Not a human move

[AlphaGo] doesn’t perceive the world or move within it, and the totality of its behaviour is manifest through the moves it makes on the Go board. Nevertheless, the intentional stance is sometimes useful to describe its behaviour.

...Commentating on the match, the European Go champion Fan Hui remarked: ‘It’s not a human move. I’ve never seen a human play this move. So beautiful.’ According to AlphaGo’s own estimate, there was a one-in-10,000 chance that a human would have used the same tactic, and it went against centuries of received wisdom. Yet this move was pivotal in giving it victory.

from What other kinds of minds might be out there? by Murray Shanahan

Aliens and angels

We have only just begun to live with smart machines. While we worry today about killer robots, the challenges to come may be turn out to be much stranger. One day, we may find ourselves living alongside aliens and angels.

from Forget killer robots: This is the future of supersmart machines by Sumit Paul-Choudhury

Image adapted from Murray Shanahan

Wraenna

Murray Shanahan finishes his book The Technological Singularity like this:

As I watch a wren through the kitchen window, clinging to a hawthorn bush, I hope that we never lose sight of the things we already have that still matter, whatever the future holds.

This sends me back to Birds Britannica by Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey, who quote Max Nicholson:

The wren cannot adequately be described as a bird of woodlands, gardens, field, moors, marshes, cliffs or wastelands — although it is all of these — but must be looked at rather as a bird of cervices and crannies, of stems and twigs and branches, of woodpiles and fallen trees, of hedge-bottoms and banks, walls and boulders, wherever these may occur. Wrens cut across, or rather scramble under, the imaginary boundaries we are accustomed to draw between different types of country.

Cocker and Mabey also quote Jeremy Mynott on the St Kilda wren:

The bird is surely the wild spirit of the place. After all it has been there some 5000 years, whereas human occupation is thought to have lasted a 1000 years. Its piercing song can already be heard from among the rocks as you first approach the islands by boat, even above the noise of crashing waves and the cries of a million seabirds. The wren seems elemental — a tiny persistent life in these desolate landscapes governed by the huge impersonal forces of wind, tide and weather.

Image: RSPB

A rope over an abyss

The largest, and most provocative sense in which a technological singularity might be an existential opportunity can only be grasped by stepping outside the human perspective altogether and adopting a more cosmological point of view. It is surely the height of anthropocentric thinking to suppose that the story of matter in this corner of the universe climaxes with human society and the myriad living brains [sic] embedded in it, marvellous as they are.  Perhaps matter still has a long way to go on the scale of complexity. Perhaps there are forms of consciousness yet to arise that are, in some sense, superior to our own. Should we recoil from this prospect, or rejoice in it? Can we ever make sense of such an idea?

The Technological Singularity Murray Shanahan (2015)

Image: recreation of figure from Triadic Ballet via pinterest