Arbiter Alert! A New Challenge

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David Robertson

Arbiter Alert! A New Challenge

Post by David Robertson » Thu Jul 09, 2015 11:47 pm

It's coming. It's merely a matter of time. A fully-stocked FIDE Commission will surely need to meet. And the ECF will need to alert all leagues and county associations of the problem, requiring them to take appropriate remedial measures.

What problem? Brain-to-Brain wiring is what problem - via WiFi even.

Things could go wrong, of course. There's no guarantee of benefit. Wire me to Nigel Davies, for example, and one of us could become very stupid indeed

Roger de Coverly
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Re: Arbiter Alert! A New Challenge

Post by Roger de Coverly » Fri Jul 10, 2015 12:08 am

David Robertson wrote:A fully-stocked FIDE Commission will surely need to meet.
Those of us who are following the rather excellent Channel 4 drama "Humans" on Sunday evenings at 9pm could speculate about the moral problems of synths (supposedly robotic servants with a human appearance) being allowed at chess tournaments "modded" with Stockfish or whatever.

MartinCarpenter
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Re: Arbiter Alert! A New Challenge

Post by MartinCarpenter » Fri Jul 10, 2015 4:31 pm

Well the more 'mundane' problem like that is going to be direct brain wiring to computers. Not now of course, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it in a few decades. Might finish (high level) competitive chess off I suppose.

David Robertson

Re: Arbiter Alert! A New Challenge

Post by David Robertson » Fri Jul 10, 2015 5:04 pm

There's been a colossal debate raging for the past two decades, intensifying in the last decade, within two distinct but related movements:

* transhumanism

A discussion about how, and when, humanity's capacity can be enhanced by various means: biological, technological, neurological etc

* posthumanism

A discussion mainly, but not solely, within the AI community about how, and when, and with what consequences, humanity may be superseded by intelligent/superintelligent entities.

Brain-to-brain wire-ups feature in both scenarios.

For anyone interested in the debates, I strongly recommend Nick Bostrom on 'Superintelligence', a path-breaking and clarifying discussion of the emerging elements in this field. Chess features on p.7-8, albeit once assumed to contain the answer to human intelligence, is now dismissed as no longer having any bearing on our understanding of the matter. A demanding, and quite scary read.

David Robertson

Re: Arbiter Alert! A New Challenge

Post by David Robertson » Fri Jul 10, 2015 10:06 pm

This piece, from the Financial Times today, is a contribution to the post-humanity debate by the Astronomer Royal, Prof Sir Martin Rees. I reprint it here in full because it's behind a paywall. And I've highlighted (* *) one salient comment towards the end.

So vast are the expanses of space and time that fall within an astronomer’s gaze that people in my profession are mindful not only of our moment in history, but also of our place in the wider cosmos. We wonder whether there is intelligent life elsewhere; some of us even search for it. People will not be the culmination of evolution. We are near the dawn of a post-human future that could be just as prolonged as the billions of years of Darwinian selection that preceded humanity’s emergence.

The far future will bear traces of humanity, just as our own age retains influences of ancient civilisations. Humans and all they have thought might be a transient precursor to the deeper cogitations of another culture — one dominated by machines, extending deep into the future and spreading far beyond earth.

Not everyone considers this an uplifting scenario. There are those who fear that artificial intelligence will supplant us, taking our jobs and living beyond the writ of human laws. Others regard such scenarios as too futuristic to be worth fretting over. But the disagreements are about the rate of travel, not the direction. Few doubt that machines will one day surpass more of our distinctively human capabilities. It may take centuries but, compared to the aeons of evolution that led to humanity’s emergence, even that is a mere bat of the eye. This is not a fatalistic projection. It is cause for optimism. The civilisation that supplants us could accomplish unimaginable advances — feats, perhaps, that we cannot even understand.

Human brains, which have changed little since our ancestors roamed the African savannah, have allowed us to penetrate the secrets of the quantum and the cosmos. But there is no reason to think that our comprehension is matched to an understanding of all the important features of reality. Some day we may hit the buffers. There are chemical and metabolic limits to the size and power of “wet” organic brains.

