Interview with Future Blogger
My interview from yesterday with Future Blogger is here. A shorter summary of some issues in the interview and my highlights for the next ten years are here. First question:
V: What do you do and how is that related to the future?
MA: I am a blogger, fundraising director for the Lifeboat Foundation (LF), a director of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA) and a science/tech writer. All of these are related to futurism – my blog discusses futurist issues, the LF looks at future risks, and the WTA represents the futurist philosophy of transhumanism. As a science/tech writer, I do some writing about the latest technologies and materials, like carbon nanofoam or hypersonic flight, but equally enjoy writing about the frontiers of the sciences like paleontology, astronomy, and biology. Not everything I do relates to futurism, but much of it does.
Anti-Transhumanist Blogs
Surprise twist! Now we create a list of anti-transhumanist blogs, so we can evaluate the other side of the story.
Here are four to start us off:
Amor Mundi by Dale Carrico
Infeasible by HP LaLancette
Secondhand Smoke by Wesley J. Smith
The Human Future by Jennifer Lahl
Organizations:
Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity
Center for Genetics and Society
Creating Teeny-Tiny Solar-Powered Robots
Here's what hobbyists can do now in the way of cheap, small, autonomous robots. I don't understand how people can see stuff like this and not say, "this will obviously be a problem as robots get more technologically advanced and begin to self-replicate". (Especially when MNT-built.) How to solve the problem? Several options, in increasing order of strictness:
1) Do nothing and see what happens.
2) Use ubiquitous surveillance to locate out-of-control self-replication events and dispatch response teams.
3) Associate every robot with a security chip that can be deactivated by the police (or whomever).
4) Create ubiquitous patrol bots that search out malignant self-replicators and destroy them.
5) Outlaw autonomous self-replicating robots unless granted specific authorization.
6) Relinquish advanced robotics entirely. (The unworkable Bill Joy solution.)
A more advanced solution would to create a friendly AI and let it handle it. However, this will be of limited use in the short term if self-replicating robotics is technologically easier than general AI.
Self-Replication in SecondLife
I was thinking about self-replication in SecondLife. I remember one incident that hit the news involved a self-replicating golden ring, Sonic-style. Wondering if there were any videos of self-replicating objects in SecondLife, I searched for "self-replication secondlife" on YouTube and found only this:
This is a test by a member of the SecondLife group Patriotic Nigras. Read the liner notes on the video for an interesting closer look at the thought process behind it.
Other videos on YouTube: Self-Replication in SecondLife, /b/lackout, Particle Test #1, so I herd you like griefing. Some of these are just particle spammers and not really self-replicators per se. I love 1:10 on the last one, because it actually shows the initial cube before it explodes into a cloud of Vegetas. By far, it seems that the most popular targets are the Lindens.
Here's another one by Patriotic Nigras: "Luskwood: It's Raining Lulz". This is a griefer attack on a furry sim. An interesting look at what happens when a sim is saturated with noisy, self-replicating objects. Let me know if you find anything else.
I see all this as a preview of what will happen in the real world once hobbyists get their hands on synthetic life and self-replicating robotics.
Transhumanist Blogs
This is an open thread on transhumanist blogs. If you write a blog which might be of interest to other transhumanists, post the link to it here.
Negative Utilitarianism
The basic idea of utilitarianism is to do the greatest good for the greatest number. A related idea, negative utilitarianism, requires us to prevent the greatest amount of suffering for the greatest number. According to its proponents, the greatest harms are more consequential than the greatest goods.
Would you rather avoid being tortured for a day, or engage in your favorite activity for a day? For many, the answer is obvious: avoid torture. This synchs well with humanity's empirically demonstrated aversion to risk. It also makes sense evolutionarily, as avoiding pain was probably more adaptive than merely seeking pleasure.
