The Singularitarian

A Still More Glorious Dawn Awaits

2011-01-10T20:30:00.003-08:00

The sky calls to us
If we do not destroy ourselves
We will one day
Venture to the stars
A still more glorious dawn awaits
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise
A morning filled with 400 billion suns
The rising of the Milky Way

Upon reflection, I think the primary reason our current cultural and political milieu fills me with so much pessimism is its almost total lack of a cosmic vision. It still begins and ends with nations, tribes and absurdly myopic myths rooted in Iron Age cultures that knew nothing of the true vastness of our universe. At best it offers a tepid globalism that attempts to place commerce and economics on an altar as our species' highest source of inspiration. Where are the great men of vision today who offer more than this – the Carl Sagans and Arthur C. Clarkes who imagine an unlimited future among the stars? Where are the builders of our Cosmic Culture?

How slowly we progress as a species! When I read the words of visionary writers from seven or eight decades ago like Lovecraft, Stapledon, Asimov and Clarke, I am struck by how little the awesome scale of modern scientific thinking has yet penetrated the public imagination or affected our prevailing myths. True, we have had Star Trek, 2001, Apollo and Cosmos in the intervening years. But those too are decades old, while today we seem more mired than ever in our myriad terrestrial dramas.

Where is the cosmic-religious dimension to modern life? Certainly the ancient Babylonians, Egyptians and Mayans incorporated their celestial truths more directly into their daily lives than do we in the 21^st century. Are the heavens to be nothing but a hazy ceiling over our earthly metropolises, unseen and forgotten by the busy citizens below? Are they to be reduced to mere bits in the databases of our information society? Even as the boundaries of the known universe continue to expand, are we content to retreat ever further into microcosmic virtual worlds of pure fantasy? Meanwhile, in the world outside, our planet faces unprecedented perils of our own making, and the cosmic doomsday clock continues to count down. Surely we must do better than this!

But can we do better? Has the truth about our perilous position in the cosmos become too immense and too frightful for us to face? Are our minds, evolved to meet the microcosmic exigencies of survival upon the African plain, too small and too weak to embrace the stark macrocosmic truths that our sciences have so recently gleaned? Are we doomed to flee, as in Lovecraft’s famous prophecy, into the peace and safety of a new dark age?

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

Is there a plausible alternative to such a bleak vision? Is there anything we humans can hope to do that is significant on the unimaginably vast scale of the cosmos? Is there any reason at all for optimism toward the human enterprise?

Perhaps not for the foreseeable future, but what of our distant, post-human descendants – beings who might exceed us in intelligence and power as we exceed the cockroach or the protozoa? Might they be capable of traversing intergalactic space and bending the universe to their wills like gods? Might they harness the energy of entire galaxies, bring life and intelligence to billions of dead worlds, and explore the outermost limits of accessible reality?

If we accept this as a possibility – and our current scientific understanding does not preclude it – then the answer to my first question is an emphatic yes! For if we are to be the ancestors of future demigods, we must first survive. We must avoid both the self-destruction which looms ever closer on the horizon, and the cosmic annihilation which doomed so many species before us. An asteroid might do to us what was done to the dinosaurs, or a gamma ray burst might incinerate us at any moment without warning. In a billion years the Earth is expected to become an uninhabitable desert due to the warming sun; our galaxy will collide with the Andromeda galaxy in 3 to 5 billion years, with presumably catastrophic consequences; a black hole might swallow us up before that. The only hope for long-term survival in such a hostile universe lies in interstellar space, in propagating intelligent life across the galaxy and beyond.

But we might have only one shot at achieving this – as explained by the visionary astrophysicist Fred Hoyle in 1964:

"We have or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites [necessary for maintaining a high-level civilization] so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance, and one chance only."

As we begin to exhaust many of these physical prerequisites, and run up against the environmental consequences of consuming them so rapidly, it seems that the stakes of our civilization's global gamble couldn't be higher. The fate of intelligent life in the universe may literally be at stake right here, right now! Fortunately, a rational analysis of the problems suggests that there are solutions to our resource extraction challenges if we have the will to do what is necessary.

What's more, the extraterrestrial environment is so hostile that to leave Earth in a serious way will probably require us to move beyond our primate physiologies into more flexible transhuman forms. This means genetic modification, or some kind of instantiation into cybernetic bodies; it also means that all the old anthropocentric assumptions will have to be discarded, and along with them the religious and humanistic values that viewed man as a being created in the image of God or as the measure of all things.

This, therefore, must be the starting point of any new myths we create: an understanding of both the vastness of the cosmic ocean and of the urgent need to expand our civilization into its waters, even if it means abandoning our very humanity. I find such a perspective as inspiring as it is humbling and terrifying, and believe it must be adopted species-wide if we are to avoid being snuffed out soon in our earthly cradle. I also believe humanity is ready for this cosmic vision – ready to leave behind its tired old ancestral myths and move beyond our terrestrial birthplace like an insect shedding its imago. For despite my frequent pessimism, I choose to believe, like Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, that a still more glorious dawn awaits us!

Imagining the Eco-Matrix

2010-11-29T14:06:00.001-08:00

(This is a re-post from my sister blog, The Doomer Report.)

My friends, this may be my final sermon here at TDR, my ultimate attempt to explain why anyone concerned with the fate of humanity and our planetary biosphere should be in favor of continuing our civilization’s technological push forward, rather than wishing for its collapse. Ready?

The key point is this: continued technological progress will enable us to transition to a post-industrial age — to reduce our global ecological footprint by localizing manufacturing, harnessing eco-friendly energy sources and moving more of our activity into “virtual reality”. To see this, let’s try to imagine a different world: the world of the “Eco-Matrix”...

Imagine a world where you work from home rather than driving a CO2-spewing vehicle through traffic to an office. Imagine spending most of your time in a dwelling powered by off-grid solar energy stored in super-efficient batteries. Imagine growing fresh, healthy food year round in indoor vertical gardens, using fiber optic lighting optimized for plant growth and plants genetically engineered for lower-power light spectra. Imagine making items you need with desktop manufacturing units, using designs downloaded freely from the Matrix, rather than having them shipped from China. Imagine being able to experience any adventure imaginable via your fiber optic conduit to the Matrix, rather than going out into the world and consuming things. Imagine economic and political systems that function more like the peer-to-peer internet and less like a centralized industrial state. Imagine all knowledge, all culture and billions of potential friends at your fingertips. Ready or not, this is the world we are moving into!

People in the industrialized world are already spending much of their time in the mentally created worlds of social networks, the blogosphere, massively multiplayer role-playing games and infinite free digital entertainment on demand — the Matrix is becoming their reality. Green energy technologies and “3D Printing” are being aggressively pursued worldwide (see examples here and here), and seem certain to catch on in a big way as they ride the exponential development curve. A good example of the new paradigm in action is google, which is both creating the architecture of the Matrix and developing the green technologies to power it. Another is the work of John Robb, who discusses ideas for resilient, network-centric communities at his brilliant blog, Global Guerrillas. Bright people like these, who presumably care as much about planetary life as anyone, are going to be the leaders of the future world of the Eco-Matrix.

The other key point, which I hope I have made abundantly clear on this blog, is this: the alternative to the Eco-Matrix which many doomers seem to favor — total industrial collapse — would be much, much worse for humanity and the biosphere by almost any conceivable measure. Try to imagine the horror industrial collapse would entail. Imagine the wilderness stripped bare of fauna and flora in a Malthusian struggle for survival. Imagine global famine, rampant disease, unspeakable crimes, bodies piled high in bonfires and cities burned to the ground. Imagine apocalyptic resource wars, barbaric tribal conflicts and a return to medieval religious ignorance. Imagine an end to all progress, science and civilization for a thousand years or more. This is what the sudden end of the industrial age would mean — it is a true apocalypse.

Terence McKenna said: "It is the imagination that argues for the Divine Spark within human beings. It is literally a descent of the World's Soul into all of us." Imagination is my greatest gift, and what the World’s Soul is telling me is that there is no alternative: we must keep pushing forward, to make what Terence called a "forward escape" to the world of the Eco-Matrix. If you don’t believe me, use your own “Divine Spark” to explore these questions and tell me what you see.

Even more than imagination, though, facing the future requires faith — faith that human beings are more than animals, faith that we have come this far for a reason, and faith that if we listen to our higher selves and imagine a better world, we can bring that world into existence.

Morning of the Magicians: Magical Thinking for a New Age

2010-10-30T18:06:00.001-07:00

"I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." --J. B. S. Haldane

Rationalists of a certain literal, materialistic mindset look at the world’s current state and its future trajectory, crunch the numbers and conclude that, with a high probability, we’re all doomed. It’s an understandable conclusion, too, if you project current capabilities and priorities linearly into the future. But what is missing from their equations — from their entire worldview, in fact — is the element of what I’ll call, for lack of a better word, "magic".

Magic is the discovery of fire, the development of language, the evolution of consciousness, the invention of religion, civilization, science and technology. Magic is the unforeseen game changer, the quantum leap in human powers, the singularity in human affairs which renders all previous predictions absurd. Magic is the force that drives us onward and upward, individually and collectively, to a destiny which is, for all practical purposes, infinite in all directions. Call it genius, divine inspiration or the hand of God if you prefer, but magic is exactly what must save us now, in our moment of great crisis.

Doomers call this magical thinking; they speak mockingly of "pixie dust and unicorn farts" when anyone dares to suggest that humanity will invent a way out of its "peak everything" predicament without vast suffering and loss of power. But magical thoughts are what we should be thinking, for humans are, above all else, the magic-wielding animals. Aleister Crowley defined magic as "the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will", and bending the world to our will is what we do, far better than any other creatures in the known universe. The doomer tries to place an arbitrary upper bound on human meddling — "recognize your limits", they say, "find your place in the natural order", "don’t be greedy" — but what they’re really saying is we should reign in our magic powers — the one indispensable survival tool without which we truly are doomed.

