Accelerating Future

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Most everyone has heard about the UK gov’t report, sponsored by chief scientist Sir David King, that says the arrival of sentient robots by 2056 is a real possibility, and if it does happen, robots will deserve all the rights and responsibilities as human citizens. This is a wonderful report, which shows how forward-looking the UK can be. However, this isn’t the first time a report like this has come out, so for me, what is particularly interesting is not the report itself, but the myriad reactions to it.

There is a lot of confusion around AI, created by a complex mix of science fiction and folk psychology at their worst. The interesting thing is that many of the spacey questions you hear people ask in reaction to this report actually have definitive, yes-or-no answers. For example, “can a machine think?” The answer is an unqualified yes - humans are machines, and we can think, so machines can think. Philosophizing, references to computer science degrees or Asimov novels, etc., are all unnecessary - we know the answer to the question, and the answer is yes.

Let’s try another question, a little more complicated: “How will you ever know a robot is truly sentient or just programmed to mimic it?” The answer rests on the exact, physical definition of sentience, which we have not discovered yet, but if it does exist, then we will eventually discover it precisely, and be able to answer whether or not a given physical object is sentient by looking at its internal physical structure. If we discover that there are gradients of sentience, then we will make lists of physical qualities that correspond to those gradients, and be able to determine which gradient the agent belongs to by checking for those physical qualities. In the future, there may exist robots that are programmed to mimic sentience, or even spontaneously generate sentientlike behaviors (not explicitly programmed in!), but are, in fact, non-sentient. In this scenario, the simplistic Turing Test would surely not be enough, because it could theoretically fool the judge. Again, you’d have to check the physical structure of the AI, either by some sort of scanning or a printout of its source code. The nice thing about reality itself is that it has very low ambiguity on the macro-level: some things are a certain physical structure, and others are not. The mind is what the brain does, so there are certain types of minds that are sentient, and others that are not. If the first test we imagine can’t tell the difference, then we need to devise another test, and use it.

Another type of reaction to this issue has to do with motivation. Here is what a commenter on Digg had to say:

“I just can’t see robots ever being given that sort of autonomy. Artificial intelligence gets put in charge of things we can’t do, not things we can. Why would you want to put it in charge of a humanoid body? We already have plenty of those.”

This comment is neither malicious, nor truly ignorant, but is a standard example of status quo bias, which could happen to anyone. Why change things from the way they are? However, a few small points are being missed here: 1) AI does do things we can do, like chess and sorting tasks, but they quickly become things we used to do, because the tasks get outsourced to AIs, 2) it only takes 1 engineer out of millions to decide to put an AI in a humanoid, or otherwise autonomous body. For #2, there are numerous chances for the commenter to be proven right, but all it takes is one dissenter to be proven wrong. Especially if the bodies an AI were given had the ability to reproduce, this “aberration” could very rapidly magnify.

Many people think AI is not coming so soon:

“If any of you Asimov-wannabes actually reads the article, you’ll get the refreshing truth, for a change. “Anyone who expects robots to start protesting and paying taxes in their lifetimes have spent a little too much time living in a rich and detailed fantasy world.” That’s all there is to it. If any of you takes it for granted that computers will become sentient “one day” or “within 50 years”, you are a gullible moron. None of you understands computer science, nor reality, well enough to know WTF you are talking about, and you prove your ignorance with your lame and played-out predictions. You nerds just repeat what you hear from each other. And it’s all make-believe shit. Meanwhile, back in the real world, there are no fucking sentient robots. Just AMD and Intel computers. That’s all. There aren’t even any PLANS to on HOW to build sentient robots. Not even those. All you will ever find are plans to MAKE plans. Those are everywhere. And fictional stories. All progress in this field is fictional. The closest thing we have to an artificial being is the latest Tickle Me Elmo doll. Everything else is, and will always be, frantic, sweaty, nerd hand-waving. And anyone who takes the AI field seriously is in a deep, ongoing state of delusion. Wake up, geniuses. For your own mental health, if nothing else.”
- commenter on Digg

“Anyone who expects robots to start protesting and paying taxes in their lifetimes have spent a little too much time living in a rich and detailed fantasy world.”
- Adam Frucci, with scifi.com

Arguing that true AI is likely to be invented within the next twenty or so years is not easy, but many intelligent people do it, despite many other intelligent people disagreeing with them. Here are a few arguments, some of which have been given in recent popular books, but I won’t go into them here.

