Digifesto

Nick Bostrom will give a book talk on campus soon. My departmental seminar on “Algorithms as Computation and Culture” has opened with a paper on the ethics of algorithms and a paper on accumulated practical wisdom regarding machine learning. Of course, these are related subjects.

Jenna Burrell recently trolled me in order to get me to give up my own opinions on the matter, which are rooted in a philosophical functionalism. I’ve learned just now that these opinions may depend on obsolete philosophy of mind. I’m not sure. R. Scott Bakker’s blog post against pragmatic functionalism makes me wonder: what do I believe again? I’ve been resting on a position established when I was deeper into this stuff seven years ago. A lot has happened since then.

I’m turning into a historicist perhaps due to lack of imagination or simply because older works are more accessible. Cybernetic theories of control–or, electrical engineering theories of control–are as relevant, it seems, to contemporary debates as machine learning, which to the extent it depends on stochastic gradient descent is just another version of cybernetic control anyway, right?

Ashwin Parameswaran’s blog post about Benigner’s Control Revolution illustrates this point well. To a first approximation, we are simply undergoing the continuation of prophecies of the 20th century, only more thoroughly. Over and over, and over, and over, and over, like a monkey with a miniature cymbal.

One property of a persistent super-intelligent infrastructure of control would be our inability to comprehend it. Our cognitive models, constructed over the course of a single lifetime with constraints on memory both in time and space, limited to a particular hypothesis space, could simply be outgunned by the complexity of the sociotechnical system in which it is embedded. I tried to get at this problem with work on computational asymmetry but didn’t find the right audience. I just learned there’s been work on this in finance which makes sense, as it’s where it’s most directly relevant today.