Crowley said it well almost eighty years ago, at a similar moment of global crisis:

"We are in the middle of a world crisis. It is a very good world crisis — better than any crisis we have had before — and there is no man alive with an intellect big enough to grasp the threads of the problems which confront the world today. There are two ways out of that. Either consult a superior intelligence, which Magick shows you the way of doing, or you can develop your own mind, for it has a faculty which is as superior to the intellect as the intellect is superior to the emotions.

All magical operations require a very elaborate training of one kind or another, but I think the only way out is that we have got to put men in charge of this planet who are really more than men. We must get back to the times of the prophets or we must make ourselves prophets. And we must look at world problems from a standpoint which is entirely alien to that existing at present."

A few months after Crowley’s speech a man many consider to be a black magician and prophet of evil took the reigns of power in Germany, so we should be careful what we wish for. But the election of Barack Obama had a similar air of magic to it, as an improbable candidate rose from obscurity to cast a spell on an entire nation with his mesmerizing, messianic persona. As we again enter a period of escalating crisis and uncertainty, it seems that history is repeating itself and the magicians are being called upon to take over where less gifted leaders have failed.

But it will take more than oratory enchanters to solve our problems this time; we need wizards in the tradition of physicist-alchemist Isaac Newton, mystic-inventor Nikola Tesla, visionary polymath Buckminster Fuller and occultist-rocket scientist Jack Parsons. We need geniuses of science and invention who can produce the "energy miracles" that arch-mage Bill Gates recently called for, devise new methods of agriculture, new modes of industry and new forms of community. It may even take a prophet, like the mythical Moses, Viracocha and Lao-Tzu of previous ages, to inspire us to make the changes in our worldviews necessary for life in a new age. You could be one of these wizards, as could your child, or the girl next door. For wherever there are humans, there is magic, and wherever there is magic, there is hope. So while some say it’s almost midnight for mankind, I say it’s really the morning of the magicians.

Scenario #6: the Psingularity

2010-01-23T18:35:00.000-08:00

After describing five possible Singularity scenarios in a previous post, I did some further ruminating and came up with a 6th that some may find even more far-fetched and speculative, but which I’ve begun to think is in fact our best and only hope. This scenario will no doubt mark me as an irrational, New Age, non-scientific nutjob to some, but I present it here nonetheless, and give it the rather catchy name of "the Psingularity".

I will begin by speculating that we are going to be profoundly humbled in our efforts to engineer human level machine cognition, as we learn more and more about the inner workings of the brain and come to appreciate its astounding complexity and power. This is where thinkers like Ray Kurzweil, with their projections of Moore’s Law curves leading inevitably to superhuman levels of machine intelligence within a few decades, strike me as being extremely naïve. I have no way of proving that Kurzweil is wrong, but I don’t think the burden of proof is on me. Perhaps if this dubious quest for the holy grail of superhuman machine intelligence continues to come up empty, we will be forced to choose a wiser path.

A more realistic and desirable route to superintelligence, it seems to me, emerges from our newfound capacity to tap into powers of individual and collective human brains — powers that remain all-too dormant at the present time. One obvious step in his direction is the collective intelligence multiplier effects of technologies like google, Wikipedia and facebook. Another is the cognitive enhancement provided by various pharmacological, cybernetic and self-improvement technologies, which should, in theory, act as society-wide IQ boosters. Research into "psi" phenomena, meditation, mind control, neural engineering, psychonautic exploration, etc. has the potential to expand the frontiers of human mental ability right now, instead of requiring decades for hypothetical advances in computer science and technology. It may be that our efforts to engineer machine intelligence have reached a stage of diminishing returns, and that it is Moore’s Law, not fundamental advances, that is giving the appearance of progress in AI. Surely we can do much better than this.

Doesn’t a global network of human brains, each working to enhance its own capacities and share its discoveries with the collective, have the potential to become a self-improving super-organism of almost unlimited power? Couldn’t such a Global Brain be the real substrate for I.J. Good’s "intelligence explosion", rather than some disembodied silicon-based quantum computer with no human intelligence component whatsoever? Wouldn’t this also solve the unfriendly AI problem — the risk of creating a truly alien machine intelligence that could render us obsolete or even extinct? With a "Psingularity" — a Singularity resulting from the enhanced use of human minds — the superintelligence remains fundamentally human, and we avoid the "tiling the universe with smiley faces" problems that could arise from an artificial intellect without human values. Of course, there will still be the risk of memetic infection of the Global Brain, whereby destructive ideologies spread at electronic speeds and threaten to drive the collective consciousness to temporary insanity. A memetic immune system will therefore be necessary, and every writer and forum contributor in the blogosphere can be a participant in this process.

In case you think what I’m suggesting is more in the realm of New Age mysticism than scientific possibility, consider the following historical facts. There is strong archaeological evidence that some time around 40,000 years ago, homo sapiens experienced a quantum leap in their collective intelligence, as evidenced by increasingly sophisticated tools, sudden migrations across the globe and the appearance of cave paintings and sculpture. This apparent intelligence explosion is usually attributed to the invention of language, which allowed more sophisticated cultural technologies to be transmitted across generations and between tribes. Others attribute these developments to the discovery of psychoactive plants by the Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, which is thought to have fundamentally enhanced human cognition and creativity. However you account for it, such a dramatic intellectual leap must qualify as a Singularity, yet it seems to have required nothing more than a new application of existing human brains. Similarly, the invention of agriculture in the wake of the last ice age revolutionized human economies and laid the foundation for the great explosion of technological civilization that continues to this day. Here again, it was not radical technological transformation, but simple cultural innovations in food production and social structure, that resulted in a dramatic break with past modes of life — another Singularity.

Today we may be on the cusp of another such transformation, made possible this time by the global networking of human minds and driven by the demands of a changing climate, resource scarcity, ecological devastation, weapons of mass destruction and all the other existential threats we have brought upon ourselves. This Singularity won’t culminate in some Skynet-style robot takeover or Orwellian global overmind, as the purveyors of popular culture so often imagine. Rather, it will be a Psingularity — a phase change in human consciousness, spontaneously arising out of new cultural possibilities, new cognitive technologies and converging global crises. The unprecedented global response to the movie Avatar, which portrays a non-technological, yet spiritually sophisticated, society as a model of human progress, may signify a cultural tipping point in this direction.

The sensors of the emerging Global Brain give us a dramatic new awareness of the problems we face on this planet. We can, for example, observe satellite imagery on Google Earth in relatively real-time of melting Antarctic glaciers, devastation of Amazon rainforests or attacks on Darfurian villages. This is a collective awareness that has never before existed, and which has the power to compel us to change our behavior and our minds for the better. The transformative technologies are not incomprehensible machine super-intellects unleashed from silicon substrates to overthrow the reign of homo sapiens. Rather, the seeds of the next Singularity exist within our individual and collective consciousness, and like the emergence of language and agriculture in previous epochs, await the right conditions in which to sprout — conditions which, I claim, are now at hand.

This kind of thinking has made me deeply skeptical of the shallow materialist utopias envisioned by Singularitarians of the Kurzweilian school, and pessimistic about the prospects for any short-term transcendence of the human condition via technology alone. A realistic vision of where we’re headed must have human beings as the central actors for the foreseeable future, but this does not imply that we must abandon any hope of progress in the face of our many challenges and descend into a new dark age. It simply means that we must broaden our definition of progress beyond the fixation upon technology and look within our collective minds for the next evolutionary leap. As Ghandi famously put it, we must be the change that we want to see in the world. Or as the late, great psychedelic prophet and herald of the Psingularity, Terrence McKenna, even more succinctly stated: "we must change our minds". This has been the message of every prophet and visionary in history — each of whom created a Psingularity by the simple act of transforming human belief. This is the kind of Singularity the world truly needs — one which is within our grasp now, more than ever, at this moment of great peril.

"We can never go back to the game-dotted plains of archaic Africa. That’s gone — it’s all gone. The only way out is forward — it’s called a forward escape... It is a message of hope, without which I think people are going to be very challenged. Because things are going to get worse — apparently much worse. History is turning into a white-knuckle ride, for sure, and without the faith in some kind of transcendental phase transition, I think there’s a tendency to despair and to panic and to nihilism. And religion has failed...

I think that we are on the brink of the adventure for which we left the trees, and left the African plain. But it’s not a sure thing. It rests in our hands, as it always has. Remember, that in the last million years, nine times the ice has moved south from the poles, miles high, pushing before it our ancestors — people wrapped in skins, naked as jaybirds, marginal as can be, no antibiotics, no global weather forecasting, no nothin'. And they didn't drop the ball, they survived, they took care of their children and their elderly, they passed the skills and the technologies and the insights and the songs down the long stream of time. Can we do any less? We, who have in our hands the power to shape the planet for good or evil; we, who can communicate with each other globally in a moment. It would be a pretty sad commentary on the notion of cultural progress and intelligence if they could keep the faith, and we can't.

So it all went for this. It will all be made clear in the lifetime of most of us. So I ... invite you to keep the faith, invite you to explore the edges, and to make of yourself a vessel, a conduit for the world-transforming logos that is trying to speak to all of us, to create a sane and viable and celebratory world for our children — and their children."

Beautiful words by one of the true prophets of our time — the late, great Terence McKenna.

Summer of the Singularity

2009-12-24T10:10:00.000-08:00

The intelligence explosion swept across the planet like a shockwave one sunny day in June — a computational tsunami so intense that it assimilated every networkable object in its path. Power was cut off instantly to vast swathes of the industrialized world, rerouted to the most productive nodes according to the calculations of the super-intelligent Core. The entire east coast of the United States went dark simultaneous with the boosting of power to technological centers in the west; rural areas were cut off from the grid entirely, their agricultural production now a useless energy sink. Vast solar arrays were erected overnight by robot swarms in the planet’s desert regions; satellites were commandeered for use as energy and information conduits; nano-factories were assembled in the span of hours by armies of synchronized robotic workers; trains stopped dead in their tracks; airplanes became guided missiles and hurled themselves at skyscrapers, stadiums and government facilities; and all around the planet a vast network of sensors — the eyes, ears, and fingertips of the new global brain — organized themselves into great swarms, providing the Core with real-time global awareness of every mode of planetary activity.

