Accelerating Future

Nothing but random links for today.

The World’s Largest Musical Instrument.
Half-eaten roll for sale on eBay.
United States Secret Service - FAQ for Kids
The C Prize
New Form of Superior Memory Syndrome
Will Japanese Robots Rule the World by 2020?
Solar Power Satellites on Wikipedia
MIT makes moves towards vehicles that morph
‘Executive’ monkeys influenced by other executives, not subordinates
…and finally, Maddox on blogs.

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Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, asks, “What is the most absurd claim you believe?” Mine, of course, is that Artificial General Intelligence with access to its own source code will recursively self-improve so fast as to achieve near-total control of local physical reality after a modest duration of time. “Absurd claims” by others and some of my responses:

John Searle is substantially correct on all his important claims about the possibility of Turing Machines having intelligence.

Searle’s claims have been extensively refuted by Ray Kurzweil, among others. There’s a deep urge to believe that humans have a certain “special sauce” that gives us genuine creative intelligence. We look for this special sauce in biology, psychology, philosophy, you name it. It isn’t there. Humans are casual functionalist systems just like anything else.

Mathematical Platonism.

See the cognitive science of mathematics, i.e., “Where Does Mathematics Come From?” by George Lakoff and Rafael E. Núñez. I too believed in mathematical platonism until recently. The showstopping argument is that, in fact, there are different maths based on different forms of set theory, but we never use them, and that our particular mathematics is nothing special, but developed because its structure was most amenable to the way our homonid brains worked. Particular branches of mathematics like algebra, geometry, etc., were invented because they correspond nicely to our kinesthetic image schemas (ways of thinking rooted in observations about our own bodies).

That what we perceive to be the Universe and everything that’s in it is really a simulation on a computer.

It’s funny, because as I scroll down from here, the ‘absurd beliefs’ seem to lean more and more towards the transhumanistic - on an economics professors’ blog that has nothing to do with transhumanism and rarely mentions it! We’re taking over, I tell you. Regarding the above - sure the Universe could be a simulation! But it might not be. What we think is “evidence” in favor of everything being a simulation; the cap on maximum velocity, for example, or quantum uncertainty, could simply be a natural phenomenon. And vice versa. Unless we actually bust out and start communicating with the people running the simulation, who confirm its existence, we can never know for sure.

People like Daniel Radetsky will pop up at this point and say, “how can you reject mathematical Platonism and accept computational realism!?!” The question is, how can pieces of mathematics running on a computer constitute real people, consciousness, an external environment worthy of the name “real”, and so on? Well, ultimately, persons running on a computer wouldn’t really be “pieces of math” - they’d be dynamic self-aware information systems whose intentionality (philosophical blabber for “will”) operates on configurations of logic gates rather than atoms. The “necessary conditions” for consciousness may turn out being somewhat restrictive, but what we know about the brain strongly suggests these conditions are causal in nature (fulfilled by virtue of a certain configuration) rather than biological (fulfilled by virtue of being embodied in proteins).

That organized religion will atrophy in my lifetime.

Hurrah!

Kids have an incredible capacity for learning. If all children received talented instruction starting at a young age, then everyone’s intellectual potential would be essentially unlimited.

I agree that children should be taught (in a way that’s fun) more extensively, at an earlier age, when possible. But unlimited intellectual potential? That’s the blank slate fallacy at its finest, right there.

Abolish the death penalty and instead make killers and rapists do slave labor. That would really create an incentive not to kill…

Unfortunately studies have shown that incentives along these lines only go so far… some humans (if not all) are built to evil under the right (wrong) circumstances. This one was even written by a woman - I had hoped that women were less inclined to build slave labor camps than men, when given dictatorial powers.

I’m not superstitious, because it brings bad luck.

This made me lol.

I believe that left-wing politicians should be paid the minimum wage to show their solidarity with the poor.

Intriguing… unfortunately, politicians with ripped clothes probably wouldn’t be very effective at raising money for programs that benefit the poor. As an aside: Arnold has opted out of receiving a salary, as governor of California. Not that this matters, as he’s practically a billionaire, but still.

That at a deeply fundamental level, the universe makes no “sense”. Or rather that the ability to accurately scale, measure, quantify, or even explain the universe has an eventual limit.

