Embracing Chaos

I'm at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco today.  It's wonderful seeing my company doing great things for the world.  Enabling people to build universally accessible applications that help people solve difficult problems together.  It gets us closer to the ultimate solution.

I'm also giving an Ignite talk.  I wanted to make it something of a motivational speech.  Encourage people to think about their own roles in helping bring about the robot revolution.  I also wanted an excuse to share some of my thoughts on how to build an alarm bed.  I'll post my slides after the conference, or at least link to somebody else who does.  But for now, I've got the credits and content licensing posted.

A while ago I posted about how to stop getting Dex phone books delivered in Seattle.  Unfortunately doing that wasn’t enough to stop all the dead trees from showing up on my doorstep.  Now there’s a new grass-roots service called Yellow Pages Goes Green which handles this nation-wide across all providers of phone books.  They liken themselves to a national do-not-call registry for dead trees.  If you use the internet or your phone to look up people and businesses, I encourage you to visit

http://www.yellowpagesgoesgreen.org/stop-yellow-pages/

and stop the unsolicited deliver of unwanted phone books.  Even if recycled, these books waste resources through paper processing, transportation and the recycling process which produces a lower quality paper, supported by inefficient advertising.

While I’m on the subject, if you haven’t tried Google SMS, it’s a great way to look things up.  Just send a text to 466453 ("GOOGLE") with the name of the business you want, and a location specified in writing or zip-code and it’ll respond with what you’re looking for.  It does all sorts of other good things too.  Works on all phones.  I’m a big fan.

There’s been a lot of fuss lately about Nick Bostrom’s ideas that we live in a simulation as a result of an article in the New York Times.  Here I’ll provide some analysis of Bostrom’s bold claim, including a proposed mechanism to explain my grandfather’s assertion that mathematical simplicity and beauty were indicators of underlying truth.  I’ll also explore the implications of this possibility to our daily lives, and show why this is another reason to follow Transhuman Morality.

Simplified Simulation or Complete, Accurate Model?

The simulations Bostrom describes would not be precise to the subatomic level, but rather use abstractions to simplify the computation.  Instead of simulating every electron, proton, neutron, quark, etc in each person’s body and everything around us, it might only simulate synapses and neurons in our brains.  Such short-cuts would be extremely useful to accomplish the goals he describes of virtually resurrecting ancestors.  (A convenient version of heaven.)  Just simulating the brains of the inhabitants of a virtual world is drastically easier than accurately simulating an entire universe down to the subatomic level.  For many purposes, including the ones we are likely to engage in anytime soon, it is sufficient. 

The software to run a simplified simulation like this would put its designer in an interesting predicament whenever the simulatees decide to build a new particle accelerator or perform some other experiment that pushes the limits of their understanding of fundamental physics.  Would a dialog box appear on the simulation screen asking the designer to make decisions about how to treat a new class of quark that had never been observed?  Then once the designer answers this question the simulation moves on?  Moreover, so many trappings of modern life are the result of applications of scientific breakthroughs like this?  For example, we could have never built semiconductors and thus computers without a solid understanding of quantum mechanics since they take advantage of quantum effects.  So closing the dialog box would require not only require describing the results of this experiment, but also coding up a bunch of new high-level abstractions that represent things like semi-conductors.  The simulation would need to know when it could use the molecular mechanics model, and when it would have to substitute a more detailed model or a coding abstraction that simplifies the results of more base laws.

If we lived in such a simplified simulation, it seems likely that chinks in the armor of reality would periodically appear.  Modern science has few inconsistencies like this.  (The big bang and quantum randomness being the two biggest two exceptions IMHO.)  I would wager that if we live in a simulation it is a completely accurate physical model that started with the big bang and covers the entire universe including our own evolution from primordial soup.  It’s not clear to me whether or not our universe has enough matter/energy to build a computer powerful enough to run such a simulation.  I should dig up my notes from Yael Maguire’s excellent talk at Foo Camp on the fundamental limits of computation to be sure, but I know it would chew through at least solar systems worth of our universe if not galaxies or more to simulate a comparable universe.  It seems more likely to me that if our world is simulated then the “host world” is governed by a different set of physical laws.  This point is debatable and important, but I’ll assume from here that the host world is governed by different laws.

