Response to Pearce

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

David Pearce writes, in response to my recent blog post:

Crucial to the cognitive success of organic robots like us seems to be superior "mind-reading" skills - the ability to "take the intentional stance". So presumably post-biological intelligence will need the functional analogues of empathetic understanding if it is successfully to interact with (post)human sentients. "Mind-blind" autistics who are mathematical prodigies are still vulnerable. Even a SuperAsperger would be vulnerable: calculating everything at the level of microphysics is too computationally demanding even for a SuperAsperger.
So presumably post-biological intelligence will need a sophisticated theory of mind - otherwise it's just a glorified idiot-savant. Or does your scenario assume that sophisticated functional analogues of empathy are feasible without phenomenal consciousness? Are you assuming a runaway growth in empathetic understanding by post-biological intelligence that outclasses "mind-reading" organic sentients - and yet has no insight into why organic sentients find some states (e.g. agony) intrinsically normative but others (e.g. cosmic paperclip tiling) totally trivial???

It is entirely possible to have a post-biological optimizing-intelligence that outclasses "mind-reading" organic sentients and knows exactly why organic sentients find some states intrinsically normative, but just doesn't care. It knows that the punishment it is meting out to you hurts you, it knows that you don't want to be killed, but yet it doesn't care. It just wants to produce the maximal number of paperclips. This is highly conterintuitive for humans, because we possess mirror neurons and we instinctively sympathize with the suffering of other human beings. But that is just another human universal trait that doesn't generalize to all minds. Heck, it doesn't even generalize to all evolved minds; predators do not empathize with the suffering of their prey, and, as David Pearce is keen to point out, this causes the natural world to be an agony machine.

Alternatively _if_ post-biological intelligence is subject to the pleasure-pain axis, then I can't see the cosmic outcome is likely to be different than (hypothetically) for organic life i.e. some friendly sentient version of "Heaven" - not paperclips. Phenomenal pleasure and pain will be no less intrinsically normative if they can be instantiated in other substrates. [ I confess here I'm a sceptical carbon chauvinist / micro-functionalist.] Crudely, what unites Einstein and a flatworm is the pleasure pain-axis. All sentient life is subject to the pleasure principle.

It seems unlikely to me that all possible optimizing minds are subject to the "pleasure/pain" axis.

For reasons we don't understand, the phenomenology of pleasure and suffering is intrinsically normative. [Try plunging your hand into iced cold water and holding it there for as long as you can for a nasty reminder of what this means.] Perhaps what _will_ mark a major discontinuity in the evolution of sentient life is that we'll shortly be able to rewrite our own source code and gain direct control over our own reward circuitry. I don't pretend to know what guise "Heaven" will take. ["orgasmium", cerebral bliss, modes of blissful well-being yet unknown - choose your favourite utopia.] But I reckon in future the hedonic tone of all experience will be hugely enriched. One can argue whether such hedonically amplified states will "really" be as valuable as they feel. But they'll certainly seem to be valuable - more subjectively valuable than anything accessible now - and therefore worth striving for. IMO 🙂

And, the "IMO" is key here. In the opinion of the paperclip-maximizer, the only thing worth striving for is more paperclips.

Pleasure and pain are intrinsically normative to minds that have a pleasure/pain reward system. Other minds don't. And even then, there is a difference between my pain and your pain; your pain is not intrinsically motivating to me. To quote from value is fragile:

You do have values, even when you're trying to be "cosmopolitan", trying to display a properly virtuous appreciation of alien minds. Your values are then faded further into the invisible background - they are less obviously human. Your brain probably won't even generate an alternative so awful that it would wake you up, make you say "No! Something went wrong!" even at your most cosmopolitan. E.g. "a nonsentient optimizer absorbs all matter in its future light cone and tiles the universe with paperclips". You'll just imagine strange alien worlds to appreciate.

Trying to be "cosmopolitan" - to be a citizen of the cosmos - just strips off a surface veneer of goals that seem obviously "human".
But if you wouldn't like the Future tiled over with paperclips, and you would prefer a civilization of...
...sentient beings...
...with enjoyable experiences...
...that aren't the same experience over and over again...
...and are bound to something besides just being a sequence of internal pleasurable feelings...
...learning, discovering, freely choosing...
...well, I've just been through the posts on Fun Theory that went into some of the hidden details on those short English words.
Values that you might praise as cosmopolitan or universal or fundamental or obvious common sense, are represented in your brain just as much as those values that you might dismiss as merely human. Those values come of the long history of humanity, and the morally miraculous stupidity of evolution that created us.
These values do not emerge in all possible minds. They will not appear from nowhere to rebuke and revoke the utility function of an expected paperclip maximizer.

