Jaron Lanier

The following are Lanier's Laws for Putting Machines in their Place, distilled from comments I've posted on Edge over the years. They are all stolen from earlier laws that predate the appearance of computers by decades or centuries.

Lanier's First Law

Humans change themselves through technology.

Example: Lanier's Law of Eternal Improvement for Virtual Reality: Average human sensory perception will gain acuity over successive generations in tandem with the improving qualities of pervasive media technology.

Lanier's Second Law

Even though human nature is dynamic, you must find a way to think of it as being distinct from the rest of nature.

You can't have a categorical imperative without categories. Or, You can't have a golden rule without gold. You have to draw a Circle of Empathy around yourself and others in order to be moral. If you include too much in the circle, you become incompetent, while if you include too little you become cruel. This is the "Normal form" of the eternal liberal/conservative dichotomy.

Lanier's Third Law

You can't rely completely on the level of rationality humans are able to achieve to decide what to put inside the circle. People are demonstrably insane when it comes to attributing nonhuman sentience, as can be seen at any dog show.

Lanier's Fourth Law

Lanier's Law of AI Unrecognizability.

You can't rely on experiment alone to decide what to put in the circle. A Turing Test-like experiment can't be designed to distinguish whether a computer has gotten smarter or a person interacting with that computer has gotten stupider (usually by lowering or narrowing standards of human excellence in some way.)

Lanier's Fifth Law

If you're inclined to put machines inside your circle, you can't rely on metrics of technological sophistication to decide which machines to choose. These metrics have no objectivity.

For just one example, consider Lanier's retelling of Parkinson's Law for the Post-dot-com Era: Software inefficiency and inelegance will always expand to the level made tolerable by Moore's Law. Put another way, Lanier's corollary to Brand's Laws: Whether Small Information wants to be free or expensive, Big Information wants to be meaningless.

Lanier's Sixth Law

When one must make a choice despite almost but not quite total uncertainty, work hard to make your best guess.

Best guess for Circle of Empathy: Danger of increasing human stupidity is probably greater than potential reality of machine sentience. Therefore choose not to place machines in Circle of Empathy.

Charles Seife

Seife's First Law

A scientific revolution is a complete surprise. Especially to its authors.

Seife's Second Law

Each generation's scientific neologisms adorn the labels of the next generation's quack cures.

Andy Clark

Clark's Law

Everything leaks.

There are no clear-cut level distinctions in nature. Neural software bleeds into neural firmware, neural firmware bleeds into neural hardware, psychology bleeds into biology and biology bleeds into physics. Body bleeds into mind and mind bleeds into world. Philosophy bleeds into science and science bleeds back.The idea of levels is a useful fiction, great for hygienic text-book writing and quick answers that defend our local turf but seldom advance scientific understanding).

Alan Alda

The following is written by a non-scientist who supposes it might be entertaining for scientists to see what passes through the head of a curious layman while trying to understand the people who try to understand Nature.

Alda's First Law of Laws

All laws are local.

In other words, something is always bound to come along and make you rethink what you know by forcing you to look at it in a broader context. I've arrived at this notion after interviewing hundreds of scientists, and also after being married for 46 years.

I don't mean that laws are not true and useful, especially when they have been verified by experiment. But they are likely to continue to be true only within a certain frame, once another frame is discovered.

Some scientists will probably find this idea heretical and others may find it obvious. According to this law, they'll both be right (depending on the frame they're working in).

Another way of saying this is that no matter how much we know about something, it is just the tip of the iceberg. And most disasters occur by coming in contact with the other part of the iceberg.

Alda's Second Law of Laws

A law does not know how local it is.

Citizens of Lawville do not realize there are city limits and are constantly surprised to find out they live in a county.

When you're operating within the frame of a law, you can't know where the edges of the frame are—where dragons begin showing up.

I've just been interviewing astronomers about dark matter and dark energy in the universe. These two things make up something like 96% of the universe. The part of the universe we can see or in some way observe is only about 4%. That leaves a lot of universe that needs to be rethought. And some people speculate that dark energy may be leaking in from a whole other universe; an even bigger change of frame, if that turns out to be the case.

It’s now known that vast stretches of DNA once thought to be Junk DNA because they don’t code for proteins actually regulate or even silence conventional genes. The conventional genes—what we used to think were responsible for everything we knew about heritability—account for only 2% of our DNA. Apparently, it’s not yet known how much of the other 98% is active, but I think the frame has just shifted here.

Welcome to Lawville; you are now leaving Lawville.

Stuart Pimm

Pimm's First Law

No language spoken by fewer than 100,000 people survives contact with the outside world, while no language spoken by more than one million people can be eliminated by such contact.

Pimm's Second Law

With every change in language (including first contact with humanity), a region's biodiversity shrinks by 20%.

Robert Provine

Provine's Motor Precocity Principle

Organisms spond before they respond (act before they react).

This principle of neurobehavioral development and evolution describes the tendency of the nervous system to produce motor output before it receives sensory input. Because motor systems often evolve and develop before sensory systems, sensory input cannot have the dominant influence on neural structure and function predicted by some psychological and neurological theories.

The evolutionary precocity of motor relative to sensory systems also argues against the classical reflex as a primal step in neurobehavioral evolution. Spontaneously active motor processes are adaptive and can emerge through natural selection unlike sensory processes that are not adaptive without a behavior to guide. Sensory systems evolved to control already existing movement.

