#like racism appears to be a systemic thing in star trek! perhaps if I use gay sex as an example racist tos fans will finally understandthis

[communistkenobi]

I’m thinking about how administrative leave requests would work in starfleet and it’s gotta be a huge pain in the ass right. vulcans would probably need a special expedited leave request process for pon-farr, because they become violent/die if they don’t excuse themselves to have sex asap, but this is probably a narrow accommodation only granted to vulcans, so if they were dating a non-vulcan who had to go through normal, slower leave request procedures that would cause logistical issues cuz emergency pon farr admin leave only works if both parties can do it at the same time, so if you’re a non-vulcan dating a vulcan you would have to probably apply to get that accommodation extended to you, and because I’m assuming starfleet operates on the same punitive logics as contemporary bureaucracies do, they’d be paranoid about non-vulcans “cheating the system” by falsely claiming they were dating a vulcan to get their leave request expedited, so they’d probably require proof of marriage or long-term cohabitation with a vulcan in order for a non-vulcan to get approved for that kind of thing, meaning casual or otherwise non-normative vulcan/non-vulcan couples in starfleet would be administratively marginalised and (re)produce a culture deriding interspecies dating, especially because humans seem to be kinda default racist towards vulcans in star trek in general, so they would probably view a human dating a vulcan as getting “special privileges” for administrative leave even though it’s just a basic accommodation. this is a classic example of how administrative apparatuses operating on a liberal conception of equity can reproduce systems of racial discrimination

[dailynewswebsite]

If a robot is conscious, is it OK to turn it off? The moral implications of building true AIs

What do you owe a devoted android like Knowledge? CBS

Within the “Star Trek: The Subsequent Technology” episode “The Measure of a Man,” Knowledge, an android crew member of the Enterprise, is to be dismantled for analysis functions until Captain Picard can argue that Knowledge deserves the identical rights as a human being. Naturally the query arises: What’s the foundation upon which one thing has rights? What offers an entity ethical standing?

The thinker Peter Singer argues that creatures that may really feel ache or undergo have a declare to ethical standing. He argues that nonhuman animals have ethical standing, since they will really feel ache and undergo. Limiting it to folks could be a type of speciesism, one thing akin to racism and sexism.

With out endorsing Singer’s line of reasoning, we would marvel if it may be prolonged additional to an android robotic like Knowledge. It could require that Knowledge can both really feel ache or undergo. And the way you reply that will depend on the way you perceive consciousness and intelligence.

As actual synthetic intelligence expertise advances towards Hollywood’s imagined variations, the query of ethical standing grows extra essential. If AIs have ethical standing, philosophers like me cause, it may comply with that they’ve a proper to life. Which means you can’t merely dismantle them, and may also imply that folks shouldn’t intervene with their pursuing their targets.

Garry Kasparov was overwhelmed by Deep Blue, an AI with a really deep intelligence in a single slim area of interest. Stan Honda/AFP by way of Getty Photographs

Two flavors of intelligence and a take a look at

IBM’s Deep Blue chess machine was efficiently skilled to beat grandmaster Gary Kasparov. But it surely couldn’t do anything. This pc had what’s referred to as domain-specific intelligence.

However, there’s the form of intelligence that enables for the power to do a wide range of issues effectively. It’s referred to as domain-general intelligence. It’s what lets folks prepare dinner, ski and lift youngsters – duties which might be associated, but additionally very completely different.

Synthetic normal intelligence, AGI, is the time period for machines which have domain-general intelligence. Arguably no machine has but demonstrated that form of intelligence. This summer season, a startup referred to as OPENAI launched a brand new model of its Generative Pre-Coaching language mannequin. GPT-Three is a natural-language-processing system, skilled to learn and write in order that it may be simply understood by folks.

It drew instant discover, not simply due to its spectacular means to imitate stylistic prospers and put collectively believable content material, but additionally due to how far it had come from a earlier model. Regardless of this spectacular efficiency, GPT-Three doesn’t truly know something past easy methods to string phrases collectively in numerous methods. AGI stays fairly far off.

