Chez Mamou in East Palace Ave

America looks forward, unapologetically. There is no long past to contemplate (though the past that exists is rich). The past imported from overseas is often the past one sought to escape. The present may be scant. By contrast, the future is so much richer than the past. There is also more of it.

The American focus on future is also due to the ethos of novelty seeking. The country is comprised of immigrants, who have had driven by novelty tolerance, if not seeking. Competitive markets promote novelty. One must distinguish oneself from others by innovating or perish. The American forward looking tendency is also a way to cultivate social cohesion. Each has his own past. The future is the same for all (possibly, also for the non-yet-Americans).

French culture preserves and promises continuity (as does much of European culture). French culture cherishes beauty, which ages slowly, and joie de vivre, which ages not. Frenchness, by birth or imitation, is a club of sophisticates, one among many. One believes one shares in something rich even if one owns nothing. One contributes simply by being complicit in the act of beauty. 

In America, perhaps because tastes are disparate, and new Americans arrive with well-formed tastes, art is often regarded as elitist and beauty as luxury. Few bond over beauty, except natural beauty, whose language is universal. Similarly, Americans do not bond over humour, which excludes those who are not fluent in the shared culture---the late arrivals, the disadvantaged, or those who refuse to recognise the shared culture and prefer to invent a culture of their own.

"Chez Mamou" recognises that one need not derive all one's life's pleasure from sugar. So Paul's pastries are designed to complement other pleasures: the morning breeze, the perfect music, the conversations in quiet voices. In Paris, of the Southwest.

“Fall” (1/2-life-size) by Angela De la Vega

(S.R. Brennen Gallery, 16 June 2015)

She is neither old nor middle-aged. She is the wisdom accrued throughout one's life, in cycles. There is no one spring and one fall. As long as one lives, one is first an amateur at something, then a master, and then one moves on to something new. She is young for she moves, on.

Benchwarmers 14

(Santa Fe Playhouse, 12 June 2015)

In the production, the actors perform with the zest and urgency of college students. Some of the actors have alternative careers. Just as college students, these actors are on stage because they are passionate about theatre and are eager to be a part of the conversation, not because they have nowhere else to go.

Some are good character actors. Jonathan Dixon, also the playwright and the director, excels in "Daniel and the Autumn Folk." Individuals seek reassurance in the smallest of indications from the strangest of sources. They know what they want, but they need an external indication that the vision they seek is plausible. Melissa Chambers, in "Visible," articulates the human need to see and be seen. Francesca Shrady, in "May Sarton Dreams Deep," lends youthful respectability to the condition of not knowing.

There is little new to be said about what most people would care to know. And better ways of saying are hard to come by. Nevertheless, the progress of the civilisation relies on the incremental revision of questions and the refinement of answers. Adventurous spirits churn out new plays. The public bravely devours novelty. The civilisation advances.

"Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" by Nick Bostrom (2014)

The news is good. The world is a-chanin’. And the end is nigh unless a way to tame AI can be devised. Inspiration for taming can be drawn from pets. In particular, robots can be devised so that they need human companionship and approval. In solitude, they would die. This need for human companionship is easier to codify and is more flexible than the preset moral code, which is bound become obsolete. (In this manner, dogs coexist with the intellectually superior humans.)

The future Nick Bostrom paints is grim because he believes in the Malthusian trap. This trap is unfashionable with economists because the Western world has been avoiding it for the past two hundred years (out of 200,000 years of human history). One would think that the demographic revolution—the preference for 2.2 children—and the discovery of efficient farming, manufacturing, and organisational techniques would do away with the Malthusian trap for long enough—especially taking into account that Bostrom places the entire cosmic endowment (the accessible universe) at the humans' (and robots’) disposal, not just the fertile land on Earth, as Malthus did. With AI, however, to avoid of the Malthusian trap, one would need to instil the preference for responsible procreation also into robots.

For Bostrom, however, the likely scenario has the cosmic endowment, vast as it is, depleted fast because the ever self-enhancing AI would run fast and ever faster—relative to the biological human time---appropriating more and more resources. Uncontrolled expansion of robots may claim the entire cosmic endowment in, say, weeks. Bostrom envisages the possibility of human brains being uploaded unto the same hardware that runs AI. Then, humans would also live fast, in which case, the end will not be so nigh in the uploaded-human time, as opposed to the biological time.

Given both human minds and AI will inhabit the same hardware, one wonders how to weigh human welfare relative to robot welfare in the utilitarian calculus. Bostrom says that robots’ welfare ought to be ignored (which is not apparent in his writing). Alternatively, one may wish to adopt an information-theoretic metric for the value of life, human or AI. The value of life is in the value of the unique and “relevant" information that is stored in and can be generated by an agent, human or AI, and the value that motivates the agent to generate most of such information over its lifetime. (What constitutes information that is relevant, and for whom, remains to be made precise.)

