All Thoughts Being Equal

I went to my first Drunken Philosophy meetup at the behest of friend and fellow blogger Kayla (one half of Crows Against Murder dot Tumblr dot com ), and it was really great. One of the more interesting questions, not coincidentally posed by her, involved the nature of art. This is a topic over-ripe with potential, but we eventually digressed from Kayla's initial question ("When an artist makes better art over time, what exactly is the thing that's getting better?") to the nuanced categorization question of What is Art? Specifically, we were interested in figuring out what distinguishes Art from Propaganda and Craft. And for that we asked whether beer brewing is an Art. We agreed that it is not, at least not what most people think of as beer brewing. When a brewer makes a beer, they are aiming for a specific taste-sensation (hereafter "taste")—this is a mental experience that is obviously tied to an external physical stimulus. That is, if a brewer want...

I.   I just finished an ebook by Stuart Armstrong called Smarter Than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence , and it's increasing my skepticism of the singulatarians—those whacky A.I.-vangelists such as inhabit MIRI, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. They're doing (what they think is) an important public service, by trying to warn the public about the dangers of a fully-godlike, insufficiently-friendly machine intelligence. Except I'm not so convinced that we could stumble on the kind of superintelligence they usually preach in fear about, an alien god with boundless powers: You [the machine superintelligence] are currently having twenty million simultaneous conversations. Your predictive software shows that about five of those you are interacting with show strong signs of violent psychopathic tendencies. You can predict at least two murder sprees, with great certainty, by one of those individuals over the next year. You consider your options. The human poli...