Use Your Brain Wednesday, Jan 21 2009
bioethics 12:07 pm
Modern policy analysts are so overexposed to approximate human-to-human parity and balance of power geopolitics that they forget there have been many times throughout history when military and political leaders have tried to take over the world. Alexander the Great tried it. So did Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Adolf Hitler, and several others. The problem with global hegemony is that, once established, it might not be possible to uproot, especially if leaders take advantage of life extension technology. A must-read analysis of the risk of global totalitarianism is presented by Bryan Caplan in the Global Catastrophic Risks volume. Caplan argues that we should avoid forming global government or increasingly wider international coalitions because of the risk that these will turn sour and enable global totalitarianism. He goes into reasons why global totalitarianism may be a stable state, one of them being that there would be no free countries as examples of alternative political systems.
Arguments for why radical human intelligence enhancement is nothing to be afraid of fall into two categories: that progress will be so incremental that mutual accountability is preserved, and that humans are already so close to being as smart as it’s possible to be that no abrupt and destabilizing forward jumps are likely to occur. Advocates for the former argument are too numerous to list, the most prominent being Ray Kurzweil, but the group of adherents includes practically all transhumanists. Advocates for the latter are rarer but still common — I recall J. Storrs Hall (author of Nanofuture and a speaker at the 2007 Singularity Summit) advocating this perspective on the CRN Global Task Force internal mailing list in 2006. Because rebutting the second argument is easy, I shall give myself a challenge and focus on the first.
Significant intelligence enhancement, like turning someone with an 140 IQ into a 220 IQ supergenius within a timespan of a few weeks or months, is regarded in mainstream neurotech research as extremely far off, if it is regarded at all. That means that if such a radical approach is pursued by anyone, it’s more likely to be pursued by a single team than several teams. If the team fails, nothing happens, but if they succeed, they stand alone. This creates a bothersome situation for any potential competitors. Because the winners bet on such long odds, the payoff is huge. Like a destitute man who bets the last of his life savings on a long-shot pick at the racetrack, only to win big, the neurotech researchers crazy enough to shoot for serious enhancement might take home all the chips.
Another plausible reason to expect abrupt breakthoughs (if any at all) rather than incremental safety is that evolution has likely already found all the easy upgrades to human intelligence. Intelligence has been the primary locus and driver of human evolution ever since we split from our hominid ancestors, and likely before that. H. habilis, the first member of the genus Homo, had a brain capacity of between 590 and 650 cm³ , while H. sapiens has a brain capacity in the range of 1350 to 1450 cm³. This is a more than doubling of brain capacity in two million years, which is a very rare event. Because brains are so energy-hungry, evolution is usually conservative with them, focusing on other things instead. That is why sauropods and other large dinosaurs had such minute brains for their size. Reptiles are not the only successful animals in the fossil record with pathetic brains — Daeodon, a vile pig-like giant (entelodont) from the Miocene, was 3 m (10 ft) long and 2.1 m (7 ft) at the shoulder, yet it only had a brain capacity of about 100 cm³.
When the genus Homo had the good fortune to stumble upon the cognitive niche, we exploited it good. Its value relative to other possible adaptations is obvious — if it weren’t so useful, then Nature wouldn’t have bothered ballooning our brain size so quickly. It is clearly possible for evolutionary superstars to get by without it. This extensive two million year exploitation of the cognitive niche shows us that evolution has undergone extensive optimization to bring us to this point. If we’re going to improve our intelligence, we’re going to have to try something radical, like developing a brain implant that fuses seamlessly with the neural circuitry that generates and stores mental imagery. This will not be easy. Even if you have a complete wiring diagram of the human brain, it still looks just like a pile of millions of tangled ethernet cords. Simply having a little drink of nootropics will not be enough.
If a major intervention is needed to get anywhere, then a major intervention is likely to be the first viable intelligence enhancement technology developed. From a naive, early 90s transhumanist perspective, this is great — big intelligence enhancement for everybody! From a more cynical perspective, that looks at how quickly and easily people get corrupted by power, and how intelligence is power, we get a frowny face. Combine that with historical knowledge that shows how readily people try to take over the world if given the chance, the fact that human nature is constant over historical time, and the possibly stable-state nature of global totalitarianism, and we have ourselves a problem. If the first intelligence-enhanced human is smart enough to rise to power in a country with a large military and nuclear arsenal, then expansionism can begin under the guise of whatever rallying call of the week is expedient. Keep in mind that John McCain gained 46 percent of the nationwide popular vote in the recent elections, and his election would have put a laughing-stock no-brainer like Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from control of enough nuclear weapons to wipe out half the world’s population. If Sarah Palin could have become President by accident, then an unscupulous and charismatic intelligence augmentee capable of concealing its origin could acquire similar power in no time at all. Then things would get really interesting.
