Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon interviewed special guest Brian Wang. In addition to his many other accomplishments, Brian has been a Foresight Nanotechnology Institute senior associate since 1997.
We spoke with Brian about the crappy beta versions of human enhancement that some people are experimenting with today, often to their detriment. When will better enhancements be available?
Click “Continue reading” for listening options and the show notes:
Let’s begin with my name, Phil, which of course is short for Philip. One of the most famous Philips in all history would have to be Philip II of Macedonia, AKA Philip of Macedon, noted for his own tremendous conquests and for being the father of Alexander the Great. The Athenians once described Philip as a “Macedonian Ares.” Ares, of course was the Greek god of war. His Roman name — Mars.
Growing up, my favorite book was Red Planet by Robert A. Heinlein. The subject of Red Planet? It’s an adventure story set of the planet Mars.
Proposition: It would be wrong to assume that an AGI (artificial general intelligence) could in any sense be the “property” of a human being for exactly the same reason that it is wrong to believe that a human being can be the property of another human being. For a human being to subject the AGI to his or her will would be a fundamental violation of that intelligence’s right to define and determine its own existence.
Question: How does an AGI come to have any “rights?”
Snarky Response: How does a human being come to have any “rights?”
More Serious Response: Assuming that human beings do have rights, and assuming that self-determination is among those rights — I really have to start with these as assumptions; anyone who wants to argue these points will just have to find another blog to read — it would be very difficult to provide a rational explanation for not extending those rights to an AGI, assuming:
The AGI is as intelligent as a human being
The AGI has its own motivations and desires (a requirement which may or may not have already been established in item 1)
The AGI has a sense of self
The AGI has feelings, and can experience pain (a requirement which may or may not have already been established in item 3, which itself may or may not have been established in item 1.)
In other words, if the experience of being an AGI is in some sense congruent with the experience of being a human being — which is what the language about intelligence, sense of self, and experience of pain, is all getting at — then making human slavery illegal while allowing AGI slavery would seem to be nothing but substrate bias in action.
But.
What about all that rhetorical dancing around I had to do about whether the later items on the list were all covered by item 1? The first item talks about an elusive concept that we call “intelligence.” The other three items are getting at, but do not specifically mention, an even more elusive concept that we call “consciousness.”
Question: Would an AGI, by definition, be conscious? Mitchell Howe has thoughts on the subject:
It could well be that any AI capable of love will also have a kind of consciousness. But at this point in time I don’t know how to test that assumption. And apart from the obvious philosophical questions this raises, I’m still not convinced it matters.
As I was recently telling a colleague, I’m confident that all of my mental abilities, both logical and artistic, are owed to the structure of the matter in my brain. “And if it’s all in there, then I see no reason to argue that certain aspects of it will be reproducible on another substrate while others will not. Indeed, for all I know, AC may actually be simpler than AI. Maybe we’ve been creating Artificial Consciousness since 1893 and just haven’t realized it yet because toasters can’t cry.â€
This is helpful, as far as it goes. AC may be simpler than AI. I’ll buy that. If you recreate a functioning conscious brain in another substrate, there’s no reason to think that it won’t be conscious. Granted.
But.
Modified Question: Would an AGI, by definition, necessarily be conscious? A square is a rectangle; a rectangle is not necessarily a square. Yes, intelligence could coexist with consciousness in another substrate. But would it have to? Could there be a highly intelligent being — as smart as or smarter than a human being — with no sense of self, no subjective experience of being itself?
What we typically think of as unconscious machines are already “smarter” than we are in limited and restrictive ways. They can do math faster than we can, they can beat us at chess, etc. Could a large number of different narrow intelligence capabilities be networked in such a way that the resulting machine could pass an arbitrary test of general intelligence and yet still have no subjective experience of self?
It seems to me that it could. Although I’m not sure how we would ever establish that such a machine is not conscious. In one of his novels, Greg Egan describes the meeting between an AI and a being who self-describes as a “non-sentient” intelligence. If they come right out and admit it, great. Problem solved, right?
