The Technological Singularity, AI Utopianism, and Faith
Dialogues on Artificial General Intelligence, Part I
Fantasy Dialogues and the Nature of Reality
I’ve noticed over the years that discussions of AGI and of future scenarios in which it results in Utopia or (more often) Dystopia are frequently extremely one-sided. If there is actually an attempt at dialogue, the participants frequently talk past one another or, more often, simply ignore the other side completely. So, a continuing element of this blog will be occasional dialogues in which the participants actually engage with each other.
In keeping with the fantastical nature of this concept, the participants in these dialogues will be a wombat, a llama, and a meerkat. They are three intelligent friends who frequently disagree yet are still happy to engage with each other, and, coincidentally, they are named Wombat, Llama, and Meerkat, respectively.
The concepts, scenarios, and thought experiments they discuss are all taken from actual concepts, scenarios, and thought experiments proposed by leading voices in the AGI discussion. The difference is that these three must actually defend those ideas to others who may not agree, and those who disagree with them must actually provide defensible reasons for why they disagree.
My goal with this series of dialogues is to provide a more rounded contribution to the discussion for those that may not have heard these ideas or who have only heard them unchallenged.
Wombat
As far as I'm concerned, the technological singularity can't come soon enough. Eternal youth and vigor, intelligence enhancement, nanotech fabricators for whatever you want, no need to work, no more traffic, and robot housekeepers. Networked into a new reality with my AGI besties. Abundance up the wazoo. Sign me up!
Llama
That, my friend, is a pipe dream based on geek-infused wishful thinking.
Wombat
On the contrary. It's based on facts, physics, and the well-established trend of exponential technological progress. Kurzweil calls it the Law of Accelerating Returns. So you can go stew in your own cynical juices while I strap on a neural interface cap ten years from now and jack into a full-sensory Tahiti beach party sim from my couch.
Llama
Please — exponential growth in computer technology does not mean exponential growth in technology overall. That isn't a real law, like the law of gravity. There hasn't been exponential growth in cars or planes or rockets. My toaster works the same as the one my mom used when I was a kid except it has more buttons and won't last as long. As a matter of fact, we're already starting to reach the physical limits of packing logic gates into computer chips, so even that's going to level off.
Wombat
First off, the current way we’re creating computer chips may be reaching some physical limits, but I’m sure there are other types and configurations of chips that will continue the trend. And you're misinterpreting the Law of Accelerating Returns. You're being too granular. It doesn't specify any particular technology is going to continue on an exponential curve. It just states that when you examine the history of civilization, you see that the rate of human technological progress overall, the rate of paradigm shifts, is increasing along an exponential curve.
Llama
I still think that's debatable. Just because we've been able to make denser and denser computer chips or use CRISPR to swap out a few strands of DNA and make glow in the dark bunnies doesn't mean that scientific discovery is going at an exponential rate. It takes time and experimentation and data collection and building knowledge and just a lot of random chance to discover things. Even when it comes to computers, hardware technology has maybe grown exponentially but software technology sure hasn't.
Wombat
You're still missing the point. What Kurzweil's saying is that progress itself is accelerating on the whole, and that while there may be dips and bumps and unevenness here or there, when you zoom out, you realize that technological progress overall has been inherently exponential in nature.
And by the way, it does in fact hold for software as well. The software curve simply lags behind the hardware curve. Just as one example, the advancements of hardware and the Internet have enabled incredible advances in machine learning. But pretty much all aspects of software development are eons ahead of where they were a short time ago, including our ability to effectively and efficiently develop and manage massive networked systems of ever increasing complexity.
Meerkat
I actually agree mostly with Wombat, but I'm not so sure about how effectively we're able to manage all that complexity. Computer systems are getting more and more prone to failures, and I think it's because we're reaching the complexity limits of what we can reliably design and build. We can build these systems but they're growing more unstable. That doesn't bode well for your brain implants or nanorobots or AGI.
Wombat
Sure, it's a constant challenge to maintain reliability while increasing complexity. In fact, the complexity of systems will probably always be a little ahead of reliability, at least at the bleeding edge. But the complexity of our systems has grown dramatically, and we've managed to do pretty well. I mean, consider all the software that keeps our modern society running. It does a good job at keeping all the balls in the air, and the software for critical systems works amazingly well.
There are always going to be some failures in any system. The same is true in biological systems, and they've been pretty successful so far.
Llama
Look, if you zoom out far enough all human progress is just a few scattered data points straddling a straight line. Not enough data points to determine a curve, and the points we have aren't very accurate. And I'll say this: when you're living on the graph, it's pretty hard to judge whether it's linear or exponential.
Wombat
Maybe so, but I think we've all felt that things are changing rapidly around us.
Llama
Yeah, but every new generation says that.
Wombat
Our practical scientific knowledge is drastically more expansive than it was a century ago. If something is physically possible, then it's likely we'll be able to do it soon. Tomorrow's toaster is going to be a molecular assembler that pops out a nicely toasted English muffin with butter already melted on it, and all you'll have to do is pop in some carbon and other assorted element cartridges every few months.
Meerkat
Until someone hacks into your toaster and creates self-replicating gray goo that uses your house and you as raw materials.
Wombat
Come on — creating self-replicating nanobots that can operate and maneuver in open air is not a simple task, and no doubt the toaster would have safeguards against it anyway. The toaster itself doesn't need to be self-replicating to work. You'd likely arrange the assemblers as an assembly line, where one tiny group of assemblers creates components that it passes off to a group of slightly larger assemblers which makes slightly larger components and so on until you get a macro scale object popping out of the "toaster."
