Just F.O. and give me your sgf-files, AlphaGo

[pataphor]

So you defeated the world champion of go for the second time, first it
was Lee Sedol and now it's Ke Jie. We are presented with a
circuitous series of web pages gushing about how much respect AlphaGo
has for the human players that used to sit on the go-throne and how
much it is willing to contribute further to the sport and to other
areas in science in which it can be of assistance.

But then we slowly start to notice the real deal. We are offered 50
games in which AlphaGo plays AlphaGo, which seems only fair for
leaching off the billions of people who they siphoned their billions
from so they could build an AI in the first place. But instead of
sharing the games fair and square we are taken by the nose into some
labyrinth of web pages where we have to read over and over again how
great the go players are, and, in extension, AlphaGo is, without ever
getting access to a simple directory listing of files with game records
in sgf format, the thing they are tempting us with the whole time.

At best we end up at a page where we are informed that users who are not
logged in don't have access to a 'get' method. And what's the whole
shtick with delivering the games 10 per day, as if it's some holy
scripture coming from God? Is that how AlphaGo is going to treat us
puny humans from now? We all know that in a few weeks those games will
be ubiquitous and worthless, but no one will be able to remove the
eternal shame from Google's face for acting so disgraciously towards
those who have made this all possible, the population of the planet.

It doesn't bode well for how access to AI results will be distributed
in the future, people seem to still think that everything is still
working the same way as ever, as if taking everyone's data and holding
it hostage is the same thing as taking a picture now and then for
personal use while not sharing and exploiting.

Throw AI into the mix and if we're not making the most extreme course
correction in the general direction of equality, of access to
information, source code, hardware and its drivers, then we're in for
an inequality the likes of which we have never seen before. And this is
really about tiny differences having and outsized effect, like
microseconds determining the winners and losers in high speed trading
contests.

We have already seen how the greatest heist in human history, a robbery
of more value than all wealth combined since the beginning, has gone
unpunished, the perpetrators could not even be named and shamed,
instead the whole class was given immunity for crimes that would put
normal humans into prison for several lifetimes. And recently other
manipulations, of social networks and politics affiliated media, have
put, as ESR seems to understand it, a troll into the most influential
position of the most powerful country in the world.

Part of the problem seems to be that those people warning us of the
effects are themselves compromised, and don't distance themselves
enough from the same status machine that awarded them their undeserved
positions at the academy or the government or the private sector.
Instead they speak with that same authority even while warning us of the
ill effects the system it resulted in has on the planet. Do they really
think they have any standing left in the court of human morality, even
if only after profiting the utmost from it and now noticing that even
they themselves will be left behind and thrown away like the rest of
the human trash?

Instead they fight some kind of background fight to maintain their
status and privileges 'for the good of the planet', like they don't
even understand, with all their smarts, that if you throw all the less
connected and less privileged people under the bus you end up with a
tiny minority holding all the good positions, but it is in no way proof
that you're somehow (genetically?) smarter than the rest.

We're left with grandiose plans of some billionaires to save the
planet, after all they can convert their luxury airships to relief
carrying devices if disasters occur and if they have no parties planned
with their inner circles the next week. But stupid and insufficient as
that idea is, it won't won't even save the billionaires if things
really start to accelerate and the tiniest of tiny differences will
have making or breaking consequences.

After this newsgroup died, or maybe simultaneously with it, there seems
to have been a new initiative, a kind of extropist manifesto instead
of the old extropian manifest, it placed more emphasis on the battle
against the copyright parasites, I mean the real parasities, not the
ones taking and giving their fair share in the noopshere but the ones
trying to turn everyone into criminals when they themselves go on and on
influencing everything, profiting heavily from it and damn the
consequences of their artificial popularity hierarchy.

Just as it should be illegal to bring information technology products
on the market without publicly disclosing the hardware schematics and
the source code to the programs that drive it, it's only natural, given
how much damage that stuff can do to our privacy and to our social
structures, that it should also be forbidden to put huge social
influencers, like films or popular music out on the Internet without
guaranteeing that everyone has free and unhindered access to it in the
end, and with "in the end" I mean a timeframe that is forever shrinking
and shrinking until we end up with microseconds, according to some
formula that is based on a possibly itself accelerating moore's law,
like not only technological progress doubles every 18 months, no, it
doubles in shorter and shorter times, to the point that we have to
acknowledge that time itself seems to halve in shorter periods, so
that the people now in human pupa form in Alcor's dewars may wake up
in a few years instead of in the projected time of a few decades or
centuries.

But by that time I hope the original extroprian academic and privileged
mindset has withered the same way as that of the various shamefully
collaboratist singularity institutes and initiatives.

P.

---

"Although, I have to admit, extropian sounds a lot better than
extropist"