Tom Lehrer om Wernher von Braun

I fortsättningen, när någon forskarkollega säger något i stil med "Forskningens samhälleliga konsekvenser lämnar jag med varm hand åt andra att funderat över, för det är ju inte mitt bord att tänka på hur resultaten används, jag är ju bara forskare", så kommer jag att svara "All right, jag respekterar din ståndpunkt,¹ men lyssna nu till den här sången från 1965 av Tom Lehrer om den berömde tyske och senare amerikanske raketforskaren Wernher von Braun".

Fotnot

1) Strängt taget kommer detta väluppforstrade men lite mjäkiga och räddhågsna påstående att vara osant, ty sanningen är den att jag inte alls respekterar uppfattningen ifråga, utan ser ned på och avskyr den av hela mitt hjärta. Se min uppsats Vetenskap på gott och ont (eller dess engelskspråkiga översättning Science for good and science for bad) där jag motiverar och försvarar denna hårda attityd.

On the ethics of emerging technologies and future scientific advances

My essay Vetenskap på gott och ont, which I announced in a blog post in April this year, is now available in English translation: Science for good and science for bad. From the introduction:

My aim in this text is to explain and defend my viewpoint concerning the role of science in society and research ethics which permeates the ethical arguments in my recent book Here Be Dragons: Science, Technology and the Future of Humanity (Häggström, 2016). To clarify my view, I will contrast it with two more widespread points of view which I will call the academic-romantic and the economic-vulgar. These will be sketched in Section 2. In Section 3 I explain what is missing in these approaches, namely, the insight that scientific progress may not only make the world better but may also make it worse, whence we need to act with considerably more foresight than is customary today. As a concrete illustration, I will in Section 4 discuss what this might mean for a specific area of research, namely artificial intelligence. In the concluding Section 5 I return to some general considerations about what I think ought to be done.

Read the entire text here.

Man får inte skicka folk i döden

Flyktingfrågan är komplicerad, och vad som är rätt ställningstagande kan ofta vara en svår sak, i synnerhet när vi betraktar den på aggregerad nivå: siffror och politik. När vi istället går ner på individnivå och betraktar ett enskilt fall kan den plötsligt bli vändigt enkel. Jag är personligen bekant med ett sådant fall. Aftonbladet uppmärksammade igår ett annat, i en ledartext av Pernilla Ericson rubricerad Tvångsgifta Sara ska utvisas till sin ”man”. Låt mig saxa några meningar ur texten om 18-åriga Sara som kommer från Afghanistan dit man beslutat att hon skall skickas tillbaka:

Sara kommer från ett land som är ett av de absolut farligaste i världen för kvinnor. Våldsbrott mot flickor och kvinnor för att uppehålla familjens heder ses i Afghanistan som en privatsak. Den som söker hjälp hos myndigheterna efter en våldtäkt riskerar att dödas. Att giftas bort mot sin vilja är vanligt.

Sara berättar att hon giftes bort som 15-åring till en 11 år äldre släkting. Morföräldrarna utsåg maken. Enligt Sara fick hon inte fortsätta studierna när giftermålet var bestämt, och maken skrämde henne när de träffades enskilt.

– Han talade illa om min familj, slog mig, rev sönder mina kläder. Det är jobbigt att berätta det här, säger hon och hennes ögon tåras.

[...]

Hon beskriver en strapatsrik resa. Det hon berättar sedan ekar i så många hedersutsatta flickors och pojkars erfarenheter. Trycket från släkten som hårdnar, som blir till ett krav, ett hot. Vittnesmål som vi måste lyssna på. Sara beskriver hur hennes pappa började pressa henne att återvända till maken.

– Tänk på min heder, sa min pappa, och jag mådde väldigt dåligt, säger Sara.

Enligt Sara utsattes hon även för hot från sin make och hans släktingar.

– “Om vi hittar dig så dödar vi dig. Om du inte säger var du är så tar vi din syster i stället”, sa de över telefon. Min syster var bara nio år då. Min mamma och syster lever fortfarande gömda i Iran.

[...]

Migrationsverket föreslår i sitt beslut att hennes make kunde möta upp henne vid flygplatsen. “Du har uppgett att du är gift och har en make som är bosatt i din hemby. Du har inte gjort sannolikt att han utgör en hotbild mot dig. Han utgör således ett manligt nätverk för dig.”

Det här känns väldigt väldigt fel. Tillräckligt fel för att även om det skulle gå att hävda att vi har demokratiskt fattade beslut om att göra så här så är det lik förbannat moraliskt fel av de tjänstemän på Migrationsverket som "bara gör sitt jobb". Man får inte skicka folk i döden, den principen väger tyngre än eventuella riksdagsbeslut om motsatsen. Man får inte det, så enkelt är det, och den som motsäger mig på denna punkt har en moraluppfattning jag inte kan förlika mig med.

Singularities

Just today, I came across the 2017 paper Singularities and Cognitive Computing. It deals with AI futurology, a topic I am very much interested in. Author of the paper is Devdatt Dubhashi. Here are four things that struck me, from a mostly rather personal perspective, about the paper:

(1) The name Häggström appears four times in the short paper, and in all four cases it is me that the name refers to. I am flattered by being considered worthy of such attention.

So far so good, but my feelings about the remaining points (2)-(4) are not quite as unambiguously positive. I'll refrain from passing moral judgement on them - better to let them speak for themselves and let the reader be the judge.

(2) The paper was published in the summer of 2017, a large fraction of it is devoted to countering arguments by me, and the author is a Chalmers University of Technology colleague of mine with whom I've previously had fruitful collaborations (resulting in several joint papers). These observations in combination make it slightly noteworthy that the paper comes to my attention only now (and mostly by accident), a full year after publication.

