anthropocene – Page 4 – An Autonomous Agent

Home (2009)

On March 6, 2013

In anthropocene, biology, documentary, earth, education, evolution, home, video, yann arthus-bertrand, youtube

I enjoy watching documentaries about Earth. Yesterday I watched Home (2009), directed by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. This film contains many nice panoramic visuals of locations around the globe. As you are watching these scenes the narrator takes you through the story of life and evolution.

Watch Home here on YouTube.

self-reference

By anautonomousagent

On March 2, 2013

In animals, anthropocene, art, biology, blog, complexity theory, computer, infinity imagined, information theory, picture, pictures, science, self-organization, self-reference, tumblr, website

self-reference is a really cool tumblr page. I would call some of the images on the site computer art. There are some fascinating images:

Human Decision Making Ability, Optimal Control

By anautonomousagent

On March 1, 2013

In anthropocene, brain, computer, dna, evolution, nasa, space, thoughts

Before humans first landed on the moon, NASA scientists and academics spent years devising a solution to the moon landing problem. The problem is that humans are physically incapable of making correct logical conclusions under stochastic conditions not consistent with human evolution. A human would quickly get lost in the flood of information processing required to land a craft going 25,000 mph. The solution: programming a computer to make the landing control decisions. In other words, for the first time in human history the helmsman on the ship of exploration was not human. In other words, it was the computer which landed us on the moon. So, how are we really supposed to comprehend, “One small step for man. One giant leap for mankind.”

As a general conclusion, for things that require such decisions at such speeds or with huge numbers of parameters we need computers. In order to properly maintain a society as large as humans, there will come a time when we will have reached a limit to sustainable growth due to reaching the limits imposed by evolution on human decision making abilities. That time has already occurred. In order to continue to grow, we will have governments which rely on computer decisions to correctly sustain large numbers of people. However, this will raise the interesting situation in which the president or ruler of a country will be faced with a decision – it could be a political or social. Does he/she accept the outcome of the computer’s calculation or his own, human solution.

I guess nothing I have written should be surprising or new. However, my point is that governments of large nations are not really entirely run by humans. So we can’t entirely blame public officials; rather, some of the blame should be on algorithms inside the computers which helped make those decisions.

Human Collective Intelligence

By anautonomousagent

On February 28, 2013

In anthropocene, autonomous agent, capitalism, collective intelligence, complexity theory, dna, Godel, math, physics, thoughts

The collective intelligence of humans is remarkable. We all share 99% of genes, yet when you look at the vast majority of the population at any given instant, the amount of ignorance and differing knowledge is stunning. Look at the achievements of humans. But, given a single individual who is deemed to be the “most intelligent” of the population, you will not find in him the majority of which is required to construct and maintain of the structures humans have built. The smartest one will only be an expert in a specific field of knowledge. Their contributions include discovering the Theory of Relativity, proving the incompleteness of logical systems (Godel’s Theorem) or writing rules for Calculus and other such concepts we now have in our library of knowledge.

This reliance on the collective is very interesting; especially considering the United States is built upon the concept of individual freedom. So, I suggest you compare the collective societies, where the individual has his freedom secondary to the state. In these populations, you don’t have the same level of massive collective intelligence as in Capitalist societies. Instead, these societies tend to have a population which share a single monotonous intelligence. It seems paradoxical to have such a collective strength emerge out of a multitude of distinct autonomous units and a lack of such strength when these units are more uniform in their actions. But is it precisely this power of individual freedom and expression which leads to the formation of reliance on collective interactions.