Accelerating Future

The InnerSpace Foundation and The IF Prize

“The IF takes the position that the most rapid timelines to solving humanity’s most serious problems — including providing complete and lasting cures for the most diseased and disabled — will be accomplished through widespread improvement of memory and mind, rather than through the best efforts of people who are well-meaning but of naturally limited abilities.” - Dr. Pete Estep

Apr 30th, 2008 (Palo Alto): Dr. Pete Estep will discuss the InnerSpace Foundation (IF), a new nonprofit being developed to promote and support neuroengineering approaches for the enhancement of memory and learning – biomedical goals that have the potential to improve not only the lives of those suffering from a specific malady, but everyone’s life.

This new organization is pursuing human intelligence enhancement as a humanitarian goal.

Looking at their website, Theodore Berger is involved. You may remember Berger as the team leader of the prosthetic hippocampus project that we mention here at Accelerating Future so often. On the IF website, Berger says, “Given sufficient funding, the development of a functional memory prosthetic device is as good as done.” Berger is Director of the Center for Neural Engineering at the University of Southern California. The rest of the advisers page is a list of world-class neuroscientists, many of which I’ve never heard of. The organization was founded by Preston Estep and James Clement.

The organization is offering two prizes: The IF Prize for Learning and The IF Prize for Memory. From the site’s FAQ:

“The IF Prize for Learning will be awarded for the successful development and demonstration of a device similar in function to a flash drive (a.k.a. thumb drive) for computers. This device will store standardized information that can be accessed by the brain (sometimes referred to as “downloading”) by thought alone (volitional access). This will allow someone to “learn” information in a completely revolutionary way. The other device will also be similar to a flash drive but will write or store a person’s memory information (sometimes referred to as “uploading”), which can be subsequently retrieved by thought.”

One more question from the FAQ:

Q: Are these technologies extremely futuristic, maybe even science fiction?

A: No. Nearly all of the technologies we use daily and take for granted, such as cell phones, airplanes, submarines, microwave ovens, and digital computers, once existed only as scientific possibilities and fiction. Ten years ago, thought-driven brain-computer interfaces were science fiction. But, recently, neuroengineers have made dramatic advances in interfacing electronic devices with the brain, and have demonstrated thought-controlled prosthetic limbs, computer desktop functions and gameplaying, and even basic speech synthesis.

Is this the beginning of a true intelligence augmentation effort?

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Linda Gottfredson is an intelligence researcher and professor at the University of Delaware, where she was given the Distinguished Faculty Award in 2007.

Gottfredson is very controversial. Why?

• supportive of the concept of g
• presents evidence for differences in average IQ among races
• supports The Bell Curve
• critical about the way gifted students are treated in public schools
• accused of academic racism

See Linda Gottfredson on Edge.org, PBS, the Wall Street Journal, and on the suppression of intelligence research. Her CV and papers are here.

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(Cross-posted from SIAI blog.)

What is intelligence? It’s like pornography — you know it when you see it.

The way people talk, you’d think that intelligence was some sort of magical fairy dust. It’s not. Intelligence is a dynamic system that takes in information about the world, abstracts regularities from that information, stores it in memories, and uses it knowledge about the world to form goals, make plans and implement them.

Simple enough. The definition I give above covers humans, cyborgs, possibly intelligent animals, artificial intelligences, extraterrestrial beings, and whatever other form of intelligence you care to dream up.

There is no intelligence that isn’t a dynamic system. Intelligence is inherently a dynamic process. This one is a no-brainer.

There is no intelligence that doesn’t take in information about the world. It needs that information to learn and make plans. If it isn’t taking in information, something is wrong, like it’s locked in a box. But even an intelligence locked in a box takes in the information that it’s in a box.

There is no intelligence that doesn’t abstract information from its perceptual data. There’s simply too much to store otherwise. It has been estimated that we take in gigabits of perceptual data every second. Only a minority of that makes it into our long-term memory or plays a critical role in concept formation. Unless the data input is artificially constrained, an intelligence will always throw away most of the information it gathers.

