Anthology Intelligence: humanity's collective brain is already our superintelligent friend: We don't need to build superintelligence because we did it already. We have it. It is us. Behind the...
Have you read "The energetics of uniquely human subsistence strategies"? It was published in Science 24 Dec 21. Here's the conclusion of the summary:
"These findings revise our understanding of human energetics and evolution, indicating that humans afford expanded energy budgets primarily by increasing rates of energy acquisition, and not through energy saving adaptations (such as economical bipedalism or sophisticated tool use) that decrease overall costs. Relative to other great apes, human subsistence strategies are characterized by high-intensity, high-cost extractive activities and expanded day ranges that provide more calories in less time. These results suggest that energy gained from improvements in efficiency throughout human evolution were primarily channeled toward further increasing foraging intensity rather than reducing the energetic costs of subsistence. Greater energetic gains per unit time are the reward for humans’ intense and behaviorally sophisticated
subsistence strategies. Humans’ high-cost but high-return strategy is ecologically risky, and
we argue that it was only possible in the context of increased cooperation, intergenerational food sharing, and a division of labor. We contend that the time saved by human subsistence strategies provided more leisure time for social interaction and social learning in central-place locations, which is critical for cumulative cultural evolution."
From an economic viewpoint, the history of mankind has been the rising intensity and efficiency of our extractive capabilities to the point where our history is dominated by issues of distribution. This latter thanks to the scientific and industrial revolutions. Social insects deal with the surplus problem by creating new colonies, but space colonization is not a practical solution and is not likely to become one any time soon.
Not a review as such, but a few immediate point observations:
1. I'd extend "Division of Labor" beyond "Markets and exchange" - not because those aren't immensely powerful and arguably our best tools for that, but because they aren't the only historically relevant ones. (Picard, for one, has famously commented on that.)
2. I think it's implied in IX.a, but, specially in the current environment, I think part of the work of the course is to separate the semiotics imported from SF (often via misreadings - the shift of "singularity" from a mathematical to a mystical sense might be the main example) from what we end up seeing in reality.
3. I'd add Lem and Herbert (maybe not limited to Dune, although his other forays into superintelligence have aged badly) to the set of relevant authors; Solaris or The Invincible take good notice of other forms of intelligence, and much of Dune -particularly the later books- explores different forms and limitations of collective/anthology intelligence; the lack of computers I think is a very good frame to help highlight the cultural aspects of our anthology capabilities.
4. Rather than a super-/non-super-intelligence binary (I take "superintelligence" like "AI" as a cultural rather than technological category) the relevant future-looking question might be which specific collective cognition/decision-making problems that are currently beyond our capabilities might become doable, and when.
So what, then, is our list of socioörganizational tools for coördinating our immensely fine division of labor?:
* Prestige,
* Reciprocal Gift-Exchange,
* Coördinated Redistribution,
* Dominance Hierarchy,
* Propaganda,
* Charisma,
* Honor,
* Democracy,
* Clientel/Feudal Patronage Network,
* Market Economy (which is something much more than Reciprocity),
* Bureaucracy (which is something much more than Redistribution),
* Mass Politics (which is something much more than Democracy),
* Algorithmic Classification…
Anything else?
> Marcelo Rinesi: Not a review as such, but a few immediate point observations:
> 1. I'd extend "Division of Labor" beyond "Markets and exchange" - not because those aren't immensely powerful and arguably our best tools for that, but because they aren't the only historically relevant ones. (Picard, for one, has famously commented on that.)
> 2. I think it's implied in IX.a, but, specially in the current environment, I think part of the work of the course is to separate the semiotics imported from SF (often via misreadings - the shift of "singularity" from a mathematical to a mystical sense might be the main example) from what we end up seeing in reality.
> 3. I'd add Lem and Herbert (maybe not limited to Dune, although his other forays into superintelligence have aged badly) to the set of relevant authors; Solaris or The Invincible take good notice of other forms of intelligence, and much of Dune -particularly the later books- explores different forms and limitations of collective/anthology intelligence; the lack of computers I think is a very good frame to help highlight the cultural aspects of our anthology capabilities.
> 4. Rather than a super-/non-super-intelligence binary (I take "superintelligence" like "AI" as a cultural rather than technological category) the relevant future-looking question might be which specific collective cognition/decision-making problems that are currently beyond our capabilities might become doable, and when.
If there are others I can't think of them. In fact the only one not on that list I'm seeing is species physiological specialization, but that's not something humans do [yet?] although it's something dominant groups like to pretend we do [via race & gender].
2. Science fiction offers some interesting what-ifs, but they tend to get interpreted in light of popularizations of their ideas. For example, the obvious lesson of the original Foundation trilogy was that things gang oft agley. As one should expect, the real world tends to poke through any layers of abstraction.
