From the essay, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” by Friedrich A. Hayek.

I believe that this is exactly correct, and why any kind of Totalitarian Government, Communist, Socialist or Fascist, is doomed to fail.  And why I so rail against The State.

(Source: econlib.org)

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The extension & projection of human power via suddenly ubiquitous and accesible robots.

First comes the high-tech arms race with China, Israel and all the other nations competing to build their own drones. Then comes the low-cost trickledown into low-tech wars like Libya’s, where tomorrow’s rag-tag militias fight with DIY drones. Finally, if robots are simply computers with wings (and missiles), then expect to see future wars fought by the descendants of flash-trading algorithms, with humans as anxious bystanders.

… … . .

toss the project on Kickstarter and build their drone using Arduino modules developed by hobbyist sites such as DIY Drones. In a recent essay [7], the consultant and futurist Scott Smith noted that both the “maker” movement and the Libyan rebels desperately hacking together weaponry are drawing on the same open source knowledge base. Or for that matter, so are the Mexican drug cartels assembling their own tanks and submarines.

“We’ve come to a point where you put together a parallel system to the U.S. Department of Defense,” says Smith. And also to the point where the DoD is soliciting the hobbyists themselves to be the next generation of weapon designers via DARPA’s crowdsourcing effort, UAVForge [8]. “If I were at a major arms contractor, I would be worried about being disrupted,” Smith says.

… … . .

But the shift from a single pair of eyes in the sky to a swarm of bots would create havoc with U.S. military doctrine, which requires having a human operator at all times, or a “man in the loop.” This is one reason why the Air Force is training more remote pilots this year (some 350) than bomber and fighter pilots combined. Then again, that’s not nearly enough for 7,000 drones, let alone 7 million, all of which would have the intelligence to fight or fly on their own, with faster-than-human response times.

That’s why the definition of “in the loop: is blurring from direct human control “to a veto power we’re unwilling to use,” says Singer. In the case of missile defense systems already in use, “you can turn it on or off,” but you can’t pick and choose which bogeys to shoot. “The speed and complexity is such that the human interface has to be minimized to be effective,” he adds, which suggests the generals in WarGames were right all along.

Or were they? Releasing increasingly autonomous warbots into the wild will demand new algorithms to command them, raising the specter of a “flash crash” on the battlefield as opposing algorithms clash and chase each other’s tails. Or what if hackers were to assemble a botnet for real: an army of machines ready to do their bidding? Perhaps a decade from now, there will be no “cyber-war [10].” There will only be war.

(Source: solidarityeconomy.net)

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datavis:

Timeline of the Universe

One of the great attractions of Utilitarianism as an ethic is that it’s mechanical, and appears to remove the “subjective” element from the decisionmaking.  That is, a person can pretend they do not have to take responsibility for actually making a judgement about rightness/wrongness.  If f(x) = Greater Good, then x it is, and it’s not “my fault,” since I’m just running the equation f(x).

One of the problems with using Utilitarianism as your go-to ethic is that you can get a variety of results depending on the scope you set for the utilitarian function.  In math-y terms, f(x) for the set x = [1 to 100] gives one result, but for the set x = [101 - 577] gives another result.  In parental terms, if I’m solving for the greatest good for my child for today, I might choose one thing; if I’m solving for the greatest good for the family unit for today, I might choose another; if I’m solving for the greatest good for the family unit for the next 10 years, there’s yet another choice; and if I’m solving for the greatest good for my vision for humanity, then there’s another choice.

My observation in myself and others is that when our main ethic is utility, we happily absolve ourselves of agency and responsibility for our actions while simultaneously choosing the scope of the function that will get us exactly what we want.

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(Source: concurringopinions.com)

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The film is framed around interviews with a number of members of the transhumanist, bioethics, disability, and robotics communities, such as Rodney Brooks, James Hughes, and Marcy Darnovsky. But it focuses primarily on three figures, each of whom is disabled: John Hockenberry, an accomplished journalist and a Distinguished Fellow of the M.I.T. Media Lab; Gregor Wolbring, a biochemist and bioethicist at the University of Calgary; and Patty Berne, a disability and LGBT activist.

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