Humanity’s Potential is Greater than We Can Comprehend

Humanity is just a tiny spark. If we survive the next few decades and successfully develop superintelligence, that spark will grow into a tremendous fire on the scale of a supernova. If we fall prey to existential risk, that spark will be forever extinguished.

Our present culture, accomplishments, and intelligence are little in comparison to what we have the potential to become by the end of this century. We have the potential to become so radically intelligent that our current selves are mere insects by comparison. This doesn’t mean we should hate or belittle ourselves, just realize that our greatest potential lies in our future as a civilization rather than our present.

The potential for this superlative transformation rests on three simple precepts: that radically greater-than-human intelligences are physically possible, that the speed cognitive activity is dictated by the speed of the underlying processing elements, and that intelligence can exist on a substrate other than proteinaceous neurons. I’ll briefly address these three.

Is greater-than-human intelligence possible? We have no physical evidence for this, because human beings are the only form …

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Looking Human Extinction in the Face

(Cross-posted from the Lifeboat Foundation blog.)

A point on human extinction risk analysis.

To look at existential risk rationally requires that we maintain a cool, detached perspective. It’s somewhat hard to think of how this might be done, although watching videos of planetary destruction could actually help! As a detective needs to look at a few crime scenes before he can get experienced and move beyond being a simple gumshoe, existential risk analysts need to view simulations and thought experiments of planetary destruction before they can consider it without flinching. Because it is impossible to acquire experience of human extinction risk, as by definition no one is alive afterwards, we have to settle for simulations.

The reaction of many educated adults to extinction risk discussions reminds me of the reaction kids in my Middle School health classes had to the mention of the word “penis”: adolescent giggling. If I were to get onstage in front of a random audience and start talking about existential risk when they didn’t expect it, using words like “planetary destruction”, they’d …

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The Other Side of the Immortality Coin

There are two sides to living as long as possible: developing the technologies to cure aging, such as SENS, and preventing human extinction risk, which threatens everybody. Unfortunately, in the life extensionist community, and the world at large, the balance of attention and support is lopsided in favor of the first side of the coin, while largely ignoring the second. I see people meticulously obsessed with caloric restriction and SENS, but apparently unaware of human extinction risks. There’s the global warming movement, sure, but no efforts to address the bio, nano, and AI risks.

It’s easy to understand why. Life extension therapies are a positive and happy thing, whereas existential risk is a negative and discouraging thing. The affect heuristic causes us to shy away from negative affect, while only focusing on projects with positive affect: life extension. Egocentric biases help magnify the effect, because it’s easier to imagine oneself aging and dying than getting wiped out along with billions of others as a result of a planetary plague, for instance.

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Michael Vassar on Willpower in New York

An Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies talk in NYC in May that I missed: Lead Me Not Into Temptation: Folk-Psychological Conceptions of Willpower and Their Implications for Policy. This was at the Human Rights for the 21st Century conference. Vassar offers plausible explanations for the long-standing hostility towards cognitive liberty throughout the world.

Abstract:

“Neither Liberal, Conservative, nor Libertarian political philosophies usually give much explicit attention to the concept of willpower (entirely conceptually seperate from “free will”). However, some examination shows that variation in how it is concieved of appears to be the basis for ideological conflicts between the partisans of different views. Until matters of fact are clarified and resolved, they may appear to be conflicting values, and the apparent conflicts may appear irresolvable. Not only that, the opposing partisans may appear insane. In this presentation I will explain how conceptions of willpowe as abundant, limited, or muscle-like, e.g. limited but renewable and capable of being cultivated and increased, imply different policy proscriptions corresponding to political divides. I will attempt to outline the necessary experiments that …

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Is it Possible to Get Non-Immortalists to Care about Existential Risks?

I’m just curious. Here I’m specifically talking about existential risks generally considered to be more than 15 or so years in the future (even though they may in fact be nearer), like self-replicating microbots, recursively self-improving AI, and the like. Do non-immortalists just not look very far ahead, or are they just skeptical that the risks are technologically feasible?