Another comment:

“Robots will no doubt one day become intelligent and sentient, but they’ll have no feelings and not suffer, so why afford them rights?”
- Digg commenter

This is another problem in predictions of robots/AI - saying that they’ll all be a certain way. In truth, if we do create intelligent robots, some will be able to have feelings and suffer, some won’t! That’s because certain physical structures correspond to qualiabearing (feeling-having) beings, and certain ones don’t. We know for a fact that humans do, but rocks don’t, for example. We’re pretty sure that lobsters and Windows XP don’t, as well. But as our software and robotic systems get increasingly complex, that boundary will get fuzzy and eventually lines will be drawn - with some robotic systems on the side with feelings, some not.

Another:

“But of course, as we haven’t even begun to fully grasp how the brain actually works.”
- Digg commenter

This is a classic one, and quite amazing. There are thousands, if not millions, of lengthy books and scientific papers on various aspects of brain function, much of which has been experimentally confirmed. This field is called cognitive science. We know a tremendous amount on the brain, so much that no one man or woman can hope to learn more than 1% of the field. However, it’s true, despite all that we know, much still remains unknown. But will we need to understand the human brain in its entirety to make artificial intelligence? The human brain is only a particular instantiation of intelligence, like an F-18 is only a particular instantiation of flight. If the F-18 were the only functioning example of flight that we had, would we need to understand it in its entirety in order to duplicate the functionality of flight? Not at all. That people think we need to fully and completely understand the human brain in order to make anything intelligent at all is pure anthropocentrism - as if our brain is the only possible physical structure in the universe that can have true intelligence.

And finally, possibly my favorite:

“this ruins the whole point of robot slaves/servants

if a robot gets rights, why dont we basically give tvs and computers rights. Robots will never be living things with real feelings and emotions, so why do they need rights. I would care if someone beat up their robot about as much as i would care if they through a brick at their tv. i.e. they’d be stupid but i wouldn’t give a shit.”
- Digg commenter

I actually do think that the majority of all AIs/robots will indeed be mindless slaves (to other robots as well as humans), and it won’t matter, because they won’t have any feelings to hurt! Transhumanists should definitely understand this point, and shake away the feeling that making any intelligence live to be a slave is fundamentally bad. Making any conscious being be a slave may be bad - but you can have intelligence without consciousness!

Anyway, it’s funny to think of a conscious AI as “ruining the point” of the robot slave paradigm, which derives from old-school science fiction.

Also: here’s Robin Hanson on why you aren’t entitled to your opinion.

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Transhumanism, like any large movement, consists of multiple currents. Many individuals identify themselves with more than one. A short overview of a few, written a couple years ago by Nick Bostrom, can be found here. In this post, I will present my own classification scheme, and include descriptions and names that Dr. Bostrom didn’t include in the Transhumanist FAQ. They will be listed in rough order of their popularity, but please don’t take the ordering scheme too seriously - it’s roughly based on the number of Google search results for each term.

Transhumanism is unique because it is so diverse. That’s why it never makes sense to label us as a religion or unified conspiracy - besides being mostly unreligious, transhumanists can barely agree on something long enough to cooperate towards it. That’s why the #1 version of transhumanism is…

1) Salon transhumanism. This is the huge group that dabbles on the fringes of transhumanism, making small donations to a few organizations here, commenting on blogs or mailing lists there, and exploring issues for the first time that other transhumanists are already tired of. The most impressive aspect of this noncommittal category of transhumanism is its sheer size - it includes folks like Bill Gates, congressman Brad Sherman, and the literally millions of people who have read Kurzweil, Garreau, Brin, Egan, et al. Many of those in this category may not explicitly call themselves transhumanists, but sure act like it, openly advocating extended lifespans, intelligence enhancement, and space colonization, their primary familiarity being through fiction however. A huge task for other transhumanists is to get salon transhumanists more closely invovled.

