Tag Archives: Future

Closer Horizons

By Robin Hanson · May 19, 2012 12:15 am · Comments (8)

A few curious folks took 250 science fiction stories across thirteen decades and looked at whether the stories were set <50 , 50 to 500, or >500 years in the future. The long term trend is that fewer stories are set in the more distant future:

(Given the small dataset, I wouldn’t take decade to decade fluctuations seriously.)

Some of this effect is probably our expecting faster rates of change, and so any given amount of strangeness is expected to arrive sooner. But I’d guess most of this effect is that we are just less interested in the distant future.

Early in the industrial revolution people were very aware of there being in a great transition, from farming to industry, and they were curious about where it all might lead. Now that we are well into the industrial era, we have a better sense for what industry is like, and are less concerned about there maybe being a new post-industrial era.

Added 1p: I did a regression of their fraction of >500 year stories vs. time, and the relation is 2% significant for both linear and log versions of the fraction. There is enough data here to see this effect. Also, both the linear and log versions of the <50 year fraction are 5% significant.

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Eventual Futures

By Robin Hanson · May 15, 2012 11:20 pm · Comments (29)

I’ve noticed that recommendations for action based on a vision of the future are based on an idea that something must “eventually” occur. For example, eventually:

  • We will run out of coal, so we’d better find replacements soon.
  • Earth will run out of stored energy of fossil fuels and radioactivity, so we’d better get ready to run only on sunlight.
  • Earth will run out of place for trash, so we must stop making trash.
  • The sun will die out, so we’d better get ready to move to another sun.
  • There will be a race to colonize other planets and stars, so our group should get out there first so we don’t get lose this race.
  • Chips will use X instead of silicon, so our chip firms must use X now, to not be left behind.
  • There will be no privacy of any sort, so we might as well get used to it now.
  • Some races will win, so we’d best fight for ours before its too late.
  • Firms will be stronger than nations, unless we break their power soon.
  • There will be a stronger world government, so let’s start one now.
  • There will be conflict between China and West, or Islam and West, so we best strike first now.
  • Artificial intelligences will rule the world, so let’s figure out now how to make a good one.
  • We’ll invent all that is worth inventing, so let’s find a way now to live without innovation.
  • We’ll know all the physics there is, so lets find something else interesting now.
  • There will be a huge deadly world war, so let’s stock some bunkers to hide in.
  • Nanobots will give everyone anything they want, so why work now?
  • The first nano-assembler’s owner will rule the world, so we best study nanotech now.
  • More fertile immigrants will out number us, so we best not let them in.
  • The more fertile stupid will make the world dumb, unless we stop them now.

The common pattern: project forward a current trend to an extreme, while assuming other things don’t change much, and then recommend an action which might make sense if this extreme change were to happen all at once soon.

This is usually a mistake. The trend may not continue indefinitely. Or, by the time a projected extreme is reached, other changes may have changed the appropriate response. Or, the best response may be to do nothing for a long time, until closer to big consequences. Or, the best response may be to do nothing, ever – not all negative changes can be profitably resisted.

It is just not enough to suspect that an extreme will be reached eventually – you usually need a good reason to think it will happen soon, and and that you know a robust way to address it. In far mode it often feels like the far future is clearly visible, and that few obstacles stand in the way of planning paths to achieve far ends. But in fact, the world is much messier than far mode is willing to admit.

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Testing My Growth Model

By Robin Hanson · May 8, 2012 10:00 am · Comments (10)

I have suggested that long run growth can be described as a sequence of exponential growth modes, from primates to foragers to farmers to industry, where mode transitions are similar in their degree of suddenness and growth rate change factors. This model will be tested in the future – it suggests that within a century or so we’ll see a change within five years to a new mode where the economy doubles every month or faster.

But my model can also be tested against the past. Our data on the animal, forager, and early farming eras is pretty poor. My hypothesis suggests that the forager era was one big growth mode similar to the farming or industry eras, with a relatively smooth rate of growth in capacity (even if rare disasters temporarily disrupted the use of that capacity), and that the forager to farming transition has a level of smoothness similar to that of the farming to industry transition.

Contrary to my model, many have suggested there was an important comparable revolution in human behavior around 50,000 years ago. My model predicts that growth accelerated smoothly from around 100,000 years ago to the near full speed farming world of about 5000 years ago, similar to the way growth accelerated from 1600 to 1900.

