Ever have a day when everything went wrong? You predicted you would have a normal day, but your alarm clock didn’t ring. Already running late, you couldn’t find your briefcase or backpack. Staggering out the door, your car won’t start. Later, you find out you missed a surprise meeting or maybe a quiz. It’s not you, it’s the whole prediction game…

#1 – Observer effect; #2 – Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle; #3 – Quantum tunneling; #4 – Butterfly effect (last time); #5 – External perturbations;#6 – Why care I…Existential unmeaning, or why predict if it doesn’t matter? (last time); #7 -Why care II…The “so what?” horizon (this time).

This post is the last in the series “Chasing the Future.” Next time will begin a new series, “Space Empire.”

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Chasing the Future: spoil sports of the prediction game #7 — Why care II…the “so what?” horizon

How much is the future of the human race worth? We’ll increase it later, but let’s start with an admittedly bargain basement $100. If you had $98.04 now, and put it in the bank at an interest rate of 2% per year, then in a year you’d have $100. That means getting $100 one year from now is only worth having $98.04 now, at least from a “Time Value of Money” perspective. Similarly, getting $100 in 2 years is only worth $96.12 now, because adding 2% to $96.12 gives $98.04 in one year, and compounding by adding another 2% gives $100 a year later. Extending this reasoning further, the human race in a modest 233 years would be worth just under a dollar now. In 466 years? Less than a penny.

It’s safe to say that a hundred dollars is an underestimate for the value of the entire human race, at least to us. So let’s increase it to a fair (or at least fairer) price. We might multiply the number of people by the value of the life of each and every person on the planet. What is the value of a person’s life? Economics (known as the dismal science, even to economists) tells us that the de facto value society places on a human life can actually be calculated, and courts of law in fact sometimes do such calculations. Answers vary, of course, but a few million dollars is often not that far off the mark. Multiply that by the number of people in the world and you get a biggish number, $100 quadrillion at the most for the value of the human race.

But wait – maybe you don’t trust the financial and legal wizards with something so important. After all, we already trust them with some pretty important things, and they periodically betray that, seriously screwing things up. Maybe we should use a higher number, just to be more sure we aren’t under-valuing ourselves.

How about a dollar for every single atom in the known universe? That’s around $10^80 (1 followed by 80 zeroes dollars)? It is a lot of cash. Way (way way) more than the United States has ever printed. There are literally not enough atoms in the known universe to even print that much money. Yet, if that is the value of humanity’s existence 9070 years from now, the value at present would be…$100! A scant 466 years after that? Less than a penny. How about the present value of humanity existing in a million years? The answer is a fraction of a penny so tiny that popular spreadsheets, calculators and computer programming languages can’t even state it. They typically just think it is 0, but if you must know, it’s actually about  $0.000[insert 8,513 more zeroes here]0001.

Wait – someone in the back has a question – yes? “But it’s not just the value in year on million we’re after. We also need to add in the value in year 1,000,001, year 1,000,002, etc., forever and ever. That’s got to add up, eventually.” Well, only a little, it turns out. The value now is “bigger,” but still less than $0.000[insert 8,511 more zeroes here]0001 even at a dollar an atom. The upshot of all this is that there is no good reason to care whether humanity exists in ten thousand or a million years, at least according to the time value of money approach favored by economists. Therefore there is no need to plan that far into the future, or go to trouble and expense to preserve the Earth indefinitely, or even to bother predicting that far ahead. The time value of money seems indeed to be a spoil sport of the prediction game.

Making it personal. Maybe you are still unconvinced. Such sophistry fails to capture the real facts at a gut, common sense level, you might say. Then consider the following argument.

You care about yourself, so you don’t want humanity to end while you are still alive (it might not be pleasant). You care about your children (or you will if you have any some day, or maybe you care about some or even all other children), so you don’t want humanity to end during their lifetimes, even if you are already gone. You probably even care (or will care) about your grandchildren because you will hopefully get to know them personally. Furthermore, you care about their grandchildren (if maybe a little less) simply because you care about your grandchildren, who care about theirs. But you have no gut level reason to care about the generations after that, because neither you, nor anyone you care about will ever know them. To put it another way, how much do you care about your grandparents’ grandparents, and how much did they care about you? Still care in some more abstract, dispassionate sense? Then see the previous paragraph.

Maybe you are a fast enough breeder, and long enough liver, that you’ll care about your great grandchildren and theirs, instead of just grandchildren. Yet that is still only 6 generations into the future, not even the biblical 7, a couple of centuries or so at the most. So relax, quit worrying, eat dessert first…. In particular, don’t bother with predicting past the 2-century “care horizon,” because there’s little point to it. The care (or “so what?”) horizon is, thus, our last spoil sport of the prediction game.

Postscript. Are you still fascinated by the future, despite all the arguments to the contrary? If so, you are like me. Read my next blog post series, “Space Empire: from Mercury to Pluto.”

References

“Time Value of Money”: TVM is standard terminology in the finance and accounting world.

