Final Thoughts on the GF 2045 Conference

I ran out of battery in the middle of the last section (with the spiritual leaders), so don't have good notes on what all of them said.  However, I think I can give an overall summary.  The folks from the eastern spiritual traditions all start from a non-materialist perspective in which consciousness is primary in the universe and not necessarily tied to matter.  They claim to have extensive experience, either within their tradition, or personally, or both, in moving consciousness around.  For example, Mahayogi 'Pilot' Baba is reported to have stopped his heart for days at a time and then come back to life (see here for a sceptical take).

So they all seemed willing to credit that it was potentially feasible that western science/technology could create a technological artifact that would support a consciousness (ho hum, we've been doing similar things for centuries, was kind of the perspective).  They were much more concerned with whether or not this would be a good thing employed en-masse by westerners.  They varied in their opinions: Swami Vishnudevananda Giri seemed to be pretty gung-ho (though he cautioned that the scientists who worked on this problem would end up profoundly changed by it), but most of the rest were fairly wary.  Phagyab Rinpoche gave a very eloquent speech in which he basically said it came down to the intent of those developing the technology.  If the goal was genuinely to help reduce the suffering of all beings, then it would probably be ok, but if the main goals were self-serving (eg just for longevity) it would probably give rise to all manner of problems.

That's the part that worries me: in the end, this stuff will be delivered by the technology industry, which is run by executives and investors who are, with some honorable exceptions, overwhelmingly driven by greed and competition.  I think that's going to show in the results.

So how did the conference impact my own thinking (as exemplified here, say)?  I continue to think that machine intelligence that is functionally (ie economically) equivalent to human is on the way.  I continue to think that it's likely to take longer than 30 years to achieve in full.  I continue to think this is going to exert absolutely massive stress on society, and that we should slow down.  The conference has caused me to revise upward my likelihood that scientists will reverse engineer the brain - I was impressed that they can produce a detailed level neuronal map of an entire mouse brain already (although they still can't emulate the complete functional behavior of even the simplest nervous systems).

And I was somewhat intrigued by the quantum mechanics arguments.  I don't have time to go into detail here, but it really is true that quantum mechanics privileges the observer, in such a way that it's not quite clear how to give a quantum-materialistic account of the human brain and mind (at least unless there's been new progress on this in the last couple of decades that I don't know about).  It's not clear to me whether this means that this project is going to run into the limits of materialism in a big way, or that there's just something that we really don't understand about quantum mechanics that the physicists are going to have to fix.

I think better of Dmitry Itskov.  Holding conferences and inviting a broad range of perspectives is at least making this stuff conscious, rather than society just continuing to drive hard in this direction without really talking about where it is that we are going.  I think he deserves credit for hosting a very open discussion.

Last Session of GF 2045

Amit Goswami

Consciousness and the Quantum: Science, Psychology and Spirituality

Technology is good for allowing humans to do what?  Creating free time - what we will do with it?  How will we make a living?  Scientific materialism is a 350 year old world view - not getting us anywhere (environmental problems etc).  Have to change our science.  "Quantum physics liberates the human spirit".  The individual behavior of objects is not determined.  "You are not a machine.  You know this already.  You have been the victim of propaganda."  Quantum activism - humans are capable of change.  "If objects are possibilities, then what makes this object turn into actuality?  All objects are concrete - they don't appear in possible positions."  Reality consists of two things - the domain of wavelike possibility, and the domain of concrete actuality.  In ancient times, people had the same idea - transcendant reality and immanent reality.  Became heaven and earth due to confusion.

GF 2045: Second Sunday Session

Randall Koene

Title: Whole Brain Emulation: Reverse Engineering A Mind.

Trying to take the big picture and look top down at how to understand the mind in order to duplicate.  Motivation for doing this is to avoid external catastrophes (meteorites, supervolcanoes, etc) - make ourselves more adaptable so we can cope with changes.  (Talk about projection - technology is the leading cause of change!)  Goal is to get to substrate independent minds.

GF 2045: First Sunday Session

Kurzweil is up...  Talking about exponentials and acceleration.  He's kind of sloppy - talking about social media and blogs taking only three years to spread (FB founded in 2004, blogs before 2000) .

Has a graph of microprocessor clock speed that doesn't seem to show the fact that clock speed has plateaud (we've moved to having many cores instead).

Kurzweil is explicit that the singularity metaphor is drawn from black holes (rather than mathematical singularities more abstractly).

GF 2045: Section 3

Back from lunch with 70% battery, so I'm going to return to live-blogging.

