The Ongoing Fukushima Nuclear Disaster

The System Currently In Place

The CEO of a prominent group promoting the manifestation of a technological singularity, Luke Muehlhauser from the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, recently came out with a very surprising statement regarding the dangers which would accompany the creation of artificial super-intelligence:

“Unfortunately, the singularity may not be what you're hoping for. By default the singularity (intelligence explosion) will go very badly for humans, because what humans want is a very, very specific set of things in the vast space of possible motivations, and it's very hard to translate what we want into sufficiently precise math, so by default superhuman AIs will end up optimizing the world around us for something other than what we want, and using up all our resources to do so.”

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of the technological singularity... it has to do (generally speaking) with programming a thinking computer that initially has the same cognitive abilities as a human being. Due to computers regularly becoming able to process evermore information faster, in a very short time, after a computer achieved a human level of intellect, it would, conceivably, surpass that level – arguably in the next moment and almost certainly within the next few years. What would start with a computer being able to pass a Turing test (basically being able to fool human observers as to whether or not they were having a dialogue with a human or a computer) would then shortly be followed by a type of self-consciousness machine that would intellectually be capable of manipulating humans and taking human rationality to its furthest degree.

Japan's Tragedy and the World's Crisis

Along with so many others around the world, my heart goes out to the people of Japan as they face an ongoing tragedy brought about by a devastating earthquake, followed by a tsunami, and subsequently a worsening nuclear disaster. When such horrible things happen to such a sophisticated and cultured society, it reminds us all of our tenuous position on this Earth.

I do not at all want to minimize the trials and tribulations of others around the world who have also been confronted with horrible disasters in recent years -- Haiti, Indonesia, New Orleans, and Iraq come to mind -- but as the third largest economy in the world, and as a technological powerhouse, what's happened in Japan is a reminder that any of us can be devastated at any time. The most advanced engineering can't prevent tragedy, and the most advanced technologies can prove to be the most dangerous.

And it needs to be pointed out that, given Japan's geopolitical & economic status, the tragedy in Japan may prove to bring about crisis around the world. The effects may not be as sudden or shocking as the earthquake which the Japanese people experienced, but the economic ramifications could be equally as tragic for many people across the globe. It feels a little callous to talk of dips to the GDP and the crash of the Nikkei stock market, but international trade has been effected -- and in this interconnected global economy, people's very lives depend on certain aspects of trade. How the terrible events in Japan will effect people in other nations remains to be seen -- but have no doubt that people will be effected in ways precisely unknown at the moment.