Accelerating Future

Why Do Atheists Have to Talk About Atheism?

A few days ago I saw some blog comment, I forget where it was, but it was something like, “It’s not atheism that I mind all that much, it’s just atheists’ incredible air of smugness about it.”

Being convinced about the high probability of something because your epistemology forces you to be given the observed evidence cannot be an act of smugness or unsmugness itself. I suppose it’s how you present it, but people trying to avoid debating the central core of any given argument will always accuse the other side of smugness, to change the subject.

Of course, the issue is really about status. Low or medium-status people are not allowed to make controversial assertions that contradict the cherished beliefs of high-status people because this is seen as a social power grab. Furthermore, there are many low-status people that indiscriminately oppose the cherished beliefs of high-status people for their own satisfaction.

For more on this, see “The 9/11 Meta-Truther Conspiracy Theory”.

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Here they are: the pigs, cows, and chickens.

But wait! An earlier commenter here on Accelerating Future had a different view on this…

HITLER WAS A VEGETARIAN! Oppps, there goes another simplistic, Left Wing Marxist utopian dreamy wish for a perfect world using one simple idea.

Darwin was right, and by the way, the reason human beings have big brains is because we ate meat. Lots of it. It takes 22 cups of flour to get some of the same needed nutrients in 4 ounces of RED MEAT.

Now if you Vegetarians wish to retard yourself and your offspring, please do so, but don’t think that us aggressive, intelligent, predatory meat eaters are going to let you just pass by and go on your way.

No, we Predatory Meat Eaters will make good little slaves out of you vegetarians. And, you will be cheap to feed and do as you are told. Why? Because you won’t have the strength or the brain power to resist domination by us Predatory Meat Eaters.

Yes, please promote Vegetarianism and Passivity. It makes it easier for us Predatory Meat Eaters to round you up and Eat You!

LOL

Be a vegetarian, become a slave to meat-eaters! Witness how such a simple trigger causes such controversy — the reaction is even more intense than that to atheism. Repeat it again and again for maximum effect!

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Wow, this surprised me. This is the sort of thing that I would write off as nonsense on first glance if it weren’t from Robert Freitas, who is legendary for the rigor of his calculations. Here’s the bit, from a World Future Society update:

The Issue: Hunger

The number of people on the brink of starvation will likely reach 1.02 billion — or one-sixth of the global population — in 2009, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). In the United States, 36.2 million adults and children struggled with hunger at some point during 2007.

The Future: The earth’s population is projected to increase by 2.5 billion people in the next four decades, most of these people will be born in the countries that are least able to grow food. Research indicates that these trends could be offset by improved global education among the world’s developing populations. Population declines sharply in countries where almost all women can read and where GDP is high. As many as 2/3 of the earth’s inhabitants will live in water-stressed area by 2030 and decreasing water supplies will have a direct effect on hunger. Nearly 200 million Africans are facing serious water shortages. That number will climb to 230 million by 2025, according to the United Nations Environment Program. Finding fresh water in Africa is often a huge task, requiring people (mostly women and children) to trek miles to public wells. While the average human requires only about 4 liters of drinking water a day, as much as 5,000 liters of water is needed to produce a person’s daily food requirements.

Futurist Fixes

1. The Food Pill. In the future, we may see a type of pill for replacing food, but experts say it likely would not be a simple compound of chemicals. A pill-sized food replacement system would have to be extremely complex because of the sheer difficulty of the task it was being asked to perform, more complex than any simple chemical reaction could be. The most viable solution, according to many futurists, would be a nanorobot food replacement system.

Dr. Robert Freitas, author of the Nanomedicine series and senior research fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing spoke with FUTURIST magazine senior editor Patrick Tucker about it.

In his books and various writings, Freitas has described several potential food replacement technologies that are somewhat pill-like. The key difference, however, is that instead of containing drug compounds, the capsules would contain thousands of microscopic robots called nanorobots. These would be in the range of a billionth of a meter in size so they could easily fit into a large capsule, though a capsule would not necessarily be the best way to administer them to the body. Also, while these microscopic entities would be called “robots,” they would not necessarily be composed of metal or possess circuitry. They would be robotic in that they would be programmed to carry out complex and specific functions in three-dimensional space.

