Climbing Technological Mount Improbable, by Extropia DaSilva
This is the talk given by Extropia DaSilva at the seminar on Transhumanism and Religion in Second Life, on Sunday, April 29, 2007. Published with permission. Unfortunately time was too short for Extropia to answer all questions she received. Please ask her about Life, the Universe and Everything here.
Hello. The talk I am presenting today is called ‘Climbing Technological Mount Improbable’, which mostly concentrates on cumulative and convergent knowledge, and how they are very likely to frustrate techno-luddism and fundamentalism.
From the Inquisition placing Gallileo under house arrest, to the Scopes Monkey Trial, there have been examples throughout history of dogma standing in the way of scientific knowledge. Transhumanists know only too well the frustration that must have been felt by those individuals whose ideas have been attacked on the basis of contradicting entrenched dogma. It also seems that, where transhumanism is concerned, fundamentalism has a certain advantage over its predecessors. I mean, if you hold the belief that our planetary system has the Earth at its centre, and not the sun, the objective truth will ultimately be determined, since we are talking about an outcome of physical laws laid down tens of billions of years before human beings existed. Fundamentalists could deny the objective truth, but could not actually rewrite the physical laws of nature and inevitably their folly was exposed. But transhumanism is somewhat different. It IS in our control, we DO have an active influence in the direction technology heads. This was the take-home message of Bill McKibben’s book ‘Enough’. Literally, that society could, if enough people wish it, decide that we need not guide technology down roads that lead to a fundamental redesign of the human species.
While McKibben wrote his book, and while I read it, there were several companies and organizations explicitly working on technologies that will usher in the radical future. As well as providing the research and development required to realise transhumanist dreams, I believe they serve the purpose of giving false hopes to those groups who stand opposed to these goals.
This sense of security comes in two forms. Firstly, the difference between what would be required to realise nanotechnology, negligible senescence and strong AI, and what represents today’s state-of-the-art…well the gap seems so huge it is foolish to believe such breakthroughs can happen in a lifetime. So it seems! Secondly, when it seems a breakthrough is likely, the opponents no doubt think they can prevent it. All they need do is get the public on their side and lobby for the closure of these organizations, and we will all go back to life As It Was Meant To Be (copyright, Leon Kass).
I did say these were false hopes, and the reason I believe this is so is because I see the radical future emerging, not so much because of a few institutions explicitly working on it, but because it is the inevitable outcome of cumulative and convergent knowledge. D’you remember how Velociraptors hunted in ‘Jurrassic Park’? One distracting its prey’s attention while more sneaked up on it from behind? That is what companies explicitly working on GRIN technologies are like. They direct the attention of luddite groups, get them focused on one narrow area, and while they are distracted technology as a whole can sneak up.
Now, I do not believe that this is an intentional strategy of these organizations. It is just that they give the impression that nanotech etc is the pre-determined goal of centralized institutions. But the majority of inventors, companies and organizations have no interest on explicitly realising transhumanist goals. They only wish to research and impliment sensible, reasonable upgrades to existing tools and services. It is this ongoing effort, the desire to provide better medicine, more efficient manufacturing, software a bit smarter than last generation’s, that the goals of transhumanism will actually arise from. Keep your eye fixed on the likes of Zyvex, or the Singularity Institute, and you are probably going to miss the direction from which GRIN tech really comes!
But when it does seem that breakthroughs are near, a public scared by such extreme tech will give weight to Luddite calls for relinquishment, right? Actually, I think a propper consideration of ‘cumulative’ knowledge shows the answer to be ‘no’. Cummulative knowledge is most eloquently explained by Richard Dawkins as ‘climbing Mount Improbable’. In his own words, ‘one side of the mountain is a sheer cliff, impossible to climb, but the other side is a gentle slope to the summit. On the summit sits a complex device’.
