Accelerating Future

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My latest project is Extreme Futurist Festival, a multi-media transhumanist arts and culture festival in Los Angeles. We are billing the festival as “counterculture meets academia”.

We have a good speaker roster up, with a couple more speakers to be added, including myself. Abstracts and the final program will be posted this week.

There will be tons of live music, including Hanin Elias, formerly of Atari Teenage Riot.

The festival will be the 16th-17th at Courtyard Los Angeles Marina del Rey. Tickets are only $50, so buy them up now!

Transhumanism is such an exciting movement, but it needs to attract more artists & culture creators of every kind, and for those artists to be exposed to our traditional core memes, and for the curators of our core memes to be exposed to more art. Help me push forward this crucial dynamic by attending the festival.

See you in Los Angeles next month!

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Sorry, there is some superfluous footage from the prior talk and intro beforehand. The actual talk begins around 2:00.

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“Balancing the Trichotomy”
Jaan Tallinn

Individual rights vs collective good: historically, to promote these competing values, societies sought balance between the two. Powerful technologies, however, are turning this dichotomy into a trichotomy. Today, we must consider the interests of individuals, modern society, and future societies that our actions will affect. Present and future societies interests’ clash most famously in matters of pollution and global warming, but the stakes are much higher that these slow-moving crises would suggest. Emerging technologies may prove so disruptive that future societies cannot control their impact. I will discuss the reasons that people are ill-equipped to manage the trichotomy and propose ways to address this pivotal problem.

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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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“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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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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Paul Raven called me “crowing” last week, so now, in an effort to minimize that tone, I’m going to post Mr. Knapp’s response to my recent post and not comment on it right away.

Does Knapp know anything about the way existing AI works? It’s not based around trying to copy humans, but often around improving this abstract mathematical quality called inference.

I think you missed my point. My point is not that AI has to emulate how the brain works, but rather that before you can design a generalized artificial intelligence, you have to have at least a rough idea of what you mean by that. Right now, the mechanics of general intelligence in humans are, actually, mostly unknown.

What’s become an interesting area of study in the past two decades are two fascinating strands of neuroscience. The first is that animal brains and intelligence are much better and more complicated than we thought even in the 80s.

The second is that humans, on a macro level, think very differently from animals, even the smartest problem solving animals. We haven’t begun to scratch the surface.

To use an analogy with flight, the principles of how birds flew through the air were known for centuries before Kitty Hawk. And scientists knew a great deal about lift, airflow, etc. well before the first plane was built by studying birds. Sure, planes don’t solve the flight problem the way birds do, but they rely on the same fundamental scientific principles.

But before scientists knew anything about birds, we basically knew: (a) they can fly, (b) it has something to do with wings and (c) possibly the feathers, too. At that stage, you couldn’t begin to design a plane.
It’s the same way with human intelligence. Very simplistically, we know that (a) humans have generalized intelligence, (b) it has something to do with the brain and (c) possibly the endocrine system as well.

The above paragraph is a vast oversimplification, obviously, but the point is to analogize. Right now, we’re at the “wings and feathers” stage of understanding the science of intelligence. So I find it unlikely that a solution can be engineered until we understand more of what intelligence is.

Now, once we understand intelligence, and if (and I think this is a big if), it can be reproduced in silicon, then the resulting AGI probably doesn’t necessarily have to look like the brain, anymore than a plane looks like a bird. But the fundamental principles still have to be addressed. And we’re just not there yet.

Answering how much or how little of the human brain is known is quite a subjective question. The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences is over 1,000 pages and full of information about how the brain works.

I correspond with lots of neuroscientists. Virtually all of them tell me that the big questions remain unanswered and will for quite some time.

We already have a model for AI that is absolutely nothing like a human — AIXI.

AIXI is a thought experiment, not an AI model. It’s not even designed to operate in a world with the constraints of our physical laws.

Even if we aren’t there yet, Knapp and Stross should be cheering on the incremental effort, not standing on the sidelines and frowning, making toasts to the eternal superiority of Homo sapiens sapiens.

