Information pseudo-ambiguity

Ray Kurzweil - personality, without exaggeration, the legendary. US presidents Lyndon Johnson (Ray was then 20 years old) and Bill Clinton, who handed Kurzweil in 1999 an “Information Nobel” - National Medal of Technology, congratulated him on his victories in the field of computer science.

Kurzweil created the first music synthesizer, first taught computers to recognize human speech. And this is only his personal achievements, not counting the work on Google, IBM, etc. Now Kurzweil is working on the consciousness of an assistant, “able to answer questions - even before you formulate them.” No, I'm not joking. This quote.

However, Ray Kurzweil, of course, is better known as a futurologist. In his book The Epoch of Spiritual Machines, he formulated the “law of accelerating returns,” which allows him to predict achievements in the development of computer technology and artificial intelligence with surprising accuracy — literally over the years.

Kurzweil's predictions come true with awesome precision: bluetooth phones, simultaneous computer translation, Siri, 3D video and augmented reality glasses, IBM Watson supercomputer, Google machines without drivers, etc., etc. But these are all berries ...

Kurzweil is ready to lay down on the rails in Yeltsin if by 2029 the computer cannot pass the "Turing test". That is, he is confident that the car will soon demonstrate to us the ability to not only think, but also experience emotions, understand metaphors, will have “subjective experience” and a sense of humor.

Now, please think about it: after some 15 years, sitting at a computer, you cannot understand who your interlocutor is - a real person or a car (this is actually the “Turing test”). I understand that this sounds a little crazy, but the scientists do not see insurmountable obstacles and move, it must be admitted, by leaps and bounds.

The question, in fact, is different: will a real person cope with the “Turing test” in 2029? ..

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When an authoritative Petersburg psychologist Lyudmila Apollonovna Yasyukova publicly announced that the gap between the smart and the stupid (and certainly not in favor of the smart) is rapidly widening - that's, of course, the secret behind seven seals! - The public reaction was, to put it mildly, ambiguous. Like, who gave you the right to judge this? Yes, even stupid us to stand? And in general, what is the mind? ..

For some reason, the respectable public easily finds in the scientific facts that deprive her of a restful sleep, the shadow of fascist eugenics. But this is not eugenics, and certainly there is not even a hint of fascism - they themselves would have been saved from the pogrom by fabulous Vsiomian percent. Idiocy really has become a new reality, and it is doubly stupid to close our eyes to this.

What is the essence of Ray Kurzweil's "law of accelerating returns"? If it is very simple: the speed of information transfer, the power of processors and the amount of RAM grow exponentially (all this economy almost doubles from year to year), but the costs of obtaining information just exponentially decrease. Thus, there is a potentiating effect of information production.

Here is a vivid example: in the first seven years of the Human Genome program only one percent of the genome was decoded, and in the second seven the remaining 99. At the same time, the cost of research decreased by four orders of magnitude during this time! In short, the volume of information is growing so fast now that they have not yet invented such yeast, so that this metaphor can be used.

However, this is a paradox: we as a whole seem to be getting smarter, at least we know and understand more about this world, but for the most part, on the contrary, we are becoming more foolish. Then, maybe, the honored domestic psychologist Lyudmila Apollonovna is mistaken? .. No, she is not mistaken. But Kurzweil is really worth reading carefully. He, of course, is a good inventor, but clearly got into the tunnel of his own “law”.

Yes, Kurzweil perfectly predicts the development of technology, but he is not at all wondering what will happen to our brain itself in these changed conditions. The brain exists in the information environment, and it is exponentially - from quantity to quality - changing. And it can hardly pass for our brain without a trace ...

Now, if, for example, the temperature on our planet showed such a galloping growth, what would happen to us? And precipitation? And the movement of the earth's crust? Our body just would not have adapted to this disgrace. And something must happen to the brain. And it happens. But can we notice this if we ourselves are only its derivative? His, so to speak, epiphenomenon ...

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I believe that you have heard this word before - “pathomorphosis”. It sounds, of course, extremely ominous, but in fact everything is very simple and not at all scary: the picture of mental disorders can change with time. This has already happened, for example, at the turn of the XIX and XX centuries. And here again.

Old, but still active, psychiatrists will tell you that the patient has not gone right now - some vile, unintelligible, without vivid symptomatology. Boredom, in a word. Previously, another thing: the patients were what they needed! If, for example, paranoia, then vigorous: the secret services pursue, the Martians moved into the bodies of people and set monstrous experiments over them, through the news announcer they transmit top-secret information about the anti-government conspiracy, a special sensor is installed in the brain for communication with God, etc. t. n. In general, went crazy before with a metal, so to speak, ringing. And now what? One solid gray.

What is the reason for this pathomorphosis? Okay, healthy people are getting stupid, but what happened to the madness? Modern medicine? Okay, but the debut of the disease shouldn't change anyway! And he is changing. Genetics? But, excuse me, what genetic changes occur with a step of one generation, and all over humanity at once? That is, the matter is still in the habitat of our brains with you (including insane ones) - in the specifics of the information field.

The fact that before us is not just a pathomorphosis, but an ideal research model, understood the rector of the Higher School of Methodology, Professor Anatoly Nikolaevich Alekhin. The follow-up study was carried out under his leadership by our employee — medical psychologist Olga Litvinenko, a remarkable scientist who possesses the scientific corrosiveness that is so rare now.

