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Re55: The Computer Control Game

Retraice^1

It's like football--no, poker--no, chess--no, war.

Air date: Saturday, 19th Nov. 2022, 11:00 PM Eastern/US.

Is war a game?

The rise of computer control (AI, more or less^2) is happening at break-neck speed. If we agree that it, like other major events in history, is player-oriented,^3 it seems like a player-oriented game being played by players. But it also seems like a war.

What is victory? It's not going to be like sports, or chess or poker. It's going to be like war. And now, our time, feels like the lead-up to war. It seems like a game-theory sort of game, like the nuclear arms race was.^4

A singleton is bad, probably

Bostrom gives two definitions of `singleton':^5 o "[A] world order in which there is at the global level a single decision-making agency."^6 o "[A] sufficiently internally coordinated political structure with no external opponents."^7

The question will be whether a singleton is better or worse than the alternatives, not `bad' or `good'.^8

But a (new) singleton is game victory

A singleton might be what constitutes `victory'. And humanity is already a singleton over the Earth, "a single decision-making agency" "with no external opponents". So the players would be playing to create and/or join the new, computer-control-based singleton. Humans are the top of the food chain, literally and figuratively, in every way that we `eat' on this planet. There's nothing in the Amazon, or in the oceans, that can fight back against us.

But not all humans are part of the "decision-making agency" within humanity.

(Bostrom says we're not a singleton.^9)

If we are a singleton

We are, in a sense, multiple competing superintelligences, in the form of coalitions.^10 If we are a singleton, than we are, in a sense, a "multi-polar scenario": "[A] post-transition society with multiple competing superintelligent agencies."^11

I.e. we might already be effectively `in' one of the scenarios that Bostrom and others are anticipating. But they expect it in the future, as the result of future technology.^12

By a certain set of definitions, we're already in a singleton, and the players in the game are playing to win the next one.^13

Three modes of thinking

* Mode 0: Don't care (`don't know what happened'); * Mode 1: Don't know (`wonder what happened'); This is Retraice, so far. * Mode 2: Don't doubt (`make things happen'). This is `player' mode.

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References

Bostrom, N. (2014). Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford. First published in 2014. Citations are from the pbk. edition, 2016. ISBN: 978-0198739838. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=978-0198739838 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+978-0198739838 https://lccn.loc.gov/2015956648

Brockman, J. (Ed.) (2019). Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI. Penguin. ISBN: 978-0525557999. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=978-0525557999 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+978-0525557999 https://lccn.loc.gov/2018032888

Crawford, K. (2021). Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. Yale University Press. ISBN: 978-0300209570. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780300209570 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780300209570 https://lccn.loc.gov/2020947842

Lee, K.-F. (2018). AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN: 978-1328546395. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9781328546395 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9781328546395 https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/search?searchArg=9781328546395

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Gingko Press. ISBN: 1584230738. Originally published 1964. This ed. 2003. https://archive.org/details/understandingmed0000mclu_n3p7 Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=1584230738 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+1584230738 https://lccn.loc.gov/2003012174

Retraice (2022/10/19). Re22: Computer Control. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re22 Retrieved 19th Oct. 2022.

Retraice (2022/11/07). Re43: The Midterms -- Part 1. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re43 Retrieved 9th Nov. 2022.

Retraice (2022/11/18). Re54: Implications and Endgames. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re54 Retrieved 19th Nov. 2022.

Weizenbaum, J. (1976). Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation. W. H. Freeman and Company. ISBN: 0716704633. Also available at: https://archive.org/details/computerpowerhum0000weiz

Wiener, N. (1954). The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Da Capo, 2nd ed. ISBN: 978-0306803208. This 1954 ed. missing `The Voices of Rigidity' chapter of the original 1950 ed. See 1st ed.: https://archive.org/details/humanuseofhumanb00wien/page/n11/mode/2up. See also Brockman (2019) p. xviii. Searches for the 2nd ed.: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780306803208 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780306803208 https://lccn.loc.gov/87037102

Yudkowsky, E. (2013). Intelligence explosion microeconomics. Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Technical report 2013-1. https://intelligence.org/files/IEM.pdf Retrieved ca. 9th Dec. 2018.

Footnotes

^1 https://www.retraice.com/retraice

^2 Retraice (2022/10/19). Cf. Crawford (2021) pp. 8-9 on the "discomfort in the computer science community" with the term `artificial intelligence', as opposed to, now, `machine learning'.

^3 Retraice (2022/11/18).

^4 See Lee (2018) on the competition in AI between the U.S. and China.

^5 He also gives a more broad definition, in a glossary (p. 409), that includes `world democracy' and `world dictator', which we didn't mention during the livestream.

^6 Bostrom (2014) p. 96.

^7 Bostrom (2014) p. 124.

^8 Bostrom (2014) p. 109.

^9 Bostrom (2014) p. 125.

^10 See Retraice (2022/11/07) on coalitions.

^11 Bostrom (2014) p. 194.

^12 Bostrom (2014); Yudkowsky (2013). Cf. Weizenbaum (1976) and Wiener (1954), and perhaps McLuhan (1964), who focus more on the human aspect of the rise of computer control.

^13 There is an apparent contradiction, if we define a singleton as permanent or unchanging. But why do that? Singletons should not be defined to be eternal and static.