Tim Adams

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“An Inferior Intelligence Will Always Depend On A Superior One For Its Survival”

June 13, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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As I mentioned last week, Elon Musk, among other Silicon Valley stalwarts, has been on a Nick Bostrom bender ever since the publication of Superintelligence. In a smart Guardian profile by Tim Adams, the Oxford philosopher is depicted as being of two minds, believing technology may be the Holy Grail or it could read us our Last Rites. That’s the dual reality of a Transhumanist and Existentialist.

Bostrom tells his interviewer he thinks the risk of human extinction by AI will likely be largely ignored despite his clarion call. “It will come gradually and seamlessly without us really addressing it,” he says.

There seem to be only two cautions in regards to Bostrom’s work: 1) Attention could shift from immediate crises (e.g., climate change) to longer-term ones, and 2) Rules developed today for a possible future explosion of machine intelligence will have to be very flexible since there’s so much information we currently don’t possess/can’t comprehend. 

An excerpt:

Bostrom sees those implications as potentially Darwinian. If we create a machine intelligence superior to our own, and then give it freedom to grow and learn through access to the internet, there is no reason to suggest that it will not evolve strategies to secure its dominance, just as in the biological world. He sometimes uses the example of humans and gorillas to describe the subsequent one-sided relationship and – as last month’s events in Cincinnati zoo highlighted – that is never going to end well. An inferior intelligence will always depend on a superior one for its survival.

There are times, as Bostrom unfolds various scenarios in Superintelligence, when it appears he has been reading too much of the science fiction he professes to dislike. One projection involves an AI system eventually building covert “nanofactories producing nerve gas or target-seeking mosquito-like robots [which] might then burgeon forth simultaneously from every square metre of the globe” in order to destroy meddling and irrelevant humanity. Another, perhaps more credible vision, sees the superintelligence “hijacking political processes, subtly manipulating financial markets, biasing information flows, or hacking human-made weapons systems” to bring about the extinction.

Does he think of himself as a prophet?

He smiles. “Not so much. It is not that I believe I know how it is going to happen and have to tell the world that information. It is more I feel quite ignorant and very confused about these things but by working for many years on probabilities you can get partial little insights here and there. And if you add those together with insights many other people might have, then maybe it will build up to some better understanding.”

Bostrom came to these questions by way of the transhumanist movement, which tends to view the digital age as one of unprecedented potential for optimising our physical and mental capacities and transcending the limits of our mortality. Bostrom still sees those possibilities as the best case scenario in the superintelligent future, in which we will harness technology to overcome disease and illness, feed the world, create a utopia of fulfilling creativity and perhaps eventually overcome death. He has been identified in the past as a member of Alcor, the cryogenic initiative that promises to freeze mortal remains in the hope that, one day, minds can be reinvigorated and uploaded in digital form to live in perpetuity. He is coy about this when I ask directly what he has planned.

“I have a policy of never commenting on my funeral arrangements,” he says.•

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“The Means By Which Thought Alone Can Conjure Physical Pain Is An Unfathomable Mystery”

June 12, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

If the heart is a lonely hunter, then the brain is a game of William Tell. It’s tough to hit the target, and sometimes missing can lead to horrible consequences.

From Tim Adams’ Guardian piece about neuroscientist Dr. Suzanne O’Sullivan’s new book concerning imaginary illnesses, It’s All in Your Head:

Some of its more avant-garde subjects have faced O’Sullivan in her treatment room. Her experience of this type of patient began when she was just qualified as a junior doctor, watching a woman she calls Yvonne being questioned by her consultant. Yvonne, after an accident in which she had been sprayed in the face with window-cleaning fluid, had convinced herself and her family that she was blind. After six months of tests doctors had found nothing wrong with her eyes. She was by this time on disability benefits with a full-time carer, unable to get around her house. O’Sullivan and her fellow junior doctors, certain she could see, found it hard not to suppress giggles as Yvonne described her condition. They were reprimanded by the consultant. The cause of Yvonne’s blindness was psychological rather than physical – a response, it later seemed, to unbearable tensions in her marriage. It was to her no less real, however: she had subconsciously persuaded herself that she had lost her sight. After six months of psychiatric help and family counselling, O’Sullivan reports, Yvonne’s vision was restored.

