Our society lacks good self-preservation mechanisms

The prospect of a dangerous collection of existential risks and risks of major civilizational-level catastrophies in the 21st century, combined with a distinct lack of agencies whose job it is to mitigate against such risks indicates that the world might be in something of an emergency at the moment. What do we mean by risks? Well, Bostrom has a paper on existential risks, and he lists the following risks as being "most likely":

• Deliberate misuse of nanotechnology,
• Nuclear holocaust,
• Badly programmed superintelligence,
• Genetically engineered biological agent,
• Accidental misuse of nanotechnology (“gray goo”),
• Physics disasters,
• Naturally occurring disease,
• Asteroid or comet impact,
• Runaway global warming,
• Resource depletion or ecological destruction,
• Misguided world government or another static social equilibrium stops technological progress,
• “Dysgenic” pressures (We might evolve into a less brainy but more fertile species, homo philoprogenitus “lover of many offspring”)
• Our potential or even our core values are eroded by evolutionary development,
• Technological arrest,
• Take-over by a transcending upload,
• Flawed superintelligence,
• [Stable] Repressive totalitarian global regime,
• Hanson's cosmic locusts scenario [Added by author]

To which I would add various possibilities for major civilization-level disasters that aren't existential risks, such as milder versions of all of the above, or the following:

• convergence of computer viruses and cults/religions,
• advanced personal weapons or surveillance devices such as nanotech, micro-UAV bugs (cyberpunk dystopia),
• erosion of privacy and freedom through massively oppressive government,
• highly effective meta-religions such as Scientology or a much more virulent version of modern evangelical Christianity

This collection is daunting, especially given that the human race doesn't have any official agency dedicated to mitigating risks to its own medium-long term survival. We face a long list of challenges, and we aren't even formally trying to mitigate many of them in advance, and in many past cases, mitigation of risks occurred on a last-minute, ad-hoc basis, such as individuals in the cold war making the decision not to initiate a nulcear exchange, particularly in the Cuban missile crisis.

So, a small group of people have realized that the likely outcome of a large and dangerous collection of risks combined with a haphazard, informal methodology for dealing with risks (driven by the efforts of individuals, charities and public opinion) is that one of these potential risks will actually be realized - killing many or all of us or radically reducing our quality of life. This coming disaster is ultimately not the result of any one particular risk, but the result of the lack of a powerful defence against risks.

One could argue that I [and Bostrom, Rees, etc] are blowing the issue out of proportion. We have survived so far, right? (Wrong, actually - anthropic considerations indicate that survival so far is not evidence that we will survive for a lot longer, and technological progress indicates that risks in the future are worse than risks in the past). Major civilizational disasters have already happened many, many times over. Most civilizations that ever existed, collapsed. Some even went really badly wrong, like communist Russia. Consider that communist Russia equipped with 21st century technology to oppress its citizens, keep Stalin alive and prop its economy up technologically would quite possibly be an instance of "Stable repressive totalitarian regime".

Most ecosystems that ever existed were wiped out by natural means, almost all species that have ever existed have gone extinct, and without human intervention most existing ecosystems will probably be wiped out within a 100 million year timescale. Objects that don't have extremely effective self-preservation systems empirically tend to get wiped by the churning of the universe.

Our western civilization lacks an effective long-term (order of 50 years plus) self-preservation system. Hence we should reasonably expect to either build one, or get wiped out.

And even though our society does have short-term survival mechanisms such as governments and philanthropists, they often behave in superbly irrational, myopic or late-responding ways. It seems that the response to the global warming problem (late-responding) or the invasion of Iraq (irrational) are cases in point from recent history, and that there are numerous examples from the past, such as close calls in the cold war, and the spectacular chain of failures that led from world war I to world war II and the rise of Hitler.

This article could be summarized as follows:

The systems we have for preserving the values and existence of our western society, and the human race as a whole are weak, and the challenges of the 21st-22nd century seem likely to overwhelm them.

