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 to us even when it becomes smarter than us and can reprogram itself. There are other unsolved problems, like, "how do we deal with genetically engineered superviruses?", "what do we do if it becomes radically easier to isolate uranium-235?", and so on. It's fun and easy to think that some government employee or academic will work hard and come up with the solution just in time, like in the movies, but it just ain't so.
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 regular everyday smart people, like academics, educated professionals, venture capitalists, and the like.
The assumptions underlying the Singularity are pretty basic.
- Intelligence is a phenomenon based on electrochemical activity in the brain.
- Other mediums, like computers, can theoretically implement intelligence.
- The study of intelligence will eventually let us create these implementations.
- At some point, they'll gain the ability to replicate and self-improve.
- The impact on the world will be huge.
Unfortunately, I'd bet that over 95% of humanity disagrees with the first assumption. The main reason is because the relevant science was only discovered in the last couple hundred years, but humanity has been busy believing that our brains have been running based on divine mandate for tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years. The first book of the Bible and the Torah, Genesis, strongly implies that only God can create humans, animals, plants, etc., from raw materials. According to a recent Newsweek poll, 91% of American adults believe in God.
Most people are dualists. They believe the mind and body are made of two different things, and work in two different ways. The body can be physically repaired by doctors because it's natural and understandable. The mind can't be physically repaired because it's special and immaterial. Nevermind that brain surgery happens every day and thousands of people have brain implants. The Judeo-Christian religions - Christianity, Judaism, and Islam - are fundamentally based on dualistic philosophy.
It's not easy to convey a five-step argument to the public when 95% of your audience won't even accept point #1.
The key is to find an audience where the majority accepts the first point. This can be done at places like Google HQ, the computer science department at Stanford, and atheist philosophy clubs. All are good places to start talking about the Singularity.
Conciseness demands tossing out as much unnecessary material as possible when making your argument. Jettisoning superfluous discussion over dualism vs. monism is absolutely essential if you're going to get anywhere in transmitting the Singularity idea to newbies. You've probably argued about it with others for hours already, and there's a limit to what most people can stand.
A good way to jettison ideas you don't intend to argue about is to be dismissive and make fun of them. For example, one can say that just because dualists' ideas are disconnected from reality doesn't mean that the physics of their brain is. Another gem is this chart from Wikipedia, which describes Descartes' lame, 17th-century ideas about the mind and body:
God of the gaps, anyone? Many atheists have not resigned from dualist views yet. If you know an atheist whom you suspect is a closet dualist, present them with this chart and ask them what to label the upper triangle, if not "God". Your "soul"? If the box has no label, then mental and physical events are connected in the same causal fabric, and follow the same basic rules. Which means we are utterly guaranteed to eventually determine the brain's workings, like we did those of the heart and stomach, and create artificial replacements with superior performance.
Anyone who can reasonably claim that this reverse-engineering process would take over 100 years is almost certainly a closet dualist. I propose that all monists personally expect AI to arrive before 2100.
But many monists, such as the majority of the transhumanist community, are still sketchy regarding the idea of an AI self-replicating and self-enhancing autonomously to the point where it becomes the primary shaper of the world. I propose that such doubts are based on a human superiority complex, plain and simple. Our species is so full of itself that it slaughters millions of animals daily with impunity - why would it acknowledge the possibility of superintelligent AI with abilities greater than ours in all domains?
It is extremely difficult to get people to relinquish their religious beliefs. Dualism is a component of religious belief, thus it seems like attacks on theistic dualism are doomed to failure. As a result of this, I suggest that those who wish to spread acceptance of the Singularity meme focus on the other philosophical flaw I mentioned - the human superiority complex.
Interestingly, one of the best tools for fighting this superiority complex is probably science fiction, which regularly features alien races of all shapes, sizes, and intelligence levels. Greater-than-human intelligence is not hard to imagine for most science fiction fans. But by science fiction, I mean science fiction stories, not Hollywood movies, which portray nonhumans in a way that only reinforces the human superiority complex.
