The
Transhumanist FAQ
– A
General Introduction –
Version 2.1 (2003)
Nick Bostrom*
Faculty of Philosophy
Oxford University
10 Merton Street, Oxford OX1 4JJ, U. K.
Click
here for the FAQ in PDF format
Published by the World Transhumanist
Association
www.transhumanism.org
*
Please see endnote for document history
and acknowledgments.
CONTENTS
1
GENERAL QUESTIONS ABOUT TRANSHUMANISM
1.1
What is transhumanism?.
1.2
What is a posthuman?.
1.3
What is a transhuman?.
2
TECHNOLOGIES AND PROJECTIONS.
2.1
Biotechnology, genetic engineering, stem cells, and cloning –
what are they and what are they good for?
2.2
What is molecular nanotechnology?.
2.3
What is superintelligence?.
2.4
What is virtual reality?.
2.5
What is cryonics? Isn’t the probability of success too small?.
2.6
What is uploading?.
2.7
What is the singularity?.
3
SOCIETY AND POLITICS.
3.1
Will new technologies only benefit the rich and powerful?
3.2
Do transhumanists advocate eugenics?.
3.3
Aren’t these future technologies very risky? Could they even
cause our extinction?.
3.4
If these technologies are so dangerous, should they be banned?
What can be done to reduce the risks?
3.5
Shouldn’t we concentrate on current problems such as improving
the situation of the poor, rather than putting our efforts into planning
for the “far” future?.
3.6
Will extended life worsen overpopulation problems?.
3.7
Is there any ethical standard by which transhumanists judge
“improvement of the human condition”?
3.8
What kind of society would posthumans live in?.
3.9
Will posthumans or superintelligent machines pose a threat to
humans who aren’t augmented?
4
TRANSHUMANISM AND NATURE.
4.1
Why do transhumanists want to live longer?.
4.2
Isn’t this tampering with nature?.
4.3
Will transhuman technologies make us inhuman?.
4.4
Isn’t death part of the natural order of things?.
4.5
Are transhumanist technologies environmentally sound?.
5
TRANSHUMANISM AS A PHILOSOPHICAL AND CULTURAL VIEWPOINT.
5.1
What are the philosophical and cultural antecedents of
transhumanism?.
5.2
What currents are there within transhumanism? Is extropianism the
same as transhumanism?
5.3
How does transhumanism relate to religion?.
5.4
Won’t things like uploading, cryonics, and AI fail because they
can’t preserve or create the soul?
5.5
What kind of transhumanist art is there?.
6
PRACTICALITIES.
6.1
What are the reasons to expect all these changes?.
6.2
Won’t these developments take thousands or millions of years?.
6.3
What if it doesn’t work?.
6.4
How can I use transhumanism in my own life?.
6.5
How could I become a posthuman?.
6.6
Won’t it be boring to live forever in a perfect world?.
6.7
How can I get involved and contribute?.
7
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND DOCUMENT HISTORY.
Transhumanism
is a way of thinking about the future that is based on the premise that
the human species in its current form does not represent the end of our
development but rather a comparatively early phase. We formally define it
as follows:
(1) The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility
and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through
applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available
technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual,
physical, and psychological capacities.
(2)
The study of the ramifications, promises, and potential dangers of
technologies that will enable us to overcome fundamental human
limitations, and the related study of the ethical matters involved in
developing and using such technologies.
Transhumanism
can be viewed as an extension of humanism, from which it is partially
derived. Humanists believe that humans matter, that individuals matter. We
might not be perfect, but we can make things better by promoting rational
thinking, freedom, tolerance, democracy, and concern for our fellow human
beings. Transhumanists agree with this but also emphasize what we have the
potential to become. Just as we use rational means to improve the human
condition and the external world, we can also use such means to improve
ourselves, the human organism. In doing so, we are not limited to
traditional humanistic methods, such as education and cultural
development. We can also use technological means that will eventually
enable us to move beyond what some would think of as “human”.
It is not our
human shape or the details of our current human biology that define what
is valuable about us, but rather our aspirations and ideals, our
experiences, and the kinds of lives we lead. To a transhumanist, progress
occurs when more people become more able to shape themselves, their lives,
and the ways they relate to others, in accordance with their own deepest
values. Transhumanists place a high value on autonomy: the ability and
right of individuals to plan and choose their own lives. Some people may
of course, for any number of reasons, choose to forgo the opportunity to
use technology to improve themselves. Transhumanists seek to create a
world in which autonomous individuals may choose to remain unenhanced or
choose to be enhanced and in which these choices will be respected.
