[Commentary]

Mark McAllister started The 2.0 Project a couple years ago to bring attention to the plight of those who cannot secure the insurance or funding required for cryonics preservation services due to pre-existing conditions. I interviewed him for a Frontier Channel article about his efforts and he has since become a good friend.

On February 08, 2008 the next version of The 2.0 Project website is expected to launch, with an expanded mission. I have seen some of the early concept art for Mark’s new site and it is fantastic. The new placeholder hints at what is coming. I cannot wait to see the new site.

Mark recently posted a video on Marblejars, a fundraising site centered around video messages. Under the topic “Funding for Cryonics Suspension” Mark discusses Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) and his efforts to raise US$80,000 (or marbles in Marblejars parlance) for cryonics suspension services from Alcor Life Extension Foundation.

I have highlighted other fundraiser efforts recently. If you have the funds to support occasional donations to worthwhile causes with a transhumanist bent, Mark’s fundraising effort is one to seriously consider.

Although the following news appears to have been confirmed by Craig Venter, it should be viewed as rumor until there is an official announcement. The Guardian is reporting that Venter and a team of scientists have created artificial life, in the form of an artificial chromosome that can make use of another organism’s cellular machinery for replication and metabolism, but will effectively be a new, artificial species. According to The Guardian an official announcement is “expected within weeks and could come as early as Monday.”

Source: The Guardian, “I am creating artificial life, declares US gene pioneer“, Saturday, October 06, 2007

[Commentary]

During the Singularity Summit 2007, one of the most unexpected moments came during a panel session on day one. Peter Voss and Dr. Stephen Omohundro sat down to answer questions from the audience after their own individual presentations. Voss had suggested during his talk that AGI could benefit health and longevity research. An audience member asked, with apparent anger and passion, why anyone would want to extend healthy lifespan and attempt to prevent death.

Voss seemed surprised by the question, and asked the audience if anyone really wanted to die. A significant minority raised their hands, cried out, and applauded.

A philosophical chasm was then suddenly laid bare, thought it appeared that neither side could wrap their heads around the alternative view. After Voss defended radical life extension, a larger portion of the crowd applauded.

Why would anyone defend death, especially with applause? I jotted down a few ideas, though no one in that camp expressed their opinions in any detail.

• Environmentalism? Some people might consider the Earth and its environment to be more important than human life if they believe, as scientific evidence suggests, humanity is responsible for global warming and other dire consequences of rapid technological progress. Worried about overpopulation, death may seem to be an appropriate release valve. However, this particular belief does not seem to consider the promise of upcoming technological solutions, the precipitous fall in birth rate in developed and some developing countries, off-world resources, and rapid efficiency gains that could herald an age of less consumption rather than more.
• Legacy? Some people might consider children a greater legacy than their own continued existence. Related to overpopulation and environmentalism concerns, some people believe they need to die to get out of the way of their children, in a cycle that will see immortality through descendants. Like these other concerns, however, legacy neglects important changes and paradigm-shifts occurring right now, while ignoring those who will not or cannot leave behind a genetics legacy.
• Religion? If existence is simply a test that separates good and evil humans upon their death and the afterlife exists to provide eternal reward or eternal damnation, then striving to continue mortal life may seem to be an affront to the supernatural. The afterlife becomes more important than mortal life, with checks-and-balances included in religious dogma to ensure people do not try to enter the afterlife too soon. This is not a concern for those who are not religious, who value current existence instead of a mythical promise of supernatural eternity.

While I would expect some critics at an event related to the Technological Singularity, I assume that the majority are at least receptive to the idea. It would be surprising to me then if some proponents otherwise still retain a deathist attitude. In fact, I was approached by someone during the evening reception who could not understand why the Singularity and radical life extension were intimately tied together. He wondered why people were discussing physical immortality when AGI would either kill us all or change the world so much that we would no longer be able to participate in progress. Why, he wondered, would anyone want to try to live forever in such a world? He and his friends then ridiculed calorie restriction by informing each other they were happily eating calories (the reception included finger foods.)

During day two, this same person asked Ray Kurzweil the same questions. Kurzweil said we will likely merge with our technology to become AGI, thus ensuring physical immortality through becoming transhuman and then posthuman. He also stated that our posthuman selves will find plenty to do, without the psychological problems a modern human faced with radical life extension might suffer. However, I was struck by how proponents of radical life extension do not seem to be well-equipped to answer such questions because they do not understand why anyone would want to die in the first place. I find myself in this camp, struggling to understand why a person would not want to hold onto this existence, no matter how painful or wonderful, because this existence is all that we have. Death, if it comes at all, should be by choice, and I should like to think that people would instead choose continued existence, with the myriad possibilities it presents, including solutions to whatever currently pains us.

But then I imagine those who applaud death cannot wrap their heads around this, just as we cannot their own ideas. Will these two philosophical camps always remain so opposed?