Dawkins is of course talking about products of natural selection and how nature pulled off the trick of putting together natural machines that seem to have been designed by an intelligent ‘watchmaker’. But I think ‘Mount Improbable’ serves equally well as an explanation to this question: ‘Why, in a world full of technology quite dazzling compared to what was available in the past, do forcastes of future technology sound too incredible to believe’?
The answer is that these forecastes make a metaphorical leap up the sheer cliff-face of Mount Improbable. But present technologies got where they are today via a gentle climb up its slope. A case in point: Try to imagine that this is 1985. In this year, Apple have a third-party hard drive available, which retails at $2000. For that money, you get something almost as big as a shoebox with a total capacity of 10 megabytes. Now try to imagine the skepticism that would greet a suggestion that, one day, a hard-drive-based device would usurp the Sony Walkman as the most popular portable music player. I mean, come on! Wired’s Steven Levy commented, ‘ha! The entire capacity (was) insufficient to store the MP3 file of Neil Young’s ‘down by the river” . You might as well put a personal CD player and a bunch of Cds in a shoebox and lug that about! Darn sight cheaper than a hard drive, non?
Ok, so who has an iPod?
And who, when they first saw an iPod, nearly fainted and was carted off intoning ‘Ohmigod it had a capacity of 5 GIGS! Squeezed into a hard drive small enough to swallow!! And they manufactured those drives for tens of dollars! Tens! As opposed to thousands!!!’? I bet the answer is, ‘not many’. Why? Because generally speaking people do not compare the latest technology with the first of its kind, but rather with the technology of the generation immediately preceeding it. Let’s assume the Toshiba hard drive in the original iPod was at step ‘N’ for storage technologies and the 1985 brick was stage ‘C’. Obviously compared to step ‘C’, a hard drive at step ‘N’ will be a very significant, even a dazzling, improvement. But hardly anyone judges it against step ‘C’. They judge it against step ‘M’ and from there it was not much of a leap at all. Just the next generation. As sensible as the step from ‘C’ to ‘D’.
Ok, so now consider Hugo de Garis’s comment. If memory serves, he pointed out that a grain of sand was sufficient space to build a computer a billion times more powerful than a human brain. Something like that. He then wondered what would happen if that super-duper nanocomputer were installed in the brain of your next door neighbour? She would be Homo-Superior! Wars would break out between Artilects and Terrans (unaugmented people)!
Sorry, this is wrong. De Garis made a metaphorical leap up Mount Improbable, all the way to the summit or stage ‘Z‘. But by the time we have designed and mass-produced version 2.0 of the human brain, we will already have produced version 1.99, 1.98 and so on, giving a smooth gradient all the way down to current neuroprosthesis such as artificial retinas and cochlears. I do not think enough people appreciate that the incredible technologies described by transhumanists actually arise from many thousands of tiny advances that ocurr each day. By the time version 2.0 of the human brain emerges from vapourware, it will be judged, not as a terrifyingly large leap in cognitive ability, but simply a mundane upgrade from stage ‘Y’, the previous generation of brain augmentation.
What I am saying is, when GRIN technologies actually fulfill transhumanist dreams they will not be radical and scary, they will just be the next sensible step. But all this talk of progressing from B to C to D makes it sound as if we climb Mount Improbable through linear steps. I am sure you are all aware of Kurzweil’s Law Of Accelerating Returns and what it says about ‘intuitive linear beliefs’, no need to go into all that. Instead, I will now talk about ‘convergent’ knowledge and how it may propell us far further up Mount Improbable than we might suppose.
Convergent knowledge is when one branch of knowledge comes to influence a seemingly separate area, regardless of the fact that they would appear to have nothing in common. Take, for example, the disease rabies and artificial intelligence. You would be hard-pressed to see any connection between the two, huh? Ah, but researchers have modified the virus that causes rabies, thereby turning it into a tool that can cross the synaptic space of a targeted cell just once to identify all the neurons to which it is directly connected. The researchers who developed this point out that it will ‘offer us an unprecedented view of the brain’. And I am guessing that we all know the relationship between reverse-engineering the brain and developing strong AI.
