A Door Into Summer
Posted by Jeriaska on December 25th, 2007
The anthropic principle tells us we should not be surprised to find that the laws of physics allow for life to exist, because here we are. In the same respect, for cryonics patients who are reanimated, there are a number of advanced technologies they should not be surprised to find in existence when they awake. J. Storrs Hall offered some predictions of what one could we expect to discover in such a historical context in his 2006 Alcor Conference presentation “A Door Into Summer.”
The following transcript of J. Storrs Hall’s 2006 Alcor conference presentation “A Door Into Summer” has not been approved by the author. DVD sets of the 6th Alcor conference and 7th Alcor conference are available for purchase at the Alcor website.
A Door Into Summer
Predictions are tough, especially about the future, at least if you believe Yogi Berra. However, in this particular case, you’re going to be able to do a little predicting about my talk because it turns out that the major thrust of it was actually foreseen by a remark that was tossed off by Ralph in his talk. I was pleased to note that he got it right. The question that I want to think about now is if we do wake up in the future at some point, what is it going to be like?
Will we have flying cars?
One hundred years ago, 1900, it was the scientific opinion of the entire world that heavier than air flight was impossible. Three or four years later the Wright brothers came along and, low and behold, showed that it was possible. But one thing that most people don’t realize is that even though automobiles existed before 1900 and there were several practicing futurists, people like Edward Bellamy, H.G. Wells, and so forth, nobody managed to predict the universal ownership of the motorcar. That may well have been the one thing that made the biggest difference in terms of our way of life as far as technological influence during the 20th century.
Will we have space travel?
There are lots of really good reasons that we should have space travel? Not the least of which is that there are more and more people on the earth, and we are using it up, because the earth is fragile. Not only is the earth fragile with respect with what we do to it but things may happen to it that cause us a bunch of problems as well. It would be really nice to be able to move out into the rest of the solar system if that actually makes sense, if it is not just plain science fiction.
Will we have robot servants?
Actually, this is something I have spent an awful lot of my life working on. This would be just the most wonderful thing to have. If we had actual robot servants and other artificial intelligence in highly sophisticated machinery of this kind it would make just as huge a difference in the human condition over the coming few centuries as either flying cars or space travel.
In physics there is this thing they call the anthropic principle which says that we should not really be surprised to find that the laws of physics allow for life to exist, because here we are. If we wake up in the future, there are a number of things that we should not be surprised to find. Technology will have to be in a state where they can actually do the revival that is necessary. We won’t wake up in a world where there are legal or moral restrictions to the extent that they won’t be able to do this sort of thing. We won’t wake up in a world where the economics is so poor that there are not the resources available to do this sort of thing.
So, the technology that we expect to find in the future world where we wake up, and this is the standard expectation in this community and related communities, is nanotechnology. If nanotechnology really is there and we really do have control of the structure of matter down to the molecular level, there are a few fairly straightforward implications. We are going to have bodies that don’t age. This is almost obvious. If you can do it once, if you can take somebody and put them through cryonic preservation and reanimate them, then just do it again. But it’s almost certain that we are going to be able to do it without quite going through the entire process and achieve the same effect.
The same thing is true of disease. We should in theory be able to counter both invasive and degenerative diseases, although if we are really stupid we will buy “Body by Microsoft” and be infested with viruses and bugs, so the mere fact that in theory technology is capable of fixing some of this stuff does not mean that we can’t necessarily be stupid enough to cause them to happen anyway.
On the other hand, we can be significantly enhanced. Respirocytes can be more than a medical remedy. They can allow you to go and skin dive for four hours without taking a breath. Any number of other specific kinds of improvements in the body, as well as improvements in the brain, we can have built-in implants that form very capable digital assistants.
But is nanotechnology of that kind strictly necessary? I don’t think it actually is, although you need to be getting fairly close. I can imagine a scanning machine that was a development of electron beam lithography machines and scanning electron microscopes that could take a brain apart cubic nanometer by cubic nanometer and pull enough information out of it that you would be able to guess what the structure had been at a level where you could recover the individual. On the other hand, of course, you would want to build a body. So you would need molecular nanotechnology for that.