Negative utilitarianism seems like a reasonable enough philosophy, at least at first. What could possibly be wrong with minimizing harm? Well, it turns out that the optimal implementation of negative utilitarianism would be to kill off all of humanity in the quickest and most painless way possible. That way, the probability of Earth-originating sentients experiencing harm in the future is reduced to zero. From the perspective of negative utilitarianism, this is the best possible outcome.
Hah! Now I'll bet you think negative utilitarianism sounds like a horrible idea, don't you? The problem is that it may be a philosophically appealing viewpoint to a subset of humanity. One challenge of futuristic technologies is that they may make possible the existence of groups that are unaccountable in practice. I'm not saying I want such groups to exist, or that such groups existing is a good idea, just that it could actually happen and we might be hard pressed to do anything about it. A prototype of such a scenario is given in the novel Aristoi, where aristocrats uses nanotechnology and brain-computer interfaces to ensure absolute dominance over the rest of humanity.
If an Aristoi class decides that negative utilitarianism makes sense, then from their perspective, it could be quite appealing to destroy all of humanity. Do we have any intelligent strategies for averting such a possibility?
Seven Influential Transhumanists
Some people have left a major mark on transhumanism during its 18-year history. Who are some of the most influential transhumanists?
1) Max More & Natasha Vita-More
2) FM-2030
4) Nick Bostrom
6) Ray Kurzweil
These are just a few of the most influential transhumanists. If there are any others you think I missed, add them in the comments.
Response to “Thoughts on Friendly AI”
I was reading "Thoughts on Friendly AI" at utilitarian-essays.com, a site with short papers on various utilitarian issues, including AI friendliness. (An unfortunate aspect of incorrectly programmed strong AI is that poses a huge risk to humanity.) I wanted to point out several interesting positions in the essay, as well as respond to a few open questions. From here on out, I will refer to the author as "Utilitarian".
Utilitarian writes:
I think the probability that humans will create an AGI is not trivially small; I wouldn't put the figure below 0.01, and personally I would consider 0.15 or so to be a more reasonable Bayesian best-guess estimate. Thus, if the stakes are sufficiently high, work related to friendly AI may have enormous expected value.
Here, Utilitarian admits having a low estimate of the probability that humans will create strong AI -- around 15%, but at least 1%. In spite of this, the author concludes that friendly AI work may have enormous expected value. This means that you don't have to believe its particularly likely that AI friendliness is a big deal for AI friendliness to be a big deal anyway. This is because of the degree of power that a strong AI would have if it is indeed technologically possible.
Next, Utilitarian launches into a look at the Coherent Extrapolated Volition (CEV) programmatic concept for AI friendliness. It is pointed out that a CEV-based AI could lead to beneficial outcomes for non-human animals if humanity's volition decides to include theirs:
CEV would be designed as a dynamic process in which the FAI would extrapolate humanity's volitions slowly at first and then build upon those volitions in order to rewrite its code and improve the extrapolation process in subsequent iterations. So, for instance, if in the first round, humans decided that chimpanzee volitions should be counted (to the extent this is possible), then chimpanzees would be included in the second round.
My general comment: it might seem unfair program a strong AI to care only about the opinions of humans for the first round (this is the current plan), but unfortunately, anything else is too risky. What if we decide to program the AI to average our volition with that of our cats, and the cats end up outnumbering the humans, and it turns out that cats don't like us all that much? Do we want a strong AI on the cats' side? Probably not. On the same note, we should program the first strong AI in such a way that it doesn't unfairly favor a small subset of humans.
Utilitarian then writes, provocatively:
However, the starting point--i.e., who will be extrapolated in the first round--is arbitrary, because we can't rely on the CEV process to decide that for us. The current plan is to extrapolate only humans and allow them to decide whether to include non-human animals in subsequent rounds. But why stop there? Why not only extrapolate humans born in January and allow them to decide whether to include humans born in other months?
We might hope that all roads will lead to Rome and that all initial choices of the set of volitions to extrapolate will lead to the same result, but this is far from obvious. Thus, the choice of whether and to what extent to include non-human animal volitions in CEV is an important open question--one with which animal-welfare organizations might consider getting involved.
