(The following is the text of the presentation I’m giving today at the Singularity Summit. I’ve set the post to go live at the same time I go onto the stage.) I was reminded, earlier this year, of an observation made by polio vaccine pioneer Dr. Jonas Salk. He said that the most important question we can ask of ourselves is, “are we being good ancestors?”
A while back, I wrote about the possibility of updating the Three Laws of Robotics as goals in order to make them a more practical means of getting at a friendly artificial general intelligence.
About half of you think we should keep the retirement age where it is, despite increases in healthy longevity, while 43% thought it should be raised or abolished.
To put it in a single sentence, I’d say that it’s because only a minority of cognitively possible goal sets place a high priority on the continued survival of human beings and the structures we value. Another reason is that we can’t specify what we value in enough mathematical detail to transfer it to a new species without a lot of requisite hassle.
The recent upswell of interest in Facebook and other social networking sites has taken us one step closer to the all-knowing and all-seeing socialpanopticon
Robots with feelings [will be available] in just 10 years, scientists predicted yesterday. They now claim it is essential to give robots their own emotions if they are to be capable of running independently and efficiently enough to take on a variety of domestic tasks.
The “Good Ancestor Principle” is based on a challenge posed by Jonas Salk:
...the most important question we must ask ourselves is, “Are we being good ancestors?” Given the rapidly changing discoveries and conditions of the times, this opens up a crucial conversation – just what will it take for our descendants to look back at our decisions today and judge us good ancestors?
Now that the RAG Tournament featuring Vladmir Kramnik and Deep Fritz has concluded with the machine emerging victorious, it’s time for some contemplation about the current state of chess and its future.
This November, comedian Michael Richards learned about the participatory panopticon. So did the UCLA police. And early in the month, Virginia Senator George Allen learned that it can have a political bite.
The participatory panopticon is the emerging scenario of distributed observation of the world around us, using cheap, networked tools like mobile phones and open, web-based tools like YouTube. A rapidly-growing number of us have literally at our fingertips systems of capturing and sharing what we see. Most of what we capture will be of interest only to ourselves, or to close friends and relatives; some, however, will have a far greater reach that we might suspect.
Public policy analysts have been raising the alarm for a decade about the changing ratio of seniors to workers in the 21st century, the “old-age dependency ratio.” One symptom of the growing alarm about the old-age dependency ratio is the Bush administration’s unpopular effort to create private pension accounts to supplement senior incomes in the 2040s when the U.S. Social Security system is predicted to exhaust its trust accounts. Defenders of public pensions, in the U.S. and Europe, have argued that there is no problem in the system of social insurance that can’t be fixed by marginal changes. Unfortunately both sides in this debate profoundly underestimate the imminent and rapid change in the demographic variables that determine the dependency ratio: birth rates, death rates, senior disability, and labor force participation. This is equally true for the demographers advising the United Nations. The linear assumptions underlying most demographic and economic models are belied by the emerging technologies already driving rapid exponential change. Emerging technologies will drive a dramatic increase in the dependency ratio. Only a basic income guarantee (BIG) can establish a new social contract that addresses the problem of “intergenerational equity,” by expanding egalitarian social security to all and preventing a slide to a more atomistic and impoverished future. BIG will also need to be accompanied by a re-negotiation of the way the labor market is structured and the way the state is financed. Download the PDF
Abstract This paper outlines the case for believing that we will have superhuman artificial intelligence within the first third of the next century. It looks at different estimates of the processing power of the human brain; how long it will take until computer hardware achieve a similar performance; ways of creating the software through bottom-up approaches like the one used by biological brains; how difficult it will be for neuroscience figure out enough about how brains work to make this approach work; and how fast we can expect superintelligence to be developed once there is human-level artificial intelligence.
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