Accelerating Future

Here the static link.

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See Roko on the issue that confronts us here. Human morality and metamorality is a very unique and specific thing, contingent on our complex evolutionary history and cognitive evolution. Break it in the transition to real AI, and we have a major problem. I care about every futurist issue, but there’s a reason why I focus the most on AI and intelligence enhancement — they could lead to the extinction of the human race if not handled properly. If an AI or upload comes to power without values that explicitly include the survival and properity of all other six billion human beings, it’s Game Over. An AI or upload could copy itself millions of times, seize all computing power on the planet, and quickly establish covert manufacturing facilities to fabricate advanced robotics. It would be unkillable. It’s equally scary whether projected to arrive in 2050 or 2100. We have to deal with it, starting now.

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J. Storrs Hall read the recent Robin Hanson post on economics and machine intelligence. Here’s his suggestion:

It seems to me that one obvious way to ameliorate the impact of the AI/robotics revolution in the economic world, then, is simple: build robots whose cognitive architectures are enough different from humans that their relative skillfullness at various tasks will differ from ours. Then, even after they are actually better at everything than we are, the law of comparative advantage will still hold.

Boom, friendliness problem solved. Build robots with different cognitive architectures than us, and they will be forced to keep us around, due to Ricardo’s law of comparative advantage. Sounds wildly naive to me.

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Robin Hanson is debating some new guy (to me) who bills himself as a futurist-oriented economist, Martin Ford. They’re mostly debating Robin’s paper on Economic Growth Given Machine Intelligence. The debate began with a post by Ford, followed by a response by Robin, followed by Ford again.

I enjoy Hanson’s response, because he jabs at both sides (techies and economists), as he is often so willing to do.

How might a human-indifferent hard takeoff superintelligence relate to humans economically? You might regard it as a universal hostile takeover of all our atoms.

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HoweStreet.com, an investing information site, has an interesting interview up with Doug Casey, Chairman of Casey Research. Casey tries to think in the truly long term, thousands of years into the past and hundreds into the future, which, being both a futurist and aficionado of history and paleontology, I really enjoy. Here’s a quote:

My friend Jim Von Ehr, CEO of Zyvex, a nanotech instrument company, once told me that some of the most valuable land in the future would be the sites of old landfills, because they are basically mountains of purified materials. Once you can reduce matter into its component atoms and make new things with it, such places, packed with high concentrations of useful atoms, will command a premium. In the future, there will be no such thing as trash. So, this bearish trend on commodities you speak of isn’t really a bearish trend at all; it’s a bullish trend in technology.

Continue.

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According to the updated Technorati index of science blogs, Next Big Future is #10 and Accelerating Future is #75. Congratulations to Brian on the stellar growth of his blog over the last year.

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Ben Goertzel mentioned this website during his talk at Singularity Summit. Fortunately, it’s a joke. Hah hah hah! See also paperclip maximizer at Less Wrong wiki.

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Naked mole rats may be ugly, but they have an advantage — you can get cancer, and they can’t. Naked mole rats are the only known cancerless animal. Scientists have found that there is a very straightforward and interesting reason why. From the press release:

Despite a 30-year lifespan that gives ample time for cells to grow cancerous, a small rodent species called a naked mole rat has never been found with tumors of any kind—and now biologists at the University of Rochester think they know why.

The findings, presented in today’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that the mole rat’s cells express a gene called p16 that makes the cells “claustrophobic,” stopping the cells’ proliferation when too many of them crowd together, cutting off runaway growth before it can start. The effect of p16 is so pronounced that when researchers mutated the cells to induce a tumor, the cells’ growth barely changed, whereas regular mouse cells became fully cancerous.

“We think we’ve found the reason these mole rats don’t get cancer, and it’s a bit of a surprise,” say Vera Gorbunova and Andrei Seluanov, professors of biology at the University of Rochester and lead investigators on the discovery. “It’s very early to speculate about the implications, but if the effect of p16 can be simulated in humans we might have a way to halt cancer before it starts.”

Next, all we need to do is cross our genes with naked mole rats, and we’ll become cancerless mole people for all eternity. Problem solved!

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H/t to Wendell Wallach at Moral Machines.

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There is lots of great activity happening at RepRap, with its superlative slogan, “wealth without money”. The big news lately is the upcoming release of “RepRap II”, also called Mendel. The first was Darwin. Here is a video of Mendel’s first print:

Mendel’s first print from Rep Rap on Vimeo.

The cost for the parts to build Mendel is approximately £395. However, it can self-replicate. Here’s a description of the improvements of Mendel over Darwin:

Mendel’s improvements over Darwin from Rep Rap on Vimeo.

And finally, here is a video of the 4-machine “RepRap Factory”, which consists solely of machines dedicated to building parts for other machines:

Multiple RepRaps from Rep Rap on Vimeo.

Congratulations to everyone at RepRap on their work.

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Congratulations to Ray Kurzweil for winning the 2009 Economist Innovation Award in the category of Computing and Telecommunication for his optical character recognition and speech recognition technology. Kurzweil wins a lot of awards, but this one is particularly distinctive. Here is the press release and the full announcement.

Craig Venter and Mark Zuckerberg also won awards in different categories.

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From ScienceDaily:

Over-expressing a gene that lets brain cells communicate just a fraction of a second longer makes a smarter rat, report researchers from the Medical College of Georgia and East China Normal University.

Dubbed Hobbie-J after a smart rat that stars in a Chinese cartoon book, the transgenic rat was able to remember novel objects, such as a toy she played with, three times longer than the average Long Evans female rat, which is considered the smartest rat strain. Hobbie-J was much better at more complex tasks as well, such as remembering which path she last traveled to find a chocolate treat.

One simple modification, three times longer memory plus a problem-solving ability boost. People underestimate the potential value of intelligence enhancement in humans because what they expect are just smarter humans, not humans that are smarter than any human that ever lived. Because the potential range of technological modifications is much larger than the range of natural variations, it’s likely we’ll eventually get smarter-than-human intelligence without even really trying, as long as we try out enough options.

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