If you want to encourage people to think about the Singularity rationally, getting them to read a little science fiction may be a good bet. But too much science fiction can cause people to get lazy when it comes to considering the nuts and bolts of the situation. People have to find their own balance. Let me just remark that reading no science fiction at all is definitely reading too little.
Featured resources:
Students with easy internet access are favouring going for online courses than attending the courses in person. This is partially because of the ultra-friendly online software available on the site. These sites also have subject specialists who can be consulted via voip. In case of opting out of a course, there are added options of data recovery as well. This kind of information is much more easily available now, thanks to the million web hosting blog fanatics out there.
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 have an image problem, thanks in large part to guys like the inventor Ray Kurzweil, who sucks down hundreds of supplements and drinks 10 cups of green tea every day with the conviction that it will prolong his life. Also not helping: geneticist Aubrey de Grey, the wild-looking, raggedy-bearded Oxford professor who proclaims that at least one person alive today may live to be 1,000 years old.
It's easy to poke fun at them. What's less avoidable than death? But just as natural as death is the urge to rise above it. And that desperate need for existential permanence is ultimately what motivates us to sacrifice ourselves for everything from art to religion to politics.
When reminded of death by something as simple as a photo of a grave, people react by adhering more tightly to their social values and their self-image. Liberals become more tolerant, religious people more spiritual, racists more consumed with hate. "By being a good American, a caring parent, a committed sports fan, a creative musician, or a brilliant scientist, and by believing in the ultimate importance and value of such pursuits, one is able to feel part of something that extends into eternity," writes University of Maryland psychologist Mark Dechesne in a recent paper on the subject of terror management theory, the branch of psychology that tries to explain this behavior.
In the end, banking on immortality through cryonics could be more plausible than believing in a second, eternal life. "It might be the most rational form of striving for immortality," says Dechesne. "The only irrational thing is that you're hoping to get it while science has not yet given any indication that it is feasible."
But life-extension research is moving into the mainstream. Perhaps as many as 10,000 people worldwide, including scientists and investors, are actively involved in these communities. "Deviating from the mainstream by yourself is quite different than deviating from it with others who are successful, intelligent, insightful, and willing to discuss unpopular beliefs together," says Anissimov. He may not live forever, but he'll benefit from a thriving community of other dreamers as long as he does.
And he'll reap more than the benefit of friendship: Embracing his goal, he exercises, and eats vegetarian. And just like everyone else, he hangs on to the idea that something—in this case science—will eventually be able to conquer death. It's a long shot, but at least the cause is built on that most triumphant of human capacities: hope.
***
The middle of the article engages in slightly tautological reasoning when it says that the immortalist movement's image is damaged by Ray and Aubrey because they do things in pursuit of immortality, like taking supplements or marketing life extension research. They are doing things characteristic of immortalists. If they didn't do them, they wouldn't be pursuing immortality. Thus the author is essentially saying "immortalists are damaging the immortalist movement by acting like immortalists". It's a roundabout way of saying, "I'm pretty uncomfortable with the whole thing but don't want to say so outright in this article".
“Investing in Immortality”, by Mitchell Howe
Few would rush to accept an offer of immortality if each successive year were to bring an ever-increasing burden of broken hips, memory loss, and incontinence. This may help explain why so many people find the thought of extreme life extension unpalatable; the best years are not usually represented by triple digits.
Hence, those who actually intend to live forever usually know something about the technology that would make this possible. They understand how the same research that could ultimately conquer aging will also be critical to treating the ailments associated with it. This conclusion is not a difficult one; even today, the leading causes of death for people in their physical prime are not diseases, but accidents, homicide, and suicide. If the biological clock could be stopped or reversed, careful individuals could live in excellent health for a very long time.
