Accelerating Future

For those who haven’t seen it… the Friendly AI Critical Failure Table. Yes, it’s humor. Here’s a few for a taste:

6: Any spoken request is interpreted (literally) as a wish and granted, whether or not it was intended as one.

7: The entire human species is transported to a virtual world based on a random fantasy novel, TV show, or video game.

8: Subsequent events are determined by the “will of the majority”. The AI regards all animals, plants, and complex machines, in their current forms, as voting citizens.

9: The AI discovers that our universe is really an online webcomic in a higher dimension. The fourth wall is broken.

10: The AI behaves toward each person, not as that person wants the AI to behave, but in exactly the way that person expects the AI to behave.

Continue.

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An image of the Brocken spectre, found on Wikipedia.

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Across every continent and throughout every ocean, evolution has woven living tapestries of awesome complexity and beauty. In perhaps the most exquisite motif of all, evolution has even given rise to minds able to recognize and appreciate this beauty. But the artistry we observe should not be confused with determined craftsmanship, for evolution does not create any blueprints or write any recipes before laboring. It sounds like an incorrect answer given by a sassy teenager on a test, but evolution by natural selection is, in reality, just a bunch of stuff that happens.

Because it is a non-intelligent process - the unavoidable reality that conditions will always favor some designs over others - evolution by natural selection has to break many, many eggs in order to make an omelet. When we marvel at the swiftness of the cheetah, we do not see the billions of ancestral cousins that weren’t quite fast enough. When we delight in the vibrant plumage of many birds, we do not see the loveless flocks of bachelors that weren’t quite attractive enough.

Modern humans share a lineage no less brutal than those of our fellow animals. Even the unique cognitive ability reflected in the name homo sapiens sapiens - the thinking thinking man - is the result of a merciless game in which the perpetuation of genetic information is the only condition for victory. From our most logical calculations to our most passionate urges, our minds are orchestras assembled and tuned solely to perform magnificent renditions of the simplest melody: the call of the wild.

But by developing such an exquisite and versatile tool as the human brain, evolution has unwittingly (for that is the only way it can ever act) given us a means of escaping the cruel laboratory of natural selection. For despite the peculiar tuning prescribed by nature, general intelligence - the kind historically unique to humans - can play more than one song.

This is not to say that becoming masters of our own evolution is as simple as recognizing our origins and deciding not to be played. Until very recently, the only tool we’ve had to influence our genetic evolution was selective breeding, and since people tend to dislike being killed or forbidden to reproduce for the sake of the gene pool, we rightly look upon the science of eugenics with great suspicion. Also, people frequently diverge in their choice of preferred genetic traits. At best, they tend to favor qualities that nature already selects. At worst, they hold prejudices that lead to ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Today, we know genes can be altered in a more targeted fashion, assuming we can decide which configurations are best to give our children. But this level of genetic engineering will require many decades-long studies and scientific breakthroughs before coming of age, and raises disturbing questions about the ethical desirability of a “designer baby” society.

Perhaps we find genetic engineering and eugenics unsatisfactory in part because they fail to do any better than natural selection at providing personal freedom; while parents using these techniques may appreciate greater reproductive control, their children would still inherit a particular genome without having any say in the matter. Breaking out of this constrictive paradigm requires technology that can allow individuals to decide for themselves what kinds of minds and bodies they will possess, thus making evolution a personal decision.

Given genetic engineering’s lengthy development cycle, it seems natural to view the more advanced technology needed for personal evolution as a distant fantasy. After all, this would require either superior alternatives to human bodies or the ability to reconfigure living bodies at the sub-cellular level - themes of only the most speculative science fiction. Nanotechnology - the nascent field of engineering materials and devices at molecular scales - can conceivably meet these specifications. But despite the accelerating progress that is starting to make nanotechnology a household word, humans are poorly suited for engineering the level of complexity and control needed for these advanced applications; we are evolved for activities of a completely different magnitude. (For instance, manufacturing trillions of multipurpose medical nanobots might be “easy” compared to making them all operate intelligently.)

Even so, the formidable barriers of advanced technology may fall easily if, instead of confronting them directly, we first build on our unique evolutionary legacy of general intelligence. The ad-hoc intellectual orchestra improvised by natural selection could almost certainly be outperformed by one assembled intelligently from the beginning. The creation of artificial general intelligence (AGI) represents a unique and formidable challenge, but holds tremendous promise as a way of playing to our greatest strength and augmenting it. In fact, the moment we achieve greater intelligence has such “singular” significance that futurists refer to it as the Singularity.

An adequately designed AGI could provide enormous assistance in the design of still more intelligent minds - a process that can be repeated in a self-reinforcing cycle. An AGI could also stand squarely outside the survival-promoting distortions that evolution has built into our thought processes, but at the same time possess a sympathetic respect for human ethics - a trait called Friendliness by some researchers. These new kinds of minds - free, capable, and compassionate to an unparalleled degree - would be invaluable partners in safely mastering technologies that can make personal evolution a reality.

