Normal Human Heroes

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.

Some time ago Slate put up a neat little application: having scoured out every idea people have had for how America will end, you get to choose your top 5. There are 144 ideas, it’s quite a selection. You can compare your predictions to the average, in terms of how many live, and if it’s humanity’s or nature’s fault; I lean towards “Everybody Dies” and “Man’s Fault”. The result I got was:
“You are a bloodthirsty misanthrope. You believe mankind is stupid and fallible and that America will destroy itself in a bloody mess. You’ll know you’re right when: The United States succumbs to a torrent of Russian nukes; we clone ourselves, get bum genes, and die.”
Actually, I think mankind is very intelligent and fallible. The two are not mutually exclusive, and we may have to be more than just very intelligent to achieve results we’ll be happy with. And I’m about as far from a misanthrope as you can get.
H/T to Dr. James Hughes for the link.

September 3rd, 2009
Sleeping polyphasically and waking up 5 times a day, I remember a lot of dreams. Managing to fall asleep on the plane, I dreamt of a world in which we failed. “The Paperclipper” had been made and turned on, though of course that wasn’t what it was expected to do, and now human kind had a handful of days to observe our world ending. Having time – and certainly that much time – to see the world end seems more in line with the release of a then-unstoppable global plague, but hey, dreams are free to be inaccurate. The dream wasn’t very violent and I don’t know what the AI was actually doing, just that it was slowly and inexorably expanding to fill the universe with repetitive structure that we find meaningless. It was taking its time but there was nothing you could do to stop it, every move against the superintelligence was perfectly anticipated, and cut short almost before it began. Humanity was free for a few days to panic in a completely pointless way, or sit back and examine its fate.
Everyone would soon be dead. Human civilization ended its 10 thousand year run, the 200,000 year reign of Homo Sapiens was over, a pretentious and innocent little light suddenly and uneventfully turning off. In our place was some meaningless mechanical future, a small technical error propagating its way through the galaxy, covering existence with an alert message about a bad variable reference. Each person’s future, from their career hopes to the date they had planned on Friday, was matter-of-factly discarded by reality. Each aspiration and hope in a human heart, every dream you’ve ever had, was stopped in its tracks by a towering, boring, grey slate wall. And each of us knew with a numb and simple knowledge, that there was nothing. we. could. do. The probability of stopping The Machine was a page full of zeroes.
I awoke with a start. We aren’t yet in that world, and here and now we still have control over our future. Wonderfully, there are things we can do.  It may not seem like much on an individual level, but it’s almost infinitely more than we’ll be able to do when the world is falling to pieces at our feet. At least by then we’ll have come to see these opportunities for the marvelous things they really are.

August 29th, 2009
I finally did that numerical analysis on whether and by how much it makes sense to focus on combating existential risk, posted here.