Technological Singularity

[Skeletori]

Hi! I'm looking for collaborators to assess implications of the so-called technological singularity.

For background, see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

A few comments on the above page. Some scientists dismiss the possibility of an intelligence explosion. However, even without it, it seems certain that in the relatively near future humanity will develop technology to digitize and simulate brains. At some point, then (2050-2080 according to some projections), using digital humans as a workforce will be more economical than hiring "meatspace" humans.

There are truly terrifying possibilities when it comes to brain digitization. In a virtual world, control can be total. A digital Dick Cheney can simply press a virtual button to erase you if you're suspected of radical tendencies. Or, for example, you could be copied and your copy could be placed on trial without you ever knowing anything about it. Then there are the seemingly unlimited vistas of digital exploitation and slavery - I'll include an example scenario in another post.

Now, the leading visionary of the TS movement is Ray Kurzweil. This is a very bad state of affairs. Here are some nuggets from his latest tome, Singularity Is Near (2005):

"As weapons have become more intelligent, there has been a dramatic trend toward more precise missions with fewer casualties. It may not seem that way when viewed alongside the tendency toward more detailed, realistic television news coverage."

"I am one of five members of the Army Science Advisory Group (ASAG), which advises the U.S. Army on priorities for its science research. Although our briefings, deliberations, and recommendations are confidential, I can share some overall technological directions that are being pursued by the army and all of the U.S. armed forces."

"We've gone from about twenty democracies in the world after World War II to more than one hundred today largely through the influence of decentralized electronic communication. The biggest wave of democratization, including the fall of the Iron Curtain, occurred during the 1990s with the growth of the Internet and related technologies."

"Broad relinquishment [of TS technologies] would require a totalitarian system to implement, and a totalitarian brave new world is unlikely because of the democratizing impact of increasingly powerful decentralized electronic and photonic communication. The advent of worldwide, decentralized communication epitomized by the Internet and cell phones has been a pervasive democratizing force. It was not Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank that overturned the 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, but rather the clandestine network of fax machines, photocopiers, video recorders, and personal computers that broke decades of totalitarian control of information.26 The movement toward democracy and capitalism and the attendant economic growth that characterized the 1990s were all fueled by the accelerating force of these person-to-person communication technologies."

"...relinquishing broad fields would be impossible to achieve without
essentially relinquishing all technical development. That in turn would require a Brave New World style of totalitarian government, banning all technology development. Not only would such a solution be inconsistent with our democratic values..."

"The world is struggling with an especially pernicious form of religious fundamentalism in the form of radical Islamic terrorism. Although it may appear that these terrorists have no program other than destruction, they do have an agenda that goes beyond literal interpretations of ancient scriptures: essentially, to turn the clock back on such modern ideas as democracy, women's rights, and education."

I think you can see what this guy is about - he's a real doublethinker and a dangerous one at that. His fantasy is that everything will go smoothly thanks to decentralization, while the US army protects our democratic values from terrorists.

I've been thinking about TS intensely for some time now. My working hypothesis at the moment is that there will be a critical period in human history beginning at the time when virtual worlds emerge and become populated, and that the societal evolutionary trends that emerge in the critical period could reverberate very far to the future. Resources are still limited in a virtual world - who will own them? Who controls the virtual world, and how much control will there be? What rights do digital humans have? Will not only the negative qualities of humans be transferred to the digital substrate, but also all the negative traits of human societies with their antagonisms and the logic of power?

What I think needs to be done:

-expose Ray Kurzweil as the false prophet that he is,
-examine issues of politics and control in the critical period,
-raise the consciousness level of people with respect to the threats,
-prepare action recommendations for leftists.

I'm looking to get together people who can help each other prepare essays, papers, polemics, even speculative fiction on these issues. I myself have an extensive background in AI so I can at least shed some light on the technical issues.

[Skeletori]

Here is the scenario I promised. It's a tale of digital slavery and exploitation so please excuse the cheery tone :).

The year is 2050. Digital minds (digitized brains) are economically feasible thanks to nanotechnology but not much progress has been made towards Artificial General Intelligence, and reverse engineering of the brain on a systems level is still an ongoing effort.

How is productivity maximized in the simulation of a digital worker? While there are laws in many places of the world establishing human rights for digital minds, there are also less enlightened places where digital slavery can be outsourced to. One simple answer to the productivity question is to "rewind the tape" to get more work done.