4. This point opens a fascinating can of worms. The idea of hard problems becoming soluble as superintelligence gets increasingly super bumps into the common rationale for capitalism as being the sole mechanism for efficient production and distribution. Do those tech bros understand that the singularity will end capitalism? You'd think they'd be terrified of super-AI.
That's a wonderful sci-fi plot. People choose a superintelligence to govern society, with goals of long-term income maximization, health, fairness, justice, human rights, and human liberties. I figure we'd lose both hamburgers and billionaires in the first day.
“ Or, alternatively: the improbable ascent of the East African Plains Ape to planetary dominion—by way of gossip, gift-exchange, and Google.”
I hope I am not in that group.
Gossip- any victim of vicious gossip would say the same.
Gift exchange- I suppose that means things like gifting at Christmas time, for example, which many people do not like.
Google-not sure. There have been other search engines. Would question other comments about our wonderful advances, since they are very vulnerable to destruction. Anyone who has gone through more than a couple of days without electricity can see how quickly some people revert to a primitive state, if the toilet cannot flush, and go completely bonkers if they go more than 2 days without a shower.
Why agriculture is bad-do not understand that one at all. There is no way you are going to feed the planet with wild game and fish only.
Other countries do worry about food supply. I wonder if the work camps of some countries is for people to keep in mind that someday you may have to grow your own food.
Gossip in this context is a means for reinforcing social order. Since no individual knows the purpose of the taboos, rituals, and social practices that embody cultural knowledge, we need to have faith. Gossip is one way to maintain the social order that supports community survival. Fighting is another, maybe more costly way of punishing norm violators. This is best understood in the context of small group hunter-gatherer societies.
Gift exchange is an important part of pre-monetary economies.
Google should be taken as a metonymy, signifying the Internet as a way of accessing the global human cultural package.
Yes. The brain transformations occasioned by our communal cooperative habits over many 10s of 1000s of generations that created the mutation that unleashed the word on us...and how the word led to exponential increases in cooperative potential mostly still untapped because of the pitfall of the word...deception.
Baumeister is a social psychologist, so the book might be more on the popular side, but it's full of experiments that demonstrate the thesis that cultural transmission is homo sapiens super-power. Not intelligence as such.
Is bipedalism that important? If so, why aren't other bipedal animals more intelligent, like kangaroos, birds? The therapod dinosaurs had far longer to evolve intelligence when they became bipedal. Obviously, they didn't become that intelligent.
Are we the only hyper-social species? If by social, you mean cooperative, then isn't it equally as important that we were also hyper-antisocial, given our warlike nature?
Our ability to develop culture by transmitting it from generation to generation, and disseminating it particularly after language was developed, seems to be a key attribute of our current success. Of course, should it also end us as a species, what will any successor intelligence say about us and our inability to create a sustainable civilization? That all these traits doomed us within less than 100 millennia to [near] extinction, a far shorter period than most other species on Earth that we know about?
It does look like you have to go tree-climbing --> bipedal walking --> using your opposable thumbs --> pan-galactic domination. Some therapods figured out that they could use their arms to fly. Otherwise, therapods that go bipedal don't seem to figure out many ways to use their arms to do stuff:
> Alex Tolley: Is bipedalism that important? If so, why aren't other bipedal animals more intelligent, like kangaroos, birds? The therapod dinosaurs had far longer to evolve intelligence when they became bipedal. Obviously, they didn't become that intelligent.
Are we the only hyper-social species? If by social, you mean cooperative, then isn't it equally as important that we were also hyper-antisocial, given our warlike nature?
Our ability to develop culture by transmitting it from generation to generation, and disseminating it particularly after language was developed, seems to be a key attribute of our current success. Of course, should it also end us as a species, what will any successor intelligence say about us and our inability to create a sustainable civilization? That all these traits doomed us within less than 100 millennia to [near] extinction, a far shorter period than most other species on Earth that we know about?
I agree that we are an anthology; but most of what we are began with cellular life and has been so cumulative that we forget what we are. Those chapters are written in our genes: the anthology is only a selection. Also, I disagree with the anthology word, would prefer
Library with Many Perplexing Restrictions Intelligence.
This is an exciting point of departure ! You’ve obviously absorbed tons of information already and will continue in the study of sources to make the course better (the delineation of the course itself depicts the subject being explored!).
So many rabbit holes to avoid. So hard for me/students to follow the voluminous reading and remember the important knowledge points.