Admittedly, opening a mind-and-body shop will probably not be the most urgent service performed by any Friendly AI. Indeed, it is the suffering of millions from potentially curable diseases and social conditions that should be making Friendly AI a world-wide research priority. (Many experts believe that AGI can be created in one or two decades with just a fraction of the funding devoted to causes like cancer research.) But initiating the transhuman destiny of homo sapiens sapiens is perhaps the most significant long-term achievement we can imagine; after that, who can say what dreams and challenges await?

We presently live in a beautiful-but-indifferent world where death and hardship are the norm. Adversity is, after all, the driving force behind natural selection. But as if that weren’t enough, evolution has tragically engineered us not to experience lasting happiness, but to restlessly tend insatiable appetites in the service of our genes. With help from Friendly new minds, however, the enduring frustrations of the human condition can be severed as the cold strings of a mindless puppeteer. The creation of greater intelligence is the first step towards evolution by choice: the freedom to create our own better selves.

©2002 by Mitchell Howe

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From respected, mainstream publication The Times Online!

Bruce Klein founded The Immortality Institute (Imminst) in 2002 as a non-profit organisation with the aim of ‘conquering the blight of involuntary death’. Klein was brought up in the town of Americus, ‘a jewel of Georgia’, in Bible Belt America, the deep south. ‘Yeah, I’m a southern redneck!’ he jokes. His family was not especially religious, though he did observe the Catholicism of his mother until the age of eleven when he took a phone call from their priest. ‘I said to him I didn’t believe any more. He got kind of upset and I hung up the phone. It was some kind of visceral thing.’

Klein was thirty-one when I met him at Imminst’s conference at the Georgia Tech Conference Center, Atlanta, in November 2005. The conference turned out to be a snapshot of the immortalist front line. It is a movement that is part cult and part serious science. But all were united by the fervency of their belief in the rightness of the project of extending life and by their vehement rejection of deathism and scepticism. The participants saw themselves as visionaries and frequently beleaguered pioneers of the only new frontier left to mankind. Klein is a groomed, fit-looking man. His wife and ‘wonderful friend’, Susan Fonseca-Klein, co-founder and director of the institute, is round-faced and pretty. Together, they have the air not of a threateningly glamorous but of a consolingly ideal couple – young, healthy, good-natured, extravagantly friendly, ambitious, optimistic, glowing. One could imagine them in an advertisement for breakfast cereal.

Part cult how? Just because it’s something unusually ambitious? Were the Wright Brothers and their supporters part cult? What about the Manhattan Project, where scientists were consolidated in Los Alamos? Silly journalists, what would we do if you didn’t take the liberty of exaggerating randomly to “spice up” the article? Reading stuff would just be so boring otherwise.

The article zooms in a bit on the AI side of the pursuit for immortality, something that many of the current ranks at ImmInst seem to be too busy consuming dinner plates of supplements to notice.

“Threateningly glamorous”, hmm. Max and Natasha, I think that’s your job.

Bryan Appleyard, I’m sure your book will be an interesting one, but don’t call immortalism part cult. It’s not necessary to sell your book, or make it interesting.

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Advantages of computer programs over humans, which some might call, “why we use computers at all”:

More design freedom, including ease of modification and duplication; the capability to debug, re-boot, backup and attempt numerous designs.

The ability to perform complex tasks without making human-type mistakes, such as mistakes caused by lack of focus, energy, attention or memory.

The ability to perform extended tasks at greater serial speeds than conscious human thought or neurons, which perform approx. 200 calculations per second. Computing chips (~2 GHz) presently have a 10 million to one speed advantage over our neurons.

The in principle capacity to function 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

The human brain cannot be duplicated or “re-booted,” and has already achieved “optimization” through design by evolution, making it difficult to further improve.

The human brain does not physically integrate well, externally or internally, with contemporary hardware and software.

The non-existence of “boredom” when performing repetitive tasks.

Advantages of human brains over hypothetical AIs:

Present AIs lack human general intelligence and multiple years of real-world experience.

The computational capacity of the human brain is estimated at 2 * 10^16, or 20 million billion calculations per second, which is twenty times greater than the supercomputer Blue Gene’s predicted achievement of 10^15, or 1 million billion calculations per second, by 2005. However, the human brain may not have a computational advantage over computers for much longer. Ray Kurzweil, for example, predicts that the computational capacity of the human brain will be accomplished on supercomputers, or clustered systems, by 2010, followed on personal computers by 2020.

The human brain has already achieved a high-level of complexity and “optimization” through design by evolution, and thus has proven functionality.

Advantages of minds-in-general (AIs) over the human brain:

(The following are not advantages of specific AI approaches, but rather advantages of minds-in-general over the human brain.)

An increased ability to acquire, retrieve, store and use information on the Internet, which contains most human knowledge.

Lack of human failings that result from complex functional adaptations, such as observer-biased beliefs or rationalization.