Named after pioneering AI researcher Alan Turing, the Turing take a look at helps decide when an AI is clever. Can an individual conversing with a hidden AI inform whether or not it’s an AI or a human being? If he can’t, then for all sensible functions, the AI is clever. However this take a look at says nothing about whether or not the AI is perhaps aware.

Two sorts of consciousness

There are two elements to consciousness. First, there’s the what-it’s-like-for-me facet of an expertise, the sensory a part of consciousness. Philosophers name this phenomenal consciousness. It’s about the way you expertise a phenomenon, like smelling a rose or feeling ache.

In distinction, there’s additionally entry consciousness. That’s the power to report, cause, behave and act in a coordinated and responsive method to stimuli based mostly on targets. For instance, once I cross the soccer ball to my good friend making a play on the purpose, I’m responding to visible stimuli, performing from prior coaching, and pursuing a purpose decided by the foundations of the sport. I make the cross robotically, with out aware deliberation, within the move of the sport.

Blindsight properly illustrates the distinction between the 2 sorts of consciousness. Somebody with this neurological situation would possibly report, for instance, that they can not see something within the left facet of their visible subject. But when requested to choose up a pen from an array of objects within the left facet of their visible subject, they will reliably accomplish that. They can not see the pen, but they will choose it up when prompted – an instance of entry consciousness with out phenomenal consciousness.

Knowledge is an android. How do these distinctions play out with respect to him?

Do Knowledge’s qualities grant him ethical standing? CBS

The Knowledge dilemma

The android Knowledge demonstrates that he’s self-aware in that he can monitor whether or not or not, for instance, he’s optimally charged or there’s inside injury to his robotic arm.

Knowledge can also be clever within the normal sense. He does a whole lot of distinct issues at a excessive degree of mastery. He can fly the Enterprise, take orders from Captain Picard and cause with him about the most effective path to take.

He can even play poker along with his shipmates, prepare dinner, focus on topical points with shut associates, battle with enemies on alien planets and interact in numerous types of bodily labor. Knowledge has entry consciousness. He would clearly cross the Turing take a look at.

Nonetheless, Knowledge most probably lacks phenomenal consciousness – he doesn’t, for instance, delight within the scent of roses or expertise ache. He embodies a supersized model of blindsight. He’s self-aware and has entry consciousness – can seize the pen – however throughout all his senses he lacks phenomenal consciousness.

Now, if Knowledge doesn’t really feel ache, not less than one of many causes Singer affords for giving a creature ethical standing isn’t fulfilled. However Knowledge would possibly fulfill the opposite situation of having the ability to undergo, even with out feeling ache. Struggling may not require phenomenal consciousness the best way ache primarily does.

For instance, what if struggling had been additionally outlined as the thought of being thwarted from pursuing a simply trigger with out inflicting hurt to others? Suppose Knowledge’s purpose is to avoid wasting his crewmate, however he can’t attain her due to injury to one in all his limbs. Knowledge’s discount in functioning that retains him from saving his crewmate is a form of nonphenomenal struggling. He would have most popular to avoid wasting the crewmate, and could be higher off if he did.

Within the episode, the query finally ends up resting not on whether or not Knowledge is self-aware – that’s not unsure. Neither is it in query whether or not he’s clever – he simply demonstrates that he’s within the normal sense. What’s unclear is whether or not he’s phenomenally aware. Knowledge isn’t dismantled as a result of, in the long run, his human judges can not agree on the importance of consciousness for ethical standing.

When the 1s and 0s add as much as an ethical being. ktsimage/iStock by way of Getty Photographs Plus

Ought to an AI get ethical standing?

Knowledge is sort – he acts to assist the well-being of his crewmates and people he encounters on alien planets. He obeys orders from folks and seems unlikely to hurt them, and he appears to guard his personal existence. For these causes he seems peaceable and simpler to simply accept into the realm of issues which have ethical standing.

