Accelerating Future

Here’s the source.

Basic AI Drives and Catastophic Risks (Carl Shulman, 2010)
Coherent Extrapolated Volition: A Meta-Level Approach to Machine Ethics (Nick Tarleton, 2010)
Economic Implications of Software Minds (S. Kaas, S. Rayhawk, A. Salamon and P. Salamon, 2010)
From mostly harmless to civilization-threatening: pathways to dangerous artificial general intelligences (Kaj Sotala, 2010)
Implications of a software‐limited singularity (Carl Shulman, Anders Sandberg, 2010)
Superintelligence does not imply benevolence (Joshua Fox, Carl Shulman, 2010)
Timeless Decision Theory (Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2010)

The above are papers, below are presentations:

How intelligible is intelligence? (Anna Salamon, Stephen Rayhawk, János Kramár, 2010)
Whole Brain Emulation and the Evolution of Superorganisms (Carl Shulman, 2010)
What can evolution tell us about the feasibility of artificial intelligence? (Carl Shulman, 2010)

If you value this research, donate to the Singularity Institute via Paypal, and your donation will be matched. At Less Wrong, various users are announcing the level of their contributions. The user “Rain”, who donated $2,700, made a comment at the site about why he donates to SIAI.

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Carl Zimmer wrote this: “Can You Live Forever? Maybe Not — But You Can Have Fun Trying“. This is a very positive, yet slightly skeptical look at the Singularity movement. This article is a follow-up to Zimmer’s earlier article in Playboy, which came out this January. This year, there have been articles on the Singularity Summit and Singularity Institute in Playboy, GQ, the UK Independent, and Scientific American. Here’s a funny bit from the current article:

After the meeting I decided to visit to researchers working on the type of technology that people such as Kurzweil consider the steppingstones to the Singularity. Not one of them takes Kurzweil’s own vision of the future seriously. We will not have some sort of cybernetic immortality in the next few decades. The human brain is far too mysterious and computers far too crude for such a union anytime soon, if ever. In fact some scientists regard all this talk of the Singularity as a reckless promise of false hope to the afflicted.

But when I asked these skeptics about the future, even their most conservative visions were unsettling: a future in which people boost their brains with enhancing drugs, for example, or have sophisticated computers implanted in their skulls for life. While we may never be able to upload our minds into a computer, we may still be able to build computers based on the layout of the human brain. I can report I have not drunk the Singularity Kool-Aid, but I have taken a sip.

Taking a sip is a subset of drinking.

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Ramez Naam: The Digital Biome from Singularity Institute on Vimeo.

Abstract:

Exponential technologies offer the promise not only of changing the human condition, but of radically altering the face of the planet on which we dwell. Within the next 20 years we will have sequenced the genome of every known species on the earth and tremendously advanced our understanding of how to utilize those genes and reprogram those organisms to alter the biosphere. Biosphere engineering will play a major role in overcoming current environmental and resource challenges, including finite reserves of fossil fuels and looming changes to the earth’s climate. That is just the beginning. An understanding of the complete biome genome will bring tremendous agility in combating future infectious disease outbreaks, in creating new sensors and manufacturing capabilities, and in revolutionizing food. Biosphere engineering and its underlying technologies will allow us to dramatically raise the population carrying capacity of the planet to tens of billions of individuals at least. With effective technology to sculpt the planetary biome, the limits of the number of humans that can live on the planet, and the quality of life of each, at tremendously higher than they appear to be today. This talk will explore some of the lower bounds of what’s possible with control of the biome.

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I get the feeling that this is what it’d be like if I had a debate with Hugo de Garis.

When people get confused about morality and think in terms of a Great Chain of Being where greater physical/computing power necessarily means better “morality”, they are forced to come to “counterintuitive” (to say the least) conclusions like being in favor of the massacre of all humanity. From de Garis’ Wikipedia page:

It is these two extreme ideologies which de Garis believes may herald a new world war, wherein one group with a ‘grand plan’ (the Cosmists) will be rabidly opposed by another which feels itself to be under deadly threat from that plan (the Terrans). The factions, he predicts, may eventually war to the death because of this, as the Terrans will come to view the Cosmists as “arch-monsters” when they begin seriously discussing acceptable risks, and the probabilities of large percentages of Earth-based life going extinct. In response to this, the Cosmists will come to view the Terrans as being reactionary extremists, and will stop treating them and their ideas seriously, further aggravating the situation, possibly beyond reconciliation.

Throughout his book, de Garis states that he is ambivalent about which viewpoint he ultimately supports, and attempts to make convincing cases for both sides. He elaborates towards the end of the book that the more he thinks about it, the more he feels like a Cosmist, because he feels that despite the horrible possibility that humanity might ultimately be destroyed, perhaps inadvertently or at least indifferently, by the artilects, he cannot ignore the fact that the human species is just another link in the evolutionary chain, and must go extinct in their current form anyway, whereas the artilects could very well be the next link in that chain and therefore would be excellent candidates to carry the torch of science and exploration forward into the rest of the universe.

