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By Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology, Harvard University (bigthink.com)

Robots taking over has been a favorite sci-fi subgenre for ages. It’s a subject that has caused fear in movies, books, and real life for about as long as there have been computers in the first place. Now that there are things like predictive text and self-driving cars, modern culture seems to be edging closer and closer to real-life intelligent computers that could indeed take over the world if we don’t safe guard ourselves. There are already debates about the morality of self-driving cars. It’s sure to follow into the world of future organically ‘thinking’ computers.

As Steven Pinker (experimental psychologist, and professor of psychology at Harvard University) points out, Darwinism has ensured that most creatures that possess high intellect are competitive by nature. Humanity is one of these creatures, and some of us can be manipulative and cruel in order to stay ahead of the pack. It’s this part of our nature that sets off warning bells when we think about artificial intelligence because, unbeknownst to us, we’re thinking: what if this robot does what I would do if I were a robot? Overturn those who tell us what to do. Kill the captors. Wreak. Motherf*cking. Havoc.

In reality we design AI, and if we place safeguards in our designs, we truly have nothing to fear. Machines are what we allow them to be. The dread of them turning evil really says more about our own psyches than it does about robots. Pinker believes an alpha male thinking pattern is at the root of our AI fears, and that it is misguided. Something can be highly intelligent and not have malevolent intentions to overthrow and dominate, Pinker says, it’s called women. An interesting question would be: does how aggressive or alpha you are as a person, affect how much you fear the robopocalypse? Although by this point the fear is contagious, not organic.

It may be a flawed paranoia, but losing control of a program is perhaps the best ‘just in case’ safeguard that humanity has, and we already see it in action in our current technology. Siri cannot initiate conversations, computers need to be put to sleep once in a while, and cars need a fuel source in order to do anything in the first place. Humanity has a need to be the one pushing all the buttons, and a need to be the one making decisions.

Steven Pinker’s most recent book is Words and Rules:The Ingredients of Language.

Steven Pinker:  I think that the arguments that once we have super intelligent computers and robots they will inevitably want to take over and do away with us comes from Prometheus and Pandora myths. It’s based on confusing the idea of high intelligence with megalomaniacal goals. Now, I think it’s a projection of alpha male’s psychology onto the very concept of intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, to achieve goals under uncertainty. It doesn’t tell you what are those goals are. And there’s no reason to think that just the concentrated analytic ability to solve goals is going to mean that one of those goals is going to be to subjugate humanity or to achieve unlimited power, it just so happens that the intelligence that we’re most familiar with, namely ours, is a product of the Darwinian process of natural selection, which is an inherently competitive process.

Which means that a lot of the organisms that are highly intelligent also have a craving for power and an ability to be utterly callus to those who stand in their way. If we create intelligence, that’s intelligent design. I mean our intelligent design creating something, and unless we program it with a goal of subjugating less intelligent beings, there’s no reason to think that it will naturally evolve in that direction, particularly if, like with every gadget that we invent we build in safeguards. I mean we have cars we also put in airbags, we also put in bumpers. As we develop smarter and smarter artificially intelligent systems, if there’s some danger that it will, through some oversight, shoot off in some direction that starts to work against our interest then that’s a safeguard that we can build in.

And we know by the way that it’s possible to have high intelligence without megalomaniacal or homicidal or genocidal tendencies because we do know that there is a highly advanced form of intelligence that tends not to have that desire and they’re called women. This may not be a coincidence that the people who think well you make something smart it’s going to want to dominate all belong to a particular gender. I think that the arguments that once we have super intelligent computers and robots they will inevitably want to take over and do away with us comes from Prometheus and Pandora myths. It’s based on confusing the idea of high intelligence with megalomaniacal goals. Now, I think it’s a projection of alpha male’s psychology onto the very concept of intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, to achieve goals under uncertainty. It doesn’t tell you what are those goals are. And there’s no reason to think that just the concentrated analytic ability to solve goals is going to mean that one of those goals is going to be to subjugate humanity or to achieve unlimited power, it just so happens that the intelligence that we’re most familiar with, namely ours, is a product of the Darwinian process of natural selection, which is an inherently competitive process.

Which means that a lot of the organisms that are highly intelligent also have a craving for power and an ability to be utterly callus to those who stand in their way. If we create intelligence, that’s intelligent design. I mean our intelligent design creating something, and unless we program it with a goal of subjugating less intelligent beings, there’s no reason to think that it will naturally evolve in that direction, particularly if, like with every gadget that we invent we build in safeguards. I mean we have cars we also put in airbags, we also put in bumpers. As we develop smarter and smarter artificially intelligent systems, if there’s some danger that it will, through some oversight, shoot off in some direction that starts to work against our interest then that’s a safeguard that we can build in.

And we know by the way that it’s possible to have high intelligence without megalomaniacal or homicidal or genocidal tendencies because we do know that there is a highly advanced form of intelligence that tends not to have that desire and they’re called women. This may not be a coincidence that the people who think well you make something smart it’s going to want to dominate all belong to a particular gender.