One food replacement Dr. Freitas has described is nuclear powered nanorobots. Here’s how these would work: the only reason people eat is to replace the energy they expend walking around, breathing, living life, etc. Like all creatures, we take energy stored in plant or animal matter. Freitas points out that the isotope gadolinium-148 could provide much of the fuel the body needs. But a person can’t just eat a radioactive chemical and hope to be healthy, instead he or she would ingest the gadolinium in the form of nanorobots. The gadolinium-powered robots would make sure that the person’s body was absorbing the energy safely and consistently. Freitas says the person might still have to take some vitamin or protein supplements but because gadolinium has a half life of 75 years, the person might be able to go for a century or longer without a square meal.

For people who really like eating but don’t like what a food-indulgent lifestyle does to their body, Freitas has two other nanobot solutions.

“Nutribots” floating through the bloodstream would allow people to eat virtually anything, a big fatty steak for instance, and experience very limited weight or cholesterol gain. The nutribots would take the fat, excess iron, and anything else that the eater in question did not want absorbed into his or her body and hold onto it. The body would pass the nurtibots, and the excess fat, normally out of the body in the restroom.

A nanobot Dr. Freitas calls a “lipovore” would act like a microscopic cosmetic surgeon, sucking fat cells out of your body and giving off heat, which the body could convert to energy to eat a bit less.

Where can you read more about Robert Freitas’s ideas? In the January-February 2010 issue of THE FUTURIST magazine, Freitas lays out his ideas for improving human health through nanotechnology.

Yes, there are many other technologies that could help out better with hunger right now. The most important are the three initiatives singled out by Giving What We Can as being high-leverage intervention points: schistosomiasis control, stopping tuberculosis, and the regular delivery of micronutrient packages. Another is the iodization of salt. How can these stop hunger? Well, the diseases and ill health caused by the absence of these measures is so great that alleviating them will increase the total amount of time that people have available to engage in farming, which in the short term will alleviate hunger more effectively than any direct measure. Delivering food in the form of aid fosters dependence.

Anyway, the summary of Freitas’ food bot ideas above seems very limited. I’m sure that Freitas has worked out the design in greater detail. For instance, are the nanobots he is talking about is powered through a radioisotope rather than a nuclear fission plant, and the text doesn’t make that clear enough, in my opinion. I wonder — how is it that gadolinium can be broken down into all the nutrients the body needs? Wouldn’t a large amount be required, because fueling the chemical reactions of the body requires bulk and mass no matter how you slice it? I am seeing a lot of technical questions and holes in the idea, as it is brusquely presented above. I will email Freitas and ask him to point us to the proper writings.

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As I mentioned in my last post, the Singularity Institute (SIAI) has launched a 2010 Singularity Research Challenge to raise funds for Singularity research. Our organization is worth giving money to because the Singularity is a matter of life and death for our entire species, and we may only have a few decades remaining to deal with it. Our group is the most dedicated to maximizing the probability of a positive outcome, and has the intelligence and skill to produce detailed ideas and attract major media attention. We achieve a huge amount with our money. Nearly everyone at the Singularity Institute, including myself, takes a salary significantly lower than our market value given our education and experience, because we personally care about this issue a whole lot.

We have a network of several dozen young academics, mostly aged 20-30, who are devoted to performing research and writing papers on the topic of the Singularity if given the proper support and infrastructure. (For a snapshot of 2009′s Visiting Fellows, along with names and bios, see this page.) Most of these people have degrees or are working on degrees from schools like Stanford, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, and Yale. For instance, SIAI volunteer Tom McCabe is at Yale and sometimes-SIAI Research Associate Marcello Herreshoff is at Stanford. Many of these youngsters are astonishing geniuses, performing extremely well at both formal and informal tests of intelligence, and it is clear that their life goal consists of having a positive impact on the Singularity.

What we lack is sufficient funding to sponsor all the research we want to sponsor. Visit the website of the Challenge and scroll down to the grant proposals to see some of our ideas for work in 2010. This list is part of an effort at SIAI being spearheaded by Research Fellow Anna Salamon to increase transparency and accountability as we expand. Anna is a competent, energetic manager who leads much of SIAI’s research wing, which is located in Santa Clara, CA. It was under her leadership that the SIAI Visiting Fellows Program was founded, and the grants proposal thing was her idea, which myself, SIAI Visiting Fellows, and volunteers duly fleshed out.