Through the
accelerating pace of technological development and scientific
understanding, we are entering a whole new stage in the history of the
human species. In the relatively near future, we may face the prospect of
real artificial intelligence. New kinds of cognitive tools will be built
that combine artificial intelligence with interface technology. Molecular
nanotechnology has the potential to manufacture abundant resources for
everybody and to give us control over the biochemical processes in our
bodies, enabling us to eliminate disease and unwanted aging. Technologies
such as brain-computer interfaces and neuropharmacology could amplify
human intelligence, increase emotional well-being, improve our capacity
for steady commitment to life projects or a loved one, and even multiply
the range and richness of possible emotions. On the dark side of the
spectrum, transhumanists recognize that some of these coming technologies
could potentially cause great harm to human life; even the survival of our
species could be at risk. Seeking to understand the dangers and working to
prevent disasters is an essential part of the transhumanist agenda.
Transhumanism
is entering the mainstream culture today, as increasing numbers of
scientists, scientifically literate philosophers, and social thinkers are
beginning to take seriously the range of possibilities that transhumanism
encompasses. A rapidly expanding family of transhumanist groups, differing
somewhat in flavor and focus, and a plethora of discussion groups in many
countries around the world, are gathered under the umbrella of the World
Transhumanist Association, a non-profit democratic membership
organization.
References:
World Transhumanist Association.
http://www.transhumanism.org
It is
sometimes useful to talk about possible future beings whose basic
capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer
unambiguously human by our current standards. The standard word for such
beings is “posthuman”. (Care must be taken to avoid misinterpretation.
“Posthuman” does not denote just anything that happens to come after the
human era, nor does it have anything to do with the “posthumous”. In
particular, it does not imply that there are no humans anymore.)
Many
transhumanists wish to follow life paths which would, sooner or later,
require growing into posthuman persons: they yearn to reach intellectual
heights as far above any current human genius as humans are above other
primates; to be resistant to disease and impervious to aging; to have
unlimited youth and vigor; to exercise control over their own desires,
moods, and mental states; to be able to avoid feeling tired, hateful, or
irritated about petty things; to have an increased capacity for pleasure,
love, artistic appreciation, and serenity; to experience novel states of
consciousness that current human brains cannot access. It seems likely
that the simple fact of living an indefinitely long, healthy, active life
would take anyone to posthumanity if they went on accumulating memories,
skills, and intelligence.
Posthumans
could be completely synthetic artificial intelligences, or they could be
enhanced uploads [see “What is uploading?”], or they could be the result of making many smaller
but cumulatively profound augmentations to a biological human. The latter
alternative would probably require either the redesign of the human
organism using advanced nanotechnology or its radical enhancement using
some combination of technologies such as genetic engineering,
psychopharmacology, anti-aging therapies, neural interfaces, advanced
information management tools, memory enhancing drugs, wearable computers,
and cognitive techniques.
Some authors
write as though simply by changing our self-conception, we have become or
could become posthuman. This is a confusion or corruption of the original
meaning of the term. The changes required to make us posthuman are too
profound to be achievable by merely altering some aspect of psychological
theory or the way we think about ourselves. Radical technological
modifications to our brains and bodies are needed.
It is
difficult for us to imagine what it would be like to be a posthuman
person. Posthumans may have experiences and concerns that we cannot
fathom, thoughts that cannot fit into the three-pound lumps of neural
tissue that we use for thinking. Some posthumans may find it advantageous
to jettison their bodies altogether and live as information patterns on
vast super-fast computer networks. Their minds may be not only more
powerful than ours but may also employ different cognitive architectures
or include new sensory modalities that enable greater participation in
their virtual reality settings. Posthuman minds might be able to share
memories and experiences directly, greatly increasing the efficiency,
quality, and modes in which posthumans could communicate with each other.
The boundaries between posthuman minds may not be as sharply defined as
those between humans.
Posthumans
might shape themselves and their environment in so many new and profound
ways that speculations about the detailed features of posthumans and the
posthuman world are likely to fail.
In its
contemporary usage, “transhuman” refers to an intermediary form between
the human and the posthuman [see “What is a posthuman?”]. One might ask, given that our current use of e.g.
medicine and information technology enable us to routinely do many things
that would have astonished humans living in ancient times, whether we are
not already transhuman? The question is a provocative one, but ultimately
not very meaningful; the concept of the transhuman is too vague for there
to be a definite answer.
A
transhumanist is simply someone who advocates transhumanism [see “What
is transhumanism?”]. It is a common error for reporters and other writers
to say that transhumanists “claim to be transhuman” or “call themselves
transhuman”. To adopt a philosophy which says that someday everyone ought
to have the chance to grow beyond present human limits is clearly not to
say that one is better or somehow currently “more advanced” than one’s
fellow humans.
