Through the Moravec Prism

Second Edition

Hans Moravec is the patriarch of robotics. The real one, not the Sci-Fi father. Asimov was just the prophet in this scheme of things. 

Moravec to Kurzweil is what's Bitcoin to Ethereum and Satoshi to Vitalik. Sorry, for the rough joke. No offence, Ray! Back in the earler 2000s I bought your books too. 

In my humble opinion - aside from the ''reality intratextualization'' concept - the other wisdom jewel of Moravec's - fruit of a life devoted to robotics - is the Moravec's Paradox . Explained in his own words: 

Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the human brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the world and how to survive in it. The deliberate process we call reasoning is, I believe, the thinnest veneer of human thought, effective only because it is supported by this much older and much more powerful, though usually unconscious, sensorimotor knowledge. We are all prodigious olympians in perceptual and motor areas, so good that we make the difficult look easy. Abstract thought, though, is a new trick, perhaps less than 100 thousand years old. We have not yet mastered it. It is not all that intrinsically difficult; it just seems so when we do it.

or with Steven Pinker's:   

The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. The mental abilities of a four-year-old that we take for granted – recognizing a face, lifting a pencil, walking across a room, answering a question – in fact solve some of the hardest engineering problems ever conceived... 

As I noted in a previous related essay of mine, a system's value dynamics is all about how it scales. Preferable of course are systems which make more good to go around than less. Respectively, to come around. 

Humanity is a network, and its scaling is stumbled by our innate attentional resources limitations. 

Human social interaction is a skill and we naturally have only as much of it. 

For now, in the good old hierarchic way, we can't deny that we scale satisfactory well (as compared, lets say, to our DNA-blockchain-fork-out first cousins the chimps) for collaborating efficiently on successful execution of trivial tasks like empire building or colonization of the Galaxy. 

But not all problems we encounter are simple. In fact most problems are more complex than we are capable to grok and master in the hierarchic collaboration mode, which quickly slams into the Shannon's 'brick wall'.

We will not dive into the abyss of AI studies here. Lets only skim the surface of the group intelligence of baseline humans.

Multiple approaches are intended to tackle intelligence amplification. Our focus now is rather on humanity upscaling. 

Why? 

Because, why wait (actually work hard) til 2050es to hold computer in our hands capable of out-thinks the whole humanity, if we have it right now?

The humanity itself! 

The problem of unscaling hierarchies is identified by very few researchers. Even fewer state, name and address it properly. 

And as far as,

'our social structures -- our institutions, our businesses, our governments -- all map to the way we communicate in large groups' (Robert Hettinga)

a progress in the direction of stronger collective intelligence, would mean not just upscaling humanity but the individual humans, too. 

Because we are literally AIs mass produced or serially manufacured by our society (ref.: feral children). 

It feels so easy for us to attend, to remember, to forget, to think, to talk, to work together - because it is so extremely Moravec-hard! 

The amplification of human collective intelligence approach is so valuable because it demonstrates that we do not indeed need to hurry up to waste time and resources to mimic nature and copy ourselves and to create high tech homunculi.

The 'problem' is the solution. Don't 'solve' it - just god damn use it! 

As Moravec found out few decades ago : 

The 1,500 cubic centimeter human brain is about 100,000 times as large as the retina, suggesting that matching overall human behavior will take about 100 million MIPS of computer power.  

When these processing human brain things are really put together in numbers the result is unprecedented power. An unstoppable force. 

Without application of dehumanizing individual genetic and other upgrades and without sticking wires in flesh, without to be necessary to understand and reengineer the billions of years of evolutionary capital, but just harness it and use it. 

If society is network and network is computer: 

- a new coherent 'laser' config outta good'ol human minds 'as are'. 

- a powerful vehicle to make us capable to safely traverse and conquer the beyond human realms, as well.

With performance stronger than thought.

The blockchain technology seems like unprecedented enabler of scaling human collaboration which is yet to see its Era. 

 

18qSKUUTAGw1uL53simrSiZ6pJpfxKACvj for research support. Thanks. 

Copyright © 2019 Georgi Karov. All rights reserved.