The latest results seem to support my model:

Back in 2000, a now famous scientific paper called “The Revolution That Wasn’t” argued that the then-conventional wisdom that modern human behavior had erupted in a “creative explosion” about 50,000 years ago in Europe was wrong. Rather, anthropologists Sally McBrearty and Alison Brooks contended that modern behavior, including creativity, has deep and ancient roots, going back some 300,000 years ago in Africa (Science, 15 February 2002, p. 1219).

At a meeting here last month, researchers heard new evidence that human evolution took a gradual, rather than revolutionary, course during two other key junctures in prehistory. A study of ancient stone tools from South Africa concludes that hunters manufactured spears with stone points—a sign of complex behavior—200,000 years earlier than had previously been thought. And new excavations at a 20,000-year-old settlement in Jordan, laden with artifacts typical of much later sites, suggest that the dramatic rise of farming villages in the Near East also had early and deep roots. … Many archaeologists now think that apparent “revolutions” are due to gaps in the record or to behavioral shifts triggered by changing conditions, rather than sudden advances in cognition. What appear to be precociously sophisticated behaviors are really reflections of what prehistoric humans were capable of all along. (more)

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Is Conflict Inevitable?

By Robin Hanson · May 3, 2012 1:00 pm · Comments (28)

Imagine you’ve been hiking in the wild for several days, with six others. Feelings are raw. Some think others aren’t carrying a fair load, some have been arguing politics, some are workplace rivals, and one has been having an affair with the spouse of another.

For weapons, the group has only a few small paring knifes. It is about time to find a place to stop for the night, and up ahead you spy a pile of rocks just the right size for violence – small enough to lift, and big enough to crush a skull. So you suggest stopping there for the night.

You think, “Violence is bad, but there is going to be violence here, so I might as well start it, so I can win. I’ll pretend to sleep then when others are still I’ll get up and smash my rival’s skull with a rock. I’ll conspire with my best ally George, who I may have to betray later. After all, the violence may continue until only one of us is left alive.”

Now, yes, it is possible to have Hunger-Games-like situations where everyone strongly expects everyone to fight until only one is left standing. And yes, in such situations you are better off hitting first, before they can hit you. But the first question you should always ask is, just how sure are you that you are in fact in such a situation.

This is what I think every time I hear people talk about inevitable future conflicts, be they Earth v. alien, robots v. humans, human v. animal, west v. east, rich v. poor, liberal v. conservative, religious vs. atheist, smart v. dumb, etc. Yes, if enough folks will see this as unrestrained war to the death, then you should consider striking first. And yes, there probably will be some sort of war eventually. But if you are wrong about the war being likely soon, you could cause vast needless destruction.

Alas, there is a unusually strong temptation to think in terms of inevitable conflict in far mode. In far mode we think more using a few sharp categories of us vs. them, we insist more on following basic principles no matter what the cost, and we think more in terms of dramatic story lines.

Worse, over the very long run, we do in fact expect a lot of winning and losing. Some firms will grow and others will go bankrupt, some professions will rise and others will fall, some musical genres will be remembered while others are forgotten, some families and races will have many kids while others have few, etc. This makes it easy to frame the long run as a no-holds-barred struggle to the death.

But if you are tempted to think this way, you should realize that that it will be very hard to preserve everything you like against future competition. It is very unlikely that you could simultaneously ensure the triumph of your planet, species, race, language, nation, city, musical tastes, favorite sport and team, preferred style of dress and home decoration, favorite story genres and characters, favorite school and profession, etc. If you are going to fight to the death for one thing, you will have to be ready to give up most everything else you like, if need be, for that one thing. And by initiating unreserved conflict in the hope of getting a first mover advantage in favor of your one thing, you may hasten the loss of many other things you treasure.

It seems to me that for most of the things you like and treasure, your best way to promote them is via peaceful trade and persuasion. Yes, most of them will probably fade away, outcompeted by something else. But your best bet to extend their duration is usually to compete peacefully, prospering as best you can to gain resources to help you support the things you like.

Maybe on the hike, Fred is your rival at work, and maybe he will beat you to that promotion you both want. Maybe he is also considering making a move on your gal. You might lose that competition too. Even so, you are usually better off trying your best via peaceful competition, than bashing in his skull with a rock during the night. He who competes but loses, and walks away, may live to fight another day.

