videos 12:47 am
There are 88 videos in the Accelerating Future video group on Vimeo. All videos are created by Jeriaska. The videos include substantial amounts of content from events including Foresight’s Unconference 2007, Aging 2008, AGI 08, AGI 09, Global Catastrophic Risks 08, and BIL. This Vimeo group is the best source for video content from those conferences, and will be updated with videos from future conferences.
Stanford Professor Emeritus Martin Hellman, a friend of SIAI and the Lifeboat Foundation, was recently featured in a press release by Stanford University, “Chance of nuclear war is greater than you think: Stanford engineer makes risk analysis”:
What are the chances of a nuclear world war? What is the risk of a nuclear attack on United States soil? The risk of a child born today suffering an early death due to nuclear war is at least 10 percent, according to Martin Hellman, a tall, thin and talkative Stanford Professor Emeritus in Engineering.
Nuclear tensions in Iran and North Korea are increasing the need to take a long look at how the United States handles weapons of mass destruction, Hellman said.
Auto manufacturers assess the risk of injury to drivers, and engineers assess potential risks of a new nuclear power plant. So why haven’t we assessed the risk of nuclear conflict based on our current arms strategy? Hellman and a group of defense experts, Nobel laureates and Stanford professors are calling for an in-depth analysis.
With more than 25,000 nuclear weapons in existence and the ability to build many times more, the choice is between creating a safer world and having no world at all, Hellman wrote in his paper “Risk Analysis of Nuclear Deterrence.”
Weapons from the Cold War still remain, but public concern for nuclear strategy has dissipated, Hellman said. Many of those who do think about it, such as political leaders, say the fantasy of nuclear disarmament is too risky for national defense, he explained.
“People who are saying change is too risky are implicitly assuming that the current approach is risk free, but no one really knows what the risk is if we don’t change,” Hellman said.
Here is a video of Martin Hellman speaking at last year’s Catastrophic Risk Conference in Mountain View:
me 11:34 pm
Just reminding you about my Twitter account. Twitter is good for interacting socially on a spontaneous basis. You can also get exclusive information that doesn’t appear here on the blog.
“There are few modes of discourse more debased and debasing than self-promotion.” – Dale Carrico
I will be on FastForward Radio next Tuesday evening at 7:30PM PST/10:30 EST. The topic of the show, which is 7th in “The World Transformed” series, is “Virtual Worlds and Personality Uploading”. Here’s the summary:
Are we living in the Matrix? Can we be sure? And even if we’re not, are there reasons why we might WANT to live there?
The other panelists include Bruce Katz and Greg Campbell. Tune it to this URL to visit the chat when the show is live.
politics 4:59 pm
Check out the comments section of my recent post on ReadWriteWeb mentioning SIAI for the general situation, which basically is 1) Mike Treder saying that Peter Thiel is a bad guy, and 2) saying that I’m going to “a warmer climate” for not rebuking his statement that liberty is incompatible with democracy. Basically, Mike Treder and James Hughes are uncomfortable with the proximity of SIAI to Peter Thiel, because Peter is libertarian. I don’t want to get knee-deep in emotional political debates, so I opt out of the game entirely.
In my post, I asserted that SIAI is non-political and that I’m personally a Democrat, as evidence that SIAI is not a “libertarian organization” or even close to it. The current Friendly AI plan (CEV) is inherently democratic, actually. The purpose of SIAI is to craft a Friendly AI theory that helps mankind survive the Singularity as well as analyze the Singularity in general and hold conferences. No political system at all will survive if we are squished by a machine superintelligence. No matter your political system, you have an interest of the question of how the first human-equivalent AI is programmed, because that will set a precedent for all subsequent AI development, which, if you’re alive long enough, will personally effect your life as well as your property.
The reason I am bothering with this post is to relay the response of Phil Bowermaster (blogger at the Speculist) to Mike Treder, where the first sentence is a quote of the latter:
Professing neutrality when faced with the moral repugnance of views like Peter Thiel’s is a sure ticket to a warmer climate.
Sheesh, if I wanted to see people get condemned to a lake of fire for all eternity for honestly trying to work out their position on complex issues, I wouldn’t typically come to this site. Maybe I’d go back to the Southern Baptist church camp in Alabama that I attended as a teenager.
But, no, come to think of, that’s not fair. The Baptists were never that judgmental.
One area where transhumanists consistently disappointment me is politics. We can talk about accelerating change and singularities and human enhancement and the possibilities are endless, but when the subject comes to politics, everyone seems to revert to one of a very small number of philosophical templates, most of them created in the 19th century or earlier. And for some reason those are inviolate.
But that’s not to say that technology has played no role in the recent evolution of political discourse. The rise of the blogosphere and sites like Daily Kos and Free Republic have established a new “accelerated” rhetorical framework for politics which now seems to be more or less universally applied. The basic assumption behind the framework is that there is Our Group and then there is the Other. Any ideas from the Other are subjected to a three-step analysis and response:
1. Hysteria / overreaction
2. Vilification
3. Condemnation
(See Kingraven, above.)
