Links - 2nd April 2020 (2) (Morality in the 21st Century - remainder)

BBC Radio 4 - Morality in the 21st Century, Episode 5: Jean Twenge - "iGen teens are not spending as much time with their friends face to face as teens did 10 years ago. Even just 10 years ago, or 20 years ago, or 40 years ago. So for example, they’re less lilkely to go out of the house without their parents. To get together informally with their friends. To ride around in a car for fun. To go to parties. To socialize with their friends. To go to the shops. All the things that teens have historically done to hang out with their friends, iGen teens do those less. Then the other category is that iGen teens are growing up more slowly. They're less likely to do activities that adults do and children don't, that are thus milestones of adolescence. So for example, by age 17 or 18 iGen teens are less likely than previous generations to have a driver’s license, to go out of the house without their parents, to date, to drink alcohol, to have sex or to have a paid job...
‘There's some unusual seeming contradictions emerging as well. You've said that iGenners are very keen on inclusivity. But you've also suggested that they're quite ready to shut out views that conflict with their own.’
‘So this has been the big issue on university campuses. And I know this has been debated in the UK as well... And it's fascinating turnaround because, say when it was the boomers who were the liberal university students, they were very much in support of free speech and you can say whatever you want. But now the most liberal students on university campuses, now that they’re iGen take, at least in some cases, the opposite view of there, there are certain things you cannot say. And if you're going to be a campus speaker coming to our campus and you want to say certain things, that we're going to try to get you “disinvited”, or if you do come we will shout you down, or even get into a physical fight with you and your security guards. So, this has happened several times over the past five years or so during the iGen era on university campuses… millennials and iGenners are much less likely to affiliate with a religion than say baby boomers were when they were also young. So taking age out of the equation. So there has been a true shift, a true decline in religious affiliation over the past 40 years. There's also been pronounced decline in religious service attendance, that there are more young people who never attend religious services at all. So, until fairly recently, there were a number of people who were saying, well, you know, these public displays of religion, they're going down, but private beliefs, they're just the same. But that's no longer true either. If you look in surveys of young adults, the percentage who say that they ever pray, or that they believe in God, has declined considerably over the last 10 years. So there's now about one in four young adults who are completely non religious, they never pray, and they don't believe in God.’
‘Where are they getting their morality from?’
‘In depth studies, for example, those done by Christian Smith at Notre Dame, suggest that they draw morality basically from individualism. That it's the idea of as long as you don't hurt anyone else, then you can do whatever you want.’
A most suggestive link between the decline of religion and the rise in liberal totalitarianism. As Dawkins said in another context, the decline of Christianity has led to it being replaced by something worse

BBC Radio 4 - Morality in the 21st Century, Episode 14: Steven Pinker and Melinda Gates - "‘It is an occupational hazard of literary and cultural elites to have contempt for the common person, which is I think why, one of the reasons Nietzsche was so popular among many intellectuals and artists. That he valorizes what the brilliant artist can do, as the ultimate moral good… [I am led to] humility, the fact that humanity is devilishly difficult to comprehend, that we all of us are flawed and limited humans. We’re products of evolution, we're not angels. None of us is omniscient. None of us is infallible. We know from history that people are very confident in beliefs that turn out later to be to be wrong. And the entire process of science and rational inquiry is accepting one's humility as a knower. That's why we subject our hypotheses to empirical testing. Let the world tell us whether we're right or wrong. That's why we promote values like free speech and open debate so that anyone can criticize anyone else, however much it might hurt. It's very pleasant to be praised. It's very annoying to be criticized. But if you realize that we're all infallible (sic), then criticism is an essential part of becoming more accurate in our knowledge.'...
‘We can visit all the great sites of civilization in the world and realize that in their day, they were thought to be invulnerable and resistant really to time. And today they are tourist attractions, the civilizations that gave rise to them have come and gone. What gives you the confidence that our Western liberal individualistic scientific rationalist humanistic civilization will not go the way of others?’
‘Well, it may. I can’t prophecy that it won't’"

