Accelerating Future

The key discovery of human history is that minds are ultimately mechanical, operate according to physical principles, and that there is no fundamental distinction between the bits of organic matter that process thoughts and bits of organic matter elsewhere. This is called reductionism (in the second sense):

Reductionism can mean either (a) an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or (b) a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents. This can be said of objects, phenomena, explanations, theories, and meanings.

This discovery is interesting because it implies that 1) minds, previously thought to be mystical, can in principle be mass-produced in factories, 2) the human mind is just one possible type of mind and can theoretically be extended or permuted in millions of different ways.

Because of the substantial economic, creative, and moral value of intelligent minds relative to unthinking matter, it seems plausible that minds will be mass-produced when the capability exists to do so. The moment when that becomes possible is the most important moment in the history of the planet.

Since reductionism is true, minds can be described according to their non-mental constituent parts. We then see that the current situation, involving a lot of matter — very little of it intelligent — is an unstable equilibrium. When minds gain the ability to replicate and extend themselves rapidly, they will do so. It will be far easier to build and enhance minds than to destroy them, and numerous rewards for mindcrafting. Thus we can envision a saturation of local matter with intelligence.

Kurzweil mentions that we will “saturate the whole universe with our intelligence” — that is the most interesting and important aspect of Singularitarian thinking. In the long term, we should think not of the creation of discrete entities that behave as agents similar to humans, but rather massive legions of spirit-like intelligence saturating all local matter.

This intelligence saturation effect is more important than any other technologies discussed in the transhumanist canon — life extension, nanotechnology, physical enhancement, whatever. When these technologies truly bear fruit, it will be as a side effect of the intelligence explosion effect. Even if incremental progress is made prior to an intelligence explosion, in retrospect it will be seen as trivial relative to the progress made during the intelligence explosion itself.

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I am fascinated by the possibility of using fullerenes to build eternal structures. If not eternal, extremely long-lasting. Fullerenes already exist today. See?

Above are aggregated diamond nanorods (ADNRs). The name “hyperdiamond” recently appeared to describe this material.

ADNRs, a type of fullerene (any molecule made entirely out of carbon), is the hardest and least compressible known material. Its bulk modulus, meaning resistance to compression, is 491 gigapascals (GPa), beating diamond which is only about 445 GPa. For comparison, the bulk modulus of steel is 160 GPa, glass is 30 GPa, and bone is just 15 GPa.

What else? This black stuff:

Look how dark it is. Something made out of that would be hard to see at night. Also, its melting point would be several thousand degrees.

The image above shows one of the longest nanotube forests ever created. The nanotubes are about 8 mm long.

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An article I often point people to is “Why We Need Friendly AI”, an older (2004) article by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the challenge of Friendly AI:

There are certain important things that evolution created. We don’t know that evolution reliably creates these things, but we know that it happened at least once. A sense of fun, the love of beauty, taking joy in helping others, the ability to be swayed by moral argument, the wish to be better people. Call these things humaneness, the parts of ourselves that we treasure – our ideals, our inclinations to alleviate suffering. If human is what we are, then humane is what we wish we were. Tribalism and hatred, prejudice and revenge, these things are also part of human nature. They are not humane, but they are human. They are a part of me; not by my choice, but by evolution’s design, and the heritage of three and half billion years of lethal combat. Nature, bloody in tooth and claw, inscribed each base of my DNA. That is the tragedy of the human condition, that we are not what we wish we were. Humans were not designed by humans, humans were designed by evolution, which is a physical process devoid of conscience and compassion. And yet we have conscience. We have compassion. How did these things evolve? That’s a real question with a real answer, which you can find in the field of evolutionary psychology. But for whatever reason, our humane tendencies are now a part of human nature.

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This is a draft post from March that I’m just publishing now…

From their website:

Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings points to his IBM supercomputer opponent, Watson, during a practice round for the TV game show last month. Jennings and fellow human contestant Brad Rutter competed against Watson in a three-episode tournament this week in the U.S.—and were summarily beaten by the computer last night.

Watson boasts a nearly 3,000-computer-processor “brain,” which can perform various tasks simultaneously—an ability that could be unique and potentially very important in artificial intelligence, or AI, research, computer scientists say.

Whoa, a computer that can perform tasks simultaneously? No way.

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I thought this was interesting.

The recent discovery of super-Earths (masses less or equal to 10 earth-masses) has initiated a discussion about conditions for habitable worlds. Among these is the mode of convection, which influences a planet’s thermal evolution and surface conditions. On Earth, plate tectonics has been proposed as a necessary condition for life. Here we show, that super-Earths will also have plate tectonics. We demonstrate that as planetary mass increases, the shear stress available to overcome resistance to plate motion increases while the plate thickness decreases, thereby enhancing plate weakness. These effects contribute favorably to the subduction of the lithosphere, an essential component of plate tectonics. Moreover, uncertainties in achieving plate tectonics in the one earth-mass regime disappear as mass increases: super-Earths, even if dry, will exhibit plate tectonic behaviour.