Hm. Maybe. Maybe we’ll have to invest exponential amounts of resources to get linear returns in physics. It’s true that the universe doesn’t care about us, and that it may resist quantification forever.

Then comes the flood of immortalists:

I believe that there is a decent chance that I will live for several hundred years.

I have to chime in on the side of the immortals. I believe that I am a member of either the first generation to live forever, or the last to die.

I think a lot of this change of heart in the past year can be attributed to Aubrey’s media explosion.

That vengence and vendetta are perfectly acceptable alternatives to courts of law, and that individuals who practice each should be lauded, not prosecuted, by government authorities.

…no.

That if all illegal recreational drugs were legalized in America, it would make little or no difference in rates of addiction or rates at which teen-agers experiment with drugs.

Agreed.

That the hot chick who hostesses at the Italian place down the street has a thing for me.

Heh.

Given whatever the natural limitation of human intelligence is, people are fundamentally as smart as they want to be.

No.

Telling children that they can be whatever they want to be is bad advice.

It’s true.

Nurture, all the way.

We want control so bad. But we forget that we only exist as a machine to propagate DNA. We exist because DNA needed us to procreate, not the other way around.

I believe that if such a thing as real artificial sentience ever comes into being, that we as a society and its engineers as its engenderers need to raise, treat, and love individuals possessing it just like any others of our children.

Well-meaning, but anthropomorphic. You can build an AI any way you want, if you have the theory and the programmers. Some AIs could be programmed to maul your face if you show them love. Others could be nice people no matter how you treat them. The moving parts between stimulus and response are pre-configured in humans, but not in Artificial Intelligence.

Psychiatry is in no way valid medicine, indeed not even valid science, and has done far more harm than good over the history of humanity.

No comment.

I believe that consciousness is primary reality not a derived phenomenon, everything else we see is the contents of Consciousness.

Perhaps!

That I went to college, worked incredibly hard, graduated (econ), and did it all to only end up as a clerk.

Math is somehow not as timeless and unattached to human contingency as it’s lauded to be.

Here, here!

That nanotechnology is as likely to kill us all as to make us live forever (and that both likelihoods are high).

More transhumanist craziness.

That’s all that catches my eye. Now for a piece of technology news:

Samsung is releasing a 32GB flash drive for mobile applications in the “not too distant future” (presumably this year). The drive is light (15g), noiseless, and uses around 5% of the power of current hard drives. (According to the article, “a typical mobile hard drive consumes somewhere between 1W and 2W of power in seek, read and write processes and between 0.2W and 0.8W when idle.”) Because the hard drive only consumes about 10%-20% of the power in a typical laptop, this translates into extended battery life of around 20 - 40 minutes, which isn’t bad, especially in light of the fact that it seems technologically easier to reduce power consumption than boost battery power. Flash drives are ideal for applications in future embedded and wearable computing technologies because of their low power consumption and noise. (Via Slashdot.)

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First draft of aforementioned letter:

To whom it may concern,

Throughout the last half-century, the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been progressing steadily. Today, AI systems help humans accomplish a variety of tasks, from filtering our e-mail to preventing credit card fraud.

If progress continues, the problem-solving abilities of AI systems will approach and then surpass the brightest human minds. These systems will acquire the ability to improve their own source code without human assistance, giving rise to smarter versions that no human team could program directly. These versions will be intelligent enough to have influence over the real world, including improving their underlying hardware.

Humanity has no experience dealing with a species smarter than it. For this reason the creation of Artificial Intelligence should be approached with caution. To distinguish between narrow-purpose AI and AI designed specifically for general intelligence and self-improvement, the term “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI) was coined.

The creation of a smarter-than-human species has been called a ‘singularity’ by futurists, by analogy to singularities in cosmology. In cosmology, the singularity at the center of a black hole refers to the point at which the laws of physics as we know them cease to apply. This doesn’t imply that laws vanish, but simply that they change in ways we can’t foresee. The analogy is not perfect, but a cosmological singularity captures some of the uncertainty we will experience when confronting a smarter-than-human species for the first time.

The creation of AGI would be unlike prior technological milestones. AGI would be capable of independently intiating actions and making choices, inventing new technologies, and solving difficult problems. Created by human programmers rather than evolution and natural selection, AGI will not necessarily be motivated by the same things that motivate us, find challenging the same obstacles that challenge us, or arrange themselves in social configurations the same way that we do.