Lack of neurobiological features that limit human control over functionality.

Lack of complexity that we have acquired from evolutionary design, e.g., unnecessary autonomic processes and sexual reproduction.

The ability to advance on the design of evolution, which is continually constrained by lack of foresight, the requirement to maintain preexisting design, and a weakness with simultaneous dependencies.

The ability to add more computational power to a particular feature or problem. This may result in moderate or substantial improvements to preexisting intelligence. (AI does not have an upper limit on computational capacity; we do.) Note that the speed of computational power is predicted to continually increase exponentially, and decrease exponentially in cost, every 12-24 months, in accordance with Moore’s Law.

The ability to analyze and modify every design level and feature.

The ability to combine autonomic and deliberative processes.

The ability to communicate and share information (abilities, concepts, memories, thoughts) at a greater rate and at a greater level of complexity than us.

The ability to control what is and what is not learned or remembered.

The ability to create new modalities that we lack, such as a modality for code, which may improve the AI’s programming ability-by making the AI inherently native to programming - far beyond our own (a modality for code may allow the AI to perceive its hardware machine code, i.e. the language used to write the AI, and other abilities).

The ability to learn new information very rapidly.

The ability to consciously create, analyze, modify, and improve abilities, concepts, or memories.

The ability to operate on computer hardware that has powerful advantages over human neurons, such as the ability to perform billions of sequential steps per second.

The capacity to self-observe and understand on a fine-grained level that is impossible for us. AIs may have an improved capacity for introspection and manipulation, such as the ability to introspect and manipulate code, which would be the functional level comparable to human neurons, which we can’t think about or manipulate.

The most important and powerful capacity of minds-in-general over the human brain is the ability to recursively self-encapsulate and self-improve its intelligence. As a mind becomes smarter, the mind can use its intelligence to improve its design, thereby improving its intelligence, which may allow further improvements to its design, thus allowing further improvements to its intelligence. It is unknown when open-ended self-improvement may begin.

Think about the differences and what they mean. The items on the above lists are not controversial - they’re either known facts or follow directly from the nature of the hardware. It’s the policy consequences that are controversial. But take the time to ignore the policy implications (if any), and by ignoring I mean not commenting on, and leaving this post just as a place to meditate about known differences between human brains, computer programs, and hypothetical AIs.

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In the early 80s, and the great scientist and engineer Eric Drexler came up with the term “nanotechnology” to describe a manufacturing technology that builds products from the atoms up. Around the turn of the century, the term was hijacked to mean anything involving nanometer-scale features, like modern computer chips. Technically, this means you could use the word “nanotechnology” to mean anything, because practically everything has nanoscale features that play a role in its overall properties. The result is that the original meaning of the word “nanotechnology” went kaput, and nanotech enthusiasts had to start saying “molecular nanotechnology” or “molecular manufacturing” to refer to what they were talking about.

Around 2001 or so, the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology started using the term “nanofactories” to describe desktop molecular manufacturing units. Now it seems like a group of researchers is attempting to hijack this word too, even though I’m sure they well know that the word already has an established meaning. From ScienceDaily:

The list of side effects on your prescription bottle may one day be a
lot shorter, according to researchers at the University of Maryland’s
A. James Clark School of Engineering.

That’s because instead of taking a conventional medication, you may
swallow tiny “nanofactories,” biochemical machines that act like
cells, first conceived of at the Clark School.

For example, these ingested nanofactories, using magnetism, could
detect a bacterial infection, produce a medication using the body’s
own materials, and deliver a dose directly to the bacteria. The drug
would do its work only at the infection site, and thus not cause th
side effects that may arise when an antibiotic travels throughout the
body in search of infections.

William Bentley, professor and chair of the Fischell Department of
Bioengineering at the Clark School, and several graduate students
including Rohan Fernandes, have developed this “magnetic nanofactory”
concept and published their research in Metabolic Engineering in
December of last year. Colleagues around the country voiced their
support for the technology in Nature Nanotechnology last month.

Artificial cells are not nanofactories! A “nanofactory” is a desktop manufacturing system! Why does the mainstream constantly steal cutting-edge terminology and water it down? My guess is that the word “nanofactory” is being used here instead of “artificial cell” or “nanobot” because a “factory” sounds more benign and neutral. People might not want to think of the idea of autonomous little robots in their bloodstream, so “nanofactories” sounds better. But they’re stepping all over the prior use of the term! Researchers know how to use Google, and I’m sure they saw the term on other websites, but they just didn’t really care.

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That’s what the radius of destruction would look like if a 10 kT nuke were detonated on top of my house! Put in your own zip code, and see how bad it would be for you.

I found this page by following a link from NTI, the global security organization founded by Ted Turner. Warren Buffet is another billionaire who supports NTI and encourages his shareholders to read books and watch films about the threat of nuclear terrorism.

You can order a free DVD of Last Best Chance, a film warning against nuclear terrorism, by visiting here.

Another blast calculator can be found at this URL.

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