Accelerating Future

“I am a 21st century person who was accidentally launched in the 20th. I have a deep nostalgia for the future.”

– FM 2030

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“For whosoever hath good inductive biases, to him more evidence shall be given, and he shall have an abundance: but whosoever hath not good inductive biases, from him shall be taken away even what little evidence that he hath.”

– Will Newsome

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1. Amusing Ourselves to Death
2. Ten Futuristic Materials
3. Top 10 Transhumanist Technologies
4. Brain-Computer Interfaces for Manipulating Dreams
5. The Benefits of a Successful Singularity
6. Six Places to Nuke for Multiplier Effects
7. Response to Charles Stross’ “Three arguments against the Singularity”
8. How Can I Incorporate Transhumanism into my Daily Life?
9. A Nuclear Reactor in Every Home
10. Wish
11. Terraformed Mars
12. Why “Transhumanism” is Unnecessary
13. Hard Takeoff Sources
14. X-Seed 4000
15. Kurzweil’s 2009 Predictions
16. The Illusion of Control in an Intelligence Amplification Singularity
17. Collaborative Map of Transhumanists Worldwide
18. Continuing Discussion with Mr. Knapp at Forbes
19. Paul Graham’s Disagreement Hierarchy
20. The Final Weapon

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My article on how to pitch articles to H+ magazine has been slightly improved and is now posted on H+ magazine.

Topics to inspire you:

• How can the transhumanist philosophy be applied to daily life?
• Quantified Self topics
• Is change actually accelerating? If so, what is the evidence?
• What technologies pose major risks and why?
• What are the next steps for robotics and AI?
• What is happening in genomics?
• What is the future of energy?
• Is culture getting friendlier to the future?
• What will the year 2020 be like?
• What will the year 2030 be like?
• What will the year 2050 by like?
• What will the year 2100 be like?
• Book reviews (Robopocalypse)
• Movie reviews (Limitless)
• Conference/event reviews
• Cool new businesses and initiatives in the transhumanist space
• Philosophical issues
• Other cultural commentary
• Space, space stations, spaceships, satellites, planetary colonization
• Topics similar to content in Scientific American and Popular Mechanics

Send your pitch ideas to editor@hplusmagazine.com. I look forward to seeing your ideas!

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I’m the new Managing Editor at H+ magazine, which in practical terms means I need to come up with five good articles a week to publish. The magazine gets a lot of traffic so it’s a good place to share information with other transhumanists.

1. Come up with an idea or coverage of a company/product/news story worth covering. Ideally you have had personal experience with the company/product/news story and are uniquely suited to write about it. If not, you should be ready to quote someone who has.

2. Send the pitch to editor@hplusmagazine.com. That goes into my inbox. Include links to samples of your other writing. (If you want to write articles for H+ magazine but haven’t written serious blog posts yet, you might want to try that first.)

3. If you get the go-ahead, investigate the story, get a quote from an expert in the area you’re writing about. Take notes. The article should primarily be reporting, not speculation or personal opinion. Editorials are welcome but harder to write than straightforward informative articles. If you do want to insert a little speculation, save it for the end.

4. Write the article. Between 500 and 1000 words is ideal. The less experienced you are at writing, the shorter and more concise it should be. Follow Singularity writing advice. Omit needless words. Remember the Most Important Writing Rule. Most likely, what you write will be boring not because you’re stupid, but because you aren’t bending over backwards far enough to please the audience. Make each sentence matter.

5. Use the inverse pyramid structure that is common for all news and magazine articles. The five Ws come first: who, what, where, when, and sometimes why and how. Then, the most important details of your story. Why should we care? That should be answered within two or three sentences of the beginning. Why is reading this article worth the reader’s precious time? Why should I read this article in my free time instead of going hiking, visiting the beach, or reading something better-written? If your idea isn’t good enough to occupy the reader’s time, don’t bother.

