Accelerating Future

Here are the results from Pew Research. Thanks to James Hughes on the ieet-x list for the link.

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Here is the short list from H+ Lund, the student transhumanist society based in Lund, Sweden.

A member of H+ Lund, Abraham Wolk, is currently an SIAI Visiting Fellow.

According to Wikipedia, Lund is one of the oldest cities in Sweden.

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Right here. Prior to my interview, Phil and Stephen talk to Kelly Parks about zombies. After that (about 20 min into the program or so) I overview what I know about the Summit speakers, and mention the reasons why I think the Summit is a valuable event to attend. In response to a question about ethics, I replied that many of the speakers will touch on ethics, some talks can be interpreted as primarily about ethics/philosophy (like Eliezer’s talk), and that to say something coherent on ethics, people need to know about the technology first.

I mentioned that phone surveys have shown that people’s positions, on, for instance, nanotechnology, can be easily manipulated by a quick sentence or two thrown in prior to the interview, and other framing effects. At Open Science Summit, I ran into a worker with the Project on Emerging Technologies who mentioned that 2/3 people had still never heard of nanotechnology. This emphasizes the importance of basic education before taking public opinion seriously. I am not saying that public opinion is not worth taking seriously! Just that it is reasonable to expect a certain level of knowledge first. For instance, people’s opinions on the Internet are mostly qualified these days, because people are actually familiar enough with the technology to evaluate it.

As emerging technologies start to become real products, ambient knowledge will increase. We’re now in the pre-deployment stage for many of these technologies’ most interesting applications, so it is reasonable to expect that only scholars, nerds, tech-enthusiasts, and the like will have the knowledge to say something substantial on the ethics of these technologies. Pundits may come to associate the technologies themselves with the nerds who are the early-adopters, but this connection does not hold too well in the long term. For many years, computers were associated with nerds, but now everyone uses them. People don’t really make fun of computers anymore, since they are using them all the time. The same effect will occur with brain implants, intelligence enhancement, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, and the like.

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I’m going on FastForward radio in about an hour, at 7PM PST, to talk about the Summit and why it will be great.

If you listen live you can contribute to the show by joining the text chat. Chat host Sally Morem will be on hand to lead the discussion. Get all the details on listening live at the audio host, Blog Talk Radio. The show starts at:

10:00 Eastern/9:00 Central/8:00 Mountain/7:00 Pacific.

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Great article from h+ magazine from about a week ago: “Rethinking the Promise of Genomics”. This is by Terry Grossman, co-author (with Ray Kurzweil) of Fantastic Voyage:

I used to be a big believer in the enormous potential of genomics, and each of my two previous books, Fantastic Voyage and TRANSCEND: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever, had chapters devoted to this topic. The relevant chapter in the earlier book, Fantastic Voyage, published in 2004, was titled “The Promise of Genomics.” My co-author in these books, Ray Kurzweil, is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost inventors and futurists, and he has made predictions for what is likely to occur in the future in the field of genomics . Yet, these days I find that I am feeling far less confident at least for the near term about the near term prospects for this “promise.”

Here’s a key quote by Grossman:

Currently I have moved much closer to the idea of “genetic irrelevance,” the idea that in the overwhelming majority of cases, our genes are of much less importance in determining our fate and that the environment in which we live and the lifestyle choices we make are of far greater importance.

Please note that I said this is true in the “overwhelming majority of cases,” but it is not true all the time. About one in 20 people is born with an abnormal gene that will create a major problem that can affect life and be quite relevant, either from birth or at some point further down the line. Examples include cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease that can manifest from birth for which we have been doing routine screening for decades and the BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 genes, which dramatically increase a woman’s risk of breast and ovarian cancer later in life. But for nearly 95 percent of us, we come off of the assembly line of birth virtually perfect.

Illuminating stuff. Go exercise! It’s important that the advocates of science and technology make it clear to the public that we are willing to be pessimistic about a technology’s dividends when it looks rational to do so. Grossman’s article reminds me of an excellent 2001 article by John Smart, “Performance Limitations on Natural and Engineered Biological Systems”:

The more complex any life form becomes, the more it becomes a legacy/path dependent system, with many antagonistic pleiotropies (negative effects in other places and functions in the organism) whenever any further change is contemplated. It seems that evolutionary development, just like differentiation from a zygote or stem cell to a mature tissue, becomes increasingly terminally differentiated the more complex and specialized the organism. One extreme case of this kind of terminal differentiation, at the cellular level, is nerve cells in the human brain, which are so specialized, and the connections they support so complex, that they cannot even replace themselves, in general. Could they eventually learn to do so without disrupting the connectionist complexity that they create in the brain, after their development has stopped? Perhaps not. The more compex the system becomes, the less flexible it is. It gets progressively harder to make small changes in the genes that would improve system, and given how finely tuned so many system elements are, large changes are out of the question.

Because the reasons outlined by Grossman and Smart, I am more in the school that cybernetics (implants, brain-computer interfaces, wearable computing, etc.) will provide the most significant performance upgrades to humans in the nearer term (20-30 years). At first bio-transhumanism will be more of a side phenomenon than the central thrust of the transition. There will be much more effective and reliable means to make humans stronger and faster before we can make ourselves live longer and deeply exploit our own genetics.

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You can still register for just $100!

See you there!!!

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Title:

The Mind and how to build one

Abstract:

What does it mean to understand the brain? Where are we on the roadmap
to this goal? What are the effective routes to progress – detailed
modeling, theoretical effort, improvement of imaging and computational
technologies? What predictions can we make? What are the consequences
of materialization of such predictions – social, ethical? I will
address these questions and examine some of the most common criticisms
of the exponential growth of information technology including
criticisms from hardware (“Moore’s Law will not go on forever”),
software (“software is stuck in the mud”), the brain (“the brain is
too complicated to understand or replicate”), ontology (“software is
not capable of thinking or of consciousness”), and promise versus
peril (“biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence are
too dangerous”).

