Tag Archives: Future

Thought Crime Hypocrisy

By Robin Hanson · May 21, 2013 10:20 am · Comments (16)

Philip Tetlock’s new paper on political hypocrisy re thought crimes:

The ability to read minds raises the specter of punishment of thought crimes and preventive incarceration of those who harbor dangerous thoughts. … Our participants were highly educated managers participating in an executive education program who had extensive experience inside large business organizations and held diverse political views. … We asked participants to suppose that scientists had created technologies that can reveal attitudes that people are not aware of possessing but that may influence their actions nonetheless.

In the control condition, the core applications of these technologies (described as a mix of brain-scan technology and the IAT’s reaction-time technology) were left unspecified. In the two treatment conditions, these technologies were to be used … to screen employees for evidence of either unconscious racism (UR) against African Americans or unconscious anti-Americanism (UAA). … Liberals were consistently more open to the technology, and to punishing organizations that rejected its use, when the technology was aimed at detecting UR among company managers; conservatives were consistently more open to the technology, and to punishing organizations that rejected its use, when the technology was aimed at detecting UAA among American Muslims.

Virtually no one was ready to abandon that [harm] principle and endorse punishing individuals for unconscious attitudes per se. … When directly asked, few respondents saw it as defensible to endorse the technology for one type of application but not for the other—even though there were strong signs from our experiment that differential ideological groups would do just that when not directly confronted with this potential hypocrisy. …

Liberal participants were [more] reluctant to raise concerns about researcher bias as a basis for opposition, a reluctance consistent [the] finding that citizens tend to believe that scientists hold liberal rather than conservative political views. …

This experiment confronted the more extreme participants with a choice between defending a double standard (explaining why one application is more acceptable) and acknowledging that they may have erred initially (reconsidering their support for the ideologically agreeable technology). … Those with more extreme views were more disposed to … backtrack from their initial position. (more; ungated)

So if we oppose thought crime in general, but support it when it serves our partisan purposes, that probably means that we will have it in the long run. There will be thought crime.

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Imagining Futures Past

By Robin Hanson · May 18, 2013 7:50 pm · Comments (23)

Our past can be summarized as a sequence of increasingly fast eras: animals, foragers, farmers, industry. Foragers grew by a factor of about four hundred over two million years, farmers grew by a factor of about two hundred over ten thousand years, and the industry economy has so far grown by a factor of about eight hundred over three hundred years. If this trend continues then before this era grows by another factor of a thousand, our economy should transition to another even faster growing era.

I saw the latest Star Trek movie today. It struck me yet again that such stories, set two centuries in our future, imagine a unlikely continuation of industry era styles, trends, and growth rates. At current growth rates the economy would grow by a factor of two thousand over that time period. Yet their cities, homes, workplaces, etc. look quite recognizably industrial, and quite distinct from either farmer or forager era styles. The main ways their world is different from ours is in continuing industry era trends, such as to richer and healthier individuals, and to more centralized government.

While this seems unlikely, it does make sense as a way to engage the audiences of today. But it leads me to wonder: what if past eras had set stories in imagined futures where their era’s trends and styles had long continued?

For example, imagine that the industrial revolution had never happened, and that the farming era had continued for another ten thousand years, leading to more than today’s world population, mostly farming at subsistence incomes within farmer-era social institutions. Oh there’d be a lot of sci/tech advances, just not creating much industry. Perhaps they’d farm the oceans and skies, and have melted the poles. Following farmer era trends, there’d be less violence, and longer term planning horizons. There’d be a lot more thoughtful writings, but without much intellectual specialization having arisen. Towns and firms would also still be small and less specialized.

Or, imagine that the farming revolution had never happened, but that foragers had continued to advance for another two million years, also reaching a population like today. They’d still live in small wandering bands collecting wild food, but in a much wider range of environments. Maybe they’d forage the seas and the skies. Their brains would be bigger, their tools more advanced, and their culture of participatory dance, music, and stories far more elaborate.

