The Last Post Was an Experiment

+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 …

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Why “Transhumanism” is Unnecessary

Who needs “transhumanism”? Millions of dollars are going into fields such as brain-computer interfacing, robotics, AI, and regenerative medicine without the influence of “transhumanists”. Wouldn’t transhumanism be better off if we relinquished the odd name and just marketed ourselves as “normal”?

Wild transhumanist ideas such as cryonics, molecular nanotechnology, hard takeoff, Jupiter Brains, and the like, distract our audience from the incremental transhumanist advances occurring on an everyday basis in labs at universities around the world. Brain implants exist, gene sequencing exists, regenerative medicine exists — why is this any different than normal science and medicine?

Motivations such as the desire to raise one’s father from the dead are clearly examples of theological thinking. Instead of embracing theology, we need to face the nitty gritty of the world here and now, with all of its blemishes and problems.

Instead of working towards blue-sky, neo-apocalyptic discontinuous advances, we need to preserve democracy by promoting incremental advances to ensure that every citizen has a voice in every important societal change, and the ability to democratically reject those changes if desired.

…

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$18.5 Million for Brain-Computer Interfacing

Another university is opening up a BCI lab, University of Washington. It makes sense because it’s near the Allen Institute for Brain Science, among other reasons. Did I mention that Christof Koch, the new Chief Science Officer of the Allen Institute, will be speaking at Singularity Summit?

Here’s an excerpt of the news release:

The National Science Foundation today announced an $18.5 million grant to establish an Engineering Research Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering based at the University of Washington.

“The center will work on robotic devices that interact with, assist and understand the nervous system,” said director Yoky Matsuoka, a UW associate professor of computer science and engineering. “It will combine advances in robotics, neuroscience, electromechanical devices and computer science to restore or augment the body’s ability for sensation and movement.”

The text is pretty generic boilerplate, it’s just the action that is important. We will likely have to wait a year or more before any interesting breakthroughs from this lab hit the news.

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Dale Carrico Classics

Just in case there are new readers, I want to refer them to the writings of Dale Carrico, probably the best transhumanist critic thus far. He’s a lecturer at Berkeley. (Maybe The New Atlantis should try hiring him, though I sort of doubt they’d get along.) I especially enjoy this post responding to my “Transhumanism Has Already Won” post:

The Robot Cultists Have Won?

When did that happen?

In something of a surprise move, Singularitarian Transhumanist Robot Cultist Michael Anissimov has declared victory. Apparently, the superlative futurologists have “won.” The Robot Cult, it would seem, has prevailed over the ends of the earth.

Usually, when palpable losers declare victory in this manner, the declaration is followed by an exit, either graceful or grumbling, from the stage. But I suspect we will not be so lucky when it comes to Anissimov and his fellow victorious would-be techno-transcendentalizers.

Neither can we expect them “to take their toys and go home,” as is usual in such scenes. After all, none of their toys — …

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Matter, Antimatter Origin Theories — Baryogenesis

I remember reading somewhere that one possibility in the early universe is that a tremendous amount of matter and antimatter both formed, most of it annihilated itself, and the small amount that remained became our present matter-dominated universe. From a few casual Google searches I have not been able to find this reference. It was probably some popular physics book written in the 1990s. Possibility one in the summary below would appear to correspond to this scenario, however.

The question is that of baryogenesis, which is not well understood. Here’s the background from Wikipedia:

The Dirac equation, formulated by Paul Dirac around 1928 as part of the development of relativistic quantum mechanics, predicts the existence of antiparticles along with the expected solutions for the corresponding particles. Since that time, it has been verified experimentally that every known kind of particle has a corresponding antiparticle. The CPT Theorem guarantees that a particle and its antiparticle have exactly the same mass and lifetime, and exactly opposite charge. Given this symmetry, it is puzzling that the universe does not have …

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Experimental Support for Monkey Self-Agency

For a contemporary press release relevant to my recent debate with Alex Knapp, “Rhesus monkeys have a form of self awareness not previously attributed to them”:

In the first study of its kind in an animal species that has not passed a critical test of self-recognition, cognitive psychologist Justin J. Couchman of the University at Buffalo has demonstrated that rhesus monkeys have a sense of self-agency — the ability to understand that they are the cause of certain actions — and possess a form of self awareness previously not attributed to them.

The study, which will be published July 6 in Biology Letters, a journal of the Royal Society, may illuminate apparent self-awareness deficits in humans with autism, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease and developmental disabilities. Rhesus monkeys are one of the best-known species of Old World monkeys, and have been used extensively in medical and biological research aimed at creating vaccines for rabies, smallpox and polio and drugs to manage HIV/AIDS; analyzing stem cells and sequencing the genome. Humans have sent them into space, cloned them and planted jellyfish …

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Ransom for “Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant” Flash Animation

My friend Kent Kemmish, at Halcyon Molecular, has offered to put up $50 for someone who does the best animated flash version of Nick Bostrom’s classic essay “The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant” (German version). Let’s say that the challenge stands for one month, until August 7th.

My other friend Kevin Fischer is also putting in $50 for a total of $100.

