The Human Takeover: A Call for a Venture into an Existential Opportunity (original) (raw)
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The Human Takeover: A call for a venture into existential opportunity
ECCO Working Paper, 2018 (v.2), 2018
We propose a venture into an existential opportunity for establishing a world ‘good enough’ for humans to live in. Defining an existential opportunity as the converse of an existential risk —i.e. a development that promises to dramatically improve the future of humanity— we argue that one such opportunity is available and should be explored now. The opportunity resides in the moment of transition of the Internet — from mediating information to mediating governance. The Internet of tomorrow will mediate the execution of contracts, transactions, public interventions, and all other change-establishing events more reliably and more synergistically than any other technology or institution. It will become a distributed, synthetically intelligent agent in itself. This transition must not be just observed, or exploited instrumentally: it must be ventured into and seized on behalf of entire humanity. We propose that the new coordinating layer of the Internet should be arranged such that it w...
Information is physical - introducing the Realimiteit Principle April
Information is Physical, 2021
A paradigm change is being experienced because the fundamental building blocks of our universe are not just matter and energy, but information. Information can't be divorced from our perceived reality. Information deficit by definition causes entropy (disorder). By information we can therefore design and build sustainable systems, just like nature does. Cybernetics is the science of communication of man and machine. Today we observe an amalgamation between human consciousness and artificial intelligence. Through cognition, i.e. the exchange of information, we can learn how not to allow or create harmful, man-made systems, but can measure their sustenance and viability by feedback loop mapping. This paper demonstrates how and suggests 2 new laws of physics; one to measure disorder and the other how to measure and create order in living systems.
Information is Physical and gives Universal Energy its functionality
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Abstract To understand the value of information and its equivalence and interconnectedness with universal energy, I will argue that information is equal to energy. I propose that information obeys all universal laws of physics and forms an essential part of the fabric of all living systems. Information gives universal energy its functionality. Energy is needed for living systems to build, move, transport, create, fabricate, live, be sustained, be stable, viable, but can’t do that without information in the form of communication, conversation, cooperation, learning, adaptation and adjustment by way of cognition i.e. the mental and biological action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience and the senses a.k.a. the process of knowing. Charles Darwin wrote; ‘each slight variation if useful, is preserved’ (Darwin, Charles, 1859). Information is a part of and essential for all living systems, a condition for life and evolution. Information is conserved and preserved by nature as an intrinsic part of the atomic and subatomic building blocks of nature. Man-build organisations, institutions, governments, industries, ideologies, as well as our planet and the universe are living systems. Cognition is not just a human ability but a symbiotic necessity for the viability of all living systems because of their natural interdependence and interconnectedness. By determining that information is a condition for living systems for them to be sustained, I aim to demonstrate by means of a case study that ethics and social responsibility is information too and are inescapable, deontological conditions for order, structure and beauty and thus for sustainability, mitigating vulnerability and risk.
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This paper aims to shed light on the dissonance caused by the superimposition of Dominant Human Systems on Natural Systems. I highlight the synthetic nature of Dominant Human Systems as egoic and linguistic phenomenon manufactured by a mere portion of the human population, which renders them inherently oppressive unto peoples and landscapes whose wisdom were barred from the design process. In pursuing a radical pragmatic approach to mending the simultaneous oppression and destruction of the human being and the earth, I highlight the necessity of minimizing entropic chaos caused by excess energy expenditure, an essential feature of systems that aim to run counter to the natural flow of the Cosmos. In Chapter 1, I discuss the pragmatism of systemic biomimicry and the tenets of ecology which must be assumed for the construction of effective human systems. In Chapter 2, the notion of construct is explored through the lense of metaphysical grounding. In Chapter 3, I explicate the dominan...
Global Solutions vs. Local Solutions for the AI Safety Problem
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There are two types of artificial general intelligence (AGI) safety solutions: global and local. Most previously suggested solutions are local: they explain how to align or “box” a specific AI (Artificial Intelligence), but do not explain how to prevent the creation of dangerous AI in other places. Global solutions are those that ensure any AI on Earth is not dangerous. The number of suggested global solutions is much smaller than the number of proposed local solutions. Global solutions can be divided into four groups: 1. No AI: AGI technology is banned or its use is otherwise prevented; 2. One AI: the first superintelligent AI is used to prevent the creation of any others; 3. Net of AIs as AI police: a balance is created between many AIs, so they evolve as a net and can prevent any rogue AI from taking over the world; 4. Humans inside AI: humans are augmented or part of AI. We explore many ideas, both old and new, regarding global solutions for AI safety. They include changing the ...
