Hm. Marcus' layout was pretty clear, I thought. If we take the utilitarian
seriously, there is some calculus for more good, less bad. But that calculus
isn't simple. And even if we can simplify it, there's no reason to believe
it'll be useful in the end. What the Neuralink ⇔ UCDavis kerfuffle demonstrates
is that capital[ism] is ethic[al|s]. It's similar to the conclusion that
technology is not agnostic to ethics/values.
But, as Marcus has pointed out in past threads (and I've agreed with) is that some
problems (may) *require* the consolidation of funds. If consolidation happens through
celebrity or taxation may be irrelevant to the fact that large pools of money are
necessary ... Big Science, Big Tech, whatever. So, in the end, in a capitalist society,
we pool our assets via private ownership of things (or the "means of
production" ... whatever that means). But our universities, largely socialist in the
past, pool their money through taxation and award funding.
We're seeing the death of the university. But we're also seeing the birth of some things
like "community organizing", trucker blockades, Consilience Projects, etc. The
ethical [ab]use of animals is just one small part of the ethical calculus we use to
reason over all these things. But it's an important one, not merely because of our
technological progress in AI (if not AGI) but because of our progress in consciousness
studies.
Can the world remain funded through private ownership? Or, asked in another
way, should broadly purposed research universities like UC Davis accept funding
from narrowly purposed corporations? If so, why? If not, why?
On 2/15/22 12:26, Steve Smith wrote:
Thanks for having this conversation in front of us, I'm pretty invested in
these kinds of issues and they are rarely discussed openly IMO.
Perhaps you can unpack for me a little (or say it another way so I can gain my
own parallax):
/In our capitalist society, is it reasonable for Neuralink to be less
susceptible to the flattening you describe by aggregating (not summing over)
all subjects' projections from a high-dimensional construct?
/
/
/
On 2/15/22 12:56 PM, glen wrote:
Excellent! Thanks. However, it's also important to note that the lawsuit is
against UC Davis, not Neuralink. So, to whatever extent that Neuralink funding,
mixed with tax payer funding, drives university research (and possibly other
things like overhead or paying a percentage of salary for some with teaching
loads, etc.), those backseating costs can deeply impact whatever it is we call
a research university.
I'm about halfway into my "evaluation" of https://consilienceproject.org/. What
I've seen so far has a healthy plating (I was going to say veneer, but that's too thin)
of pretty words. But those pretty words sound a tiny bit like Neuralink's corporatized
strawman/response to these accusations. I bring up Consilience because it's placed in
between a for-profit company and a research university. On Consilience's About page, you
see 2 ethical commitments:
• collective attribution of authorship, and
• transparency in methodology
These may seem a bit contradictory to some observers. My guess is that, given
some time and effort (maybe even semi-automated NLP computation), I could
ferret out who wrote which featured article. What I'd like to be transparent is
who contributes what to each article. (This is a professional task I have to
some extent with my clients ... so it's not mere hobby.)
Going back to the lawsuit against UC Davis and the 3 example spectrum (and
perhaps even the political tangent SteveS raised), where does Neuralink end and
UC Davis begin? In our capitalist society, is it reasonable for Neuralink to be
less susceptible to the flattening you describe by aggregating (not summing
over) all subjects' projections from a high-dimensional construct?
We see a similar thread in the "academic free speech" rhetoric the alt-right is
pushing these days (though there are lefty exceptions) ... aka when is an academic not
talking as an academic? And in the Barret and Gorsuch exhortations that they're not
partisan hacks ... even when talking at a partisan event.
[sigh] I know these fluffy issues aren't interesting to most people. It's way
easier to shut up and calculate. But not only are they interesting to me, I
think they're necessary, then, now, and later.
On 2/15/22 11:30, Marcus Daniels wrote:
For some activity there will be a mesh of consequences, that perhaps with enough transparency, debate, and observation the facts of the matter could be quantified as a large graph. Across this graph, one could apply a subject's function of the utility of each one of those consequences. If some of the consequences are both illegal and observable and a node represented a risk to the subject doing the assessment of the graph, then that node would probably result in a negative utility for most subjects and perhaps it will overwhelm other positive evaluations across other nodes. One could perform the same procedure across all possible subjects. The sum would be a social evaluation of the mesh of consequences. I think it would not be very useful, and not even address externalized costs. Throughout this procedure the subjects' utility functions would all be subject to advertising, propaganda, religion, blood sugar and hormones. Measure twice you could get different
answer.
If there are externalized costs that need to be recognized for the survival of
humans, then humans will have to create laws with large risks for those that
don't comply with them. (Case-by-case harassment, vigilantism, or terrorism
wouldn't scale as well.) My guess in this Neuralink case, is that if there
were any deviations from best practices, they will be aware of this risk in the
future. In the cynical view of it being propaganda, well, yes, they'll be
motivated to make the best kind they can and to set things up to
compartmentalize the most sensitive or emotionally charged information.
--
glen
When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.
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