The designers of CEV assume that the category "all humans" is ideal for the initial input. It must be made openly clear that this choice is entirely arbitrary. For reasons I will describe in another post, I actually suspect it might be safer to use only one human being as the initial input. In any case, the author points out here that animal welfare organizations might be interested in lobbying for a place for certain animals, for instance the great apes, in the first CEV input stage.
Personally, I object to the killing of higher vertebrates if at all possible. I suspect that once that in-vitro meat becomes available, many people will "spontaneously" begin realizing that destroying animals for food was an ethical sacrifice all along, and the practice will fall out of vogue, like slavery. Would this be recognized in the first round of CEV? I'm counting on it, but who knows? If the answer is no, do I have a moral obligation to lobby that higher vertebrates be included in the initial CEV input? I don't think so, because doing so might make the fundamental building block more complex, less stable, and more unpredictable.
We have an obligation to maximize the stability and predictability of the outcome of strong AI, because anything else is unfair to the people that have to live with it. It might not be possible to put the genie back into the bottle. An obviously flawed AI might be capable of self-perpetuating its influence despite any attempts to stop it, leading to an unpleasant period between its creation and Heat Death. This could be about 1040 years, a long time by any measure.
Do all roads lead to Rome? I hope so, but there is little way of telling in advance. One crutch used in the CEV approach is to have a way of peeking at the final outcome and vetoing it if it is obviously a failure. If a single person or exclusive group has the right to do this, one might ask, "how is this different than using just their volitions as input to begin with?" I see a difference, but it's admittedly subtle. The elite group would have veto power, but it wouldn't be micro-managing the outcome.
Utilitarian then writes:
It may be the case that animals don't have an abstract enough sense of their volitions for CEV to work with them. If this is true, the same could be said of human infants. It's not obvious to me that human infants deserve more direct influence over CEV than, say, pigs. If one makes the argument that human infants have the potential to develop into adults with a better sense of their true volitions, then replace "human infants" by "human adults with significant intellectual disabilities."
It may be a good idea to exclude human adults with significant intellectual disabilities and human infants. Neurologically, all humans above a certain age are basically similar, but infants and adults with significant intellectual disabilities will be distinctly different. Where do we draw the line? I don't know, but it seems counter-productive to include the input of minds that lack an abstract sense of morality. Most would at least agree that people in a coma cannot make moral choices in their current state.
Utilitarian writes:
It's plausible that the lives of most wild animals involve more suffering than happiness; this is especially likely if insects are sentient. On the other hand, most humans value nature highly and would prefer for wildlife to exist. I'm afraid that the CEV of humanity wouldn't give enough consideration to the suffering of wild animals and, even worse, might create vastly more through terraforming, directed panspermia, or sentient computer simulations of nature.
My hope is that this concern would be addressed by the "if we knew more" part of CEV. If humans were more cognizant of wild-animal suffering and were able to more deeply imagine how horrible it is for, say, a frog to be swallowed alive by a snake, then perhaps they would be more reluctant to value "pristine natural environments." And if their opinions were still unmoved, then maybe the impulse to preserve nature would be so strong that it would indeed have some merit.
If insects are sentient, we will figure it out soon enough. We should have faith in humanity's ability to identify failings in our own morality and collectively improve, as has occurred since at least the Middle Ages. In any case, specially intervening to remove the possibility entirely would be a breach of ethics and interference from an elite group.
A similar concern relates to lab universes. If anyone were going to create infinitely many new universes in a laboratory, it would probably be an AGI. I'm concerned that humans would find the creation of new universes so exciting, cool, or unusual that they would ignore the fact that they would create an infinite amount of suffering in the process--and probably far more suffering than happiness
If lab universes are possible, hopefully we'll come to a democratic conclusion that they shouldn't contain suffering sentients. I don't see why we wouldn't.