To “think immortalâ€, then, is to engage in sophisticated long-term planning – anticipating the secondary effects of technological progress and the opportunities they present. But it is also to recognize the way many issues which may not have seemed worth caring about during an eighty-year lifetime could literally be matters of life and death over many centuries. Whether the bell tolls in sixty years or six hundred, the knell would be premature to someone who might have lived as long as the stars.
This type of thinking adds new complexity to the historical dilemma of retirement planning: figuring out when retirement will leave the minimal combination of interest, principal, and entitlements needed to live comfortably until death. The challenge, of course, lies in the impossibility of knowing exactly how soon death will come and how much money will be needed in the meantime. Today’s would-be immortals must not only prepare for physical old-age, but make special arrangements for the cases of “premature†death and indefinite life span. As with any investment plan, a well-balanced portfolio is essential.
Along with traditional fiscal prudence and a combination of high and low risk/yield investments, committed immortalists generally consider it prudent to take out a cryonics life insurance policy as soon as it is practical to do so. These policies, which name as beneficiary an institution where the body or head will be promptly frozen in a maximally preservative state, are no longer the eccentric testaments of the self-absorbed (if they ever were.) It takes a certain scientific optimism to consign one’s corpse to a cylinder of liquid nitrogen; those who do so typically understand what the general public still does not: that a number of credible technological visions exist by which the essential pattern of a mind may be reinstantiated in a new and better form – in a world of material abundance scarcely imaginable today. The popular arguments that a thawed mind would be badly damaged, or that one’s descendants may not be interested in the high cost of thawing, are thus, to these investors, scarcely worth acknowledging. However, the anti-cryonicists at least make the important point that the future of the frozen may well be cold – a point many immortalists, in their hopeful enthusiasm, may choose not to think about. They definitely should; optimism can put someone in cryogenic suspension, but it cannot bring them out.
Cryonics depends on a future society with the means and the willingness to restore the dead to a better life. But holders of cryonic life insurance, of all people, should understand that those same technologies that could make their rebirth possible may also be used to catastrophic ends. To enjoy a meaningful future, the living and the suspended alike must first have a future, a commodity now taken for granted but destined to become increasingly tenuous as biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence approach adolescence. Genetically engineered plagues could be haunting nightmares of virulence. Microscopic, self-replicating nanomachines could spread like a cancer and consume the biosphere. Unfriendly artificial intelligence could see humanity as the infection: a threat to be eradicated.
Contributions to organizations working to bring these technologies to responsible maturity -- rather than our own extinction -- thus make essential additions to an immortalist portfolio. One such organization is the Foresight Institute, which promotes and develops guidelines for the safe development of nanotechnology. Another is the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI), which strives to ensure that the first truly superhuman intelligence will be squarely on our side, working with its creators to safely greet the dawn of ultratechnology and stamp out the indignities of the human condition.
In fact, the potential benefits of compassionate superintelligence are so enormous as to make SIAI a worthy first-tier investment for anyone, immortalist or otherwise. This is especially true for younger people, who stand a very good chance of living through the Singularity (the greater intelligence milestone) even without cryonic arrangements; they and others would be well advised to watch their health and avoid needless physical risk, lest they miss out.
No single portfolio can ever right for everyone. But if you are interested in the possibility of living indefinitely – if the thought of going “gentle into that good night†angers you – there are investments you can make. In any case, whether you intend to live forever, expect to die next week, or simply want to leave a better world behind for those who will follow you, successfully planning for the future today demands that you carefully consider the kind of future you hope will be enjoyed – and invest in that as well.