That’s it! Follow these simple guidelines, and your article will be accepted and you will become famous overnight. Within the transhumanist community, anyway. :)

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Updating this map is a little tricky, you have to be invited as a collaborator by someone who already is one. If you know someone already on the map you can ask them for an invite, otherwise you have to fill in your email address in form below. Then you can also invite anyone else to collaborate, you just need their email address. I promise I won’t sell it to spammers, this list is only for adding people to the map.

View Transhumanists Worldwide in a larger map

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Are you wildly brilliant? Do you read Less Wrong? Interested in learning new mental skills and helping us build a movement to directly implement the Singularity? If so, then consider applying to our 2011 Summer Program — “Rationality Boot Camp”.

The program 10 weeks, from June to August. This is an all-encompassing collaborative and learning experience, held in Berkeley, California. The program covers all your expenses for the duration, including the flight, if you are accepted.

I participated in the program in Summer 2008 and loved the experience. There, I made friends and intellectual collaborations that continue to be among my most valued and productive relationships. (It should be emphasized that this is a brand-new program, designed from scratch and being tried for the first time this summer.)

Visit here for bios of some people who have participated in the ongoing program over the past couple years, or are currently in it.

The deadline is basically now… if you are free this summer and interested in applying, I suggest you do so immediately.

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I was recently informed that my abstract was accepted for presentation at the Society for Philosophy and Technology conference in Denton, TX, this upcoming May 26 – 29. You may have heard of their journal, Techné. Register now for the exciting chance to see me onstage, talking AI and philosophy. If you would volunteer to film me, that would make me even more excited, and valuable to our most noble cause.

Here’s the abstract:

Anthropomorphism and Moral Realism in Advanced Artificial Intelligence
Michael Anissimov
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence

Humanity has attributed human-like qualities to simple automatons since the time of the Greeks. This highlights our tendency to anthropomorphize (Yudkowsky 2008). Today, many computer users anthropomorphize software programs. Human psychology is extremely complex, and most of the simplest everyday tasks have yet to be replicated by a computer or robot (Pinker 1997). As robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) become a larger and more important part of civilization, we have to ensure that robots are capable of making complex, unsupervised decisions in ways we would broadly consider beneficial or common-sensical. Moral realism, the idea that moral statements can be true or false, may cause developers in AI and robotics to underestimate the effort required to meet this goal. Moral realism is a false, but widely held belief (Greene 2002). A common notion in discussions of advanced AI is that once an AI acquires sufficient intelligence, it will inherently know how to do the right thing morally. This assumption may derail attempts to develop human-friendly goal systems in AI by making such efforts seem unnecessary.

Although rogue AI is a staple of science fiction, many scientists and AI researchers take the risk seriously (Bostrom 2002; Rees 2003; Kurzweil 2005; Bostrom 2006; Omohundro 2008; Yudkowsky 2008). Arguments have been made that superintelligent AI — an intellect much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field — could be created as early as the 2030s (Bostrom 1998; Kurzweil 2005). Superintelligent AI could copy itself, potentially accelerate its thinking and action speeds to superhuman levels, and rapidly self-modify to increase its own intelligence and power further (Good 1965; Yudkowsky 2008). A strong argument can be made that superintelligent machines will eventually become a dominant force on Earth. An “intelligence explosion” could result from communities or individual artificial intelligences rapidly self-improving and acquiring resources.

Most AI rebellion in fiction is highly anthropomorphic — AIs feeling resentment towards their creators. More realistically, advanced AIs might pursue resources as instrumental objectives in pursuit of a wide range of possible goals, so effectively that humans could be deprived of space or matter we need to live (Omohundro 2008). In this manner, human extinction could come about through the indifference of more powerful beings rather than outright malevolence. A central question is, “how can we design a self-improving AI that remains friendly to humans even if it eventually becomes superintelligent and gains access to its own source code?” This challenge is addressed in a variety of works over the last decade (Yudkowsky 2001; Bostrom 2003; Hall 2007; Wallach 2008) but is still very much an open problem.