Motivations of the Simulation Designers and Implications for Personal Morality

As the NY Times article points out, the simulators might just be bored, doing the equivalent of playing video games with us.  Or they might be scientific researchers investigating how changes to fundamental laws affect how worlds evolve.  Whatever their goals are in running a simulation of this scale, they are almost certainly interested in the complexity that we are creating here and now.  But how should we behave?

Robin Hanson suggests that as individuals living in a simulation we should try to lead the most interesting, impactful lives that we can.  This goal attempts to optimize for the case that the simulators will pick individuals from this simulated society to do something special with.  I think it extremely unlikely that the designers care about individuals at all.  If they’re looking at anything, I’d bet it’s entire societies.  So, if we are living in a simulation, I argue that we should do our best to advance technology as an insurance policy against extinction.  I have written a fair bit about the transhuman morals that such a guiding principal implies, but basically it boils down to being a geek and/or a hippie – advance technology as fast as possible and conserve natural resources so that the world doesn’t end before we reach the next level of technology.  Thinking that somebody might hit the “stop” button on the entire simulation puts a new twist on the idea of the world ending because as a society we failed to reach a certain level of technological sophistication.

A Simulation Argument for Truth in Mathematical Beauty and Simplicity

If our world is a simulation running inside a massive computing device, then something must have programmed this simulation.  The programmers of the simulation chose the physical laws that we live by, perhaps to see what would happen.  This puts an interesting spin on evaluating fundamental physical laws.  Which of these two equations below is more likely to be an accurate representation of the way the simulation designer wrote the code?  These are two different mathematical representations of P.A.M. Dirac’s eponymous equation, which is AFAIK believed to be a completely accurate representation of our physical world.

By this logic, the second one is almost certainly closer to how the simulation programmer understood the concept.  This perspective puts an interesting twist on Occam’s razor – the principal that the simpler explanation is probably true.  My grandfather believed that the simpler a physical law was, the more likely it was to be correct.  In this way he saw a certain beauty in math and physics.  If our world exists only as a simulation, then the simpler a physical law is, the more likely it is to be an accurate representation of the way the simulation was coded.

My old pal Stephen Hawking has been in the news a lot today for going on a vomet-comet ride.  (Okay, we’re not really old pals, but we’ve chatted a couple of times, notably at my grandpa’s memorial service where he gave a really touching eulogy.)  At a press conference before his flight, Stephen said:

"Life on Earth is at an ever-increasing risk of being wiped
out by a disaster such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a
genetically engineered virus or other dangers."

On this point I completely agree with him.  This idea was a key point I made in my recent Ignite talk on Transhuman Morality.  We’re going to wipe ourselves out.  But as far as what we should do about it, Stephen and I disagree.  He sees space travel as the route to salvation.  This planet is getting burned up, so we’d better find a new one, so the logic goes.  I think this line of reasoning is unrealistic and even reckless.  The idea that we can stop worrying about saving this planet is the reckless part.  Having an out like this encourages people to act irresponsibly.

The reason why it’s unrealistic is more subtle.  I said at Ignite that we won’t be flying around in space ships visiting other planets like in Star Trek, and people hassled me about it.  I know this is a little heretical for a futurist to say, but I believe it.  I should clarify a bit: I think it’s likely we’ll visit the other planets in our solar system — there’s plenty of useful matter here that we can mine and put to good use.  But a physical conscious entity leaving this solar system is tantamount to suicide as far as any relationship that entity could hope to maintain with the culture here is concerned.  The recent discovery of an earth-like planet only 20 years away puts this idea into perspective.  Even if we could make a trip at an average speed of half light speed, (a reasonably aggressive goal considering the need to accelerate and decelerate) a round-trip would take 80 years.  80 years ago the world saw the first telephone trans-atlantic telephone call.  In another 80 years, many believe we will have hit the information singularity meaning who knows what will be here.  Return would be nearly impossible, and almost certainly pointless since the world one would return to would be completely alien.  Leaving to colonize?  Possible I suppose, but good luck.  And at that point I really don’t think there would be any motivation.

