Live Webcast in Ethical Issues in Synthetic Biology
There's an interesting live webcast on synthetic biology happening tomorrow at 12:30PM, sadly I can't make it, let us know how it went if you do tune in.
Moral Machines Blog
Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen, authors of Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong, a fascinating look at morality in machines, have a blog on the topic that I wasn't aware of until recently.
You should definitely check out their book. It's relatively brief and analyzes many important issues around how one might go about building machines with a sense of morality. Wendell made a post where he praised my recent project Preventing Skynet and made a call for closer interaction between two communities in machine morality:
Our friend Michael Anissimov has, together with others, initiated a new blog, "Terminator Salvation: Preventing Skynet: Just say 'no' to genocidal artificial intelligence!" We applaud this effort and encourage members of the machine morality, machine ethics, and roboethics community to contribute to the blog. There has been a kind of split into two communities, with only a little cross-over, between those focused around future ethical challenges posed by a possible Singularity and those whose attention is directed at more immediately challenges and the implementation of moral decision making in present or near-future technology. I'd like to propose that we make efforts to bridge this gap, and will have more to say about that in a future posting.
I do agree, though the two groups may have a few inherent differences. Upon reading Wallach's book, however, I think many of these differences may be superficial in some instances. Our group is particularly concerned with the question, "how do we create a self-improving AI that we can trust not to kill us as it becomes more powerful than the entire human race?" The machine morality, machine ethics, and roboethics communities are interested in the more general question, "how do we build machines that we can trust to make moral decisions?" Many of the ideas from the latter camp could be useful for the goals of former, and vice versa.
The Singularity Institute (SIAI) is taking steps to integrate itself more seriously with the mainstream roboethics community. In just a week, SIAI employees Anna Salamon and Steve Rayhawk and SIAI associate Carl Shulman will be presenting papers at the European Conference at Computing and Philosophy. One of the papers is based on the project we did last summer as part of the SIAI internship program, Uncertain Future. I am currently visiting the current SIAI summer program and recently got to see preliminary presentations of both papers. Thanks to the support of SIAI's generous donors, I'm sure we'll be seeing more SIAI representatives at academic conferences on computing, philosophy, and roboethics.
Singularity Institute President on Forbes.com
Michael Vassar has an article up on Forbes. Here's how it starts:
Are you in a city? If so, may I ask you to look around? Almost everything you see was created deliberately. Human minds built theories and implemented plans. Due to these plans, rocks were gathered, shaped and rearranged. You call some of these rocks your house. The main things that weren't created deliberately are the minds themselves.
This is part of a larger AI special on the site. Nice selection, including articles by Judea Pearl, Nick Bostrom, Ben Goertzel, Peter Norvig, and Hugo de Garis.
Ready to Get Nuked?
Al Qaeda is ready to drop a nuke or two on us Americans:
"God willing, the nuclear weapons will not fall into the hands of the Americans and the mujahideen would take them and use them against the Americans," Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, the leader of al Qaeda's in Afghanistan, said in an interview with Al Jazeera television.
Note that the simplest type of nuclear weapon, the gun-type fission weapon, is essentially a cannon that fires one chunk of enriched uranium at another. It isn't brain surgery. The hard part is getting the enriched uranium. Thankfully for terrorists, there is enriched uranium at facilities in the former Soviet Union that is "kept safe" only by a couple poorly-paid night guards, and Pakistan is politically unstable.
See the Nuclear Threat Initiative for more information. Thankfully, President Obama takes the threat seriously (unlike many of my commenters), and he met with this group recently to talk about moving towards a world free of nuclear weapons.
Several million degrees in a fraction of a second. Thankfully I live in foggy San Francisco. Fog has the potential to absorb a lot of energy from a thermal pulse. Also, since San Francisco is on the West Coast, and the prevailing wind goes east, fallout from any ground-level explosions will be dispersed away from my location. Others might not be so lucky.
McNally Jackson Forum: Transhumanism Past, Present, and Future
The McNally Jackson bookstore in New York is having a panel with members of the New York Transhumanist Association, this Thursday at 7PM. Let us know how it went if you go.
Creating a Mental Transcript of Everything You Think
The vast majority of all thought is wasted because we forget what we were thinking. There is no record unless we write it all down.
Some form of electronic telepathy already exists, but it is crude. Ambient Corp's neckband lets you speak without opening your mouth. The system only knows 150 words.
In the longer term, it may be possible to use a similar technology to make a constant transcript of thoughts in realtime. This article from PopSci mentions:
Neuroscientists are already able to read some basic thoughts, like whether an individual test subject is looking at a picture of a cat or an image with a specific left or right orientation. They can even read pictures that you're simply imagining in your mind's eye. Even leaders in the field are shocked by how far we've come in our ability to peer into people's minds.
Did you know that we can already read basic thoughts? The PopSci article is optimistic about timeframes -- it sort of has to be, because it is a magazine made for entertainment. (And generally untrustworthy, like its cousin New Scientist.) Mind reading technology may be somewhat far off (or possibly not), but it certainly has interesting implications. I am curious about combining mind-reading technology with augmented reality to open up exciting new forms of collaboration and gaming. There could be major breakthroughs in that area within a decade, if we are lucky.
