Accelerating Future

There is a new site online for transhumanist-oriented videos. It’s Thoughtware.tv.

Thorium gets coverage on a leading investment website.

Peter Turney, who works for the Interactive Information Group at the Institute for Information Technology in Ottawa, blogs about my remarks on Friendly AI, and lists several interesting papers that discuss Friendly AI in academia, including one he wrote in 1991, entitled “Controlling super-intelligent machines”. If any of these papers are half as insightful as the work of the Singularity Institute, the insights therein could contribute significant value to the push towards benevolent superintelligence. I’ll be printing out and reading the papers Turney referenced.

Our good friends Clarke, Kurzweil, and Dr. J have been quoted in an article by San Jose’s very own Mercury News. They’ve all published transhumanist-oriented books in the last two years. I’ll be reading Breakpoint soon and letting you know what I think.

CRN’s development scenario project, conducted the weekend before last, was a great success. Jamais Cascio, who conducted the project, has a post on it. It mainly involved chatting on the phone for 7 hours over two days, using Google docs and a chatroom/whiteboard to moderate and take minutes. We talked about over a hundred variables of potential relevance to the development of molecular manufacturing. If you visit the first link in this paragraph, you can also vote on the IEET poll which asks, “What do you think about the utopian impulse?” A good question. My own opinion is both that utopian energies drive human aspirations for betterment, and that these impulses turn out to be premonitions of a successful future where scarcity, disease and violence are fully eliminated.

Peter Pesti is working on a detailed roadmap of the future. He combines predictions from Ian Pearson, Ray Kurzweil, and Aubrey de Grey, among many others. The point is not to argue that all these predictions will come true exactly on schedule, but to have a unified roadmap that records all the predictions and lets us cross-reference and compare them.

Our missile defense shield is now working! This is excellent news. People speak very negatively about the billions of dollars being spent on the military (and indeed, it’s probably too much), but sometimes these projects pay off. A missile defense system is a tremendous technological achievement that will be used to protect lives rather than take them.

Joe Stewart, author of several books on cybersecurity, joins the Lifeboat Foundation and founds our cybercrime/malcode board, an important new addition to the growing effort to fight catastrophic risks. I encourage you to subscribe to our news and blog feeds to keep up to date with this organization’s important work.

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All the way back in April 2002, my singularitarian colleague Gordon Worley made a post to the SL4 mailing list that I thought explained technological risk quite well. As it’s still stuck in my head today, I decided to dig it up and post it here. The first part is a guy he’s responding to.

> So to let other people do the talking, I recently found an article on
> Wired by David Brin about how society could regulate itself by everybody
> basically being able to spy upon each other. Ramp up the technology a
> bit with prehuman intelligences helping each human do the spying. And
> you could get a stable society.

I doubt this. Let’s jump in the Way Back Machine to see why …

So, here I am, in the ancestral environment. I’m amongst a tribe of
about 150 humans. They live close together and can spy on each other
fairly easily. While a few can hide a little, human societies work
because you can’t go against society without some consequences, so
there’s always someone sticking his or her nose into someone else’s
business. One day Unk is caught not sharing the chicken he caught.
Well, everyone knows that Unk’s family has gone without meet for a few
weeks, so they let this pass. A few days later, he catches another
chicken and again shares none of it. When he does this the third time,
people are pissed. The solution: beat him. Maybe rape his wife and
kill one of his children, too. Unk is upset and he fights a few of his
neighbors and manages to bloody them a little. After that Unk is a good
human and mostly gets along in society.

Now we take the Way Back Machine into the future (yes, we’re going
negatively backwards):

So, here I am in the year 2015 where nanotech spy technology is
everywhere. Just yesterday Knu (the great great great… great
grandson of Unk - unless of course the village had managed to get his
wife pregnant that time Unk did not share his chicken) was caught by his
neighbors cracking the encryption on a DVC (digital video cube) and
watching every Inspector Clouseau film without paying $5 a minute to the
MPAA like all other good, god-fearing people do. Since the MPAA doesn’t
know about this, his neighbors kindly decide to inform them. With the
press of a button, the MPAA sends out nanobots to Knu’s home and has it
liquidated. Literally. Knu, soaking wet and pissed, is still fully
capable, unlike his long dead relative Unk who was badly bruised and
only able to throw a punch or two before a fight was over. Using the
assembler at the nearby Kinko’s, Knu builds and sends out some nanobots
to liquidate this neighbors houses to get revenge. But, as it turns
out, Knu is not the best programmer, so his nanobots accidently
liquidate the Earth. The dolphins enjoy all the extra space (now
they’re really thanking humans for all the fish :-P) but humans are dead
or drowning.

