Finally, someone found Philae.

I think the lander cheated by somehow insinuating itself deep into a crack. Probably by pulling that maneuver it saw Han Solo do in Star Wars. Show off. It better watch out for mynocks, though.

David Brin reviews some recent books on the future of artificial intelligence. He’s more optimistic than I am. For one, I think most of the AI pundits are little better than glib con men, so any survey of the literature should consist mostly of culling all the garbage. No, really, please don’t bring up Kurzweil again. Also, any obscenely rich Silicon Valley pundit who predicts a glorious future of infinite wealth because technology can just fuck right off.

But there’s also some stuff I agree with. People who authoritatively declare that this is how the future will be, and that is how people will respond to it, are not actually being authoritative, because they won’t be there, but are being authoritarian. We set the wheel rolling, and we hope that we aren’t setting it on a path to future destruction, but we don’t get to dictate to future generations how they should deal with it. To announce that we’ve created a disaster and that our grandchildren will react by creating a dystopian nightmare world sells them short, and pretending that they’ll use the tools we have generously given them to create a glorious bright utopia is stealing all the credit. People will be people. Finger-wagging from the distant past will have zero or negative influence.

Across all of those harsh millennia, people could sense that something was wrong. Cruelty and savagery, tyranny and unfairness vastly amplified the already unsupportable misery of disease and grinding poverty. Hence, well-meaning men and women donned priestly robes and… preached!

They lectured and chided. They threatened damnation and offered heavenly rewards. Their intellectual cream concocted incantations of either faith or reason, or moral suasion. From Hindu and Buddhist sutras to polytheistic pantheons to Judeao-Christian-Muslim laws and rituals, we have been urged to behave better by sincere finger-waggers since time immemorial. Until finally, a couple of hundred years ago, some bright guys turned to all the priests and prescribers and asked a simple question:

“How’s that working out for you?”

In fact, while moralistic lecturing might sway normal people a bit toward better behavior, it never affects the worst human predators, parasites and abusers –– just as it won’t divert the most malignant machines. Indeed, moralizing often empowers them, offering ways to rationalize exploiting others.

Beyond artificial intelligence, a better example might be climate change — that’s one monstrous juggernaut we’ve set rolling into the future. The very worst thing we can do is start lecturing posterity about how they should deal with it, since we don’t really know all the consequences that are going to arise, and it’s rather presumptuous for us to create the problem, and then tell our grandchildren how they should fix it. It’s better that we set an example and address the problems that emerge now, do our best to minimize foreseeable consequences, and trust the competence of future generations to cope with their situations, as driven by necessities we have created.

They’re probably not going to thank us for any advice, no matter how well-meaning, and are more likely to curse us for our neglect and laziness and exploitation of the environment. If you really care about the welfare of future generations, you’ll do what you can now, not tell them how they’re supposed to be.

The AI literature comes across as extremely silly, too.

What will happen as we enter the era of human augmentation, artificial intelligence and government-by-algorithm? James Barrat, author of Our Final Invention, said: “Coexisting safely and ethically with intelligent machines is the central challenge of the twenty-first century.”

Jesus. We don’t have these “intelligent machines” yet, and may not — I think AI researchers always exaggerate the imminence of their breakthroughs, and the simplicity of intelligence. So this guy is declaring that the big concern of this century, which is already 1/6th over, is an ethical crisis in dealing with non-existent entities? The comparison with religious authorities is even more apt.

I tell you what. Once we figure out how to coexist safely and ethically with our fellow human beings, then you can pontificate on how to coexist safely and ethically with imaginary androids.

Over the last several days, I’ve seen a lot of excitement about a particular result of the SETI search. Scientists observed a signal from the direction of a star called HD 164595, which is about the size of our sun, and “only” 95 light years away. It’s also known to have a non-Earth-like planet in orbit around it; maybe there are some nice rocky planets in the habitable zone, as well?

In case you were curious, here’s the “message”:

It was a burst of energy significantly larger than the fuzzy noise seen in their usual observations. It happened once. It’s also a lot of energy to abruptly emerge from the neighborhood of a star, and that’s interesting in itself. The scientists involved are recommending that we keep an eye on that star — and I agree that we might learn something from that.

But it’s not likely to be an alien civilization trying to talk to us. That ought to be at the bottom of everyone’s list of possibilities. Even Seth Shostak has nothing but sensible interpretations.

This is a bit of a puzzling story, as the Russians found this signal a year ago or so, but just didn’t let others know. That’s not good policy, as what you really want is confirmation at another telescope, but… Is it real? The signal may be real, but I suspect it’s not ET. There are other possibilities for a wide-band signal such as this, and they’re caused by natural sources (or even terrestrial interference).

I just did a quick calculation of how much wattage they’d need to wield from 94 light-years (I think that’s the distance) in order to produce the apparently received signal, and that would be a big utility bill, even if they were directing the transmission (as opposed to broadcasting equally in all directions).

What I find odd is all the sites talking about inferring Kardashev levels from the size of the burst. The Kardashev scale is a science-fictiony estimate of the amount of energy available to a civilization: we’re at Kardashev 0; it would take a Kardashev 1 civilization able to tap energy sources equivalent to the entire amount of energy falling on their planet from their star to send a signal aimed directly at us; and it would take a Kardashev 2 civilization to produce an expanding sphere of signal nonspecifically propagating in all directions.

It seems to me that that is all an argument against this being communication from aliens. That one little blip took a greater amount of energy than our entire society can produce. It’s reasonable to argue that a more advanced civilization could have access to even more energy, but then you’d have to argue that super-advanced highly technological aliens then used their vast power to send one uninformative short blat of power outward. This would only make sense if the planet were inhabited by an entire species of privileged frat-boy types who thought it hilarious to fart at the universe.

That isn’t interesting. I’d be more enthusiastic if this were a novel natural phenomenon.