Because there is no fundamental connection between goals and intelligence unless we make it so, we can actually build AIs that are very powerful but respect us “puny” humans. There’s no fundamental conflict because there is no mystical, spiritual, metaphysical, unscientific force that nudges powerful beings to automatically look down on less powerful beings, in the same way that there’s no mystical force that nudges powerful beings to be especially kind to less powerful beings. The morality of a superintelligence will be a function of its initial conditions. In the highly deterministic environment of a computer chip, a seed AI is free to select only those modifications that it knows won’t topple or ruin its entire goal system.

Thinking in terms of a Great Chain of Being, cosmic inevitability, “developmentally predetermined outcomes”, and the like, which is very much the view presented in The Singularity is Near, makes it seem like we can take our hands off the driving wheel and everything will turn out just fine. It won’t.

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The full version is here and here; only the first part is on YouTube. This is the best introduction to the Singularity Institute for non-English speakers because of the subtitles in many languages.

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Global Village Construction Set in 2 Minutes from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.

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In a recent letter written to John Rennie responding to his recent critique of Ray’s predictions, Kurzweil defended himself and his predictions, and most importantly, linked to this. This huge document is over 150 pages long and packed with cool images and facts.

Kurzweil hits back at Rennie:

While I appreciate some of the things John Rennie has to say, his review of my predictions is filled with inaccuracies, including misquotes of mine, and misunderstandings of the meaning of my words and the reality of today’s technology. For starters, he takes note of my point about selection bias, but his entire article suffers from this bias. While he acknowledges that I wrote over 100 predictions for 2009, in a book I wrote in the late 1990s, he only talks about a handful of them. And he persistently gets these wrong. He writes that I predicted “widespread, foolproof, real-time speech translation.” We do in fact have real-time speech translation in the form of popular phone apps. But who ever said anything about “foolproof?” Rennie just made that up like a lot of the factoids in this article. Not even human translators are foolproof. Apparently that has now been removed from the online version.

It’s true that the only way to really figure anything out is look at each prediction one by one, as Ray has now done. I haven’t read the analysis yet but it looks very impressive. Here’s the punchline on page 5:

As I discuss in detail below, I made 147 predictions for 2009 in ASM, which I wrote in the 1990s. Of these, 115 (78 percent) are entirely correct as of the end of 2009, and another 12 (8 percent) are ―essentially correct (see below) — a total of 127 predictions (86 percent) are correct or essentially correct. Another 17 (12 percent) are partially correct, and 3 (2 percent) are wrong.

Nice detail.

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Why not visit and click the “like” button? You can do the same at the new page we created for the Tallinn-Evans Singularity Holiday Challenge, which I’ve heard contains a good number of available utilons.

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Everything below is cross-posted from the SIAI blog.

Thanks to the generosity of two major donors; Jaan Tallinn, a founder of Skype and Ambient Sound Investments, and Edwin Evans, CEO of the mobile applications startup Quinly, every contribution to the Singularity Institute up until January 20, 2011 will be matched dollar-for-dollar, up to a total of $125,000.

Interested in optimal philanthropy — that is, maximizing the future expected benefit to humanity per charitable dollar spent? The technological creation of greater-than-human intelligence has the potential to unleash an “intelligence explosion” as intelligent systems design still more sophisticated successors. This dynamic could transform our world as greatly as the advent of human intelligence has already transformed the Earth, for better or for worse. Thinking rationally about these prospects and working to encourage a favorable outcome offers an extraordinary chance to make a difference. The Singularity Institute exists to do so through its research, the Singularity Summit, and public education.

We support both direct engagements with the issues as well as the improvements in methodology and rationality needed to make better progress. Through our Visiting Fellows program, researchers from undergrads to Ph.Ds pursue questions on the foundations of Artificial Intelligence and related topics in two-to-three month stints. Our Resident Faculty, up to four researchers from three last year, pursues long-term projects, including AI research, a literature review, and a book on rationality, the first draft of which was just completed. Singularity Institute researchers and representatives gave over a dozen presentations at half a dozen conferences in 2010. Our Singularity Summit conference in San Francisco was a great success, bringing together over 600 attendees and 22 top scientists and other speakers to explore cutting-edge issues in technology and science.

We are pleased to receive donation matching support this year from Edwin Evans of the United States, a long-time Singularity Institute donor, and Jaan Tallinn of Estonia, a more recent donor and supporter. Jaan recently gave a talk on the Singularity and his life at a entrepreneurial group in Finland. Here’s what Jaan has to say about us:

“We became the dominant species on this planet by being the most intelligent species around. This century we are going to cede that crown to machines. After we do that, it will be them steering history rather than us. Since we have only one shot at getting the transition right, the importance of SIAI’s work cannot be overestimated. Not finding any organisation to take up this challenge as seriously as SIAI on my side of the planet, I conclude that it’s worth following them across 10 time zones.”
– Jaan Tallinn, Singularity Institute donor

Make a lasting impact on the long-term future of humanity today — make a donation to the Singularity Institute and help us reach our $125,000 goal. For more detailed information on our projects and work, contact us at institute@singinst.org.

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