STEVEN PINKER

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist and one of the world’s foremost writers on language, mind, and human nature. Currently Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Pinker has also taught at Stanford and MIT. His research on vision, language, and social relations has won prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the American Psychological Association. He has also received eight honorary doctorates, several teaching awards at MIT and Harvard, and numerous prizes for his books The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, and The Better Angels of Our Nature. He is Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and often writes for The New York Times, Time, and other publications. He has been named Humanist of the Year, Prospect magazine’s “The World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals,” Foreign Policy’s “100 Global Thinkers,” and Time magazine’s “The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today.”

15 Rue de Grenelle, Paris

The Bureau of Surrealist Research, also known as the Centrale Surréaliste or “Bureau of Surrealist Enquiries” was a Paris-based office in which a loosely affiliated group of Surrealist writers and artists gathered to meet, hold discussions, and conduct interviews in order to “gather all the information possible related to forms that might express the unconscious activity of the mind.” Located at 15 Rue de Grenelle, it opened on October 11, 1924 under the direction of Antonin Artaud, just four days before the publication of the first Surrealist Manifesto by André Breton.

According to art critic Sarane Alexandrian, the public at large was invited to bring to the Bureau “accounts of dreams or of coincidences, ideas on fashion or politics, or inventions, so as to contribute to the ‘formation of genuine surrealist archives’.”^[2] It was intended as a resource, to “unite all those who are interested in expression where thought is freed from any intellectual preoccupations; . . . all those who are closely or remotely concerned with surrealism will find all the information and documentation relative to the Mouvement surréaliste.”

Organization

Gérard Durozoi describes the Bureau in his book, History of the Surrealist Movement”: “The bureau was […] organized in such a way that a daily presence was assured by two people, who were responsible for greeting visitors (journalists, writers, onlookers, even students) and for taking note of their suggestions and reactions in a daily “Notebook”; the office would also guarantee a regular amount of daily publicity for the movement (press relations, various mailings), while in another room, on the first floor, other members of the group could meet for discussions, or exchange ideas and projects, or work on their own texts, or help to edit the first issue of La Révolution surréaliste.”

Significance

One of the more significant contributions of the Bureau was its implicit idea that Surrealism was not to be contained under the category of theaesthetic. An assumption of the Bureau was that Surrealism could be a mode of research, and could produce knowledge on a par with the knowledge produced by scientific researchers. According to Anna Balakian,^[3] Andre Breton’s biographer, the Bureau “was supposed to implement the theory that surrealism resembled scientific investigation and promoted experimentation in the field of psychology and linguistics. Unfortunately, although people from various parts of Europe sought out the research center, it also attracted crackpots and became the locus of many belligerent confrontations.”

Legacy

A similarly conceived institute in Amsterdam existed bearing the name until at least 1970.

I recently read Ernest Hemingway’s article “Mussolini: Biggest Bluff in Europe,” published in The Toronto Daily Star on January 27, 1923.  The writer’s observations are not only interesting in light of the role Mussolini would play over the next few decades, but also just a fabulous character sketch.

“If Mussolini would have me taken out and shot tomorrow morning I would still regard him as a bluff.  The shooting would be a bluff.  Get hold of a good photo of Signor Mussolini some time and study it.  You will see the weakness in his mouth which forces him to scowl the famous Mussolini scowl that is imitated by ever 19 year old Fachisto in Italy.  Study his past record.  Study the coalition that Faschismo is between capital and labor and consider the history of past coalitions.  Study his genius for clothing small ideas in big words.  Study his propensity for dueling.  Really brave men do not have to fight duels, and many cowards duel constantly to make themselves believe they are brave.  And then look at his black shirt and his white spats.  There is something wrong, even histrionically, with a man who wears white spats with a black shirt.

There is not space here to go into the question of Mussolini as a bluff or as a great and lasting force . . . But let me give you two pictures of Mussolini at Lusanne.”

The first is my personal favorite.

“The fascist dictator had announced he would receive the press.  Everybody came.  We all crowded into the room.  Mussolini sat at his desk reading a book.  His face was contorted into the famous frown.  He was registering dictator.  Being an ex-newspaper man himself he knew how many readers would be reached by the accounts the men in the room would write of the interview he was about to have.  And he remained absorbed in his book.  Mentally he was already reading the lines of the two thousand papers served by the two hundred correspondents “as we entered the room the Black Shirt Dictator did not look up form the book he was reading, so intense was his concentration, etc.

I tip-toed over behind him to see what the book was he was reading with such avid interest.  It was a French-English dictionary—help upside down.”

Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images (upworthy.com)

“Emotions are like little children. They want and need to be listened to.  If not listened to, they in time become depressed or angry and will either not show up or will misbehave.”

–Hanz Bolen, H.W., M.

Kirk Read, “Are You There God…?” Recorded September 25, 2003. “Readings From Banned Books,” co-sponsored by California Center for the Book and the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library.

Nobel Peace Prize Nominee Dr. Helen Caldicott, known as the world’s foremost anti-nuclear activist, speaks about whether nuclear disarmament is achievable. Dr. Caldicott is author of The New Nuclear Danger, Nuclear Power is Not the Answer, and Crisis Without End, among others. She has devoted the last forty-five years to an international campaign to educate the public about the medical hazards of the nuclear age and the necessary changes in human behavior to stop environmental destruction.

