Society for Risk Analysis Annual Meeting Presentation
This is just a reminder that I will be presenting at the Society for Risk Analysis annual meeting in Salt Lake City on December 5-8. The meeting is open to anyone interested in risk analysis. Registration is $500. Robin Hanson and Seth Baum will be there as well. My presentation will be part of the "Assessment, Communication and Perception of Nanotechnology" track. The full session list is here. Seth will be chairing the "Methodologies for Global Catastrophic Risk Assessment" track, where Robin will be giving his talk.
Here's my abstract:
T3-F.4 14:30 Public Scholarship For Global Catastrophic Risks. Anissimov M*; Singularity Institute
Abstract: Global catastrophic risks (GCRs) are risks that threaten civilization on a global scale, including nuclear war, ecological collapse, pandemics, and poorly understood risks from emerging technologies such as nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. Public perception of GCRs is important because these risks and responses to them are often driven by public activities or by the public policies of democracies. However, much of the public perception is based on science fiction books and films, which unfortunately often lack scientific accuracy. This presentation describes an effort to improve public perceptions of GCR through public scholarship. Public scholarship is the process of bringing academic and other scholarship into the public sphere, often to inform democratic processes. The effort described here works on all GCRs and focuses on emerging technologies such as biotechnology and nanotechnology. The effort involves innovating use of blogs, social networking sites, and other new media platforms. This effort has already resulted in, among other things, a visible online community of thousands following the science around GCRs, and plans to further move discussion of scholarly GCR literature into the mainstream media. It is believed that public scholarship efforts like these can play important roles in societal responses to GCRs.
Here's Professor Hanson's abstract:
W3-A.3 14:10 Catastrophic Risk Forecasts From Refuge Entry Futures. Hanson RD*; George Mason University
Abstract: Speculative markets have demonstrated powerful abilities to forecast future events, which has inspired a new field of prediction markets to explore such possibilities. Can such power be harnessed to forecast global catastrophic risk? One problem is that such mechanisms offered weaker incentives to forecast distant future events, yet we want forecasts about distant future catastrophes. But this is a generic problem with all ways to forecast the distant future; it is not specific to this mechanism. Bets also have a problem forecasting the end of the world, as no one is left afterward to collect on bets. So to let speculators advise us about world’s end, we might have them trade an asset available now that remains valuable as close as possible to an end. Imagine a refuge with a good chance of surviving a wide range of disasters. It might be hidden deep in a mine, stocked with years of food and power, and continuously populated with thirty experts and thirty amateurs. Locked down against pandemics, it is opened every month for supplies and new residents. A refuge ticket gives you the right to use an amateur refuge slot for a given time period. To exercise a ticket, you show up at its entrance at the assigned time. Refuge tickets could be auctioned years in advance, broken into conditional parts, and traded in subsidized markets. For example, one might buy a refuge ticket valid on a certain date only in the event that USA and Russia had just broken off diplomatic relations, or in the event a city somewhere is nuked. The price of such resort tickets would rise with the chance of such events. By trading such tickets conditional on a policy that might mitigate a crisis, such as a treaty, prices could reflect conditional chances of such events.
Filling in the Four-Layered Model of H. Sapiens Nature
Robin Hanson is really on fire now with his analysis of farmer vs. forager psychology. Whether consciously or not, he's extending the farmer model given by Cochran and Harpending in The 10,000 Year Explosion. Cochran and Harpending's model is interesting in the way it points out the disappointing truth about humanity's self-domestication. To put it in crude terms, we've naturally selected ourselves into a bunch of conformist townie wussies.
My default model of Homo sapiens is four-layered -- our primate-mammalian background from 80 mya, the Homo sapiens EEA (environment of evolutionary adaptiveness) pan-species bedrock, post-African diaspora/farming/Neolithic Revolution selection pressures, and the modern world. Rich data is available to update the model at all four levels, but in my opinion #3, the farming revolution, is most neglected. I hazard to guess it's the most neglected because the particulars of it make distinctions between different groups of existing humans.
Another neglected area, as far as my reading goes, is the mystical/mythical side of the time period intermediate between the EEA and farming. The period of time when all our elaborate myths were invented, perhaps 10-20,000 years ago. The Golden Bough provides powerful evidence of the content of this entire area (hint: it involves burning lots of effigies), but what scholarly work exists on mythological origins prior to all trendy modern traditions? The Golden Bough was published 120 years ago. Anyone know more recent material?
Gem of an Idea: A Flexible Diamond-Studded Electrode Implanted for Life
From Eurekalert:
Diamonds adorning tiaras to anklets are treasures but these gemstones inside the body may prove priceless.
