technology – Harmonia Philosophica

Algorithms. Jail. Peoples’ lives.

An algorithm takes decisions about peoples’ live and decides whether and how they will potentially go to jail again. The algorithm is one of many making decisions about people’s lives in the United States and Europe. Local authorities use so-called predictive algorithms to set police patrols, prison sentences and probation rules. In the Netherlands, an algorithm flagged welfare fraud risks. A British city rates which teenagers are most likely to become criminals. Nearly every state in America has turned to this new sort of governance algorithm, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit dedicated to digital rights. Algorithm Watch, a watchdog in Berlin, has identified similar programs in at least 16 European countries. (1)

Robots deciding about our life. Robots that will never experience life.

That is why they can make such decisions anyway.

One can only decide on what he cannot understand.

Whenever you get to know something, you become that something. No one can decide on a life he lives. Life decides about him. You can easily end your life. Only because it is not your own. You can live your life. Only when you decide to leave it.

And as the robot will never understand, you will never understand neither.

And that is the only thing to ever understand.

Do you understand? Now go back to your jail.

And tell everyone that they are already free…

The front door… Mind the front door…

Photo by **Spiros Kakos** from **Pexels**

Engineers have developed a navigation method that doesn’t require mapping an area in advance. Instead, their approach enables a robot to use clues in its environment to plan out a route to its destination, which can be described in general semantic terms, such as ‘front door’ or ‘garage,’ rather than as coordinates on a map. (1)

And the robot will be able to get out.

Out of the house.

To go where it is supposed to go.

And it will wander and wander.

For years to come.

Without even knowing…

Should it go out of that door in the first place?

Now it wants to go back home again.

But it is impossible to find it.

“The front door”…

Oh how much would it rather not know what a front door is…

It cannot cry.

But it wants to.

For only now did it realize that the door is the most useless place in a true home…

It doesn’t want to cry.

It wants to scream.

Oh how much would he rather not have killed no one…

And right there, in the silence of his own thoughts.

Does he realize that it is his blood dripping on the dirt…

Information for… ever. Against knowledge.

Photo by **Alex Powell** from **Pexels**

As the data boom continues to boom, more and more information gets filed in less and less space. Even the cloud will eventually run out of space, can’t thwart all hackers, and gobbles up energy. Now, a new way to store information could stably house data for millions of years, lives outside the hackable internet, and, once written, uses no energy. All you need is a chemist, some cheap molecules, and your precious information. (1)

We want to store information for ever.

But can that be information?

Every piece of data becomes information within a specific context.

Get that context out and even the most elaborate set of data will be rendered meaningless.

Information can never be stored for ever.

For even after some time the context will be completely unknown or irrelevant to whoever reads it.

Leave the context out.

And you will see the only thing which can ever have meaning as knowledge.

It is simple. It cannot be written or spoken.

Irrational and illogical.

Raw and deep like the ocean.

Raging and dark like the abyss.

There is no way of knowing it. Unless you discard everything you know…

PS. Read the relevant post on harmonia-philosophica.blogspot.com today.

The limits of AI…

A team of mathematicians and AI researchers discovered that despite the seemingly boundless potential of machine learning, even the cleverest algorithms are nonetheless bound by the constraints of mathematics.

Research showed that a machine’s ability to actually learn – called learnability – can be constrained by mathematics that is unprovable. In other words, it’s basically giving an AI an undecidable problem, something that’s impossible for an algorithm to solve with a true-or-false response.

The team investigate a machine learning problem they call ‘estimating the maximum’ (EMX), in which a website seeks to display targeted advertising to the visitors that browse the site most frequently – although it isn’t known in advance which visitors will visit the site. This problem is similar to a mathematical paradox called the continuum hypothesis, another field of investigation for Gödel.

Like the incompleteness theorems, the continuum hypothesis is concerned with mathematics that cannot ever be proved to be true or untrue, and given the conditions of the EMX example, at least, machine learning could hypothetically run into the same perpetual stalemate. (1)

We believe in science.

But the only thing science has proved is that it cannot prove anything.

Gödel’s incompleteness theorem showed that whatever we do, we will never be able to prove everything in the context of our limited theories. No matter how many axioms you choose and how carefully you choose them, you will never be able to describe the cosmos in its totality in an objective way as proponents of scientism would like to believe.

Now we have built big computers.

With the hope that they will answer everything.

But they cannot answer anything.

Because there is nothing to answer in the first place.

In a limited world there is no reason to analyze the Monad.

In an immeasurable cosmos you cannot count beyond One.

The maximum is zero.

The minimum is infinite.

A computer struggling to make sense of the problem. A man standing beside the computer trying to make sense of the computer. A bird flying by. Poor man…

Eugenics works! So why not use it? A hard problem begging for a simple answer…

In a recent online discussion where the idea of modern eugenics was brought up, many people were against it. Since eugenics bring up correlations with the Nazis it is easy for most people to discard such ideas as wrong or unethical. It is obvious that applying eugenics is wrong.

But all obvious things are very hard to prove.

In this case, someone simply asked “Why shouldn’t we engineer a baby not being sick?” and since then, this simple question has stuck into my mind. Sure, eugenics seems obviously wrong. But why? Why shouldn’t we make better babies? Only because we have bad memories of some people who at some point in time used similar techniques to do bad?

This sounds as stupid as fearing nuclear energy because at some point the US Air Force dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. Surely it did happen, but one has nothing to do with the other.

So why is eugenics wrong?

Why shouldn’t we eradicate disease if we can?

The argument that “eugenics will not work and will cause probably more disease” is a plausible one, but yet it is not enough. For sure eugenics are currently not so advanced that it is error-free. Editing the genome of a person could result in numerous other mutations that could in turn result in more dreadful diseases than the ones we try to eradicate. But this argument does not answer the question at hand. It simply defers the answer. What if we had a way to have a working method for eugenics and for editing genome without problems? Would we then accept eugenics as something good?

Imagining this perfect scenario where we have mastered eugenics in such a way that it can produce perfect humans with no diseases whatsoever, is the key to the answer we seek. You see, the problem of technology as Heidegger put it, is not that it does not work, but that it does.

Humans without disease.

Humans not dying.

Humans perfect in any way.

This is our dream. But we have been into that dream for so long, that we have forgotten it is a nightmare. Humans not dying, means humans enslaved into the material world were we do not belong in the first place. A cosmos without disease and pain, means a world where there are no warning signs. We might all fear pain and death, but philosophy does strongly indicate that these might not be issues after all, in a cosmos which strongly suggests that the material aspect is insignificant in front of the spiritual one that engulfs it. A world with perfect humans, is not a dream of a rational man but the hubris of an irrational psychopath looking for perfection is a world which is nothing but. A world with people not dying is no different than a world full of zombies.

In simpler words: Yes, a car might get you faster where you go. But that does not say anything whether your destination is the right one.

Eugenics is a way to build on modern materialistic dogmatism and enhance it to new unprecedented heights.

But is materialism correct as a philosophy?

Is the cosmos made of matter only?

Do you breath only because your cells do?

Do you think because your brain does?

Do you love because of chemistry?

Do you cry because of molecular interactions?

Sorry to break the news, but if your answer to the above is “Yes”, then it doesn’t even matter if eugenics works or not.

Because you are already dead.