Machine Autonomy Skepticism 1. Taking autonomous machines seriously According to the US Department of Defense, as of October 2008 unmanned aircraft have flown over 500,000 hours and unmanned ground vehicles have conducted over 30,000 missions in support of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over the past few years a number of government and military agencies, professional societies, and ethics boards have released reports suggesting policies and ethical guidelines for designing and employing autonomous war machines. In these reports, the word ‘autonomous’ is used more or less uncritically to refer to a variety of technologies, including automated systems, unmanned teleoperated vehicles, and fully autonomous robots. Describing such artifacts as ‘autonomous’ is meant to highlight a measure of independence from their human designers and operators. However, the very idea of autonomous artifacts is suspiciously paradoxical, and little philosophical work has been done to provide a general account of machine autonomy that is sensitive to both philosophical concerns and the current state of technological development. Without a framework for understanding the role human designers and operators play in the behavior of autonomous machines, the legal, ethical, and metaphysical questions that arise from their use will remain murky. My project is to lay the groundwork for building an account of autonomous machines that can systematically account for the range of behavior demonstrated by our best machines and their relative dependence on humanity. Pursuing this project requires that we take autonomous machines seriously and not treat them as wide-eyed speculative fictions. As a philosophical project, taking autonomous machines seriously requires an address to the skeptic, who unfortunately occupies the majority position with respect to technology. The skeptic of machine autonomy holds that any technological machine designed, built, and operated by human beings is dependent on its human counterparts in a way that fundamentally constrains its […]

Another essay in the “Things I believe that you probably don’t” series Extremism has been getting a bad rap lately. It gets blamed for acts of terror, for political dysfunction, and for general cruelty and hatred. Few people will admit to being an extremist; the ones who do often appear unreasonable and difficult to work with. Extremism is opposed moderation, which is the reasonable and practical demeanor we are all urged to adopt. Moderation isn’t just the alternative to extremism, it is also claimed to be the tactic best used to counter extremism where it lies. Michael Kazin recently attempted a defense of extremism (and, by proxy, of Ted Cruz) in the New Republic: Sometimes, those who take an inflexible, radical position hasten a purpose that years later is widely hailed as legitimate and just. Extremism is the coin of conviction, whether virtuous or malign. It forces middle-roaders to crush the disrupter or adapt. Kazin goes on to list the examples you’d expect to find in an article like this: abolitionism and the suffragettes, and Goldwater’s pedantic reworking of Cicero in 1964: “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” These arguments are all instrumental in character: they purport to show that extremism is a viable and effective tactic for realizing one’s ideological principles, and moreover that extremism has been responsible for what have come to be some of our most important institutional values. The claim is that extremism works, and we are evidence of is success. Ted Cruz might be the punching bag of the moment, but Kazin assures us that history vindicates the extremists that stick to their principles and shun moderation. Given this instrumental argument, one would expect some explanation […]

There are plenty of stories about what’s going on with the shutdown, both in terms of the banalities of D.C. politics and legal arcana, and in terms of the impact it has and will continue to have on real people’s lives. But none of this really gives us much perspective on the event in terms of the narratives we tell about ourselves, collectively, in order to make sense of it all. So maybe this will help: our country is having a stroke. A stroke happens when a part of the brain loses function due to lack of blood flow. The blockage can happen in a variety of ways, but what matters is that the juice isn’t flowing to the brain, and so parts of it shut down and stop functioning. The analogy to our government shutdown works surprisingly well, if you can stomach its implications. I’m not trying to make a small political point or lay the blame anywhere. Determining whether the blockage was caused by the Tea Party or the medical insurance lobby or the broken and constraining conventions of Congressional procedure at this point is like wondering while it happens whether a stroke was caused by poor diet, lack of exercise, or genetic disposition. The more important lesson going forward is that the system is in poor health and is experiencing trauma as a result. It should be noted that, contrary to certain memes currently being spread, an organic system (like a “government”) is not the sort of thing that can be “turned off and on again” in the way that is default for much of our digital gadgetry. Your computer suddenly works after a reboot because powering off also dumps the memory, and hopefully eliminates whatever corrupt files were causing the problem. In this way, rebooting is […]

