Accelerating Future

Fritz Haber (1868 - 1934) is one of the most controversial scientists of all time. A chemist, he developed the Haber process, which provides a way of extracting atmospheric nitrogen for the bulk synthesis of ammonia. Ammonia created by the Haber process is used to produce the world’s synthetic fertilizers, which nurture crops for over a third of the global population, providing food for billions of people who might otherwise not even be alive. The old way of getting fertilizer involved scraping bat poop from the walls of caves, or, later, extracting it from nitrogeneous rocks from Chile. For his invention, Haber received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918.

Unfortunately, being a WWI-era German military scientist, Haber did a lot of other research that could only be construed as evil. He is called the “father of chemical warfare” for developing poison gas for use in World War I, although the practice had been outlawed by the 1907 Hague Conventions. It wasn’t until 1997 that the stockpiling and use of chemical weapons was outlawed globally by the Chemical Weapons Convention. Haber also developed the infamous Zyklon B gas, which was used to murder millions of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals during the Holocaust. The ironic thing is that Haber was actually a converted Jew, and dozens of members of his extended family were killed by Zyklon B in concentration camps.

In 1915, Haber’s wife, a fellow chemist and collaborator, was so distraught about her husband’s research that she shot herself in the chest with his army pistol, right in their home garden. Haber didn’t seen to care much: he got a new wife who had no problem with his vile pursuits. He died in a Swiss convalescent home in 1933, never having an opportunity to see the genocide that his poisonous gas wrought during World War II. His son, Hermann, who emigrated to the United States during the war, subsequently committing suicide in 1946.

Dr. Haber’s story is a cautionary tale for the scientists of the present. In the next 20 years, if not sooner, military researchers will develop weapons much more destructive than mere nuclear bombs. The development of such weapons may be unavoidable. The necessity of the global arms race demands it. If democratic countries do not acquire the technology, elite-ruled countries will. This is an unpleasant reality that some fail to recognize.

At the same time, the scientists who develop this technology have a grave responsibility to stop their work if the leaders of their countries obviously turn sour, and to boycott contributions to any especially untoward projects. Whether or not the Bush administration (with its appointment of the warmongering fanatic John Bolton to the position of Permanent US Representative to the UN) qualifies as such leadership is subject to debate. But scientists have an obligation to take ethical responsibility for their work. If they are put to task on secret projects that are obviously vile, such as weaponized synthetic life, or artificial general intelligence for autonomous military robots, they should quit immediately and go into business, academia, or retire.

The global arms race must stop, or we are all doomed. Especially when we acquire technologies that are nigh-magical in their destructive capabilities. The solution could be a singleton, defined by Nick Bostrom as follows:

In set theory, a singleton is a set with only one member, but as I introduced the notion, the term refers to a world order in which there is a single decision-making agency at the highest level. Among its powers would be (1) the ability to prevent any threats (internal or external) to its own existence and supremacy, and (2) the ability to exert effective control over major features of its domain (including taxation and territorial allocation).

In the paper, Bostrom further adds “Singletons could be good, bad, or neutral”, and lists their possible benefits, including:

• Avoiding arms races, which can be costly even if they don’t lead to war.
• Avoiding a space colonization race that burns up the cosmic commons.
• Avoiding outcomes characterized by extreme inequality.
• Avoiding evolutionary pathways that lead to radically dystopian outcomes.

Bostrom warns against necessarily conceiving of a singleton as a dystopian tyrant, writing, “A singleton need not be monolithic. It could contain within itself an enormous variety of independent agents each pursuing their own disparate goals, just as is the case in a liberal democratic state. The goals and actions of the singleton could be decided by its inhabitants or their elected representatives.” He also argues why the eventual creation of a singleton seems likely in the context of the past: “Historically, we have seen an overarching trend towards the emergence of higher levels of social organization, from hunter-gatherer bands, to chiefdoms, city-states, nation states, and now multinational organizations, regional alliances, various international governance structures, and other aspects of globalization. Extrapolation of this trend points to the creation of a singleton.”

Maybe scientists could better spend their time working towards a benevolent singleton instead of weapons that could one day be turned on them and their families.

(Fritz Haber with his friend and colleague Dr. Einstein, who had the foresight to tell President Roosevelt in 1939 that the Nazis were working on the nuclear bomb, and that the Allies would need to develop their own bomb or risk being annihilated.)

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One branch of science I am fascinated by is paleontology. As stated in my previous post, I find it hard to understand and appreciate the natural world without knowledge of the evolutionary relationships between extant species. Also, I just think it’s cool.

Accordingly, I have started a paleontology blog, Arthropleura. From the about page:

“Arthropleura is a paleontology blog by Michael Anissimov. It is named after Arthropleura, an 8-ft long relative of centipedes and millipedes that lived during the Carboniferous period. Arthropleura was the largest terrestrial invertebrate that ever lived.”

