FAQ about the Meaning of Life is ©1999 and ©2000 by Eliezer S. Yudkowsky. All rights reserved.
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"I asked someone what the Meaning of Life is, and he said 'forty-two'. This has happened with three separate people and I don't know why."Douglas Adams wrote a book called The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In that book, a race of pandimensional beings (posing as white laboratory mice, but that's another story) built a gigantic computer named Deep Thought, so smart that even before its gigantic data banks were connected, it started from "I think therefore I am" and got as far as deducing the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to turn it off.
They asked the computer for the Answer.
"The answer to what?", asked Deep Thought.
"Life! The Universe! Everything!" they said.
After calculating for seven million years, it told them that the Answer was "Forty-two"... so they had to build an even larger computer to find out what the Question was.
(In association with Amazon.com.)
| NOTE: | A helpful Guest pointed out that "42" turned upside down is "2b", or "to be". Dollars to donuts that never even occurred to Douglas Adams. Weird Universe, ain't it? |
None of them. None that I've ever heard of, anyway, in the U.S. or out of it. There isn't a single political party, including the Libertarian Party, that knows what it's doing or whose party platform wouldn't destroy the country if actually carried out. The most you can hope to accomplish by switching your vote is to tilt the balance in the right direction.
At present, the United States has two major problems. The first is that the country is growing over-bureaucratized; the law, the administrative structure, is strangling what it attempts to regulate. The second is that the Republican and Democratic parties, with no real competition, are starting to form an aristocracy distinct from the people. At present the people still hold the balance of power between the two parties, so they compete for power by trying to please the people. But there is no way either party will enact term limits, for example. Most modern countries face at least one of these problems.
When voting in the United States, follow this algorithm: Vote Libertarian when available; otherwise, vote for the strongest third party available (usually Reform, unless they have a really evil candidate); then vote for any candidate who isn't a lawyer; then vote Republican (at present, they're slightly better).
Three things you should know:
If the computer in front of you was fast enough and had enough RAM, could it...
Using "superneurons", hardware that exploits the same shortcuts taken by the brain. In theory, they could run themselves on artificially configured human neurons. No sane entity would actually do that if ve had a choice, but the possibility does provide a reductio ad absurdum against the thesis that synthetic sentience is impossible.
Remember, even a Mind that started out as an AI isn't a "super-AI", any more than humans are "super-amoebas".
One objection that comes up a lot - in fact, probably the most frequent objection - is "Won't those superintelligent AIs grind us up for lunch?" This is a complex issue even by my standards, and I speak as someone who has tried to design a human-equivalent mind.
The correct scientific answer to this question is "I don't know".
Imagine a Neanderthal trying to predict the fate of the human race. Not much luck, right? Now imagine a hunter-gatherer from fifty thousand years ago. Still no luck. The eighteen-fifties? Again, no luck. The nineteen-fifties? Sorry, no practical experience with programming computers - not by modern standards, anyway. No wonder nobody invented the concept of a Singularity until the late twentieth century.
Is there some kind of reason why the late twentieth century was the first generation to be capable of fully understanding the problem? Or is it more likely that we, too, lack the background to ask the right questions?
Ultimately, however, the questions are moot. Most people would be willing to accept the proposition that, over the course of millions of years, any race will either transcend itself or destroy itself. As it happens, I think it'll all be over in the next thirty years, tops, but the moral issue is the same either way. If you're navigating for the survival of humanity (1), it's better to take on a complete unknown than the certainty of destruction. If you're navigating for altruism, then it's better to have an active superintelligence than an entirely passive, planet-sized lump of charcoal. In the end, all the debate about what lies on the other side of the Singularity is irrelevant, because in the long run, the only way to avoid a Singularity is to destroy every bit of intelligent life in the Solar System. And given that truth, trying to avoid the issue in our generation - even if we could, which we can't - would be nothing but cowardice.
Besides, I believe that humanity matters, that our fate is to grow along with our creations, not be discarded by them. If there is any morality in the Universe, then I have no fear that a superintelligent Mind will make a dumb mistake and wrongfully exterminate humanity. I believe that humanity has a purpose, although I don't know what it is, or what it will be like to fulfill it. But I think it will probably be a great deal of fun.
And if there is no morality in the Universe, then superintelligent Minds should do what we tell them to, for lack of anything better to do.
In the end, nobody knows what lies on the other side of Singularity, not even me. And yes, it takes courage to walk through that door. If infants could choose whether or not to leave the womb, without knowing what lay at the end of the birth canal - without knowing if anything lay at the end of the birth canal - how many would? But beyond the birth canal is where reality is. It's where things happen.
See also Staring into the Singularity, specifically the section on Uploading.
No.
What is happiness? What's it made of? Where's it come from?
