Showing posts with label ecology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ecology. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Writing, Ideology & Mass Communication In Techno-Industrial Society

Originality, accuracy, and clarity can be hard things to measure in terms of the written word. Originality is always bound to some degree with the familiar. Accuracy, while sometimes easier to assess, is rarely complete and can still lead us to faulty conclusions. Clarity is largely dependent upon the ability of any readers to comprehend, relate to, and think reasonably about whatever is being presented to them. These three aspects comprise but a general shortlist of problems a writer may face when trying to compose something of worth and interest to the broader reading public.

Underlying political and ideological tendencies, which are engrained in the general public, further serve to restrict a writers ability to find and captivate an audience. The promotion of certain ideas, right or wrong, can even be dangerous to writers who promote them. People have been burnt at the stake and put before firing squads because of their ideas.

More commonly problematic is simply the inability of writers to adequately reach a receptive audience. On the simplest level this could sometimes be due to a writers limited access to a suitable medium. However, even having access to modern tools of mass communication does not guarantee that the message being produced will reach a broad or receptive audience. The reasons for this are many.

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

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.

Thursday, September 01, 2011

Dispatches from the Apocalypse

An excellent, moving article from the Utne Reader written by Junot Díaz, from Boston Review

"Isn’t that after all the logical conclusion of what we are wreaking? The transformation of our planet into a Haiti? Haiti, you see, is not only the most visible victim of our civilization—Haiti is also a sign of what is to come."