Transhuman Goodness: April 2009

Richard Jones' Comments ...

Roko, it was a pleasure to meet you too, and I'm sorry the meeting was rather brief - no doubt we would have found more to disagree with had we talked longer.

Let me make a few quick comments on the points you mention. Firstly, and this, I think, gets to the heart of what Dale is saying, it's not at all clear that enough conceptual heavy lifting has been done to support the simple notions of intelligence that your arguments depend on. Secondly, while I agree that in principle you can discuss advanced AI entirely independently of Drexlerian nanotechnology, in practise Kurzweilian projections of the timescales on which brains can be scanned in sufficient detail rely on some kind of radical nanotechnology to emerge that can make practical that which with today's technology is very far out of reach. Finally, you're welcome to think in terms of singularitarianism as political activism that seeks to steer the priorities of science towards its goals, but don't be surprised if I don't agree with your assessment of what those priorities should be.

Since Richard is a clever guy and probably the most intelligent, coherent critic of the singularitarian movement I've heard, I've promoted his comment to a post. Feel free to leave comments here or on facebook. Richard Blogs at Soft Machines.

Comment on this post on Facebook [You have to create a Facebook account and add me as a friend for this to work, but by doing so you'll be able to network with other people interested in the future of humanity, and you'll help to inform other people on Facebook about what is going on]

Meeting with Professor Richard Jones - scientists display a remarkable ability to converge on the truth...

On Friday, I had the pleasure of meeting with Professor Richard Jones who (blogs at Soft Machines) at his Sheffield office. This was motivated by a rather tedious blog-comment argument over on accelerating future, mostly between me and Dale Carrico. In that discussion, Richard briefly commented in support of some of the things that Dale said, so I was curious to meet Richard - a prominent scientist and critic of certain (somewhat careless) claims made by proponents of advanced nanotechnology research.

In my meeting with Richard, I introduced him to some ideas from Eliezer's school of thought. In particular, the following two ideas were pretty important, I felt:

1. That the way we evolved from less intelligent primates indicates that humans are roughly as stupid as it is possible to be without being too stupid to have a functioning society. - Richard was initially skeptical about this position, but on further reflection we agreed that the rate at which technological society had developed from the onset of agriculture to today was so fast on an evolutionary timescale that we could not reasonably expect a modern human newborn to have significantly more cognitive ability and potential than a hunter-gatherer newborn from 13,000BC. Another way of putting this is that humans are at or close to the very beginning of the hierarcy of intelligent life, not the end point.

This position has some very important implications:

It is very likely that, if there is an ultimate limit on how intelligent a system could be in our universe (for example, due to the Bekenstein bound), then it is likely to be a very long way above the human level of intelligence. This is purely a probabilistic argument: it is unlikely that such a bound would be above the minimum required for organized society, but only just above that minimum.
Many technical problems that seem very hard to us would probably be fairly trivial to intelligences that are genuinely smarter than us, because these intelligences would be able to improve themselves deliberately and would therefore not be bound by the slow evolutionary timescale of human intelligence improvement. We should thus expect smarter than human AI to be very powerful indeed. For example, indefinite life extension of human beings would probably fall into the "trivial" category for smarter than human AI. (Why? Well, mere humans have extended their lifespans by a factor of 3, with a consistent increase of 1 year per decade at the time of writing. Given that humans are, on a cosmic scale of intelligence, idiotically stupid, it seems highly likely that a self-improving smarter than human AI bound only by the laws of physics would be able to solve the problem). Similar comments apply to claims like space colonization, revival of cryonics patients, etc.

2. It is possible to accept the claims made by the Singularity Institute about smarter than human AI, whilst rejecting claims made by Drexlerian nanotechnology proponents. These claims are independent and, scientifically speaking, unrelated.

3. There is an important role for transhumanist and singularitarian advocacy which is not science, but political activism. The role of such activism is not to distort scientific findings to make "sceince fiction - like" claims seem more plausible, but to influence the order in which science is done, i.e. to influence priority.

For example, suppose $100 million available today can either be spent on studying the many species of parrots that live in the Amazon Basin, or that same $100 million in 2009 can be spent developing safe smarter than human AI. Science itself cannot decide which piece of research to do now - there is no scientific answer to that question. It is necessarily a political question.

And the singularitarian position is that it is better - by the standards of any sane human being - to spend that money on safe smarter than human AI research.