A response to Massimo Pigliucci: “the problems with transhumanism”

Massimo Pigliucci responded (and was reprinted) to an article on IEET by Kyle Munkittrick called “Transhumanism F.A.Q. : Is Aging A Moral Good?”.

Munkittrick makes some good arguments, and some bad arguments. Pigliucci points out a bad one here:

Munkittrick begins his own response to critics of transhumanism by stating that if anyone has a problem with technology addressing the issues of disease, aging and death then “by this logic no medical intervention or care should be allowed after the age of 30.” This, of course, is a classic logical fallacy known as a false dichotomy. Munkittrick would like his readers to take one of two stands: either no technological improvement of our lives at all, or accept whatever technology can do for you. But this is rather silly, as there are plenty of other, more reasonable, intermediate positions

but Munkittrick is not presenting the transhumanist argument in its strongest form; we can restate the argument in favour of life extension like this: Do you think that the current 50-60-year healthspan followed a 15-30 year senescence and death – a happenstance of historical accident and a limited degree of technological innovation is optimal? If not, then presumably one is faced by the following genuine dilemma: either you think that the ideal healthspan is longer than 50 years, or shorter. If you think the ideal is shorter, then presumably you are planning to commit suicide at some point? Most people, Massimo included, would probably take the other option and argue that a healthspan of longer than 50 years is best for them, technology permitting, in which case they are pro-life extension. [perhaps not pro-immortality for themselves, though]

This form of argument has been generalized by Nick Bostrom as the reversal test.

Moving on, Pigliucci complains about the issue of life extension and population growth. This has been addressed at length elsewhere, but the strongest argument I can think of in favour of life extension is that people who live for a very long time may not keep having children every 30 years; they might decide to have children once and then go and do other things. In this case, population growth is only linear rather than exponential. This kind of population growth is something that we can cope with – by colonizing space and other planets, or by advancing technology to increase the population density on earth – as has happened many, many, many times before.

In the long run, the theoretical limit on human population is given by the available matter and energy in the universe, which we can colonize at a rate which is asymptotically cubic in time – a constantly expanding sphere around earth. If most people have one set of children in their lives, and people who do have more than one set of children do so with longer and longer gaps in between, it would be easy to stay within that cubic bound even out into the far future – say, 1 million or even 1 billion years from now, even if most people lived forever.

Arguments like this show that the population increase/resource limitation problem requires a rate-balancing solution; a careful plan for ensuring that everyone’s right to life is respected whilst at the same time maximizing peoples’ right to reproduce subject to the constraint of resources. It does not warrant a barbaric, premature and absolute slaughter of everyone over a certain age.

True immortality – actually living forever – is probably not worth talking about at the moment, because we are too young and inexperienced as a species to work out what the best choices are. It is better to aim to keep everyone alive for the next thousand years and reconsider our options then.

Transhumanism isn’t just about life extension. H+ is about improving all aspects of our existence, including mitigating the risks of advanced technology and improving the quality of people’s lives. Any transhumanist who claims to ignore risks and blindly support all technology irrespective of its projected effect on our overall quality of life is not in fact a transhumanist – they are a techno-optimist, which is a distinct notion from h+. The work of David Pearce and Nick Bostrom includes much about quality of life, elimination of suffering and living the best possible existence. The singularitarian community is thinking about the creation of a human-benevolent superintelligence which would probably be better at optimizing our experience than we can even imagine. Yudkowsky’s articles on fun theory come to mind here.

And lastly and by far most importantly, the transhumanist movement is closely associated with the more recent rationalist movement which centres around the work of Eliezer Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson. At LessWrong.com, the rationalist movement considers in extreme detail and rigor the ways that humans fail to achieve their goals and the ways that they fail to have accurate beliefs. Someone like Pigliucci, whose blog is called “Rationally Speaking” would seem to be pursuing the same goals as the rationalist community at LessWrong, and I hope that in the future the transhumanist community will follow the principles of rationality (such as recognizing the importance of the human cognitive biases literature) better than it does at the moment.