I doubt my posting on Arthropleura will be as frequent as it is on Accelerating Future. Certainly, I believe that paleontology carries less utilitarian weight than the ethics and pragmatics of emerging technologies, but I am interested enough in the field to start a blog devoted to it. If you’re interested in the subject, please subscribe.

When I become superintelligent, I will start a blog on every topic I’m interested in, even the most banal.

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Among scientists and the scientifically literate public, there is a strong movement that says: “if science can be done, it should be done”. That is, all possible avenues of research should be pursued because the benefits always outweigh the risks, and anyone who disagrees is being anti-science. This stance might be called the flip-side of anarcho-primitivism. I call it the Religion of Science.

Many Christians believe all good things have their source in God. Some advocates of science seem to believe all good things come from science. Not so. Although all topics should be investigated in a scientific way, and science is one of our most powerful tools for improving human life, it is not infallible. The power of science can easily be channeled into militarism, manipulation, suppression, and outright accidents.

Some on the Left are distrustful of science because they identify it with corporations and the establishment. Others on the Religious Right are distrustful of science because of the numerous religious claims it flatly contradicts. What both sides need to acknowledge is that science and technology really are as powerful as its most enthusiastic proponents believe. Nuclear weapons and the Internet are just a warm-up. By refusing to see the evidence for this, and come to terms with science, these two groups lock themselves out of the debate. How big an impact will science have over the next couple decades, really?

When examining the future impact of science on the economy and society, I look first to manufacturing. Manufacturing is used to fabricate products and machines we use daily, things we can touch, feel, and see. These objects are tangible. Many people won’t believe a scientific development is real until they’re holding it in their hands. We know you can fit a camera, music player, browser, and cell phone on the same device because the iPod is real.

To take a peek behind the next page, look at the research grabbing the headlines today. J. Craig Venter recently said, in reference to his work on synthetic life, “We are sparking an industrial revolution.” His lab is set to implant a synthetic genome in a bacterium this year, manipulating it like a marionette. The bacterium, to be called Mycoplasma laboratorium, would have a self-replication time of about 2 hours. In a large enough incubator, a single synthetic bacterium could create a colony weighing 100,000 metric tons in just a week. What these synthetic life-forms will be used to manufacture will be limited by little but the design specs of the ribosome and the available raw materials. This shows the extreme impact science will have in the immediate future.

Mainstream nanotechnologists are giving attention to molecular nanotechnology. The Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems was recently released, to little media fanfare, but the involvement of scientists and engineers from three national laboratories — Pacific Northwest, Oak Ridge, and Brookhaven — gives us a clue that these people take the technology seriously. And molecular manufacturing could be orders of magnitude more powerful than bacterium-based manufacturing, building machines out of diamond and fullerenes instead of proteins.

Very intelligent people are starting to be convinced that the future of manufacturing lies in self-replicating systems, which is why we see projects like RepRap emerging, whose motto is “wealth without money”. Saul Griffith, an inventor who recently became a recipient of the MacArthur “genius grant”, highlighted the power of nanometer-scale self-replication (molecular manufacturing) in his 2004 PhD thesis. Answering the question, “What are you optimistic about?” on Edge.org, Physicist and genetic theorist Gregory Cochran said, “Hardly anyone seems to realize it, but we’re on the threshold of an era of unbelievable abundance. Within a generation—sooner if we want it enough—we will be able to make a self-replicating machine.”

The potential of near-future manufacturing technology is truly colossal. When self-replicating technologies start pulling their own weight financially and then some, an economic boom will start and not stop until the world is a very different place. Making as much of anything we want, limited only by energy and raw materials. More and more scientists and engineers are waking up to this near-future reality.

The downside of self-replication is the extreme danger. The radical magnification, decentralization and diversification of manufacturing will make it harder to track who is building what. Decentralized manufacturing capability will greatly boost the incentive to acquire and sell designs for hardware, especially military hardware. Even more worrisome would be a bacteria designed to be immune to viruses, or some new distributed weapon we cannot imagine today.

When I see people calling me a “Luddite” for worrying about future technological developments, I think one of two things. Either they greatly underestimate the transformative power of the technology they themselves advocate, or they recklessly support scientific research without considering all the consequences. Personally, I think the creation of the first synthetic life form, whether it happens this year or the next, will signify the arrival of a fundamentally different era. An era where mankind taps into the power that has made life the dominant feature on the Earth’s surface today: reprogrammable self-replication at the molecular level.

Without universally followed regulations and guidelines, things could get way out of control. I am not an authoritarian, but when you give humans a power that basically amounts to magic, ground rules have to be set and followed. Some avenues of research may even need to be abandoned.

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