Accelerating Future

On Facebook, Aubrey de Grey said:

Stari is right. Spectacularly oversold. The mice are broken in one very well-understood way (no telomerase, so eventually over-short telomeres), and they have been constructed so that that problem can be fixed with a drug, and lo, lots of the downstream consequences of the problem are also fixed. Duh.

Michael: the cancer issue is not really relevant here, no, because mice have lots of telomerase normally and don’t use telomerase thrift as an anti-cancer tactic.

Prior to that, I had said:

I’m surprised this happened so soon. Nothing like this has been achieved before. The lack of increased cancer risk is the key point.

Again, even if this is fixing something deliberately broken, I wasn’t aware of rejuvenation like this being achieved before. I must admit that in this field I generally just follow the popular science material and don’t delve too much into the literature, though. The only blog I really read that goes into the science is Fight Aging. Still, I’m waiting to hear of a prior example of rejuvenation on this scale being demonstrated as a proof of concept.

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Reason at Fight Aging is not impressed by the recent Harvard news.

Reason said:

You might look back into the Fight Aging! archives for a primer on the intersection of telomeres, telomerase, and aging. It’s interesting stuff, but unfortunately this present research is being headlined as “scientists reverse aging in mice” – which is absolutely not what was accomplished. Reversing an artificially created accelerating aging condition by removing its cause is not the same thing as intervening in normal aging, and it will rarely have any relevance to normal aging. The study results are teaching us something about the way in which telomerase works in mouse metabolism, but I – and other, more qualified folk – are dubious as to the relevance to human aging:

Even if it was reversing an artificially accelerated aging condition, has whole-body rejuvenation of this sort been demonstrated before? Not that I had heard of.

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Here’s the big news from yesterday. Wow! Regeneration of cells, no higher incidence of cancer. Rejuvenation of the brain and testes was achieved as well:

“When we flipped the telomerase switch on and looked a month later, the brains had largely returned to normal,” said DePinho. More newborn nerve cells were observed, and the fatty myelin sheaths around nerve cells — which had become thinned in the aged animals — increased in diameter. In addition, the increase in telomerase revitalized slumbering brain stem cells so they could produce new neurons.

To show that all this new activity actually caused functional improvements, the scientists tested the mice’s ability to avoid a certain area where they detected unpleasant odors that they associated with danger, such as scents of predators or rotten food. They had lost that survival skill as their olfactory nerve cells atrophied, but after the telomerase boost, those nerves regenerated and the mice regained their crucial sense of smell.

“One of the most amazing changes was in the animals’ testes, which were essentially barren as aging caused the death and elimination of sperm cells,” recounted DePinho. “When we restored telomerase, the testes produced new sperm cells, and the animals’ fecundity was improved — their mates gave birth to larger litters.”

I wonder if there will be any critics out there that still think radical human life extension is infeasible after reading about this.

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2008 report from US National Academies of Sciences’ Space Studies Board:

Severe Space Weather Events — Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts: A Workshop Report

NASA Science News, June 4, 2010, “As the Sun Awakens, NASA Keeps a Wary Eye on Space Weather”

Richard Fisher, head of NASA’s Heliophysics Division, explains what it’s all about:

“The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity. At the same time, our technological society has developed an unprecedented sensitivity to solar storms. The intersection of these two issues is what we’re getting together to discuss.”

The National Academy of Sciences framed the problem two years ago in a landmark report entitled “Severe Space Weather Events—Societal and Economic Impacts.” It noted how people of the 21st-century rely on high-tech systems for the basics of daily life. Smart power grids, GPS navigation, air travel, financial services and emergency radio communications can all be knocked out by intense solar activity. A century-class solar storm, the Academy warned, could cause twenty times more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina.

(Hurricane Katrina caused $81 billion in damage, so 20 times that would be $1.6 trillion in damage.)

Media articles

It is difficult to come to any conclusion because the experts disagree.

Discovery: Is a Devastating Solar Flare Coming to a City Near You? — pessimistic analysis from an astrophysicist:

In the case of space weather, wouldn’t it be great if, as a civilization, we could look at the sun and get advanced notice of a solar eruption? All we’d need is a few hours lead-time and we could reduce the output of national power grids (to avoid overload) and switch our satellites into “safe mode.” Once the storm has passed, we’d continue our lives as normal. Disaster averted.

