// Life 3.0 // 13.06.18
Today's artificial intelligence tends to be narrow, with each system able to accomplish only very specific goals. In contrast, human intelligence is remarkably broad: a healthy child can learn to get better at almost anything. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is maximally broad: able to accomplish virtually any goal, including learning.
It feels much harder to multiply 231,457 by 271,528 than to recognise a friend in a photo, yet computers creamed us at arithmetic long ago, while human-level image recognition has only recently become possible. This fact that low-level sensorimotor tasks seem easy despite requiring enormous computational resources in known as Moravec's Paradox and is explained by the fact that our brain makes such tasks feel easy by dedicating massive amounts of customised hardware to them - more than a quarter of our brains in fact.
Digital brains are more difficult to build than clean-slate superhuman AGIs, just as mechanical birds turned out to be harder to build than airplanes.
"Computers are universal machines, their potential extends uniformly over a boundless expanse of tasks. Human potentials, on the other hand, are strong in areas long important for survival, but weak in things far removed." - Moravec
Substrate
Solids have many long-lived states whereas liquids and gases don’t. If you engrave someone's name on a gold ring, the information will still be there years later, because reshaping the gold required energy, but if you engrave it in the surface of a pond, it will be lost within a second as the water surface effortlessly changes its shape.
If you email a friend a document to print, the information may get copied in rapid succession from magnetizations on your hard drive to electric charges in your computer's working memory, radio waves in your wireless network, voltages in your router, laser pulses in your optical fibre and, finally, molecules on a piece of paper. In other words, information can take on a life of its own, independent of its psychical substrate.
From a physics perspective, everything that future life may want to create is simply elementary particles arranged in some particular way. Just as a blue whale is rearranged krill and krill is rearranged plankton, our entire solar system is simply hydrogen rearranged during 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution: gravity rearranged hydrogen into stars which rearranged the hydrogen into heavier atoms after which gravity rearranged such atoms into our planet where chemical and biological processes rearranged them into life.
Singularity
Intelligence is the ability to accomplish complex goals. Consciousness is subjective experience; the way information feels when being processed in certain ways.
A drop of water is wet, but an ice crystal and a cloud of steam aren’t, even though they are made of identical water molecules. Why? Because the property of wetness depends only on the arrangement of the molecules. It makes absolutely no sense to say that a single water molecule is wet, because the phenomenon of wetness emerges only when there are many molecules, arranged in the pattern we call liquid. So solids, liquids and gases are all emergent phenomena: they're more than the sum of their parts, because they have properties above and beyond the properties of their particles. They have properties that their particles lack. Just like solids, liquids and gases, I think consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, with properties above and beyond those of its particles.
Your consciousness lives in the past. Estimates suggest that it lags behind the outside world by about a quarter of a second. Intriguingly, you can often react to things faster than you can become conscious of them, which proves that the information processing in charge of your most rapid reactions must be unconscious.
The round-trip travel time for a message crossing Earth is about 0.1 second, roughly the timescale on which we humans think.
A Human in the Loop / Autonomous Weapons
Unlike nuclear weapons, A.I weapons require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials.
Chemists and biologists have broadly supported international agreements that have successfully prohibited chemical and biological weapons, just as most psychists supported the treaties banning space-based nuclear weapons and blinding laser weapons.
The Theodicy Problem
Why would a good god allow suffering? In an AI-protector-god scenario, the solution to the theodicy problem is that the perceived freedom makes humans happier overall.
"For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule." - Aristotle in Politics. Even after human enslavement became socially unacceptable in most of the world, enslavement of animals has continued unabated. Like human slave, non-human animals are subjected to branding, restraints, beatings, auctions, the separation of offspring from their parents, and forced voyages. Moreover, we are treating our ever-smarter machines as slaves without a second thought.
Since ancient times, philosophers have dreamt of deriving ethics (principles that govern how we should behave) from scratch, using only incontrovertible principles and logic. Alas, thousands of years later, the only consensus is that there is no consensus. While Aristotle emphasized virtues, Immanuel Kant emphasized duties and Utilitarians emphasized the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Kant argued that he could derive from first principles (which he called 'categorical imperatives') conclusions that many contemporary philosophers disagree with; that masturbation is worse than suicide, that homosexuality is abhorrent, that it's OK to kill bastards and that wives, servants and children are owned in a similar way to objects.
We humans are social animals who subdued all other species and conquered Earth thanks to our ability to cooperate. Some people have found it advantageous to collaborate in groups such as tribes, companies or nations where they in turn relinquish some power to a chief, boss or government. Some groups may in turn choose to relinquish some power to a governing body to improve coordination, with examples ranging from airline alliances, to the European Union.
What about spooky quantum speeds?