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Inequality Is Diversity

By Robin Hanson · April 17, 2012 11:20 pm · Comments (18)

The Cambrian explosion … was the relatively rapid appearance, around 530 million years ago, of most major animal phyla, as demonstrated in the fossil record, accompanied by major diversification of organisms including animals, phytoplankton, and calcimicrobes. Before about 580 million years ago, most organisms were simple, composed of individual cells occasionally organized into colonies. Over the following 70 or 80 million years the rate of evolution accelerated by an order of magnitude (as defined in terms of the extinction and origination rate of species[4]) and the diversity of life began to resemble that of today. (more)

Now that humans have pioneered powerful innovations in law, tech, and organization, the obvious long-term future to expect is a diversity in use of those innovations: our descendants will radiate out in feature space to fill a wide range of niches, not only on Earth, but under and above it as well. Just as Cambrian explosion descendants shared common cell tech and structures, our descendants may mostly preserve some key features of human minds and societies far into the coming explosion. But that still leaves room for a vast diversity.

Since our society tends to give lip service to celebrating diversity, it can also give lip service to celebrating this future diversity. But humans also tend to be wary of inequality. Foragers were especially vigilant to prevent some of them from overtly dominating others, and while farming and industry cultures have led us to tolerate more inequalities, we aren’t especially happy about it.

This is a problem because it is very hard to imagine a Cambrian explosion level of diversity among our descendants without a lot more inequality. For plants or animals today, pick most any dimension along which you want to call some “better” than others, and you’ll find a wide variation — some are a lot better than others. Pretty much the only dimension in which all existing species are near “equal” is survival – all have survived. But of course they are a tiny fraction of winners vastly outnumbered by all the dead loser species.

Thus our descendants are likely to differ greatly from one another on most all imaginable dimensions, including dimensions of value, where some are called “better”. The only ways to prevent that is either to destroy all descendants, or for a central power to seize control of this process and impose a concept of equality favored by those who control it. And if you supported an attempt to seize central control on this basis, you’d risk folks with other agendas seizing control of this central power base.

While such a central control attempt might make sense someday, when we have learned better ways to coordinate, for now I think we have to accept that the future will come with both great diversity and great inequality – and that we can’t really have much diversity without a lot of inequality as well.

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Em Need For Speed

By Robin Hanson · April 16, 2012 1:35 pm · Comments (18)

I recently found fault with Keith Henson’s assumption that sexual competition would induce ems to run as fast as physically possible. So how fast do I think ems would run? Here is my current analysis:

Em speeds should intersect supply and demand. Speed supply comes from how em hardware (e.g., device, energy, and cooling) costs vary with speed. Since human brains use a very parallel design with cells whose signals change far slower than electronic circuits, the cost of em hardware should be roughly linear in em speed across a wide range, to a very fast max, perhaps a million times faster than humans. In this range, thinking twice as fast costs about twice as much.

Above that linear regime, a 1% speedup will add more than 1% to costs, with this speed premium approaching infinity at a maximum feasible speedup, perhaps a factor of a billion. Very slow ems should also suffer a cost premium, as they’d still need to store a mental state.

With compatible hardware, brief speed increases might be cheap if em brains have substantial heat capacity. Longer but still temporary speed changes might be made by swapping into different brain hardware, though this could have substantial switching costs.

On the demand for em speed, I see seven relevant factors:

  1. When physical systems have natural resonance periods, managing those systems suggets em response times near the shortest of those periods. For example, since small moveable human body parts have resonance periods of a fraction of a second, human brains have reaction times on that time scale – reacting faster might help sometimes, but costs too much. Ems with smaller human-like bodies would want faster brains to match their shorter periods.
  2. Ems that talk often would benefit from having similar mind speeds. This would create a tendency for em speeds to clump at common standard speeds. Ems that talk often to humans would have near human speeds. Ems with highly mismatched speeds could talk naturally if the slow one temporarily moved to faster mental hardware.
  3. It is awkward for ems to talk when there are substantial communication delays. For any given distance to em conversation partners, there is some max speed above which delays are noticeable and hence costly.
  4. It is tempting to use faster ems to speed up any project whose duration might take a substantial fraction of the economy’s doubling time, or where there is a race with competing projects. Of course project durations may be limited by factors other than em thinking speeds.
  5. The more important is a negotiation or argument between ems, the more private gains can come from having a faster em mind, to out-think the other ems. So in hierarchical organizations, higher level leaders would have faster minds.
  6. When it is useful to coordinate two different tasks, one could either have two ems do the two tasks and talk periodically, or have a single faster em do both tasks. A single em doing both tasks probably has skills less well matched to those tasks, and would pay extra costs to switch between tasks. But when task coordination is important enough, these can be prices worth paying.
  7. When it is important to minimize the time a worker is away from their tasks at leisure and sleep, it will be tempting to run those non-work activities very fast. This could allow near continuous time coverage of a task.

