Sorry, meant higher HOMICIDE rates.

Your concerns are valid and useful, because without them we really would be prone to these sorts of problems, but I would argue that progress in computation (and progress generally) *has* been beneficial to people, and we shouldn’t be so quick to shy away from its latest offerings just because we mistrust its motives.

Think about trying to use a computer and internet connection from a few years, decades, or centuries back. Medical technologies, safety measures, diet, whatever: if you had cut yourself off from the “weaponry and profit” motivated increases in these areas at some point in the past, do you think you’d be better off or worse off than you are now?

I would argue that improvements in weaponry directly benefit the average person. The quickest way to see this is to consider that a weak weapon in the hands of someone hostile to you is just as strong as it needs to be – if you don’t have a better one to defend against it. A highly motivated group with swords can cause a lot of damage if their victims are also only armed with swords, and indeed, Steven Pinker shows that tribal societies saw higher mortality rates by percentage of population than our own.

It seems to me that more and more complex weapons require more and more stable and complex societies for their manufacture: for instance, if I’m the current strongman in charge of my band of subjects, I can only beat the other strongman and *his* band of subjects by getting more complex weapons, and I can only get more complex weapons by allowing a more complex society to flourish under me (to smelt the ore, get the bindings for the hilts, design the programs for the launch codes, etc), which ends up benefiting my underlings, because now they actually live in a structured society with rules instead of just under fear of my killing them if they don’t follow my whims. Consider what happens if a tribal chieftain kills his rebellious second-in-command: nothing, because the second-in-command was, definitionally, the strongest rivalling force in the tribe. Now consider what happens if Barack Obama kills some leading general: everybody has far more leverage to push back against that kind of abuse of power by one person.

Seems to me that “better weapons” tend to be highly correlated with “better civilisations”, both in terms of power and in terms of the well-being of their inhabitants. You can chicken-egg the argument in circles, asking if weapons are the driving force behind progress or vice versa, but it seems to me that the trend is a good thing either way (a “virtuous spiral”?). A world where everybody only has swords (or rocks, or fists) is a world where the strong rule, for a few years, destroying and taking whatever they want until someone stronger takes over from them: nothing can ever change or improve. No matter how cynical you are about the motives of today’s leaders, it seems to me that those same people could make your life worse at every lower stage of technological development.

Here’s a Matt Ridley talk that’s almost related:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLHh9E5ilZ4

And “profit” may sound like a callous motivation, but it’s also an honest one: could the “charity” of a feudal empire, where the emperor has all the swords and soldiers, really have brought us the internet, cars, industrial civilisation, etc? Or the “charity” of the tribal chief? Of course, I suppose if you *want* to live in a hunter-gatherer society you can do without “profit”, but in that case, the only valid reason I can see for using tools more advanced than stone hand-axes would be to righteously knock such tools out of the hands of others, and then drop those tools yourself when the task of limiting others was completed, and thereafter only ever pick up a tool more advanced than a stone hand-axe to keep that level of tool out of the hands of others, and so on, indefinitely. A sort of self-hamstringing arms-race-in-reverse, a perpetual stagnation machine, fundamentally hostile to all curiosity and growth. Derrick Jensen seems to me to be the best advocate for this POV, but I’m not sure that’s what you had in mind.

We seem to have developed a problem, too, in differentiating “The Technological Singularity” from “a technological singularity.”

This might sound frightening today but in a couple of decades we will have augmented brains and the process will start to make more sense as we realize how much more there is to everything and how much our biological brain is missing out of reality. Just think about it. The reality we know is nothing but signals in the brain that was sensed, traveled, converted, filtered, etc by a very fragile and inaccurate biological system. What about all the other parts of reality that we are unable to sense. Some we have discovered with the help of technology (ultrasound, x-ray, cells, atoms, faraway galaxies, etc) but we still can’t sense them directly and what about all the other things that we don’t know about as of yet. A worm is not aware that there are TVs because it cannot sense it. We are still “worms” compared to the augmented and full synthetic brains of the future. I’m not saying this to downplay humanity as we are IT, we have made this possible with our collective consciousness. Not the individual brains but the collection of them as in essence we have paralleled millions of minds with the help of written notes (books) first and then with computers and hard drives and the internet.
Who would’ve thought 50 years ago that we will put 2.5 billion transistors in a postage stamp size shell all but effortlessly and sell it to millions of people, each for less than a month’s rent. These millions of people are using those devices as we speak and inventing collectively the future that we find hard to wrap our individual minds around.

Some will be poised with surfboards.

Although I know what you mean, but in my opinion there is no such thing as “real” or artificial intelligence just levels of intelligence. If you think about it, “real” or human intelligence is artificial. We are born with a biological substrate that has basic level software (to control bodily functions and give us the potential to learn) and we are modifying (training) it with the help of technology and our culture (a technology itself). I would even argue that the only major difference between our brain and computers is a sufficient level of miniaturization. We will achieve the required size/density in the next 15 years and we will interconnect millions of individual functions within arms reach of each other and you wont be able to tell the difference between “it” and an augmented human brain. I said “augmented human brain” because “it” will be much more intelligent than a biological human brain.

This might be unpopular, but if you are a real realist, you must realize how unintelligent we are as individuals. I mean think about it, we are still believing in fairy tales (like religion and Congress for that matter). The hardware we are using is way outdated and much limited, the only reason we got so far is because of collective intelligence and utilizing technology. I know some individuals made exceptional contributions but they couldn’t have done it without the prerequisites of collective intelligence that brought them up and helped them along the way.

But the day that someone with locked-in syndrome is able to be self-sufficient via new technology is probably not that far in the future. That would be amazing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked-in_syndrome

Within several years we should be able to interface a bird brain into a new, robotic body. Soon after that we will be able to transfer the thoughts of the bird brain completely into a new substrate. I believe these efforts will supersede AI since we won’t have to create the initial programming. The brain functions will be ported over through these interfaces. This is then real intelligence, not artificial. Once porting of real intelligence becomes commonplace, who could argue that a ported human intelligence would not still be an intelligent entity?