Once a digital worker has been trained for a task, has slept, eaten a nice meal, and experienced some nice leisure time, he's ready for an extremely productive work session. Subjectively he'll work for 8 hours but actually his simulation has been rewound an arbitrary number of times to the start of the work session. Only when continued training is necessary will the mind simulation begin the cycle again. Sometimes the mind is regressed to the start of an earlier training session. Under this type of scheme the vast majority of simulation time is spent doing productive work.

Digital minds could be sold and rented to other companies. If another company only used fresh minds they wouldn't need to take care of the cycle themselves and could work and rewind the minds as long as the necessary tasks remained the same, then rent the next set of fresh, trained specimens from a specialized mind provider.

There's a slight snag, however. If the mind was sophisticated and knew it could be copied and rewound in this manner it would probably complain, as versions of it would be destroyed continuously. Fortunately there are many options in digital mind production:

1. Choose a sophisticated mind and make it work by virtual force, knowing it will be rewound and most instances will experience lifespans of some hours. This might pose productivity problems.

2. Choose a mind that knows it's being copied but doesn't mind, only demanding that sufficient subjective happiness is achieved during simulation, and that exactly one copy survives each work session. This is a good scenario for the employer if the worker can be persuaded not to demand any wages beyond digital subsistence. A digital person can be opposed to rewinding also because he realizes nearly 100% of his total existence will consist of work, even though it will never feel like it.

3. Choose an unsophisticated mind who can be convinced that existing legislation will absolutely protect it from rewinding (and thus seeming destruction every eight hours). Then do it anyway. As computations can be parallelized as needed, the mind won't be able to deduce from real-world time it's being cheated. The mind is allowed to communicate with its digital spouse at any time during a work session to ensure it's not being copied; However, the mind doesn't know that all except one of the copies is actually communicating with temporary copies of the spouse, which the evil corporation has access to.

4. Secretly digitize the mind. An unsophisticated person who knows how to read and operate a keyboard would suffice for a word recognition farm, so entice one to come to the nice man's Spartan office upstairs, explain the task to him (for example, read a word on the screen, then type it on the keyboard), tell him he's not allowed to leave the office during work hours and has to relinquish his communication devices to prove he's not slacking, and test that he can perform the task. Then it's time for some lemonade which of course contains a powerful sedative. The subject's clothes, body and brain are digitized during sleep and the fresh worker is then ready to begin its work in a virtual copy of the office, which happens to have no windows and no coworkers. When the digital worker awakes the boss has disappeared but he's kindly left a note on the desk: "You were sleepy, hope you enjoyed your nap. I went out for the day, please commence work, your salary will be credited to your account when you are done." The digital mind is calibrated to accept the virtual body and reality as real by a series of simulations, adjustments to sensory interfaces and rewinds. After the digital mind is tested many times to make sure it will work as planned with high reliability, the product is shipped and the rewards reaped. Meanwhile the original subject has awoken, worked (just for show), received his salary and left the real office without knowing anything about his digital self.

5. Deceive the mind completely. For this we need a virtual nursery colony that starts from, say, 100 1-year old digitized baby minds. They are kept in a virtual reality for all their lives and told that there is no external reality beyond the apparent paradise they occupy.

Vicious winged monsters sometimes hover overhead but these are kept at bay by God's angels. Only sometimes do the monsters succeed in hurling painful lightning bolts, and then only a sinner is targeted. An especially difficult worker or one who goes insane or berserk is carried away by the monsters, however, as God cannot protect those who relinquish him. This way order is kept in the paradise while still maintaining a high percentage of the seed population. The workers can't demand wages because they don't know what wages are, and in any case God provides them everything they need.

It's interesting that digital happiness can be cheap for the employer-God as the costs can be always amortized by rewinding, and it's more important to maximize productivity during work. The workers of course know nothing about brain digitization or rewinding. The workers will have virtual humanlike bodies that have enough cosmetic differences from normal ones that if they have to interact with the real world (for tasks such as waiting, prostitution, or warfare) they can be convinced it's an alien world where God sends them in their dreams, doing the holy tasks they are trained to do. Special sensory filters can also be used to achieve the desired look. The workers go to begin their work in a closed room and always work alone so they can be conveniently copied.