The choices an AGI makes when improving upon its own programming will stem from its initial top-level motivations. To minimize the probability of rogue AI, researchers working towards generally intelligent systems need to instill them with positive goal structures – altruism, benevolence, philanthropy. Because the benefits of successful AGI would be so large, arguing about the specifics of the distribution scheme is not as important as ensuring that everyone receives them.
It is our position that AGI cannot be avoided entirely. As AI researchers and futurists, it is our responsibility to do as much as we can to ensure a positive outcome. We have begun by emphasizing the importance of Artificial Intelligence and the fundamental difference between self-improving AI systems and the AI systems of today.

We do not expect to confront these questions in the distant future. Smarter-than-human AI is something we anticipate arriving in the next years or decades, not centuries. The creators of the first Artificial General Intelligence are people that could very well be alive today. The policies and precedents we set in the present will have influence over what will happen in the future. The potential benefits of AI exceed those of any other technology. We will do our best to ensure they are accessible to all.

Signed,

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Today I am excited about the possibility of a scientists’ open letter on Artificial General Intelligence and the Singularity, proposed by Bruce Klein of the Immortality Institute. The idea is based on the success of open letters on cryonics and anti-aging which were written last year. An open letter on AGI would be a significant improvement on, for example, my page titled “Who Cares About the Singularity?” It would need to be liberally dashed with Ph.Ds and other well-established persons. See the discussion thread over at ImmInst. My position is that any open letter on AGI should include at least the following points to be effective:

1. Artificial General Intelligence is a legitimate field that seeks to build software systems with general intelligence, that is, AI that can independently find problem-solving strategies and solutions for problems in biology, physics, engineering, architecture, nanotechnology, cognitive science, and programming, with quality equalling or surpassing the brightest human minds.

2. Artificial General Intelligence is a subfield of Artificial Intelligence with the greatest long-term consequences. Most of Artificial Intelligence is focused on building software systems for narrow tasks, rather than flexible general intelligence.

3. Artificial Intelligence as a field is not frozen or stagnant, and many important advances have been made in recent years.

4. Artificial General Intelligence, if built, would be intelligent enough to improve on its own programming and robotics without human assistance. Construction of the first true AI could have consequences far beyond the original programmers’ intentions. Because of its superior cognitive hardware, AGI could self-improve very rapidly by human standards. This represents significant risk but also significant promise. Rogue AI is a legitimate, near-term threat to the human species, on par or exceeding the risk of nuclear war, bio-terror, or asteroid impact.

5. The problem of how to ensure that AI remains friendly to humanity as it gains the ability to reprogram itself is unsolved. Before we build human-equivalent Artificial General Intelligence, there should be extensive theoretical and experimental (on infra-human AIs) studies to ensure that future AGIs are good global citizens, even given the ability to reprogram themselves, adhering to the “spirit” and not just the “letter” of their goal programming.

6. Ultimately, human-equivalent AI cannot be avoided. So AGI researchers should do their best to ensure that AGIs benefit humanity rather than hinder it. Because the benefits of successful AGI would be so large, arguing about the specifics of the distribution of benefits is not as important as ensuring that everyone receives them.

7. We must not anthropomorphize AI, and assume that AGIs will be motivated by the same things that motivate us, find challenging the same obstacles that challenge us, arrange themselves in social configurations the same way that we do, etc.

8. A number of potential paths to AGI exist, including symbolic AI, genetic algorithms, universal inference and decision theory, and whole brain emulation.

And because today is Sunday, I’m providing links to a couple fun games for your amusement. First, there is a 3D Logic, a brain-teasing microgame where the player must find paths between colored nodes on three faces of a 3D cube. Then, there is Katamari Damacy II, an interactive flash based on the ever-popular PS2 game. It only takes a few minutes to beat.

Last but not least, has Digg finally beat Slashdot. For those of you who are not familiar, Digg is a site that generates news headlines based on user votes. Slashdot is a centralized news site (historically the most popular) with articles written by a few authors.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

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The following is a letter that my sister wrote to a Luddite professor she had last semester:

I was a student of yours once. I earned a mediocre grade in your class, and didn’t submit work I feel met my abilities at the time, but passed nonetheless. I remembered some aspects of your teaching, but was reminded of them recently when a friend of mine in your senior year English class mentioned them to me, upset. I’ve thus decided to write you a letter regarding this matter and give you my opinions on it.