Today’s computers do not learn like we do. Their internal network is far simpler than a human brain, but they partly make up for this disadvantage because their “nerves” transmit messages at the speed of light, millions of times faster than the chemical transmission in human brains. They can learn to identify dogs, cats and human faces by crunching through millions of images. They learn to translate from foreign languages by reading multilingual versions of millions of pages of EU rules, among other documents (and, crucially, they never get bored).

These are primitive steps, and there is disagreement about the route towards machines of human-level intelligence. Some think we should emulate nature, and reverse-engineer the human brain. Others say that is as misguided as designing flying machine by copying how birds flap their wings. Philosophers debate whether “consciousness” is special to the wet, organic brains of humans, apes and dogs, so that robots, even if their intellects seem superhuman, will still lack self-awareness or inner life. But of the kind of “thinking” that has enabled humans to understand and then harness the forces of nature, far more will be done by silicon computers (or quantum ones) than has ever been managed by people.

Artificial minds will not be confined to the 14 mile layer of water, air and rock in which organic life has evolved at the earth’s surface. Indeed this biosphere may be far from an optimal habitat for post-human “life”. Interplanetary and interstellar space will be the preferred arena for the grand constructions of robotic fabricators, including the non-biological brains that might one day develop insights as far beyond our imaginings as string theory is for a monkey.

The collective activities of human brains have underpinned the emergence of all our culture and science. They may not have been the first intelligences in the cosmos, however, and they are most unlikely to be the last. Searches for extraterrestrial intelligence are attracting growing support. Astronomers have learnt in the past decade that there are likely to be billions of earthlike planets, orbiting stars in our galaxy. Searches will focus on the nearest of these. But we do not know how likely it is that chemistry generates life (replicating, metabolising, entities), nor what chance primitive organisms have of evolving to earth-like biospheres. If our searches fail, there will be a compensation: if advanced life is exceedingly rare, we need be less cosmically modest. Our earth, though a tiny speck in the cosmos, could be the unique “seed” from which intelligence spreads through the galaxy.

** Our era of organic intelligence is a triumph of complexity over entropy, but a transient one, which will be followed by a vastly longer period of inorganic intelligences less constrained by their environment. If life is widespread, worlds orbiting stars older than the sun could have had a head-start. If so, aliens are likely long ago to have transitioned beyond the organic stage. **

We have no crystal ball. But it is a fair bet that machines, not organic brains, will most fully understand the cosmos. They may be our own remote descendants. Or they may be out there already, orbiting distant stars. Either way, it will be the actions of autonomous machines that will most drastically change the world, and perhaps what lies beyond.

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Christopher Kreuzer
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Re: Arbiter Alert! A New Challenge

Post by Christopher Kreuzer » Fri Jul 10, 2015 10:23 pm

Fascinating, David. Many thanks for posting that and the link to and recommendation of the 'Superintelligence' book by Bostrom. A lot of this reminds me of some of the science fiction I have read, particularly the 'Culture' series by the late Iain M. Banks (is it really 2 years since he died?).

Brian Towers
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Re: Arbiter Alert! A New Challenge

Post by Brian Towers » Sat Jul 11, 2015 10:39 am

Sir Martin Rees wrote:Philosophers debate whether “consciousness” is special to the wet, organic brains of humans, apes and dogs, so that robots, even if their intellects seem superhuman, will still lack self-awareness or inner life.
That is the key question. If true then the driver of progress, human will, being unique to "wet" beings means that there will be no "post organic" period.

In particular, this -
Sir Martin Rees wrote: ** Our era of organic intelligence is a triumph of complexity over entropy, but a transient one, which will be followed by a vastly longer period of inorganic intelligences less constrained by their environment. If life is widespread, worlds orbiting stars older than the sun could have had a head-start. If so, aliens are likely long ago to have transitioned beyond the organic stage. **

We have no crystal ball. But it is a fair bet that machines, not organic brains, will most fully understand the cosmos. They may be our own remote descendants. Or they may be out there already, orbiting distant stars. Either way, it will be the actions of autonomous machines that will most drastically change the world, and perhaps what lies beyond.
is wishful thinking, a kind of intellectual, wet dream.
Ah, but I was so much older then. I'm younger than that now.

