Most of the respondents only discussed advances they hope will happen in their own scientific field.
But wait, you can’t talk about the future, because it hasn’t happened yet, right? Looking any further than five years into the future must mean you are childish, and have your head in the clouds.
Well, the point of this section in New Scientist is to say that this attitude is wrong, and that futurism deserves a place in scientific discourse. We make predictions and continuously refine them according to new evidence. For example, the possibility of wireless energy transfer changes the picture for the next 20 or so years, and beyond. There’s nothing wrong with futurism, and many futurist predictions of the past have borne out - though more have failed than succeeded.
Remember, Singularitarians such as myself forsee a prediction horizon in the future - a horizon caused by the arrival of superintelligence. One respondent, Steven Pinker, unsurprisingly, brought up his uncertainty about the future in his response:
I absolutely refuse even to pretend to guess about how I might speculate about what, hypothetically, could be the biggest breakthrough of the next 50 years. This is an invitation to look foolish, as with the predictions of domed cities and nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners that were made 50 years ago.
I will stick my neck out about the next five to ten years, however. I think we’ll see a confirmation of the fundamental hypothesis of evolutionary psychology - that many aspects of human cognition and emotion are evolutionary adaptations - from various new techniques for assessing signs of selection in genomic variation within and between species. The recent discoveries of selective pressures on genes for the normal versions of genes for microcephaly, for a speech and language disorder, and for development of the auditory system will be, I suspect, the harbinger of a large number of naturally selected genes with effects on the mind.
You got it, Pinker! I respect his general attitude, but I must break with Pinker’s reluctance to predict the biggest breakthrough. To me, it seems obvious - the biggest breakthrough will be the one that itself begets more breakthroughs. That is, a breakthrough in brainpower, whether it be Artificial Intelligence, or Intelligence Augmentation. We transhumanist folks call this the Singularity. Some refuse to predict when they think it will happen, but for those who buy into the singularity hypothesis, the general consensus tends to be sometime between 2020 and 2040.
And how about the Singularity? Did any respondents bring it up? Terry Sejnowski, the computational neurobiologist, did…
How far will we get in 50 years? By then we will have machines that pass the Turing test. However, this is a weak test that does not get at the harder problem, which is to understand how the brain creates consciousness. To crack this we must first understand unconscious processing, which does most of the heavy lifting for us. I suspect that when we start to make progress with this the problem of consciousness will, like the Cheshire cat, disappear, leaving only a smile in the air.
I get the feeling that any AI complicated enough to actually pass the Turing Test would probably be conscious, both in the information-theoretic sense of being made of self-watching cognitive loops, but also in the phenomenological sense of having that “I see red” special-sauce of subjective experience. We humans like to think that consciousness is super-special, and that nothing that operates on “mere” computations can ever be granted it without great difficulty, but unfortunately much of this sentiment derives from psuedoscientific dualism that should have died out 60 years ago.
But it was Eric Horwitz that spoke most explicitly about AI:
Within 50 years, lives will be significantly enhanced by automated reasoning systems that people will perceive as “intelligent”. Although many of these systems will be deployed behind the scenes, others will be in the foreground, serving in an elegant, often collaborative manner to help people do their jobs, to learn and teach, to reflect and remember, to plan and decide, and to create. Translation and interpretation systems will catalyse unprecedented understanding and cooperation between people. At death, people will often leave behind rich computational artefacts that include memories, reflections and life histories, accessible for all time.
Robotic scientists will serve as companions in discovery by formulating theories and pursuing their confirmation. By mid-century, advances attributed to automated scientists will include several world-changing breakthroughs.
When Horwitz uses the word “companions” to describe future AIs, he is either purposefully toning himself down or (more likely) he actually believes it. Is it appropriate to refer to a mind that runs on logic elements that operate at 10,000,000 greater serial speed than neurons, a “companion”? In the moral sense, hopefully, in the practical sense, not at all.