Back in the e-mail I’m writing right now:

So, as we see, humans don’t really change, just the technology does.
Consequently, humans with technology that can destroy the world are very
dangerous. It’s mostly through luck that we have managed not to nuke
ourselves out of existence or back to the Stone Age. One day someone
with nuclear weapons or nanotech or something is going to probably kill
everything on Earth. For many of us, the push to reach the Singularity
as quickly as possible is that the longer we wait the more likely it is
that we’ll be caught on Earth when someone decides to blow it up.

Well and humorously put!

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Richard A. Clarke is served as an advisor to four U.S. presidents from 1973 to 2003: Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He was a specialist in counter-terrorism, intelligence, and cybersecurity, and a member of the Senior Executive Service, the interface between the President’s top appointed officials and the rest of the federal government. The Senior Executive service operates and oversees nearly every government activity in approximately 75 Federal agencies.

Since he retired in 2003, Clarke has been writing books. After he wrote Against All Enemies, his memoirs, he went into writing futurist thrillers, such as The Scorpion’s Gate (2005) and Breakpoint (2007). In a recent interview on the Diane Rehm Show, Clarke spills the beans, talking about how he thinks humanity will take control over its own evolution, the transhumanist movement, and his fiction. As a security specialist, Clarke is also concerned about large-scale threats to the security of the US, such as cyberattacks.

Thanks to Jason Matheny for the pointer.

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From the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies website:

Jonathan McCalmont: Nick Bostrom, you are a philosopher, the Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, a university fellow in the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization at the university of Oxford and co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association. How did you come to be a transhumanist?

Nick Bostrom: It was a matter of discovering rather than becoming. I discovered that there was a name for a view that made a lot of sense to me. The view was that people ought to have the opportunity to live much longer, healthier, smarter, and happier lives, and that technological enhancement of human capacities could enable this. The name was transhumanism.

Read the rest.

Nick Bostrom is probably the one public figure that I have the most in common with. When you look at Nick’s interviews and writings, you notice that, while he is very interested in transhumanism in general, he is particularly concerned with the creation of greater-than-human intelligence. For example, in the interview he says, regarding his initial consideration of these ideas, “I was dumbstruck because it occurred to me that we would eventually learn to manipulate and engineer the stuff that thinks, and this might result in above-human intelligence. That prospect seemed uniquely important.” This focus, on the prospect of superintelligence and ensuring how its creation will go well, is a branch of transhumanism called singularitarianism. (If you find that hard to pronounce, remember, or spell, this song may help you remember.) The word comes from “Singularity” merged with “arian”, like libertarian comes from “liberty” merged with “arian”.

Recently, Nick wrote a paper with Max Tegmark using anthropic reasoning to infer the probability of planetary catastrophe. My recent post on Tegmark mentions how he himself has now developed singularitarian sensibilities. For an outline of many principles common to singularitarians, see this link. The Singularity Institute is the premier organization for singularitarians. In addition to engaging in AI research, the organization puts on events like the Stanford Singularity Summit, which brings together prominent thinkers to discuss the Singularity.

To read more about the singularitarian perspective, I recommend AI as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk.

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On a blustery December day in 1903, a pair of bicycle mechanics made good on a challenge mankind had given itself since it first looked up into the sky and envied the perspective and freedom of the birds. These two men, brothers, recognized that the thousands of years of technological progress on which they stood were sufficient to enable a glorious leap into a new era: the age of powered flight. Having diligently combined the latest advances in gliders and gasoline engines with their own experimental knowledge of aerodynamics, Orville and Wilbur Wright took their prototype out to the dunes of Kitty Hawk and made history. Over the next hundred years our world shrank and our frontiers expanded heavenward, thanks to two men with a keen sense of the times in which they lived and a compelling vision of what was possible.