These sound like fascinating worlds to imagine, and would make good object lessons as well. Our future may be as different from the world of Star Trek as these imagined worlds would be from our world today.

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Robot Econ Primer

By Robin Hanson · May 15, 2013 1:30 am · Comments (75)

A recent burst of econo-blog posts on the subject of a future robot based economy mostly seem to treat the subject as if those few bloggers were the only people ever to consider the subject. But in fact, people have been considering the subject for centuries. I myself have written dozens of posts just here on this blog.

So let me offer a quick robot econ primer, i.e. important points widely known among folks who have long discussed the subject, but often not quickly rediscovered by dilettantes new to the subject:

  • AI takes software, not just hardware. It is tempting to project when artificial intelligence (AI) will arrive by projecting when a million dollars of computer hardware will have a computing power comparable to a human brain. But AI needs both hardware and software. It might be that when the software is available, AI will be possible with today’s computer hardware.
  • AI software progress has been slow. My small informal survey of AI experts finds that they typically estimate that in the last 20 years their specific subfield of AI has gone ~5-10% of the way toward human level abilities, with no noticeable acceleration. At that rate it will take centuries to get human level AI.
  • Emulations might bring AI software sooner. Human brains already have human level software. It should be possible to copy that software into computer hardware, and it seems likely that this will be possible within a century.
  • Emulations would be sudden and human-like. Since having an almost emulation probably isn’t of much use, emulations can make for a sudden transition to a robot economy. Being copies of humans, early emulations are more understandable and predictable than robots more generically, and many humans would empathize deeply with them.
  • Growth rates would be much faster. Our economic growth rates are limited by the rate at which we can grow labor. Whether based on emulations or other AI, a robot economy could grow its substitute for labor much faster, allowing it to grow much faster (as in an AK growth model). A robot economy isn’t just like our economy, but with robots substituted for humans. Things would soon change very fast.
  • There probably won’t be a grand war, or grand deal. The past transitions from foraging to farming and farming to industry were similarly unprecedented, sudden, and disruptive. But there wasn’t a grand war between foragers and farmers, or between farmers and industry, though in particular wars the sides were somewhat correlated. There also wasn’t anything like a grand deal to allow farming or industry by paying off folks doing things the old ways. The change to a robot economy seems too big, broad, and fast to make grand overall wars or deals likely, though there may be local wars or deals.

There’s lots more I could add, but this should be enough for now.

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Cooperate Or Specialize?

By Robin Hanson · May 12, 2013 10:45 am · Comments (17)

Futurists sometimes get excited about new ways to encourage cooperation in Prisoner’s Dilmena like games. For example, future folks might interact via quantum games, future AIs might show each other their source code, or future clans of em copies might super-cooperate with one another. Folks who know just enough economics to be dangerous sometimes say that this “changes everything”, i.e., that future economies will be completely different as a result. In fact, however, not only do we already have lots decent ways to encourage cooperation, such as talking and reputation, we also consistently forgo such ways to better encourage flexibility and specialization.

As I reviewed in my last post, we have strong reasons and abilities to cooperate within family clans, especially when such clans heavily intermarry and live and work closely together over many generations. And our farming era ancestors took big advantage of this. To function and thrive, however, our industry era economy had to suppress such clans, to allow more flexibility and specialization. Industry needs people to frequently change where they live, what kinds of jobs they do, and who they work with, and to play fair within industry-era reimagined firms, cities, and nations. Strong family clans instead encouraged stability and nepotism, and discouraged people from moving to cities and new jobs, and from cooperating fairly with and showing sufficient loyalty to other families within shared firms, cities, and nations.

Our industry era institutions consistently forgo the extra cooperation advantages of strong family clans, to gain more flexibility and specialization. This is now a huge net win. Our descendants are likely to similarly forgo advantages from new ways to cooperate, if those similarly reduce future flexibility and specialization. For example, future societies of brain emulations are likely to be wary of strongly self-cooperating clans of copies of the same original human. While such copy clans have even stronger reasons to cooperate with each other than family clans, copy clans might cause future organizations to suffer even more than do family-based firms, cities, and nations today from clan-based nepotism, and from low quality and inflexible matches of skills to jobs. Ems firms and cities are thus likely to be especially watchful for clan nepotism, and to avoid relying too heavily on any one clan.