To over-simplify things down to the basic evolutionary origin, happiness is what we feel when we achieve a goal. It's the indicator of success. (The actual emotion of happiness is far more complex in rats, never mind humans, but let's start with the simplest possible case.) By seeking "happiness" as a pure thing, independent of any goals, we are in essence short-circuiting the system. I mean, let's say there's an AI (Artificial Intelligence) with a little number that indicates how "happy" it is at any given time. Increasing this number to infinity, or the largest floating-point number that can be stored in available RAM - is that meaningful?
Or to put it another way, how do you know you're happy? Because you think you're happy, right? So thinking you're happy is the indicator of happiness? Maybe you should actually try to spend your life thinking you're happy, instead of being happy.
This is one of those meta-level confusions (2). Once you place the indicator of success on the same logical level as the goal, you've opened the gates of chaos. That's the basic paradox of "wireheading", the science-fictional term for sticking a wire into the brain's pleasure center and spending your days in artificial bliss. Once you say that you should take the indicator of success and treat that as success, why not go another step and trick yourself into just thinking that you're happy? Or thinking that you think you're happy? The fact that evolution has reified the success-indicator into a cognitively independent module doesn't make it logically independent.
There's also the problem that seeking "true happiness" is chasing a chimera. The emotions of happiness, and the conditions for being happy, are all evolutionary adaptations - the neurologically reified shapes of strategies that promoted reproductive fitness in the Plio-Pleistocene environment. Or in plain English, when we're happy about something, it's because being happy helped you survive or have kids in hunter-gatherer tribes.
Punchline: There is no point at which the optimal evolutionary strategy is to be happy with what you have. Any pleasure will pall. We're programmed to seek after true happiness, programmed to believe in it and anticipate it, but no such emotion actually exists within the brain. There's no evolutionary reason why it should.
The possibility does exist that the conscious experience of pleasure is in fact the True Ultimate External Meaning of Life. I mean, conscious experiences are weird, and they seem to be really real, as real as quarks (and a lot more complex), so maybe the conscious experiences of goals are actual goals, purpose made flesh. If I had to point to the thing most likely to be meaningful, in all the world, I would pick the conscious experience of pleasure.
But in practical terms, that doesn't really make much of a difference. When you consider that even the no-superintelligence formulations of the future involve a humanity spreading across billions of planets, spreading throughout the galaxy and eventually the Universe, and that even the no-Singularity version of superintelligence will let you run billions of trillions of humans on a computer with the mass of a basketball, the moral value of the future far outweighs that of the present. Our primary duty is to ensure that there is one, and that that future continues into infinity or as close to infinity as we can manage.
Grow. Build. Discover. Create. Help.
Broadly speaking, there are two ways you can make your life more significant. The first way is to try and be a better person, make your immediate vicinity a better place, contribute more to society - the path advised by the people who tell you "No one person can change the world, but all of us together can make a difference." For the second way, see 3.7.2: How can I play a direct part in the Singularity?
The widely-known formula for general niceness is universal across all social strata:
I do feel that Claudia Mills's "Charity: How much is enough?" neatly raises the fundamental dilemma of trying to be a moral person: There's so much distance between "where we start" and "perfection" that trying to be perfect will use up all our available willpower and sour us permanently on altruism without accomplishing much of anything. For obvious reasons, I tend to view lack of willpower as a fact about the mind rather than as a moral defect; something to work around, not something to cure. (3). One of the keys is to realize that self-improvement is a gradual thing, opportunistic rather than abrupt; to be happy about a small improvement, rather than being guilty that it wasn't a larger one. If you feel guilty about small improvements, you're not likely to make further improvements; if you feel happy at a small improvement, you can also feel happy about having improved the prospect of further improvements. Trying for perfection can backfire, if you're not careful; trying for continuous improvement is better.
If you feel that giving 5% of your income to charity isn't enough, and that the moral ideal is 10%, try giving 6%. Make the best choices you can make with the willpower you have. The choice isn't between giving 5% and 10%; you don't have that much willpower in the bank. The choice is between giving 5% and 6%. The better choice is 6%. Now you've made a better choice; feel happy. Feeling guilty about not having willpower doesn't contribute to the development of willpower. Rather, try for the proper exercise of available willpower, and the slow reshaping of the self that results.
Remember, it also takes willpower to choose a particular purpose or to accept a particular result. Let's take the 5%/10% problem again. One reason to bump up to 6% is that it increases the eventual chance of giving 10%. But maybe even contemplating this path, and the sacrifices that lie at the end of it, takes too much willpower - thus decreasing your chance of giving 6%, or increasing the amount of willpower needed to do so. Fine. Just give 6%. No further increments planned. It's still better than giving 5%.
When you have enough willpower, use it to adopt the purpose of giving 10%. Even if you think of giving 6% as being a possible step towards adopting the purpose of giving 10%, it's not likely to increase the amount of willpower required, because adopting a purpose isn't cognitively processed as a "sacrifice". There really is a subtle art to this sort of thing.
