- STARING INTO THE SINGULARITY
http://yudkowsky.net/singularity.html
The short version:
If computing power doubles every two years, what happens when
computers are doing the research?
Computing power doubles every two years. Computing power doubles
every two years of work. Computing power doubles every two
subjective years of work.
Two years after computers reach human equivalence, their power doubles
again. One year later, their speed doubles again.
Six months - three months - 1.5 months ... Singularity.
It's expected in 2035. (Oops, make that 2025.)
- The End of History
- The Beyondness of the
Singularity
- The Definition of
Smartness
- Perceptual
Transcends
- Great Big Numbers
- Smarter Than We Are
- Sooner Than You Think
- Uploading
- The Interim Meaning of
Life
- Getting to the
Singularity
The End of History
It began four billion years ago in a pool
of muck, when a molecule made a copy of itself and so became the ultimate
ancestor of all earthly life.
It began two and a half million years ago, when the first human awoke
to consciousness.
Fifty thousand years ago with the rise of the Cro-Magnons. Ten
thousand years ago with the invention of civilization. Five hundred
years ago with the invention of the printing press. Fifty years ago
with the invention of the computer.
In less than forty years, it will end.
Vernor Vinge saw it first. At some point in the near future, someone
will come up with a method of increasing the maximum intelligence on the
planet - either coding a true Artificial Intelligence or enhancing human
intelligence. An enhanced human would be better at thinking up ways of
enhancing humans; he would have an "increased capacity for invention".
What is this increased ability going to be directed upon? Why, the next
generation of enhanced humans, of course.
And what will that doubly enhanced intelligence do? Research methods on
triply enhanced humans, or build AI - Artificially Intelligent -
assistants or even independent AI researchers who operate at computer
speeds. And an AI researcher would be able to reprogram itself,
directly, to operate even faster - and better still, smarter. And then our
crystal ball explodes, everything we know is out the window, Life As We
Know It is over, the "old models break down and new ones must be applied".
Hence the phrase: Singularity.
There are multiple paths to the Singularity. Nanotechnology - the
ability to build computers atom by atom and brains neuron by neuron.
Artificial Intelligence - if we can create programs that can match our
intelligence, they shall shortly thereafter exceed us in speed if not in
ability, because computers are currently increasing in speed by 55% per
year. Even a mildly "intelligent" program, with the ability to notice some
meaning in text, could greatly increase the rate of scientific progress by
making knowledge more accessible. We could bootstrap our way to the
Singularity via the relatively mild enhanced humans produced by Algernon's
Law. Something completely unanticipated could occur, such as this decade's
invention of the Scanning Tunnelling Probe, which advanced the
nanotechnology timetable by about ten years.
If the current trends continue - if we don't run up against some
unexpected theoretical cap on intelligence, or turn the Earth into a
radioactive wasteland, or trip on one of the hazards of truly advanced
technology - the Singularity is inevitable. A planet scoured of life and a
superintelligence are the only two stable states, and the Universe is
filled with stable things; Life As We Know It is unstable, and it will
shortly be over one way or the other. The generally accepted
estimate has been and remains 2035 - less than forty years! - although
many, including I, think that the Singularity may occur substantially sooner.
Some terminology, due to Vinge's Hugo-winning A Fire Upon The Deep:
Power - an entity from beyond the Singularity. Transcend,
Transcended, Transcendence - The act of reprogramming oneself to be
smarter, reprogramming (with one's new intelligence) to be smarter still,
and so on ad Singularitum. Also the metaphorical area where the
Powers live, or belonging to that area. Beyond - The grey area
between being human and being a Power; the domain inhabited by entities
smarter than human, but not possessing the technology to reprogram
themselves directly and Transcend.
(In association with
Amazon.com.)
The Beyondness of the
Singularity
"I imagine bugs and girls have a dim perception that Nature played a
cruel trick on them, but they lack the intelligence to really comprehend
its magnitude."- Calvin
But why should the Powers be so much more than we are now? Why
not assume that we'll get a little smarter and that's it?
Consider the sequence 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32... In other words, the
iteration of F(x) = (x + x). Every couple of years, computer performance
doubles. (That's actually gone up recently, to 55% per year.) That is the
proven rate of improvement as overseen by constant, unenhanced minds,
progress according to mortals.
Right now the amount of computing power on the planet is equal to the
power of a human brain (10^11 to 10^26 operations per second, with
consensus at 10^17) multiplied by the number of humans. The amount of
artificial computing power is so small as to be irrelevant, not because of
the number of humans, but because of the sheer power of a human brain. At
the old rate of progress, computers reach human-equivalence levels - 10^17
floating-point operations per second or one hundred petaflops - at around
2035. That's actually a bit long - since there are one-teraflops machines
around now [as of 1996; it's now up to 3.2 teraflops], which wasn't
expected until 2000 or so, and since computers started improving at 55%
per year instead of 40% or so. Once we have human-equivalent computers,
the amount of computing power on the planet is equal to the number of
humans plusthe number of computers. The amount of intelligence
available takes a huge jump. Ten years later, humans become a
vanishing quantity in the equation.
That doubling sequence is actually a very pessimistic projection,
because it assumes that computer power continues to double at the same
rate. But why? Computer speeds don't double due to some inexorable
physical law, but because researchers and engineers find ways to make them
faster. If some of the researchers and engineers are computers...
A group of human-equivalent computers spends 2 years to double computer
speeds. Then they spend another 2 subjective years, or 1 year in
human terms, to double it again. Then they spend another 2 subjective
years, or six months, to double it again. Six months later, the computing
power goes to infinity.
That is the "Transcended" version of the doubling sequence. A
Transcended version of a sequence {a0, a1,
a2...} is a function where the interval between an
and an+1is inversely proportional to an . (If
there's a pre-existing mathematical term for this, let me know.) So a
Transcended doubling function starts with 1, in which case it takes 1
time-unit to go to 2. Then it takes 1/2 time-units to go to 4. Then it
takes 1/4 time-units to go to 8. This function, if it was continuous,
would be the hyperbolic function y = 2/(2 - x). When x = 2, (2 - x) = 0
and y = infinity. The behavior at that point is known mathematically as a
singularity.
And the Transcended doubling sequence is a fairly pessimistic
projection, not a Singularity at all, because it assumes that only
speed is enhanced. What if the quality of thought was
enhanced? Right now, two years of work - well, these days, eighteen months
of work. Eighteen subjective months of work suffices to double the speed
of computers. Shouldn't this improve a bit with thought-sharing and
eidetic memories? Shouldn't this improve if, say, the total sum of human
scientific knowledge is stored in predigested, cognitive, ready-to-think
format? Shouldn't this improve with short-term memories capable of holding
the whole of human knowledge? A human-equivalent AI isn't merely
"equivalent" - if Kasparov had had even the smallest, meanest automatic
chess-playing program integrated solidly with his intuitions, he would
have beat Deep Blue into a pulp. That's The AI Advantage: Simple tasks
carried out at blinding speeds and without error, conscious tasks carried
out with perfect memory and total self-awareness.