However what about Skynet within the “Terminator” films? Or the troubles lately expressed by Elon Musk about AI being extra harmful than nukes, and by Stephen Hawking on AI ending humankind?

[Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

Human beings don’t lose their declare to ethical standing simply because they act towards the pursuits of one other individual. In the identical means, you possibly can’t robotically say that simply because an AI acts towards the pursuits of humanity or one other AI it doesn’t have ethical standing. You is perhaps justified in combating again towards an AI like Skynet, however that doesn’t take away its ethical standing. If ethical standing is given in advantage of the capability to nonphenomenally undergo, then Skynet and Knowledge each get it even when solely Knowledge needs to assist human beings.

There aren’t any synthetic normal intelligence machines but. However now’s the time to think about what it might take to grant them ethical standing. How humanity chooses to reply the query of ethical standing for nonbiological creatures could have massive implications for the way we cope with future AIs – whether or not sort and useful like Knowledge, or set on destruction, like Skynet.

Anand Vaidya doesn’t work for, seek the advice of, personal shares in or obtain funding from any firm or group that will profit from this text, and has disclosed no related affiliations past their educational appointment.

from Growth News https://growthnews.in/if-a-robot-is-conscious-is-it-ok-to-turn-it-off-the-moral-implications-of-building-true-ais/ via https://growthnews.in

[topmixtrends]

FOUR EPISODES into the new Star Trek series, Discovery, the crew receives a distress call from Corvan II, a resource-rich planet. A colony of humans is under attack from the Klingons. The victims, dilithium miners, flicker on screen, as miserable as anything we’d read about in Émile Zola’s descriptions of coal mining in Germinal. As dirty and distressed as the faces in a Dorothea Lange photo. Crying babies are so compelling! The Discovery, the closest ship in the fleet, is 90-odd light years away. They’ll never make it in time. But it turns out that the ship is equipped with a brand-new mode of transportation, a spore-based energy system that could, in theory, complete the trip in a few seconds. So, against the advice of his chief scientist, and even though the system may not be ready, the captain gives the order: go! Next, in a stunning display of visual effects, rings surrounding the ship’s saucer begin to rotate as the ship “spore jumps” just in time to drop a few torpedoes on the Klingon Birds-of-Prey. And before we can blink, the Discovery “spore jumps” back to its starting point.

The casual viewer might not make anything particular of this techno-aesthetic scene.

But as everyone knows, Trekkies are anything but casual. On their podcasts, forums, and blogs, they obsessively parse every word, every detail, making cross-references to the other series and movies of the Trek universe. They expect consistency across the whole franchise. Every Trekkie knows that in the original series (which begins 10 years after Discovery) ships are propelled, faster than the speed of light, by “warp drives,” a feat achieved thanks to dilithium crystals that moderate matter-antimatter (fusion) reactions. [1]

Needless to say, the appearance of these spores, as an organic method of propulsion, immediately raised Trekkie eyebrows. As one podcaster explained, “We know, assuming the timeline isn’t screwed up … we know it’s not going to work. We’ve already seen the twenty-fourth century and we know that they don’t have organic warp drives.” (STDP006 podcast: 10/10/2017; Golden Spiral Media.) At this point we don’t know how this apparent contradiction will be resolved. Maybe the spore drives only worked this once and consequently fall into oblivion. In episode five, the “Ripper,” a monster beamed aboard Discovery from a destroyed ship, is released into space. The monster had functioned like a living super computer, communicating spatial coordinates to the spores by some sort of symbiotic means. Michael Burnham, the show’s protagonist, figures out that Ripper is a giant (nuked?) version of an actually existing tiny Earth organism, the tardigrade, which can survive without nourishment for years and exhibits other notable characteristics of resilience. Maybe the best scientific minds will be unable to bio-engineer a new creature capable of withstanding the rigors of spore navigation so the whole enterprise will fall into oblivion. Maybe it will turn out that this tech was developed in an alternative timeline. Maybe the Borg are responsible for upsetting the natural course of things. Maybe it was all a dream. Or, god forbid, perhaps the producers of Discovery don’t care about the kind of consistency demanded by fanboys. Not likely. We’ll just have to wait.