For those who take the time to follow trends and reflect on the dizzying pace of technological innovation, a similar revelation can present itself; a conclusion so momentous that, as was the case with those who initially found the idea of controlled flight absurd, it can be somewhat hard to swallow. Progress has reached the point where another historic leap is possible, one arguably more significant than all the advancements of the last thousand years put together.

From the first primitive flints and spears, civilization has moved forward by creating tools to improve the quality of life, and on using these tools to create still better tools. Every modern miracle, from antibiotics to the international space station, owes its existence to our having successfully built upon the achievements and discoveries of our predecessors. But there is one tool that we have never managed to improve upon, even though it must ultimately take credit for every social, spiritual, or technological leap we make: our intelligence.

The groundwork at last exists for a project that will culminate with the creation of greater-than-human intelligence. In fact, a number of avenues are now open to achieve this, including genetic modifications and direct brain-computer interfaces. But the approach most likely to be safe, predictable, and practical in the near term is the creation of true Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI, if designed correctly and responsibly, will be able both to improve its own capabilities and to share our human understanding of morality - an ability called Friendliness by some researchers. Thus, we can expect the earliest Friendly AI to quickly become an invaluable member of the human family, vastly increasing our collective ability to solve problems and resolve differences.

This creation of greater-than-human intelligence, a milestone known as the Singularity, will explode our current models of technological progress, removing one of the limiting constants from our equations describing change. Infused with the creative equivalent of rocket fuel, exponential growth (the current trend in many industries) will become hyperexponential growth, with advances coming so quickly that the world as we know it will be abruptly discontinued. In its place will be a reality so brilliantly crafted that we may be incapable of imagining it with our current level of intelligence.

What we can imagine is this: today’s discontents giving way to the more dignified pursuits of mankind, with the galaxy itself opened to our exploration and discovery. Nanotechnology - the engineering of materials and machines at the molecular level - will permit universal material prosperity, through self-replicating factories that produce goods of unprecedented quality at negligible cost. Combined with genetic engineering, this will mean the end of disease and aging. Such capabilities are readily foreseen given that we have already made important strides in both these fields; greater intelligence will allow us to master them, and to rapidly deliver on their enormous potential.

Since the rise of civilization we have seen no appreciable increase in our level of intelligence. Remarkable as our human intellect may be, it is still a flat line along which we have shuffled in pedestrian fashion for the last 50,000 years. But we need not confine ourselves to this dusty old road. We can fly.

For above this flat surface of intelligence - above the mindset of daily struggle and business as usual - is a larger view of history and reality: the perspective of a fully empowered society that defines poverty as having to work to make ends meet, that remembers involuntary death as a disease that was cured in the early 21st century, and that knows scarcity only through historical accounts.

But no matter how many pieces we have lying around, we will not make the leap to greater intelligence - to the Singularity - unless we make the commitment to put it all together… and to do it right. AI, especially Friendly AI, simply won’t design itself (at least not the first time!). The creation of greater-than-human intelligence is the greatest project ever to be undertaken by our species, but is entirely doable within the next 10 to 20 years - or sooner - if enough people are willing to get involved. There is no reason to wait. Let’s get out to the dunes and make history.

©2002 Mitchell Howe

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From Edge’s World Question Center:

We’re Not Insignificant After All

When gazing up on a clear night, it’s easy to feel insignificant. Since our earliest ancestors admired the stars, our human egos have suffered a series of blows. For starters, we’re smaller than we thought. Eratosthenes showed that Earth was larger than millions of humans, and his Hellenic compatriots realized that the solar system was thousands of times larger still. Yet for all its grandeur, our Sun turned out to be merely one rather ordinary star among hundreds of billions in a galaxy that in turn is merely one of billions in our observable universe, the spherical region from which light has had time to reach us during the 14 billion years since our big bang. Then there are probably more (perhaps infinitely many) such regions. Our lives are small temporally as well as spatially: if this 14 billion year cosmic history were scaled to one year, then 100,000 years of human history would be 4 minutes and a 100 year life would be 0.2 seconds. Further deflating our hubris, we’ve learned that we’re not that special either. Darwin taught us that we’re animals, Freud taught us that we’re irrational, machines now outpower us, and just last month, Deep Fritz outsmarted our Chess champion Vladimir Kramnik. Adding insult to injury, cosmologists have found that we’re not even made out of the majority substance.