I haven't even started on the subject of AIs redesigning their
cognitive architectures, although they'll have a far easier time of it -
especially if they can make backups. Transcended doubling mightrun
up against the laws of physics before reaching infinity... but even the
laws of physics as now understoodwould allow one milligram (more or
less) to store and run the entire human race at a million subjective years
per second. (Without even using quantum computing.)
Let's take a deep breath and think about that for a moment. One
milligram. The entire human race. One million years per
second. That means, using only this planet for computing power, it would
be possible to support more people than the entire Universe could
support if we colonized every single planet. It means that, in a
single day, this civilization would have lived over 80 billion
years, several times older than the age of the Universe to date.
The peculiar thing is that most people who talk about "the laws of
physics" and hard limits on Powers would never even dream of setting the
same limits on a (merely) galaxy-spanning civilization of (normal) humans
a (brief) billion years old. Part of that is simply a cultural convention
of science fiction; interstellar civilizations can break any physical law
they please, because the readers are used to it. But part of that is
because scientists and science-fiction authors have been taught, so many
times, that Ultimate Unbreakable Limits usually fall to human ingenuity
and a few generations of time. Powered flight, faster-than-sound, space
travel - all proved impossible.
We know that change crept at a snail's pace a mere millennium ago, and
that even a hundred years ago it would have been impossible to
place correct limits on the ultimate power of technology. We know that the
past could never have placed limits on the present, and so we don't try to
place limits on the future. But with transhumans, the analogy is not to
Lord Kelvin, nor Aristotle, nor to a hunter-gatherer - all of whom had
human intelligence - but to a Neanderthal. With Powers, to a fish. And
yet, because the power of higher intelligence is not as publicly
recognized as the power of a few million years; because we have no
history of naysayers being embarassed by transhumans instead of
mere time; some of us still sit, grunting around the fire, setting
ultimate limits on the sharpness of spears; some of us still swim about,
unblinking, unable to engage in abstract thought, but knowing that the
entire Universe is wet.
To convey the rate of progress driven by smarter researchers, I
needed to invent a function more complex than the doubling function used
above: T(n). You can think of T(n) as representing the
largest number conceivable to someone with a class n brain. More
formally, T(n) is defined as the longest block of 1s
produceable by any halting Turing Machine with n states acting on
an initially blank tape. If you are familiar with computers but not Turing
Machines, consider T(n) to be the largest number produceable by a
computer program with ninstructions. Or, if you're an information
theorist, you can think of T(n) as the inverse function of
complexity; it produces the largest number with complexity n or
less.
The sequence produced by iterating T(n), S{n } =
T(S{n- 1}), is constant for very low values of n. S{0} is
defined to be 0; a program of length zero produces no output. This
corresponds to a Universe empty of intelligence. T(1) = 1. This
corresponds to an intelligence not capable of enhancing itself; this
corresponds to where we are now. T(2) = 3. Here begins the leap into the
Abyss. Once this function increases at all, it immediately tapdances off
the brink of the knowable. T(3) = 6? T(6) = 64?
T(64) = vastly more than 1080, the number of atoms in the
Universe. T(10^80) is something that only a Transcendent entity is ever
going to be able to calculate, and that only if Transcendent entities can
create new Universes to supply the necessary computing power. I would
venture to guess that even T(64) will never be known to any strictly human
being.
Now take the Transcended version of S{n}, starting at 2. Half a
time-unit later, we have 3. A third of a time-unit after that, 6. A sixth
later - one whole unit after this function started - we have 64. A
sixty-fourth later, 10^80 or whatever. An unimaginably tiny fraction of a
second later... Singularity.
Is S{n} really a good model of the Singularity? Of course not.
"Good model of the Singularity" is an oxymoron; that's the whole
point;the Singularity will outrun any model a human could have
formulated a hundred years ago, and the Singularity will outrun any model
we formulate.
Also, T(10^17), or T(human), should presently equal 10^12, or the power
of a computer, and S{n} should equal S{n-1} +
T(S{n-1}). The main objection, though, would be that S{n} is
an ungrounded metaphor. The Transcended doubling sequence models faster
researchers. It's easy to say that S{n} models smarter researchers,
but what does smarter actually mean in this context?
The Definition of Smartness
Smartness is the measure of what you see as
obvious, what you can see as obvious in retrospect, what you
can invent, and what you can comprehend. To be a bit more
precise about it, smartness is the measure of your semantic primitives
(what is simple in retrospect), the way in which you manipulate the
semantic primitives (what is obvious), the way your semantic primitives
can fit together (what you can comprehend), and the way you can manipulate
those structures (what you can invent). If you speak complexity theory,
the difference between obvious and obvious in retrospect, or
inventable and comprehensible, is somewhat like the
difference between NP and P.
All humans who have not suffered neural injuries have the same semantic
primitives. What is obvious in retrospect to one is obvious in
retrospect to all. Four notes: First, by "neural injuries" I do not
mean anything derogatory - it's just that a person missing the visual
cortex will not have visual semantic primitives. People who lose their
visual cortex forget what it is like to see. Second, theorems in math may
be obvious in retrospect only to mathematicians - but anyone else who
acquired the skillwould have the ability to see it too.
Third, to some extent what we speak of as obvious involves not just
the symbolic primitives but very short links between them. I am counting
the primitive link types as being included under "semantic primitives".
When we look at a thought-sequence and see it as being obvious in
retrospect, it is not necessarily a single semantic primitive, but is
composed of a very short chain of semantic primitives and link types.
Fourth, I apologize for my tendency to dissect my own metaphors; I really
can't help it.
Similarly, the human cognitive architecture is universal. We all have
the same sorts of symbolic structures. The nature of these structures is
not known, no more than we know what symbols are made of, but our ability
to communicate with each other indicates that, whatever we are
communicating, it is the same on both sides. If any two humans share a set
of symbols, any structure composed of those symbols that is understood by
one will be understood by the other.
Different humans may have different degrees of the ability to
manipulateand structure symbols; different humans may see
and invent different things. The great breakthroughs of physics and
engineering did not occur because a group of people plodded and plodded
and plodded for generations until they found an explanation so complex, a
string of ideas so long, that only time could invent it. Relativity and
quantum physics and buckyballs and object-oriented programming all
happened because someone put together a short, simple, elegant semantic
structure in a way that nobody had ever thought of before. That is being a
little bit smarter; that's where revolutions come from. Not time. Not hard
work; although hard work was usually necessary, others had worked far
harder without result. Raw smartness.
Now think about the Singularity. Think about a chimpanzee trying to
understand integral calculus. Think about the people with damaged visual
cortices who cannot remember what it was like to see, who cannot imagine
the color red or visualize two-dimensional structures. Think about a
visual cortex with trillions of times as many neuron-equivalents. Think
about twenty thousand distinct colors in the rainbow, none a shade of any
other. Think about rotating fifty-dimensional objects. Think about
attaching semantic primitives to the pixels, so that one could see a
rainbow of ideas in the same way that we see a rainbow of colors.
Why does anything exist at all? Nobody knows. And yet the answer is
obvious. The First Cause must be obvious. It has to be obvious to
Nothing,present in the absence of anything else, formed from
-blank-. What is it that evokes conscious experience, the stuff
that souls are made of? We are made of conscious experiences. There
is nothing we experience more directly. How does it work? We don't
have a clue. Two and a half millennia of trying to solve it and
nothing to show for it but "I think therefore I am." The solutions operate
outside the semantic primitives and the semantic structures we can use.