Other than room and board for researchers, SIAI doesn’t have much overhead. There are some administrators, such as President Michael Vassar and our Chief Compliance Officer Amy Willey, and one PR nerd, yours truly. Our goal is to convert dollars into existential risk mitigation more effectively than any other group. Of course, your evaluation of this will vary depending on how much of a risk you believe the Singularity could pose to humanity. Among those who believe that the Singularity could be a risk and it ought to be studied and dealt with, the Singularity Institute often gets high marks. When we receive constructive criticism from supporters, we keep it in mind in everything we do, and frequently question ourselves.

One unfortunate element that holds us back at this point is that the majority of our supporters are in their twenties or early thirties and therefore have limited personal wealth. However, some of SIAI’s dedicated supporters have already secured jobs in the tech sector with decent earning potential. As the Singularity Institute’s support base grows and matures, we will certainly possess greater resources, but we don’t want to wait. We want to fund as much Singularity research as we can, right now. Those considering donating larger amounts, say $1,000 or more, should feel free to get in touch with Anna Salamon (her email address is on the challenge page) and talk about what sort of research you would consider worthwhile to fund.

Discussion about the Singularity, and the Singularity Institute itself, are here to stay. We will still be around in 2020, 2030, 2040 — however long it takes to get to a positive Singularity. We are in it for the long haul. The question is, are you with us? If a robotic or AI advance you see in the news in the next decade impresses you with the speed of mankind’s progress towards real artificial intelligence, and has you concerned about the implications, you may regret not donating to our organization now, in 2009 or 2010. If time travel were possible, then the Singularity Institute is the kind of organization that people would be sent back in time to help. By sheer dumb luck, however, you happen to be one of the few people who has heard of the Singularity Institute this early in the game. Wouldn’t it be silly not to take advantage of that fact?

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Here is a summary of the Singularity Institute’s 2009 accomplishments that myself and other SIAI staff and friends compiled recently in preparation for our 2010 Singularity Research Challenge, where every dollar donated up to $100,000 will be matched. You can also select which research you choose to support, if you like. We compiled almost 20 grants to choose from. Without further adieu, here is the summary, and be sure to visit SIAI’s website for proper formatting and links:

2009 has been a year of growth and new horizons for the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI). We achieved a number of milestones relevant to our mission — pursuing dialogue, research, and activism to promote a beneficial Singularity. The response we’ve received has been considerable — SIAI is more high-profile and frequently-mentioned now than it has ever been.

Our key accomplishments in 2009 were holding the Singularity Summit in New York, hiring three new employees (Michael Vassar, Michael Anissimov, and Amy Willey), establishing a continuous SIAI Visiting Fellows Program, delivering eight presentations across four conferences, improving cooperation with allied organizations such as the Future of Humanity Institute, and establishing the Less Wrong web community, which receives thousands of visitors per day and fosters many high-quality discussions on philosophical and practical issues related to decision theory and rationality. The Uncertain Future, an interactive web application for quantitatively modeling future possibilities such as human-level AI, human intelligence enhancement, and global catastrophic risk, was also released as a beta version in December.

In April, Eliezer Yudkowsky completed two years of posting sequences on Less Wrong (which will be edited into a book on rationality and Singularity-relevant topics like reductionism and decision theory), drafting strategy documents for improving internal organization and long-term planning. Throughout the year, we continued consolidating SIAI staff, Visiting Fellows, volunteers, and interns in the San Francisco Bay Area. SIAI Visiting Fellow Peter de Blanc revised a paper on unbounded utility functions. The Singularity Institute received media coverage for its work in The New York Times, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Forbes, and many other venues. An article by SIAI President Michael Vassar, “Machine Minds”, made it into the Forbes special “The AI Report”.

The Singularity Institute’s long-term mission is to maximize the probability of a beneficial Singularity, through dialogue, research, and activism. All of our activities are ultimately chosen to further this purpose. The Singularity Institute particularly focuses on the possibility of a Singularity through artificial general intelligence, but also analyzes other potential pathways, including whole brain emulation and human cognitive enhancement.