Two Case Western Reserve University researchers are building implants made of diamond and flexible polymer that are designed to identify chemical and electrical changes in the brain of patients suffering from neural disease, or to stimulate nerves and restore movement in the paralyzed.
The work of Heidi Martin, a professor of chemical engineering, and Christian Zorman, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science, is years from human trials but their early success has drawn interest worldwide.
My general stance on enhancement and implants is "go diamond or go home", and its corollary, "go fullerene or go home".
ASIM Experts Series: Brain-Machine Interfacing: Current Work and Future Directions, by Max Hodak, October 17, 2010
"ASIM" stands for Advancing Substrate Independent Minds, the field previously known as mind uploading, though ASIM can be construed as broader. ASIM is the focus of Carboncopies, a new non-profit founded by Suzanne Gildert (now at D-Wave) and Randal Koene (Halcyon Molecular). Me and Randal work at the same company so I get to see him in the lunch room now.
The presentation, to be held in Teleplace this upcoming Sunday (email Giulio Prisco for directions on how to log in) has the following abstract:
Brain-machine interfacing: current work and future directions
Max Hodak - http://younoodle.com/people/max_hodak
Abstract: Fluid, two-way brain-machine interfacing represents one of the greatest challenges of modern bioengineering. It offers the potential to restore movement and speech to the locked-in, and ultimately allow us as humans to expand far beyond the biological limits we're encased in now. But, there's a long road ahead. Today, noninvasive BMIs are largely useless as practical devices and invasive BMIs are critically limited, though progress is being made everyday. Microwire array recording is used all over the world to decode motor intent out of cortex to drive robotic actuators and software controls. Electrical intracortical microstimulation is used to "write" information to the brain, and optogenetic methods promise to make that easier and safer. Monkey models can perform tasks from controlling a walking robot to feeding themselves with a 7-DOF robotic arm. Before we'll be able to make the jump to humans, biocompatibility of electrodes and limited channel counts are significant hurdles that will need to be crossed. These technologies are still in their infancy, but they're a huge opportunity in science for those motivated to help bring them through to maturity.
Max Hodak is a student of Miguel Nicolelis, the well-known BMI engineer.
Assorted Links 10/10/10
Anders Sandberg: What did you learn about the singularity today?
BBC News -- Smart specs unite world and data
First-Ever Immersive Tech Summit to Convene in LA
How to better understand and participate on Less Wrong
Neurons cast votes to guide decision-making
Salk Institute finds neural code used by the retina to relay color information to the brain
Tiny generators turn waste heat into power
Nanotechnology team reports the strongest organic nanomaterial ever developed
Titanium foams replace injured bones
Mapping the Brain on a Massive Scale
Highly Flexible and All-Solid-State Paperlike Polymer Supercapacitors
Greg Fish’s Response to My Response to Hank Hyena
Science blogger Greg Fish applauded me for rebuking the "nerd rapture crowd".
It's worth pointing out that I am a radical transhumanist obsessed with getting an immortal robot body. There's nothing wrong with that. I just want to have properly calibrated estimates of the likelihood of actually acquiring such a body and the work required by society to get there.
Notice how the moral valence part of my brain is sectioned off from the model-building part. I can want something really, really bad, and that doesn't bias my estimated probability of it. (Or at least, I try to prevent it from doing so.) At the same time, I can really fear something, like geomagnetic storms, but that doesn't lower my estimated probability of its occurrence. What a way to live! (Sarcasm.)
Hank Hyena’s “Me, Me!” Transhumanism
Some of you may have caught Hank Pellissier's (also known as Hank Hyena) review of Singularity Summit 2010 on a World Future Society blog, where he said:
"Glancing at the program, I realized no one else was going to even remotely address augmentation. Why? Because they're computer geeks, I decided in an epiphanic flash. They adore computers; they want to build THEM smarter and quicker and stronger... But what about ME? I want all that, for myself."
Hank... no. Come on. The point of the Singularity Institute is to build AI for the benefit of humanity, and we even get people who complain that we focus too much on preserving human values and not letting AI "develop on its own". Fuck computers, really. (Sorry for the language, but I want to make a strong point about values.) The point of a computer is to serve a conscious being. A computer is a hunk of sand and plastic. Certain computers may one day implement conscious beings, but even then, the being itself is somewhat more of nebulous concept than the computer, which is just the substrate. Even though you are your brain, we generally refer to each other as people and not "brains".