Yes game theory captures important truths about human behavior, including about costs we pay from failing to fully cooperate. But prisoner’s dilemma style failures to cooperate in simple games comprises only a tiny fraction of all the important things that can and do go wrong in a modern economy. And we already have many decent ways to encourage cooperation. I thus conclude that future economies are unlikely to be heavily redesigned to take advantage of new possible ways to encourage prisoner’s dilemma style cooperation.

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Delay Cosmology

By Robin Hanson · May 5, 2013 4:00 am · Comments (63)

We live in an age of unusually rapid fundamental discovery. This age cannot last long; it must soon slow down as we run out of basic things to discover. We may never run out of small things to discover, but there can be only so many big things.

Such discovery brings status. Many are proud to live in the schools, disciplines, cities, or nations from which discovery is seen to originate. We are also proud to live in this age of discovery. While this discovery divides us to some extent, making us jealous of top discoverers, it unites us more I think, in pride as part of this age of discovery.

This ability to unite via our discoveries is a scarce resource that we now greedily consume, at the cost of future generations to whom they will no longer be available. Some of these discoveries will give practical help, and aid our ability to grow our economy, and thereby help future generations. For those sorts of discoveries the future may on net benefit because we discover them now, rather than later.

But many other sorts of discoveries are pretty unlikely to give practical help. By choosing to discover these today, we on average hurt future eras, depriving them of the joy and pride of discovery, and its ability to unite them around their shared status. This seems inefficient, because many kinds of discovery should get cheaper over time, because there are probably diminishing returns to the joy of more discoveries in the same generation, and because the future may have stronger needs for ways to unite them.

This all suggests that we consider delaying some sorts of discovery. The best candidates are those that produce great pride, are pretty unlikely to lead to any practical help, and for which the costs of discovery seem to be falling. The best candidate to satisfy these criteria is, as far as I can tell, cosmology.

While once upon a time advances in cosmology aided advances in basic physics, which lead to practical help, over time such connections have gotten much weaker. Today, the kinds of basic physics that cosmology is likely to help is very far from the sort that has much hope to give practical aid anytime soon. Such basic physics is thus also a sort of discovery we should consider delaying.

I’m not saying we create strong international law to prohibit such discovery. Much could go wrong with that to turn net gains into net losses. But we might at least locally offer more social disapproval and less status to such discoveries, in recognition of their greedy grab from future generations. Why praise the discoverers of today, who help little else and take glory and unity away from the future?

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Em Econ At Harvard

By Robin Hanson · April 15, 2013 8:00 am · Comments (0)

I’ll talk on Em Econ twice this week at Harvard:

Added: The Boston lockdown Friday moved the discussion to Saturday. I’ve added links to audio and slides.

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If More Now, Less Later

By Robin Hanson · April 7, 2013 11:10 pm · Comments (40)

On Thursday I talked, together with Elie Hassenfeld of GiveWell, at the UC Berkeley Faculty Club on Effective Altruism (audio here). Scott Alexander wrote a thoughtful report, which Tyler blogged. One claim I made that I’ve before (here, here, here) is that because real interest rates (i.e., average investment rates of return) tend to be positive, it is more effective to wait, investing now and then donating later. Since many continue to question that claim, I thought I’d elaborate a bit.

In the past I’ve used Ben Franklin as an example of the possibility of using trusts to save for a very long time. But I think that distracted from my basic point, which can be made just by suggesting that you wait until the end of your life to donate. Waiting longer might in fact be better, but it has more tax and agency issues; you can’t as easily ensure your money is spent the way you want.

