People get all bent out of shape thinking about the eminent takeover of artificial intelligence. Personally I think we're already robots, or rather, we've always been.
Bees in a hive, wolves in a pack, gas molecules in a prescribed volume. Do we really make decisions or does something else do it for us? And I don't mean God, I mean physics.
A nice string of headlines surfaced lately that alludes to this idea of humans being driven by forces well beyond our control:
Research finds tipping point for large-scale social change
Jun 2018, phys.org
Roughly 25% of people need to take a stand before large-scale social change occurs. This idea of a social tipping point applies to standards in the workplace and any type of movement or initiative.
How physics explains the evolution of social organization
Jun 2018, phys.org
A scientist at Duke University says the natural evolution of social organizations into larger and more complex communities that exhibit distinct hierarchies can be predicted from the same law of physics that gives rise to tree branches and river deltas.
[Author] outlines how these seemingly disparate phenomena are actually connected through the constructal law of evolution in nature. Penned by Bejan in 1996, the law states that for a system to survive, it must evolve over time to increase its access to flow. [...] and the true nature of an innovation is simply a local design change that increases the efficiency of the distribution of a resource to the entire population. While the individual innovator may benefit greatly from the idea, the entire community also gains better access to that resource, which serves to reduce overall inequality.
Study of Google search histories reveals relationship between anti-Muslim and pro-ISIS sentiment in U.S.
Jun 2018, phys.org
Researchers suggest, targeting [Islamic] groups in countries such as the U.S. might be causing home-grown radicalization to occur.
[They] found a common theme—in low income communities where there were a lot of anti-Muslim searches, there were also a lot of searches by people looking for more information about radical Islamic groups. Such communities, the researchers further noted, tended to be homogeneous in nature, mostly white, with few people of color. People from the Middle East, they point out, stand out in such communities. This finding, they claim, suggests that anti-Muslim activities such as discrimination and being targeted by government officials might actually be pushing some of those targeted people toward becoming extremists.
Adding a bit of moderation, we should note that humans lack agency in this context the way that smoking one cigarette takes 0.05 seconds off your life. Assertions like this come from absolutely huge, unimaginable numbers of people and variables working in concert and across time.
Our little brains can't handle it. This is why it's so hard to connect that one cigarette to lung cancer (especially in the face of nicotine addiction) and also why many if not most of us can't handle the possibility that neither we nor an omnipotent entity have control. It is instead the interaction of myriad forces, generating every-increasingly complex arrangements. Coincidentally, it is Liebniz bday (thanks google doodle); he is the guy that said things don't exist in themselves but only in their relation to others - an idea that has yet to be fully incorporated into our universal model of this thing we live in.
image source: valve steam controller
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