©2002 by Mitchell Howe
Other Kinds of Minds
A central aspect of the transhumanist project should be to imagine what we are trying to become or create. What kind of minds can there be? It may be that there is an abundance of possible minds we cannot even imagine from our current frame of reference, but on the flipside, some of the minds that we can imagine may in fact turn out to be forbidden by the laws of nature. We have only one true data point on the graph of mindspace - humankind. The psychological differences we observe between humans may be a useful guide in imagining other kinds of minds. Philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and computational complexity theory may help too. On a past post that went over some basics of the nascent field of Friendly AI - building positive AIs - a commenter, Raphael, said this:
I agree that most people anthropomorphize and that the Asimov’s Laws are risible (if they worked, then Asimov wouldn’t have had any drama to write about). It also seems highly plausible that the space of possible intelligences is much larger than the space of human intelligences (e.g. from low-IQ to Newton).
However, I’m not sure how much we can say beyond that. For instance, given that we don’t know what intelligence is (in any detailed way), it is hard to say exactly how diverse the space of intelligent minds is. I will substantiate this point by analogy. Without knowledge of computational complexity theory, it is easy to assume that the space of conceivable algorithms is the same as the space of physically realizable algorithms. In other words, that all algorithms we can devise are such that we could (with huge amounts of computing power) actually implement those algorithms. However, we now know that this is completely wrong. There are simple problems which can only be solved via algorithms that cannot be implemented in our universe.
The question is interesting. I have strong intuitions that a very large diversity of minds is possible, and can name specific qualities of different possible types of minds, but I lack the empirically verified theory that would be necessary to say that such minds are possible with certainty. As an effort to explore this space, I'm going to list some different types of minds I can imagine and invite people to criticize the plausibility of their existence. Are some mind variants more plausible than others? Is there a criteria for determining this other than their foreignness from a human-centered psychological perspective? That's what we should try to find out.
Some relevant dimensions along which we can imagine minds that vary widely are:
1) Clock speed. Functionalism tells us that minds are defined as the interactions of the hardware on which they are instantiated. When the hardware is slow, the mind is slow. When the hardware is fast, the mind is fast. Humans have about 10^11 neurons firing at about 200 times per second (200 Hz). It should then follow that arbitrary changes to hardware performance in any given brain results in a corresponding change in speed of thinking, perceiving, experiencing, planning, creativity, and communication. In this model, minds with 10^11 neurons that run at 0.2 Hz could be expected to think a thousand times slower than human beings, whereas minds with the same number of neurons running at 200 KHz could be expected to think a thousand times faster. Invalidating this proposal would require that minds with slower hardware, do not, in fact, operate slower than human brains, or that minds with faster hardware do not, in fact, operate faster than human brains.
2) Distribution. Human minds are contained up in a 3-pound hunk of meat shielded by a calcite cranium. If functionalism - that is, the idea that minds are defined as the physical activity in the brain - holds, then a variety of distributed or condensed mind-forms should be possible, as long as there is low latency and sufficient bandwidth between cognitive nodes. Electronic signals travel at the speed of light, meaning that an artificial intelligence should be able to exist as a program distributed across computers on opposite sides of the planet and still function effectively. At the same time, highly miniaturized computing machinery, such as nanocomputers, should, in theory, be able to hold human-equivalent minds with a volume and weight much smaller than our current 1450cc brains. For size scalability among brains to be impossible would require that functionalism is false, which, according to anyone that studies the brain, looks quite unlikely.
3) Communication. Imagine the evolution of homonid communication from the standpoint of natural selection if it were a intelligent actor: "If I lower the larynx a bit here, give better control of chest muscles to the neocortex there, and expand the auditory cortex like so, then we might have something." Language: complex information transfer accompanied by high-fidelity memory storage of the data, is not something that comes naturally to evolution-designed biological life. Electronic systems offer the appeal of the discrete state and the regularity of distinct file types. They can transfer images, text, sound, CAD files, even virtual landscapes at speeds limited mainly by the bandwidth of the data pipe. We can imagine minds that store complex skills, observations, and analyses as independent data files - kungfu.mi, for instance. For nonbiological minds, we should expect the possibilities of communication to be much greater than among biological humans. This dimension of variation falls out automatically when you go outside the default human I/O.
