A Friend is Jailed while Scientists Worry
By John Taylor; 2009 Jul 26
After many years of languishing under my migraines, this summer I seem able to concentrate on one thing (actually two things) long enough to produce something longer than a single essay, one day's work. I am collecting together and revising disparate ideas, conceived over many years, for saving the world. If all goes well, I might even seek publication for this "Cosmopolitan Condition" series in book form. This would be a big change after some thirty years of active, full time writing as an unpublished amateur. I enjoy my amateur status, but these ideas are important and I have a duty to spread them as much as I can. At the same time, I feel that this summer I have perhaps neglected my small readership on the Badi' Blog, so today I will offer general commentaries on these two recent items in the news:
A Friend of the U.S. President is Jailed
Scientists Worry as Machines Approach Super-Intelligence
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A Friend of the U.S. President is Jailed
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The media has been full of the news of the recent arrest (and later release) of a prominent member of the African American community for breaking into his own home when his door jammed. I have read several articles talking about various aspects of this issue. I learned that relations between Black men with the police are a flashpoint for racism in the United States.
This reminded me of a lesson I got myself when I was given a ride many years ago with an African Canadian Baha'i, Myron Duncan. We had not gone one block before a cop pulled us over and, for the first and only time in my life, I was confronted by an openly suspicious, contemptuous, impolite police officer. Myron told me that his pink van driven by a Black man screamed "pimpmobile" to their ears. Once, he said, he was passing through a small town and was pulled over four times, each time grilled by a similarly rude police officer. When the fifth cop car stopped him he exploded, protesting loudly at what is now called racial profiling. They let him go, but by all reports if he had "gone righteous" like that in the States he would still be in jail, or at least have a criminal record.
I have often thought about this grating experience of getting the fifth degree for just riding in my friend's "pimpmobile." After much pondering I came up with the idea of getting rid of the entire profession as we now know it. We should adopt as a social goal the elimination, or at least vastly reducing the number of armed police officers. A cop should be a rare intervention brought in only as a last resort. It is a structural wrong when the police come in cold, more like an invading army than the peace officers they are paid to be. Even bouncers in a bar have a better idea of who they are dealing with than police officers in many confrontations.
Why not make law enforcement more like the medical system? In a hospital there are many nurses for every doctor. Doctors are only called in for major decisions and critical interventions.
Why not create a new profession similar to nurses for maintaining law and order? I call it the neighborhood helper (this is what the Chinese call a similar trade). A helper would be a trained social worker who lives nearby. She would do most of the work that is presently done by beat cops, leaving the police to do what they do best, take care of violence and other extreme breaches of the peace. What you hear over and over from police officers interviewed after this incident is, "In these confrontations it is difficult because the people do not want us to be there. They hate talking to us." Maybe the people are right. Maybe there should be another kind of official to talk with first.
To go back to the cause celebre of Professor Gates, the Black man arrested for breaking into his own home, such a thing could never have happened if neighbourhood helpers were called in first. For one thing, a NH lives in the same block, so she already knows who lives there and who does not. Gates was arrested for not surrendering the correct identification photo ID after his break-in. A neighbourhood helper would not even need to go out the door upon hearing a report from another neighbour who had witnessed a Black man breaking into a local house. She could have simply called up Mr. Gates on the phone, confirmed that it was him, and asked if he needed any further help after his door jammed. There would be no need for unpleasant confrontations.
That said, another important point came out of the many interviews in the media with the police. (see: "As Officers Face Heated Words, Their Tactics Vary, New York Times, Michael Willson and Solomon Moore, July 25, 2009) The issue of an officer's tolerance lies at the heart of the dispute surrounding the arrest of this professor.
People in these confrontations tend to be extremely rude and verbally abusive. In this case, the police officer has the rather gross and clumsy power to either arrest the verbal assailant or have a thick skin and ignore the torrent of profanity. Clearly, this is not so much a fault of the police as it is the public in general. Courtesy, the crown of virtues, has been cast to the winds. Even with neighbourhood helpers involved, it is unlikely that much can be done about this problem other than training, especially religious training. It was not for nothing that Baha'u'llah forbade swearing, backbiting and other forms of verbal abuse.
Another flaw of the public is that we are reluctant to obey any direct order from an authority figure. This is because there is a common misconception of what freedom is. This inadequate and indeed perverse idea of freedom is that "nobody has a right to tell me to do anything." This Baha'u'llah condemns in the Aqdas as an outcome of "animal freedom," where we think we are free if we have the freedom of lower beings, rather than higher, angelic ones. Furthermore, Baha'u'llah teaches that obedience is a virtue of God Himself, and we should all embrace it willingly, joyfully.
"What mankind needeth in this day is obedience unto them that are in authority, and a faithful adherence to the cord of wisdom. The instruments which are essential to the immediate protection, the security and assurance of the human race have been entrusted to the hands, and lie in the grasp, of the governors of human society. This is the wish of God and His decree..." (Baha'u'llah, Gleanings, 206)
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Scientists Worry as Machines Approach Super-Intelligence
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Abdu'l-Baha in America warned that "every day new instruments are invented for destruction of the very foundation of the human race." (Mahmud's Diary, 95) He may have been exaggerating a century ago, but now it is almost literally the case that a new horror is invented every single day. A recent New York Times article covered the latest and perhaps the greatest threat to the "very foundation" of our existence, the invention of machines that make smarter machines that make smarter ones, until they are smarter than we are.