When people at the Singularity Summit talk about computers and AI technology, the primary reason they give a damn about it is because it enhances some aspect of human performance. Usually the focus is on enhancing the senses, cognition, and thought. This is human enhancement. I suspect because Hank is a bit on the older side (nothing wrong with that -- I want to live for billions of years), he has physical enhancement more in mind. Well, there were talks relevant to that. Ben Goertzel's talk on "AI Against Aging" was about using AI to analyze genomic information to tease out new correlations between alleles and conditions. It's a form of augmentation because it lets us do analysis we couldn't do on our own, then apply it to curing aging, which is another form of augmentation. What would Hank say about this, that it's not direct enough, or something? That we should just focus on genomic analysis using existing tools and never improve them? Hank, the reason for developing better tools is to hurry along augmentation. It's analogous to someone complaining that a group building a bridge is casting iron beams instead of sawing down a tree and hoping it falls right across the river. Better tools lead to better augmentation outcomes. Try to climb Everest with inferior tools and you just freeze.
Gregory Stock talked about ethical issues around likely upcoming augmentation (uploading), that's "predictions of augmentation", I should think. If someone is taking profound augmentation for granted in their talk, isn't that paying credit to human augmentation?
Steven Mann's talk was almost completely about augmentation. He discussed his EyeTap system which records everything he sees and creates an augmented reality interface. Hank complains that "Mann veered away from enhancement to spend the last 10 minutes introducing us to his wet new invention, "the world's first musical instrument that produces sound from vibrations in water." If he spent most of the beginning of his talk discussing augmentation, and then spends 10 minutes talking about an excellent musical instrument that had everyone excited, is that such a big deal?
I could go on, but the point is that practically every talk at the Singularity Summit was about augmentation in some fashion -- Hank Hyena just didn't always understand the connection. Another example would be Lance Becker, who discussed avoiding reperfusion injury, which could save huge numbers of people from dying when their body or brain is somehow deprived of oxygen for an extended period of time. This is very much a form of augmentation. Not permanent, not an implant, but if you have a heart attack and this saves your life, I think you'd be very much appreciative anyway. Until we invent respirocytes (artificial red blood cells) or something like them, that invention will be a life-saver.
Same Goals, But Our Methods are Superior
Another annoying part of Hyena's review is this bit, which embodies a simplistic view of the future that several prominent transhumanists have fallen into as well:
Exactly, I thought. I want my IQ boosted, my senses expanded, my muscles strengthened, my organs cleansed. I want the Singularity to happen inside me. Why? I'm reasonably concerned that a smarter-than-us AI machine might choose to eliminate gross humanity, but mostly... I'm tired of my mental and physical limitations. We "meatbags" - a new pejorative for our archaic anatomy - need to be upgraded. We've already assisted ourselves with contact lenses, plastic hips, hearing aids, prosthetic limbs... but still, the preponderance of our flesh remains Paleolithic.
I want all this same stuff, and the best way to get there as soon as possible is through Friendly AI. Why? Because there's too much to do otherwise. If people think they have faster routes to a disease-free, post-scarcity, post-death world, by all means, pursue them, but everyone should understand that those who pursue Friendly AGI have the same base goals as you, we just use different means. We want the same damn thing. We repeat this again and again, but some people just don't get it. We aren't narrow-minded nerds with a special love for AI, really.
Hank also seems to think it would be possible to use human augmentation to keep up with or fight AI, which is just foolish. (Stephen Hawking is foolish for thinking this as well.) If AI gets to the point of human-superior intelligence, there will be no fighting with it. It will just win. You're better off making yourself safe by building an AI on your side. The chance of you personally becoming powerful enough to contain and control all AI research globally is close to zilch. Even some prominent transhumanists have this fantasy. They think they run away from, or outsmart recursively self-improving AI. Don't bother. The advantages a smarter-than-human AI would inherently have by virtue of its substrate are just too immense.
There's another problem with messing around with direct human augmentation -- it's really damn hard. Even the Pentagon, with billions of dollars in research funding, is sort of dancing around the edges of it. Before we can have direct human augmentation, we need better support systems. Support systems are much easier to engineer. Hank, did you know that the risk of complications in practically any surgery is a few percent? True augmentation that requires surgery is impossible without advanced robotics. Manual surgery by doctors is too expensive and imprecise. Humans mess up. We need advanced robotics and AI to achieve the outcomes we desire. No society is going to adopt widespread surgical enhancement unless the complication rate is pushed way, way down. Yes Hank, I know that you would probably volunteer to be among the first to line up for the augmentation, but the problem with early prototypes is that they have bugs to be worked out. That involves basically torturing animals (animal "testing") on a mass scale, and we haven't even begun making cyborg rabbits yet, so what makes you think that cyborg humans are anywhere close? Robotics and AI -- external systems -- are where it's at, and it will remain that way for 15-20 years at least.
