Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday

[barracuda]

It's probably worth keeping in mind that Moore's Law is an economic model as well as a curve of transistor carrying capacities for integrated circuits:

The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year... Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer.

[Jeff]

But my understanding of the Singularity is that it's less something you sign up for down at the local assimilation center and more something that happens beyond anyone's control, like the flash epidemic prefigured by the Timewave hypothesis. To borrow and extend a metaphor from Hugh, it begins as a mist, then becomes a fog, a rainstorm, and finally a tsunami, the finale occuring with blurring rapidity once the first machine becomes conscious and sets forth to make a smarter self. It is supposed to have an aire of inevitability to it, right, based as it is, essentially, on Moore's Law?

I could be wrong, but I think Kurzweil says the potential is inevitable (presuming technology outpaces collapse), but the leap to non-biotic life must be a willed act.

[barracuda]

It seems that there is a bit of a timing issue between the inevitability of the self-replicating, self-improving conscious machine culture and the techno-rapture. Isn't the first rather necessary for the second to occur? Or is the idea that, once the machines become conscious, everyone will have a choice to make? The Singularity itself is supposed to be an event horizon of sorts (hence the name), an asymptotic peak beyond which the future cannot be foreseen. The idea came about partly because science fiction writers like Vernor Vinge ran into an impasse in their fiction after all the good ideas about the future had beeen used up (by Robert Heinlein, that bastard). They began to assert that this was the case because there was a technological dark point of progress beyond which human motivations and protagonisms became irrelevant and unknowable (even though, within the physical sciences, when a rate of change in a theory is seen to increase without limit it is "generally a sign for a missing piece in the theory.")

So if a technological Singularity can be said to possess such a cultural Schwarzschild radius, it's hard to envision any particularly willful acts by humans which fit into the process. I realise that these things come in a variety of flavors, but the mind-dump into the machine consciousness must occur before the Singularity proper for the idea to have any meaning. And without the Singularity, the mind-dump is, presumably, less effective than is possible to foresee with the advent of the god-machines. But the motivations of the infinite mind are unknowable, so I'm caught in a feedback loop. All of which convinces me all the more that the whole concept is a rarified literary conceit surrounded by the paucities of postmodern creativity.

[slomo]

It seems that there is a bit of a timing issue between the inevitability of the self-replicating, self-improving conscious machine culture and the techno-rapture. Isn't the first rather necessary for the second to occur? Or is the idea that, once the machines become conscious, everyone will have a choice to make? The Singularity itself is supposed to be an event horizon of sorts (hence the name), an asymptotic peak beyond which the future cannot be foreseen. The idea came about partly because science fiction writers like Vernor Vinge ran into an impasse in their fiction after all the good ideas about the future had beeen used up (by Robert Heinlein, that bastard). They began to assert that this was the case because there was a technological dark point of progress beyond which human motivations and protagonisms became irrelevant and unknowable (even though, within the physical sciences, when a rate of change in a theory is seen to increase without limit it is "generally a sign for a missing piece in the theory.")

So if a technological Singularity can be said to possess such a cultural Schwarzschild radius, it's hard to envision any particularly willful acts by humans which fit into the process. I realise that these things come in a variety of flavors, but the mind-dump into the machine consciousness must occur before the Singularity proper for the idea to have any meaning. And without the Singularity, the mind-dump is, presumably, less effective than is possible to foresee with the advent of the god-machines. But the motivations of the infinite mind are unknowable, so I'm caught in a feedback loop. All of which convinces me all the more that the whole concept is a rarified literary conceit surrounded by the paucities of postmodern creativity.

In other words, religion, in the worst sense of the word.

[Simulist]

And you'll know it's a religion when they start pronouncing "Kurzweil" like it had three syllables just like they do for Jesus.

[slomo]

And you'll know it's a religion when they start pronouncing "Kurzweil" like it had three syllables just like they do for Jesus.

If you've spent much time on Reddit, you have probably seen the worshipful reverence of prophets Dawkins and Hawking, not to mention St. Darwin.

[Simulist]

With enough devotion applied to it, even a good idea can make you want to puke.

[vanlose kid]

And you'll know it's a religion when they start pronouncing "Kurzweil" like it had three syllables just like they do for Jesus.

Sorry, just had to ask, but how do you pronounce "Jesus" with three syllables, and who does this?

*

[barracuda]

I sometimes say, "jay-HE-sus" when my wireless internet connection goes down in the middle of a post.

[Simulist]

And you'll know it's a religion when they start pronouncing "Kurzweil" like it had three syllables just like they do for Jesus.

Sorry, just had to ask, but how do you pronounce "Jesus" with three syllables, and who does this?

*

(A) See Barracuda's post, above.

(B) Televangelists often do this. Few of them may have actual seminary training, but they did once take a class on "jay-HE-sus."*

_________
*Not necessarily to be confused with Jesus™. Not valid in all areas. Some restrictions apply.

[Jeff]

22 August 2010 Last updated at 19:16 ET


Alien hunters 'should look for artificial intelligence'
By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

A senior astronomer has said that the hunt for alien life should take into account alien "sentient machines".