My main point is that by the time we have sufficient technology for interstellar travel, we won’t have physical bodies any more.  The robot revolution will be complete.  As a society we will be much more concerned with creating faster computers in which to store our consciousnesses than with whatever we think we’d achieve by leaving the solar system.  Colonization might take the form of transmitting executable programs that represent our personalities into deep space with the hopes that some society will pick them up and try to execute them on whatever hardware they have.  Or perhaps sending out a nano-seed that knows how to build a receiver to pick up such a signal.  But it’s hard to imagine sending a physical copy of the data that represent our personalities in a format that’s compressed enough that it could be executable, while including the plans for making a more powerful computer to run on.  If we were at this stage, the only reason to do so would be because we had converted all the physical matter in our solar system to become information processing machinery and we needed more raw material with which to represent our thoughts.  That day may come, but it will not be soon.

So I agree we should continue to pursue space exploration, because it helps advance technology.  But it is not a way out of our pressing environmental concerns.  The world needs geeks to transcend beyond biological bodies.  But geeks need hippies to keep the world around for long enough to get there.

[Vomet comet picture courtesy of Kevin Boydston.]

The nice folks at Ignite posted videos for the rest of our talks from the second Ignite night, including my presentation on Why only Geeks and Hippies can save the world.  Watching it, I see that it’s a lot rougher than I remember.  The text as I intended to deliver it is available here, which might be a bit more coherent.  Anyway, here’s the video:

Enjoy!

[Here is the full text of what I practiced for my talk at Ignite Seattle last night.  I didn't manage to cram it all into the 5 minute presentation, largely because the audience was reacting a bit too loudly in places.  IMHO that's a good thing.  You can download my slides (slightly updated from the presentation).  Video coming soon -- check back.]

I’m here to talk about a system of morality that’s based on the upcoming end of society as we know it.  I’ll explain why only geeks and hippies can save the world.  I’m serious — I’m talking about the possible destruction of everything we know and care about.

Let’s look forward to the next 1,000 years.  What’s life going to be like?  Are we going to be flying around in spaceships visiting other planets like in Star Trek?  I don’t think so.  Or will we be killing each other over the last few gallons of gasoline like in Mad Max?  Maybe, and this is what I’m really scared of.  Or will the machines have risen up to try to destroy us like in Terminator?  Again maybe, but I’m not really worried about this, and I’ll explain why.

Now look back a billion years ago.  That’s when life first showed up.  And then a million years ago humans showed up.  Just a thousand years ago they had printing presses, and a hundred years ago we had cars and ten years ago we had google.  Progress is speeding up faster and faster exponentially and it’s not going to stop.

What’s happening is that people are getting smarter and more capable of solving complex problems both by themselves and by collaborating with others using tools like e-mail and text messaging.  Our brains are slowly starting to merge with computers.  Look at cell phones: who here actually remembers any phone numbers any more?  And who cares?  We don’t need to.

We’re heading towards what’s known as The Information Singularity.  This is where human brains and computers actually merge into the same thing.  When this happens technology will progress so fast that un-aided humans will be completely unable to keep up.  This is where all of our technology is heading.  But you know, we might never get there.

What if there was a nuclear war?  How far back would that set us?  100 years?  100,000 years?  Would we ever be able to get back to where we are?  Maybe not.  That could be the complete end to evolution as we know it.  Nuclear war’s not the only way this could happen either. 

Imagine that somebody got so pissed off that they bio-engineered a super-virus to kill all white people.  And it accidentally killed all people.  Or what if global warming got to the point where the weather is so bad that advanced society just can’t exist?  The ecosystem could collapse.  We could run out of energy resources.  Gray goo.

I believe that in the next thousand years something is going to render our planet uninhabitable to life as we know it.  And the question is, when that day comes, will we be ready for it?  Will technology have advanced to the point where we don’t need life as we know it in order to preserve what we really care about? 

Well what is it that we really care about?  This is the critical question facing our society right now.  We can’t close our eyes and hope it just goes away — it won’t.  Now some will say "EARTH FIRST!  People made this problem and we need to back off and let nature fix itself."  But I don’t buy that.  I say we embrace the chaos and push forwards.  Here’s why.

I believe that the most valuable thing in the world is complex thought, information, ideas, memes, logic, reason, discussion, art, emotion.  All of these things are way more important to me than things like birds.  Or plants.  Or even humans.  Because we don’t need bodies to listen to music.  Or to tell stories. Or to fall in love.

We can achieve salvation through technology.  When the upcoming robot revolution arrives, I say we let the robots win.  Don’t fight them — join them!  Let’s cast off these weak unreliable human bodies and transcend to a society of pure thoughts and ideas.