“Well, only a little, it turns out.” There is a formula for calculating the sum of a geometrically decreasing, infinite series. Look it up (or play with a spreadsheet instead).

Ever have a day when everything went wrong? You predicted you would have a normal day, but your alarm clock didn’t ring. Already running late, you couldn’t find your briefcase or backpack. Staggering out the door, your car won’t start. Later, you find out you missed a surprise meeting or maybe a quiz. It’s not you, it’s the whole prediction game…

#1 – Observer effect; #2 – Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle; #3 – Quantum tunneling; #4 – Butterfly effect (last time); #5 – External perturbations (last time); #6 – Why care I? Existential unmeaning, or why predict if it doesn’t matter? (this time); #7 -Why care II? Time value of money (next time)

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Spoil Sport of Prediction #6 – Why care I? Existential unmeaning, or why predict if it doesn’t matter?

Handsome woman — lovely bust. Fine young fellow — woke up lust. Babies’ diapers, bottom wipers. Years of struggle. Coffin. Dust. (Unix Fortune)

Is that all? Is there no point to life? Because then, there is no real point to the future, or to predicting it. If you find this perspective a downer, you’re not alone. Existential depression is said to be a risk among gifted children, for example, so it can start early. Existential nihilism – the distressing feeling “that the world lacks meaning or purpose” is the cause.

It is easy to ask if the future matters, and conclude that it does not. It is likewise easy to argue that the existence of humanity itself is no great gift to the Earth. And in that case, why worry about the future of the human race? Even if humanity never destroys itself, in 10 or 100 million years our descendants will as different from us as our ancestors were 10 or 100 million years ago – i.e. not humans. Some turn to religion for meaning. Though there is little objective evidence to justify one religion over all the others (thus invalidating them), plenty of people fail to understand that.

So what to do? If concern for the future is ultimately pointless, then just “Eat dessert first.” “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die.” And “Don’t worry, be happy.”

In fact, that is essentially what happens. Business decisions focus on short term payback, with “long term planning” designating horizons as short as 3 years out. Political decisions focus on the short term, perhaps one reason why “democracy is the worst form of government except all those others that have been tried” (Winston Churchill, who also said, “It is a mistake to try to look too far ahead. The chain of destiny can only be grasped one link at a time.”). Of course, it’s not just businesspeople and politicians who focus on the short term. Many ordinary people do as well. In that, we heed our roots: animals are quintessentially short-term in their behaviors.

By failing to predict the future, we act (or react) only in the short term, but there is at least one good reason to do just that. The further out we go in predicting, the less likely we will be right, and thus the higher the risk that the effort spent preparing will end up wasted. That is an overarching lesson behind all of the spoil sports of the prediction game.

On the other hand, blindly focusing on the near term is a kind of tunnel vision. The risk there is failing to prepare as the future silently approaches…then suddenly jumps up and bites society on the butt. We can choose to try to anticipate the future, yet all too often, when “societies choose to fail or succeed,” they choose incorrectly when there is no second chance.

Solution

Happy and distressed states exist in humans and many animals. An intrinsic property of such states is that they matter. When you as a child fell and scraped a knee, it hurt. The hurt is not the root of the problem, nor is the ground. The scrape is. When the scrape heals, it no longer hurts. Similarly, reality or a chemical imbalance may “scrape” the mind, causing the hurtful feeling that life is meaningless.

The real problem is not the distressing feeling itself, nor the bumper sticker-shallow slogan about universe that it wears. Like changing the ground, changing the universe is hard, perhaps impossible, and at best a slow and indirect solution.

Søren Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855), Danish philosopher, theologian, and father of existentialism, concluded that both problem and solution lie within the sufferer him- or herself. The first problem is the person’s own mind, brain, or both, with the solution to be reached accordingly. The ground or universe is only the second problem. Ancient philosopher Hillel the Elder identified a third as well: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And when I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”

References

“Existential nihilism – belief in the idea ‘that the world lacks meaning or purpose’… .” E.g. http://www.allaboutphilosophy.org/existential-nihilism-faq.htm.

“Eat dessert first.” Quote attributed to Ernestine Ulmer.

“Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die.” Isaiah 22:13.

“Don’t worry, be happy” (Meher Baba, 1930’s http://www.avatarmeherbaba.org/erics/glossc-d.html), e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File on’t_worry,_be_happy.jpg, 1966. Borrowed as title of Grammy award-winning song by Bobby McFerrin, 1988).

“In fact, that is essentially what happens. Business decisions focus on short term payback, with long term planning applied to horizons as short as 3 years out.” According to e.g. http://www.corporateexecutivecoach.com/long-term-planning-in-business.htm.

“Since it is within our power to try to anticipate the future or not, all too often, when ‘societies choose to fail or succeed’… .” J. Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Penguin Group, 2004.

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And when I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” R. Hillel, Pirkei Avot 1:14.