The etymology
of the term “transhuman” goes back to the futurist FM-2030 (also known as
F. M. Estfandiary), who introduced it as shorthand for “transitional
human”. Calling transhumans the “earliest manifestation of new
evolutionary beings,” FM maintained that signs of transhumanity included
prostheses, plastic surgery, intensive use of telecommunications, a
cosmopolitan outlook and a globetrotting lifestyle, androgyny, mediated
reproduction (such as in vitro fertilization), absence of religious
beliefs, and a rejection of traditional family values. However, FM’s
diagnostics are of dubious validity. It is unclear why anybody who has a
lot of plastic surgery or a nomadic lifestyle is any closer to becoming a
posthuman than the rest of us; nor, of course, are such persons
necessarily more admirable or morally commendable than others. In fact, it
is perfectly possible to be a transhuman – or, for that matter, a
transhumanist – and still embrace most traditional values and principles
of personal conduct.
References:
FM-2030. Are You a Transhuman? (New
York: Warner Books, 1989).
Biotechnology
is the application of techniques and methods based on the biological
sciences. It encompasses such diverse enterprises as brewing, manufacture
of human insulin, interferon, and human growth hormone, medical
diagnostics, cell cloning and reproductive cloning, the genetic
modification of crops, bioconversion of organic waste and the use of
genetically altered bacteria in the cleanup of oil spills, stem cell
research and much more. Genetic engineering is the area of biotechnology
concerned with the directed alteration of genetic material.
Biotechnology
already has countless applications in industry, agriculture, and medicine.
It is a hotbed of research. The completion of the human genome project – a
“rough draft” of the entire human genome was published in the year 2000 –
was a scientific milestone by anyone’s standards. Research is now shifting
to decoding the functions and interactions of all these different genes
and to developing applications based on this information.
The potential
medical benefits are too many to list; researchers are working on every
common disease, with varying degrees of success. Progress takes place not
only in the development of drugs and diagnostics but also in the creation
of better tools and research methodologies, which in turn accelerates
progress. When considering what developments are likely over the long
term, such improvements in the research process itself must be factored
in. The human genome project was completed ahead of schedule, largely
because the initial predictions underestimated the degree to which
instrumentation technology would improve during the course of the project.
At the same time, one needs to guard against the tendency to hype every
latest advance. (Remember all those breakthrough cancer cures that we
never heard of again?) Moreover, even in cases where the early promise is
borne out, it usually takes ten years to get from proof-of-concept to
successful commercialization.
Genetic
therapies are of two sorts: somatic and germ-line. In somatic gene
therapy, a virus is typically used as a vector to insert genetic material
into the cells of the recipient's body. The effects of such interventions
do not carry over into the next generation. Germ-line genetic therapy is
performed on sperm or egg cells, or on the early zygote, and can be
inheritable. (Embryo screening, in which embryos are tested for genetic
defects or other traits and then selectively implanted, can also count as
a kind of germ-line intervention.) Human gene therapy, except for some
forms of embryo screening, is still experimental. Nonetheless, it holds
promise for the prevention and treatment of many diseases, as well as for
uses in enhancement medicine. The potential scope of genetic medicine is
vast: virtually all disease and all human traits – intelligence,
extroversion, conscientiousness, physical appearance, etc. – involve
genetic predispositions. Single-gene disorders, such as cystic fibrosis,
sickle cell anemia, and Huntington's disease are likely to be among the
first targets for genetic intervention. Polygenic traits and disorders,
ones in which more than one gene is implicated, may follow later (although
even polygenic conditions can sometimes be influenced in a beneficial
direction by targeting a single gene).
Stem cell
research, another scientific frontier, offers great hopes for regenerative
medicine. Stem cells are undifferentiated (unspecialized) cells that can
renew themselves and give rise to one or more specialized cell types with
specific functions in the body. By growing such cells in culture, or
steering their activity in the body, it will be possible to grow
replacement tissues for the treatment of degenerative disorders, including
heart disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and many others. It may
also be possible to grow entire organs from stem cells for use in
transplantation. Embryonic stem cells seem to be especially versatile and
useful, but research is also ongoing into adult stem cells and the
“reprogramming” of ordinary cells so that they can be turned back into
stem cells with pluripotent capabilities.
The term
“human cloning” covers both therapeutic and reproductive uses. In
therapeutic cloning, a preimplantation embryo (also known as a
“blastocyst” – a hollow ball consisting of 30-150 undifferentiated cells)
is created via cloning, from which embryonic stem cells could be extracted
and used for therapy. Because these cloned stem cells are genetically
identical to the patient, the tissues or organs they would produce could
be implanted without eliciting an immune response from the patient's body,
thereby overcoming a major hurdle in transplant medicine. Reproductive
cloning, by contrast, would mean the birth of a child who is genetically
identical to the cloned parent: in effect, a younger identical twin.