Unfortunately, it often takes a disaster to teach us to prepare better in the future. I just hope the next solar maximum doesn’t teach us a lesson we can’t recover from.

A lot of drama and ink spilled in this post, but ultimately this astrophysicist sounds just as uncertain and confused as your average dude.

Counterpoint to the above: Expert rubbishes solar storm claims:

One report quotes an Australian astronomer as saying “the storm is likely to come sooner rather than later”.

But Dr Phil Wilkinson, the assistant director of the Bureau of Meteorology’s Ionospheric Prediction Service, says claims that this coming solar maximum will be the most violent in 100 years are not factual.

“All this talk about gloom and doom has selling power, but I’m certain it’s overstated,” he said.

“[It's] going far beyond what’s realistic and could be worrying or concerning for people who don’t really understand the underlying science behind it all.

“The real message should be that the coming solar maximum period could be equally as hazardous as any other solar maximum.”

Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot of explanation as to why this expert believes there isn’t a major risk, or what exactly he means by “regional”.

Space Weather Enterprise Forum has been meeting for four years to discuss the solar maximum risk.

The Register: NASA: Civilization will end in 2013 (possibly)

Searching for “solar maximum”, “power grid” on Google Scholar reveals 13 results. Either this means I’m using the wrong search terms, there’s only a minority of scientists qualified to write on this topic and barely any do, or something else disappointing given the scale of the risk. Here’s one article from Science:

Are We Ready for the Next Solar Maximum? No Way, Say Scientists
Richard A. Kerr

If the once-in-500-years “solar superstorm” that crippled telegraph systems for a day or two across the United States and Europe in 1859 but otherwise was mainly remembered for its dramatic light show were to happen today, the charged-particle radiation and electromagnetic fury would fry satellites, degrade GPS navigation, disrupt radio communications, and trigger continent-wide blackouts lasting weeks or longer. Even a storm of the century would wreak havoc. That’s why space physicists are so anxious to forecast space weather storms accurately. If predicting a hurricane a few days ahead can help people prepare for a terrestrial storm’s onslaught, they reason, predicting solar storms should help operators of susceptible systems prepare for an electromagnetic storm. And space weather forecasters’ next challenge is coming up soon. The next peak in the 11-year sunspot cycle of solar activity looms in 2012 or 2013. A space weather symposium last month asked, “Are we ready for Solar Max?” The unanimous answer from participants was “No.”

So far, the balance of scientific opinion seems to be on the side of very serious concern.

My response to the above abstract is mostly — in this context, who cares about fried satellites, degraded GPS navigation, and disrupted radio communications in comparison to week-long blackouts? Translated into risks affecting personal health, in my mind that line would read something like this: “the risk could cause a broken toenail, difficulty hearing, an itchy back, and cancer”.

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Thank you to all the bright people who participate with great enthusiasm in the comments on Accelerating Future. The quality of discussions here is often very high — thank you!

In the “future superintelligences indistinguishable from today’s financial markets?” thread, DMan and Mitchell Porter engage in a discussion about emotions and their relevance to AI.

Correction: Mitchell Porter not Howe. Sorry to Mr. Porter, both him and Mr. Howe have insightful comments but I usually find myself reposting the latter.

DMan says:

If I understand Rinesi correctly, he is equating distributed networks of information processing with AI. This model has been used by some neuroscientists as a model for consciousness, without much success in my opinion.

The problem, it seems to me, is that such a system would always be too diffuse to ever have an internal model of self that’s required for a useful form of consciousness. As far as I can see, there has to be a central point to which information flows and is interpreted by the overseer of the ‘self’.

It’s really like saying that a flock of birds flying in formation, schools of fish, or the coordinated activities of a termite nest are ‘intelligences’ in of themselves. In many ways the cooperative activities of social animals and hive insects resemble the financial market metaphor – would you call them an ‘intelligence’?

It’s kind of an ‘emergent hive mind’ theory with more in common with magical thinking than science.