Llama
You make it sound like we'll be ordering a molecular toaster from Amazon next year. That's just not going to happen. The physical environment of the nanoscale is nothing like the macro environment in which we're able to build machines. At the nanoscale, water is like molasses, Brownian motion makes everything continuously wiggle around, and van der Waals forces stick nearby molecules together whether you want them stuck or not.
Protein molecules, which are very likely critical to any nanoscale device, are incredibly sticky and hard to control. Everything is constantly being bombarded, stretched, and bent.
Wombat
Well, you're making it sound like nanomachines are impossible creations, but that's provably wrong. All of biology is proof that you're wrong, or at least that the problems you listed can be overcome. Biology is full of molecular assemblers, with nanoscale motors that convert chemical energy into mechanical motion and membranes with active ion channels that sort molecules.
We have software controlled manufacturing in protein synthesis, where molecular machines called ribosomes read information from strands of messenger RNA and use that code to create sequences of amino acids. The amino acid sequences define the 3-dimensional structures and functions of proteins. We have the proof of concept for nanoscale molecular assemblers right there within our own bodies.
Llama
I'm just saying that it's really hard to get things working in the real world. You can describe artificial nanomachines and even model them in software, but the physical world is a harsh mistress. Atoms tend to misbehave and rearrange themselves, the wrong atoms get caught up in the machinery and damage it, friction and stickiness cause massive stability problems.
And like I said, everything is in constant, bumper car-like motion. It's like making a clock and its gears out of rubber then letting it tumble around in a washing machine filled with maple syrup and bits of duct tape. Your clock's going to keep crappy time.
Wombat
And yet here we are arguing about it, two biological entities chock full of working nanomachines. Apparently, there are ways around the problems. Now all we need is to make some updated models of the nanomachines, let them loose inside us, and they can clean out our arteries, clear away our zombie cells, eat any cancerous cells, and in general keep us young and healthy.
Meerkat
Ponce de León has entered the room.
Wombat
First of all, it's apocryphal that Ponce de León was searching for the Fountain of Youth. Second of all, you are under no obligation to preserve your youth and vigor if old age and death is your bag.
Llama
I'm with Meerkat on this. Immortality is simply the stuff of myth and religion.
Wombat
I didn't say anything about immortality. I said the end of aging and age related diseases. You can still get squashed by a bus. And what I'm talking about doesn't necessarily require nanotechnology — that's just one route. We may come up with a biological route first. Immortality, however, would require the ability to upload your consciousness into some sort of device and hopefully the ability to download it back into a new biological or robotic body should the need arise.
Llama
OK, slow down. Look, we all want to avoid death. I get it. But wishing something were possible is not the same as its actually being possible. We all know deep down that this is a fantasy, right?
Wombat
So first you Straw Man me with the immortality label, and now you're slapping me with Argument From Incredulity and Appeal to Ignorance fallacies. You might as well have told the Wright Brothers in 1902 that flying machines were nothing more than Greek myth and Renaissance dreams only to have them use science and engineering to literally dump cold water all over you from the plane they invent the following year.
Llama
I think eternal youth is a taller order than powered flight. There's a reason people say that the technological singularity is simply the rapture for nerds.
Wombat
That may make a snappy headline, but it's simply an Ad Hominem attack on nerds rather than a disputation of the ideas of singularitarians such as myself. The technological singularity and the components that are likely to be a part of it or result from it are based on science.
Llama
Seems more like they're based on faith to me.
Wombat
Only if you change the definition of faith. Sure, I'm optimistic and that's part of why I think the likelihood of the singularity is pretty good, and why I'm hopeful that what it brings about will be positive for humanity. I could be wrong. And maybe being able to admit that is the biggest difference between having confidence in science and simply having faith.
Llama
Being optimistic is one thing, but being delusional is quite another. Perhaps the dividing line is when you think that fantastical things will not only happen but they will actually happen to you. Maybe all these things will come about. Maybe we'll figure out how to make molecular assemblers and develop eternal youth, or maybe we'll invent AGI systems that will do it for us and we'll merge with them and transcend our biological roots.
But it's not happening tomorrow and it's not happening anytime soon. Certainly not in time for anyone walking around now.
Wombat
When you're at the knee of an exponential curve, it seems linear.
Llama
But you're still assuming that technological progress is exponential. Maybe it's not. Maybe it's s-shaped and you get a little spurt, and then it flattens out again. Things going to infinity rarely happen in the real world. Maybe it exists at the center of a black hole, but nothing in biology goes to infinity. Nothing in society goes to infinity. Nothing in the classical workings of the universe goes to infinity. There are always brakes on growth.
Wombat
Forget about infinity. It's a singularity in the sense that you can't predict or even truly contemplate what existence will be like after it. It's like being on one side of a black hole — there's no way to know what's on the other side of that hole.
Meerkat
Assuming there is another side.
Wombat
Whatever. It's just a name. Don't attack the concept just because you don't like the name. I mean, don't get me started on artificial intelligence. Talk about poorly conceived names.
Llama
Look, there isn't just the problem of developing technology that's way beyond anything we know how to do. It's also the fact that society has an inertia that generates drag on changes which rub people the wrong way. Go ask any random ten people if they want little robots roaming around inside their bodies. Ask them how they feel about sitting around idly while artificial intelligence takes over and runs the show. Most will be horrified rather than overjoyed.
Wombat
Artificial intelligence and nanotechnology are just tools. When we all see the benefits of these technologies, we'll accept them and eventually integrate them into who we are just like we do now with our smartphones.
Meerkat
Are you keeping in mind the fact that artificial intelligence by definition will have a mind of its own? Maybe it won't want to integrate with us.
Wombat
Here we go…
Meerkat
You can scoff, Wombat, but I have one word for you: paperclips.
To be continued…