Seti, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has until now sought radio signals from worlds like Earth.

But Seti astronomer Seth Shostak argues that the time between aliens developing radio technology and artificial intelligence (AI) would be short.

Writing in Acta Astronautica, he says that the odds favour detecting such alien AI rather than "biological" life.

...

"If you look at the timescales for the development of technology, at some point you invent radio and then you go on the air and then we have a chance of finding you," he told BBC News.

"But within a few hundred years of inventing radio - at least if we're any example - you invent thinking machines; we're probably going to do that in this century.

"So you've invented your successors and only for a few hundred years are you... a 'biological' intelligence."

...

Dr Shostak says that artificially intelligent alien life would be likely to migrate to places where both matter and energy - the only things he says would be of interest to the machines - would be in plentiful supply. That means the Seti hunt may need to focus its attentions near hot, young stars or even near the centres of galaxies.

"I think we could spend at least a few percent of our time... looking in the directions that are maybe not the most attractive in terms of biological intelligence but maybe where sentient machines are hanging out."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11041449

[brekin]

That means the Seti hunt may need to focus its attentions near hot, young stars or even near the centres of galaxies.

"I think we could spend at least a few percent of our time... looking in the directions that are maybe not the most attractive in terms of biological intelligence
but maybe where sentient machines are hanging out."

[Jeff]

hot, young stars

"That's hot."

[barracuda]

Artificial Ape Man: How Technology Created Humans

Archaeologist and anthropologist Timothy Taylor explains how a long-vanished artefact explains human evolution and led to "survival of the weakest."

You begin your book The Artificial Ape by claiming that Darwin was wrong. In what way?

Darwin is one of my heroes, but I believe he was wrong in seeing human evolution as a result of the same processes that account for other evolution in the biological world - especially when it comes to the size of our cranium.

Darwin had to put large cranial size down to sexual selection, arguing that women found brainy men sexy. But biomechanical factors make this untenable. I call this the smart biped paradox: once you are an upright ape, all natural selection pressures should be in favour of retaining a small cranium. That's because walking upright means having a narrower pelvis, capping babies' head size, and a shorter digestive tract, making it harder to support big, energy-hungry brains. Clearly our big brains did evolve, but I think Darwin had the wrong mechanism. I believe it was technology. We were never fully biological entities. We are and always have been artificial apes.

So you are saying that technology came before humans?

The archaeological record shows chipped stone tool technologies earlier than 2.5 million years ago. That's the smoking gun. The oldest fossil specimen of the genus Homo is at most 2.2 million years old. That's a gap of more than 300,000 years - more than the total length of time that Homo sapiens has been on the planet. This suggests that earlier hominins called australopithecines were responsible for the stone tools.

Is it possible that we just don't have a genus Homo fossil, but they really were around?

Some researchers are holding out for an earlier specimen of genus Homo. I'm trying to free us to think that we had stone tools first and that those tools created a significant part of our intelligence. The tools caused the genus Homo to emerge.

How do we know the chipped stones were used as tools?

If you wanted to kill something or to defend yourself, you don't need a chipped stone tool - you can just pick up a rock and throw it. With chipped stone, something else is going on, something called "entailment": using one thing to make another. You're using some object to chip the stone into a particular shape with the intention of using it for something else. There's an operational chain - one tool entails another.

What were these tools used for?

Upright female hominins walking the savannah had a real problem: their babies couldn't cling to them the way a chimp baby could cling to its mother. Carrying an infant would have been the highest drain on energy for a hominin female - higher than lactation. So what did they do? I believe they figured out how to carry their newborns using a loop of animal tissue. Evidence of the slings hasn't survived, but in the same way that we infer lungs and organs from the bones of fossils that survive, it is from the stone tools that we can infer the bits that don't last: things made from sinew, wood, leather and grasses.

How did the slings shape our evolution?

Once you have slings to carry babies, you have broken a glass ceiling - it doesn't matter whether the infant is helpless for a day, a month or a year. You can have ever more helpless young and that, as far as I can see, is how encephalisation took place in the genus Homo. We used technology to turn ourselves into kangaroos. Our children are born more and more underdeveloped because they can continue to develop outside the womb - they become an extra-uterine fetus in the sling. This means their heads can continue to grow after birth, solving the smart biped paradox. In that sense technology comes before the ascent to Homo. Our brain expansion only really took off half a million years after the first stone tools. And they continued to develop within an increasingly technological environment.

You write in the book that this led to a "survival of the weakest". What does this mean?

Technology allows us to accumulate biological deficits: we lost our sharp fingernails because we had cutting tools, we lost our heavy jaw musculature thanks to stone tools. These changes reduced our basic aggression, increased manual dexterity and made males and females more similar. Biological deficits continue today. For example, modern human eyesight is on average worse than that of humans 10,000 years ago.

Unlike other animals, we don't adapt to environments - we adapt environments to us. We just passed a point where more people on the planet live in cities than not. We are extended through our technology. We now know that Neanderthals were symbolic thinkers, probably made art, had exquisite tools and bigger brains. Does that mean they were smarter?

