Accelerating Future

H/t Singularity Hub. Video is shown at 50X.

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Greg Fish over at Weird Things has a post on the Singularity, which is negative about it, and I made a response in the comments. Part of the problem here is the definition of “Singularity” and which one I care about. I don’t care about the word “Singularity” as a synonym for “Progress”. However, as a practical matter, I am concerned that unfriendly AI profoundly threatens the future of the human species. If human-equivalent and human-surpassing AI is possible in principle, it will be developed sooner or later, whether or not transhumanism, life extension, or body modifications are cool at the time. “Transhumanist attitude” is an interesting topic unto itself, but relatively independent of the technical questions of whether AGI is possible, and if so, whether it poses a threat to us, and if so, whether we should do something about it. To me, the answers to all the questions are obviously “yes”.

Transhumanist subcultural identification can be a fun thing, but there’s definitely a limit to how seriously I take it. AI, on the other hand, is a serious matter, whether or not you are a transhumanist. Artificial Intelligence has the potential to impact the world on a much, much more radical level than say, artificial flight.

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Hooray!

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Miron Cuperman recently alerted me to a new website, BrainPreservation.org. Here’s the homepage text:

I do want to change the world – I want to put an end to death. I want to make it every person’s right to experience the future centuries from now, and to live without the constant fear that aging and crippling disease will take away their joy for life, make them a burden to their loved ones, and strip them of their dignity. We have it within our power today to create that world. Let me say that again, we have it within our power today to create that world. From a medical and technical standpoint all that is needed is the development of a surgical procedure for perfusing a patient’s circulatory system with a series of fixatives and plastic resins capable of perfectly preserving their brain’s neural circuitry in a plasticized block for long-term storage. Such a procedure would, in effect, put the patient into a long dreamless sleep where they can wait out the decades or centuries necessary for the development of the more advanced technology required to revive them.

How could a patient ever be awoken from such an unconventional sleep? The necessary technology exists in primitive form today – the plasticized brain block will be automatically sliced into thin sections and these scanned in an electron microscope at nanometer resolution. Such scanning can map out the exact synaptic connectivity among neurons while simultaneously providing information on a host of molecular-level constituents. This map of brain connectivity will then be uploaded into a computer emulation controlling a robotic body – the patient awakes to a new dawn of unlimited potential.

Given our current state of knowledge it is quite likely that the perfection of a surgical brain-preservation procedure could be accomplished in less than five years with minimal amounts of research funds. However, aside from a few underfunded research groups, no serious brain preservation research is currently being performed. More tragically, even if such a surgical procedure were available today the legal system would prevent its proper use as a life saving measure by preventing it from being administered before the declaration of legal death. The reasons are social and political, and from those standpoints such a world is much harder to reach. It requires large numbers of people to viscerally accept a new metaphor — a metaphor that the last 150 years of biological science has demonstrated to be accurate — the metaphor that we are machines.

Amen! The above is not so much a proposal for new technology, as it is a proposal for new attitudes. If I want to preserve my brain now, and “commit suicide” according to the Judeo-Christian-influenced standard meme complex, then I should be allowed to do so. As a transhumanist, I am comfortable with making that statement in public, and wouldn’t feel awkward saying so in front of any number of friends or family, if necessary. Transhumanist goals, like the noble one outlined above, are already being held back by coward transhumanists. Transhumanists, say what you believe in public, now, or you aren’t having an impact.

It doesn’t matter if it’s just a Blogspot blog with a single post. Say it.

Another interesting aspect of the site is a proposal for a brain preservation technology prize.

How about a new era, where we can potentially live forever because our neural content is perfectly preserved and ready for reanimation? I don’t know about you, but I enjoy being on the right side of history a decade or three in advance. Might as well get on the right side now, rather than jump on the bandwagon when it’s being mobbed.

A preserved mind is a beautiful thing. A skull-bowl full of bacterial pudding-mush is not. There is no afterlife — Heaven is a lie made up by our ancestors to cope with the pain of death.

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The above magazine allegedly got the meme of molecular nanotechnology really going in 1986, according to Eric Drexler. He pointed out that nanotechnology is not really meant to “mimic life”. Anyway, molecular nanotechnology sure is scary! I hope it isn’t developed anytime soon.