Let that be as it may. I just hope no one requires that I die at a particular time and date, should radical life extension otherwise become possible. I may shake my head in confusion at their beliefs today, but tomorrow I will defend myself by all means necessary.

“When will AI surpass human-level intelligence?”

This not an uncommon question in the futurist sphere, and especially among transhumanists and singularitarians. Bruce Klein, President of Novamente, a company pursuing Artificial General Intelligence by way of virtual agents, asked this question on the company’s blog and invited people to respond. The question appears straight forward enough. Whether or not you follow progress in artificial intelligence, it is easy enough to parse what is being asked. A layperson might reply with “never” or “hundreds of years” or, if they know something about the field, maybe a date some time this century.

What the layperson probably will not do is contentiously set up their answer by deconstructing the original question. Leave it to the experts to do that. A sampling of response introductions:

• “Bruce, I generally think the question is misphrased.”
• “I can’t answer the question because too many of the terms aren’t clear. There is a limited number of things that can be usefully said while standing on one foot.”
• “Depends on how we define things.”
• “I sometimes hate the relative opacity of this popular question, yet always love the motivations behind asking it!”
• “In a way computers are already smarter than people.”
• “Essentially, I don’t think that is a well-founded question. When it comes to playing chess or balancing accounts, AI has already exceeded human intelligence. Operations can be performed orders of magnitude faster and more accurately.”

In most of the responses, a series of dates are eventually provided, along with assumptions being made, rationalizations, personal beliefs, and sometimes sources. Not only the question but the asking of the question could be examined further. Who is asking the question and why? Who is answering and why? What is the context - historical, social - in which this question is being asked? How does this question-answer process work in cyberspace, via email and blog post, as opposed to other media? How might people who do not speak or write English pose the same question, and how might they respond? Why have only men responded so far?

This then is intellectual discourse, an activity that might lead some laypeople to scratch their heads and ask why the responders did not just provide a year and a brief explanation for their selection. Let us look back at the opening statement of the original post by Klein: “A question very simply crafted poll I’m asking a few friends to gain a better perspective on the time-frame for when we may see greater-than-human level AI.”

The edit says a lot about the responses that were received. Sometimes it is interesting, even useful, to just ask a simple question and expect a simple answer. We know what is being asked without becoming facetious about it.

My answer after my own verbose setup? Next decade (2010 - 2019).

Why (uh-oh)? Trends and technologies converge. Too often people examine individual trends and ignore convergence and surprises, all the while keeping in place their biases, including human-centric biases. The substrate from which human-level artificial intelligence will arise is a matrix of computing hardware, software, communications technology, progress in our understanding of the human brain, experiments in social networking and the metaverse, robotics, economic (the cost of human labor versus automation, robotics, and AI; military, government and private investments), etc. This substrate is all but in place.

To a historian, new technology might appear to have arrived suddenly, as if one day Technology X did not exist and the next day it did. In the days that follow, Technology X loses its luster and becomes just another part of the background noise of our technological existence, another piece of the substrate, a historical footnote. Convergence occurs and technologies appear to vanish into one another.

We - proponents and critics alike - place human-level artificial intelligence on a pedestal. That this was a hard problem, or is not a hard problem at all, will be all but forgotten with the advent of AGI. Human-level intelligence itself is only as miraculous or mundane as we individually and subjectively choose to view it.

Whether or not we as laypeople or we as experts define our terms, we make assumptions about intelligence from our interactions with other humans. When those assumptions about intelligence match with our interactions with other sentient beings, AI will have surpassed human-level intelligence. Yes, surpassed, not just equaled. That will happen within the next decade, when the substrate is appropriate for it.

I was not quite there yet.

Although all my digital music and movie downloads are now legal, only most of my television show downloads are. I obtained Naruto from a popular fansub and I obtained Doctor Who just as quickly as it became available Saturday afternoons, using a wonderful program called TVTAD.

But no more.

Stealing is stealing. Stealing is not the appropriate response to content providers who have yet to make their content available legally on the Internet. If I am going to say anything more about this in the future, then I better make damn sure I am on the appropriate moral ground to do so. Therefore, I have uninstalled TVTAD and deleted all the past episodes of Naruto and Doctor Who I had stored.

Goodbye, pirating. The activity brought me great enjoyment and near-instant gratification. But if content providers do not want to put their content up for the world to enjoy, legally, then I do not need their content. I will also no longer respond by stealing their content. And when they do offer their content legally, then I will have something to look forward to as I get caught back up.

Oh, and creators of Doctor Who: stop ragging on transhumanists with your silly plots! The Doctor himself is an enhanced and incredibly capable entity. Why are enhanced capabilities okay for him but not for humans? Come on now!

I loved Digg before I realized what it was, before I undestood who Time Magazine was really talking about when they declared their 2006 Person of the Year was You.

