Accelerating Future

The IEET sometimes replicates blog posts of mine in their articles section. They do this because I said they could. I like it when they do that, because I think what I say is important and should be heard by more people. Otherwise I wouldn’t say it.

You can help me and other IEET fellows by caring about the IEET and what it does. There’s cool stuff there. For instance, IEET executive director James Hughes, who many of you may have heard of, recently did an interview with the Boston Globe on extinction risks. It helps when he and IEET fellows do things like that, because it lowers the chance that we all die. And not dying is awesome.

3 Responses »

The future is not a story to entertain you. Brought up on Star Wars, Star Trek, The Terminator, and other stories, many geeks view the future almost exclusively through the lens of overly-beloved fiction. Though these geeks may not consciously think, “the future is basically Star Trek coming into existence”, the initial reflex when confronted with a cool new piece of technology is to make a fictional reference. For example, look at the comments on practically any “futuristic technology” headline that appears on Digg. No one can resist.

For a story to be interesting to humans, it has to feature interesting content occurring at the human level. A story about the interaction of worms and rabbits is not very interesting to humans unless the characters are entirely anthropomorphic. Conversely, humans cannot write meaningful stories about content above the human level, because we lack the cognitive complexity to imagine such things.

However, the universe does not care that we find only stories at the human level interesting. The vast majority of natural phenomena are dictated by structures that are far smaller or far larger than humans, and often far less complex. In the near future, as humans create transhumans, the script of history will start to be written in a more sophisticated font that we lack the cognitive wherewithal to make direct sense out of.

This “interestingness bias” causes futurists to come up with showy stories to get attention. One particularly flagrant example is BT futurologist Ian Pearson, who in 2002 predicted notebook computer screens with contrast as good as paper by 2003, mobile phone location used in traffic management systems by 2004, the first organism brought back to life in 2006, anti-noise technology built into homes by 2010, and the highest-earning celebrity being synthetic in 2010. All these predictions have either failed or are on the way to failing, and seem to be made more for show than seriousness.

If I were in charge of a futurist seminar, one of the first things I would probably do is discourage anyone from mentioning any fictional story whatsoever. I do believe that fiction does have something to teach us about future possibilities, but the bias towards interesting stories is so overwhelmingly strong that most casual thinking about the future is thoroughly contaminated by it. No narrative can predict the future, because the future is a blur of uncertainties from our perspective, and will only appear like a narrative in retrospect.

This bias towards interesting future stories is particularly worrisome in the context of unFriendly AI. People anthropomorphize advanced AI and come up with a thousand interesting and semi-ironic stories for why it wouldn’t be a threat to us: for instance, AIs might find humans “boring” and blast off into space, or create their own basement universe, or figure out so much knowledge about the world that they dessicate from existential ennui. These scenarios all strike me as B-grade science fiction. More likely, when confronted by a recursively self-improving unFriendly AI with abstract mathematical goals unrelated to human concerns, the simple outcome is death. No robot wars, no citizenship battles, no epic historical dialogue between the President of the United States and the AI leader. Just defeat. How’s that for your interesting story?

27 Responses »

Ed Regis is a science journalist type I’ve always liked, mainly for 1995 book Nano, which got me into nanotechnology when I was 11. Although the book generally has good reviews on Amazon, I had to post this one, by Robert J. Crawford:

As a professional reviewer, once in a while you come across a book that is so ridiculously bad, that so appallingly falls short of what the author claims, that you wish you had never contracted to review it because that means you have to carefully read it. Of the hundreds of popular science books that I have read, I can say without hesitation that this one may be the worst. And yet its tone is utterly arrogant and self-satisfied. It is truly a monument to the author’s egotism.

Though billed as a science book, there simply is no science in it. Instead, it is a kind a hagiographic biography of Eric Drexler, who has done nothing but talk.

However, if you are uncritically convinced of Drexler’s vision, which is nothing if not arresting, you will probably like this book. What it does is seek to elevate Drexler to prophet status before he has accomplished anything but unproven hypotheses at best, and speculation and hype at the worst.

Since his “hagiographic” worship of Dr. Drexler in 1995, Ed Regis has totally changed his mind. For instance, in a 2001 interview with Nanotech Now, he had this response:

Nanotech Now: With the advent of mature MNT, where do you see the most drastic changes occurring? How can society and industry prepare for it?