I admit that a good reason to donate now is if you believe that we are quickly running out of worthy recipients of charity, either because the world is getting richer and nicer, the charity world is getting more effective, or we happen to live in an unusual time of great need or danger. People who think that global warming and ecological collapse will soon make the world a hell can’t believe this, nor can those who fear great disruption in an em transition. But others may.

I also agree that tax considerations will change the rate of return you can expect, and that by giving over a period of time you may learn from your early gifts to better pick later gifts. But it should be enough to start this learning process when you are older; your life experience will help you learn faster then.

The issue I want to focus on in this post is: how high do interest rates have to be to justify saving to donate later? I’ve sometimes said that interest rates need to be higher than growth rates, and some have questioned if interest rates are in fact higher than growth rates. Others, like my co-speaker Ellie Hassenfeld and his college Holden Karnofsky at Givewell, argue that giving now to help people who are sick or under-schooled creates future benefits that grow faster than ordinary growth rates. But now I think I was mistaken – if real charity needs are just as strong in the future as today, then all we really need are positive interest rates. Let me explain.

When a person chooses to save financially, they choose to spend a bit less in their usual ways, in order to give money to someone else, in the expectation of getting money back from that someone else at a later date. If they had instead not saved, and spent the money instead, that spending may well have also indirectly benefited them in the future. They might buy some medicine, get more exercise, get more sleep, try out some new products, make some new friends, or learn some new skills, any of which might help their future self.

But at the margin, a person who saves another dollar, or chooses not to borrow another dollar, must typically expect the financial returns from their investments will help them more in the future than will such indirect effects of spending today. In fact, they should expect this savings will benefit their future self more than any of these other ways of spending today. After all, why give up money today if that both gives you less to spend today, and gives you less in the future? So there wouldn’t be any savings, or less than maximal borrowing, if people didn’t expect more gains later from saving than from spending today.

This implies that unless charity recipients are saving nothing and borrowing as much as they possibly can, they must expect that you would benefit them more in the future by saving and giving them the returns of your savings later, than if you had given them the money today, even after taking into account all of the ways in which their spending today might help them in the future. So there really must be a tradeoff between helping today and helping later; if you help more today, you help less in the future. At least if you help them in a way they could have helped themselves, if only they had the money.

Of course you might not care as much about future suffering, or future folks might suffer less. But if you do care as much, and there is as much future need to help, then if interest rates are positive you can obtain more real resources with which to give more real help if you will save now, and donate later.

You might wonder: what if a deserving charity recipient is borrowing, and at a higher interest rate than you can get from by investing? This implies that you might benefit them and yourself by loaning them money, if you could overcome the barriers that have prevented others from doing so. It also implies that if you were going to help them, you might want to do it now rather than later. But this doesn’t change the fact that there is a tradeoff between helping today vs. tomorrow. And if there will be people later in a similar situation of need, you can do more good by waiting to help them later.

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Civilization Vs. Human Desire

By Robin Hanson · April 3, 2013 9:10 am · Comments (75)

A few years ago I posted on Kevin Kelly on the Unabomber:

The Unabomber’s manifesto … succinctly states … the view … that the greatest problems in the world are due not to individual inventions but to the entire self-supporting system of technology itself. … The technium also contains power to harm itself; because it is no longer regulated by either nature of humans, it could accelerate so fast as to extinguish itself. …

But … the Unabomber is wrong to want to exterminate it … [because] the machine of civilization offers use more actual freedoms than the alternative. … We willingly choose technology with its great defects and obvious detriments, because we unconsciously calculate its virtues. … After we’ve weighted downsides and upsides in the balance of our experience, we find that technology offers a greater benefit, but not by much. (more)

Lately I’ve been reading Against Civilization, on “the dehumanizing core of modern civilization,” and have been struck by the strength and universality of its passions; I agree with much of what they say. Yes, we humans pay huge costs because we were built for a different world than this one. Yes, we see gains, but mostly because we are culturally plastic – we let our culture tell us what we want and like, and thus what to do.