Will becoming a yokel improve your life and save the planet?

A critique of Open Source Ecology (OSE)

I saw this post at Sentient Developments by Edward Miller, the underlying idea is open source ecology. If we are to reliably produce good ideas about changing the world here in the blogsphere, then we must prune out the bad ideas; open source ecology is a bad idea if ever I saw one. First, let me quote the main open source ecology wiki page:

Open Source Ecology is a movement dedicated to the collaborative development of tools for replicable, open source, modern off-grid "resilient communities." By using permaculture and digital fabrication together to provide for basic needs and open source methodology to allow low cost replication of the entire operation, we hope to empower anyone who desires to move beyond the struggle for survival and "evolve to freedom."

Here is a quote from Edward's post:

It is this sort of thinking which is required for a peaceful transition to a new era for our civilization. It will allow us to become resilient to the converging threats which face us from ecological destruction to market failure to terrorism. Global supply chains have shown themselves to be exceedingly vulnerable to these shocks. I hope we can overcome these by localizing production by utilizing global knowledge sharing so we can all enjoy the type of future some of the previous guest bloggers have been talking about. … I would like to see the technologies for food production to be as decentralized as possible. Whether that means vertical farms, community gardens, or single family gardens. I think what would make the most sense is to have cheap, mostly automated greenhouses with drip irrigation built into homes as standard practice.

But does it make any sense on a cold, rational level?

1. Will open source ecology allow people to feed themselves using only locally produced food and materials, without requiring everyone that give up their day job and without vastly reducing population densities?

Just how much land do you need to support one person by farming? This reference states that "Depending on climate, soil conditions, agricultural practices and the crop grown, it generally requires between 1,000 and 40,000 m² (0.25 and 10 acres) per person". The UK can thus probably support a population of about 10 million if we all do nothing but farm in our own little farmsteads. In support of this point, according the UK Census of 1801, the UK population was about 8.5 million, and according to another source it was about 4 million in 1600. So, before we developed modern agriculture, we were, in fact, limited to that figure of 50 people per square kilometre – note that 50 people per square kilometre times 250,000 square kilometres (the total area of the UK) is 12.5 million people.

Now, it is possible that in the very best of circumstances, using the best technology available today – hydroponics, fertilizer and artificial lighting, we might achieve the upper bound of 1000 people per square kilometre. But even this is not high enough. To feed all the people in a large city – for example London – using only the available land area of London, equates to feeding 5000 people using just 1 square kilometer. The usable area is of course even less. These people would have to be able to feed themselves by being farmers in their spare time, all using only locally produced tools and energy, without giving up their day jobs with an area the size of a large living room per person for growing crops, purifying water and recycling sewage. Excuse me if I deride this idea as total and utter nonsense, on a par with the beliefs of creationists, rather than being merely implausible.

2. Will open source ecology allow people to feed themselves using only locally produced food and materials, by making everyone into full-time subsistence farmers and dismantling cities so that population density is low?

In order for everyone to survive like this, the cities would have to be dismantled and the population spread evenly over the country – this is because the population in cities is much greater than 1000 people per square kilometer. This would, of course, completely disrupt the country for years and be massively expensive and unpopular. It is, however, plausible that many jobs could be done without cities – for example using telecommunications technology, but there are some jobs that really do require at least 100 people to be in the same place – for example an engineering company or a chip fabrication plant, an army barracks or military base, or a car factory. It is, however, not plausible that people could feed themselves through subsistence farming using only locally made materials, and only 1000 square meters of land whilst holding down a normal job. People have perhaps 1 hour of free time that they could spend doing manual labour per day – and if we look at the videos on the OSE site, we hear reports of “full days of backbreaking manual work” – and on the OSE factor-e-farm they use nonlocally produced fuel and a nonlocally produced engine for their tractor which does the hardest manual work for them. This shows that OSE high-tech subsistence agriculture is not an option that can be kept "on standby" in case of a problem - it is an all-or-nothing switch to a different, more local phase of society. And, of course this means that we have to consider it in a different light: not as a backup for modern society, but as an alternative. As such it has its own increased risks which I will mention later.

