I would start with energy. With obscene amounts of energy a lot of other problems get solved relatively easily. It takes a lot of energy to create fresh water from saltwater… but with excess energy why not? So, AI is tasked with creating safer nuclear or more efficient solar (or something we can’t imagine). It builds an army of robots to manage the construction. Now we have gobs electricity flowing everywhere. Maybe it makes better batteries to store and move energy around without transmission loss. Sure, why not? Now, we use all the extra electricity that isn’t being used for run cat video servers to pump tons of fresh water out of the oceans. We could turn deserts into farms.. or just massive food forests. More armies of robots could be used to tend to and gather the crops. Now we’ve got more food and fresh water then we know what to do with.. and free electricity. Things are looking good. But people are still dying of disease etc. So, we are going to need some medical nanobots that are capable of maintaining human bodies. This isn’t that far fetched. Unfortunately, people are still dying of accidents.. which are now more tragic because death is becoming less inevitable since we’ve wiped out disease and starvation. So, there are a few options here. We could grow surrogate bodies in labs and then upload our consciousness to them. Or, we could upgrade human bodies a bit.. add some metal/plastic.. some emergency nano-repairbots. If things get really rough (asteroids?) we may need to look at putting backup copies of everything in the “cloud”. I’m leaving something out here though. Every time we see people coming to the rescue something always gets in the way.. other people. If suddenly infrastructure became unnecessary.. a lot of governments would very quickly lose power. If I have all the food/water/power I need (imagine everyone “off the grid”).. why would I need a powerful central government watching out for me? Transportation? Nah, I’ve got my electric self-repairing off road vehicle for that (heck, it might even fly). That just leaves.. policing. Will people still steal when they have everything they need? Yeah, probably. Will countries still find a reason to fight? Yeah, it’s hard to believe religious extremism and territorial disputes are just going to vanish over night after going on for thousands of years. Is there a superintelligence solution to this? It’s not hard to imagine a solution.. but not a good one. The scenarios here range from a “can my superintelligence beat yours” to a police state where a strong AI controls every aspect of human life.. making sure everyone follows every single law. There may be some complex middle ground where law breakers are arrested and then a jury of “real” people show up via skype (or something) to deliberate. The point though is that when it comes to people being bad.. there is no clear technological solution. We should definitely try and get to the point where that is the only real problem we are trying to deal with though.
Category: Superintelligence
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Spiritual technology
I’m not a huge fan of our words for many things. What exactly do we mean my spiritual or supernatural? Einstein once described what we now call “entanglement” as “spooky action at a distance”. One particle interacting with another particle instantaneously across any distance was too “spooky” for Einstein. All these labels we put on things are an attempt to make sense of our complicated world. They are needed, but they can easily get in the way of truly understanding things.. or keep us from exploring new ideas.
One of my favorite lines in the movie Nacho Libre is “I don’t believe in God, I believe in Science.”. It’s hard to tell what exactly the writer was thinking when they put that line in there. It’s only really funny because of the characters and the situation but that’s how a lot of people think. For most people science means: Things I can touch, test, and stuff really smart people tell me is true. God and religion is the realm of fairy dust and hypocrites.
Back to the whole “entanglement” thing. I think this is where things get a little gray. It’s now a proven scientific “fact”.. but it sounds much too much like fairy dust. When you believe “Science” you don’t really get to pick and choose. To believe in science means to believe that there was nothing and then one day “nothing” exploded and the Universe popped out. Not only that, but of the near infinite ways it could have come about it just so happened to work out in our favor.
I’ve always believed that if there is a “spiritual” it’s mostly likely a “physical” that is just we don’t understand or aren’t capable of accessing. At some point the spiritual realm would need to interact with the physical realm anyway (what would be the point otherwise?). Entanglement is an easy one here. Teleportation and prayer (instant distant communication) suddenly seem much less fairy dust-like. But what about other things that still belong to the fairy dust realm?
God. The idea of an all knowing, all powerful being still lives in the fairy dust realm. But what about AI? It’s not that hard to build a case that at SOME point in our future an AI could be capable of becoming an all knowing, all powerful being. Especially if it mastered the use of entanglement to communicate with itself (and others?) throughout the Universe. This is not a new idea.. it’s at least as old as Issac Asimov. But with recent at advances it’s looking more and more inevitable.
Heaven. We are busy building virtual worlds and ways to interact with these virtual worlds. Why not make them “perfect”? No death, only fun. Sure, you’ll die in the real world.. but then why not work on uploading our brains to this virtual world.. aren’t we just essentially software running on bad hardware anyway? Why couldn’t there be backup copies of us already? If entanglement worked a bit like the Internet’s “cloud” it would be easy. Delete the copy of me here.. don’t worry there is a copy on another server somewhere that is updated in realtime. W00t.
Angels & Demons. This is easy. If we lowly humans are capable (or will be in a 100 years or so) of creating super power AI beings/robots/cyborgs whatever that are capable of operating at a higher level of physics.. whose to say in the few billion years that the Universe has been around someone else hasn’t been us to it? What’s the first thing we humans do when we create virtual worlds? We create “virtual” characters to inhabit them for us to befriend or fight or whatever. They don’t even need to obey the same laws of physics (physics is just “code” anyway).
Dragons & Magic (why not?). Easy too. Genes are becoming as easy write as software. Why not design and “print” a dinosaur? It’s coming. Because we can. Magic? I can ask a black box on my phone to call someone on the other side of the planet.