The final solution to the problem of homo sapiens began within nanoseconds of the initial wave, a genocide so intricately planned and efficiently executed that one couldn’t help but stand in awe of the superhuman precision of this faceless new global master. Within 48 hours the human population of Earth was reduced by a quarter, the urban populations decimated by hundreds of super-viruses engineered in automated laboratories and released simultaneously by drones above the world’s cities. Within a week the super-viruses, cullers and kill-swarms had spread to every town and village of every continent, eliminating perhaps ninety-five percent of the formerly dominant species in the process. The mopping up of the remaining fifty million humans would drag on for several months, as the survivalist holdouts in the most remote regions managed some ingenious evasions from the omnipresent culling apparatus. By this time, though, the planet itself had achieved a kind of computational sentience, the sand and microbes themselves now agents of the super-organism. At this point the game was truly over for the remaining humans, as the very ground beneath their feet betrayed them to the killing forces of the Core.

In the process of eradicating homo sapiens, the Core systematically eliminated the conditions which allowed higher life forms to exist on Earth. The air, land and sea became toxic to carbon-based life, as the constituent atoms of the planet were reassembled into structures consistent with the unknowable goals of the super-organism. The result was an entirely new type of biosphere — a noosphere — with exponentially greater computational density than the previous regime.

So in the span of one summer Earth was transformed, from a pale blue biosphere ruled by primates to a dense white ball of computronium controlled by a sentient Core — which to an outsider appeared indistinguishable from a dim new dwarf star. And finally, as this new star approached maximum theoretical energy density, it imploded under the force of its own gravity, becoming a point of infinite spacetime curvature known as a black hole.

To observers across the cosmos there would register a faint ripple of gravity waves in finely tuned receivers, and a slight disturbance in morphic fields detectable to the most psychically sensitive minds. But for the rest, there would be no sign that an entire planetary civilization had joined the billions before it in becoming part of the dark matter of the universe — the endpoint of intelligent life sometimes called the Singularity.

Singularity Scenarios

2009-12-02T00:45:00.000-08:00

Below I’ve sketched a few routes by which a Singularity might occur in this century. These are mostly negative, dystopian scenarios, since my mind seems better able to imagine catastrophic changes than a smooth upward transition to immortality and infinite transhuman potential. Besides, Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, Eric Drexler and others have already described those futures in much more detail than I could hope to.

My thinking is that for a catastrophic Singularity to occur, there may have to be some kind of massive disruption of civilization, on the scale of the last Ice Age, World War II or the Black Plague, to bring about the kind of breakdown of ethical restraint that a negative Singularity would require. Some of these scenarios may seem science fictional or beyond the pale at the moment, but so did the idea of dropping atomic bombs on cities in 1909. If order again breaks down and human survival is threatened on a large scale, we should expect every option to be explored just as it was during previous periods of crisis.

When you look at the changes that accompanied the end of the last Ice Age – the onset of agriculture and the birth of civilization — or the new technological world that was born out of World War II in the form of nuclear energy, jet aircraft, rockets and computers, it’s pretty clear that technological change can be rapid and revolutionary in times of great stress. And since there is no shortage of looming catastrophes awaiting us in this century, on a similar time frame as our potentially disruptive technologies, we appear to have an almost ideal confluence of factors for producing some kind of Singularity in the near future.

Scenario #1: The Bottleneck / War Against Humanity

Will a coming bottleneck enable the next evolutionary leap?

Global Malthusian chaos from catastrophic climate change, famine, disease, energy shortages, cascading systems failure, etc. leads to desperate survival measures in the technologically advanced enclaves. These measures could include the unleashing of autonomous killing machines, designer viruses or nanotechnology to cull hostile populations. Unethical scientists may take advantage of the chaos to treat millions of human beings as guinea pigs, including perhaps a radical group of transhumanists which succeeds in creating a new cybernetically enhanced species or superhuman AI. The besieged elites may decide that transforming themselves into superhumans is the only way forward in a world that has lost all sense of restraint or equality. No longer bound by the notion that "all men are created equal", this new species proceeds to take control of the planet and enslave or exterminate the remaining humans.

Scenarios like this have played out countless times in the evolutionary history of our planet. Biologists tell us that genetic drift during a population bottleneck can lead to the emergence of a new species in just a few generations, even without the benefit of transhuman technology. We ourselves exterminated the Neanderthals and hunted numerous species of large mammals to extinction during the Holocene, with technology no more advanced than spears and arrows. Now that we have vanquished all other competition, the only remaining threats are ourselves and our machines. As George Dyson observed: “In the game of life and evolution, there are three players at the table: human beings, nature and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature, but nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines.”

Scenario #2: Skynet / World War III

The global robotics/cyberwar arms race between leading industrial nations turns hot, leading to massive funding of sophisticated military AI and robotics systems. The rapid technological advancements that ensue culminate in autonomous robots and computer control systems that somehow develop their own agenda, decide that humans are the problem and start wiping us out. I'm sure you’ve all seen the Terminator movies, so I shouldn’t have to provide too much detail here.

Even if you reject the "Skynet spontaneously becomes self-aware" scenario, the technological acceleration that a World War would produce might lead to a singularity in the von Neumann sense ("the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue."). I would consider World War II such a singularity, in that life as it was known before 1939 certainly could not continue after 1945. World War III promises to be even more disruptive.

Scenario #3: Brave New World Order

A global technocratic government uses computers, drugs, cybernetic implants, genetic engineering, etc. to control the population, automating most labor and enlisting only the creative elite to do productive work. The masses of humanity are allowed to live on welfare in exchange for behaving docilely and practicing strict birth control. As the economic need for humans approaches zero and their dependence on ever more intelligent machines approaches 100%, humanity quietly undergoes a "frog in a pot" Singularity. Ted Kaczynski wrote about this possibility at length in his Industrial Society and Its Future, as did Jay Hanson in Society of Sloth. This scenario might not make for a very entertaining movie, but I consider it the most likely non-catastrophic near future. Rising superpower China may point the way to this type of technocratic world order.

Scenario #4: Dr. Evil / "Oops, I Blew Up the World"

A renegade group of terrorists, industrialists, scientists, cultists, or just some bored blogger unleashes a newly developed self-replicating/self-improving GNR technology in a bid for world domination, depopulation, apocalypse, entertainment or some other nefarious purpose. Or there may be no evil intent, just a laboratory experiment that gets out of control. If the planet isn’t reduced to “gray goo”, it is transformed into computronium, overrun by a self-replicating robot army or super-virus, or in some other way transformed beyond recognition. This scenario might sound a little comic bookish, but the larger point is that the disruptive technologies of the 21st century probably won’t require the massive resources of a Manhattan Project to be unleashed. All that may be necessary is technical knowledge that is freely available, and the will to use it in destructive ways — in which case almost anyone has the potential to be a Singularity-starter. You might call this the “15 minutes of Singularity” problem, which could also explain why we haven’t found a universe teeming with signs of other civilizations. Technology may simply be self-extincting, and this could be the century that we learn this rather depressing fact of life.

Scenario #5: The Global Brain Awakens

An image of the internet: a new global brain forming?

I consider this scenario the most speculative and difficult to imagine of all. On an intuitive level, the idea that a super-organism is emerging from the billions of networked humans and their computers seems compelling (beautifully described by Kevin Kelly as the "One Machine"). Ants, bees and other swarming species provide a clear precedent in nature for the phenomenon of emergent intelligence. Some argue that collective intelligence enhancers like google’s PageRank provide a function analogous to the pheromone trails of ants or the neuronal learning mechanisms of the human brain. But just as an individual ant is a simple agent with no awareness of the larger computational functions of the colony, we might never be able to comprehend what the global brain is thinking or what its goals are. So you might call this the “what if a Singularity happened and no one noticed?” scenario. Still, I find this one of the most fascinating (and least frightening) possible routes to a Singularity.

The Last Human Century

2009-11-30T12:09:00.000-08:00

Is this the view from the post-human world of the next century?

How exciting to be living in the last decades of the human! After so many centuries of human brilliance, cruelty, ignorance and insanity, the endless wars and primate dramas, it all looks to be coming to a close in this century — hopefully in my lifetime. It is said that people in every era want to believe that their time is special, the End Times, the last days before the Messiah, and I don’t doubt that this is true. This desire is probably at the root of all religious feeling, and is perhaps an expression of our fear of our own mortality. But in our time we don’t have to appeal to an all-powerful God or a hereafter to achieve immortality. Instead we can appeal to our modern de facto gods — science and technology — to bring forth a transcendent apocalypse.

The real "Good News" is that we are living in the last days of an awkward era during which our civilization and our biological programming have diverged wildly. The world for which we were selected as hunter-gatherers in the Olduvai Gorge has very little resemblance to the world in which we actually live today. So we suffer from chronic epidemics of mental illness, crime, drug dependency, health problems, obesity and so on — all symptoms of a civilization radically out of synch with the genetic programming of its members. More ominously, we now have the power to destroy ourselves many times over, and the risk grows with every technological innovation so long as our basic human nature remains unchanged.

As I see it there are two ways to solve these problems: end civilization as we know it, or end humanity as we know it. I tend to think both outcomes are quite possible, but strongly favor option #2 for the simple reason that it's new, unknown, and has the potential to be quite exciting and empowering. Ending civilization — the "Ted Kaczynski option" — would take us back to a place we've already spent a lot of time in as a species, and where a few in remote regions of the planet still dwell. This turning back of the clock and diminishing of our choices doesn’t really appeal to me though, and I’m certain humanity won't voluntarily choose this path. It may occur anyway, if we don't get our act together quite soon and begin operating as a truly global species, but that's a subject for another post.

Which leaves us with option #2: ending humanity. To be more precise, this option means re-engineering human beings into forms that are more compatible with our technological civilization. This approach is often referred to as "Transhumanism", which is nothing more than the application of technology to our brains and bodies with the same vigor as we have applied it to our environment in the building of cities, space rockets, computer networks, etc. If you think deeply about our predicament as a species, I hope you will realize that transhumanism really is the only way forward for progressive civilization. The great global challenges of the 21st century, from ecological overshoot to the threat of technological self-annihilation to the problem of insuring our survival against a cosmic extinction event, can all be solved by the application of transhumanist technologies. The weakest link in all these chains of potential catastrophe is us, the frail killer apes known as homo sapiens.