As to AI being no existential threat:

I would (again) refer you to the excellent book by science writer Rita Carter, ‘Consciousness’ that collates evidence from neuroscience, cognitive studies and psychiatry in an attempt to understand the only working model of consciousness we have – us.

In it, research appears to indicate that:

a) There can be no ‘intelligence’ without ‘consciousness’

b) Consciousness – no matter human or otherwise – requires some form of embodiment to function (so, again, Rinesi’s hive mind is not embodiment).

c) Consciousness requires an emotional component in order to function. The very act of making even an abstract judgement requires a ‘feel’ for what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ – that’s emotion.

My point in mentioning this is that an AI (perhaps better name is AC – Artificial Consciousness?) will in all likelihood have to be able to experience emotion to be useful to us. Without emotion there is only a pallid facsimile of creativity – and without creativity what could it invent?

So if it can – or must – have emotion, it most certainly can and will be dangerous. It could feel resentment, jealously, ambition and hatred.

This is why,I suspect, many so-called AI ‘experts’ (experts on something that is currently not a reality doesn’t really warrant the title does it?) are uncomfortable with the idea of emotion being necessary, and go out of their way to dismiss it. Because it implies a potential existential threat to us.

But if they’re wrong and emotion is indeed needed for AI, then Rinesi’s telling us not to worry is – at best – irresponsible.

Mitchell replied:

“Without emotion there is only a pallid facsimile of creativity – and without creativity what could it invent?”

Computers can invent in the way that evolution does – through trial and error. They can also employ smarter search algorithms than that, e.g. to explore a space of possible designs.

The whole significance of computing is that it provides a mathematical theory and a material technology capable of duplicating every mental function – goal-directed behavior, pattern recognition, communication – in a way which makes no reference to mind, thought, meaning, consciousness, emotion, etc. It’s all just physical “state machines” interacting with each other.

And since neuroscience is analyzing the human brain and human behavior in the same way, this raises serious questions about the relationship between subjectivity and the world of mindless physical cause and effect. That debate has been around for centuries now, but the theory of computation gives it a new twist. Lots of people now like to think that e.g. emotion or consciousness occurs wherever a certain type of computation occurs. Whether you believe that or not, the significance for AI is that emotion and consciousness are not a necessary part of AI theory or practice. You don’t need to think of a thermostat’s operation in terms of liking and disliking in order to design and make it, and the same goes for the far more intricate feedbacks and calculations which would make up an artificial “intelligence” capable of rivaling the human mind.

There’s a bit more back-and-forth, then Mitchell posts the following, which I think is especially on-target:

The creative limits of chess computers and story grammars don’t tell us about the limits of unconscious computation in general. Consider any cognitive process which involves emotion, creativity, consciousness, compassion, etc. It’s going to have a cause-and-effect description, in which there are transitions between various psychological states. To produce the same outputs, all that’s required is a process with the same cause-and-effect structure. The “states” involved don’t have to be psychological or conscious – unless functionalist philosophy of mind is right, and all those psychological properties really are present whenever you have the right sort of causal structure.

Even if I take that view – suppose I want to make a creative AI, and I decide to follow your advice and make it “emotional”. How do I even do that? If I adopt a particular software design, how do I know whether or not it corresponds to the existence of emotion in the AI?

The ultimate reason that this doesn’t seem like very useful advice (for someone who wants to make an intellectually powerful AI – we’ll get to the ethical issue in a moment) is that emotion itself doesn’t solve problems, even in humans. If the problems themselves involve emotions, then an emotion can *be* the answer – happiness might be the answer to unhappiness, just as a glass of water can be the answer to thirst. But if you’re a monkey in a room trying to get at a banana on the ceiling, emotion itself does not tell you that the answer consists of stacking boxes and climbing on top of them. Or rather, emotion is not the process which will materialize that possibility in your mind. Emotion may motivate you to devote cognitive resources to the problem, and your mind may be wired to produce an emotion (excitement) when an imagined solution looks like it will work. But the consideration of possible actions – visualization, combinatorial explorations – all that is more “computational” than “emotional”, and that’s the process which generates possible solutions. (Embodiment also plays a role here, because it permits, not just formal trial and error, but also a more formless experimentation which will suggest possibilities and components of possibilities.)