Now I’ve watched my fair share of Star Trek episodes and movies, but I certainly wouldn’t qualify as a Trekkie. I’ve never put on Spock ears or attended a convention and I can’t identify the plots of TOS — the original series — from the titles. I’m someone who is interested in climate change, and recently, in decoupling fuel from energy to help think about forms of radical engagement to achieve rapid decarbonization. I couldn’t resist including an entry for “dilithium” in my book Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), but according to my own criteria, it really shouldn’t be there. “Nuclear,” for instance, is a system of energy, so it doesn’t get its own entry, whereas “uranium” and ��plutonium” do. Technically, as I mentioned, warp speed (speed faster than light) is achieved in Federation starships via a matter/antimatter (fusion) reaction. Dilithium crystals serve as a medium to help achieve this, but the actual substance that fuels the reaction is, to be precise, antimatter. I made an exception because the mining of dilithium is such an important and evocative theme throughout various quadrants of the Star Trek universe.

In a way, dilithium is like “hydrogen.” We talk about cars pulling up to filling stations and pumping in hydrogen instead of gasoline, but unlike oil, once removed from the ground and refined, hydrogen doesn’t exist as such, ready to be inserted into a vehicle. It has to be subjected to a process of catalysis before it can create energy to power the engine to turn the wheels. And for now, at least, that process is more likely than not powered by fossil fuels. The same kind of murkiness applies to “electric vehicles.” We can embrace them precisely because we only engage directly with one small element, the compact garage charger. We don’t have to see or think about the vast fossil infrastructure — out of sight, underground, or, “over there,” beyond our immediate perceptual horizon — that still persists at all levels of life while we drive along feeling pleased. The phenomenon of “carbon lock-in” — the idea that our globe is so deeply entangled with oil and coal that no good will gesture on the part of well-meaning individuals will have any significant effect — is hard to swallow. Distinctions between “fuel” and “energy” matter if we’re going to move beyond the kind of green optimistic haze that swirls around “future fuels” in the public sphere. It’s too easy to keep going these days with a vague sense of hope: if we only scale up some new technologies we can keep all the structures and systems we currently enjoy, replacing fossil-based fuels with renewable fuels. Like when you bring up the vast scale of climate change at the dinner table and your relatives say, “But I hear solar and wind prices are coming down and there’s nothing Trump and company can do about that. Coal mining isn’t coming back. So relax and have another glass of wine.”

And by the way, Star Trek apparently takes place in a post–climate change, post–fossil fuel world. “We” must have figured out a way to remove carbon from the atmosphere in order to avoid catastrophe, while also transitioning to “future fuels,” just as we will have overcome poverty, racism, and various other social problems. Note to Star Trek writers: I’m available if you want to hire me to introduce the shift to a post-carbon economy as a future theme about Earth’s past.

In Discovery, mining of dilithium goes on. (Incidentally, given the importance of the besieged outpost, Corvan II, as a source of 40 percent of the Federation’s dilithium supplies, why are there no Federation ships guarding the colony?) And if the whole matter/antimatter warp-drive system will someday be replaced by something greener and more powerful, we are still not there in the future. It’s hard not to hear echoes of our current energy transitions in the plot line.

Trekkies tend to revel in optimism, so they have generally been disturbed by the call by Discovery’s uncharacteristically dark captain, Lorca, to weaponize the spores to help in the war against the Klingons. Poor Lieutenant Stamets, the on-board astro-mycologist (named for an actually existing scholar of fungal remediation). He’s not only lost his colleague/rival on the Glenn, but now he’s reminded, rather bluntly, that his work is the intellectual property of Star Fleet. But aside from the analogy with academia, we might see another one, to the field of nuclear science. Fuels like uranium and plutonium do not harm on their own. “Peaceful atoms,” they could be used for peaceful purposes (energy). But they could also be enriched or inserted into a system that transmutes them for use on warheads. Things could go either way. Spores are, dare I say, rather queer. Stamets and the ship’s doctor are, by the way, the first openly gay couple on Star Trek. They are seen, in episode five, brushing their teeth side-by-side in their quarters, a fairly banal homo-normative scene following Stamets’s reckless and unsanctioned attempt to take over from the tardigrade in the first (and perhaps the last?) intergalactic human-mycelia displacement network.