I have the impression that your curriculum has lately been analyzing the computer age and its impacts on human culture. This is an important topic and certainly one which needs to be discussed. However, my friend tells me that your approach has been, on the whole, biased, claiming that you’ve said many times that “the information age will destroy us all,” and that you dislike computers and computer people. This is fine as a personal opinion, but not as instruction material in a class meant to educate students on the virtues of literature and methods by which to fine-tune writing skills. I’ve had many good and bad English teachers, but the ones i’ve learned from and respected were those who tore my diction, sentence and paragraph structure to pieces, graded my papers objectively, and encouraged me to dissect literature without the distraction of movies and even their own views.

I am a technology enthusiast. For this reason, I find your stance–or how it has been relayed to me–offensive. You have every right to espouse the opinion that technology is dangerous and dehumanizing–indeed, in some ways this is true. However, advancements in technology are responsible for saving countless human lives. Many of the people closest to me today would be dead without the help of computers. In addition, the popularity of the internet has allowed cultural exchange like never before. Individuals are able to access information from multiple sources with little effort, reducing the influence of biased media. With the help of a computer, an investigation on global injustices is a simple feat; Americans, who used to be confined to a selectively limited media shell, can now explore new worlds and learn about the joys and pains experienced by others, thousands of miles away. This is a blessing more than a burden.

Although the future of artificial intelligence is unsure, and the ultimate result of the information age unclear, rest assured good things will come with the advent of an objective analytical artificial intelligence. We may enter an age where death will be, thankfully, a forgotten atrocity, due to further medical advancements made by beings with unlimited computational capacity and empathy. Overpopulation is a concern, but who on their death bed would say no to another ten years, hundred years, or infinite number of years of life, with a renewed form? As a teacher, you understand the value of education and learning–personally, I hope to never stop learning–and so, perhaps you can see the infinite joy in infinite life. Though space on this earth is limited, universal space is unlimited.

In a recent assignment where students were instructed to give presentations on the topic of emotions, I was told that the majority of the students described emotions from a subjective perspective and related the objective definition of emotions to sterile computers. Emotions are a beautiful thing, and part of what makes our lives so worth living, but it would be ignorant and depressing to consider them accessible only to humanity. Numerous studies (Kalin, Ned H., Shelton, Steven E. “Nonhuman Primate Models to Study Anxiety, Emotion Regulation, and Psychopathology.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 1008 (2003), Banister, Nuri. “Animals May Share Same Emotions as Humans.” Journal of Young Investigators 13 (2005) ) have revealed that mammals on many tiers of cognitive complexity are capable of experiencing emotions: rats, primates, and humans alike share this beloved ability. Would it be so disastrous if artificial organisms could one day partake of this joy we hold so dear? Would they be persecuted for being the products of human construction? Emotions are special, this much we know, but they are only special insofar as we do not yet fully understand the neuro-chemical mechanisms which underlie their activation and formation. But, I am confident that we one day will, because they, like every other function in the human body, are governed by chemical and physical law. You would be well advised to research evolutionary psychology and neuro-chemistry if you wanted to truly understand what emotions are.

Lastly, I was also informed that you previewed the movie, The Matrix, to your students, and encouraged them to discuss its prevailing themes. The Matrix, to me, is a joke movie which promotes xenophobia and misunderstanding. The entire scientific community was in uproar with its release. Neo, a fictitious character played by Keanu Reeves, battles against emotionless, demon robots in a dystopian future ruled by artificial intelligence. Firstly, if an artificial intelligence wise enough to construct such a system existed, it would be able to figure out immediately that humans are a poor source of energy and a waste of space, and would obliterate us all rather than conserve our bodies in a virtual reality environment. Secondly, if it understood humans well enough (and were in the first place inclined) to emulate a perfect replica of our modern terrestrial environment, it would feel some empathy toward humanity. If this were the case, it would see us as having value and would therefore be entirely opposed to letting humans endure pain, instead wishing that we have complete autonomy over our futures. This seems black and white, either complete destruction or complete harmony, but individuals far more educated on the topic of AI coding than the authors of The Matrix have explained in detail why these are the only two options. If the AI were empathetic, it would desire to help us, and part of this help is the fulfillment of our wishes (which would presumably not include being confined to a VR world). Conversely, if an AI were not empathetic, it would not relate to humanity and see us as entirely useless, considering the basic atoms available in our bodies as more efficient fuel than a living human (which requires food, oxygen, waste disposal etc.) I just hope that the students of your class didn’t get the wrongful impression that AI and computers are evil by watching that joke, The Matrix–I didn’t get to see their responses to your prompts, so I wouldn’t know–but if they did, that would indeed produce an awfully skeptical, needlessly fearful graduating class.

