What if Facebook is doing us the biggest favour of all?

What if Facebook's scooping up of our personal data is doing us a huge favour?
How can that be? Let's imagine, and think, really big for a moment.

Humans as corporeal beings may be facing an extinction event. We are destroying our eco-system at an alarming rate, making large tracts of land uninhabitable. Sperm count has fallen in developed countries by 50% in four decades. If the rates of decline continue we'll be hitting 'The Handmaid's Tale' scenarios before we run out of Earth to live on.

There are those that argue (Life3.0) that far from dieing out, we may be about to evolve. That evolution would see us abandon our bodies and attain consciousness as digital beings.

To do so would free us from the challenges of keeping our bodies in a decent state - alive for example, and enable us to explore the universe, giving meaning to the vast tracts of it that currently have none (because there is no consciousness out there to experience it).

With me so far? Ok. So how does that mean Facebook is doing us a favour?

AI needs a lot of data to start learning and doing things humans do. It will need even more to recreate conscious versions of ourselves to live in infinity as zeros and ones.

What if this is Facebook, Google, Baidu, Yandex, Amazon's real mission - even if they don't realise it themselves? They are gathering and storing the data - to enable our evolution-as-upload as part of (rather than subject to) The Singularity.

Someone has to do it. If Facebook wants to make use of my data in the meantime to personalise an ad or two - I think that's a very reasonable exchange.

Happy Ishter!

Should we code humanity into evolution?

Via:  https://news.vanderbilt.edu/vanderbiltmagazine/robot-evolution/

AI - if you take the leap to superintelligence and the singularity - may be our next and massively accelerating evolution. In the decades to come that evolution is likely to decide how many of the 'flaws' of humanity have a place in our/the future.

If we do have any control over it, how can we hard code our nobler selves into a new version Three Laws of Robotics? The evolutionary advantageous urge to co-operate, our empathy (leading to altruism, care for others, love), the value we place on trust (and our innate ability to sense deception). 

These are not questions of the far future. If we believe there is something worth protecting about humanity now is the time to consider it.

No-one and nothing survives the process of evolution indefinitely. We are in the unique position of both creating our replacement and having an opportunity to set its behaviours for the future.

The challenge when trying to set rules for behaviour though is the huge cultural weight shaping our view of wrong and right. That view varies from culture to culture and through time.

Do we have the right we have to set the rules for how our replacements must behave?

Or should we leave it to evolutionary forces among competing super-intelligences?

We have that choice.

Is Capital approaching its own Singularity?

Strange times - and so a second post on the economic-societal discontinuity we find ourselves amid.

Strange times when the politicians find themselves out of control (most parliamentarians in the UK wanted to remain in Europe, for example, most 'reasoned analysis of the promises of Donald Trump would have him sidelined by the US Presidential campaign process - and still he comes...).

Strange times - when lies become the gold-standard for political currency and we find ourselves evaluating who to trust in a post truth world?

Who and what to blame?

Spare a moment to consider The Singularity - not of computer technology - but of Capital.

Markets are meant to be the single most effective tool we have for distributing resources. The idea was that resource ends up where people have greatest need for it - supply scurrying to meet demand.

And in pursuit of this perfect market dynamic we have relentlessly handed control of the market to capital. The Bank of England has been out of political control for decades, the free market is almost universally saluted as a paragon of doing the right thing.

But rather than become the ultimate distributor against need, the market has become the single greatest machine of growing capital for capital's sake. It creates volume very efficiently - it has failed to match this with an evolution in distributive capacity. Indeed - it has proven it can't be trusted to do so.

It puts the payouts in the hands of fewer and fewer who simply use their gains to gather more and more, er gains (see what I mean, for its own sake?). What is the point of any individual having more than 10 million dollars in the bank? I'm not saying its morally wrong, or reprehensible, but in a world where millions starve you may have thought that a free (frictionless) market would have the capability to correct itself if its purpose is the efficient distribution of resources.

The reality is it isn't - never has been - at least not as far as 'most people' are concerned. In the past we placed more controls on it. And the wealth to poverty gap was a much smaller one. We had progressive taxation. Now the rich pay a lower % of personal income than the poor.  How does that help distribute resource efficiently? Freedom to choose to spend on what you choose is the argument of the defenders of the rights of capital over the rights of people.

So maybe - just as the predicted point at which computers make cleverer computers than themselves and go into a cycle building ever cleverer machines until they are wiser than all human thought, maybe capital has reached or is rapidly approaching its own singularity - the point at which it generates more and more capital in an unstoppable cycle and without a moment's thought for the humans it was once meant to serve.

In the technological singularity the arrival of the super intelligence (best guesses around 25-30 years from now) heralds the end of the Human Era.

"...the new superintelligence would continue to upgrade itself and would advance technologically at an incomprehensible rate." It would make of us what it chose.

Perhaps capital has escaped its moorings and is cycling in a wilder and wilder vortex of self-gratification, sucking up everything in its path, hoovering it into an ever reducing pool of power-wielding pockets, until at last there is nothing left to own, buy or sell, the pile implodes and, big bang style, redistributes its content thinly and more evenly across the world's markets...

What can save us from the Singularity of Capital. Perhaps a return to the basic trust on which capital was built in the first place - the promises it made (on its bank notes being backed by real values), genuine trust?

Perhaps by winding back and taking a different turn. I'm thinking how Co-operatives emerged to defend against the early excesses of capital against the man in the street.

Perhaps by understanding that aggregation of wealth beyond need has a cost for the rest of the world we inhabit.

I'd like to think the revolution of the web still has the power to bring to fruition a world in which we are valued as much for what we share as for what we accrue.

I just hope that world can find its feet before Capital reaches its singularity.