My point is to recognize that the way machine intelligence operates, and will for the conceivable future, is in a manner that is complementary to human intelligence. And I’m fine with that. I’m excited by AI research. I just find it unlikely, given the restraints of physical laws as we understand them today, that an AGI can be expected in the near term, if ever.

I am, however, excited at the prospect of using computers to free humans from grunt work drudgery that computers are better at, so humans can focus on the kinds of thinking that they’re good at.

Emphases mine.

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Stross:

super-intelligent AI is unlikely because, if you pursue Vernor’s program, you get there incrementally by way of human-equivalent AI, and human-equivalent AI is unlikely. The reason it’s unlikely is that human intelligence is an emergent phenomenon of human physiology, and it only survived the filtering effect of evolution by enhancing human survival fitness in some way. Enhancements to primate evolutionary fitness are not much use to a machine, or to people who want to extract useful payback (in the shape of work) from a machine they spent lots of time and effort developing. We may want machines that can recognize and respond to our motivations and needs, but we’re likely to leave out the annoying bits, like needing to sleep for roughly 30% of the time, being lazy or emotionally unstable, and having motivations of its own.

“Human-equivalent AI is unlikely” is a ridiculous comment. Human level AI is extremely likely by 2060, if ever. (I’ll explain why in the next post.) Stross might not understand that the term “human-equivalent AI” always means AI of human-equivalent general intelligence, never “exactly like a human being in every way”.

If Stross’ objections turn out to be a problem in AI development, the “workaround” is to create generally intelligent AI that doesn’t depend on primate embodiment or adaptations.

Couldn’t the above argument also be used to argue that Deep Blue could never play human-level chess, or that Watson could never do human-level Jeopardy?

I don’t get the point of the last couple sentences. Why not just pursue general intelligence rather than “enhancements to primate evolutionary fitness”, then? The concept of having “motivations of its own” seems kind of hazy. If the AI is handing me my ass in Starcraft 2, does it matter if people debate whether it has “motivations of its own”? What does “motivations of its own” even mean? Does “motivations” secretly mean “motivations of human-level complexity”?

I do have to say, this is a novel argument that Stross is forwarding. Haven’t heard that one before. As far as I know, Stross must be one of the only non-religious thinkers who believes human-level AI is “unlikely”, presumably indefinitely “unlikely”. In a literature search I conducted in 2008 looking for academic arguments against human-level AI, I didn’t find much — mainly just Dreyfuss’ What Computers Can’t Do and the people who argued against Kurzweil in Are We Spiritual Machines? “Human level AI is unlikely” is one of those ideas that Romantics and non-materialists find appealing emotionally, but backing it up is another matter.

(This is all aside from the gigantic can of worms that is the ethical status of artificial intelligence; if we ascribe the value inherent in human existence to conscious intelligence, then before creating a conscious artificial intelligence we have to ask if we’re creating an entity deserving of rights. Is it murder to shut down a software process that is in some sense “conscious”? Is it genocide to use genetic algorithms to evolve software agents towards consciousness? These are huge show-stoppers — it’s possible that just as destructive research on human embryos is tightly regulated and restricted, we may find it socially desirable to restrict destructive research on borderline autonomous intelligences … lest we inadvertently open the door to inhumane uses of human beings as well.)

I don’t think these are “showstoppers” — there is no government on Earth that could search every computer for lines of code that are possibly AIs. We are willing to do whatever it takes, within reason, to get a positive Singularity. Governments are not going to stop us. If one country shuts us down, we go to another country.

We clearly want machines that perform human-like tasks. We want computers that recognize our language and motivations and can take hints, rather than requiring instructions enumerated in mind-numbingly tedious detail. But whether we want them to be conscious and volitional is another question entirely. I don’t want my self-driving car to argue with me about where we want to go today. I don’t want my robot housekeeper to spend all its time in front of the TV watching contact sports or music videos.

All it takes is for some people to build a “volitional” AI and there you have it. Even if 99% of AIs are tools, there are organizations — like the Singularity Institute — working towards AIs that are more than tools.

