Accelerating Future Transhumanism, AI, nanotech, the Singularity, and extinction risk.

Peter Thiel and Patri Friedman on Their Way Forward

Peter Thiel talks about stuff at Cato Unbound magazine.

I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself “libertarian.”

Like most immortalist libertarians, Peter wants to connect together immortalism with libertarianism, boosting libertarian transhumanism. In transhumanism, the battle between socialists and libertarians is one of endless "excitement" to old-timers and confusion to journalists trying to report on the movement.

Let me comment that most restrictions on freedom come from finite resources. The development of simple self-replicating factories, fed perhaps by acetylene, water, and the Sun, ought to render irrelevant most of the awfully boring debates between libertarian and social democratic transhumanists.

See my interview with Robert Freitas for more on this angle. Dale Carrico calls this superlative vision the "programmable poly-purpose self-replicating room-temperature device". I argued before with Richard Jones that molecular manufacturing doesn't need to be room-temperature to be revolutionary, it can even require temperatures around absolute zero. Even if all MNT fails, we can still use synthetic biology for high-throughput manufacturing, including for organic electronics, if we can't use synthetic biology to create atomically precise inorganic patterns.

Patri Friedman makes the argument elsewhere on the Cato Unbound site: direct political activism is pointless, instead try spending your time on developing new technologies that alter the web of incentives that dictate how the whole game is played. This could apply to democratic socialism as well.

Back to Peter again, he basically says that since libertarianism ain't working in the current environment, it's time to go to cyberspace, outer space, and seasteading to deal with the lack of authentic freedom. Patri's article mentions that he thinks that full jack-in to cyberspace won't be possible in the near future, but I disagree. I would consider immersive VR plausible by 2025, CRNS (Current Rate No Singularity). Even today, games like Crysis are approaching realistic visual scenes. Speakers and projectors will soon be made that are small enough to fit in a helmet lightweight enough that you can put it on and not remember too easily that you're wearing a helmet. The mass popularity of WoW and SecondLife should be an indicator that massively shared worlds are a step away from becoming truly mainstream, but people are still being skeptical. While being filmed recently for a documentary on virtual worlds, I said the turning point will be when mass amounts of people can legitimately make money by doing real work in the context of such worlds. Work like mechanical engineering, not like designing gothic virtual clothing.

As for outer space, it's back to that same criticism I was talking about in my recent posts on space. In the near term, where near term means decades from when mass space travel becomes feasible, which is decades away CRNS, space travel will just get you more political attention, not less. The only reason that the asteroid belt gets so little attention right now is that no one lives there. In his essay, Peter points out that the Heinlein sci-fi future won't be here for a bit:

We must redouble the efforts to commercialize space, but we also must be realistic about the time horizons involved. The libertarian future of classic science fiction, à la Heinlein, will not happen before the second half of the 21st century.

That is the vision that so many transhumanists and readers of this blog hold to, because they were raised on that stuff and it serves as the core of their selfhood. Only now are they beginning to adopt the view that Marshall T. Savage articulated in 1992 and I've been going on about since founding this blog: that the future is right here in exotic places on the planet, not in outer space. Libertarians as a whole have been particularly slow to pick up on this, preferring to fantasize about space, requiring leaders like Thiel and Friedman to slap them upside the head and yank them along, saying, "this is what we're doing now". Why so tremendously slow?

Thiel continues on to say:

The future of technology is not pre-determined, and we must resist the temptation of technological utopianism — the notion that technology has a momentum or will of its own, that it will guarantee a more free future, and therefore that we can ignore the terrible arc of the political in our world.

This notion of technological utopianism is pretty much the vision championed by Kurzweil: technology is a quasi-spiritual force advancing independently of individual human choices, and we can deal with unfriendly AI by ensuring that markets around the world are free. Right.

The Archaism of the Old Rich

To amuse myself with some light reading after the obscenely lengthy Golden Bough, I'm going through Class: A Guide Through the American Status System by Paul Fussell, a really amusing book. Here's a recent review by The Atlantic.

Reading a passage in the book confirms for me what I've had a feeling for all along: the upper classes (and would-be upper classes) have a distinct antipathy for thinking about the future. Here's the passage:

We've already seen that organic materials like wool and wood outrank man-made, like nylon and Formica, and in that superiority lurks the principle of archaism as well, nylon and Formica being nothing if not up-to-date. There seems a general agreement, even if often unconscious, that archaism confers class. Thus the middle class's choice of "colonial" or "Cape Cod" houses. Thus one reason Britain and Europe still, to Americans, have class. Thus one reason why inheritance and "old money" are such important class principles. Thus the practice among top-out-of-sight and upper classes of costuming their servants in some archaic livery, even such survivals as the white apron on the maid or, on the butler, a striped vest. It's a way of implying that the money goes back a considerable time, and that one retains the preferences and habits one learned very long ago.

What Verblen specified as the leisure class's "veneration of the archaic" shows itself everywhere: in the popularity among the upper-middle class of attending opera and classical ballet; of sending its issue to single-sex prep schools, because more unregenerate and old-style than coed ones; of traveling to view antiquities in Europe and the Middle East; of studying the "humanities" instead of, say, electrical engineering, since the humanities involve the past and studying them usually results in elegiac emotions. Even the study of law has about it this attractive aura of archaism: there's all that dog Latin, and the "cases" must all be rooted in the past. Classy people never deal with the future. That's for vulgarians like traffic engineers, planners, and inventors. Speaking of the sophisticated TV viewer's love of old black-and-white films, British critic Peter Conrad comments, "Style for us is whatever's perished, outmoded, lost." Since the upper orders possess archaism as their very own class principle -- even their devotion to old clothes signals their retrograde sentiment -- what can the lower orders do but fly to the new, not just to sparkling new garments but to cameras and electronic apparatus and stereo sets and trick watches and electric kitchens and video games?

Uh-oh, looks like I'd better throw away all my video games!

In San Francisco, where the archaism of the wealthy set collides with the futurism of young startup mavens on a daily basis, these observations couldn't be more useful or enlightening.

Usually, ignoring the future isn't that huge of a deal, but humanity is at a special point in history where accelerating technological change is giving us tools with powers far beyond what we would have anticipated, thereby putting us in great danger until we can enhance our intelligence and compassion along with our technology.