science 11:59 pm
Naked mole rats — is there anything they can’t do? A University of Illinois at Chicago press release reminds us that mole rats can withstand oxygen deprivation for up to 30 minutes, which may give us clues for protecting the brain from stroke.
Another recent brain-related news item concerned therapeutic hypothermia to minimize trauma to injured brain issue. It seems as if there is a wave of research in this direction.
science 6:06 pm
See here a site on bird intelligence and Wikipedia’s page of tool-using animals.
policy 2:13 pm
Wow! Congratulations to Nick Bostrom, Ray Kurzweil, and Jamais Cascio for being selected for Foreign Policy’s first annual list of Top 100 Global Thinkers. Their associated writeups can be found here.
Ray Kurzweil: “for advancing the technology of eternal life”.
Jamais Cascio: “for being our moral guide to the future.”
Nick Bostrom: “for accepting no limits on human potential.”
Two transhumanists and one “non-transhumanist transhumanist” on the list!
Scanning the list, another notable names are Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Steven Chu, Henry Kissinger, Peter Singer, Linus Torvalds, and Larry Summers.
#19 is Gladwell. He has been keeping his igon values well calibrated, I see. Here’s a quote from his associated write-up:
By making surprising arguments seem obvious, Gladwell has added a serious dose of empiricism to long-form journalism and changed how we think about thought itself.
This sentence causes pain in my mind. I am shocked at how Gladwell is perceived as a scientific writer by the broader public, even intellectuals. His arguments contradict science. This gives me a window into the scientific standards of the “intellectual elite” behind Foreign Policy.
futurism and nanotechnology and singularity 11:59 am
My latest article (#3) in the Singularity series on Good.is is up, a piece that describes exponential manufacturing titled Building “The Everything Machine”. Meanwhile, Roko’s article on “Why the Fuss About Intelligence?” is the 2nd most discussed article on the site in the last week. I will repost my article here for further discussion, but I also encourage you to register on the site and comment there. Here it is:
Building the “Everything Machine”
Nanotechnology and exponential manufacturing could help us make whatever humanity needs, atom by atom.
Part three in a GOOD miniseries on the singularity by Michael Anissimov and Roko Mijic. New posts every Monday from November 16 to January 23.
Last week, Roko Mijic talked about how human intelligence made civilization possible, and how genuinely smarter-than-human intelligence—what some call “superintelligence”—would change everything, by magnifying nearly all of our capabilities.
It is important to note that organizations or countries are not smarter-than-human intelligences any more than a tribe of chimps is a smarter-than-chimp intelligence. We are talking about thinkers with fundamentally improved cognitive architectures, either through brain-computer interfacing or the creation of creative, flexible, brilliant artificial intelligence. Engineered intelligences with greater memory, creativity, pattern-matching capabilities, decision-making skills, self-transparency, and self-modification abilities.
This category of enhanced intelligences may not be as far away as you think. MIT scientists are already working on optically-triggered brain-computer interfaces that could link up many thousands of neurons to computers in the near future. Ed Boyden, who works at the MIT Media Lab, has called for the creation of an “exocortex” that assists our natural brains with an external, artificial cognitive assistant, also called a “co-processor.” We may even discover drugs or gene therapies that qualitatively improve intelligence by increasing the speed at which neurons can communicate, as was recently done with a rat, Hobbie-J.
When discussions of superintelligence crop up, a common question that is asked is, “okay, these entities are smarter-than-human, but wouldn’t they still be very limited by their environment and the intelligence of humans they have to work with?” Couldn’t we just pull the plug on a very clever artificial intelligence? Wouldn’t an enhanced human intelligence be limited by the slower people around it?
Not necessarily. One way superintelligent entities could leapfrog human industrial infrastructure and communication time lag would be by creating self-replicating manufacturing units, which might be based on synthetic biology or just sophisticated robotics. There already exists a self-replicating manufacturing unit today: RepRap (short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper), developed by a team at the University of Bath in Britain. It just requires human assistance for assembly—from there, the machine can print out practically all of its own parts, except for a few standard parts like computer chips. Completely autonomous self-replication is on the horizon.
The ultimate self-replicating manufacturing unit would be based on nanoscale fabrication—the rapid manipulation of individual atoms to build large products from raw materials. In 1959, the legendary physicist Richard Feynman gave a talk to the American Physical Society called “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” During the talk, he said “The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom.” Since Feynman’s talk, we have made leaps and bounds towards the goal of bottom-up manufacturing, building tiny robotic arms that can manipulate single atoms, molecular switches, gears, “nanocars,” even a nanoscale walking biped.
