Accelerating Future

Part of the rationale for being a “transhumanist”, or, more broadly, having grandiose dreams for humanity’s future, is the extremely simple and mundane observation that the available matter and free energy in our general vicinity is far larger than what we have utilized of it thus far. The incoming solar energy is about a million times greater than global energy consumption, and the available hydrothermal energy to be extracted from the energy gradient between the mantle and the upper crust is many times that. These energy sources far exceed that available from all fossil fuels, uranium, and thorium combined. In the long run (less than a century?), solar and hydrothermal will become our primary energy sources, simply because nothing else will be able to meet our exponentially growing demand.

The biosphere contains just two trillion tonnes of carbon, but the oceans contain about 36 trillion tonnes of carbon (mostly as bicarbonate ion), and several trillion tonnes of additional carbon exist as fossil matter, including the leftovers from the catastrophic Azolla event 49 million years ago. Retrieving oceanic carbon and reintroducing it to the organic biosphere could allow us to reestablish beautiful forests over much of the surface of the planet. Historically, tropical forests extended to within 40 degrees of the equator, subtropical forests to 60, and other forests to the poles. Palm trees and turtles thrived at the North Pole. Our current ice, grass, and desert-covered Earth is a geophysical abnormality caused by an Ice Age that began 23 million years ago when Antarctica split from South America, permitting the creation of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and leading to an “Icebox Earth” with glaciated poles. We have had greener ages, and we can bring them back with technology, particularly organic and inorganic self-replicating agents.

Though most environmentalists center their efforts around preserving currently existing biodiversity, forward-looking environmentalists should look towards not just preserving the already existing biodiversity, by setting environmental conditions conducive to the development of millions of new species and a planet covered in luxuriant foliage. By using vertical farming, which will be demonstrated as proof-of-concept within years, and closed-cycle manufacturing, we can minimize our footprint and sustain upwards of 100 billion people with negligible environmental impact. The current impression that the planet is overpopulated is a selection effect resulting from people living in crowded cities, concentrated by technological and economic necessity. Decentralized manufacturing and high-resolution virtual communication will allow a more evenly distributed populace.

Some, like environmentalist Bill McKibben — have said “Enough”, enough technology, enough life, enough progress. Unsurprisingly, I disagree. Looking back from the perspective of a world more than 20 times lusher and Nature-filled than today, with more than 20 times more people distributed evenly across huge tracts of land now practically empty, it will be hard to say, “we should have stopped when we were just at 5% of this potential”. There have been other times in history with just 5% of the biomass and life of today — immediately after major mass extinctions. If today’s world is “enough”, then why stop there? Why not revert back to a world with even less biodiversity and biomass? It would be a surprising coincidence if the current biomass is just right, rather than too little or too much. Those arguing otherwise are just products of their environment — the glacier, desert, and steppe-covered poverty of the Late Cenozoic.

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It’s important to realize the obvious: that every human problem, every malady, every concern, every evil, is at root simply a suboptimal arrangement of atoms and molecules. If this sounds quasi-spiritual, it’s because it is — for millennia, pre-scientific humans have attributed all ills to various agents — the gods, magicians, and other humans. This is because these ills demand an explanation, and we didn’t have a plausible one, so we made it up. Now, at least in the abstract, we have a concrete, very likely correct answer: suboptimal atomic arrangements.

This realization is neither trivial nor too broad to be useless. If your problems are caused by the gods (that some people sadly still believe in…), then to solve them, you either need to give up, on engage in rituals (prayer, sacrifice, etc.) that have an empirical impact of precisely zero. The ultimate promise is that the gods or God will come at the end of time to make everything better. Unfortunately (?) for us, that will never happen.

The alternative is to slash all spirits from your worldview and model the world as a game board where all the pieces are humans. This too isn’t quite correct, as many who avoid the error of deification of Nature fall right into the trap of the fundamental attribution error, where everything that goes right or wrong becomes some human’s fault or credit. The attribution error is absolutely omnipresent in politics, because invoking it also invokes human political emotions that a leader can easily use to manipulate everyone who has never heard of the error. Since this is practically everyone, it’s politically rational to exploit it to its fullest, and a self-reinforcing feedback loop of error is created. Excuse me, but there are a lot of relevant forces in this world besides deliberate human choice. The shared biases of all human beings come to mind, as do biological realities such as the existence of malaria, and economic realities such as centralized manufacturing.

One sidenote on the notion that “all ills are caused by suboptimal atomic arrangements”. People will have different definitions of what is suboptimal, that is patently obvious. That doesn’t change the fact the subjective personal ills are caused by suboptimal atomic rearrangements, or that there’s a huge space in the center of the Venn diagram of shared humans goals that is specified by certain specific atomic arrangements. Simply because we can’t specify all these arrangements doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

Despite my recognition of a physicalist basis to all problems, I do not advocate a universal convergence towards One True Atomic Pattern or other such absolutist nonsense. I simply wish us to recognize that all shared human problems can be ultimately diagnosed and remedied using the scientific method plus remedial effort: use tests to determine the suboptimal atomic arrangements, then devise engineering solutions to rearrange current arrangements into a more optimal state. This holds true for mental phenomena as well as phenomena in the external world — my brain is “the external world” for others and it is entirely physical. Those who advocate an aphysical basis for consciousness are making the same mystical mistakes that our ancestors have yawn-inducingly made for thousands of years. I am special even if my consciousness has a purely physical basis.

