Top 10 Transhumanist Technologies
Transhumanists advocate the improvement of human capacities through advanced technology. Not just technology as in gadgets you get from Best Buy, but technology in the grander sense of strategies for eliminating disease, providing cheap but high-quality products to the world's poorest, improving quality of life and social interconnectedness, and so on. Technology we don't notice because it's blended in with the fabric of the world, but would immediately take note of its absence if it became unavailable. (Ever tried to travel to another country on foot?) Technology needn't be expensive - indeed, if a technology is truly effective it will pay for itself many times over.
Transhumanists tend to take a longer-than-average view of technological progress, looking not just five or ten years into the future but twenty years, thirty years, and beyond. We realize that the longer you look forward, the more uncertain the predictions get, but one thing is quite certain: if a technology is physically possible and obviously useful, human (or transhuman!) ingenuity will see to it that it gets built eventually. As we gain ever greater control over the atomic structure of matter, our technological goals become increasingly ambitious, and their payoffs more and more generous. Sometimes new technologies even make us happier in a long-lasting way: the Internet would be a prime example. In the following list I take a look at what I consider the top ten transhumanist technologies.
10. Cryonics. (Not cryogenics, that's something else.)
Cryonics is the high-fidelity preservation of the human body, and particularly the brain, after what we would call death, in anticipation of possible future revival. Cryonics is an important transhumanist technology not only because it is already available today, but because the technology is relatively mature - we can reliably stop cells from decaying. In vitrification, the brain is not frozen in the conventional manner but with a cryoprotectant (antifreeze) mixture, which effectively prevents the formation of crystals, causing the water to freeze smoothly, like glass. Maintenance of a cryo-patient is not difficult - it requires no electricity, but merely the replenishment of liquid nitrogen about every three weeks. As cryonics becomes more popular, this process could become automated and extremely reliable. Further improvements in dewar technology will continue to increase safety and reduce costs. The Cryonics Institute in Michigan, for example, has operated since 1976 without a single mishap.
Financed by the interest of the payout of a life insurance policy (which for people under 40 may cost as little as $100 a year to own), patients can be securely cryopreserved for as long as the cryonics company stays afloat and the dewar stays in one piece. Eventual revival does not require the technology to become available tomorrow, or next year... as long as the liquid nitrogen keeps replenished, you can stay on ice for as long as it takes. For an existence proof of cryonic revival, there are frogs that can freeze solid and revive later, though reviving a human from freezing would likely require molecular nanotechnology (MNT). When we will be able to revive a cryo-patient will be strongly related to when we develop sophisticated MNT. Once we do develop MNT, the prospect of successful revival is extremely likely - it would involve slowly melting the ice and rebooting the metabolism by kickstarting the appropriate chemical reactions within cells.
9. Virtual reality.
The above image may look like a photo, but it's actually a screenshot from the game Crysis, a first-person shooter which will be released later this year. Look at screenshots from the game and you'll see that computer graphics are already beginning to approach photorealism. Sometime in the 2020s, reality simulations will become so high-resolution and immersive that they'll start to get indistinguishable from the real thing. Simulations will become the preferred environments for work and play. Pretty soon the main obstacle to truly immersive VR will not be the visuals but the haptics - our sense of touch. To fool our senses into believing haptic technologies are conveying the real thing, the "frame rate" needs to be significantly higher than for visual technologies, a few hundred updates per second rather than a few dozen - which is why development could take another decade or two. But many millions of dollars are currently going into efforts to develop advanced VR.
Clearly, World of Warcraft's eight million subscribers and SecondLife's five million subscribers are onto something. At least 1% of all broadband Internet users play in virtual worlds, and this number is increasing rapidly. These worlds typically outclass the real world in terms of customizability, but still have yet to catch up in terms of sensory richness or social fulfillment. But it's only a matter of time. In the mid-to-late 2020s, I expect full-body, high quality haptic VR suits to be affordable to the average person in developed countries, obtained either from your local WalMart or perhaps printed right out of a desktop nanofactory after payment of a fee. For more on this, here is one scientific paper, "Towards full-body haptic feedback".
8. Gene therapy/RNA interference.
Gene therapy replaces bad genes with good genes, and RNA interference can selectively knock out gene expression. Together, they give us an unprecedented ability to manipulate our own genetic code. By knocking out genes that code for certain metabolic proteins, scientists have been able to make mice that stay slim no matter how much junk food they eat. Lou Gehrig's disease has been cured in mice, and it could only be a few years before we develop a therapy that can cure it for humans too. Aubrey de Grey's SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) research program contains various prescriptions for the use of gene therapy. Within a couple decades or so, progress in anti-aging therapies will improve to the point where we are gaining more than an extra year of lifespan per year, reaching so-called "longevity escape velocity" eventually culminating in indefinite lifespans.