If we could design and fabricate the appropriate nanoscale machines and put them into a system capable of building all its own parts, we’d have something called a nanofactory, or to put it another way, an “everything machine.” The earliest nanofactories might only build products out of a couple types of atoms, say carbon and hydrogen, but they would have a tremendous impact because they would be automated by necessity, could self-replicate, and would be capable of building almost any chemically stable structure (as long as it used atoms the machine could handle) with atomic precision. Powered by the Sun and using purified natural gas for feedstock molecules, these nanofactories could quickly and easily build huge numbers of residences, greenhouses, appliances, medical equipment, water purification equipment, and much more, at a cost thousands of times lower than the manufacturing technology of today.
Humans are making progress towards nanofactories today, but I’ll bet that smarter-than-human intelligences could make much more rapid progress. In fact, it’s possible that the most direct route to nanofactories is through smarter-than-human intelligence.
And if you combine a smarter-than-human intelligence with self-replication and nanoscale production, it’s difficult to put a limit on how quickly superintelligence could change the world.
Michael Anissimov is a futurist and evangelist for friendly artificial intelligence. He writes a Technorati Top 100 Science blog, Accelerating Future. Michael currently serves as Media Director for the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) and is a co-organizer of the annual Singularity Summit.
philosophy 11:00 am
Robin Hanson found a skeptical Bryan Caplan when the former explained his positions on cryonics to the latter. (”The more I furrowed my brow, the more earnestly he spoke.”) Caplan said:
What disturbed me was when I realized how low he set his threshold for [cryonics] success. Robin didn’t care about biological survival. He didn’t need his brain implanted in a cloned body. He just wanted his neurons preserved well enough to “upload himself” into a computer. To my mind, it was ridiculously easy to prove that “uploading yourself” isn’t life extension. “An upload is merely a simulation. It wouldn’t be you,” I remarked. …
“Suppose we uploaded you while you were still alive. Are you saying that if someone blew your biological head off with a shotgun, you’d still be alive?!” Robin didn’t even blink: “I’d say that I just got smaller.” … I’d like to think that Robin’s an outlier among cryonics advocates, but in my experience, he’s perfectly typical. Fascination with technology crowds out not just philosophy of mind, but common sense.
Hanson responded with an articulate explanation of causal functionalism and the illusory quality of the mind/matter distinction:
Bryan, you are the sum of your parts and their relations. We know where you are and what you are made of; you are in your head, and you are made out of the signals that your brain cells send each other. Humans evolved to think differently about minds versus other stuff, and while that is a useful category of thought, really we can see that minds are made out of the same parts, just arranged differently. Yes, you “feel,” but that just tells you that stuff feels, it doesn’t say you are made of anything besides the stuff you see around and inside you.
Although the argument may seem to be about cryonics on the surface, it is really about the viability of uploading.
IQ and intelligence 2:33 pm
As somewhat of an aside, Mr. Lynch criticized my critique of Gardner’s theory of “multiple intelligences” as “irreverent”. This is extremely unfair. All I said was that his theory is “something that doesn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny.” I criticize an ad hoc, unscientific theory that has practically no empirical evidence to support it, and the popular appeal of which derives entirely from its egalitarian and inclusive political flavor, and get called irreverent.
Calling Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences unscientific is not even nearly the most irreverent thing I’ve said, by a long shot. It shouldn’t even be considered irreverent, period. Theories of this sort, which have great popular appeal to the public and practically zero appeal to cognitive psychologists, should be regarded as guilty before proven innocent. Skepticism should be our default mode. Rain on as many unscientific parades as you can.
futurism and singularity 2:01 pm
Dudley Lynch, a self-described “non-scientific observer of what’s being said and written about The Singularity at the moment”, has written up an article on the Singularity. Conclusion: “I suspect it’s still going to be awhile before anyone has an idea about The Singularity worth keeping.”
I get a cameo in his write-up:
Michael Anissimov of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and one of the movement’s most articulate voices, continues to warn that “a singleton, a Maximillian, an unrivaled superintelligence, a transcending upload”—you name it—could arrive very quickly and covertly.
Let me add a qualification to that. I do not think that such an entity could arrive quickly and covertly starting from today as a reference point, unless there are extremely well-funded secret projects that have already been working with brilliant researchers and theoreticians for maybe a decade or more (not likely at all). The point I keep making is just that an entity could go quickly from slightly human-surpassing intelligence to superintelligence, a concept known as a “hard takeoff”. To get from here to slightly human-surpassing intelligence could take a while, probably more than 10 years but less than 40 (but who knows), and a project with an annual budget in the millions (maybe tens of millions but probably not hundreds of millions, is my guess). The brain is not magic and we are learning a tremendous amount about it all the time.
I especially stress this point with respect to AI. Even “merely” human-equivalent AI would have a tremendous number of advantages over human thinkers — the ability to copy itself, absorb information more readily, customize and overclock its cognitive modules, design new cognitive modules from scratch, accelerate its thinking speed, avoid the empirically demonstrated biases in reasoning that afflict all humans, explore the entire state space of cognitive features that evolution didn’t think of, blend together deliberative and autonomous cognitive processes, create multiple spheres of attention, and much more. Many of these features are listed in part 3 of “Levels of Organization in General Intelligence”, a Singularity Institute paper.
