Well, this is my first post to the board, hope its not too out there :).
How feasible is the concept of transhumanism and the idea that the convergence of artificial intelligence and Moore’s Law will lead to a ‘singularity’? I recently stumbled upon the Transhumanist FAQ (www.transhumanism.org), and while it seems rather bizarre at first, it was actually backed up by some rather compelling logic (and a good helping of
speculation). What do you think?
I’m a big believer in this stuff. I’m in the coding business, and I tell people that we’re building our grandchildren.
Sooner or later, computers will be smarter, faster, stronger, and better in any measurable way than humans. Longer, more accurate memory, faster communications with other beings on the planet, etc. I lament sometimes that I wasn’t born 100 years early. It would be exciting to see the next generation of evolution.
I think the arguments are very reasonable, myself, as humans will advance science as far as they can. We will naturally want to augment ourselves, first physically, then mentally, altering what it means to be human as we go along. Very soon, we will find out that our creations are just as human as we are. We will not have ‘lost’ something. Rather, we will have gained something immeasurable: A companion in our quest to improve ourselves and explore the universe. And that, self-improvement and exploration, is the basis of the extropian philosophy. It also sums up why I consider myself an extropian.
Its idealism at its worst, this is the information age’s version of the tired Tim Leary rhetoric of never dying and becoming enlightened super-humans. Except of using psychedelic drugs for this end we’re gonna use nano technology and genetic engineering. Probably sounds convincing to gullible and idealistic geeks but then again so did Leary to gullible and idealistic trippers.
Like every sci-fi prediction it does its best to ignore reality, especially politics and economics. According to past “tech-seers” TV should be beaming in free education to everyone on the planet, scientific cosmology should have replaced spiritualism, AI robots would be everywhere, space flight would be affordable to the everyone, etc.
While I agree that some of the arguments of the transhumanists should be taken with a grain of salt, it seems that you are ignoring the absolutely mind-boggling plunge into the computer age that has taken place in just twenty years. Would you have said the same thing about the internet twenty years ago? Would you have assumed that politics and economics would have prevented the rapid integration of computers into every facet of our society? I can’t help but think that the internet is but the first step in the formation of a collective transhuman consciousness… the amount of information that is literally at your fingertips on the web even now is staggering (and I think we can all agree that the internet is in its infancy).
I’d also like to direct the conversation towards the concept of the ‘singularity’, which was addressed in the second link of my original post. IMO, this is the far more radical theory. If this theory proves correct, then the other concerns of the Transhumanist philosophy are rather trivial… since they will soon be rendered irrelevant by the upcoming technological singularity. While I’m sceptical of the proposed timeframe, the basic premise that we are destined to either annihilate our race or achieve singularity seems plausible to me…
First off, the internet sounds a bit over the top but then again we’ve had phone lines covering the world for sometime now, putting computers on long-distance fiber isn’t so far fetched as one might think.
Its not the technology as much as it is the naive idealism, we can squarely peg the success of the internet on the popularity of the HTML and of course the economy of scale that makes computers afforable. We don’t need tons of chip power (Moore’s Law) to make it run, the internet boom could have somehow happened in '84 and we’d all be on 300 baud connections sending email through our C=64’s and loving it and having heated discussions on how color monitors and video and broadband will alieviate global ignorance and make a utopia based on technology.
Bullshit. I’ve watched the internet degenerate into a giant on-line catalog and a haven for anti-social types to pretend their the opposite sex in chat rooms. Yes, its very egalitarian if you consider how easy it is to put up data and the how huge the potential audience is, but other than that its still business as usual as will be nano/gengineering.
Here’s slightly more cynical and much more realistic view of nano/gengineering when it becomes relativly cheap. The upper class begins to make the more perfect kid because they can afford to. The first mass-scale use of nano for anyone other than the wealthy is the cure for impotence, huge market ya know. The huge brained kids become so pendatic and overly-intellectual they have little in common with normal kids and parents realize that really, really smart doesn’t necessarily mean better. Your boss orders you to get a replacement eye and data port in your head if you don’t want to lose your job to the kids who have already embraced the tech lifestyle. You take out a huge loan for the operation. Your new eye displays ads in the upper corner to help the cost. Nano weapons start a new war scare.
Somewhere in this mess the ideals of living forever, being a supergenius, and starting a utopia just never come up that often and are laughed at as being too religious. Look at how people who go out to live in communes are treated today, think they’ll take an electric commune more seriously? Think you can just ignore the limitations of capatalism and free market? Even if you could change the world, a different economic system probably won’t let Moore’s law flourish so well.
We’ve had many attempts at an analog utopia and we’ve got human nature to thank for its many fails. Advanced tech isn’t going to teach us the proper ethics or the blueprint to a perfect society, assuming there is such a thing. Tech is a tool, humans are historically anti-utopian. Sorry Dr. Leary.
Its funny how no one discussed the opposite of the utopia, maybe nano/gengineering will give people the ability to devolve into more animalistic creatures. Maybe it’ll become popular because of the excitement and the constant life-or-death struggle that animals have. Maybe theres a middle ground of cybernatic human like animals who knows? But if I was gonna bet real money on it I’d say the future will look alot like Bladerunner or Snow Crash.
Ooh, animal-humans… humanoid animals… FURRIES!!! Mua ha… I’ve been looking forward to Nano for a long time. I’m gonna be the first Furry on my block, how about you?
Actually, 20 years ago the internet WAS seen as far fetched. People thought that the idea of individually owned computers was laughable, a giant calculator for doing bills and balancing checkbooks? It was too expensive, they said. Laugh, laugh, laugh.
Now computers are considered essential to business, almost to daily life.