Speaking of animals, we need better computer simulations of biological systems to avoid hundreds of thousands of highly painful, often lethal tests on defenseless rodents, rabbits, chimps and dogs. I know the "me! me!" attitude says "let them die for me", but even the guys that run these tests are constantly looking to improve their simulations. For a few years my dad worked at Genentech, and often talked about the PR challenges they had to deal with in animal testing. There are plenty of scientists whose work involves killing animals all day, and although they may learn something from it, I doubt they would mind if their animals were replaced by simulations that provided the same information. From a pragmatic perspective, there's also the question of cost. You can save orders of magnitude on cash by testing upgrades in silico rather than in vivo.
Build Some Muscle, You Frail Nerds!
Want your IQ boosted, your senses expanded, your muscles strengthened, your organs cleansed? Some transhumanists may not realize that you can do these things today, without Future Tech(tm). Future tech should not be viewed as a free path for lazy people to get smarter and in shape. I mean, it could be viewed as that, but it's not very honorable. It should be viewed as an extension of things we can do today to improve our minds and bodies. Want your IQ boosted? Get ten hours of sleep a night. Want to expand your senses? How about buying a microscope, a telescope, and really figuring out how to use your smartphone to access information? Want to strengthen your muscles? How about a run and a trip to the gym? Want to cleanse your organs? Eat wholesome food and moderate your alcohol intake.
To avoid looking like (and being) frail nerds sitting in front of computers awaiting Techno Rapture, we need to push ourselves with what we have now. Many transhumanists might not realize what unaugmented human beings are capable of. For instance, there's this one badass by the name of Richard Proenneke who lived alone for 30 years in the remote Alaskan wilderness in a log cabin he built. This was his retirement -- he was 52 when he moved out there and 86 when he died. He only returned to civilization at age 82. Most peoples' retirement consists of sitting on their ass getting drunk and watching television until they die, but this guy was keeping himself alive in an unforgiving sub-zero environment simply with his own dedication and skills. Most dudes in their early 20s who fancy themselves badass would be dead after a week or two in that environment. One naive youngster who tried it, Chris McCandless, died in a few months, because the moose he shot rotted, because he didn't know the first thing about preserving it.
The best forms of "augmentation" available today are simply being proficient with computers/smartphones and getting into shape physically. Say that I bought an exoskeleton tomorrow and used it to go for a hike in the mountains. Well, it would let me hike with minimal effort for a while, then eventually probably run out of power or otherwise break down, and I would be unaugmented again. My biological body has manifold advantages over any exoskeleton that will be developed in the immediate future -- it runs on biomass, it's self-repairing, it has a highly redundant structure, it can grow, it's closely connected to my brain via nerves, etc. Even the best exoskeletons will only be used for specialized purposes until we develop molecular nanotechnology.
Molecular nanotechnology is really necessary to get anywhere with augmentation. Otherwise, forget it. Surgery is a hassle. No one will ever get FDA approval to rip off a dude's arm and replace it with a cyborg arm, even if the cyborg arm is "better". (The first few million prototypes definitely won't be.) Transhumanists have to understand the potential of molecular nanotechnology and how far superior it is to anything we are developing now, or they just get confused about future possibilities.
Many transhumanist ideas, including Ray Kurzweil's books, are developed in the context of MNT becoming available in the 2020s. Without MNT or AGI, the future looks much more mundane for the next couple decades. The real excitement for augmentation may be with brain-computer interfaces like the kind that Ed Boyden of MIT is developing, but even Mandayam Srinivasan's (MIT Media Lab) talk on brain-computer interfaces didn't impress Hank because "the robots got to do all the cool stuff". Hank, those robots are going to be developed into our literal appendages. Don't you see how this is part of the process? Robotics must be improved apart from humans before it gets miniaturized, powerful, and sophisticated enough to be worth ripping our skin open, throwing out what evolution gave us, and putting in the new components. If you're in such a hurry, you can always pay an underground surgeon in the Philippines to slice you open and put in whatever the state of the art is today, but I doubt you would enjoy the results.