When us Singularitarians say that an intelligence could potentially bootstrap itself very rapidly from just-barely-smarter-than-human to much-much-smarter-than-human relatively quickly, our reasons aren’t “magic” or “it sounds cool”. We have scientific and rational reasons, it’s just that they don’t fit into soundbites, and there are few people articulate enough to present the arguments in an accessible way.
I don’t personally buy into Kurzweil’s 2029 date — it’s very speculative. The key point is that intelligence operates based on principles and rules that will eventually be reverse-engineered, and once we understand those principles, we’ll have the ability to “teach a rock to think”, to paraphrase Michael Vassar. The ability to teach a rock to think would be no small thing — it could transform the world practically overnight.
Mr. Lynch, here are two ideas about the Singularity worth keeping — one, that artificial intelligences will not behave anthropomorphically, and two, advanced artificial intelligence will be a risk even if we do not program them malignly.
life extension 1:41 pm
Received from Ben Eisler via Facebook:
Hi everyone,
As some of you may be aware, Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal and President of Clarium Capital) is presently committed to matching all donations to the SENS Foundation for aging research by a further fifty percent.
In other words, this means that by reaching our target of ten thousand members, our group has the potential to raise an additional 500 thousand dollars for medical research to end the disabilities and diseases of aging, for everyone.
However, there’s a catch. To take advantage of this considerable matching grant, we must reach our target by the end of this year, giving us just over a month to get there.
We believe we can do it.
We are proposing a massive push so as to make this happen, and we need your help.
If everyone can attract just a few friends to sign up for our cause page, we can reach our target of ten thousand members and raise as much as 1.5 million dollars for SENS research. Ideally we would like to get there by Christmas, as that will give us a week to collect on donations.
This may seem like a tall ask, but remember, there is power in numbers. Once we reach two thousand members, everyone will need attract only four other people to reach our target. Once we reach five thousand, everyone will need to attract only ONE other person, and so on. All very doable!
In the meantime, both SENS Foundation (sens.org) and the Immortality Institute (imminst.org) will be promoting our cause on their websites, which will be a great help as well.
Let’s get to work, and bring an end to the disabilities and diseases of aging.
If 10,000 people all agree to give $100, and Peter Thiel matches it 50%, that equals $1.5M.
Some of us, like those in my generation (I’m 25), may be reluctant to give to SENS because they believe that medical science will progress fast enough without their intervention to let them live indefinitely. I would consider that unfair and calloused to our friends from earlier generations.
Of course, another route to life extension would be through friendly artificial general intelligence (FAI). It’s worth remembering that if we solve the aging problem but not the FAI problem, we all die anyway. However, if we solve the FAI problem but not the aging problem, it’s quite likely that FAI will then solve the aging problem for us. So FAI is truly the only long-term solution for life extension, but SENS is a possible shorter-term solution for the older among us. Even modest success for SENS might also cause the wealthier, older set to start thinking about the longer-term future, which includes the question of how to program powerful artificial intelligences that don’t automatically kill us through indifference.
nanotechnology 1:31 pm
Audio and video of Richard Feynman’s classic “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” lecture (1959), which presented the vision of molecular nanotechnology for the first time, is available from Photosynthesis.com, an audio site. There are other archival recordings available, including complete audio and video from the 4th Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology, held in 1995. Apple Computer was a key sponsor of the conference.
Back then, it seems to me that a lot of people thought that molecular nanotech would be closer by now (I remember hearing people say “about 20 years”, so roughly 2015), but they were obviously wrong. My guess is that the innovation and economic activity in the tech sector around that time made them overoptimistic about progress in general.
random 12:30 pm
Here’s Dan Piraro, who draws the comic Bizarro, on the holiday of Thanksgiving.
random 12:21 pm
Robin Hanson on how students are too obsessed with GPA and should instead focus on original, independent research:
Students seem overly obsessed with grades and organized activities, both relative to standardized tests and to what I’d most recommend: doing something original. You don’t have to step very far outside scheduled classes and clubs to start to see how very different the world is when you have to organize it yourself.
For example, if you try to study a subject in depth without following a textbook or review, you’ll have to decide for yourself which sources seem how relevant to your topic. If you try to add something to the subject you’ll have to decide what changes are how feasible and interesting. Doing these may feel awkward at first, but they will be very useful skills later in life. Similar skills come from writing your own game or starting your own business or composing your own album.
Along with many other things that Prof. Hanson says, this sort of thing should be obvious, but neglecting it is nearly universal. How come so many of the “smart people” we all know are so focused on activities organized for them by other people?