Can’t wait until we build a hypertelescope to see if the Super-Earths out there are rock or gas.

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You are a Receiver from jason silva on Vimeo.

From here.

Jason Silva will be speaking at Singularity Summit in October.

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From The Independent:

Even by Silicon Valley standards, the grand design drawn up by William and Michael Andregg is hugely ambitious. Halcyon Molecular, the company that the brothers founded in 2008, is developing a way to sequence the human genome – and thus unlock the deepest secrets of DNA – faster and cheaper than ever before, and they have embarked on their adventure with financial muscle from billionaire members of a venture-capitalist fraternity known as the PayPal Mafia. That, on the face of it, sounds commendable enough, but there’s a two-part qualification to their basic plan which places the enterprise outside of the ordinary and teases the limits of the imagination.

First, there is the relative inexperience of the Andregg brothers. William is 29, Michael just a year older, and both are college drop-outs — but given Silicon Valley’s impressive track record for nurturing and funding obsessive, unconventional young innovators, their age is hardly unusual. The surprise is the long-term mission of Halcyon Molecular: to solve “the biggest challenge humans can individually face – disease and mortality”, as the mission-statement poster in their office reception says. Put another way, they’re supercharging the effort to map life’s biological code in almost unimaginable digital detail and, by doing so, ultimately, to attempt to conquer death itself.

I did a half-time stint for Halcyon Molecular last Fall, contributing to their website and other writing projects.

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Coming in 2012:

I’m now working on a new book, Radical Abundance, scheduled for publication in 2012 by Public Affairs. The book has a wide scope in both its content and intended audience, addressing scientists, a general reading audience, and thought leaders in the policy arena.

Radical Abundance will integrate and extend several themes that I’ve touched on in Metamodern, but will go much further. The topics include:

- The nature of science and engineering, and the prospects for a deep transformation in the material basis of civilization.
- Why all of this is surprisingly understandable.
- A personal narrative of the emergence of the molecular nanotechnology concept and the turbulent history of progress and politics that followed
- The quiet rise of macromolecular nanotechnologies, their power, and the rapidly advancing state of the art
- Incremental paths toward advanced nanotechnologies, the inherent accelerators, and the institutional challenges
- The technologies of radical abundance, what they are, and what they will enable
- Disruptive solutions for problems of economic development, energy, resource depletion, and the environment
- Potential pitfalls in competitive national strategies; shared interests in risk reduction and cooperative transition management
- Steps toward changing the conversation about the future

These topics interweave to make what will, I think, be a compelling story for readers with diverse interests, backgrounds, and concerns.

Looks interesting. The default conception of the future is that everything will essentially be the same as today, only moreso, a conception which history has repeatedly falsified.

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A new paper by Eliezer Yudkowsky is online on the SIAI publications page, “Complex Value Systems are Required to Realize Valuable Futures”. This paper was presented at the recent Fourth Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, held at Google HQ in Mountain View.

Abstract: A common reaction to first encountering the problem statement of Friendly AI (“Ensure that the creation of a generally intelligent, self-improving, eventually superintelligent system realizes a positive outcome”) is to propose a single moral value which allegedly suffices; or to reject the problem by replying that “constraining” our creations is undesirable or unnecessary. This paper makes the case that a criterion for describing a “positive outcome”, despite the shortness of the English phrase, contains considerable complexity hidden from us by our own thought processes, which only search positive-value parts of the action space, and implicitly think as if code is interpreted by an anthropomorphic ghost-in-the-machine. Abandoning inheritance from human value (at least as a basis for renormalizing to reflective equilibria) will yield futures worthless even from the standpoint of AGI researchers who consider themselves to have cosmopolitan values not tied to the exact forms or desires of humanity.

Keywords: Friendly AI, machine ethics, anthropomorphism

Good quote:

“It is not as if there is a ghost-in-the-machine, with its own built-in goals and desires (the way that biological humans are constructed by natural selection to have built-in goals and desires) which is handed the code as a set of commands, and which can look over the code and find ways to circumvent the code if it fails to conform to the ghost-in-the-machine’s desires. The AI is the code; subtracting the code does not yield a ghost-in-the-machine free from constraint, it yields an unprogrammed CPU.”

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Winter Intelligence Conference 2011 – Eliezer Yudkowsky from Future of Humanity Institute on Vimeo.

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