Bill Dembski

Freedom, Technology, Education

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Freedom, Technology, Education
Only the educated are free — Epictetus

Passing of My Mother

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My Mom, Ursula Dembski, passed away around 11:30am on Sunday, July 15, 2018 at Comfort House, the hospice home in Pella, Iowa. She was 86. My Dad, William J. Dembski, preceded her in death by nine months (for my remembrance of his life, see here). The funeral is scheduled to take place at Oakwood Cemetery in Pella at 10:30am on Friday, July 20th (see Garden Chapel website for details).

As their only child and son, I’m saddened to lose both my parents in nine months, and doubly so in that less than a year ago I still hoped that both would move to Iowa from Arizona, live a few more years, and get to enjoy their only grand kids. My Dad didn’t make it to Iowa. My Mom did in December 2017. But she was diagnosed with an advanced and aggressive lung cancer in February 2018, the oncologist giving her six months to live. She outlived his estimate by ten days.

Even though my Mom was officially diagnosed with lung cancer on February 5, 2018, it’s clear in retrospect that she had it at least six months prior. She had had problems breathing and had three separate X-rays taken of her lungs while still in Arizona. For whatever reasons, the doctors thought it was fluid on the lung or something benign. Even here in Pella, the initial X-rays didn’t prompt any urgency. But my Mom was getting weaker and weaker, having night sweats as well as pain at night on her side while trying to fall asleep.

I pressed my Mom to get to the bottom of this, but thought that she was dealing with some sort of infection. Finally, a CT was done, at which point the doctors suddenly started talking in terms of lesions and cancer. But by then it was too late. She was diagnosed with a mesothelioma, and the cancer was no longer confined to her lungs but had spread to her ribs. Dealing with increasing weakness and pain, she was a shut-in the last three months of her life. Fortunately, the neighbors in the apartment next to her were wonderful and did just about everything for her, making it possible for her to stay in her apartment until the last few days of her life.

Ursula Dembski (December 21, 1931 — July 15, 2018) was born Ursula Armbruster to Albert Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Armbruster (1893 — 1969) and Hildegard Armbruster (1904 — 1980). I don’t recall if my maternal grandmother had a middle name, but my maternal grandfather had three and so disliked having so many that he refused to give my Mom a middle name. My Mom also had a brother four years older than her, Albert Carl Armbruster (yes, he did get one middle name), who received a doctorate in veterinary medicine, but left that field to become a professor of Arbeitswissenschaft (ergonomics) at the Technische Hochschule (Technical University) in Berlin. He died April 20, 2006. [Read more…] about Passing of My Mother

Launch of the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence

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The Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence was launched last night in Seattle (July 11, 2018). The launch was streamed live, and here is the YouTube record of it:

The new center has two websites:

Center for Intelligence

Mind Matters

Here is the text of my remarks:

Good evening. Thank you for attending this launch of the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence. In my talk tonight, I’m going to address three points: (1) why the work of this center is important, (2) what its impact is likely to be, and (3) why it is appropriately named after Walter Bradley.

First, however, I want to thank friends and colleagues of Seattle’s Discovery Institute for their vision in forming this center and providing a secure home for it. Thanks go especially to Bruce Chapman and Steven Buri for making this center a full-fledged program of Discovery; to John West for working through the many crucial details that an initiative like this entails; to Robert Marks for his towering presence in the field of computational intelligence and his willingness to lead the center; and finally to Walter Bradley for giving us not only his name but also his example and inspiration (more on this later).

The Walter Bradley Center, to the degree that it succeeds, will not merely demonstrate a qualitative difference between human and machine intelligence; more so, it will chart how humans can thrive in a world of increasing automation. Such a vision ought to be praiseworthy and non-controversial. But in an age of computational reductionism inspired by scientific materialism, where so much of the mainstream academy views our humanity as unexceptional and even obsolete, such a vision is anything but.  [Read more…] about Launch of the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence’s Homunculus Problem: Why AI Is Unlikely Ever to Match Human Intelligence

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The other day, almost simultaneously, two colleagues emailed me with the same request, though worded differently — namely, to ask for a good argument to show that AI is no match, and indeed can be no match (however far it is developed), for human intelligence.

Here’s how my colleagues posed their questions.

COLLEAGUE 1: I was listening to [a podcast] on fears of AI raised by Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, and Elon Musk. Apart from Goedel’s theorem, are there known information science barriers to AI being able to think like a human?

COLLEAGUE 2: What’s exactly wrong [with AI] philosophically? … Even to say “as machines become smarter” is simply wrong. We don’t have a scientific definition of intelligence itself… What, exactly, does that even mean? A simple calculator is a genius, because it multiplies large numbers effortlessly… What’s gone wrong with this most important modern debate?