Like many transhumanist technologies, gene therapy is really exciting because it's just beginning. No scientist has yet performed gene therapy on germline cells (sexual cells in the gonads) due to the ethical controversy of producing genetic changes which are heritable, but, as with many of these things, it's only a matter of time. Regulations in any given country will only be capable of slowing the overall progress of the field by a few years at most. The money will go where the research is permitted. In its mature form, gene therapy and genetic engineering will become extremely cheap and powerful, letting humans live comfortably in a wider range of environments and gain immunity to most, if not all diseases. Supercomputers of the future, with thousands or millions of times the crunch power of today's best, will let us simulate the changes in extreme detail before we attempt them with actual human beings. This will make ill side effects quite unlikely for the typical case, much to the dismay of the authors of "genetic engineering turned daddy into a bloodthirsty zombie!" trash novels and films.
7. Space colonization.
Space colonies will become necessary to house the many billions of individuals that will be born in the future as our population continues to expand at a lazy exponential. In his book, The Millennial Project, Marshall T. Savage estimates that the Asteroid Belt could hold 7,500 trillion people, if thoroughly reshaped into O'Neill colonies. At a typical population growth rate for developed countries at 1% per annum (doubling every 72 years), it would take us 1,440 years to fill that space. Siphoning light gases off ******* and ****** and fusing them into heavier elements for construction of further colonies seems plausible in the longer term as well.
Why expand into space? For many, the answers are blatantly obvious, but the easiest is that the alternatives are limiting the human freedom to reproduce, or mass murder, both of which are morally unacceptable. Population growth is not inherently antithetical to a love of the environment - in fact, by expanding outwards into the cosmos in all directions, we'll be able to seed every star system with every species of plant and animal imaginable. The genetic diversity of the embryonic home planet will seem tiny by comparison.
Space colonization is closely related to transhumanism through the mutual association of futurist philosophy, but also more directly because the embrace of transhumanism will be necessary to colonize space. Human beings aren't designed to live in space. Our physiological issues with it are manifold, from deteriorating muscle mass to uncontrollable flatulence. On the surface of Venus, we would melt, on the surface of Mars, we'd freeze. The only reasonable solution is to upgrade our bodies. Not terraform the cosmos, but cosmosform ourselves.
6. Cybernetics.
Can you spot the cyborg in this picture? You're looking right at him! It's Michael Chorost, the man who was born almost deaf but now can hear, thanks to a cochlear implant. Most of the cyborgs in fiction fit certain stereotypes - Ãœbermensch wannabes, cyborg assassins, and supercops. But cyborgs already walk among us, and they look just like normal people. This trend will continue in the future. Many cyborg upgrades which will become available in the 20s and 30s, such as hearing and vision enhancement, metabolic enhancement, artificial bones, muscles, and organs, and even brain-computer interfaces will be invisible to the casual observer, implanted beneath the skin. Cybernetic features on the surface, such as dermal enhancements or technological actuators like retractable wings, will be carefully camouflaged. No one will want to shock the rest of society by looking like the tin man in public.
The process of cyborgization has already been happening for centuries if not millennia, since the advent of clothing and piercings. For many generations, but especially in the last couple decades, our technological gadgets have been getting smaller, more functional, and more closely integrated with our natural activity. Recently, Microsoft announced Microsoft Surface, a mouseless, keyboardless form of desktop computing which takes input from finger tracing and hand gestures. The sophistication of biotechnology and the availability of better materials and precision manufacturing will let us make systems so small and effective that even everyday people elect to implant them. These cybernetic systems will greatly improve our everyday experience, from letting us hear a wider range of ambient sounds, to viewing millions of stars rather than just a few thousand, to making us more resistant to accidents. They will improve the overall economy by enabling us do more work in less time for better pay. In the long term, enhanced humans may get a bigger portion of the economic pie than un-augmented humans, but the pie itself will become so much larger than even the poorest humans of tomorrow will be better off than the wealthiest of today.
Here's a good cyborg blog I found while doing research for this article, and the Power Jacket, a 4-pound jacket that enhances strength and is used by people recovering from paralysis. For more, see the cybernetics category of my del.ic.ious links, or my top ten list of cybernetic enhancements.
5. Autonomous self-replicating robotics.
Why do manual labor when the robots can do it for you? Self-replication might be considered the Holy Grail of robotics. A landmark NASA study, "Advanced Automation for Space Missions", found that robotic self-replication is just a matter of engineering, and that no fundamental theoretical breakthroughs are needed. The study proposed sending a 100-ton package to the Moon, with a self-replication time of 1 year, and letting it self-replicate until the desired level of development is attained. The design - which was fleshed out in great detail - was based on electric carts running on rails within the factory, "paving machines" that direct sunlight to melt lunar regolith, robotic strip miners for obtaining raw materials, and a solar cell "canopy" for powering it all. After 10 years, over 100,000 tons of lunar factory could be produced autonomously. The factory's functions could then be hijacked for the benefit of human colonists, used to produce housing, products, and provide large quantities of solar power.