Ed Regis: “Advent of mature MNT”? You’ve got to be joking. The one thing that has most impressed me about MNT since I’ve been aware of the field, which I guess has been for about 15 years, is the snail’s pace of progress toward the goal. We’ve seen tons of conferences, books, theories, predictions, discussions, workshops, institutes, companies, scenarios, simulations, pictures, articles, initiatives, meetings, study groups, Web sites, magazines, newsletters, matching grants and unmatching grants, et cetera. The one thing we haven’t seen is any substantial progress toward MNT.

I also question the common assumption that we have to “prepare for it.” I see no reason why we cannot simply wait until it happens, and then accommodate ourselves to it then and there, after the fact, when, if, and as it occurs. I think a lot of this before-the-fact worrying, handwringing, theorizing, scenarioizing, worst-case and best-case planning, et cetera, is a waste of time, especially in the event that the hoped-for revolution does not occur, or does not occur in the time frame envisioned by its prognosticators.

Most people have had no trouble accommodating themselves to all sorts of incredible technological feats, everything from the moon landing to the Concorde, VCRs, CAT scans, heart and lung transplants, hip replacements, cloned sheep, and truly stylish Japanese sports cars. Who would have thought!

The tone here sounds a bit bitter — Mr. Regis is disappointed that his dreams were crushed when the Great Nanotechnology Revolution didn’t occur soon enough. No need to be so sad, the 21st century is just getting started.

As you might have guessed, I totally disagree with Mr. Regis. There has been progress towards MNT. (See some of the talks at Future Current for a small sampling.) It’s a huge deal, and preparing for it is critical. Numerous scientists, futurists, and VCs start thinking about it for the first time every day. We ignore it at our peril.

The next Google could be a molecular nanotechnology company.

I just wanted to post Regis’ comments to make it obvious that there are people who have lost their faith in MNT, and regarding what bit of faith they have left, they still think it isn’t worth preparing for. That’s their choice, and I disagree. Much of the preparation work for MNT arms control and regulation issues overlaps strongly with legal/sociological issues surrounding rapid prototyping, and those are already materializing as we speak.

Honestly though, I think it’s worth snickering a little bit at Mr. Regis’ earlier overconfidence in the nearness of molecular assemblers. When asked by Edge.org “what have you changed your mind about?”, he said:

I used to think you could predict the future. In “Profiles of the Future,” Arthur C. Clarke made it seem so easy. And so did all those other experts who confidently predicted the paperless office, the artificial intelligentsia who for decades predicted “human equivalence in ten years,” the nanotechnology prophets who kept foreseeing major advances toward molecular manufacturing within fifteen years, and so on.

Mostly, the predictions of science and technology types were wonderful: space colonies, flying cars in everyone’s garage, the conquest (or even reversal) of aging. (There were of course the doomsayers, too, such as the population-bomb theorists who said the world would run out of food by the turn of the century.)

But at last, after watching all those forecasts not come true, and in fact become falsified in a crashing, breathtaking manner, I began to question the entire business of making predictions. I mean, if even Nobel prizewinning scientists such as Ernest Rutherford, who gave us essentially the modern concept of the nuclear atom, could say, as he did in 1933, that “We cannot control atomic energy to an extent which would be of any value commercially, and I believe we are not likely ever to be able to do so,” and be so spectacularly wrong about it, what hope was there for the rest of us?

And then I finally decided that I knew the source of this incredible mismatch between confident forecast and actual result. The universe is a complex system in which countless causal chains are acting and interacting independently and simultaneously (the ultimate nature of some of them unknown to science even today). There are in fact so many causal sequences and forces at work, all of them running in parallel, and each of them often affecting the course of the others, that it is hopeless to try to specify in advance what’s going to happen as they jointly work themselves out. In the face of that complexity, it becomes difficult if not impossible to know with any assurance the future state of the system except in those comparatively few cases in which the system is governed by ironclad laws of nature such as those that allow us to predict the phases of the moon, the tides, or the position of Jupiter in tomorrow night’s sky. Otherwise, forget it.

