Accelerating Future

This image was created by Aaron Saenz of Singularity Hub. Pretty cool!

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Today I posted an article by Paul Hughes that I really like, entitled “Future Shock Levels”.

Categorizing people by their shock level with regard to the future… it’s great!

What is your future shock level? I’d be curious if there are any SL1s that read this blog.

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Called “the first political meeting on immortality in history”, around 100 Russian transhumanists met in the center of Moscow, across the street from the Bolshoy theater, to “support immortality, creating new technologies, regenerative medicine, genomic research and everything related to fighting aging and radical life extension.”

The meeting was organized by Danila Medvedev, Valeria Pride, Mikhail Batin and others from the Russian Transhumanist Movement.

Great job, guys! This is really cool. This is an important and exciting event both for Russian transhumanism and the worldwide transhumanist movement.

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Here is a skeptical view on the Singularity by “fledgling otaku”, from 2008.

The author writes:

I’d like to see someone articulate a case for Singularity that isn’t yet another fancy timeline of assertions about what year we will have reverse engineered the human brain or have VR sex or foglets or whatever.

Good point!

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“I am a 21st century person who was accidentally launched in the 20th. I have a deep nostalgia for the future.”

– FM 2030

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I interviewed Luke Muehlhauser the other day for the SIAI blog.

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“For whosoever hath good inductive biases, to him more evidence shall be given, and he shall have an abundance: but whosoever hath not good inductive biases, from him shall be taken away even what little evidence that he hath.”

– Will Newsome

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To me, transhumanism is a temporary movement — transitional. Its role is to help individuals and society transition to living in a world where some portion of society technologically transforms their minds and bodies on both incremental and fundamental levels. This might range from getting a Google-connected neural implant to uploading one’s consciousness into a virtual world. We transhumanists consider (cautious!) developments along these lines to be a good thing, and feel that the most pressing objections and concerns have been adequately addressed, including:

- What are the reasons to expect all these changes?
- Won’t these developments take thousands or millions of years?
- What if it doesn’t work?
- Won’t it be boring to live forever in a perfect world?
- Will new technologies only benefit the rich and powerful?
- Aren’t these future technologies very risky? Could they even cause our extinction?
- If these technologies are so dangerous, should they be banned?
- Shouldn’t we concentrate on current problems…
- Will extended life worsen overpopulation problems?
- Will posthumans or superintelligent machines pose a threat to humans who aren’t augmented?
- Isn’t this tampering with nature?
- Isn’t death part of the natural order of things?

The key is to see “Transhumanism” as a philosophy being just a temporary crutch, a tool for humanity to safely make the leap to transhumanity. Transhumanism is really only simplified humanism. Eventually, transhumanists hope to see a world where a wide variety of physical and cognitive modifications are available to everyone at reasonable cost, and their use is responsibly regulated, with freedom broadly prevailing over authoritarianism and control. When and if we arrive at that world in one piece, everyone will become de facto transhumanists, just as today, most people are de facto “industrialists” (benefit from and contribute to modern industrial society) and de facto “computerists”.

It is also possible to imagine someone who doesn’t anticipate taking advantage of transhumanist technologies being in favor of “transhumanism” nonetheless. That is, insofar as transhumanists competently and openly discuss the potential upsides and downsides of certain ambitious technological pathways such as extreme life extension and artificial intelligence, and make progress towards beneficial futures. Since widespread cognitive and physical enhancement is something that will soon effect everyone, including the unmodified, everyone has an obvious stake in the trajectory of enhancement technologies even if they do not personally use them.

Transhumanism can also be viewed as a discussion primarily among those who anticipate taking advantage of enhancement technologies before most others. As such, transhumanism forms a beacon that alerts the rest of society to likely changes and informs society about the kind of people who are most interested in human enhancement. Since certain “transhumanist” technologies, particularly intelligence enhancement, may prove to have decisive power over the course of history in the centuries ahead, it is important to examine the groups pursuing it and their motives.

For instance, DARPA is a hotbed of enhancement research. So, the role of the transhumanist is to alert society to that fact, ask them if they care, and if so, what they think about it. Is it a good thing that the development of human enhancement is being spearheaded by the United States military?

A transhumanist elicits opinions and perspectives of human enhancement from a variety of commentators who might not spontaneously offer their opinions otherwise. This includes critics of enhancement such as The New Atlantis, representing the “Judeo-Christian moral tradition”.

Another purpose of the transhumanist is to be a concentrated source of facts and opinions on the concrete details of proposed enhancements, with facts and opinions clearly distinguished from each other. In theory, if the long-term dangers of a particular new technology or enhancement therapy plausibly exceed the benefits, transhumanists are responsible for discouraging the development of those technologies, instead developing alternative technologies that maximize benefits while minimizing risks. It would be easier for transhumanists to divert funding away from dangerous technologies, than, say bio-conservatives, because researchers under the influence of the extended transhumanist memeplex are the ones developing the crucial technologies and bio-conservatives are not.

A transhumanist is not just a blind technological cheerleader, enraptured by the supposed inevitability of a cornucopian future. A transhumanist should acknowledge the hazy and uncertain nature of the future, accepting beliefs only to the degree that the evidence merits, guided not by ideology but by flexible thinking, always welcoming criticism and views contrary to standard orthodoxies.

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I often talk about how building AI could be dangerous. Here I want to talk a little bit about how building AI could be a great thing. Of course I am talking about general AI exceeding human intelligence. I would say, “equal to or exceeding”, but human-equivalence in AI is basically anthropocentrism, akin to thinking that extraterrestrial visitors will have roughly human-equivalent technology rather than blatantly sophisticated technology. If we have general AI at all, we will likely have superintelligent general AI. It is implausible that AIs will stall around the human-equivalent level for long, if at all.

Some reasons that come to mind for building AI are those of scientific or philosophical interest.

• …proves we understand intelligence in enough detail to create one.
• …indicates that intelligence is substrate-independent.
• …is an important step towards our mastery of physical reality.
• …continues the Copernican revolutionary trend.
• …will give us a tool to understand the mind better than ever before.
• …allows for psychology to be turned into a truly hard science.
• …gives astrobiologists a look at “aliens” without having to travel.
• …produces a truly new outlook on the universe and other minds.
• …gives us a window into what it’d be like to be self-transparent.
• …will give us a guide before ourselves embarking into new mindspace.
• …might let us unlock the mysteries of conscious experience.

It’s difficult to overstate the philosophical or scientific doors that would be opened by creating a true artificial intelligence.

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Electric Sheep is a collaborative abstract artwork founded by Scott Draves. It’s run by thousands of people all over the world, and can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers “sleep”, the Electric Sheep comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as “sheep”.

Anyone watching one of these computers may vote for their favorite animations using the keyboard. The more popular sheep live longer and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm with mutation and cross-over. Hence the flock evolves to please its global audience. You can also design your own sheep and submit them to the gene pool.

The result is a collective “android dream”, blending man and machine to create an artificial lifeform.

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“Superlativity in my view is a discourse not a research program, it relies for its force and intelligibility on the citation of other, specificially theological/ transcendentalizing discourses, it is a way of framing a constellation of descriptions taken for facts, embedding them into a narrative that solicits personal identification, and forms the basis for moralizing advocacy.”

Agree or disagree? What is superlativity to you?

In the comments, turn off the overcharged emotions, please.

For more, see The Superlative Summary.

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Say that the mind were non-physical, metaphysical, or whatever. Still, we know that physical brains give rise to minds, so mass-producing physical brains would still allow us to mass-produce non-physical minds. So, pure reductionism is not even necessary to carry the point I was making in the previous post.

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