This process has worked great for the political blogs in drawing in huge masses of eager readers, mostly the same people who think they’re up to date on current events because they watch The Colbert Report or listen to Rush Limbaugh.
Personally, I’d like to see a group such as IEET take a different approach. Maybe they could look for some kind of, oh I don’t know, Middle Way that transcends opposites? Or maybe that’s too ambitious. To use Brian’s analogy, maybe they could at least come up with a middle way that transcends Pepsi and Coke? Frankly, I would expect that sort of thing to be more in line with their world view than all this (both figurative and now literal) fire and brimstone talk.
Forgive my reductionism, but there will always be tension between those who believe that the good of the individual is primary and that the good of the group must be subordinated to it, and those who believe that the good of the group is primary and that the good of the individual must be subordinated to it. A working system (as opposed to a lofty set of ideological propositions) will inevitably consist of a series of trade-offs between those two. Technology has the potential to ease the impact of some of these trade-offs, and even replace them with new trade-offs, but the tension will never completely go away.
Even without Michael’s super-intelligences (which will show up sooner or later) the introduction of an open-source universal assembler enabled by nanotechnology and potent narrow AI could do significantly more to liberate the world’s poor than any trickle-down economic growth model or redistributionist scheme. When technology trumps political theory, I go with the technology. The vital question: would such technology be made available through some big government push or through private efforts?
Either. Both. Neither. Take your pick. Maybe if we find a way to talk with each other about these things like reasonable people we’ll come up with a completely new model that’s better than anything we’ve tried before.
The nice thing about technology is that it can benefit everyone and cut through political divisions. Both the capitalists of America and the Communists of the USSR used engines and steel. Positive sum.
Also, see a review of the argument by Brian Wang.
AI 11:25 pm
You might have heard this already, but here is CNET’s coverage of Henry Markram’s talk. Their article is titled, “Artificial brain in 10 years, apocalypse soon after?”
I think Markram is wrong about being able to model an intelligent virtual human brain within 10 years. I can’t wait to see his talk online so I can see the details he presents for that projection (if any). Still, it seems plausible to me that whole brain emulation could be achieved within 20-30 years. If so, any AGI projects attempting to launch a Friendly AI should plan to do so within 15-20 years, or brain scanning technology will catch up with them and help solve whole brain emulation.
singularity 10:36 pm
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singularity 9:28 pm
Brian Wang has some more background on the NYT article.
Here is the site for the panel they were talking about. Presidential Panel, sounds pretty fancy.
The people there look pretty old — I’m seeing a sea of grey. Nothing wrong with that, but I’m starting to notice an unusual pattern — younger people (under roughly 45) worry about an intelligence explosion, and older people worry less. Is it because younger people are irrational, or because older people have difficulty picking up new ideas? Vinge, Joy, and Kurzweil aren’t young. Either way, if younger people retain their concern for the intelligence explosion over time, that view will begin to dominate.
My suspicion is that most older people have grown up so long within the human order of things that they have great difficulty imagining a superintelligence showing up and rearranging everything. Notice I say MOST.
singularity 7:38 pm
The recent Singularity story at the NYT was also picked up by ChattahBox.com, which paraphrased the original article in their coverage. Here’s a quote:
Kurzweil expanded on the theories first advanced by I. J. Good and Vernor Vinge, promoting the notion of the rise of superintelligent machines that would improve their own designs beyond what humans ever envisioned.
That’s a meme we haven’t been seeing enough — that many of Kurzweil’s ideas are merely an expansion of older ideas, and you can theoretically throw away Kurzweil’s accelerating change arguments and retain the ideas of Good and Vinge.
Also, here’s an interesting image of Ray with his virtual alter-ego, Ramona:
I thought this image was cool because it shows Ray in more typical (non-business) clothes and with fluffed-up hair, like an everyday jogger. It would be cool to see Ray or Ramona give a talk in SecondLife.
singularity 7:21 pm
Matt Yglesias at ThinkProgress, “a prominent voice in the liberal blogosphere”, just linked the NYT article on the Singularity a couple days ago.
singularity 4:28 pm
Following on the heels of a Singularity-related article from just a couple months ago, “The Coming Superbrain”, New York Times journalist John Markoff has penned another Singularity-related article, “Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man”.
What is nice about these articles is that they are not solely about Kurzweil’s Singularity, and they actually branch out to consider issues of roboethics and the intelligence explosion.
The topic of this latest article is a conference convened at Asilomar by the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) to discuss the dangers of advanced AI. What is interesting is that the conference seems to have been convened as a reaction to what our community has been up to over the past decade — agitating publicly about the dangers of advanced AI.