Further, it’s an illusion to think that supercomputer modeling is up to the task of truly reliable crystal-ball gazing. It isn’t. Witness the epidemiologists who predicted that last year’s influenza season would be severe (in fact it was mild); the professional hurricane-forecasters whose models told them that the last two hurricane seasons would be monsters (whereas instead they were wimps). Certain systems in nature, it seems, are computationally irreducible phenomena, meaning that there is no way of knowing the outcome short of waiting for it to happen.

Formerly, when I heard or read a prediction, I believed it. Nowadays I just roll my eyes, shake my head, and turn the page.

It’s important to remember that it’s possible to make predictions about the future that are entirely correct, as long as you’re not excessively specific. Anyone that makes money on the stock market or who runs a startup knows how to take risks and make predictions on a 2-5 year timeframe. If you have an above-average ability to predict the future, you can potentially use it to collect free money on the prediction markets. But most of the time, anything we predict is just a guess.

Life extension, risk prevention, human enhancement, etc., are worth pursuing for their own sake, no matter how long it takes, not to fulfill some rigid timeline or vision. Even incremental gains can be incredibly beneficial.

H/t to Mark Plus for bringing this to my attention.

(For those not in the know, the name of this post is a play on Regis’ other book, The Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition.)

15 Responses »

In modern cladistics, there is a strong pressure to only classify organisms in monophyletic groups — that is, groups that contain all descendants of a common ancestor and nothing else. This is quite reasonable from a specialist’s point of view, as the alternative is quite confusing. Polyphyletic terms like “worm”, “mesozoa”, and “plankton” refer to broad and arbitrary groupings of unrelated organisms, and may be acceptable for casual use, but when you really care about classifying organisms in a consistent way, these terms are useless, and are regularly discarded.

I apply this same principle in my thinking about science, technology, and futurism. Futurist dialogue is rife with ‘polyphyletic’ terms like “Singularity”, “nanotechnology”, and “nuclear”. Some of these terms may have been coined with precise definitions that have since been lost in the cacophony of interested, well-meaning amateurs that are trying to appear informed, or worse, PR spinners that have hijacked words like “nanotechnology” intentionally.

When engaging in constructive dialog on futurist topics, it’s important to know what the hell you’re talking about. Unfortunately, there is a tradeoff for specificity — greater complexity of terms, as well as restricted meanings that prevent rhetorical hand-waving useful for drawing people in without confusing them. Personally, I prefer a layered approach — incrementally more specific terminology for specific purposes. As another downside, groups with too much esoteric language frustrate those without the vocabulary, and inspire calls of “cult!” or “alienated from reality”.

What particularly disappointed me recently in this area is the definition of “Singularity” in Ray Kurzweil’s 2005 book, The Singularity is Near. His definition consists of several pages filled with dozens of bullet points, ranging from “nanotechnology will enable the design of nanobots” to “Ultimately the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence. This is the destiny of the universe.” (Not only is the latter phrase an addition to the confusion around the term, it implies an inevitability that ignores global catastrophic risk.) Please, Mr. Kurzweil, be more specific, and summarize terms in a few sentences at the most.

Sometimes, it’s beneficial for someone who wants to change the definition of a term to simply use it in the intended context, and hope it catches on. Even I am guilty of this. For instance, I use the word “cybernetics” to refer to cyborg technology, as we see it used in fiction, especially anime, instead of using Norbert Wiener’s frustratingly broad traditional definition. This causes conflict with some of my older colleagues, who respect Wiener’s definition, but among the younger crowd, it is a simple fact that “cybernetics” is strongly associated with cyborgs. In this respect, I am simply riding on a pre-existing wave.

Be careful about the meanings of words. Some people might get into an argument that has nothing to do with the substance at hand, but merely disagreements over the meaning of words. To avoid this, we must take the time to define our terms precisely, and not get flustered when we find that our own intuitive definition of the term is overly broad and nonspecific.

7 Responses »

The are several categories relating to the Tree of Life which I consider important.

The first category includes all extant creatures. By adolescence, we are familiar with thousands of animals. Scientists estimate there are somewhere between 5 and 100 million species altogether. Most are probably insects and arachnids, including over a million species of both mite and beetle.

The second category includes all species that have ever lived. This number is somewhere between 10 and 100 times greater than the number of extant creatures, therefore somewhere between 50 million and 10 billion. To me, making sense of the first category requires understanding the second. I am fascinated by the second category because most people don’t know too much about it, and it’s like visiting an alien world — there are so many unusual and fascinating creatures in the fossil record.

