How to think about thinking about theories of thought

I read some interesting articles on theories of thought and information recently. The first was an interview/lecture, Formulating Science in Terms of Possible and Impossible Tasks by Chiara Marletto (Edge.org). I can’t claim to understand even half of what she’s talking about, but understanding is tantalizing enough that I feel it might be worth something. I’ve included some citations from the transcript below.

“Yet it also has a radically different perspective on things because, as I said, in the prevailing conception, the fundamental objects are the laws of motion and the initial conditions of our universe. In constructor theory, on the other hand, the fundamental objects are transformations that are possible/impossible, and the explanation of why they are possible/impossible. It turns out that, under our laws of physics, in order for any transformation to be achieved, knowledge must be brought about in order to make a certain transformation performable to higher and higher accuracy. Knowledge, which is a ‘causal’ kind of information—information with a causal power that has the ability of remaining instantiated in physical systems—is a highly emergent object and it cannot be handled in the prevailing conception of fundamental physics, while in constructor theory it becomes one of the central objects.”

It seems that constructor theory posits abstractions that allow us to reason about the world in a more powerful way, that avoids getting lost in the all the fiddly bits of modern physics, with its infinitude of possibility. I’m sure it’s solidly anchored in mathematics but feel no closer to grasping its essence yet. She attacks the line of reasoning given above a couple of times and each time it feels kind of circular. I still don’t think she’s adequately explained what constructor theory actually is…although it does seem admittedly like a very non-intuitive way of describing events and reality and comparing information, so I may have just missed it.

“One of the ideas that will be dropped if constructor theory turns out to be effective is that the only fundamental entities in physics are laws of motion and initial conditions. In order for physics to accommodate more of physical reality, there needs to be a switch to this new mode of explanation, which accepts that scientific explanation is more than just predictions. Predictions will be supplemented with statements about what tasks are possible, what are impossible and why.”

My initial reaction, even on re-reading is: but what is the new mode of explanation? What is possible and what is impossible? I fully acknowledge that I may not be well-trained enough to be able to discern between this kind of talk and magic. I need examples, but fear that those might be beyond me as well. Is this how people feel when confronted with modern technology?

“Probabilities have been a hard concept to pin down and they are fundamental to a certain way of looking at quantum physics. Yet, quantum physics is, fundamentally, a deterministic theory. One question is how does one connect the testing of quantum theory, which one way or another relies on the idea of probabilities, with the fundamentally deterministic structure of quantum theory? This question has been tackled in different ways but there is still a controversy about that, and we are hoping to apply constructor theory to this issue in order to sort it out.”

I’m looking forward to it. Make of it what you will. I will note that constructor theory exists and tackle it again some other time.

The next article in the vein of world-changing ways of thinking about thinking is The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence by Tim Urban (Wait But Why). I felt utterly able to grasp what he was getting at, but felt that he was letting the idea run away from him. His optimism is appreciated and even understandable, but he’s ignoring a lot of history and hand-waving that away by claiming that history will not apply because of the geometric level of increasing awesomeness.

Here he nicely describes how awesome our world would be for a traveller from just a few centuries ago.

“When you get there, you retrieve a dude, bring him to 2015, and then walk him around and watch him react to everything. It’s impossible for us to understand what it would be like for him to see shiny capsules racing by on a highway, talk to people who had been on the other side of the ocean earlier in the day, watch sports that were being played 1,000 miles away, hear a musical performance that happened 50 years ago, and play with my magical wizard rectangle that he could use to capture a real-life image or record a living moment, generate a map with a paranormal moving blue dot that shows him where he is, look at someone’s face and chat with them even though they’re on the other side of the country, and worlds of other inconceivable sorcery.”

While he’s superficially right, I’m not so sure how continually rocked this person would be—especially if you managed to grab someone with a reasonably analytical head on his or her shoulders. If you grabbed a moron who didn’t understand even the technology of his own day—the way most zombies wander around in our age unable to distinguish their world’s technology from magic—then that person would have their mind utterly blown. But their mind was already blown by their own world, so that’s not too surprising.

Here’s where he gets a bit excited: “So—advances are getting bigger and bigger and happening more and more quickly. This suggests some pretty intense things about our future, right?”

Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to talk about change, rather than advancement? And these futurists think only in terms of technology, whereas socially, politically and morally we haven’t moved much at all. What does this so-called law of accelerating returns mean for Palestine? Will things get amazingly awesome there? Or will the amazing awesomeness be restricted to the Israeli ability for subjugation? Or am I just not getting how amazingly awesome the future will be?

“All in all, because of the Law of Accelerating Returns, Kurzweil believes that the 21st century will achieve 1,000 times the progress of the 20th century.”

Fucking Kurzweil: he says it so it’s a law rather than a theory. He’s extrapolating an exponential curve based on a few data points while ignoring the fact that with increased power to make gadgets comes also the increased power to bomb ourselves back to the Stone Age. And given our lack of improvement on the social front, an increased likelihood that we might actually do so, Stephen Pinker’s documentation of a decrease in violence in our world notwithstanding.

“Build a computer that can multiply two ten-digit numbers in a split second—incredibly easy. Build one that can look at a dog and answer whether it’s a dog or a cat—spectacularly difficult.”

It’s not about easy or difficult—it’s about complexity. It’s not easy to build a calculator, but it is objectively less complex to do so than to build a visual-recognition system.

Here he discussed the capacity for thought in AIs:

“This doesn’t sound like much until you remember that we were at about a trillionth of human level in 1985, a billionth in 1995, and a millionth in 2005. Being at a thousandth in 2015 puts us right on pace to get to an affordable computer by 2025 that rivals the power of the brain.”

Wait, where’d the geometric progression go? Now we have a linear progression…or is it possible that some problems get asymptotically harder? Why is the argument of “it’s always been like this, so let’s extrapolate into the future with the same curve” so attractive? We don’t think this way for other situations. For example, if my friend has 1000 1-dollar bills in a messy pile, I can steal one and he will not notice. I can do this for a few days, probably weeks, and he will probably not notice. No-one you ask would expect him to never notice. At the very latest, this progression stops when there is no more money left. Couldn’t our “improvement” in technology follow this kind of curve? Why should we believe Kurzweil’s extrapolation?

There is also the small problem of where all the energy and material for these amazing advancements are going to come from. This energy-ignorant approach to futurism is also present in the article Scorched Earth, 2200AD by Linda Marsa (Aeon), in which she writes of a medium-term future in which the human population has been reduced to 6% of the current levels, the temperature is 180ºF and, “[a]s far as the eye can see, what’s left of civilised society is sheathed in glass – the ribbons of highways ferrying the bullet trains.”

My question is: who builds and maintains these trains and buildings? Who mines the material? From where? Also in enclosures? How big are these things? Do we use robots? Drones?

Where I have a hard time following Kurzweil and Co. is that we are supposedly accelerating faster but we don’t even have the relatively mundane stuff we dreamed up fifty years ago. What we can imagine today is not even remotely achievable not because of limited IQ but physical limitations. Instead of making the predicted quantum leaps, we make incremental, asymptotic change.

Worst of all for these predictions, where we are not constrained by physics, we shackle our ideas to the profit motive. What is not short-term profitable is abandoned. Agencies and organizations capable of long-term change are dismantled and defanged. This is what I meant before: the exponential rate at which our gadgets get fancier doesn’t matter if the society in which those gadgets are created doesn’t develop at a similar rate.