About a week or so back, I wrote a longish critique of +Jason Silva‘s philosophy of technology. Although my comment was critical and negative, I don’t believe I trolled, insulted, or otherwise abused anyone in the thread. Nevertheless, my comment has since been deleted. See for yourself: https://plus.google.com/u/0/102906645951658302785/posts/U4EFvbX9pa5 You’ll notice a few direct responses to my comment, and my replies to those comments are still around, but my original comment has been deleted. Luckily, I archived it here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/117828903900236363024/posts/J2TxJqhSv2D I’m rather disappointed that Silva chose to censor my critique, instead of addressing it and taking it seriously. I think I’m raising legitimate concerns that ought to be addressed. I’ve enjoyed engaging the responses from Silva’s fans, including some G+ science heavyweights whom I respect a lot, like +Fraser Cain. I’ve tried to engage the community in a respectful manner with the goal of discussion and dialogue. I’m not trying to start a fight, I’m just trying to do some philosophy on a topic I care about at least as much as Jason. I’d understand if Jason is too busy to respond, but I don’t understand the need to delete my comment. He’s since reshared the talk, presumably to get a fresh comment thread going without my critique. I’m not trying to troll, so I’ll leave the thread alone. However, Silva’s series of talks makes it clear that he’s willing to stake quite a lot of his intellectual motivation on this idea of “exponential thinking”. In my original critique, I argued that this term is empty, and has no basis in neuroscience, psychology, or philosophy. The only academic reference you’ll find for the term comes from the Singularity Institute and their brand of futurism. That’s fine if you’re looking to give motivational speeches to the tech industry, but as a philosophical […]

// This essay was originally posted here. I have complex feelings about +Jason Silva. He describes his work as “philosophical espresso shots” of “psychedelic art” conveying wonder and awe in technology “as the manifestation of our dreams”. I’m all in favor of psychedelic art. I’ve honestly found some of Silva’s art to be inspired, and I’ve used it in my classes. It’s started some interesting discussions. But I’ve also found myself needing to say a lot to provide background and context for the claims he makes. Sometimes I can, but too often I find that in fact _there is no background_ for helping to make sense of the claims being made in this work. There is very little theory supporting the stream-of-consciousness style association of infobytes and futurism. Maybe I come from a different school, but for me philosophy is associated with rigor and clarity of thought, in the pursuit of _understanding_. What Silva packages as “wonder and awe” is too often just disguised bewilderment. Perhaps we should encourage a childlike sense of wonder, but I also think we should try to cultivate clear and mature thinking wherever possible. In any case, we should be careful to distinguish wonder from bewilderment. Wonder is a sense of fascination that encourages further exploration. Presumably, that exploration ought to settle into a mature and developed understanding of a field– not to eliminate wonder but rather to mark intellectual progress and to encourage still further exploration of the details. Bewilderment, on the other hand, is the sense of confusion one feels when overwhelmed by experiences one can only just barely process. Bewilderment might be an inevitable aspect of any learning experience (including psychedelic ones), but it is clearly distinct from wonder, and it isn’t so clearly something that we should be encouraging. Learning, done […]

Things I believe that you probably don’t volume 1 Human Caste Systems I believe that human beings naturally self-organize into components that tend to accommodate the larger organizations in which they are embedded. That doesn’t mean that people are always altruistic or considerate of others; it just means that people will tend to work together towards organized interests when provided the opportunity. I’m thinking, for instance, about the ways a crowd might distribute itself inside a subway train: how they make room to accommodate incoming and outgoing passengers, or passengers with special needs, and so on. Each individual on the train must consider not just their local territory but also the distribution of other passengers on the car in order to determine where best to settle. Since each of us is in a different position relative to the others and the distribution of people on the train is regularly in flux, the passengers are each performing a slightly distinct balancing act in subtle coordination with all the rest. I’d hardly describe this process as “altruistic”, but it’s certainly an investment in collective, cooperative behavior, and it’s frankly amazing that we not only have the ability to do it, but that we actually do. Not always, but enough to run all the cities. I also believe that what we take to be the “appropriate” distribution of persons in space is influenced at a deep structural level by the conceptual and procedural assumptions shared by all the individuals on that train, and furthermore that many of those structures are socially conditioned. The “appropriate” distribution of persons on a bus, or the accommodations taken to be adequate for persons with special needs, or indeed, whose needs are worth considering at all, are all going to change depending on the social and historical circumstances […]

Privacy is not a digital value. That doesn’t mean that privacy is dead, or that privacy doesn’t matter. It means that privacy is not the kind of value that naturally emerges from the system of concepts, technologies, and social norms that characterize the digital age. And that means privacy is going to be a hard value to maintain, so if privacy is something we value we’re going to have to do a lot of extra work because the framework we’re in doesn’t have much respect for it. I’m a digital advocate. I think the digital values are important and worth endorsing, and before we get all worked up about privacy it is important to remember the unique benefits of the values that the digital age does support. Sharing is the kind of value that emerges naturally from a digital framework; the concepts, tools, and social expectations of our age are all oriented to support it. In some sense it is the primary value from which all other digital values flow, the way that Aristotle’s virtues all followed the form of the Good. Sharing also allows for the reproduction-with-variation routine so popular in other natural arenas, which explains both the dynamism of our age and the readiness with which we adopt its rhythms. Sharing is also pretty obviously in tension with the value of privacy. While privacy is not a digital value, it is a value of humanism: that set of concepts, tools, and norms that characterized the age of enlightenment and its incredibly productive political and intellectual fruit. The core humanistic value is freedom, and privacy was valued in humanistic frameworks to the extent that it ensured the possibility of freedom. Privacy isn’t a core value of humanism the way sharing is a core digital value, so I don’t believe […]

