Accelerating Future

Lately I’ve been writing a lot of short articles for WiseGEEK.com, whose unostentacious tagline promises “clear answers for common questions”. The site is fairly popular in the Great Wide World of Intarnet, boasting an Alexa rating that hovers between 5,000 and 10,000 on a weekly basis. Following are some articles of mine that have been published fairly recently. Some questions are common, some are self-selected and quite eclectic:

What is a Space Pier?
What is the process of winemaking?
What is a folksonomy?
What is a hypertelescope?
How much radiation can the human body safely receive?
What is a polymerase chain reaction
Why is carbon fiber so useful?
How do glaciers move?
What is an EMP?
What is sonoluminescence?
What is an electrolaser?

Here are some others, a bit older, but of classic transhumanist interest:

What are some common objections to life extension?
What is the technological Singularity?
What is the Kardashev scale?
What are existential risks?
What is Friendly AI?
What is cryonics?

If you like ‘em, link ‘em!

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My gf just pointed my attention to this:

Human Upgrades

The site is fictional but interesting. The tagline, “the possibility is our obligation”, should be taken with a grain of salt. Statements like this, of course, are what gets transhumanists in trouble with the mainstream all the time, and it seems like some people in the mainstream actually want transhumanists to say things like this, because it gives them more ammo in arguments.

Is it our obligation to take a child to the hospital when they are sick? Yes… although members of the First Church of Christ, Scientist seem to disagree in certain respects.

Is it our obligation to ensure that our child has a genetic disposition to be healthy and free of birth defects, if the technology to do so exists and is cheap and noninvasive? Most transhumanists and many normal people seem to think so, although some members of the President’s Council on Bioethics seem to disagree. Many would convincingly argue that they are wrong.

Is it our obligation to ensure that our minds are free from the propensity to be emotionally erratic, or make inferences that contradict probability theory, or follow short-term incentives when we would forgo them if we had the self-control? Ensuring this would require substantial neurological modification, probably beyond what simple genetic engineering could muster. But some would argue that these properties are what define us as human. I argue that we do have an obligation to free ourselves from these errors, even if they are part of what defines us as “human” - although this obligation is not strong enough to justify overriding free choice.

What creates obligations? The needs of others. If we can modify our psychologies to interact effectively with an extremely wide range of beings with all manner of errors, then can we eliminate any such need, thereby eliminating obligations constraining our forms entirely? No, because there are certain fundamental ethical imperatives, like “minimize suffering”, that will always contradict it. I assume that we will converge on a basic set of ground rules, within which there is huge room for variation, but states outside of which are forbidden or strongly discouraged. For example, don’t create a mind whose life is not worth living.

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On Digg today:

Five Reasons Google Will Invent Real AI

Turns out that it’s from the gossip blog Valleywag. Its author recently attended the Singularity Summit. Looks like the topic is staying in his mind a bit! Of course the recent George Dyson article (”Turing’s Cathedral”) likely contributed as well.

Is the idea plausible? For Google to have a chance at reaching real AI, they would have to make it a priority. As in, would they need to create a project specifically devoted to it, and nothing else. They would need to put a dozen or more supergeniuses to work full-time for years on end, at a likely cost of tens of millions of dollars with no substantial return in the forseeable future. Do any Singularity-watchers think this could happen? Not before some other group has made substantial progress already, is my guess.

What are the necessary conditions for any group having even a chance at AGI (artificial general intelligence) in the next couple decades, or before nanocomputing, whichever comes first? Here’s what I’m throwing out there:

Deep pockets. Enough funding that the project can proceed without having to worry about commerical spin-offs. So we’re talking about a government, corporation, startup, or non-profit with at least a couple million in the bank, perhaps more.

Exceptional brains. To get there first, core team members will need to be the best there is, close to the upper boundaries of what is possible with human intelligence. We’re talking people that are 1/100,000, not 1/10,000 or 1/1000.

Education in the right fields. Universities don’t offer degrees in Artificial General Intelligence. The knowledge set necessary to create AGI successfully is not known, but it will likely encompass all the following fields: cognitive science, math, programming, probability theory, traditional AI techniques, information theory, and maybe more. It is not a knowledge set that an employee at Google will just happen to be familiar with, even if they are well-educated.

