Scope Of Rules Construction And Definitions: Fill & Download for Free

Jingoistic nonsense, of course. It doesn’t matter which nation you fill in there, because it’s a meaningless statement.The big feature here is the use of “greatness.” What is greatness? How is it defined? Well, there is no widely accepted definition, so one can define and redefine it as one chooses. There are constructions of greatness by which Rome, China, Spain, Britain, the Mongol empire, and one or two iterations of ancient Persia are clearly at the top of the charts if you want to give weight to things like longevity, long-lasting influence of law and culture, and scope of rule (measured variously by area or percentage of humanity or share of economic productivity under its umbrella). But there are other ways which would put America at the top, or still others which would privilege other nations if you pick and choose the right arbitrary measurements.So, then, this is a completely subjective statement, along the lines of “bacon is the best food.” Everybody is entirely free to think their country is the greatest, but don’t start thinking that it’s an objective fact.

It generally means that one should avoid criticizing a group that is more oppressed than the one that you yourself belong to. The fly in the ointment here of course is how does one define oppressed? This isn’t easy. For one, levels and types of oppression differ. Add to that problems of intersectionality, criteria for membership and political expediency and we soon have a Gordian knot to entangle.The Original Gordian Knot Source: Cutting the Gordian KnotProgressives however take a sword to this knot and use a type of logic exemplified in the hypothetical below:Create four ranking systems based on race, gender, sexual orientation and class. Supply a score for every individual from 5 to 0 based on the degree of oppression that their specific group has suffered. 5 being the least oppressed. 0 the most.This is how the rules work in a nutshell.A 0 can criticize a 1 but not the other way around as long as the criticism is within the same category. In other words heat flows up not down.However a 0 in one category cannot criticize a 3 in another category if the first individual’s score in that specific category is greater than 3.A 0 in all four categories is by definition immune to all criticism. A 5 in all four is a virtual pinata.Ignore any residual factors that can complicate the model. It’s just noise.Everyone can be classified along this ranking system. I mean everyone.Oh I forgot…you better check your individualism at the door else you can expect some of this….https://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2018/06/is-kanye-west-an-uncle-tom.htmlSounds absurd. Of course it is.This is what happens when the collectivism of group identity politics triumphs over the sovereignty of the individual. What it leads to is the soft bigotry of low expectations.racism of low expectationsHowever all is not lost, one can take solace in being above the fray plus the virtue signalling opportunities are endless.On the other hand if you want pragmatic workable solutions to tough problems don’t limit the scope of the debate. Punching up or down is a nonsense construct and should be rejected as such.Cartoon Source: Tyrant Cartoons and Comics (Cartoon 1)and Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (Cartoon 2)