Thus while some ems will have speeds to match the physical systems they manage, and ems would be faster at sleep, leisure, on thinking-dominated projects, and at high organization levels. The speed of other ems would be set more by how important is coordination for their tasks, and em speeds would tend to clump.

Coordination seems especially important in key design tasks, and in management. For example, it would be especially tempting to have all the parts of a large intricate software project written by the same very fast em. It would also be tempting to have the top thousand or more manager roles in a big organizations all be filled by a single very fast em.

Faster ems would naturally tend to be richer ems, if nothing else because they’d have some discretion in how they used their time, and that time is worth more. Thus a single very fast boss could afford to own more of a firm, reducing owner vs. manager conflicts.

If faster ems tend to be richer, win arguments, and fill key design and management roles, they would naturally be treated as higher status, at least by our status cues. Ems would also likely see them as higher status.

Social roles can often be usefully divided into roles that deal more with insiders, vs. roles that deal more with outsiders. For example, in a family, childcare is an inside role, while working for money is an outside role. In a hierarchical organization, managers have a more outside role – they deal more with outsiders. We care more about openness and helpfulness in inside roles, but more about opacity and toughness in outside roles.

When ems of different speeds meet, the slower em would naturally be more transparent and the faster one more opaque. It seems that faster ems would tend more to take on outside roles, which will be associated with higher status. In hierarchical organizations, subordinates might be expected to be open, such as via allowing direct hardware access to their emotional expressions, while bosses might typically hide their feelings from subordinates.

The overall picture here seems to be of even more inequality than I had imagined when I just considered wealth inequality among a larger future population whose lifespans vary more. Each em firm may have one very fast rich dominant boss who personally owns a lot of the firm. All front line managers might report to this one super boss, in meetings where they temporarily run at boss speeds, and are expected to be emotionally open to boss inspection. Sir, yes sir!

All else equal, an increase in the spatial extent of a firm or city would tend to reduce the speed of ems that might notice substantial communication delays. If em firms and cities tend to naturally grow larger over time, they’d also tend to naturally become slower, at least at their peak speeds. The gains that the would have otherwise achieved from faster speeds would be compensated by being able to interact naturally with a wider range of ems.

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Murphy on Growth Limits

By Robin Hanson · April 15, 2012 1:25 pm · Comments (22)

Physicist Tom Murphy says he argued with “an established economics professor from a prestigious institution,” on whether economic growth can continue forever. They both agreed to assume Earth-bound economies, and quickly also agreed that total energy usage must reach an upper bound within centuries, because of Earth’s limited ability to discard waste heat via radiation.

Murphy then argued that economic growth cannot grow exponentially if any small but necessary part of the economy is fails to grow, or if any small fraction of people fail to give value to the things that do grow:

Not everyone will want to live this virtual existence. … Many would prefer the smell of real flowers. … You might be able to simulate all these things, but not everyone will want to live an artificial life. And as long as there are any holdouts, the plan of squeezing energy requirements to some arbitrarily low level fails. …

Energy today is roughly 10% of GDP. Let’s say we cap the physical amount available each year at some level, but allow GDP to keep growing. … Then in order to have real GDP growth on top of flat energy, the fractional cost of energy goes down relative to the GDP as a whole. … But if energy became arbitrarily cheap, someone could buy all of it. … There will be a floor to how low energy prices can go as a fraction of GDP. … So once our fixed annual energy costs 1% of GDP, the 99% remaining will find itself stuck. If it tries to grow, energy prices must grow in proportion and we have monetary inflation, but no real growth. …

Chefs will continue to innovate. Imagine a preparation/presentation 400 years from now that would blow your mind. … No more energy, no more ingredients, yet of increased value to society. … [But] Keith plopped the tuna onto the bread in an inverted container-shaped lump, then put the other piece of bread on top without first spreading the tuna. … I asked if he intended to spread the tuna before eating it. He looked at me quizzically, and said—memorably, “It all goes in the same place.” My point is that the stunning presentation of desserts will not have universal value to society. It all goes in the same place, after all. (more; HT Amara Graps)

While I agree with Murphy’s conclusion that the utility an average human-like mind gains from their life cannot increase exponentially forever, Murphy’s arguments for that conclusion are wrong. In particular, if only a fixed non-zero fraction of such minds could increase their utility exponentially, the average utility would also increase exponentially.