Our descendants, successors, future selves will figure out the semantic
primitives necessary and alter themselves to perceive them. The Powers
will dissect the Universe and the Reality until they understand why
anything exists at all, neurons until they understand qualia. And that
will only be the beginning. It won't end there. Why should there be
only three hard problems? After all, if not for humans, the Universe would
apparently contain only one or two hard problems - how could a
non-conscious thinker formulate the hard problem of consciousness? Might
there be states of existence beyond mere consciousness - transsentience?
That's what the Singularity is all about.
So before you talk about life as a Power or the Utopia to come - a
favorite pastime of transhumanists and Extropians is to discuss the
problems of uploading, life after being uploaded, and so on - just
remember that you probably have a much better chance of solving all three
hard problems than you do of making a valid statement about the future.
This goes for me too. I'll stand by everything I said about humans,
including our inability to understand certain things, but everything I
said about the Powers is almost certainly wrong. "They'll figure out the
semantic primitives necessary and alter themselves to perceive them."
Wrong. "Figure out." "Semantic primitives." "Alter." "Perceive." I would
bet on all of these terms becoming obsolete after the Singularity. There
are better ways and I'm sure They - or It, or [sound of exploding brain]
will "find them".
Perceptual Transcends
I would like to introduce a unit of
post-Singularity progress, the Perceptual Transcend or PT.
[Brief pause while audience collapses in helpless laughter.]
I'm not trying to get it right, just make a point.
A Perceptual Transcend occurs when all things that were
comprehensiblebecome obvious in retrospect, and all things
that were inventablebecome obvious. A Perceptual Transcend
occurs when the semantic structures of one generation become the semantic
primitives of the next. To put it another way, one PT from now, the
whole of human knowledge becomes perceiveable in a single flash of
experience, in the same way that we now perceive an entire picture at
once.
Computers are a PT above humans when it comes to arithmetic - sort of.
While we need to manipulate an entire precarious pyramid of digits, rows
and columns in order to multiply 62305 by 10358, a computer can spit out
the answer - 645355190 - in a single obvious step. These computers
aren't actually a PT above us at all, for two reasons. First of all, they
just handle numbers up to two billion instead of 9; after that they need
to manipulate pyramids too. Far more importantly, they don't notice
anything about the numbers they manipulate, as humans do. If a human
multiplies 23704 by 14223, using the wedding-cake method of
multiplication, he won't multiply 23704 by 2 twice in a row, just steal
the results from last time. If one of the interim results is 12345 or
99999 or 314159 he'll notice that too. The way computers manipulate
numbers is actually lesspowerful than the way we manipulate
numbers.
Would the Powers settle for less? A PT above us, multiplication is
carried out automatically but with full attention to interim
results, numbers that happen to be prime, and the like. If I were
designing one of the first Powers [and I am - '99], I would create an
entire subsystem for manipulating numbers, that would pick up on
primality, complexity, and all the numeric properties known to humanity. A
Power would understand why 62305 times 10358 equals 645355190, with
the same understanding achieved by a top human mathematician who spent
hours studying all the numbers involved. And at the same time, the Power
will multiply the two numbers automatically.
For such a Power, to whom numbers were true semantic primitives,
Fermat's Last Theorem and the Goldbach Conjecture and the Riemann
Hypothesis might be obvious. Somewhere in the back of its mind, the
Power would test each statement with a million trials, subconsciously
manipulating all the numbers involved to find why they were not the
sum of two cubes or why they were the sum of two primes or
why their real part was equal to one-half. From there, the Power
could intuit the most basic, simple solution simply by
generalizing. Perhaps human mathematicians, if they could perform the
arithmetic for a thousand trials of the Riemann Hypothesis, examining
every intermediate step, looking for common properties and interesting
shortcuts, could intuit a formal solution too. But they can't, and they
certainly can't do it subconsciously, which is why the Riemann Hypothesis
remains unobvious and unproven - it is a conceptual
structureinstead of a conceptual primitive.
Perhaps an even more thought-provoking example is provided by our
visual cortex. On the surface, the visual cortex seems to be an image
processor. In a modern computer graphics engine, an image is represented
by a two-dimensional array of pixels (picture elements, spots of color).
To rotate this image, each pixel's rectangular coordinates {x, y} are
converted to polar coordinates {theta, r}. All thetas, representing the
angle, have a constant added. The polar coordinates are then converted
back to rectangular. There are ways to optimize this process, and ways to
account for intersecting and empty pixels on the new array, but the
essence is clear: To perform an operation on an entire picture, perform
the operation on each pixel in that picture.
At this point, one could say that a Perceptual Transcend depends on
what level you're looking at the operation. If you view yourself as
carrying out the operation pixel by pixel, it is an unimaginably tedious
cognitive structure, but if you view the whole thing in a single lump, it
is a cognitive primitive - a point made in Hofstadter's Ant Fugue when
discussing ants and colonies. Not very exciting unless it's Hofstadter
explaining it, but there's more to the visual cortex than that.
For one thing, we consciously experience redness. (If you're not sure
what "conscious experience" a.k.a. "qualia" means, the short version is
that you are not the one who speaksyour thoughts, you are the one
who hears your thoughts.) Qualia are the stuff making up the
indescribable difference between redand green.
The term "semantic primitive" describes more than just the level at
which symbols are discrete, compact objects. It describes the level of
conscious perception. Unlike the computer manipulating numbers formed of
bits, and like the imagined Power manipulating theorems formed of numbers,
we don't lose any resolution in passing from the pixel level to the
picture level. We don't suddenly perceive the idea "there is a bear in
front of me", we see a picture of a bear, containing millions of pixels,
every one of which is consciously experienced simultaneously. A Perceptual
Transcend isn't "just" the imposition of a new cognitive level; it turns
the cognitive structures into consciously experienced primitives.
"To put it another way, one PT from now, the whole of human
knowledge becomes perceiveable in a single flash of experience, in the
same way that we now perceive an entire picture at once."
Of course, the PT won't be used as a post-Singularity unit of progress.
Even if it were initially, it won't be too long before "PT" itself is
Transcended and the Powers jump out of the system yet again. I exerted all
my ability to write an even briefly plausible description of progress
beyond the Singularity, and yet the Singularity is as far beyond me as it
is beyond any other human, and my PTs will be as worthless a description
as the doubling sequence discarded so long ago. Even if we accept the PT
as the basic unit of measure, it simply introduces a secondary
Singularity. Maybe the Perceptual Transcends will occur every two
consciously experienced years at first, but then will occur every
conscious year, and then every conscious six months - get the picture?
It's like the "Birthday Cantatatata..." in Hofstadter's book Godel,
Escher, Bach. You can start with the sequence {1, 2, 3, 4 ...} and jump
out of it to w (omega), the symbol for infinity. But then one has
{w, w + 1, w + 2 ... }, and we jump out again to
2w. Then 3w, and 4w, and w2 and
w3and ww and
w^(ww) and the ordinal e0 ,
which includes all exponential towers of ws.