Another argument against the primacy of reflexes is that they require the unlikely simultaneous evolution of a sensory and a motor process. The tendency of organisms to "spond before they respond" requires the re-evaluation of many other traditional neurobehavioral concepts and processes.

Provine's Self/Other Exclusionary Principle

The "self," the most basic sense of personhood, is defined as that which is not "other." "Other," the most primitive level of social entity, is defined as a non-self, animate stimulus on the surface of your skin.

Self is distinguished from other by a neurological cancellation process. These definitions are attractive because they permit a neurologically and computationally based approach to problems that are traditionally mired in personality and social theory. Although our sense of identity involves more than self/non-self discrimination, such a mechanism may be at its foundation and a first step toward the evolution of personhood and the neurological computation of its boundaries. For a demonstration of this mechanism, consider your inability to tickle yourself. Tickle requires stimulation by a non-self animate entity on the surface of your skin. Similar, self-produced stimulation is cancelled and is not ticklish.

Without such a self/non-self discriminator, we would be constantly be tickling ourselves by accident, and the world would be filled with goosey people lurching their way through life in a chain reaction filled with tactile false alarms. Developing a similar machine algorithm may lead to "ticklish" robots whose performance is enhanced by their capacity to distinguish touching from being touched, and, provocatively, a computationally based construct of machine personhood.

Art De Vany

De Vany's Law

The future is over-forecasted and underpredicted.

Alison Gopnik

Gopnik's Learning Curve

The ability to learn is inversely proportional to years of school, adjusted for hormones.

Gopnik's Gender Curves

The male curve is an abrupt rise followed by an equally abrupt fall. The female curve is a slow rise to an extended asymptote. The areas under the curves are roughly equal. These curves apply to all activities at all time scales (e.g. attention to TV programs, romantic love, career scientific productivity).

Raphael Kasper

Kasper's Law

One should never blindly accept things as they are.

Jose Saramago writes in The Cave with his usual quirky punctuation and sentence structure:

"... we often hear it said, or we say it ourselves, I'll get used to it, we say or they say, with what seems to be genuine acceptance ..., what no one asks is at what cost do we get used to things."

Kasper's Second Law

Try to know where and how your thoughts arise and always give credit to your teachers.

Susan Blackmore

Blackmore's First Law

People's desire to believe in the paranormal is stronger than all the evidence that it does not exist.

Blackmore's Second Law

Humans are not in control of the web; the memes are.

Stanislas Dehaene

Dehaene's First Law

Every successful human invention such as arithmetic or the alphabet has a "neuronal niche"—a set of cerebral processors that evolved for a distinct purpose, but can be recycled to implement the new function.

Two corollaries:

The difficulty of learning a new concept or technique is directly related to the amount of recycling needed—the distance between the evolutionary older function and the new one.

When the old and the new functions are closely related (isomorphic), an evolutionary old cerebral processor can provide a fast, unconscious and unexpected solution to a recent cultural problem—this is what we call
"intuition".

Dehaene's Second Law

The confusability of two ideas, however abstract, is a direct function of the overlap in their neuronal codes.

Richard Rabkin

Rabkin's Rule

Nothing is a simple as it seems.

Rabkin's Dictum

If you don't understand something, it's because you aren't aware of its context.

Donald Hoffman

Hoffman's First Law

A theory of everything starts with a theory of mind.

Quantum measurement hints that observers may create microphysical properties. Computational theories of perception hint that observers may create macrophysical properties. The history of science suggests that counterintuitive hints, if pursued, can lead to conceptual breakthroughs.

Hoffman's Second Law

Physical universes are user interfaces for minds.

Just as the virtual worlds experienced in VR arcades are interfaces that allow the arcade user to interact effectively with an unseen world of computers and software, so also the physical world one experiences daily is a species-specific user interface that allows one to survive while interacting with a world of which one may be substantially ignorant.

Nassim Taleb

Taleb's First Black Swan Law

The risk you know anything about today is not the one that matters. What will hurt you next has to look completely unplausible today. The more unplausible the event the more it will hurt you.

Consider that had the WTC attack been deemed a reasonable risk then we would have had tighter control of the skies and it would have not taken place. It happened because it was improbable. The awareness of a specific danger makes you protect yourself from its precise effect and may prevent the event itself from occurring.

Taleb's Second Black Swan Law (corollary)

We don't learn that we don't learn.

We don't learn the First Black Swan Law from experience, yet we think that we learn something from it. Abstract subject matters (and metarules) do not affect our risk avoidance mechanisms; only vivid images do. People did not learn from the WTC (and the succession of similar events in history such as the formation of financial bubbles) that we have a horrible track record in forecasting such occurrences. They just learned the specific task to avoid tall buildings and Islamic terrorists—after the fact.

Geoffrey Miller

Miller's Law of Strange Behavior

To understand any apparently baffling behavior by another human, ask: what status game is this individual playing, to show off which heritable traits, in which mating market?

Miller's Iron Law of Iniquity

In principle, there is an evolutionary trade-off between any two positive traits. But in practice, every good trait correlates positively with every other good trait.

Miller's First Law of Offspring Ingratitude

People who don't understand genetics attribute their personal failings to the inane role models offered by their parents.

Miller's Second Law of Offspring Ingratitude

People who do understand genetics attribute their personal failings to the inane mate-choice decisions made by their parents.