The third category includes all species that could ever theoretically exist. We can really blow this up to huge proportions, including species based on something besides DNA, including non-carbon-based life forms, if they are physically possible, which seems likely. In this category I include alternate evolutionary paths.

In my view, there is a strong element of randomness to the specifics of evolution. In a parallel universe, Earth may have been inhabited by entirely different intelligences, born from an entirely different Tree of Life. Sauropsids may have become intelligent instead of synapsids, or something even more radical.

I like to draw my “circle of empathy” large — so large, in fact, that I can go so far as to say that any form of self-reflective general intelligence with subjective experience is worthy of value, regardless of the biological context it grew up in. We can go even further and include non-conscious animals, though these may be considered as deriving their value from the appreciation of conscious beings.

When biotechnology advances to the point where can synthesize animal-sized genomes from scratch (we’ve already gotten to the level of bacteria), humans will surely create entirely new animals, both for study and pleasure. Leaving aside issues of regulation, I think that the first category will expand to include many elements of the second and third categories. Eventually, we will recognize that members of the second and third categories have the same inherent value as members of the first, and all will share the matter-energy resources of the local area.

So, as an environmentalist, I care about preserving existing biodiversity, but as a transhumanist environmentalist, I also care about the creation and preservation of de novo biodiversity. These creatures will provide an interesting accompaniment during our journey greening the Galaxy.

This may sound futuristic, but the first synthetic life will be created in a lab this year.

3 Responses »

The Industrial Revolution is essentially when the modern world began. For the first time, the production of food and many basic goods was partially automated. The impact was huge: whereas most of history up to that point had been a zero-sum exercise in fighting over a fixed pie, the Industrial Revolution increased the size of the pie itself many times over. This laid the groundwork for positive sum thinking, the notion that we can all have better lives if we just cooperate instead of trying to edge out the next guy.

Today, we have the luxury of pointing out some of the downsides of industrialization, but if we could experience pre-industrial life firsthand (or observe it by visiting those few areas of the planet untouched by industrialization), we would recognize what we are blessed with. Usually we reserve our gratitude for other humans, but the machines that drive industrial civilization deserve our thanks as well. Without them, there would be no mass-produced clothes, or toilets, or plumbing, or medicine, or books, or computers, or pretty much anything except for what we or people we hire could build on a manual, one-by-one basis.

Many of the “superlative” visions of transhumanists, and some other futurists and tech-savvy folk, introduce the notion of a world where the Industrial Revolution is completed, and literally any production we desire can be automated. In the words of the RepRap project, this would give us “wealth without money”. To me, and many others, this is a question of when, not if. I see modern skepticism over the possibility of self-replicating machines to be analogous to pre-Industrial skepticism over the notion of a huge array of products without excessive labor input.

Because I’ve been thinking about self-replicating machines for over a decade now, I’ve already spent quite a bit of time considering many of the positive and exciting implications of the technology. Palaces built by automated legions, cities constructed in weeks or less, solar panel arrays hundreds of square miles in extent covering the desert floor. Call it superabundance, the natural consequence of having machines that self-replicate from raw materials, are powered by the sun, and do all the work for you. It’s the Final Industrial Revolution, because after we develop reprogrammable self-replicating machines, there will be no production left to automate.

I’ve thought about the feasibility and potential of self-replicating machines enough that I’m desensitized to many of the benefits. Maybe I was introduced to the concept young enough in life that I take it for granted. Instead of speculating endlessly about the possible benefits, lately I’ve been very concerned about the risks. My thesis is this: if we can survive the next 50 years or so, we’re home free. I don’t see actively pursuing self-replicating machines as morally necessary as ameliorating the risks, because the eventual invention and deployment of these machines is inevitable. Someone will definitely do it, probably sooner rather than later.

So I consider the risks. Unfortunately, this puts me up as a target for criticism, along with people like Martin Rees and Stephen Hawking. For instance, one “expert in apocalyptic movements and neocatastrophism” called Hawking’s warnings of catastrophic global disaster “regrettable hype”. Honestly, what other intelligent species could build enough bombs to kill everyone on the planet, then go around saying that we have nothing to worry about?