Well, maybe. But how would an intelligence know that it isn’t conscious? Wouldn’t that require a sense of self? Or perhaps a sense of lack-of-self? But having a sense of lack-of-self starts to sound a little bit like consciousness. On the other hand, ultimately we want Egan’s distinction to be real so that we can make it to the following
Modified Proposition: It would be wrong to assume that a conscious AGI could in any sense be the “property” of a human being for exactly the same reason that it is wrong to believe that a human being can be the property of another human being.
In Egan’s fictional world, non-sentient AIs are treated pretty much like property, although many of them read like they would have a fair shot at passing the Turing Test. Non-sentient AGI may just be fantasy, but it is a tempting fantasy. To have intelligent beings tirelessly do our bidding sounds great, but only if they are doing this with no sense of loss or pain on their part. Nor would it be acceptable to take a conscious AI and “edit out” its own desires in favor of ours — date rape drugs enable date rape, but they don’t make it a good thing.
So the questions remain. Do consciousness and general intelligence go hand-in-hand? If so, then we know some of the boundaries of the human/AI relationship going in. If not, the rules of engagement are less clear. But the over-arching questions remains: how would we ever know for sure, one way or the other, which intelligence are or are not conscious?
Ronald Bailey has written an interesting article weighing our future fuel options. The problem – our green alternatives aren’t cheap enough and the cheap alternatives aren’t green. He’s not impressed by ethonol or hydrogen.
He is excited by next generation (nanotech engineered) lithium ion batteries. Also:
Biotechnology is another possible pathway to a post-petroleum future. For example, the privately-held biotech company, LS9, based in San Carlos, CA. aims to use synthetic biology to skip over ethanol to directly produce gasoline. LS9 co-founder and Harvard University geneticist George Church describes synthetic biology as “treating biology the way you would treat large-scale integrated circuits. We’ve been dealing with one part at a time or a small number of parts. Synthetic biology is engineering of new systems using parts that we trust.” Another way to think about it is that biologists want to do to biology what engineers have done to electronics and chemists have done with chemistry.
I had similar thoughts back in June.
I mean, everybody already knows that, in the new season, CTU has been shut down and that Tony Almeda is still alive and — apparently — evil. What? You didn’t know that? Well, those are still not spoilers, seeing as all those facts are revealed in the previews that Fox has been showing for weeks now. So get caught up already.
Actually, that may be easier said than done. I went to Fox.com looking for the previews so I could link them here and all I could find was a video of Keifer Sutherland lecturing me about global warming. Plus, it looks like the season premiere will be delayed due to the writer’s strike — confirming my long-held suspicion that there is no master plan for 24; they’re making it up as they go along.
Anyhow, one of my favorite things about 24 is these little moments when Chloe will say, “Here, Jack, I’ve accessed the full electrical schematic for LAX,” and Jack says “Upload that to my PDA,” and then it’s like — Zip! Jack has the schematic. Yeah. Right. If you get as big a kick out of that sort of thing as I do, then you are sure to enjoy the unaired 1994 pilot for 24.
Via GeekPress, who also provides the following spoiler-laden link with this warning:
If you don’t want to know the plot to the Star Trek 11 movie, then don’t click here.
I really don’t want to follow the link, but I’m concerned about what I’ve been hearing about this movie. Could somebody who isn’t all that into Star Trek please do me a favor and follow the link, then leave a comment letting me know that they aren’t really going to have Kirk, Spock, and McCoy (much less the other four) all attending Star Fleet Academy at the same time — which makes no sense, based on their various ages. That might be enough of a show-stopper to keep me from going to see it, J. J. Abrams notwithstanding.
Fascinating. It seems that they can actually change our past, Captain. But to meddle in established history in this manner would be most illogical.
If you do follow the link and want to send me a message of reassurance — or warning — please put an appropriate spoiler warning on your comment.
Rand Simberg does a nice job deconstructing of some rather nonsensical coverage emerging from the inevitable discussion of human cloning following the announcement of the ability to clone primates. There is no shortage of naive and, yes, hysterical ideas about human cloning out there. We’ve spent some time responding to these in the past and now, as a public service, here’s a quick summary of responses to the three most egregious (and yet popular) ideas that people have about cloning.