Math and programming talent. It’s one thing to have a high IQ and be educated in the multiple necessary fields. However, if you’re going to do successful engineering, it’s likely that you’ll have to be specifically talented at implementing your ideas in code. There are plenty of really smart, really well-educated interdisciplinary scientists out there that are simply not engineers and can only program at an average level. They write papers and give lectures that are brilliant, but when it comes to actually building a huge program, the spark is just not there. And last but not least…

A correct theory. For every 10,000 theories of general intelligence that sound great, feel great, there may be only one (or zero) that can be implemented on available hardware without complexity overload or centuries of debugging. It doesn’t matter if you’re the smartest person in the world, if you settle on the wrong theory, and try to implement it, it just won’t work. Then you’ll need to tear everything down and start over, most likely from scratch. If only one person is in charge of the overall theory, then all it takes is that one person to be wrong for everyone’s time to be wasted.

As we can see from the above requirements, they’re not fulfilled yet. They could be before the decade is out, though, which would lay the groundwork for real progress.

Tangentially: a couple days ago, Bruce Klein, President of Novamente LLC, claimed here that “we estimate it will take 6 years w/ a full-time staff (about a dozen programmers) to reach human-level AI”. How can they be so sure about timeframes? Because they are convinced they already have a theory that will work, and they are just implementing it. Should we be skeptical of this claim? I certainly think we should. More often than not, when people think they have the right theory, it turns out they don’t. This doesn’t mean it will never happen… just that I doubt that anyone can be so sure so far in advance.

In case you’re wondering, a pdf describing Novamente’s theory of intelligence can be found here.

Also, here is a comprehensive list of projects working towards AGI today, in June 2006. I think this was also put together by Bruce Klein.

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My X-Seed 4000 post reached the front page of Digg’s technology section today… the page has received about 5000 hits in the past seven hours, pretty cool. (Update: the final traffic count was about 25,000 unique visitors in the single day that the post was linked from digg’s front page.) In honor of this, let’s brainstorm structures significantly bigger and more exciting than X-Seed:

1. Space Pier
2. Space beanstalk
3. 100km-aperture hypertelescope
4. Death Star
5. Borg Cube
6. some structures from Halo
7. Ringworld
8. A Dyson sphere
9. Deep Space Nine
10. Many proposed space colonies
11. Globus Cassus
12. Omega Point

Add your own in the comments.

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I ran across this CNN event/feature just now - an ongoing thing called the CNN Future Summit. It opened with a television event and continues with a series of stories every week. There is also a tangentially-related site called CNN Future Summit Challenge, where people can submit their hopes and fears about the future and “build your own robot” using a sketchy-looking flash interface. Seems like the submissions ended on June 15th. What I like about the overall tone of the stories is that they aren’t overoptimistic, as one might worry, but actually discuss a variety of existential risks that could stem from these technologies.

The thing that’s interesting about both sites is that they’re blatantly transhumanistic, and Ray Kurzweil is featured right on the front page of the first. A poll question asks if people are interested in using technology to enhance their bodies:

Tens of thousands of people must have participated in this poll. Of course it’s probably biased in favor of people who watched the show and were interested enough to visit the site, but 82% is a huge number in favor. I’ve seen similar polls on MSNBC in the last year and the results were actually similar.

What is great is that this is free publicity for transhumanism and transhumanist philosophies. The series of stories focuses on scientific and engineering disciplines with the potential to enhance our bodies and minds - robotics, cybernetics, genetics, and stem cells. The possibility of a ‘Heaven’ created by vast improvements in quality of life due to these technologies is discussed. Joel Garreau, author of “Radical Evolution” is also mentioned. It seems that the excitement surrounding Garreau and Kurzweil’s recent books has culminated in this CNN feature, which is an example of “exposure events” catalyzing even greater exposure events.

Here is a dialogue, which I think is relevant in light of this, that appeared on the wta-talk mailing list shortly after the recent Human Enhancement and Human Rights conference:

A man walks into a bar…

“I just came from the craziest conference!” he says to the bartender.

“Really?” says the bartender. “What was it about?”

“Well” the man says “these crazy people who call themselves Transhumanists
believe we should use futuristic technology to get rid of diseases and make
people more intelligent and happy and stuff.”

“Really?” says the bartender.

“Yeah” the man says. “And these Transhumanists want to use robots and
something called nanotechnology so we don’t have to work so hard and we can
all be rich.”

“Really?” says the bartender.

“Yeah” the man says. “And these Transhumanists want to use biotechnology to
keep people young and let them live almost forever.”

“Wow! I just realized something” says the bartender.

“What’s that?” the man asks.

“I’m a Transhumanist!” says the bartender.

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Ben Goertzel has written an excellent piece on the topic here.

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