Suprablog HQ

There is an excellent article on the New York Times called The Rise of the Machines, which details just how little anyone seems to understand some of the financial instruments and their vast global interdependencies.

It reminds me first and foremost of the time that I saw Bill Joy speak at the Kennedy School of Government. It was in the midst of the dot com boom, and Bill Joy was singing to quite a different tune. According to Joy, with three main inputs into the future, science and technological progress, broader access to education and the spread of information, and violence, one of them has to change to avoid impending doom. The unabomber was working on retarding the first, no one has ever successfully seriously slowed the second (and do we want to have to obtain a “license” to be educated?), and so the third looks strangely like the most likely to change in the most fundamental way as little as that seems any more possible than altering the first two.

I also read a book called Digital Soul, which was actually much more interesting than I expected. I thought it was going to rehash all of the same issues, but it presented some fairly interesting insights. For example, people often ponder “artificial intelligence”, but in the book, Thomas Georges introduced me to the term “artificial stupidity”, asking what it would even look like. The idea is generally that we assume that a superior intelligence would look a lot like our own, using human intelligence as the benchmark, and how stupidity must be included in human definitions of intelligence. However, we already have computer intelligence that is far, far superior to our own, just different for different purposes. How would we recognize a superior intelligence if it emerged any more than a cow can recognize our intelligence as superior to its own?

Overall, I continue to insist that we need to put money back in the service of humanity. It is the lever that has the most leverage on all three major inputs into the future given how pervasive it is. I found it interesting and completely unsurprising to read that Ithaca, NY, aims to become America’s first Podcar City. Tell me there is no correlation between that type of progressive, big dream thinking, and one of the main types of money that they use.

Which would be better? A one trillion dollar bailout of wacky financial instruments that no one understands (merely perpetuating and prolonging this deaf, dumb, and blind system of things…if we do that at least we should teach “it” to read), or a global supersonic maglev subway system allowing anyone to get anywhere in the world in under three hours? The latter could probably even be accomplished for less than that, but we the humans have no choice in the matter. The only way to prove otherwise is to just do it.