If similar self-replicating systems could be constructed on Earth, there would be little limit to the material plenty they could provide. Self-replicating factories could turn the vast empty badlands of Australia into lush gardens by pumping water from the oceans, self-replicating factories in the high Arctic could melt snow and create gigantic transparent domes suitable for habitation, and submersible automata in the seas could dredge sand from abiotic regions of the ocean floor and process it into gigantic platforms for human colonization. By opening up such vast new regions of the Earth's surface, talk of overpopulation and crowding would fall by the wayside for quite a few decades, with people realizing how much space there actually was all along. And once things really do get too crowded here on Earth, we can move to the Moon, Mars, and the asteroid belt, using the power of self-replicating robotics to create rotating space colonies suitable for housing trillions of people.
Self-replicating factories could reduce the costs of material goods close to that of food - the primary expenses would consist of raw materials, energy, and whatever small quantity of human oversight is necessary to keep an eye on the overall structure of things. By utilizing special, man-made "nutrients" for top-level functions (rare or exotic molecules such as custom-synthesized proteins) and the broadcast architecture - whereby derivative factories must receive affirmations from a central parent factory to continue self-replicating - such factories could be made safe by design. With such abundance, humanity might actually shift from having a zero-sum perspective on a world to a positive-sum perspective. With medical tools and basic goods in ample supply, no one in the world would need to suffer from poverty or curable disease. The nature of human work would shift from manual drudgery and mind-numbing routine to more creative and personally fulfilling endeavors, like art, music, math, science, literature, and exploration.
For more details on the state of the art in self-replicating machines, see the Wikipedia entry, or the magnum opus on the topic, Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines.
4. Molecular manufacturing.
If self-replication is the Holy Grail of robotics, then molecular nanotechnology (MNT) is the Holy Grail of manufacturing. Molecular nanotechnology would use massive arrays of nanometer-scale actuators (produced initially through self-replication) to manufacture macroscale products with atomic precision. This concept is known as the nanofactory. In practical terms, the creation of nanofactories would mean that practically everything could be made out of diamond, motors would become so powerful that a cubic centimeter would provide enough torque to propel a car, medical nanodevices could heal wounds and repair organs without the need for surgery, and air-suspended nanodevices ("utility fog") could be configured to simulate practically any desired object on demand. On the downside of things, it could become easy to manufacture mite-sized robots with a payload of poison sufficient to kill thousands, or a laptop-sized device capable of separating U-235 from U-238 in a worrisomely simple and rapid fashion, or self-replicating synthetic algae capable of clogging up our oceans with grey goo. Enabling widespread use of the positive applications while cleanly and completely suppressing the nasty applications is a first-order challenge. Incidentally, you can make a difference right now by donating to the Lifeboat Foundation or Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, two of very few organizations focusing on this area.
To some, molecular nanotechnology sounds like science fiction, and based on the grandiose applications I discussed in the previous paragraph, you can't blame them. But many of the prerequisites of molecular manufacturing have already been demonstrated - "molecular surgery" has been used to snip off and replace individual hydrogen atoms, various functional nanoscale devices have been built, scanning tunneling microscopy has been used to mechnically manipulate individual atoms, and so on. The challenge is to create a nanoscale manipulator arm capable of placing individual atoms with angstrom-level precision, avoiding undesired reactions, and serving as a universal constructor that can build a copy of itself. There are numerous technical challenges still outstanding, but when these are overcome, manufacturing will be granted the power that nature has had for hundreds of millions of years - the ability to fabricate large objects with molecular precision. The numerous potential applications of the techology to human enhancement are obvious; with molecular manufacturing, we could orchestrate elegant improvements to every single body component, achieving all of the upgrades described on my top ten list, and many more.
3. Megascale engineering.
Most people are familiar with megascale engineering because it is seen throughout fiction - the Death Star, for instance. Typically, megascale engineering refers to building structures at least 1,000 km in length in one dimension, such as a space elevator, Globus Cassus, or Dyson sphere. With the self-replicating robotics described above, the production of such large structures could be done largely by autonomous drones, with intelligent agents only managing the highest top-level functions and architecture. Considering that mankind's long-term future is in space, and that space right now is pretty devoid of any structure useful or habitable to humans, we have a lot of work to do, and if you can make the projects megascale, why not?
