Singularity
| At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this week, the director of the MIT Media Lab, Joi Ito said the visions of computers and humans put forward by Ray Kurzweil and other proponents of the Singularity emphasizes the wrong priorities for development. According to Ito, technological progress should aim for resilience, not efficiency. |
According to Ito, who recently spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Kurzweil's vision of the Singularity-- when super intelligent artificial intelligence and nanotechnology make immortally possible and computer progress is so fast that the future becomes profoundly unknowable -- is a bad idea.
Active in the internet, Ito is the Chairman of Creative Commons. He is also currently on the board of Digital Garage, Culture Convenience Club (CCC), Tucows, Machinima.com, EPIC, Technorati, and WITNESS.
As a venture capitalist and angel investor Ito was an early stage investor in Kickstarter ,Twitter, Six Apart, Technorati, Flickr, SocialText, Dopplr, Last.fm, Rupture, Kongregate, Etology Inc, Fotopedia and other Internet companies.
The author of Emergent Democracy, Ito has been head of the MIT Media Lab since September 2011, considered an "unusual choice" since Ito studied at two colleges, but did not finish his degrees.
At Davos, Ito said he believes the Singularity vision puts the wrong priorities first.
"I'm on the other side of the Singularity guys. I don't think immortality is a good thing," Ito said. People who think about maximizing efficiency "don't think about the ecological, social-network effects. In the future, every science invention we do should be at least neutral," and preferably positive.
"When you introduce immortality, you have to think about what does it do to the system. At the Media Lab, our design principle is not to make the world more efficient, but making the system more resilient, more robust."
Ito sees the rise of robotics and AI as an impetus to change education.
"You're training kids to become obedient members of a mass-production society," he said. "But as there's more and more automation, you want people to be more and more creative," like kindergarten when children spend more time playing around, exploring, and teaching each other. Educational testing and evaluation today judges kids in a computer-free testing environment completely unrelated to what's in the real world.
Today, "you can look on the Internet, you can ask your friends," Ito said. "'Cheating' is actually a feature. Success as an adult is how resourceful you are at getting people to help you do things. Those are all unassessed things" in today's schools and tests.
Following these principles, the Ito-led MIT Media Lab favors a more unstructured environment. "Our students and faculty can explore whatever they want. We just let them go," Ito said. "If you're not asking permission and writing proposals, the cost of innovation is very low."
Students can talk about ideas in the morning and "by the afternoon they've built a prototype," he said, especially now that 3D printers make rapid prototyping a reality.
Ito had grand visions for how 3D printers will change manufacturing. "We're going to be manufacturing things everywhere instead of centrally. Every single person is going to become a designer," he predicted.
Ito thinks technology should help people rethink what's possible with cities, he also said.
He proposes people able should be able to do things like page buses on demand, and rentable commuter bicycles should be cheaper to use if people drop them off in high-demand areas.
"We're trying to look at the city from a software perspective and build the hardware around it," Ito said.
SOURCE CNET, Top Image: Joi Ito
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I'm not quite sure that Mr. Ito has put so much thought into his analysis of the Singularity. While I have my own reservations about the outcome, none of it arises from thoughts about sustainability due to immortality. If you follow the line just a step or two further it's clear that consciousness would quickly evolve (i.e. intelligence explosion, or in other words scientific knowledge and it's applications being explored at speeds ranging from near instantaneous to merely several magnitudes faster than human capability) so that it would exist on some kind of digital substrate, and thus there wouldn't be any of this overpopulation nonsense at all.
ReplyDeleteNow, whether or not these transcendant beings take it upon themselves to completely convert the Earth, the Sun, and the Solar System in total into some kind of computronium or other resources to further propagate themselves into the Universe is perhaps a more pressing anxiety for the environment than overpopulation. It would be much appreciated if those individuals who choose to speak about these ideas in the press would at least make themselves acquainted with even the basic lines of thought on it.
This guy seems a bit more intelligent than that other singularity-critic, Sterling... Most of what Ito says seems eminently reasonable and insightful. The point about humans being more creative as robots & AIs take over the more redundant, menial tasks is a a good point to take home. But I don't want to die :( I am not disheartened in my enthusiasm for singularitarian thinking, really, because Ito does not seem to put forward any strong argument against concepts like digital immortality, he seems to merely say he thinks its a bad idea. Why? If Mr. Ito wants to die at any point I would not necessarily stand in his way, but I don't, and if it is within the limits of human ability through technology to suspend aging, or upload minds to more durable substrates, we should support that research. Not out of fear of death, but out of love for life.
ReplyDeleteHis comments were quite disappointing because he really just stated that he was on the other side of those Singularity guys and then proceeded to talk about his own views on where education should go. No real connection between Singularity thought and what he wanted to discuss.
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