We can do it!  We can build a network of computers powerful enough to hold all of us at once.  We can upload our consciousnesses into these computers by simulating the human brain in software.  It’s an incredibly hard problem — way harder than say simulating the weather.  But we can do it.  Computers are getting faster and faster all the time and likewise our understanding of the brain is getting better and better.  Someday soon we will be able to simulate an entire brain in software down to the very last neuron and when that happens, that computer will actually have the personality of a real human being.  It’ll work because there is no quantum soul.  We are nothing but our neuronal structure.

Some people will miss having bodies.  They’ll miss things like kayaking and eating food.  But they won’t miss dying.  Just like nobody misses having a warm fire to come home to in their cave.

You know, our lives are pretty darned good here and now.  So I gotta ask: What are you going to do with this?  Are you just going to play?  Be a hedonist?  Or do you want to do something that matters with your life?  Do you want to work to preserve complex thought and information into the next millennium?  It’s up to you.

But if you do want to help, listen to Avi.  Install compact fluorescent bulbs.  Shop at Madison Market and support sustainable agriculture.  Get political and try to calm down the crazies who want to blow everything up.  In other words, be a hippie.  We might not be able to stop the fall,  but we can definitely postpone it.  Hopefully for long enough.

Or work from the other side to speed up technology.  Talk to Bre about building robots.  Write educational software to make people smarter.  Work on communication tools.  Research how the brain works and how to connect it directly to computers.  In other words, be a geek.

Because it’s the geeks and the hippies who are going to preserve what’s really important into the next millennium.  If you ask me, to not do so is to act immorally.  This system of morality is based on two axiomatic assumptions:

    1) We cannot keep going like this forever.

    2) Complex thought and information are more valuable than nature and life.

If you’d like to read more about this, Kurzweil has written lots of good books on the singularity.  My good buddy Mez has written a fabulous book on relevant technology trends.  Or you can read my blog at embracingchaos.com.  Thanks.

Transhumanist Morality is the idea that we should
consider the impact of our actions in the context of the millennium-scale history
of humanity. Specifically, I think the
only way we will avoid some kind of dystopian apocalyptic fate is by seeking
salvation through technology.

In this context, moral actions are those that increase the
probability that as a species we achieve technological salvation before we blow
ourselves up. I’d like to explore what
this means in very practical terms by analyzing a number of jobs I’ve had and
considered and seen my friends do over the years.

SEO for e-Commerce

I once seriously considered a job doing Search Engine
Optimization for an e-Commerce company. They offered me truckloads of money to get their web pages to the top of
the google rankings. The work would have
been technically fascinating, but I ended up rejecting the job largely on moral
grounds. I just couldn’t feel good
about the work I’d be doing.

Even without a transhuman perspective, this job clearly has a zero-sum impact on society. Reverse-engineering pagerank isn’t actually building value. Move sales away from other companies and
towards your own only has a positive impact on society if you genuinely believe
your company is creating more value for the consumer than your competitors
do. This kind of corporate
righteousness is dangerous and I just didn’t believe it.

Pure marketing efforts like SEO might as well be selling
used-cars for all the good it has on the long-term story-arc of humanity.

Electronic Music Systems

While at first blush this might seem trivial, I actually do
consider this work (my current primary employment) to be moral from a
transhuman perspective.

Making it easier for people to consume music they love makes
their leisure time more efficient and effective. This makes people happier. Following the logic of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human needs, happy people
have more energy to devote to other causes. So by making people happier, I’m creating more capacity to solve the
meaningful problems. It’s an indirect
effect, but I think it is helping.

A reasonable counter-argument to this is that great creativity
often seems to come from the emotionally tortured, especially in the fine
arts. But I don’t think this pattern
holds up for great scientists and engineers.

Direct Political Activism

There are many reasons to consider the current political
regime in the US immoral from a transhuman perspective. The war on terror stands a chance of cutting
this whole conversation short by achieving the dystopian outcome in this
generation. Stifling stem-cell research
is directly preventing technological advancement. Regressive judgmental social policies like discrimination based
on sexual preference makes many people miserable and stifles creativity per the
earlier Maslow argument. This
government is certainly doing plenty to bring about the eventual destruction of
our technologically advanced society.

