Yesterday I spoke to Nikola Danaylov at the Singularity Weblog. The title of the podcast comes from a quote I made during the interview, when Nikola asked me whether or not he thought we would need to sacrifice aspects of our humanity to go through a Technological Singularity. My response was that if we do the Singularity right, we need not compromise in any fashion: human beings from techno-enthusiasts to the Amish will be enthusiastic with the results.

During the podcast, Nikola asked me what I thought humanity’s chance of surviving the Singularity would be, and I said that my current estimate was around 25%, but that could change depending on what happens, and how much effort is put towards a positive Singularity.

Register today, before prices go up at midnight!

We still have discounted hotel rooms available, for $139/night instead of the usual $199.

Google… what the hell? I submitted some good ideas to that program.

From the Pope’s April 3rd (“Holy Saturday”) address, via Aubrey:

An ancient Jewish legend from the apocryphal book “The life of Adam and Eve” recounts that, in his final illness, Adam sent his son Seth together with Eve into the region of Paradise to fetch the oil of mercy, so that he could be anointed with it and healed. The two of them went in search of the tree of life, and after much praying and weeping on their part, the Archangel Michael appeared to them, and told them they would not obtain the oil of the tree of mercy and that Adam would have to die. Later, Christian readers added a word of consolation to the Archangel’s message, to the effect that after 5,500 years the loving King, Christ, would come, the Son of God who would anoint all those who believe in him with the oil of his mercy. “The oil of mercy from eternity to eternity will be given to those who are reborn of water and the Holy Spirit. Then the Son of God, Christ, abounding in love, will descend into the depths of the earth and will lead your father into Paradise, to the tree of mercy.” This legend lays bare the whole of humanity’s anguish at the destiny of illness, pain and death that has been imposed upon us. Man’s resistance to death becomes evident: somewhere – people have constantly thought – there must be some cure for death. Sooner or later it should be possible to find the remedy not only for this or that illness, but for our ultimate destiny – for death itself. Surely the medicine of immortality must exist. Today too, the search for a source of healing continues. Modern medical science strives, if not exactly to exclude death, at least to eliminate as many as possible of its causes, to postpone it further and further, to prolong life more and more. But let us reflect for a moment: what would it really be like if we were to succeed, perhaps not in excluding death totally, but in postponing it indefinitely, in reaching an age of several hundred years? Would that be a good thing? Humanity would become extraordinarily old, there would be no more room for youth. Capacity for innovation would die, and endless life would be no paradise, if anything a condemnation. The true cure for death must be different. It cannot lead simply to an indefinite prolongation of this current life. It would have to transform our lives from within. It would need to create a new life within us, truly fit for eternity: it would need to transform us in such a way as not to come to an end with death, but only then to begin in fullness. What is new and exciting in the Christian message, in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, was and is that we are told: yes indeed, this cure for death, this true medicine of immortality, does exist. It has been found. It is within our reach. In baptism, this medicine is given to us. A new life begins in us, a life that matures in faith and is not extinguished by the death of the old life, but is only then fully revealed.

It’s been more than 5,500 years, and God never showed up, so now what? In fact, it’s been 200,000 years since the beginning of Mankind. God, maybe you’re a little bit late, don’t you think? Also, note how the Pope casually mentions Christian readers “(adding) a word of consolation” about an Archangel to the text, and refers to Apocrypha as theologically meaningful. Does making stuff up count as theologically significant if it was done far enough in the past?

The Pope asks, “Would that be a good thing?”, in reference to living hundreds of years. Well, the average human lifespan used to be around 20, and now it’s roughly four times longer, so is that a good thing? Why do people have to live so long? Why does your criticism of hundreds of years of life not apply to today’s elderly folks?

The Pope says, “Humanity would become extraordinarily old, there would be no more room for youth.” This isn’t so, because old people will modify their neurology to make it more fluid, like that of youth, in unprecedented combinations that retain executive maturity while allowing youthful creativity and flow. If we can heal neural aging, then it will only be a matter of time before we can heal the neural rigidity that causes fluid intelligence to decline after roughly the age of 30.