1. Cloning is not a human photocopier.
A clone is a genetic duplicate of an organism. It is an identical twin to the original, delivered at some later date (or else we’d just call it a twin, not a clone) and — presumably — by a different mother. So if your are cloned, you will share the same relationship with that individual that an identical twin shares with his or her sibling. As Rand points out, it’s unclear what familial relationship you will legally share with the clone. The clone could be your child, your sibling, your cousin, or no (legal) relation whatsoever. It all depends on who is doing the cloning.
Unless and until some radically new human gestation technology is developed (see point 2) any human clones who arrive in this world will do so the way everyone else does. They will be babies, born of mothers. Your clone will not be an adult duplicate of you with all your memories, but rather a baby with a predisposition to grow up looking, perhaps acting, and maybe thinking a lot like you. That’s all.
Human photocopier technology may be with us at some point. In fact, we spent an entire segment discussing the implications of such technology on the most recent FastForward Radio. But cloning is not it.
2. Cloning is not growing armies in vats.
There is a popular idea that clones are synthesized or manufactured human beings. They are not. To quote myself:
Reproductive cloning raises serious moral and ethical issues, but “cloned armies” is not one of them. The ability to produce armies would require not cloning, but a technique popular in (uninformed) science fiction movies that might properly be called Rapidly Growing Large Numbers of Sentient Adults in Vats. That I know of, no one is currently working on developing that technology…
For the time being, producing a human clone will require having a viable mother willing to carry the child to term. You’ll need a mother for every child (just like you do now) and you’ll need the full nine months. There are no shortcuts and no economies of scale with cloning. Should either RGLNSAV or the related but more modest RGLNBV (Rapidly Growing Large Numbers of Babies in Vats) come on line at some point, some serious issues may emerge. Of course, even just using sperm (plenty of that around) and eggs (harder, but by no means impossible, to get in large quantities) to produce your Insta-Army, both RGLNSAV or RGLNBV could cause plenty of mischief.
But again, they don’t exist and — as far as I know — no one is trying to develop them.
3. Clones are not slaves
The slavery issue comes up in the “cloned army” scenario, also in nightmare scenarios such as The Island, wherein — spoilers coming — clones are created to provide replacement parts for evil rich people. At least The Island gets the legalities right — clones are human beings, and human beings are protected by law in most jurisdictions from being held against their will or forced to sacrifice themselves by providing replacement parts for others. So any racket like in The Island would require operating underground. Cloned armies would also have to be created somewhere outside of most legal jurisdictions. Sharing the same genetic code with someone else does not erase or diminish one’s humanity under law, or else we’d have special rules about how we treat identical twins.
There was an episode in the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation which managed to pull off a hat-trick where these three misconceptions are concerned. The Enterprise encounters a small society that reproduces only by cloning which needs an infusion of fresh blood, as it were. Things quickly get wacky…
The Mariposans ask the Enterprise-D crew for a sample of their DNA, so they could create new clones. The crew refuses, so the Mariposans kidnap Commander William Riker and Doctor Katherine Pulaski to steal their DNA. When Riker and Pulaski find out, they visit the colony’s cloning labs and destroy the new clones.
The clones that Riker and Pulaski kill are adults. They are still in vats, though, and I think they’re bald. The basic idea here seems to be that Riker and Pulaski are perfectly entitled to murder these mostly formed adult human beings because they are
– Exact duplicates of Riker and Pulaski, and therefore in some sense a violation of their right to individuality.
– Not yet conscious. This is never explicitly stated, but the scene where they kill the clones would have been even harder to swallow had the clones opened their eyes and looked scared.
I believe the makers of this episode were attempting to draw some clumsy analogy to abortion. Unfortunately, due to the rapid maturation provided by the vat technology, the Riker and Pulaski clones looked to have been somewhere in the 100th and 120th trimesters, respectively. Either under Federation law, Roe v. Wade has been substantially expanded, or the presumption that one’s clone is simply one’s property to do with as one wishes is a firmly embedded legal principle of the 24th century.