The more I learned about this, the less significant I felt. Yet in recent years, I’ve suddenly turned more optimistic about our cosmic significance. I’ve come to believe that advanced evolved life is very rare, yet has huge growth potential, making our place in space and time remarkably significant.

The nature of life and consciousness is of course a hotly debated subject. My guess is that these phenomena can exist much more generally that in the carbon-based examples we know of.

I believe that consciousness is, essentially, the way information feels when being processed. Since matter can be arranged to process information in numerous ways of vastly varying complexity, this implies a rich variety of levels and types of consciousness. The particular type of consciousness that we subjectively know is then a phenomenon that arises in certain highly complex physical systems that input, process, store and output information. Clearly, if atoms can be assembled to make humans, the laws of physics also permit the construction of vastly more advanced forms of sentient life. Yet such advanced beings can probably only come about in a two-step process: first intelligent beings evolve through natural selection, then they choose to pass on the torch of life by building more advanced consciousness that can further improve itself.

Unshackled by the limitations of our human bodies, such advanced life could rise up and eventually inhabit much of our observable universe. Science fiction writers, AI-aficionados and transhumanist thinkers have long explored this idea, and to me the question isn’t if it can happen, but if it will happen.

My guess is that evolved life as advanced as ours is very rare. Our universe contains countless other solar systems, many of which are billions of years older than ours. Enrico Fermi pointed out that if advanced civilizations have evolved in many of them, then some have a vast head start on us — so where are they? I don’t buy the explanation that they’re all choosing to keep a low profile: natural selection operates on all scales, and as soon as one life form adopts expansionism (sending off rogue self-replicating interstellar nanoprobes, say), others can’t afford to ignore it. My personal guess is that we’re the only life form in our entire observable universe that has advanced to the point of building telescopes, so let’s explore that hypothesis. It was the cosmic vastness that made me feel insignificant to start with. Yet those galaxies are visible and beautiful to us — and only us. It is only we who give them any meaning, making our small planet the most significant place in our observable universe.

Moreover, this brief century of ours is arguably the most significant one in the history of our universe: the one when its meaningful future gets decided. We’ll have the technology to either self-destruct or to seed our cosmos with life. The situation is so unstable that I doubt that we can dwell at this fork in the road for more than another century. If we end up going the life route rather than the death route, then in a distant future, our cosmos will be teeming with life that all traces back to what we do here and now. I have no idea how we’ll be thought of, but I’m sure that we won’t be remembered as insignificant.

(Emphasis by me.)

Max Tegmark is on our side of the court now. Be prepared for more smart people saying that 1) we could easily self-destruct in the coming century, and 2) the benefits if we don’t are practically unimaginable.

Because advanced evolved life is so rare, and our potential is so great, it’d be a really big deal if we snuffed ourselves out. The opportunity cost of not colonizing the Virgo supercluster alone simply boggles the mind.

Be part of the people who are saying this before it’s cool. Be an existential risk-paranoid Singularitarian.

Thanks to Michael LaTorra for the pointer.

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Reading today’s post over at the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology reminded me of this image. The topic at hand was the mechanization of warfare, and the worrisome development of an auto-turret that is accurate at up to half a mile. The image is of Metal Gear D, from the video game series of the same name (minus the D). If human civilization continues as it has, then there are a lot of machines like this in our future. Over at the Lifeboat Foundation blog, I have a few words to say on the militarization of space.

There is a conundrum in the concept of the arms race. The best way to keep the world safe is to have the biggest guns, period. But it’s also an easy way to destroy the world. Keeping the world safe with mere words is impractical. Thus, someone must always have the biggest guns. Anti-authoritarian, well-intentioned people like to whine at length about this. But we have to accept that unless someone keeps the peace, the natural tendency is descent into conflict. All we can do is try to steer things such that the most powerful agent(s) at any given time are truly benevolent.

The best way to accomplish that is not to endlessly shuffle through futile anthropocentric political arrangements, but to actually change the cognitive architecture underlying the most powerful agents to make them more benevolent by nature. You could theoretically do this with enough progress in neuroengineering, but building a Friendly AI just seems easier. Is FAI possible? Yes. Here is a page that argues why.

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