[p2p-research] Drone hacking

[Ryan Lanham]

On Thu, Dec 24, 2009 at 1:18 PM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:

> our ethical record is mixed, and unfortunately, we don't have anybody to
> cede it to, this is why we need to develop it further, in a p2p way,
>
> the neural alchemist trilogy of peter hamilton has a interesting thesis: no
> space civilisation made it without such a ethical breakthrough, that must
> occur when a planetary civilisation reaches the stage where it can destroy
> itself ... exactly the stage where we are now!
>
> Michel
>
>
I see no need of breakthrough.  To me, P2P becomes increasingly obvious as
we move toward a highly intelligent environment where abundant capacity
comes to the fore.

To your credit Michel, you have been all around the problem space, I'd
suggest you need only stop rejecting seeming dead ends and reuse the
components to combine theories into new outcomes.

Thirty years ago, no nanotech, minimal serious genetics, no cell phones, no
PCs...almost no understanding of complex diseases, large data sets, etc.  30
years from now we will have accelerated much further regardless of what
ethics people deploy.

I suppose it also depends on what we mean by human.  The Science &
Technology Studies (STS) crowd plays with this a lot.  We'll have hybrids
and monsters of all sorts in the interim.

Whether we are extending the bounds of what it is to be human, or creating
something that is new and autonomous is a quibble, ultimately.  First flight
was a glider or a kite-like affair little more than a human extension.
Within 4 decades we had jets and guided missiles.

I prefer (at the risk of reductionism) to think of our component elements as
things we can do or things we can automate.  Clearly we can automate lifting
or locomotion now quite trivially...though it was just 200 years ago that
serious automation of locomotion began.

What is interesting about us in a modern sense is our capacity to
learn--morality is an afterthought.  Learning is really the feature that
makes us different.

We learn because we have evolved structures that facilitate learning, but
our sensors aren't all that great (good but not great).  What makes us
different is the neural capacity to learn.  Reasoning is trivial...Plato
built reasonable models of it 2500 years ago.  Morality is largely normative
or trivial...automating a static minded Supreme Court judge would be easier
than automating a student.  It is learning that is complex.

We do need to be a bit reductionist to understand learning...and we have
tried different approaches...many of which will now start to merge together
and accelerate.  With the current advances, we will soon have the compute
ability to simulate (reasonably) a human mind.  We know more and more about
our own actions.   We can predict our own approaches...how we start to
approach learning.

It is not something to be feared I am confident.  If we had abundant
learning, abundant moral reasoning, we could indeed cede power to that
better angel of ourselves.
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