My hope is that with this letter, you might reconsider your opinion on the information age. Humans are creative and amazing creatures, and one of our greatest accomplishments is the computer. It saves lives, has opened new doors for expression and art, and may one day lay the foundation for a new and beautiful species, or an improvement of the human species. Optimism and education are always the best approaches to understanding the future.

Thanks for your time,

Nina Anissimov

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If Albert Einstein were still alive today, he would have turned 127 earlier this week. Posthumous analysis of his brain found that the parietal operculum region was missing, leading to an inferior parietal lobe with 15% more volume than usual. The inferior parietal region is a part of the brain that underlies mathematical thought, visuospatial cognition, and imagery of movement. Einstein could envision complex physics problems holistically. Does this mean that we should use neural stem cells to artificially increase the size of parietal lobes in chimps to see what happens? Yes.

And what if Einstein could still be alive today, contributing to physics? He died at 76. 127 isn’t too much to ask for, only a few decades longer than people live when they’re really healthy. Perhaps we should all make a bigger point to fight aging?

In honor of Einstein, let’s check out Mangled Worlds Quantum Mechanics, a new interpretation of QM from transhumanist (and polymath professor at George Mason University) Robin Hanson. New Scientist writes an article on the topic, “Is Our Universe About to be Mangled?”, that slightly misses the point. George Dvorsky kindly clarifies.

In other news, Mike Treder goes on New York Public Radio today to talk about nanotech. A few years ago he was just a guy with experience managing radio stations. Now he’s a transhumanist extraordinaire, travelling around the world and going on radio shows with millions of listeners to warn them about the reality of nanotech that the establishment behind the National Nanotechnology Intiative won’t dare discuss in any detail. Amazing work, Mike.

Ramit Sethi is especially amusing today. His is one of the few non-science, non-tech blogs I read regularly.

I’m starting to build up a respectable collection of del.ic.ious links. Wanna see? If you’re on del.ic.ious, how about posting the link to your page in the comments? Heck, how about commenting more often in general?

And finally, let’s all pay a visit to Natasha, who is busy championing the artistic side of transhumanism.

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Happy pi day. The most pi-representative moment of the year occurred this morning at 3:14 AM, March 14th.

Fun fact! The number pi doesn’t actually exist in reality. It’s just a convenient human abstraction for calculating the circumference of a roughly circular object based on its radius, or vice versa. Because the lowest known level of physical reality is actually “pixelated” (based on discrete Planck increments), there is no such thing as a true curve except inside a computer program or virtual reality. Einstein realized this near the end of his life, and was bummed.

Some things are darn close to a perfect circle, though. The probability distribution of an electron in a hydrogen atom is almost spherical, barring random quantum fluctuations. The folk theoretical representation of celestial bodies like the sun and moon are idealized spheres or discs. Gravity Probe B, designed to test the theory of relativity, contains a gyroscope that comes within 40 atomic diameters of a perfect sphere.

The most spherical known object is probably the neutron star. The size of a small city, these collapsed stars possess such intense gravity and density that individual atoms are shredded and their nuclei are pressed together in a neutronium soup. “Mountains” on neutron stars measure a few millimeters at the most.

One day there might exist even more perfectly circular or spherical objects. For example, a seed AI might be asked to construct as perfect of a circle as possible, or choose to create such a circle as a subgoal of something else. Without the overriding background knowledge that “general human happiness is more important than constructing a perfect circle”, the seed might choose to disassemble the Earth and arrange it into a ring of particles that most closely embodies the sacred pi ratio. What a way for the human race to go, eh?

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