Superlongevity, Superintelligence, Superabundance Monday, Aug 17 2009
transhumanism 10:38 pm
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.
August 17th, 2009 at 11:10 pm
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August 18th, 2009 at 11:49 am
Achieving any of these milestones would radically improve quality of life for everyone on Earth.
Everyone? Really??
Michael, this is the sort of hyperbolic, unrealistic statement that troubles me about your writing. Have you forgotten again about politics?
Even if one or more of them — superlongevity, superintelligence, or superabundance — could be achieved, we’d still have to contend with age-old struggles for power and position. To assume that the amazing achievements of technology would somehow make human nature instantly benign seems incredibly naive.
August 18th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
I’m not saying they would make human nature instantly benign at all, just radically improve quality of life. Steam engines radically improved our quality of life. So did the Haber-Bosch process and plastics. Superlongevity, superintelligence, and/or superabundance would improve our quality of life much more than steam engines, the Haber-Bosch process, and plastics combined, unless, of course, the superintelligence were human-indifferent or the superabundance were utilized by an expansionist superpower to suppress other nations.
Why are you reading points into my words that I never said? Making life better does not equal making everyone benign.
A lot of human conflict seems to derive from not having enough wealth. If we had nanofactories to build medical supplies and AIs to act as doctors, there would be no health care debate. Health care would be free unless an overarching power specifically wanted to make life suck for people.
Superintelligence would be an important step on the road to being able to thoroughly understand and edit our own brains, however, which could eventually allow us to make ourselves inherently more benign, if we chose to.
August 18th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
In similar fashion, if we had networked computers to copy and distribute music, movies, software, and books, these things would free unless an overarching power specifically wanted to make life suck for people.
(Come to think of it, that’s an apt description for the current bosses.)
So far, human society has a poor track with abundance. We don’t know what to do with it, so we typically invent scarcity through coercion. We’ve had the technology to provide material comfort to everyone on the planet for decades now. It hasn’t happened. I don’t see nanofactories would magically change this.
August 18th, 2009 at 6:53 pm
Some things are already “superabundant” in the US at least, such that you don’t think of them. Everyone expects a bathroom and water fountain to be nearby. The price is small and spread throughout the system. Other things in our life could become just like those, totally forgotten. One day blogs will read “of course flying to the moon is free, when I said superabundant I meant interstellar flight for everyone.”
But I think in other places super abundance will be followed by super consumption. You don’t see anyone buying intel P90s for the desktops now that “real CPUs” are available. As cars got cheaper and better they didn’t actually get cheaper - more features were heaped on to match the willing expenditure level.
You’re totally right about RIAA/MPAA. They need to go down.
August 18th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
If we had nanofactories to build medical supplies and AIs to act as doctors, there would be no health care debate.
[sigh] Yes, and if we only had grocery stores, no one would ever go hungry.
The point is that we already have everything we need to eliminate poverty forever, but we haven’t done so because we’re imperfect beings. More technology won’t change that. You could go back a hundred years or five hundred years and find people just like yourself believing that if we only had enough of ‘that’ then everything would be fine–it would radically improve quality of life for everyone on Earth.
No, I’m sorry, the world just doesn’t work that way. We keep getting more stuff and better stuff and we still have massive oppression, prodigious suffering, and extreme inequality. There is no magic solution–not nanofactories or life extension or superintelligence–that will suddenly and definitely make all our troubles disappear. We’ll only find new things to fight over.
I’m not cynical about working to make things better, and I do believe that most people are generally living happier lives than in the past, but it’s a long, arduous, and gradual process. We should keep trying, and we have to recognize that it is up to us, and only us: no heavenly angel or friendly machine will appear as if by magic to take all our cares away. We are responsible for our own fate.
August 18th, 2009 at 9:31 pm
There’s a major difference between going back a hundred years and going back five hundred. While I’m critical of putting too much hope in technology for social change, it does determine what human organization can accomplish. In 1509, muscle power did nearly all the work. Even the most egalitarian political system would have left everyone subject to disease, famine, toil, and want. No so in 1909. Exploiting external energy fundamentally changes the game. The maximum physical comfort that could be available to all increased exponentially over those four hundred years.