Everybody
recognizes the benefit to ailing patients and their families that come
from curing specific diseases. Transhumanists emphasize that, in order to
seriously prolong the healthy life span, we also need to develop ways to
slow aging or to replace senescent cells and tissues. Gene therapy, stem
cell research, therapeutic cloning, and other areas of medicine that have
the potential to deliver these benefits deserve a high priority in the
allocation of research monies.
Biotechnology
can be seen as a special case of the more general capabilities that
nanotechnology will eventually provide [see “What is molecular
nanotechnology?”].
Molecular
nanotechnology is an anticipated manufacturing technology that will make
it possible to build complex three-dimensional structures to atomic
specification using chemical reactions directed by nonbiological
machinery. In molecular manufacturing, each atom would go to a selected
place, bonding with other atoms in a precisely designated manner.
Nanotechnology promises to give us thorough control of the structure of
matter.
Since most of
the stuff around us and inside us is composed of atoms and gets its
characteristic properties from the placement of these atoms, the ability
to control the structure of matter on the atomic scale has many
applications. As K. Eric Drexler wrote in Engines of Creation, the
first book on nanotechnology (published in 1986):
Coal and diamonds, sand and computer chips, cancer and healthy tissue:
throughout history, variations in the arrangement of atoms have
distinguished the cheap from the cherished, the diseased from the healthy.
Arranged one way, atoms make up soil, air, and water arranged another,
they make up ripe strawberries. Arranged one way, they make up homes and
fresh air; arranged another, they make up ash and smoke.
Nanotechnology, by making it possible to rearrange atoms effectively, will
enable us to transform coal into diamonds, sand into supercomputers, and
to remove pollution from the air and tumors from healthy tissue.
Central to
Drexler’s vision of nanotechnology is the concept of the assembler.
An assembler would be a molecular construction device. It would have one
or more submicroscopic robotic arms under computer control. The arms would
be capable of holding and placing reactive compounds so as to positionally
control the precise location at which a chemical reaction takes place. The
assembler arms would grab a molecule (but not necessarily
individual atoms) and add it to a work-piece, constructing an atomically
precise object step by step. An advanced assembler would be able to make
almost any chemically stable structure. In particular, it would be able to
make a copy of itself. Since assemblers could replicate themselves, they
would be easy to produce in large quantities.
There is a
biological parallel to the assembler: the ribosome. Ribosomes are the tiny
construction machines (a few thousand cubic nanometers big) in our cells
that manufacture all the proteins used in all living things on Earth. They
do this by assembling amino acids, one by one, into precisely determined
sequences. These structures then fold up to form a protein. The blueprint
that specifies the order of amino acids, and thus indirectly the final
shape of the protein, is called messenger RNA. The messenger RNA is in
turned determined by our DNA, which can be viewed (somewhat
simplistically) as an instruction tape for protein synthesis.
Nanotechnology will generalize the ability of ribosomes so that virtually
any chemically stable structure can be built, including devices and
materials that resemble nothing in nature.
Mature
nanotechnology will transform manufacturing into a software problem. To
build something, all you will need is a detailed design of the object you
want to make and a sequence of instructions for its construction. Rare or
expensive raw materials are generally unnecessary; the atoms required for
the construction of most kinds of nanotech devices exist in abundance in
nature. Dirt, for example, is full of useful atoms.
By working in
large teams, assemblers and more specialized nanomachines will be able to
build large objects quickly. Consequently, while nanomachines may have
features on the scale of a billionth of a meter – a nanometer – the
products could be as big as space vehicles or even, in a more distant
future, the size of planets.
Because
assemblers will be able to copy themselves, nanotech products will have
low marginal production costs – perhaps on the same order as familiar
commodities from nature’s own self-reproducing molecular machinery such as
firewood, hay, or potatoes. By ensuring that each atom is properly placed,
assemblers would manufacture products of high quality and reliability.
Leftover molecules would be subject to this strict control, making the
manufacturing process extremely clean.
The speed
with which designs and instruction lists for making useful objects can be
developed will determine the speed of progress after the creation of the
first full-blown assembler. Powerful software for molecular modeling and
design will accelerate development, possibly assisted by specialized
engineering AI. Another accessory that might be especially useful in the
early stages after the assembler-breakthrough is the disassembler,
a device that can disassemble an object while creating a three-dimensional
map of its molecular configuration. Working in concert with an assembler,
it could function as a kind of 3D Xerox machine: a device for making
atomically exact replicas of almost any existing solid object within
reach.
