Bill Dembski

Freedom, Technology, Education

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

The Sidelining of Nike

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Nike’s decision to enlist Colin Kaepernick as a spokesperson and then ascribe to him the words “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” has elicited a large reaction, to which I’ll contribute here.

Speaking for myself, I find it wearisome when companies that make products with no conceivable political implication decide to weigh into politics, take a partisan position, provoke controversy, and then shove their point of view in the public’s face.

ESPN does this, but I will still watch ESPN. Yet Nike has not been content simply to engage in partisan politics. In addition, it has decided to stake out so bone-headed and indefensible an ad campaign as to insult the intelligence of the public and especially its customers.

It’s as though Nike were saying, “We’re going to make completely stupid and outrageous claims, and you’re going to keep buying our stuff, and because you do even though we insulted your intelligence, you’ll be our consumer slaves forever!” [Read more…] about The Sidelining of Nike

Virtual Railroads and West Virginia Back Roads: AI’s Temptation to Theft Over Honest Toil

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AI (artificial intelligence) poses a challenge to human work, threatening to usurp many human jobs in coming years. But a related question that’s too often ignored and needs to be addressed is whether this challenge will come from AI in fact being able to match and exceed human capabilities in the environments in which humans currently exercise those capabilities, or whether it will come from AI also manipulating our environments so that machines thrive where otherwise they could not.

AI never operates in a vaccuum. Rather, any instance of AI operates in an environment. We often think that AI will leave an environment untouched and simply supersede human capability as it operates in that environment. But what if the success of AI depends not so much on being able to rival human capabilities as in “changing the game” so that AI has an easier job of it. The mathematician George Polya used to quip that if you can’t solve a problem, find an easier problem and solve it. Might AI in the end not so much supersede humans as rather impoverish the environments in which humans find themselves so that machines can thrive at their expense?

To see what’s at stake with this line of concern over AI, consider the prospect of automated vehicles. Automated vehicles, we are told, are poised to take over all of human driving. Once the machine learning for the automation of driving matures just a bit more, we are assured that human drivers will be out of a job — the machines will drive so much better than us that it would in fact be unethical for humans to continue to drive. And, of course, as an unfortunate side effect, humans whose jobs depend on driving will all be put out of work (truck drivers, taxi drivers, etc.).

Now the actual progress of automated vehicles has not reflected this rosy picture (rosy if you’re an AI advocate, dismal if you’re out of a job). Recent fatalities with automated vehicles have undercut this picture to the public at large. But the deeper conceptual problem with the automation of driving is that there appear just too many contingencies on the road, contingencies that human drivers can handle without difficulty but for which machines require specialized training. [Read more…] about Virtual Railroads and West Virginia Back Roads: AI’s Temptation to Theft Over Honest Toil

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. He was off by a month.

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 scan 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 in Seattle the evening of 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, delivered in my stead by Robert Marks because I was unable to attend on account of my Mom’s impending death (she passed away July 15):

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