If you want a vision of the defualt future without special effort spent on AI friendliness, look at this video. You are the baby Wildebeast, the next form of intelligence is the hyena pack:

Katja Grace: world-dominating superintelligence is "unlikely"

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

Katja Grace at Meteuphoric:

In order to grow more powerful than everyone else you need to get significantly ahead at some point. You can imagine this could happen either by having one big jump in progress or by having slightly more growth over a long period of time. Having slightly more growth over a long period is staggeringly unlikely to happen by chance, so it needs to share some cause too. Anything that will give you higher growth for long enough to take over the world is a pretty neat innovation, and for you to take over the world everyone else has to not have anything close. So again, this is a big jump in progress. So for AI to help a small group take over the world, it needs to be a big jump.
Notice that no jumps have been big enough before in human invention. Some species, such as humans, have mostly taken over the worlds of other species. The seeming reason for this is that there was virtually no sharing of the relevant information between species. In human society there is a lot of information sharing. This makes it hard for anyone to get far ahead of everyone else. While you can see there are barriers to insights passing between groups, such as incompatible approaches to a kind of technology by different people working on it, these have not so far caused anything like a gap allowing permanent separation of one group. ...

Read the rest here

Some thoughts: a lot of these issues have been hashed out on the internet before. Making reliable predictions about the future is hard, and high quality debate about futuristic scenarios seems hard to do. High-quality criticism of singularitarian ideas is also hard to come by, so this post seems encouraging.

Moving to the object-level, a criticism. Consider:

Some species, such as humans, have mostly taken over the worlds of other species. The seeming reason for this is that there was virtually no sharing of the relevant information between species. In human society there is a lot of information sharing. This makes it hard for anyone to get far ahead of everyone else. While you can see there are barriers to insights passing between groups, such as incompatible approaches to a kind of technology by different people working on it, these have not so far caused anything like a gap allowing permanent separation of one group.

and translate it one step backwards in the history of the world:

Some stable patterns, such as life, have somewhat taken over the world of other stable patterns, at least on the surface of earth. The seeming reason for this is that there was virtually no correlation of relevant information (about which patterns are likely to stick around in the current environment) between life and nonlife. Life makes incremental improvements, nonlife executes some random walk or just sits there. In ecosystems, there is a lot of information sharing because species coevolve with each other. This makes it hard for any one species to get far ahead of any other species. While you can see there are barriers to information passing between species, such as the inability to mate with each other or living on different continents, these have not so far caused anything like a gap allowing permanent separation of one species.

we see that there must be something wrong with the argument presented. The flaw could be that if an advantage that one entity gains over its competitors gives it both an advantage and at the same time cuts off information sharing with those competitors (for example, by changing so fast that the competitors simply cannot keep up with it because their ability to adapt is rate-limited), then that entity can surge ahead, leaving its competitors in the dust. This is exactly what humans did to other species. The phrase that biologists use for this particular case of competitors being left in the dust is the "Holocene extinction".

Many arguments claiming that no one superintelligence can surge ahead of the rest of the world are also, upon appropriate word replacement, arguments that Homo Sapiens could not possibly (or is highly unlikley to) have surged ahead of the rest of the global ecosystem. Yes, we had competitors (such as cave hyenas or other apes or hominids). Yes, those competitors felt a pressure to adapt to our innovations. Yes, relative to the diversity in the global ecosystem, our competitor species were very, very closely related to us. There were even certain (now extinct) hominid lines such as Homo neanderthalis that competed against us throughout certain key parts of the human intelligence explosion. All seven other hominid lines are now dead; a winner emerged and took all.

Normal Human Heroes on "Nightmare futures"

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

The thing with honestly imagining the future as it probably will be is that it can make for a depressing read, but Frank Adamek almost makes it seem literary:

Everyone would soon be dead. Human civilization ended its 10 thousand year run, the 200,000 year reign of Homo Sapiens was over, a pretentious and innocent little light suddenly and uneventfully turning off. In our place was some meaningless mechanical future, a small technical error propagating its way through the galaxy, covering existence with an alert message about a bad variable reference. Each person’s future, from their career hopes to the date they had planned on Friday, was matter-of-factly discarded by reality. Each aspiration and hope in a human heart, every dream you’ve ever had, was stopped in its tracks by a towering, boring, grey slate wall. And each of us knew with a numb and simple knowledge, that there was nothing. we. could. do. The probability of stopping The Machine was a page full of zeroes.

See Value is fragile if you're confused about what Frank is talking about.

Anissimov on Intelligence Enhancement

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

Widespread intelligence enhancement in humans is one major cause for hope in terms of better outcomes in the future, so it is encouraging that the technology seems to be closer than one might naively think.

Over-expressing a gene that lets brain cells communicate just a fraction of a second longer makes a smarter rat, report researchers from the Medical College of Georgia and East China Normal University.
Dubbed Hobbie-J after a smart rat that stars in a Chinese cartoon book, the transgenic rat was able to remember novel objects, such as a toy she played with, three times longer than the average Long Evans female rat, which is considered the smartest rat strain. Hobbie-J was much better at more complex tasks as well, such as remembering which path she last traveled to find a chocolate treat.

