Accelerating Future

Classes on utilitarianism rarely include encouragements to keep up with the latest in science and technology, or study it specifically. But they definitely should. Our society is in the midst of a technology-dominated era, where new inventions have a much bigger impact on human welfare than newly elected politicians.

Our minds are programmed to overfocus on politics, and underfocus on technology. The reason why is that our ancestors evolved in an environment where the political scene was constantly changing while technology stayed roughly static. Today, both areas change rapidly, but technology has a greater impact.

The classical example (it should be, anyway), is the Haber-Bosch process, the chemical process by which we manufacture fertilizer from nitrogen in the atmosphere. Without it, billions of people would never have been born, because food would be more expensive and scarce. Starvation would be rampant and fewer people would choose to have children. The agricultural industry would be reliant upon acquiring natural nitrate deposits, such as Argentinian guano, to provide fertilizer for food. If it weren’t for the Haber-Bosch process, these nitrate deposits would probably have run out some time ago.

If we suppose that these billions of people are leading lives worth living, then the invention of the Haber-Bosch process was an act of tremendous positive utility, for which two central individuals, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, deserve credit. Logic might dictate that these two men should be household names, but they aren’t, because we take their innovations for granted. But if the Haber-Bosch process suddenly stopped working, millions of people would starve, or be dependent on their governments to pick up the huge check for the acquisition of alternative fertilizers.

Today, only a minority of philosophers are techno-literate. They can say, “we should be utilitarian” in the abstract, but are they well-qualified to make the actual decisions about which technologies to advocate and which to ignore? We might optimistically assume that this is automatically taken care of by the market, and while the market is a much better economic optimizer than many human decision-making agencies, it is short-sighted. A consumer buying a product from a certain company is typically not buying it to contribute to future research that will bring economic benefit - they are only focused on the product at hand. Vocal activism from scientists, philosophers, and policy-makers is necessary to accelerate development of beneficial technologies.

Some politicians are on the right track when they say that the right way to address global warming is through technology. Changing consumption behavior on the personal level is radically harder than simply introducing a new technology that is inherently more efficient or less environmentally destructive. But the politics is more emotionally engaging, so we overfocus on that.

To get past the politics and become capable of debating the technology on a finer level, utilitarians should take the time to read up on it.

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We know that reprogrammable self-replicating systems are possible because they’re swarming all around us. Every living thing is a reprogrammable self-replicating system. DNA is the program, asexual or sexual reproduction is the means of replication. But there’s still more work to be done before we can create artificial self-replicating systems. Let’s take a look at the history of the concept in recent times.

The concept of self-replicating automata was first formalized by John von Neumann, one of the greatest computer scientists and mathematicians of the 20th century. His Universal Constructor was virtual rather than physical, and can be seen as history’s first computer virus. Von Neumann proved that the most effective way of performing massive mining operations such as mining an entire moon or asteroid belt would be by using self-replicating machines, taking advantage of their exponential growth. His magnum opus on the topic, Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, was published in 1966.

After von Neumann’s work, the field of self-replicating systems was dormant for a decade and a half. It was revived in 1980 at the request of newly elected President Jimmy Carter, for a cost of $11.7 million. This was the landmark “Advanced Automation for Space Missions” NASA summer study, conducted by Robert Freitas, among others. The study, which focused on lunar robotics, concluded, “there are several alternative strategies by which machine self-replication can be carried out in a practical engineering setting”, and that “the virtually cost-free expansion of mining, processing, and manufacturing capacity, once an initial investment is made in an autonomous self-replicating system, makes possible the commercial utilization of the abundant energy and mineral resources of the Moon”. Unfortunately this proposal was quietly declined and passed into obscurity, with negligible media coverage. Freitas still works on the tools to build artificial self-replicating systems today, through his Nanofactory Collaboration project.