(3) The reference list contains 10 items, but strikingly omits the one text that almost the entire Section 2 of the paper attempts to engage with, namely my February 2017 blog post Vulgopopperianism. That was probably not by mistake, because at the first point in Section 2 in which it is mentioned, its URL address is provided. So why the omission? I cannot think of a reason other than that, perhaps due to some grudge against me, the author wishes to avoid giving me the bibliometric credit that mentioning it in the reference list would yield. (But then why mention my book Here Be Dragons in the reference list? Puzzling.)

(4) In my Vulgopopperianism blog post I discuss two complementary hypotheses (H1) and (H2) regarding whether superintelligence is achievable by the year 2100. Early in Section 2 of his paper, Dubhashi quotes me correctly as saying in my blog post that "it is not a priori obvious which of hypotheses (H1) and (H2) is more plausible than the other, and as far as burden of proof is concerned, I think the reasonable thing is to treat them symmetrically", but in the very next sentence he goes overboard by claiming that "Häggström suggests [...] that one can assign a prior belief of 50% to both [(H1) and (H2)]". I suggest no such thing in my blog post, and certainly do not advocate such a position (unless one reads the word "can" in Dubhashi's claim absurdly literally, meaning "it is possible for a Bayesian to set up a model in which each of the hypotheses has probability 50%"). If the sentence that he quoted from my blog post had contained the passage "as far as a priori probabilities are concerned" rather then "as far as burden of proof is concerned", then his claim would have been warranted. But the fact is that I talked about "burden of proof", not "a priori probabilities", and it is clear from this and from the surrounding context that what I was discussing was Popperian theory of science rather than Bayesianism.¹ It is still possible that the mistake was done in good faith. Perhaps, despite being a highly qualified university professor, Dubhashi does not understand the distinction (and tension) between Popperian and Bayesian theory of science.²

Footnotes

1) It is very much possible to treat two or more hypotheses symmetrically without attaching them the same prior probability (or any probability at all). As a standard example, consider a frequentist statistician faced with a sample from a Gaussian distribution with unknown mean μ and unknown variance σ², making a 95% symmetric confidence interval for μ. Her procedure treats the hypotheses μ<0 and μ>0 symmetrically, while not assigning them any prior probabilities at all.

2) If this last speculation is correct, then one can make a case that I am partly to blame. In Chapter 6 of Here Be Dragons - which Dubhashi had read and liked - I treated Popperianism vs Bayesianism at some length, but perhaps I didn't explain things sufficiently clearly.

In the long run

It is important to consider the future of humanity not just in terms of what the world will be like in 2030 or 2050, but also in the (much) longer run. The paper Long-term trajectories of human civilization, which grew out of discussions during the GoCAS guest researcher program Existential risk to humanity in Gothenburg last fall and which is out now, does precisely this. I am proud to be coauthor of it.¹ First author is Seth Baum, who initiated the discussion that eventually lead to this paper. Seth is an American risk researcher and futurologist, and director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute. To readers of this blog he may be familiar from his public appearances in Sweden in 2014 and 2017. The Global Catastrophic Risk Institute has a press release in connection with the paper:

Society today needs greater attention to the long-term fate of human civilization. Important present-day decisions can affect what happens millions, billions, or trillions of years into the future. The long-term effects may be the most important factor for present-day decisions and must be taken into account. An international group of 14 scholars calls for the dedicated study of “long-term trajectories of human civilization” in order to understand long-term outcomes and inform decision-making. This new approach is presented in the academic journal Foresight, where the scholars have made an initial evaluation of potential long-term trajectories and their present-day societal importance.

“Human civilization could end up going in radically different directions, for better or for worse. What we do today could affect the outcome. It is vital that we understand possible long-term trajectories and set policy accordingly. The stakes are quite literally astronomical,” says lead author Dr. Seth Baum, Executive Director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, a non-profit think tank in the US.

[...]

The scholars find that status quo trajectories are unlikely to persist over the long-term. Whether humanity succumbs to catastrophe or achieves a more positive trajectory depends on what people do today.

“In order to succeed it is important to have a plan. Long-term success of humanity depends on our ability to foresee problems and to plan accordingly,” says co-author Roman Yampolskiy, Associate Professor of Computer Engineering and Computer Science at University of Louisville. “Unfortunately, very little research looks at the long-term prospects for human civilization. In this work, we identify some likely challenges to long-term human flourishing and analyze their potential impact. This is an important step toward successfully navigating such challenges and ensuring a thriving future for humanity.”

The scholars emphasize the enormous scales of the long-term future. Depending on one’s ethical perspective, the long-term trajectories of human civilization can be a crucial factor in present-day decision-making.

“The future is potentially exceedingly vast and long,” says co-author Anders Sandberg, Senior Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at University of Oxford. “We are in a sense at the dawn of history, which is a surprisingly powerful position. Our choices – or lack of decisions – will strongly shape which trajectory humanity will follow. Understanding what possible trajectories there are and what value they hold is the first step towards formulating strategies for our species.”

Read the full press release here, and the paper here.

Footnote

1) Here is the full (and, I daresay, fairly impressive) author list: Seth D. Baum, Stuart Armstrong, Timoteus Ekenstedt, Olle Häggström, Robin Hanson, Karin Kuhlemann, Matthijs M. Maas, James D. Miller, Markus Salmela, Anders Sandberg, Kaj Sotala, Phil Torres, Alexey Turchin and Roman V. Yampolskiy.