If the subject of consciousness is not intrinsically pinned to the conscious platform, but can be arbitrarily re-targeted, then we may want AIs that focus reflexively on the needs of the humans they are assigned to — in other words, their sense of self is focussed on us, rather than internally. They perceive our needs as being their needs, with no internal sense of self to compete with our requirements. While such an AI might accidentally jeopardize its human’s well-being, it’s no more likely to deliberately turn on it’s external “self” than you or I are to shoot ourselves in the head. And it’s no more likely to try to bootstrap itself to a higher level of intelligence that has different motivational parameters than your right hand is likely to grow a motorcycle and go zooming off to explore the world around it without you.

YOU want AI to be like this. WE want AIs that do “try to bootstrap [themselves]” to a “higher level”. Just because you don’t want it doesn’t mean that we won’t build it.

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This is a dialog that grew out of an email conversation with Rick Moss, author of the recent book Ebocloud, which explores futuristic social networks combined with brain-computer interface technology. I find the topic interesting and am curious about work in this area.

Rick Moss:

Michael, here’s our question: Could a Social Singularity occur? You’re thinking, without a respectable definition of the term, what’s the point of asking? Granted, the usage of Social Singularity found out there is rather arbitrary. Mostly, it seems bloggers are tossing it around in an attempt to sex-up concepts like crowdsourcing and the “hive mind” without any sense of responsibility.

So I’d like to (humbly) offer up a reasonable definition based on ideas I stumbled into when writing my recently published novel, Ebocloud. I think it’s worth going through the exercise, and here’s why: a Social Singularity might very well be a heck of a lot more favorable to the human race than a plain old Singularity. Stay tuned to learn why.

As we all know, a Singularity is a technological mash-up that results in smarter-than-human intelligence. Unfortunately, the physical limitations of human gray matter tends to be the spoiler for Singularity theories that count on making people part of that smarter-than-thou equation. Neurons can only transmit electrochemical signals so quickly and they can’t multiply geometrically in the brain like computing power (as per Moore’s Law). That makes it more likely that the self-learning computers will win the ultimate Singularity Jeopardy match. Kind of scary.

In my Social Singularity theory, corporeal limitations don’t go away. In fact, they’re embraced. Let’s get into it.

For a Social Singularity to occur, I see certain conditions that will need to be met. The first: human minds—and a lot of them—will need to be networked to a very powerful computer network (let’s call it a cloud, since that’s the configuration of choice these days), presumably by way of brain computer interfaces, or BCIs. (This is the way it’s done in Ebocloud, details to come.) The objective of the human-cloud collective is to facilitate a feedback loop whereby human sensory data and biometrics are uploaded to the cloud to be aggregated, analyzed and used in various applications, then redistributed back to the human participants.

No, human nervous systems are not geared for data-intensive, multi-media input and output, so in my scenario, the cloud applications must be content with collecting small amounts of data from the humans (wirelessly transmitted to the cloud). And whatever information is sent back to the people must be in small, relatively modest packages.

Michael, we’ll get back to the big Social Singularity question, but based on what I’ve told you so far, can you imagine applications hosted on a cloud network that could be used by thousands of wirelessly networked human participants? Given their physical limitations, what if any potential do you see?

Michael Anissimov: What resolution? The resolution of sensory data and biometrics really matters. In a certain sense the internet already exchanges sensory data and biometrics so you’re being too vague here for me to say anything.

Ever heard of Quantified Self? They are doing this now. It’s written about in one of the most popular books on Amazon, “The Four-Hour Body” by Tim Ferriss. So in its mild form it already exists, not really futuristic because it’s already here…. but you probably mean something else.

RM: Yes, definitely something else. The Quantified Self movement is self-centered, whereas the applications I’d like to explore here would be for the general benefit of the species. Yes, Mr. Ferriss is selling a lot of books promising to “prevent fat gain while bingeing” and “produce 15-minute female orgasms” (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Ebocloud offers a glimpse of a possible evolutionary step for humankind. (How could it possibly compete in book sales?)