In describing the meeting, it begins like this:
The meeting on the future of artificial intelligence was organized by Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who is now president of the association.
Dr. Horvitz said he believed computer scientists must respond to the notions of superintelligent machines and artificial intelligence systems run amok.
Yes. But wait! We must separate ourselves from the superlative concepts of transhumanism, even though it is that very thinking which caused us to convene this conference in the first place!
“Something new has taken place in the past five to eight years,” Dr. Horvitz said. “Technologists are providing almost religious visions, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture.”
Here, replace “Rapture” with “the world getting a lot better”. Our claim is that a superintelligence with a human-friendly morality could make the world a lot better faster than humans can, and this is considered as a parallel to the Rapture, because in a human-only world, the intervention of any non-human agent that substantially improves our lot is invariably compared to the Rapture. Think about it: there is no possible scenario where non-human intelligences substantially improve our lives in a reasonable period of time that wouldn’t be compared to the Rapture. The concept is just too directly linked to that of Jesus and God. There is one issue, however — the Judeo-Christian God (or any god) never existed, and Jesus was “merely” a wise teacher who died 2,000 years ago, whereas superintelligence is actually possible. Big difference.
Dr. Horvitz continues:
“My sense was that sooner or later we would have to make some sort of statement or assessment, given the rising voice of the technorati and people very concerned about the rise of intelligent machines,” Dr. Horvitz said.
Indeed. Given our rising voice and complaints demanding consideration of the risks and benefits of human-level AI over the last 5-8 years, you are now forced to issue a statement. Mainstream roboethics now seems to be partially defined by the way in which it reacts to considerations of superintelligence articulated by Kurzweil, Vinge, Bostrom, and Yudkowsky. I must admit that I didn’t see this happening as early as 2009. I would have thought that we would have needed to wait until 2015, or 2013 at least.
Horvitz says:
The A.A.A.I. report will try to assess the possibility of “the loss of human control of computer-based intelligences.” It will also grapple, Dr. Horvitz said, with socioeconomic, legal and ethical issues, as well as probable changes in human-computer relationships. How would it be, for example, to relate to a machine that is as intelligent as your spouse?
This sort of activity can certainly be useful, because I think that the way we handle ethical issues on the road to AGI will partially determine how we handle AGI. But notice the way that Horvitz is comfortable postulating human-level intelligence without major changes — if I had a machine that is as intelligent as my spouse, then couldn’t it be programmed or taught to do advanced mathematics? It seems like the journey from lizard-level intelligence to human-level intelligence is much, much larger than the journey from a human-level intelligence that is uneducated and one that can do advanced mathematics and engineering. If I have a human-equivalent machine that can do $100K/year work for $2K/year or less (electricity and maintenance costs, say), then doesn’t that have the makings of an economic hard takeoff?
If we had human-equivalent machines, then couldn’t we set them to work on developing better brains for themselves? Why stop at the human level? Why assume that the developmental pathway would naturally stop at the human level, when AIs themselves will have much better cognitive resources to examine the roadblocks and challenges? Why not assume that the research trajectory naturally pauses at 10X the human level, or 20X, whatever that means? Why not assume that it stops at a level as far above us as we are above chimps? Because we have a habit of engaging in anthropocentric thinking that reassures us that we will always have complete control over our machines and never have to deal with the responsibility of crafting a morality for them that actually functions for our survival when they become massively more powerful than us.
This kind of lazy self-worship (as a species) is exemplified by a recent guest column at the New York Times, titled “Computers vs. Brains”:
This gets us to the deepest point: why bother building an artificial brain?
As neuroscientists, we’re excited about the potential of using computational models to test our understanding of how the brain works. On the other hand, although it eventually may be possible to design sophisticated computing devices that imitate what we do, the capability to make such a device is already here. All you need is a fertile man and woman with the resources to nurture their child to adulthood. With luck, by 2030 you’ll have a full-grown, college-educated, walking petabyte. A drawback is that it may be difficult to get this computing device to do what you ask.
Wow. What about the fact that human neurons only operate at 200 Hz, whereas a computer chip can operate about 100 million times faster? That means more thought in less time, which means more research breakthroughs, cures, solutions, works of art, creativity, wisdom, and “common sense”. More to the point, a higher quality of intelligence will provide better solutions even if it were running the same speed as us. Why is it so difficult to imagine genuinely greater intelligence? As Edward Lichtenstein said, it is impossible to “think in a way that we do not think”.
Superintelligence is on its way, whether or not the AAAI thinks so. The question is not whether or not its coming, but how to specify its values in such a way that we can be confident it has a moral decision-making ability equal or better than that of the beings that created it. This is a complex technical and philosophical question, best approached not by analyzing the comparatively small differences between human ethical and moral systems, but the differences that set humans apart from all other species.
If these issues interest you and you are free to visit New York in early October, consider signing up for the upcoming Singularity Summit 2009.