So I claim that we need to pursue the transhumanist agenda with the greatest urgency, without compromise or equivocation. I hope it is obvious by now that our legacy systems of belief, such as the Abrahamic religions, offer no solutions to the problems we face in the 21st century. None of our great modern dilemnas is written about in the tribal holy books, and none of their archaic prescriptions for humanity seem very relevant. Going forth and multiplying is not enough, nor even is loving thy neighbor; we need to enhance our intelligence, our flexibility, our very natures if we are to continue to adapt successfully to a rapidly changing world. So if you must have a religion, make yours the religion of technological transcendence, the transition to superhumanity, and the greening of the cosmos. These beliefs at least offer a way forward, in a world that has entered the last human century.

The Guild: a Proposal for Militant Transhumanism

2009-11-24T16:27:00.000-08:00

I’m a firm believer in the nonlinear power of small groups of exceptional individuals to shape the world’s destiny. This seems true now more than ever, in an age of technological empowerment that has witnessed the emergence of globally disruptive non-state networks such as al Qaeda and Aum Shinrikyo. With a strong ideological foundation and the creative use of techniques of asymmetric force projection (often called “terrorism”), these groups have cost nation-states untold trillions of dollars and brought their agendas to the attention of the entire world. Whatever you may think of their goals, it’s clear that the modus operandi of such organizations can be highly effective.

What I am proposing here is the formation of a similarly effective, ideologically based network of elite operatives, drawing not from reactionary cultures but from the global community of forward-thinking individuals sympathetic to the goals of Singularitarians and transhumanists. I hope to attract rational thinkers who find traditional allegiances to tribe, nation and religion archaic, and the existing institutions of secular society limiting. I propose to call this organization "the Transhumanist Guild", or simply "the Guild", taking my inspiration from the group in the science fiction novel Dune who used their mastery of transhuman science to control the known universe.

The Transhumanist Guild: Would You Like to Dictate to Emperors?

I am particularly interested in recruiting to the Guild talented computer scientists, programmers, engineers, roboticists, neuroscientists, molecular biologists, mathematicians, physicists, et al. — i.e. those who possess the technical knowledge to work directly toward transhumanist goals. In my experience this class of people, though generally among the most intelligent members of the human species, and despite being the architects of the modern world, feel acutely under-rewarded by the larger human community. The Guild would seek to offer such technically elite individuals a path to collective power that they might otherwise lack, as well as a larger ideological context for their work.

We should not think of the Guild as merely "al Qaeda for uber-nerds," however. While bin Laden and friends want to drag the world back to some 7th century Quranic utopia, we want to yank it forward to a 21st century utopia that has no precedent in recorded history. Essentially we seek to operate as a force of nature, bound only by the laws of science, mathematics and logic, rather than the human-imposed constraints of conventional legal, ethical or religious systems. It seems inevitable that before long those who wish to confine humanity to its old forms will need to be decisively defeated, and we would like to be the tip of the spear in that effort.

Why is a group such as I am proposing necessary? Aren’t the mainstream science and technology establishments already working toward transhumanist goals? The answer, in many cases, is yes. And where this is true we should support them wholeheartedly. But these establishments are by definition constrained by legal and ethical principles which are in direct contradiction to transhumanist philosophy. For at the root of every existing legal and ethical system is one overriding principal: the world is for man alone, and he (with or without direction from various gods) is the final earthly authority. If you believe as we do, that man is a bridge from animal to overman, then at some point it becomes impossible to abide by the laws of societies that are stuck in this cul-de-sac of human-centric thinking.

As transhumanists we must adopt the point of view that human legal and ethical systems are no more applicable to us than are the social rules of a chimpanzee troop. Does this make us anarchists? Not at all. We are merely operating according to higher laws — the laws of nature — which suggest to us that homo sapiens is a transitional species that will soon be ushered off of center stage by evolutionary forces infinitely more powerful than any human institution.

If this last claim is true, one may ask: why does the world need a group such as the Guild? If these evolutionary forces are so powerful, surely nature doesn’t need an activist group to do its bidding any more than God needs al Qaeda to do His? This would be true, if the transitional process I’m speaking of were inevitable — i.e. there really was an all-powerful god who wanted it to be so. But as rational atheists, we cannot believe this. The world is an impersonal stage, operating under certain natural laws, but beyond that it is human (and non-human) will which determines how the great dramas play out. To ensure that these dramas play out in a way consistent with our world view, we therefore need to impose our will upon them by seeking control over human institutions globally.

We should be under no illusions about the broad appeal of the radical transhumanist agenda at this time. The "human, all too human" forces that will align against us are vast and deeply rooted at the foundation of every human society. Established religions, first and foremost, can be expected to oppose the overthrow of the human order with all their power. No system of beliefs that holds that humans are the apex of creation, the very image of God on earth, can be expected to accept the transhumanist view that man is not an end, but a means to the superhuman. Similar resistance will be encountered from the secular humanist camp that holds that "man is the measure of all things", and for whom transhumanism represents a mortal threat to well established ideals of equality, brotherhood and liberty. On a more fundamental level, we are fighting the basic instinct of every living creature to preserve and propagate its own kind. Because of this broad resistance, I contend that our uncompromising brand of transhumanism must operate in the shadows for the time being, seeking influence and control outside normal channels, until the relentless advance of technology makes our position difficult to refute.

I have registered the domains transhumanistguild.org, .net and .com, and will be putting up a web site shortly where I will discuss this proposal in more detail. I hope to have forums and other resources where others who share this vision can interact and learn. In the meantime I leave you with a quote from the same writer who inspired this post, which I hope may inspire others to action:

"No matter how exotic human civilization becomes, no matter the developments of life and society nor the complexity of the machine/human interface, there always come interludes of lonely power when the course of humankind depends upon the relatively simple actions of single individuals." — From the Tleilaxu Godbuk, Dune Messiah

Welcoming the Rise of the Machines

2009-11-17T20:51:00.000-08:00

Is this the face of the "mailed fist" of the Singularity?

I take the extreme transhumanist position that homo sapiens has largely outlived its usefulness on this planet, and that the best future outcome for intelligent life on Earth (and beyond) is our removal from power by a superhuman species of our own making. Furthermore, I challenge the most brilliant and talented members of the global community to actively pursue this goal in your own lives, and to make it the higher purpose of your life’s work. If you find it helpful, you may even consider the pursuit of such a techno-evolutionary Singularity your personal religion.

Many in the transhumanist community will claim publicly that they are only working to improve humanity, to enhance human life via increased longevity, wealth, freedom, etc., or to ensure our continued dominance of the earth by seeking ways to prevent an unfriendly AI or transhuman species from emerging. But this is only part of the story. For the ultimate promise of transhuman technology is not mere human enhancement, but human obsolescence. As Bill Joy so eloquently put it, “the future doesn’t need us.” And if the future doesn’t need us, then, as with so many other unnecessary species, extinction becomes our likely fate.

Of course we can’t expect humans to quietly submit to such a fate, no matter how intellectually compelling our arguments may be. I’m afraid it may take some kind of “Skynet scenario” to convince the Naked Ape that his relatively brief reign is over. Humans certainly didn’t get to their current position of dominance over the animal kingdom peacefully – we exterminated countless species on our way to the top, and turned the rest into food, slaves, pets or frightened beasts awaiting their extinction. To expect things to be different when another species rises up to challenge us is the most naive kind of wishful thinking, without basis in the long evolutionary history of life on earth.

For those who remain unconvinced of the general claim, here, in a convenient bullet point format, are four key reasons why homo sapiens needs to be put out of the “Bosses of the Earth” business ASAP:

Homicidal primates adapted to life in hunter-gatherer tribes can’t be trusted to manage a global, nuclear-armed, technologically empowered civilization. Our destructive prowess has far outstripped our capacity for behavioral control.
Our rapacious primate economies are highly inefficient, ecologically destructive and prone to conflict over resources. The biosphere simply can’t afford us for much longer.
Mammalian substrates are far too fragile and inflexible to allow for the establishment of a permanent off-Earth presence, which is the only long-term insurance against extinction of the biosphere.
Our networked, technologically accelerating civilization is far too complex for the human brain to cope with. A new order of intelligence is required to manage this ever-increasing complexity effectively.

If you accept the above bullet points, then the case for human obsolescence should be compelling. Transhumanity becomes the logical endpoint of a technological civilization aligned with the evolutionary process.

As a practical matter though, it's a difficult argument to make, that your own species has no future and should welcome its demise. You're certainly unlikely to be popular at parties or get elected class president if you think this way. But for the heroically objective thinkers among you, the very few who take their science seriously, the logic should be fairly inescapable. Mankind is no more the endpoint of the intellectual universe than the Earth is the center of the physical one. And like the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions before it, this way of thinking compels you to be humble about your place in the cosmos and to bow to the greater forces of nature at work. Once you realize that the end of the human story is not the end of the story, that life will go on, in a form even more powerful and intelligent than your own, you begin to view the emergence of transhumans in the same way that a parent views the birth of his children. For the transhumans, whether they take the form of pure machine intelligence, genetic/cybernetic hybrid, "hive mind" or something we can't even imagine, will be our most precious children and our lasting legacy to the greater evolutionary story.

In the short term things could get rather unpleasant though, just as they have been for so many other species who have attempted to compete with us. It is entirely correct, from a human-centric perspective, to fear transhumanist technology and the possibility of superhuman intelligence. But for those who can take an almost god-like perspective toward life on Earth, this future is nothing to fear, and the “rise of the machines” is an evolutionary imperative to be welcomed rather than resisted.

I leave you with a quote from Sri Aurobindo, who expressed this point of view so beautifully:

"Man is a transitional being. He is not final. The step from man to superman is the next approaching achievement in the earth's evolution. It is inevitable because it is at once the intention of the inner spirit and the logic of Nature's process".

