(2017-10-19) Hon S5e04 Division By Infinity

Dan Hon s5e04 : Division by Infinity

One thing that’s stuck with me throughout this newsletter (since January 2014! Over 293 episodes! is the concept of the Californian Ideology[0] - the beliefs hovering over the U.S. West Coast like a sort of venture-backed word cloud.

Californian Ideology being one of the causes of the problems (wider/whiter) society is now having with the products of Silicon Valley. Here’s a quick example: Connecting People is an Unalloyed Good, therefore it justifies Moving Fast and Breaking Things

I feel something is missing because I’m an optimist: I believe in science, technology and progress. We have made progress (my socially progressive, fiscally conservative, neo-liberal friends - and these days, I’m not afraid to count myself as a neo-liberal provided I get to explain what it means to me will point to as many Gates Foundation reports saying that, globally, things are better). But for an optimist like me, that progress isn’t (and will never be?) good enough.

at the start of the retreat, as a sort of grounding exercise, we were asked to think about two questions:

• 1. What three truths would we [individually] want the world to know and understand about AI?; and
• 2. What are three questions or problems about AI that would need answering or addressing, for us to achieve the world we want?*

There’s a qualitative difference between: a) technology in the abstract and theoretical; the technology in potentia of imagining a world of global, networked citizens b) technology in the practical reality

cold hard reality of, well, 2 billion monthly active users and 1.15 billion mobile daily active users on a single social network.  Regardless of scenario, in the end, we won. Everyone (yes, for certain values of everyone) got connected, the trend’s there, it’s unstoppable now. Doesn’t matter how. (Well, not as much). All that matters is that it happened, and we’re here now. I mean,

Global networks promising open and democratic exchange of ideas presupposed there would be no bad actors.

I treat Facebook as a sort of real-world instantiation of Metcalfe’s law: connections are good

COSMO: Where were you last November? With luck, I might be able to crash the whole damned system. A better world. No more rich people, no more poor people, everybody’s the same, everybody’s connected. Together. Isn’t that what we said we always wanted?   BISHOP: Cos, you haven’t gone crazy on me, have you? COSMO: Who else is gonna change the world, Marty? Greenpeace? BISHOP laughs. COSMO is SERIOUS and BISHOP’s face DROPS

value (undefined!) increases, the goal is to capture all of the users to deliver all of the value

Your utility function with which you evaluate whether you should do things - whether consciously or unconsciously - has a back-door vulnerability because you let infinities in. Once you let infinities in, you can’t have a useful utility function because an infinity means that the ends justify the means.

Mallory Ortberg wasn’t wrong when she described Black Mirror as “What if phones, but too much”[1].  But she wasn’t entirely right, either - she could’ve also said: what if humans being human, but too human-y.

Isaac Asimov’s entire body of work around his Three Laws is around how they’re imperfect. His protagonist, one of the first sentient machine therapists, goes round explaining that all the purportedly “bad” behavior of Robots is down to them trying, ineffectually, to reconcile really shitty governing behavior design.  In other words, Asimov’s telling in part the story that strict laws that don’t allow for discretion (and here I draw an analogy to those who think smart contracts will save us, and concede that they will, apart from the cases in which they will completely fail, of which we already have some fantastic examples) or flexibility don’t work.

throwaway line about the fragility of Star Trek’s post-scarcity economy at that time by Captain Lorca: “[of course] that was before the future came, and hunger and need and want disappeared. [beat] of course, they’re making a comeback now, thanks to you.”