Never mind a brain with a hundred billions neurons, like we have now — we ought to have brains with tens of trillions of neurons, not necessarily even in the same place. Once we expand and distribute our cognitive architectures, our lives really will be eternal, unless we are pursued by those with the ability to truly snuff out every branch of our mental tree.

The Pope says, “Capacity for innovation would die, and endless life would be no paradise”, but wasn’t that the idea behind the imaginary Paradise that you believe in? Wouldn’t God grant us endless life? Why would we retain our capacity for innovation in Heaven but not on Earth? I suppose that Catholics believe that God will magically restore our capacity for innovation if we make it to Heaven, but why do you believe that magic can do it and science never can? The Bible barely even says anything about Heaven — for all we know, references to being closer to God after death are probably entirely metaphorical. The detailed descriptions of New Jerusalem are a joke, obviously made up by Stone Age writers with Stone Age beliefs. Does God really think that a city of gold would impress people in the 21st century? No, because God has never communicated with humanity outside from delusional human beings today and delusional human beings from the past whose stories got transcribed into “sacred texts”.

The Pope says, “Man’s resistance to death becomes evident: somewhere – people have constantly thought – there must be some cure for death.” He expresses uncertainty because he doesn’t want to say outright that indefinite life extension is possible, but he implicitly acknowledges that life extension into centuries is possible. I’m tired of accusations that mix together incredulity with a moral response — if the technology isn’t feasible, then it doesn’t deserve a moral response. If it is feasible, then it deserves a stronger moral response, immediately.

The Pope reveals Christian deathism when he says, “A new life begins in us, a life that matures in faith and is not extinguished by the death of the old life, but is only then fully revealed.” Please then — look forward to your death. A corpse is nothing but worm-food, unfortunately. When the neurons stop firing and start being consumed by bacteria, you die forever. Only a crude simulacra can ever be assembled thereafter.

Eternal life on Earth is not necessarily incompatible with Christianity. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that life extension is a bad thing. We’ve been “creating life” for centuries by creating new plants and animals for agriculture. Why didn’t the Church speak out against that? Because the Church is ultimately forced to approve what people want, and it has no guidance of its own, because God is nowhere to be seen, and his manifest absence makes communication quite difficult.

Even if God did exist, his lack of communication with us, and his alleged genocidal acts in the past, his threats of Hell condemn him as an evil being. If God did exist, we ought to defeat him. We need to grow up and make our own rules — not depend on an invisible and silent Stone Age Hebrew deity.

Today I got a call from the Boston Globe letting me know that a member of the Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board, “Don Heathfield”, turned out to be a Russian spy. What a surprise, huh? Naturally, I voted to remove him from the board.

The Lifeboat Foundation’s Scientific Advisory Board has 1,148 members. I guess this makes 1,147.

John Horgan goes on the offensive against the Singularity concept on his relatively new blog at SciAm.

My own skepticism is based on simple comparisons of Kurzweil’s claims with what is actually happening in science. For example, Kurzweil contends that reverse-engineering the brain isn’t that big a deal. “The brain is at least 100 million times simpler than it appears because the design is in the genome,” he wrote on the blog Posthumans. “The compressed genome is only about 50 million bytes,” which is “a level of complexity we can handle.”

I agree with John that this estimate of the difficulty of AI is an oversimplification. It carries the assumption that AI will be a copy of the human brain, which isn’t necessarily true. It also ignores the complexity of the process of neurogenesis and continued development. The real brain is much, much more complex than the portion of the genome that codes for it, and it probably won’t be until after the Singularity until we understand the details of how the brain is created from the genetic code.

Is it really so far-fetched to believe that we will eventually uncover the principles that make intelligence work and implement them in a machine, just like we have reverse-engineered our own versions of the particularly useful features of natural objects, like horses and spinnerets? News flash: the human brain is a natural object.

I think Kurzweil is wrong and overconfident on a lot of specific points, but I appreciate his overall vision.