In favor of SIAI, Utilitarian writes:
Of course, these scenarios assume that the friendly AI would be built correctly and humanely, but this is an argument in favor of SIAI's work, rather than against it. Better to have a friendly AI determine the future of our part of the universe than a careless (or even malevolent) AI built by less circumspect programmers.
I will address the third part, "Religion", in another post.
Is Star Trek a Fascist Society?
On the World Transhumanist Association discussion list, the topic came up, "is hard science fiction fascist literature?" Dr. James Hughes pointed out the following:
"Hard science fiction generally isn't fascist, but one can make a
plausible case that Star Trek being fascist.
A) They have no politics. It's a military dictatorship.
B) They have no money. It's a command economy.
C) All conflict is racial. Humans v. Klingons v. Romulans etc.
D) The races have intrinsic cultural personalities which make them less
attractive than the humans. Attractive members of alternate races try to
become more human: Spock and Worf trying to get a sense of humor. Data
trying to get emotions.
E) Something terrible happened to Asians, Africans and Latins, because
90% of all humans are English-speaking whites.
F) Cognitive enhancement and life extension technologies are outlawed,
or at least all R&D towards those goals have been stopped.
G) Everyone apparently has some kind of mind-block against realizing
that the transporter beam could make copies of all the crew and keep
them young and immortal.
H) The Prime Directive maintains human (and allied) supremacy over the
hapless lesser peoples who are denied political and technological
progress in order supposedly to respect their cultural "difference."
However Kirk does go back to 1939 and stands aside to let his pacifist
girlfriend to get run down by a car instead of allowing her to convince
Roosevelt to stay out of WWII. So at least Star Trek wasn't Nazi."
Although this is amusing, it seems like Star Trek is actually a capitalist society. See Brian Wang's response here.
Accelerating Future on Facebook
Accelerating Future now has a Facebook group. Join it by clicking here:
Update: this group has now exceeded 100 members! Thank you for joining!
The Dream Machine: Brain-Computer Interfaces for Manipulating Dreams
A first-generation commercial brain-computer interface (BCI) is being released by Emotiv Systems later this year. What does the future hold for BCI?
By 2050, and likely sooner, you will be able to buy a BCI device that records all your dreams in their entirety. This will be done in one of two ways. One method would be to use distributed nanobots less than a micrometer in diameter to spread throughout the brain and monitor the activation patterns of neurons. By this point, cognitive science will have advanced enough to know which neural activation patterns correspond to which sensory experiences. This has already been done with cats (using electrodes, not nanobots), where researchers led by scientist Garrett Stanley were able to extrapolate what a cat was seeing merely by monitoring the neurons of its visual cortex. Here are some images they obtained:
The next steps will be to increase the resolution, add monitoring of emotions, sounds, and smells, and make it safe for human use. To access the brain and stimulate our neurons or record neural activity, we can use light-activated nanoparticles, which allow for the wireless activation of neural circuits. These could selectively stimulate our neurons according to a program and directly intervene in our dream experiences, as well as recording them to an external disk. Call it becoming a true onieronaut. "Dream reports" will prove that the technology is much, much more profound than lucid dreaming. Far more controllable and far more real. We might even be able to record our dreams directly into our memories, so we could remember them better. Every sensation in the world corresponds to a unique neural activation pattern -- including dreams.
A major challenge, of course, would be to get FDA approval for such a device. The therapeutic and practical benefits of a high-resolution BCI device are so large that if it can be shown not to cause any damage or negative side-effects to its user, approval seems likely.
If the BCI device offers input to the brain as well as recording output, then dreams could be played back too. A Dream Machine would let us show our dreams to others. If we know which neural activation pattern corresponds to which perceptions (sight, sounds, etc.), it's not a huge leap to selectively stimulate neurons to produce customized dream scenarios, or even enter the dreams of others in action. (In ascending order of technological difficulty.)