Have you ever tried and failed to swat a fly with your hand? The reason that it can react faster than you is that it's smaller, so it takes less time for information to travel between its eyes, brain and muscles. This 'bigger = slower' principle applies not only to biology, where the speed limit is set by how fast electrical signals can travel through neurons, but also to future cosmic life if no information can travel faster than light. So for an intelligent information-processing system, going big is a mixed blessing involving an interesting trade-off. On one hand, going bigger lets it contain more particles, which enable more complex thoughts. On the other hand, this slows down the rate at which it can have truly global thoughts, since it now takes longer for the relevant information to propagate to all its parts.
Special Relatively is superseded by General Relativity, where the speed limit is more liberal: nothing can travel faster than the speed of light through space, but space is free to expand as fast as it wants.
Thought Hierarchies
A living organism is an agent of bounded rationality that doesn't pursue a single goal, but instead follows rules of thumb for what to peruse and avoid. Our human minds perceive these evolved rules of thumb as feelings, which usually (and often without us being aware if it) guide our decision-making towards the ultimate goal of replication. Feelings of hunger and thirst protect us from starvation and dehydration, feelings of pain protect us from damaging our bodies, feelings of lust make us procreate, feelings of love and compassion make us help other carriers of our genes and those who help them and so on. Guided by these feelings, our brains can quickly and efficiently decide what to do without having to subject every choice to a tedious analysis of its ultimate implications for how many descendants we'll produce.
Schrödinger pointed out that a hallmark of a living system is that it maintains or reduces its entropy by increasing the entropy around it. In other words, the second law of thermodynamics has a life loophole: although the total entropy must increase, it's allowed to decrease in some places as long as it increases even more elsewhere. So life maintains or increases its complexity by making its environment messier.
The laws of physics appear to endow particles with the goal of arranging themselves so as to extract energy from their environment as efficiently as possible.
Bare Metal
Verification asks if a system meets its specifications, whereas validation asks if the correct specifications were chosen.
FLOPS are floating-point operations per second, say, how many 19-digit numbers can be multiplied each second.
Acrostic: where the first letter in each sentence forms a hidden message.
Auto-associative is memory by association rather than by address.
Even the vast dark expanses of space between galaxies tend to contain a significant number of intergalactic stars (rejects once ejected from their home galaxies).
There is a monster black hole in the middle of our Galaxy, which weighs about 4 million times as much as our Sun.
Some people with depression or schizophrenia have 'flat affect'.
The best-selling copyrighted book of all-time is The Guinness Book of Records.
Today's artificial intelligence tends to be narrow, with each system able to accomplish only very specific goals. In contrast, human intelligence is remarkably broad: a healthy child can learn to get better at almost anything. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is maximally broad: able to accomplish virtually any goal, including learning.
It feels much harder to multiply 231,457 by 271,528 than to recognise a friend in a photo, yet computers creamed us at arithmetic long ago, while human-level image recognition has only recently become possible. This fact that low-level sensorimotor tasks seem easy despite requiring enormous computational resources in known as Moravec's Paradox and is explained by the fact that our brain makes such tasks feel easy by dedicating massive amounts of customised hardware to them - more than a quarter of our brains in fact.
Digital brains are more difficult to build than clean-slate superhuman AGIs, just as mechanical birds turned out to be harder to build than airplanes.
"Computers are universal machines, their potential extends uniformly over a boundless expanse of tasks. Human potentials, on the other hand, are strong in areas long important for survival, but weak in things far removed." - Moravec
Substrate
Solids have many long-lived states whereas liquids and gases don’t. If you engrave someone's name on a gold ring, the information will still be there years later, because reshaping the gold required energy, but if you engrave it in the surface of a pond, it will be lost within a second as the water surface effortlessly changes its shape.
If you email a friend a document to print, the information may get copied in rapid succession from magnetizations on your hard drive to electric charges in your computer's working memory, radio waves in your wireless network, voltages in your router, laser pulses in your optical fibre and, finally, molecules on a piece of paper. In other words, information can take on a life of its own, independent of its psychical substrate.
From a physics perspective, everything that future life may want to create is simply elementary particles arranged in some particular way. Just as a blue whale is rearranged krill and krill is rearranged plankton, our entire solar system is simply hydrogen rearranged during 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution: gravity rearranged hydrogen into stars which rearranged the hydrogen into heavier atoms after which gravity rearranged such atoms into our planet where chemical and biological processes rearranged them into life.
Singularity
Intelligence is the ability to accomplish complex goals. Consciousness is subjective experience; the way information feels when being processed in certain ways.
A drop of water is wet, but an ice crystal and a cloud of steam aren’t, even though they are made of identical water molecules. Why? Because the property of wetness depends only on the arrangement of the molecules. It makes absolutely no sense to say that a single water molecule is wet, because the phenomenon of wetness emerges only when there are many molecules, arranged in the pattern we call liquid. So solids, liquids and gases are all emergent phenomena: they're more than the sum of their parts, because they have properties above and beyond the properties of their particles. They have properties that their particles lack. Just like solids, liquids and gases, I think consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, with properties above and beyond those of its particles.
