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

Phil Bowermaster’s Response to Mike Treder

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.