Molecular
nanotechnology will ultimately make it possible to construct compact
computing systems performing at least 1021 operations per
second; machine parts of any size made of nearly flawless diamond;
cell-repair machines that can enter cells and repair most kinds of damage,
in all likelihood including frostbite [see “What is cryonics? Isn’t the probability of
success too small?”]; personal
manufacturing and recycling appliances; and automated production systems
that can double capital stock in a few hours or less. It is also likely to
make uploading possible [see “What is uploading?”].
A key
challenge in realizing these prospects is the bootstrap problem: how to
build the first assembler. There are several promising routes. One is to
improve current proximal probe technology. An atomic force microscope can
drag individual atoms along a surface. Two physicists at IBM Almaden Labs
in California illustrated this in 1989 when they used such a microscope to
arrange 35 xenon atoms to spell out the trademark “I-B-M”, creating the
world’s smallest logo. Future proximal probes might have more degrees of
freedom and the ability to pick up and deposit reactive compounds in a
controlled fashion.
Another route
to the first assembler is synthetic chemistry. Cleverly designed chemical
building blocks might be made to self-assemble in solution phase into
machine parts. Final assembly of these parts might then be made with a
proximal probe.
Yet another
route is biochemistry. It might be possible to use ribosomes to make
assemblers of more generic capabilities. Many biomolecules have properties
that might be explored in the early phases of nanotechnology. For example,
interesting structures, such as branches, loops, and cubes, have been made
by DNA. DNA could also serve as a “tag” on other molecules, causing them
to bind only to designated compounds displaying a complementary tag, thus
providing a degree of control over what molecular complexes will form in a
solution.
Combinations
of these approaches are of course also possible. The fact that there are
multiple promising routes adds to the likelihood that success will
eventually be attained.
That
assemblers of general capabilities are consistent with the laws of
chemistry was shown by Drexler in his technical book Nanosystems in
1992. This book also established some lower bounds on the capabilities of
mature nanotechnology. Medical applications of nanotechnology were first
explored in detail by Robert A. Freitas Jr.
in his monumental work
Nanomedicine, the first volume of which came out in 1999. Today,
nanotech is a hot research field. The U.S. government spent more than 600
million dollars on its National Nanotechnology Initiative in 2002. Other
countries have similar programs, and private investment is ample. However,
only a small part of the funding goes to projects of direct relevance to
the development of assembler-based nanotechnology; most of it is for more
humdrum, near-term objectives.
While it
seems fairly well established that molecular nanotechnology is in
principle possible, it is harder to determine how long it will take to
develop. A common guess among the cognoscenti is that the first assembler
may be built around the year 2018, give or take a decade, but there is
large scope for diverging opinion on the upper side of that estimate.
Because the
ramifications of nanotechnology are immense, it is imperative that serious
thought be given to this topic now. If nanotechnology were to be abused
the consequences could be devastating. Society needs to prepare for the
assembler breakthrough and do advance planning to minimize the risks
associated with it [see e.g. “Aren’t these future technologies very risky?
Could they even cause our extinction?”]. Several organizations are working to preparing the
world for nanotechnology, the oldest and largest being the Foresight
Institute.
References:
Drexler, E. The Engines of Creation:
The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. (New York: Anchor Books, 1986).
http://www.foresight.org/EOC/index.html
Drexler, E. Nanosystems: Molecular
Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation. (New York: John Wiley &
Sons, Inc., 1992).
Freitas, Jr., R. A.
Nanomedicine,
Volume I: Basic Capabilities. (Georgetown, Texas: Landes Bioscience,
1999).
Foresight Institute.
http://www.foresight.org
A
superintelligent intellect (a superintelligence, sometimes called “ultraintelligence”)
is one that has the capacity to radically outperform the best human brains
in practically every field, including scientific creativity, general
wisdom, and social skills.
Sometimes a
distinction is made between weak and strong superintelligence. Weak
superintelligence is what you would get if you could run a human
intellect at an accelerated clock speed, such as by uploading it to a fast
computer [see “What is uploading?”]. If the upload’s clock-rate were a thousand times
that of a biological brain, it would perceive reality as being slowed down
by a factor of a thousand. It would think a thousand times more thoughts
in a given time interval than its biological counterpart.
Strong
superintelligence refers to an intellect that is not only faster than
a human brain but also smarter in a qualitative sense. No matter how much
you speed up your dog’s brain, you’re not going to get the equivalent of a
human intellect. Analogously, there might be kinds of smartness that
wouldn’t be accessible to even very fast human brains given their current
capacities. Something as simple as increasing the size or connectivity of
our neuronal networks might give us some of these capacities. Other
improvements may require wholesale reorganization of our cognitive
architecture or the addition of new layers of cognition on top of the old
ones.
However, the
distinction between weak and strong superintelligence may not be
clear-cut. A sufficiently long-lived human who didn’t make any errors and
had a sufficient stack of scrap paper at hand could in principle compute
any Turing computable function. (According to Church’s thesis, the class
of Turing computable functions is identical to the class of physically
computable functions.)