Community detection in graphs Santo Fortunato 2010 http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.0612 // This is a major literature review, totaling over 100 pages (including references), about different methods for detecting communities and clusters in graphs. There are lots of different methods and algorithms for defining and identifying a “community”, and there are no universally agreed upon definitions or methods, but these reviews are very useful for understanding the state of network science. // I went through and clipped the majority of the 40+ figures and example networks, and uploaded them to the photo album archive on my G+ stream. I’ve also curated a few pages of key information, especially concerning modularity and hierarchy, for easy browsing and reference here. // I strongly encourage people to check out the original paper, which includes an appendix introducing basic terms and concepts in graph theory. Abstract: The modern science of networks has brought significant advances to our understanding of complex systems. One of the most relevant features of graphs representing real systems is community structure, or clustering, i. e. the organization of vertices in clusters, with many edges joining vertices of the same cluster and comparatively few edges joining vertices of different clusters. Such clusters, or communities, can be considered as fairly independent compartments of a graph, playing a similar role like, e. g., the tissues or the organs in the human body. Detecting communities is of great importance in sociology, biology and computer science, disciplines where systems are often represented as graphs. This problem is very hard and not yet satisfactorily solved, despite the huge effort of a large interdisciplinary community of scientists working on it over the past few years. We will attempt a thorough exposition of the topic, from the definition of the main elements of the problem, to the presentation of most methods […]

// My Complexity thread in SA is starting to pick up some discussion. Here’s an essay I wrote for the discussion: McDowell wrote: Adam Curtis’ “All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace” deals with the history of Systems Theory, Ecology, and the political implications – primarily in part 2 I’ll repeat that this is a terrible documentary. Systems thinking and cybernetics should definitely not be conflated with individualism or Randian-style libertarianism, yet the documentary takes a critique of the latter as sufficient for damning the former. The move is not without precedent; as I mentioned earlier, Hayek famously argued (as you and Curtis seem to be endorsing) that the complexity of natural systems (especially human social and economic systems) makes them impossible to model and predict, and therefore the project of governing and planning for such systems is a hopeless waste of time, causing more problems than it solves. Hayek concludes the obvious free market libertarian positions; Curtis is a little more reserved and simply critiques the hype over computers as a stabilizing and organizing force. While it is true that computers aren’t necessarily a stabilizing force (anyone who has lived for the last 20 years has plenty of empirical evidence to the contrary), it is just as true that computer modeling is a successful way of generating reliable predictions in some domains, and that the predictive success of a model depends a lot on the nature of the model and the complexity of the system being modeled. Perhaps this is a place to talk a little more about complexity. One of the defining characteristics of a complex system is that there are many perspectives to take on the system, not all of which will be consistent, but each of which might nevertheless be useful for making predictive inferences […]

Note: I recently posted a major effort post on the Something Awful forums to introduce some recent research in complex systems theory. This is basically a curated version of my G+ stream from the last few months to highlight research relating to complexity and organization, so there isn’t really anything new. Still, I thought it would be good to archive and repost the work here. ________________ It shouldn’t surprise anyone that our ability to model the global climate, to visualize partial 3D neural pathways, to complete the standard model, to predict the spread of disease epidemics or the outbreak of food riots all happen to occur at roughly the same time in history that computers start beating humans at Jeopardy! and 2.4 billion people (almost 70% of the west) are busy collectively churning out about 2.5 quintillion bits of data every day. In the last two decades, humanity has become very good at collecting, moving, and sorting through massive amounts of data, and have become more comfortable with the network theory and computational tools for modeling information at these scales. These models allow one to view system-level activity and organizational behavior unlike anything we’ve had before. It’s had a strongly unifying effect in the sciences, and in addition to changing many of our customs and norms (and successfully knocking the environment out of a relatively stable state) it has also brought some important changes to the way we think about science. This combination is already starting to have some dramatic impact on our future and what we can do with it. “Big Data” is a term that is obviously designed to scare the ignorant and emasculate the public. What matters, of course, is not the size of the our data but fact that the mountains of information we all constantly […]