News — At The Edge — 4/14

Two sets of articles this week

• Presence of the past — tribalism and fighting the last war — is limiting our evolution.
• Presence of the future — science and technology vs. military industrial complex — is an ongoing conundrum.

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Presence of the past

Parasitism and the fight for the wrong century —

“Our fears tend to be of 20th century boogeymen…[but] world and its dystopias have moved on. The Nazis and the Soviets…inspired Orwell’s ‘1984’…[and] a world in which no one really fought for territory any more….

Wealth and power are no longer remotely related to how much real estate or raw materials you control…[and] attempting to occupy and control a hostile nation inevitably…costs enormously more than any possible benefits….

There are plenty of neo-fascists…and we often seem to be doing our best to accidentally construct…a police state out of modern technology… in the much-abused name of ‘security’….

There’s a new playbook for oppression today. Instead of outright totalitarian rule, you construct the appearance of democracy, while controlling it by subtly…restricting the options available…behind the scenes; or by simply outright stuffing the ballot box….

[Beauty] of this system — call it parasitism — is that it is very rare to encounter a challenger who cannot be co-opted…[with] enough wealth for its upper-tier…families to live lives of…gilded luxury, without the unpleasant threat of being assassinated or deposed that comes with outright fascism or totalitarianism….

These parasitic systems couldn’t exist without today’s technology. They are mostly networked, not hierarchical. They watch, they adapt, and they distract…[and] very rarely need to resort to violence, because, like the Borg, and like capitalism itself… parasitism usually has the capacity to absorb all those who confront it….

Presumably the solution is a technological one; let’s hope it’s discovered soon.” https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/01/ready-to-fight-for-the-wrong-century/

Civilization’s Anti-Human, Not Machines_April 2000, as millennium celebrations passed into history, Silicon Valley luminary, Bill Joy, wrote a provocative…_medium.com

Why Pure Reason Won’t End American Tribalism —

“[Positive reviews] Steven Pinker’s new bestseller Enlightenment Now…[say] we should be deeply grateful for the Enlightenment [legacy]…science, reason, and humanism….

[The] negative reviews say [he]…attributes too much of our past progress to Enlightenment thought…[and] faith in science and reason is naïve, given how often they’ve been misused; his assumption that scientifically powered progress will bring happiness betrays a misunderstanding of our deepest needs…[and] ignores the importance of enlightenment in the Eastern sense….

Though reason can help us solve the problems facing humankind, our species isn’t great at reasoning. We have ‘cognitive biases’…which inclines us to…welcome evidence that supports our views and to not notice, or reject, evidence at odds with them…[and] can be activated by tribalism…[and] challenges his sunny view of the future and calls into question his prescriptions….

Namely, it shapes and drives some of the cognitive distortions that muddy our thinking about critical issues; it warps reason…. The more you dislike the other tribe, the more uncritically you trust your experts and the more suspiciously you view the other tribe’s experts…[and] their evidence…[arousing] feelings of aversion, suspicion, perhaps even outrage….

Feelings are designed by natural selection to guide your behavior automatically, without you reflecting on them dispassionately….

Mindfulness involves being acutely aware of…your feelings and how they guide your thought…[to] be less inclined to reflexively reject evidence at odds with your views, less inclined to uncritically embrace…evidence supportive of your views….

[There’s] growing recognition that the once-sharp distinction between cognition and affect, between thinking and feeling, is untenable; thinking and feeling inform one another in a fine-grained and ongoing way….The problem isn’t that natural selection didn’t bless us with critical faculties; it’s that our feelings tell us when to use those faculties and when not to use them, and they do this in a way that typically escapes our conscious awareness….

Buddhist enlightenment is the sense in which it is a state of…absolute transcendence of the perspective of the self…[so] as you get less reactive and more reflective, you can, in principle, get better at objectivity….

By addressing the antagonism that underlies them, mindfulness can make direct inroads on the more obvious threat posed by tribalism — the conflicts that kill people, the simmering tensions that keep them from getting together and solving problems….

The great Enlightenment philosopher David Hume… wrote that reason is ‘the slave of the passions’….

After all, our minds are designed to delude us into thinking we are being reasonable when we’re not. It is only when we make it a practice to look carefully at the mechanics of the delusion — look at the way affect steers reason.” https://www.wired.com/story/why-pure-reason-wont-end-american-tribalism/

Ghost of Christmas Past?_As you read this you are aware of the fact that you are reading. At the same time, you are also aware of many other…_medium.com

Presence of the future

Need to make a molecule? Ask this AI for instructions —

“[AI] program that produces blueprints for the sequences of reactions needed to create small organic molecules…could speed up the process of drug discovery and make organic chemistry more efficient….

Chemists have conventionally scoured lists of reactions recorded by others, and drawn on their own intuition to work out a step-by-step pathway to make a particular compound. They usually work backwards, starting with the molecule they want to create and then analyzing which readily available reagents and sequences of reactions could be used to synthesize it…which can take hours or even days of planning….

[Now] deep-learning neural networks to imbibe essentially all known single-step organic-chemistry reactions — about 12.4 million of them…to predict the chemical reactions that can be used in any single step.

The tool repeatedly applies these neural networks in planning a multi-step synthesis, deconstructing the desired molecule until it ends up with the available starting reagents….[AI] learns from the data alone and does not need humans to input rules for it to use.” https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03977-w

‘The Business of War’: Google Employees Protest Work for the Pentagon —

“[A] letter protesting…involvement in a Pentagon program…[has] more than 3,100 signatures…[and] likely to intensify as [AI]…is increasingly employed for military purposes…[asks] Google pull out of Project Maven…and announce a policy that it will not ‘ever build warfare technology’….

Google and the Pentagon said the company’s products would not create an autonomous weapons system…[though] improved analysis of drone video could be used to pick out human targets….

[Eric Schmidt] serves on a Pentagon…Defense Innovation Board, as does a Google vice president, Milo Medin….Amazon touts its image recognition work with the Department of Defense, and Microsoft has promoted the fact that its cloud technology won a contract to handle classified information for every branch of the military….

Project Maven…began last year as a pilot program to find ways to speed up the military application of the latest A.I. technology….[T]he Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Cloud procurement program was in part designed to ‘increase lethality and readiness,’ underscoring the difficulty of separating software, cloud and related services from the actual business of war.’” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-ceo-pentagon-project.html

Quicksand of Our Past_History teaches men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. [Eban]_medium.com

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May you live long and prosper!Doc Huston