C-Realm Podcast with Me is Up
The show I did with KMO of the C-Realm podcast is up. This is the first half of our conversation -- the next half will be posted next week.
Top Futurist Blogs from Invesp Consulting
I received a note from a site that claims they have a good set of algorithms for determining the top blogs in any given category. According to them, this blog is the 10th in terms of popular futurist blogs, but I think their algorithm definitely needs work. For instance, Pink Tentacle and Overcoming Bias are only about futurism a fraction of the time. And where is Next Big Future? Brian has almost 3 times the RSS subscribers I have. It is interesting how many different variables they look at... but to base an ultimate ranking on the number of Propeller or Mixx submissions, even a little bit? Come on.
Letter to SIAI Newsletter List about Singularity Summit
I recently sent out an email to all 6,863 contacts on the SIAI newsletter list, here it is reproduced for your pleasure:
Dear SIAI newsletter subscriber,
With only six weeks to go until our first Singularity Summit on the East Coast -- in New York on October 3-4 -- SIAI has been getting geared up in preparation. With your help, this will be the year when the Singularity goes mainstream, with heavy coverage in the global media. A recent front page story in the New York Times discussed both the Singularity and growing concern about the potential risks of artificial intelligence. The AAAI, the leading artificial intelligence association, convened a panel to evaluate long-term risks of AI, with AAAI President Eric Horvitz noting the rise of the Singularity Institute in explaining the formation of the panel. Forbes magazine ran a major report on AI, to which SIAI President Michael Vassar contributed. A documentary on the life and ideas of SIAI Board of Directors member Ray Kurzweil, Transcendent Man, debuted in April at the Tribeca Film Festival. As public attention increases, space for serious discussion opens up.
I hope you will consider coming to this year's Singularity Summit. We have a great speaker lineup, including technology luminaries Peter Thiel and Ray Kurzweil, world-renowned AI researchers Jurgen Schmidhuber and Marcus Hutter, quantum computation specialist Michael Nielsen, eminent philosopher of mind David Chalmers, and many more. Your Summit ticket is a tax deductible donation to SIAI, almost all of which goes to support our continuing research and outreach efforts. The Summit also offers an unusual chance to socialize with an extraordinary audience: a smart, strategic, and business-savvy group of long-term thinkers.
If you have friends, family members, or business associates who might be interested in the Summit, invite them to join you. They’ll have a good time; they’ll see what all the fuss is about; and you'll benefit from a referral discount for group purchases.
Our sincerest thanks for your support for the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
Sincerely,
Michael Anissimov
Media Director, SIAI
A Boring Disagreement?
My disagreement with Dale Carrico, Mike Treder, James Hughes, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Jones, Charles Stross, Kevin Kelly, Max More, David Brin, and many others is relatively boring and straightforward, I think. It is simply this: I believe that it is possible that a being more powerful than the entirety of humanity could emerge in a relatively covert and quick way, and they don't. A singleton, a Maximillian, an unrivaled superintelligence, a transcending upload, whatever you want to call it.
If you believe that such a being could be created and become unrivaled, then it is obvious that you would want to have some impact on its motivations. If you don't, then clearly you would see such preparations to be silly and misguided.
Why do people make this more complex than it needs to be? It has nothing to do with politics. It has everything to do with our estimated probabilities of the likelihood of a more-powerful-than-humanity being emerging quickly. I am practically willing to concede all other points, because I think that this is the crux of the argument. Boring and simple, if I am indeed correct.
I am fairly confident that, at this point in history, superintelligence is the MacGuffin -- the key element that determines how the story of humanity will go. I could be entirely wrong, of course, but that is my current position, and it is derived from cogsci and economics-based arguments about takeoff curves, not political nonsense. If it is wrong, it should be entirely simple to refute the hard takeoff hypothesis at the locus of cogsci and economics-based arguments rather than political or sociological arguments. Particularly, I think that James Hughes, as a sociologist, seems to have a desire to search for a "sociological" (social signaling/subcultural) explanation for other people's beliefs, rather than looking at the economics/cogsci side of the arguments, which is their entire substance. You have to note that the people that believe in hard takeoff hypotheses are mostly subculturally isolated from one another, and barely even come into geographical contact. What wins us over are abstract arguments like, "humans are qualitatively smarter than chimps and have a huge advantage over them; why couldn't there exist a superintelligence that has a similar qualitative advantage over us?"