However, under the more primitive and restrictive laws of the 21st century, it’s clear that killing your adult (or infant) clone would land you in jail for murder. And I have a feeling that the “I was protecting my individuality” defense would get you nowhere. Well, maybe you’d have a shot with a California jury, but otherwise…
I’m hardly suggesting that there are no serious legal and ethical issues that must be considered where cloning is concerned. There are. But we can only deal with them seriously when we stop talking about all this nonsense.
Rand Simberg does a nice job deconstructing of some rather nonsensical coverage emerging from the inevitable discussion of human cloning following the announcement of the ability to clone primates. There is no shortage of naive and, yes, hysterical ideas about human cloning out there. We’ve spent some time responding to these in the past and now, as a public service, here’s a quick summary of responses to the three most egregious (and yet popular) ideas that people have about cloning.
1. Cloning is not a human photocopier.
A clone is a genetic duplicate of an organism. It is an identical twin to the original, delivered at some later date (or else we’d just call it a twin, not a clone) and — presumably — by a different mother. So if your are cloned, you will share the same relationship with that individual that an identical twin shares with his or her sibling. As Rand points out, it’s unclear what familial relationship you will legally share with the clone. The clone could be your child, your sibling, your cousin, or no (legal) relation whatsoever. It all depends on who is doing the cloning.
Unless and until some radically new human gestation technology is developed (see point 2) any human clones who arrive in this world will do so the way everyone else does. They will be babies, born of mothers. Your clone will not be an adult duplicate of you with all your memories, but rather a baby with a predisposition to grow up looking, perhaps acting, and maybe thinking a lot like you. That’s all.
Human photocopier technology may be with us at some point. In fact, we spent an entire segment discussing the implications of such technology on the most recent FastForward Radio. But cloning is not it.
2. Cloning is not growing armies in vats.
There is a popular idea that clones are synthesized or manufactured human beings. They are not. To quote myself:
Reproductive cloning raises serious moral and ethical issues, but “cloned armies” is not one of them. The ability to produce armies would require not cloning, but a technique popular in (uninformed) science fiction movies that might properly be called Rapidly Growing Large Numbers of Sentient Adults in Vats. That I know of, no one is currently working on developing that technology…
For the time being, producing a human clone will require having a viable mother willing to carry the child to term. You’ll need a mother for every child (just like you do now) and you’ll need the full nine months. There are no shortcuts and no economies of scale with cloning. Should either RGLNSAV or the related but more modest RGLNBV (Rapidly Growing Large Numbers of Babies in Vats) come on line at some point, some serious issues may emerge. Of course, even just using sperm (plenty of that around) and eggs (harder, but by no means impossible, to get in large quantities) to produce your Insta-Army, both RGLNSAV or RGLNBV could cause plenty of mischief.
But again, they don’t exist and — as far as I know — no one is trying to develop them.
3. Clones are not slaves
The slavery issue comes up in the “cloned army” scenario, also in nightmare scenarios such as The Island, wherein — spoilers coming — clones are created to provide replacement parts for evil rich people. At least The Island gets the legalities right — clones are human beings, and human beings are protected by law in most jurisdictions from being held against their will or forced to sacrifice themselves by providing replacement parts for others. So any racket like in The Island would require operating underground. Cloned armies would also have to be created somewhere outside of most legal jurisdictions. Sharing the same genetic code with someone else does not erase or diminish one’s humanity under law, or else we’d have special rules about how we treat identical twins.
There was an episode in the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation which managed to pull off a hat-trick where these three misconceptions are concerned. The Enterprise encounters a small society that reproduces only by cloning which needs an infusion of fresh blood, as it were. Things quickly get wacky…
The Mariposans ask the Enterprise-D crew for a sample of their DNA, so they could create new clones. The crew refuses, so the Mariposans kidnap Commander William Riker and Doctor Katherine Pulaski to steal their DNA. When Riker and Pulaski find out, they visit the colony’s cloning labs and destroy the new clones.
