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Category: ethics – Page 19

Keep your eye on the prize, but meanwhile don’t lose sight of other nifty opportunities too. What am I talking about? During the famous Gold Rush era, eager prospectors sought the dreamy riches of unearthed gold. Turns out that very few actually struck it rich by discovering those prized gold nuggets. You might be surprised to know that while panning for gold, there was a possibility of finding other precious metals. The erstwhile feverish desire to get gold would sometimes overpower the willingness to mine silver, mercury, and other ores that were readily seen while searching for gold.

It all has to do with data, particularly data mined or scanned from the Internet that is then used principally to data train generative AI apps.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its successor GPT-4 would not exist if it were not for all the data training undertaken to get the AI apps into shape for doing Natural Language Processing (NLP) and performing interactive conversations with humans. The data training entailed scanning various portions of the Internet, see my explanation at the link here. In the case of text-to-text or text-to-essay generative AI, the mainstay of ChatGPT, all kinds of text were scanned to ferret out patterns of how humans use words.

I’ll say more about this in a moment.

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In this talk, De Kai examines how AI amplifies fear into an existential threat to society and humanity, and what we need to be doing about it. De Kai’s work across AI, language, music, creativity, and ethics centers on enabling cultures to interrelate. For pioneering contributions to machine learning of AIs like Google/Yahoo/Microsoft Translate, he was honored by the Association for Computational Linguistics as one of only seventeen Founding Fellows worldwide and by Debrett’s HK 100 as one of the 100 most influential figures of Hong Kong. De Kai is a founding Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at HKUST and Distinguished Research Scholar at Berkeley’s ICSI (International Computer Science Institute). His public campaign applying AI to show the impact of universal masking against Covid received highly influential mass media coverage, and he serves on the board of AI ethics think tank The Future Society. De Kai is also creator of one of Hong Kong’s best known world music collectives, ReOrientate, and was one of eight inaugural members named by Google to its AI ethics council. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.

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Zoom Transcription: https://otter.ai/s/j26AyG6FRGCfmHCNLGe5Pg.

Help us welcome Anders Sandberg to the Foresight family! As a Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy, we are proud that he will be joining a fantastic group of Foresight Senior Research Fellows: https://foresight.org/about-us/senior-research-fellows/

Anders will present a cherry-picked selection of his epic Grand Futures book project: What is available in the “nearer-term” for life if our immature civilization can make it past the tech/insight/coordination hurdles? We’ll focus on post-scarcity civilizations to get a sense of what is possible just past current human horizons in the hope it may inspire us to double down on solving humanity’s current challenges to unlock this next level.

Based on our Zoom polls, cognitive enhancement features as high interest for many of you and is also one of Anders’ main research interests. Let’s add a brief tour through different cognitive enhancement scenarios, their ethical considerations, and how to make progress in the right directions.
Join us with your questions and comments and let’s give Anders a warm welcome into the Foresight community!

About Anders:
Anders Sandberg is a Foresight Senior Fellow and a Research Associate at the Future of Humanity Institute from the University of Oxford. Anders Sandberg’s research at FHI centers on management of low-probability high-impact risks, estimating the capabilities of future technologies, and very long-range futures. Topics of particular interest include global catastrophic risk, cognitive biases, cognitive enhancement, collective intelligence, neuroethics, and public policy.

Anders is a Senior Research Fellow on the ERC UnPrEDICT Programme. He is a research associate to the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, and the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics. He is on the advisory boards of a number of organizations and often debates science and ethics in international media.

Continue reading “Post Scarcity Civilizations & Cognitive Enhancement | Anders Sandberg, Foresight Senior Fellow” | >

By Cheryl Gallagher Cultural and Creative Content Specialist

In the news recently, the US Copyright Office partially rescinded copyright protections for an article containing exclusively AI generated art. It was a landmark decision that is likely just the beginning of a long legal and ethical debate around the role, ethics, and rights of Artificial Intelligence in today’s global society — and tomorrow’s interplanetary one.

AI artworks are currently being denied copyright protection because copyrights only protect human generated work, and in the Copyright Office’s current opinion, the “artist” does not exert enough creative control over the output of the program (i.e., just using a written prompt to generate an image does not constitute a copyrightable work, as the program generated it, not the human involved). At least some AI generated images are considered to have enough human “involvement” to be copyrightable, but more direct working with the imagery is required.