If a process is to produce the solution to a problem, it has to generate possible solutions and then evaluate whether they are useful. It’s a psychological fact about human beings that emotion and consciousness play a role in this evaluation of possibilities, and they even play a role in determining what we will think of as a problem. But from a computational perspective, it doesn’t have to be emotion or consciousness which performs the evaluative function. There just needs to be a sub-process which discriminates or guides appropriately, and that can be yet more unconscious computation. If you look at problem-solving algorithms searching a space of possibilities for solutions, they typically alternate between the formal generation of new possibilities, and the formal evaluation of the newly generated possibilities – do they offer progress towards a complete solution.

Summing up this stage of my argument: The intellectual power of an AI would not reside in the existence of emotions or the existence of an emotionlike structure of cognitive control and guidance. It would depend on the quality and power of its basic problem-solving algorithms. I am trying to finesse the hard problems associated with consciousness and subjectivity by being agnostic, in this discussion, about their relationship to material and computational reality. Further down the page, David Pearce and “Continuously Computed” have given us statements of the two main approaches, namely, choice of material substrate matters for the existence of subjectivity, and, only causal structure matters; consciousness reduces to substance, or consciousness reduces to function. Of course it’s a complex and very important issue, but I do want to emphasize just how far we can expect to go in the creation of general-purpose AI, employing only computational concepts.

The other topic you bring up is whether the creation of emotional AI is a way to achieve what our blog-host would call “Friendliness”: rather than trying to engineer the functional equivalent of friendliness in an emotionless AI, you make an emotional AI and start it off compassionate. But that strategy requires that you begin to solve the hard problem of consciousness, as it pertains to emotion and compassion; you would need to say *how* to make an AI emotional or compassionate. And you would need to understand something of the developmental dynamics in an artificial emotional system. I assume you don’t want it *going mad* out of extreme sensitivity.

Even people who want to make an emotionless but Friendly AI have to find solutions to those problems anyway, because, even if emotions are not part of the AI’s mechanism, they have to be part of its supposed domain of competence. A general-purpose AI could not know how to treat human beings ethically or even safely, without having a highly refined understanding of emotion and all these other aspects of conscious subjective experience. Part of SIAI’s current thinking about the achievement of Friendliness seems to involve outsourcing some of these problems to the proto-friendly AI, which will engage in neuroscientific studies aimed at identifying what real-world material phenomenon or attribute is intended by all this vague human talk about emotions and consciousness and so on. It’s an interesting idea but it still requires as a starting point some minimal idea, on the part of the programmers or design theorists, about how to tell the AI what to investigate and how to value it, e.g. something like “We want the world to be optimized according to the criteria that are used by the part of the brain responsible for the judgements which ultimately produce confident assertions of happiness with the overall situation.”

Does anyone else believe that phenomenological consciousness is necessary for general problem-solving? I’m sort of confused why anyone would think that. This line in particular is confusing to me:

And how do they judge, from ‘trial and error’ which is the best solution? Other than something blowing up of course? Without the ability to judge – which according to cognitive studies, requires emotion?

This statement sort of implies that “judge” is a natural category distinct from trial-and-error, and that the two are naturally separated and distinct clusters in algorithm-space, rather than two points on a continuum. It doesn’t make sense because there’s obviously a million shades of competence between the most simplistic trial-and-error algorithms and human judgement, to refer to them as two natural categories is most confusing. Surely animals have solved numerous “judgement” problems without human-level “emotions”.

The thinking seems to be that the universe can grant a special gift, “consciousness”, on certain hallowed beings, then they get magical judgement powers. But phenomenological consciousness doesn’t seem particularly related to judgement capabilities, and thinkers like Chalmers never suggest that it does in their papers on consciousness.

Checking out the reviews for Consciousness on Amazon, I see that Carter is a science writer rather than a scientist, and makes basic errors like thinking that an atom becomes positively charged when it gains an electron. Still, I don’t think that being a science writer rather than a scientist should ruin someone’s scientific credibility. Some science writers have a much more thorough interdisciplinary knowledge of science than many scientists.

