Accelerating Future

Part of the rationale for being a “transhumanist”, or, more broadly, having grandiose dreams for humanity’s future, is the extremely simple and mundane observation that the available matter and free energy in our general vicinity is far larger than what we have utilized of it thus far. The incoming solar energy is about a million times greater than global energy consumption, and the available hydrothermal energy to be extracted from the energy gradient between the mantle and the upper crust is many times that. These energy sources far exceed that available from all fossil fuels, uranium, and thorium combined. In the long run (less than a century?), solar and hydrothermal will become our primary energy sources, simply because nothing else will be able to meet our exponentially growing demand.

The biosphere contains just two trillion tonnes of carbon, but the oceans contain about 36 trillion tonnes of carbon (mostly as bicarbonate ion), and several trillion tonnes of additional carbon exist as fossil matter, including the leftovers from the catastrophic Azolla event 49 million years ago. Retrieving oceanic carbon and reintroducing it to the organic biosphere could allow us to reestablish beautiful forests over much of the surface of the planet. Historically, tropical forests extended to within 40 degrees of the equator, subtropical forests to 60, and other forests to the poles. Palm trees and turtles thrived at the North Pole. Our current ice, grass, and desert-covered Earth is a geophysical abnormality caused by an Ice Age that began 23 million years ago when Antarctica split from South America, permitting the creation of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and leading to an “Icebox Earth” with glaciated poles. We have had greener ages, and we can bring them back with technology, particularly organic and inorganic self-replicating agents.

Though most environmentalists center their efforts around preserving currently existing biodiversity, forward-looking environmentalists should look towards not just preserving the already existing biodiversity, by setting environmental conditions conducive to the development of millions of new species and a planet covered in luxuriant foliage. By using vertical farming, which will be demonstrated as proof-of-concept within years, and closed-cycle manufacturing, we can minimize our footprint and sustain upwards of 100 billion people with negligible environmental impact. The current impression that the planet is overpopulated is a selection effect resulting from people living in crowded cities, concentrated by technological and economic necessity. Decentralized manufacturing and high-resolution virtual communication will allow a more evenly distributed populace.

Some, like environmentalist Bill McKibben — have said “Enough”, enough technology, enough life, enough progress. Unsurprisingly, I disagree. Looking back from the perspective of a world more than 20 times lusher and Nature-filled than today, with more than 20 times more people distributed evenly across huge tracts of land now practically empty, it will be hard to say, “we should have stopped when we were just at 5% of this potential”. There have been other times in history with just 5% of the biomass and life of today — immediately after major mass extinctions. If today’s world is “enough”, then why stop there? Why not revert back to a world with even less biodiversity and biomass? It would be a surprising coincidence if the current biomass is just right, rather than too little or too much. Those arguing otherwise are just products of their environment — the glacier, desert, and steppe-covered poverty of the Late Cenozoic.

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“The main thing that stands between the human species and the creation of a supervirus is a sense of responsibility among individual biologists.”
– Richard Preston, The Demon in the Freezer, page 227

From a 2002 article by Danny Penman in The Guardian:

“A few months’ work in a makeshift laboratory is all it would take to produce a biological weapon that could kill hundreds of millions of people.

The scientific information is freely available and the raw materials easily sourced. The only difficult part would be mastering the necessary scientific skills, and they are taught on most biology degree courses.

One of the simplest ways of constructing a biological weapon would be to engineer an existing human disease and to make it even more lethal. Something as simple as the flu virus, when engineered with the gene for botulinum toxin, could wipe out a significant part of the human race. A low dose of this toxin is the main ingredient in cosmetic botox injections.

The genetic sequence for the toxin is freely available. This sequence could then be uploaded to a commonly available gene synthesizer, which would churn out millions of copies of the gene in a few hours. The flu virus would then be grown in the presence of this newly synthesized gene. As the virus reproduced, a few of the virus particles would absorb the gene. With a bit of luck, the budding terrorist would have produced a new biological weapon.”

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Human beings are inherently vulnerable to a significant number of lethal compounds. Given a highly contagious biological vector to distribute these compounds, the potential outcome is grim. Given adequate tools, knowledge, and time, groups could manufacture several such viruses and release them simultaneously in different areas, thwarting quarantine and antidote efforts. Governments know this — hence the Biological Weapons Convention. Bio-weapons are off-limits for warfare at the international level, but such rules might break down in the case of a large enough war, and will not be respected by rogue parties.