Your consciousness lives in the past. Estimates suggest that it lags behind the outside world by about a quarter of a second. Intriguingly, you can often react to things faster than you can become conscious of them, which proves that the information processing in charge of your most rapid reactions must be unconscious.
The round-trip travel time for a message crossing Earth is about 0.1 second, roughly the timescale on which we humans think.
A Human in the Loop / Autonomous Weapons
Unlike nuclear weapons, A.I weapons require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials.
Chemists and biologists have broadly supported international agreements that have successfully prohibited chemical and biological weapons, just as most psychists supported the treaties banning space-based nuclear weapons and blinding laser weapons.
The Theodicy Problem
Why would a good god allow suffering? In an AI-protector-god scenario, the solution to the theodicy problem is that the perceived freedom makes humans happier overall.
"For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule." - Aristotle in Politics. Even after human enslavement became socially unacceptable in most of the world, enslavement of animals has continued unabated. Like human slave, non-human animals are subjected to branding, restraints, beatings, auctions, the separation of offspring from their parents, and forced voyages. Moreover, we are treating our ever-smarter machines as slaves without a second thought.
Since ancient times, philosophers have dreamt of deriving ethics (principles that govern how we should behave) from scratch, using only incontrovertible principles and logic. Alas, thousands of years later, the only consensus is that there is no consensus. While Aristotle emphasized virtues, Immanuel Kant emphasized duties and Utilitarians emphasized the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Kant argued that he could derive from first principles (which he called 'categorical imperatives') conclusions that many contemporary philosophers disagree with; that masturbation is worse than suicide, that homosexuality is abhorrent, that it's OK to kill bastards and that wives, servants and children are owned in a similar way to objects.
We humans are social animals who subdued all other species and conquered Earth thanks to our ability to cooperate. Some people have found it advantageous to collaborate in groups such as tribes, companies or nations where they in turn relinquish some power to a chief, boss or government. Some groups may in turn choose to relinquish some power to a governing body to improve coordination, with examples ranging from airline alliances, to the European Union.
What about spooky quantum speeds?
Have you ever tried and failed to swat a fly with your hand? The reason that it can react faster than you is that it's smaller, so it takes less time for information to travel between its eyes, brain and muscles. This 'bigger = slower' principle applies not only to biology, where the speed limit is set by how fast electrical signals can travel through neurons, but also to future cosmic life if no information can travel faster than light. So for an intelligent information-processing system, going big is a mixed blessing involving an interesting trade-off. On one hand, going bigger lets it contain more particles, which enable more complex thoughts. On the other hand, this slows down the rate at which it can have truly global thoughts, since it now takes longer for the relevant information to propagate to all its parts.
Special Relatively is superseded by General Relativity, where the speed limit is more liberal: nothing can travel faster than the speed of light through space, but space is free to expand as fast as it wants.
Thought Hierarchies
A living organism is an agent of bounded rationality that doesn't pursue a single goal, but instead follows rules of thumb for what to peruse and avoid. Our human minds perceive these evolved rules of thumb as feelings, which usually (and often without us being aware if it) guide our decision-making towards the ultimate goal of replication. Feelings of hunger and thirst protect us from starvation and dehydration, feelings of pain protect us from damaging our bodies, feelings of lust make us procreate, feelings of love and compassion make us help other carriers of our genes and those who help them and so on. Guided by these feelings, our brains can quickly and efficiently decide what to do without having to subject every choice to a tedious analysis of its ultimate implications for how many descendants we'll produce.
Schrödinger pointed out that a hallmark of a living system is that it maintains or reduces its entropy by increasing the entropy around it. In other words, the second law of thermodynamics has a life loophole: although the total entropy must increase, it's allowed to decrease in some places as long as it increases even more elsewhere. So life maintains or increases its complexity by making its environment messier.
The laws of physics appear to endow particles with the goal of arranging themselves so as to extract energy from their environment as efficiently as possible.
Bare Metal
Verification asks if a system meets its specifications, whereas validation asks if the correct specifications were chosen.
FLOPS are floating-point operations per second, say, how many 19-digit numbers can be multiplied each second.
Acrostic: where the first letter in each sentence forms a hidden message.
Auto-associative is memory by association rather than by address.
Even the vast dark expanses of space between galaxies tend to contain a significant number of intergalactic stars (rejects once ejected from their home galaxies).
There is a monster black hole in the middle of our Galaxy, which weighs about 4 million times as much as our Sun.
Some people with depression or schizophrenia have 'flat affect'.
The best-selling copyrighted book of all-time is The Guinness Book of Records.