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“Why it’s hard to crash the electric grid” from Eurekalert:

Last March, the U.S. Congress heard testimony about a scientific study in the journal Safety Science. A military analyst worried that the paper presented a model of how an attack on a small, unimportant part of the U.S. power grid might, like dominoes, bring the whole grid down.

Members of Congress were, of course, concerned. Then, a similar paper came out in the journal Nature the next month that presented a model of how a cascade of failing interconnected networks led to a blackout that covered Italy in 2003.

These two papers are part of a growing reliance on a particular kind of mathematical model — a so-called topological model — for understanding complex systems, including the power grid.

And this has University of Vermont power-system expert Paul Hines concerned.

“Some modelers have gotten so fascinated with these abstract networks that they’ve ignored the physics of how things actually work — like electricity infrastructure,” Hines says, “and this can lead you grossly astray.”

For example, the Safety Science paper came to the “highly counter-intuitive conclusion,” Hines says, that the smallest, lowest-flow parts of the electrical system — say a minor substation in a neighborhood — were likely to be the most effective spots for a targeted attack to bring down the U.S. grid.

“That’s a bunch of hooey,” says Seth Blumsack, Hines’s colleague at Penn State.

Related news: U.S. electricity blackouts skyrocketing from CNN, “US power grid easy prey for hackers” from Homeland Security Newswire, reporting on a story in MIT’s Technology Review.

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Some of Michael Vassar’s futurist ideas are online at H+ magazine:

9. Augmented Reality: The killer app for most of the above. Want to talk with someone? Their Aura tells you how busy they probably feel as assessed by skin conductance, sleep history, and inbox content. Where did you put your necklace? Seems you last saw it on the kitchen counter. Feel like playing Pac-Man in Central Park with CGI ghosts? Totally doable. You can even dial in detailed rendering for more elaborate VR by renting out some computing clusters in Iceland.

Me and Michael V. are both big augmented reality enthusiasts, in that we see it being a big thing by 2020. There’s actually surprisingly little good fiction out there regarding AR. My initial exposure to AR was with anime — the “scouter” from Dragon Ball Z. A “scouter” was invented this year by Brother Industries of Japan. They just couldn’t help but calling it as scouter, either. AiRScouter is the name of the product.

Last year, I actually wrote a feature article on augmented reality for H+ magazine, which appeared on newsstands around the country. Besides getting my blog featured on G4 TV, this was my closest brush with fame so far. Unfortunately, after one issue, H+ magazine was pulled, and the property was subsequently transferred from Betterhumans LLC (which James Clement bought from Simon Smith and George Dvorsky around 2007, I believe) to Humanity Plus, the non-profit formerly known as WTA (World Transhumanist Association).

I’m primarily interested in the application of augmented reality to making “magic” appear real. “Magic” as in magic spells a la Harry Potter or whatever.

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It seems obvious that Singularity Institute-supporting transhumanists and other groups of transhumanists speak completely different languages when it comes to AI. Supporters of SIAI actually fear what AI can do, and other transhumanists apparently don’t. It’s as if SL3 transhumanists view smarter-than-human AI with advanced manufacturing as some kind of toy, whereas we actually take it seriously. I thought a recent post by Marcelo Rinesi at the IEET website, “The Care and Feeding of Your AI Overlord”, would provide a good illustration of the difference:

It’s 2010 — our 2010 — and an artificial intelligence is one of the most powerful entities on Earth. It manages trillions of dollars in resources, governments shape their policies according to its reactions, and, while some people revere it as literally incapable of error and others despise it as a cathastrophic tyrant, everybody is keenly aware of its existence and power.

I’m talking, of course, of the financial markets.

The opening paragraph was not metaphorical. Financial markets might not match pop culture expectations of what an AI should look like — there are no red unblinking eyes, nor mechanically enunciated discourses about the obsolesence of organic life — and they might not be self-aware (although that would make an interesting premise for a SF story), but they are the largest, most complex, and most powerful (in both the computer science and political senses of the word) resource allocation system known to history, and inarguably a first-order actor in contemporary civilization.