First up is Marvin Minsky, who is of course a god in computer science.  I'm very intrigued to know what he has to say on these subjects.

He thinks we're going to run out of workers due to increasing lifespan and low fertility!  Don't think he's looked at the data on employment/population ratio, which show the reverse.  This is his case for the need for smart robots and it's based on a total lack of knowledge of the relevant economic statistics!

Smart robots have not made a whole lot of progress since the 1970s, in his view.  Humans are resourceful and complex (extended example on object recognition in vision) and it's been hard to duplicate that.

AI has split into different approaches that work on particular subfields.  In the sixties/seventies, quite a lot of progress was made on algorithms that could solve basic math problems (high school/college algebra/calculus).  So seemed easy to solve highly technical problems.  But extremely difficult to get computers to solve "common sense" things that even young children can do.

Minsky believes that understanding of the brain is very limited at the large scale.  Know a great deal about individual neurons, a little about connections between neurons, and almost nothing about how large assemblies of neurons collaborate to solve problems.  Know that different brain regions do different things, but very little about how they are done.

Shouts out to Freud for an early theory of learning being due to strengthening neural connections, fifty years ahead of time.  Also draws on Freudian ideas of inner critics.  Wants to see more money diverted to top-down analysis of thinking/brain, versus bottom-up neuroscience in order to make better progress on AI.

"My prediction for the 2040s is that this will happen more slowly than most of us think, but that eventually it will happen".

Next up are Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff.  They are famously AI sceptics and have a completely different theory than most people of how brain/consciousness work.

Hameroff is talking in person, Penrose by video.  Hameroff's life is devoted to "What is consciousness".  Defines consciousness as subjective awareness - objective correlates are not know scientifically.  Eastern view is consciousness pervades universe.  Western view is brain produces consciousness as some kind of excitation of neurons in a network of connections.

Outlining his microtubule theory of consciousness - too complex to liveblog but pretty interesting stuff - more plausible on first exposure than I would have guessed.

Means brain does 10²⁷ operations per second instead of 10¹⁶ per second.  Puts the singularity back a good ways (if you think the latter is tied to mere computation speed, anyway).

Now Penrose up - big gap in quantum mechanics where Schrodinger equation and making measurement are foundation principles, but inconsistent (apologies to the non-physicists here).  Obvious place to look for consciousness.  Schrodinger's cat - why don't we see superpositions?  Articulating a new theory of quantum mechanics/consciousness here - I'm not going to follow this without a lot more study.  Rest of the audience must be completely lost (assuming there aren't too many physics PhDs here).  Whoa - their theory of consciousness somehow can accomodate it occurring not tied to the brain and so can accomodate out-of-body experiences etc.

These guys are either crazy or geniuses (or both).

Now Alexander Panov, a Russian physicist.  Outlining the idea of the technological singularity.  Kurzweil prediction of date of singularity is based on comparing computational capacity of brains and computers, with brains approximated as number of synapses times switching frequency of about 100Hz, with computation extrapolated using Moore's Law.

Points out that software progress is not tied all that closely to hardware progress. Computer translation sucked in the eighties and sucks now, despite a million-fold increase in computer power.  No indications that we understand how to program a strong AI.  Claims the problem of simulating nervous system of the simple worm C. elegans (with only a few hundred neurons) is unsolved.

Also, individual neurons have been shown to be stateful and learn - so brain is more than just the neuronal interactions.  More discussion of possibility of quantum effects in brain.

Martine Rothblatt

"The Purpose of Biotechnology Is the End of Death".  Talking about mindclones - talking about duplication of consciousness, thinks "Humans will have no trouble getting used to being in two places at the same time".  Speculating about "mindware" - software that can interact with a "mindfile" - an uploaded consciousness.  Yawn - not happening soon.  Very glib shallow defense of the idea that it's inevitable that we will be able to upload minds (given we still have no real idea how the brain/mind works, I don't see how this can possibly be certain).

Problem of mindclone civil rights.  Does a mindclone have rights - while biological form still exists?  Afterwards?  "The cause celebre of the 21st century".

Are you legally responsible for the actions of your mind-clones?

What about mind-clone procreation?  Do combinations of mind-clones that have never been biologically alive have rights?

Anders Sandberg

Ethics of mind uploading.  Analogy with animals - what moral consideration do they deserve?  Long philosophical discussion of rights of software.

