Freedom and Honduras

There's a surprisingly encouraging article at Reason Magazine titled Global Freedom Had Few Blooms. Not so much because of the article, which listed many assaults against freedom that had occurred over the course of the past year, but because of the comments involving the case of Honduras.

Honduras, in case you didn't know, recently averted a coup by the sitting President, Manuel Zelaya. Its Supreme Court, with the cooperation of its Congress, ordered the military to remove him from the country, and made another person from Zelaya's party the interim President. Afterwards, evidence of vote fraud (in the form of election returns for a referendum that had not yet taken place) was found on computers in the office of former President Zelaya. That the United States supports Zelaya, and not the people of Honduras, raises troubling questions.

The article at Reason included Honduras as an example of a place where democracy did not do so well, but the commenters quickly corrected it, pointing out what I've said above, and much more as well. Check it out for yourself.

This article was encouraging not only because it led to an accurate description of the Honduran situation, but because that description came from the grass roots, so to speak, not from above. The world of the future that I want to see is one where thinking, action and awareness move from the bottom up, not from the top down.

Singularity

The Singularity is the idea that we are on the verge of technological advances so amazing that we cannot comprehend what is on the other side. In a nutshell, technology will allow humans to be so smart that we will be able to improve our intelligence exponentially. The linked talk by Vernor Vinge quotes I.J. Good:

"Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the _last_ invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control. ... It is more probable than not that, within the twentieth century, an ultraintelligent machine will be built and that it will be the last invention that man need make."

The Singularity is exciting to think about, but I am unconvinced that it will actually happen. We know that Moore's Law has been true, more or less, for the past thirty years, but we don't know that that will continue into the future, and we have good reason to believe that it won't, at least without breakthroughs that open up new computing technologies. In other words, we don't have any guarantees, or even direct evidence, that it is possible for computing speed to exceed certain thresholds.

We also are not significantly closer to understanding the nature of consciousness, intelligence or sentience. We know little about how a brain functions. We do not know how to manipulate existing memories. Strictly speaking, none of those are required for the Singularity to occur, but they would help.

Don't get me wrong: the Singularity is possible. But likely? I don't think we have enough evidence to know, one way or the other. Inevitable? No.

Battlestar Galactica: The Plan

We recently watched The Plan, a film offshoot of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica television show. As fans of the show, we enjoyed it; it added some details and filled in some plot holes from the regular series. Someone who has never seen the show, on the other hand, would probably be lost.

The BSG franchise has many tragic elements, and The Plan focuses on several; genocide, betrayal and mistrust feature prominently. They continue to be eclipsed, however, by the sense of sadness I feel about the end of the series.

Next on the schedule is a re-viewing of Battlestar Galactica: Razor. After I watched it for the first time, it crystallized my view that in the series, the humans are the bad guys and the Cylons are actually the good guys. Seasons 3 and 4 added this refinement: the Cylon "skinjobs" (who look like humans) are also bad guys, leaving only the robot-like Centurions to be proper protagonists. Razor is much more accessible to non-fans, and I'm curious if any have seen it before seeing the rest of the show.