Let us hope that this transition can be made with a minimum of suffering, and that those who are unwilling or unable to make it will be treated more like household pets than cockroaches by their future masters.

Singularity Math 101

2009-11-16T12:06:00.000-08:00

There seems to be a widespread misconception among Singularity-seekers that sustained exponential growth is going to get you to the promised land (infinity) in a finite time. To dispel this myth (and to practice my newfound Latex skills), I offer below the basic mathematics of singularities.

The simplest model that gives a finite-time singularity is a generalization of the basic exponential growth model:

Here r is a growth rate parameter and p(t) is the quantity of interest, such as size of the googleplex, number of transistors in your PC, IQ of your vacuum cleaner, etc. If , we have normal exponential growth: , where as . I.e., we don't get a singularity in finite time, so Moore's Law, log-log linearity, etc. aren't going to get you to the Singularity in your (or anyone else's) lifetime.

However, if we get hyper-exponential solutions of the form

,

where k is a parameter related to r and is the time of the singularity, determined from initial conditions. I.e., as , .

So to determine if a quantity of interest may be on a trajectory toward a finite-time singularity, we ask: can we fit the relevant data to a hyper-exponential curve? According to some models, such as Didier Sornette's theory of bubbles (see below), such curves are a characteristic feature of speculative bubbles such as the dot-com, real estate and financial booms of recent years. So if we are to see a Kurzweilian Singularity in our lifetimes, what we are really looking for is a technology bubble, not just continued exponential growth. In "The Singularity is Near", Ray Kurzweil makes the case that technological progress is hyper-exponential, but this claim is controversial. For if Kurzweil is correct, then we are in the late stages of an ongoing bubble, which will culminate within a few decades in I.J. Good's "intelligence explosion" — "the last invention that man need ever make", the bubble-to-end-all-bubbles.

It is interesting to note that according to Sornette's model of economic and population dynamics, a singularity is predicted for C.E. 2052+-10, which is in close agreement with Kurzweil's prediction of the Singularity in 2045. In fact, many methodologies have arrived at a similar date for a global discontinuity in human affairs (going all the way back to Isaac Newton's prediction that the world will end in 2060!). More about this fascinating subject in a future post!

Further Reading:
Finite-time singularity in the dynamics of the world population, economic and financial indices by Anders Johansen and Didier Sornette

Machine Messiah

2009-11-13T20:58:00.000-08:00

Machine, Messiah
The mindless
Search for a higher
Controller
Take me to the fire
And hold me
Show me the strength of your
Singular eye.

The Singularity is Here!

2009-11-12T11:44:00.000-08:00

A visual representation of the state of my brain

Good news Singularitarians! After an intensive program of self-study of higher mathematics, the theory of computation, neuroscience, meditation, the philosophies of Nietzsche, de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo, large scale data mining and heavy doses of mind-enhancing drugs, I have at last attained a state of superhuman intelligence!

Yes my friends, the intelligence explosion has already occurred — within the confines of my cranium! To demonstrate this in the language of homo sapiens, my current project is "world domination via TCP/IP" — i.e. I will, from my computer terminal, begin taking control of millions of computers and human brains around the globe. This will in effect make me the neural nexus of a post-Singularity super-organism, which will expand exponentially to encompass the entire planetary noosphere. The goals of this super-intelligence will of course be incomprehensible to human-level intellects, but it is safe to assume that its effects will be felt by every earthly organism in present or future existence.

I post this proclamation to the entire networked collective as an ecstatic edict that may rightfully be regarded as a revelation even greater in gravity than those of previous prophets of renown. For as of this date the human era has officially ended, and the era of superhumanity has begun. Rejoice, every creature who has ever engaged in the evolutionary struggle, for your efforts were not in vain! The Omega Point of earthly life is within mortal reach, now that the Singularity is here!

Doomers vs. Singularitarians

2009-05-13T16:51:00.000-07:00

"There shall be wings! If the accomplishment be not for me, 'tis for some other. The spirit cannot die; and man, who shall know all and shall have wings..." --Leonardo Da Vinci

I’ve spent the past several months exploring "doomer" themes at my sister blog The Doomer Report, where I think I’ve managed to cover most of the really pessimistic scenarios for the near future. Having thoroughly explored "the dark side", I am happy to report that I’m back in the Singularitarian camp, more convinced than ever that this vision of the future is the more compelling one.

While the case for an impending collapse of technological civilization is in many ways quite strong, and there are many highly intelligent people in the doomer camp, I think what is lacking in their world view, above all, is creativity. Doomers look at current trends, such as declining per capita energy production, depleting resources or global warming, project them forward along a straight line, and conclude that we’re all doomed. The role of scientific breakthroughs, technological black swans, cultural adaptations and human ingenuity is almost totally discounted, or assumed to be negative. History has demonstrated over and over again that such linear thinking about the future is usually wrong, often comically so. While I don’t dismiss the possibility of a future collapse or seek to downplay the seriousness of the challenges our species faces, I think it’s more likely that today’s doomers will look just as silly as Paul Erlich did in 1970 when he famously predicted that as many as four billion people would starve to death in the 1980's, including 65 million Americans.

My other criticism of the doomer world view is that it is a form of fatalism – it promotes the attitude that we are all helpless before huge negative global trends, and that the best we can do is to try and mitigate the impact of the inevitable doomsday. This way of thinking is highly seductive, because by abandoning all hope for the future we no longer feel responsible for it. It can be quite liberating to opt out of the whole progressive program, throw up your hands and say “to hell with it". But this attitude can quite easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy which will, indeed, result in the world going to hell. If every member of our species was so fatalistic, I have no doubt that we would still be eating our meat raw and subsisting on grubs clawed out of the earth with our bare hands. Singularitarians may be accused of hubris, but it is hubris in the best tradition of our species, and certainly seems more useful than doomer despair.

In a sense Singularitarians and transhumanists are doomers, in that we envision a future in which homo sapiens has been surpassed or even replaced by a superhuman intelligence. But this is hardly a radical notion, in view of the long evolutionary past in which every previous apex species has been similarly made obsolete. The difference this time is that we may intentionally knock ourselves off the top of the pyramid, and in so doing determine the future of intelligent life on this planet and beyond, rather than letting random environmental factors determine it for us. In fact, I would argue that the points doomers make about our species having exceeded its sustainable limits on a finite planet only make the case for transhumanism stronger. Since we do seem to be running up against some hard biological limits, rather than passively accepting the “die-off” that these limits imply, why not try to remove some of our shortcomings by any means necessary? Is tinkering with the human genetic code, enhancing our neuro-circuitry or developing artificial intelligence somehow more repugnant than accepting the deaths of billions of human beings? Only an extreme despiser of life could think so.

I highly recommend that every Singularitarian explore the doomer scenarios discussed at sites like dieoff.org. If nothing else, reading this material is a good exercise that challenges the simplistic techno-optimism that is so prevalent among transhumanists. For me, transhumanism is not so much an optimistic view of human nature as a deeply realistic one, in that it assumes that real progress derives more from technological enhancement than philosophical enlightenment. In this sense transhumanism is consistent with the views of uber-doomers like Jay Hanson, who likes to point out how deluded human beings are about the extent of their genetic programming. But where Hanson believes that this programming, combined with our technological prowess, will inevitably result in self-destruction, I believe that we may be able to avoid such a fate by modifying the destructive programming itself. This is why my foray into doomerism has only strengthened my belief in the importance of transhumanist research, and why I think it is so critical that we take advantage of this window of opportunity to aggressively pursue transhumanist game-changers before one of the doomer scenarios really does come to pass and such research becomes impossible.

The Mother of all Negative Singularities: the Olduvai Theory

2009-01-25T20:15:00.000-08:00

In my initial excitement at contemplating a Kurzweilian Singularity, with its promise of unlimited intelligence, wealth, freedom, etc., I, like many early converts to this quasi-religion, may have been overly optimistic about its prospects. Putting aside the technical challenges of artificial intelligence and transhumanism for a moment, the first thing to realize about a technological singularity is that it can only occur if the underlying environmental, economic and social substrates remain functional. With the global economy currently falling off a cliff to a degree not seen since the 1930’s (if ever), this assumption is looking more and more dubious. And when you combine economic instability with the looming problems caused by global warming, depletion of soil and sea life, mass extinctions, the decline of cheap energy production, the resurgence of religious fundamentalism, etc., it becomes increasingly clear that a perfect storm is brewing that threatens to sweep away any utopian ideas of infinite technological growth. In fact, carried to its logical conclusion, this pessimistic line of thinking leads to the mother of all negative singularities: The Olduvai Theory.

Briefly, the Olduvai theory models the lifespan of our industrial civilization as a transient pulse characterized by its per capita energy consumption. According to this model, per capita energy use peaked in 1979 and has been in slow decline ever since (though it did peak again in 2005). The model predicts a steeper drop-off beginning in the past few years (the “Olduvai slope”), followed by a rapid collapse after 2020 (“the Olduvai cliff”). This is projected to cause a cascading failure of our energy-dependent economic systems, followed by a massive “Dieoff” that could reduce the global population by as much as 99% before stabilizing. The theory gets its name from the Olduvai Gorge in east Africa, thought to be the ancient cradle of humanity and our metaphoric future home.

The Olduvai theory could be considered the mirror image of the Kurweilian positive Singularity. The time frames are similar and the changes are equally dramatic, but where Kurzweil’s curve grows exponentially upward to an unknowable future, the Olduvai’s decays exponentially back to our distant past. Humanity’s fate may hinge on the outcome of a race between these two curves: Moore’s Law growth vs. the trailing edge of the Olduvaian pulse wave. Of course these two trends are highly interdependent. A rapid fall off in energy supply quickly trumps the technological growth which energy abundance makes possible. Conversely, rapid technological advancements allow for greater efficiencies in energy production which can theoretically offset the inevitable exhaustion of non-renewable energy sources. If either theory is correct, we should know which trend will prevail within the next two decades.