Here are a number of links I’ve been meaning to share. A disproportionate amount are from Singularity Hub, a site that’s been increasing in quality lately. They don’t really post about the Singularity (high technology in general and the Singularity are not equivalent, sorry), but it’s still interesting news.

Nanotechnology artificial leaves for hydrogen production
Rutgers 2010 Singularity course
Company to sell ‘world’s first practical jetpack’ for $75,000 (w/ Video)
How to see through opaque materials
How to Reboot Your Corpse (pathetically poorly researched article from IEEE… a publication whose reputation is rapidly falling among tech enthusiasts)
Robot Gymnast Performs Again!
fMRI read the images in your brain — we know what you’re looking at
Adam the Robot Scientist Makes its First Discovery (Old news passed off as new news but still interesting)
Slick Looking Unlocked GSM Watchphone Available for $199 (video)
Eye Popping Pics of Cyborg Animals from Photoshop Contest
Four Great Science Fiction Authors Weigh In on the Singularity (video)
Mitsubishi Smallest Robot Arm Builds Lego Van (video)
SixthSense Augmented Reality Device Goes Open Source
Robots to Rescue Soldiers
How Long Until Human-Level AI? (old, but I’m linking it so everyone sees it)
Boring Conversation? Let Your Computer Listen for You
Future bio-nanotechnology will use computer chips inside living cells
Harnessing energy from everyday movements

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Brian Wang has the news.

Africa needs more rain. The West can theoretically boost rainfall in Africa.

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It’s called the Nuclear Tipping Point, and I wish they’d market it more aggressively to youngsters as well as the older set, but unfortunately their marketing crew is just too damn old. I mean no disrespect to older folks (after all, I plan to live for hundreds of thousands of years), it’s just that younger folks seem to get more rallied up and enthusiastic over causes, and we need that here. I don’t think that a grim academic perspective is very useful for real action either. Important causes start in academia, but can’t stay there.

The last movie this laudable organization put out was called Last Best Chance. It’s funny because it’s overly self-serious and Fred Thompson is President in it.

This latest movie has even more famous old men in it than the last one, and it’s totally free. Famous old men featured include Colin Powell, Arnie, and everyone’s favorite controversial-as-hell Secretary of State, Mr. Realpolitik himself, Henry.

It’s sad how the people who invented the nuclear bomb and spent their careers dealing with the threat of it are now screaming about the risk of terrorist nuclear weapons, and no one under the age of 40 is listening. Few people over 40 are listening either, but the numbers seem better there. (Obama, most notably.) Perhaps it will take a nuke going off in one of our major cities before people wake up. There’s this thing called a boat that lets you bring a payload right up to the coast without too much trouble.

My generation is too interested in webcomics, MMOs, perpetual left-right political warfare, and gosh-wow technologies to care about the real risks right in front of us.

Here’s Colin Powell.

Here’s the blurb:

The film is introduced by General Colin Powell, narrated by Michael Douglas and includes interviews with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. “Nuclear Tipping Point” was written and directed by Ben Goddard and produced by the Nuclear Security Project in an effort to raise awareness about nuclear threats and to help build support for the urgent actions needed to reduce nuclear dangers.

For those concerned about existential risks, try to first see if you can get anyone interested in plausible non-existential risks. That can set a baseline for the level of success you expect to achieve for existential, longer-term threats like AGI.

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Rudi Hoffman is the man to go to for life insurance to fund a cryonics contract. Last I heard, he had cornered about 95% of the market in this small niche. In light of the recent Mary Robbins case, Rudi has written up a list of choices cryonicists can make to ensure that our hostile relatives don’t try to pull us out of the freezer, valiantly (according to some people, apparently) making our neural structures available for consumption by a variety of worms and bacteria. Here’s the intro:

Several of my clients and friends have asked me for observations regarding securing their cryonics arrangements even with contrary wishes of friends and relatives. Given the recent Mary Robbins case in Colorado, and multiple previous cases available in some detail on the websites of both CI and Alcor, structuring your affairs in the most secure manner currently has top of mind awareness for many who are serious about their cryonics plans.

The purpose of this article is to provide some insight into how serious cryonicists can structure their affairs to assure themselves they have done everything possible regarding funding and legal structures for their optimal suspensions.