Many but not
all transhumanists expect that superintelligence will be created within
the first half of this century. Superintelligence requires two things:
hardware and software.
Chip-manufacturers planning the next generation of microprocessors
commonly rely on a well-known empirical regularity known as Moore’s Law.
In its original 1965-formulation by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, it
stated that the number of components on a chip doubled every year. In
contemporary use, the “law” is commonly understood as referring more
generally to a doubling of computing power, or of computing power per
dollar. For the past couple of years, the doubling time has hovered
between 18 months and two years.
The human
brain’s processing power is difficult to determine precisely, but common
estimates range from 1014 instructions per second (IPS) up to
1017 IPS or more. The lower estimate, derived by Carnegie
Mellon robotics professor Hans Moravec, is based on the computing power
needed to replicate the signal processing performed by the human retina
and assumes a significant degree of software optimization. The 1017
IPS estimate is obtained by multiplying the number of neurons in a human
brain (~100 billion) with the average number of synapses per neuron
(~1,000) and with the average spike rate (~100 Hz), and assuming ~10
instructions to represent the effect on one action potential traversing
one synapse. An even higher estimate would be obtained e.g. if one were to
suppose that functionally relevant and computationally intensive
processing occurs within compartments of a dendrite tree.
Most experts,
Moore included, think that computing power will continue to double about
every 18 months for at least another two decades. This expectation is
based in part on extrapolation from the past and in part on consideration
of developments currently underway in laboratories. The fastest computer
under construction is IBM’s Blue Gene/L, which when it is ready in 2005 is
expected to perform ~2*1014 IPS. Thus it appears quite likely
that human-equivalent hardware will have been achieved within not much
more than a couple of decades.
How long it
will take to solve the software problem is harder to estimate. One
possibility is that progress in computational neuroscience will teach us
about the computational architecture of the human brain and what learning
rules it employs. We can then implement the same algorithms on a computer.
In this approach, the superintelligence would not be completely specified
by the programmers but would instead have to grow by learning from
experience the same way a human infant does. An alternative approach would
be to use genetic algorithms and methods from classical AI. This might
result in a superintelligence that bears no close resemblance to a human
brain. At the opposite extreme, we could seek to create a
superintelligence by uploading a human intellect and then accelerating and
enhancing it [see “What is uploading?”]. The outcome of this might be a superintelligence
that is a radically upgraded version of one particular human mind.
The arrival
of superintelligence will clearly deal a heavy blow to anthropocentric
worldviews. Much more important than its philosophical implications,
however, would be its practical effects. Creating superintelligence may be
the last invention that humans will ever need to make, since
superintelligences could themselves take care of further scientific and
technological development. They would do so more effectively than humans.
Biological humanity would no longer be the smartest life form on the
block.
The prospect
of superintelligence raises many big issues and concerns that we should
think deeply about in advance of its actual development. The paramount
question is: What can be done to maximize the chances that the arrival of
superintelligence will benefit rather than harm us? The range of expertise
needed to address this question extends far beyond the community of AI
researchers. Neuroscientists, economists, cognitive scientists, computer
scientists, philosophers, ethicists, sociologists, science-fiction
writers, military strategists, politicians, legislators, and many others
will have to pool their insights if we are to deal wisely with what may be
the most important task our species will ever have to tackle.
Many
transhumanists would like to become superintelligent themselves. This is
obviously a long-term and uncertain goal, but it might be achievable
either through uploading and subsequent enhancement or through the gradual
augmentation of our biological brains, by means of future nootropics
(cognitive enhancement drugs), cognitive techniques, IT tools (e.g.
wearable computers, smart agents, information filtering systems,
visualization software, etc.), neural-computer interfaces, or brain
implants.
References:
Moravec, H. Mind Children (Harvard:
Harvard University Press, 1989).
Bostrom, N. “How Long Before
Superintelligence?” International Journal of Futures Studies. Vol.
2. (1998).
A virtual
reality is a simulated environment that your senses perceive as real.
Theatre,
opera, cinema, television can be regarded as precursors to virtual
reality. The degree of immersion (the feeling of “being there”) that you
experience when watching television is quite limited. Watching football on
TV doesn’t really compare to being in the stadium. There are several
reasons for this. For starters, even a big screen doesn’t fill up your
entire visual field. The number of pixels even on high-resolution screens
is also too small (typically 1280*1224 rather than about 5000*5000 as
would be needed in a flawless wide-angle display). Further, 3D vision is
lacking, as is position tracking and focus effects (in reality, the
picture on your retina changes continually as your head and eyeballs are
moving). To achieve greater realism, a system should ideally include more
sensory modalities, such as 3D sound (through headphones) to hear the
crowd roaring, and tactile stimulation through a whole-body haptic
interface so that you don’t have to miss out on the sensation of sitting
on a cold, hard bench for hours.