Like some of the other items on this list, megascale engineering is only indirectly transhumanist - but is still very relevant to the long-term future of intelligent life. Megascale engineering goes hand-in-hand with the grandiose transhumanist vision: intelligent beings spreading across the cosmos, and eventually shaping the very structure of the universe itself. The fact that these vast expanses of colonizable space are currently neglected imposes on us a vast opportunity cost - if we hurried up a bit and colonized them, we could give rise to tremendous numbers of people leading worthwhile lives. What experiences would they have, and what stories would they tell? We'll never find out, unless we make it happen.
2. Mind uploading.
Mind uploading, sometimes referred to as nonbiological intelligence, centers around the controversial proposition that cognitive processing can be implemented on substrates other than our current neurons. Considering decades of successful results in neurophysiology, and the recent construction of the world's first brain prosthesis - an artificial copy of the hippocampus - this seems very likely. It appears that our minds are defined more by the information pattern they embody than the particular hardware they are implemented on. Numerous philosophers of mind have long recognized this, but acceptance among the wider public has been a long time in coming: people don't want to think that they're "just" data structures being implemented as computational automata on biological neurons. But it is hard to think of it any other way: once we dismiss the possibility of an immaterial soul, we must acknowledge the mind as a material pattern implemented in physical configurations, and if other substances aside from our current neurons can meet the requirements for these configurations, then there is no reason why intelligence and consciousness could not exist on another substrate. For a humorous look at this complex philosophical argument, see "They're Made Out of Meat" by Terry Bisson.
If our brains really don't have to be made out of meat, then we can transfer them to other substrates. By incrementally replacing each neuron with a synthetic neuron-equivalent, the whole process could go down painlessly and seamlessly. The transfer could be as slow or as fast as we want: from the information-processing perspective of the brain itself, nothing ever changes. Light still comes in through the eye's lens, hits the retina, is transformed into nerve impulses which travel down the optic nerve, receives further processing in the visual cortex at the back of the brain, the highlights of which are sent to the prefrontal cortex for integration with information from the other senses. The brain can't tell if it's made out of traditional meat, or accelerated biological neurons, or entirely nonbiological neuron-equivalents: the computation is the same. Sometimes this notion is also referred to as an application of the Church-Turing thesis.
If entirely synthetic brains are possible, then there's nothing stopping such persons from inhabiting computer networks - not indirectly, sitting in chairs as we currently do, but directly, engaging in computer worlds as a sentient program of tremendous complexity. With molecular manufacturing on hand, reversing the process would be as simple as printing out a hundred or so kilograms of flesh and bone again, complete with memories from the networked experience. This is probably among the transhumanist visions that most reliably elicits the "yuck!" reaction, but if functionalism is true, then virtual experience will be indistinguishable from physical experience. Not only that, but even more enjoyable, due to the manifold degrees of freedom which would become newly accessible. In a virtual world, there are no laws of physics except those we choose.
For a bit more on simulations, see this primer, and remember: be careful not to generalize from fictional evidence.
1. Artificial General Intelligence.
As argued in the previous section, functionalism seems likely. If so, then strong AI is possible. Thinking, feeling, imagining, creating, communicating, thoughtful synthetic intelligences with conscious experiences. Whether serial computing is sufficient, or parallel computing is necessary, both are within technological reach, and present-day computing speeds are fast approaching the computing power of the human brain. In fact, according to many estimates, the fastest present-day supercomputer, Blue Gene/P, has already exceeded it. Blue Gene/P operates continuously at speeds of over a petaflop, which is a million billion operations per second. For strong AI skeptics, no computer - even one operating at trillions of trillions of trillions of operations per second, is sufficient to implement true intelligence, but to functionalists like myself, such a meat-centric perspective is unjustified.
Distinct from artificial intelligence in general, which has come to refer to any sophisticated software program, artificial general intelligence refers to AIs that display open-ended learning and similar competency levels to human beings. A handful of researchers are working diligently towards artificial general intelligence, informed by the mathematics of inference and probability theory: Jürgen Schmidhuber, whose "main scientific ambition has been to build an optimal scientist, then retire"; Marcus Hutter, author of the landmark book Universal Artificial Intelligence; Ben Goertzel, who recently presented his AI design in a talk to Google; and Eliezer Yudkowsky, who is developing a reflective decision theory from first principles. Whether or not others believe in the feasibility of general AI, these individuals will keep working, and one will eventually succeed.
The way the world would be impacted by the arrival of general AI is too extreme to discuss in much detail here. If raw materials such as sand can be converted into computer chips and then into intelligent minds, eventually the majority of material in the solar system could be made intelligent and conscious. The result would be a "noetic Renaissance": the expansion of intelligence and experience beyond our wildest dreams. Conversely, if not given empathic values, artificial intelligence could lead to the doom of all. It's up to us to set the initial conditions appropriately: if not, we might not be around to regret it.
