So Robin: *would* you describe yourself as a transhumanist and futurologist?

Transhuman kid stares at a couple of humans playing dice. They make one roll and in another millisecond he says:

‘A mind’s models of reality are like a sort of space. The ‘objects’ are like predicates – symbolic representations of states, the ‘forces’ are like the strengths of the relations between predicates – probability distributions – and the ‘geometry’ is like the concepts or categories. The apparent probability distributions are actually just special cases of curvatures (categorizations) in the geometry of mind space‘

He’s a smart kid this transhuman kid.

http://www.blog.speculist.com/archives/002212.html#comments

Refer to the 4th comment, dated December 26, at 6:42 pm. That is the final version.

It is recommended that, if possible, you also listen to the podcast, at

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/fastforwardradio/2009/12/23/fastforward-radio–countdown-to-foresight-2010-par.mp3?localembed=download

. This will help you to determine whether Mr. Hanson’s comments were interpreted in an appropriate context. Especially when working off transcripts, devoid of the comments of other participants, it’s possible to take things out of context.

Thanks to Mr. Hanson for the opportunity to engage in this discussion.

[2200 words deleted here - we have a 500 word comment length limit. RH]

I am currently working on personal goals, like my economic security, but when I decide to work on the far-future, I will be able to find those who really care, no problem. I have thought a lot about how to do that, and am willing to share my thinking with anyone who emails me.

The podcast, from 12/22, was content-rich. Robin started out with comments about decision and prediction markets, but it really started getting interesting at about 32:30 in the podcast. Following is a transcript of most of Robin’s comments from that point. I and hopefully other listeners will inject their opinions shortly, either here or on the Speculist blog. Robin and Brian Wong were the guests on the show:

“I find it fascinating that people get so worked up about this ‘Is the future optimistic or pessimistic’ thing, as if it’s like taking sides on your favorite football team, or something.

You ask yourself, why does it matter how optimistic we are about the future? I mean, say we thought the future wasn’t gonna come quite as fast as other people thought. Still, over the long run, we’ll still have this wonderful future, but it won’t get here quite as fast.

The rate of improvement, the exact rate of improvement, if it’s changing by a factor of two – that seems a lot less important, than that we get there eventually.”

“I think you should take seriously the various things that can go wrong, and say, ‘yeah, we probably won’t hit those things, but if we did, that would be really terrible, and what can we do about that?’ Or what’s the best thing to do about that? And then you get to the question of how is it best to avoid the various things that could go wrong? Then you get to people saying, ‘well, if we just slowed everything down, maybe we could deal with these problems better’. And then you’re getting on the other side, people saying, ‘well…’, like me really saying, ‘if you slow things down, you’re just gonna cause a whole bunch of more problems.’

But I mean, that seems to be the place to have the conversation. Not about overall optimism or pessimism, but the wisdom or prudence of being more slower, careful – or going gung-ho all the way.”

“…our universe is 14 billion years old. So, this era we’re in now, of rapid growth, is a very small fraction of the overall history of the past and of the future. So obviously, we’re really taken with it. And this is our world, but it just can’t last a long time, on a cosmic time scale.”

“…and Drexler understood that. And lots of people understood that. And so it’s interesting to think about ‘well, what will things have to be like, when you reach those fundamental limits.”

“…, and to see that growth rates would have to slow, and we’d have to be more at the limits of our capacity, and if we’re in a competitive world – which I think is likely – you know, if we’re evolving and competing, then we would be more closely adapted to our world, in the sense of finding it hard to have different behavior that would really have a competitive advantage”

“We’re clearly not very well adapted to our current world. That is, we’re apes who suddenly are thrust into this amazing growth spurt. And, we’ve had some selection and some adaptation over that period. But, for the large part, we are not adapted to this world. We’re doing all sorts of things apes would do: looking at the world around us, and imagining this was the jungle or the forest, and dealing with things that way, but we’re not making long-term plans, we’re not trying to sort of optimize the future of the universe.”

“…That’s not the kind of creatures we were, and still are.”

A short exchange with Brian, and then:

“Well, I think there are two big issues that we can think about now. One big issue, is ‘do we make it at all?’ If there’s a substantial chance of some big disaster we were talking about, that would just destroy it all, then that’s something that we could have some leverage over. To try to figure out how to avoid that. That’s the existential risk story, so even if you think the chances are only 1 percent, that could be our one leverage on the future, to make sure that one percent doesn’t happen.”

“…One thing we could do about the long term future, is try to make sure we can make it there, by looking at whatever the risks are, and trying to minimize them.”

“And the second big thing that we can do about the long term future, is to consider how much we want to have central coordination. It’s a sensitive, dangerous thing to consider, but it is one of the things that will have an influence over the distant future. If somehow we make a world government, and it ends up being strong, then it can end up controlling all of the colonization that goes out from here, and could have a permanent mark on that, if it was powerful enough. I’m not sure that’s a good idea, but it definitely is one of the big ways, we may have a mark on the future.”

