Metablog

Hey, check it out. 300 comments of people deriding my beliefs and treating me like a lunatic. And all because I dare defend the idea of the singularity.

While reading some provoking comments on another interesting post over at Overcoming Bias, I found a link to an even more provoking essay by Robin Hanson.

You are a body with a mind. Your mind is the result of activity in your brain, and your body was grown from a single cell following the instructions of your genes, which you acquired from your parents. Your parents acquired their genes from their parents, and so on back for billions of years. (The few genes not acquired from parents were created by random mutations.) The fact that you have certain genes and not others was determined almost entirely by a fierce competition between genes to create better “survival machines,” i.e., creatures that perpetuate and spread those genes. The genes that produced you are not a random sample from all possible genes; they are some of the few genes that, so far, remain in this competition.

[…]

Our genes do not care whether we experience more pleasure than pain. Our genes only care that we anticipate both possibilities, so that they can control us via our passions, i.e., our preference for pleasure over pain. When our bodies are no longer capable of reproducing, or of helping those who share our genes reproduce, our genes literally do not care if we live or die. Our genes will happily shorten our lifespans, or give us great pain, if that will help those genes to reproduce. Our genes will also lie to us to promote their goals, such as by making us think that our happiness depends more than it does on our success. Our genes can indeed be cruel masters.

[…]

Why do humans have such big brains, which are so devoted to a dream world of abstract ideas and feelings that have so little direct relation to personal survival and reproduction? Our best theory at the moment is that this dream world is produced by sexual selection, much like the large and colorful and otherwise useless tail of the peacock. […] The theory is that we similarly have “mating minds”, i.e., minds that are designed in large part to impress potential mates and allies. When we display to observers how agile and creative we are at love, humor, talk, story, art, music, fashion, sport, charity, religion, and abstract ideas, we show those observers that we have high quality genes, with few bad mutations. Having such minds also helps us to judge the quality of others’ genes from their displays.

Cheerful, eh?

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“Darwin”, of DarwinCatholic, (h/t Gene Expression) writes here about a Business Week piece on the ethics of selective abortion using genetic screening for various disorders.

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Six nuclear targets that, if hit, could effectively end civilization. (From Michael Anissimov.)

There are a lot of people worrying nowadays about the global energy crisis. Peak oil. The lack of alternative energies. The practicality of solar and hydroelectric and wind and the politics of actually getting it implemented. But why are comparatively few people concerned about the graver dangers facing humanity? Things like genetic engineering, which has the potential to allow a terrorist to create a supervirus, or nanotechnology, which could create something like a supervirus, only that acts much quicker and affects all life instead of just a few species (including humans). You would think people would be worried about this. Well, you would think that if you thought that people were rational. But they’re not, not, not, not. The field of heuristics and biases tells us that humans make scads of different errors, in predictable ways, when we do reasoning. The paper I link, by Eliezer Yudkowsky, gives a great overview, with a specific eye as to how they affect evaluations of global risks.

His next paper (to be published in the same book), deals with another specific threat facing humanity. That is, the creation of a smarter-than-human intelligence. A smarter-than-human intelligence is not simply an intelligence with a very large IQ. You see, IQ (as far is it really does measure general intellectual ability) covers the infinitismal range of intelligence from dumb human to smart human. That complete range, compared to the range from no intelligence to human intelligence, is an extremely tiny dot. And when we sucessfully program an AI, it starts out with no intelligence, and quickly travels along the line until it reaches human intelligence. Is there any reason it should stop there? No, if it gets to human intelligence in the first place, it’s quickly going to go far, far past that. (That’s even besides recursive self-improvement.)

Anyway, that’s just a small taste of the article. He has another great piece of writing here. What is truth?

You can add two numbers together. Adding bigger numbers results in bigger sums. Adding more numbers results in bigger sums. But when you generalize the process, to multiplication, you now have the ability to succinctly represent huge numbers, much more easily than with addition. Multiplication can be generalized, to exponentiation, and exponentiation can be generalized as well. Even the processing of creating new generalizations can be generalized.

A generalization is like a paradigm shift. In the history of the universe, human language, especially the written word, was a paradigm shift, from unintelligent directed processes evolving complexity, to directed intelligence creating complexity. The next paradigm shift is with directed intelligence creating intelligence, and it’s just as large as the previous one. Much bigger than the printing press. Much bigger than the industrial revolution.

I don’t think any arguments about the “rate of change” really hold water, because a paradigm shift causes a discontinuity in many trends. At best, rate of change arguments can show how specific technologies that will help us understand the nature of intelligence, and eventually to recreate it, are being developed at a rate to where by year X we will have Y resources available to throw at the problem of intelligence.

So, is it possible to create intelligence? Yes. It logically follows from naturalism. Evolution created intelligence, and intelligence is simply a computational process, (as every physical thing is,) so humans can create intelligence using any Turing complete machine, i.e. a sufficiently fast computer. The question of whether we will have the ability to create intelligence within the next twenty or two hundred years requires a lot more argument, but this is the starting point.