Normal Human Heroes

November 19th, 2009

I came across this in June but thought it could go for a posting here. The world is changing so fast, by this point to talk about transhumanism is a combination of extrapolation and prediction, and “I told you so”.
There’s some information in here about national comparisons and populations, which isn’t so interesting to me but I think makes the video much more mainstream and interesting to those not familiar with transhumanist ideas, by presenting them along with these more approachable concepts. As an example, it was my aunt that actually sent me the video. So on a side note, perhaps those interested will find this video useful for introducing others to accelerating change.

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.

August 15th, 2009
(Yesterday I posted about history implying a strong heuristic that radical claims about the future shouldn’t be believed. This heurstic is valid, and has to be worked against to lead a person to set it aside and actually look at the evidence on a particular issue.)
If you’re a person with a radical claim about the future to make, you’ve got serious work cut out for you. If the heuristic suggests that claims about the end of the world and massive global change are not worth considering and are something put forth by irrational and unconventional weirdoes, then hopefully you can lead people to set aside the heuristic by displaying rationality and being as conventional as possible. It helps if instead of being a smelly person who stands on street corners all day, you’re the head of an Oxford institute, an MIT graduate with at least a half dozen successful companies, or a computer pioneer and one of the founders of the industry’s leading companies. It helps at least a little if you did such things first, before you put much weight in the possibility of humanity going extinct by the end of our lifetimes. The long and the short of it is that it helps if by all other accounts you are rational, intelligent, and not terribly strange.  None of that is good reason to unquestioningly believe what you’re saying, but it is a good reason to actually look at the evidence on those claims.
There are two ways to be strange with respect to world-changing future developments. The first and most salient way is to simply assign significant probability to such things. The conventional opinion does not, and those who assigned high probability in the past seldom even seem justified in retrospect. The second way is: given that you assign a non-negligible probability, what are you doing about it? Here both conventional opinion and a rational analysis might agree that we should be doing quite a bit. That is, if you seriously assign significant probability, we should ”be serious about” the possibility.
I think this is generally conflated with the oddity of assigning the non-negligible probability in the first place, so that doing a great deal about these claims makes the claim itself seem less believable. Maybe it’s because it draws more attention to the belief, or because it makes a person more nervous to have someone actually acting on such ideas, or because it makes the association with prior doomsayers stronger and calls the heuristic back into play. So then to try and convince others of the possibilities we just mention them as an interesting bit of arm-chair speculation, put them forward as a strictly academic discussion, avoid expressing great emotion, and don’t factor them into decisions on whether to spend a day watching a LotR marathon. Then our friends can say “Sally sure has some weird ideas about the future, but at least she’s cool about them. At least she doesn’t get too worked up about the possible death of 7 billion people.”
I’m not suggesting we go the route of Sarah Conner, for a variety of reasons (BTW I’ve only seen the films). But what I do suggest is that if we rationally think there is a significant chance of existential disaster or a massive global development that we’ll regret not preparing for, then we rationally out to do something significant about it (I’ll leave utilitarian calculus to a later post). Maybe that actually means we should apply limited effort in order to bypass a common heuristic about credibility, but that’s something we should come to through rational decision-making, not assumption.

August 14th, 2009
(This post applies to a number of transhumanist concerns, but like much of my writing there is some focus on Friendly AI as I currently expect this to be our most critical challenge)
If you’re a “normal” activist, you have it relatively easy. If you say you’re working to get clean water to millions of people and somebody says “I don’t think this problem is real”, you can show them the pictures, the videos, the studies, the census data, and even go there and talk to those people. You can test the water and see that yes, it’s dirty, and you can do medical examinations of the people and say yes, they are suffering.
If you’re a transhumanist activist and you say you’re working to ensure equitable distribution of intelligence amplification technology, or to prevent us all from having our atoms realigned for a superintelligence’s computing, the most you have to show is some intelligent analysis, some semi-log plots of technological change, and some recent but distantly related scientific discoveries. That may be enough for rationally assigning a high probability, but you can’t take the person and show them a world ruled by a despotic and unopposable elite of augmented CEOs, or one in which everybody we know is dead.
Working to prevent outcomes that aren’t even possible yet, especially existential disasters and the “end of the world”, I’ve been told more than once that I sound like I’m crazy. And the people who have said that are right! Because the fact remains that the group of people who’ve thought the world could end has had quite a few ‘crazies’. Every single person who thought the world was going to end was wrong, at least if we ignore the Multiple Worlds hypothesis. This belief has a track record of 0 successes, 0% accuracy. Which, obviously, is a  very good thing for us.
We don’t have time to look at the evidence of every person who waves their arms around proclaiming our demise, so we use that human forte of heuristics. And history suggests a heuristic that doesn’t give such claims a lot of credence. I’ll admit right now that it’s a good guess that a given person proclaiming the possible end of the world has a few screws loose, especially if it’s by a single extremely powerful entity who kills each and every one of us. If you don’t have hours, days, or weeks to sit down and sift through the evidence, this is a fine guess to make. But it IS just a guess, and one that considers very little of the evidence for a particular claim. Evidence about past claims of apocalypse carries different weight than an in-depth analysis showing that superintelligence will never arise, or that if it does there is no significant chance for it to do anything we really dislike.