Another example. If you study the life-cycle of insects, you would perhaps not think your research would end up helping Parkinson’s Disease sufferers. But, according to New Scientist, ‘Rheogene…has come up with a technique that might address concerns (of the safety of a drug for Parkinson’s called GDNF). It has developed a safety switch that should allow GDNF to be delivered to the brain by gene therapy, precisely controlling the amount produced. The switch is based on the receptor for ecydsone, the hormone that makes insects shed their external skeletons’.
How on Earth do you make the leap from a hormone that makes insects shed their external skeleton, to a safety switch for gene therapy? Well, consider what the software tool Geneways can do. ‘It reads tens of thousands of scientific papers and files information automatically on a database. In response to a query about a certain molecular pathway, the database can then define how that molecule relates to others, a process that allows the discovery of new molecular interactions and pathways’.
I don’t know if this is how Parkinson’s researchers came to learn that ecydsone would make an effective safety switch or not, but it does highlight the fact that we are able to tie together increasingly large and diverse areas of scientific knowledge, and turn this mess of information into easily-searchable and accessible data. Apply cumulative knowledge to something like Google, and perhaps you ultimately get smart software tools that can read billions of journals and blogs, listen in on all the chatter of the scientific community, and in microseconds see in that complex web answers to intractable problems no human could ever perceive, even if they spent a lifetime studying the data on the Web.
Vernor Vinge well understands the potential. ‘We need to extend the capabilities of search engines and social networks to produce services that can bridge barriers created by technical jargon and forge links between unrelated specialities, bringing research groups with complimentary problems and solutions together’.
Vinge can rest assured that, yes, search engines and social networks are evolving to meet these criteria. And we transhumanists can rest assured that convergent knowledge will make the fundamentalist dream of halting technological progress practically impossible. Why? Because it will be impossible to predict how and why, when and if, any seemingly innocuous research will amount to a spark sending a fire of convergent knowledge spreading through cyberspace, from which breakthrough answers to GRIN technologies will arise.
Consider the following fields: Material sciences, mechanical engineering, physics, life sciences, chemistry, biology, electrical engineering, computer science and IT. Some are clearly related to others, some have no relationship, right? Wrong. They ALL related to the field of nanotechnology. And because all these fields converge on nanotech, research in any one of these areas could result in breakthroughs for molecular nanotechnology. It might be clearly related, like a biologist reverse-engineering a biological nanomotor like that of the Flagellum bacteria. But equally, a solution might take the form of an emergent pattern of a billion research topics, comments and insights, spread across all the disciplines in a complex web of cause-and-effect. Possibly, no single document or comment has anything to do with Drexlerian nanotechnology per se, it is just that a solution to some intractible problem becomes obvious to deeply-networked research groups who are aided by software tools that find possible solutions emerging from other, perhaps seemingly unrelated, areas of science and which then translate the specialised language used by one group into that used by another.
How can the luddites REALLY hope to stop the emergence of nanotech? How, when it is emerging out of so many diverse fields? To do so, they would have to go as far as telling shampoo manufacturers they can no longer research new formulas, lest their chemists open up a pathway to molecular manufacturing!
Given the power of cumulative and convergent knowledge, I think a strong case can be made regarding the ultimate inevitability of the eventual realisation of transhumanist goals in AI, nanotechnology etc. These are, after all, the outcome of trends whose continuation is essential for the future survival of human civilization:
Understanding the body and brain at the molecular level upwards. Supported by overwhelming need to alleviate suffering from disease and senescence, we are reverse-engineering the tools needed to understand the mechanisms behind the many terrible ailments that inflict needless misery on unfortunate people and so design effective countermeasures. Such research is also yielding valuable insights for understanding the principles of intelligence, and molecular nanotechnology.
Refining the manufacturing process, a great necessity considering the fact we have finite material resources to work from. Every step towards refining the manufacturing process is progress towards manipulating matter with atomic precision.
