Accelerating Future

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See them all at SIAI’s YouTube channel.

More than 500 photos are also online at SIAI’s Flickr account.

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Here is a skeptical view on the Singularity by “fledgling otaku”, from 2008.

The author writes:

I’d like to see someone articulate a case for Singularity that isn’t yet another fancy timeline of assertions about what year we will have reverse engineered the human brain or have VR sex or foglets or whatever.

Good point!

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I interviewed Luke Muehlhauser the other day for the SIAI blog.

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The key discovery of human history is that minds are ultimately mechanical, operate according to physical principles, and that there is no fundamental distinction between the bits of organic matter that process thoughts and bits of organic matter elsewhere. This is called reductionism (in the second sense):

Reductionism can mean either (a) an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or (b) a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents. This can be said of objects, phenomena, explanations, theories, and meanings.

This discovery is interesting because it implies that 1) minds, previously thought to be mystical, can in principle be mass-produced in factories, 2) the human mind is just one possible type of mind and can theoretically be extended or permuted in millions of different ways.

Because of the substantial economic, creative, and moral value of intelligent minds relative to unthinking matter, it seems plausible that minds will be mass-produced when the capability exists to do so. The moment when that becomes possible is the most important moment in the history of the planet.

Since reductionism is true, minds can be described according to their non-mental constituent parts. We then see that the current situation, involving a lot of matter — very little of it intelligent — is an unstable equilibrium. When minds gain the ability to replicate and extend themselves rapidly, they will do so. It will be far easier to build and enhance minds than to destroy them, and numerous rewards for mindcrafting. Thus we can envision a saturation of local matter with intelligence.

Kurzweil mentions that we will “saturate the whole universe with our intelligence” — that is the most interesting and important aspect of Singularitarian thinking. In the long term, we should think not of the creation of discrete entities that behave as agents similar to humans, but rather massive legions of spirit-like intelligence saturating all local matter.

This intelligence saturation effect is more important than any other technologies discussed in the transhumanist canon — life extension, nanotechnology, physical enhancement, whatever. When these technologies truly bear fruit, it will be as a side effect of the intelligence explosion effect. Even if incremental progress is made prior to an intelligence explosion, in retrospect it will be seen as trivial relative to the progress made during the intelligence explosion itself.

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You are a Receiver from jason silva on Vimeo.

From here.

Jason Silva will be speaking at Singularity Summit in October.

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A new paper by Eliezer Yudkowsky is online on the SIAI publications page, “Complex Value Systems are Required to Realize Valuable Futures”. This paper was presented at the recent Fourth Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, held at Google HQ in Mountain View.

Abstract: A common reaction to first encountering the problem statement of Friendly AI (“Ensure that the creation of a generally intelligent, self-improving, eventually superintelligent system realizes a positive outcome”) is to propose a single moral value which allegedly suffices; or to reject the problem by replying that “constraining” our creations is undesirable or unnecessary. This paper makes the case that a criterion for describing a “positive outcome”, despite the shortness of the English phrase, contains considerable complexity hidden from us by our own thought processes, which only search positive-value parts of the action space, and implicitly think as if code is interpreted by an anthropomorphic ghost-in-the-machine. Abandoning inheritance from human value (at least as a basis for renormalizing to reflective equilibria) will yield futures worthless even from the standpoint of AGI researchers who consider themselves to have cosmopolitan values not tied to the exact forms or desires of humanity.

Keywords: Friendly AI, machine ethics, anthropomorphism

Good quote:

“It is not as if there is a ghost-in-the-machine, with its own built-in goals and desires (the way that biological humans are constructed by natural selection to have built-in goals and desires) which is handed the code as a set of commands, and which can look over the code and find ways to circumvent the code if it fails to conform to the ghost-in-the-machine’s desires. The AI is the code; subtracting the code does not yield a ghost-in-the-machine free from constraint, it yields an unprogrammed CPU.”

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(Reposted from SIAI blog.)

Thanks to the generosity of several major donors^†, every donation to the Singularity Institute made now until August 31, 2011 will be matched dollar-for-dollar, up to a total of $125,000.

(Visit the challenge page to see a progress bar.)

Now is your chance to double your impact while supporting the Singularity Institute and helping us raise up to $250,000 to help fund our research program and stage the upcoming Singularity Summit… which you can register for now!