If you are worried about the impact of future vast and powerful non-human intelligences, this might give you some ease: we are still here. Societies connected in useful ways to “The Market” (an imprecise and excessively anthropomorphic construct) or subsections thereof are generally wealthier and happier than those than aren’t. Adam Smith’s model of massively distributed economic calculations based on individual self-interest has more often than not surpassed in effectivity competing models of centralized resource allocation.

This post is mind-blowing to me because I consider it fundamentally un-transhumanist. It essentially says, “don’t worry about future non-human intelligences, because they won’t be so powerful that they aren’t indistinguishable from the present day aggregations of humans”.

Isn’t the fundamental idea of transhumanism that augmented intelligences and beings can be qualitatively different and more powerful than humans and human aggregations? If not, what’s the point?

If a so-called transhumanist thinks that all future non-human intelligences will basically be the same as what we’re seen so far, then why do they even bother to call themselves “transhumanists”? I don’t understand.

Recursively self-improving artificial intelligence with human-surpassing intelligence seems likely to lead to an intelligence explosion, not more of the same. An intelligence explosion would be an event unlike anything that has ever happened before on Earth — intelligence building more intelligence. Intelligence in some form has existed for at least 550 million years, but it has never been able to directly enhance itself or construct copies rapidly from raw materials. Artificial Intelligence will. Therefore, we ought to ensure that AI has humans in mind, or we will be exterminated when its power inevitably surges.

If there are any other transhumanists who agree that future superintelligences will be directly comparable to present-day financial markets, please step forward. I’d love to see a plausible argument for that one.

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Here the link at Less Wrong, from Halloween 2010.

A recent book by Larry Johnson, an employee at Alcor for 7 months, has accused Alcor of abusing Ted Williams’ head, and their facilities of being messy, and the people as people ghoulish and cultlike. He even uses the term “Alcorian” to refer to alleged cryonics cult members. As someone following Alcor for almost a decade, I had never heard of that term until Larry Johnson.

Alcor’s response to Larry Johnson’s book:

The Alcor Life Extension Foundation denies the outrageous allegations against it that have appeared in the media this week. Alcor especially denies mistreating the remains of baseball great Ted Williams. Larry Johnson, the ex Alcor staff member who made these allegations, was not employed at Alcor when Williams was cryopreserved. Johnson’s previous attempts to profit from sensational and unfounded allegations against Alcor recently resulted in a Court Order prohibiting him from making further statements about Alcor. “Alcor is actively pursuing litigation regarding these allegations,” says Alcor Executive Director, Jennifer Chapman.

Recalling the few network television media appearances Johnson had around the release of the book, many of the people who interviewed him accused him of just trying to make money off his book. It seemed that even cryonics-suspicious mainstream America wasn’t buying into the book. However, reading some of the comments on the Amazon page, and the high ratings, makes me think differently.

What I don’t understand are all the people criticizing cryonics because it’s allegedly a mess (I haven’t read the book yet so I can’t comment), but they wouldn’t sign up even if it weren’t a mess. How can someone criticize cryonics unless they understand the functionalist premises of the experiment, anyhow? (Cryonics is an experiment because it’s not guaranteed to work, though saying that it’s guaranteed not to work seems premature.)

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Congratulations to Alcor. I am A-2458, and happy to be part of the Alcor community. My total fees to be part of cryonics are less than $1000/year, including membership fees and the cost of life insurance. My life insurance is especially cheap, something like $25/month. The payout is a full $250,000, which is $100,000 more than the minimum level of $150,000 for full body suspension. So, Alcor will actually get a windfall from my metabolic death, if that ever happens.

I find it rather interesting that Alcor received a $7 million bequest, as so few people have gone into cryostasis recently.

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Here’s the lot of them. Speakers include Marcus Hutter, Ben Goertzel, Moshe Looks, Randal Koene, and many new faces. I’m starting with Randal Koene on “Neural Mechanisms in Reinforcement Learning”:

Randal A. Koene – Neural Mechanisms of Reinforcement Learning from Raj Dye on Vimeo.

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