3. Will open-source ecology help save the human race from extinction? Will it make our society more resilient?

Given the above analysis - that we simply do not have enough land to live the "local" way, it is clear that open source ecology would not be able to save everyone. But it could certainly save some people - for example the survivors of a particularly bad nuclear war or bioterrorist pandemic. In fact, after such a war, people would probably spontaneously invent something like OSE due to the severe lack of food and the disruption of trade and transportation. So, on this count, OSE is a clear winner - a great fallback option for the "lucky" survivors. However, waiting for most people in the world to die is not exactly the ideal existential risk mitigation strategy; anyone who lives in a city would almost certainly end up dead in any scenario where OSE because useful..

4. Will open source ecology "free us from the necessity of wage labour", "make us freer"?

Now, in a sense, this claim is a little bit too vague to analyze. The implication seems to be that we will have more free time, or that we will spend less time working. Perhaps one could interpret it to mean that we will live in a moneyless society, and we won't have to work to make money any more. Unfortunately, both of these claims are false. Firstly, how much free time you have for a given standard of living is a function of how rich your society is, i.e the GDP per capita. In the UK, this value is high, so life is relatively good. What would happen if we implemented open source ecology? Would we get richer? No! Because of economies of scale, making production more local makes everything more expensive. Fundamentally, our civilization works because of economies of scale. Adam smith discovered this in his seminal work, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations; Smith realized that by specializing to produce just one thing, you can produce that thing more cheaply. A lot more cheaply, in fact. Now, since our present high wealth is powered by super-massively large economies of scale, reducing the scale to the farmstead level will decrease our wealth. We will not be able to afford such luxuries as healthcare, education, going to university, meeting more than a small group of people, using computers, travelling around the world, going to art galleries, watching movies, making art, having specialists who make scientific discoveries, etc. We will instead have to spend our time tending the crops or repairing the home-made tractor.

5. Will open source ecology will be good for the environment?

Well, getting rid of 90% of the world's population would undoubtedly be good for the environment. Fewer people means less environmental footprint, but it strikes the author that this is not a politically viable option in the near-term. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that a small number of people take up the open source ecology movement, utilizing a small amount of land that is not really being used at the moment anyway. Will this be good for the environment? Perhaps, though the effect will be insignificant, since the number of people involved would be small.

6. Will OSE protect us from terrorists?

As I have already argued, local living would mean disbanding or vastly reducing the army and the government (as well as pretty much everything else except farmers!). Any larger than average group that decided to arm itself would be able to "gobble up" adjacent groups through military conflict, kill the men and rape the women (humans have done this kind of thing throughout history, and it seems to have been the dominant mechanism which caused large societies to replace small ones). It is only by having the most efficient possible farming techniques that leave a large segment of the population free from the need to farm for food that countries such as the UK and the USA are able to achieve the kind of military dominance we have, by having specialists in fighting, weapons development and espionage. So, although OSE would protect us against terrorists attacking central infrastructure such as power plants or tall buildings, it would leave us wide open to something much, much worse: open military conquest and war crimes by anyone who decided that conquest was more important than local living.

7. Will highly advanced technology make Open Source Ecology work?

With the development of advanced nanotechnology, and robotics (possibly nanorobotics) we are likely to see products and materials with superlative performance that would allow a person to very easily produce enough food to feed themselves in a very small area of land.. But don't hold your breath: such technology will probably arrive around 2050-2100, and even then if your nanoreplicator or farming robot broke down, you would not be able to fix it using locally made tools. So ultra high-tech local subsistence farming is not actually resilient – using high-technology solutions makes you more reliant upon centralized facilities to supply and repair such devices.

