We propose a venture into an existential opportunity for establishing a world ‘good enough’ for humans to live in. Defining an existential opportunity as the converse of an existential risk—that is, a development that promises to dramatically improve the future of humanity—we argue that one such opportunity is available and should be explored now. The opportunity resides in the moment of transition of the Internet—from mediating information to mediating distributed direct governance in the sense of self-organization. The Internet of tomorrow will mediate the execution of contracts, transactions, public interventions and all other change-establishing events more reliably and more synergistically than any other technology or institution. It will become a distributed, synthetically intelligent agent in itself. This transition must not be just observed, or exploited instrumentally: it must be ventured into and seized on behalf of entire humanity. We envision a configuration of three kinds of cognitive system—the human mind, social systems and the emerging synthetic intelligence—serving to augment the autonomy of the first from the ‘programming’ imposed by the second. Our proposition is grounded in a detailed analysis of the manner in which the socio-econo-political system has evolved into a powerful control mechanism that subsumes human minds, steers their will and automates their thinking. We see the venture into the existential opportunity described here as aiming at the global dissolution of the core reason of that programming’s effectiveness—the critical dependence of the continuity of human lives on the coherence of the socially constructed personas they ‘wear.’ Thus, we oppose the popular prediction of the upcoming, ‘dreadful AI takeover’ with a call for action: instead of worrying that Artificial Intelligence will soon come to dominate and govern the human world, let us think of how it could help the human being to finally be able to do it.

 

The Human Takeover: A Call for a Venture into an Existential Opportunity
Marta Lenartowicz, David R. Weinbaum , Francis Heylighen, Kate Kingsbury and Tjorven Harmsen

Information 2018, 9(5), 113; https://doi.org/10.3390/info9050113

Source: www.mdpi.com

Increasingly, the Turing test—which is used to show that artificial intelligence has achieved human-level intelligence—is being regarded as an insufficient indicator of human-level intelligence. This essay extends arguments that embodied intelligence is required for human-level intelligence, and proposes a more suitable test for determining human-level intelligence: the invention of team sports by humanoid robots. The test is preferred because team sport activity is easily identified, uniquely human, and is suggested to emerge in basic, controllable conditions. To expect humanoid robots to self-organize, or invent, team sport as a function of human-level artificial intelligence, the following necessary conditions are proposed: humanoid robots must have the capacity to participate in cooperative-competitive interactions, instilled by algorithms for resource acquisition; they must possess or acquire sufficient stores of energetic resources that permit leisure time, thus reducing competition for scarce resources and increasing cooperative tendencies; and they must possess a heterogeneous range of energetic capacities. When present, these factors allow robot collectives to spontaneously invent team sport activities and thereby demonstrate one fundamental indicator of human-level intelligence.

 

When Robots Get Bored and Invent Team Sports: A More Suitable Test than the Turing Test?
Hugh Trenchard

Information 2018, 9(5), 118; https://doi.org/10.3390/info9050118

Source: www.mdpi.com

The World Health Organization (WHO) and news reports are describing the deployment of a new experimental vaccine for Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Originally 4,000 doses were sent to the country, and while the number is growing to 8,000 or more, there are still not enough to widely inoculate the city of Mbandaka with a population of over a million. Reports describe how the vaccine will be used in a "ring vaccination" technique. In ring vaccination, those who are most likely to be infected receive the vaccine. Currently this is being done by inoculating the known contacts of the sick and the contacts of the contacts, as well as healthcare workers. Prior experiments suggest that the vaccine can prevent the disease in those individuals.

 

Yaneer Bar-Yam, Will the new ring vaccination stop the spread of Ebola?, New England Complex Systems Institute (May 23, 2018).

Source: necsi.edu

An ambitious study in yeast shows that the health of cells depends on the highly intertwined effects of many genes, few of which can be deleted together without consequence.

Source: www.quantamagazine.org

We investigate the implications of the persistence of traditional patterns of state organization by examining the relationship between property rights and the economy for monarchies and republics. We argue that, relative to republics, monarchies protect property rights to a greater extent by reducing the negative effects of internal conflict, executive tenure, and executive discretion. In turn, a better protection of property rights results in greater standards of living. Using panel data on 137 countries between 1900 and 2010, we formulate and test a model with endogenous variables. We find strong evidence that monarchies contribute to a greater protection of property rights and higher standards of living through each of the three theoretical mechanisms compared to all republics. We also find that democratic-constitutional monarchies perform better than non-democratic and absolute monarchies when it comes to offsetting the negative effects of the tenure and discretion of the executive branch. We discuss the implications of the persistence of traditional patterns of political authority and rule for political sociology and economic sociology.

 

Symbolic Unity, Dynastic Continuity, and Countervailing Power: Monarchies, Republics, and the Economy
Mauro F Guillén

Social Forces, soy037, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soy037

Source: academic.oup.com