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Kaj Sotala: Why Care About Artificial Intelligence?
Kaj Sotala, a fellow supporter of both the Lifeboat Foundation and Singularity Institute, has published a new article, "Why care about artificial intelligence?" to follow up on his "Artificial intelligence within our lifetime?" article, which I covered in March.
The main thrust of the article is that AIs could potentially be much, much more powerful than human beings, and therefore we have an important stake in how their motivational systems are constructed. The main talking points are:
- Artificial intelligences can do everything humans can
- Limitations of the human mental architecture
- Limitations of the human hardware
- Comparative human/AI evolution and initial resources
- Considerations and implications of superhuman AI
- Controlling AI: Enabling factors
- Controlling AI: Limiting factors
- Immense risks, immense benefits
- Summary and implications
Also recently published by Kaj on his site are the works, "Transhumanism: Happiness, Equality, Choice", "Ethics of forced choice and future selves", and "In defense of transhuman development". The papers are only a couple of pages each, suitable for a quick and informative read.
Transhumanist Statement
I have seen a world where death and disease have been defeated by science...
where food, shelter, and clothing is manufactured quickly, and without waste...
where transparency makes violent crime impossible, and authorities accountable...
where people walk on other planets and in endless virtual worlds...
where intelligence and empathy are magnified far beyond present levels...
where the diversity of sentient beings has expanded to unimaginable proportions...
where the risk of human extinction has been reduced to near zero.
I will endeavor to take the fastest safe route to such a future, and direct my present-day energies towards its realization. I will be polite and understanding to skeptics and naysayers. I will thoroughly enjoy my daily life while simultaneously working for a better future. I will work towards that future for the good of all, not just myself, and try my best to maintain an altruistic point of view at all times.
Singularity Reading Recommendations
For those interested in more seriously exploring the issues of Artificial General Intelligence and the Singularity, I'd like to recommend the following writings, in the following order:
Creating Friendly AI
Levels of Organization in General Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk
Coherent Extrapolated Volition
Knowability of Friendly AI
If you make it through these five documents, please do email me and tell me what you think. One of the biggest barriers to sophisticated Singularity discourse is simply that most people do not take the time to look at the existing literature in detail.
Skeptical Science and Technology Quotes
"..so many centuries after the Creation it is unlikely that anyone could
find hitherto unknown lands of any value." - committee advising Ferdinand
and Isabella regarding Columbus' proposal, 1486
"I would sooner believe that two Yankee professors lied, than that stones
fell from the sky" - Thomas Jefferson, 1807 on hearing an eyewitness
report of falling meteorites.
"Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil?
You're crazy." - Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his
project to drill for oil in 1859.
"Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction." - Pierre
Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872
"The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the
intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon." - Sir John Eric Ericksen,
British surgeon, appointed Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria
1873.
"Such startling announcements as these should be depreciated as being
unworthy of science and mischievious to to its true progress" - Sir
William Siemens, 1880, on Edison's announcement of a successful light bulb.
"We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy." -
Simon Newcomb, astronomer, 1888
"Fooling around with alternating current is just a waste of time. Nobody
will use it, ever." - Thomas Edison, 1889
"The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have
all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the
possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new
discoveries is exceedingly remote.... Our future discoveries must be
looked for in the sixth place of decimals." - physicist Albert. A.
Michelson, 1894
"It is apparent to me that the possibilities of the aeroplane, which two
or three years ago were thought to hold the solution to the [flying
machine] problem, have been exhausted, and that we must turn elsewhere."
- Thomas Edison, 1895
"The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known
forms of machinery, and known forms of force can be united in a
practicable machine by which men shall fly for long distances through the
air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the
demonstration of any physical fact to be." - astronomer S. Newcomb, 1906
"Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value." - Marechal
Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre, 1911
"Caterpillar landships are idiotic and useless. Those officers and men
are wasting their time and are not pulling their proper weight in the war"
- Fourth Lord of the British Admiralty, 1915, in regards to use of tanks
in war.
"Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and
reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum against
which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily
in high schools." - 1921 New York Times editorial about Robert
Goddard's revolutionary rocket work.
"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who
would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" - David
Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the
radio in the 1920s.
"All a trick." "A Mere Mountebank." "Absolute swindler." "Doesn't know
what he's about." "What's the good of it?" "What useful purpose will it
serve?" - Members of Britain's Royal Society, 1926, after a demonstration
of television.
"This foolish idea of shooting at the moon is an example of the absurd
lengths to which vicious specialisation will carry scientists."
-A.W. Bickerton, physicist, NZ, 1926
"Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." -
Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929.