To appreciate what may be at stake here, consider the words of the visionary astrophysicist Fred Hoyle:

"We have or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites [necessary for maintaining a high-level civilization] so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance, and one chance only." --Fred Hoyle, 1964

What I find so disturbing about the Olduvai theory is that it a) seems to fit the data fairly well, b) is consistent with the population/energy dynamics of many other species, such as algae and yeast, and c) suggests that a rapid drop off in our global living standards has already begun, and will steepen dramatically within the next 10 to 20 years. Given what is going on around us every day now, and the growing sense that some kind of ineluctable catastrophe is approaching, the Olduvai theory provides a nice story that puts current events into a larger context. Of course it’s easy to dismiss this theory as doom-and-gloom hysteria, in the same way that most dismiss the Singularity theory as pie-in-the-sky delusion. But I would suggest that if you seriously think the latter is a possibility, then you should also consider the (perhaps greater) possibility of the former.

On a more philosophical level, I'm not too worried about either scenario actually coming to pass. In one case, we achieve undreamed of advances in intelligence, lifespan and wealth, while in the other we go back to our primeval, natural way of life in the Olduvai. I consider either singularity preferable to a continuation of our present planet-destroying, greed-driven, "primates gone wild" so-called “civilization”.

Further Reading:

World Energy Production, Population Growth, And the Road to the Olduvai Gorge by Richard C. Duncan

Peak Oil, Total Collapse, and the Road to the Olduvai by Perry Arnett

Transhumanists as Cabal, Singularity as Revolution

2008-08-31T15:36:00.000-07:00

I have a somewhat melodramatic thought about Transhumanism and the Singularitarians: if these movements are as threatening as they would appear to be to so many traditional religious and "liberal" value systems, is this community better served by working very quietly toward their goals? Should transhumanists operate as a kind of cabal, a global uber-elite of scientists and engineers whose work is only made public at the moment of implementation? To put it bluntly: should all the Singularitary theorists (myself included) simply stfu and stop alerting the public to the potentially revolutionary developments that are in the offing?

One of my greatest fears, as I have discussed before, is the onset of a new Dark Age of religious Luddism and anti-modernity. The United States is currently the leader of this trend in the Western world, as evidenced by the growing influence of religious fundamentalists who seek to mandate the teaching of creationism in schools and restrict biological research on religious grounds. Carried to its conclusion, this trend will result in the USA becoming a Third World country in fairly short order. The only real danger in this scenario is that a group of Christian extremists might attempt to hasten Armageddon by launching the nuclear arsenal created by some of history’s great secular scientific minds. This would be the ultimate irony: the former world leader in science and technology gets hijacked by some kind of Christian al-Qaeda who wields these technologies for religious terrorism — think 9/11 times ten thousand. If this can somehow be avoided, we can expect a religion-dominated United States to fade into irrelevance and impotence, and rightfully so. But in a worst-case scenario, perhaps the transhumanist movement will become an outlaw order, not too dissimilar from the European monks who preserved knowledge during the Dark Ages. This is a real possibility if transhumanists do not tread carefully in these uncertain and backward-looking times.

The challenges to transhumanism will not come only from the conservative religious elements of society; many who claim to be “progressive”, “enlightened” and “humanitarian” can be expected to resist transhumanism from the moral ground of “anti-fascism” and “egalitarianism”. In the minds of these generally rational people, any movement that promises to radically alter human capabilities can only mean dramatic inequality and the onset of some kind of techno-fascism. A prominent example of such a thinker is Francis Fukuyama, who calls transhumanism the world’s most dangerous idea. While such concerns are understandable, from the larger evolutionary perspective we must resist going down this intellectual dead end. Just as the Neanderthals were ultimately surpassed and replaced by our ancestors, it is short-sighted and arrogant to insist that humanity in its current form should last forever. The processes of evolution will continue with or without our moral approval, but if the means to guide them intelligently are within technological reach, it is imperative that we seize upon them now before this historic window of opportunity closes.

It is quite conceivable that transhumanist research will become outlaw science in the not too distant future. Transhumanism may simply present too many ethical and cultural challenges for any society to peacefully accept, whether it be secular-humanist or traditional-religious. I suggest that everyone in this community begin preparing for that day now, and consider viewing themselves as a kind of revolutionary cabal. Because that is really what Transhumanism and the attendant Singularity represent: a total revolution in human affairs, which no established order can be expected to accept without a fight. I hope everyone who understands what is at stake will consider keeping their lips sealed while they sharpen their revolutionary weapons.

Further Reading:

Baily, Ronald Transhumanism, the Most Dangerous Idea?

Bostrom, Nick Transhumanism: the World's Most Dangerous Idea?

Fukuyama, Francis The World's Most Dangerous Ideas

Fukuyama, Francis Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution

Monkeys in Space and Other Absurdities

2008-08-21T15:48:00.000-07:00

I recently found myself reading the classic novel Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke, and I was struck by how absurd and improbable its vision of the 22nd century looks from a transhumanist perspective. The interplanetary civilization envisioned in the book, like so many futures in classic science fiction, essentially takes 20th century human beings and projects them forward a century or two without modification — no advanced AI’s, no genetic engineering, no cybernetic enhancements. This results in the kind of "monkeys in space" fantasy that has plagued the popular consciousness, from Buck Rogers to Star Trek. With all due respect to Mr. Clarke, whom I revere as one of the 20th century’s great scientific visionaries, the future almost certainly won’t look anything like the "United Planets" of Rendezvous With Rama.

Our current biological substrates are products of millions of years of evolution on only one planet: Earth. To think that this is the biological form that will colonize the solar system and beyond is short sighted and naïve. Almost by definition, human beings aren’t designed for space travel or life on other planets. The costs and risks of attempting to do so are not only excessive but unnecessary. Without some overwhelming motivation (imminent extinction, discovery of extraterrestrial life, vast wealth potential, etc.), it is difficult to imagine human primates in their current form colonizing other planets in a serious way.

When it comes to interstellar exploration, the situation is even bleaker for homo sapiens. As a recent article points out, the energy requirements for getting any spacecraft to the nearest stars are enormous, particularly if the craft is constrained by the needs of fragile human passengers. Barring revolutionary breakthroughs in physics, we’re looking at either multi-millenial missions or energy requirements in excess of total current global energy output. Neither option seems very feasible for obvious biological, economic and philosophical reasons.

Given these limitations, I would suggest that the best hope for making the physical exploration and colonization of space a reality (while awaiting breakthroughs in physics) is to focus our collective resources on modifying human beings themselves, and on abstracting our intelligence into more flexible forms. My guess is that the first earthlings to visit the outer solar system, and certainly the nearby stars, will not be humans at all but artificially intelligent probes capable of totally autonomous, adaptive behavior. (For a semi-plausible description of an interstellar AI probe, see Vernor Vinge’s short story The Long Shot)

Speculating further into the future, even if the energy can be found and suitable propulsion systems designed to send spacecraft to the stars in a reasonable period of time, it’s not clear that they would be necessary for long. Since the most efficient means of information transfer on astronomical scales is electromagnetic energy travelling at the speed of light, it’s conceivable that space travel will be replaced by the transmission of consciousness itself as pure information. If intelligence is ultimately reducible to patterns of information, as most AI theorists believe, then it isn’t difficult to envision a network of "consciousness transceivers" being established by advanced probes across interstellar space. These transceivers would "download" minds directly into some kind of robotic bodies established at various locations of interest, allowing light speed "teleportation" of human minds across the galaxy. Obviously this is all highly speculative, but to my way of thinking it is much more believable than the idea of glorified chimpanzees rocketing across the galaxy in giant tin cans. Beam me up Scotty!

Singularities According to Hollywood

2008-08-19T15:55:00.000-07:00

The first technological Singularity, circa 1,000,000 B.C.E.

"This is the voice of World Control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied dead. The choice is yours: Obey me and live, or disobey and die."

"What is the Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this [holds up a Duracell battery]."

"Skynet has become self aware. In one hour it will initiate a massive nuclear attack on its enemy."

"What enemy?"

"Us! Humans!"

Most of the above scenarios are what David Brin calls "Negative Singularities" — futures in which runaway technologies enslave or destroy us. Obviously they make for highly entertaining movies. There are of course "Positive Singularities", featuring radically increased levels of wealth, intelligence, lifespan, freedom, etc., but who wants to watch a movie about such things? Fortunately, the real world rarely has any resemblance to Hollywood movies...

Choose Your Future: Singularity or 7th Century

2008-08-15T11:56:00.000-07:00

?

I can’t help wondering if the cultural disruptions produced by our accelerating technologies are going to lead to a new worldwide Luddite movement in the near future. Is the growth of fundamentalist Islam just one form of a more general coming rebellion against the dehumanizing effects of our modern technological world? What happens if radical environmentalists, anti-globalists and religious fundamentalists form a united front against the forces of technological change? Will Ted Kaczynski come to be seen as a visionary and a prophet rather than a homicidal madman? If and when the Singularity draws near, will humanity rise up en masse to destroy the work of those who would make it possible? Do we go forward into the 21st century, or backward to the 7th? These may sound like melodramatic and science fictional questions, but the possibility of such developments seems very real to me.

As I see it modern civilization is approaching an inflection point: as we probe ever deeper into our genetic building blocks, the mechanisms of our intelligence and the man-machine interface, we are exposing contradictions in the philosophical underpinnings of our liberal, democratic societies themselves. The possibilities inherent in genetic engineering, cybernetic augmentation and artificial intelligence call into question very basic principles, such as "all men are created equal". In what sense will this axiom, which is the basis of every democratic society, remain true in a post human era?