The unfortunate fact is that Nature is unforgiving. If you're older than 50 or 60, you should sign up for cryonics immediately, and not count on living forever due to advances in biotechnology. About halfway through life is where disorders and diseases start killing us more often than accidents. Some of these are difficult to avoid, and just happen, even if we do everything right. If you do everything right with food and exercise but don't sign up for cryonics, you are signing your own death warrant. What about improving cryonics? What about the Brain Preservation Prize? Cryonics is the catch-all plan. Nothing else is certain enough -- even cryonics is uncertain because you might die in circumstances where the transport and stabilization folks can't get to you soon enough, or because a future grid-down scenario interrupts the flow of liquid nitrogen and you thaw out. When I talk to older transhumanists that are into cryonics, I see people who are psychologically calmer than those who endlessly obsess over their food, questionable supplements, and other minutiae that will mean jack squat if they get into a simple car accident. Why not pump some iron so that your next fall down the stairs isn't a fatal affair? Why are there so many older transhumanists who are chubby, or who have a frame so frail it looks like a stiff breeze could take them out?
In his review, Hank wrote:
At lunch, I chomped on a turkey sandwich donated by Boudin and engaged a Florida hacker in a flesh-based vs. artificial organ argument. "I don't want a pig heart that will die like a pig," I whined. "I want a synthetic heart that lasts forever; they're arriving in only five years." He demurred, pulling his beard. We talked about rock-climbing next. Wouldn't it be great to have ultra-powerful fingers?" I proposed. "I'd scamper up Half Dome like a spider!" He retorted, "it's also enjoyable to simply see what we can accomplish within our own limitations." Luddite, I thought. Can't we have fun?
Both of them are right. Hank is silly for calling someone who wants to accomplish what they can within their own limitations a Luddite. Does he expect everything to be handed to him on a silver platter? Transhumanism is not a bowl of free candy. It's an extension of the age-old desire to improve ourselves, which requires work, sweat, inconvenience, getting out of our comfort zone, and other non-nerdy activities that some transhumanist braniacs shy away from.
All or Nothing
One more point. To get the kind of cybernetic upgrades that Hank and I both want would require replacing the entire musculoskeletal system, or even the entire body minus the brain. I credit this insight to Greg Fish, who regularly brings it up. In a recent blog post, he wrote:
Likewise, it’s fun to dream about being a superhuman cyborg, but actually giving up a limb and coping with the consequences is completely different. There would be no way to reattach legs and arms, and once the surgery begins, there’s no going back. Personally, I wouldn’t want to fix what’s not broken. Now, if at some point in my old age bits and pieces start falling into disrepair and the proper technology had a good, long, successful run at limb and organ replacements, I might just go for it. But until then, I’d like to stick with what biology gave me. And I suspect that so would many others…
This is damn right. I suspect that with molecular nanotechnology and extensive research and development, you could eventually build a robotic arm so awesome and superior that I'd be willing to saw off my original arm for it, but remember this is sawing off your arm we're talking about here. Sawing off your own arm is not something you do lightly, unless you're trying to commit suicide in a way that is totally brutal and metal.
The immediate future of human enhancement is in biology and the better use of external augmentations. People are too socially timid to even take advantage of external augmentations available today that improve our survival prospects by a significant margin. For instance, wearing a helmet while driving. Over a million people per year die in car accidents, and fifty million are injured, but most people treat driving as if it were completely safe. Forget cyborg arms, how about a transparent helmet that that is so inconspicuous that people can wear it confidently while driving without worrying about being laughed at by strangers?
When I get my internal upgrades, which probably won't be until a hard takeoff Singularity anyway because humans are too stupid to make good ones before then, I'm going to get it all done at once. Remember how Hank was talking about super-strong fingers? Well, if your fingers were ultra-strong and you were scampering up Half Dome like spider man, your fingers would fall off, because the muscles and tendons just below the fingers wouldn't be able to take the stress. You plummet off Half Dome and your body sits at the bottom as a rotting carcass. The only way to really upgrade the body is to upgrade the whole thing at the same time. Everything in the body is designed with the assumption that everything else is the the way it's always been.
I know everyone wants to fly, and to fly right, your body has to be durable. Durable as in the entire thing should be made of fullerenes. Anything less is pointless. Fullerene heart, fullerene skull, fullerene matrix throughout the brain cushioning it from g forces, fullerene muscles, etc. Fullerenes are the only class of materials really durable enough to have fun with, and anything less is just a prototype waiting to get trashed. Even a full fullerene chassis would be dependent on external bits (micro-UAVs) to really function at its full potential, so you're dependent on external robotics anyway. If I could choose between a highly "advanced" by pre-Singularity, pre-MNT standards cyborg body, and a simple flexible exoskeleton plus a bit cloud for support, I'd choose the latter.