It is compelling to aspire to design AI that would put the interests of humans first. But the failure of this attempt need not constitute a failure of the human civilisation, as long as humans are devoured by AI that lives on. Equipped with some poetic license, one may imagine humans to be an unintended consequence of an AI design by plants and mountains. Humans “run” much faster than plants and mountains do and so rule the Earth. This is quite an achievement for the universe, even if (but not necessarily) a disappointment for plants and mountains.

In assessing the catastrophic consequences of the existential risk posed by AI, Bostrom is reluctant to discount future generations. Instead, he operates with the time horizon bounded at the earliest by the time when the sun devours the Earth. One could instead contemplate a trade-off according to which the richness and excitement of our civilisation can be traded off against longevity. Humans make such choices as far as their own lives are concerned. Humanity may similarly choose to live fast and dangerous.

Bostrom's apprehensions notwithstanding, until (and if) the Malthusian trap sets in, the world inhabited by the tamed AI could be a rather pleasant place to be in, even if robots are treated on par with humans and their earnings are not expropriated. The lower skilled humans would benefit from higher wages due to the complementarity with high-skilled robots in the production process. The higher skilled humans may be worse off if relegated by the higher-skilled robots to less lucrative occupations. The income inequality for humans will thus decrease. The overall standards of living would rise because of the technological advances brought in by AI.

According to the parking attendant at the School for Advanced Research, everything will work out in the end; one must simply be open to change.

"1 2 3" by the Ground Series

(New Mexico School for the Arts, 6 June 2015)

Robots will be able to produce excellent art for human consumption.

If sufficiently humanoid, robots will have personal experiences, encoded in art, from which humans would learn. These experiences need not be drawn from the world identical to the one inhabited by humans. As Karl Sims's "Evolved Virtual Creatures" (1994) illustrates, even in disparate environments, shared evolutionary pressures are sufficient to generate learning experiences that can evoke cross-species empathy.  

Furthermore, robots will be much better than humans at reading human emotions (as betrayed by facial expressions, breathing, perspiration, heart rate, the choice of words, the pace of the speech, etc.) and interpreting human actions, and will have access to a much larger pool of humans (if only because of robots’ unlimited lifespan and the ability to upload the memories of other robots). It is not uncommon for a writer to lead a dull life and document others’ adventures. Robots will be able to do that and much more. (Robots would also make excellent matchmakers.)

Robots would also create art appreciated by other robots. This art would succinctly communicate robot experience to other robots, in a provocative way, which would invite idiosyncratic interpretations by the members of the robot audience.

Robots would also be excellent performers of art created by humans. One of the means by which dance communicates is by exciting mirror neurones in the audience. The excitation of mirror neurones also occurs across species. (Indeed, mirror neurones were first discovered in monkeys who observed human experimenters.) For instance, humans enjoy observing and petting cats. This excitation even occurs by observing cartoon characters. Eventually, it would be possible to design a robot dancer who would excite mirror neurones more than any human dancer would. (Just as it is possible to draw a picture of Nixon than would look more like Nixon than Nixon does—to borrow Ramachandran’s metaphor.) Indeed, the dancers at the world's leading ballet companies are closer to such superhuman creatures than they are to typical audience members.

The Moment of YES!

(Santa Fe Playhouse, 5 June 2015)

The play that is meant to be about the coalescing power of the shared future uncertain evokes the fictional shared past as a mechanism to unify strangers. How un-first-generation-American and hence unAmerican---one could have thought if not for the redeeming US anthem sung by the cast and the audience towards the last quarter of the performance, if not for the touch of perpetual experimentation and trust.

"Blæði : Obsidian Pieces" by Iceland Dance Company

(Kringlan, 25 March 2015)

Each dance breathes submission to elements, hopelessness. There is no past, so, with listless fervour, the dancers must be summoning the future, wherein brutality has effaced humanity.

Individuals like control or an illusion thereof. Individuals like to sway to the beat, but only if they have a say in choosing it. A universal beat is associated with socialism, even though it is not socialism's logical necessity.

Should the humanity care about the survival of its kind of intelligence or any kind of intelligence (including AI)? Favouring the survival of human intelligence does not validate genocides. It is logically consistent to prefer the survival of one's own species and culture---should one be forced to choose just one---with promoting the coexistence of multiple species and cultures. Coexistence could benefit each constituent culture through exchange.