Notes and Quotes

So how do you detect autonomy? Well, we might say that an entity is autonomous if it displays any of these traits: self-repair, self-defense, self-maintenance (securing energy, disposing of waste), self-control of goals, self-improvement. The common element in all these characteristics is of course the emergence, at some level, of a self. In the technium we don’t have any examples of a system that displays all these traits-but we have plenty of examples that display some of them. Autonomous airplane drones can self-steer and stay aloft for hours. But they don’t repair themselves. Communication networks can repair themselves. But they don’t reproduce themselves. We have self-reproducing computer viruses, but they don’t improve themselves.

Seemingly simple inventions like the clock had profound social con-sequences. The clock divided an unbroken stream of time into measurable units, and once it had a face, time became a tyrant, ordering our lives.

Technology is our extended body, or rather extended body of our ideas.

Language is the final transformation in the natural world and the first step in the manufactured world.

For the past 30 years the conventional wisdom has been that once a person achieves a minimal standard of living, more money does not bring more happiness. If you live below a certain income threshold, increased money makes a difference, but after that, it doesn’t buy happi-ness. That was the conclusion of a now-classic study by Richard Easterlin in 1974. However, recent research from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania shows that worldwide, affluence brings increased satisfaction. Higher income earners are happier. Citizens in higher-earning countries tend to be more satisfied on average.

My interpretation of this newest research-which also matches our intuitive impressions-is that what money brings is increased choices, rather than merely increased stuff (although more stuff comes with the territory). We don’t find happiness in more gadgets and experiences. We do find happiness in having some control of our time and work, a chance for real leisure, in the escape from the uncertainties of war, poverty, and corruption, and in a chance to pursue individual freedoms-all of which come with increased affluence.

Every city starts as a slum. If it’s suitable for growth it develops from there, becoming a town, with concentric circles of slums at its boundaries. Every citizen hates newcomers.

This is how all technology works, it starts as a prototype, then through continuous iteration it becomes great.

The reason people move from villages to cities is for a better future for their children.

Simultaneous independent innovation is the norm in nature. Example the eye. This is convergent evolution.

It is caused by two factors:

1. Negative constrains of geometry and physics.
2. Positive constraints of genes and metabolic pathways, which coalesce in a few repossession possibilities.

Curiously, this freely chosen aspect of ourselves is what other people remember about us. How we handle life’s cascade of real choices within the larger cages of our birth and background is what makes us who we are. It is what people talk about when we are gone. Not the given but choices we made.

When we unleash inanimate objects from their shackles of hereditary inertness and give them particles of choice, we give them freedom to make mistakes. We can think of each new crumb of artificial sentience as a new way to make mistakes. To do stupid things. To make errors. In other words, technology teaches us how to make innovative kinds of mistakes we could not make before. In fact, asking ourselves how humanity might make entirely new kinds of mistakes is probably the best metric we have for discovering new possibilities of choice and freedom.

When Google (or one of its descendants) is able to understand ordinary spoken questions and is living in a layer of our clothing, we will quickly absorb this tool into our minds. We will depend on it, and it will depend on us-both to continue to exist and to continue getting smarter, because the more people use it the smarter it gets.

How can technology make a person better? Only in this way: by providing each person with chances. A chance to excel at the unique mixture of talents he or she was born with, a chance to encounter new ideas and new minds, a chance to be different from his or her parents, a chance to create something his or her own.

Peace is summoned all over the world because it births increasing opportunities and, unlike a finite game, contains infinite potential.