Would anyone else be interested in adding to that purse? We probably need to boost it by a few times to make this happen.

Updates:

Kent Kemmish initially put in $50. Kevin Fischer put in $50. Luke Parrish put in $50. Steve put in $50. Christopher Hamersley put in $50. Lincoln Cannon put in $50. Didier Coeurnelle put in $200.

The purse is now at $500.

Kickstarter won’t work because it has to be created by the person who does the project, and they are encumbered by having to promise deliverables. Both of these do not apply in this situation.

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The Benefits of a Successful Singularity

What is the point of a beneficial Singularity? A challenging question because there are so many potential benefits. Some of the benefits I enjoy more might not be the same as the benefits you would enjoy. People can disagree.

What kind of Singularity happens depends on what kind of singleton we end up with, but we can wistful and optimistic, right? The Singularity I’m working towards would have the following components:

1) Invention of molecular nanotechnology or superior manufacturing technology, enabling the production of near-unlimited food, housing, clean water, and other products.

2) Enforcement of local “volitional bubbles” that reduce the rate of non-consensual violent crime to zero. I’d be curious to see how altruistic superintelligence or the CEV output would handle cases where people join “fight clubs” where the risk of death is part of the bylaws.

3) Unless the current overall system is objectively optimal even to an altruistic superintelligence, presumably this would be rearranged for the better as well, though exactly how and in light of what drives and freedoms is hard to say. Probably …

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The Final Weapon

It’s not really “fair”, but history generally consists of people getting better and better weapons, and whoever has the best weapons and the best armies makes the rules. The number of historical examples of this phenomenon are practically unlimited. The reason America is respected and feared today is because of our military capabilities, particularly nuclear weapons. Complain if you want, this is reality.

I am excited by the possibility that the 200,000 year arms race will finally come to an end by a singleton. It had to end sometime. Personally, it will be a relief, if we survive. While many people can happily enjoy their lives on a daily basis, just focusing on their tiny sphere, myself and others are cursed with concerns about the overall trajectory of humanity and human conflict. My relationship with Murphy’s law is so close that I would hardly be surprised to hear the detonation of nuclear weapons in the distance, practically anytime or anywhere.

Nuclear weapons, of course, are toys in comparison to the products of MNT, or worse yet, true …

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Replying to Alex Knapp, July 2nd

Does Knapp know anything about the way existing AI works? It’s not based around trying to copy humans, but often around improving this abstract mathematical quality called inference.

I think you missed my point. My point is not that AI has to emulate how the brain works, but rather that before you can design a generalized artificial intelligence, you have to have at least a rough idea of what you mean by that. Right now, the mechanics of general intelligence in humans are, actually, mostly unknown.

What’s become an interesting area of study in the past two decades are two fascinating strands of neuroscience. The first is that animal brains and intelligence are much better and more complicated than we thought even in the 80s.

The second is that humans, on a macro level, think very differently from animals, even the smartest problem solving animals. We haven’t begun to scratch the surface.

Based on the cognitive science reading I’ve done up to this point, this is false. Every year, scientists discover cognitive abilities in animals that were

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The Illusion of Control in a Intelligence Amplification Singularity

From what I understand, we’re currently at a point in history where the importance of getting the Singularity right pretty much outweighs all other concerns, particularly because a negative Singularity is one of the existential threats which could wipe out all of humanity rather than “just” billions. The Singularity is the most extreme power discontinuity in history. A probable “winner takes all” effect means that after a hard takeoff (quick bootstrapping to superintelligence), humanity could be at the mercy of an unpleasant dictator or human-indifferent optimization process for eternity.

The question of “human or robot” is one that comes up frequently in transhumanist discussions, with most of the SingInst crowd advocating a robot, and a great many others advocating, implicitly or explicitly, a human being. Human beings sparking the Singularity come in 1) IA bootstrap and 2) whole brain emulation flavors.

Naturally, humans tend to gravitate towards humans sparking the Singularity. The reasons why are obvious. A big one is that people tend to fantasize that they personally, or perhaps their close friends, will be the people …

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Two Approaches to AGI/AI

There are two general approaches to AGI/AI that I’d like to draw attention to, not “neat” and “scruffy”, the standard division, but “brain inspired” and “not brain inspired”.

Accomplishments of not brain inspired AI:

Wolfram Alpha (in my opinion the most interesting AI today) spam filters DARPA Grand Challenge victory (Stanley) UAVs that fly themselves clever game AI AI that scans credit card records for fraud the voice recognition AI that we all talk to on the phone intelligence gathering AI Watson and derivatives Deep Blue optical character recognition (OCR) linguistic analysis AI Google Translate Google Search text mining AI OpenCog AI-based computer aided design the software that serves up user-specific Internet ads pretty much everything

Accomplishments of brain-inspired AI:

Cortexia, a bio-inspired visual search engine Numenta (no product yet) Neural networks, which have proven highly limited ???? (tell me below and I’ll add them)

One place where brain-inspired AI always shows up is in science fiction. In the real world, AI has very little to do with copying neurobiology, and everything to do with abstract mathematics …

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