Thursday, October 19, 2017

Round Up #8

I finished War and Peace!  My review, on Good Reads.

Finds While Web Surfing.

From the Wikipedia article on Eliezer Yudkowsky, the following:

Citing Steve Omohundro's idea of instrumental convergence, Russell and Norvig caution that autonomous decision-making systems with poorly designed goals would have default incentives to treat humans adversarially, or as dispensable resources, unless specifically designed to counter such incentives.

This only puts me further in the camp of those who see globalized markets as our first brush up with run-away artificial intelligence.  It also, unfortunately adds to my suspicion that we as a species will not be able to coordinate well on enough on this matter to get our designs right to "counter such incentives."  On the other hand, AI research is a smaller group than the billions of economic actors in the world (understatement, I know).  Know hope, but still make living for today the biggest part of your portfolio of meaning.

Speaking of the perils of globalized markets, check out a piece on the mathematics of inequality.

Using a mathematical model devised to mimic a simplified version of the free market, he and colleagues are finding that, without redistribution, wealth becomes increasingly more concentrated, and inequality grows until almost all assets are held by an extremely small percent of people. . . [it] also shows that free markets cannot be stable without redistribution mechanisms. The reality is precisely the opposite of what so-called ‘market fundamentalists’ would have us believe.
Moloch, I say.  Moloch!

Reddit

I have been staying off more and more. However, I did run across this comment on why we don't need a "rotten tomatoes" for charities.

Also, I used the "collapse support sub" to express why and how I am going about an information diet.


Aphorisms/Shorts

"I'm extremely talented" and "I'm a victim" both often serve the same purpose: a no effort attempt to make the speaker look better, or, failing that, less bad.

My new summary of politics: you're all being played for chumps.

The Trump victory was white people's OJ verdict.

I’m certainly not a genius, just a world-class eccentric.