FAQ about the Meaning of Life is ©1999 and ©2000 by Eliezer S. Yudkowsky. All rights reserved.
| Up: | FAQ about the Meaning of Life. |
|
|
| Prev: | FAQ about the Meaning of Life. | Monolithic | |
| Next: | 2: Logic. |
The same place held by all the other technology-using species now briefly living on or around the ten billion trillion (1) stars in this Universe: Our role in the cosmos is to become or create our successors. I don't think anyone would dispute that something smarter (or otherwise higher) than human might evolve, or be created, in a few million years. So, once you've accepted that possibility, you may as well accept that neurohacking, BCI (Brain-Computer Interfaces), Artificial Intelligence, or some other intelligence-enhancement technology will transcend the human condition, almost certainly within your lifetime (unless we blow ourselves to dust first).
"Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended."The really interesting part about the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence is the positive-feedback effect. Technology is the product of intelligence, so when intelligence is enhanced by technology, you've got transhumans who are more effective at creating better transhumans, who are more effective at creating even better transhumans. Cro-Magnons changed faster than Neanderthals, agricultural society changed faster than hunter-gatherer society, printing-press society changed faster than clay-tablet society, and now we have "Internet time". And yet all the difference between an Internet CEO and a hunter-gatherer is a matter of knowledge and culture, of "software". Our "hardware", our minds, emotions, our fundamental level of intelligence, are unchanged from fifty thousand years ago. Within a couple of decades, for the first time in human history, we will have the ability to modify the hardware.
-- Vernor Vinge, 1993
And it won't stop there. The first-stage enhanced humans or artificial minds might only be around for months or even days before creating the next step. Then it happens again. Then again. Whatever the ultimate ends of existence, we might live to see them.
To put it another way: As of 2000, computing power has doubled every two years, like clockwork, for the past fifty-five years. This is known as "Moore's Law". However, the computer you're using to read this Web page still has only one-hundred-millionth the raw power of a human brain - i.e., around a hundred million billion (10^17) operations per second (2). Estimates on when computers will match the power of a human brain vary widely, but IBM has recently announced the Blue Gene project to achieve petaflops (10^15 ops/sec) computing power by 2005, which would take us within a factor of a hundred.
Once computer-based artificial minds (a.k.a. Minds) are powered and programmed to reach human equivalence, time starts doing strange things. Two years after human-equivalent Mind thought is achieved, the speed of the underlying hardware doubles, and with it, the speed of Mind thought. For the Minds, one year of objective time equals two years of subjective time. And since these Minds are human-equivalent, they will be capable of doing the technological research, figuring out how to speed up computing power. One year later, three years total, the Minds' power doubles again - now the Minds are operating at four times human speed. Six months later... three months later...
When computing power doubles every two years, what happens when computers are doing the research? Four years after artificial Minds reach human equivalence, computing power goes to infinity. That's the short version. Reality is more complicated and doesn't follow neat little steps (3), but it ends up at about the same place in less time - because you can network computers together, for example, or because Minds can improve their own code.
From enhanced humans to artificial Minds, the creation of greater-than-human intelligence has a name: Singularity. The term was invented by Vernor Vinge to describe how our model of the future breaks down once greater-than-human intelligence exists. We're fundamentally unable to predict the actions of anything smarter than we are - after all, if we could do so, we'd be that smart ourselves. Once any race gains the ability to technologically increase the level of intelligence - either by enhancing existing intelligence, or by constructing entirely new minds - a fundamental change in the rules occurs, as basic as the rise to sentience.
What would this mean, in concrete terms? Well, during the millennium media frenzy, you've probably heard about something called "molecular nanotechnology". Molecular nanotechnology is the dream of devices built out of individual atoms - devices that are actually custom-designed molecules. It's the dream of infinitesimal robots, "assemblers", capable of building arbitrary configurations of matter, atom by atom - including more assemblers. You only need to build one general assembler, and then in an hour there are two assemblers, and in another hour there are four assemblers. Fifty hours and a few tons of raw material later you have a quadrillion assemblers. (4)! Once you have your bucket of assemblers, you can give them molecular blueprints and tell them to build literally anything - cars, houses, spaceships built from diamond and sapphire; bread, clothing, beef Wellington... Or make changes to existing structures; remove arterial plaque, destroy cancerous cells, repair broken spinal cords, regenerate missing legs, cure old age...