There’s more follow-up material on AI from The New York Times. Here’s the blurb:

What is artificial intelligence? What issues are raised by the current work on creating machine minds? Here are some philosophical questions and creative activities stemming from the ongoing developments in the pursuit of conscious computers and inspired by the Times Magazine article on I.B.M.’s Watson, a machine that can play “Jeopardy!”.

Fun activities with AI and philosophy!

By Robert McCall.

Singularity Summit — please post about it on your blog, register for it, tell your friends about it, or, heaven forbid, Twitter about it. If you post about it on your blog or tell your friends, tell them to list you in the “Who told you about us?” field, then email me for a $100 discount for every non-student referral. Like last time, I am serving as co-organizer of the conference.

Our venue is a 1,100-person ballroom. That means that this even has the potential to become the first 1,000+ person transhumanist/Singularity oriented gathering. In other words, a historic event: 1000 people for 2010. Regarding the cost of the event ($485 until July 1st), to put it into perspective, you have to remember that we are putting this on in San Francisco. Everything costs way more, and there are a lot of people who pay a lot for these events because they expect a lot. The Bay Area is filled with high-earning, highly educated technical professionals. Love it or hate it, that is the nature of this area. The price point is also part of the product, insofar as many of the people who pay the money for the tickets want to network with others who pay a similar amount for the same reason.

To bring down costs for our most enthusiastic supporters and for students, we have several generous discounts. It is extremely unusual for a conference to offer open-ended discounts on referrals like this. Refer five people and you can get it for free.

The conference lineup is filled with more science-oriented than ever before, showing our transition to more of an academic focus in the conference brand. Of the twenty currently confirmed speakers, eighteen are active scientists, researchers, or engineers. Only James Randi (JREF) and Michael Vassar (SIAI) fall into other categories.

Like many other conferences, one of the primary available benefits is networking. Outside of a few intellectual hubs like the SF Bay Area, Boston, and London, it can be hard to find more than a couple people well-versed in emerging technologies, such as BCI, biotech, nanotech, and robotics/AI. At the Singularity Summit, you will be very surprised by the average education and intelligence level of the attendees. Many of them will attend the conference with the intent to meet people — perhaps you? If you are looking for a link to moving to the Bay Area, or just want to explore options, note that a major percentage of Summit attendees are CEOs, non-profit leaders, or owners of their own small consultancies. With the right qualifications, it may be possible to get hired by a fellow Summit attendee.

Because the Singularity movement is so new, it’s hard to say anything with certainty. We are not a centuries-old organization, that’s for sure. This month, SIAI actually turns 10. That’s part of the excitement — being a part of something that is cutting-edge, and could transform overnight due to unforeseen variables. Occasionally, people on this blog ask, “where are all the transhumanists that are actually achieving things in robotics, implants, biotech, etc?” The answer is that many of them are too busy to play around with blogs/etc and just attend events and meet people, because that ultimately pays off better for them. Attend the Summit, and you will have the opportunity to meet a great many of them.

If you’re going to the Summit and want to make your attendance better known to the community that reads this blog, please mention it in the comments.

Here’s my favorite part from the Times article, mostly because it was the only part that was really new to me, and it provides validation of my personal beliefs.

Steve Jurvetson, a director of Synthetic Genomics, is part of a group of very rich, very bright Singularity observers who end up somewhere in the middle on the philosophy’s merits — optimistic about the growing powers of technology but pessimistic about humankind’s ability to reach a point where those forces can actually be harnessed.

Mr. Jurvetson, a venture capitalist and managing director of the firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, says the advances of companies like Synthetic Genomics give him confidence that we will witness great progress in areas like biofuels and vaccines. Still, he fears that such technology could also be used maliciously — and he has a pantry filled with products like Spam and honey in case his family has to hunker down during a viral outbreak or attack.

“Thank God we have a swimming pool,” he says, noting that it gives him a large store of potentially potable water.

Jurvetson is a paragon of competence and worldliness. He’s nothing like the popular stereotype of a survivalist as a gun-toting far right loony bin. I would point to him as a strategy of silencing critics of preparedness and survivalism.