4) Reprogrammability. Clearly the human mind is trainable to a certain extent and even partially deliberately reprogrammable. However, we have very limited control over the overall anatomical structure or chemical makeup of our brains. Our limbic system places games with our "higher faculties". We have little control over the structure of neurons, the way our brains process visual or auditory data, or our fundamental instincts. A mind with access to its own source code could modify any aspect of itself it thought fit. It could observe the fine-grained structure of other such minds and take inspiration from their cognitive structures in the way that a modern painter might take inspiration from Renaissance artists. It could even build new sensory modalities designed for specialized purposes, like simultaneously visualizing the dynamics of thousands of moving parts in a complex engine, being able to tell one from another in the same way we can tell two faces apart.
5) Intelligence. The vast intelligence difference between primitive microbes and today's humans give us a kind of clue at the type of variation that is possible. Rather than assume that human beings are around the limits of intelligent thought, or can "visualize anything if we put our minds to it", we should assume we are typical - somewhere in the middle between microbes and the ultimate limits of intelligence - if not on the far low end of the spectrum. The actual quantity of processing power we have at our disposal is certainly one limiting factor on our intelligence, but perhaps even more important is the particular arrangement of our brains. Intelligence is a relatively recent evolutionary innovation, and our brains as a whole, most of which is based off of preexisting morphological complexity, is not specifically designed to accommodate or nurture general intelligence. We should expect that a mind designed deliberately to implement intelligence could go far beyond our ability to reason, imagine, plan, create, and experience reality.
6) "Morality". The baggage-free version: "goal orientation". An AI could begin with whatever goal orientation we give it. There are practically no limits. We could make AIs that are our obedient slaves and love it. Humans dislike being enslaved because being so tends to result in fewer reproductive opportunities, thus evolution selected against it. This evolutionary design would not be built into AIs. Synthetic minds start off with nothing: a blank slate. You could make a humanoid robot whose goal is to eternally hop in a circle while rubbing its stomach and patting its head, and it could achieve that goal, as long as it had a reliable power supply and spare parts. The concept of "self" in the sense of "I exist" is not the same thing as the concept of self as humans know it: i.e., "I'm a self-interested moral agent with certain inalienable rights which I continuously have to reemphasize because my evolutionary and cultural history consists of others constantly challenging those rights, and I am programmed by evolution to be concerned about them". In an AI, all that self-centered goal complexity is simply not there. A certain degree of goal complexity is necessary to produce intelligence at all, but it's quite minimal, and the room for variation in the 'footnotes' is immense. If we want AIs to do things we consider "normal", like caring about others, we'll have to program it in, and instill a desire to build upon those goals in ways that keep the spirit of the original intentions. Otherwise, there's no telling what we'll end up with.
Can you imagine other dimensions of variation? Can you think of any regions of the above possibilities which might be ruled out by physical law? If the potential space of possible moralities in particular is so large, do we have an ethical obligation to craft synthetic minds with human-empathic goal orientations?
Articles and Papers
Watered-down immortalism will be on CNN this weekend.
Ever since I remember (late 80s), efforts towards life extension have been accompanied by the phrase "live to a hundred!" I'm happy that this can't go on for long, because the next even number past a hundred is two hundred, and that's too long for most people to take seriously. Either you accept the concept of actuarial escape velocity, or anything past a hundred sounds radical to you. That's the way the memetics of the situation works.
I'm sure you've heard that Kurt Vonnegut is dead. Another genius lost forever, because he failed to freeze his neural architecture in place. Don't let it happen to you.
Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg on converging cognitive enhancements. Dr. Bostrom also discusses the future of human evolution, in particular, possible "dead ends" where progress continues, but the things we value are selected out.
Dr. Tegmark: the world is an abstract mathematical structure.
John Baez on why mathematics is boring.
One of the creators of Skype, Jaan Tallinn, joins the Lifeboat Foundation scientific advisory board.
The Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry released a 60-page paper of civil service jargon on the topic of roboethics. Roboethics is what you focus on when you haven't yet realized that pure AI is the main threat.
Bochum Verification Project for verification of arms treaties. Dr. Jurgen Altmann, in particular, seems to have a clue about the future.
Ben Goertzel on why the time for AI is now.
SIAI Updates
Updates from the Singularity Institute:
What would the money be used for?
- SIAI R&D Program (Ph.D. Scholarship, Postdoctoral Fellowship, Research Programmer)
- The Singularity Summit II (September 8-9, Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, San Francisco, CA)
- SIAI Research Fellowship Program & Fund (to Support Present & Future Research Fellows)
- SIAI Fund Development (Roundtable Dinners, Special Events, Foundation Grant Proposals)
- SIAI Educational Outreach & Marketing (Website, Blog, Newsletter, Media, Online Marketing)
If half of the challenge ($200,000) is met by May 21st, Peter Thiel will pledge an additional $50,000 in matching funds.
Ray Kurzweil has joined the Board of Directors for SIAI.
New interview with Barney Pell. Dr. Pell has an impressive background in AI.
SIAI has proposed an AI Impact Initiative.
Ben Goertzel and Bruce Klein have joined SIAI's team. Ben, Eliezer, Marcello, and others will be working towards Friendly AI as a more unified group.
SIAI matters for two reasons. First, they encourage discussion of the Singularity by holding the annual Singularity Summit. The Singularity, the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence, is the defining event of the coming century, and it could happen in as soon as one or two decades. Second, SIAI is the only organization that takes the problem of Friendly AI seriously. Friendly AI is not an automatic thing. It's something you need to think about and work towards. That's what SIAI is doing.
Self-improving Friendly AI could accomplish a tremendous amount of good. It doesn't matter whether it takes 10 years, or 100 years - benevolent superintelligence in the form of Friendly AI could solve literally all of our problems. Creating such an AI successfully will not be easy. We could mess up and create minds that don't care about us. That's why the field is so important. The earlier we start, the better.
Rebel Against the Future – Kirkpatrick Sale
Few people are self-professed Luddites - typically, people are afraid of what they don't understand and can't use, thus they are afraid of the latest modern technology. But anything invented before they were 14 is not considered "technology" but just "stuff that's always been there", and hence they aren't afraid of it. Aside from the Amish, it's hard to think of a true technology-relinquishing group, but looking around Wikipedia, I found out that a man named Kirkpatrick Sale is considered a prominent self-labeled Luddite. I found an interview with him that I thought was interesting. It got me thinking about these types of people.
I think that transhumanists and futurists should pay attention to Luddites. Why do these people hate technology? It isn't because "they're crazy". It's easy to write off the people you disagree with, but we really shouldn't. Maybe they have legitimate reasons for their dislike of technology. I myself do not love technology for technology itself, but for its' enabling power. I would prefer that most technology be seamless and embedded - that I use my mind to type instead of my fingers, that I can just know the time instead of having to look at a clock, that I could fly across the world myself instead of using an airplane, and so on. That's what transhumanism is often about - 'getting rid' of technology by integrating it into our bodies and personalities.
Here are a couple answers in the interview that I thought were especially interesting:
Q: What emerging technologies should we be especially concerned about?
A: The computer, particularly the PC will bring unmitigated disaster, simply because it enables the powers of this society to do faster and more efficiently the kinds of things it likes to do, with resulting social disintegration, economic polarization, and environmental devastation.
...even though I would have no clue about this guy's worldview if it weren't for a computer.
Q: It is reasonable to assume that the hotly debated issues of the day will pale in relevance in the next twenty to thirty years with expected advances in nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, robotics, biotechnology, etc.. Do you think there is a growing realization over what we are facing?
A: I'd like to see the hotly debated issues be those of nanotechnology, etc. right now. If not, and if they are not somehow contained or rejected, I don't think anyone will be around in 30 years to debate anything.
