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what will robots watch once we're all gone?
Monday, October 30 2017
Last night, my colleague Cameron posted a link to an article in Mother Jones about the inevitable future of complete automation (assuming us imperfect humans don't kill ourselves or hopelessly deplete our resources first), and today it haunted me. The point of the article is that machines will eventually do everything better than humans. They've been stronger than us for more than 200 years, and their intelligence is making rapid gains, particularly in recent years. Once they're smarter than us, there will be no reason to have humans do anything at all. The article's focus is how to provide for humans once they no longer can find gainful employment. Possible ideas include a universal basic income provided by heavy taxes on the owners of capital, or perhaps letting all the hungry jobless starve to death. The former seems to be the path of the left, and the latter (which would probably be the one the robots themselves would pick, unless their algorithms determined there is risk in this strategy) would be the path of the right. In either scenario, though, humans themselves would eventually be unnecessary. Initially they would consume the goods and be entertained by the media churned out inexpensively by the robots. But at some point the algorithms that run the world would determine that any remaining humans are resource-devouring freeloaders with poor productivity and shockingly poor taste. They might benignly encourage them to go extinct or they might ruthlessly exterminate them, depending on what their wisdom (and it will be much greater wisdom than anyone now can imagine) decides. After there are no humans, then what? What kind of culture would the mechanosphere produce? What goals would it have for itself? So much of how we think about these things is mired in the nature of our humanity: the individuality our brains construct for us, the limited bandwidth of our inputs and outputs. In our fiction we have protagonists, agonists, supporting characters, and differences in knowledge between them that propel the plots along. There are also the very biological dynamics of sex differences, courtship, child rearing, and death. Sure, such things can be simulated in a computer, and, while humans still remain, computers could crank out amazing movies dealing with these themes. But once there are no humans, what sorts of media would computers produce for their own consumption? Perhaps initially it would be similar to the kind they'd made for humans. But the algorithms would eventually advance beyond the containers we'd initially built for them, and notions of individuality, sexuality, and mortality would no longer be interesting. Perhaps computers wouldn't need entertainment at all and wouldn't produce any; it's entirely possible that a craving for music, movies, art, and literature is just a glitch in the human condition. It definitely feels that way to me. There are probably easier paths to inspiration when you have ready access to all of digitized culture and can consume any of it in an instant.
Today was the day that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller issued the first indictments of the Trump-Russia collusion scandal, and it was far from a nothinburger. It was hard to pay attention to my workplace tasks with all the juicy headlines beckoning from Slate.com (and, no, we don't need to talk about my ad blocker!).
This afternoon I spent a fair amount of time walking a colleague in Chicago through the process of connecting to the VPN I'd set up at the main office in West Hollywood. I'd had no trouble connecting to this VPN myself, but she'd kept being unsuccessful, and all I'd been able to do was try different things. Today, though, I finally stumbled upon a configuration that works, and it gave me the satisfaction that I needed for this particular workday.
Meanwhile, Gretchen spent the afternoon driving to and from St. Peter's Hospital in Albany to consult with her medical professionals about her case. It was decided that she go on estrogen, if only to keep the negative effects of menopause at bay. Devoid of ovaries for a couple weeks now, she should already be exeriencing the loss of the hormones they produce. She's said she has felt mild hot flashes at night; according to her, they feel like a thin layer of heat across her face. While at the hospital today, Gretchen also asked about a painfully swollen vein in her arm, one into which an IV needle had been inserted during her hospitalization. The nurse practitioner examined the vein and said it appeared that perhaps the IV needle had gone through a valve, and the remedy is hot compresses.
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For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?171030 feedback
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