To summarize our major accomplishments over the past year:

1. Singularity Summit 2009 in New York. Our fourth annual Singularity Summit was the first Singularity-focused conference ever held on the East Coast. Held October 3-4, the Singularity Summit featured 25 excellent speakers on topics including biotechnology, futurism, decision theory, artificial intelligence, quantum computing. the scientific method, cognitive ability, philosophy, computer science, and even synthetic neurobiology. Over 800 people attended, and the conference attracted reporters from over two dozen news organizations, including the New York Times. Coverage was provided by Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Forbes, and many other media venues. Speakers this year included venture capitalist Peter Thiel, Wired magazine contributing editor Gary Wolf, AI researchers Juergen Schmidhuber, Marcus Hutter, and Itamar Arel, SIAI employees Anna Salamon, Ben Goertzel, and Eliezer Yudkowsky, philosopher David Chalmers, futurist Ray Kurzweil, Stephen Wolfram of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha fame, and many others. Videos from the Summit are online at Vimeo. After the Summit, SIAI held an in-depth workshop, which allowed the speakers and SIAI staff to share ideas and brainstorm about the risks and benefits of a possible Singularity.

2. Hiring of new employees. Early in the year, Executive Director Tyler Emerson departed the Singularity Institute and his role was filled by a new President, Michael Vassar. Mr. Vassar holds a B.S. in biochemistry from Penn State and an MBA from Drexel University, and was previously Founder and Chief Strategist at Sir Groovy, an online music licensing firm. Prior to that, he held positions with Aon, the Peace Corps, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Throughout the year, he participated in numerous interviews and podcasts on behalf of SIAI, including interviews at Accelerating Future, The Futurist, Future Blogger, and h+ magazine.

Two new research fellows, Anna Salamon and Steve Rayhawk, were hired by SIAI in late 2008. Salamon and Rayhawk had previously participated in the 2008 SIAI Summer Program, which was led by Salamon. Salamon holds degrees in mathematics from UC Santa Barbara and Great Books from St. John’s, and Rayhawk holds a degree in mathematics from UC Santa Barbara. Salamon and Rayhawk are both focusing on applying computational Bayesian decision theory to problems in technological forecasting, risk management policy, and social epistemology, and form the core of our Visiting Fellows Program, bringing visiting scholars up to speed on the work that SIAI does. In early 2009, SIAI also hired a Media Director, Michael Anissimov, responsible for compiling, distributing, and promoting SIAI media materials including our writing, websites, and videos, and communicating the activities of SIAI to the public. Anissimov is author of Accelerating Future, a popular blog focused on science and futurism. Most recently, in December, SIAI hired Amy Willey, who holds a law degree from New York University, as Chief Compliance Officer.

With the addition of these new employees, SIAI brought its total full-time employee count to six, including Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky, who has worked for SIAI since he co-founded the organization in 2000.

3. In 2009, SIAI established a Visiting Fellows Program, based in Silicon Valley. The program began with SIAI’s 2009 Summer Fellows, brought together to work on challenging projects in decision theory, philosophy, technological forecasting, heuristics and biases, and planning for the Singularity Summit 2009. Primarily graduate students, the Fellows came from educational backgrounds in mathematics, computer science, and physics, with the remainder ranging from philosophy to economics and biochemistry. They attend or hold degrees from universities including Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Cambridge, Carnegie Mellon, Auckland University, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and the University of California-Santa Barbara. Fellows traveled to Silicon Valley from throughout the United States and from Russia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Some of these researchers stayed on past the summer or joined shortly thereafter to work with SIAI as volunteers or Visiting Fellows on a more extended basis. Some of the work that came out of the Visiting Fellows Program has been presented in papers and talks at venues like the European Conference on Computing and Philosophy, the Asia-Pacific Conference on Computing and Philosophy, and a Santa Fe Institute conference on forecasting. The Visiting Fellows Program has been instrumental in fostering a devoted community of Singularity Institute supporters making useful contributions towards SIAI’s ultimate goal, and SIAI recently put out a fresh call for new SIAI Visiting Fellows.