Michael, I share your enthusiasm for the three transhumanist goals. I just think we’ll need an old-fashioned revolution to go alone with the scientific advances. I could be wrong. The emergence of broadly useful AI represents a wild card. That’s profoundly new. We don’t need digital gods to effect radical change; narrow AI capable of filling in for people would be enough. So many problems stem from the scarcity of intelligence. Manufacturing brainy beings on demand prove as significant as the shift to external energy sources. We’ll have to wait and see.
August 20th, 2009 at 1:31 am
I agree with Michael there will probably a rough transition period but a nanofactory alone will bring about changes that it would be naive to dismiss. We underestimate the capability of people in the third world, the main restriction placed on them is corruption, both local and international. This is caused by and also perpetuates a degree of financial inequality that we would find unacceptable in our comforatble western societies. Give one nanofactory to a person in the slums of Ho Chi Minh City and in months everyone will have one. When money and wealth become less important what do you gain from being corrupt? There may be suffering and disruption initially but the eventual abundance will improve people’w lives if we survive the transition.
August 20th, 2009 at 6:48 am
I hope nanofactories spread so quickly, robert, but I retain my doubts. Unless ironclad technical barriers prevent folks from producing weapons and drugs, the powers that be will be understandably terrified. In your example, the US or international community might deploy robotic soldiers or covert agents to prevent millions of people from gaining access to weapons of mass destruction.
August 20th, 2009 at 6:50 am
I’m in complete agreement that superlongevity, superintelligence, and superabundance are worthy goals for transhumanists to consider. Of course, more than this, they are worth human goals. Certainly, if one loves one’s own life and in love with living it, why would one not continue doing so indefinitely? Still, there are so many who think it wrong and selfish for one to wish a life far beyond the current average. My only conclusion is such persons do not authentically love life and the living of it and think it odd if another has such genuine attachment to the same. As for superintelligence, certainly, we humans could improve in the accuracy of our observational skills and the efficiency of our reason, but more than these things or rather prerequisite to them is is superawareness or superclarity. As for superabundance, my thoughts on the matter are that such comes only as human beings focus more on renewable resources and the improvement of those resources and an obsessive avoidance of resources only depletable. To this subject I attach one of the guiding principles in my own thinking - “Create more than you destroy.” On the surface, it seems rather simple but, of course, its simplicity is its power as a message - if one wants abundance, one must see to it that what one consumes is easily replaced or, ideally, what one consumes is far less than what one has produced through superawareness and superintelligence. We must become creative agents of nature rather than the destructive force so characteristic of our species. If we can learn and do these things, perhaps the “better human” will turn out to be only ourselves genuinely living to our potential.
August 20th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
Vastly improved quality of life for all does not mean equal quality of life for all. Yes, there is an unequal distribution of creature comforts as well as basic necessities around the world. Yes, people suffer and people die. However, can you honestly say that the industrialization of the world and global communications hasn’t improved quality of life? Seriously? I think people who have benefited from NGO’s or humanitarian efforts like famine, hurricane or tsuanmi relief might beg to differ. The list of technologies that have global impact on quality of life is virtually unlimited…again, this isn’t the same as saying all is perfect and pure and good in the world.
Why would you expect perfection from history even as you say we can’t achieve it in the future because humanity is in the equation. It doesn’t make sense as an argument against striving for technological advances, especially the broad strokes that Michael once again demonstrates here?!?