The clones that Riker and Pulaski kill are adults. They are still in vats, though, and I think they’re bald. The basic idea here seems to be that Riker and Pulaski are perfectly entitled to murder these mostly formed adult human beings because they are
– Exact duplicates of Riker and Pulaski, and therefore in some sense a violation of their right to individuality.
– Not yet conscious. This is never explicitly stated, but the scene where they kill the clones would have been even harder to swallow had the clones opened their eyes and looked scared.
I believe the makers of this episode were attempting to draw some clumsy analogy to abortion. Unfortunately, due to the rapid maturation provided by the vat technology, the Riker and Pulaski clones looked to have been somewhere in the 100th and 120th trimesters, respectively. Either under Federation law, Roe v. Wade has been substantially expanded, or the presumption that one’s clone is simply one’s property to do with as one wishes is a firmly embedded legal principle of the 24th century.
However, under the more primitive and restrictive laws of the 21st century, it’s clear that killing your adult (or infant) clone would land you in jail for murder. And I have a feeling that the “I was protecting my individuality” defense would get you nowhere. Well, maybe you’d have a shot with a California jury, but otherwise…
I’m hardly suggesting that there are no serious legal and ethical issues that must be considered where cloning is concerned. There are. But we can only deal with them seriously when we stop talking about all this nonsense.
Phil Bowermaster returns to FastForward Radio with a report on this year’s Foresight Nanotech Unconference. Also, we have an audio interview with Dr. Zheng Cui who is developing a cancer treatment that works by strengthening the immune system.
Click “Continue reading” for listening options and the show notes:
Dr. Zheng Cui specializes in tumor biology at Wake Forest University Hospital in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. As an associate professor at the university, he teaches biochemistry, molecular biology, lipid biochemistry, cancer biology, and cancer immunology. Dr. Cui’s groundbreaking research in identifying innate immunity to cancer in mice and, more recently, human beings has received significant recent media attention. At the Speculist, we have been following these developments for some time. So we were delighted when Dr. Cui agreed to take the time to chat with us about this exciting research and what it has to say about how cancer will be dealt with in the very near future. We’ll also be talking to Dr. Cui in an upcoming FastForward Radio segment, so keep watching this space.
How did you make the initial connection between cancer and the immune system?
In 1999, my lab encountered a mouse that was expected to die upon a lethal injection of cancer cells that uniformly killed all other normal mice we tested before, several dozens or even several hundreds. But he didn’t. In the following years, we came to realize that the ability of survival from lethal cancer challenges was a genetic trait that can be passed on to 40% of offspring if one parent was cancer-resistant. We also found out that the apparently innate, naturally-existing resistance was entirely mediated by the cellular immune system. One could deplete the cellular immune system and thus abolish the resistance or transfer the immune cells from the resistant donors to normal mice that would subsequently acquire similar resistance to cancer. It also became apparent that this kind of cancer resistance is very different from any previously described cancer immunity in the literature, this newly found innate cancer immunity was much stronger. We basically used the “normal mice” that were used for demonstrating immunity to cancer as our negative controls (non-resistant controls). We knew at very early stages that we were dealing with something very different, a rare display of Mother Nature’s power in a very simple form.
It appears that immunity to cancer in mice is an all-or-nothing affair, but in human beings it falls according to a normal distribution. How do you account for this difference, and does it suggest to you that — owing to the necessarily limited sample size of human beings that you have examined for cancer immunity to date — there may be people out there with “super” cancer immunity: not subject to change of seasons, stress, or some of the other limitations you have encountered?
The difference is based upon the fact that lab mice are most inbred and humans are outbred. The lab mice are maintained as pure strains. Within the strains, breeding is routinely done between brothers and sisters of same strain. After many generations of this kind of inbreeding, the genetic make-up of all the mice within the strains are very much homogenized. Thus, the mice within the same strains are considered as identical twins except occasional germline mutations. Most humans, on the other hand, except identical twins, are outbred populations and have distinct genetic make-up from each other.
Dr. Zheng Cui
The anticancer activity in human leukocytes is very dynamic. It suggests that it is indeed interfaced with many environmental factors, such as the changes of seasons, stress and aging. Before we have evidence showing that some humans may indeed have the “super” activity untouched by these factors, we would rather base our treatment strategies on the influence of these factors on most human donors. I do believe that there are humans out there to have such “super” activity but these individuals are rare in my opinion.