But to answer your question, Mr. Ferriss recommends such self-biometrics as weighing your own feces. You’re the scientist; I’m just the crackpot sci-fi author, but I’d say we’re looking to go lower res than that. Let me fill in some more details.

In Ebocloud, the massive humanitarian social network of the title is distinguished from rivals (i.e., Facebook) by its emphasis on physical-world interaction. And so the founding scientists want to augment the experience with a wearable interface that will allow users to sense the presence of their fellow members and work with them in close coordination. What they come up with is a BCI called a dToo (digital tattoo). Laser-bonded in substrate layers to the skin on the inner wrist, the device incorporates wireless technology to connect with “the cloud” and integrated circuitry bonded to the nervous system by way of nanotubes that seek out nerve endings. (It’s sci-fi…just go with it.)

After the dToo is applied, a map is made of the subject’s nervous system and two-way communication, at a rudimentary level, is established. And yet it’s quickly proven that when accurately administered, simple impulses sent to the minds of participants in a group can be used to great affect. Minor sensory stimulation coupled with neurotransmitter (e.g. dopamine) triggers indicates the presence and relative position of others in the network. Apps are developed to coordinate group movement so that work relief activities and arts projects take on super-human grace and efficiency. Essentially now an extension of the cloud network, the users begin to experience occurrences of spontaneous orchestrated movement analogous to herd behavior. (Picture schools of fish shifting in undulating rhythms.)

So Michael, given that we’re in the realm of speculative fiction, this is all highly … well, speculative, but yes… the challenge is working with low res information but administered to hundreds of thousands of participants. Do you begin to see possibilities?

Michael Anissimov: The Quantified Self movement is not at all based just around the individual, the whole point of recording the data is so that people can share it, compare their progress, and notice high-level generalities that would have been obscured if it weren’t for the recording. Also, I’m not a scientist, just a science writer.

The idea of a “digital tattoo” connected to brain-stimulating and brain-computer interfacing nanotubes is interesting, but wouldn’t it be easier to just have the tattoo on the head instead of the wrist? Anyway, sure, I see possibilities in this area — probably more scary ones than positive ones, because people already seem socially conformist enough, but I’m not sure. The first obvious beneficial application that comes to mind is the military.

Why would this work better with the military than in more a popular culture context? A couple reasons; 1) the military lives and works together exclusively, while civilians wander around between schools, work, yoga class, cycling club, etc. The idea of a select group of people binding together at the exclusion of all other people, like a cult, would be too socially shocking to take off very easily at first, 2) the military has more of a need for social cohesion and organization than civilians. Civilians do things casually, and generally are forgiven for small mental mistakes at work, whereas in the military, accurate coordination and communication is a matter of life or death.

Another fundamental limitation is the family unit. People are genetically programmed to place their family above other forms of social organization, in almost all cases. Non-familial, non-traditional forms of societal organization are often viewed with suspicion. That’s not to say that they don’t exist. Certainly there is the counterculture. This leads me to think that this system would be more likely to be adopted by countercultural groups, possibly with extremist goals. Why? Not because the technology is inherently sinister, but just because extremist groups have the desire to cooperate and communicate more effectively with a group, and most everyday folks do not. Many people already feel overbearing control at work — a digital tattoo that magnified that, in a work context, would clearly be unwelcome.

In a more positive context, I can certainly see artistic or cultural collectives using the technology to augment traditional activities such as theater and dance.

RM: Yes, I agree you need a terrifically strong social construct for the Social Singularity to occur and also that traditional groups aren’t at all idea. We might look to tap the power of online social networking but, unlike Facebook and such, there needs to be a driving sense of purpose. That’s what the ebocloud.com invention is all about. The ebocloud adherents are highly motivated to a) help themselves and their families, b) help their fellow members in the network and, c) improve the world (most likely but not necessarily in that order).