On a more mundane note, the spores might make us think of the development of biofuels in our current “energy transition,” but without all of the negatives. The Trek spores have no need for other fuels to grow or distill them. They float around in space (the so-called “panspermia” theory) and grow in a magical forest in a gigantic on-board terrarium. There is no need to displace food crops, since food is replicated on board the ship. The spores don’t emit any byproducts, harmful or otherwise. And unlike other forms of fuels, the spores are not used up in combustion. It’s a nice immersive fantasy, not a bad set of images to take us away from all kinds of unbearable realities today.

I wonder: Could the writers of Discovery have read anthropologist Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015)? In the face of massive climate upheaval and other disasters, Tsing embraces the potentially redemptive qualities of fungi, as they continually adapt. Fungi are complex life forms that metabolize plants and coexist in different kinds of ecosystems, performing what she calls symbiopoiesis. They are, like the sparking special effects on the ship, beautiful. Like the World Wide Web, fungi offer infinite possibilities of recombination and new relations in the future. Stamets tells his lover he experienced a whole universe of possibilities when he was hooked up to the drive. Spores flying around the atmosphere (maybe even in outer space?) could configure forms of cosmopolitanism, the happy side of invasive species.

By the time you are reading this piece we’ll all probably know more about the spores on Discovery. Fans of the new series love to speculate. They consume and analyze it week by week, as it is doled out, in close to real time, so it seems appropriate to me to do so here. In comparison, TOS, shown on network television in the late ’60s, had self-enclosed and self-resolving episodes. Serialization is crucial, of course, to 19th-century literature. It’s how kids read the imaginary voyages of Jules Verne. Week by week in the newspaper. And Verne is, for me, the most important writer for thinking and dreaming about possible relations to fuels. So let’s see what happens, but meanwhile, back here on early 21st-century Earth, time to mitigate is slipping away, tipping points are fast approaching. Catastrophic events made much more likely by rising sea levels and warming global average temperatures are pulling apart life as we know it. So it is all the more imperative to ask what is meant by “the future” when one talks of change. Is the future something we project for ourselves on screens? Star Trek offers us a mirror of our better selves. In the future humans are still flawed, and so are those other species that we coexist with in complex relations that bear traces of our own past forms of colonialism, benevolence, communitarianism, exploitation. Overall, though, contact with extraterrestrial beings and places has led to the social and cultural evolution of the human race. The future is bright.

Ultimately we should be wary of thinking about those spore drives as part of a narrative of progress, one that could simply allow us to defer now, in the present, any radical shifts in how we produce and consume energy. This narrative presents a tyranny of common sense that defers new fuels to a future that is just around the corner, but not yet. It governs statements like:

Human history is a record of endless human innovation, most of which has improved the human condition. Who knows what energy sources and technologies of the future may trump the energy benefits of fossil fuels?

This comes from the pen of one Kathleen Hartnett White, in a policy brief titled, “Fossil Fuels: The Moral Case” (2014). White, a former regulator in the Texas oil industry, has just been named by Trump to chair the Council on Environmental Quality. She illustrates her case study for the benefits of fossils with images of poor Americans, including what may be Dorothea Lange’s most iconic image, “Migrant Mother.” How does this image of a desperate mother with her children, displaced dustbowlers in California migrant camp in 1936 help White battle what she calls the false hysteria over climate change? [2] Without fossils, White asserts, we would never have developed beyond subsistence farming. Do we want to go back to this? Of course not — we all agree, right? So for now, let’s enjoy the benefits of carbon-based energy and wait for history to take its course.