Why would cancer immunity be subject to external conditions such as stress or the seasons?
One thing we have collectively learned is that reactions of humans to things like stress is a physiological response called “fight or flight response”. The major mediator of this kind of response is the release of stress hormones such as glucocorticoids, or steroid hormones. These hormones become potent stimulators of SOME physiological functions, like heart beat, skeletal muscles contractions etc. Meanwhile, steroid hormones suppress many other physiological functions that are not immediately crucial for survival responses, or “fight or flight”. This is merely a redistribution of energy metabolism from auxiliary functions to strength-related functions. Short and not-so-frequent stress reaction is not considered harmful to humans and other animals. However, if the stress signals linger, the constitutive release of low level of stress hormones would have a lasting suppressive effects on the immune functions. It is well documented that stress suppresses immunity in many aspects.
Many biologists believe that life forms including humans began at equatorial regions where solar energy is constant year-round. As humans become civilized with tools to travel, they began to move away from the equator and into places with seasonal changes. In the early days of moving north and south from the equator, one way to confront winters when food became severely scarce was to hunker down in the caves and reduce energy-consuming activity. This kind of life pattern may have lasted for over a million years for humans to overcome the food shortage in the winter. Human activity in the winters only began after industrialization, about several hundred years or several thousands years ago at best. It is possible that the changes in our physiological strategies for overcoming winters adapted over a million years has not caught up with the only recent events of industrialization in recent centuries. The extremely cases for animal to overcome winters are the cases of hibernation, such as in the bears and ground squirrels. The metabolic rates could have easily dropped to 5-10% of their summer levels. Humans don’t go to that extreme. But many of us do feel winter lows in everything in comparison to summers. Maybe the immune reaction is just one of these things sensitive to winters when we have to confront flu and other infectious diseases. The flu season may be a good example of weakened immune system due to winters.
The next step in your research is to test a transfusion of cancer-killing granulocytes in human subjects. How will you choose your test subjects? When do you expect the trial to begin?
Our first trial for using granulocytes from cancer-resistant donors to treat cancer patients will begin, hopefully, in June of 2008, when the cancer-killing activity in leukocytes returns and after we are able to raise enough money to support the trial.
We will choose cancer patients who no longer respond to conventional cancer therapies. We prefer the patients who have what we called measurable diseases so that the outcome of the treatment can be easily monitored. Patients have to be ambulatory and have at least 4 months of life expectancy. Sometimes, even the best medicine can’t save the lives of patients if it is too late.
We will select the donors who are healthy and preferably young and have high cancer-killing activities. Of course, they should be free of infectious diseases.
How do you anticipate this research to impact the treatment of other diseases? Is there an immune component to heart disease or diabetes? It would seem that there is a straightforward (potential) application for HIV.
I would be very happy if this new treatment can bring some kind of clinical benefits to cancer patients, such as one or more extra years of good quality life without the side effects of chemo and radiation therapies. Everything more would be just bonuses. After that, I am pretty sure that there will be an army of scientists who would figure out how they can translate this new concept for treating other human conditions.
I’m continuing to get caught up on the Linkathon email. “Happy Crow” writes us:
You inspired me to write something while listening to the latest Fast-Forward radio. I don’t know what all the limits are on push-prizes, but what about one that created courses designed to let “the rest of us” benefit from the same kind of linguistic logic that allows philologists to comprehend a dozen-some languages?
Anyway, whether for link, or just for your reaction, here’s the url, and thanks in advance.”
My thought is that push prizes can be effective for most any type of development that people would like to see happen. The keys, I think, are:
The amount of money that’s offered for these prizes varies according to what needs to be accomplished. We’ve had fun recently talking on FastForward Radio about the success of both the DARPA Urban challenge, and Stephen Wolfram’s universal Turing machine question. DARPA paid out $3.5 million, Stephen Wolfram paid out $25,000. They both got their money’s worth I think.
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