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DARPA gave it to them:

“RICHARDSON, Texas, Oct. 2 — Zyvex Labs today announced the award of a $9.7M program funded by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and Texas’ ETF (Emerging Technology Fund). The goal of this effort is to develop a new manufacturing technique that enables “Tip-Based Nanofabrication” to accelerate the transition of nanotechnology from the laboratory to commercial products. Starting with the construction of ‘one-at-a-time’ atomically precise, ‘quantum dot’ nanotech-based products in volume at practical production rates and costs. Harnessing this capability will position the United States and Texas with the fundamental technology to develop next-generation quantum dot applications for military and commercial applications such as advanced communications, metrology, and quantum computers. The spin-off nanomanufacturing capabilities from that early application will result in revolutionary nanotech products in follow-on development.”

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In my opinion, current advocates of molecular nanotechnology (MNT) aren’t doing enough to address the risks. Christine Peterson of the Foresight Institute advocates an open source physical security model, which is helpful, but should be accompanied by more specific recommendations to form a seed around which further ideas can accrete. The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology has laid out the technological specs of MNT and called for more discussion, but has provided little in the way of concrete recommendations. Ray Kurzweil seems to just think that everything will pretty much automatically turn out fine.

Nanofactories (manufacturing units based on MNT) will need to have extensive, unhackable built-in safeguards in order to be safe. If they can be hacked and these hacked nanofactories cannot be recovered, that could be very bad (significantly worse that terrorists getting weapons-grade uranium). That’s a phrase I’d like MNT advocates to repeat publicly: “terrorists or tyrants getting their hands on unlocked nanofactories would be far worse than weapons-grade uranium”. Unlocked (or poorly regulated) nanofactories would be able to build devices that enrich uranium many times more effectively than current centrifuge technology. That’s somewhat of a problem, unless we plan to gather up all the uranium on the planet and keep it locked up in vaults.

If unhackable nanofactories cannot be built, then to push ahead on the technology would be irresponsible. Mainstream “experts” will be saying this in 5-15 years, but I’m saying it now.

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It’s important to realize the obvious: that every human problem, every malady, every concern, every evil, is at root simply a suboptimal arrangement of atoms and molecules. If this sounds quasi-spiritual, it’s because it is — for millennia, pre-scientific humans have attributed all ills to various agents — the gods, magicians, and other humans. This is because these ills demand an explanation, and we didn’t have a plausible one, so we made it up. Now, at least in the abstract, we have a concrete, very likely correct answer: suboptimal atomic arrangements.

This realization is neither trivial nor too broad to be useless. If your problems are caused by the gods (that some people sadly still believe in…), then to solve them, you either need to give up, on engage in rituals (prayer, sacrifice, etc.) that have an empirical impact of precisely zero. The ultimate promise is that the gods or God will come at the end of time to make everything better. Unfortunately (?) for us, that will never happen.

The alternative is to slash all spirits from your worldview and model the world as a game board where all the pieces are humans. This too isn’t quite correct, as many who avoid the error of deification of Nature fall right into the trap of the fundamental attribution error, where everything that goes right or wrong becomes some human’s fault or credit. The attribution error is absolutely omnipresent in politics, because invoking it also invokes human political emotions that a leader can easily use to manipulate everyone who has never heard of the error. Since this is practically everyone, it’s politically rational to exploit it to its fullest, and a self-reinforcing feedback loop of error is created. Excuse me, but there are a lot of relevant forces in this world besides deliberate human choice. The shared biases of all human beings come to mind, as do biological realities such as the existence of malaria, and economic realities such as centralized manufacturing.

One sidenote on the notion that “all ills are caused by suboptimal atomic arrangements”. People will have different definitions of what is suboptimal, that is patently obvious. That doesn’t change the fact the subjective personal ills are caused by suboptimal atomic rearrangements, or that there’s a huge space in the center of the Venn diagram of shared humans goals that is specified by certain specific atomic arrangements. Simply because we can’t specify all these arrangements doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

Despite my recognition of a physicalist basis to all problems, I do not advocate a universal convergence towards One True Atomic Pattern or other such absolutist nonsense. I simply wish us to recognize that all shared human problems can be ultimately diagnosed and remedied using the scientific method plus remedial effort: use tests to determine the suboptimal atomic arrangements, then devise engineering solutions to rearrange current arrangements into a more optimal state. This holds true for mental phenomena as well as phenomena in the external world — my brain is “the external world” for others and it is entirely physical. Those who advocate an aphysical basis for consciousness are making the same mystical mistakes that our ancestors have yawn-inducingly made for thousands of years. I am special even if my consciousness has a purely physical basis.