The PTs may introduce a second Singularity, and a third Singularity,
and a fourth, until Singularities are coming faster and faster and the
first w-Singularity is imminent -
Or the Powers may simply jump beyond that system. The Birthday
Cantatatata... was written by a human - admittedly Douglas
Hofstadter, but still a human - and the concepts involved in it may be
Transcended in the very first PT.
The Powers are beyond our ability to comprehend.
Get the picture?
Great Big Numbers
It's hard to appreciate the Singularity
properly without first appreciating really large numbers. I'm not talking
about little tiny numbers, barely distinguishable from zero, like the
number of atoms in the Universe or the number of years it would take a
monkey to duplicate the works of Shakespeare. I invite you to consider
what was, circa 1977, the largest number ever to be used in a serious
mathematical proof. The proof, by Ronald L. Graham, is an upper bound to a
certain question of Ramsey theory. In order to explain the proof, one must
introduce a new notation, due to Donald E. Knuth in the article Coping
With Finiteness. The notation is usually a small arrow, pointing
upwards, here abbreviated as ^. Written as a function:
int arrow (int num, int power, int
arrownum) {
int answer =
num;
if (arrownum ==
0) return num * power;
for (int i = 1;
i < power; i++)answer = arrow(num, answer, arrownum - 1);
return
answer;
}
// end arrow2^4 = 24 =
16.
3^^4 = 3^(3^(3^3)).
7^^^^3 = 7^^^(7^^^7).
3^3 = 3 * 3 * 3 = 27. This number is small enough to visualize.
3^^3 = 3^(3^3) = 3^27 = 7,625,597,484,987. Larger than 27, but so small
I can actually type it. Nobody can visualize seven trillion of anything,
but we can easily understand it as being on roughly the same order as,
say, the gross national product.
3^^^3 = 3^^(3^^3) = 3^(3^(3^(3^...^(3^3)...))). The "..." is
7,625,597,484,987 threes long. In other words, 3^^^3 or arrow(3, 3, 3) is
an exponential tower of threes 7,625,597,484,987 levels high. The number
is now beyond the human ability to understand, but the procedure for
producing it can be visualized. You take x=1. You let xequal
3^x. Repeat seven trillion times. While the very first stages of
the number are far too large to be contained in the entire Universe, the
exponential tower, written as "3^3^3^3...^3", is still so small that it
could be stored if a small percentage of all the computers on the Web
cooperated.
3^^^^3 = 3^^^(3^^^3) = 3^^(3^^(3^^...^^(3^^3)...)). Both the number and
the procedure for producing it are now beyond human visualization,
although the procedure can be understood. Take a number x=1. Let
x equal an exponential tower of threes of height x. Repeat
3^^^3 times, where 3^^^3 equals an exponential tower seven trillion threes
high.
And yet, in the words of Martin Gardner: "3^^^^3 is unimaginably larger
than 3^^^3, but it is still small as finite numbers go, since most finite
numbers are very much larger."
And now, Graham's number. Let x equal 3^^^^3, or the
unimaginable number just described above. Let x equal
3^^^^^^^(x^s)^^^^^^^3. Repeat 63 times, or 64 including the
starting 3^^^^3.
Graham's number is far beyond my ability to grasp. I can describe it,
but I cannot properly appreciate it. (Perhaps Graham can appreciate it,
having written a mathematical proof that uses it.) This number is far
larger than most people's conception of infinity. I know that it
was larger than mine. My sense of awe when I first encountered this number
was beyond words. It was the sense of looking upon something so much
larger than the world inside my head that my conception of the
Universe was shattered and rebuilt to fit. It felt as I imagine a mountain
looks to people who don't appreciate nuclear weapons: something forever
beyond us to subdue. All theologians should face a number like that, so
they can properly appreciate God. My happiness was completed when I
learned that the actual answer to the Ramsey problem that gave
birth to that number - rather than the upper bound - was probably
six.
Why was all of this necessary, mathematical aesthetics aside? Because
until you understand the hollowness of the words "infinity", "large" and
"transhuman", you cannot appreciate the Singularity. You must
knowthat even appreciating the Singularity is as far beyond us as
visualizing that number is to a chimpanzee. Farther beyond us than that.
No human analogies will ever be able to describe the Singularity, because
we are only human.
The number above was forged of the human mind. It is nothing but a
finite positive integer, though a large one. It is composite and odd,
rather than prime or even; it is perfectly divisible by three. Encoded in
the decimal digits of that number, by almost any encoding scheme one cares
to name, are all the works ever written by the human hand, and all the
works that could have been written, at 200 words per minute, over the age
of the Universe raised to its own power a thousand times. And yet, if we
add up all the base-ten digits the result will be divisible by nine. The
number is still a finite positive integer. It may contain Universes
unimaginably larger than this one, but it is still only a number. It is a
number so small that the algorithm to produce it can be held in a single
human mind.
The Singularity is beyond that. We cannot pigeonhole it by stating that
it will be a finite positive integer. We cannot say anything at all about,
except that it will be beyond our understanding.
If you thought that Knuth's arrow notation produced some fairly large
numbers, what about T(n)? How many states does a Turing machine
need to implement the calculation above? What is the complexity of Graham's number, C(Graham)? Probably on the order of 100. And
moreover, T(C(Graham)) is likely to be much, much larger than Graham's
number. Why go through x= 3^(x ^s)^3 only 64 times? Why not
3^^^^3 times? (That'd probably be easier, since we already need to
generate 3^^^^3, but not 64.) And with the extra space, we might even be
able to introduce an even more computationally complex algorithm. In fact,
Knuth's arrow notation may not be the most powerful algorithm that fits
into C(Knuth) states. Again, T(n) is the metaphor for the growth
rate of a self-enhancing entity because it conveys the concept of having
additional intelligence with which to enhance oneself. I don't know when
T(n) passes beyond the threshold of what human mathematicians can,
in theory, calculate. Probably more than n=10 and less than
n=100. The point is that after a few iterations, we wind up with
T(4294967296). Now, I don't know what T(4294967296) will be equal to, but
the winning Turing machine will probably generate a Power whose sole
purpose is to generate a really large number. That'swhat the term
"large" means.
Smarter Than We Are
It's all very well to talk about cognitive
primitives and obviousness, but again - what does smarter mean? The
meaning of smart can't be grounded in the Singularity - I haven't
been there yet. So what's my practical definition?
"The toughest challenge for a writer is a character brighter than the
author. It's not impossible. Puzzles the writer needs months to solve,
or to design, the character may solve in moments. But God help the
writer if his abnormally bright character is wrong!" - Larry
Niven
"Of course, I never wrote the 'important' story, the sequel about the
first amplified human. Once I tried something similar. John Campbell's
letter of rejection began: 'Sorry - you can't write this story. Neither
can anyone else.'" - Vernor Vinge
Smartness is that quality which makes it impossible to write a story
about a character smarter than you are. You can write about super-fast
thinkers, eidetic memories, lightning calculators; characters who learned
a dozen languages in a week, who can read a textbook in an hour, or who
can invent all kinds of wonderful stuff - as long as you don't have to
produce the invention, that is. But you can't write a character with a
higher level of emotional maturity, a character who can spot the obvious
solution you missed, a character who knows (and can tell the reader) the
Meaning Of Life, a character with superhuman self-awareness. Not unless
you can do these things yourself.