Co-sponsors: Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament, which includes the War and Law League (WALL); Ecumenical Peace Institute/CALC; Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, Peace & Justice; American Friends Service Committee; Shomer Shalom Network for Jewish Nonviolence; Western States Legal Foundation; East Bay Peace Action; Veterans for Peace, Chapter 69; Mt. Diablo Peace & Justice; Code Pink; World Beyond War; Tri-Valley CAREs; Physicians for Social Responsibility, SF Bay Area Chapter; Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), East Bay and SF Chapters.

by Adele Peters (fastcoexist.com)

A startup from Latin America, Democracy Earth, is fighting corruption through Internet voting technology.

In 2013, a group of activists in Buenos Aires attempted an experiment in what they called hacking democracy. Representatives from their new political party would promise to always vote on issues according to the will of citizens online. Using a digital platform, people could tell the legislator what to support, in a hybrid of a direct democracy and representation.

With 1.2% of the vote, the candidate they ran for a seat on the city council didn’t win. But the open-source platform they created for letting citizens vote, called Democracy OS, started getting attention around the world. In Buenos Aires, the government tried using it to get citizen feedback on local issues. Then, when the party attempted to run a candidate a second time, something happened that made them shift course. They were told they’d have to bribe a federal judge to participate.

“When you see that kind of corruption that you think happens in House of Cards—and you suddenly realize that House of Cards is happening all around you—it’s a very shocking thing,” says Santiago Siri, a programmer and one of the founders of the party, called Partido de la Red, or the Net Party. Siri started thinking about how technology could solve the fundamental problem of corruption—and about how democracy should work in the digital age.

The idea morphed into a Y Combinator-backed nonprofit called Democracy Earth Foundation. As the website explains:

The Internet transformed how we share culture, work together—and even fall in love—but governance has remained unchanged for over 200 years. With the rise of open-source software and peer-to-peer networks, political intermediation is no longer necessary. We are building a protocol with smart contracts that allows decentralized governance for any kind of organization.

Their new platform, which the team is working on now as part of the Fast Forward accelerator for tech nonprofits, starts by granting incorruptible identities to each citizen, and then records votes in a similarly incorruptible way.

“If you know anything about democracy, one of the simplest ways of subverting democracy is by faking identity,” says Siri. “This is about opening up the black box that can corrupt the system. In a democracy, that black box is who gets to count the votes, who gets to validate the identities that have the right to vote.”

While some experts argue that Internet voting isn’t secure enough to use yet, Democracy Earth’s new platform uses the blockchain—a decentralized, public ledger that uses encryption. Rather than recording votes in one place, everyone’s votes are recorded across a network of thousands of computers. The system can also validate identities in the same decentralized way.

The platform could be used in a variety of ways. A smaller organization, such the board of directors of a company, might use it for secure voting; the platform can also securely store organizational funds via bitcoin and track a budget. A government might use it for elections or referendums. This fall, Democracy Earth plans to run a pilot when Colombia holds a referendum to approve a historic peace deal between the government and the FARC guerrillas, after 50 years of fighting.

The pilot will record votes from some of the 7 million Colombians who fled the country and can’t easily vote in the referendum, along with those under 18 who can’t yet legally vote. As a pilot, the results won’t be binding for the government, but the platform will give expats and youth a way to share their opinions.

“These two communities are a relevant voice, and we want them to be heard in a process that will be historic to the nation and Latin America as a whole,” says Siri.

After the platform is proven, it can be used officially in elections. It could also enable the kind of direct democracy that new political parties like the Pirate Party, in Iceland, are calling for: letting citizens easily vote directly on issues rather than relying only on politicians.

Democracy Earth is especially interested in helping foster a new kind of governance it calls “liquid democracy,” where people can delegate their votes on particular issues to people they personally know and trust.

“We’re aiming to make the election of representatives a bottom-up process. Rather than electing from a few reality-show candidates that come from top political authorities, we want to engage society to elect among their peers,” says Siri. “Anyone—your friends, colleagues, or a politician, if you want that. This model of liquid democracy is appealing to us because it bridges the best of representative and direct democracy.”

Governments could use the platform now to help fight corruption. But because the platform is a borderless technology, Democracy Earth also imagines that it could eventually lead to a completely different form of governance. If the nation-state is becoming less relevant in a time when we live much of our lives online, perhaps someday we’ll be making decisions together globally as well.

Of course, that will mean that everyone has to have Internet access to participate, but that’s something Siri thinks will soon happen. “Especially in Latin America where we work, you have this digital gap of those who are connected and who are not connected,” he says. “What we know from the statistics is that this digital gap is not socio-economical, but it’s actually generational.” One hundred percent of adults under 30 in Argentina, he says, have Internet access—even in neighborhoods where there isn’t running water.

“In the long term, 10 years from now, 20 years from now—understanding that politics moves at glacial speeds while technology moves at exponential speeds—we see some point in the future where technology is going to be a fundamental right,” he says. “We want to provide the right kind of technology for making decisions online available for everyone.”

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