I think they are right that AI is dangerous, and they are dangerously wrong about why. I see two fairly likely futures.Future 1: AI destroys itself, humanity and most or all life on earth, probably a lot sooner than in 1000 years.Future 2: Humanity radically restructures its institutions to empower individuals, probably via transhumanist modification that effectively merges us with AI. We go to the stars.Right now, we are headed for Future 1, but we could change this. Much as I admire Elon Musk, his plan to democratise AI actually makes Future 1 more, not less, likely.Here's why:There's a sense in which humans are already building a specific kind of AI; indeed, we've been gradually building it for centuries. This kind of AI consists of systems that we construct and endow with legal, real-world power. These systems create their own internal structures of rules and traditions, while humans perform fuzzy brain-based tasks specified by the system. The system as a whole can act with an appearance of purpose, intelligence and values entirely distinct from anything exhibited by its human components.All nations, corporations and organisations can be considered as this kind of AI. I realise at this point it may seem like I'm bending the definition of AI. To be clear, I'm not suggesting organisations are sentient, self-aware or conscious, but simply that they show emergent, purpose-driven behaviour equivalent to that of autonomous intelligent agents. For example, we talk very naturally about how "the US did X", and that means something entirely different from "the people of the US did X" or "the president of the US did X", or even "the US government did X".These systems can be entirely ruthless toward individuals (just check the answers to What are some horrifying examples of corporate evil/greed? and What are the best examples of actions that are moral, even uplifting, but illegal? if you don't believe me). Such ruthlessness is often advantageous -- even necessary, because these systems exist in a competitive environment. They compete for human effort, involvement and commitment. Money and power. That's how they survive and grow. New organisations, and less successful ones, copy the features of dominant organisations in order to compete. This places them under Darwinian selection, as Milton Friedman noted long ago.Until recently, however, organisations have always relied upon human consent and participation; human brains always ultimately made the decisions, whether it was a decision to manufacture 600 rubber duckies or drop a nuclear bomb. So their competitive success has been somewhat constrained by human values and morals; there are not enough Martin Shkrelis to go around.With the advent of machine learning, this changes. We now have algorithms that can make complex decisions better and faster than any human, about practically any specific domain. They are being applied to big data problems far beyond human comprehension. Yet these algorithms are still stupid in some ways. They are designed to optimise specific parameters for specific datasets, but they're oblivious to the complexity of the real-world, long-term ramifications of their choices.So machine learning algorithms, increasingly, act like the neural ganglia of organisations; they do the computational heavy lifting, while humans act as messengers and mediators between them. The jobs machine learners are designed to do are those that help their organisations out-compete other organisations. And this is what we should expect any innovations that approach strong AI to be designed to do as well. To help organisations compete.There is, of course, great scope for this competition to be good for humanity: we get faster, better search results, more interesting Quora feeds, and more effective cancer drugs. But we must expect humans to be systematically dis-empowered. Why?Firstly, as machine learning algorithms improve, they will gradually be integrated with one another to form coherent, independent competitive systems that approach more traditional definitions of AI. Doing this will increase the system's overall efficiency, and thus make it more competitive. Humans will be removed from decision-making roles simply as a side-effect.Secondly, humans have moral scruples, empathy, selfishness, biases and foresight, all of which can limit the competitive effectiveness of the organisations we work for. The systems that win will be those that eliminate these human weaknesses. (We humans might not consider these things weaknesses, but in evolution, even foresight can be a weakness if it prevents you from advantaging yourself over your competitors.)Thirdly, we can also expect increasingly sophisticated control over our access to information, again for competitive reasons. What you don't know about, you can't fight. Arguably this is manifesting already in the ongoing battles between governments and corporations over internet regulation.So, AIs will be powerful and humans won't. Who cares? Here's the big problem with this scenario. These AIs are evolving under natural selection in a globally-connected world. One of the hardest problems for natural selection is the tragedy of the commons: a situation where multiple agents share a limited resource. Every agent has an individual incentive to take more than their share, but if too many do so, the resource is destroyed and everybody loses. Unfortunately, in most scenarios, agents cannot trust one another not to abuse the resource, so they predict (accurately) that it will be abused. Knowing this, the rational response for every agent is to abuse it.Humans are probably the only species capable of thinking our way around the tragedy of the commons, precisely because we have evolved a peculiarly cooperative cognitive architecture that makes strong, trusting relationships and social contracts seem natural to us. I see absolutely no reason why the AIs we are currently creating will share this cooperative ethos; from their evolutionary perspective, it is simply one of the human weaknesses that can be eliminated for competitive benefit. Our species evolved it in a very specific tribal environment where we experienced the tragedy of the commons, over and over at small local scales. Individuals who couldn't cooperate lost everything. The evolution of our organisations has the opposite trajectory: they compete in a highly connected world with abundant resources, a world where exponential growth is not only possible but expected. Currently evolving organisations have never experienced the tragedy of the commons, so they have no evolutionary incentive to develop any structure to deal with it effectively.I think if we were truly confronted with the humanitarian consequences of climate change, only a tiny proportion of individual humans would accept the risk and suffering entailed by inaction. Yet, despite acknowledging the data on this, nations continue to squabble over negligible reductions in carbon emissions. Individual humans have the foresight and global perspective to appreciate that this is a disaster, but our organisations are structured to deny that perspective precisely because it undermines their success in short-term competition.Providing open access to machine learning technologies, as Musk proposes, will only intensify competition among emerging AIs. If a small number of ruling AIs were to attain world domination, it's just possible they might be able to coordinate to avoid mutual destruction. But when millions of AIs are fighting for market share, the coordination problems involved in long-term sustainability become intractable.Perhaps humans still have enough power to win the fight over climate change. I don't know. But without drastic systemic change, we will be progressively locked out of major decisions and fed increasingly biased information to maintain compliance. On a world with finite resources and an economy based around exponential growth, we will inevitably face another global tragedy of the commons. Will our ruling AIs rise to the occasion? Why would they?