Humans are easily fooled. Studies show that we place ridiculous confidence in the value of face-to-face interviews for job hiring when the data shows that prior performance is far more predictive of future performance. Someone that can control their facial signals with a degree of deliberativeness and planning slightly superior to any natural human being would have a huge unfair advantage, leapfrogging the evolutionary arms race of deceivers and deceit-detectors. We have a totally overblown confidence in our own ability to detect deceit in other minds because our brains have been shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to be able to detect deceit in other humans. These other humans were built by genomes in lockstep with our own as far as the evolutionary arms race goes. Take away the shared humanness, and your beloved deceit compass is useless. A person with a seemingly superficial set of cognitive upgrades for calculating and planning out their own facial expressions and vocal tone might be able to fool people 1000 times out of 1000, like a used car salesman from Hell. Combine that with genuinely superior intelligence and you have an entity that can run circles around us.
I don’t mean to be an alarmist. The first enhanced human intelligence might be a great guy or gal, someone who genuinely wants to lift everyone else up and lead us into a happy Kurzweilian future, or even better. It could also be someone who never thought of themselves as elitist until they started regularly thinking thoughts that not even the smartest humans are capable of, then suddenly other people begin to look like dirt. There are many people out there, bioethicists included, who mock the idea of giving rights to animals or foregoing the slightest culinary whim for the well-being of a non-human animal. Wesley J. Smith, a widely recognized bioethicist with the Discovery Institute and a former collaborator with Ralph Nader, calls human exceptionalism the “bedrock of human rights”. A small clique of transhumans might have a different idea — they might call transhuman exceptionalism the bedrock of their own elitist “rights”. Accordingly, human beings would become nothing but tools to be used in their rise to power.
The moral of the story is that we should be very careful about how we advocate intelligence enhancement technologies, and how these are applied when developed, especially in the immediate days or weeks after the fabrication of the first effective prototypes.
For one interesting short story on the possible effects of genuine human intelligence enhancement, see Ted Chiang’s short story Understand.
Interesting article.
The idea of responding to global catastrophic risks with global government scares the hell out of me. We need diversity and competition in producing solutions, not one monolithic agency imposing one solution. I strongly prefer David Friedman’s de-centralized perspective as outlined in his book Future Imperfect.
Megapolis, it wouldn’t really be global government, more like a machine that spits out an impartial AI based on integrating together human preferences (also known as a CEV). The problem with “diversity in solutions” as I see it is that such diversity in this situation is by definition impossible because some individual entity has to be first. Sort of like how it’s not possible for two people to win a race simultaneously. One will always be a tiny bit ahead. When it comes to runaway intelligence enhancement, small differences in initial conditions can lead to unimaginable differences in quite a short time.
Of course, there’s nothing to stop people from trying to implement solutions (diversity and competition), it’s just that one would win. Even though only one intelligence would cross the line first, the ensuing world need not be centralized.
Thanks for your suggestion of reading “Understand” It conceptualizes super intelligence quite well. Keep up the good work.
“If Sarah Palin could have become President by accident”
What makes you such a smart ass? What if the current (lefty) situation is even worse?
If you are as biased in H++ as you are in politics … Please, spare me with your liberal subagenda, where your agenda is much more interesting. As long as there is still any.
Thomas your defense of Palin is utterly pointless.
As for the actual post:
I could only comment on one thing, the stability of a dictatorial one world government [a democratic organization would require a level of regional self determination that would make it vulnerable to renewed nationalism], and the possibility or likelihood of rapid advancement in intelligence enhancement are unquestionable, or at least unquestionably outside my purview. However it occours to me that when you say…
“Combine that with historical knowledge that shows how readily people try to take over the world if given the chance, the fact that human nature is constant over historical time…”
That is it not possible, or again likely that radical intelligence enhancement would also involve a radical change in human nature. Either to exacerbate or quell megalomaniacal desires. Or perhaps a one world government is indeed the ideal system of governance for all peoples, and that tyrannical or benign a transhuman would inevitably arrive at the same conclusion, the necessity of a single ruling entity. If republicanism, nationalism, communism etc can be seen as a long line of new paradigms of rule it would seem at least unpoetic that the future should bring a return to enlightened absolutism, but perhaps poetry must at some point give way to reality.
