Alan Moore

[peter]

Most people will have come across the works of Alan Moore, even if his name itself is unfamiliar to them.

Author of such works as Watchmen and The League of Unusual Gentlemen, I think Moore is one of the unsung geniuses (genii?) of the imaginative world, and was thus interested to hear him in a brief interview on YouTube recently.

He expressed his opinion on two areas of interest to me, and I'd like to hear what you guys have to say about his thoughts.

Firstly on AI, Moore said he didn't believe that we would be creating sentient AI anytime soon. In fact IIRC correctly, he wasn't sure that such a development would be possible at all. He was absolutely convinced that AI of the type that we currently have would continue to advance, particularly in the area of what he referred to as 'niche AI'. He gave the example of either Beijing or Hong-Kong (he wasn't sure which) as a city where the traffic control was already entirely in the 'hands' of an advanced AI system, which runs without human input of any kind, saying that he felt that we would see more and more areas of life where control was passed over in this way to AI specifically designed to operate within that niche.

But as for actual AI sentience, consciousness, he didn't see it anywhere on the horizon in our lifetime.

As an aside, I think the further development of our current AI to mimic sentience might be the thing here, rather than the actual development itself. I mean, how will we know? If the mimicry becomes so good as to become indistinguishable from the 'real thing', then does the distinction become meaningless? But this wasn't an area that he discussed in the short time he had, confining his remarks, rather, to what I have said already.

He also felt, he said, that humanity was reaching one of its pivotal transformations, a change as fundamental as that of the move from the hunter-gatherer existence to the agricultural way of life, or the development of industrialisation. It wasn't possible as yet to really understand the form that this would take (though clearly one assumes, it will involve above AI and outsourcing of many of the fundamental roles that traditionally occupy our lives). In this section he referred to the "horrendous death throes" of capitalism, so he clearly imagines this transformations will be to some kind of post capitalist organisation of the world, though he certainly didn't imply that it would involve the increase of socialism to fill the void. Rather I got the impression that he felt something entirely new was on the horizon, something that would take half a century or so in order to take shape, and that would be neither good nor bad, but would simply be (as it were). He was at pains to say that this would not be a thing created so much by any deliberate design, but would simply be an organic development of which we could have no real input or foreknowledge of. He used the example of "sheep shit and turnips" to illustrate this. How the (what) fifteenth century agrarian who discovered that turnips planted on fields would restore the productivity of the land and in combination with the use of sheep dung as fertiliser would bring about the productive increase in the land to the point where food security allowed for the industrial revolution to occur. Fifty years would, he felt, give us some idea of where we are going, but that these might not be easy ones as we struggled to adapt.

Anyway, that was about it. Any thoughts anyone?

[sgt.null]

I'm Moore than happy to
Discuss his comics work.

[peter]

Been watching some good interviews with the man on YouTube recently Sarge. Certainly worth checking out. I really do put him up there as an unsung genius.