The prospect of autonomous machines out of control is such a frightening possibility that it has dominated science fiction for the past century. Now it is about to become a reality. As this article points out, machines now can drive a vehicle around town, mobile robots can make their way reliably through a building, plugging themselves into wall sockets for more power, fly deadly drones without supervision wreaking destruction on an entire nation; they can play the role of doctor and even pretend to be sympathetic to a human patient's woes. Many traditional human jobs, such as driving a car, are under threat as automobiles rapidly learn how to drive themselves. Some scientists are even comparing the compelling power of robots to that of old time religion. The article cites one scientist as saying,
"Something new has taken place in the past five to eight years. Technologists are replacing religion, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture." (Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man, John Markoff, New York Times, July 25, 2009)
The point where machines do surpass humans is being called not the rapture but the "singularity." If you believe pundits like Raymond Kurzweil, after the singularity we may find the contents of our brains and memories being uploaded into computers in the same way that believers have always thought of the soul being translated to heaven after the death of the body.
Or the singularity may mean that machines decide to crush us like parasitic fleas. The latest Terminator movie offers an iron hard vision of permanent war between smarter, stronger machines and puny humans who survive mostly as a plot device to keep the Terminator series moving profitably forward. So important a watershed will the Singularity be in human history that we could measure time as before and after the Singularity. Which would make this the Age of B.S. I think we always knew, of course, that this is the age of B.S., but the singularity gives a whole new meaning to the term.
As I watched the terrible vision of doom in the Terminator film, I was reminded of the frightening prophesy of Baha'u'llah in the perhaps ironically named Tablet, Kalimat-i-Firdawsiyyih, or Words of Paradise.
"Strange and astonishing things exist in the earth but they are hidden from the minds and the understanding of men. These things are capable of changing the whole atmosphere of the earth and their contamination would prove lethal. Great God! We have observed an amazing thing. Lightning or a force similar to it is controlled by an operator and moveth at his command. Immeasurably exalted is the Lord of Power Who hath laid bare that which He purposed through the potency of His weighty and invincible command." (Baha'u'llah, Tablets, 69)
Compared to this, I do not think the loss of jobs to machines is a serious problem. Machines have always been able to run faster, fly higher, punch harder and calculate faster than humans. As Baha'is we hold that our distinctive virtues are not so much physical and mental as spiritual. If body and mind serve the purposes of love and spirit, then there will be light upon light. Otherwise, all is darkness, eternal conflict. Abdu'l-Baha said,
"God has endowed us with intellects, not for the purpose of making instruments of destruction; but that we might become diffusers of light; create love between the hearts; establish communion between the spirits and bring together the people of the east and the west." (Abdu'l-Baha, Divine Philosophy, 182-183)
The scientists are right to worry. As things are, our entire system is designed to serve limited, material ends. It is always easier, from an amoral point of view, to rob or kill than to make something yourself. There is no getting around it; that is the outcome of the materialist viewpoint. As long as we think in this narrow way, the machines we make will reflect that dangerous mindset. As they get smarter than us we will inevitably have to worry about our survival, because this is the kind of "smart" that made them. It leads only to death and destruction.
However if society is seeking the kind of "smart" that "creates love between the hearts" and "brings together the people of the east and the west," then so much the better. Let the robots we make get as smart as they want, it will only make things better. In that case, when we make our super-smart machine brains, we will just have to introduce a "moderation" chip along with a "spirituality" module.
Baha'u'llah, in addressing the leaders of civilization, prescribed just this, moderation in all things, and especially in broad social goals. This advice to think and act moderately is the basis of the following prescription that His son, Abdu'l-Baha, gave during His stay in America almost a century ago. He points out that whereas material civilization is a mirror, passively reflecting light, spiritual civilization can be like a lamp, with its own energy source. In that event, the super-intelligence of machines with their built-in rules of moderation, would not be a threat, they would be just another bounty of God's gift to man, technology.
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"Their material civilization resembles a glass of the utmost transparency and purity but divine civilization is like a shining lamp. When these two combine, the utmost perfection will be realized. The light of the oneness of humanity, of universal peace, of equality of human rights and of divine morals will emanate from this country to all the regions of the world and will illumine them all."
Someone asked whether, with all these worldly occupations and physical labors, it is possible that such a spiritual condition can be realized. 'Abdu'l-Baha replied:
"Provided they behave moderately, the more people advance in the material realm, the more their capacity for attaining spirituality is augmented. The sounder the body, the greater is the resplendency and manifestation of the spirit. Truly, what impedes spirituality are the dogmas and imitations that are contrary to true science and a sound mind."
(Mahmud's Diary, New York, June 24, 1912, p. 122)
John Taylor
email: badijet@gmail.com
blog: http://badiblog.blogspot.com/
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