I am not a nanotechnology fan. I don't think the human species has enough intelligence to handle that kind of power. That's why I'm an advocate of intelligence enhancement. But unless you've heard of nanotechnology, it's hard to appreciate the magnitude of the changes we're talking about. Total control of the material world at the molecular level is what the conservatives in the futurism business are predicting.
Material utopias and wish fulfillment - biological immortality, three-dimensional Xerox machines, free food, instant-mansions-just-add-water, and so on - are a wimpy use of a technology that could rewrite the entire planet on the molecular level, including the substrate of our own brains. The human brain contains a hundred billion neurons, interconnected with a hundred trillion synapses, along which impulses flash at the blinding speed of... 100 meters per second. Tops.
If we could reconfigure our neurons and upgrade the signal propagation speed to around, say, a third of the speed of light, or 100,000,000 meters per second, the result would be a factor-of-one-million speedup in thought. At this rate, one subjective year would pass every 31 physical seconds (5). Transforming an existing human would be a bit more work, but it could be done (6). Of course, you'd probably go nuts from sensory deprivation - your body would only send you half a minute's worth of sensory information every year. With a bit more work, you could add "uploading" ports to the superneurons, so that your consciousness could be transferred into another body at the speed of light, or transferred into a body with a new, higher-speed design. You could even abandon bodies entirely and sit around in a virtual-reality environment, chatting with your friends, reading the library of Congress, or eating three thousand tons of potato chips without exploding.
If you could design superneurons that were smaller as well as being faster, so the signals had less distance to travel... well, I'll skip to the big finish: Taking 10^17 ops/sec as the figure for the computing power used by a human brain, and using optimized atomic-scale hardware, we could run the entire human race on one gram of matter, running at a rate of one million subjective years every second.
What would we be doing in there, over the course of our first trillion years - about eleven and a half days, real time? Well, with control over the substrate of our brains, we would have absolute control over our perceived external environments - meaning an end to all physical pain. It would mean an end to old age. It would mean an end to death itself. It would mean immortality with backup copies. It would mean the prospect of endless growth for every human being - the ability to expand our own minds by adding more neurons (or superneurons), getting smarter as we age. We could experience everything we've ever wanted to experience. We could become everything we've ever dreamed of becoming. That dream - life without bound, without end - is called Apotheosis.
With that dream dangling in front of you, you'll be surprised to learn that I do not consider this the meaning of life. (Yes! Remember how you got here? We're still talking about that!) It's a big carrot, but still, it's just a carrot. Apotheosis is only one of the possible futures. I'm not even sure if Apotheosis is desirable. But we'll get to that later. Remember, this is just the introductory section.
All this is far from being the leading edge of transhumanist speculation, but I wouldn't want to strain your credulity. Still, if you want some of the interesting stuff, you can take a look at my "Staring Into the Singularity", or the Posthumanity Page from the Anders Transhuman Pages. See also 5.4: Where do I go from here?
If, on the other hand, you're still in a future-shock coma over the whole concept of improved minds in improved bodies, I recommend Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition, the book which was my own introduction to the subject. (For more on Great Mambo Chicken, see the Bookshelf.)
Otherwise, we now return you to your regularly scheduled FAQ.
Springboarding off of the concept of Singularity (above; this section isn't going to make much sense if you haven't read it), there are three major reasons:
Living solely for happiness - avarice - is wrong. Not in the moral sense - many great things have been achieved through greed. I am speaking here not only of the "base" desires that led to the invention of fire, but more refined desires, such as the desire for freedom, the desire for knowledge, even the desire for higher intelligence. Not even superintelligence is an end in itself. The only reason to do a thing is because it is right. There is no end which we ought to pursue even if we knew it to be wrong. Living for happiness is wrong in the logical sense - whether avarice walks paths that are noble or mean, it is a sign of a disorganized philosophy. Goals have to be justified.
The second theory might be called "confusion" - roughly, the belief that we can't really be certain what's going on, because the human species isn't smart enough to Figure It All Out. Confusion is the simplest of all philosophies, and the most durable. It is the one that assumes the least; by Occam's Razor, the strongest. Confusion is the underpinning of altruism and the last refuge of a Singularitarian under fire. Avarice shades into confusion through the hope that a superintelligence will explain things to you; confusion shades into altruism through the hopes that a superintelligence will know and do, whether or not it chooses to explain.
Altruism supplies direction. Altruism can provide a full, logical justification for a course of action. The price of that is the loss of simplicity. (7). Only altruism qualifies as a genuine Meaning of Life (8). Altruism is the simplest explanation that relates choices to reality; confusion is the simplest explanation that relates choices to mind.
