The economies of error — valuing mistakes and folly.

Someone might have a genetic predisposition to a disease — let us say, Cancer. The person does not develop cancer, but some offspring might — and the cancer cells decide to proliferate and flourish — build huge cancerous superstructures, abeit malignant to the host — “it wants to grow” — in the likeness of the Kevin Kelly book — What does technology want? — we could ask the question — What does Cancer want?

Cancer does not want anything — it is an error in the fabric of life, a rather malignant one, which has ways of multiplying indiscriminately.

Intelligent machines with ‘dispositions’ acquired from an initial human interaction or otherwise — just even in the form of debris, could potentially develop structures that pursue that branch of inquiry, and eventually become very sophisticated — a purely random occurrence.

You could look at that and infer consciousness — whereas the generative processes that followed that trajectory have absolutely no interest in the outcomes. There is in every humanly generated algorithm, the possibility of error, and some catastrophically grievous. (There is a book I forget the name of which, I should revisit — sometimes there are patterns in errors — Thoms’s Catastrophe theory could help).

So, attributing such seemingly intelligent behavior — which firstly is not intelligent — only seems so because we as human do that attribution as something being conscious, is a fundamental error.

In fact such a development might have nothing to do with human interest, yet might turn out to accidentally be interesting to human. — a lot of simulation is like that, and we attribute intent to that.

This is much like the Intelligence Design argument — just because we have not yet conceived the generative processes and mechanisms, we call design, we think there might be something there beyond us. Beyond us alright — but of very terrestrial origins, somethings that resulted from human work.

Finally, the reason why these processes bewilder and confound us and hold us in awe, is because, just like what happens within us, these processes result in emergent behavior explained with complexity thinking, (complexity isn’t something an object possesses, it is a way of explaining what it does — seemingly without a maker), and some of the structures that might result are complex adaptive systems, and that process of development and growth can be exponential very fast, accelerate and go out of control.

That is why we need to learn how to deal with these emerging phenomena — consciously and conscientiously, so we use what furthers our development, but strangle and excise, very early in the development those branches that might be harmful to ur existence as a species perhaps.

That is a different kind of thinking — that is a shift of inconceivable proportions at this moment in our development.

I am not getting into — “do we need this?” My thinking usually is — that at this moment I do not see why we need this, but the culture in technology is let’s do it and see what happens — except the people doing it are not the ones who are around to see what happens.

They have by then made their exits and gone off to the Caribbean or wherever. We have a huge ethics problem and we are highly underdeveloped as a species in that sense.