Unfortunately for Jurvetson, the fancy homes in the hills of Silicon Valley are likely to be the first to be invaded and looted when the you-know-what hits the fan. Perhaps he has a survival retreat somewhere else and a private helicopter, though. If so, I applaud him for his wisdom and foresight.

It’s shocking how many life extensionists out there obsess day and night about what food they do or don’t eat, but are completely unprepared for even a short cutoff of basic services. Food tends to be a particularly fertile ground for lunacy and obsession. The Golden Bough provides a good background of this phenomenon, which of course stretches back thousands of years.

Patrick Millard’s ongoing coverage of Biosphere 2
Anders Sandberg: Seeing the World
Indiana Law Interfering With Citizens’ Free Speech Rights Found Unconstitutional
RepRap blog: Open Source Scanning Tunneling Microscope
Category: Mendel Development at RepRap Wiki
Open Source Ecology
Jim Von Ehr says Zyvex will Achieve Digital Matter from Building Blocks by 2015 and Rudimentary Molecular Manufacturing by 2020
Whole Brain Emulation: the Logical Endpoint of Neuroinformatics
Protein Computing, Bio-based Quantum Computing and Nano-sized biolasers from ExQor Technologies
Eurekalert: Eating processed meats, but not unprocessed red meats, may raise risk of heart disease and diabetes
‘Fountain of youth’ steroids could protect against heart disease
Want to Get Smarter, Faster? Sleep 10 Hours: NPR
6-story Jesus statue in Ohio struck by lightning
eWeek: Who’s Afraid of the Singularity?
TIME — Tastes Like Chicken: the Quest for Fake Meat
ABC Science: Cyborg rights “need debating now”
YouTube: iRobot 710 Warrior with APOBS
Jason Silva in Vanity Fair: Why We Could All Use a Heavy Dose of Techno-Optimism
Technology Review: Microrobotics Competition Shows Impressive Feats
Technofascism Blog: US Department of Defense Wants Robot Army by 2034

Follow me on Twitter, and watch me troll this overrated site.

You can read it here. The gist is that Singularity University is more broadly focused than the article implies. (Some people in the comments were wondering what fast-fabrication of houses has to do with the Singularity, and the answer is that Kurzweil’s definition of the Singularity is so broad that it can encompass practically anything.) Since that is the case, perhaps it would have been more appropriate if the NYT gave more attention to the Singularity Institute, which is more explicitly focused on the Singularity.

The Seasteading Institute is holding their Ephemerisle event at the Sacramento River Delta in a little over a month. Be sure to check out their website and consider going if you are in the area.

Tickets are $132.50 for a limited time, and go to support the infrastructure of this floating festival. The website points out that hosting an event on water is extremely expensive due to liability insurance, and the cost of insurance per attendee is more like $500. The difference is subsidized by Seasteading Institute donors. I guess that explains why floating festivals aren’t held more often.

There is also a promo post on the blog that goes into more depth.

There’s a new lengthy article on the Singularity from The New York Times, slated to appear on the front page of tomorrow’s business section, I’m told.

The Lifeboat Foundation website got a complete makeover not too long ago, and all my essays there were upgraded with new images to make them ever more interesting! I suggest you go on over and check some of them out. Many of them are adaptations of my best blog posts:

Existential risks:

Classifying Extinction Risks — 2007

Futurism:

10 Futuristic Materials — 2008
Brain-Computer Interfaces for Manipulating Dreams — 2008
Top Ten Cybernetic Upgrades Everyone Will Want — 2007 (one of my faves!)
Immortalist Utilitarianism — 2004 (a classic early work!)
Top Ten Transhumanist Technologies — 2007 (made the Digg frontpage!)

Nanotechnology

First-Stage Nanoproducts and Nanoweaponry — 2006

Robotics/AI

What are the Benefits of Mind Uploading? — 2009

As always, there’s been some nice activity over at anti-transhumanism central, The New Atlantis Futurisms blog. Most recently is a post “Why Transhumanism Won’t Work”, which is as provocatively named as my recent post “Transhumanism Has Already Won”. The post, a guest post by Mark Gubrud, is more of a screed against mind uploading than against transhumanism in general, however Gubrud claims that “transhumanism itself is uploading writ large.” Basically, Gubrud calls attention to a talk that will be given by a philosophy professor against mind uploading at the upcoming H+ conference at Harvard. The essence of the argument is that advocates of mind uploading are dualists because they speak of a “pattern” that is really a “soul” which is postulated to be transferable across substrates. (It’s ironic that Gubrud makes a guest post arguing against the soul on a site funded by “Washington, D.C.’s premier institute dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy.” It shows that some modern Christians are willing to be pragmatic about the messages they put out there.)