Having said this, it's clear there will be a legal/practical minefield if we ever could upload minds.  Who owns the upload?  What happens if multiple uploads are running - can they all vote?  What happens if somebody runs bootleg copies of you?

GF 2045: Section 2

My battery indeed ran out and prevented live blogging of the second session, so I'm going to give a very quick summary.  This section concerned the current technology of android and human-computer interface.

The highlight was Hiroshi Ishiguro, a Japanese robotics professor who builds life-like androids.  He's a warm, funny, appealing speaker, and brought a couple of androids with him, including a replica of himself.  The state of the art in androids is that they look fairly life-like but behave like stiff, indeed severely autistic, individuals with computer generated voices saying pre-determined things (although a video of an android and a robot talking while both running cleverbot was fairly hilarious).

This has been Ishiguro's life work, and he describes his motivation as being to understand what it means to be human - only by trying to build simulations can we understand what really makes humans tick.  I have some sympathy with that motivation.

The other thing that was very helpful was a pair of professors from Berkeley (Jose Carmena and Michel Maharbiz) who gave a talk about the current state of Brain-Machine interface.  It's pretty primitive - they can stick a grid of a few dozen needles into the brain and read stuff out of it, but it will only last for a year or two.  In using robotic prosthetics, they currently cannot get anywhere near the needed degrees of freedom to control all that the arm can do.  Plus the requirement to get wires out through the skull is a major problem (infection risk).  They are currently working on an approach ("neural dust"), in which a bunch of tiny disattached receptors (the dust) would be scattered in the cortex and communicate via ultrasound with a base station at the surface of the cortex, which in turn would relay the information wirelessly to another station attached to the skull exterior.  If they can get it to work, that sounds like it would be a big advance.

In short, this stuff is currently light-years from being able to control anything like a complete avatar.  Of course, there's still three decades between now and 2045.

Still, I have to say that the ability of robots/algorithms to displace humans from jobs is many decades ahead of the ability to provide much improvement to the human body.  My concern is that it's likely to stay that way.

Live Blogging the GF 2045 Conference

I'm going to try and live-blog the GF 2045 conference.  I may get tired or bored, or my battery might run out, and quit, but I'm going to give it a go.

Up now is Dmitry Itskov.  Slightly awkward Russian speaker.  Giving a straight up "The future will be Utopia" pitch.  No-one will die, everyone will be happy, we will all spend our time working on our spiritual growth, we'll be able to travel holographically everywhere.  My inner Burkean is screaming.

Snowden and the Toxicity of the Internet

I think we are still operating with very partial information here.  Glenn Greenwald has promised that he has thousands of documents from Snowden still, dozens of which are newsworthy.  It's still very unclear how Snowden came to have access to the documents he seems to have, who he really is, whether his testimony is 100% accurate, or where he has gone now.  I assume a lot more will come out in coming days and weeks.

With that caveat, here are a few thoughts: this case illustrates some long-standing concerns I have about the direction of society.

A Couple of Notes on Global Futures 2045

The link in this morning's links posts to Dmitry Itskov led me to a big conference in Manhattan that he is putting on June 15/16th.  The speaker's list involves a bunch of eminent singularity/AI thinkers, as well as various spiritual thinkers.

I am increasingly struck by the overtly spiritual language being used by techno-optimist singularity thinkers.  From the conference's "About" page:

The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.

The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.

A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.

A Parallel

A stray thought I had last night.  I was thinking about the compulsion we in computer science have to develop artificial intelligence.  My experience is that most of my colleagues in the field simply don't really question whether or not it's a good thing that they are working on trying to build algorithms that are smarter than we are.  Whatever our reasons are, it's by and large not because we've really thought it through with an open mind and have decided it's a great idea.  Instead, we are compelled by powerful unconscious motivations, and then try to justify it after the fact.

The analogy that occurred to me is the physicists in the first half of the twentieth century figuring out nuclear physics ("splitting the atom") and eventually developing nuclear weapons.  They remain humankind's most destructive weapon.  And yet, in a strange way, they have led to marked moral/spiritual progress on the part of the species.  They were used twice, and then we've refrained from using them in anger since.  And as a result, there's been no open war between major powers since 1945.  To see how remarkable this is, here's a list of major wars in Europe - there have been wars between major powers every few decades since time immemorial.  But the prospect of nuclear war was so awful that we finally learned to stop.  At least, I hope it stays that way.

So perhaps that's the hope here.  In starting to build something that has the potential to completely tear our society apart altogether, maybe it will force us to finally confront the unconscious forces that drive us to blindly innovate and grow our economy, whatever the cost.  Being a bit more conscious about where we want to go would be a good thing.