In the early and mid-80s, an MIT graduate student named Eric Drexler made waves with his theories of nanoscale assemblers and self-replicating nanobots. His landmark 1986 book, Engines of Creation, has since been translated into six different languages and serves as a standard reference for nanotechnology discussions. In 1992, he authored a more technical book, Nanosystems, which goes into great detail regarding the feasibility of self-replicating molecular assemblers. In the 15 years since this book has been published, its critics have yet to find a single technical error. This was the first book to show that ribosomes are not the only theoretically possible molecular-scale self-replicating assemblers. It also showed how massively parallel manufacturing by molecular assemblers could be used to build human-scale products to atomic precision, without overheating, in durations measured in hours. The main challenge would be building the first molecular assembler - from then on, the exponential power of self-replication would take over.

Most recently, in 2004, Tihamer Toth-Fejel determined that “the complexity of a useful kinematic self-replicating system is less than that of a Pentium IV”. This conclusion came out of a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts study, “Modeling Kinematic Cellular Automata”. In 2003, for their Timeline for Molecular Manufacturing, the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (CRN) argued that the complexity of a self-replicating molecular assembler would be similar to that of the Space Shuttle. In his October 2003 paper, “Design of a Primitive Nanofactory”, CRN Director of Research Chris Phoenix explained the development path between the first molecular assembler and desktop nanofactories in great detail, showing how tiny 200 nm blocks could be combined in enormous numbers to create human-sized products made out of diamond, using nothing but simple hydrocarbons for feedstock.

Today, the prospect of reprogrammable self-replicating machines is all but ignored by mainstream science and engineering. A dozen or so researchers continue to pursue the goal, hampered by a lack of funding and popular support. The community is small enough that I’ve met most of the involved individuals personally and continue to correspond with many of them regularly. Most of these researchers believe we’ll be able to build a molecular assembler sometime before 2025.

For much more on this, see my other posts on the topic. For a comprehensive view on the history and theory of self-replicating kinematic machines, see the book of the same name, Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines. Incidentally, First Class members of the Lifeboat Foundation get this book sent to them free of charge.

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There are quite a few individuals that react to the idea of qualitatively smarter-than-human intelligence, AI or otherwise, with extreme skepticism and derision. My guess is that there are four possible reasons for this, which different people display in different combinations and intensity levels.

The first is the folk theory that intelligence is a light bulb - either it’s on, or it’s off. No in between. If you have it, it only varies to a matter of degree, not qualitatively. Humans have intelligence and animals don’t, which is why it’s okay to raise animals for food, for instance. Intelligence and subjective consciousness go hand in hand.

The second is the argument from divine privilege. Man, being made in God’s image, has been given the gift of reason. We cannot magnify this gift on our own any more than we can engineer a machine that turns us into angels. This “gift of reason” argument is what I was taught by my parents as a child.

The third is technological skepticism. For example, my grandfather, who is an atheist, believes it will be centuries before we understand the brain in enough detail to manipulate it significantly. This skepticism derives partially from a linear intuitive view of technological progress, and partly from a pseudo-spiritual worship of brain complexity.

The fourth is outright denial based on fear. Some people associate superintelligence with heartlessness, boring rationality, ruining all the fun, threatening to replace us, and so on. This is primarily based on fictional portrayals. There are dozens of films and books in which superintelligences are the bad guys. Astonishingly, the dumber good guys always seem to triumph in the end.

Can you think of any others?

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Bacterial cells have little organelles in them called mesosomes. According to the Wikipedia article, “Mesosomes may play a role in cell wall formation during cell division and/or chromosome replication and distribution and/or electron transfer systems of respiration. Electron transport chains are found within the mesosome producing 32-34ATP. They act as an anchor to bind and pull apart daughter chromosomes during cell division.” Various subscription-required articles, though some free, go on and on about the possible functions of these small organelles in the bacterial division, respiration, etc. Mesosomes were originally discovered in 1960.

Small problem. Sometime in the mid-70s, scientists realized that mesosomes weren’t even real. They were just artifacts caused by freeze-fractures in the chemical fixation process for electron microscopy. Little intrusions produced where the plasma membrane and cell wall came apart from the stress of the fixation process. So much for that idea.

If you figure that biologists get paid something like $60,000 per year, and it takes a couple months to do research and write a paper, and maybe something like 500 papers were published on mesosomes before they realized that what they were studying was pure bunk, then the biology community as a whole burned through ~$5 million chasing a ghost.