8. So what is OSE good for at the moment?

Well, it seems like a natural fallback if the worst does happen. In brighter times - such as those of today - it is a great hobby, rather like having an allotment, a metalworking hobby and a home-science hobby all rolled into one. It also seems to foster a sense of community and social capital, though at the cost of the people involved being somewhat deluded about the significance of what they're doing. Open source ecology is ultimately a hobby movement, and does not stand a serious chance of changing the world for the better in a big way. Though, on the other hand, it is one of the best hobbies I have ever seen, because it contributes to people having a better understanding of how practical things work, to working together with their community as a team, and to people getting both physically and mentally fit.

9. Why have otherwise very intelligent people been sucked in by the OSE’s false claims?

It looks to me like OSE is an example of the worst possible human cognitive bias – motivated cognition. This is what happens when you become emotionally attached to an idea – in this case “decentralization as the solution to all our problems” - and then you start actively looking for arguments in support of it and actively looking for ways to dismiss any arguments against it. As you become more enamoured with the idea, you start to associate all good things with it and disassociate all bad things from it. The proponents of OSE didn’t even say one bad thing about OSE on their website, but they associated every positive thing they could think of with it – it will make us freer, richer, help the environment, free us from the drudgery of work, protect us from terrorists, they even claimed that it could lead to an end to all wars and human conflicts. Motivated cognition is a systematic failure mode of the human mind which everyone is highly susceptible to unless they take active steps to prevent it, known as rationality training. You can find out more about this by looking at LessWrong.com, or the Wikipedia article on cognitive biases.

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An insight from the new Transformers film

Last night I saw Transformers: Revenge of the fallen; overall, it was (of course) a fairly terrible film. Some great action sequences went some way towards making up for the childish plot, cliched characters and relationships and some really, really bad attempts at slapstick/"American style" vulgar comedy.

But there was one scene which really meant something to me. The lead character, Sam, has been "chosen" by the Transformers (the good robots) and the US secret service to act as some kind of liaison between the Transformers and the US government, he also has some kind of family history of involvement with the Transformers; but he "just wants a normal life" - he is a reluctant hero. He starts university and finds that his roommate, Leo, runs a conspiracy theory website that collects reports about the presence of alien robots on Earth. Sam obviously has to pretend that he doesn't know anything about the Transformers, and Sam and Leo get into an argument about whether the conspiracy is true or not, with Sam lying to Leo, and Leo insisting that he'll get to the bottom of the mystery.

Later, Leo and Sam get pulled into a major fight between the Transformers and the Decepticons, and the Decepticons force the government to make Sam a wanted man. Leo gets scared and starts to panic: having been shot at and chased by alien robots and now by the police too, he tells Sam that he's going to turn himself - and all the rest of the fugitives - in to the authorities.

Sam then retorts: "Well this is what you wanted! You've got your conspiracy theory, now stop complaining!"

The very outspoken transhumanist/singularitarian community may, in time, find itself in Leo's position.

Save the human race with a click!

After having seen that Facebook causes is getting somewhat serious in terms of publicity and donations - but that the top causes were for things that aren't exactly the most important priorities at the moment - I decided to start a cause for saving the human race. (I couldn't find one, but it turned out there were a few, under different names).



For those people who don't already know, the survival of the human race over the next 100 years is a very touch-and-go thing. Martin Rees, estimates that (due to various risks) we stand a 50% chance of terminating ourselves over the next 100 years, and Nick Bostrom puts the figure at >20%.

Most people think of the destruction or decimation of the human race as something that only happens in fiction, not in real life. So it is very hard to convince people to donate time, money or effort to preventing it. Other far less important causes such as pet welfare* receive far, far more money and support. This is simple scope insensitivity combined with Hanson's near/far distinction - people put the end of the human race in the "far" category, so they don't want to do anything about it.