Were analyzed hundreds of archival case histories - just patients with paranoid schizophrenia. Revealed the structure of delirium, the actors, the structure of relations - in general, everything as Comrade Propp bequeathed. Two groups were key in this study: those patients who were born and formed before the boom of computers and the Internet, as well as those who came to this world already at the end of the 80s.

And this is where the “two worlds - two systems” really came to be!

The very essence of paranoia lies in its amazing structure. Previously, we even talked about the moment of "crystallization of delirium," when the patient literally suddenly became "everything is clear" - that this is, for example, a conspiracy, or persecution, or some kind of fantastic effect. He “clearly” understood what had happened, why he was being hunted, what he was guilty of, what he was suspected of, and so on.

Remember the "Mind Games"? A brilliant film about the great mathematician John Nash, played by the then inimitable Russell Crowe. Yes, yes, all these terrible people in black who work for the CIA, conspiracy against the USA, secret information in open sources, newspaper clippings hanging on the walls of the garage ... This is real, quality, so to speak, structural nonsense.

But those patients, whose maturity fell on the era of galloping information growth, demonstrate a fundamentally different picture of nonsense. Not only do they not particularly understand what is happening to them when a psychotic attack begins, but they are not even interested in what is happening. Well, they say, yes, something strange. Well, yes, someone said something to someone, they somehow looked wrong, suspicious ... Instead of “Government”, “KGB”, “Martians” and all “dark forces” - neighbors in the stairwell, sellers in the store, relatives, fellow students. And those, however, are hardly connected with each other, but what they want from the patient and why, in fact, is completely incomprehensible. Kasha-Malasha.

In other words, representatives of the “generation X” are structurally nonsense, and in the delusional constructions of the “players” there is no structure, and close - disappeared. But delirium is after all just a mental product, albeit a very specific one. Morphologically and psychophysiologically, the brain in both cases is the same, and in both cases it is affected by the same ailment (the genetic nature of this disease has not changed at all). Why is the quality of this mental product so different?

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Perhaps the main problem that, according to Kurzweil, the creators of artificial intelligence must solve now, is the problem of “hierarchy”.

As I have repeatedly told here, our thinking operates with intellectual objects through an intellectual function. The latter builds complex hierarchies: from intellectual objects, simpler — intelligent objects are more complicated, if not completely complex.

The complexity (“intelligence”) of an intellectual object — the thought that we think — is precisely its structural or, neuropsychologically speaking, hierarchical organization. Of course, computer programs of the structural hierarchy are not alien, but still they more resemble a linear "Turing machine" - they take the number of operations, rather than their multidimensional complexity. However, scientists, as they say, are working on this problem.

And while artificial intelligence is trying to grow exponentially, learning to create complex intellectual objects, human brains have gone in the exact opposite direction. We develop a kind of “like thinking”: like - like, like, not like - go ahead. Simple, fun, scandalous - yes, we are interested. Difficult, seriously, you need to ponder - scroll. We seem to go on a binary code - like those machines - 0 and 1, 1 and 0. To linear thinking!

“I was told that each formula included in the book would double the number of customers,” writes Stephen Hawking in the preface to his Short History of Time. Although, frankly, on this any book on physics should be finished ... But the author of the "black holes" is right. I suppose that my text, which I am writing on the verge of, I must say, a possible simplification (one more step - and it will turn into absolute nonsense), not many of my contemporaries are able to master. By the way, thanks for reading this place!

Anatoly Nikolaevich Alekhin, introducing the concept of pseudo-ambivalence, proceeds from the clinical picture of the actual disease. What is the usual, normal, so to speak, mental retardation? A patient with an appropriate diagnosis is intellectually passive, acts impulsively, cannot concentrate attention for a long time, thinks very concretely and utilitarianly, does not like and does not understand abstract reasoning. Doesn't this remind you of anything? .. Average user of social networks, for example?

Only one thing differs from clinical debility in pseudo-ambivalence: there is no way to make a clinical moron difficult and difficult to think - the state of his “gray cells” doesn’t imply this, doesn’t add up to his head, that you don’t do with it, complex intellectual objects .

But the "gray matter" information psevdodebil safely, and, in principle, his brain can be trained. But why? No, why not train him, and why should he train? What's the point? What is the motivation? Tsymes what? Will he somehow be respected for this in a special way? Or, on the contrary, will they shame that he is a fool? Or he will not survive without it? Not.

Clever to be not fashionable, not cool, and not even cool ... And what to do with it?

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The 2029 problem and the upcoming “Turing Test” exam for cars and people is not a joke at all. Already, the real world is so complex that not a single person can comprehend the processes taking place in it at least somewhat. So the wise Kurzweil is stuck in the tunnel of his invention and does not think at all about the consequences. But then this beast will only become more complicated ...

We have long had to understand the threat that this new to our brains is a hyperinformational environment. Understand and start working on ways of self-defense, that is, to engage in genuine information security.

But we did not understand, did not prepare, and perhaps even were late. How else to explain the fact that the public, not thinking of their lives without electricity, modern medicine and mobile communications, continues to grab the shrouds, which, by the way, were subjected to radiocarbon analysis, and pray for monarchist bones that have passed a preliminary DNA test?

How can this obvious oxymoron ever fit in a human head ?! Only with the complete lack of structure ...

Well, okay, I'll go see the Walking Dead - there, at least, the headless morons do not impersonate normal citizens, and the quantitative ratio of "smart" and "stupid", by the way, exactly corresponds to our - non-cohesive - reality.