Have you read "The energetics of uniquely human subsistence strategies"? It was published in Science 24 Dec 21. Here's the conclusion of the summary:
"These findings revise our understanding of human energetics and evolution, indicating that humans afford expanded energy budgets primarily by increasing rates of energy acquisition, and not through energy saving adaptations (such as economical bipedalism or sophisticated tool use) that decrease overall costs. Relative to other great apes, human subsistence strategies are characterized by high-intensity, high-cost extractive activities and expanded day ranges that provide more calories in less time. These results suggest that energy gained from improvements in efficiency throughout human evolution were primarily channeled toward further increasing foraging intensity rather than reducing the energetic costs of subsistence. Greater energetic gains per unit time are the reward for humans’ intense and behaviorally sophisticated
subsistence strategies. Humans’ high-cost but high-return strategy is ecologically risky, and
we argue that it was only possible in the context of increased cooperation, intergenerational food sharing, and a division of labor. We contend that the time saved by human subsistence strategies provided more leisure time for social interaction and social learning in central-place locations, which is critical for cumulative cultural evolution."
From an economic viewpoint, the history of mankind has been the rising intensity and efficiency of our extractive capabilities to the point where our history is dominated by issues of distribution. This latter thanks to the scientific and industrial revolutions. Social insects deal with the surplus problem by creating new colonies, but space colonization is not a practical solution and is not likely to become one any time soon.
No! I need to!
Not a review as such, but a few immediate point observations:
1. I'd extend "Division of Labor" beyond "Markets and exchange" - not because those aren't immensely powerful and arguably our best tools for that, but because they aren't the only historically relevant ones. (Picard, for one, has famously commented on that.)
2. I think it's implied in IX.a, but, specially in the current environment, I think part of the work of the course is to separate the semiotics imported from SF (often via misreadings - the shift of "singularity" from a mathematical to a mystical sense might be the main example) from what we end up seeing in reality.
3. I'd add Lem and Herbert (maybe not limited to Dune, although his other forays into superintelligence have aged badly) to the set of relevant authors; Solaris or The Invincible take good notice of other forms of intelligence, and much of Dune -particularly the later books- explores different forms and limitations of collective/anthology intelligence; the lack of computers I think is a very good frame to help highlight the cultural aspects of our anthology capabilities.
4. Rather than a super-/non-super-intelligence binary (I take "superintelligence" like "AI" as a cultural rather than technological category) the relevant future-looking question might be which specific collective cognition/decision-making problems that are currently beyond our capabilities might become doable, and when.
So what, then, is our list of socioörganizational tools for coördinating our immensely fine division of labor?:
* Prestige,
* Reciprocal Gift-Exchange,
* Coördinated Redistribution,
* Dominance Hierarchy,
* Propaganda,
* Charisma,
* Honor,
* Democracy,
* Clientel/Feudal Patronage Network,
* Market Economy (which is something much more than Reciprocity),
* Bureaucracy (which is something much more than Redistribution),
* Mass Politics (which is something much more than Democracy),
* Algorithmic Classification…
Anything else?
> Marcelo Rinesi: Not a review as such, but a few immediate point observations:
> 1. I'd extend "Division of Labor" beyond "Markets and exchange" - not because those aren't immensely powerful and arguably our best tools for that, but because they aren't the only historically relevant ones. (Picard, for one, has famously commented on that.)
> 2. I think it's implied in IX.a, but, specially in the current environment, I think part of the work of the course is to separate the semiotics imported from SF (often via misreadings - the shift of "singularity" from a mathematical to a mystical sense might be the main example) from what we end up seeing in reality.
> 3. I'd add Lem and Herbert (maybe not limited to Dune, although his other forays into superintelligence have aged badly) to the set of relevant authors; Solaris or The Invincible take good notice of other forms of intelligence, and much of Dune -particularly the later books- explores different forms and limitations of collective/anthology intelligence; the lack of computers I think is a very good frame to help highlight the cultural aspects of our anthology capabilities.
> 4. Rather than a super-/non-super-intelligence binary (I take "superintelligence" like "AI" as a cultural rather than technological category) the relevant future-looking question might be which specific collective cognition/decision-making problems that are currently beyond our capabilities might become doable, and when.
If there are others I can't think of them. In fact the only one not on that list I'm seeing is species physiological specialization, but that's not something humans do [yet?] although it's something dominant groups like to pretend we do [via race & gender].
You make a lot of good points.
2. Science fiction offers some interesting what-ifs, but they tend to get interpreted in light of popularizations of their ideas. For example, the obvious lesson of the original Foundation trilogy was that things gang oft agley. As one should expect, the real world tends to poke through any layers of abstraction.
4. This point opens a fascinating can of worms. The idea of hard problems becoming soluble as superintelligence gets increasingly super bumps into the common rationale for capitalism as being the sole mechanism for efficient production and distribution. Do those tech bros understand that the singularity will end capitalism? You'd think they'd be terrified of super-AI.
That's a wonderful sci-fi plot. People choose a superintelligence to govern society, with goals of long-term income maximization, health, fairness, justice, human rights, and human liberties. I figure we'd lose both hamburgers and billionaires in the first day.