People are terrified of discussing catastrophic risk for a number of reasons, but I think the two primary ones are negative affect and a bias towards optimism. They sound like the same thing, but they’re actually slightly different. Negative affect is the uncomfortable feeling many people get when discussing something they don’t like, such as the annihilation of the human species. The solution is to turn the conversation to a jokey tone as quickly and desperately as possible. Sure, I guess heavy topics aren’t for everyone, but I wish that people could discuss the risk without flinching away at least 1% of the time, but I’m not seeing it. The second reason is a positive bias towards optimism. Humans have a well documented psychological propensity towards unrealistic optimism. Optimism is a badge you can hold up to a community to say, “I’m psychologically normal, and motivated to join in shared projects!” Well, great, but when we’re in a unique historical era where we have weapons that can kill off the human race but lack the wisdom to forgo their use, this attitude can be downright suicidal.

The Final Industrial Revolution will be happening in our lifetimes. How can we steer it down a beneficial path? “Stand back and let it happen” is a recipe for failure.

7 Responses »

Yesterday marked 14 years since the release of Final Fantasy VI, a game whose story impacted me early on in life and continues to serve as a frequent metaphor for many things I observe and analyze now. Final Fantasy VI is my primary fictional inspiration, and has been since I first discovered it in 1994.

Like many console RPGs, FFVI revolves around the accumulation of weapons and experience, along with interaction with NPCs, but it was the first to include substantial plot complexity and character development, paving the way for Final Fantasy to become a huge franchise. The game blends story, music, dialogue, interactivity, and artwork in a way that inspired millions and still holds a strong following. Final Fantasy VI is widely considered one of the best RPGs ever made.

Instead of most swords & sorcery stories which occur in a stereotypical medieval or fantasy setting, FFVI occurs in a steampunk background similar to the late Second Industrial Revolution, with electricity, railroads, factories, robotics, and airships. The world in the game is culturally sophisticated, with art galleries, opera houses, and auctions. The story is set 1000 years after a catastrophic war, the War of the Magi. Prior to the war, mankind had similar levels of technology to the present, and it is implied that it took civilization 1000 years to recover from its self-destructive actions. The primary goal of the protagonists in the story is to avert a repeat of this same war.

The cause of the war was the discovery and exploitation of magic — channeled through unique fossils called magicite. The story begins when magicite is rediscovered for the first time. The imperial dictatorship of the game seeks to exploit magicite by integrating it with war machines. Meanwhile, a mysterious woman with natural magical abilities escapes imprisonment from this dictatorship, and travels the world in search of allies. Her goal, which she accepts with hesitation due to her pacific nature, is to convince others to stop the empire from starting a magical war that once again throws civilization 1000 years behind and makes life miserable for many. Despite their uneasiness about the power of magic, the protagonists end up using it wisely and carefully to prevent disaster.

Mid-way through the game, the protagonists essentially fail in their task, and the primary antagonist, Kefka, unleashes a magical Apocalypse that razes the surface of the world and sets civilization back substantially. The second half of the game occurs in the “World of Ruin”. This disruption of the planet naturally causes the release of a number of ancient Lovecraftian monsters which the protagonists must contend with as they make their way to the final confrontation with Kefka. They use both magic and conventional technology to make it to the end.

You can naturally see the parallels between the plot of this game and my preoccupation with the promise and perils of emerging technologies and the specter of existential risk. Like Arthur C. Clarke said, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Even today, we manipulate technologies — heavier-than-air flight, nuclear power and weapons, rockets and satellites, computers and the Internet, cell phones and genetic engineering — which our ancestors of just 150 years ago could have barely imagined. The pace of technological change is accelerating, and within 50 years, and probably less, we’ll be confronted with technologies more powerful than anything we can imagine today. Through nanotechnology and advanced computing, we’ll gain control over the fine-grained structure of matter, allowing us to create practically any chemically possible structure in near-arbitrary quantities.

If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is. Now, like the protagonists of Final Fantasy VI, we must come to terms with magic and turn it to good rather than evil. If we slip and fall, we might not merely set mankind back 1000 years, but eliminate it entirely. We simply cannot survive a no-holds-barred war with the ultratechnology of coming decades. The collateral damage would be too huge.

Anyway, happy 14 years of Final Fantasy VI.

12 Responses »