Accelerating Future

Art by Anders Sandberg.

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Via Pink Tentacle:

It won’t fill you up, but it is a feast for the eyes (if you look through a microscope). This so-called “world’s smallest bowl of ramen” — a 1-micron (1/1000-mm, or 1/100th the width of a human hair) wide bowl containing dozens of 20-nanometer (1/50,000-mm) thick noodles — was created by University of Tokyo professor Masayuki Nakao as part of an effort to develop new carbon nanotube-based microcircuit fabrication technology. Nakao used a metal particle beam to carve the bowl from silicon, and he mixed up a soup of ethanol and catalyst inside the bowl to form the carbon nanotube “noodles.” According to Nakao, it was a major challenge to keep it from overflowing. No word yet on how the tiny meal tastes.

[Source: Yomiuri]

I tend to view most things like this as basically stunts.

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The branding of catastrophic risk as a globe on fire makes me snicker a bit.

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For the reasoning behind this, read “How to Disagree”.

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Dr. Max More, a futurist philosopher and father of contemporary transhumanism, has been getting a little more active online lately, after a long hiatus.

Extropia Core reports that Dr. More willing be giving a talk in Secondlife the Sunday after next, titled “Unsolved Problems in Transhumanism”.

Here is the blurb:

Max More is back. In his first public Second Life appearance, the founder of contemporary transhumanism will discuss unsolved problems within the movement:

- Communication Strategy: How can we communicate ideas most effectively and rationally, overcoming the typical tension between the two? How does this relate to constrained and unconstrained visions of transhumanism (in Thomas Sowell’s terms)?

- Visionary Horizon: How far should we focus on offering solutions to current problems vs. envisioning longer-term solutions and visions?

- Visionary vs. Practical: To what extent should transhumanists try to be a movement that is organized, integrated, and directed? Should the movement or transhumanist activity concern itself primarily with ideas or practice or both, and should it include a major component that is a practical guide to self-transformation?

- Bridging the Knowing-doing Gap: Both as movement and as individuals, how can be do better to practice what we espouse?

- Organizing: How can we better organize and converse, using the best available knowledge to do so?

- Historical Accuracy and Continuing Honesty: Establishing and maintaining an accurate history of transhumanism; combating Orwellian rewriting of the past.

As always, Dr. More welcomes feedback on his thinking.

The last question may have to do with attempts to brush his early contributions to H+ under the carpet and giving undue attention to pre-transhumanist historical figures, like JBS Haldane, who had proto-transhumanist ideas but did little to get contemporary transhumanism started. We’ll see.

I was introduced to online transhumanism through Dr. More’s Extropian Principles, which I read in 2001. I had read The Age of Spiritual Machines just prior to that, and my thoughts in the area were strongly coalescing. (Another important influence around this time was Yudkowsky’s “What is Friendly AI?”)

What else is there? Well, I dropped by Dr. More’s homepage and noticed that it just got the first update in years, which references that he has joined Facebook, Second Life, and World of Warcraft. Also, he has started a blog.

I’ve been fortunate enough to hang out with Dr. More a couple times in the last year at transhumanist events. Given what transhumanism has become, it’s fascinating to talk to the man that started it all during the 1980s.

“We have achieved two of the three alchemists’ dreams: We have transmuted the elements and learned to fly. Immortality is next.” — Max More, On becoming posthuman

“No more gods, no more faith, no more timid holding back. Let us blast out of our old forms, our ignorance, our weakness, and our mortality. The future belongs to posthumanity.” — Max More, On becoming posthuman

(Also read Dr. More’s Letter to Mother Nature.)

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Evolution crafts organisms with specific goals. Always, they revolve around a variable called inclusive fitness. Subgoals of inclusive fitness include ability to survive, obtain food, mate, and (sometimes) protect offspring and engage in evolution-mediated reciprocal altruism. In humans, the subgoals blossom into a peacock-tail-like phantasmagoria of music, art, ornamentation, intellectual pursuits, yadda yadda. Still, these are all spinoffs of inclusive fitness.

Inclusive fitness according to Earthly life is a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny subset of all information-theoretically possible goal systems. The Hamming distance between Earthly life’s goals and goals of biota on another planet may be huge. This phenomenon magnifies itself when you have intelligence that can formulate its own goals and rearrange its evolutionary goals into arbitrary permutations.

Heard of the concept of a limit? When a certain goalset is implemented at the limit, totalistic things happen. For instance, if you were to implement a rabbit genome’s goalset to the limit, most of the terrestrial biomass on planet Earth would be converted into copies of rabbits. Ditto with practically every other animal. Animals are basically just robots manipulated by long DNA molecules, anyway.

When we can produce arbitrary goalsets and back them up with optimization pressure equivalent or exceeding that exerted by Homo sapiens, it’s usually called “bad”. Yet within the next century, we’ll likely create one that we consider “harmless”.

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Yesterday I was in the middle of brushing my teeth, and thinking, “I wonder how Peter Voss, Justin Corwin, and the rest of them down at A2I2 are doing?” (In case you didn’t know, A2I2 is an AGI company.) For an outline of the architecture, go here.

Lo und beholde, I check my email this morning and there is an update from A2I2, dated May 22nd:

Towards Commercialization

It’s been a while. We’ve been busy. A good kind of busy.

At the end of March we completed an important milestone: a demo system consolidating our prior 10 months’ work. This was followed by my annual pilgrimage to our investors in Australia. The upshot of all this is that we now have some additional seed funding to launch our commercialization phase late this year.

On the technical side we still have a lot of hard work ahead of us. Fortunately we have a very strong and highly motivated team, so that over the next 6 months we expect to make as much additional progress as we have over the past 12. Our next technical milestone is around early October by which time we’ll want our ‘proto AGI’ to be pretty much ready to start earning a living.

By the end of 2008 we should be ready to actively pursue commercialization in addition to our ongoing R&D efforts. At that time we’ll be looking for a high-powered CEO to head up our business division which we expect to grow to many hundreds of employees over a few years.

Early in 2009 we plan to raise capital for this commercial venture, and if things go according to plan we’ll have a team of around 50 by the middle of the year.

Well, exciting future plans, but now back to work.

Peter

Well then. A2I2 currently has 16 full-time employees and a significant amount of funding. But an expansion has been in the works for a while. I wonder what their AGI engine will be commercialized for?

And as I often ask, “are we there yet?”

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