We are in our infancy when it comes to this new science and technology. Our words don’t begin address what many of these things really mean. If I woke up in a “virtual” world one day. How many days would I need to spend in there before that became my world? And don’t picture simple silly pixelated graphics. I mean a virtual world where I can breathe, touch, and taste. At what point does “virtual” vanish and become “real”. If I’ve spent YEARS in this world getting to know “characters” that are as smarter (or smarter) then real people. Would I be sad if one died? Would I be sad if I died? It would become really hard to convince me otherwise if I had “lived” there long enough. Some physicists are now trying to conduct tests to make sure that we aren’t already living in a “virtual” world. Would it matter? What would it change anything? And.. what would be the purpose of this “Earth” simulation? (Perhaps to learn to love an all powerful being in spite of everything else?)>
As a Christian.. aren’t we kind of in a virtual world already? There is a creator on the outside (and inside) looking in and controlling aspects. He has the power to flip a switch and shut the whole “program” down at any moment.. when it’s powered down we are told there is a “back up” copy of each and everyone of us.. destined to go on either to a Hell simulation or Heaven simulation (simulation probably isn’t the best world to use here). Those are big topics to flippantly blow past.. but this is a blog post.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/superintelligence-fears-promises-and-potentials
A more positive response/rebuttal to the idea of superintelligence.
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Can robots love?
This particular question has probably been debated since the the advent of the computer.. and maybe even before. However, this may become more of a heated topic in the near future. As rapid strides are made into the realms of AI it’s going to be come more important. We are going to want more and more from our digital personal assistants and it won’t be long before they start anticipating our wants and needs. Amazon and Facebook probably know more about what I want then I do. Siri scans my emails and suggests contacts and calendar appointments. Our smart home thermostats anticipate our arrival to regulate our temperature. Soon driverless cars will anticipate where and when we’ll need to be. If a single entity, such as Siri, becomes the central point for our managing much of our lives it may well be that we establish some form of emotional connection. However, going beyond a digital assistant things get a little less clear. Take for instance the simple command “Make me happy”. As Nick Bostrom points out in his book “Superintelligence” the AI may very well realize that happiness in the human brain is correlated to chemicals and the next thing you know you’ve got a wire running into your brain and an unending grin on your face. Or how about “Keep me safe”. You would almost certainly be locked in metal box and fed through tubes. Maybe even worse, a truly powerful entity could start destroying anything that it deems as a threat.
So, what’s the solution? You can’t possibly program or even train an AI for every possible scenario. Even the simplest task could be misconstrued with catastrophic consequences. If you fed it every law created by humanity.. it would be unusable. I would argue that the only really safe way would be for this superintelligence to fully understand what it is to be human.. is for it to be human itself. Of course, it would face numerous temptations.. such as “I could solve all humanity’s problems with force”. Or, “I should probably wipe out most of humanity and start over”. Our only hope would be that is laid down it’s power long enough to fully grasp the human condition.
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Our cultural savior complex
American culture is drowning in superheroes. It would seem that 1 out of every 3 movies is a superhero movie. Why? I think we know that it’s going to take more then mere mortals to get us out of the mess we are in. We often lift up guys like Bill Gates and Elon Musk as potential saviors. Our real life “Iron Man” as Musk has been called. We need help. We need people who aren’t ripped apart by bullets and that don’t fall into the typical trappings of wealth and power.
Humans are constantly confronted with our limitations. People around us get sick and die. We read about problems that seem completely unsolvable. We vainly throw posts out on Facebook hoping to trigger some sort of grass roots movement that will change the world. And boy oh boy do we cope. Chocolate, exercise, video games, sex, Netflix.. and back to movies about people or even demi-gods that have the ability to do what we can’t.. save the world.. or at least make a small part of it better.
In the context of “Rebuilding God” this will probably mean that humanity will get to a point that we’ll be willing to try anything to have a savior. Even if that means flipping a switch on the creation of a homemade god. Imagine a “human” that can know everything.. that can live thousands of years.. that can connect all the dots and solve all the hardest problems. Sure, it may wipe us out in the process.. but hopefully not. Maybe.
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The Doomsday Invention
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/doomsday-invention-artificial-intelligence-nick-bostrom
“If scientific- and technological-development efforts do not effectively cease, then all important basic capabilities that could be obtained through some possible technology will be obtained.” In light of this, he suspects that the farther into the future one looks the less likely it seems that life will continue as it is. He favors the far ends of possibility: humanity becomes transcendent or it perishes.
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The Inevitability of God
It only takes a small leap of imagination for most people to see that some form of superintelligence is inevitable eventually. Some see this as an advanced civilization on another remote planet, for others it’s a “smart” toaster that decides it’s had enough of humanity. Regardless, if you look at just how quickly humans have gone from living in caves smashing each other’s heads with rocks to putting robots on distant plants.. it’s pretty mind blowing. Especially when you factor in the billions of years Earth has been here and even the Universe. Humanity hasn’t even been a blink. My point is this: If we’ve come this close to creating a self creating superintelligence in the incredibly short period of time since the invention of fire.. doesn’t it seem odd to think we are the first to make this happen? Considering the trillions of stars and now billions of potentially habitable planets out there surely some race of creature has managed to make some sort of inorganic being capable of improving itself and an near infinite rate. Because we know it’s possible, that means it’s probable. If it’s probable, given the time and number of planets, it’s inevitable. Even if it hasn’t happened yet, we could be in a superintelligence arms race with other beings out in the Universe somewhere. It would seem like it’s us or them. Someday we may have some being made out of who knows what show up and decide that it needs to fulfill it’s creator’s mandate, “We need more paperclips, you will all be paperclips”. It’s inevitable.
Why is it so easy for people to believe in advanced alien life but not God?
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Superintelligence Now
https://howwegettonext.com/superintelligence-now-eb824f57f487#.ifck4vtz7
“we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization — a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.”