A technically detailed answer to the question, “how can we create a human-friendly superintelligence?” is an interdisciplinary task, bringing together philosophy, cognitive science, and computer science. Building a background requires analyzing human motivational structure, including human-universal behaviors (Brown 1991), and uncovering the hidden complexity of human desires and motivations (Pinker 1997) rather than viewing Homo sapiens as a blank slate onto which culture is imprinted (Pinker 2003). Building artificial intelligences by copying human motivational structures may be undesirable because human motivations given capabilities of superintelligence and open-ended self-modification could be dangerous. Such AIs might “wirehead” themselves by stimulating their own pleasure centers at the expense of constructive or beneficent activities in the external world. Experimental evidence of the consequences of direct stimulation of the human pleasure center is very limited, but we have anecdotal evidence in the form of drug addiction.

Since artificial intelligence will eventually exceed human capabilities, it is crucial that the challenge of creating a stable human-friendly motivational structure in AI is solved before the technology reaches a threshold level of sophistication. Even if advanced AI is not created for hundreds of years, many fruitful philosophical questions are raised by the possibility (Chalmers 2010).

References

Bostrom, N. (2002). “Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios”. Journal of Evolution and Technology, 9(1).

Bostrom, N. (2003). “Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence”. Cognitive, Emotive and Ethical Aspects of Decision Making in Humans and in Artificial Intelligence.

Bostrom, N. (2006). “How long before superintelligence?”. Linguistic and Philosophical Investigations 5 (1): 11–30.

Brown, D. (1991). Human Universals. McGraw Hill.

Chalmers, D. (2010). “The Singularity: a Philosophical Analysis”. Presented at the Singularity Summit 2010 in New York.

Good, I. J. (1965). “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine”, Advances in Computers, vol 6, Franz L. Alt and Morris Rubinoff, eds, pp 31-88, Academic Press.

Greene, J. (2002). The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth about Morality and What to Do About it. Doctoral Dissertation for the Department of Philosophy, Princeton University, June 2002.

Hall, J.S. (2007). Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine. Amherst: Prometheus Books.

Omohundro, S. (2008). “The Basic AI Drives”. Proceedings of the First AGI Conference, Volume 171, Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, edited by P. Wang, B. Goertzel, and S. Franklin, February 2008, IOS Press.

Pinker, S. (1997). How the Mind Works. Penguin Books.

Pinker, S. (2003). The Blank Slate: the Modern Denial of Human Nature. Penguin Books.

Rees, M. (2003). Our Final Hour: A Scientist’s Warning : how Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind’s Future in this Century – on Earth and Beyond. Basic Books.

Wallach, W. & Allen, C. (2008). Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong. Oxford University Press.

Yudkowsky, E. (2001). Creating Friendly AI. Publication of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

Yudkowsky, E. (2008). “Artificial Intelligence as a positive and negative factor in global risk”. In N. Bostrom and M. Cirkovic (Eds.), Global Catastrophic Risks (pp. 308-343). Oxford University Press.

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There will be only one future, that we’re all forced to share, that’s the thing. If you do something stupid, someone on the other side of the world can suffer.

There aren’t “futures”, there is one Future.

The future is not accelerating, by the way.

Why do I still call my blog “accelerating future”? 1) transition costs, 2) I want to bring in people who think the future actually is accelerating and change their minds, of course!

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February 13, 2011. Transcendent Man screening, San Jose, CA.
May 10-13, 2011. Cryonics Teens and Twenties Meetup, Ft. Lauderdale, FL.
May 26-29, 2011. Society for Philosophy and Technology 2011 Conference, Dayton, TX.
July 7-8th, 2011. World Future Society 2011 Meeting, Vancouver, Canada.
Dates TBA. Singularity Summit 2011, New York, NY.
August 3-6. The Fourth Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, Mountain View, CA.

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Yesterday was the 5th anniversary of this blog.

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• Systems Integration
• Materials Science
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• Applied Physics
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• Organometallic Chemistry
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More details on necessary skills is available here.

If so, and you’re interested in working for the most exciting biotech startup in California and possibly even the world, I encourage you to send me your resume and a short letter describing your skills and interests. You can learn more about Halcyon Molecular at the website, updates, and technology pages.

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