Re: Existential risks

Curt Welch wrote:
Tim Tyler <seemysig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Humans are a crummy starting point for any future development -
so our descendants will most likely be more closely related to
today's machines than they are to us.

Well, really, you can look at DNA as the starting point, and humans are
just AI machines created by the DNA to help it survive. In turn we will
create other AI machines to continue that process of keeping the DNA alive.
The DNA is in control here, not us.

Unless something happens and the DNA fails to survive, our decedents will
continue to look just like they have for billions of years now - societies
of DNA strands surrounded by huge industrial complexes they built which
help keep them alive. Our work at creating AI is just adding to that, it's
not changing anything - the DNA is still in control.

We are many orders of magnitude smarter than our DNA, but yet, here we are,
using our super intelligence to keep _it_ alive. If DNA could create super
intelilgence and make it continue to survive the purpose of keeping the DNA
alive, what makes you think the super intelligence we create will do
anything other than continue to serve that same purpose?

The genetic medium for AIs are databases and computers - not DNA.

DNA is a pretty useless medium for them currently:
instead we have hard disks, CDs, DVDs, solid
state storage devices, etc.

The original problem that led to to biological systems
producing alternatives to DNA for storing information in
was the fact that DNA was not convenient as a writable
medium.

When organisms developed nervous systems they soon found
they needed temporary storage in order to maintain a
primitive model of the outside world.

However DNA did not wind up fulfilling this role -
and instead it was played by a complex collection
of enzymes acting to alter the activation potential of
synapses.

DNA is also a one dimensional storage medium. That makes it
easy to copy information stored in it, but leads to
problems if you want to sequentially access the
information or to index it.

Historically humans have preferred storage media with at
least two dimensions - since this reduces seek times
and provides better random access.

From a modern perspective, storage media can be classified
according to where they lie in a multi-dimensional space,
with axes labelled: cost, lifespan, thermal range,
error rate, size, access time, write capability, random access
capability - and so on. DNA lies at one point in this space.

However data storage is not a "one size fits all market" -
Different applications require different solutions -
and DNA is probably not optimal for any of them.

Rather it is an out-of-date solution that natural
selection managed to cobble together early on - and
which then became locked in. The idea of it persisting
for very long in the face of engineered alternatives
strikes me as being pretty fanciful.

Building on the human foundation is a ridiculous plan.

Yes, but it's not _our_ choice. We have no more choice than the AIs we
will build will have a choice on how they are motivated. We are here only
because the DNA lets us be here (so to say). We will survive only as long
as the DNA considers us worthy of taking care of them. They have built us
in a way to make it against our very nature to do anything other than keep
the DNA alive. We will build other AIs in the same way - to make it
against their very nature to do anything else than keep the DNA alive. The
forces of evolution are at work to make sure it stays that way.

It is not DNA, but the *information* therein that is valuable.

One of the lessons of computer science is that information
storage medium is not very important. Information is
*fundamentally* portable.

However, a lot of the information discovered by biology will
be too primitive to last much longer. Who will need
photosynthesis, when we have nuclear fusion? What's the
point of neurotransmitters if brains can't be backed up.
A lot of existing adaptations /will/ be preserved - but
mostly in the history books.

Organisms were once based on RNA. Perhaps you would
have argued then that the genes of those organisms
have built them in such a way to make it against their
very nature to do anything other than keep the RNA alive.

Yet today, RNA has been replaced, almost entirely.

The medium is irrelevant. What matters is the messages.

Only if a life form more powerful than DNA based life emerges will the DNA
be evolved out of existence. DNA based life is "smart enough" to know not
to create things that will kill it, and DNA based life has all of human
society working to keep it alive.

So what are all the new heritable information storage media doing?
We invented floppy disks, hard disks, CDs, DVDs, etc because they
were better than DNA at information storage tasks. Gene sequences
are already stored in databases. We are not going to not use
a better database, just because it might compete with DNA. DNA
is expendible. What matters is the messages, not the medium.

All the technology we create, including AI technology, just creates a
larger protective shell around the DNA.

DNA sucks. It is totally replacable - and we will replace it.

The era of one-size-fits-all inheritance is long dead.

Augmenting humans would just wind up with their brains
being replaced by computers, and their bodies by robots -
not a significantly different result from a straight
machine takeover.

It's the same result. The DNA will fight to keep itself alive and not be
replaced.

Rather the *information* in the DNA will leap at the opportunity to
migrate into better media, to better ensure their immortality.

Any genes that fail to make the leap will be obliterated by those
that do.

Uploads may preserve some human minds, but you need an
extremely advanced AI to make that possible, and then,
the motivation to upload old personalities becomes pretty
weak. How many people play with Commodore PET emulators
these days - not many. Human minds will be even more
archaic and useless, by the time they can be uploaded.

These issues are just so hard to predict. I think you are right that by
the time we could upload a mind, we will have already figured out how to
build far more intelligent machines and the world will be full of
intelligent machines of all shapes and sizes and levels of intelligence.
By that point in time, a single human mind won't be very important to
preserve. It would be nice to preserve an Einstein or Bach, but that's
because they brains that did something most other brains could not do. But
by the time we could do that, all the great minds of our times will be
machines, not humans. So by the time we can do it, society probably won't
see it as something we should do.