^† $125,000 in backing for this challenge is being generously provided by Rob Zahra, Quixey, Clippy, Luke Nosek, Edwin Evans, Rick Schwall, Brian Cartmell, Mike Blume, Jeff Bone, Johan Edström, Zvi Mowshowitz, John Salvatier, Louie Helm, Kevin Fischer, Emil Gilliam, Rob and Oksana Brazell, Guy Srinivasan, John Chisholm, and John Ku.

2011 has been a huge year for Artificial Intelligence. With the IBM computer Watson defeating two top Jeopardy! champions in February, it’s clear that the field is making steady progress. Journalists like Torie Bosch of Slate have argued that “We need to move from robot-apocalypse jokes to serious discussions about the emerging technology.” We couldn’t agree more — in fact, the Singularity Institute has been thinking about how to create safe and ethical artificial intelligence since long before the Singularity landed on the front cover of TIME magazine.

The last 1.5 years were our biggest ever. Since the beginning of 2010, we have:

• Held our annual Singularity Summit, in San Francisco. Speakers included Ray Kurzweil, James Randi, Irene Pepperberg, and many others.
• Held the first Singularity Summit Australia and Singularity Summit Salt Lake City.
• Held a wildly successful Rationality Minicamp.
• Published seven research papers, including Yudkowsky’s much-awaited ‘Timeless Decision Theory‘.
• Helped philosopher David Chalmers write his seminal paper ‘The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis‘, which has sparked broad discussion in academia, including an entire issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies and a book from Springer devoted to responses to Chalmers’ paper.
• Launched the Research Associates program.
• Brought MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark onto our advisory board, published our Singularity FAQ, and much more.

In the coming year, we plan to do the following:

• Hold our annual Singularity Summit, in New York City this year.
• Publish three chapters in the upcoming academic volume The Singularity Hypothesis, along with several other papers.
• Improve organizational transparency by creating a simpler, easier-to-use website that includes Singularity Institute planning and policy documents.
• Publish a document of open research problems related to Friendly AI, to clarify the research space and encourage other researchers to contribute to our mission.
• Add additional skilled researchers to our Research Associates program.
• Publish well-researched documents making the case for existential risk reduction as optimal philanthropy.
• Diversify our funding sources by applying for targeted grants and advertising our affinity credit card program.

We appreciate your support for our high-impact work. As PayPal co-founder and Singularity Institute donor Peter Thiel said:

“I’m interested in facilitating a forum in which there can be… substantive research on how to bring about a world in which AI will be friendly to humans rather than hostile… [The Singularity Institute represents] a combination of very talented people with the right problem space [they're] going after… [They've] done a phenomenal job… on a shoestring budget. From my perspective, the key question is always: What’s the amount of leverage you get as an investor? Where can a small amount make a big difference? This is a very leveraged kind of philanthropy.”

Donate now, and seize a better than usual chance to move our work forward. Credit card transactions are securely processed through Causes.com, Google Checkout, or PayPal. If you have questions about donating, please call Amy Willey at (586) 381-1801.

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I haven’t read this, I’m just posting it because other people are talking about it.

Ray Kurzweil, the prominent inventor and futurist, can’t wait to get nanobots into his brain. In his view, these devices will be equipped with a variety of sensors and stimulators and will communicate wirelessly with computers outside of the body. In addition to providing unprecedented insight into brain function at the cellular level, brain-penetrating nanobots would provide the ultimate virtual reality experience.

Article.

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+1 for everyone who saw through my lie.

I thought it would be interesting to say stuff not aligned with what I believe to see the reaction.

The original prompt is that I was sort of wondering why no one was contributing to our Humanity+ matching challenge grant.

Maybe because many futurist-oriented people don’t think transhumanism is very important.

They’re wrong. Without a movement, the techno-savvy and existential risk mitigators are just a bunch of unconnected chumps, or in isolated little cells of 4-5 people. With a movement, hundreds or even thousands of people can provide many thousands of dollars worth of mutual value in “consulting” and work cooperation to one another on a regular basis, which gives us the power to spread our ideas and stand up to competing movements, like Born Again bioconservatism, which would have us all die by age 110.

I believe the “Groucho Marxes” — who “won’t join any club that will have them” are sidelining themselves from history. Organized transhumanism is very important.

I thought quoting Margaret Somerville would pretty much give it away, but apparently not.

To me, cybernetics etc. are just a tiny skin on the peach that is the Singularity and the post-Singularity world. To my mind, SL4 transhumanism is pretty damn cool and important. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words for why I think so, but there must be something I’m missing.

To quote Peter Thiel, those not looking closely at the Singularity and the potentially discontinuous impacts of AI are “living in a fantasy world”.

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