There is somewhat of an overlap between the technologies predicted to lead to radical life extension (nanotech mainly) and the risks themselves, so it would make sense that immortalists are more informed on these technologies, including their risks. But this overlap only goes so far – websites on radical life extension generally address the benefits of medical nanotechnology while largely ignoring the risks. There are also many risks unrelated to life extension: AI, synthetic biology, nanoweapons, etc. So maybe immortalists just care about these risks because they have a much longer expected lifespan and accordingly look further into the future?

The ironic thing is that risks 15+ years away still threaten most of the population today, including all baby boomers. Why …

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10 Reasons

10 Reasons to Live as Long as Possible

1. Because the universe has plenty of room. 2. Because eighty or ninety years isn’t enough to try much out. 3. Because death is so final. 4. Because you’ll get to see what happens next. 5. Because a few hundred friends isn’t enough. 6. Because you can then join the long-term project to make Earth better. 7. Because boredom can’t prevail against new places, ideas, and people. 8. Because aging and death are primitive and inherently unpleasant. 9. Because your loved ones and children don’t deserve to see you perish. 10. Because if you don’t enjoy it, you can end it at any time. 10 Reasons to Enhance Human Intelligence

1. Because stupidity stops being funny pretty fast. 2. Because sitting in a classroom can be torture. 3. Because if we don’t, somebody else will. 4. Because it’s part of our species growing up. 5. Because people are suffering due to their own ignorance. 6. Because people are suffering due to ignorance of the wealthy. 7. Because dumb people don’t know …

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The Patternmakers

Cross-posted from SIAI blog.

Consider two classes of AIs. One class of AIs manipulates external objects to direct the world towards a goal state, the other doesn’t. AIs with the greatest real-world impact fall into the first category. The objects may be virtual as well as physical, although they’re both ultimately the same thing, as reality is harmonious and unified.

Within the first category, there are AIs with motivations that output the open-ended, indefinite manipulation of external objects, and AIs with motivations that cause the manipulations to stop after a critical threshold of utility maximizing (or satisficing) is performed.

A CEV-AI is an example of the latter category. It extrapolates humanity’s volition, creates an optimizing process that embodies it, then shuts itself down. There’s a technical problem here–how to program it in such a way that it doesn’t attempt to turn the planet into a supercomputer to compute humanity’s volition, disintegrating humanity in the process? Some version of interim Friendliness no doubt, but remember, the CEV-AI’s primary job is to output humanity’s collective will, not be …

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Singularity Summit in San Francisco

It’s that time of the year, when transhumanists, AI guys, and transhumanist AI guys get together under the banner of the Singularity Institute to impress or disappoint us with their knowledge of the Singularity (whatever they think it is), AI, AIs exterminating humanity, transforming Earth into a paradise, and other items on the menu. Yes, it may be only the second Singularity Summit, but it’s bound to be an awesome one, with various famous people on the list, including some new ones.

If I were to give a talk at the summit, it would probably be an explicit presentation about how hard of a takeoff I think it will be between quasi-human and superintelligent AI, i.e., a damn hard one, and maybe, if I’m fortunate, someone like Eliezer will at least hint to this in his presentation. I also like Peter T.’s hard-hitting language in the press release.

Press Release:

The Singularity Summit to address promise and peril of advanced AI to future of humanity

What are the major challenges to achieving advanced AI? What …

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Existential Risks: Serious Business.

So there was a rumor, possibly false (although the linked page builds on a mention from a scientist that was actually attending the event), that a Dr. Pianka wanted to kill 90% of humanity with ebola. His statement is here. The gist of his statement is that he actually just wouldn’t mind if humanity is killed by ebola, but wouldn’t actively pursue it. Still, the point is that there could be evil supergeniuses among us. (Read his statement for more detail.)

This issue reminds me of an acronym that Phillippe Van Nedervelde used in his talk on existential risks and the Lifeboat Foundation at Transvision 2007 — SIMAD — Single Individual, Massively Destructive. He also pointed to the Unabomber, and showed a picture of him when he was a math teacher, looking just like a typical professor. There is a risk from radical, out-of-control nutcases like Al Qaeda, yes, but these people tend to have problems infiltrating truly relevant organizations or acquiring the complex knowledge necessary to do real damage.

In the case …

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