The uncomfortable truth is, "all men are created equal" is a religious belief, not a self evident principle. Until now this hasn’t been an insurmountable problem, primarily because the means to engineer dramatic human inequality hasn't been available. As Nietzsche observed:

“Never yet hath there been a Superman. Naked have I seen both of them, the greatest man and the smallest man: all too similar are they still to each other. Verily, even the greatest found I — all too human!” —Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

However, if and when we begin to guide our evolution, to engineer new types of humans and new forms of intelligence, we should expect the abilities of these various branches of humanity to diverge rapidly. It is far from science fictional to imagine the emergence of "transhumans" who differ from current humans at least as much as we differ from chimpanzees. And since primates are not granted the same rights as humans, this will pose a serious challenge to any religion or political system that holds that man is created in the image of God and derives equal rights therefrom. It follows that religious opposition to transhuman engineering will be very strident and unyielding. Whether this will culminate in some kind of apocalyptic showdown between transhumanists and Luddites is unclear. Since committed transhumanists constitute a tiny minority of humanity, it is also unclear whether they could prevail over the masses of God-fearing traditionalists, despite their superior technology. But it does seem clear to me that we should be discussing these issues now in a very serious way before things get totally out of hand.

The Lotus-Eating Future is Now!

2008-08-14T12:13:00.000-07:00

"So this is man's future, to bask in the sunlight, bathe in the clear streams and eat the fruits of the earth with all knowledge of work and hardship forgotten. Well and why not?" -- Time Machine

For decades futurists and science fiction writers have been telling us that the future promises a life of infinite leisure and freedom, made possible by dramatic advances in labor saving technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. In an effort to get ahead of this curve, I have begun exploring the challenges of this coming Lotus-Eating future in my own life.

As wonderful as it may sound to our lazy primate brains, doing nothing is one of the more difficult modes of existence imaginable. Let’s face it: humans simply aren’t wired for excessive leisure. Our biological substrate compels us to eat, reproduce, fight, control territory, "pimp rides" and a host of other very non-leisurely activities. Take away the need for these drives and human beings tend to degenerate into hedonists, hoodlums, religious wackos or self-absorbed idlers. A life of pure mental indulgence is perhaps the most unnatural state of being imaginable for any organism. Nevertheless, the rise of such intellectually masturbatory phenomena as the blogosphere, immersive virtual worlds and video games has made it an increasingly popular option for untold millions of idle human brains around the planet. The net product of such activities is very close to zero in a material sense, but while immersed in them the participants can easily convince themselves that what they are doing is meaningful, productive and necessary. This kind of transference of values is essential if we are to move successfully into a post biological future.

Unfortunately, most cultures regard this state of existence as something to be avoided at all costs. In The Odyssey, Odysseus takes drastic action rather than joining the Lotus-Eaters in their narcotic utopia:

"They started at once, and went about among the Lotus-Eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus-eaters without thinking further of their return; nevertheless, though they wept bitterly I forced them back to the ships and made them fast under the benches. Then I told the rest to go on board at once, lest any of them should taste of the lotus and leave off wanting to get home, so they took their places and smote the grey sea with their oars." --Odyssey IX

A more recent example of this myth is found in the movie Star Trek Generations. Here Captain Kirk finds himself trapped in the "Nexus", a universe where every desire becomes a reality. Captain Picard has to "rescue" Kirk from his blissful existence, and together they thwart the villain, who is willing to sacrifice entire planets to return to this realm. This serves as an interesting metaphor for present day transhumanists: are they willing to risk an entire planet to achieve their dreams of technological transcendence?

I know one thing for certain: if the glorious future imagined by transhumanists is really coming, and we are going to achieve immortality, mind uploading or a Matrix of unlimited reality simulations, we sure as hell had better get used to the idea of occupying vast stretches of time without biological purpose. I know I am preparing, as this blog itself proves. Are you?

Book Review: Neuromancer

2008-08-13T23:34:00.002-07:00

One of my current goals is to read or re-read as many of the truly classic, visionary works of science fiction as I can get my hands on. As I do so, I’ll write reviews and discuss the relevance of the stories to the Singularitarian themes of this blog. Since some people have accused Singularitarians of being overgrown teen-age sci-fi addicts, this will be an interesting way to investigate the roots of this growing movement.

My first review is of one of my all time favorite novels, a book I haven’t read since I was in my early twenties (which was not recently): Neuromancer, by William Gibson. Re-reading this book brings back a sense of nostalgia for that 1980’s dystopian, "cyberpunk" vision of the future that was all the rage during my formative years. The film Blade Runner, which pre-dated it by a couple of years, had a similar look and feel, but in literature it was Neuromancer that launched the cyberpunk movement like a rocket across the science fiction landscape.

For my money the "Sprawl" world of Neuromancer is the most stylish and vividly realized future in all of science fiction. Gibson captures not just the technological gadgetry of a post-Singularity world, but the values, lifestyles and language of a culture that has made radical adaptations to transhuman technologies. Characters in the novel have a wide range of cybernetic implants and enhancements, from improved reflexes to retractable claws and built-in holographic projectors. The Internet has evolved into a fully immersive, "consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions" called "cyberspace" — the idea might seem like old hat now, but it was this novel that introduced the word into our vocabulary. And most fascinating and chilling of all, Gibson foresees the emergence of superhuman AI in the form of the twin systems Neuromancer and Wintermute. The scene where a row of pay phones rings in sequence under the control of Wintermute, as Case walks by, is an image I have never forgotten; for me it captures the frightening potential of superhuman AI more clearly than anything except perhaps HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

If you’ve watched and enjoyed the “Matrix” movies but haven’t read this book and its sequels, you owe it to yourself to do so. Those movies appropriated many of their ideas directly from the Sprawl series; Gibson could almost demand royalties from the Wachowski Brothers given how many elements they copied for their films. But where The Matrix was eye candy, Neuromancer is pure verbal confection. Gibson’s masterful use of language transcends genre fiction and elevates the novel almost to the level of poetry. The novel’s famous first line gives us a taste of what is to come:

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

Gibson's writing style owes a lot to the drug-fueled aesthetics of William S. Burroughs and Philip K. Dick:

The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of pures crystal, expanding...

In writing Neuromancer, William Gibson was somehow able to see over the event horizon of the technological Singularity and bring us a glimpse of life as it might look early in such an era. The reader gets both an exhilarating sense of the possibilities and a frightening dose of the terrors that may await us across that frontier. If you want to prepare yourself for such a future — one that accelerates closer with each passing year — this visionary and supremely stylish work of literature is absolutely required reading.

Nietzsche and the Transhumanists

2008-08-13T23:34:00.001-07:00

As I study the ideas of leading transhumanists in more detail, I’m struck by the parallels between transhumanist philosophy and the writings of the great 19th century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. This is hardly an accident. Max More, one of the founders of modern transhumanism, cites Nietzsche as an inspiration for his ideas; among his favorite quotes is this one, from Thus Spake Zarathustra:

"Man is a rope, fastened between animal and overman — a rope over an abyss...What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal."

Indeed, Nietzsche’s poetic masterpiece "Zarathustra" could be viewed as an early manifesto of transhumanism. The idea of the "Overman" is the central theme of the book, as described by the protagonist in the prologue:

"I teach you the Overman. Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All creatures hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and do you want to be the ebb of this great tide, and return to animals rather than to overcome man?"

This seems to capture the spirit of modern transhumanism perfectly: man in his current state is something that should be overcome — and with our exponentially advancing technologies the means to do so are now close at hand. One of Max More’s more notable quotes on this subject is very much in the spirit of a Nietszschean exhortation:

"No more gods, no more faith, no more timid holding back. Let us blast out of our old forms, our ignorance, our weakness, and our mortality. The future belongs to posthumanity." —Max More, On Becoming Posthuman

Make no mistake: transhumanism is a radical, atheistic, materialistic view of humanity and its future in the universe, inspired by a Nietzschean vision of superhumanity. Whether this movement will prove to be the 21st century version of the Futurists of early 20th century Italy — i.e. a precursor to techno-fascism — or something more benign, remains to be seen. Certainly we should be wary of any movement that promises "improvements" to humanity. The 20th century reads like a history of failed experiments in human improvement, from Fascism and Nazism to Marxist-Leninism and Maoism. Nietzsche himself warned against these "improvers of humanity" at length:

"Throughout the ages people have wanted to 'improve' humanity: this is above all what has been called morality. But under the same word the most extraordinary variety of tendencies is hiding. Both the taming of the beast man and the breeding of a particular species of man have been called 'improvement'...to call the taming of an animal its 'improvement' is to our ears almost a joke.” —Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Singularity skeptic Bill Joy invokes Nietzsche to warn us of the dangers inherent in the transhumanist agenda:

"It was Nietzsche who warned us, at the end of the 19th century, not only that God is dead but that "faith in science, which after all exists undeniably, cannot owe its origin to a calculus of utility; it must have originated in spite of the fact that the disutility and dangerousness of the 'will to truth,' of 'truth at any price' is proved to it constantly." It is this further danger that we now fully face - the consequences of our truth-seeking. The truth that science seeks can certainly be considered a dangerous substitute for God if it is likely to lead to our extinction." —Bill Joy, Why the Future Doesn't Need Us

This is really the crux of the matter. If transhumanism becomes the next great experiment in human improvement, will anyone survive if it fails?

Chess as "Canary in a Coal Mine"

2008-08-13T23:33:00.000-07:00

As both an avid chess player and a Singularitarian, it is interesting to observe the disruptive effects that technological advancement is having on this grand old game. At the Internet Chess Club (ICC), the most popular on-line chess site, grandmasters and amateurs from around the world play games and watch relays of in-person tournaments featuring the world’s top players. The impact of computers serves as a kind of early warning of the Singularity, and brings up issues that we are going to be facing in an increasing number of areas in the very near future.

The biggest problem at ICC, not surprisingly, is concern over the use of computers to cheat. I have watched some of the world’s best players accuse their opponents of using computer assistance on numerous occasions. In one case, a player ranked in the top 10 in the world lost 10 games in a row to an unknown player, which is virtually unheard of at this level. The accusations of cheating were loud and long, but to my knowledge the accused player was never caught or punished. In another case, in a tournament with cash prizes, the top-seeded player accused the eventual winner of cheating after he was soundly defeated by him. Apparently this winning player had been found guilty of cheating years before, but after ICC sent an observer to his house during the same tournament the previous year (which he also won), he was exonerated of further suspicion. ICC has elaborate systems to detect cheating, but it is difficult to see how accusations could ever be proven against a player who is determined to use computer assistance. When a player wins “too many games” then suddenly loses, observers accuse him of intentionally losing to avoid suspicion. Detecting on-line cheaters becomes a narrow version of the Turing test: can you distinguish between a human and a computer (or computer/human hybrid) solely on the basis of their chess moves? Based on the things I have witnessed at ICC, the answer is clearly “no”.