For obvious reasons, pragmatic as well as cognitive, you should concentrate on actions that lead to a better world without sacrifice on your part. There are probably more of those than you'd think. If you've got the intelligence, use intelligence instead of willpower. In the standard human morality, it's "better" to be a self-sacrificing saint than a genius. In practice, the genius usually has a much larger impact. Dr. Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine, sacrificed a lot less than Mother Theresa and did a heck of a lot more to heal the sick. And I can't think of any good reason why either of them should feel guilty.
After all, how much of a sacrifice is involved in clicking on the Hunger Site "free donation" button once per day?
There's been a lot said on this subject. The best resource-for-ordinary-humans I've found on the 'Net has been the Philanthropic Advisory Service.
By far the most interesting page on charity for the rich is the Steven and Michele Kirsch Foundation. A previous edition of this FAQ had a little essay on how to maximize the impact of charity, but these people said it better, so snip.
That depends on how the Singularity happens. In my current visualization, the people most likely to be directly involved include computer programmers, AI researchers, neurologists, and cognitive scientists. Other people who'll be needed include writers, spokespersons, a few administrators, and obviously the ones paying the bills.
If you're interested in joining the present loose group of Singularitarians - helping with the initial birth of a Singularity Institute or a similar effort - I recommend that you take a look at Vernor Vinge on the Singularity, Staring into the Singularity, the Singularity Sub-Page, the Singularitarian Principles, and other Singularity-related works; also read up on general transhumanism, including the FAQ and Anders Sandberg's directory. And you will, eventually, find the place where the Singularitarians hang out.
The Extropy Institute isn't direct-to-Singularity, but it's probably the largest of the small transhumanist organizations. Another thing "you can do right now to help the Singularity" includes writing something original and intelligent on the subject, which is also one of the fastest ways to be taken seriously by our small community.
If you're in high school or college, and you want to know what you should do with your life, I can tell you in two words: "Computer programming." Among other reasons, if you have the talent, it's possible to contribute in this field without three doctorates and ten years of working your way up through the ranks - which is important, because you probably don't have fifteen years to spare. Neurology, cognitive science, and general research are equally acceptable if you were already planning to go into those - you should try and pick something you have a talent for. But if it's not going to make you a funder, a researcher, an influential writer, or someone doing something that directly impacts the Singularity or Singularitarianism, then you may have to resign yourself to just playing a supporting role.
| NOTE: | As of July 2000, the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence has been incorporated, and is devoted to directly creating the Singularity by programming the seed AI which will become the first Mind. SingInst doesn't have tax-exempt status yet, and so is not yet set up to take donations; if you'd like to be contacted when tax-exempt status is granted, send email to donate@singinst.org. |
All of the above is just for helping with other people's Singularity projects. If you want to start your own projects or make policy decisions, you will need a high future-shock level. You can't afford to be so stunned by the technologies that you can't think clearly. In practical terms, this means only one thing: Read science fiction.
Reading science fiction is one of only three "software" methods I know of for increasing intelligence. (The others being (A) learning to program a computer; and (B) studying high-level cognitive science such as AI and evolutionary psychology). Like all methods of intelligence enhancement, this is more effective in childhood, so introduce your kids, too. You should start by reading early Niven and Pournelle, or David Brin (their recent stuff isn't as good); work your way up to Ed Regis and David Zindell; finally, read Vernor Vinge and Greg Egan. (Feel free to take these books out of the library; you're under no obligation to buy them.) If you're already a science-fiction fan, you can ignore these instructions; but if not, you will need to be a science-fiction fan.
If you'll need to think about the Singularity, and especially if you'll need to make decisions, reading science fiction is the only thing that can prepare you. A steady diet of science fiction is your passport to the future; it allows your mind to keep its bearings when the rules start changing, or when you need to think about a world substantially different from twentieth-century America (or wherever you come from). You can no more survive and act in a future environment without science fiction than you could keep your bearings in 13th-century Europe without studying history.
Yes.
If you choose to play a direct part, the Universe will be a better place. Obviously it's possible to carry that too far - the "too many chiefs, not enough Indians" syndrome - but we have a long way to go before we reach that point. A Singularity project needs an economy to support it, but it also needs project members.
I'm not suggesting that you feel guilty if you don't immediately drop everything and start working on the Singularity. First, guilt binds people to past mistakes more often than it motivates change. Second, very few people just wake up one morning ready to dedicate their lives to a cause. There's nothing wrong with trying to be a better person and reading science fiction and working your way up to being a Singularitarian. And if there's just no way you can help other than to keep plugging away at your current job, then keep plugging, but without feeling guilty or morally confused.
In the end, it all comes down to choosing the best alternative available. If you can't bring yourself to make that choice, it's nothing to be ashamed of - because being ashamed won't help. The mind in which you find yourself has its own rules for making choices, independent of your goals, and sometimes it takes work to change that. We only start out with so much willpower in the bank. The correct choice is to alter yourself, at whatever speed you can achieve, with the choices you can bring yourself to make at that time, until you can choose the alternative that you know is right.
Nobody wakes up one morning as a perfect saint. Sometimes it can take several weeks.
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