Nick Bostrom on Superintelligence
Quoting from Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence:
It seems that the best way to ensure that a superintelligence will have a beneficial impact on the world is to endow it with philanthropic values. Its top goal should be friendliness. How exactly friendliness should be understood and how it should be implemented, and how the amity should be apportioned between different people and nonhuman creatures is a matter that merits further consideration. I would argue that at least all humans, and probably many other sentient creatures on earth should get a significant share in the superintelligence’s beneficence. If the benefits that the superintelligence could bestow are enormously vast, then it may be less important to haggle over the detailed distribution pattern and more important to seek to ensure that everybody gets at least some significant share, since on this supposition, even a tiny share would be enough to guarantee a very long and very good life. One risk that must be guarded against is that those who develop the superintelligence would not make it generically philanthropic but would instead give it the more limited goal of serving only some small group, such as its own creators or those who commissioned it.
This seems pretty straightforward. Another important factor may be whether we assume that superintelligence will acquire a favorable morality with little real work (as J. Storrs Hall seems to think will happen), or whether we have to figure out what "it" is and program it in by hand. The latter seems to be a huge hassle, yet also unavoidable. The "lazy way" around the problem would seem to be to enhance a human's intelligence until it becomes recursively self-improving, but that also introduces problems of its own. Most Singularity transition scenarios seem to assume that no one intelligence will jump significantly ahead of the others, and that the most powerful agent at any given time will still be dependent on the collective. I prefer transition strategies that work even if the most powerful agent at any given time is unrivaled.
I am very concerned about humans that program a superintelligence to serve only a group or even a single individual. If a human being had a superintelligence on its side with the goal only to serve its master, that human might be impossible to bring down. You can think it's BS if you want, but I am concerned about the possibility. If this is possible, then who cares about "advanced science and technologies" like nanotech, biotech, and infotech? We can develop all the fancy gadgets we want, and still be caught naked when someone creates a superintelligence and uses it to achieve his or her goals. Eventually, the genie might get out of control, which could simply bring down everything. I doubt that a human could rein in a superintelligence without its own complete morality indefinitely, but maybe it is possible.
The idea is to infuse superintelligence with its own complete morality so you don't have to worry endlessly. If we are lazy, we will be stuck with a half-completed work, and get to experience it for the rest of eternity. Once a superintelligence is created, it might be impossible to get rid of. We'd also be doing our universe a disservice by creating a monster that may spread outwards as fast as it can. It is rude to create a self-propagating superintelligent entity that does not put your best face forward as a species. Consider it the galactic equivalent of farting in a crowded elevator.
Ray Kurzweil on FastForward Radio
Ray Kurzweil will be on FastForward Radio tonight at 10:30 Eastern/9:30 Central/8:30 Mountain/7:30 Pacific. The topic of discussion will be the Singularity. I was just on the show myself a couple weeks ago, talking about virtual worlds and the future of personality.
Minds that Make Optimal Use of Small Amounts of Sensory Data
Following is a guest post from "S is for Singularity", duplicated from Less Wrong.
In That alien message, Eliezer made some pretty wild claims:
My moral - that even Einstein did not come within a million light-years of making efficient use of sensory data.
Riemann invented his geometries before Einstein had a use for them; the physics of our universe is not that complicated in an absolute sense. A Bayesian superintelligence, hooked up to a webcam, would invent General Relativity as a hypothesis - perhaps not the dominant hypothesis, compared to Newtonian mechanics, but still a hypothesis under direct consideration - by the time it had seen the third frame of a falling apple. It might guess it from the first frame, if it saw the statics of a bent blade of grass.
They never suspected a thing. They weren't very smart, you see, even before taking into account their slower rate of time. Their primitive equivalents of rationalists went around saying things like, "There's a bound to how much information you can extract from sensory data." And they never quite realized what it meant, that we were smarter than them, and thought faster.