Let's take a concrete example, the story Flowers for
Algernon(later the movie Charly), by Daniel Keyes. (I'm afraid
I'll have to tell you how the story comes out, but it's a Character story,
not an Idea story, so that shouldn't spoil it.) Flowers for
Algernon concerns a neurosurgical procedure for intelligence
enhancement. This procedure was first tested on a mouse, Algernon, and
later on a retarded human, Charlie Gordon. The enhanced Charlie had the
standard science-fictional set of superhuman characteristics; he thought
fast, learned a lifetime of knowledge in a few weeks, and discussed arcane
mathematics (not shown). Then the mouse, Algernon, gets sick and dies.
Charlie analyzes the enhancement procedure (not shown) and concludes that
the process is basically flawed. Later, Charlie dies.
That's a science-fictional enhanced human. A real enhanced human, of
course, would not have been taken by surprise. A real enhanced human would
realize that any simple intelligence enhancement will be a net
evolutionary disadvantage - if enhancing intelligence were a matter of a
simple surgical procedure, it would have long ago occurred as a natural
mutation. (This goes double for a procedure that works on rats!) As far as
I know, this never occurred to Keyes. (I selected Flowers, out of
all the famous stories of intelligence enhancement, because, for reasons
of dramatic unity, this story shows what happens to be the correct
outcome.)
Note that I didn't dazzle you with an abstruse technobabble explanation
for Charlie's death; my explanation is two sentences long and can be
understood by someone who isn't an expert in the field. That's the
difference between a fictional genius and an actual enhanced human
such as myself. I wouldn't have been taken by surprise, and for that
matter I wouldn't have been that dramatically upset if I had. Normal
author no enhancement, real enhancement no story.
Do I hear the audience demanding an explanation? Well, a full
explanation is elsewhere; the brief version is that I am a Specialist,
with a neurological perturbation (best guess: pathway severed from the
right mammillary body or amygdala) that indirectly resulted in cognitive
resources being over-allocated to a few favored abilities, including
causal analysis and combinatorial design. This is of course a net
evolutionary disadvantage (in accordance with Algernon's Law), since an
evenly balanced set of abilities is the design optimum.
From my perspective, of course, I'm perfectly normal. Other humans have
this odd blind spot or slowness when it comes to seeing certain "obvious"
answers, although they have no trouble understanding them.
Algernon's Law, for example. I can't imagine how anyone who read
Flowers for Algernon, much less the author, managed to miss
it.
I also have blind spots, wherever cognitive resources have been
diverted. Although I have no trouble understanding certain concepts, I
cannot formulate them myself. Often just hearing the name given to
a concept - and chunking it into a symbol rather than a group of ideas -
causes everything else to fall into place. I can't name my ideas except
over the course of years; usually someone else winds up naming them. Why?
Obviously I have a much fuzzier picture of my blind spots than my
abilities, but I think they have to do with symbol formation, spotting
non-causal similarities, and formulating linear strings of goals. (I'm
sure you're not interested in the specifics; I just want you to know that
they're there.) The point is...
It's hard to convey what the term smarter means to someone who's
never seen their own or someone else's blind spot. That is why I am the
most fanatic Singularitarian on the planet; because I have some slight,
infinitesimal, actual experience with how intelligence enhancement works.
Because I have a visceral appreciation of how utterly, finally, absolutely
impossible it is to think like someone even a little tiny bit
smarter than you are. I know that we are all missing the obvious,
in every day, and every way. There are no hard problems, only problems
that are hard to a certain level of intelligence. Move the smallest bit
upwards, and some problems will suddenly move from "impossible" to
"obvious". Move a substantial degree upwards, and all of them will become
obvious. Move a huge distance upwards, and Lord knows what.
And I know that my picture of the Singularity will still fall
short of the truth. I may not be modest, but I have humility - if I can
spot anthropomorphisms and gaping logical flaws in every alleged
transhuman in every piece of science fiction novel, it follows that a
slightly higher-order Specialist (much less a real transhuman!) could read
this page and laugh at my lack of imagination. Call it experience, call it
humility, call it self-awareness, call it the Principle of Mediocrity. I
know, in a dim way, just how dumb I am.
I've tried to show the Beyondness of the Singularity by brute force,
but it doesn't take infinite speeds and PTs and ws to place
something utterly beyond us. All it takes is a little tiny bit of
edge, a bit smarter, and the Beyond stares us in the face once
more. I'venever been through the Singularity. I've never
been to the Transcend. I, like any Specialist, just staked out an area of
the Low Beyond. This page is devoted to communicating a sense of awe that
comes from personal experience.
From my cortex to thine; every concept here was born of a mere human -
and any impression it has made on you was likewise born of a mere human.
Someone who has devoted a bit more thought, or someone a bit more fanatic;
it makes no difference. Whatever impression you got from this page has not
been an accurate picture of the far future; it has, unavoidably, been an
impression of me. And I am not the far future. Had this page
been written by a Power, you would have gained an accurate impression. But
it isn't, and wasn't, and so you didn't. Take whatever emotion this page
evoked, and associate it not with the Singularity; associate it with me,
the mild, quiet-spoken fellow infinitesimally different from the rest of
humanity. Don't bother trying to extrapolate beyond that. You can't.
Nobody can - not you, not me.
2035. Probably earlier.
Sooner Than You Think
We don't lack the technology; the
Singularity could happen tomorrow.The Internet has enough power, if
properly reprogrammed, to run a human brain, and perhaps a smaller
computer has enough power to run a seed AI. We possess machines capable of
producing arbitrary DNA sequences. We have bacteria capable of turning DNA
into protein. 100K of information from the future could specify a protein
that built a device that would give us nanotechnology overnight. 100K
could contain the code for a seed AI. We don't have to receive that
information from the future, either. One breakthrough - just one major
insight - in the science of protein engineering or atomic manipulation or
Artificial Intelligence, one really good day at Cycorp
or Zyvex, and the books of
history close. That could happen at any time. There is a major
breakthrough in some scientific field once per day, and that statistic is
from years ago.
Drexler has written a detailed, technical, how-to book for
nanotechnology. After stalling for thirty years, AI is making a comeback.
Computers are growing in power even fasterthan their usual,
pedestrian rate of doubling in power every two years. Quate has
constructed a 16-head parallel Scanning Tunnelling Probe. Last but not
least, I'm starting to work out methods of enhancing human intelligence
and coding a transhuman AI.
The exact time of Singularity is customarily predicted by taking a
trend and extrapolating it, much as The Population Bomb predicted
that we'd run out of food in 1977. For example, population growth is
hyperbolic. (Maybe you learned it was exponential in math class, but it's
hyperbolic to a much better fit than exponential.) If that trend
continues, world population reaches infinity on Aug 17, 2027, plus or
minus 1.8 years. Although it is impossible for the human population to
reach those levels, some say that if we can create AIs, then the graph
might measure sentient population instead of human
population. These people are torturing the metaphor. Explain to me who
designed the population curve to take into account developments in AI.
It's just a curve,a bunch of numbers. It can't distort the
future course of technology just to remain on track.
