In an interview with Elon Musk in Aeon magazine recently, I came across a thought provoking quote about humanity’s impressions of themselves,
We might think of ourselves as nature’s pinnacle, the inevitable endpoint of evolution, but beings like us could be too rare to ever encounter one another. Or we could be the ultimate cosmic outliers, lone minds in a Universe that stretches to infinity.
It is the sophistication of the human brain that propels us to this exclusive club of beings who can not only understand complex philosophical and scientific processes, but weave seemingly unconnected pieces of information with each other to draw useful inferences from them. Would it be possible to recreate the general functionality of the human brain through knowledge that is available today?
Predicting the future? Precognition? Defined as the non-inferential prediction of future events. Non inferential is important. as is the timeline across which this is happening.
for instance, in the minotiry report – crimes are predicted routinely. we’re ever closer to that scenario with pred pol and blue crush.
does this mean that we’re getting to a place where precog or precrime is going to be common? is that just another expression of profiling?
the theme of spielbergs movie was free will vs determinism. so the question is – if people are aware of their future, can they change it?
is the advent of AI and predictive analytics getting us there? Will it ever improve to a point where (given all the signing of ai accords and warnings from world personalities) where this is real?
we are being watched. it’s not 1984, but 2014 is pretty damned accurate to say that the internet is watching us. not literally yet, but our actions. cameras. video streams. location. as our increasing reliance on technology avances, more and more data is being fed to the engines that power everything.
model building will become easier.
ultimately, a collective intelligence is going to be born.
and this goes back to extinction? of the famous short story – now there is a god?
PredPol
https://in.news.yahoo.com/minority-report-moves-reel-real.html
The flaw of the system is that, once people are aware of their future, they can change it.
Free will vs determinism
Minority report
Question of free will – does that exist?
Spielberg described his ideas for the film’s technology to Roger Ebert before the movie’s release:\
I wanted all the toys to come true someday. I want there to be a transportation system that doesn’t emit toxins into the atmosphere. And the newspaper that updates itself…
The Internet is watching us now. If they want to. They can see what sites you visit. In the future, television will be watching us, and customizing itself to what it knows about us. The thrilling thing is, that will make us feel we’re part of the medium. The scary thing is, we’ll lose our right to privacy. An ad will appear in the air around us, talking directly to us.
Spielberg said that the arrest of criminals before they have a chance to commit their crimes in the movie had some real world background in post 9/11 America, commenting that “\e’re giving up some of our freedom so that the government can protect us.”\ The future world in Minority Report of retinal scans, robotic human inspectors, and intrusive, individualized, public advertising arrived in American theaters as the country was debating how much governmental intrusion into personal matters was necessary to ensure safety of its citizens.\ Spielberg said he would be against a PreCrime system if it were ever possible, as he believes that if it did exist, those in control of it would undoubtedly abuse its powers.\ Kowalski questions what the benevolent precogs in the film could become in the hands of those who trained their skills for political intrigue.\ Science fiction scholar Gary Westfahl asserts that in a political context, PreCrime may be seen “a metaphor for racial profiling, and one could view the liberation of the precogs as the end of a form of slavery.”\
That, in a nutshell, is the inner deciding process that humans have evolved. That is the reality behind the idea of free will: these processes of rational choice and self-control. It’s this or nothing. If you accept free will, this is what it is. If you insist on disbelieving in free will, these are the processes that are commonly taken for it. But either way, there is a real phenomenon here. And to understand human life, it is vital to understand how this phenomenon works
http://www.thegreatdebate.org.uk/determinismandfreewill.html
The question of free will may now be stated thus. “Given all the conditions requisite for eliciting an act of will except the act itself, does the act necessarily follow?” Or, “Are all my volitions the inevitable outcome of my character and the motives acting on me at the time?” Fatalists, necessarians, and determinists answer “Yes” to this question. Libertarians, indeterminists and anti-determinists reply “No” to it. The mind or soul in deliberate actions is a free cause. Given all of the conditions requisite for action, we (in virtue or our mind or soul) can either act or abstain from action. It can, and sometimes does, exercise its own causality against the weight of character and present motives.
Artificial intelligence
Intelligent assistants
Is mining data and predictive analytics leading up to the precognition era? Will it ever get to a point where it will affect the future itself?
Is knowing the future a good thing?
--
If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me as @viksit on Twitter.