I noticed that Rudi missed one thing that several cryonicists have suggested to me: putting a “certificate of religious belief” in your wallet that makes a concrete statement against autopsy for religious reasons. One friend of mine used a lamination machine to attach this directly to his ID. I am especially concerned about this for young cryonicists because I’ve heard that when a young person dies under circumstances even the slightest bit unusual, autopsies are common.

As soon as blood starts to coagulate, vitrification becomes impossible, seriously reducing the quality of the suspension. Though I am hopeful that even the most primitive suspensions will lead to revivals some day, it casually seems to me (as a non-scientist) that suspensions involving vitrification will require lower levels of technology for a successful revival.

Since I’m on the topic of cryonics, why not quote Ben Franklin:

I have seen an instance of common flies…drown’d in Madeira
wine…Having heard it remark’d that drowned flies were capable of
being reviv’d by the rays of the sun, I proposed making the experiment
upon these; they were therefore expos’d to the sun…In less than three
hours, two of them began by degrees to recover life…and soon after
began to fly, finding themselves in Old England, without knowing how
they came thither.

I wish it were possible…to invent a method of embalming drown’d
persons, in such a manner that they may be recall’d to life at any
period, however distant. For having a very ardent desire to see and
observe the state of America a hundred years hence, I should prefer to
any ordinary death, being immers’d in a cask of Madeira wine…to be
later recall’d to life by the solar warmth of my dear country!”

On one occasion, this caused me to remark to Michael Vassar, “do you think there are some people buried in caskets of Madeira wine in the ground that we just haven’t discovered yet?”, to which he replied, “I doubt it.” A pity… I am looking at a quarter right now, and I should think that in the long term, the world would be willing to trade every quarter in circulation (likenesses of Washington) for the actual preserved brain and body of George Washington. Whether he would care to be revived in the present, however, may be a separate question, but if he were, I can only imagine that he would enjoy some level of political influence in US politics.

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There’s another media explosion over cryonics, this time having to do with a woman named Mary Robbins. She signed numerous documents indicating she wanted to be cryopreserved at Alcor, then, her family claimed that she changed her mind in her final days. A Colorado court recently ruled in favor of Alcor because no documentation to back up the family’s argument was ever produced, as required by Colorado law. Here is the Associated Press coverage. This ruling sets a good precedent. It sometimes seems as if hostile family members are willing to throw away the law to ensure that their relative rots in the ground in lieu of being cryopreserved. Almost as if their soul would be trapped if they were suspended.

It’s disappointing how many family members freak out when they find out that their mother/father/relatives are signed up for cryonics and going into cryosuspension. Even if I thought cryonics was complete bunkum, I would at least have the decency to respect the wishes of my relative.

Even if I thought revival from a preserved state were impossible, I would still be sympathetic to cryonics because it is based on the principle of preserving rather than destroying a very valuable object — the human brain. This leaves open the possibility of future analysis, imaging, and inferences about the person whose brain it was. If my ancestor’s brains were preserved, there would come a day where it could be possible to analyze them non-invasively and maybe learn something about their neurology. For instance, you might have heard about how blind people acquire a better sense of hearing and vision than everyone else. In the not-too-distant future, it could become possible to scan a brain and determine if someone was blind by the structure of their visual cortex. More and more details would follow as neuroscience progressed, until eventually everything would become determined. The brain, just like everything else in the world, is thoroughly non-mystical.

Preservation is our only window into the past. Imagine the knowledge destroyed when the Library of Alexandria was incinerated. Similar knowledge is destroyed whenever worms and bacteria dissolve a brain, we just don’t have all the tools to look at it yet. Surprisingly, many people are still not clear on the acknowledged fact that all our memories, personality, feelings, and inclinations are encoded in the structure and chemistry of our brains. They believe in a separate metaphysical “mind” somehow independent of the brain. But the mind is simply the structure and function of the brain. Even if revival proved impossible in the long term, the preservation of individual brains today could provide a unique window into the past for future generations to analyze, providing a strong argument for its value.

The human brain is the most remarkable known object in the entire universe. Why throw it out like a bit of moldy hamburger? For a very modest cost, the seats of our consciousness can be preserved after our metabolic death. In fact, the technology already exists to destructively scan brains piece-by-piece — ever heard of ATLUM? This serial sectioning method allows for such precise nanoscale scanning that individual synapses and vesicles are visible using a scanning electron microscope. You can read more about the technology at the brain emulation roadmap. Within a few decades or maybe even less, it will be possible to create a computer file that consists of a nanoscale scan of an entire human brain. It’s only a matter of time before scientists learn how to interpret the patterns of such scans as frozen thoughts, memories, personality, and other complex mental features. It may take a while, but hey — if you’re frozen at liquid nitrogen temperature, your neural molecules ain’t going anywhere fast.

