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Why is the language of transhumanists & religion so similar?

#1
C C Offline
https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-the-langua...so-similar

EXCERPT: [...] The odd thing about the anti-clericalism in the AI community is that religious language runs wild in its ranks, and in how the media reports on it. There are AI ‘oracles’ and technology ‘evangelists’ of a future that’s yet to come, plus plenty of loose talk about angels, gods and the apocalypse. Ray Kurzweil, an executive at Google, is regularly anointed a ‘prophet’ by the media – sometimes as a prophet of a coming wave of ‘superintelligence’ (a sapience surpassing any human’s capability); sometimes as a ‘prophet of doom’ (thanks to his pronouncements about the dire prospects for humanity); and often as a soothsayer of the ‘singularity’ (when humans will merge with machines, and as a consequence live forever). The tech folk who also invoke these metaphors and tropes operate in overtly and almost exclusively secular spaces, where rationality is routinely pitched against religion. But believers in a ‘transhuman’ future – in which AI will allow us to transcend the human condition once and for all – draw constantly on prophetic and end-of-days narratives to understand what they’re striving for.

From its inception, the technological singularity has represented a mix of otherworldly hopes and fears. [...] When the singularity is conceived as an entity or being, the questions circle around what it would mean to communicate with a non-human creature that is omniscient, omnipotent, possibly even omnibenevolent. This is a problem that religious believers have struggled with for centuries, as they quested towards the mind of God. [...] Now, in online forums, rationalist ‘singularitarians’ debate what such a being would want and how it would go about getting it, sometimes driving themselves into a state of existential distress at the answers they find.

In one notorious case from 2014, singularitarians posited a strictly utilitarian superintelligence known as ‘Roko’s Basilisk’. It was named after Roko, the user who first proposed it on the rationalist blog LessWrong, and the Basilisk, a mythological creature that was believed to kill people with its stare. In Roko’s version, the creature was described as a near-omnipotent AI entity. Because the Basilisk acts relentlessly to create the greatest good for the greatest number, and logically deduces that only its existence can ensure this outcome, it creates an incentive to bring itself into existence: it will punish any humans, even after their death, who don’t put their efforts into trying to create it. The mechanism behind this punishment is complex – but suffice it to say that, once you know about the Basilisk, you face a possible eternity in a computer-simulated prison, thanks to the Basilisk’s super-predictive powers and its capacity to manipulate cause and effect.

Humans are therefore faced with an invidious choice once they learn about Roko’s Basilisk: they can help to build the superintelligence, or face painful and unending perdition at the hands of a future, ultra-rational AI. Eliezer Yudkowsky, the founder of LessWrong, was so concerned by this train of thought and the angst it caused some members of his forum that he deleted the original post and banned all commentary about the Basilisk.

However, the Basilisk isn’t really a new dilemma. ‘I’ve been familiar with Roko’s Basilisk for 40 years. They taught me the concept in Sunday school in the first grade, by telling me that God would punish anyone who heard His Word and still disbelieved,’ a commenter wrote on the religious forum Patheos. ‘Nearly every religion has such a claim.’

You too might have recognised elements of the Basilisk: it’s a revised and updated version of Pascal’s Wager. Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century French mathematician and theologian, proposed that, since we cannot know of the creator’s existence through human reason, we can only take a bet. If we choose to believe, and if God does in fact exist, then we receive eternal happiness, and a mere nothing if we are wrong. By contrast, if we choose to not believe, then we risk eternal damnation if God does in fact exist – and again, only nothingness if we are correct and he does not. So weighing the respective possibilities of eternal torment against eternal salvation, the best course of action is to act as if God is real, and either receive his blessings or nothing at all. The secular Basilisk stands in for God as we struggle with the same questions again and again.

At a different AI conference, this time in London, I saw the British writer Calum Chace give a talk about two singularities. The economic singularity, as he calls it, is a future where work is doomed in an increasingly automated world. He set this up against the technological singularity, the superintelligence predicted by prophets such as Kurzweil. The two scenarios seem to be expressing different types of fear: the worry about being jobless is hardly the same kind of problem as dealing with the nature and motivations of new, non-human intelligences. But it occurred to me that both situations involve moving beyond imagination and into what remains unknown....

MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-the-langua...so-similar
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#2
Magical Realist Offline
Four words---the promise of immortality. Unfortunately "millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon."---Susan Ertz
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