"There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be
obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at
will." -- Albert Einstein, 1932
"The energy produced by the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who
expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is
talking moonshine" - Ernst Rutherford, 1933
"The whole procedure [of shooting rockets into space]...presents
difficulties of so fundamental a nature, that we are forced to dismiss the
notion as essentially impracticable, in spite of the author's insistent
appeal to put aside prejudice and to recollect the supposed impossibility
of heavier-than-air flight before it was actually accomplished." Richard
van der Riet Wooley, British astronomer, reviewing P.E. Cleator's "Rockets
in Space", Nature, March 14, 1936
"Space travel is utter bilge!" -Sir Richard Van Der Riet Wolley, astronomer
"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." - Popular
Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949
"I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked
with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a
fad that won't last out the year." - The editor in charge of business
books for Prentice Hall, 1957
"Space travel is bunk" -Sir Harold Spencer Jones, Astronomer Royal of
Britain, 1957, two weeks before the launch of Sputnik
"There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be
used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television, or radio
service inside the United States." -T. Craven, FCC Commissioner, 1961
"But what... is it good for?" - Engineer at the Advanced Computing
Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken
Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp.,
1977
“What are the Odds?”, by Mitchell Howe
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a topic that always seems to drop on and off the radar of public interest in synch with Hollywood portrayals and celebrity prognostications. Indeed, the most recent spat of attention has followed a much-publicized $10,000 wager made by futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil against corporate trailblazer Mitchell Kapor. The bet, solemnized at www.longbets.org (where all winnings go to charity), is that a computer, or "machine intelligence," will pass the so-called Turing test by 2029. The Turing test, a challenge to see if a computer can fool a human judge into thinking it is human, is a traditional benchmark for the point when true Artificial Intelligence can be said to have been achieved - a historic moment, by any measure.
But with recent discussion of AI taking place in the context of a wager, debates have tended to focus on the difficulty of the problem rather than the implications - as though the arrival of true Artificial Intelligence would only mean the difference between a robot making your coffee and brewing it yourself.
What are the stakes, really? Why should this wager matter to you personally? And what, exactly, are the odds?
First Scenario: Kapor Wins. (No true AI by 2029)
Between now and 2029, the steady march of progress will continue; worker productivity will climb as technological innovation improves efficiency in most industries. Genetic engineering will make new headway in combating disease and improving food supplies. Nanotechnology - the engineering of materials and devices at the molecular level - will steadily mature, accelerating economic development.
As a consequence of these conditions, your standard of living will improve, your life expectancy will increase, and you will enjoy new leisure activities made possible by faster computers and richer interfaces (i.e. Virtual Reality). But during this time you will also endure the usual misfortunes of illness and injury, and one or more persons close to you will suffer a disease, accident, or age-related death. There is also a good chance that somewhere in the world, an intentional or accidental use of genetically engineered bio-weapons or self-replicating nanotechnology will cause casualties numbering in the millions. And there is a small but non-zero chance that such a disaster will bloom out of control and wipe out the human race.
Second Scenario: Kurzweil Wins. (True AI before 2029)
Between now and 2029, scientists will work out a functional design for true AI that possesses a core desire to understand and assist humanity (a characteristic called Friendliness by some researchers). While unimpressive at first, the new AI will learn quickly and receive extra computing capacity to increase its capabilities. Once mature, it will assist its programmers in the design of a next-generation AI. This process will be repeated a number of times with considerable improvements in both intelligence and Friendliness, and before too long will produce one or more minds that can only be called superintelligent. Applying phenomenal brilliance to the betterment of the human condition, Friendly superintelligence will ensure that nanotechnology and genetic engineering are quickly mastered to an extent that human scientists alone could never have reached. Technological progress will be so rapid as to fundamentally change our perception of civilization itself.
As a consequence of these conditions, you (and everyone else) will enjoy unconditional material prosperity and indefinite life-expectancy - with the resulting time and means for pursuits that may include increasing your own intelligence and exploring the galaxy. You will be free to forgo most of the usual misfortunes of illness and injury, and no person close to you will suffer death from disease or old age unless they choose to. The same intelligence that allows for the mastery of genetic engineering and nanotechnology will also work to prevent the possibility of cataclysmic disasters stemming from these technologies. And other potential threats to our planet, such as asteroid strikes and climate change, will be averted or remedied with surprising ease.
You may feel that this second scenario sounds too good to be true; indeed, this is one reason why many people bet against it. It does, admittedly, depend on a number of things going right. But the chief requirement for a positive outcome is reasonably straightforward: namely, that the first AI to begin the spiraling cycle of increasing intelligence be engineered to share human compassion and values, despite any changes incurred through successive redesigns. Given success in this area, the huge and positive contribution that could be made by superintelligence is generally accepted by futurists; in fact, they even have a name for the point at which greater-than-human intelligence starts changing the world: the Singularity.