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It really does exist!

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In the secret, back-room Singularitarian mailing lists and discussion venues, we often ask: “More publicity good? Or more publicity bad? How much publicity is optimal?”

There’s no question that our cause (building safe seed AI) has more exposure now than ever. While it can be hard, if not impossible, to distinguish references to Singularity a la Kurzweil from Singularity a la I.J. Good, the two concepts are meshed together and people really do get exposure to both, even if they come away thinking that Singularity means “transhumanism” instead of “recursively self-improving superintelligence”. And the people who are really in the know can actually tell the difference. For instance, Kevin Kelly, founding editor of WIRED, recently wrote about our version of the Singularity at his blog, the Technium. When the Intel CTO mentioned the Singularity coming by 2060, he was talking about Kurzweil’s Singularity, so in my mind that doesn’t really count.

The goal is to get ourselves enough exposure to get the funding and talent we need to implement Friendly AI as quickly and safely as possible, and no more. Any additional exposure is a risk, because it increases the chance that someone with a ton of money says, “AGI, that sounds like a great idea! Good thing Isaac Asimov did all the groundwork on that friendliness issue for us, so we can just plow ahead on the intelligence part!” Then, after a successful brute force implementation, the AI develops self-replicating robotics, creates trillions of dummies that meet the definition of “human” based on its training set, and goes about spending the rest of eternity converting the universe into sock puppets and making certain to obey them. (Which is pretty easy, considering that the AI controls both the dummies and the system doing the obeying.)

The answer to the “more publicity?” question depends greatly on how hard one wagers AGI to be, or more appropriately, what your probability distribution over difficulty levels is. The people who wager that AGI is relatively “easy”, as in, requiring about a dozen brilliant programmer-theorists a la Fellowship of the Ring, along with a good ten or twenty million dollars, won’t want our cause to gain much more publicity or exposure. Those who wager AGI is extremely hard, as in requiring thousands of programmer-theorists and billions of dollars, would obviously want as much exposure as possible, as it would be necessary to reach the finish line. I fall somewhere in the middle.

On Overcoming Bias, Eliezer Yudkowsky recently observed how he thought many people in the field of AGI were simply ordinary. In my worldview, this is great. My personal experience with SIAI employees and interns indicates they are anything but ordinary. That means the “good guys” — those who make a huge deal about AI Friendliness and warn that we could all be exterminated if we mess up AGI programming — are doing better than the “bad guys” — those who just want to create AGI because it sounds like an interesting research project and are anticipating nothing more than obedient robots with IQs of 90.

But, in my view, the “good guys” still don’t have enough resources and talent, so we need more exposure. Not exposure to the general public, but targeted exposure to highly educated audiences. In a certain sense, the meme is self-filtering. Our version of the Singularity can’t be boiled down to soundbites easily. It helps to have detailed background knowledge about things like philosophy of mind, reductionism, rationality, the human tendency towards anthropocentrism, Homo economicus, evolutionary psychology, and more. Average members of the general public may stumble upon blogs like this and try to understand what I’m saying, but based on what I’ve seen, they’re likely to seize on some tiny incidental point I made and ignore the bigger picture, thereby stopping the spread of the meme in its tracks. Insofar as it makes reckless drives towards AGI less probable, that’s a good thing.

In the end, I don’t think that a million dollars a year and a dozen supergeniuses is enough. We need more resources, more talent, because the challenge of AGI is huge. It looks like the probability of success (by anyone) before 2015 is quite low, and the good guys have a significant theoretical head-start. I think we can afford (and in fact require) more exposure, until the necessary philanthropists and supergeniuses step forward. A major software project is not cheap, and taking the planning fallacy into account, things are going to take more work than we suspect. But once we reach that threshold — stop! Don’t keep plugging ahead for exposure like a mindless robot. That’s just what we’re trying to avoid, y’know?

And wait — you said there are smart bloggers out there that actually aren’t writing about this stuff?

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The IEET sometimes replicates blog posts of mine in their articles section. They do this because I said they could. I like it when they do that, because I think what I say is important and should be heard by more people. Otherwise I wouldn’t say it.

You can help me and other IEET fellows by caring about the IEET and what it does. There’s cool stuff there. For instance, IEET executive director James Hughes, who many of you may have heard of, recently did an interview with the Boston Globe on extinction risks. It helps when he and IEET fellows do things like that, because it lowers the chance that we all die. And not dying is awesome.

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