It is interesting to note that the technical possibility to send interstellar Ark appeared in 1960th, and is based on the concept of “Blust-ship” of Ulam. This blast-ship uses the energy of nuclear explosions to move forward. Detailed calculations were carried out under the project “Orion”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) In 1968 Dyson published an article “Interstellar Transport”, which shows the upper and lower bounds of the projects. In conservative (ie not imply any technical achievements) valuation it would cost 1 U.S. GDP (600 billion U.S. dollars at the time of writing) to launch the spaceship with mass of 40 million tonnes (of which 5 million tons of payload), and its time of flight to Alpha Centauri would be 1200 years. In a more advanced version the price is 0.1 U.S. GDP, the flight time is 120 years and starting weight 150 000 tons (of which 50 000 tons of payload). In principle, using a two-tier scheme, more advanced thermonuclear bombs and reflectors the flying time to the nearest star can reduce to 40 years.
Of course, the crew of the spaceship is doomed to extinction if they do not find a habitable and fit for human planet in the nearest star system. Another option is that it will colonize uninhabited planet. In 1980, R. Freitas proposed a lunar exploration using self-replicating factory, the original weight of 100 tons, but to control that requires artificial intelligence. “Advanced Automation for Space Missions” http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/ Artificial intelligence yet not exist, but the management of such a factory could be implemented by people. The main question is how much technology and equipment should be enough to throw at the moonlike uninhabited planet, so that people could build on it completely self-sustaining and growing civilization. It is about creating something like inhabited von Neumann probe. Modern self-sustaining state includes at least a few million people (like Israel), with hundreds of tons of equipment on each person, mainly in the form of houses, roads. Weight of machines is much smaller. This gives us the upper boundary of the able to replicate human colony in the 1 billion tons. The lower estimate is that there would be about 100 people, each of which accounts for approximately 100 tons (mainly food and shelter), ie 10 000 tons of mass. A realistic assessment should be somewhere in between, and probably in the tens of millions of tons. All this under the assumption that no miraculous nanotechnology is not yet open.
The advantage of a spaceship as Ark is that it is non-specific reaction to a host of different threats with indeterminate probabilities. If you have some specific threat (the asteroid, the epidemic), then there is better to spend money on its removal.
Thus, if such a decision in the 1960th years were taken, now such a ship could be on the road.
But if we ignore the technical side of the issue, there are several trade-offs on strategies for creating such a spaceship.
1. The sooner such a project is started, the lesser technically advanced it would be, the lesser would be its chances of success and higher would be cost. But if it will be initiated later, the greater would be chances that it will not be complete until global catastrophe.
2. The later the project starts, the greater are the chance that it will take “diseases” of mother civilization with it (e.g. ability to create dangerous viruses ).
3. The project to create a spaceship could lead to the development of technologies that threaten civilization itself. Blast-ship used as fuel hundreds of thousands of hydrogen bombs. Therefore, it can either be used as a weapon, or other party may be afraid of it and respond. In addition, the spaceship can turn around and hit the Earth, as star-hammer – or there maybe fear of it. During construction of the spaceship could happen man-made accidents with enormous consequences, equal as maximum to detonation of all bombs on board. If the project is implementing by one of the countries in time of war, other countries could try to shoot down the spaceship when it launched.
4. The spaceship is a means of protection against Doomsday machine as strategic response in Khan style. Therefore, the creators of such a Doomsday machine can perceive the Ark as a threat to their power.
5. Should we implement a more expensive project, or a few cheaper projects?
6. Is it sufficient to limit the colonization to the Moon, Mars, Jupiter’s moons or objects in the Kuiper belt? At least it can be fallback position at which you can check the technology of autonomous colonies.
7. The sooner the spaceship starts, the less we know about exoplanets. How far and how fast the Ark should fly in order to be in relative safety?
8. Could the spaceship hide itself so that the Earth did not know where it is, and should it do that? Should the spaceship communicate with Earth? Or there is a risk of attack of a hostile AI in this case?
9. Would not the creation of such projects exacerbate the arms race or lead to premature depletion of resources and other undesirable outcomes? Creating of pure hydrogen bombs would simplify the creation of such a spaceship, or at least reduce its costs. But at the same time it would increase global risks, because nuclear non-proliferation will suffer complete failure.
10. Will the Earth in the future compete with its independent colonies or will this lead to Star Wars?
11. If the ship goes off slowly enough, is it possible to destroy it from Earth, by self-propelling missile or with radiation beam?
12. Is this mission a real chance for survival of the mankind? Flown away are likely to be killed, because the chance of success of the mission is no more than 10 per cent. Remaining on the Earth may start to behave more risky, in logic: “Well, if we have protection against global risks, now we can start risky experiments.” As a result of the project total probability of survival decreases.
13. What are the chances that its computer network of the Ark will download the virus, if it will communicate with Earth? And if not, it will reduce the chances of success. It is possible competition for nearby stars, and faster machines would win it. Eventually there are not many nearby stars at distance of about 5 light years – Alpha Centauri, the Barnard star, and the competition can begin for them. It is also possible the existence of dark lonely planets or large asteroids without host-stars. Their density in the surrounding space should be 10 times greater than the density of stars, but to find them is extremely difficult. Also if nearest stars have not any planets or moons it would be a problem. Some stars, including Barnard, are inclined to extreme stellar flares, which could kill the expedition.
14. The spaceship will not protect people from hostile AI that finds a way to catch up. Also in case of war starships may be prestigious, and easily vulnerable targets – unmanned rocket will always be faster than a spaceship. If arks are sent to several nearby stars, it does not ensure their secrecy, as the destination will be known in advance. Phase transition of the vacuum, the explosion of the Sun or Jupiter or other extreme event can also destroy the spaceship. See e.g. A.Bolonkin “Artificial Explosion of Sun. AB-Criterion for Solar Detonation” http://www.scribd.com/doc/24541542/Artificial-Explosion-of-S.....Detonation
15. However, the spaceship is too expensive protection from many other risks that do not require such far removal. People could hide from almost any pandemic in the well-isolated islands in the ocean. People can hide on the Moon from gray goo, collision with asteroid, supervolcano, irreversible global warming. The ark-spaceship will carry with it problems of genetic degradation, propensity for violence and self-destruction, as well as problems associated with limited human outlook and cognitive biases. Spaceship would only burden the problem of resource depletion, as well as of wars and of the arms race. Thus, the set of global risks from which the spaceship is the best protection, is quite narrow.
16. And most importantly: does it make sense now to begin this project? Anyway, there is no time to finish it before become real new risks and new ways to create spaceships using nanotech.
Of course it easy to envision nano and AI based Ark – it would be small as grain of sand, carry only one human egg or even DNA information, and could self-replicate. The main problem with it is that it could be created only ARTER the most dangerous period of human existence, which is the period just before Singularity.

The main ways of solving the Fermi Paradox are:
1) They are already here (at least in the form of their signals)
2) They do not disseminate in the universe, do not leave traces, and not send signals. That is, they do not start a shock wave of intelligence.
3) The civilizations are extremely rare.
Additional way of thinking is 4): we are unique civilization because of observation selection
All of them have a sad outlook for global risk:
In the first case, we are under threat of conflict with superior aliens.
1A) If they are already here, we can do something that will encourage them to destroy us, or restrict us. For example, turn off the simulation. Or start the program of probes-berserkers. This probes cold be nanobots. In fact it could be something like “Space gray goo” with low intelligence but very wide spreading. It could even be in my room. The only goal of it could be to destroy other nanobots (like our Nanoshield would do). And so we will see it until we create our own nanobots.
1b) If they open up our star system right now and, moreover, focused on total colonization of all systems, we are also will fight with them and are likely to lose. Not probable.
1c) If a large portion of civilization is infected with SETI-virus and distributes signals, specially designed to infect naive civilizations – that is, encourage them to create a computer with AI, aimed at the further replication by SETI channels. This is what I write in the article Is SETI dangerous? http://www.proza.ru/texts/2008/04/12/55.html
1d) By the means of METI signal we attract attention of dangerous civilization and it will send to the solar system a beam of death (probably commonly known as gamma-ray burst). This scenario seems unlikely, since for the time until they receive the signal and have time to react, we have time to fly away from the solar system – if they are far away. And if they are close, it is not clear why they were not here. However, this risk was intensely discussed, for example by D. Brin.
2. They do not disseminate in space. This means that either:
2a) Civilizations are very likely to destroy themselves in very early stages, before it could start wave of robots replicators and we are not exception. This is reinforced by the Doomsday argument – namely the fact that I’m discovering myself in a young civilization suggests that they are much more common than the old. However, based on the expected rate of development of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, we can start a wave of replicators have in 10-20 years, and even if we die then, this wave will continue to spread throughout the universe. Given the uneven development of civilizations, it is difficult to assume that none of them do not have time to launch a wave of replicators before their death. This is possible only if we a) do not see an inevitable and universal threat looming directly on us in the near future, b) significantly underestimate the difficulty of creating artificial intelligence and nanoreplicators. с) The energy of the inevitable destruction is so great that it manages to destroy all replicators, which were launched by civilization – that is it is of the order of a supernova explosion.
2b) Every civilization sharply limit itself – and this limitation is very hard and long as it is simple enough to run at least one probe-replicator. This restriction may be based either on a powerful totalitarianism, or the extreme depletion of resources. Again in this case, our prospects are quite unpleasant. Bur this solution is not very plausible.
3) If civilization are rare, it means that the universe is much less friendly place to live, and we are on an island of stability, which is likely to be an exception from the rule. This may mean that we underestimate the time of the future sustainability of the important processes for us (the solar luminosity, the earth’s crust), and most importantly, the sustainability of these processes to small influences, that is their fragility. I mean that we can inadvertently break their levels of resistance, carrying out geo-engineering activities, the complex physics experiments and mastering space. More I speak about this in the article: “Why antropic principle stopped to defend us. Observation selection and fragility of our environment”. http://www.scribd.com/doc/8729933/Why-antropic-principle-sto.....vironment- See also the works of M.Circovic on the same subject.
However, this fragility is not inevitable and depends on what factors were critical in the Great filter. In addition, we are not necessarily would pressure on this fragile, even if it exist.
4) Observation selection makes us unique civilization.
4a. We are the first civilization, because any civilization which is the first captures the whole galaxy. Likewise, the earthly life is the first life on Earth, because it would require all swimming pools with a nutrient broth, in which could appear another life. In any case, sooner or later we will face another first civilization.
4b. Vast majority of civilizations are being destroyed in the process of colonization of the galaxy, and so we can find ourselves only in the civilization which is not destroyed by chance. Here the obvious risk is that those who made this error, would try to correct it.
4c. We wonder about the absence of contact, because we are not in contact. That is, we are in a unique position, which does not allow any conclusions about the nature of the universe. This clearly contradicts the Copernican principle.
The worst variant for us here is 2a – imminent self-destruction, which, however, has independent confirmation through the Doomsday Argument, but is undermine by the fact that we do not see alien von Neuman probes. I still believe that the most likely scenario is a Rare earth.

Paul J. Crutzen

Although this is the scenario we all hope (and work hard) to avoid – the consequences should be of interest to all who are interested in mitigation of the risk of mass extinction:

“WHEN Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the word Anthropocene around 10 years ago, he gave birth to a powerful idea: that human activity is now affecting the Earth so profoundly that we are entering a new geological epoch.

The Anthropocene has yet to be accepted as a geological time period, but if it is, it may turn out to be the shortest – and the last. It is not hard to imagine the epoch ending just a few hundred years after it started, in an orgy of global warming and overconsumption.

Let’s suppose that happens. Humanity’s ever-expanding footprint on the natural world leads, in two or three hundred years, to ecological collapse and a mass extinction. Without fossil fuels to support agriculture, humanity would be in trouble. “A lot of things have to die, and a lot of those things are going to be people,” says Tony Barnosky, a palaeontologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In this most pessimistic of scenarios, society would collapse, leaving just a few hundred thousand eking out a meagre existence in a new Stone Age.

Whether our species would survive is hard to predict, but what of the fate of the Earth itself? It is often said that when we talk about “saving the planet” we are really talking about saving ourselves: the planet will be just fine without us. But would it? Or would an end-Anthropocene cataclysm damage it so badly that it becomes a sterile wasteland?

The only way to know is to look back into our planet’s past. Neither abrupt global warming nor mass extinction are unique to the present day. The Earth has been here before. So what can we expect this time?”

Read the entire article in New Scientist.

Also read “Climate change: melting ice will trigger wave of natural disasters” in the Guardian about the potential devastating effects of methane hydrates released from melting permafrost in Siberia and from the ocean floor.

Peter Garretson from the Lifeboat Advisory Board appears in the latest edition of New Scientist:

“IT LOOKS inconsequential enough, the faint little spot moving leisurely across the sky. The mountain-top telescope that just detected it is taking it very seriously, though. It is an asteroid, one never seen before. Rapid-survey telescopes discover thousands of asteroids every year, but there’s something very particular about this one. The telescope’s software decides to wake several human astronomers with a text message they hoped they would never receive. The asteroid is on a collision course with Earth. It is the size of a skyscraper and it’s big enough to raze a city to the ground. Oh, and it will be here in three days.

Far-fetched it might seem, but this scenario is all too plausible. Certainly it is realistic enough that the US air force recently brought together scientists, military officers and emergency-response officials for the first time to assess the nation’s ability to cope, should it come to pass.

They were asked to imagine how their respective organisations would respond to a mythical asteroid called Innoculatus striking the Earth after just three days’ warning. The asteroid consisted of two parts: a pile of rubble 270 metres across which was destined to splash down in the Atlantic Ocean off the west coast of Africa, and a 50-metre-wide rock heading, in true Hollywood style, directly for Washington DC.

The exercise, which took place in December 2008, exposed the chilling dangers asteroids pose. Not only is there no plan for what to do when an asteroid hits, but our early-warning systems – which could make the difference between life and death – are woefully inadequate. The meeting provided just the wake-up call organiser Peter Garreston had hoped to create. He has long been concerned about the threat of an impact. “As a taxpayer, I would appreciate my air force taking a look at something that would be certainly as bad as nuclear terrorism in a city, and potentially a civilisation-ending event,” he says.”

Read the entire article at New Scientist. Read the NASA NEO report “Natural Impact Hazard Interagancy Deliberate Planning Exercise After Action Report“.

Nature News reports of a growing concern over different standards for DNA screening and biosecurity:

“A standards war is brewing in the gene-synthesis industry. At stake is the way that the industry screens orders for hazardous toxins and genes, such as pieces of deadly viruses and bacteria. Two competing groups of companies are now proposing different sets of screening standards, and the results could be crucial for global biosecurity.

“If you have a company that persists with a lower standard, you can drag the industry down to a lower level,” says lawyer Stephen Maurer of the University of California, Berkeley, who is studying how the industry is developing responsible practices. “Now we have a standards war that is a race to the bottom.”

For more than a year a European consortium of companies called the International Association of Synthetic Biology (IASB) based in Heidelberg, Germany, has been drawing up a code of conduct that includes gene-screening standards. Then, at a meeting in San Francisco last month, two of the leading companies — DNA2.0 of Menlo Park, California, and Geneart of Regensburg, Germany — announced that they had formulated a code of conduct that differs in one key respect from the IASB recommendations.”

Read the entire article on Nature News.

Also read “Craig Venter’s Team Reports Key Advance in Synthetic Biology” from JCVI.

What is the artificial intelligence singularity? At its core it is simply the claim that when (if) computers get smart enough to figure out how to make themselves smarter, they will do so. At that point computers will improve by themselves at a high rate, and without human assistance or even permission. Humans will then lose control of the process of making better computing devices. With the world under the sway of entities much smarter than ourselves, the world will be not only be very different, it will be unimaginably different, since we can no more understand, outwit, or control an entity much smarter than ourselves than a cow can a person. At least that’s the theory. The counterpoint is the claim that for humans to build an intelligent robot is as absurd as for monkeys to reach the moon by climbing a tree pointing toward the sky.

Singularities. A singularity is a situation in which a mathematical model stops working. For example, for what x is the equation x/2=5 true? x=10, because then x/2=5; no singularity there. But what about x/0=5? Then there is no solution because ordinary arithmetic does not define what happens if you divide by zero. Thus the result is said to be “undefined.” When whatever you are dividing with, be it money on Connecticut income tax form CT-1040, line 53, volume of the mass at the center of a black hole, or whatever, happens to be zero, you’ve encountered a singularity, and there is no answer. The Connecticut tax authorities might take a dim view of the matter, but astrophysicists are concerned: it is thought that the gravity inside a black hole can become stronger than the ability of matter to resist compression, leading it to be squeezed into a point of zero volume. Since calculating density requires dividing by volume (density=mass/volume), the density of matter at the center of a black hole would be undefined, and thus a singularity.

By analogy, the AI singularity occurs when computers get smart enough to build computers even more intelligent, which in turn build even smarter ones. With no end in sight, that account breaks down by giving no answer to the question of how far the process will go, seemingly predicting an unending spiral further and further toward infinite intelligence.

Of course, infinite intelligence can’t happen, any more than a misguided Connecticut resident could have caused the entire state financial infrastructure to go “poof!” by trying to fill out line 53 without having any 2008 Connecticut adjusted gross income. Similarly, there is something strange at the center of a black hole, but it is real and definable even if we don’t yet know what it is. (And maybe the density problem is merely that density is a derived, not a basic physical quantity, and should not be applied to black holes.) Singularities are properties of defective descriptions of real phenomena, not of real phenomena themselves.

The AI singularity. For the AI singularity, the real phenomenon involves computers getting steadily more powerful. They will come to outpace human intelligence in more and more ways. Computers have long exceeded our intelligence in speed and reliability of mathematical calculation. They can play chess more intelligently (as measured by being better). Each generation of modern computer can only be designed with computers, and to a greater and greater extent with each new generation. This process will continue but there will never be a moment when computers suddenly become smarter than humans and take over, because (1) intelligence is so complex and undefinable a concept that no single satisfactory measure of it exists, or can exist, and (2) intelligence as a technological and social force is so dependent for its power on interaction with others that, without an embedding social fabric, it would be mostly powerless. Thus we won’t wake up one day to find our previously loved machines suddenly informing us, “all your base are belong to us.” But the trends do suggest that they are gaining greater and greater intelligence and influence on our lives, with who knows what revolutionary results.

So what is intelligence and how can we tell how much of it computers have? The tricky question of properly defining and measuring intelligence does not seem to be solvable even for people. Nonetheless, everyone knows intelligence exists and that some have more of it. The classical approach to defining when computers have intelligence is the Turing Test, named after British code breaker and war hero Alan Turing, who later committed suicide by eating a poisoned apple (like Snow White) after being convicted of homosexuality, and then “treated” with hormone injections in accordance with the legal process of the time.

The essence of the Turing Test is that, in a keyboard conversation, if one can’t tell whether one is texting with a chatbot or a person, and it is a chatbot, the chatbot should be considered intelligent. This is a clever idea, but not perfect. One problem is that it assumes that writing intelligent-seeming text messages actually requires intelligence. Another is that a person can tell the difference between text messages produced by intelligent and non-intelligent entities. The third major problem is that it ignores the possibility that a computer could be intelligent yet still unable to pass the test, much as a person not fluent in your language, though intelligent, would be unable to pretend fluency.

Turing Test considered harmful. The Turing Test is useful if imperfect, and has inspired a regular contest. Since 1991 the “Loebner Prize” has been awarded yearly to the owner of the chatbot contestant best able to fool a panel of human judges (the first chatbot was Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, described in 1967). As an amusing side note, AI pioneer Marvin Minsky is on record as offering cash to anyone who can get Loebner to stop sponsoring the “stupid” prize. For his part, Loebner (a single gentleman and advocate of legalizing prostitution) argues this actually makes Minsky a co-sponsor of the prize, since he would have to give his cash offering to the owner of the first chatbot to fully pass the test, thus winning the Grand Loebner Prize and ending the annual competitions.

The Turing test is clearly suspect on logical grounds alone (as explained above), and most anyone working on chatbots will confirm that in practice, they don’t consider their impressive creations to be truly intelligent. The truth is that intelligence is meaningful mostly socially: someone is intelligent mostly because society is in general agreement that their behavior is intelligent, and behavior is intelligent mostly because it operates on socially constructed problems. Einstein may have worked mostly alone, but he was hardly in isolation. The problems he worked on were determined by the social community of physicists together with the structure of the universe. His solutions are intelligent because he was a physicist and other physicists agree that they are. That is why he thought about the cosmos the way he did, instead of, for example, as Theosophy founder Madame Blavatsky did.

Chatbot performance appears to be improving year after year, so progress is being made. Indeed, the winner’s performance in the Loebner Prize competitions over time would appear to be one way to measure progress in computer intelligence. Although not a perfect metric, it is an interesting one. Other metrics, also imperfect but very different from chatbot performance and from each other, also exist.

Computers can do arithmetic, long considered an example of intelligence in humans, but much faster. Computers are getting even faster and more accurate over time as bit widths and FLOPS increase, driven by hardware improvements in clock speed, concurrency, etc.

Progressively increasing computer chess performance resulted in a specially built computer that beat human champion Garry Kasparov as early as 1997. Game playing in general is a fruitful source of potential ways to measure improvements in computer abilities that humans need intelligence for, because games tend to provide a clear context that supports quantifying performance. For example robots compete in soccer in the robocup games, held yearly since 1997.

A trend toward improvement in a composite of different tasks indicative of computer intelligence is more convincing than improvement in any one metric, in part because intelligence itself is a such a complex, composite attribute. A useful approach might be to keep a running count of human games that machines are able to play better than humans. Chess is already there, but soccer is not (hopeful robocup organizers have the goal to “By the year 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world soccer champion team.”).

What we can do. Relax. The AI singularity will not suddenly rear up, changing your life dramatically for either the worse or, according to many core singularitarians, the better if only we guide the emergence of hyperhuman intelligence properly. (How to do so is a question, since for us to control the outcome of such an intelligence is analogous to cows controlling the outcome of human intelligence, a task cows have not performed well.) Singularitarians are unjustifiably extreme in their optimism, but every age has its messianic movements and its apocalypticists. If there is to be something like an AI singularity, it is happening already and at a fairly steady rate, thereby contradicting the typical definition of “singularity” in favor of steady, if brisk, increase. Computers are already far in advance of human arithmetic intelligence, and society has leveraged that into a many benefits. This will continue to happen with other computer capabilities as the number that exceed human intelligence grows progressively.

Movies have long relied an the concept of a human “mad scientist” who creates a robot of great capabilities. That will never happen. It takes a village to raise a child; it takes a sizeable community of skilled humans to create even a pencil: referring to everything from chopping trees for the body to making rubber and metal for the eraser, L. E. Read notes in “I, Pencil,” “…not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.” Even the simplest computer is far more complex than a pencil. For a robot to create a robot of greater capability than itself would require either large numbers of humans and other computers to help, just as it does now, or a single robot with the intelligence, motor skills, and financial resources of thousands of humans and their computers, factories, banks, etc. How many thousands? No way to know for sure. But consider that human societies of thousands, once isolated, have lost even basic pre-industrial technologies. Tasmania is a well-known example.

An important need is for metrics that can tell us, in practical terms, the rate of progress by which artificial intelligence is marinating society. Arithmetic, the Turing Test, and chess are interesting but do not fit the bill alone. As factors in a richer, composite metric they can contribute. Another factor that might be useful is to count the rate of new AI applications becoming available over time. Such a metric should be debated and converged upon by society.

Notes

“…money on Connecticut income tax form CT-1040, line 53…”: see for example http://www.ct.gov/drs/lib/drs/forms/2008forms/incometax/ct-1040.pdf. If your modified Connecticut adjusted gross income was zero in that year, you would have hit a singularity had you chosen to try to fill out the form.

“all your base are belong to us”: a passage in the English translation of the Japanese video game Zero Wing that went viral in the early 21st century. See e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fV_KxVwZjU&feature=fvst

“Turing test”: see A. M. Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Mind, Oct. 1950, vol. LIX, no. 236, pp. 433-460. E.g. http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/LIX/236/433.

ELIZA: J. Weizenbaum, Contextual Understanding by Computers, Communications of the ACM, vol. 10, no. 8, August 1967, pp. 474-480. See also J. Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, W. H. Freeman and Co., 1976.

“Loebner Prize”: see http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html.

“As an amusing side note…”: see http://loebner.net/Prizef/minsky.html.

“Progressively increasing computer chess performance”: e.g. R. Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, Penguin Books, 2005, pp. 274-278.

“By the year 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world soccer champion team.” Http://124.146.198.189/images/goal1.gif, accessed via http://www.robocup.org/ as of this writing.

“It takes a village to raise a child”: Hillary Clinton, It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us, Simon & Schuster, 1996.

“L. E. Read’s ‘I, Pencil’”: The Freeman, December 1958. Also http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I,_Pencil, etc.

“human societies of thousands, once isolated, have not maintained even basic pre-industrial technologies”: G. Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, Princeton University Press, 2007.

May 2: Many U.S. emergency rooms and hospitals crammed with people… ”Walking well” flood hospitals… Clinics double their traffic in major cities … ER rooms turn away EMT cases. — CNN

Update May 4: Confirmed cases of H1N1 virus now at 985 in 20 countries (Mexico: 590, 25 deaths) – WHO. In U.S.: 245 confirmed U.S. cases in 35 states. – CDC.

“We might be entering an Age of Pandemics… a broad array of dangerous emerging 21st-century diseases, man-made or natural, brand-new or old, newly resistant to our current vaccines and antiviral drugs…. Martin Rees bet $1,000 that bioterror or bioerror would unleash a catastrophic event claiming one million lives in the next two decades…. Why? Less forest, more contact with animals… more meat eating (Africans last year consumed nearly 700 million wild animals… numbers of chickens raised for food in China have increased 1,000-fold over the past few decades)… farmers cut down jungle, creating deforested areas that once served as barriers to the zoonotic viruses…” — Larry Brilliant, Wall Street Journal

From financial crisis to global catastrophe

Financial crisis which manifested in the 2008 (but started much earlier) has led to discussion in alarmists circles – is this crisis the beginning of the final sunset of mankind? In this article we will not consider the view that the crisis will suddenly disappear and everything returns to its own as trivial and in my opinion false. Transition of the crisis into the global catastrophe emerged the following perspective:
1) The crisis is the beginning of long slump (E. Yudkowsky term), which gradually lead mankind to a new Middle Ages. This point of view is supported by proponents of Peak Oil theory, who believe that recently was passed peak of production of liquid fuels, and since that time, the number of oil production begins to drop a few percent each year, according to bell curve, and that fossil fuel is a necessary resource for the existence of modern civilization, which will not be able to switch to alternative energy sources. They see the current financial crisis as a direct consequence of high oil prices, which brace immoderate consumption. The maintenance is the point of view is the of «The peak all theory», which shows that not only oil but also the other half of the required resources of modern civilization will be exhausted in the next quarter of century. (Note that the possibility of replacing some of resources with other leads to that peaks of each resource flag to one moment in time.) Finally, there is a theory of the «peak demand» – namely, that in circumstances where the goods produced more then effective demand, the production in general is not fit, which includes the deflationary spiral that could last indefinitely.
2) Another view is that the financial crisis will inevitably lead to a geopolitical crisis, and then to nuclear war. This view can be reinforced by the analogy between the Great Depression and novadays. The Great Depression ended with the start of the Second World War. But this view is considering nuclear war as the inevitable end of human existence, which is not necessarily true.
3) In the article “Scaling law of the biological evolution and the hypothesis of the self-consistent Galaxy origin of life”. (Advances in Space Research V.36 (2005), P.220–225” http://dec1.sinp.msu.ru/~panov/ASR_Panov_Life.pdf) Russian scientist A. D. Panov showed that the crises in the history of humanity became more frequent in curse of history. Each crisis is linked with the destruction of some old political system, and with the creation principle technological innovation at the exit from the crisis. 1830 technological revolution lead to industrial world (but peak of crisis was of course near 1815 – Waterloo, eruption of Tambora, Byron on the Geneva lake create new genre with Shelly and her Frankeshtain.) One such crisis happened in 1945 (dated 1950 in Panov’s paper – as a date of not the beginning of the crisis, but a date of exit from it and creation of new reality) when the collapse of fascism occurred and arose computers, rockets and atomic bomb, and bipolar world. An important feature of these crises is that they follow a simple law: namely, the next crisis is separated from the preceding interval of time to 2.67+/- 0.15 shorter. The last such crisis occurred in the vicinity of 1991 (1994 if use Panov’s formula from the article), when the USSR broke up and began the march of the Internet. However, the schedule of crisis lies on the hyperbole that comes to the singularity in the region in 2020 (Panov gave estimate 2004+/-15, but information about 1991 crisis allows to sharpen the estimate). If this trend continues to operate, the next crisis must come after 17 years from 1991 , in 2008, and another- even after 6.5 years in 2014 and then the next in 2016 and so on. Naturally it is desirable to compare the Panov’s forecast and the current financial crisis.
Current crisis seems to change world politically and technologically, so it fit to Panov’s theory which predict it with high accuracy long before. (At least at 2005 – but as I now Panov do not compare this crisis with his theory.) But if we agree with Panov’s theory we should not expect global catastrophe now, but only near 2020. So we have long way to it with many crisises which will be painful but not final. Read more