Yes, exactly.

If they could have that behavior duplicated in a machine, would they choose
to do it? Calling it uploading is really deceptive. It's not uploading as
if we were being _transfered_ to the machine. It's just building a machine
which is able to produce a close copy of our behavior and nothing more.
If, after seeing AIs do it all the time, humans should have a clear
understanding that duplicating the behavior doesn't allow _them_ to move
into the other body - it just allows the machine to mimic their behavior.

Allowing yourself to be copied, is what the option here is, not
transferring your soul into a machine. It might be neat to be able dump
the wiring of a brain, and archive it for all time - to allow anyone in the
future to run the brain emulator and talk to the person that was once alive
to learn what it was like "back in the day". That would be cool.

I doubt most unmodified humans will be interested in uploading. Indeed,
I rather doubt that there will be many unmodified humans around by the
time that uploading becomes possible.

But will we as a society allow that emulated brain dump to continue to have
voting rights? To continue to consume resources and direct the allocation
of energy and raw material forever? I don't think we will. Most likely,
once we lose our DNA, we will just be put on the shelf and archived - like
a box of old photos and books about what did in life.

Ex-humans might be regarded as budding psychopaths. Uploads may need
brain surgery and "inhibitor safeguards" before they can join society.

And what happens if we become so advanced that we can stop death? What
happens when we figure out how to keep humans alive (at least some part of
them like the brain) forever? What happens if through a slow process of
genetic engineering that we learn to extend life indefinitely? If this
happens, and if we don't manage to escape the earth into space and colonize
other planets (or build huge planet sized space stations from raw material
we find in space), we will have to regulate birth rates to prevent over
population. If people don't die, we can't let people reproduce. That will
be an odd battle. Do we prevent birth, or force people to be killed, or
take away their right to consume resources and allow them to live only as
long as someone younger who still have voting rights are willing to share
their resources with them? It's just so very different than what we have
do deal with now since we are powerless to keep people alive.

Death loses its sting once you can be backed up and copied. I doubt
biological aging will be convincingly fixed before the world fills
up with digital minds. So, the whole enterprise of fixing biological
aging mostly strikes me as a misguided waste of time: the route to
immortality is plainly a digital one.

However humans and society ends up evolving, I believe the DNA will still
be in control - at least for a very long time.

It can't be taken out of control until some other system of survival by
reproduction comes along to replace it.

That is happening now. Look at all the new heritable information storage
media that have established themselves recently.

Once we have smart enough AIs, they will be able to build other AIs
> and DNA based life will have some competition.

DNA already has serious competition from databases and the other new
media.

But we have all of human society working against it happening.

Human society is not on the side of DNA. DNA sucks - and is
plainly in serious need of replacing.

I don't see why humans will ever want the machines to take over
or how we will ever allow it to happen. It's like fire, and viruses, and
bugs that threaten to destroy our food sources. We see it all as a serious
threat to humans and we kill them without a second thought. We will only
build, and use AI, to the extent that we can trust it won't take over.

Takeovers are common. The quill pen did not gradually
transform into a word processor by a series of gradual modifications.

Rather takeovers were involved: the old technology was replaced
by the new one.

We haven't had a genetic takeover for a long time, but they
/have/ happened before, and we are having one now:

``Cultural evolution is many orders of magnitude faster than
DNA-based evolution, which sets one even more to thinking
of the idea of 'takeover'. And if a new kind of replicator
takeover is beginning, it is conceivable that it will take
off so far as to leave its parent DNA (and its grandparent
clay if Cairns-Smith is right) far behind. If so, we may
be sure that computers will be in the van.''

- Chapter 6 of " The Blind Watchmaker", 1982.

``Today, billions of years later, another change is under
way in how information passes from generation to
generation. Humans evolved from organisms defined almost
totally by their organic genes. We now rely additionally
on a vast and rapidly growing corpus of cultural
information generated and stored outside our genes - in
our nervous systems, libraries, and, most recently,
computers.

Our culture still depends utterly on biological human
beings, but with each passing year our machines, a major
product of the culture, assume a greater role in its
maintenance and continued growth. Sooner or later our
machines will become knowledgeable enough to handle their
own maintenance, reproduction and self-improvement without
help. When this happens the new genetic takeover will be
complete.''

- "Mind Children", pages 3 and 4.

So even if the society of AIs evolved, why would they waste their time
fighting us for this little part of the universe when they can just as
easily spread out in the other direction and take over the rest of the
universe? It seems to me that if other AI reproducing life did evolove,
the DNA based life and the AI based life wouldn't end up having any big
battles until thee entire Universe was populated. We would instead just
have lots of small battles over the various distant out-posts we were
trying to get a foot-hold in. So we are talking millions if not billions
of years for that to happen just because of the size of the universe.

Inferior organisms do not persist because there are other places
for things to live. Instead, they get their lunch eaten.
--
__________
|im |yler http://timtyler.org/ tim@xxxxxxxxxxx Remove lock to reply.
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