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

Jamais Cascio: The Singularity in Five Slides

The Singularity, in Five Slides from Jamais Cascio on Vimeo.

Here, Jamais Cascio explains the classic Singularity story that people like me repeat ad nauseum, because we see the Singularity as important. Jamais flew all the way to New York from the Bay Area to give a "counterprogramming" talk to the Singularity Summit, so we might as well pay attention to what he has to say. Here is the full talk: "Putting the Human Back into the Post-Human". 98 minutes.

Also, notice Jamais' publicity technique. He takes a 3-minute clip out of his talk, to highlight an important part, fulfill common curiosity about the Singularity, and covertly promote his full talk. The 3-minute clip is very brief, easy to understand, interesting, and has potential to be a low-level viral video. Other people who give talks who want to promote themselves would be well-advised to copy his technique.

Another thing to notice: Jamais' rich hand movements. Jamais gestures enthusiastically all the time. These add complexity to the presentation and help convey a range of thoughts through body language. They make the talk less boring. It also demonstrates his confidence and engagement with what he is saying.

In his longer talk, at 5:50, he says, "Recently one of them (referring to Singularity aficionados) told me recently that "once we have something that can elevate itself to godhood, then the future is out of our hands." Did I say that? I certainly agree with it to some extent. I think it is especially important to recognize in the negative sense, as in, important to recognize that once human-superior intelligence is created and starts successfully improving its own intelligence in leaps and bounds, we could be destroyed by it if it does not explicitly value us. Even if the chance of destruction were only 1/100, it would still make tremendous sense to be concerned because 1/100 probability of human extinction is a huge deal. When it comes to creating new forms of intelligence, abundant caution appears to be a best practice. That is the most important message we are trying to convey.

It makes complete sense that humans would pass the torch on to superior intelligences at some point in our development. That doesn't mean that humans would stop achieving things -- not at all. Jamais says that we neglect the human side of the Singularity, but I still think about it quite frequently. For instance, near the beginning of this blog I pointed out that the future will look more like the past because that is the sort of environment we evolved to love. Aubrey de Grey builds on this concept in his recent paper and talk.

Just because humans stop being the most powerful entities after the Singularity doesn't mean that humans are meaningless. I, for one, would want to stay human for at least some time after a Singularity. If indefinite life extension truly becomes possible, as us transhumanists are wont to think, then I will have plenty of time between the Singularity and the Heat Death of the universe to engage in all of my most frivolous whims. I could even build a machine to spontaneously output philosophically persuasive-sounding justifications for all of those whims. The reason why I hesitate to go on about the possible character of human life after the Singularity is that many people are still very skeptical that the Singularity is a viable concept at all, and fawning over Upload Heaven is not going to win me any points with skeptics, to whom I see an obligation to answer seriously. Also, Ray Kurzweil is widely available to explain what digital paradise will be like, so why do I need to do anything?

Look at how I casually use words like "Upload Heaven" and "digital paradise" to describe life after a friendly Singularity. Why? Well, our present standards of living are like royalty in comparison to the inhabitants of Babylon in 3000 BC, or even those poor peasants in the Middle Ages. I can fly around the world on a huge steel bird whenever I want as long as I can come up with the cash. I am using a tiny machine to instantaneously send out messages to a group of people so large that it would require a small stadium to house them all. My ancestors would have great difficulty understanding my explanation of my daily life, even though we are the same species. Imagine communication across species with neural architectures as different as that between a flatworm and a human. The future, in comparison to the past, is like magic. And we all remember what Arthur C. Clarke said about that.

Back to the point which I lazily dropped two paragraphs ago, that it is natural for us to expect humans to be surpassed eventually. What was Jamais thinking, that humans would be top dog forever? When humans are surpassed, especially by an intelligence that would be able to use exponential manufacturing to mass-convert gigatonnes of sand into fields of robotics and computing elements, it is disingenuous to expect us humans to be the lead players in the show any more. That's alright -- I should hope that humans would be able to choose to live in human-only societies if they want to, and humans will still be able to great things, as long as they don't judge each other's accomplishments by the standard they would apply to a superintelligence.

Yes, human politics and the like could continue after the Singularity, but if we are surrounded by ubiquitous superintelligence, then Homo sapiens navel-gazing might be unwarranted. More exciting that our own politics might be engagement with these novel life forms. With their guidance, we might be able to try out thousands of novel mental configurations only made possible through advanced neurosurgery. We might install "imagination enhancers" that allow us to formulate more durable and flexible concepts, shatter the 5 plus-or-minus-2 limit of items in working memory, and transcend other cognitive limits set by our biology.

I just wrote the above in reaction to the first 7 minutes of Jamais' talk, and now I'll watch the rest and think about it.