Ebocloud.com is based on an extended family concept first floated by Kurt Vonnegut back in the early ‘70s when he was inspired by the Ebo tribal culture of Nigeria. New ebocloud members are profiled and assigned to tribes, or “ebos”, each providing a mutual support system for “ebo cousins.” The sprawling cloud network is set on an open source app platform so members can organize ebo activities, running the gamut from neighborhood work parties, arts programs and pot-luck dinners to disaster relief efforts.

Ebocloud.com is a democratic, bottom-up organization, awarding “Kar-merits” to members for their altruistic efforts­—merit points they can draw on when they are themselves in need. The member devotion to ebocloud becomes cult-like, yes, but the founders build in checks and balances against individuals assuming power over the general will of the membership.

The ebos (each named for a different wildflower) are spread across the globe but work face-to-face within communities. At a point, the “cousins” take to tattooing their wrists with their wildflower insignias so they can recognize each other in public. Acknowledging “ebo-ink” becomes an important ritual. That’s why the ebocloud scientists go for a digital tattoo on the wrist, to mimic the social convention that has been adopted by the cousins.

It’s a fictional scenario, of course, in which all the pieces fall into place, resulting in a Social Singularity. I’m not asking if it would happen this way in reality, but if it perhaps suggests a formula by which one might occur.

MA: I’d agree more broadly that something like this could occur in the 2020s or 2030s if people formed groups around topics they thought were most compelling. Religious groups, like Christian, Jewish, or Islamic groupings, come to mind.

The most important thing about the Singularity is creating a transhuman intelligence. You can only go so far with combinations of humans, whatever superficial flourishes you put on them, be it a digital tattoo, karma points, or whatever. In retrospect a “Social Singularity” would more likely be seen as an ambient dynamic contributing to some specialist actually doing the neuroengineering or AI research necessary to launch a real Singularity. In retrospect, it will be the neuroengineering or AI that was seen as being the most crucial feature, not the social nature of the group that that spawned it.

I think the idea is interesting, but more like a pre-Singularity social phenomena, a “hyper-Facebook”, than anything else. It seems like the general human desire for socialization stays about the same, distributed in a bell curve, and isn’t heavily impacted by technology. The existence of Facebook did not necessarily make everyone hyper-social. Highly social people use it to socialize extensively, and those who aren’t very social to begin with don’t use it for that purpose.

If you’re talking about something with direct connections to the pleasure center of the brain, I would certainly call that neuroengineering, but unless the device is actually improving the quality of the information being processed, you still have the same old stupid humans. Hooking humans up to each other and hooking them up to drugs has already been done, but the scenario you describe does make it deeper. Maybe something like an ebocloud will herald a repeat of the 1970s. I think whether or not such a technology catches on will depend on the vibe of the era. The 1980s, for instance, were highly individualistic while the 1970s were communal.

RM: As the hypothesis is presented in Ebocloud, there is a distinct opportunity to, as you say, “improve the quality of the information being processed.” The transhuman superintelligence is achieved as “the cloud” network gains access to the sensory input of millions of dToo-bearing people. Imagine the network of supercomputers gathering stimuli from the sight, hearing and physical sensations of the tens of thousands attending a stadium event, aggregating it along with third party data, “stitching” it all together into a “vision” of the event, then feeding that unimaginably rich sensory experience back to the audience. And then, imagine these augmented human perceptions uploaded again to the cloud. It is in this feedback loop that I see the possibility of a singularity spontaneously occurring, but of course, only if the software designers are up to the task of channeling the resulting confluence of human/computer intelligence into something constructive or artistic. Otherwise, it’ll be noise multiplied geometrically.

In the Ebocloud scenario, I see social networking as integral to the achievement of a singularity, not as some precursor to such. Although I agree with your thinking that the technology’s adoption may depend on the “vibe of the era,” I see market forces being much equally influential. I expect that commercial social media firms will be flush with extra cash for R&D in the next ten years, as will the developers of personal digital devices and BCIs. The likes of Apple, Google and Facebook, with their billions to burn on wild-eyed notions, could very likely spur technological leaps in these areas. It would be nice if these developers were at least aware of the possibility of a social singularity so that they don’t stumble into the phenomenon blindly. That could be tragic.

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