The amount of information that you pull out of a brain, if you scan it at a level close enough to recover all of the information there, is a huge amount of data. The bottom bar here is human-equivalent processing power (HEPP) according to Hans Moravec, who envisioned building robots with engineered software. The next line is human-equivalent processing power according to Ray Kurzweil, who envisions essentially doing what we are talking about here: reading out the structure of a brain and simulating it on a machine. As well as I can estimate it, there is a big step up to the amount of computing power necessary just to do that readout and sort the data down to a usable form.
What that means is that given computing power is increasing with time, by the time we have the computing power necessary to do the readout, we are going to have human-equivalent processing power for awhile.
Here is the same basic idea. Each one of these bars is divided at a point that represents where I think technology is now. The extent of the bar has to do with the fact that these technologies are all getting cheaper as time goes by. I would be personally willing to try and build you a machine for $1 million with current technology that would run a Moravec style engineered software robot. That does not mean that anybody knows what the software is yet, but as far as the hardware is concerned that is where I think we are now: $1 million for an AI brain.
The far end of this is where I think the technology will be by the time we can actually do the brain scan. The current level for the upload brain is way out of reach, but by the time we can do the scan, the upload brain is going to be kind of expensive but within reach. A robot body is more expensive than the computing hardware right now but it will be a lot closer to affordable by the time the scanning technology gets here. Actually being able to recreate the biological bodies that we have now will be really expensive. I have no clue how to go about it. You can think about producing a new body by techniques kind of like cloning, but as far as I know nobody with current technology has any clue how to take your brain and put it into that body.
So, “Good morning, welcome to the future. Would you like a cup of coffee? By the way, your mind is being simulated on a computer. We won’t be able to build an authentic biological body for you for several years, so you might want to think about your options…”
This is current economic statistics from the World Bank. The top row is poor countries, the bottom row is rich countries. The left column is the natural resources per capita of the people there. The point to note is that a quarter of the wealth of people in poor countries right now is just their natural resources. This primarily means the value of the land as farmland, although there is some amount of mining and other stuff. The bottom line here is that not much more than half of their wealth is in the form of knowledge. Basically, people in these countries are only about four times as well off as chimpanzees would be in the same place. The knowledge that they have is roughly just how to be a dirt farmer and get a little more out of it than the animals would.
By contrast, in rich countries today, the amount of wealth by percentage is actually larger in absolute terms, but in percentage it is small. Whereas, the vast bulk of wealth is knowledge. What I want you to do is use the poor countries as a proxy for the past. We are going to take some poor dirt farmer who lived in 1706, just before the invention of the steam engine. His life expectancy is 30. He travels where he can walk. He probably knows someone who owns a book. He has never seen a steam engine because they haven’t quite gotten it working yet. It is a year’s labor to make a wool blanket. This is the economic situation people had before the industrial revolution.
Now, I want you to take the difference between that level of technology and our level of technology today and shift it up so that the bottom end of that difference is here, and I want you to imagine what the top end would be like. I think that is basically what Arthur Clarke meant by this famous phrase, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
So, what is going to happen next? As I was saying before, by the time we are able to do the readout of a cryopreserved brain, the computing power and the science necessary to build intelligent machines will be here and will be cheap. Machines will do all the work. There will be nothing a human being can do better than a machine. This includes thinking. The combination of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence will be able to produce stuff that is not only as detailed in structure but as detailed in design as life itself at rates much faster than life can do that.
Now, just imagine again that you are the poor dirt farmer from 1700 and you have been brought forward to today, and you want to make a living that was like the living that you made and be a productive member of the community. If you actually came to today and looked around you might find that there were more attractive options available to you. By exactly the same analogy, when you wake up in the future after nanotechnology, you might very well want to try some different options than simply doing what it is you do now.
Here is the map of your options. This is where you start, you’re in a biological body and you get read out into what is basically a three-dimensional picture of your brain at a very high level of resolution. In order to do anything with that, you have to translate that into a logical map of the brain that basically is a circuit diagram. The normal notion is that you are going to take this and use that to produce another version of the physical description that is fixed. You transfer that back into a biological body, and there you are, young and healthy. If you are the philosopher John Searle of Berkeley, that’s what you do, because he does not believe that if you were to take the same mind and put it back into another substrate that it is really a mind anymore.