I think I may have drifted from my point, can the knowledge of human nature in the past ever be applied to a transhuman in the future ? And if a fundamental change in human nature were inevitable, what form could it be predicted to take ?
If the projection of ones H+ memeset to the current politics is “Biden smart, Palin stupid” … then the original memeset might be quite naive as well.
“Bad, bad emperor Augustus, thank you Jupiter for Tiberius …” kind of language is a bad sign for the credibility of the speaker. Non the less he is selling something else. Well – does he?
The scenarios of superintelligence all hinge on a very crucial point, that will at least heavily influence how they might play out. What is intelligence? Following from that: What will we upgrade? In turn leading to the question: What will the consequences be?
As far as I know we still don’t have a clearly cut idea of what intelligence is. The ability to reason on basis of a sufficiently extended knowledge base? Problem solving? Good performance in a wide variety of tasks? Complex, adaptable sensory-motor loops, leading to complex behavior? All of those (and many more) are considered as a proper definition of intelligence. For simplicity’s sake there is always the refuge of the operant definition, stating that intelligence is what an IQ test measures. I’ll let you work out the problems with that approach yourself.
So we aren’t entirely sure what the central factor of intelligence is. Assuming that we can enhance it, we don’t exactly know what we will have to enhance.
For example it’s easy to imagine some brain enhancement that might boost your IQ by many points, probably without affecting your chances for world domination. Imagine a little computer fused to your brain, that is capable of providing you with the right solutions to all the spatial subtasks in your IQ test. And that within the fraction of a second. Even if your IQ has been boosted, you probably won’t be able to take over the world with that alone.
We can make it a tad more spectacular and enhance all of your logic skills. Think about some implant that will enable you to solve equations within the fraction of a second and reason abstractly with the speed of a computer. What would the consequence of that be? You’d get a whole lot better at math. Yet that probably wouldn’t make you a successful world dominator. Mathematicans aren’t prevalent among world leaders, even though they are logically among the best in the world. So those kinds of skills, that would give you an IQ boost towards and above the 200s, probably won’t help you that much in the establishment of your global hegemony.
When talking about the potential dangers of enhanced intelligence in connection with political systems, it helps to think about the particulars. In my opinion this enhancment probably will not come in a single step, but one faculty at a time. Logic, spatial, sensory motor, memory… And possibly the limits to the enhancements will vary depending on the skillset.
It might be quite a long and difficult process to understand and enhance the more subtle of our faculties, like the use and mastery of language, which will be very important in your ruthless ascent to power.
So this concept of enhanced superintelligence is quite possibly not as threatening it seems. When the time for comprehensive superintelligence is ripe, the world probably will already be full of enhanced savants that are limited to certain areas of expertise. And if society can deal with those, the superintelligent human is only the next small step.
Thomas, Sarah Palin is an idiot and everyone knows it, including Republicans like Mike Huckabee. Even Stone Cold Steve Austin is an intellectual in comparison to her. I don’t have a liberal subagenda, I’m just using an example of how easy it could be to take power, even if you’re a total moron like Sarah Palin. For the record, I’m a centrist, and yes I support Obama. (Just like a huge percentage of the American people.) I’m not amused by candidates (McCain) that make jokes about bombing Iran, whether they be Democrat or Republican. If I were a Republican, honestly, I’d make fun of Sarah Palin even more, because her coming to prominence as a leader of the party would simply ruin its credibility in the eyes of the people. You betcha.
Wolf, nice comment, I’ll think about what you said. I both simultaneously hope you’re right (because it would make Intelligence Augmentation less risky) and wrong (because IA could help a lot with FAI if rolled out soon). Perhaps if narrow abilities are enhanced initially, the result will just be a smart math-y guy rather than a superior being. But the fact of the matter is that we don’t know. We don’t know the difference between human and Neanderthal brains, but whatever it was, it allowed us to drive Neanderthals into extinction.