MartinCarpenter
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Re: Arbiter Alert! A New Challenge

Post by MartinCarpenter » Sat Jul 11, 2015 8:51 pm

Well, if you want really wishful thinking, we might eventually manage to create something like the culture :)
(Banks. Not that the utopian setting stopped him writing some supremely dark novels.).

Steven DuCharme
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Re: Arbiter Alert! A New Challenge

Post by Steven DuCharme » Sat Jul 11, 2015 11:56 pm

The answer my friends is blowin' in the wind. The answer is blowin' in the wind
I float like a pawn island and sting like an ignored knight :mrgreen:

John McKenna

Re: Arbiter Alert! A New Challenge

Post by John McKenna » Sun Jul 12, 2015 1:00 am

Yes, fascinating, and if the wind is a tempest it blows in what follows - I tend to have nagging doubts about the future of humanity and its burgeoning alliance with, and reliance on, machines. These machines no matter how advanced will never achieve even a rudimentary level of consciousness, let alone the self realization required to acquire a theory of mind. At best they will be a very poor simulacrum of a human and therefore will always need human intelligence to give meaningful direction to their artificial machinations. Naturally, certain powerful, but misguided, members of the human race may attempt to, unnaturally, integrate their brains and amalgamate their bodies with advanced technology. If this has to be done in order to survive on the polluted planet or to escape, in increasing numbers into space, as the resources of the planet are depleted below the level that supports the population then it will be a necessary evil. If it is done purely to attempt to upgrade humans into superhumans then beware...

Q. What's the most abudant thing in the universe?
A. Stupidity
Q. What comes after evolution?
A. Devolution, stupid.

The post-human devolutionary future may be as inhuman as the preceding evolutionary past.

Dr. Morbius - In times long past... this planet was the home of a mighty and noble race of beings... which called themselves the Krell. Ethically, as well as technologically... they were a million years ahead of humankind... for in unlocking the mysteries of nature... they had conquered even their baser selves... and when, in the course of eons, they had abolished sickness... and insanity and crime and all injustice... they turned, still with high benevolence... outward toward space. Long before the dawn of man's history, they had walked our Earth... but then, seemingly on the threshold of some supreme accomplishment... which was to have crowned their entire history... this all but divine race perished in a single night. In the centuries since that unexplained catastrophe... even their cloud-piercing towers... of glass and porcelain and adamantine steel... have crumbled back into the soil ... and nothing, absolutely nothing remains above ground.
Recently I have turned up some rather puzzling indications... that in those final days before their annihilation... the Krell had been applying their entire racial energies... to a new project... one which they actually seemed to hope... might somehow free them once and for all... from any dependence on physical instrumentalities...

Commander Adams - The big machine... cubic miles of Klystron relays... enough power for a whole population of creative geniuses... operated by remote control, Morbius, operated by the electromagnetic impulses... of individual Krell brains. To what purpose? In return, that machine would instantaneously project solid matter... to any point on the planet, in any shape or color they might imagine... for any purpose, Morbius! Creation by mere thought.

Dr. M - Why haven't I seen this all along?

Commander A - Like you, the Krell forgot one deadly danger... their own subconscious hate and lust for destruction. The beast. The mindless primitive. Even the Krell must have evolved from that beginning. And so those mindless beasts of the subconscious... had access to a machine that could never be shut down. The secret devil of every soul on the planet... all set free at once to loot and maim... and take revenge and kill!
(Forbidden Planet 1956)

That scenario was shown by WS in The Tempest - Prospero was the master of both Ariel and Caliban by his magic, just as, in Forbidden Planet, Dr. Morbius is the master of both the benign robot he consciously created and the malignant monster his subconscious mind created using the Krell machine. The magic of machines is likely to be more black than white unless human nature drastically improves, which it has shown only a limited likelihood of doing thus far. Who do you trust to make the decision? But, ask first - how far do you trust yourself?

Above, Prof. Sir Martin Rees said - the far future will bear traces of humanity...and ... if so, aliens are likely long ago to have transitioned beyond the organic stage.

Traces of humanity contained in what kind of inorganic alien beings? That's the question.
A Krellish Ariel, or Hellish Caliban, married to a trace of Dr. Morbius - just enough to give them direction, for better, or for worse?