Also, the standard power law (Cobb-Douglas) functional form for how utility depends on several inputs says that utility can grow without bound when one sector of the economy grows without bound, even when another needed sector does not grow at all and takes a fixed fraction of income. For example, if utility U is given by U = Ea N1-a, where E is energy and N is non-energy, then at competitive prices the fraction of income going to the energy sector is fixed at a, no matter how big N gets. So N can grow without bound, making U grow without bound, while E is fixed.

My skepticism on exponential growth is instead based on an expectation of strongly diminishing returns to everything, including improved designs:

Imagine that … over the last million years they’ve also been searching the space of enjoyable virtual reality designs. From the very beginning they had designs offering people vast galaxies of fascinating exotic places to visit, and vast numbers of subjects to command. (Of course most of that wasn’t computed in much detail until the person interacted with related things.) For a million years they have searched for possible story lines to create engaging and satisfying experiences in such vast places, without requiring more computational resources behind the scenes to manage.

Now in this context, imagine what it means for “imagination” to improve by 4% per year. That is a factor of a billion every 529 years. If we are talking about utility gains, this means that you’d be indifferent between keeping a current virtual reality design, or taking a one in a two billion chance to get a virtual reality design from 529 years later. If you lose this gamble, you have to take a half-utility design, which gives you only half of the utility of the design you started with. …

It may be possible to create creatures who have such strong preferences for subtle differences, differences that can only be found after a million or trillion years of a vast galactic or larger civilization searching the space of possible designs. But humans do not seem remotely like such creatures. (more)

Neither mass, nor energy usage, nor population, nor utility per person for fixed mass and energy can grow exponentially forever.

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N. Calif. Talk, Meetup

By Robin Hanson · April 1, 2012 5:20 pm · Comments (8)

Next weekend I’ll have two events in northern California:

  1. I’ll give the Future Friday talk at Halcyon, 6:30p Friday April 6, 505 Penobscot Dr, Redwood City, CA 94063. (Enter on north side of building)
  2. Meetup, 7pm+, Saturday April 7, 1195 Andre Ave., Mountain View CA 94040.

Here is more about my Friday talk:

Em Econ 101 – My best guess for the next revolution on the scale of the industrial, or farming, or human revolutions, is artificial intelligence in the form of whole brain emulations, or “ems.” Many have considered ems from technical and philosophical viewpoints, but I consider em economics. That is, I try to work out in as much social detail as possible a relatively-likely reference scenario set modestly far into a post-em world.

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Me on Al Jazeera again

By Robin Hanson · March 28, 2012 1:03 pm · Comments (13)

I’ll be on Al Jazeera again at 3:30p EST today , this time with George Dvorsky and Ari Shulman; the topic: ethics of transhumanism.

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Egan’s Zendegi

By Robin Hanson · March 25, 2012 10:10 pm · Comments (43)

Greg Egan is one of my favorite science fiction authors, and his latest novel Zendegi (Kindle version costs a penny) seems to refer to this blog:

“You can always reach me through my blog! Overpowering Falsehood dot com, the number one site for rational thinking about the future—”

That is Nate Caplan, a self-centered arrogant rich American male nerd, who creepily stalks our Iranian female scientist hero Nasim Golestani, an expert in em (brain emulation) tech. Nate introduces himself this way:

I’m Nate Caplan. My IQ is one hundred and sixty. I’m in perfect physical and mental health. And I can pay you half a million dollars right now, any way you want it.

Nate wants to pay so he can be the first em:

It’s very important to me that I’m the first transcendent being in this stellar system. I can’t risk having to compete with another resource-hungry entity; I have personal plans that require at least one Jovian mass of computronium.

Nasim naturally despises Nate.

So is Nate Caplan inspired by me, by my famously libertarian colleague Bryan Caplan, or by Eliezer Yudkowsky, who was my co-blogger back when Egan wrote this book?

Consider that Egan’s book also contains a Benign Superintelligence Bootstrap Project, clearly modeled on Eliezer’s Singularity Institute:

Their aim is to build an artificial intelligence capable of such exquisite powers of self-analysis that it will design and construct its own successor. … The successor will then produce a still more proficient third version, and so on, leading to a cascade of exponentially increasing abilities. … Within weeks—perhaps within hours—a being of truly God-like powers will emerge.

This institute is backed by an arrogant pompous “octogenarian oil billionaire” Zachary Churchland. To say more here, I’m going to have to give spoilers – you are warned. Continue reading "Egan’s Zendegi" »

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