On the other hand, if you are me, you do something else. You go from this description to another machine that can do the same things, but can also do more things. You can build a body with nanotechnology that is considerably more capable than the human body. It can do things like fly. You can build a brain that has the same amount of matter and uses the same amount of energy as a human brain that thinks a thousand times faster. That would be a nice thing to be. On the other hand, you don’t have to be a hardwired robot at all. You can go into a virtual form and be a program that lives in a huge shared computer with a whole bunch of other programs and has much higher rates of intercommunication and access to thousands of different virtual worlds, and so forth. Or you can transfer yourself into matter that has no fixed physical form and you can decide what form you want to take from second to second, or you can be the control program of a spaceship or whatever else you want to do. The key is, you are not stuck in any one of these because you can get from any of these places to any other place. The only reason that you wouldn’t want to go back into a biological body after having done any of these is that you have to throw away 99% of your new mind.
This is the same chart basically, only on a different scale. Capability runs high and cost runs to the right. Unfortunately, the poor human body is down here is the most expensive and least capable corner. You can be enhanced by using some more nanotech and putting in your respirocytes and what have you, or for the same price you can go all the way up to the dedicated robot. If you are really into being a human being, you can run down the cost scale and produce a nanotech version of the human body for a lot less than the same amount of cost and a lot less than the same amount of matter. According to my best estimates, the amount of matter necessary to build a body that has the same intelligence and strength as the human body is a ballpoint pen. You can be a perfectly good human being, including all your senses and all your other capabilities and so forth with a nanotech substrate. That’s your option if you stay at the same capability level. If you want to go to pure software, you can move down in cost even more at any one of these levels. For any particular dedicated body, you can have a higher capability for the same price in pure software. Again, as I said before, you are not stuck in any of these. You can always transfer.
What does that mean as far as the way the world is going to work? The average person is going to be much smarter than they are now. The reason that we are not smarter than we are now is not because we don’t want to be. It is because we are all running on the same stupid hardware. Even biological humans, people who are born in those days and start out as biological humans, will be augmented in various ways. Many of them will probably just move over into some engineered form. It is going to be a much more complicated civilization. I think probably there is going to be a range of different sort of user interfaces to the civilization. Right now civilization cannot get too complex or else physical human beings would not be able to operate with it. There is sort of a built in ceiling to how complex the user interface of civilization can get. Right now we have different user interfaces for pets, children, and adults. It seems only reasonable to imagine that the scale is going to keep going up once we have people who are able to operate at higher levels of interaction and once hopes higher levels of responsibility.
Suppose you are not quite ready for that yet and you want to stay roughly human or you want to be a little improved one way or the other. What are your options? Remember, again, whatever your options are you can always change back and forth. One thing is that you can go to outer space. That is one of the dreams of people like me and maybe possibly some of you. I think that is going to be available to us. There are going to be a vast number of different virtual worlds that range anywhere from existing historical models to completely imaginary games, to stuff that I cannot even think of. It’s probably going to be one of the major art forms. Think of the amount of creativity involved in creating a world that is so interesting that all your friends will want to come and live there with you. People are doing that today. People are getting sucked into these massive online games and that is just a hint of the sort of thing that it will be like when you can actually sort of live in there and be able to interact with that world as if you were right there in your physical body and feel no different than with the real world today.
Going back to humunculi, the Latin for “little man,” the cool thing is that you can take a much larger population actual human beings, people who in particular love nature and the biosphere of earth the way it is, and want to be a part of it and take care of it, if you put people in that form they will have not only figuratively but literally a much smaller footprint on the biosphere. People whose goal in life or want to spend part of their life taking care of and being a part of earth’s biosphere might want to take that as their mode of existence and tread lightly on the land while preserving the earth.
These bodies can still have considerably greater physical capabilities than a human body but much lower mass, tolerate much higher G’s, so that a number of interesting launch schemes that require being subjected to a thousand G’s to get into space become feasible for people like this. They can live comfortably in outer space, on the moon, on Jupiter, essentially the range of environments that the solar system provides with the exception of the sun. They can have resistance to radiation. People don’t realize how much of a problem radiation in space poses to biological humans living out there. Of course, if they want to they will be able to reproduce faster than we do.
My guess is that within a century or so after the intellectual revolution and nanotechnology come about that the majority of people in our solar system will be of this kind, simply because of these possibilities. Oh, and yeah, we will have flying cars.