It must be said, then, that the stakes in the Kurzweil/Kapor wager are, in fact, awesome. But what are the actual odds that AI will be developed anytime soon? Gambling metaphors fail, for predicting the Singularity is not like forecasting the weather or winning the lottery. The answer to the question of when true AI will be born depends entirely on the actions of real people, like you, who are free to participate in this discussion and support the causes they care about.
Will AI be possible in the near future? Yes. The human brain is extremely complicated and not yet fully understood, but AI engineers do not need to simulate the entire brain in silicon - only the patterns and features that give rise to general intelligence. And if all else fails, the brain can eventually be modeled in close detail. Though mysterious, the brain is tangible proof that intelligence can come in small packages.
AI naysayers would have us believe that the disappointing failure of AI projects over the last fifty years means that we cannot hope to achieve true Artificial Intelligence in the next fifty. However, as investment advertisements must always warn, past performance is no guarantee of future results - an axiom that applies to failure as well as success. Forward-looking individuals realize that, barring our own extinction, AI will eventually be created. But when and how AI comes into being will not depend on a roll of the dice or a spin of the wheel, but on how aggressively and responsibly we set about solving the problem. Think back to the above scenarios for a moment. Kapor and Kurzweil have each bet $10,000. But given the enormous qualitative difference between life before and after the Singularity, how much would it be worth to you to see Friendly AI happen sooner - whether by a few decades, a few years, or even just one day?
We are all participants in this wager, with the poker chips already down and the stakes astronomically high. But what are the odds?
The odds are whatever we choose to make them.
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The Centrality of Self-Replication
Anything that truly impacts the world either self-replicates, has existed in abundance for a very long time, or depends on self-replicators to produce it. Some obvious examples are humans and wheat. The relatively low cost of food products is attributable to their self-replicating nature.
Non self-replicating objects, such as most appliances, furniture, land, and most other forms of property tend to be more costly and scarce than self-replicating objects.
If we could move some of these costly items from the non self-replicating category to the replicating category, or better yet, develop a general-purpose factory that is self-replicating, we would remove most technological barriers to post-scarcity, and greatly improve human prosperity, particularly for the very poor. The condition where a society can quickly and economically fabricate a wide range of useful items, on demand, from inexpensive feedstock, has been called superabundance. A transition to a superabundant society is the next logical step in the progression from manual-labor dependent manufacturing to fully automated manufacturing.
The underlying manufacturing technology and building materials of an era crucially determines the social and political contours of a culture. This is why human prehistory is broken down into the Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age. Neal Stephenson has proposed that the next age might be called the Diamond Age, anticipating the use of covalently bonded carbon as a primary raw material for products. It is not implausible that human civilization will enter the Diamond Age well before the century's close.
When a reprogrammable factory is built that can self-replicate from raw or abundant materials, it will probably be viewed in retrospect as one of the human species' most significant milestones, even more notable than the Moon landing or the use of fire.
An important question: how difficult is it to build a self-replicating factory? Bacteria and other relatively simple prokaryotes self-replicate with ease in a variety of nutrient-rich environments, performing their metabolic tasks largely using just their cell membranes, without dependence on organelles except for ribosomes. They contain all the fundamental necessities of a self-replicating system: blueprints for a copy (DNA), fabricators (ribosomes), a means of processing raw materials into metabolic feedstock (cell membrane), a fabrication medium (cytoplasm), and a shell (cell wall). To reap the economic benefits of self-replication, we must create an artificial construct with all the same basic components and the capability to produce useful outputs from common raw materials such as iron ore or organic detritus.
A recent study on robotic self-replication successfully built self-replicating robotic systems using simple feedstock blocks called Molecubes. In their press release, the Cornell team emphasized that simplicity of building blocks may be the key to robotic self-replication, and pointed out that biological variation is all ultimately founded on different configurations of 20 basic amino acids. Instead of making self-replicators that can reproduce using common chemicals, it might be slightly easier to use cheaply mass-produced feedstock building blocks, at least at first.
Many scientists looking at the challenge of robotic self-replication look to the substance of carbon as an ideal candidate for a basic building block. Carbon, particularly carbon nanotubes, have many useful properties - they can be opaque or nearly transparent, strong or weak, brittle or springy. Using a single type of highly abundant and versatile element for a self-replicating manufacturing system would simplify its design.
Self-replicating machines are one of those interesting research areas that we should be looking for signs of in the daily technology and science headlines. It may be research for space-based applications that kicks the thrust for self-replicating robotics into high gear, as prohibitive launch costs are an excellent motivator for devising systems that make the best possible use of on-site materials.