4. SIAI researchers, volunteers, and Visiting Fellows presented the following nine talks and papers throughout 2009:

* “Changing the frame of AI futurism: From storytelling to heavy-tailed, high-dimensional probability distributions”, by Steve Rayhawk, Anna Salamon, Tom McCabe, Rolf Nelson, and Michael Anissimov. (Presented at the European Conference of Computing and Philosophy in July ‘09 (ECAP))
* “Arms Control and Intelligence Explosions”, by Carl Shulman (Also presented at ECAP)
*“Machine Ethics and Superintelligence”, by Carl Shulman and Henrik Jonsson (Presented at the Asia-Pacific Conference of Computing and Philosophy in October ‘09 (APCAP))
*“Which Consequentialism? Machine Ethics and Moral Divergence”, by Carl Shulman and Nick Tarleton (Also presented at APCAP);
*“Long-term AI forecasting: Building methodologies that work”, an invited presentation by Anna Salamon at the Santa Fe Institute conference on forecasting;
*“Shaping the Intelligence Explosion” and “How much it matters to know what matters: A back of the envelope calculation”, presentations by Anna Salamon at the Singularity Summit 2009 in October;
* “Pathways to Beneficial Artificial General Intelligence: Virtual Pets, Robot Children, Artificial Bioscientists, and Beyond”, a presentation by SIAI Director of Research Ben Goertzel at Singularity Summit 2009;
* “Cognitive Biases and Giant Risks”, a presentation by SIAI Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky at Singularity Summit 2009;
* “Convergence of Expected Utility for Universal Artificial Intelligence”, a paper by Peter de Blanc, an SIAI Visiting Fellow.

Many more talks and papers are in the works for 2010, including a talk by SIAI Media Director Michael Anissimov at the Foresight 2010 conference in January.

5. One of the primary goals of the Singularity Institute in 2009 was to strengthen our ties to academia and allied organizations, which was accomplished through talks, papers, and direct dialogue. SIAI researchers and representatives built closer ties to organizations such as the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, Santa Fe Institute, American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Foresight Institute, and many others. SIAI researcher Anna Salamon was invited to give a talk at an exclusive conference on technological forecasting held by the Santa Fe Institute. The Singularity Institute has been using videoconferencing, blogs, and mailing lists to keep in contact with our supporters and collaborators around the globe. SIAI more than tripled its representatives through the Visiting Fellows program, allowing it to better interface with a larger network.

6. 2009 saw the founding of the Less Wrong web community. Less Wrong was founded as a rationalist community to “systematically improve on the art, craft, and science of human rationality”. Thousands of people visit the site every day, with hundreds participating regularly in the comments sections. Less Wrong grew out of Overcoming Bias, a blog co-authored by SIAI Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky and George Mason University economist Robin Hanson. Yudkowsky wrote extensively on Overcoming Bias from 2007-2009, and his posts have been ported over to Less Wrong, where they are organized into sequences that address topics such as reductionism, determinism, human rationality, metaethics, mathematics, and many others.

Less Wrong is important to the Singularity Institute’s work towards a beneficial Singularity in providing an introduction to issues of cognitive biases and rationality relevant for careful thinking about optimal philanthropy and many of the problems that must be solved in advance of the creation of provably human-friendly powerful artificial intelligence. At the same time, it has gathered a community that can provide rapid feedback and significant progress on such problems. For instance, Less Wrong participants Wei Dai and Vladimir Nesov proposed decision algorithms that can deal with a certain classes of problems where Bayesian updating seems to lead decisionmakers astray. This work was closely related to decision theory work done in-house at SIAI, namely Eliezer Yudkowsky’s timeless decision theory, an algorithm that computes the counterfactual consequences of possible actions using an extension of Judea Pearl’s formalism of causal networks to logical uncertainties, and additional work by Anna Salamon and Steve Rayhawk. These developments have received positive attention from Gary Drescher and philosopher David Chalmers, and will be written up for peer review in the coming year.

Besides providing a home for an intellectual community dialoguing on rationality and decision theory, Less Wrong is also a key venue for SIAI recruitment. Many of the participants in SIAI’s Visiting Fellows Program first discovered the organization through Less Wrong.

7. This year Eliezer Yudkowsky finished his posting sequences on Less Wrong, which attracted thousands of enthusiastic readers and came to serve as the seed of a new community. Yudkowsky used the blogging format to write the substantive content of a book on rationality, enabling that work to be read and receive feedback as it progressed. Throughout the summer, Yudkowsky engaged in Friendly AI research with Marcello Herreshoff, a Stanford mathematics student who previously spent his gap year working for SIAI. Yudkowsky is now converting his blog sequences into the planned rationality book, which he hopes will significantly assist in attracting and inspiring talented individuals to effectively work towards the aims of a beneficial Singularity and reduced existential risk.