Evidence shows that over the last 30,000 years there has been an overall decrease in brain size and the trend seems to be continuing. That's because we can outsource our intelligence. I don't need to remember as much as a Neanderthal because I have a computer. I don't need such a dangerous and expensive-to-maintain biology any more. I would argue that humans are going to continue to get less biologically intelligent.

If you said to me, you can either have your toes cut off or your whole library destroyed, with no chance of ever accessing those works again, I'd say "take my toes" - because I can more easily compensate for that loss. Of course, you could get into a grisly argument over how much of my biology I'd give up before I'd say, "OK, take the Goethe!"

Is human technology really any different from, say, a bird's nest, a spider's web or a beaver's dam?

Some biologists argue that human culture and technology is simply an extension of biological behaviours and in that sense humans are like hermit crabs or spiders. That's an idea known as "niche adaptation". I see human technology as different because of the notion of entailment. A number of philosophers and social anthropologists have argued that the realm of artifice has its own logic - an idea that traces back to Kant's idea of the autonomy of the aesthetic realm. Philosophy, art history and paleoanthropology have to all come together for us to understand who we are.

The point is, the realm of artificial things - that is, technology - has a different generative pattern than the Darwinian pattern of descent with modification. People like to argue that you can apply Darwinian selection to, say, industrial design. That led Richard Dawkins to propose and Susan Blackmore to develop the "meme" idea - cultural analogues of genes that are not biological but they are still replicators and follow the basic logic of biological evolution.

I would argue that memes simply don't make sense. And the reason is that when you look at an artificial object like a chair, for instance, there is no central rule that defines it. There is no way to draw a definite philosophical boundary and say, here are the characteristics that are both necessary and sufficient to define a chair. The chair's meaning is linguistic and symbolic - a chair is a chair because we intend for it to be a chair and we use it in a particular way. Artificial objects are defined in terms of intention and entailment - and that makes artificial things very different from biological things.

People like Ray Kurzweil talk about an impending singularity, when technology will advance at such a rapid pace that it will become intelligent and the world will become qualitatively different. Do you agree?

I am sympathetic to Kurzweil's idea because he is saying that intelligence is becoming technological and I'm saying, that's how it's been from the start. That's what it is to be human. And in that sense, there's nothing scary in his vision of artificial intelligence. I don't see any sign of intentionality in machine intelligence now. I'm not saying it will never happen, but I think it's a lot further away than Kurzweil says.

Will computers eventually be able to develop their own computers that are even smarter than them, creating a sudden acceleration that leaves the biological behind and leaves us as a kind of pond scum while the robots take over? That scenario implies a sharp division between humans and our technology, and I don't think such a division exists. Humans are artificial apes - we are biology plus technology. We are the first creatures to exist in that nexus, not purely Darwinian entities. Kurzweil says that the technological realm cannot be reduced to the biological, so there we agree.

At the end of the book, you note that there is no "back to nature" solution to climate change. Does that mean our species was doomed from the start?

The point is, we were never fully biological entities, so there is no "nature" to go back to, for us. Wait, you might ask, what about people who "live in nature", people like the Aborigines in Tasmania? In fact, the Tasmanians used technology to adapt and survive and they might have done that for maybe another 40,000 years. The issue is that their type of technology - non-entailed - is not the way humans will survive in the final scenario. Ultimately we need major progress - because even without climate change, the sun is eventually going to blow up.

Now, you might think that's a ridiculously long time away, but that's the kind of ridiculous timescale palaeoanthropologists think about. I look back 4 million years and see our emergence and our evolution and then I look forward 4 million years because those are the timescales I'm used to. And in the long run, humans will go extinct if we can't get off this planet. The only way out, ultimately, is up. The Tasmanians didn't have the kind of technology that would lead them there, but we do.

[tazmic]

That led Richard Dawkins to propose and Susan Blackmore to develop the "meme" idea...

IIRC an appendix to Arthur Koestler's book The Sleepwalkers (A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe), whilst not using the word meme, pretty much sets the groundwork for the notion. I'd be surprised to learn that Dawkins hadn't read Koestler.

From the link:

"The history of cosmic theories can be called, without exaggeration, a history of collective obsessions and controlled schizophrenias, and the manner in which some discoveries have been made resemble the conduct of a sleepwalker, rather than the performance of an electronic brain."

Ignoring the ironic collision with the subject of this thread (a slip of the tongue?), he advocates the sleepwalking approach to maximise science's advance..

"The central theme of The Sleepwalkers is the changing relationship between faith and reason. Koestler explores how these seemingly contradictory threads existed harmoniously in many of the greatest intellectuals of the West. He illustrates that while the two are estranged today, in the past the most ground-breaking thinkers were often very spiritual."

"The conclusion he puts forward at the end of the book is that modern science is trying too hard to be rational. Scientists have been at their best when they allowed themselves to behave as "sleepwalkers," instead of trying too earnestly to ratiocinate."

I think it is here that he outlines the idea of the 'meme pool' and the importance of seeding it over trying to control it.