And yes, contrary to Kelly, we mostly do not choose how civilization changes, nor would we pick the changes that do happen if we could. As I reported a week ago, our usual main criteria in verbal evaluations of distant futures is if future folks will be caring and moral, and since moral standards change most would usually rate future morals as low. Also, high interest rates show that we try hard to transfer resources from the future to ourselves. And if we could, we’d also probably make future folks remember and honor us more, and not forget our favorite art, music, stories, etc.

So, if we could, we’d pick futures that transfer to us, honor us, preserve our ways, and act warm and moral by our standards. But we don’t get what we’d want. That is, we mostly don’t consciously and deliberately choose to change civilization according to our preferences. Instead, changes are mostly side effects of our each trying to get what we want now. Civilizations change as cultures and technologies are selected for being more militarily, rhetorically, economically, etc. powerful, and for giving people what they now want. This is mostly out of anyone’s control, and yes it could end very badly.

And yet, it is our unique willingness and ability to let our civilization change and be selected by forces out of our control, and then to tell us that we like it, that has let our species dominate the Earth, and gives us a good chance to dominate the galaxy and more. While our descendants may be somewhat less happy than us, or than our distant ancestors, there may be trillions of trillions or more of them. I more fear a serious attempt by overall humanity to coordinate to dictate its future, than I fear this out of control process.

By my lights, things would probably have gone badly had our ancestors chosen their collective futures, and I doubt things have changed much lately. Yes, our descendants may not share today’s moral sense, or remember us and our art as much as most of us might like. But they will want something, often get it, and there may be so so many of them. And that could be so very good, by my lights.

So I say let us venture on, out of control, into the great and perhaps terrible civilization that we may become. Yes, it might be even better if a few forward looking elites could at least steer civilization modestly away from total destruction. But I fear that once substantial steering-abilities exist, they may not stay modest.

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What About The Future Matters?

By Robin Hanson · March 22, 2013 10:05 pm · Comments (9)

The future of 2050 might be different in many ways if, for example, climate change were mitigated, abortion laws relaxed, marijuana legalized, or the power of different religious groups changed. Which of the following types of differences matter most to you? To most people?

  • Dysfunction: murder, serious assault, disease, poverty, gender inequality, rape, homelessness, suicide, prostitution, corruption, burglary, fear of crime, forced immigration, gangs, terrorism, global warming.
  • Development: technological innovation, scientific progress, major scientific discoveries, volunteering, social welfare organizations, community groups, education standards, science education.
  • Warmth: warm, caring, considerate, insensitive, unfriendly, unsympathetic.
  • Morality: honest, trustworthy, sincere, immoral, deceitful, unfaithful.
  • Competence: capable, assertive, competent, independent, disorganized, lazy, unskilled.
  • Conservation: respect for tradition, self-discipline, obedience, social order, being moderate, national security, family security, being humble.
  • Self-transcendence: honesty, social justice, equality, helpful, protect environment, meaning in life.
  • Openness to change: independence, exciting life, enjoying life, freedom, a varied life, being daring, creativity,
  • Self-enhancement: social power, being successful, ambition, pleasure, wealth, social recognition.

In fact, most people can hardly be bothered to care about the distant future world as a whole, and to the extent they do care, a recent study (details below) suggests that the main thing they care about from the above list is how warm and moral future folks will be. That is, people hardly care at all about future poverty, freedom, suicide, terrorism, crime, poverty, homelessness, disease, skills, laziness, or sci/tech progress. They care a bit more about self-enhancement (e.g., success, pleasure, wealth). But mostly they care about benevolence (warmth & morality, e.g., honesty, sincerity, caring, and friendliness).

Now this study only looked at eight future changes, half of them religious, and I’m not that happy with the way they did their statistics. So there’s a slim hope better studies will get different results. But overall this is pretty sad; like us, future folks will actually care about many more things than their benevolence, and so they may well lament our priorities in helping them.

This result is what one should expect if people think about the far future in a very far mode, and if the main distinct function of far views is to make good social impressions. To the extend they have any opinions about the distant future, people focus overwhelmingly on showing their support for standard social norms of good behavior. They reassure their associates of their support for good norms by showing them that making people nicer according to such norms is the main thing they care about regarding the distant future.

