Normal Human Heroes

September 30th, 2009
Living out in the boondocks I’m on a very open stretch of land, sprinkled with a few trees and houses, and the juxtaposition between human edifice and weather seems stronger here. I enjoy that contrast, particularly with inclement weather, as long as I’m not out in it for long. Massive forces and bodies, shifting and colliding over the surface of the planet, and yet these tiny human specks are often not even bothered enough to stop what they’re doing. We’re so fantastically small in comparison, so fragile seeming, and yet with that wonderful spark of intelligence we can shape our world around us to suit our desires. Beyond the strength the house affords I sometimes like to step out under the towering dark clouds, into the thick of the rain and the wind, and feel both the exhilaration of them beating down and their effective powerlessness.
These massive forces also hint at those greater ones beyond the surface of Earth, those that really would kill you in a few seconds, without hatred or compassion. Human beings are wonderfully ecumenical but we cannot survive exposure in our upper atmosphere or under the oceans, on any other known planet or outer space. Even there intelligence has already accomplished amazing feats, taking this soft skinned prairie-dwelling species into the air, through the vacuum of space and onto another astronomical object, something it was ridiculously not evolved for.
Yet intelligence may not be the final victor in its fight with these massive dumb elements. A volcanic eruption already nearly finished us, and future asteroids or gamma ray bursts could end our adventure with all the moral deliberation of an acid neutralizing a base. By including those massive effects less intelligent than us, we might consider the endless march of technological progress, or of evolution – biological, memetic, or upload reproduction. None of these systemic effects have dreams, hopes, loves or joys, and to achieve an appreciable chance of a world we find meaning in we need intelligence to continue its triumphs*. It’s the reigning champions Monkey-Brained Savanna Creatures vs The Universe, final round.
* Of course intelligence won’t always primarily mean human intelligence, but for now we can consider it as Us against the unintelligent march towards creating such beings.

September 25th, 2009
Evidence suggests that when looking for short term partners, women enjoy a large shoulder-to-hip ratio, dominant behavior, slow wide-reaching movements, and not being forcibly turned into computronium. Women are also more sexually responsive and faithful when their partner has dissimilar genes for fighting off disease-causing bacteria, and when their bodies haven’t been decimated by supervirulent engineered pathogens.
(For those familiar with OvercomingBias and LessWrong)

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.