This is the Digg promise of socially selected content, around 11:00 PM on March 15, 2007 from the Technology Newly Popular page:

“[Picture] Digg’s Lead Designer Daniel Burka circa 1992″

The description smiles that “[a]pparently the bowl haircut was all the rage back in 1992.”

“KDE 4.0 Release Schedule”.

The description begins with a excited guess - “should be available on October 23, 2007!” - and continues with a judgement, told in all caps - “BUT not all the changes originally anticipated will make the 4.0 release.”

Thank you, Citizen.

Digg is a borrower of better or worse content elsewhere, selected not by logical expert algorithms that might weed out the worst or collate the many, or by professional and proven editors, but instead by the untrained social masses who prefer colorful language like “suck”, “fuck”, and “yuck”.

Digg is too easy, and because it is so easy, the wisdom of its crowd can only be the lowest common denominator of their combined effort. The worst of the worst can contribute and see their work promoted to the front page. The best of the best can too, but if they choose to do so they are lost with the rest of the crowd.

Compare Digg to Wikipedia, where the lowest common denominator is somewhat higher because of the somewhat more difficult learning curve.

There is a reason why writers are writers. They write. They submit. They fail. They try again, and again, and they do not give up until they are writers. They are not pretenders, citizens who unite for some poorly examined cause and who congratulate themselves for overthrowing some imagined “elite”.

There is no reason for me to defend this silly blog post, this description of Digg and Web 2.0 and the dirty little secret that corrupted me with its promise.

Real writers do not defend that they write. They write.

And I hope You - the Borgesque You praised by Time - die.

This is a nightmare right out of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

Bolivian troops seize key smelter

The numbers do not lie, and they are surprising:

• The majority of households in the United States are now unmarried.
• In the United States, death rates are collapsing even faster than birth rates - once every 13 seconds versus once every 7 seconds, respectively.
• Poverty rates around the world are also falling rapidly, as a percentage of the total human population and as the total number of people afflicted. At this rate, by 2015 the number of people in extreme poverty will be less than half of that in 1981 (0.6 billion versus 1.5 billion).
• In the United States, violent crime, despite periodic short term spikes, continues a downward trend that began 13 years ago.

These changes are the direct result of scientific and technological breakthroughs over the past 20 years and the spread of education, especially to women. Of special note are new drugs and treatments that have extended life expectancies, the Internet, birth control, and wireless and cellular networks. As these technologies reach more impoverished countries, effects are immediate, creating the “leap frog” effect of developing countries adopting new technologies at a faster rate than developed countries.

It remains popular to lament about the state of the world, and extremist views of apocalypse are as widespread as ever, but as more and more people reject religion, faith, and spirituality; as more and more women are empowered; and as individuality continues to usurp community, statistics clearly reflect results that defy the most pessimistic presumptions.

Tom Merritt from CNET writes about “My fight with Amazon Unbox” and his thoughts, along with many of those commenting on the article, are predictably negative. In the blogosphere the universe centers around the individual speaking and most individuals tend to fill their space with bitching. Call it Bitch 2.0.

Amazon Unbox is the best digital download service yet since Apple added television programming for purchase through their iTunes Music Store last October. From iPod quality to DVD-quality, from one download version to two (DVD-quality and portable media player versions), from a modest selection to 200 television series and 1000 movies, from one service to many, and all of this in less than a year. This is something to bitch about?

Merritt complains that the Unbox software is too invasive and requires too much effort to install and uninstall. He complains that he cannot burn his purchases for viewing on a DVD player, and he complains that the first file downloaded was corrupted.

Merritt, and his sympathetic readers, should remember that he is an early experimenter with a service early in the existence of this industry. He should remember that just a year ago, no such extensive video service or software existed. He should remember that content producers pay money to produce content and can be forgiven for being Draconian in their first fledging attempts in a new industry. He should remember that Draconian measures always diminish with competition. He should remember that he was not forced to download the Unbox software and that his first Unbox digital download was free. He should remember that new services and software are beta whether or not they have been labeled as such.

I, on the other hand, remember what it was like before most media became available online. I remember my clunky television and the physical storage space required for VHS tapes and DVDs. I remember not having ready access to my favorite television shows and movies. I remember driving to the store to purchase content or waiting for content to arrive via snail mail. I remember watching television at a network’s preset time. I also remember the sour reception of DVDs, iPod and the iTunes Music Store, and other so-called failures. I remember less than a year ago when there were no broadband video channels supported by advertising nor burn-to-DVD services.

In spite of the negative commentary, consumers are rapidly adopting digital downloads. Competition continues to sweeten the offerings. In a year, most of the issues with current services will have been resolved or replaced.

Bitch all you want, you Bitch 2.0′ers; all you are really doing is taking for granted just how rapidly our world is changing and how far we have come.