Born to do Math 110 – Floridian Informational Meridian
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/01
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: One of my favorite Florida Man stories – the world’s worst superhero. Man murders an imaginary friend and turns himself in [Laughing]. That one really tickled me.
Rick Rosner: Most Florida Man stories, your immediate handle on most of them is that people are dumb, especially in Florida.
Jacobsen: 2/3ds of their mentally ill go untreated. It is a funny representation but also a serious issue.
Rosner: You start with the idea that people are frickin’ idiots. Then you have to dig down for as many stories of the guy. You go online and see if you can find stories that are more in-depth. Eventually, you either find more details you start fleshing it out yourself.
That is a lonely guy. He’s got an imaginary friend. He’s got anger issues, perhaps. You can make all these guesses as to what is going in the guy’s black box of a brain. It is going to be the same thing with humans, augmented humans, and machine learning. It will be different black boxes talking to one another.
Jacobsen: It will be two types of black boxes. Evolved things, they are bound to simply a dynamic life. They have development, decrepitude, and death. The artificially constructed ones, they may be dynamic. They could in their software. But, in general, they are static in their registration, in their information processing.
Rosner: We will begin to see a whole zoo of what you are calling “static” and “dynamic.” It will be a while before Google Translate begins to manifest explicitly conscious behavior. But it is not impossible to imagine.
Where you could imagine a busybody Google Translate, you are trying to translate from English to Russian. The system uses its accumulated experience of the world. Although, it may not be conscious.
It begins to accumulate an unconscious knowledge of what people want when they’re searching or typing, “Yea, you may not want that word, schmucko.” It may complete thoughts, “You may not have thought of Schadenfreude. Have you heard of Schadenfreude, bro?”
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: We certainly know it is possible machine learning things to manifest as rudimentary busybodiness. That can be somewhat mistaken for conscious understanding. But at some point, when the machine understanding and the super-duper-busybodiness gets super-duper-powerful, you might be able to reasonably supposed that it is a non-zero level of conscious living in the system.
It would help to develop a mathematics of consciousness, whether we do it or someone else does it. It would be good to have a mathematics of consciousness. It would be good to get a picture, a rough picture, of the level of understanding within machine systems.
Whether that level of understanding is functionally conscious or not, once you get to consciousness, it is the establishment of a central information processing arena for new information that is sufficiently new, sufficiently complicated; that it can’t be dealt unconsciously.
It is informationally efficient to throw it into the central conscious arena. At some point, a system that is on a computational budget. As it becomes more and more complicated, it is reasonable that there would be an emergent economy that says, “This new information is most likely to be productively processed if our system had a central arena where that information is presented to all the subsystems in our overall system for some kind of global analysis.”
It is a kind of information processing efficiency. Many actors are involved in it. You earn points, existence points in an evolved creature by figuring out what is going on. You are paid for understanding. We get paid for understanding the world for continued existence and some other stuff.
If you understand the stock market, you get paid stuff. If you get good at social life, you get social points.
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