It is O’Sullivan’s contention that “psychosomatic disorders are physical symptoms that mask emotional distress”. In the 19th century sufferers of such conditions were paraded by the celebrated neurologist Jean-Marie Charcot, who revealed to sold-out audiences how such states could be induced by suggestion and hypnosis. Even with fMRI scans and advances in neural imaging, the means by which thought alone can conjure physical pain is an unfathomable mystery. “One day a woman loses the power of speech entirely and the next she speaks in the voice of a child. A girl has a lump in her throat and becomes convinced she cannot swallow. Eyes close involuntarily and no amount of coaxing will open them.” Each of O’Sullivan’s patients is different; however, buried trauma or stress (itself an undefined cause and effect) seems often to be a trigger.•

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“Have You Made A Conscious Effort To Block Out Some Of That Information When You Are Writing?”

May 18, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In a Guardian Q&A tied to his new book, Joshua Ferris tells interviewer Tim Adams about being a novelist in the Internet Age:

“Question:

The Internet in the book is often seen as a conversely destructive force. Is that your experience?

Joshua Ferris:

I think it’s a force of anxiety. Anyone who wants to be completely sure of their information – personal, political, historical – is faced with a huge number of sources willing to provide it. It can be a very dubious place. A hall of mirrors with diminishing returns.

Question:

Have you made a conscious effort to block out some of that information when you are writing?

Joshua Ferris:

I don’t belong to social media at all. Not for any principled reason, but because I don’t want to spend the time on it. I do think books are harder to read when you move away from the quick cuts of the internet. You have to reach back for your attention span. If you’ve spent two hours looking at 6,000 very different web pages it’s difficult to concentrate on a single story that requires sustained attention. I don’t think books are going to go away. I think maybe they’re going to become a more fine taste.

Question:

Do you think the pervasiveness of that screen culture also makes novels harder to write?

Joshua Ferris:

Not if the novelist is a novelist. The determined novelist is just interested in the fact that she must write novels.”

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“Smith Envisioned ‘A Changing Of The Guard Within The Media'”

March 25, 2013 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

From a Tim Adams’ Guardian profile of the ever-humble Shane Smith of Vice fame, a passage that looks into the shockingly big-money operation of the formerly upstart media company, which recently garnered major attention for turning Dennis Rodman into a pierced and tatted diplomat of sorts:

“Vice has come an awful long way from its origins as a free and underground music magazine in Smith’s native Montreal 20 years ago. He created it with a couple of friends – having persuaded the city fathers to let them take over an earnest community title called the Voice. In the two decades since Vice dropped its middle ‘o’ it has grown from being a ‘hipsters’ bible,’ given away on street corners and in record stores, to a global brand with offices in 34 countries. The high-traffic online and documentary film incarnations of the Vice sensibility are about to spawn a 24-hour terrestrial news channel available in 18 countries. A documentary series in partnership with august HBO will include the Rodman and McAfee films. There is also a record label and an ad agency, Virtue, which numbers Nike and Dell among its clients. Announcing some of those departures at an industry event in Abu Dhabi last year, Smith envisioned ‘a changing of the guard within the media,’ and announced his ambition for Vice to become both the largest online media network in the world and ‘the voice of the angry youth.’

To back up this fighting talk, Spike Jonze, the disruptive intelligence behind the film Being John Malkovich and the Jackass franchise, was recently installed as creative director. Two years ago a consortium that included Sir Martin Sorrell’s WPP advertising group, and Tom Freston, founder of MTV, invested a reported $50m in Vice media. Since the company purchased Vice.com (formerly a porn site) the same year, revenues have doubled to a reported $200m in 2012, on which insiders suggest an unverified 20 per cent profit margin. Smith talks of 3,000 contributors, though the official payroll is about 850. The average age of a Vice journalist is 25, but scanning the screen-staring ranks of the magazine’s newsroom that seems on the high side. It is easy to see why, on his visit here, Rupert Murdoch might suddenly have felt all of his 82 years.“

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“Up To About 1800, People Were Allowed To Have Visions Or To Hear Voices”

December 10, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Oliver Sacks recently sat for an interview with Tim Adams at the Guardian to discuss his new book, Hallucinations. One exchange concerning a shift toward rationalism in the last 200 years, although we continue to create mundane ways to distance ourselves from facts:

“Guardian:

It seems that such visual disorders at certain points in history have been more ‘believable’ and also, therefore, more commonly noted?

Oliver Sacks:

Yes, in other places and at other times, hallucinations were far more acceptable. Up to about 1800, people were allowed to have visions or to hear voices. They were seen to have some external spiritual reality; they were ghosts or angels or demons. The word hallucination only really became a pejorative at the end of the 18th or early 19th century. We still associate it with madness. But how those who hallucinate understand what they see also changes. We are more likely to see UFOs and aliens when people in earlier times would see angels.”

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