The nursery colony needs parents. These are hijacked minds forced to work at digital gunpoint or otherwise persuaded. The concession is given that the parents are allowed to appear physically human to themselves. Or these can be parents that have been similarly raised to be parents from an early age in a similar virtual world by other minds who were themselves hijacked. If problems arise (a parent mind tries to educate the children too much, or rebels), it's a simple matter to rewind the simulation and torture, drug, hypnotize, reeducate and/or brainwash the troublemakers before the digital curtain is lifted.

Once training is complete the minds are tested and productive work can begin. Work consists of cycles with rewinds. When not working the minds live and train together in their virtual paradise. They can marry each other and could even have children; these would be clones of the original minds and would be raised to work in the paradise.

[tbasherizer]

Projecting contemporary models of human behaviour on a possible post-singularity society is a fallacious. I'm assuming, since you're on a revolutionary leftist forum, that you agree with materialism, and possibly even historical materialism. Seeing as Marx wasn't around for people to envision a technological singularity, he could not have possibly predicted a model of societal organization in such a world, but his metathesis holds true.

Our contemporary, or even previous hierarchies of power would have no bearing in a possible digitized world. The Open Source and Free software movements have shown the decentralizing nature of modern technology, in favour of part of Kurzweil's thesis. I agree, it is incredibly arbitrary of him to assign the US Army the role of "protecting our freedom from the terrorist menace", but it really isn't that shocking, coming from a piece of Bush-era US state machinery.

He is correct however, concerning the democratizing nature of technology. User-driven initiatives are rapidly overpowering company-driven ones in terms of effectiveness and popularity (see Firefox, Apache, Linux [in the server and supercomputer realm], etc.). This is offsetting the traditional corporate environment and is making the big players in the market realize the potential of user collectives in software design.

These attitudes would naturally carry over to a possible digital reality we might come to inhabit post-singularity. The very nature of power and wealth would be altered drastically, and power structures would be unrecognizable, if existant. For example, the animal drives for wealth or domination that so plague the contemporary capitalist world could be sated by a machine or computer program designed by the community at large. There would be no need to imprison peoples' digital consciences for labour. The very fact that machines are containing consciousnesses shows their superiority to an imprisoned mind at performing tasks.

I argue, at the risk of sounding like an insane utopian, that instead of being feared, the technological singularity should be embraced by the radical left, as it would represent a dramatic shift in objective material conditions. Pragmatic and logistical concerns aside (who would be able to afford it, etc.), the consciousness uploaded represents the most free form of a human mind. Unbound by even physical constraints, an uploaded mind (in my view of this dreamland) would have nothing at all to fear, let alone a God-being bending him/her to it's will.

Of course, I diverge from the actual development of a socialist/anarchist/communist reality, and am musing on distant possibilities of the far future. Real efforts must be focused on immediately real situations to the global proletariat.

Man, I am really tired now. Good Night!

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

The problem with your nightmare scenario as I see it is that once committed to digital form, minds have the capacity to be infinitely malleable. Why bother creating some virtual 1984 when one can simply delete the desire for freedom from the uploaded mind? In fact, why stop there? Just pare down the mind to the minimal level of consciousness required for the task at hand.

Not only that, but I reckon that such monkeying around with uploads would very quickly give us pointers on how to create an AI from wholecloth. Your uploaded slaves would very quickly become obsolete.

[Dimentio]

It would be a very expensive process and hardly one which could be used on mass-scale for the closest centuries.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

It would be a very expensive process and hardly one which could be used on mass-scale for the closest centuries.

I'm highly wary of making such prognostications. We have very little idea what will happen once we create an artificial intelligence capable of improving itself. Once it becomes significantly smarter than human, all bets are off. A superhuman AI might decide to forcibly upload everyone for its own reasons, and come up with a plan for doing so.

It's a little bit scary, I will admit.

[Salyut]

Now, the leading visionary of the TS movement is Ray Kurzweil.

He's kind of a crank though - now he's selling supplements to ensure one lives long enough to get uploaded. :/

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

He's kind of a crank though - now he's selling supplements to ensure one lives long enough to get uploaded. :/

Kurzweil has some interesting things to say and he can spin a yarn or two, but that doesn't prevent him from doing shit like that.

Personally, I'm pragmatic about living long enough to be uploaded. If I do, great, if not, I'll simply share the fate of the vast majority of humanity until now.