* if you doubt that protecting pets is as important than saving the entire human race, consider that the destruction of humanity implies the subsequent devastation of the pet population as pets run out of food, and the eventual reversion of the survivors to new species of wild animals; a process that would surely cause immeasurable animal suffering, and select for the most violent characteristics in the surviving animals


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Athena debunks some Buddhist Quantum goodness

Athena Andreadis has written a somewhat acerbic and, in my opinion excellent criticism of some Buddhist video about how Buddhism is "compatible" with quantum mechanics. The video is only mild nonsense compared to what we see from Christianity, so I wrote an initially positive comment about it on Sentient Developments. But then I read Athena's Post:

Physicists and mathematicians are aware of these limitations when they use such constructs [such as Schrodinger's equation]. In contrast, when people who are not conversant with a scientific concept use it to lend credibility to shaky or shady conclusions, they become demagogues and/or charlatans. And before anyone trots out the elitism hobby-horse, all I can say is, just have the next person you meet on the street repair your car or give you a haircut. The same logic applies, and no amount of skimming Wikipedia entries will make up for in-depth knowledge and critical thinking.

Buddhism has become fashionable among people who wish to be considered spiritual but not religious, many of them self-proclaimed progressives – hence it’s de rigeur not to criticize it. Some of its prestige comes from politics (primarily the Tibet/China situation, but only because it’s pertinent to US financial concerns), some from the intelligence and charisma of the current Dalai Lama, some from the simple fact that it appears exotic to Westerners when compared to the home-grown Abrahamic monotheisms.

I like the aesthetics of Zen Buddhism very much. However, there is nothing to attract me in the religion’s misogyny (women have no souls and must be reborn as men to attain Nirvana), its primitive cosmology of universe-toting turtles, its punitive stance that suffering is the result of bad past karma, its oppressive policies whenever it gained its share of temporal power (including pre-Chinese Tibet, which was a far cry from Shangri-La) or the dog-like master/disciple formula that I dissected in my critique of that pinnacle of ersatz mythology, Star Wars.

Worse yet, what is the outcome of suppressing desire, Buddhism’s ultimate goal? It’s the fate of the Miranda settlers in Serenity, the fate of any conscious being that gazes obsessively at its navel with the belief that reality is but an illusion. If this is true, why explore or invent? The Western religions have an awful lot to answer for. But at least in their figures of defiance, from Prometheus to Lucifer, they incorporate a key element: striving for something larger than one’s puny self without letting go of one’s individuality.

Yes, I agree completely. Good work, Athena!

Though, in defence of Buddhism I will say that many people need some kind of comforting nonsense, and Buddhist nonsense seems to be relatively harmless compared to Islamic nonsense, for example. It's like when I go to the dentist, he could tell me not to eat any sugary foods, ever. But he knows I'll eat some sugary foods, so he recommends that I eat bananas rather than deep fried Mars bars. I see Buddhist nonsense vs. Islamic or Christian nonsense a bit like this.

Bioconservative and biomoderate singularitarian positions

Let us define a singularitarian as a person who considers it likely that some form of smarter than human intelligence will be developed in a characteristic timeframe of a century, and that the manner in which this event occurs is important enough to expend effort altering. Given this definition, it is perfectly possible to be a bioconservative singularitarian - that is someone who:

opposes genetic modification of food crops, the cloning and genetic engineering of livestock and pets, and, most prominently, rejects the genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification of human beings to overcome what are broadly perceived as current human biological and cultural limitations.

- one can accept the (at present only suggestive) factual arguments of Hanson, Yudkowsky, Bostrom etc that smarter than human intelligence is the only long-term alternative to human extinction (this is what one might call an "attractor" argument - that our current state simply isn't stable), whilst taking the axiological and ethical position that our pristine, unenhanced human form is to be held as if it were sacred, and that any modification and/or enhancement of the human form is to be resisted, even if the particular human in question wants to be enhanced. A slighly more individual-freedoms-oriented bioconservative position would be try very hard to persuade people (subject to certain constraints) to decide not to enhance themselves, or to allow people to enhance themselves only if they are prepared to face derision and criticism from society. A superintelligent singleton could easily implement such a society.

