10:45 Attendee Feedback
A guy stopped to tell me he listens to the podcast. Said he wanted to keep his criticism positive. Finds it too “folksy and rambling.” Half of that is by design, of course.
10:30 Gregory Stock
Evolution of Post-Human Intelligence
Exuberance doesn’t necessarily pan out. Lots of great visions of how things will be but we don’t get there in the time frames we expect. We are suffering from a data Tsunami.
Kurzweil’s vision as seen in his new film is the triumph of love / human values.
Stock sees the Singularity as the extinction of humanity.
“A journey into we know not where.”
We have no idea what will be on the other side — no reason to think our values will survive.
We need a macroevolutionary perspective.
We are animating the inanimate world — breathing complexity that rivals life into the sand beneath our feet.
Genomic revolution — we are beginning to take control of our own evolutionary process.
A transformation is underway. Won’t we be transcended?
Evolution isn’t static. Evolution itself is evolving. (Accompanied by several amusing photos of animals having sex.)
Social evolution — ideas can compete and evolve in the abstract now — rapidly accelerating the process. Traditional Darwinian evolution is being replaced. No exponentials in Darwinian evolution — other things are happening faster by orders of magnitude.
Past evolutionary breakthroughs:
First — life out of non-life. Blue green alage 3.5 billion years ago.
Next — complex cells, symbiosis of bacteria into more complex organisms
Next — mutlicellular organisms
Next — to planetary superorgnism (Accompanied by images of the US at night, internet connections, city skylines.)
This is not a metaphor — it’s a real organism with its own nervous, digestive, and cisulatiry systems. Internal processes. Internal competition. Requires no external membrane.
Simple biology took simple nonbiology (calcium phosphate) to create bone. This led to the sophsiticate orgganisms we have today. Now complex biology is manipulating complex nonbiology.
New levels of complexity subsume old ones. We are going to no longer be “free range.” We’re going to be left behind.
What does an amydala cell know about fear? Very little. What do we know about what’s happening with the superorganism? Very little.
The Singularity — the future is going to get very weird very quickly. What does it mean for us?
Human ehtics and values are not unique to us — they are critical to primate social strategy. Chimps have the basic building blocks — sharing, empathy, loyalty (images of chimps grieving a lost fellow, a chimp trying to comfort a crying child.)
Why would we expect these values to persist? They cyber world is all about speed, boundaries are weak, competition is intense. Different reality will require different values. Uploading — humans will disappear through the skylight. The only way to preserve human values is to stop evolution.
Singleton rule might be one way to do this
Superorganism communities is another possibility
If top-down control is the only way to preserve humanity, humanity is over.
Current debates — cloning, designer kids, genetic engineering, human enhancement, AI — are just symbolic. And thay are all the same argument. Brings a lot of angst. But people SHOULD be worried — the line between the natural and technological is being permanently blurred / eliminated.
Change will come from the nimble, the bold. “Notwithstanding
Sigma Bio Sciences CEO and founder.
Managed Alzheimer’s research — the posetr child for unment medical need.
Very prevalent — if you make it to 85, you have a 50% chance of getting it.
Sigma looks at proteins.PP2A may be key — started looking for things to activate it. Coffee — 4 cups or more per day reduces incidence of diabetes and Parkinsons. (Yay!) Coffee bean extract (SIG1012) administered to mice, extends life, delays motor problems.
On to human trials. Coffee is generally recognized as being safe to consume.
9:45 Michael Vassar
The singularity — is it a rational thing to discuss?
Some things are rational but not scientific — building the Roman aqueducts, building a Gothic cathedral. Civilizations have been around for thousands of years — in the 17th century two new things came along science and capitalism.
There were precursors to science, eg Archimedes. rational, mathematiical, useful but not science.
–Didn’t test a hypothesis
–No organized literature/publication standards
–Archimedes’ method works but requires honest geniuses
Scholarship works because it is basically pattern recognition with built-in correction. Scholarship is a scaled up version of how children learn. Society has more resources than a child — scholars are “superchildren” who learn for society.
There is no innate human drive to keep learning, to keep changing one’s view of the world. Scholarship fails because of correlated errors, bias against unexpected claims, inaccessibility for outsiders, and standard biases of human cognition.
What changed in the 17th century — radical skepticism
Enlightenment Science
Build on long chains of reasoning from solid foundations
Look for surprising conclusions
Test conclusions
Doesn’t require geniuses!
Enlightenment science was a good start
Seemingly necessary assumptions may be false
Its form can be imitated to aid justification of what you want to believe
Darwin and Wallace — working independently came to the same conclusion.
The Singularity
Independent origination of similar hypothesis (Von Neumann, Vinge)
Logical argument — the intelligence explosion
Massive data analysis — Kurzweil
Nominal buy-in by credible non-experts
Therefore the Singularity is rational and scientific.
9:15 AM Looks like the live feed is not happening — Sorry,Sally