What does this have to do with the subject matter of this site? I often talk about intelligence enhancement and the recursive snowballing effect that I and many others predict would occur soon after its development. If a sufficiently intelligent biologist were on the research team that first discovered “mesosomes” in 1960, they could have discovered these were just artifacts by replacing the water used in the fixation process with an inorganic solvent, and all this confusion would have been saved. Our society has a bias against being too hard on people for these little mistakes, because, at least they tried. People would be pointing fingers non-stop if we always judged past events with the knowledge of hindsight. And we’re only human, right?

The magical difference that increased intelligence produces is getting it right the first time. It’s very tough for us to imagine a slightly-smarter-than-human intelligence that constantly solves difficult problems right off the bat, because we’ve never seen one. If the smartest human we can throw at the problem is just about as good as anyone else, then we project the quality of hardness onto the problem - not onto the abstract recognition that “human intelligence isn’t good enough”. This is the mind projection fallacy. But what we naively label “impossible” might be “easy” even to a mild version of superintelligence, say a human being with an artificially expanded neocortex. We may say, “this problem inherently requires five years of research!”, but a superintelligence walks along, says, “no it doesn’t”, and solves it in five minutes. We’re too quick to label things extremely difficult or impossible, but if we don’t, we lose our self-respect as a species, so many would argue we have to.

It seems like only transhumanists are capable of really stepping outside of that box of Homo sapiens and saying, “what if we were really and truly fundamentally smarter?” If more people could do this, then pursuing intelligence enhancement technology might become a national or even global priority.

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This is the title image of Chris Phoenix’s 2005 NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts study, titled “Large-Product General-Purpose Design and Manufacturing Using Nanoscale Modules”. I had missed it before because it’s not on CRN’s website, but it’s a full 112 pages and looks like a fascinating and technically detailed document.

Also, a couple images of me, one of which was used for the Psych Today article (left one) are online. Don’t laugh, they made me wear those damn gloves.

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I made the above image while idly listening to the podcast mentioned previously. It describes the Singularity idea pretty straightforwardly. If technology can be used to improve intelligence, even a little bit, then that will lead to further advances in intelligence enhancement technology, and so on, until there are superintelligent gods, right there on our front porch. Thus, it’s counterproductive to work on the really big projects ourselves, when we can ’simply’ invent intelligence enhancement technology, use it to make ourselves smarter, and then use our superintelligence to much more effectively pursue them.

Skepticism around the idea, explicitly or implicitly, generally takes the form that human beings are pretty much the smartest and fastest thinkers that can possibly exist, therefore intelligence enhancement technology will only provide tiny gains. Considering how far intelligence has come since the beginning of life on Earth, I think it’s pretty bold to suggest that we’re the endpoint of the process of intelligence improvement. Some also think it’s “betraying humanity” to advocate superintelligence, but really, I personally love humanity a lot, but think we should avoid xenophobia about greater intelligence. The world needn’t be a zero-sum place where humans automatically lose just because a smarter species shows up.

In the past, the process was incredibly slow, because evolution takes millions of years to make appreciable changes. This time, the process will be incredibly fast, partially because minds are substrate-independent and can be cognitively accelerated by better hardware, but also due to the qualitative smartness factor.

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My interview with RU Sirius has been made into a transcript and posted online, for your skimming pleasure. This was the first time I got to meet RU in the flesh, after having bought his 1992 book, Mondo 2000: A User’s Guide to the New Edge, at a garage sale when I was 16. I think he is pretty cool and I like the way he is giving numerous transhumanists and intelligent futurists publicity nowadays.

In other news, Eliezer Yudkowsky was interviewed recently by Cameron Reilly, an Australian podcast mogul. He’s also interviewed other familiar people you may have heard of, like Aubrey de Grey, Ray Kurzweil, etc. You can find the links to those other interviews right there on the page. This is not the best podcast ever… if you’ve never listened or read anything of Eliezer’s before then I would recommend this video first.

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