An essential
element of immersion is interactivity. Watching TV is typically a passive
experience. Full-blown virtual reality, by contrast, will be interactive.
You will be able to move about in a virtual world, pick up objects you
see, and communicate with people you meet. (A real football experience
crucially includes the possibility of shouting abuse at the referee.) To
enable interactivity, the system must have sensors that pick up on your
movements and utterances and adjust the presentation to incorporate the
consequences of your actions.
Virtual
worlds can be modeled on physical realities. If you are participating in a
remote event through VR, as in the example of the imagined football
spectator, you are said to be telepresent at that event. Virtual
environments can also be wholly artificial, like cartoons, and have no
particular counterpart in physical reality. Another possibility, known as
augmented reality, is to have your perception of your immediate
surroundings partially overlaid with simulated elements. For example, by
wearing special glasses, nametags could be made to appear over the heads
of guests at a dinner party, or you could opt to have annoying billboard
advertisements blotted out from your view.
Many users of
today’s VR systems experience “simulator sickness,” with symptoms ranging
from unpleasantness and disorientation to headaches, nausea, and vomiting.
Simulator sickness arises because different sensory systems provide
conflicting cues. For example, the visual system may provide strong cues
of self-motion while the vestibular system in your inner ear tells your
brain that your head is stationary. Heavy head-mounted display helmets and
lag times between tracking device and graphics update can also cause
discomfort. Creating good VR that overcomes these problems is technically
challenging.
Primitive
virtual realities have been around for some time. Early applications
included training modules for pilots and military personnel. Increasingly,
VR is used in computer gaming. Partly because VR is computationally very
intensive, simulations are still quite crude. As computational power
increases, and as sensors, effectors and displays improve, VR could begin
to approximate physical reality in terms of fidelity and interactivity.
In the long
run, VR could unlock limitless possibilities for human creativity. We
could construct artificial experiential worlds, in which the laws of
physics can be suspended, that would appear as real as physical reality to
participants. People could visit these worlds for work, entertainment, or
to socialize with friends who may be living on the opposite site of the
globe. Uploads [see “What is uploading?”], who could interact with simulated environments
directly without the need of a mechanical interface, might spend most of
their time in virtual realities.
Cryonics is
an experimental medical procedure that seeks to save lives by placing in
low-temperature storage persons who cannot be treated with current medical
procedures and who have been declared legally dead, in the hope that
technological progress will eventually make it possible to revive them.
For cryonics
to work today, it is not necessary that we can currently reanimate cryo-preserved
patients (which we cannot). All that is needed is that we can preserve
patients in a state sufficiently intact that some possible technology,
developed in the future, will one day be able to repair the freezing
damage and reverse the original cause of deanimation. Only half of the
complete cryonics procedure can be scrutinized today; the other half
cannot be performed until the (perhaps distant) future.
What we know
now is that it is possible to stabilize a patient’s condition by cooling
him or her in liquid nitrogen (- 196 C°). A considerable amount of cell
damage is caused by the freezing process. This injury can be minimized by
following suspension protocols that involve suffusing the deanimated body
with cryoprotectants. The formation of damaging ice crystals can even be
suppressed altogether in a process known as vitrification, in which the
patient’s body is turned into a kind of glass. This might sound like an
improbable treatment, but the purpose of cryonics is to preserve the
structure of life rather than the processes of life, because
the life processes can in principle be re-started as long as the
information encoded in the structural properties of the body, in
particular the brain, are sufficiently preserved. Once frozen, the patient
can be stored for millennia with virtually no further tissue degradation.
Many experts
in molecular nanotechnology believe that in its mature stage
nanotechnology will enable the revival of cryonics patients. Hence, it is
possible that the suspended patients could be revived in as little as a
few decades from now. The uncertainty about the ultimate technical
feasibility of reanimation may very well be dwarfed by the uncertainty in
other factors, such as the possibility that you deanimate in the wrong
kind of way (by being lost at sea, for example, or by having the brain’s
information content erased by Alzheimer’s disease), that your cryonics
company goes bust, that civilization collapses, or that people in the
future won’t be interested in reviving you. So, a cryonics contract is far
short of a survival guarantee. As a cryonicist saying goes, being
cryonically suspended is the second worst thing that can happen to you.