Overall, it was a pleasure to speak with Richard. We agreed on pretty much everything that we discussed - which was a breath of fresh air compared to the rivalrous feel of the Accelerating Future comments thread from which the visit was inspired.

What is transhumanism?

Transhumanism is a movement of people who think that we can radically enhance the human condition using technology. “Trans” stands for transitional, so a trans-humanist is someone who thinks of being human as a transitional state - upon which we can greatly improve. Transhumanists are interested in accelerating technological change which may allow some profound changes to occur within our own lifetimes. Transhumanists are also concerned that future technological development is carried out in an ethical and democratic fashion.

That all sounded very abstract, so let me give some more concrete examples of what improving upon the human condition might involve. Transhumanists take a great interest in defeating aging and death. Our current human bodies are frail - we grow old and we die. It doesn’t have to be like this - there is no reason why technologically enhanced people can’t live for many hundreds or even thousands of years, but someone needs to go and develop the technology, and they need to be funded to do so.

Most of us are forced – by material necessity – to work at jobs that we hate instead of doing exciting, creative things that we enjoy and which would make us better people. Again, it doesn’t have to be this way - advances in automation technology, robotics, and artificial intelligence could automate those repetitive tasks that we call work, and leave us to enjoy those activities that we call fun.

Our minds, whilst brilliant in some ways, are severely limited in others. Our psychology is often competitive and jealous; when someone else is successful it can make us feel a little worse, and we frequently attain happiness at the cost of others. We suffer from biases like racism and sexism, irrationalities like fundamentalist religion, addiction and lack of willpower. But your mind is not immutable - with suitable interfacing technologies, you could re-program your mind so that your biological drives match up with your higher intentions.

Technology does not materialize of its own accord, and it will not necessarily be used or developed in the most effective way, or even in an ethical way. The same technologies which will allow us to overcome age-old problems have the potential to create new and deadlier risks. For example, molecular nanotechnology will allow huge advances in medical technology, but it will also facilitate new and deadlier weapons. The transhumanist movement seeks to encourage and embrace the huge positive potential of technology, and to guard against the associated risks.

This introduction is based on Michael Anissimov’s post, Transhumanism as Questioning Our Nature, which I throughly recommend. He put the situation well:

"it’s perfectly possible to be enthusiastic and cheerful about life, while simultaneously acknowledging that our bodies are weak and are minds are twisted by our genes’ shallow goals."

You may also want to see the Transhumanist declaration from the World Transhumanist Association.

Follow Transhuman Goodness on NetworkedBlogs

... By clicking on This Link

I'm about 2 followers short of making the front page for "philosophy" on NetworkedBlogs, so even a few more people is great. In return, I promise to do some scholarly philosophy posts...

If everyone who read this blog followed me on NetworkedBlogs... wow, I'd easily double my audience through the additional PageRank and links I'd get. So if you think that saving the human race from technological Armageddon, solving third world poverty, curing aging, and colonizing the universe are kind of worth doing, there's a simple thing you can do to help: follow us on NetworkedBlogs!

Michael Vassar hits the nail on the head

Michael Vassar was recently interviewed by accelerating future. I was delighted to hear that someone else had had basically the same insight as me.

When asked: "Can you tell us the story of how you first found out about SIAI’s mission", Michael responded [emphasis mine]:

"The major influence was my progressive discovery of the inadequacy of the deliberative and decision-making organs of modern society. I saw fundamentalism. I saw the War on Drugs. I saw failure to adequately secure nuclear materials in Eastern Europe and failure to build adequate levies in the world’s richest nation. Eventually I integrated all of these facts into my world-view rather than leaving them as dangling exceptions to an unchallenged assumption that the collective behavior of the world around me was basically sane. It became clear that if a technological singularity this century was pretty likely I should still expect that by default no one with any serious power would react rationally to the possibility until much too late. Warren Buffet, Sam Nunn, and Ted Turner get kudos for being an exception with their Nuclear Threat Initiative, but they are an exception that proves the rule. Yes, the powers that be could really be collectively stupid enough to hear about the singularity, acknowledge it in the occasional speech, but generally ignore it and allow it to happen in whatever manner is the easy default, even if that default is human extinction. They collectively mess up much easier issues all the time."

Daily Galaxy rubbishes Bostrom's simulation argument.