Were Neanderthal brains all that different than ours? Probably not by a huge amount. If we revive Neanderthals, then we’d be able to see exactly how their brains differ from ours. Extrapolating those differences, we might be able to come up with a design for a smarter human. Of course, that’s a long-term “if all else fails” method, and AGI would probably come before that anyway.
I figure that a human being could likely rise to world domination in a world of Neanderthals. Perhaps I’m wrong, but that’s what I think. So I’d expect a being smarter than humans in the way that we’re smarter than Neanderthals to be able to do the same. Perhaps the first IA tech will provide no such intelligence boost, as you argue and I think is plausible. I still want to get people thinking about the possibility and hold themselves back from embracing IA tech without at least pausing for a moment to think about the possible consequences.
I disagree that genuine superintelligence would be a “small step” from enhanced savants. The combination of enhanced abilities is greater than the sum of their parts.
Michael, is this your own thinking or have you read it somewhere:
“If a major intervention is needed to get anywhere, then a major intervention is likely to be the first viable intelligence enhancement technology developed.”
It needs to be pointed out to those in favor of conservative research. If conservative research gets you nowhere, you stop and say: “And now for something completely different.” You can’t make it to year million New Year’s party unless you do something that’s not been done before and do it in a major way.
It seems this is a general principle that applies to everything where science is stuck. You should not expect more incremental steps. You should expect a huge, magnitude jump to dislodge the jammed progress meter.
Progress meter jammed? Incremental steps not helping? This calls for a Major Intervention.
As was asked on OB, what do you think if the transhumanist/singularitarian community one day received a major intervention; a 1T stimulus package? That would certainly put a few things in a new perspective. How would the money be best spent? That includes you, with your Lifeboat work. Would a space rock shield be built (would 1T even be enough)?
OK, fine with me then, Michael. But please avoid Coke-Pepsi deliberations. Stupid folks like me, could easily mistaken you for a Pepsi seller.
Okay, I admit the “last small step” part was a bit polemic. What I wanted to express was more along the lines of a gradual ascent towards superintelligence, than the quantum leap that would be able to throw the world’s political landscape radically off balance.
I have a feeling that the border between “genuine” superintelligence and “just” enhanced savants might turn out to be a blurry one.
Reviving Neanderthalians? Sounds interesting. Though I suddenly have that strangely satisfying picture in my mind, of billions of Dollars spent in reviving the guy. And then getting a child with a face of slightly odd propotions and different build, which develops normally. Leading to the conclusion: The fall of the Neanderthalian was a cultural thing.
I don’t think it’s probable, but in a world ruled by neurons and brains, such heresies hold a perverse satisfaction for me.
Still, as you say, before reviving our old cousins from the past, there are other things to be done.
Analogy time: I think of a brain as like a car engine, with the IQ as the volume of the internal cylinders (e.g. 4 litres). These cylinders are nothing without the fuel to generate the power. The fuel in this context is data, or memory. A 200+ IQ person would need to have an exceptional memory (capacity, content and response time) for the “theoretical” high intelligence not to be wasted in some degree. Physically, brain size is less important than brain cell complexity + flexibilty + longevity.
Michael, a cheap shot at Palin shows you up as a sad little geek. Aw bless. :)
Not necessarily. The environment modern humans inhabit (in the 1st world, at least) is quite different from where our ancestors lived during the Pleistocene epoch. We tend to continue learning for most of our lives (which are longer), have less and less need to remember things from our childhood, and use our brains on much more complicated problems.
So, given that this environment is quite recent, I don’t think evolution has had much time to work on it. I think it’s quite possible that slight tweaks, perhaps as simple as maintaining into adulthood the child-like ‘critical period’ that makes learning languages or new concepts easier. This may not get us to IQ 220, but 10-20% increases in intelligence would not be implausible.
DWMF, no, the very phenomenon that Palin was taken seriously by so many says a lot about the American public. Many of the top political commentators (not sad geeks, surely) still mention her, for good reason. You might call all center or center-left intellectual commentators, including the President, sad geeks if they mentioned her, though, so the term lacks descriptive value.
Only dedicated right-wingers would bother defending her, as we see here in these comments. Luckily, the right-wingers are almost completely out of power (at least here in the US), and are moving towards becoming a minority party. Hopefully it will stay that way for a long, long time.
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