-Confused
August 21st, 2009 at 12:35 am
Hi, Michael, and everyone else. Yeah, I know: been a few months since I’ve visited here last. Good job here on this particular post, Michael. We do indeed already have the tech (more-or-less “off-the-shelf”) to provide everyone on the planet with a reasonably affluent lifestyle. At the risk of sounding quasi-Marxian (but, then again, why supposedly quasi-Marxian and not liberal, say…), it is however, a social/political *institutional* (change[s]) question as it is a purely tech question (i.e., it not just “oh, hurry, come-on hyper-tech, robotics, nanotech, and everything [socio-techno/economically] will ‘turn out’ just fine [’by itself’]”). On the contrary, it will take changes in how people think about what is (already) actually possible and what even better things can be brought to fruition in the not-too-distant-future. The world “public” (as in “We the People”) will have to DEAMND change conducive to achieving the sorts of (axiomatically-good, of course) goals you discuss. The Zeitgeist Movement is a step in this direction: see http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/joomla/?Itemid=51. To now perhaps a bit Rawlsian, there needs to develop, worldwide, an “overlapping consensus” on various inter-related issues. And, thanks to numerous blogs and sites, not the least of which is THIS one, that overlapping consensus is, though still VERY *nascent*, beginning to take shape, to “gel”…
As Bucky (Fuller) points out in his posthumous sequel to *Critical Path*, *Cosmography*, **power-structures** are beginning to disintegrate and/or transform into more (at least potentially) benign network structures. RepRap’s “China on one’s desktop” will plausibly accelerate this exponentially. BUT, I concur with some my colleagues here, as well as none other than the great Tommy Jefferson: An occasional REVOLUTION—to Thoreau the bastards out, as it were—is not at all a bad idea, either!
August 21st, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Mike, we are responsible for our own fate, so we have to save ourselves from human-indifferent superintelligence by putting effort towards human-friendly superintelligence. If we have a disagreement, it has to do more with the difficulty of creating superintelligence, its relevant timeframe, and what factors come into play in determining how it behaves towards human beings. These speculative areas of study have more to do with cognitive science, computer science, and philosophy than politics.
If I believed the same values as you did for various questions around superintelligence, there would probably be no argument. I am aware that there could exist nanofactories and still be scarcity, which is why we need to set an egalitarian precedent now with progressive politics. My “superlative” statements do make contact with contemporary politics in areas where I think it is relevant. Superintelligence is not one of those areas. I do not think the goal system of the first superintelligences will be contingent upon the political atmosphere at the time of their creation. I think it will be contingent on their cognitive content and motivational systems.
MCP2012, I certainly agree that technologies wouldn’t make everything necessarily turn out fine, but also remember that superintelligence is not a technology — it would be a mind, like us. If we ourselves can solve political problems by engaging them, then a superintelligence could do much better. It might be even able to suspend pervasive irrationalities that are inherent to humans discussing politics.
August 21st, 2009 at 7:08 pm
I wonder about the effect of the powers that be on the described superintelligences. A traditional scenario would have each mighty nation developing their own AI and employing it for advantage. If a single superintelligence were instead developed independently with the express purpose of solving all political problems and/or ending scarcity, you would hear an uproar from the elites. Proposing entirely new political and economic arrangements based on superintelligence is itself a political act. Some would consider the move an existential threat and oppose it bitterly; others would welcome and seek to benefit from the suggested transition. I don’t see how you could prevent political conditions from affecting the goal system of the first superintelligences. Unless world leaders miraculously came to harmonious relations and embraced the common good, they would mettle with programming at the very least.
August 21st, 2009 at 8:58 pm
Well, the idea would be to build the superintelligence as a relatively small group and give some kind of algorithm for deciding what to build. So, you wouldn’t let world leaders mess with it. You’d want for it to become unstoppable by the time it became obvious that it existed. I’m not sure how else to put it. This desire doesn’t come from some control-freak fantasy, but simply because 1) it seems like the takeoff slope for a SI could be relatively steep, 2) if its programming became widely known and open to modification, you’d have a disastrous scenario where everyone tries to program the SI for their own benefit. As Nick Bostrom says in his paper on the topic:
“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.[6] 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.”
What we want is simple. A superintelligence with generally philanthropic motivations that is able to become the most powerful force in the world before anyone else gets to it.
Once someone creates the first superintelligence, it might not go away. As in, nothing will be able to kill it. It will simply be too far ahead. You cannot nuke something that is running on millions of computers worldwide, you cannot destroy an enhanced human intelligence that can disguise itself so you can never find it, etc. One of my assumptions is that a true superintelligence will be able to outsmart whatever obstacles are put in front of it by humans.
The current prevailing idea for a motivational system in my circle is this one. Does this look like an okay idea to you? I am tentatively in favor of it but would need to know a lot more details on how the extrapolation algorithm works.