Normal Human Heroes

September 17th, 2009
Riding the bus this morning we were stopped at one corner for a bit, and there was a woman there waiting for another line. She was dressed very simply in a work uniform, with her hair back, and a 2 or 3 year old son in her arms. He was looking about, squinting and seeming a little irritated with the sunlight. She seemed in that quiet early-morning mood, and though she gave off a strong impression of intelligence and maturity I got the feeling the child was unplanned, perhaps had when she was still a teenager. I’d also guess she was single, and I started to think about life and outcomes we may never have wished for but that we come to live with. Then, as he was looking with confusion at the bus or something else, she came out of her reverie and with great warmth and easy affection, kissed him on the cheek.

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 20th, 2009
While I sympathized with singularitarian thought, I didn’t fully consider myself a singularitarian. Maybe it’s due to some bad rap the community has (founded or not, I can’t yet say) for sometimes being elitist or isolationist, or unwilling to integrate with other efforts to protect the future. Thinking about it though, I guess I basically am one. I currently think that if we stick around we’re going to have to deal with superintelligence eventually, that doing so could realize very negative or very positive futures (including a potentially ideal way to combat all known existential risks), and I’m working to make sure we build such a thing well, and survive till such a point. But while you could describe me as a singularitarian, I don’t really identify that way. I don’t even identify as a transhumanist.
I don’t think homo sapiens sapiens are very good at keeping instrumental goals and terminal goals separate, finishing a LessWrong article I had started earlier I also found something by Eliezer on the topic. The heavily associational operation of the mind seems partially to blame for this shifting of instrumental values into apparently terminal values. Regardless I think a great deal of very unproductive argument stems from people identifying and associating with instrumental values. If we identify with our terminal values (assuming they are distinct and distinguishable), we’ll likely find most all of us have a great deal in common. For a highly relevant example, consider the recent furor over singularitarianism, revolving around comments by Peter Thiel and Mike Treder . Like in most avenues of life, I believe everyone involved shared terminal values of human life, freedom, happiness etc. If we realize that all members of the discussion essentially share our terminal values, we can see that they’re working towards our own ultimate goals. With shared respect and increased trust we can then sit down and talk strategy. Provided of course that you’re willing to readily give up a prior promising solution, be it an egalitarian democratic process or protective superintelligence, if it no longer seems the best route to accomplishing terminal goals.
I think I’ve run into people who actually consider building smarter than human minds a terminal value, but I don’t know of any singularitarian who thinks so. Nor do I consider the creation of Friendly AI a terminal value, and I’m sure some (other)  singularitarians would agree. The same goes for immortality, discovering the inner secrets of subjective happiness, and immersive VR. If you can show me a case that any of those things are less likely to lead to human happiness and freedom than alternatives, I’ll start working on the alternatives. Admittedly some of them would be hard to persuade me from, but that’s a technical point about strategy. I’m assuming in the end Bill McKibben and I both feel strongly about animal and human well-being (though perhaps his terminal goals also involve plants).
So if you want to indicate succinctly some of the ideas I hold, yes you can call me a singularitarian, a transhumanist and a technoprogressive. And though I’m concerned about more than just AI and would love to help a variety of people in their efforts, you could probably call this a singularitarian blog. As for what I identify myself with, it’s “human” and maybe “altruist”, and that’s about it.

August 18th, 2009
I got back recently from an 8-week research internship in Idaho, working on artificial neural networks. Like my 3-month study in Japan, my reasons for going had nothing to do with meeting people, but like Japan the other students are what I most remember. Unlike in routine life where everyone has their established groups and limited motivation to branch out, here everyone is a stranger, and since almost everyone likes to interact with people they don’t stay that way for long. When I went to Japan, I hadn’t had the experience of getting to know so many new people since junior high, and it really kind of blew me mind. We obviously all shared some kind of large interest in Japan, and I thought having less in common with the Idaho students might make a large difference, but it didn’t much. These kinds of things make me wish we didn’t normally live such cloistered social lives, but with few exceptions, c’est la vie.
It’s interesting to think back to first meeting the other students, getting first impressions, running through the conventional where-are-you-from and what’s-your-major, etc. This is the level on which we know most of the people we interact with in life. And yet most of those first impressions weren’t very accurate, and they necessarily all did an abysmal job of representing those people’s depth and complexity.
I love to think back to first meetings and imagine telling the past me all the things I would learn about a person, all the things we would do, and how surprised past me would be. We each have people who’ve radically affected our lives, who’ve become fixtures and critical elements of our stories. With the exception of some family, those grand arching interactions all began with a “Hi, how are you?” or a “Hey, what’s up?”. The tip-of-the-iceberg cliche just doesn’t cut it.
Back at home, I feel like I know those other students relatively well. There’s sure to be much more to learn, things that only years of friendship might uncover, but those 2 months made a world of difference from being strangers. I care about them, their lives and their futures, but I don’t actually think those people are exceptional. I can’t find any good reason to believe that a great many of the people I see or meet for a short time aren’t just as interesting and enjoyable and able to be missed, if one gets to know them.
There are currently 6,778,285,580 people on earth, according to the estimate by the U.S. Census Bureau. Yes, some of those people are basically  assholes. And there are some exceptional people who are just as trite and uninteresting as they first appear, who do not merely hide or repress their depth so much as they utterly lack it. But unless you’re a real misanthrope, there are billions of people on this world that with time and a common language you’d come to appreciate and enjoy. Millions upon millions of potential friends, kept from being so only by lack of social and physical proximity. A million years, lived as we live them now, would not be enough to know them all†. And each and every one of those intricate and valuable lives would be lost in an existential disaster‡.