Those promised details: Continue reading "What About The Future Matters?" »

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Slowing Computer Gains

By Robin Hanson · March 14, 2013 3:45 pm · Comments (32)

Whenever I see an article in the popular sci/tech press on the long term future of computing hardware, it is almost always on quantum computing. I’m not talking about articles on smarter software, more robots, or putting chips on most objects around us; those are about new ways to use the same sort of hardware. I’m talking about articles on how the computer chips themselves will change.

This quantum focus probably isn’t because quantum computing is that important to the future of computing, nor because readers are especially interested in distant futures. No, it is probably because quantum computing is sexy in academia, appearing often in top academic journals and university press releases. After all, sci/tech readers mainly want to affiliate with impressive people, or show they are up on the latest, not actually learn about the universe or the future.

If you search for “future of computing hardware”, you will mostly find articles on 3D hardware, where chips are in effect layered directly in top of one another, because chip makers are running into limits to making chip features smaller. This makes sense, as that seems the next big challenge for hardware firms.

But in fact the rest of the computer world is still early in the process of adjusting to the last big hardware revolution: parallel computing. Because of dramatic slowdowns in the last decade of chip speed gains, the computing world must get used to writing a lot more parallel software. Since that is just harder, there’s a real economic sense in which computer hardware gains have slowed down lately.

The computer world may need to make additional adaptations to accommodate 3D chips, as just breaking a program into parallel processes may not be enough; one may also have to to keep relevant memory closer to each processor to achieve the full potential of 3D chips. The extra effort to go into 3D and make these adaptations suggests that the rate of real economic gains from computer hardware will slow down yet again with 3D.

Somewhere around 2035 or so, an even bigger revolution will be required. That is about when the (free) energy used per gate operations will fall to the level thermodynamics says is required to erase a bit of information. After this point, the energy cost per computation can only fall by switching to “reversible” computing designs, that only rarely erase bits. See (source):

PowerTrend

Computer operations are irreversible, and use (free) energy to in effect erase bits, when they lack a one-to-one mapping between input and output states. But any irreversible mapping can be converted to a reversible one-to-one mapping by saving its input state along with its output state. Furthermore, a clever fractal trick allows one to create a reversible version of any irreversible computation that takes exactly the same time, costing only a logarithmic-in-time overhead of extra parallel processors and memory to reversibly erase intermediate computing steps in the background (Bennett 1989).

Computer gates are usually designed today to change as rapidly as possible, and as a result in effect irreversibly erase many bits per gate operation. To erase fewer bits instead, gates must be run “adiabatically,” i.e., slowly enough so key parameters can change smoothly. In this case, the rate of bit erasure is inverse in speed; run a gate twice as slowly, and it erases only half as many bits (Younis 1994).

Once reversible computing is the norm, gains in making more smaller faster gates will have to be split, some going to let gates run more slowly, and the rest going to more operations. This will further slow the rate at which the world gains more economic value from computers. Sometime much further in the future, quantum computing may be feasible enough so it is sometimes worth using special quantum processors inside larger ordinary computing systems. Fully quantum computing is even further off.

My overall image of the future of computing is of continued steady gains at the lowest levels, but with slower rates of economic gains after each new computer hardware revolution. So the “effective Moore’s law” rate of computer capability gains will slow in discrete steps over the next century or so. We’ve already seen a slowdown from a need for parallelism, and within the next decade or so we’ll see more slowdown from a need to adapt to 3D chips. Then about 2030 or so we’ll see a big reversibility slowdown due to a need to divide part gains between more operations and using less energy per operation.

Overall though, I doubt the rate of effective gains will slow down by more than a factor of four over the next half century. So, whatever you might have thought could happen in 50 years if Moore’s law had continued steadily, is pretty likely to happen within 200 years. And since brain emulation is already nicely parallel, including with matching memory usage, I doubt the relevant rate of gains there will slow by much more than a factor of  two.

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