2) Immortalists. One of the most powerful strands in transhumanism, in recent years especially, but dating all the way back to Robert Ettinger or before, are the immortalists. Immortalists are focused on living forever. In some abstract sense, they’re not fundamentally different than all those billions of people who want to live forever by going to Heaven, but have an actual plan to do it here on Earth. Immortalists are doing really well financially - the Methuselah Mouse Prize bank account just passed $4 million, which, in the immortal words of Aubrey de Grey, is “quite a lot, really”. The Immortality Institute, which I co-founded back in 2002, is one of the most active transhumanist forums on the internet, and if you type “immortality” into Google, it’s right after the Wikipedia page. The immortalists have it all - bloggers, television appearances, a large community of devoted donors, and a productive nucleus of aging researchers who are engaged in innovative research to beat the crap out of aging. When many people hear the word “transhumanist”, they think of immortalists. Which makes sense, because practically all transhumanists are immortalists. The #1 immortalist blog on the interwebs is Fight Aging.

3) The World Transhumanist Association. Ah, the WTA. Even though he is no longer Executive Director, many associate the WTA with the transhumanly-active Dr. James Hughes, who built it up from nothing since it was founded by Nick Bostrom and David Pearce in 1998. The WTA has almost 4,000 members worldwide, with dozens of chapters located in places like Toronto, Seattle, London, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, DC/Boston, Israel, Moscow, Buenos Aires, Helsinki, etc. You might call it a worldwide transhumanist conspiracy. The WTA has no official headquarters, though by looking at the global map, we can see that there is a much-higher-than-usual density of WTA transhumanists in California and New England. As far as I can tell, there are no transhumanists in Wyoming. The WTA is not a sect of transhumanists so much as it is an umbrella organization for all transhumanists. There are many transhumanists, however, that are much more active in their sects than in the WTA as a whole. Here is a survey of members from 2005.

4) Extropians. The extropians have been around a long time, since the late 80s, when T.O. Morrow coined the term “extropy”, meaning “the extent of a system’s intelligence, information, order, vitality, and capacity for improvement”. The extropians have seven principles: Perpetual Progress, Self-Transformation, Practical Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Open Society, Self-Direction, and Rational Thinking. There used to be six: Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, and Spontaneous Order, which could be summed up in the spiffy acronym, “BEST DO IT SO!” Extropianism reached its zenith in the mid-90s with the WIRED article, “Meet the Extropians”, but still maintains an active mailing list to this day. The Extropy Institute, the primary organizational instantiation of the extropians, shut down earlier this year, but there are plans to turn the site into a “library of transhumanism and the future”. Extropians have a reputation for being libertarian in their politics, though there are extropians of all political stripes. Classic extropians are people like Max More, Natasha Vita-More, and Robert Bradbury, all of whom have contributed much to the transhumanist dialogue over the last decade or longer.

5) Singularitarianism. What the hell? My own favorite flavor of transhumanism is all the way down here, at #5. The first thing I have to say about singularitarianism is that all of its syllables are entirely necessary, and if it’s really so hard for you to pronounce or spell, you should consider revisiting English 101. (If you’ve never heard the world aloud before, this song might help you remember.) Singularitarianism was first conceived in 1996, by child prodigy Eliezer Yudkowsky, who was 16 at the time. Singularitarianism centers around the idea of superintelligence, and its incredible potential. The idea is that, if, either through human intelligence enhancement or artificial intelligence, we were to create a mind significantly smarter than all human geniuses, it could eventually reach a point where it could continue to improve its own intelligence unaided, leading to a feedback loop of cognitive enhancement. This could quickly lead to something way, way more powerful and smarter than the human race, which, if it cared about us, could do us a lot of good. Conversely, if a superintelligence didn’t explicitly care for us, its natural activity could lead to our destruction. The proposed solution to this problem is Friendly AI - a seed that cares about us, and only makes modifications to itself in such a way that this quality is preserved indefinitely. Singularitarianism is possibly the most controversial branch of transhumanism, and is represented by the Singularity Institute.