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From Eurekalert, a press release titled, “Complex decision? Don’t sleep on it”:

Neither snap judgements nor sleeping on a problem are any better than conscious thinking for making complex decisions, according to new research.

The finding debunks a controversial 2006 research result asserting that unconscious thought is superior for complex decisions, such as buying a house or car. If anything, the new study suggests that conscious thought leads to better choices.

Since its publication two years ago by a Dutch research team in the journal Science, the earlier finding had been used to encourage decision-makers to make “snap” decisions (for example, in the best-selling book Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell) or to leave complex choices to the powers of unconscious thought (”Sleep on it”, Dijksterhuis et al., Science, 2006).

At stake in these conscious/unconscious thought experiments (literally) is a wider philosophical argument about the value of intuition and hunches. We want to think that hunches produce better decisions, and have been taught since we were children that this is an intelligent way to approach reality (”Use the Force, Luke”.) However, it ain’t so. Though hunches may be useful for simple decisions, like when to swing a bat to hit a ball, conscious thought appears to be superior for complex decisions, the ones that really matter.

It appears that the mysteriousness of unconscious thought may be part of its appeal. However, I find that conscious thought can be as mysterious as unconscious thought. Underlying every conscious thought is a bedrock of unconscious beliefs and assumptions. Only through deliberate questioning can we methodically dig up these beliefs and question them for accuracy and relevance. Without regular housekeeping, things can get pretty messy down there. The great project of analyzing our beliefs with conscious thought is far more interesting than the plug-and-play autonomicity and quick fix of unconscious thought.

Some arguments for the infeasibility of AI rest on the supposed mysteriousness and power of unconscious thought. But as I mention, conscious thoughts rest on unconscious ones, so this mysteriousness and power are still retained in consciousness. All that aside, cognition is way less mysterious than it was a few decades ago, and now we know a tremendous amount about the mind. It’s only a matter of time before its structure becomes understood, just like our place in the cosmos, interactions between chemicals, the behavior of electromagnetic fields, and thousands of other phenomena that were once baffling but are now taught in High School.

Of course, investigating the structure of thought in greater detail and coming to understand it may frustrate people like Douglas Hofstadter, who would lose respect for humanity if we come to learn too much about ourselves too soon. According to Hofstadter, reaching the goal of AI in a few decades would make him “fear that our minds and souls were not deep”.

Such spiritualistic language in reference to the human mind only discourages level-headed research and objective question-asking.

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Evolution crafts organisms with specific goals. Always, they revolve around a variable called inclusive fitness. Subgoals of inclusive fitness include ability to survive, obtain food, mate, and (sometimes) protect offspring and engage in evolution-mediated reciprocal altruism. In humans, the subgoals blossom into a peacock-tail-like phantasmagoria of music, art, ornamentation, intellectual pursuits, yadda yadda. Still, these are all spinoffs of inclusive fitness.

Inclusive fitness according to Earthly life is a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny subset of all information-theoretically possible goal systems. The Hamming distance between Earthly life’s goals and goals of biota on another planet may be huge. This phenomenon magnifies itself when you have intelligence that can formulate its own goals and rearrange its evolutionary goals into arbitrary permutations.

Heard of the concept of a limit? When a certain goalset is implemented at the limit, totalistic things happen. For instance, if you were to implement a rabbit genome’s goalset to the limit, most of the terrestrial biomass on planet Earth would be converted into copies of rabbits. Ditto with practically every other animal. Animals are basically just robots manipulated by long DNA molecules, anyway.

When we can produce arbitrary goalsets and back them up with optimization pressure equivalent or exceeding that exerted by Homo sapiens, it’s usually called “bad”. Yet within the next century, we’ll likely create one that we consider “harmless”.

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Albert Einstein described belief in God as “childish superstition” and said Jews were not the chosen people, in a letter to be sold in London this week, an auctioneer said Tuesday.

The father of relativity, whose previously known views on religion have been more ambivalent and fuelled much discussion, made the comments in response to a philosopher in 1954.

As a Jew himself, Einstein said he had a great affinity with Jewish people but said they “have no different quality for me than all other people.”

“The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.

“No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this,” he wrote in the letter written on January 3, 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, cited by The Guardian newspaper.

The German-language letter is being sold Thursday by Bloomsbury Auctions in Mayfair after being in a private collection for more than 50 years, said the auction house’s managing director Rupert Powell.

In it the renowned scientist, who declined an invitation to become Israel’s second president, rejected the idea that the Jews are God’s chosen people.

“For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions,” he said.

“And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people.”

And he added: “As far as my experience goes, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.”