Improving the reliability and user-friendliness of IT technology, by learning how to give software more autonomy, and to intelligently work with people, thereby minimizing those infuriating moments when we must dumb down our intelligence to account to for the stupidity of machines.
Of course these noble efforts are going to continue, but I do not wish to encourage complacency. Fundamentalism may not be able to permanently halt technological progress, but it can temporarily frustrate it. We see this happening today with regards to biotechnology. The public is largely distrustful of GM. Markets have to cater for consumerist tastes and the public’s distrust of, say, eating cloned beef, is a formidable force and an obstacle that we need to address. But how?
I believe the answer lies in educating the layperson, so that it is understood that much of the negative publicity surrounding GM is more propoganda than fact. There is a great deal of misinformation regarding transhumanism and its many tools, so much in fact that I can only deal with a couple here. I have mentioned cloned beef, so I will point out that anybody who claims they would not want to eat it does not appreciate that he or she has almost certainly done so already. The meat industry has long used a technique called ‘budding’, whereby technicians separate the undifferentiated cells in a fertilized cow egg that has undergone several divisions. This technique can yield hundreds of artificially-induced twins which are all clones are at the end of the day.
It needs to be understood the extent to which all our food is largely a product of human- rather than purely natural- selection. All our farm animals and all our crops resulted from artificial manipulation of genetic material, using techniques that were far less controlled and refined than modern GM practices. But refined does not equal ‘flawless’. We advocates of GM need to be open in admitting that some products will do more harm than good. But the current zero tolerence attitude toward biotechnology is plain silly. Imagine if the Thalidamide tragedy had resulted in intense pressure, not just to ban that particular drug, but to close down the entire pharmaceutical industry. Of course, such a demand would be ludicrous but that is precisely what we see regarding GM technology. Let us preach the more sensible approach of dealing with each GM product on a case-by-case basis. Let us not disregard any legitimate safety concerns but rely only on scientific facts, not propoganda.
I want to address one more criticism of transhumanism, one that I have often ecountered. Namely, that we look down our noses at human beings. You read this time and again in anti-transhumanist propoganda: That we are full of self-loathing regarding ourselves and cannot wait to replace humanity with an ill-defined technological successor. Such a viewpoint seemingly cannot appreciate that you can admire something and understand its flaws at the same time. I mean, I fully appreciate the incredible craftsmanship that went into making a Neolithic flint axe, but at the same time I understand how crude stone-age tools are in comparison to a modern intergrated circuit. I know that the people who crafted flint tools had minds every bit as sophisticated as the average contemporary adult. Our vastly improved technological mastery is a result of us inheriting an immense body of cumulative knowledge. There really is nothing contrary about admiring the ingenuity, the wonderful ability, of humans past and present, but at the same time appreciating how crude we are compared to what is technically possible.
It really does not need a genius to see where all these goals, each one of which has many, many justifications for its continued R+D, is headed. It is headed toward the radical future, the summit of Mount Improbable. Near that summit, we shall see Genetics, Robotics, Information technology and Nanotechnology, which are driven by many diverse disciplines, go on to converge at a single point right at the top. The summit of human technological progress, beyond which only POST-humans- “mind children” as Moravec called them- can tread.
This seems to fit nicely with the notion that we are heading for a ‘technological singularity’, which is a term that refers to engineered intelligence that surpasses natural intelligence in all respects. That, by the way, is the only correct definition, and as Micheal Anissmov pointed out, ‘other definitions, focusing on the acceleration of technological change, the greater global cooperation of human beings, and so on, are contortions of the original definition, made up after the fact’. Unfortunately, people have mistaken speculations regarding the consequences of engineered super intelligence for definitions of the singularity itself, and many of these speculations have clear parallels with religious ‘rapture’. Therefore, the singularity has become warped into an inevitable future event in which the true-believers ascend to paradise. This is a notion that really needs to be prevented from spreading its meme, because it feeds our innate desire to believe in the existence of a higher power that will solve our problems for us.
