{"id":9774,"date":"2014-12-03T10:33:32","date_gmt":"2014-12-03T05:03:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/?p=9774"},"modified":"2021-01-30T11:46:41","modified_gmt":"2021-01-30T06:16:41","slug":"natural-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/2014\/12\/03\/natural-law\/","title":{"rendered":"Natural Law"},"content":{"rendered":"

After a couple of years of Samsung, I bought\u00a0a Moto X (2nd gen) phone, the Droid Turbo and Nexus 6 also being considerations. In the first few days of use, the automation that Moto’s Assist, Actions and Voice allows\u00a0has impressed upon me the potential of such technologies and the dependency we could have on them. \u00a0As Karen Landis states in the\u00a0Pew Internet Project’s\u00a0Killer Apps in the Gigabit Age<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0\u201cImplants and wearables will replace tools we carry or purchase…It will also redefine what a \u2018thought\u2019 is, as we won\u2019t \u2018think\u2019 unassisted.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

It reminded me of\u00a0an article I’d read in Vanity Fair titled ‘The Human Factor<\/a>“, and a particular observation in it – To put it briefly, automation has made it more and more unlikely that ordinary airline pilots will ever have to face a raw crisis in flight\u2014but also more and more unlikely that they will be able to cope with such a crisis if one arises. <\/em>This thought is elaborated in ‘Automation Makes Us Dumb<\/a>‘, drawing the difference between two design philosophies – “technology – centred automation” and “human- centred automation”. The former is dominant now and if one were to extrapolate this\u00a0, a scary thought emerges.<\/p>\n

I think the best articulation of that scary thought is by George Dyson in Darwin Among the Machines –\u00a0“In the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines.”\u00a0<\/i>I had seen this in\u00a0Bill Joy’s amazing 2000 Wired article “Why the Future doesn’t need us<\/a>“, which itself discusses the idea that\u00a0Our most powerful 21st-century technologies – robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech – are threatening to make humans an endangered species<\/em>.<\/p>\n

That’s probably a good counter balance against\u00a0our ego that convinces us that we are meant to be the planet’s dominant species forever. Having said that, we’re definitely trying our best to make it so \u00a0– by going after immortality. Google’s work on genomes<\/a> and nanoparticles<\/a> (must read!) are fantastic steps in that direction and have the potential to change the way we are as a species.\u00a0Or maybe, as I’ve written before,\u00a0we will speciate in the form of\u00a0the augmented human<\/a>. To quote Anita Salem from the Pew discussion, (referred to earlier)\u00a0\u201cThe operating system will be integrated into the human body<\/em>“<\/p>\n

I don’t think Nature has any favourites among species. So, there’s no reason why what we call an ‘artificial intelligence’ will not be allowed to replace us, and the subjectivity of human existence as we know it and all that it entails is pitted against the objectivity of a machine thinking whose worldview I cannot predict! Therefore, irrespective of the paths we take, at some point in the future we will have to address the role of AI in our lives. There’s a dialogue in Interstellar that made me think quite a bit.<\/p>\n

\"interstellar-michael-caine\"<\/p>\n

I wonder what choices we will make as a species, since the compassion towards each other’s condition that probably enabled our survival initially is systematically being replaced by the selfishness of individual betterment. Or maybe that was Nature’s plan all along. Maybe Nature is selfish too, it wants evolution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After a couple of years of Samsung, I bought\u00a0a Moto X (2nd gen) phone, the Droid Turbo and Nexus 6 also being considerations. In the first few days of use, the automation that Moto’s Assist, Actions and Voice allows\u00a0has impressed upon me the potential of such technologies and the dependency we could have on them. […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6054,6055,1479,98,6056,6060],"tags":[2659,702,4722,105,4723,4721,1322,1730],"class_list":["post-9774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ai","category-augmented-human","category-thoughtstream","category-future","category-society-culture","category-technology","tag-automation","tag-evolution","tag-genomes","tag-google","tag-interstellar","tag-nanoparticles","tag-nature","tag-species"],"aioseo_notices":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9774"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9774\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15099,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9774\/revisions\/15099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}