darkzbaron
Sep 9, 2018 · 4 min read

From Relative to Absolute

Serena Williams winning in Wimbledon in 2016

The absolute is scary, it leads to determinism, with no escape.

And it is unnecessary… we strive very well with partial knowledge taking decisions based on impressions, truncated information, experience…

If we were to have all information before chosing a particular apple, we would be first scared realising that chosing this apple as a pertefctly informed being would make us responsible for the outcome of that decision.

Comparing men and machine in 2018 shows that we are indeed far ahead when it comes to make decision in low information conditions, thanks to our most precisous gift: intuition.
Intuition allows us to create light ex-nihilo, from total darkness. Human brains do not need petabyte of data to strive.

Information is always a relative concept. What does it mean to know about the game of poker ?
Some answer would define knowing as knowing better than your neighboor , an indea of the average or an opponent.
Absolute knowledge, on the other hand, is easily defined as knowing everything there is to know.

With mankind experience being increasingly recorded, tracked and analysed. Poker does not escape this rules, with millions of games played online, tracked and recorded.
From this, it is no longer so far fetched to conceptualise the idea of absolute poker knowledge. With machines and softwares being able to process huge amounts of data and derive meaningful patterns. All of poker meaningful patterns for instance.
The concept of absolute information is now more a question of which domains are not suitable for this sort of approach.

The likes of Google, Facebook or Amazon — the latter has crossed the trillion dollar valuation last week — have indeed access to so much information that it is safe to assume that they have absolute information on many patterns.
It is no longer a secret that Facebook can localise pretty much anyone on the planet, even if they don’t have a Facebook account - moving patterns.
For the world outside the Silicon Valley, absolute information is still a hard concept to swallow as it challenges the very core on which societies have build themselves; distribution of knowledge, relevance and construction of the social self.

Cooperation
One of the magic of cooperation, with any other being is the distribution of knowledge. It is a mainly subconsicous process that makes two cooperative entity focus, learn and remember different things. It’s a well known and ressearched dynamic in couples, in fact I argue that it applies in any form of cooperation including cross specy colaboration such as human/dogs or human/horses.

The advent of absolute knowing entities (e.g. Google Search Engine) for example challenges this very fundamental of society. Essentially, two different rational beings would always find reasons to cooperate as they have different knowledge which would makes them potentially useful to each other. With absolute knowing entities, cooperation is clearly not encouraged; why would I need your knowledge if Google knows better than you.

Where does fear start ?
I think that, we as humans, did not yet consistently accept the concept of absolute knowledge entity albeit accepting the theological concept of a god. As a matter of fact, nowaday. Many people , rightly or wrongly think that they can beat Google Maps at devising directions. I strongly believe that machines can beat humans in much more domains than we dare to think about.

Change and therefore error is at the core of life. We replicate our DNA with errors compared to our genitors for that reason. We are wired to think absolute as relative, only valid for a certain time frame.

As long as absolute information systems would return errors we will continue to specialise in interpreting potential false positive. It is sort of the self-driving car paradigm, people would stop learning how to drive only when self-driving car make no mistake. As this is not likely to happen anytime soon, people would still learn how to drive.

Technological Singularity
It is very uncertain that the answer to technological singularity will be super humans. We humans rarely face change with effort but rather a surge of ego. The super human scenario would see humans becoming super specialist as it is unlikely that the ability to cross-over multiple domains would be surpassed by machines. Super humans would go by meta-knowledge and resort to machines for specialized knowledge.

Most likely societies would entail multiple realities and structure around concepts beyond usefulness with Universal Income as a cornerstone.

darkzbaron
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