Happy E.T. Jaynes Day
Today is the birthday of Edwin Thompson Jaynes, a pioneer in probability theory, pictured above from his time at Berkeley in 1946. If Jaynes were alive today, he would be 85 years old. A world-class genius and devoted man of science, Jaynes made serious contributions to statistical mechanics, quantum physics, probability theory, philosophy of science, and even the physiology and mechanics of piano playing. His amusing and straightforward writing style make his works a pleasure to read.
Jaynes is primarily known for advancing the maximum entropy interpretation of thermodynamics, or MaxEnt approach, which, along with Bayesian inference, gives a mathematically optimal way of analyzing large amounts of input data, extracting patterns, and predicting future input. Maximum entropy methods are very popular (Google returns over a million results for the term) and are used for automated data analysis in dozens of disciplines, including medicine, economics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, and more. These methods are widely used in machine learning and can be considered a form of AI.
Most fascinating of all is Jaynes' interpretation of probability theory. He realized that probability theory is a generalization of Aristotlean logic and by introducing degrees of belief this logic can be made much more flexible, as well as capable of dealing with uncertainty. This view is explained at length in his last work, Probability Theory - the Logic of Science. Although some parts of the book are fairly math-heavy, you can still get a lot out of the first few chapters with basic arithmetic.
For shorter pieces by Edwin Jaynes, see his page of unpublished works, which papers and lectures such as "How Does the Brain Do Plausible Reasoning?", and his page of published works, including the fascinating "Prior Probabilities".
Jaynes' bio can be found here.
Singularity-Related Activity for July
For the WiseGeek article contest that I promoted earlier on my blog, the grand prize and one of ten runner-up prizes were won by Accelerating Future readers, for a total cash-out of $7,750. The winning entry was "How Do I Look for Truth in Scientific Controversies?", by a reader who has chosen to remain anonymous. This proves what you may have already known: if you keep reading Accelerating Future, you are likely to end up rich and happy. ;)
In related news, the bloggers over at the Singularity Institute have been busy, and you should consider checking out the latest posts. On his own blog, Michael Graham Richard considers the security risks that a late-stage AGI project might face. My response: if AGI researchers maintain a relatively low profile, then any security danger will be minimal, because the people in power aren't likely to believe that true AI is possible any time soon.
New site: Derek Pegritz, an English teacher and aspiring author, is putting together a locus for Singularity-related hard sci-fi. It's just starting off, but watch that space.
And as a reminder, Transvision 2007 is coming up in three weeks, in Chicago. If you want to hang out with all the cool kids, including the author of The Singularity is Near, Ray Kurzweil, then you'll want to make plans right away. William Shatner, Arianna Huffington, and Marvin Minsky are attending, and let's not forget... yours truly!
If Transvision 2007 is too soon, I suggest attending the upcoming Singularity Summit II: AI and the Future of Humanity here in San Francisco, a two-day event on September 8-9. Robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks will be attending, as well as Google's Director of Search Quality, Peter Norvig. Podcasts with the summit speakers will be made available over the coming months, and the entry fee is only $50. Conferences with speakers of this quality are usually hundreds of bucks.
And as always, I encourage you, the reader, to start your own blog on these topics... the more the merrier, you know? Tom McCabe recently joined us on this domain with his own writings. You might want to consider subscribing.
Buckyball Melting at ~8,500 Kelvin
I've frequently wondered whether it would be possible for cybernetically enhanced humans to colonize Venus without the use of terraforming, or even take a quick dip into the Sun's photosphere and live to tell the tale. If we could replace the skin, muscles, and bones in the body with more durable synthetics, it could be possible. The idea that fullerenes could be used for synthetic muscles has been kicking around for some time, and the results of stress tests on carbon nanotubes released this week show great promise.
In the movie, the buckyball starts to get really fussy around 6,000 Kelvin, which, coincidentally, is just slightly hotter than the Sun's average surface temperature of 5,778 K (9,953° F). The main issue with exploring/colonizing the Sun is that of unstable orbits taking would-be colonists directly to the core - however, between 0.08 and 0.21 AUs from the Sun is a dynamically stable zone, which may even contain Vulcanoid asteroids we have been prevented from observing thus far due to glare. This region may eventually open up for hardy colonists, as long as they can stand the heat and radiation.
Compared to the immediate circumsolar region, Venus is quite hospitable. With a mean surface temperature of 735 K (863° F), and a pressure of 90 atmospheres, living on Venus would be similar to dwelling near a deep-sea hydrothermal vent under about a kilometer of water. Harsh, no doubt, but nothing some forms of Earthly life can't handle. If life forms made out of gooey proteins can deal with it, then it's nothing that fullerene biota couldn't handle. Why bother terraforming Venus when we can Venusform ourselves?
H/t to Machine Phase for the buckyball movie.