Martin Sustrik's Shortform

One man's singularity is another man's Tuesday:

The Singularity [is] the future point at which artificial intelligence exceeds human intelligence, whereupon immediately thereafter (as the story goes) the machines make themselves rapidly smarter and smarter and smarter, reaching a superhuman level of intelligence that, stuck as we are in the mud of our limited mentation, we can’t fathom.

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

What's easy to overlook in the above definition is that in the real world there's no generic "human intelligence", just the intelligence of individual human beings.

Not all of us are thus going to experience singularity at the same time. Some of us will have to deal with it sooner, some later.

Technological singularity, in other words, isn't an objective phenomenon. It's a subjective thing. In reality, unlike in the simplistic model, it does not resemble the absolute, indisputable physical singularity at the center of a black hole. It is more like black hole's event horizon, an imaginary border, a point of no return, through witch we pass, one at a time and often not even noticing.

Thinking about it in this way gives the discussion an empirical basis. We could ask: If the singularity is a subjective phenomenon, are there already people who have experienced it? Are there people for whom the world is already too fast-moving and too complex to follow? Are there people, who, stuck in the mud of their limited mentation, as Stanford Encyclopedia mercilessly puts it, can't fathom what's going on?

If so, we don't have to guess how the post-singularity world will look like. We can just ask.

And yes, there are flat-earthers out there and there are conspirational theorists of all flavours, so we definitely have something to work with...

And there seems to be a dilemma here:

Either you believe that the world that is too fast and too complex to follow is still somehow tractable - and it that case you should prove it by taking a flat-earther and helping them to adopt a better model of the world...

Or you believe that changing their mind is impossible and then you have to worry that once you cross the technological event horizon yourself, you will get lost yourself, that you will become just a high-IQ version of a conspiration theorist.

This is related to an idea I keep stressing here, which is that people rarely have consistent meta-level principles. Instead, they’ll endorse the meta-level principle that supports their object-level beliefs at any given moment. The example I keep giving is how when the federal government was anti-gay, conservatives talked about the pressing need for federal intervention and liberals insisted on states’ rights; when the federal government became pro-gay, liberals talked about the pressing need for federal intervention and conservatives insisted on states’ rights.

--- https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/

One encounters that kind of thing all the time, e.g. people trying to change the constitution to cause particular object-level changes.

But on the other hand, it feels like a useful political tool: Whoever is willing to sacrifice their object-level goals can achieve their meta-level goals instead. And given that meta-level changes are likely to have more profound long-term impact, it may be worth it.

Elaborating the above example, if you are anti-gay, but pro-state all you have to do is to wait until pro-gay people support strengthening the states at the expense of the federal government. At that point you can join forces with them and give more power to the states. I'll hurt your object anti-gay agenda, but you achieve your meta-level agenda which will keep paying off in 20 or 50 years when the gay issue is probably no longer salient enough to care.