct forms: establishing links between distinct groups and homogenizing practices across groups.”

 “War spreads ideas, technologies, and people far more quickly than commerce does.”

 “The kamikaze […] relied on combining state-of-the-art technology with state-of-the-art religious indoctrination.”

 “Human diversity may be great when it comes to cuisine and poetry, but few would see witch-burning, infanticide, or slavery as fascinating human idiosyncrasies that should be protected against the encroachments of global capitalism and Coca-Colonialism.”

 “Saying that black people tend to commit crimes because they have substandard genes is out; saying that they tend to commit crimes because they come from dysfunctional subcultures is very much in.”

 “In terrorism, fear is the main story, and there is an astounding disproportion between the actual strength of the terrorists and the fear they manage to inspire.”

 “Terrorists don’t think like army generals. Instead, they think like theater producers.”

 “In 1914 war had great appeal to elites across the world because they had many concrete examples of how successful wars contributed to economic prosperity and political power. In contrast, in 2018 successful wars seem to be an endangered species.”

 “Today the main economic assets consist of technical and institutional knowledge rather than wheat fields, gold mines, or even oil fields, and you just cannot conquer knowledge through war.”

 “Human stupidity is one of the most important force in history, yet we often tend to discount it.”

 “Unlike such universal religions as Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, Judaism has always been a tribal creed.”

 “Scientists nowadays point out that morality in fact has deep evolutionary roots predating the appearance of humankind by millions of years. All social mammals, such as wolves, dolphins, and monkeys, have ethical codes, adapted by evolution to promote group cooperation.”

 “From an ethical perspective, monotheism was arguably one of the worst ideas in human history.”

 “What monotheism undoubtedly did was to make many people far more intolerant than before, thereby contributing to the spread of religious persecutions and holy wars.”

 “Does God exist? That depends on which God you have in mind: the cosmic mystery, or the worldly lawgiver?”

 “After giving the name of “God” to the unknown secrets of the cosmos, they [the faithful] then use this to somehow condemn bikinis and divorce.”

 “The deeper the mysteries of the universe, the less likely it is that whatever is responsible for them gives a damn about female dress codes or human sexual behavior.”

 “The missing link between the cosmic mystery and the worldly law giver is usually provided through some holy book.”

 “The third of the biblical Ten Commandment instructs humans never to make wrongful use of the name of God. […] Perhaps the deeper meaning of this commandment is that we should never use the name of God to justify our political interests, our economic ambitions, or our personal hatreds.”

 “The idea that we need a supernatural being to make us act morally assumes that there is something unnatural about morality.”

 “Every violent act in the world begins with a violent desire in somebody’s mind, which disturbs that person’s own peace and happiness before it disturbs the peace and happiness of anyone else.”

 “Self-professing secularists view secularism in a very different way. For them, secularism is a very positive and active worldview, defined by a coherent code of values rather than by opposition to this or that religion.”

 “The most important secular commitment is to the truth, which is based on observation and evidence rather than on mere faith. Secularists strive not to confuse truth with belief.”

 “This is the deep reason secular people cherish scientific truth: not in order to satisfy their curiosity, but in order to know how best to reduce the suffering in the world. Without the guidance of scientific studies, our compassion is often blind.”

 “Questions you cannot answers are usually far better than answers you cannot question.”

 “Not only rationality, but individuality too is a myth. Humans rarely think for themselves. Rather, we think in groups. Just as it takes a tribe to raise a child, it also takes a tribe to invent a tool, solve a conflict or cure a disease.”

 “This is what Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach have termed “the knowledge illusion”. We think we know a lot, even though individually we know very little, because we treat knowledge in the minds of others as if it were our own.”

 “It is extremely hard to discover the truth when you are ruling the world. You are just far too busy.”

 “Power is all about changing reality rather than seeing it for what it is.”

 “Justice demands not just a set of abstract values, but also an understanding of concrete cause-and-effect relations.”

 “… in a world in which everything is interconnected, the supreme moral imperative becomes the imperative to know.”

 “We have zero evidence that Eve was tempted by the serpent, that the souls of all infidels burn in hell after they die, or that the creator of the universe doesn’t like it when a Brahmin marries a Dalit –yet billions of people have believed these stories for thousands of years. Some fake news lasts forever.”

 “When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that’s a religion.”

 “If you want to gauge group loyalty, requiring people to believe an absurdity is a far better test than asking them to believe the truth.”

 “[…] if you want reliable information, pay good money for it. If you get your news for free, you might well be the product.”

 “[…] perhaps the worst sin of present-day science fiction is that it tends to confuse intelligence with consciousness.2

 “Whenever you see a movie about an AI in which the AI is female and the scientist is male, it’s probably a movie about feminism rather than cybernetics. For why on earth would an AI have a sexual or gender identity? Sex is a characteristic or organic multicellular beings. What can it possibly mean for a nonorganic cybernetic being?”

 “The mind is not the subject that freely shapes historical actions and biological realities; the mind is an object that is being shaped by history and biology.”

 “If this generation lacks a comprehensive view of the cosmos, the future of life will be decided at random.”

 “So what should we be teaching? Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching ‘the four Cs’ –critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity.”

 “Already in 1849, the Communist Manifesto declared that ‘all that is solid melts into air.’ Marx and Engels, however, were thinking mainly about social and economic structures. By 2048, physical and cognitive structures will also melt into air, or into a cloud of data bits.”

 “To stay relevant –not just economically but above all socially- you will need the ability to constantly learn and to reinvent yourself […]”

 “To survive and flourish in such a world [where profound uncertainty is not a bug but a feature], you will need a lot of mental flexibility and great reserves of emotional balance.”

 “The Industrial Revolution has bequeathed us the production-line theory of education.”

 “Because of the increasing pace of change, you can never be certain whether what the adults are telling you is timeless wisdom or outdated bias.”

 “The voice we hear inside our heads is never trustworthy, because it always reflects state propaganda, ideological brainwashing, and commercial advertisements, not to mention biochemical bugs.”

 “Homo sapiens is a story telling animal that thinks in stories rather than in numbers of graphs.”

 “To give meaning to my life, a story needs to satisfy just two conditions. First, it must give me some role to play. […] Second, whereas a good story need not extend to infinity, it must extend beyond my horizons.”

 “A crucial law of storytelling is that once a story manages to extend beyond the audience’s horizon, its ultimate scope matters little.”

 “How do we make the story feel real? Priests and shamans discovered the answer to this question thousands of years ago: rituals.”

 “Why does the Indian government invest scarce resources in weaving enormous flags instead of building sewage systems in Delhi’s slums? Because the flag makes India real in a way that sewage systems do not.”

 “Of all the rituals, sacrifice is the most potent, because of all the things in the world, suffering is the most real.”

 “If by ‘free will’ you mean the freedom to do what you desire, then yes, humans have free will. But if by ‘free will’ you mean the freedom to choose what to desire, then no, humans have no free will.”

 “[…] the ‘self’ is a fictional story that the intricate mechanisms of our mind constantly manufacture, update, and rewrite.”

 “We humans have conquered the world thanks to our ability to create and believe fictional stories. We are therefore particularly bad at knowing the difference between fiction and reality.”

 “When you are confronted by some great story and you wish to know whether it is real or imaginary, one of the key question to ask is whether the central hero of the story can suffer.”

 “Whenever politicians start talking in mystical terms, beware.”