In response to “what if the big government does it wrong?”,

Hanson replied,

“Absolutely. First of all, I want to say, it’s a question that we should think long and careful about.”

Responding to Hanson’s suggestion that we think about World Government, Brian Wang asked why would we expect the people in power to give it up?

“Well, we’re only a couple of people here, out of billions. So we should realize that our influence may be limited. But still, if we want to think about the question, that’s the kind of question to ask. It could be, for example, that sometime in the next century, we will have a tentative world government, and then if that does badly, after that people say, ‘no more of that, never again.’ And that’s how the influence will go, via this very formative, memorable example of how it didn’t go very well.”

The host asked Robin whether he sometimes thought of a singleton advanced AI as the world government, as opposed to human beings.
“Well, I think that’s part of the range of options to keep in mind. But I think people vastly overestimate how easy it might be. ”

“… but they underestimate how hard it is, to actually manage central coordination. We humans have had large amounts of experience trying to coordinate cities and states and nations, and larger things. And we’ve seen a lot about how it gets expensive, and how it gets hard. And so, you can call it an AI that’s in charge of anything, but it’s not clear that just calling it that, makes all these problems go away. I mean, it has to have some internal structure, and it has to have an internal way it’s organized. And the question is, how does it manage those problems, and how does it overcome the great costs and conflicts that we’ve had, that we’ve tried to coordinate on a large scale. ”

“I’m not gonna say anything is entirely clear, but for example, some people say, ‘well, if you just have a bunch of clones of the same thing, and the entire government is run by clones of the same creature, then they won’t have any internal conflicts, therefore they will all have peace and coordination.’, or something like that.”

Brian injected that the trend seemed to be that more numerous nations tend to be formed, rather than a trend toward consolidation, i.e. world government. Mr. Hanson responded.

“Over the centuries, the trend is more toward central government. No question, over the longer time scale.”

“Nations have had more centralized government, nations have been taxing a larger fraction of income.”

“They’re doing more actions on a national level, rather than a regional or metropolitan area level. There just, over the last century, clearly more government. ”

In response to Brian commenting on how much better life is with more options, and individuals have more control over their lives,

“I would say in the past that we’ve had government that were too big and too small, and a wide range of variety. I would say that one of the things that governments that were too big did, is they got involved in too many things. And one of the lessons that people learned is to back off on certain kinds of things. On the other hand, the government got involved in certain kinds of things, and they (people) liked it. And they kept doing more of it. ”

The hosts asked about the role of the futurist in these things, and about what they (Brian and Robin) will be doing at the ForeSight conference.

“So the actual futurist, most business futurists, are focused on a relatively short time scale, about 3-10 years, or not much longer than that. So clearly most demand for futurism, that’s sort of practical, is in that time scale.”
“But I’m most interested in the longer time scale, that you know after 20-100 years or something, and out there most of the people who do that kind of futurism, are basically entertainers, unfortunately. That’s the kind of mode they’re in, science fiction, inspirational speakers, whatever else it is.”

“And, I’m an academic, I’m a professor, and I know how much people love to see sort of odd, creative, contrarian points of view, but honest, I think what the future most needs, what understanding the future most needs, is just to take the standard points of view from our various academic fields, and then combine them. Not necessarily to be creative and contrarian, but just to take what computer scientists usually think that’s sort of the most straightforward, conservative things. What computer scientists think, combine that with economists think, for example, and put those views together, to make our best estimate of what is likely to happen. And honestly, that doesn’t happen today.”

“That doesn’t happen today, because when an economist looks at the future, when he thinks about computers, he doesn’t use what computer scientists think about computers. He uses what he has read in the newspaper, about computers. So each academic discipline takes their own expert field, and they combine that with their amateur image of other fields. And when computer scientists talk about the future of artificial intelligence, or whatever, they don’t go talk to economists about what they think. They make up their own economics, like most people do. They make up their own social science that seems intuitively right to them. And then they use that to make forecasts.”

“…and that’s basically how futurism fails, is that we don’t combine expert (something) from multiple fields. That’s the kind of thing I want to talk about, and describe some basic insights from.”

As others have noted, transhuman-rights is not the main definition of transhumanism, only a byproduct. You can actually make any argument about civil rights. People who think the sky is yellow might enter into a civil rights battle for their freedom if blue-skiers started to oppress them. However, one would never argue that yellow-skiers are in it to bitch about their rights. Their rights to be who they are is besides their main argument, which is the sky is yellow.

This is the weakest argument I’ve read so far. You say you’re indifferent, but then compare transhumanism to powerful social movements that one can not afford to ignore. Did you just crank this out because you had to write something for December 22nd, 2009?