6) Democratic transhumanists. This left-leaning, democracy-boosting segment of transhumanism has been popularized in Dr. James Hughes’ recent book, Citizen Cyborg, and his online essay, Democratic Transhumanism 2.0. Democratic transhumanism puts a lot of effort towards placing transhumanism within the wider political context of today: in addition to the economic and social dimensions of political orientation, James points to another: biopolitics, where the gamut ranges from Luddite (anti-enhancement) to transhumanist (pro-enhancement). The interesting insight here is that this dimension is entirely orthogonal to the others - where someone is on the traditional 2D political compass is not indicative of where they fall on the biopolitical continuum. The quintessential blog of democratic transhumanists is Cyborg Democracy.

7) Academic transhumanism. Transhumanism - at school! Academics like Nick Bostrom and Robin Hanson are brilliant and well-regarded enough to write about transhumanism without getting quickly ejected from their respective universities. They are academic transhumanists, who write about academic transhumanist things. This branch of transhumanism is powerful, because 1) it tends to be more precise and well-researched than the vast majority of transhumanist discourse, 2) the tone allows it to be easily integrated with other academic topics, such as economics, heuristics and biases, cognitive science, ethics, and the like, 3) students have a greater tendency to respect it, 4) other academics might take it seriously, 5) it has the potential to discover new and powerful ideas that lie at the end of long and deep roads of thought. In Bostrom’s Transhumanist FAQ, this current is known as “theoretical transhumanism”, though I think “academic transhumanism” is more self-explanatory.

Transhumanist arts and culture. Natasha Vita-More formally kicked off this segment of transhumanism in 1982 with her Transhumanist Arts Statement. There is a website devoted to TA&C, and dozens of transhumanist-oriented artists including Stelarc, Anders Sandberg, Gina Miller, and many more. There are a few transhumanist bands. The ones I am aware of are: Eidölon, Cyanotic, and Yluko. They are all metal/industrial. Mr. Bungle also has a couple songs about nanotechnology and transhumanism. You should check them out if you enjoy chaotic noise.

9) Non-transhumanist transhumanists. There is a segment of transhumanists, of unknown size, that feels uncomfortable with the connotations of the transhumanist label, or consider it divisive, but still hold many of the beliefs and values of transhumanists. Examples would be our friends Jamais Cascio and Dale Carrico. These individuals participate in the transhumanist/futurist mileu but just don’t like to use the T-word to describe themselves. Less provocative labels, such as “technoprogressive”, tend to be preferred.

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On the extropy list, a post by Dr. Rafal Smigrodzki, a long-time transhumanist, aging researcher, and outspoken libertarian, entitled, “A Useful Remark”:

Over at transhumantech Eugen made this remark:

“A machine god pantheon by default kills things by habitat destruction”

(this is in response to James, who talks about his usual stuff, basic income, free healthcare, and “democracy”)

This brings to mind Eliezer’s analysis of the applicability of evolutionary theory to superintelligent artificial intelligences (SAIs). According to Eli, and I agree with him here, evolution would not apply to a singleton AI, given the absence of mutation and selection which are the sine qua non of evolution.

But Eugen points to a situation where even in the absence of mutation (that is, randomly generated change) there could be evolution, with its associated tendencies towards exponential proliferation and filling of all accessible ecological niches. All you need is one AI without very strong built-in limitations on the destruction of humans, and even in the presence of friendly AI’s of equal intelligence the outcome could be dire: an unfriendly AI could physically expand heedless of its impact on humans, and it could self-modify without concern for its long-term stability. Lack of physical and mental limitations could give the UFAI an edge over FAIs, forcing them to expand and self-modify, perhaps leading to loss of Friendliness.

I agree with Eugen that unmodified humans are likely to survive only in a world with one FAI (”The One”), or a group of closely cooperating FAIs (”Them” :)). An ecology of self-enhancing entities essentially assures the obliteration of HAWKI (Humanity As We Know It).

Given that it is most likely technically difficult to prevent the emergence of such an ecology using the good old methods (committees, congressional acts, pen-pushers spouting regulations, jackbooted enforcers and other fruits of commie imagination), considerations of basic income, and other such stuff, are about as relevant to our future as droit de seigneur.