The language Horwitz uses for describing future robotic scientists is anthropocentric - he clearly implies rough equivalency of ability between post-Turing AIs and the smartest human scientists. But the points that Moravec and Kurzweil and Yudkowsky and many others have been making for upwards of a decade is that once AI reaches human-equivalency, it necessarily soars past it. Anyone who paints their picture otherwise is 1) unintentionally deceiving the public about the consequences of AI, 2) displaying a quaint naivete about the underlying hardware differences between biological and nonbiological cognitive systems. It’s the old vision, one that has been around for decades…
Even though Horwitz talks about AI systems in the background, he still implies that individual AIs will do the cognitive lifting of roughly a single human being. And would you really think that the AI of 2050 would have to be instantiated with the robotics technology of the late 20th century? I mean, you can see the bolts on that robot.
The notion that we will invent AI, and then AI will reason on par with us indefinitely, is based on the assumption that human intelligence is all there is, and there’s nothing beyond it. This attitude strikes me as like that of a person in a small rural village who absolutely refuses to acknowledge the existence of any outside world.
Anyway…
Francis Collins talked anti-aging, though of course not SENS, because that is verboten:
Fifty years from now, if I avoid crashing my motorcycle in the interim, I will be 106. If the advances that I envision from the genome revolution are achieved in that time span, millions of my comrades in the baby boom generation will have joined Generation C to become healthy centenarians enjoying active lives.
What a cheery vision! However, it is unambitious. Collins is probably aware of Aubrey de Grey’s work and arguments, but like most who do aging research, would prefer to ignore it.
Mr. Collins has little reason to be supportive of the possibility of indefinite lifespans, after all, he became a born-again Christian after observing the faith of his critically ill parents and reading a book by C.S. Lewis. This, my friends, is intellectual failure.
Richard Miller said things similar to Collins:
Turning on the same protective systems in people should, by 2056, be creating the first class of centenarians who are as vigorous and productive as today’s run-of-the-mill sexagenarians.
Gregory Chaitin, the information theorist, displayed some nascent transhumanism:
I hope that by 2056 weird astronomical observations will lead to radical new fundamental physics. I expect people will be tampering with the human genome, which should be fun. In my own field, I hope the current desiccated, formal approach has died out and people are more adventurous and creative.
John Halpern, assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, had something very interesting and non-boring to say:
In the coming months I will give psychotherapy assisted by MDMA (ecstasy) to dying cancer patients to see if their anxiety, pain and other end-of-life issues improve. I would like to test whether LSD or psilocybin can relieve debilitating cluster headache, and whether peyote offers Native Americans a treatment for drug and alcohol abuse. Within 10 years, enough positive results could establish that there are special benefits from “psychedelics”. This may lead to a new field of medicine in which spirituality is kindled to help us accept our mortality without fear, and where those with addiction problems, anxiety or cluster headache discover a path to genuine healing. Capable of inducing the deeply mystical, these substances may prove to be a source for compassion and hope so desperately needed in these perilous times.
Perhaps psychedelics aren’t really as crude or useless as our Puritanical culture would assert.
Meanwhile, Bill Joy, who was so concerned about existential risk just a little while ago, blows this opportunity by talking about energy:
work in the area of green technology for energy and resources. The most significant breakthrough would be to have an inexhaustible source of safe, green energy that is substantially cheaper than any existing energy source.
Ideally such a source would be safe, in that it couldn’t be made into weapons, nor would it make hazardous or toxic waste or CO2. It seems to me that this is most likely to come from a deep new understanding of a physical effect at the nanoscale (or smaller) that allows safe and simple access to fusion – or another completely unexpected energy technology
It seems to me, Bill, that we already have one - thorium. It’s just a matter of building the reactors. In any case, spreading the word about existential risk is more important than green energy. Can’t have green energy if your planet is on fire, or the cellular machinery of every member of the human species is being hijacked by malignant nanomachines, now can you?
Focusing on the existential risk aspect is especially important because it’s a less fun job. Bill would rather talk about green energy than technological risks, because green energy makes us smile and technological risks don’t. This species-universal tendency to ignore the risks makes it all the more important for rationalists to counterbalance it.
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