If you project on a graph the minimum size of the materials we can
manipulate, it reaches the atomic level - nanotechnology - in I forget how
many years (page vanished), but I think around 2035. This, of course, was
before the time of Scanning Tunneling Microscopes, which has recently been
used to make an atomic-scale abacus on which actual calculations were
performed, or the completely unanticipated artificial atom ("You can make
any kind of artificial atom - long, thin atoms and big, round atoms."),
which has in a sense obsoleted mere molecular nanotechnology - the
surest sign that nanotech is just around the corner. I believe Drexler is
now giving the ballpark figure of 2013.
Similarly, computing power doubles every two years
eighteen months. If we extrapolate forty thirty years
ahead we find computers with as much raw power (10^17 ops/sec) as
somepeople think humans have, arriving in 2035
2025. Does this mean we have the software to spin souls? No. Does
this mean we can program smarter people? No. Does this take into account
any breakthroughs between now and then? No. Does this take into account
the laws of physics? No. Is this a detailed model of all the researchers
around the planet? No.
It's just a graph. The "amazing constancy" perhaps entitles it
to consideration as a thought-provoking metaphor of the future, but
nothing more. The Transcended doubling
sequence doesn't account for how the
faster computer-based researchers can get the physical manufacturing
technology for the next generation set up in picoseconds, or how they can
beat the laws of physics.
Mathematics can't predict when the Singularity is coming. Well, it can,
but it won't get it right. Even the remarkably steady numbers, such as the
one describing the doubling rate of computing power, (1) describe unaided
human minds and (2) are speeding up, perhaps due to computer-aided design
programs. Statistics may be used to predict the future, but they don't
modelit. What I'm trying to say here is that "2035" is just a wild
guess, and it might as well be next Tuesday.
In truth, I don't think in those terms. I do not "project" when the
Singularity will occur. I have a "target date". I would like the
Singularity to occur in 2005, which I think I would have a reasonable
chance of doing via AI if someone handed me a billion dollars a year. I
would really, really like the Singularity to arrive before
nanotechnology, given the virtual certainty of deliberate misuse, misuse
of a purely material (and thus amoral) ultratechnology powerful enough to
destroy the planet. You cannot just sit back and wait. To quote
Michael Butler, "Waiting for the bus is a bad idea if you turn out to be
the bus driver."
The most we can say about 2035 is that it seems like a reasonable upper
bound, given the current rate of progress. The lower bound? Thirty
seconds.
Breakthroughs archives.
Eurekalert
web page.
Uploading
Maybe you don't want to see humanity
"replaced" by a bunch of "machines" or "mutants", even superintelligent
ones? You love humanity and you don't want to see it obsoleted? Well,
tough luck. But just because humans become obsolete doesn't mean
you will become obsolete. You are not a human. You are an
intelligence which, at present, happens to have a mind unfortunately
limited to human hardware. That could change. With any luck, all persons
on this planet who live to 2035 or 2005 or next year or whenever - and
maybe some who don't - are going to wind up as Powers.
Transferring a human mind into a computer system is known as
"uploading"; turning a mortal into a Power is known as "upgrading". The
prototypical upload is the Moravec Transfer, proposed by Dr. Hans Moravec
in the book Mind Children. The Moravec Transfer gradually
moves (rather than copies) a human mind into a computer. You need
never lose consciousness. The key assumption of the Moravec Transfer is
that we can perfectly simulate a single neuron, which Penrose &
Hameroff would argue is untrue. Let's assume that either the laws of
physics are computational or we can build a trans-Turing computer that
does the same thing a neuron does, to which P&H would have no
objection. Note that the details which follow have been redesigned and
fleshed out a bit (by yours truly) from the original in Mind
Children.
A neuron-sized robot swims up to a neuron and scans it into memory. The
computer starts simulating the neuron. The robot waits until the neuron
perfectly matches its simulation inside the computer, and then replaces
the neuron with itself as smoothly as possible, sending inputs to the
computer and transmitting outputs from the simulation of a neuron inside
the computer. This entire procedure has had no effect on the flow of
information in the brain, except that one neuron's worth of processing is
now being done inside a computer instead of a neuron. Repeat, neuron by
neuron, until the entire brain is composed of robot neurons whose guts are
inside the computer.
Despite this, the synapses (links) between robotic neurons are still
physical; robots report the reception of neurotransmitters at artificial
dendrites and release neurotransmitters at the end of artificial axons.
Phase two replaces the physical synapses with software links. For every
axon-dendrite (transmitter-receiver) pair, the electrical inputs are no
longer reported by the robot; instead the computed axon output of the
transmitting neuron is added as a simulated dendrite to the receiving
neuron. At the end of Phase Two, the robots are all firing their axons,
but none of them are receiving anything, none of them are affecting each
other, and none of them are affecting the computer simulation. Finally, we
disconnect the robots. You have now been placed entirely inside a
computer, bit by bit, without losing consciousness. In Moravec's words,
your metamorphosis is complete.
If either of the phases still seems too abrupt, the transfer of an
individual neuron, or synapse, can be spread out over as long a time as
necessary. To slowly transfer a synapse into a computer, we can use
weighted factors of the physical synapse and the computational synapse to
produce the output. The weighting would start as entirely physical and end
as entirely computational. Since we are presuming the neuron is being
perfectly simulated, the weighting affects only the flow of causality and
not the actual process of events. Slowly transferring a neuron is a bit
more difficult. The robot would have to surround the neuron and suddenly
replace the axons and dendrites with robotic tentacles without disturbing
the neural cell body. (That's going to take some pretty fancy footwork!)
If this turns out not to be feasible, the robot can enclose the neuron
entirely. At this point, the robot accepts weighted outputs from both the
neuron and the computer. Once the weighting has shifted entirely to the
computer, the neuron is discarded.
Assuming we can simulate an individual neuron, and that we can replace
neurons with robotic analogues, I think that pretty thoroughly
demonstrates the possibility of uploading given that consciousness is a
function of neurons. And if we have immortal souls, then uploading is a
realsnap. Take soul out of brain. Put soul in new substrate. Upload
complete.
At this point it is customary to speculate about how one goes about
eating, drinking, walking around; people state that they are unwilling to
give up physical reality, worry about whether or not they will have
sufficient computational power to simulate a hedonistic world of their
wildest desires, and so on and so on ad nauseam. Even Vinge
himself, discoveror of the Singularity, has gone on record as wondering
whether one's true self would be diluted by Transcendence.
I hope that by this point in the page you have been sufficiently
impressed by the power and scope and incomprehensibility and general
Transcendence of the Singularity that you see these speculations for what
they are. If you wish to remain undiluted, you will be able to arrange it.
You will be able to make backups. You will be able to preserve your
personality regardless of substrate. The only folks who have to worry
about being unwillingly diluted are the first humans to Transcend - but
we'll take the risk.
Of course, it may be that any being of sufficient intelligence
wantsto be diluted. Exercising anxiety over that possibility seems
spectacularly pointless, analogous to children worrying that, as adults,
they will no longer want to be thoughtlessly cruel to other children. If
you wantit, it's not something wrong that you should worry
about.