There is no intelligence that doesn’t store memories. Even the main character of Memento had a perfectly functioning short-term memory. Without it, intelligence wouldn’t be possible. Lacking memories, we would be completely ignorant of both the past and the future. Not intelligent at all.

There is no intelligence that lacks goals. Even a randomly generated goal is still a goal. Uttering a word, turning your head to look at something, moving aside when a large object is incoming — these are all small goals. Any form of differential desirability constitutes goalhood. Without differential desirability, an intelligence will just sit still until it starves or otherwise runs out of power. An intelligence may derive its goals from external feedback… but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have goals, just that it copies them from elsewhere.

There is no intelligence that doesn’t make plans. Making plans is an essential part of achieving goals. Intelligences visualize a goal state and then try to come up with a series of actions that will guide the current world into that goal state.

There is no intelligence that doesn’t implement plans. Admittedly, this is the shakiest of the above requirements, as there could exist an intelligence that is an Oracle, making plans but passing them on to others to implement. I would consider that intelligence as implementing its plans indirectly, as making plans inherently implies their possible implementation. Okay, so maybe I cheated on that one.

And so concludes my attempt at coming up with a somewhat detailed nonanthropomorphic definition of intelligence.

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Accelerating Future reader and professor of economics at Smith College, James D. Miller, recently published an article on embryo screening and intelligence enhancement at Tech Central Station. Here is an excerpt:

“Two British fertility clinics have found a way of safely obtaining thousands of eggs from a woman. Fertility clinics, therefore, will soon be able to give a couple thousands of embryos to pick from. So let’s say that a certain couple’s genes mean that normally they have only a 1% chance of conceiving a child with the genetic potential to reach a genius IQ. With the ability to select among thousands of embryos, however, this couple could now almost guarantee that their offspring has the genetic potential of a genius.

Imagine that in ten years China forces all its college students to get genetic tests. Students with intelligence genes in the top 1% of the top 1% of humankind are then forced to donate sperm or eggs. China then uses the sperm and eggs to create a billion embryos each year. The genetic intellectual potential of all these embryos is checked. Those in the top 10,000 are implanted into women. Each of these embryos has the intellectual potential to be in the top one-billionth of humankind.

Now because of environmental factors many of these embryos won’t turn into intellectual titans. But let’s say that one in ten does. This means that each year 1,000 people with the scientific ability of Einstein will be born. By 2035 they will become adults and start doing scientific research. I imagine these Einsteins will be rather helpful to China’s economy and military.”

I strongly doubt that we will make it all the way to 2035 without radical intelligence enhancement emerging through some other route, such as intelligence enhancement drugs or AI, and I’ll bet James agrees with me that leapfrogging the above scenario is possible, but his presentation is very interesting because few people think about these issues.

Although James’ article may make the process sound more straightforward than it actually would be in reality, it really might be that straightforward, and even a chance of it happening means we should open our eyes to the possibility. Some counterpoint arguments were given by a flustered commenter.

Professor Miller is currently writing a book on intelligence enhancement and the Singularity.

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Today is the birthday of Edwin Thompson Jaynes, a pioneer in probability theory, pictured above from his time at Berkeley in 1946. If Jaynes were alive today, he would be 85 years old. A world-class genius and devoted man of science, Jaynes made serious contributions to statistical mechanics, quantum physics, probability theory, philosophy of science, and even the physiology and mechanics of piano playing. His amusing and straightforward writing style make his works a pleasure to read.

Jaynes is primarily known for advancing the maximum entropy interpretation of thermodynamics, or MaxEnt approach, which, along with Bayesian inference, gives a mathematically optimal way of analyzing large amounts of input data, extracting patterns, and predicting future input. Maximum entropy methods are very popular (Google returns over a million results for the term) and are used for automated data analysis in dozens of disciplines, including medicine, economics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, and more. These methods are widely used in machine learning and can be considered a form of AI.