8. In December, a subset of SIAI researchers and volunteers finished improving The Uncertain Future web application to officially announce it as a beta version. The Uncertain Future represents a new kind of futurism — futurism with heavy-tailed, high-dimensional probability distributions. The purpose is to provide a tool for use by futurists and the informed public to input probability distributions over quantitative questions like, “how much computing power would be necessary to implement neuromorphic AI?”, combining them into a “picture of the future according to you”. Another goal of the project is to provide an alternative to the futurist methodologies of storytelling and scenario building, which dominate the field even though they often cause futurists to overestimate the probability of precise, vivid stories at the expense of a wider space of neglected possibilities.

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A New Atlantis blogger, Charles Rubin, has chided me on my support of reprogramming predators.

I responded that eliminating predation begins at home with vegetarianism, and that the point is not to get there all at once, but to remove the worst instances of suffering in nature, like predators eating their prey alive.

It’s not about telling people a false “story” like Santa Claus, because I openly admit that we are nowhere near a pain-free world. All I am saying is that such a world would be a good thing.

Historically and contemporarily, our world contains so much suffering that it almost seems like a suffering-centered joke-world. I identify with a post-suffering world at the expense of my identification with the current world. I consider a post-suffering world to be a “natural” state and our present world to be “unnatural”.

Most Westerners do not really understand how terrible it is to live in many places around the world. There are concentration camps in North Korea where people are tortured and chemical weapons are tested on them. You can be put away for 20 years just for listening to South Korean radio. Your entire family may go to the concentration camps if you commit a political crime.

Rape, torture, and sexual slavery are common in most parts of the world. It would take a military campaign with tens of millions of occupying soldiers and police to even make progress towards stopping it, and you’d have to count the soldiers and police to not commit crimes themselves.

When you see how messed up the human world is, it makes sense to then look at the animal world and see how fucked up that is. Again, it’s a joke. If a god made this world, that god is a wicked being and should be forsaken.

Refusing to participate in the cycle of violence is as easy as becoming vegetarian, or preferably vegan. Start with quitting pork, because pigs are the most intelligent, then move on to beef and chicken. Vegetarianism has become more fashionable in recent years, and that is a good thing. Developments in in vitro meat will alleviate much animal suffering as well.

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Roko has written an article on the human benefits of the Singularity, “The Utopia Force” at Good.is. Here it is.

How intelligent machines could make being human unimaginably better.

Part six in a GOOD miniseries on the singularity by Michael Anissimov and Roko Mijic. New posts every Monday from November 16 to January 23.

Think of this note as if it were an invitation to a ball—a ball that will take place only if people show up. We call the lives we lead here “Utopia.”

– Nick Bostrom, Letter from Utopia.

Why should you care about the singularity when studies show that material possessions and technology beyond a certain point don’t actually make people any happier? Two weeks ago, I spoke about the possibility of giving a superintelligent AI the goal of doing whatever the human race would, after careful consideration, decide was best. This is known as the CEV algorithm. The outcome of this process would be very much unlike the technology, gadgets, and consumerism of today.

As Nick Bostrom has so eloquently reminded us, humanity’s biggest problems aren’t what we think they are: the most insidious and hard to notice, according to Bostrom, is that life is not nearly as good as it could be. This problem is really difficult for us to see; what could possibly be substantially better about our lives, even here in the developed world?

To start with, one has to realize that we’re not built for our own good. Evolution built us caring only about our ability to pass our genes on. We are easier to hurt than to pleasure, and we have been built with happiness set-points that are near impossible to significantly move away from without altering our biology. Studies have shown that giving a person $1,000,000 doesn’t actually make them happier in the long run, because of the hedonic treadmill effect: The human brain gets “used to” your circumstances, so that if your circumstances improve, your happiness goes up at first, but then returns to average. Our genes “calculate” that our bodies are worth keeping in good shape for 50 or so years, but after that, we are of little use, so our genes allow us to fall apart.

The society around us is also not built entirely for our benefit; it is a set of self-sustaining institutions that are, to a lesser or greater degree, influenced by the whims of a capricious electorate. Corporations can survive by hiring marketing departments to make us want things that we don‘t really need, and by hiring lobbying departments to make sure that the democratic process doesn‘t get in the way (see, for example, the tobacco industry). The challenges that work presents to us are often stifling and tedious; working in an office is not the natural human environment, which is why so many people ask for (and never get) a job that involves being outdoors.