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For those who are interested, there is a long article at MillerMcCune.com on David Cope, the UC Santa Cruz professor emeritus who has a history of creating AIs that compose music. His latest creation, dubbed Emily Howell, is ready to be unveiled soon, and the article includes a couple samples of “her” work. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Emmy was once the world’s most advanced artificially intelligent composer, and because he’d managed to breathe a sort of life into her, he became a modern-day musical Dr. Frankenstein. She produced thousands of scores in the style of classical heavyweights, scores so impressive that classical music scholars failed to identify them as computer-created. Cope attracted praise from musicians and computer scientists, but his creation raised troubling questions: If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart? And was there really any soul behind the great works, or were Beethoven and his ilk just clever mathematical manipulators of notes?

Cope’s answers — not much, and yes — made some people very angry. He was so often criticized for these views that colleagues nicknamed him “The Tin Man,” after the Wizard of Oz character without a heart. For a time, such condemnation fueled his creativity, but eventually, after years of hemming and hawing, Cope dragged Emmy into the trash folder.

This month, he is scheduled to unveil the results of a successor effort that’s already generating the controversy and high expectations that Emmy once drew. Dubbed “Emily Howell,” the daughter program aims to do what many said Emmy couldn’t: create original, modern music. Its compositions are innovative, unique and — according to some in the small community of listeners who’ve heard them performed live — superb.

Cool, huh?

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Michael Anissimov: “Don’t Fear the Singularity, but Be Careful: Friendly AI Design” at Foresight 2010 Conference from Foresight Institute on Vimeo.

Here’s my talk from Foresight! If you read this blog, there won’t be much new to you. I probably should have summarized the talk at the beginning. Unfortunately I got cut off at around slide 40 out of 55 due to schedule problems, so I missed the opportunity to summarize some of SIAI’s recent work and ended up mainly talking about 1) generic progress in AI, 2) media coverage of AI and Singularity, 3) the intelligence explosion idea, 4) the AI advantage, and 5) the inherent unconnectedness of morality and intelligence (Hume). Ignore the title; I didn’t really get into Friendly AI design at all. It was more of an introduction to why Friendly AI may be required. (I’m not sure I would have even used the term “Friendly AI” if I were making up the talk title again, because it’s been argued by a number of people that the term sounds silly and unserious.)

If I could redo this talk (I plan to do so on video) I would focus a little more on ideas and less on AI advancements, and throw out all the quotes, just quickly summarizing them instead. I would also try even harder to avoid looking down at my laptop during the talk, and would have removed my nametag. I need to buy one of those remote clicker things. I realize I spent a fair amount of time summarizing other people’s AI research rather than ideas unique to me or SIAI, but at the time it seemed necessary because I assumed that few people in the audience would be familiar with the range of advances in AI over the last year alone. People have to understand that AI is making steady progress, otherwise why worry about more advanced AI? If I thought AI really were stuck in the mud, then I wouldn’t be as frantic about the need for safe AI.

Several people pointed out to me that the talk title also seems odd because I am all about getting people to “fear the Singularity” — or fear a negative Singularity where humanity gets steamrolled by indifferent superintelligence. My idea here was that we don’t have to fear the Singularity if we’re careful. I often get the impression that people’s minds just shut down when considering the prospect of an AI Singularity, even if they don’t object to the plausibility of human-level AI in principle, just because they see it as extremely alien in comparison to a human-sparked Singularity. Part of the idea I was going for was that an AI-sparked Singularity can be managed effectively, but as I mentioned, I didn’t even get around to talking about that.

Thinking about my comment on the superficial mundaneity of analyzing the genetic expression of baker’s yeast, I realize that it may not be considered that mundane to some scientists, but I’m not sure because I’m not a biologist that researches microbial genetic expression. I just figured that since yeast is a model organism, we already know a fair amount about its patterns of genetic expression and that the experiments were mainly for show.

You can follow along with the talk with my slides here.

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