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Introduction: The End of the Future: Governing Consequence in the Age of Digital Sovereignty
The End of the Future: Governing Consequence in the Age of Digital Sovereignty, 2019
We are now entering an era where the human world assumes recognition of itself as data. Its basis for existence is becoming fully subordinated to the software processes that tabulate, index, and sort the relations entailed in making up what we perceive as reality. The acceleration of data threatens to relinquish ephemeral modes of representation to ceaseless processes of computation. This situation compels the human world to form relations with non-human agencies, to establish exchanges with the algorithms and other software processes that accelerate and intensify the possibility of its obsolescence in order to allow for a profound upgrade to our own ontological understanding to take precedent. Through a partial attunement to what is always already non-human in its form of mediation to a higher intelligence, we are able to rediscover the actual inner logic of the age of intelligent machines, as at once the reason of trauma and the instrument of catastrophe for a humanity still beholden to a linear process of rationality. Humanity now finds itself captive to pervasive institutionalised forms of violence whose force has everything to do with the aggressive pattern of economics in a neoliberal age, bound with an internet that has taken on a fourth dimension to generate consequence in the material world. This has allowed the internet to become thingly insofar as it will soon be understood not as an interface but as an environment. It thus takes on the ability to shape conditions beyond the imaginary and embed itself into materiality in a variety of ways that benefit from the demise of state parameters and the enlivenment of a fluidity of information able to migrate across time and space. All previous forms of media suffered from imprisonment within a screen, which limited their ability to function as the foundation for alternative networks, or as nodes of multilayered connectivity. The promise of a universal connectivity through a perpetual 2 The End of the Future: Governing Consequence in the Age of Digital Sovereignty summons of our inclinations brings forth nothing less than a new form of imperialism able to transform space into a sphere of liquidity, and complexity into a condition of movement. As labour precarity and labour migration becomes the normative situation of a disenfranchised humanity, so too does its acquiescence to a universal accessibility where individuals are continuously subject to digital interpolation, and as such their behaviours and movements are made available to generating exploitable forms of interest. The data created is thus credited to others and interpreted to advance the interests of others; all in order to finance the states and corporations who control the means for making worlds we alone discover. The prospect of a future that has the capacity to come to an end prompts us to apprehend an understanding of the digital through its dynamic intersection with the advent and development of the nation-state, race, colonisation, navigational warfare, mercantilism and capitalism, and the mathematical sciences over some five centuries. Its task is to animate an understanding of the twenty-first century as an era where the screen has split off from itself and proliferated onto multiple surfaces, and as a consequence has allowed an inverted image of totalitarianism to flash up at this point in history, and be altered to support our present condition of binary apperception. It progresses through a recognition of a now atomised political power whose authority lies in the control not of the means of production, but of information, and thus, digital media now serves to legitimise and promote a customised micropolitics of identity management. On this new apostolate plane, it is possible to conceive a world in which each human soul is captured and reproduced as an autonomous individual bearing affects and identities. The digital infrastructure of the twenty-first century makes it possible for power to operate through an esoteric mathematical means, and for factual material to be manipulated in the interest of advancing the means of control. This pathway towards understanding the significance of the digital travels a wide course between Elizabethan England, North American slavery, German fascism, Cold War cybernetic social engineering and counterinsurgency, and the (neo)libertarianism of Silicon Valley in order to arrive at a place where a cool organising intelligence that started from Introduction: Life on the Algorithmic Estate 3 an ambition to resourcefully manipulate bodies, ends with their profound neutralisation. The digital in this sense is made to denude its relationship to historical political economies, and to relate to ecologies of culture and media production spanning centuries as opposed to mere decades. In that time span, it has emerged variously as the quintessence of political representation, the essence of public perception and the immaterial layer through which the impacts on everyday life might be felt. The digital has managed to relate collective values to individual identities, and in so doing draw up an inventive terrain all its own in which these positionings are now given the power to become operational and indeed operative when it comes to our understanding of subjectivity itself. The digital has become essential to humanity's self-understanding through its ability to implicate itself within a pattern of changing societal and perceptual hierarchies that exists everywhere around it and from which it is now possible to conclude have assumed their own 'digital consciousness'. Over time, the digital comes to be tied to an understanding of emerging institutional protocols and new forms of non-representational visualities as they emerge in various guises within the algorithmic estate. It is possible to witness this through the evolution of various public spheres whose spatial coordinates now encompass the dynamic realities of both a material and digital world. A diversity of critical perspectives including those drawn from visual culture, media studies, cultural studies, science and technology studies, ethnography, cultural theory, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, environmental humanities, and sociology together provide a compendium through which to grasp the historical consequence of data. These critical perspectives when brought together present a compelling new narrative around data as a technology of public truth and private architectures, aesthetically produced through new practices of capitalism. Within this challenging terrain, modes of information can be placed in further context and situated in conjunction with new and emerging regions of power. Here contemporary perception and cultural history can be joined together in various guises to generate a cogent understanding of data as both a vehicle for political agency, as well as its repression and, therefore, as an elemental 4 The End of the Future: Governing Consequence in the Age of Digital Sovereignty force that figures crucially within any analysis of the turbulent realities of our time. Such times and indeed the notion of time itself has become radically altered by the rise of digitisation so that memory itself has become the stuff of cheap storage and facile retrieval. We believe in a mode of recall now that is at once universal and progressively omniscient. The softness of software as we have come to know it presents humanity with the tantalising prospect of our bodies being subject to interiorised programmability as a means of optimising their functionality. It is by no means a coincidence that this is happening at a time humanity is grappling with its own biological finitude in this world. The human bodies that exist amidst that anxiety are now further burdened in their effort to conserve their resources by a body of information that, by contrast, has no looming expiry date. As such the algorithm's solutions-based thinking may well be on a collision course with our best interests and its capacity for overtaking our authority positioned well beyond our current scope of projection. In a tangible sense, 'programmability' already fuels the current organization of the contemporary neoliberal state. Moreover, in many respects, computer code now functions as its own mechanism of causality and sovereignty. Similarly, the social, political, and economic coding embedded within our societies, now increasingly is materialised in the software and hardware that render us as conscious subjects, rather than the other way around. What we perceive has become the effect of technologies that are becoming increasingly adept not only in the prediction of our behaviour but in subtly influencing it. These technologies persuade us to accept a concept of the future that is very much furnished to us on the basis of past data. Our interface with the algorithm over time could easily become shorthand for everything we believe in, performing as a medium of interpretation of our lived reality. It is invisible yet generates visible, logical effects, and this holds vast implication for our perception of everything from genetics to the invisible hand of the market, from ideology to culture. A faith in the algorithm, more generally, is providing an esoteric bridge to an understanding between theoretical concepts and pragmatic reality. Data has generated a capacity of invocation that permits it to not merely describe the world, but to recast it in its own image. The Introduction: Life on the Algorithmic Estate 5