Manipulating our dreams... how many thousands of years has humanity waited for this? Here's a frequent kind of background I see in my dreams:
...other things I see include gigantic academic complexes, cliff networks, green hills overlooking sunny blue bays, and many others. I'm sure you can imagine hundreds of scenarios from your dreams, many of which seem so fleeting. But it won't necessarily be that way forever.
The possible societal effects of a Dream Machine would be immense. Dream recordings and recreations would offer an opportunity to:
1) Validate or refute Freudian theories about the connections of dreams to subconscious or conscious psychological states.
2) Create a "science of dreams", or oneirology, that organizes all available dream data, breaks up dreams into categories, studies which type of people get which dreams, etc.
3) Create a "dream entertainment industry" where people choose to have customized dreams, with features like greater visual complexity or richness of colors, or even massively multiplayer dreams.
4) The possible rise of "dream celebrities" -- people who freely upload their dreams for others to examine, followed by a positive reception. People might lead double lives -- boring accountant by day, world-famous lucid dreamer by night. Some people might even get paid for their dreams.
5) Uncover the hidden world of dreams that barely rise above our subconscious. People tend to have several dreams per night, but remember only one or two. We experience these dreams when they happen, our brain just neglects to transfer the information content into long-term memory. (The reasons for this are likely evolutionary -- we would get confused about reality if we remembered too many of our dreams.) Imagine if we could record all these dreams and play them back at will. With enough storage density (molecular memory), you could even store your dreams on a pendant around your neck.
6) Convert dream-worlds into real-worlds; amusement parks based on dreams, or utility fog banks that quickly morph in response to a given personal or collective dreamscape. Or vice versa: turn real world places and people into dream objects.
7) In general, blur the line between dreams and reality by making dreams more tangible, manipulable, interactive, customizable, and social. Bring dreams "in from the cold". Make dreams as mysterious, colorful, productive, foreign, erotic, or mundane as you want them to be.
Considering these possibilities, the first thing that makes me nervous is that people would institute inappropriate regulations over the use of this technology. For instance, some groups of people might hate the idea of removing some of the "mystery of dreams" (like how modern biology ostensibly dispels some of the mystery of life, or modern physics dispels some of the mystery of nature) through technology. As someone who is socially liberal, barring sufficiently negative externalities, I'd advocate light regulation on this technology. Heavy regulation should be saved for more dangerous technologies such as synthetic biology and molecular nanotechnology
Possible risks:
1) If dreams start to be run on servers, hacking or computer viruses could be a problem. In most cases, this would likely just result in the dream shutting down (not a big deal -- this already happens all the time), but if your dream got hijacked, someone could use them to threaten or attempt to brainwash you. This is what doubters will focus on excessively -- but remember, our brain and body is already acceptable to "viruses" -- including real viruses, bacteria, prions, and parasites, but we manage to defend against it. Eventually, we will develop computers with technological immune systems as complex and effective as the human immune system, it will just take time. Even if dream-recording BCI devices are possible, dream-manipulating BCI devices may have to wait until computer security catches up.
2) Communication through dreams could make it more difficult for parents to control their children, or for regimes to control their populations, by opening up the information channels they have access to. In this regard, the challenge would be similar to a magnified version of the struggles already seen with the Internet in general.
3) A "delightful dream", so thoroughly enjoyable and amazing that it spreads across the world, and all humanity is consumed by it. From that point onward, we only develop our civilization for the purpose of maintaining this euphoric state, a local maxima in the fitness landscape of cultural progress and evolution. This might be a dream that involves direct stimulation of the pleasure center. (For this reason, it might be good to avoid building BCI devices that directly stimulate the pleasure center.) The "delightful dream" scenario would be considered a subset of wireheading. It might be more notorious, though, because while many people wouldn't stick electrodes into their head just to stimulate their pleasure center, they might be willing to use a Dream Machine might, which could get them trapped in a wirehead when they otherwise would avoid it.
Those are the main risks I can think of, but there are likely more. One thing is for sure -- if we can avoid the risks and maximize the benefits, the world will be a very interesting place in 2050.
Sweet dreams!