Perhaps most importantly, the social dynamics that emerge from the interaction of many people who are each individually seeking status, power, and happiness often results in zero and negative-sum interactions. People are mean to each other, argue, fight, cheat, lie, and frequently make each others’ lives a misery—and this is ultimately a result of our evolved psychology, which was designed to deal with situations in which humans were forced by scarcity to kill each other in order to survive.

A world fashioned by the CEV algorithm would, at the very least, fix all of these fairly obvious flaws. Human psychology and biology could be altered to make us kinder, happier, healthier, and free from involuntary death or aging, and to remove the hedonic treadmill effect. New and better institutions could be developed from the ground up, and complex yet nourishing intellectual and physical challenges could be designed to replace what we today call “work.”

Iain Banks has described such a world in his science-fiction books about a future society called “The Culture”: enhanced humans live for thousands of years, and do exactly what they want with their time; they create art and science, they socialize, they enjoy a selection of customized virtual reality and real-world experiences and safe recreational drugs. They are all permanently young and attractive, with bodies and brains that have been altered in beneficial ways, they rarely argue with each other or have significant or prolonged negative interactions, and they have lots of sex.

If we consider all the possible ways that the universe could be arranged, and rank them in terms of how good they would be, Banks’ utopia certainly gets a very high rank. But it seems unlikely that it is the very best—or even close to the best. Banks’ utopia represents the limit of good experiences that we can currently think of and realize are good according to our complex values. Just how much better could it get?

In order to really make an accurate guess about the limits of goodness of the world, one must think about the problem indirectly or by analogy, because there are some states that are both so good and so complex that we cannot even imagine them yet. For example, what are the limits of goodness of subjective experience? What is the limit of the level and degree of mutual respect, friendship, passion or love that is possible?

At the risk of severely embarrassing myself forever over the internet, I’ll illustrate this with a personal example. Before I had ever kissed anyone, I didn’t actually know that the subjective experience of a passionate kiss was possible. I knew that kissing was possible, but not what it would feel like, or even that feelings that good were possible. Not only was I missing out, but I was unaware that I was missing out.

Humanity as a whole may have the same problem. We haven’t realized that a level of life that far surpasses what we currently experience might be possible. Imagine a human raised by animals who did not have the ability to speak, or the very real South American Indian tribe who are unable to learn, even when given food incentives, to count up to 10. Imagine a person who spent their entire life without experiencing romantic love, imagine a human who had neither hearing nor sight. These impoverished human beings are to us as we are to humans living in a post-positive singularity world: There are very probably intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional enhancements that would put their recipients as far beyond the citizens of The Culture as we are beyond a blind, solitary ignoramus.

A benevolent superintelligent AI would drastically and precisely alter the world, but do so in a direction that was dictated by your preferences. It would be like a new physical force that consistently pushed life towards our wisest utopian ideal. This ideal, or something very close to it, really is attainable. The laws of physics do not forbid it. It is attainable whether we feel that it is “unreasonable” that life could get that good, whether we shy away from it for fear of sounding religious, whether we want to close our eyes to the possibility because it scares us to believe that there is something greater out there, but we might let it slip through our fingers.

And indeed we might. As Carl Sagan puts it, “Our descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds throughout the solar system and beyond, will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of raw potential once was, how perilous our infancy”
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Roko Mijic is a Cambridge University mathematics graduate, and has worked in ultra low-temperature engineering, pure mathematics, digital evolution and artificial intelligence. In his spare time he blogs about the future of the human race and the philosophical foundations of ethics and human values.

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A few weeks ago Paul Raven at Futurismic picked up my link to David Pearce’s essay “Reprogramming Predators”, which throws out some ideas for preventing things like, oh, I don’t know, hyenas eating off the face and trunk of a living baby elephant stuck in a mud pond. I thought a couple comments on Futurismic were funny.

Chad said:

I couldn’t disagree with this guy more. In fact, I think it is rather ludicrous we could make a change this large and not see disastrous effects on every aspect these creatures lives and ours.

James said:

I couldn’t agree with this guy more. In fact, I think it ludicrous we don’t immediately start working for this change so that we can prevent the disastrous effects the status quo has on these creatures lives and ours.

Funny! The fact of the matter is that wildlife documentaries have brainwashed most of the planet into admiring the powerful grace of predators that Darwinian selection made into ruthless serial killers and torturers. Besides those documentaries, many humans identify with predators because a lot of history has been a zero-sum game where your loss is my gain, and predators are the archetypical example of a winner of a zero-sum game.