Some Things That Will be True After AI

Kevin Drum muses about the advent of true artificial intelligence:

I agree, and something similar to this needles me periodically whenever my mind drifts into dorm room bull session mode.1 You see, I believe that we're only a few decades away from true artificial intelligence. I might be wrong about this, but put that aside for the moment. The point is that I believe it. And needless to say, that will literally change everything. If AI is ubiquitous by 2040 or so, nearly every long-term problem we face right now—medical inflation, declining employment, Social Security financing, returns to education, global warming, etc. etc.—either goes away or is radically transformed in ways we can't even imagine.

I agree with Kevin that AI is the biggest deal out there.  I also think it's coming, though I suspect it will take longer than 2040 to arrive fully* and that it will arrive in stages over the course of a number of decades.  Indeed, in important ways we can already feel the early effects.

It's worth thinking about some things that won't change as a result of AI, or at least not quickly.  Here's a draft list:

• There will still be 9 or 10 billion humans on the planet (or may the gods and goddesses help us).
• They will still want to live in big warm houses with lots of stuff, and travel around as much as they are able.
• They will still want to have sex and raise children.
• They will still be prone to getting very pissed if anyone tries to take their stuff away.
• The economy will still consist of competing corporations regulated by governments (it's just that both the corporations and governments will over time employ fewer and fewer humans).
• Humans will still have all the legal rights (I just don't see why we are ever going to think it's in our interest to give legal rights to algorithms).

It follows pretty immediately that most of our environmental problems, for example, won't be going anywhere as a result of AI.

On the other hand, we are going to have to go through some massive wrenching cultural adjustments in our ideas of work and dependency and how we derive meaning from our lives.  Jamais Cascio recently coined the term the Burning Man Future, which I like.  In particular, it captures the idea that the entire culture is going to increasingly have to become like what is currently a hippy artist fringe.  Either that, or we need to decide that there are some things we really don't want to invent and stop working on this stuff.

* It's probably worth pointing out that I have spent most of my career designing statistical reasoning algorithms for a living so my intuitions here are at least somewhat educated.  Of course, I could be as wrong as the next expert usually is.

Obama to Accelerate Towards Singularity

NYT sez:

The Obama administration is planning a decade-long scientific effort to examine the workings of the human brain and build a comprehensive map of its activity, seeking to do for the brain what the Human Genome Project did for genetics.

George M. Church, a molecular biologist at Harvard, said he was helping to plan the project, the Brain Activity Map. The project, which the administration has been looking to unveil as early as March, will include federal agencies, private foundations and teams of neuroscientists and nanoscientists in a concerted effort to advance the knowledge of the brain’s billions of neurons and gain greater insights into perception, actions and, ultimately, consciousness.

Scientists with the highest hopes for the project also see it as a way to develop the technology essential to understanding diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, as well as to find new therapies for a variety of mental illnesses.

Moreover, the project holds the potential of paving the way for advances in artificial intelligence.

Indeed it does.

This illustrates exactly why I claimed that the approach to the singularity is ultimately the greatest threat to us; we are completely culturally blind to the idea that innovation could be bad for us, across the political spectrum.

Being a Little Less Gloomy

I have a little bit more to say on yesterday's gloomy robotics post.  The point I wanted to add is that this will inevitably become a huge political issue.  At the moment, the consensus that innovation is always good is not seriously questioned on either side of the political spectrum, except by a relatively small fringe (though Kevin Drum - definitely not a fringe character - did link to yesterday's post in broad agreement).  But as the processes of automation and technological unemployment continue, this will inevitably change.  Obviously, we will not create 100% unemployment amongst humans without provoking a massive political backlash along the way.

The nature of the kinds of exponentials involved is such that it will appear as though change is relatively slow until suddenly robots are popping up everywhere and job loss is threatening people who matter (or at least their kids).  So at some point - perhaps in the 2020s or 2030s - this will become a red hot political issue that everyone is talking about.  Then it will be possible to campaign for reform (reform being the preferable alternative to revolution - but one that doesn't get much traction until there is a credible fear of revolution).

So the task now is mainly one of thinking - of figuring out when the moment comes, what should we be trying to do?  What kinds of cultural changes will be needed, and what kinds of changes to legal institutions can produce a reasonably enduring human society in which people aren't like something out of WALL-E?  Clearly the main changes will have to come in the way we think about and regulate the innovation process.