This position seems internally consistent to me, and given the seemingly unstoppable march of technological advancement and its rapid integration into our society (smartphones, facebook, online dating, youtube, etc) via corporate and economic pressure, bioconservative singularitarianism may become the only realistic bioconservative position.

One can even paint a fairly idyllic bioconservative world where human enhancement is impossible and people don't interact with advanced technology any more, they live in some kind of rural or hunter-gatherer world where the majority of suffering and disease (apart from death, perhaps) is eliminated by a superintelligent singleton, and the singleton takes care to ensure that this world is not "disturbed" by too much technology being invented by anyone. Perhaps people live in a way that is rather like one would have found on a Tahiti before Europeans got there. There are plenty of people who think that they already live in such a world - they are called theists, and they are mistaken (more about this in another post).

For those with a taste for a little more freedom and a light touch of enhancement, we can define biomoderate singularitarianism, which differs from the above in that it sits somewhere more towards the "risque" end of the human enhancement spectrum, but it isn't quite transhumanism. As before, we consider a superintelligent singleton running the practical aspects of a society and most of the people in that society being somehow encouraged or persuaded not to enhance themselves too much, so that the society remains a clearly human one. I would consider Banks' Culture to be the prototypical early result of a biomoderate singularity, followed by such incremental changes as one might expect due to what Yudkowsky calls "heaven of the tired peasant" syndrome - many people would get bored of "low-grade" fun after a while. Note that in the Culture, Banks describes people with significant emotional enhancements and the ability to change gender - so this certainly isn't bioconservative, but the fundaments of human existence are not being pulled apart by such radical developments as mind merging, uploading, wireheading or super-fast radical cognitive enhancement.

Bioconservative and biomoderate singularities are compatible with modern environmentalism, in that the power of a superintelligent AI could be used to eliminate damage to the natural world, and humans could live in almost perfect harmony with nature. Harmony with nature would involve a superintelligence carefully managing biological ecosystems and even controlling the actions of individual animals, plants and microorganisms, as well as informing and guiding the actions of human societie(s) so that no human was ever seriously harmed by any creature (no-one gets infected by parasites, bacteria or viruses (unless they want to be), no-one is killed by wild animals), and no natural ecosystem is seriously harmed by human activity. A variant on this would have all wild animals becoming tame, so that you could stroll through the forest and pet a wildcat.

A biomoderate singularity is an interesting concept to consider, and I think it has some interesting applications to a Freindly AI strategy. It is also, I feel, something that I think will be somewhat easier to sell to most other humans around than a full-on, shock level 4, radical transhumanist singularity. In fact we can frame the concept of a "biomoderate technological singularity" in fairly normal language: it is simply a very carefully designed self-improving computer system that is used to eliminate the need for humans to do work that they don't (all things considered) want to do.

Due to various historical co-incidences, the same small group of people who popularized technologically enabled bio-radical stances such as gender swapping, uploading, cryopreservation, etc also happen to be the people who popularized ideas about smarter than human intelligence. When one small, outspoken group proposes two ideas which sound kind of similar, the rest of the world is highly likely to conflate them.

The situation on the ground is that one of these ideas has a viable politico-cultural future, and the other one doesn't: "bioradical" human modification activates so many "yuck" factors that getting it to fly with educated, secular people is nigh-on impossible, never mind the religious lot. The notion that smarter-than-human intelligence will likely be developed, and that we should try to avoid getting recycled as computronium is a stretch, but at least it involves only nonobvious factual claims and obvious ethical claims.

It is thus an important task to separate out these two ideas and make it clear to people that singularitarianism doesn't imply bioradicalism.

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