Now, I am not going to speculate on the existence of God, except to point out that there is actually such a smooth continuum from atheistic science to theistic religion, that it is actually very difficult to define where one ends and the other begins. But I can make a definite statement regarding the existence of the technological singularity. Physically, singularities have no existence. They are, after all, merely metaphores for a current lack of knowledge. The ‘singularity’ at the centre of black holes or at the moment of the Big Bang will vanish in a flash of mathematical clarity as soon as we have a working theory of quantum gravity. Similarly, any mind that is engineered for super intelligence is not going to perceive a technological singularity, because that is a metaphore for the existence of concepts fundamentally ungraspable to unaugmented minds.
I think it is worth asking if the term ‘singularity’ has unfortunate similarities with the word ‘singular’ and therefore implies a single technological breakthrough that propels us to post-humanity. I think that is as misleading as the quest for ‘the’ origin of life. Such a quest encourages us to define an absolute definition for ‘life’ and ‘nonlife’ when, in fact, the transition from one to the other was a progressive hierarchy of steps leading from a pre-biotic Earth enriched in organic molecules to cellular life. It is decidedly arbitrary to pin down the exact moment when any system of gradually increasing complexity becomes ‘alive’. Dawkin’s Mount Improbable has no definite point marking the arrival of ‘life’, and ‘technological mount improbable’ has no definitive point marking the emergence of ‘post-humanity’.
I mean, you could argue that some people already lie beyond a kind of singularity. Mathematical equations are tools that enable some humans to grasp concepts that the rest of us can only superficially understand. Some modern mathematical theorems rely on hundreds of specialised mathematical tools, each one of which will be understood by a member of the maths community checking that part of the proof, but who does not understand the techniques used in another part of the proof. It is becoming increasingly necessary to rely on computers to check such proofs. They tell us that the conjecture is logically undeniable, and therefore worthy of being called a ’theorem’ but we CANNOT GRASP THE LOGICAL CHAIN THAT SHOWS THIS TO BE TRUE. Human brains are fundamentally unable to process information in the appropriate way.
When physicists start talking about ripping and rejoining N-dimensional objects in Calabi-Yau space, I do not really understand what this metaphorical language refers to. I am like a blind person trying get her head around what ’red’ is. But that’s OK because our species has a unique (on this planet, at least), ability to accumulate knowledge, which manifests itself in technological evolution. It might be tempting to think of the singularity as represented by the summit of a mountain, but I think a better metaphore would be a climb that unaugmented minds find increasingly difficult to conquer. I anticipate tools, which could be anything from more elegant metaphores, to an upgrading of my neural architecture, that will enable me to grasp any concept with increasing clarity. Is that a certainty? No, it is just something I have faith in but I like to think it is based on down-to-Earth observation. Issac Newton famously stated ‘if I have seen further than other men, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of Giants’. Our ascent up technological mount improbable is possible thanks to the efforts of people past and present, the majority of whome toil in obscurity to further our understanding of the universe. It behoves us to remember that the ‘technological singularity’ in whatever form or forms it takes (there are many ways to ‘engineer superior intelligence’) results from immense intellectual effort. Do not believe in the singularity as an inevitable future event in which a Deus Ex Machina fixes our problems for us. The more we believe this to be the case, the more likely we are to be lulled into a state of passivity and the less likely we are to put in the sheer hard work required to achieve ‘singularity’.
If the technological Singularity is not the summit of Mount Improbable after all, one might ask what is. Will science reveal the answer? Or maybe philosophy? Perhaps theology? Or should we conjecture that these are all manifestations of a grander overarching conceptual framework that we currently cannot comprehend, but may come to appreciate as we ascend to a state that might appropriately be defined as ‘God’? I like to think so!
Thank you.
Posted by G.P. on 04/29 at 06:44 PM