Global Robot Population

Prime Age Men Crawling Back to Work

Anti-Technologists Resort to Violence

Targeting academics investigating nanotechnology apparently:

A package bomb that injured two professors at a university here this month is the latest in a string of attacks by a new terror group inspired by the Unabomber. Its violent actions have put campuses across Mexico on alert and caused nanotechnology researchers worldwide to take precautions with their mail.

Nanotechnology was singled out as a target for the attacks in manifestos posted on the Web by the group behind the bombs, which calls itself "Individualities Tending Toward Savagery." It has been linked to attacks in France, Spain, and Chile, and to a bomb sent earlier this year to a scientist at another Mexican university who specializes in nanotech. An analyst who helped identify the Unabomber—who turned out to be a former professor—says the posts show signs of someone well-educated who could be affiliated with a college.

The online rants credit the Unabomber as an inspiration. The Unabomber, a former professor of mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley named Theodore Kaczynski, spread fear in academe for nearly 20 years with his mail-bombing campaign, which killed three professors and wounded 23 others until he was arrested, in 1996. Today he sits in a federal prison in Colorado with no chance of parole, but he continues to write articles calling for a revolution to achieve his dream of an end of technology and a return to hunter-gatherer societies.

(via Jamais Cascio).

While I have major reservations about some directions of current technological development, the use of violence to oppose it is deplorable and counterproductive. Peaceful protest and the ballot box are the ways to achieve societal change. Furthermore, the goal of returning to a hunter-gatherer society is ridiculous in a world of almost seven billion people.  Hopefully the criminal(s) will be caught and tried expeditiously.

On Keynes and Coalmines

Paul Krugman reminds us of this thought experiment from Keynes:

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.

It seems to me not very much of a stretch beyond current technology to imagine a fully automated digging machine that would find the bottles in the dirt (via figuring out where the soft dirt is from the machine effort feedback combined with processing sonar images say - those glass bottles with mostly air in must show up once you get close).  The machine could then crack them open and shoot the banknotes back up a pneumatic tube to the surface.

Given that, Keynes' scheme might not result in very much employment any more.

Can we Grow the Economy Any More?

Kevin Drum had an interesting post yesterday in which he collected a list of theories for why it's difficult to grow the economy any more:

1. The basic Rogoff/Reinhart observation that financial collapses due to asset bubbles just take a long time to work through. Given the size of the 2008 collapse, historical evidence suggests that it's going to take five or six years to recover, and that's that.
2. The Tyler Cowen "Great Stagnation" hypothesis. We've picked through all the low-hanging economic fruit over the past century, and like it or not, we're now entering an extended period of low productivity growth because we're not inventing lots of cool new stuff.
3. The related (I think) investment drought hypothesis. Ben Bernanke famously ascribed the housing bubble partly to a "savings glut" from overseas, and the flip side of that is an investment drought. The reason financial assets became so popular is that, even with all that money sloshing around the system, there simply weren't very many high-quality investment opportunities available in firms that make real-world goods and services, and that hasn't changed.
4. The peak oil theory. Production of oil has pretty much maxed out, which means that every time the economy gets moving it will create a spike in oil prices, which will send the global economy back into recession. We're now in a continual oil-fueled boom/bust cycle that limits our long-term growth rate.
5. The Michael Mandel contention that increased consumption simply leaks out of the economy to China and other countries. Stimulating consumption in the U.S. just won't do much for the American economy if all those extra dollars mostly get spent on overseas goods and services.
6. Various structural explanations that suggest the United States has an increasing number of workers who flatly don't have the skills to do anything useful in the modern economy — a problem that was temporarily masked by the housing bubble and was only fully exposed when the economy collapsed. This takes various forms, both weak (workers can be retrained but it will take a while) and strong (forget it, they're simply useless).
7. The self-serving group of partisan hack theories: regulatory uncertainty is the real problem, taxes are too high, the EPA is strangling America, hyperinflation is just around the corner, markets are cowering in fear of future deficits, etc. etc.

Of these, I subscribe to versions of 1, 4, 5, and 6.  But let me comment first on the ones I don't agree with.

Automation or Offshoring? Evidence from General Motors

Taking "Singularity" Apart

The term "singularity" as applied to the medium-term future of technology/humanity bundles together a variety of predictions for purposes that suit advocates of continued technological development, but don't necessarily have to occur together.  In this post, I want to briefly point out the different pieces, and comment on the strength of the connections.  For readers wanting some more background on the concept, the Wiki article is a good place to start.