There is now a grand project comprising at least a hundred thousand
scientists and engineers working in diverse ways to understand the
best example we have of an intelligent process: the human brain. It
is arguably the most important project in the history of the
human-machine civilization. The goal of the project is to understand
precisely how the human brain works, and then to use these revealed
algorithms as a basis for creating even more intelligent machines.

As we learn the algorithms underlying human intelligence, we will
similarly be able to engineer it to vastly extend the powers of our
intelligence. Indeed this process is already well under way. There
are literally hundreds of tasks and activities that used to be the
sole province of human intelligence that can now be conducted by
computers usually with greater precision and vastly greater scale.

Was it inevitable that a species would evolve that is capable of
creating its own evolutionary process in the form of intelligent
technology? I will argue that it was.

According to my models we are only two decades from fully modeling and
simulating the human brain. By the time we finish this
reverse-engineering project, we will have computers that are millions
of times more powerful than the human brain. These computers will be
further amplified by being networked into a vast world wide cloud of
computing. The algorithms of intelligence will begin to self-iterate
towards ever smarter algorithms.

This is how we will address the grand challenges of humanity such as
maintaining a healthy environment, providing for the resources for a
growing population including energy, food, and water, overcoming
disease, vastly extending human longevity, and overcoming poverty. It
is only by extending our intelligence with our intelligent technology
that we can handle the scale of complexity to address these
challenges.

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Here it is.

“Understand” is a classic.

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Here’s the new quote I’m using on my Facebook:

“Disease, poverty, environmental destruction, unnecessary suffering of all kinds: these are things that a superintelligence equipped with advanced nanotechnology would be capable of eliminating.”

Nick Bostrom, “Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence”

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Aldous Huxley and George Orwell… who was right?

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The comments section of my SIAI call for volunteers has become home to an extensive debate on moral realism, the relationship between values and intelligence, and the moral implications of a timeless universe and discreteness of spacetime. The primary participants include “Hedonic Treader”, Jonatas Müller, and David Pearce.

Regular readers are familiar with my moral anti-realist views and my emphasis that creating superintelligence with the expectation that it will discover complex values is a depressing sort of planetary suicide.

The moral anti-realist stance is not new. It’s not so much a personal preference, as a statement about the structure of the world — that there are no moral propositions which are true or untrue. “Thou shalt not kill”, is not a part of the structure of the universe, just a rule humans evolved to encourage one another to follow, for obvious reasons.

“It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.”

– David Hume, A Treatise Upon Human Nature (1740)

Moral anti-realism has been in the spotlight among transhumanists and singularitarians primarily because of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Less Wrong blog posts, which explain the relevant issues.

Here’s David’s argument:

One of the hallmarks of intelligence is the capacity to distinguish the important form the trivial. We wouldn’t describe a human who spent his life tiling his garden with paperclips as “intelligent”, even if he used some arcane mathematical formula to do so. At most, we’d say he was an idiot savant.

A value-nihilist will be unimpressed by this response. How can we have any idea what a posthuman superintelligence will find valuable? Why not paperclips? There isn’t any objective fact of the matter – no “truthbearer” to settle the issue.

In one sense, I’d agree. A posthuman superintelligence may value modes of experience and propositional content that we would currently find inconceivable. And of course human cultures display an amazing diversity of moral practices. In another sense, however, I think the value-nihilist response is profoundly mistaken. This is because – for reasons we can’t fathom – the universe does have an inbuilt metric of importance: the pleasure-pain axis. You can’t be mistaken about the importance of your being in agony: its importance is built into the very nature of the experience itself. For reasons science doesn’t understand, organic robots aren’t just zombies with utility functions. The existence of phenomenal agony is an objective fact about the world: the phenomenal experience of pain and pleasure occupies spacetime coordinates, and it’s as much an objective fact about the universe as the rest mass of the electron. If I – or a Ted Bundy – think paperclip tiling is more important than your agony, then this judgement is not just a moral limitation on our part, but also an intellectual limitation – a failure adequately to compare the aesthetic satisfaction derived from contemplating well-tiled paperclips with what it’s like to be in unbearable agony. By contrast, a full-spectrum Superintelligence – as distinct from a mere SuperAsperger – will presumably command an impartial “God’s-eye view”, stripped of egocentric and anthropocentric bias. A Superintelligence will be able to compare and contrast the relative weights of all possible perspectives – and act accordingly. This means cosmic paperclip tiling is out: it’s dumb for humans – and dumb for posthumans too.

I am optimistic that experiments in Artificial Intelligence will verify the truth of moral anti-realism, probably with little remaining doubt, within the next decade or so. Some will naturally argue that machines’ moral non-complexity derives from its lack of phenomenological experience, and that will remain a point of contention until we can experiment with a variety of human-machine hybrids and intermediates. However, I think the broad picture will be a moral realization analogous to the cosmic realization that we were just a tiny corner of the universe. Our moral universe is a tiny corner of the total possible moral universe, and our values are not particularly persuasive to anything but fellow humans.

Just because some morals and feelings are in-built for humans does not mean that they are universally persuasive. It is possible that humans both “discover” their own internal values and “invent” memetic structures around them. An appropriately designed Artificial Intelligence could also “discover” that its ultimate goal in life is to spin itself around like a top all day, and even feel that every conscious agent must enjoy the same thing, whether they argue otherwise or not.

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I was honored to see that the creator of WordPress, the very software this blog runs on, plugged my page “Why Intelligent People Fail” yesterday. Definitely a page worth seeing if you haven’t yet.

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