The human brain has a finite number of neurons and therefore a finite
number of states. Eventually, you will die, go into an eternal loop, or
Transcend. In the long run... the really long run... mortality
isn't an option.
Maybe, after Transcending, you will perhaps be a bit changed. If that
is so, it is both inevitable and morally right. Given that absolutely
nothing you can do will change that, why worry? Save your anxiety for what
you can affect.
(The same goes for worries about hostile superintelligences wiping out
humanity. I cannot guarantee this won't happen, since I'm not
superintelligent. However, I am reasonably (95%) certain that the
Powers will be ethical;I just don't know what really is "ethical", the
true moral right. If wiping out your creators is morally wrong, it won't
happen. If we do get wiped out, it will be because, were we upgraded to
superintelligences instead, we would see the moral necessity and commit
suicide. If that's the case, there is absolutely nothing we can do about
it, both in the long run (see above) and the short run (see below); and,
even were we granted the opportunity, it would be morally wrong to take
it. Observer-dependent morality is a chimerical artifact of evolutionary
competition; it dissolves under the application of sufficient
intelligence. If you think it would be wrong to kill you, and you are
rationally correct about it, presumably the Powers will see the same
argument and you'll be perfectly safe. Again, why worry?)
The Interim Meaning of Life
"You know, I don't understand why humans evolved as such thoughtless,
shortsighted creatures."
"Well, it can't stay that way forever."
"You think we'll get smarter?"
"That's one of the two possibilities."- Calvin and Hobbes
I know. You don't want things to move so fast. You want a
slowSingularity, a soft Singularity, one that isn't quite so
frightening. You would like all of humanity to enter the first stages
together, in a smooth, synchronized Transcendence. You wish a serene song
of rising intelligence, rather than a sudden shock. A gentle seduction.
Believe me, if that was possible, I'd do it. Not for myself, I've
already said my goodbyes to life as we know it. I'd do it to reassure all
the people on whose cooperation the Singularity depends. My allegiance is
to the Singularity, but I don't think it makes much of an
intrinsicmoral difference when Earth's Singularity happens,
as long as it's within the next ten thousand years or so. I am in such a
tearing hurry for exactly one reason: Every delay increases the
possibility that humanity will exterminate itself before reaching
Singularity.
Nanotechnology, in my humble opinion, poses the most urgent threat.
Complete control over the molecular structure of matter, via tiny
self-reproducing robots, would make it too easy to deliberately wipe out
all life on the planet. "Active shields" might suffice against accidental
outbreaks of "grey goo", but not against hardened military-grade nano,
perfectly capable of attacking active shields with fusion weapons. And
yet, despite this threat, we can't even try to suppress nanotechnology;
that simply increases the probability that the villains will get it first.
(However, most nanotechnologists (e.g. Zyvex
) intend to sell generalized assemblers or
otherwise publish their success. If you have the opportunity to politely
explain to these people that they are being dumbfoundingly, suicidally
naive about the benevolence of their fellow humans, by all means do so.)
Although nuclear war would almost certainly leave enough survivors to
get civilization started again, I think it would probably alter the
balance between AI and nanotech in the wrong direction. A major economic
collapse would also slow AI more than nanotech; nanotech requires a single
laboratory, while a seed AI requires an Internet and probably thousands of
programmers. Those, then, are the three major "deadlines", as I call
them: Nanotech, nuclear war, and economic collapse.
Yudkowsky's Threats:
- The future is not a playground; it is a minefield.
This isn't
to say that there isn't any fun or happiness in the pre-Singularity
future. But it isn't a Utopia and you have to be careful.
- Blind fear will get you killed even faster than blind
enthusiasm.
This includes all forms of technophobia. It
includes any panic, no matter how terrible the threat.
- Attempting to suppress a technology only inflicts more
damage.
It develops unevenly, or the compensating benefits are
denied, or someone else gets it first. You can't even try to regulate it
or slow it down. This holds true of any technology, no matter how
dangerous.
- Technologies with military applications are always
misused.
This is human nature. Human nature, to a cognitive
engineer, is a thing that can be changed; but until it changes, there
will be someonewilling to take global risks for personal
power.
- It is easier to destroy than defend.
Ever since the invention
of nuclear weapons, offensive technology has been overwhelmingly more
powerful than defensive technology. Unless a new technology can defend
against nuclear weapons produced and augmented by that technology, this
will remain true.
Nor is the possibility of destruction the only reason for racing to
Singularity. There is also the ongoing sum of human misery, which is not
only a practical problem, not only an ethical problem, but a purely moral
problem in its own right. Have you ever read P.J. O'Rourke's description
of a crack neighborhood? If I had the choice of erasing crack
neighborhoods or erasing the Holocaust, I don't know which I'd pick. I do
know which project has a better chance of success. I also know that the
victims, in retrospect if nothing else, will probably prefer life as a
Power to life as a junkie.
Have you ever pondered the Great Questions of Life, the Universe, and
Everything? Have you ever wondered whether it really matters, cosmically
speaking, if you stay in bed this morning? Have you ever stared into the
hard problem of ethics, or consciousness, or reality, and felt yourself
slowly going insane as you realized that there is no justification
for subjective experience, getting out of bed, or anything existing at
all? How can we do anything, set any goals, without knowing the Meaning of
Life? How can we justify our continued participation in the rat race if we
don't know why we're running? What's it all for?
We don't know. We have to guess, and act on our best guesses.
Regardless of the absolute probabilities, superintelligence has a
better chance of discovering the true moral right, having the power
to implement it, and wanting to implement it. The state where
superintelligence exists is, with a very high degree of probability
regardless of the True Meaning of Life, preferable to the current state.
That's the Interim Meaning of Life, and it works well enough... but it's a
long, long way from certainty, or really knowing what's going on!
I have had it. I have had it with crack houses, dictatorships,
torture chambers, disease, old age, spinal paralysis, and world hunger. I
have had it with a death rate of 150,000 sentient beings per day. I have
had it with this planet. I have had it with mortality. None of this
is necessary. The time has come to stop turning away from the mugging on
the corner, the beggar on the street. It is no longer necessary to close
our eyes, blinking away the tears, and repeat the mantra: "I can't solve
all the problems of the world." We can. We can end this.
And so I have lost, not my faith, but my suspension of
disbelief.Strange as the Singularity may seem, there are times when it
seems much more reasonable, far less arbitrary, than life as a human.
I suppose the ancient philosophers might have had it worse - they,
after all, had no knowledge of physics. Their world must have seemed
arbitrary indeed. Why is this pink lump a hand? Why does it respond to my
will? Why is it soft and not hard? But knowing physics changes nothing.
The world remains arbitrary. I know my hand is a collection of atoms - but
why should I care about this pink lump? What makes anything
important? Why? Why? Why?
And while we make and stake our best guesses - "human life", "free
will", "new ideas" - the sum of human suffering goes from bad to worse.
And I knowthat there is a better way! Why rationalize this
life? Why make it seem bright and happy? There is an alternative!
Our fellow humans are screaming in pain, our planet will probably be
scorched to a cinder or converted into goo, we don't know what the hell is
going on, and the Singularity will solve these problems. I declare
reaching the Singularity as fast as possible to be the Interim
Meaning of Life, the temporary definition of Good, and the foundation
until further notice of my ethical system.