Altruism. You should get up in the morning because you will make the Universe a better place. Or rather, you will make it more likely that humanity's successors will make it a better place. Same cause-and-effect relation; the length of the chain of events doesn't matter.
What will make a difference two hundred million years from now?
In order of importance:
This particular list assumes a particular sequence of technologies leading up to the Singularity, said sequence being the one I think most probable. Other sequences of events might put neurosurgery, or nanotechnological research, or other technologies, at the top.
But the general principle remains the same. Some group, somewhere, achieves Singularity, which was the whole point of having a human species in the first place. Then "significance" propagates from that group backwards in time, through everyone who helped make it happen, or helped someone who helped someone who helped make it happen, or was the parent of someone who helped someone, and so on, back to the dawn of moral responsibility thousands of years ago.
Nobody's life has exactly zero significance.
By the time you were born, you'd already used up some resources.
Nobody is going to break exactly even.
The real question you're asking is:
Even that is hard to answer. Consider all the coincidences that combined to make you the person you are. Consider the books that sculpted your mental landscape, books you just happened to run across in the library. Consider how unlikely was your particular genetic mix (around 8.8 trillion to one). And consider how easy it would have been for someone else to change things.
Your greatest deed may have been disarranging a few books on a shelf; your most hideous act may have been jostling someone on a subway. Life is a chaotic place.
The real question you're asking is:
That depends on your profession.
Some people definitely lead significant lives. This would include farmers, anyone who has a job that involves actual sweat, and anyone who has to show up at work on Labor Day. It includes rich families who give more to charity than they spend on themselves, and venture capitalists who invest in technology companies. It includes any scientific researcher who's made a discovery, or even established a given area as being a blind alley. It includes any computer programmer who's helped build a widely used tool or published a new programming technique. Most directly, it includes cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, and Artificial Intelligence programmers.
It includes anyone who uses their muscles, their brains, or their property to grow, build, discover, and create. It includes science fiction writers who inspire others to enter a career in research or AI. And it includes parents and teachers who have raised children (this definitely counts as "actual sweat") who work in any of the above areas.
Some people, at most, break even. This includes bureaucrats, marketing personnel, stock traders, and venture capitalists who fund leveraged buyouts. It includes the generic middleman and anyone whose job title is "Strategic Administrative Coordinator". It includes modern artists, professors of communication, and psychoanalysts. It includes most lawyers and middle management. If your job involves going to meetings all day, using terms with no real meaning, or shuffling paper (which includes stock certificates), you probably aren't breaking even. (9). We could easily get by on 20% of the workforce, in these professions. As it is, only about 5% are breaking even. These are the professions which, on this particular planet only, happen to be overvalued, and thus over-occupied, and also easy to fake.
Some people manage to do a huge amount of damage. This includes politicians, royalty in the Middle Ages, dictators, the management of large and ossified companies, high-level bureaucrats, environmental activists, televangelists, and class-action lawyers. Are there exceptions? Yes. Benjamin Franklin was a politician, for example. However, as a general rule, no more than 2% of the people in such professions manage to break even. On the other hand, the 0.1% that do more than break even can make up for a lot.
See also 3.6: How can I become a better person? and 3.7.2: How can I play a direct part in the Singularity?.
Heh, heh, heh. What makes you think I decided AI was significant after I became a computer programmer, instead of vice versa? When I was a kid, I thought I was going to be a physicist. But then, at age eleven, I read a book called Great Mambo Chicken, and I said to myself: "This is what I want to do with my life." It was a career epiphany unmatched until I read about the Singularity five years later.
I found out about the Singularity in stages, and became a programmer in stages; but in general, my dedication to programming has followed my realization that programming is important, rather than vice versa.
If I had to name a single human with the most concentrated significance (10) as of 2000, it would be Douglas R. Hofstadter. Dr. Hofstadter's Copycat is a significant advance in AI, he has sponsored an AI paradigm shift in the right direction, and he has inspired millions through his Pulitzer Prize-winning and amazingly amazingly good book, "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid". (For more about Gödel, Escher, Bach, see the Bookshelf. (In association with Amazon.com.))
Runners-up include K. Eric Drexler (11), Douglas Lenat, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Francis Bacon, and Socrates. Advancing contenders: Vernor Vinge, Hans Moravec.
| Next: | 2: Logic. |
| Up: | FAQ about the Meaning of Life. |
| Prev: | FAQ about the Meaning of Life. |