“ Or, alternatively: the improbable ascent of the East African Plains Ape to planetary dominion—by way of gossip, gift-exchange, and Google.”
I hope I am not in that group.
Gossip- any victim of vicious gossip would say the same.
Gift exchange- I suppose that means things like gifting at Christmas time, for example, which many people do not like.
Google-not sure. There have been other search engines. Would question other comments about our wonderful advances, since they are very vulnerable to destruction. Anyone who has gone through more than a couple of days without electricity can see how quickly some people revert to a primitive state, if the toilet cannot flush, and go completely bonkers if they go more than 2 days without a shower.
Why agriculture is bad-do not understand that one at all. There is no way you are going to feed the planet with wild game and fish only.
Other countries do worry about food supply. I wonder if the work camps of some countries is for people to keep in mind that someday you may have to grow your own food.
Gossip in this context is a means for reinforcing social order. Since no individual knows the purpose of the taboos, rituals, and social practices that embody cultural knowledge, we need to have faith. Gossip is one way to maintain the social order that supports community survival. Fighting is another, maybe more costly way of punishing norm violators. This is best understood in the context of small group hunter-gatherer societies.
Gift exchange is an important part of pre-monetary economies.
Google should be taken as a metonymy, signifying the Internet as a way of accessing the global human cultural package.
Let me put in a plug for Janet Baker’s rendition of Purcell’s setting of “Lord, what is man”.’ The “Oh! for a voice” passage gets me every time.
I would love to audit this course.
Yes. The brain transformations occasioned by our communal cooperative habits over many 10s of 1000s of generations that created the mutation that unleashed the word on us...and how the word led to exponential increases in cooperative potential mostly still untapped because of the pitfall of the word...deception.
A very old story that needs reinvigoration.
Please.
Proceed.
I first ran into this idea in Roy Baumeister's book, "The Cultural Animal", published in 2005. https://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Animal-Nature-Meaning-Social/dp/0195167031
Baumeister is a social psychologist, so the book might be more on the popular side, but it's full of experiments that demonstrate the thesis that cultural transmission is homo sapiens super-power. Not intelligence as such.
I think it's worth a look.
Thanks! - B
Is bipedalism that important? If so, why aren't other bipedal animals more intelligent, like kangaroos, birds? The therapod dinosaurs had far longer to evolve intelligence when they became bipedal. Obviously, they didn't become that intelligent.
Are we the only hyper-social species? If by social, you mean cooperative, then isn't it equally as important that we were also hyper-antisocial, given our warlike nature?
Our ability to develop culture by transmitting it from generation to generation, and disseminating it particularly after language was developed, seems to be a key attribute of our current success. Of course, should it also end us as a species, what will any successor intelligence say about us and our inability to create a sustainable civilization? That all these traits doomed us within less than 100 millennia to [near] extinction, a far shorter period than most other species on Earth that we know about?
It does look like you have to go tree-climbing --> bipedal walking --> using your opposable thumbs --> pan-galactic domination. Some therapods figured out that they could use their arms to fly. Otherwise, therapods that go bipedal don't seem to figure out many ways to use their arms to do stuff:
> Alex Tolley: Is bipedalism that important? If so, why aren't other bipedal animals more intelligent, like kangaroos, birds? The therapod dinosaurs had far longer to evolve intelligence when they became bipedal. Obviously, they didn't become that intelligent.
Are we the only hyper-social species? If by social, you mean cooperative, then isn't it equally as important that we were also hyper-antisocial, given our warlike nature?
Our ability to develop culture by transmitting it from generation to generation, and disseminating it particularly after language was developed, seems to be a key attribute of our current success. Of course, should it also end us as a species, what will any successor intelligence say about us and our inability to create a sustainable civilization? That all these traits doomed us within less than 100 millennia to [near] extinction, a far shorter period than most other species on Earth that we know about?
Brad : I strongly recommend you read the beginning of my recent conversation with Gemini at
https://ronaldcalitri.substack.com/p/bioeconomics-and-the-true-division
Then, we spread out in a more arcane manner:
https://ronaldcalitri.substack.com/p/eye-to-ai-bioeconomics-is-perplexing
I agree that we are an anthology; but most of what we are began with cellular life and has been so cumulative that we forget what we are. Those chapters are written in our genes: the anthology is only a selection. Also, I disagree with the anthology word, would prefer
Library with Many Perplexing Restrictions Intelligence.
Not that that helps.
v smart on your part—and its part. Thx. - B.
This is an exciting point of departure ! You’ve obviously absorbed tons of information already and will continue in the study of sources to make the course better (the delineation of the course itself depicts the subject being explored!).
So many rabbit holes to avoid. So hard for me/students to follow the voluminous reading and remember the important knowledge points.