From the Daily Galaxy:

Philosophy is a vital study for the human race - from the ancient Greeks to the modern day, some of the finest thinkers have examined the human condition and produced valuable insights and conclusions on what it means "to be." Unfortunately much of the other work in the field is dubious, including a recent paper which argues that we're all living in a vast computer simulation. Yes, it WAS written after the first Matrix film but before the sequels. Funny that.
Unfortunately this isn't a fanfic: it's a refereed paper published in the Philosophical Quarterly, which must have been hurting for content. It was written by, Nick Bostrom, the Director of the "Future of Humanity Institute" at Oxford University, the sort of person we'd generally assume to be above such things. But we suppose that even those pondering the fate of the species need publicity and funding too - probably more than most people, in fact.

Reading the paper is a fun game of "Spot the logical flaws" for all the family, with bonus points for every "Warning sign of BS paper" picked out.

The most egregious flaw is the use of a form of the fantastically annoying Bayesian argument: the idea that if we suppose there far more B-type of people than A, then we're more likely to be born as a B than A. It's been which has been used to argue everything from the imminent end of the species to this simulation silliness despite:

a) assuming that we're all somehow stacked up waiting to exist like capsule toys in a spiritual vending machine.
b) Statistics Error No 1: confusing probability with actual fact, and arguing that nothing but the most common option should exist. For example, by the Bayesian argument you and everyone you know is Asian.
c) It's been an equally (in)valid at every stage in human history since we first dropped out of the trees, and was wrong then too.

One wonders whether the author, Luke McKinney, stopped to ponder how reasonable it is to assume that a professor at Oxford University, who set a national record for academic performance in his home country of Sweden, completed three degrees in the time it takes most people to do one, got a PhD from LSE, and is professor and director of a multi-million pound research institute at 34 makes basic statistics errors.

When we disagree with people who are obviously much cleverer than we are, we should seriously consider the hypothesis that they are right and we are wrong, and the reason this is not obvious to us is that we are not clever enough to see our mistake.

For reference, "confusing probability with actual fact, and arguing that nothing but the most common option should exist" is not a common error in statistics (you'd have to be moronically stupid to go from "the probability of X is close to 1" to "X is a certainty"), and Bostrom doesn't commit it. From this comment alone, it is fairly clear that Luke McKinney probably doesn't understand Bayesian Statistics.

I worried out loud on facebook to a vastly intelligent Cambridge mathematician that, since he is a Christian, and much cleverer than me, perhaps my atheism is mistaken?

I'm fascinated by the fact that so many clever cambridge mathematicians are christian. You, M, N.B. ... I am beginning to wonder if maybe I'm wrong about it! If I disagreed with you, M and N on a question of mathematics, I would simply admit that I was wrong and look for my error...

Testing out a new commenting system

Spreading the word about Friendly AI, humanistic transhumanism and the singularity is one of the major themes of this blog. In fact, it is nothing short of an urgent task.

When I write an interesting post, people are kind enough to comment on it, and we have had some good discussions here. But Only people who have already found the Transhuman Goodness blog see those comments. Most people who know about the existence of the blog already know about this set of ideas, so most of the debate that goes on probably counts as preaching to the choir.

A great way to promote the idea of humanistic transhumanism, or h+, outside the small(ish) community of people who read this blog is to make use of people's social networks on Facebook. So I'm going to try an experiment: instead of allowing comments on my blog page, I will disable comments on the blog and place a link to the item in my Facebook feed for this post. If you want to comment on the post, click this link, and make the comment on Facebook. If you're not on Facebook, then get a Facebook account!

Suppose that 5 people comment on a post this way, each of who have 150 Facebook friends. The fact that they commented on the Facebook feed item for the post means that some significant fraction of 750 people will see the comment thread in their Facebook feeds. Neat!

This post is meant to be an experiment to see if it works. Please, do comment on the link I've placed below.

UPDATE: The link was broken to start with, but I've got it working now so that all you need to comment is a facebook account. Please, if you're reading this, leave a comment!

UPDATE: Thanks to those who commented. Also, if you don't have anything to add to a post, but you agree with the main point of the post, then "like" it on facebook.

Comment on this post on Facebook [You have to create a Facebook account and add me as a friend for this to work, but by doing so you'll be able to network with other people interested in the future of humanity, and you'll help to inform other people on Facebook about what is going on]

Like this post on Facebook [Press the "Like" button on the Facebook page] [A prize will go to the first person who does this... ]

Transhuman Goodness