It’s with this kind of reasoning in mind that I will wait to see what happens with the new spores on Discovery. I’ll forget the present, for an hour, but I will still be up at night with periodic panic attacks about our future on this warming planet. At least I’ll have the Star Trek podcasts keep me company.

¤

Karen Pinkus teaches at Cornell University where is currently a Social Science, Humanities, Arts Fellow in Residence at the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future. She is the author of Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

¤

[1] There are several book-length studies of the science of the Star Trek franchise. Lawrence Krauss, The Physics of Star Trek (New York: Basic Books, revised edition 2007) goes into the function and plausibility of warp drive and dilithium in great detail.

[2] The photograph, in the public domain and so available for use in any context, actually has a complex history. Many years later, the subject, Florence Owens Thompson, asserted that she had never spoken to Lange, who apparently embellished her story of the interaction. I doubt that White has thought through the bigger question of the relation of the Dust Bowl to soil depletion, wheat farming, New York bankers, and so on. She’s only reading Lange’s photo with a single signifier: poverty. And that is, for her, so morally bankrupt that it alone should squelch any discussion of moving beyond fossils, beyond business as usual.

The post “Star Trek: Discovery” and the Dream of Future Fuels appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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Growing up, my father was a big Star Trek fan. As a child, I didn’t really care for the show. It was a bit too philosophical for a 9-year-old and there were no light sabers to be found.

Eventually I became a fan of the show, however. I learned to appreciate its writing, which was quite good at times, while overlooking the cheap sets and the goofier plots.

There were some really bad stories, of course, but one could ignore this because the show was often exploring big ideas: how humans understand truth; how logic and emotion can both help and inhibit our quest for truth; the nature of good and evil.

One of the wackier plots I can recall involved Kirk and Spock working with, ahem, Abraham Lincoln (or, technically, an alien projecting itself as Lincoln). They were pitted against various villains throughout history by—bear with me here—a conscious rock that wanted to understand the difference between good and evil.

Most of the episode is not worth mentioning, but there is a 30-second exchange that seems quite relevant today.

Aboard the Enterprise, Lincoln meets Lt. Uhura. This white man of the 19th century looks at this black woman of the 23rd century and says, “What a charming Negress.”

Yeah. It was awkward. (Even writing about it now I feel awkward.)

Lincoln did not mean to offend Uhura, but he quickly senses he may have committed a faux pas.

“Oh. Forgive me, my dear,” he says. “I know that in my time, some used that term as a description of property.”

Lincoln’s statement, in modern parlance, is a microaggression: “an indirect, subtle, or unintentional discrimination against members of a marginalized group.”

Microaggressions are “the new racism,” Time magazine declared in 2014. These microaggressions almost always involve transgressions much subtler than Lincoln’s clumsy remark, yet they are handled in a much different fashion in 2017.

In modern American universities, people who commit microaggressions are reported, usually anonymously, to authorities. Transgressors are often compelled to offer public apologies. Corporations, while offering regular instruction on how to avoid microaggressions, compare them to actual violence.

Perhaps such preventative actions are entirely appropriate. But I found myself prefering Uhura’s response.

“But why should I object to that term sir,” she says. “See, in our century, we’ve learned not to fear words.”

Now, of course words can hurt. But consider the context. Uhura is saying it would be silly for her to feel injury because of someone else’s lack of etiquette. A person’s ignorance of a particular custom says precisely nothing about the offended party.

Uhura’s response looks not just more mature, but more constructive. It would seem to foster mutual understanding, whereas reporting systems and punitive actions seem more likely to fuel resentment.

In response to Uhura’s reply, Lincoln bows his head slightly and offers his hand in appreciation of her grace.

“The foolishness of my century had me apologizing where no offense is given,” Lincoln replies.

It’s amazing how many things Star Trek got right in predicting our future. Alas, it seems they got this one terribly wrong. I wonder if that’s our loss.

This post Star Trek Taught Us How to Deal With Microaggressions was originally published on Intellectual Takeout by Jon Miltimore.

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