†  If we assume conservatively that friendship can be shared with 1 in 14 people, that leaves about 500 million such people. If you got to know one a day (really know, not just learn a few facts about), this would take you more than 1,369,863 years.
‡ Or possibly have so few survivors that the human race will be unable to maintain its numbers, or be repressed by an immortal totalitarianism, etc

August 12th, 2009

It seems very unlikely that anyone who reads (or more properly will read) this blog doesn’t also read AcceleratingFuture, but for those who don’t, stop by and especially check out Michael Anissimov’s recent introduction to Friendly AI. If superintelligence is possible, this subject is of great and intimate importance to each of our lives.
(My outlook on the future is more similar to his than anyone else’s I’ve come across, and for those interested in some of the blog differences, my plan is for this blog to be primarily about motivation [though Anissimov already covers it more than others I’ve seen]. While I plan to continue increasing my knowledge of relevant subjects, very intelligent treatments of the issues themselves are already present in several places, Michael’s blog being one. If you’ve already been convinced of the plausibility of an existential risk, potential danger, or just a way the world could be better, my hope is to help you go out and do something about it. )

August 12th, 2009

“Daylight”
I’ve been listening to Matt and Kim for a while now, they’re a local band out of Brooklyn that a friend got me into. Besides the music itself I really enjoy how happy they are in all of their videos. I fantasize about a world in which more people are free and able to be that happy, at least if they want to. I have some friends going through hard times, and they in turn have it better than the millions who lack basic necessities. Even on the scales of happiness we’re familiar with already, there is a lot of room for improvement.

August 11th, 2009 (See the About page above for more information on the underlying ideas of this blog.)
If there is anything to the majority of transhumanist claims, we are at an exceptionally interesting point in history. As technological progress accelerates, radical changes in the fabric of human life seem possible within our lifetimes. Negligible senescence, full immersion virtual reality, better minds and bodies, and neuroengineered gradients of bliss all might be possible. So might the death of the nearly 7 billion people on Earth, technological domination of a world totalitarianism, and futures in which humankind is alive but exists as something we would never have rationally chosen to become. Whether our future resembles utopia, a planetary graveyard or prison, or something in between depends on our actions as a society.  Despite how bizarre it sounds to say it, it may be that all of our lives, the human race, the world, and perhaps even the galaxy are at stake. This sounds like a comic book job for Superman.
And yet not surprisingly, Superman is nowhere to be found. Calls for Batman and Spiderman have likewise turned up nothing but some movies and books. For better or worse, we live in a world without Jedis. Even futures posthumans rely on us to enable their existence, and we cannot expect cyborgs Major Kusanagi and Batou to solve our problems; JC Denton is likewise out. There is no Neo.
All we are left with is us. We don’t have superhuman fighting skills and research departments on call to invent slick gadgets. We are neither mystical wizards nor beings from another dimension, we haven’t fallen into nuclear reactors and gained godlike powers, and getting angry doesn’t give us golden hair and a thousand times our usual strength. Sadly, artistic license doesn’t allow us to get shot 20 times and straggle home. And despite desires to the contrary, we don’t yet have the technology to enable perfect memories, orders-of-magnitude faster thought, or 30 minute sprints on single gulps of air.
What we do have are foibles, eccentricities, and fixations. We have imperfections and disabilities, irrational modes of thought and poor calibration. We’re dragged down by fear and self-doubt and insecurities. We’re given to rash and ineffective violence, and to thinking in tribalistic, us-versus-them mindsets. We shake and we cry and we bleed, we get sick and we get disparaged and we get depressed. We don’t even know if we can make any difference.
And yet I think there is reason for hope that we can. History is full of examples of “ordinary humans” rising to face challenges that seemed beyond them. Abraham Lincoln once said “We are now on the brink of destruction. It appears to me that even the Almighty is against us. I can hardly see a ray of hope.” Yet his efforts were ultimately successful. And regardless of what the future may hold we are still the most powerful and intelligent creatures on this planet, and are likely to remain so for several years. Unless you believe in a god, there is no entity more able to step forward. If you could choose only one being to apply itself to these issues, it would be a human being.
Even now we can improve ourselves to become people better equipped for navigating our future. We can notice and account for our weaknesses when going forward, even as we work to reduce them. We can become more rational and better calibrated. We can manage our fears, keep our doubts well matched to reality, and face our insecurities. We can hold ourselves back from intuitive but damaging violent action, and force ourselves to remain open to new ideas, even those we most dislike, in order to best know reality and the course we ought to take. We can realize that our enemies are human error and human hatred, not human beings. And we can cultivate and maintain healthy bodies and minds, to keep us around and at our most effective.
Our actions that we take now, today and in the coming years, may determine whether humanity is a funny little short-lived oddity or the seed of a humane and joyous starfaring civilization. All that has gone before and all that will come after may rest on our shoulders. Of course it’s true it might not, maybe we’re even ”fated” to destruction or paradise, and then maybe we should just say to hell with the chance to save 6.7 billion lives, to help bring about lifetimes of potentially thousands of years and better lives for all humankind and other creatures. A person is free to throw up their hands at the task and concentrate on having the most fun they can now. But there’s some chance that what you do will matter, even if just by allowing a few more lives access to a “posthuman utopia”. And if we ever get to such a pleasant place, which life would you be more proud to have lead?
Please, don’t sell yourself short. Don’t leave the future up to unfeeling trends and social phenomena. Allow yourself to be the very best you can be, allow yourself to be great. And yes, save the world.

Comic by Ryan Armand. Click the picture for his comic, it’s pretty cool. Thanks to uionioph for filling me in on the author.

I couldn’t post new entries to the site for about 2 weeks, and also had finals, so I just now got around to this and apparently NHH was hacked. I’m going rebuild the site, shouldn’t take me long. If you see this in the meantime, yes this is the same place.