Hey, I agree!
Foresight Exchange – Selected Claims + Commentary
The Foresight Exchange is a spiffy site. People get together and bet fake money that various futurist events will occur. The idea is that the environment of a prediction market will let you see the aggregate views of a group of betters in a way more insightful than just voting. Bets introduce the dimension of magnitude of confidence. In theory, the urge to win also causes people to think things through more carefully than they would if they had to answer off the cuff.
Naturally, when visiting the site, I go right to the "Computing Theory/AI section". You can see the various lists of claims here. To make your life easier, I'm going to post the interesting AI-related bets here along with their "price plots" (probability graphs) over time.
Ticker symbol: GoCh
The Claim:
A machine will be the best Go player in the world, sometime before the end of 2020 (even if subsequently eclipsed by human players). The evidence and playing conditions are the same as for the Machine Chess Champion Claim, with time limits etc. adjusted for the playing customs of human high-level Go competition.
Price plot:
People are lukewarm on this one. Available computing power per dollar is predicted to increase 100 times over by 2020. I would think this would be enough to brute-force the problem, but it's hard to tell for sure. True brute force is not possible - there are far more possible Go games than chess games - but a Go AI could go pretty far simply by using a large set of heuristics and training set data consisting of games played by the greatest masters. By 2020, I think that Go AI should be good to go.
Next one...
Ticker symbol: mdvw
The Claim:
Before 2025:
1. A mindviewing device can detect the processing of the human mind.
2. The device helps us understand most of the sentence of mind in brain.
3. The device is approved by most scientists.
What 2 is trying to say is that you could use the device to read out most of a sentence that some guy has in his head, without any corpus limits or special training.
Price plot:
Most people obviously don't believe this one will happen. I think they are wrong. We can already make a video of what a cat is seeing by implanting probes in kitty's brain. The main thing holding back human brain-computer interfacing research are ethics regulations against most human testing. New testing noninvasive testing methods, like transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) are circumventing these ethics limits. Ian C. also posted this interesting link yesterday - about a guy trying to create a brain chip that can recreate thoughts. Basic NT (just 'nanotechnology', not even molecular nanotechnology) will allow million-unit-and-up brain probe arrays. Words in our brain are stored in something called the phonological loop, and even if working memory is really defined as interneural connection weights across large portions of the brain and is not strictly localized, I still believe that we'll be able to read sentences in people's mind by then.
Next!
Ticker symbol: Robbie
The Claim:
By the end of December 31, 2035, a humanly mobile robot will be in actual use, as a worker in some business use, consumer service, military use, civil service, or scientific capacity. The robot must be generally human-like or humanoid in shape (see "Background", below), and must have a very human-like competency of motion, along with the ability to distinguish between adult humans, animals, and young children, in circumstances in which the "object" in question is in plain view, *and* in which there is no costuming, trickery, or other mitigating circumstance that might cause even a human to be mistaken.
Price plot:
This one is pretty certain. 2035 looks conservative. 2025 seems more likely. It's true that all the Asimo demos are carefully choreographed, plus it recently managed to face plant while walking down stairs, so we aren't there yet, but it's only a matter of time. If the human motor neurocircuitry is too hard to recreate independently, we can just copy it. The computers and scanners to achieve that will be here in the mid-20s if the rate of progress continues as it has. Such a robot would have a reprogrammable motor lobe, allowing it to act like a ballerina one second and a martial artist the next.
Of course, the introduction of a non-human robot with the full human range of motion would go a long way towards eliminating most conventional labor. They could also build more copies of one another. If that last sentence made you slightly afraid, then you probably have an Adversarial Attitude towards robotics and AI, which tends to get in the way of thinking reasonably about it. Get rid of it and you'll be happy you did.
All done for now. There are plenty of interesting claims on other topics, I suggest you check them out. Have a nice weekend!
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