Although a singleton globe-spanning FAI appears to be our best bet for survival (a good reason to support SIAI), I am wondering if there are other methods. I remember that Eugen used to advance the notion of a massive program of uploading which would occur before building true SAI. Do you still think this is a good idea, Eugen? I wish it was, but I think that SAI (although not necessarily FAI) is a bit easier than uploading, so it’s likely that SAI will happen first, for better or for worse.

This topic has been raised here many times but I would still like to know if anybody has any new realistic ideas about saving humanity from SAI, other than the FAI? (Pen-pusher ideas are not realistic, so don’t even mention them)

Rafal

Rafal’s comments are incendiary, no doubt, and very hostile towards James Hughes, who, despite his political differences with libertarians, has a lot of important things to say. However, Rafal has a point - for humans to survive in a world with superintelligent AIs, they need to be protected by whichever entity around has the most power, otherwise the natural activity of human-indifferent AIs will almost certainly lead to our destruction. “Another idea” that isn’t Friendly AI would be to enhance human beings to the point where they can recursively self-improve, and hope that whoever is most powerful continues to have the best interests of humanity in mind.

One thing is for sure - the level playing field we see today - where one human is roughly as smart and strong as the next, is not likely to persist into the indefinite future.

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The New Atlantis is likely the #1 source online for deathist, anthropocentric vitriol. The President’s Council on Bioethics, with a habit of booting off anyone who isn’t a bible thumper, is another (in 2008, see you guys later!) These are being joined by the slowly Luddite-leaning Templeton Foundation, which actually at one point awarded Nick Bostrom with a large grant, and does support worthy discussions such as those surrounding multiverse physics, but nonetheless seems to be decaying. Apparently the new top dog, the founder’s son, is a born-again. Anyway, here’s a selection from the New Atlantis article:

Obviously one is dealing here with a sensibility formed more by comic books than by serious thought. Ludicrous as it seems, though, transhumanism is merely one logical consequence (if a particularly childish one) of the surprising reviviscence of eugenic ideology in the academic, scientific, and medical worlds. Most of the new eugenists, admittedly, see their solicitude for the greater wellbeing of the species as suffering from none of the distasteful authoritarianism of the old racialist eugenics, since all they advocate (they say) is a kind of elective genetic engineering—a bit of planned parenthood here, the odd reluctant act of infanticide there, a soupçon of judicious genetic tinkering everywhere, and a great deal of prudent reflection upon the suitability of certain kinds of embryos—but clearly they are deluding themselves or trying to deceive us. Far more intellectually honest are those—like the late, almost comically vile Joseph Fletcher of Harvard—who openly acknowledge that any earnest attempt to improve the human stock must necessarily involve some measures of legal coercion. Fletcher, of course, was infamously unabashed in castigating modern medicine for “polluting” our gene pool with inferior specimens and in rhapsodizing upon the benefits the race would reap from instituting a regime of genetic invigilation that would allow society to eliminate “idiots” and “cripples” and other genetic defectives before they could burden us with their worthless lives. It was he who famously declared that reproduction is a privilege, not a right, and suggested that perhaps mothers should be forced by the state to abort “diseased” babies if they refused to do so of their own free will. Needless to say, state-imposed sterilization struck him as a reasonable policy; and he agreed with Linus Pauling that it might be wise to consider segregating genetic inferiors into a recognizable caste, marked out by indelible brands impressed upon their brows. And, striking a few minor transhumanist chords of his own, he even advocated—in a deranged and hideous passage from his book The Ethics of Genetic Control—the creation of “chimeras or parahumans…to do dangerous or demeaning jobs” of the sort that are now “shoved off on moronic or retarded individuals”—which, apparently, was how he viewed janitors, construction workers, firefighters, miners, and persons of that ilk.

Blah blah eugenics blah blah gene pool blah comic books blah blah infanticide JESUS CHRIST. This is the most dense and cheap-shot-filled anti-transhumanist smearing I’ve seen in my 10-long years of being on this side of the fence.