Getting to the Singularity
This page isn't a call to arms in the
ordinary sense. I am not raising a political cause or forming a social
group. Perceiving those elements of the mind, I prefer to stay away from
them. I do not command. I upgrade my readers' minds until their goals
match my own. I suppose that in our insane culture that sounds arrogant,
but it's not one-tenth as arrogant as the condescenscion quietly implicit
in exerting coercion.
This page is a call to awareness. "Incoming! Heads up! Watch out! In
ten years it's all over!" If this makes you want to join the Cause or
rebuild your ethical system or have a midlife crisis or send someone
money, wonderful. But the main idea is that you should have trouble
keeping a straight face whenever someone talks about "a hundred years down
the road", issuing 50-year bonds or retiring in 2030.
That said, what can we do to accelerate the Singularity?
Some of my readers will be neurologists and researchers and
programmers; for them, the correct course is to be ready when the
Singularity requires you. Make brain-tampering and Artificial Intelligence
your hobby, keep up with the forefront of the most modern methods and
advances, and maybe even try to contribute your own ideas every now and
then.
If you want to help and all you've got is money, probably a lot of
researchers on paths to the Singularity are spending valuable time writing
grant proposals or doing things that could be done by lab assistants. It
would be a fine thing if there were a Singularity Support Foundation to
ensure that these people weren't distracted. There is probably one
researcher alive today - Hofstadter, Quate, Penrose, Chalmers, Drexler,
Lenat, Moravec, Minsky, someone just graduating college, or even me - who
is the person who gets to the Singularity first. Although some
conceptual breakthroughs may be dependent on the laboratory, others may be
dependent on how much time is spent in thought. Every hour that
person is delayed is another hour to the Singularity. Every hour, six
thousand people die, and most of the survivors are unhappy for an hour.
Perhaps we should be doing something about this person's spending a fourth
of his time and energy writing grant proposals.
One major problem faced by a new movement is turning into a cult, a
mutual admiration society, or a bunch of crackpots. Drexler barely
prevented this from happening to nanotechnology. I have two major hints as
to how to go about this.
First, think of yourself as a business venture. Plan to make a profit.
Bootstrapyour way to the Singularity instead of begging for spare
change. Ask for venture capital and have something specific in mind.
There's a lot of money to be made in AI. Even a little bit of semantics in
a computer can result in huge increases in usability and power.
Second, don't go Utopian. Don't describe Life after Singularity in
glowing terms. Don't describe it at all. I think the all-time low point in
predicting the future came in the few brief paragraphs ofUnbounding the
Futurethat I read, when they described a pedestrian being run over and
his hand miraculously healing. That's ridiculous. Pedestrian? Run over?
Hand?Biological bodies, cars, in a nanotech world? Why
not just hire a bunch of apes to describe the ease of getting
bananas with a human mind?
In the words of Drexler:
"I would emphasize that I have been invited to give talks at places
like the physical sciences colloquium series at IBM's main research
center, at Xerox PARC, and so forth, so these ideas are being taken
seriously by serious technical people, but it is a mixed reaction. You
want that reaction to be as positive as possible, so I plead with
everyone to please keep the level of cultishness and bullshit
down, and even to be rather restrained in talking about wild
consequences, which are in fact true and technically defensible, because
they don't sound that way. People need to have their thinking grow into
longer-term consequences gradually; you don't begin there." [Emphasis
mine.]
The problem with people expounding their Utopian visions of a nanotech
world is that their consequences aren't wild enough. Looking at
stories of instantly healing wounds, or any material object being
instantly available, doesn't give you the sense of looking into the
future.It gives you the sense that you're looking into an
unimaginative person's childhood fantasy of omnipotence, and that
predisposes you to treat nanotechnology in the same way.
Worse, it attracts other people with unimaginative fantasies of
omnipotence. There's no better way to turn into a bunch of parlor pinks,
sipping coffee and planning the Revolution without actually doing
anything. I suppose I shouldn't be too harsh on the nano-Utopia types.
Some of them may be actual researchers or science-fiction writers or other
people doing useful things, some of them may be rank-and-file sincerely
trying to make it happen who just got caught in the general lack of
imagination, and of course none of them have been to the Low Beyond. Once
you've read this page, though, there's no excuse.
This page is about staring into the Singularity. It is about awe, the
Beyond, the end of history, and things beyond human comprehension. It is
intended to invoke a sense of future, and I hope that my readers
will be inclined to view nanotechnology, artificial intelligence,
neurology, and all the other paths to the Singularity in the same way - as
part of the future. I hope that attracts the right sort of people.
In a moment of insanity, I subscribed to the Extropian mailing list.
These people know what "Singularity" means. In theory, they know what's
coming. And yet, even as I write [in '97 - they've improved a bit in '99,
maybe even due to my prodding], folk who really ought to know
better are arguing over whether transhumans will have enough computing
power to simulate private Universes, whether the amount of computing power
available to transhumans is limited by the laws of physics, whether
someone uploaded into a trans-computer is really the same person or just
an amazing soybean imitation, and - least believably of all - whether our
unimaginably intelligent future selves will still be, er... let's say,
"interested in the old-fashioned method of reproduction".
Why is this our concern? Why do we need to know this? Can it not
be that maybe, just maybe, these problems can wait until
afterwe're five times as smart and some of our blind spots have
been filled? Right now, every human being on this planet who has heard of
the Singularity has exactly one legitimate concern: How do we get there
as fast as possible?What happens afterward is not our problem
and I deplore those gosh-wow, unimaginative,
so-cloying-they-make-you-throw-up, and just plain boringand
unimaginative pictures of a future with unlimited resources and completely
unaltered mortals. Leave the problems of transhumanity to the
transhumans.Our chances of getting anything right are the same as a
fish designing a working airplane out of algae and pebbles.
Our sole responsibility is to produce something smarter than we are;
any problems beyond that are not ours to solve.
How do we keep the world economy from disintegrating for at least
another ten years? How do we keep first-generation nanites from eating the
planet? If an enhanced human is evil, intelligent enough to outrun us, and
not smart enough to be good, how do we defeat him? If the Internet woke up
tomorrow, how would we know, how could we talk to it, and how could we
make backups? If a nascent Power with ill intentions originates on the
Internet (probably because some moron violated the Prime Directive of AI
and imposed Asimov Laws), what containment procedures will be necessary
and how much damage could it do? Even these aren't very practical
questions, but at least they are our concern, things we may need to
deal with using our naked wits.
How do we get a multi-billion-dollar Singularity Support Foundation up
and running? Who's willing to fund an AI project? Who do we need to
recruit for an AI project? Will OpenSourcing the AI help, and is it safe?
How can we disable the standard technophobic backlash? How can we find the
pre-existing Specialists needed to create the basic design patterns for
the AI?
These are the practical questions that will be faced in the immediate
future. The correct questions, and the answers, are the proper
concern of mailing lists. I don't object to letting the imagination run
free; it may produce useful ideas. But don't get so emotionally involved
in it, don't even think about trying to claim that your position has a
chance of being correct, and spend your time coding a transhuman AI - or
simply making money - instead.
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