BBC Radio 4 - Morality in the 21st Century, Episode 12: Nick Bostrom - "‘Technology is trying to achieve more with less effort’
‘But you've distinguished between, say, the cart, and the car because the cart made horses more useful and more efficient, whereas the car made horses irrelevant, obsolete. So you're worried about that second thing aren’t you?’
‘Well, what primarily concerns with with the prospect of superintelligence is really not so much the human obsolescence part. We can discuss that further. But the bigger concern to me is that it's not just that we wouldn't find jobs, but that there would be a more fundamental conflict of interest between this superintelligent system and humans, and that it would prevail because it was much smarter. And so that in the same way that if there's an ant colony on plot of ground, maybe we want to build a parking lot there. And unfortunately for the ants, we will get our way because we are smarter and more powerful. It’s not because we hate the ants or resent them or anything like that, but it's just that the same resources that they would want to use for their ends, we might want to use for different ends’...
'I think there is this misconception that people have that on some absolute scale of intelligence. That you have at one end, the village idiot. And then far over at the other end, you have Albert Einstein. And that's because I think our concept of smartness is sort of calibrated on the existing human distribution. We use this concept to classify and understand people. But if we're instead asking, how difficult is it to engineer a system that can perform all the things that the village idiot can do? And how difficult is it to engineer a system that can do all the things that Einstein could do? Those two points, I think, are very close to one another. The village idiot can drive a car, it can hold a conversation, can get dressed in the morning, eat breakfast, can do a whole host of things. And the only additional thing that Einstein can do a little bit better is maybe some mathematical reasoning relevant to physics. Maybe he had 20% more neurons in some particular cortical area. And that small difference looms large to us, but from an engineering point of view, it might just be scaling up the system by another 10%.’"

BBC Radio 4 - Morality in the 21st Century, Episode 11: Mustafa Suleyman - "‘I was fascinated once by a woman who became a mother for for the first time, a Jewish mother, who said, you know, now I have a child, I can relate to God much better. Now I know what it's like to create something you can't control. In AI have we created something we can't control?’
‘No, we've certainly not created something we can't control. I think that sort of speculation is philosophically interesting, and may or may not come to pass over the next 50 to 100 years. Who knows? Right now, these are absolutely systems that we can control. They’re systems that we can hold accountable. And there are all sorts of both technical and I think legal mechanisms that ensure that they serve us. And that they’re useful to us, and that we have oversight over how they actually work in practice’
‘So you don't share the fears of the late Stephen Hawking or Elon Musk, for instance, that the AI is just a danger to the future of humanity’
‘I think that sort of speculation does a disservice to the more practical, real world near term ethical consequences of the collection of data at the kind of scale that we've des-, we've talked about, and the use of these sorts of much more narrow applied machine learning algorithms to make all kinds of real world decisions about directing traffic, you know, through our suburbs rather than through main streets. That may sound trivial and boring to many people. But there are many, many practical consequences of that single algorithmic decision. The kinds of videos that you might watch online, the kinds of news that you might consume, the kinds of friends that you may or may not be prompted to meet again. These are very real world practical, ethical examples, decisions that are, we are subject to every day… I'm really worried about the sort of Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking narratives that have speculated about a long term future where autonomous, super intelligent systems could be independently roaming around our world, have agency over us, have more power than our species. That is not a desirable world, as far as I can see. And so my concern is to focus on how we can really ensure that these algorithms are contained and controlled. Their agency is restricted. And they're focused on the real challenges that we have today. We have 800 million people who don't eat well every night, who are malnourished. We have 900 million people who don't have access to clean water every night. We have all sorts of diseases. We have raging child poverty, even in this country, 5 million children in child poverty"

BBC Radio 4 - Morality in the 21st Century, Episode 10: Artificial Intelligence - "‘Don't you see, in fact, work is essential to human dignity?’
‘Well, I think there are two functions of work. So one is a source of income, obviously, but in this hypothetical scenario, machines could everything. So imagine that that problem is solved and there is, it is true, this second function of work as a source of meaning, dignity and something to do. And that will require a fundamental rethink of our culture, what we place value on. And we know that there are various groups aside from classical aristocracy that don't work. For children, they seem to have worthwhile lives, they don't produce anything of economic value. Some retirees if they are healthy and have many friends enjoy life, and so we would have to kind of reeducate people to learn to find meaning and worthwhile activity outside the need to earn income’...
‘I think the most poignant sentence in all of religious literature occurs in Genesis chapter six, where God sees exactly what he's done by creating us. And it says: and God regretted that he had created humankind. Might we one day regret that we had created something that was clever and altogether more gifted than humankind?’
‘It is possible. I think, also, there is the possibility we would make an enormous mistake by not doing it. Even if maybe we would never find out how big the mistake was’"