In the comments, Will Pearson asked for "some form of proof of concept". It seems that researchers at Cornell - Schmidt and Lipson - have done exactly that. See their video on Guardian Science:
'Eureka machine' can discover laws of nature - The machine formulates laws by observing the world and detecting patterns in the vast quantities of data it has collected
Researchers at Cambridge and Aberystwith have gone one step further and implemented an AI system/robot to perform scientific experiments:
Researchers at Aberystwyth University in Wales and England's University of Cambridge report in Science today that they designed Adam - they describe how the bot operates by relating how he carried out one of his tasks, in this case to find out more about the genetic makeup of baker's yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, an organism that scientists use to model more complex life systems. Using artificial intelligence, Adam hypothesized that certain genes in baker's yeast code for specific enzymes that catalyze biochemical reactions. The robot devised experiments to test these beliefs, ran the experiments, and interpreted the results.
The crucial question is: what can we learn about the likely effectiveness of a "superintelligent" AI from the behavior of these AI programs? First of all, let us be clear: this AI is *not* a "superintelligence", so we shouldn't expect it to perform at that level. The problem we face is analogous to the problem of extrapolating how fast an Olympic sprinter can run from looking at a baby crawling around on the floor. Furthermore, the Cornell machine was given a physical system that was specifically chosen to be easy to analyze, and a representation (equations) that is known to be suited to the problem.
We can certainly state that the program analyzed some data much faster than any human could have done. In a running time probably measured in hours or minutes, it took a huge stream of raw position and velocity data and found the underlying conserved quantities. And given likely algorithmic optimizations and another 10 years' of Moore's law, we can safely say that in 10 years' time, that particular program will run in seconds on a $500 machine or milliseconds on a supercomputer. These results actually surprise me: an AI can automatically and instantly analyze a physical system (albeit a rigged one).
But, of course, one has to ask: how much more narrow-AI work would it take to actually look at video of some bouncing, falling and whirling objects and deduce a general physical law such as the earth's gravity and the laws governing air resistance, where the objects are not hand-picked to be easy to analyze? This is unclear. But I can see mechanisms whereby this would work, rather than merely having to submit to the overwhelming power of the word "superintelligence". My suspicion is that with current state-of-the-art object identification technology, video footage of a system of bouncing balls and pendulums and springs would be amenable to this kind of analysis. There may even be a research project in that proposition.
As far as extrapolating the behavior of a superintelligence from the behavior of the Cornell AI or the Adam robot, we should note that no human can look at a complex physical system for a few seconds and just write down the physical law or equation that it obeys. A simple narrow AI has already outperformed humans at one specific task; though it still cannot do most of what a scientist does. We should therefore update our beliefs to assign more weight to the hypothesis that on some particular narrow physical modelling task, a "superintelligence" would vastly outperform us. Personally I was surprised at what such a simple system can do, though with hindsight it is obvious: data from a physical system follows patterns, and statistics can indentify those patterns. Science is not a magic ritual that only humans can perform, rather it is a specific kind of algorithm, and we should expect there to be no special injunction against silicon minds from doing it.
Superlongevity, Superintelligence, Superabundance
Dale Carrico, one of the more prominent critics of transhumanism, frequently refers to "superlongevity, superintelligence, and superabundance" as transhumanist goals, of course in a disparaging way. Yet, I openly embrace these goals. Superlongevity, superintelligence, and superabundance are a perfect summary of what we want and need. How can we achieve them?
Superlongevity can be achieved by uncovering the underlying mechanisms of aging and counteracting them at the molecular level faster than they can cause damage. Huge research project, a long-term effort, but definitely worth the time and money. Leading organization in this area? The SENS Foundation.
Superintelligence will be a difficult challenge, creating an intelligent being smarter than humans in every domain. It could take decades, or possibly longer, but it does seem possible. There are various possible routes to superintelligence: brain-computer interfacing, neuroengineering, and last but not least AI. I humbly offer my own organization, the Singularity Institute, as the leading organization in this area, but it is entirely possible that another group will get there first.
Superabundance can be achieved by creating programmable self-replicating machines powered and supplied by easily available resources and materials, like generic carbonaceous material (such as topsoil, or better yet, calcium carbonate), water, and the Sun. Then, making practically unlimited quantities of carbon-based products would be as simple as owning the fertile land and flicking a switch. You may have noticed that plants operate the same way. Another huge, difficult task. RepRap might be considered an embryonic version.
Achieving superlongevity, superintelligence, and superabundance will be incredibly challenging, but seemingly inevitable as long as civilization continues to progress and we don't blow ourselves up or have a global fundamentalist dictatorship on our hands. There is no guarantee that we will achieve these goals in our lifetime -- but why not try? Achieving any of these milestones would radically improve quality of life for everyone on Earth. The first step to making technological advancements available to everyone is to make them available for someone.