Most fascinating of all is Jaynes’ interpretation of probability theory. He realized that probability theory is a generalization of Aristotlean logic and by introducing degrees of belief this logic can be made much more flexible, as well as capable of dealing with uncertainty. This view is explained at length in his last work, Probability Theory - the Logic of Science. Although some parts of the book are fairly math-heavy, you can still get a lot out of the first few chapters with basic arithmetic.

For shorter pieces by Edwin Jaynes, see his page of unpublished works, which papers and lectures such as “How Does the Brain Do Plausible Reasoning?”, and his page of published works, including the fascinating “Prior Probabilities”.

Jaynes’ bio can be found here.

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Anthropologist Donald E. Brown’s landmark book Human Universals points out over 200 behavioral and cognitive features it is suspected are common to all human beings. The list is very instructive for thinking about this species that we so happen to have been born into, and how it might be different from future species we engineer or otherwise create. Here are a few of the more interesting ones:

• tabooed foods
• childhood fear of loud noises
• husband older than wife on average
• anthropomorphization
• reciprocal exchanges (of labor, goods, or services)
• dreams, interpretation of
• statuses on other than sex, age, or kinship bases
• onomatopoeia
• magic to win love
• language, prestige from proficient use of

See the full list here. Human cognitive biases may also be universal. Also related is the search for a list of inductive biases.

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The following, the name of a protein coat used by a certain strain of Tobacco Mosaic Virus, is the longest word used in the English language in a serious context, i.e., published not just for the sake of the length of the word itself:

acetylseryltyrosylserylisoleucylthreonylserylprolylserylglutaminyl-
phenylalanylvalylphenylalanylleucylserylserylvalyltryptophylalanyl-
aspartylprolylisoleucylglutamylleucylleucylasparaginylvalylcysteinyl-
threonylserylserylleucylglycylasparaginylglutaminylphenylalanyl-
glutaminylthreonylglutaminylglutaminylalanylarginylthreonylthreonyl-
glutaminylvalylglutaminylglutaminylphenylalanylserylglutaminylvalyl-
tryptophyllysylprolylphenylalanylprolylglutaminylserylthreonylvalyl-
arginylphenylalanylprolylglycylaspartylvalyltyrosyllysylvalyltyrosyl-
arginyltyrosylasparaginylalanylvalylleucylaspartylprolylleucylisoleucyl-
threonylalanylleucylleucylglycylthreonylphenylalanylaspartylthreonyl-
arginylasparaginylarginylisoleucylisoleucylglutamylvalylglutamyl-
asparaginylglutaminylglutaminylserylprolylthreonylthreonylalanylglutamyl-
threonylleucylaspartylalanylthreonylarginylarginylvalylaspartylaspartyl-
alanylthreonylvalylalanylisoleucylarginylserylalanylasparaginylisoleucyl-
asparaginylleucylvalylasparaginylglutamylleucylvalylarginylglycyl-
threonylglycylleucyltyrosylasparaginylglutaminylasparaginylthreonyl-
phenylalanylglutamylserylmethionylserylglycylleucylvalyltryptophyl-
threonylserylalanylprolylalanylserine

The Wikipedia entry is here. The word contains 1185 letters. A much longer word is the full chemical name for titin, the longest known protein, weighing in at 189,819 letters. Thanks to our wonderful computer technology, this word could probably be stored on a hard drive the size of a microbe.

I look forward to a day when superintelligent agents will toss words like these back and forth in microseconds, comprehending their full significance and cross-referencing them effortlessly. I’m excited about this not merely for the sake of grandiosity or hubris, but in anticipation of the new ideas that would become accessible through engaging in discourse on the superhuman level.

It’s interesting that humans usually find long words humorous. We like to laugh off things we don’t understand very well.

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