When we
consider the procedures that are routine today and how they might have
been viewed in (say) the 1700s, we can begin to see how difficult it is to
make a well-founded argument that future medical technology will never be
able to reverse the injuries that occur during cryonic suspension. By
contrast, your chances of a this-worldly comeback if you opt for one of
the popular alternative treatments – such as cremation or burial – are
zero. Seen in this light, signing up for cryonics, which is usually done
by making a cryonics firm one of the beneficiaries of your life insurance,
can look like a reasonable insurance policy. If it doesn’t work, you would
be dead anyway. If it works, it may save your life. Your saved life would
then likely be extremely long and healthy, given how advanced the state of
medicine must be to revive you.
By no means
are all transhumanists signed up for cryonics, but a significant fraction
finds that, for them, a cost-benefit analysis justifies the expense.
Becoming a cryonicist, however, requires courage: the courage to confront
the possibility of your own death, and the courage to resist the
peer-pressure from the large portion of the population which currently
espouses deathist values and advocates complacency in the face of a
continual, massive loss of human life.
References:
Merkle, R. “The Molecular Repair of the
Brain.” Cryonics magazine, Vol. 15, No’s 1 & 2. (1994).
http://www.merkle.com/cryo/techFeas.html
Uploading
(sometimes called “downloading”, “mind uploading” or “brain
reconstruction”) is the process of transferring an intellect from a
biological brain to a computer.
One way of
doing this might be by first scanning the synaptic structure of a
particular brain and then implementing the same computations in an
electronic medium. A brain scan of sufficient resolution could be produced
by disassembling the brain atom for atom by means of nanotechnology. Other
approaches, such as analyzing pieces of the brain slice by slice in an
electron microscope with automatic image processing have also been
proposed. In addition to mapping the connection pattern among the 100
billion-or-so neurons, the scan would probably also have to register some
of the functional properties of each of the synaptic interconnections,
such as the efficacy of the connection and how stable it is over time
(e.g. whether it is short-term or long-term potentiated). Non-local
modulators such as neurotransmitter concentrations and hormone balances
may also need to be represented, although such parameters likely contain
much less data than the neuronal network itself.
In addition
to a good three-dimensional map of a brain, uploading will require
progress in neuroscience to develop functional models of each species of
neuron (how they map input stimuli to outgoing action potentials, and how
their properties change in response to activity in learning). It will also
require a powerful computer to run the upload, and some way for the upload
to interact with the external world or with a virtual reality. (Providing
input/output or a virtual reality for the upload appears easy in
comparison to the other challenges.)
An
alternative hypothetical uploading method would proceed more gradually:
one neuron could be replaced by an implant or by a simulation in a
computer outside of the body. Then another neuron, and so on, until
eventually the whole cortex has been replaced and the person’s thinking is
implemented on entirely artificial hardware. (To do this for the whole
brain would almost certainly require nanotechnology.)
A distinction
is sometimes made between destructive uploading, in which the original
brain is destroyed in the process, and non-destructive uploading, in which
the original brain is preserved intact alongside the uploaded copy. It is
a matter of debate under what conditions personal identity would be
preserved in destructive uploading. Many philosophers who have studied the
problem think that at least under some conditions, an upload of your brain
would be you. A widely accepted position is that you survive so long as
certain information patterns are conserved, such as your memories, values,
attitudes, and emotional dispositions, and so long as there is causal
continuity so that earlier stages of yourself help determine later stages
of yourself. Views differ on the relative importance of these two
criteria, but they can both be satisfied in the case of uploading.
For the continuation of personhood, on this view, it matters little
whether you are implemented on a silicon chip inside a computer or in that
gray, cheesy lump inside your skull, assuming both implementations are
conscious.
Tricky cases
arise, however, if we imagine that several similar copies are made of your
uploaded mind. Which one of them is you? Are they all you, or are none of
them you? Who owns your property? Who is married to your spouse?
Philosophical, legal, and ethical challenges abound. Maybe these will
become hotly debated political issues later in this century.
A common
misunderstanding about uploads is that they would necessarily be
“disembodied” and that this would mean that their experiences would be
impoverished. Uploading according to this view would be the ultimate
escapism, one that only neurotic body-loathers could possibly feel tempted
by. But an upload’s experience could in principle be identical to that of
a biological human. An upload could have a virtual (simulated) body giving
the same sensations and the same possibilities for interaction as a
non-simulated body. With advanced virtual reality, uploads could enjoy
food and drink, and upload sex could be as gloriously messy as one could
wish. And uploads wouldn’t have to be confined to virtual reality: they
could interact with people on the outside and even rent robot bodies in
order to work in or explore physical reality.
Personal
inclinations regarding uploading differ. Many transhumanists have a
pragmatic attitude: whether they would like to upload or not depends on
the precise conditions in which they would live as uploads and what the
alternatives are. (Some transhumanists may also doubt whether uploading
will be possible.) Advantages of being an upload would include:
Basics