People thought automobiles would never replace the horse.
We couldn’t make it to the MOON.
Ug sharp stick no be better than rock.
Though the human capacity for stupidity, avarice, and cupidity is boundless, we are also capable of invention, creation, and imagine that borders on spectacular.
And we wouldn’t be getting third eyes, we’d be growing multiple arms on the citizens of third world countries, and giving hormone treatments to kids so they’ll be 8 feet tall and SUPERB at basketball.
I eagerly await the next 60 years. Though I’m sure I’ll have to undergo screening going to work to make sure I’m not carrying any espionage-tailored nanobots, I’m also pretty sure I’ll be able to get my eyes fixed without resorting to lasers.
Have you all heard of Stelarc? He’s kinda way out there, but he’s been doing this kinda funny stuff on a Macro level, not a nano level for quite some years.
For the most part I agree with you. The coming technicalogical age will likely be bound by a capitalist/corporate framework, and it will likely lead to further class stratification. I’m more interested in the Singularity concept, which you haven’t really addressed. The prediction in this case is that we will achieve singularity UNLESS we annihilate ourselves first. This has nothing to do with a utopia…
*There may be developed computers that are “awake” and superhumanly intelligent. Large computer networks (and their associated users) may “wake up” as a superhumanly intelligent entity. *
What basis in reality do these assumptions have? AI works by mimicking natural selection processes and simulating conscious-like actions, look how well it works in stock analysis and prediction today. AI is not some grand experiment waiting for computers to wake up, I can’t stress how much this sounds like some hackneyed Sci-Fi plot.
What I think fuels Vinge’s “waking up” other than comic books is our poor understanding of what real animal consciousness is and the assumption that its probably just the after effect of a chorus of firing neurons. On the animal level this is purely theoretical let alone a premise of the future of computing.
Even if creating consciousness is simply waiting for the “hundreth monkey” to join in, that doesn’t necessarily mean that digital models will actually have the same effect.
AI is really about writing algorithms that self-learn from their mistakes, it is not about adding the 100th processor and magically having a machine with independant thought, feelings, and desires.
This “singularity” as Vinge describes it doesn’t seem possible without the magical awaking computer.
The crux of the matter is whether “consciousness” could ever be achieved by a computer (unless the line between computer and biological entity is blurred or erased entirely). I conceed that consciousness is very poorly understood (and poorly defined as well…), but I personally do believe that consciousness is an emergent property of brain neurochemistry.
I find the notion that God or some other mystical force has provided us with a soul or the ‘gift of sentience’ far more absurd than the notion that evolution has shaped our brain into a sophisticated organic computer. If you analyze the brains of simpler organisms, the resemblence to a modern computer is quite clear, so the question arises: when did ‘consciousness’ evolve? And furthermore, how does ‘evolution’ of the computer differ from biological evolution? One important distinction is that, once established, even the most primitive AI would have an effective ‘generation time’ that vastly outpaces biological evolution. Furthermore,unlike biological evolution, AI-seed directed ‘evolution’ could be directed towards a specific goal.
Having said all that, I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know a damn thing about the state of AI, and I am indeed speculating wildly. However, even with these uncertainties, and perhaps because of them, I have to disagree with your outright dismissal of these ideas.
BTW, you’ll be amused to know that while Vinge’s day-job is as a mathematician, he does indeed write Science Fiction (won a Hugo award too ).
OK, just for the sake of argument, let’s say that someone writes a computer program capable of “waking up”. It would have to actually be written specifically for that capacity; I can tell you right now that Windows ain’t gonna do it. OK, now that computer does, indeed, wake up. Know what you’ve got now? A little baby computer intelligence, aww, isn’t it cute? It would still need to learn, grow, and mature, a process that would probably take even longer than for humans. There’s no reason to believe that a newly-awaken computer would instantly be able to handle all the information to which it has access. Current computers can do this, but that’s only because they’re thinking like computers! It’s easy to process data if you’r using strict rules, from which you cannot depart. It’s much more difficult if you’re trying to be flexible.
*If you analyze the brains of simpler organisms, the resemblence to a modern computer is quite clear, so the question arises: when did ‘consciousness’ evolve? *
I also don’t want to get into the old scientific materialism vs. spiritual explanation of consciousness, but I think its pretty obvious both camps are highly speculative, though if you’re familiar with my posts you’ll see I definately learn towards the latter. That being said:
I don’t at all see how simple organisms act like computers, when computers themselves are created and programmed by people. Your statement sounds a little too much like the argument from design, which I’m sure you disagree with.
I also don’t see how the timing of neuron fire, structure of neurons, the CNS, and structure of the brain relates at all with how computer processors are designed and used. Though neural net type AI programming and design(something you should read about its really cool) tries to mimick brain activities its a far cry from how organisms actually work. I don’t think the comparision between simple organisms and computers is very fair, it sounds more like a semantic comparision instead of a real one. Considering computers keep doing more and more different things everyday, this game of semantics can go on forever.
This doesn’t mean AI isn’t real or that it won’t gradually improve, but AI will always be a simulation not the real thing. The same way the F-16 training simulator isn’t an F-16 an AI machine isn’t alive. MIT’s AI lab’s webpage has lots of interestig info on how AI is being used today. Commercial software http://www.stockmaster.com runs off of AI algorithms too. I think it was developed at MIT.
I hate to be too much of a naysayer and I think your posts and transhumanism are really interesting but AI has nothing to do with the fantasy of ‘waking up’ and a digital utopia still sounds pretty far fetched.
Chronos brings up a good point about a highly developed AI system needs to be raised like a person to act like a person. MIT’s cog robot project is an attempt at this.
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