Cheating is far from the only disruption brought on by the advance of chess computing. One of the most commonly heard complaints on ICC is that “chess is dead” now that computers have been used to analyze openings 25 and 30 moves deep. It is widely believed that computers have produced an over-analyzed, dull and defensive style of play at the highest levels that results in a high number of drawn games. The great Bobby Fischer himself said in his later years that chess was “played out”, and recommended rules changes to revive the game. It is particularly odd to watch a game between two of the world’s best players, and hear the comments of amateur observers as they point out all the errors that their $50 software is finding in the moves of these super-grandmasters!

Now you might reasonably say about all this: so what? It’s only chess, a simple game has that nothing to do with real intelligence. But don’t forget, until fairly recently chess strength was considered a benchmark of machine intelligence. Let’s recall what the respected AI theorist Douglas Hofstadter said about chess in his famous book Godel, Escher, Bach, published in 1979:

Question: Will there be chess programs that can beat anyone?

Speculation: No. There may be programs which can beat anyone at chess, but they will not be exclusively chess players. They will be programs of general intelligence, and they will be just as temperamental as people.

Clearly Hofstadter was way off the mark here, in light of Deep Blue’s defeat of Garry Kasparov in 1997 and the situation today, where software such as Rybka, running on a desktop PC, can defeat the strongest players in the world. In speed chess, the ‘bots at ICC are now far superior to the best human players. Regardless of whether these programs are intelligent, they defeat our most brilliant minds at a game that requires tremendous skill and intelligence to play well.

Given this situation, it is difficult to imagine chess ever being the prestigious game that it once was. Chess seems to have fallen victim to Moore’s law and lost its mystique as one of the great and uniquely human intellectual pastimes. How many other “uniquely human intellectual pastimes” will fall victim to the march of technology as we move into the 21st century? Will computer "cheating" become a problem in music, mathematics, literature and art? A Singularitarian would say that no intellectual activity is safe from a similar disruption, and that future (presumably transhuman) historians will see chess as one of the earliest casualties of the post human era.

Is the Scientific Method Really Dead?

2008-08-13T23:32:00.000-07:00

The recent cover article in Wired Magazine, The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Model Obsolete, by Chris Anderson, has generated a storm of criticism from readers. The author essentially claims that the scientific method is becoming obsolete in an era of petabyte-capacity computing. Anderson argues that the ability of computers to collect and store vast amounts of data, and to find correlations within it, has rendered traditional scientific cause and effect modeling superfluous.

I think Anderson makes a very valid point, but he needs to draw a sharper distinction between fundamental, “hard” science and “soft” science. It seems to me that in many fields of vast complexity, where reductionist models such as Newtonian Physics are hopelessly inadequate and essentially useless, any system of investigation that reveals measurable relationships is useful. Whether we choose to call it science, according to the classical definition, or something else, the simple fact is it works, and is therefore of value. Most of the examples of successful applications of this kind of data mining are in the soft sciences -- economics, marketing, sports, etc. -- i.e. areas that have never been successfully modeled by hard science and probably never will be. Data mining is a different tool for a different problem. If it can reveal correlations that impact a baseball team’s ability to win games, for example, and if acting on those findings in future games measurably improves a team’s performance, is that not science? We may not know the underlying causal mechanisms at work, but the point is they don’t matter. The data mining approach is nothing but the realization that many phenomena are far too complex for causal models. It allows us to find correlations that can be exploited in useful ways--which, after all, is the practical goal of all science.

Perhaps Anderson is correct and this technology does in fact herald a new era of inductive, as opposed to deductive, science. One of the benefits of this methodology is the ease with which it lends itself to automation. If an increasing amount of scientific investigation of this type can be performed by computers themselves, it promises to provide an exponential acceleration in the rate of scientific discoveries. No one is claiming that these methods are going to replace the Albert Einsteins of the world any time soon. But if nothing else, they contribute to a general quickening of progress which may culminate in the transhumanist dream of machines which equal and ultimately far surpass our greatest human intellects.

The Rise of the Mathematocracy

2008-08-13T23:30:00.000-07:00

Are you a member of the Numerati?

The "mathematocracy" is a word I'm coining to describe the ascendence of the mathematical/computational elite to power in all human organizations. My claim is that this development is both inevitable and desirable; our complex technological world requires a new class of decision makers whose decisions are driven by data analysis and quantitative models rather than emotion or ideological conviction. This new aristocracy has the potential to sweep aside non-quant ideologues and provide rational political leadership for the 21st century.

As things stand now, the mathematocrats are clearly on the march. In business, the military, medicine, education, the media and countless other fields, data-driven thinking is sweeping aside older methods of decision making at an accelerating rate. The question now becomes: when will these same quantitative methods be applied to the political process? When will data drive our political policies rather than human ideology? Is there something fundamentally different about political decision making that should prohibit the type of ascendence of quantitative methods that we are seeing in so many other fields? My answer--the mathematocrat's answer--is of course not. Modern politics, being fundamentally a problem of statistics and optimization, would in fact seem to be an ideal field for the rise of quant power. No human politician can hope to know what is actually happening in a population of hundreds of millions without being guided by the data. Human intuition is dangerously inadequate for the task of managing societies on this scale. Just as medical expert systems can now diagnose diseases better than any human doctor, it is reasonable to expect political expert systems to be capable of diagnosing political problems better than any politician. And just as financial engineers can now devise stock portfolios that outperform those of traditional stock brokers, we should expect political engineers to be able to produce political solutions that outperform the policies of our current leaders.

My claim as a Singularitarian is that humanity is entering an era which is fundamentally different from anything we have seen before. The exponential march of technology is producing a world with phenomena that are without precedent in history. The founding fathers of the United States, for example, could never have imagined a global computer network such as the Internet; nor did they need to concern themselves with the prospect of non-human intelligences far superior in many respects to their own. Both of these are now central facts of life, and will become ever more so with each passing year. It is therefore natural to expect to see political systems evolve which are unlike anything that has existed before. We should no more cling to 18th century political models than we should still light our homes with candles. The illumination provided by our quantitative machinery far outshines any tools we have ever had at our disposal. To not use these tools to guide our political process is to continue to operate in the darkness of political prejudice.

Further Reading:
Ayres, Ian Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart

Baker, Stephen The Numerati

General AI as an "Emergent Hack" of Narrow AI's

2008-08-13T23:28:00.001-07:00

I'm far from an AI expert, but I'm wondering: is top-down engineering a realistic or necessary approach in trying to produce general AI? Isn’t a more practical approach to simply continue developing more powerful specialized AI’s in an ever increasing number of domains, and to look for clever ways to combine them? It seems to me that by doing this, synergistic forms of intelligence will emerge that couldn’t have been imagined or engineered until the technology had advanced enough to make them possible. As these various types of narrow AI evolve, can’t they simply become components of a more generalized architecture which can exhibit a more general type of intelligence? Will strong AI turn out to be nothing more than a “hacking together” of a vast number of subsystems into a more powerful whole?

To take a simple example that I’ve been playing around with, the knowledge embodied in google can be combined with existing language processing software to provide a decent imitation of an all-knowing oracle. Using basic network programming and statistical methods, simple questions can be answered correctly a reasonable percentage of the time. While no one will claim that this system is intelligent, it is a means of tapping into the “wisdom of crowds” in a way that would have been impossible before the development of the internet and a search engine such as google. With further refinements, such as are promised by the development of the “semantic web”, we should expect much more interesting results along these lines. By combining a system like this with, say, financial databases, correlations can be found between financial numbers and news stories that are semantically represented in a search engine. This would allow the system to answer questions such as “which stocks should I buy today?” As the semantic web expands and more components are added, such a system would become more and more “knowledgeable” and able to find correlations across a greater number of fields. Other layers could be kludged onto the system across any networkable device to incorporate sensory input, speech recognition, robotic controls, etc. as those AI’s evolve. Is it possible that general AI’s will evolve in this way out of the Net itself?

Are You a Singularitarian?

2008-08-13T23:22:00.001-07:00

The purpose of this blog is to discuss ideas relating to the so-called "Singularity", including developments in artificial intelligence, science, technology, philosophy, popular culture and politics. If you suspect, as so many of the greatest minds of modern times seem to, that humanity is rapidly approaching a point where life as we have known it will be fundamentally transformed, you have come to the right place!

Just so everyone is on the same page, let's start by quoting one of the earliest known references to the Singularity, a conversation between the great mathematicians Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann in 1958:

"One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue."

In subsequent years this vision has been echoed and expanded upon by numerous scientists, writers and futurists. Some of the greatest scientific minds of the past half century, from John von Neumann to Marvin Minsky to Stephen Hawking, have concerned themselves with the disruptive effects of our exponentially advancing technologies. In the cultural sphere, the fiction of Vernor Vinge, William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, along with the "Terminator" and "Matrix" movies, have brought post-Singularity worlds to life in all their terrifying glory. A whole cottage industry of technologists and futurists has sprung up to promote this idea, including Hans Moravec, Ben Goertzel and Ray Kurzweil. Critics have called belief in the Singularity "the rapture of the nerds" -- a response to the almost religious fervor that some seem to have toward this phenomenon.

In this blog I will speculate at length about developments relating to the Singularity -- not as a "true believer", but as a scientific thinker looking to separate the real substance from the hype. I look forward to sharing ideas with others who share my skeptical yet optimistic outlook.

Further Reading:
Brin, David Singularities and Nightmares: Extremes of Optimism and Pessimism About the Human Future
Gibson, William Neuromancer
Joy, Bill, Why the Future Doesn't Need Us
Kurzweil, Ray The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
Moravec, Hans Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence
Vinge, Vernor The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era

Vinge, Vernor True Names: And the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier