Normal Human Heroes

December 25th, 2009
I have really positive associations with Christmas, and as an atheist but a cultural Christian I still really enjoy it. I self-perceived most of my youth as a fight against boredom, and with little income, Christmas really helped out. It was also one of the only 3 or so times a year I got to see my “fun” grandparents.
These days I have the money to buy the things I really want, so the gifts aren’t such a big thing anymore, but it’s still a lot of fun. Listening to a song that came on (posted below), a different kind of fantasy struck me. Being focused on existential risk throughout the year, I have it occasionally. There’s a lot of beauty that’s possible, and enjoyments that are worlds beyond what we can imagine, but sometimes, I fantasize just about safety. I think about a world where we’ve done it, succeeded, with no more existential risk, no more involuntary death, no more significant suffering. The enhancements, the superhuman happiness, the vastly greater intelligence, the radically enhanced communication, I can wait for. We could take our time, the future shining and unblemished by danger or fear, each of us knowing we’d be around as long as we want to be, able to take ourselves as far as we want, as fast as we want. We’d be able to relax so fully, enjoying each other’s company as we approach a welcoming horizon.

Sarah McLachlan singing John Lennon’s “Happy Christmas (War is Over)” You might want to listen without watching the video, which while nice, dissipates and changes the tone of the song a little.

P.S. If you’re wondering what I’m talking about in technical terms, I’m referring to the rise of  a benevolent singleton, protecting our present and future while allowing the self-determination of personal choice. Something we might get if SIAI or their allies eventually succeed.

December 18th, 2009
Two months ago I experienced some burnout and had to scale back my efforts at existential risk reduction. I was optimizing every single bit of my time towards that end, and for a possible variety of reasons I couldn’t sustain it. That was acceptable, as long as I knew I couldn’t do it. When it comes to saving billions of lives – as well as both our future and our past – I can’t accept applying anything other than my best effort. If that meant taking some more time for relaxation, so it was.
Even so, this went again my grain in a little. We are entering the single most pivotal time in the history of our civilization, species, and Earth, and as long as I can do something about it, it seems a little silly to sit around playing video games. In addition I’ve never been good at balancing really entertaining games and work, beyond getting homework in on time. Months ago I made a policy against playing any new video games, and I came back to decide that again; these days I’m most satisfied if I keep myself grounded in this world. In addition, any sort of role model I have would be fighting tooth and nail to protect the beauty of our present and the potential of our future. I could accept doing less if I had to, but it felt very off.
For about a month now I’ve been back at spending more and more time and effort on “saving the world”. I’m happier because of it, and I think I’ve got things figured out this time, I’m a little surprised I didn’t see it before. When I was going through that burnout, all the things I most wanted to do were social things. As I pointed out even then, I was doing fine until I got into a situation where my optimizations didn’t take  me on their own into proximity with others. Now I’m back to optimizing all my time towards existential risk reduction, with the one exception of occasional social events. I think I actually had tried this earlier, but by that point I was already coming down and didn’t have the time to see it work.
What’s more, I’m now an aspiring rationalist, and despite some fair assumptions by others, I did not really consider myself one before. A few readers may not fully realize what I’m talking about, which is kind of a pity. I’d suggest reading LessWrong, but even doing that I didn’t “get it” for months. Reading some good sci-fi also helped. For about a year I had been working at being maximally productive with my actions, but only recently am I working to be maximally productive with my thoughts. This is where the very significant gains lie.
If there ever was a time for us to become heroes, it is now, and it’s satisfying for me to be more directly back on that path.

November 29th, 2009

Why Friendly AI research is critical: even if you give an AI nice sounding directives, it can be hard to know how far such an alien mind will take something.  We take for granted all the other beliefs going around in our heads, such as that a hug shouldn’t be that strong, partly because we aren’t powerful enough to take things that far. The often discussed situation is that of just directing an AI to make people happy. What counts as a person? What counts as happy? What are acceptable ways to make people happy? You don’t want the AI to disassemble you into a hundred smaller “humans” and make them happy, or worse yet a bunch of microscopic pictures of happy people. You also don’t want it to put everyone into a drugged stupor. Designing a superintelligence is analogous to having a wish granting genie, but one of those annoying literal types for which almost every wish is a very bad thing.

November 21st, 2009
(This review contains only negligible spoilers).

I just finished reading Accelerando by Charles Stross. It’s a masterpiece of hard science fiction, and I highly recommend it.
Vernor Vinge coined the term Singularity when he observed that no author could write realistically about smarter-than-human intelligences. Literature allows you to realize characters who are stronger or more outgoing, but the intelligence of their plans is limited by your ability to think of them. Superintelligences must be kept off screen or in some infant stage. Considering the likelihood of superhuman intelligence in our relatively near future, this makes writing really hard sci-fi a difficult endeavor. Vinge blurbs on the back cover of the book “There is an intrinsic unknowability about the technological singularity. Most writers leave it safely offstage or invent reasons why it doesn’t happen”, which applies to his own work as well. In comparison Stross’s Accelerando dives in headfirst, with mainstream (post)human civilization becoming essentially incomprehensible by the middle of the book.
Of course any real superintelligences still have to be kept off screen, and so the story follows characters who for one reason or another have been left behind by the tsunami of increasing intelligence. This creates the interesting effect that despite inhabitating lives stranger (and more probable) than those in the vast majority of sci-fi, the characters’s situations manage to feel very backwater. It’s as if you were following a family of Amish throughout the industrial and information revolutions, but more significant.
At a few points I grew dissapointed as it seemed Stross’s literary ambitions may have overcame him, with superintelligences mysteriously on our level, but by the end it all makes fair sense through one route or the other. I would have enjoyed those sections more if I knew that to begin with. There were also a small handful of differences between my own best estimates and the world of Accelerando. The Singularity is a tad on the slow side, and there always remain a number of independent, comparably powerful entities. This is probably my largest contention (it seems more likely for a single superintelligence to achieve dominance at some point), but there might not be much of a story if this were otherwise. There’s also no significant mention of emotional engineering, ala David Pearce’s Hedonistic Imperative or Nick Bostrom’s Letter From Utopia. A more sociological than technological point, but people are pretty nonchalant about creating and deleting copies of themselves. I care more about expectation of experience than identity, but as a preferential utilitarian I can get along just fine with those who think otherwise, as long as they don’t force that choice on others.
When I first heard about this book, the take-away message was the great density of concepts. The book is packed with advanced technological proposals, internet subculture references, unusual vocabulary, economics, neuroscience, history…it goes on. However Accelerando is much more readable than this would suggest, and most of the references are tangential, perfect understanding not required. The few times a concept is critical he takes a moment to explain it, and those interested can hunt down referenes on the net (try doing that 10 or 15 years ago). I’m admittedly not bleeding-edge (cutting maybe?) on speculative technology, but to the limits of my knowledge all the ideas are presented in a sober, best-guess fashion. To load the book with so many ideas takes quite an intellect or a great deal of work, and most likely both. Stross took 5 years to write this and has an impressive background, with degrees in pharmacy and computer science, and those who’ve known (biblical sense) WoW might be interested to learn he came up with death knights, back in the day.
The best and favorite thing I can say about this book is that it is mind boggling. A common criticism of sci-fi is that it takes one idea and places it in an otherwise changed world. Accelerando is just the opposite, which includes just about every feasible proposal and then mixes them in with additional ideas about their interaction. This allows for very unique and interesting turns of plot, and the book tends to put the reader in a constant state of future shock, continuing for 400 pages, even while in the relative backwater I mentioned above. The density of information and references adds to this effect nicely. The human mind suffers from the conjunction fallacy, and we’re more likely to put belief in speculation that is more specific, such as the setting of a book. Despite this I think Accelerando is excellent for improving our sense of the future, by reminding us that the future isn’t going to be one or a few new ideas, it’s going to be a great number of them, all interacting and creating ever newer ones. There are three meanings to the Singularity, one of which is that without intelligence enhancement, really understanding the world is something you’d have to entrust to others. It’s one thing to read about that kind of future but another to catch a glimpse of it, and that’s something that Accelerando provides.
Vinge also calls Accelerando “the most sustained and unflinching look into radical optimism I’ve seen”. While our own future could be much better, this really is a pretty optimistic book, which I like as I’m generally an optimist myself. It also presents some very possible dangers and threats. The future could be better than we’re physically capable of imagining, but there are thousands of ways it could go badly and it’d be worth it (understatement) to prevent those outcomes. The future may be incomprehensible, but for now we’re still in control, and still the most intelligent life on this planet. Let’s make the most of that, because it’s not going to last.

November 17th, 2009

Birds, Emiliana Torrini
Let’s stay awake and listen to the dark.
Before the birds, before they all wake up.
It’s the ending of a play and soon begins another.
Hear the leaves applaud the wind.
See the sun come rising and white-wings start to fly.
Like strings of pearls in the firey sky.
I don’t want to close my eyes, don’t want to leave the stage now,
As the leaves applaud our stay.
Lend me yours wings and teach me how to fly.
Show me when it rains, the place you go to hide.
And the curtains draw again and bow – another day ends.
The leaves applaud the wind.

November 3rd, 2009
While I’m confident that most of my readership also follows Michael Anissimov’s Accelerating Future blog, his posted video of a panel from the Singularity 2009 conference is so relevant to the topics of Normal Human Heroes that it would be criminal not to include it here. Really great discussion from some of the de facto leaders of the most critical and under appreciated fields.

Changing the World Panel — Singularity Summit 2009 — Peter Thiel, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Aubrey de Grey from Singularity Institute on Vimeo.

October 31st, 2009
I promised I would say more about some of my reasons for wanting to work at avoiding existential risk. Here it is, a little delayed.
There are a lot of reasons to devote time and money to reducing existential risk. I’ve talked about some of them, and they’re mostly pretty obvious: save 6,400,000,000 lives and perhaps all life on our planet, ensure the continuance of intelligence and human beings  in our section of the galaxy, and allow us to develop negligible senescence and do some cautious utopia engineering (and then reap the benefits). Most any ethical code would assign a great deal of importance to this. But there are also reasons that striving to reduce x-risk is inherently attractive.
When we were children we had all sorts of crazy preferences for our future careers. Astronauts, bank robbers, the president, horses, Ewoks, etc. As time goes by we realize many of these are unlikely, prohibited by social and market factors, sometimes by basic biology. For most of us we started to think more about careers near the end of high school, and then it was jobs like auto-mechanic, microbiologist, engineer, mathematician, teacher. A few tests told me I should be an architect; I ignored these results but sometimes I wonder. Now as I’m finishing my B.S. I’m starting to apply for full time jobs, things like microprocessor engineer, process engineer, consultant. If I hadn’t decided to work and donate, I would have pursued academic research and published papers, added my tiny little push to the nearly-inexorable advance of scientific understanding.
These are all fine careers to pursue for their own sake. They add value to the economy. They can improve lives. They can do some small part towards improving our civilization and planet. I had long planned to adopt, and I would have been able to support and nurture a human life. But then, then comes a chance to do something big. To be a part of something so monumentally huge it sounds almost stupid. “Saving the world” is like something out of a kid’s show, but there it is, along with the growing number of journal papers, academic departments, donors, summits, non-profits, people and plans. I wouldn’t mind being a researcher and I had always expected to be an engineer, but let me be frank with you: I’ve always wanted to be a hero. To go up against obstacles and against the odds, to overcome the impossible, to succeed when failure means death, and to sit back and recollect when it was all over, in a world that I had had some impact on, even a small one. When trends or disasters move the world towards destruction, to be on the other side fighting back with all I’ve got, so that even if they take down everything I love they’ll have to go through hell to do it (deliberate anthropomorphization). To work for something so much larger than myself.
I really would prefer that the world were in less danger and that intelligence were easier to design. In addition to the obvious benefit of avoiding the risk of megadeath, I would then be free to relax and wait for the Kurzweilian Age of Spiritual Machines. I was serious though when I called this a “chance”, an opportunity. Hidden in all the dangers that lie ahead of us, here is our chance to be heroes of the highest caliber, where failure is worse and success better than any story I’ve ever heard. Also, it’s convenient that we get to avoid the constant risk of death of the average hero-character. The risk of death is certainly there, and if we fail, then . . . well, everybody dies. Maybe not immediately, maybe technology is halted by a world totalitarianism, but I don’t see immortality being prevalent in that kind of future. Until such a day though, we can be heroes in relative comfort, with houses and food and medical care. That doesn’t mean it’s easy – our difficulties are just intellectual and persuasive instead of military – but if it were easy then this wouldn’t be much to talk about.
In short, working to avoid existential disaster is the coolest damn thing I could possibly do. If you put “existential risk reducer” next to being just a process engineer or consultant, it’s not really fair to call it a choice at all. This is a very direct and short-term reason for doing this, but it has a long-term corollary as well: having such a large impact on humanity’s chance for survival stands  a good chance of being one of the very few things you can’t do as a posthuman. Even if we do this right and you live for an eternity, you may never again get a chance like this to be a hero.
“This is the true joy in life — that of being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one.”
-George Bernard Shaw

September 30th, 2009
Living out in the boondocks I’m on a very open stretch of land, sprinkled with a few trees and houses, and the juxtaposition between human edifice and weather seems stronger here. I enjoy that contrast, particularly with inclement weather, as long as I’m not out in it for long. Massive forces and bodies, shifting and colliding over the surface of the planet, and yet these tiny human specks are often not even bothered enough to stop what they’re doing. We’re so fantastically small in comparison, so fragile seeming, and yet with that wonderful spark of intelligence we can shape our world around us to suit our desires. Beyond the strength the house affords I sometimes like to step out under the towering dark clouds, into the thick of the rain and the wind, and feel both the exhilaration of them beating down and their effective powerlessness.
These massive forces also hint at those greater ones beyond the surface of Earth, those that really would kill you in a few seconds, without hatred or compassion. Human beings are wonderfully ecumenical but we cannot survive exposure in our upper atmosphere or under the oceans, on any other known planet or outer space. Even there intelligence has already accomplished amazing feats, taking this soft skinned prairie-dwelling species into the air, through the vacuum of space and onto another astronomical object, something it was ridiculously not evolved for.
Yet intelligence may not be the final victor in its fight with these massive dumb elements. A volcanic eruption already nearly finished us, and future asteroids or gamma ray bursts could end our adventure with all the moral deliberation of an acid neutralizing a base. By including those massive effects less intelligent than us, we might consider the endless march of technological progress, or of evolution – biological, memetic, or upload reproduction. None of these systemic effects have dreams, hopes, loves or joys, and to achieve an appreciable chance of a world we find meaning in we need intelligence to continue its triumphs*. It’s the reigning champions Monkey-Brained Savanna Creatures vs The Universe, final round.
* Of course intelligence won’t always primarily mean human intelligence, but for now we can consider it as Us against the unintelligent march towards creating such beings.

September 25th, 2009
Evidence suggests that when looking for short term partners, women enjoy a large shoulder-to-hip ratio, dominant behavior, slow wide-reaching movements, and not being forcibly turned into computronium. Women are also more sexually responsive and faithful when their partner has dissimilar genes for fighting off disease-causing bacteria, and when their bodies haven’t been decimated by supervirulent engineered pathogens.
(For those familiar with OvercomingBias and LessWrong)

September 15th, 2009
With human history stretching back a few thousand years, there’s been quite a few exceptional people. Or maybe just fairly regular people who’ve done exceptional things, and that makes us consider them exceptional. Regardless, whatever you might find admirable, there have been people who’ve displayed those traits to an extraordinary degree. For most of us, I’m talking about courage, compassion, wisdom, tenacity, etc. What causes us to look up to a person – or a group – even more, is when they were able to bring about lasting change. People who improved the world around them, often times being part of the reason our lives are as good as they are. Maybe it’s the leaders of the civil rights movements, Abraham Lincoln, the authors of the Declaration of Independence, or the signers of the Magna Carta. It could be the founders of the environmental movement, those who have intelligently campaigned for better working conditions in the US and elsewhere, or diplomats who have devoted their lives to improving human rights. It could be Marie Curie, Davinci, or Pythagoras. It could be more personal heroes, such as parents, a teacher, or hard-as-nails ancestors upon whom our existence depended.
Whoever they are, whoever you might look up and whatever great works you might be thankful for, practically none of that survives an existential disaster. It matters a little, sure, that we and others have benefited from their efforts for at least a few years. And just maybe those accomplishments will keep doing good after existential disaster, like giving a permanently hamstrung humanity on a blasted earth some better form of government, as they appreciate what literature of ours survived. Perhaps some superintelligence carries a little of their values or work with it into the stars, after we’ve all been turned into computronium, and maybe that makes it just slightly easier to take. But as an acceptable approximation, all the good that has ever been done on this Earth won’t really mean crap if our planet becomes a roiling mass of replicationg nanobots or inert nano-smiles.
There have been thousands if not millions who have even died to protect a worthy ideal or leave a better world for future people, and the continued value of their efforts requires us to protect what they gained. If we fail to ensure a meaningful future, then we also fail to ensure a meaningful past, and the sum of all human sacrifices will mean almost nothing. The mantle of human history – perhaps inconveniently, perhaps surprisingly – falls on us.