The New Tree of Life

Various futurist thinkers, and even a few unusually insightful journalists have pointed out that the next generation of threats to humanity are self-replicating technologies.

It’s really too bad that self-replicating technologies are so dangerous, because such technologies would also be most useful for completely realigning the material structure of the world with our collective will.

Self-replication is something that life figured out a long time ago. The DNA in every cell of your body has a replication lineage that can be traced, in an unbroken line, all the way back to the first self-replicating piece of genetic material ever. Every branch on the Tree of Life is a descendant of the first self-replicating organic being.

The problem with this mode of organic self-replication we’re so familiar with is that it’s relatively restricted in what it can build. Water is essential in large quantities for all the processes of life so any terran biological life form must be made up of primarily H2O. This requirement strongly constrains all material properties, including freezing point, boiling point, tensile strength, density, toughness, …

Read More →

Crossing the Line

Crossing the line to superintelligence is of vastly greater significance than the invention of fire, the Internet, or landing on the Moon. All these accomplishments came from human-level intelligence. Boost the underlying intelligence itself, and you’ve done something far deeper than create some new external product of human-level intelligence.

For example, consider the world from the viewpoint of a Homo erectus. They had tools – handaxes. These tools were of various types – pointed, cordate, ovate, ficron and bout-coupé shapes, cleavers, retouched flakes, scrapers, and segmental chopping tools. Flint, basalt, chalcedony, quartzite, andesite, sandstone, chert and shale were all used as raw materials to build these axes. Some were very large and probably just ornamental. Some were discus-shaped and possibly used as hunting weapons. It is thought they also had a social role, with enterprising Homo erectuses fashioning better tools for greater peer approval. From the viewpoint of one of these guys, they had command over a remarkable number of handaxe forms and designs, and put them to use for a variety of different …

Read More →

Short Article on Human Universals

“Human universals” is a term used in anthropology and evolutionary psychology to refer to behavioral or cognitive traits common to all neurologically normal humans. The notion of human universals was partially formulated as a challenge to cultural relativism, a predominant view of human nature in the late 20th century, which some psychologists and anthropologists see as greatly exaggerating the variance among members of the human species.

In a book of the same name published in 1991, professor of anthropology Donald Brown listed hundreds of human universals in an effort to emphasize the fundamental cognitive commonality between members of the human species. Some of these human universals include incest avoidance, territoriality, fear of death, rituals, childcare, pretend play, mourning, food sharing, kin groups, social structure, collective decision making, etiquette, envy, weapons, aesthetics, and many more. Wider recognition of human universals has led to a sort of mini-revolution in psychology, which has begun to take more input from the harder sciences of anthropology and biology, and less from the ubiquitous pop-psychology of the 20th century.

One of the greatest popularizers …

Read More →

Why is AI Dangerous?

To put it in a single sentence, I’d say that it’s because only a minority of cognitively possible goal sets place a high priority on the continued survival of human beings and the structures we value.

Another reason is that we can’t specify what we value in enough mathematical detail to transfer it to a new species without a lot of requisite hassle.

It would be easy if we could just transfer over the goal set of a “typical human” or a “nice person” and hope for the best. But there’s a problem: we have no experimental evidence of what happens when a human being can modify its own goals, or increase its own intelligence and/or physical power exponentially.

What little evidence we have of scenarios where people acquire a lot of power in a short amount of time indicates that the outcomes are usually not pretty. In fact, we have complicated democratic mechanisms built into our society to guard against these types of outcomes.

Most AI designers are missing the challenge because no one wants to have to take …

Read More →

The Planet Everyone’s Been Talking About

I don’t quite understand why some people are getting all worked up about the news of a possibly human-hospitable planet 20.4 light years away in Gliese 581.

First, we have a human hospitable planet right here that we’ve barely even begun to use. In a post last September, I outlined how the Earth could easily hold 100 billion people, if not more, by colonizing the deserts and highlands. I didn’t even talk about the oceans, polar regions, underground, or low Earth orbit. To those desperate to get off the planet post haste, I ask: where’s your creativity? Do you realize that we could hollow out regions the size of cities underground, reroute sunlight from the surface down into them, and have a perfectly nice living environment, with none of the inconveniences of outer space such as: lack of organic chemicals, ice cold temperature, ionizing cosmic rays, lack of gravity, lack of water, deadly vacuum, etc? If living underground isn’t your cup of tea, then there is the possibility of ocean colonies, powered by the temperature …

Read More →

Human Intelligence and the Multiverse

Humans find it hard to imagine intelligences smarter than we are because we’re designed by evolution to ignore the problems we can’t solve and focus on those we can. Doing it any other way would be an inappropriate use of cognitive resources.

What are the top five elements in your body and their relative proportions? You can’t answer? What’s taking you so long? You don’t even know what you’re made of?

Fact is, humans are pretty damn stupid. Not stupid relative to me or stupid relative to Einstein, but stupid in the scheme of things. Stupid relative to what we could be. We can offer any number of excuses, but in the end they’re nothing but excuses.

Homo sapiens evolved out of the primordial muck. We’re what happens when the muck gets just barely smart enough to reflect upon itself and manipulate its environment significantly.

There are two anthropic pressures at play here. Let’s assume, like Max Tegmark and other physicists, that we live in a gigantic multiverse where all possibilities are realized. The sector of the multiverse capable …

Read More →

Short Article on Superintelligence

A short article I just wrote, mere seconds ago, for the Q&A site WiseGEEK:

***

A superintelligence is a theoretical smarter-than-human being. Despite the superficial implausibility of the idea, numerous scientists have not ruled out the possibility of a superintelligence being created within the next century or even the next 20 years. Some researchers have even stated it as their career goal. Some of the most interesting speculations regarding superintelligence involve scenarios where the superintelligence continues to further enhance its own intelligence and capability. Such an event has been termed a “Singularity” by theorists.

Recent movies such as The Matrix have popularized the notion of a superintelligence with the public. Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the possible paths to superintelligence, and perhaps the most frequently discussed. With robotics as its “hands” and computers as its “brains”, a sophisticated artificial intelligence could think more thoughts and achieve more actions than a human would be capable of. This would prove especially true if the AI could redesign its own cognitive architecture, engineer and fabricate new robotics tools, and absorb …

Read More →

Rob Freitas Interview

I recently interviewed Robert A. Freitas Jr. on behalf of the Lifeboat Foundation. The interview had 12 questions and ranged from inquiries about his recent work to why hydrocarbons will be the ideal nanofactory feedstock. Freitas’ bio:

A research scientist with molecular nanotechnology company Zyvex, Robert Freitas Jr. has written more than 100 technical papers, book chapters and popular articles on a range of topics and most recently authored Nanomedicine, the first book on the potential medical applications of nanotechnology. In 2002, Freitas was a finalist for the Feynman prize in nanotechnology.

One of Dr. Freitas’ most notable recent efforts is the Nanofactory Collaboration project.

If you like the information Lifeboat is putting out, I encourage becoming a member to support our work.

Read More →

TED Conference Videos

Videos of talks from the summer 2005 Technology, Entertainment, Design conference are now online. Talks from our friends Ray, Aubrey, and Nick are available and excellent as always. Just be sure to turn down your speakers for the initial intro is loud. For most of you, the material will be nothing new, but seeing them in action and hearing the audience’s response noises is interesting.

Meanwhile, the Google Foundation’s Executive Director, Larry Brilliant, thinks small by talking about fighting global pandemics.

From the “Bold Predictions, Stern Warnings” theme, I like this tagline: “These talks come from speakers who aren’t afraid to go negative — to name the problems they see, and propose bold solutions, with clear-eyed passion.”

There’s a funny thing about being negative. You’re always supposed to propose a solution right away. People tell me this all the time. But guess what: the solution doesn’t always exist. What then? True AI is coming and we have no idea how to set its goals and motivations such that it continues to be nice …

Read More →

The Human Superiority Complex

At the foundation of Singularity theory lies the idea of recursive self-improvement. Advances in artificial intelligence or the augmentation of humans is expected to lead to further advances in intelligence enhancement, and so on, until some unknown barrier, perhaps set only by the laws of nature. This unfolding “intelligence explosion” has been called a Singularity by some. Whether or not Singularity is the best word, it has stuck and will continue to stick, so trying to wrestle with the terminology is pointless at this stage.

As you can see by the content on this blog, I’m obviously some sort of a believer of the Singularity idea. Most of the earth’s inhabitants have never heard of the idea and never thought of it, though it did originate in 1965. Since then, it has mostly been discussed by computer scientists working in artificial intelligence, but a decade or two ago it started slowly creeping into the public consciousness – through science/technology and futurist enthusiast types, mostly. The challenge is taking it beyond the geek crowd, and into the scene of …

Read More →

Text of Psychology Today Article

Following is the text from the recent Psychology Today article titled “The Boy Who Wants to Live Forever… and Other Champions of the Lost Cause” that profiled me and the immortalist movement.

***

The Immortalist: When the Challenge is Eternity

For a strapping 22-year-old, Michael Anissimov spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about death. At an age when most young men are convinced that dying is something that happens only to other people, Anissimov is obsessed with halting aging and death altogether.

At the age of 18, he helped found the Immortality Institute, a nonprofit that promotes life-extension research in order to “conquer the blight of involuntary death.” He’s begun the paperwork necessary for having himself cryonically suspended—frozen for the future, should he die before the technologies that he believes will lead to greatly extended lifespans become available. “Death is just a technical problem,” he says. “People react strongly to the idea of living hundreds of years, but the body doesn’t care if we think it’s radical to preserve it.”

Life extentionists, cryogenics enthusiasts, and longevity buffs …

Read More →
← Older Entries