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As long as people have been alive, they’ve wanted to stay alive. But unlike finding the fountain of youth or becoming a vampire, uploading your brain to a computer or the cloud might actually be possible. Theoretically, we already know how to do it, and Elon Musk is even trying a brain implant with Neuralink. But technically, we have a long way to go. We explain the main technological advancements that we’ll need to make whole brain emulation a reality.

MORE TECHNOLOGY VIDEOS:
Why We Still Don’t Have Smart Contact Lenses.


Why We Still Haven’t Cloned Humans — It’s Not Just Ethics.

How Blockchain And Remote Monitoring Can Improve The Healthcare Experience.

#Brain #Tech #TechInsider.

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What it’ll take to upload our brains to a computer.

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My latest Opinion piece:

I possibly cheated on my wife once. Alone in a room, a young woman reached out her hands and seductively groped mine, inviting me to engage and embrace her. I went with it.

Twenty seconds later, I pulled back and ripped off my virtual reality gear. Around me, dozens of tech conference goers were waiting in line to try the same computer program an exhibitor was hosting. I warned colleagues in line this was no game. It created real emotions and challenged norms of partnership and sexuality. But does it really? And who benefits from this?

Around the world, a minor sexual revolution is occurring. It’s not so much about people stepping outside their moral boundaries as much as it is about new technology. Virtual reality haptic suits, sexbots, and even implanted sexual devices—some controlled from around the world by strangers—are increasingly becoming used. Often called digisexuality, some people—especially those who find it awkward to fit into traditional sexual roles—are finding newfound relationships and more meaningful sex.

As with much new technology, problems abound. Psychologists warns that technology—especially interactive tech—is making humans more distant to the real world. Naysayers of the burgeoning techno-sex industry say this type of intimacy is not the real thing, and that it’s little different than a Pavlovian trick. But studies show the brain barely knows the difference from arousal via pornography versus being sexually active with a real person. If we take that one step further and engage with people in immersive virtual reality, our brain appears to know even less of the difference.

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Why do AI ethics conferences fail? They fail because they don’t have a metatheory to explain how it is possible for ethical disagreements to emerge from phenomenologically different worlds, how those are revealed to us, and how shifts between them have shaped the development of Western civilization for the last several thousand years from the Greeks and Romans, through the Renaissance and Enlightenment.

So perhaps we’ve given up on the ethics hand-wringing a bit too early. Or more precisely, a third nonzero sum approach that combines ethics and reciprocal accountability is available that actually does explain this. But first, let’s consider the flaw in simple reciprocal accountability. Yes, right now we can use chatGPT to catch Chat-GPT cheats, and provide many other balancing feedbacks. But as has been noted above with reference to the colonization of Indigenous nations, once the technological/ developmental gap is sufficiently large those dynamics which operate largely under our control and in our favor can quickly change, and the former allies become the new masters.

Forrest Landry capably identified that problem during a recent conversation with Jim Rutt. The implication that one might draw is that, though we may not like it, there is in fact a role to play by axiology (or more precisely, a phenomenologically informed understanding of axiology). Zak Stein identifies some of that in his article “Technology is Not Values Neutral”. Lastly, Iain McGilchrist brings both of these topics, that of power and value, together using his metatheory of attention, which uses that same notion of reciprocal accountability (only here it is called opponent processing). And yes, there is historical precedent here too; we can point to biological analogues. This is all instantiated in the neurology of the brain, and it goes back at least as far as Nematostella vectensis, a sea anemone that lived 700 million years ago! So the opponent processing of two very different ways of attending to the world has worked for a very long time, by opposing two very different phenomenological worlds (and their associated ethical frameworks) to counterbalance each other.

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There is a new catchphrase that some are using when it comes to talking about today’s generative AI. I am loath to repeat the phrase, but the angst in doing so is worth the chances of trying to curtail the usage going forward.

Are you ready?

Some have been saying that generative AI such as ChatGPT is so-called alien intelligence. Hogwash. This kind of phrasing has to be stopped. Here’s the reasons to do so.

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