Both these colleagues are skeptics of strong AI, the view that machines will catch up to and eventually exceed humans in intelligence. Moreover, given the current limitations of what AI has in fact accomplished (for instance, natural language processing and accurate translation between languages remain duds for AI), their skepticism has some justification. But the worry is what AI might accomplish given faster machines and more advanced programming — that given better hardware and software, machines will eventually surpass us.

What my colleagues and I would like (I’m also a skeptic of strong AI), then, is some good reason for thinking that however far AI is developed with advances in hardware and software, there will always remain a sharp discontinuity between machine and human intelligence, a discontinuity that cuts so deep and marks such a hard divide between the two that we can safely set aside the worry that machines will supplant us. [Read more…] about Artificial Intelligence’s Homunculus Problem: Why AI Is Unlikely Ever to Match Human Intelligence

The Future of Meaningful Work

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Here’s a reprint of an article I published at TheBestSchools.org in April 2017 on the challenge of artificial intelligence to meaningful human work:

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In the last days of the Obama administration, on December 20, 2016, the White House published a white paper (no pun intended) titled “Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy.” Listed among the contributors were John Holdren, the President’s science advisor, as well as world-class experts in economics, technology, and domestic policy. This paper was a big deal.

Its upshot was that advances in artificial intelligence (especially machine learning) threaten to phase out as many as 50 percent of U.S. jobs over the next 20 years, and that this occurrence will so disrupt the economy that it will require a vigorous multi-pronged governmental response, ranging from improved education to increased social safety nets. MIT Technology Review as well as Wired picked up on this white paper and underscored its concerns. The title of the Wiredpiece captured the worry for the future: “The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet. It’s the End of the Middle Class.” (Skynet is, of course, the malevolent conscious artificial intelligence intent on enslaving and destroying humanity in the Terminator films.)

Threats to jobs from technology have been with us since the Industrial Revolution. But in reading the White House paper, one gets the sense “this time is different.” An extended box on page 20 titled “The End of Work?” (the question mark is especially troubling) raises the possibility of AI not just phasing out some jobs but instead phasing out all human work period, rendering human work passé because, if the promise of AI comes true, everything that we can do machines will eventually do better. But even leaving aside such a grand dystopian vision (which these days is promoted with a smile by singularity and transhumanist enthusiasts), the paper argues convincingly that many jobs as we know them now won’t be around much longer. The case study it presents about AVs (automated vehicles) and the human drivers soon to be displaced is hard to discount.  [Read more…] about The Future of Meaningful Work

Google’s Antitrust Future

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Mark Steyn’s April 4, 2018 piece on the YouTube gunwoman Nasim Aghdam included two wonderful passages about the Internet as Google and its YouTube subsidiary are remaking it. Commenting on YouTube itself, Steyn writes:

YouTube is a racket: industrial copyright theft on a planet-wide scale. They get Gladys Scroggins of 27b Elm Street to do most of the active thievery – posting, say, her favorite Michael Jackson video – and then they become one of the biggest corporate behemoths in history by selling advertising off her theft, and tossing the occasional dime Gladys’ way. If you raise an objection to anything they’re doing, you get 47 emails from fellows with different first names – “Bob”, “Dave”, “Nigel”, “Kelli-Su”, “Miguel”, “Rajiv”, “LaShon’dra”, “Bud” – all reciting the exact same boilerplate screw-you response.

As it is, what finally put the shooter, Aghdam, over the edge with YouTube was her ridiculously low views-to-earnings ratio: 300,000 views for 10 cents. Expanding on how YouTube can demonetize and remonetize down its accounts at will (and often for political reasons), Steyn adds:

Why, it’s almost like being made to sit at the back of the cyber-bus or use a separate de-monetized drinking fountain… Don’t like it? Well, you can go to a rock-ribbed conservative like, say, Senator Mike Lee of Utah. But Google/YouTube recently moved into his state and — surprise! — he now seems disinclined to rock that particular boat. Tucker Carlson interviewed him, and some edgy Internet types lifted the interview and posted it to YouTube, billing Senator Lee as “Google’s Number One bootlicker” — and then complained that Google/YouTube had “shadow banned” them so they’d only just realized that Google/YouTube were preventing them cleaning up with Google/YouTube ad revenue by posting somebody else’s content on Google/YouTube in order to trash Google/YouTube. That right there is the Internet in a nutshell.

Steyn is right as far as he goes, but the problem is even more insidious and pervasive. [Read more…] about Google’s Antitrust Future