Previously the great scientist’s comments on religion — such as “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind” — have been the subject of much debate, used notably to back up arguments in favour of faith.

Powell said the letter being sold this week gave a clear reflection of Einstein’s real thoughts on the subject. “He’s fairly unequivocal as to what he’s saying. There’s no beating about the bush,” he told AFP.

– PhysOrg

Looks like Einstein was too “tactful” (preoccupied with what other people think) to say what he actually believed in public during his lifetime, so it had to be discovered 50 years later. Thanks, Einstein.

More:

The Guardian

“Despite his categorical rejection of conventional religion, Brooke said that Einstein became angry when his views were appropriated by evangelists for atheism.”

Too bad. You are angry when people take what you say seriously?

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Today is the birthday of David Pearce, a utilitarian philosopher and a co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association along with Nick Bostrom. The above image is from an interview with David in the German edition of Vanity Fair.

David Pearce is the primary founder of the modern philosophy of abolitionism, the idea that all involuntary suffering is unacceptable and must be eliminated. To me, David, and a few others like Nick Bostrom and Pablo Stafforini, this is common sense, but to most of the public, it’s an unfamiliar idea. David’s notion of abolitionism includes completely remaking the ecosystem so that predators do not cause the suffering of prey. You might say, “but that’s not natural!”, but the fact of the matter is that “natural” can be cruel and evil. If you were being consumed by wolves in the forest, I’d doubt you’d say “I accept and support this natural outcome, lol”. Most animals do not have the benefit of human technology for them to protect themselves from suffering, disease, and profound discomfort.

I was reading the Pearce interview in Vanity Fair, and wanted to pick out a few choice tidbits:

VF What about the suffering of animals?

D.P. When it is possible to produce genetically engineered “vat food” that is both tastier and cheaper than food from intact animals, you are likely to see a switch to global veganism. It’s likely that this technological development is going to happen in the next 50 years.

I totally agree with this one — everyone will be a vegan soon, if for nothing else, that in vitro meat will be better and cheaper. When we’re no longer compelled to mass murder animals in factory farms, many people will stand up and say, “well, we knew it was wrong all along”. Amazing how morally sophisticated people can get when practical alternatives to the immoral behavior emerge! (I’m guilty of this just as much as anyone.)

One more:

VF And do you want all animals to become vegans, too?

D.P. Fanciful as it sounds, yes – though this switch would require massive genetic rewrites and ecosystem redesign. In terms of Nature, I’m not a great one for romanticizing wildlife - which is often pretty brutal. We’re inconsistent. People think cats are beautiful and forgive them for tormenting mice. But to someone who, say, romanticizes blond Aryan supermen in their occasional savagery we would be less forgiving. If I pass a butcher-shop, to be honest, I think of Auschwitz. Yes, the non-human animals that we raise in factory farms and kill are not particularly intelligent; but they suffer horribly, just like human babies and toddlers. We tend to associate intensity of consciousness with intelligence. In fact the most distinctively intelligent human traits like our language capacity or mathematics – their accessibility to introspection is very subtle at best. Whereas the most intense emotions like pain, thirst and hunger tend to be extremely primitive. It’s doubtful whether a pig, for instance, suffers any less than a human infant.

Well… let’s do it! A task this huge seems to be a job for benevolent superintelligence.

Again, happy birthday to David Pearce. Today’s a perfect day to look over all his stuff and get (re)familiarized with his ideas.

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The basic idea of utilitarianism is to do the greatest good for the greatest number. A related idea, negative utilitarianism, requires us to prevent the greatest amount of suffering for the greatest number. According to its proponents, the greatest harms are more consequential than the greatest goods.

Would you rather avoid being tortured for a day, or engage in your favorite activity for a day? For many, the answer is obvious: avoid torture. This synchs well with humanity’s empirically demonstrated aversion to risk. It also makes sense evolutionarily, as avoiding pain was probably more adaptive than merely seeking pleasure.

Negative utilitarianism seems like a reasonable enough philosophy, at least at first. What could possibly be wrong with minimizing harm? Well, it turns out that the optimal implementation of negative utilitarianism would be to kill off all of humanity in the quickest and most painless way possible. That way, the probability of Earth-originating sentients experiencing harm in the future is reduced to zero. From the perspective of negative utilitarianism, this is the best possible outcome.

Hah! Now I’ll bet you think negative utilitarianism sounds like a horrible idea, don’t you? The problem is that it may be a philosophically appealing viewpoint to a subset of humanity. One challenge of futuristic technologies is that they may make possible the existence of groups that are unaccountable in practice. I’m not saying I want such groups to exist, or that such groups existing is a good idea, just that it could actually happen and we might be hard pressed to do anything about it. A prototype of such a scenario is given in the novel Aristoi, where aristocrats uses nanotechnology and brain-computer interfaces to ensure absolute dominance over the rest of humanity.

If an Aristoi class decides that negative utilitarianism makes sense, then from their perspective, it could be quite appealing to destroy all of humanity. Do we have any intelligent strategies for averting such a possibility?

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