I made a very short comment in response to the post:

Why don’t we lose our identity/become different people when the constituent proteins making up our cells are continuously renewed? Is the soul transferred from the old proteins to the new proteins? How is that scientific?

This elicited a good-length response from Gubrud, beginning with this dramatic condemnation of my seemingly innocuous question:

You ask a very good question, one of the key questions which lead people into the nihilistic wilderness in which a noxious weed like transhumanism can flourish.

!!!

The #1 question on my mind when I read this is, “Is Gubrud a Christian, or does his hatred of transhumanism stem from something else?”

Gubrud continues to talk about how identity is just a concept, which I concur with, and then says:

Transhumanists look outside the human community for a source of meaning and moral order. They believe in a great story of Evolution, Intelligence, and Destiny. It’s kind of a throwback to a pre-Copernican worldview.

Humanists understand that this is a random universe, to which we bring our own meanings. Humanists treasure humanity and nature, while regarding technology as the tool we use to protect these primary values, rather than a primary value in itself.

This really is a debate about human values and the future of humanity. There still ain’t nobody else here.

This is definitely false with respect to the community around the Singularity Institute, at least. We understand that human values are a lone candle in an otherwise morality-indifferent galaxy. The only difference is that we see opportunity for moving beyond strict adherence to the fitness-maximizing goals that natural selection gave us, and into secondary characteristics such as mathematics, literature, art, etc. If the latter is truly more important than the former, then given the opportunity to modify our own minds and bodies, we will choose minds and bodies that nurture the latter while the former falls out of style.

To sum up, I have to say — folks, critiques of mind uploading and transhumanism are not the same thing. You can blend them together like some sort of philosophical porridge, but for clarity’s sake they ought to be handled individually. I think part of the problem is that transhumanism is so compelling that attacking it head-on is a huge challenge, so critics prefer to target its more radical ideas, such as mind uploading.

Mind uploading is indeed a radical idea, and I can sympathize with some of Gubrud’s arguments about continuity, but critics have to realize that the “mind uploading as dualism” argument is over a decade old and has already been refuted many times. It is refuted by positing mind transfers so incremental that it is quite impossible to say that the original person has been lost. The transfer can be made arbitrarily incremental, and there will still be people who say that the original person is lost, and keep saying that forever, but it seems quite likely that society will eventually adopt the technology anyway. We’ve already incrementally uploaded so much data about ourselves into an “exoself” of computer files and Internet sites.

Here’s a link to the short essay. Excerpt:

People who practice situational awareness can often spot this planning process as it unfolds and then take appropriate steps to avoid the dangerous situation or prevent it from happening altogether. Because of this, situational awareness is one of the key building blocks of effective personal security — and when exercised by large numbers of people, it can also be an important facet of national security. Since situational awareness is so important, and because we discuss situational awareness so frequently in our analyses, we thought it would be helpful to discuss the subject in detail and provide a primer that can be used by people in all sorts of situations.

A broad and important topic.

The Singularity Summit 2010 features a variety of discounts for registration, including $100 off for students and $100 off for every non-student referral. However, the greatest discounts are for registering early — there is a $300 discount off the at-the-door cost of the conference if you register by midnight tonight, Monday the 7th. After that, there will only be a $200 discount until July 1st, and a $100 discount until August 1st. If you register now, you can get your ticket for $385, or $285 if you’re a student or make a referral. There is no limit on discounts for non-student referrals, so you can refer multiple people for an even greater discount. See you August 14-15 for this exciting conference at the San Francisco Hyatt!

Update: we extended early registration to midnight on the 8th.