But the pendulum of politics swings very naturally back and
forth.  (As evidenced by last week’s election.)  Convincing a few people to
change their votes really doesn’t matter much because the aggregate political
mood has a will of its own. Trying to
alter that will by changing fundamental systems like openness of the press or
campaign funding policies or society’s sense of engagement in politics is
definitely more worthwhile since that work is better leveraged. But working on kicking out the current
damaging regime is a short-term fix that will just get undone after another
political cycle. There is a small
chance that kicking them out prevents catastrophe, and for that reason it’s
worthwhile, but I still haven’t lost my faith in the checks and balances in the
whole system.

Renewable Energy

Running out of energy resources is one easy-to-foresee way
that our advanced society could collapse. As such, work on renewable energy helps to delay or even prevent this
set of doomsday scenarios.

This work is decidedly moral because it extends our runway
giving us longer to do what we need to before things go seriously south. This provides an indirect linear improvement
in the situation. Indirect because it’s
only addressing one possible set of doomsday scenarios. Linear because it’s directly combating the
problem directly – it’s not clear how good work here enables faster development
of good work in other areas.  But this definitely helps.

Research into Neuroscience, Robotics, Computational Linguistics, etc

These and other fields offer great promise in the near term
to advance technology in the direction of technological salvation. A confluence of these technologies with a
few that we don’t understand yet have the potential to realize various scifi
visions of overcoming the physical limitations that will otherwise painfully
drag us back to a more primitive existence.

As such, work in these fields is directing helping to solve
the problem. This is highly moral
work.  It is leveraged in that these advances will spur other advances.

Working on Internet Explorer or Google

Almost 10 years ago I got to contribute in a very small way to IE5.  Back then browsers were still evolving quickly.  It’s not as clear of the value or working on Firefox today, but back then building better browser technology was one of the most
direct contributions to increased human intelligence. Today the best analogy would probably be working on search for Google or MSN.  The ubiquitization of the internet has dramatically improved
people’s ability to solve complex problems quickly. I really don’t know what technological salvation will involve,
but I am sure that getting there will require solving a great many complex
problems.

Work like this that facilitates human communication and
problem solving is extremely moral. By
facilitating all forms of problem-solving, it is accelerating the pace of
advancement in nearly every other field we can consider. This kind of exponential growth is what
we’re gonna need to avoid the bad scenarios.

e-Learning

Electronic learning systems have the potential to improve
the quality of education for everybody everywhere. This means enabling people to better solve complex problems in a
very direct way: they’re smarter.

I firmly believe that the next decade is going to see a
revolution in education at all levels. The net result will be an educational system which is extremely
meritocratic, enabling anybody who is motivated to achieve intellectual skills
close to their full intrinsic potential. A smarter population will make solving every technological challenge in
the future easier. As such, I currently
don’t see any activity more moral than building electronic learning systems.

I consider myself a transhumanist.  I spend probably too much time thinking about very long-terrm trends of humanity.  Some of the trends I see seem obvious to the point of being irrefutable, while others I’m sure are controversial.  Nevertheless, I’ll lay out a few of the basic tenants of transhumanism, and begin to explain why they lead to the very deep and personal implications they have for me.

Computers are getting faster and more powerful.  As they do so, they’re helping humans be smarter.  Maybe not invidual humans, as some studies have shown that things like e-mail and powerpoint can actually make people stupider for some definition.  I can see the truth in this by considering several very smart friends of mine who don’t actually remember their spouse’s cell phone numbers.  Because they don’t need to.  Their computer familiars remember these things for them — the external brain.  In combination we get smarter — the synergy of humans and computers or groups of humans connected through computers — whatever you want to call these aggregate life-forms, they are way better at solving difficult problems than any individual human was just 15 years ago, when there was little e-mail and no Google.  In just 15 years, we’ve seen massive improvements in our ability to solve problems!

Moreover, technological change is accelerating.  These changes aren’t going to stop until we have completely overcome biology.  Unless something horrible happens.  Which it could.  To be explicit, I see humanity facing two possible futures on the multi-century timescale:

• Enlightenment by transcending the limitations of biology through technology
• A dramatic, catastrophic, probably violent and painful return to a simpler way of life

Because of this, I feel a sense of transhumanist morality obliging me to dedicate my life’s work to striving for the first option: species-wide enlightenment through technology.

I plan on writing a lot more on this topic.  But I wanted to start by stating a thesis along with a few basic ideas.