Dale Carrico on Superlative Futurology
Read Dale Carrico's latest critique of what he calls "superlative futurology".
Convo at Sentient Developments on Hedonistic Imperative
Some heavy-hitting philosophers, like David Pearce and Mark Walker, have gotten involved at a discussion in the comments thread of my guest post at Sentient Developments. They are trying to convince Athena Andreadis that having more control over our emotions is a good thing and that we can eliminate pain without becoming drooling zombies. Note that hyperthymic (very happy) people not only are completely functional, but they have a tendency to be more creative than people in the middle of the happiness bell curve.
In the thread, people point out the value of pain -- it's evolutionarily useful, etc. I consider it quite likely that we'll find workarounds to all the obstacles that stand in the way of removing it, however. The vast majority of pain is useless. The minority of pain that is useful could be replaced by automatic "warning signals" that pop up when we would otherwise be feeling useful pain, or even connecting the cause of pain directly to pain-avoidance instincts without the intermediary of conscious pain.
People find that last part really hard to grasp. How could you jerk away your hand from a hot stove in a fraction of a second without feeling pain? The fact of the matter is that, in the end, pretty much any stimulus can be arbitrarily connected to any reaction in a physical system as long as you have the necessary access and a well-specified description of the stimulus and reaction. In the long term, we'll be able program ourselves to laugh insanely at the sound of drops of water, or recoil in fear from beavers. There are no magical connections between stimuli, conscious feelings, and instinctual reactions. Evolution built them all from scratch. As our ability to reengineer the human brain increases, we'll gain the ability to reprogram literally anything we want. I think that people will eventually choose to make practically every stimulus result in some shade of happiness -- the question is how to program these "gradients of bliss".
Nothing in the world is inherently happiness-causing or pain-causing. It's all based on the neural circuitry doing the perceiving. Thinking otherwise is falling prey to the Mind Projection Fallacy, an error we seemed programmed to make, but once we realize it's wrong, we ought to drop it forever.
Comparison of Consumer Brain-Computer Interface Devices
Check out this interesting comparison of consumer brain-computer interfaces on Wikipedia.
Emotiv is apparently coming out with their EPOC in Q4 2009. The page says:
Due to the complex detection algorithms involved, there is a slight lag in detecting thoughts, making them more suitable for use in games like Harry Potter than FPS games.
Obviously faster computers would help here. People ask about the economic motivations for why the average person would want faster computers. This could become one of them.
Obama Dissolves Presidential Council on Bioethics
Funny. Apparently Obama considers the current Presidential Council on Bioethics to be nothing more than a philosophical talk shop that avoids creating consensus. But... I thought they did have a (lame) consensus? Perhaps this is all nicey-nice talk for, "the group sucks, let's make a new one."
President Obama will appoint a new bioethics commission, one with a new mandate and that “offers practical policy options,†Mr. Cherlin said.
Probably this means one not poisoned by Judeo-Christian fundamentalism and Kassite stupidity. Though Obama is a Christian, he's a Christian in that more modern sense of the word, as in, he pretty much ignores parts of the Bible he doesn't like. He's publicly denounced Leviticus, which is a good start. Here's what Jesus said:
Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.
For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.
Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. (Mark 5:18)
How about we like, say screw all the parts of the law that have to do with stoning women who aren't virgins on their wedding night? Christians always like to use Jesus as an excuse to basically say that everything in the Old Testament is invalid, but Jesus himself said that he approves of the Old Testament. He also believed that Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale. He also said "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God" (Matthew 19:24), and here's how his group worked:
And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need. (Acts 2:44)
So Jesus was an advocate of being poor and communist.
Guest Post at Sentient Developments — “Eliminating All Pain, Forever”
I just submitted a guest post to George Dvorsky's blog, Sentient Developments (which gets significantly more traffic than me nowadays, making it the #1 transhumanist blog!) reminding people about the Hedonistic Imperative, David Pearce's great idea.
Natasha Vita-More on Love of the Body in Transhumanism
A while back, Athena Andreadis posted an article I didn't like at Sentient Developments complaining about how transhumanists are allegedly anti-body and/or anti-fitness, which is in my experience is false. She figured that mind uploading meant getting rid of the body when such an idea is pretty silly and it's hard to imagine why anyone would want it -- the point of mind uploading would be to have a virtual body indistinguishable from our current one, or capable of greater sensuality and experience, not less.
Natasha Vita-More, an early founder of transhumanism, responded with a great piece, "Interpretive Dance of the Transhumanist Future". She points out how transhumanism does care about the human body and numerous articles about how transhumanists have historically been criticized for being too concerned about fitness and/or sexiness. This is especially relevant to me as reading about Max and Natasha in 2001 helped make me realize that transhumanism wasn't just for nerds but also for well-rounded people. Today most of the transhumanists I know personally eat well, exercise, and enjoy things like sports and travel. Not at all like the stereotype portrayed by Andrew Zolli (argh!) in WIRED.