As we begin to enter into a positive-sum world (hopefully!), zero sum games will become old. At the risk of being cliche, I will invoke Paul 13:11:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

Our species is childish. We laugh at suffering. But given increased intelligence and compassion, this will not endure forever. If someone is poor and hungry, their morals may be lax, but the well-fed may have enough additional resources to contribute to others. As our economic productivity improves with the assistance of machines, our society will have such great wealth and health that we will begin turning our attention to the “fringe concerns” of today, such as the ongoing slaughter of prey animals by predators. In vitro meat will eliminate the need for the mass murder of animals for food, and genetic reprogramming and advanced robotics will help us transition predators away from consuming sentient beings. Perhaps they can be directed to consume artificially engineered non-conscious meat-animals that are periodically airdropped across large areas of the Canadian Arctic and Amazon Rainforest. Perhaps we can engineer meat-plants that protect their tasty insides from bacteria but can be torn open by tigers.

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From Eurekalert:

Learning styles challenged
There is no evidence supporting auditory and visual learning, psychologists say

Are you a verbal learner or a visual learner? Chances are, you’ve pegged yourself or your children as either one or the other and rely on study techniques that suit your individual learning needs. And you’re not alone— for more than 30 years, the notion that teaching methods should match a student’s particular learning style has exerted a powerful influence on education. The long-standing popularity of the learning styles movement has in turn created a thriving commercial market amongst researchers, educators, and the general public.

The wide appeal of the idea that some students will learn better when material is presented visually and that others will learn better when the material is presented verbally, or even in some other way, is evident in the vast number of learning-style tests and teaching guides available for purchase and used in schools. But does scientific research really support the existence of different learning styles, or the hypothesis that people learn better when taught in a way that matches their own unique style?

Unfortunately, the answer is no, according to a major new report published this month in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The report, authored by a team of eminent researchers in the psychology of learning—Hal Pashler (University of San Diego), Mark McDaniel (Washington University in St. Louis), Doug Rohrer (University of South Florida), and Robert Bjork (University of California, Los Angeles)—reviews the existing literature on learning styles and finds that although numerous studies have purported to show the existence of different kinds of learners (such as “auditory learners” and “visual learners”), those studies have not used the type of randomized research designs that would make their findings credible.

Unfortunately, in psychology, empirical verification is not a high priority, while making stuff up that sounds good is. In psychology, it seems as if the heuristic “if SWPLs find it emotionally uplifting, it’s probably wrong” works well. At least that’s what I’m coming to believe.

My Occam’s razor hypothesis to explain the “learning styles” myth is that dumber people learn better with pictures, while smarter people can learn effectively from both pictures and text. This hypothesis is backed up by centuries of traditional wisdom, and it ought to be experimentally tested. By calling dumber people “visual learners” and smarter people “verbal learners” (though they probably learn from pictures better than the former group as well), you get to be more polite, though wrong.

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The roboethics article I linked on the 15th subsequently appeared in the Japan Times on the 17th.

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From PEA Soup, a blog devoted to policy, ethics, and academia:

Many people teach their small children the myth of Santa Claus: that a magical being who lives at the North Pole brings presents on Christmas Eve. Secondary aspects of the myth are that whether one receives presents is a function of one’s behavior, and that you can communicate with Santa about your preferences. Not only parents, but retail establishments and (I have recently discovered) public schools collude in perpetuating this myth among children of a certain age.

Perpetuating the Santa myth has at least these moral reasons against it:

1. It involves a lot of lying and deception practiced on credulous people.
2. It tends to foster greed in children and contributes to their false impression that one’s happiness is determined by one’s material possessions.
3. In telling children that the quantity and quality of one’s gifts are a function of one’s behavior, when actually they are a function of one’s socio-economic standing and parental temperament, it induces moral complacency in well-off children and false feelings of moral inferiority in less well-off children.

It seems to me that these reasons are sufficient to show that perpetuating the Santa myth is immoral. Most of America strongly disagrees with me on this point. I would be interested to know what the professionals at PEA Soup think.

Lying to children about Santa is just one of the many ways in which parents feel no compunctions about manipulating their children rather than treating them as persons. The only “good” thing about this manipulation is that it is supposedly for the benefit of the child, though that is debatable. One problem with the Santa myth not mentioned above is that the associated manipulation and lies is indicative of a broader pattern of manipulation and lies.

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