Robin Hanson on SETI in USA Today
Robin Hanson, economist and author of Overcoming Bias, recently appeared in USA Today talking about SETI. He appears as a counterpoint to Seth Shostak, a guy who I believe is totally out of it. Here's the relevant section:
But researchers such as Robin Hanson of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., wonder whether the big picture really looks so promising when it comes to advanced life. Hanson supports SETI but finds it telling that humans haven’t come across anything yet. “It has been remarkable and somewhat discouraging,†Hanson says, “that the universe is so damn big and so damn dead.â€
Great quote, love it. To quote Marshall T. Savage, author of that superlative masterpiece, The Millennial Project:
There is a program to actively search for signals from other civilizations in the galaxy: SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). This is a noble cause, but it seems slightly absurd. Scientists huddle around radio telescopes listening intently to one star at a time for the sound of dripping water, when what they are seeking would sound like Niagara Falls. The most cursory radio snapshot of the sky should reveal K2 civilizations as clearly as the lights of great cities seen from orbit at night. That we don't see any such radio beacons in the skies probably means there are no Kardasahev Level Two civilizations in this galaxy.
Perhaps advanced civilizations don't use radio, or radar, or microwaves. Advanced technology can be invoked as an explanation for the absence of extra terrestrial radio signals. But it seems unlikely that their technology would leave no imprint anywhere in the electromagnetic spectrum. We have been compared to the aborigine who remains blissfully unaware of the storm of radio and TV saturating the airwaves around him. Presumably, the aliens use advanced means of communications which we cannot detect. What these means might be is, by definition, unknown, but they must be extremely exotic. We don't detect K2 signals in the form of laser pulses, gamma rays, cosmic rays, or even neutrinos. Therefore, the aliens must use system that we haven't even imagined.
The argument, appealing thought it is, cannot survive contact with Occam's razor -- in this case Occam's machete. The evidence in hand is simply nothing -- no signals. To explain the absence of signals in the presence of aliens, demands recourse to what is essentially magic. Unfortunately, the iron laws of logic demand that we reject such wishful thinking in favor of the simplest explanation which fits the data: No signals, no aliens.
The skies are thunderous in their silence; the Moon eloquent in its blankness; the aliens are conclusive by their absence. The extraterrestrials aren't here. They've never been here. They're never coming here. They aren't coming because they don't exist. We are alone.
If Dr. Shostak wants to find some aliens, perhaps he should try ingesting some powerful hallucinogens. Then he will be able to see all the aliens he wants.
Seasteading Institute Conference and Floating Festival to Set Sail in September
I just got an email from Seasteading Institute President Patri Friedman letting me know about the organization's upcoming conference and floating festival, which will be September 28th - 29th for the conference and October 2-4 for the festival. Yes, they are having a floating freedom festival, as Patri calls it.
Ephemerisle (floating freedom festival): Website, Press Release
Seasteading 2009 Conference: Website, Press Release
I am planning to attend the seasteading conference and right after that will fly to New York to set up for Singularity Summit. Cool!
World Future Society 2010 Conference
The World Future Society is now accepting registrations for their 2010 conference. Some confirmed speakers are here.
Friendly AI Supporter Solves Super Mario
Robin Baumgarten, a PhD student at Imperial College, London, author of the AI Panic blog, and fellow Friendly AI supporter, recently got some nice blog coverage for creating an AI (script, really) that plays Super Mario more effectively than any human. Check it:
At this point I must brag that I have beaten Lost Levels. The tactics that the script uses can actually work pretty well -- in a lot of the harder levels, running semi-blindly seems to work better than taking it slow and easy, which just puts you at greater risk of being attacked. I wonder -- which video game will get solved next? Many of them seem trivially easy, but platformers (like Mario) seem relatively challenging, from an AI perspective.
Congrats, Robin! I am reminded of the Black Belt Bayesian post "Speedrunning Through Life". Superintelligences will speedrun through real life problem-solving, analysis, and mediation in the same way that Robin's AI speedruns through Mario. Though the real world is more complex than a game, the concept is fundamentally the same. I find it hilarious that there are humans who actually believe that their problem-solving acumen and speed is about as good as anyone could get, or that the real world is anything but a highly complex video game where you can feel pain and death is final.