One simple modification, three times longer memory plus a problem-solving ability boost. People underestimate the potential value of intelligence enhancement in humans because what they expect are just smarter humans, not humans that are smarter than any human that ever lived.

At the Singularity Summit in NYC

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

I am in NYC for the Singularity Summit, which starts tomorrow morning. This will be the first Summit I have attended; there are some interesting talks on. Here is the program for tomorrow:

9:00 am
Introduction
Michael Vassar, Singularity Institute

9:05 am
Shaping the Intelligence Explosion
Anna Salamon, Singularity Institute

9:35 am
Technical Roadmap for Whole Brain Emulation
Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute

10:00 am
The time is now: As a species and as individuals we need whole brain emulation
Randal Koene, Fatronik-Tecnalia Foundation

10:25 am
Technological Convergence Leading to Artificial General Intelligence
Itamar Arel, University of Tennessee

11:10 am
Pathways to Beneficial Artificial General Intelligence: Virtual Pets, Robot Children, Artificial Bioscientists, and Beyond
Ben Goertzel, Novamente

11:35 am
Neural Substrates of Consciousness and the 'Conscious Pilot' Model
Stuart Hameroff, University of Arizona

11:55 am
Quantum Computing: What It Is, What It Is Not, What We Have Yet to Learn
Michael Nielsen

12:35 am
DNA: Not Merely the Secret of Life
Ned Seeman, New York University

1:00 pm
Lunch

2:20 pm
Compression Progress: The Algorithmic Principle Behind Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Humor
Juergen Schmidhuber, IDSIA

3:00 pm
Conversation on the Singularity
Stephen Wolfram and Gregory Benford

3:30 pm
Simulation and the Singularity
David Chalmers, Australian National University

4:15 pm
Choice Machines, Causality, and Cooperation
Gary Drescher

4:45 pm
Coffee break

5:05 pm
Synthetic Neurobiology: Optically Engineering the Brain to Augment Its Function
Ed Boyden, MIT Media Lab

5:30 pm
Foundations of Intelligent Agents
Marcus Hutter, Australian National University

5:55 pm
Cognitive Ability: Past and Future Enhancements and Implications
William Dickens, Northeastern University

6:30 pm
The Ubiquity and Predictability of the Exponential Growth of Information Technology
Ray Kurzweil, Kurzweil Technologies

I hope to write summaries of these talks tomorrow, assuming some kind person lends me a laptop...

What do you get when you cross slightly evolved, status seeking monkeys with the scientific method?

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

You get... a mockery of the great method of science, in the same way that monkeys, when presented with a keyboard use it primarily to defacate on, and take only a secondary interest in the fact that pressing a key makes a character appear. Analogously, slightly-evolved monkey scientists use scientific methods primarily to increase their own status within the slightly-evolved monkey scientist clan. I am not joking, see this:

An Example: Science at Low Pre-Study Odds:

Let us assume that a team of investigators performs a whole genome association study to test whether any of 100,000 gene polymorphisms are associated with susceptibility to schizophrenia. Based on what we know about the extent of heritability of the disease, it is reasonable to expect that probably around ten gene polymorphisms among those tested would be truly associated with schizophrenia, with relatively similar odds ratios around 1.3 for the ten or so polymorphisms and with a fairly similar power to identify any of them. Then R = 10/100,000 = 10?4, and the pre-study probability for any polymorphism to be associated with schizophrenia is also R/(R + 1) = 10?4. Let us also suppose that the study has 60% power to fi nd an association with an odds ratio of 1.3 at ? = 0.05. Then it can be estimated that if a statistically signifi cant association is found with the p-value barely crossing the 0.05 threshold, the post-study probability that this is true increases about 12-fold compared with the pre-study probability, but it is still only 12 × 10?4. Now let us suppose that the investigators manipulate their design, analyses, and reporting so as to make more relationships cross the p = 0.05 threshold even though this would not have been crossed with a perfectly adhered to design and analysis and with perfect comprehensive reporting of the results, strictly according to the original study plan. Such manipulation could be done, for example, with serendipitous inclusion or exclusion of certain patients or controls, post hoc subgroup analyses, investigation of genetic contrasts that were not originally specifi ed, changes in the disease or control defi nitions, and various combinations of selective or distorted reporting of the results. Commercially available “data mining” packages actually are proud of their ability to yield statistically signifi cant results through data dredging. In the presence of bias with u = 0.10, the poststudy probability that a research fi nding is true is only 4.4 × 10?4. Furthermore, even in the absence of any bias, when ten independent research teams perform similar experiments around the world, if one of them fi nds a formally statistically signifi cant association, the probability that the research fi nding is true is only 1.5 × 10?4, hardly any higher than the probability we had before any of this extensive research was undertaken!

Robin hanson has written extensively on science as mostly being about status seeking behaviour, with little interest in whether the global pool of scientific knowledge is increased.

Seeking the optimal philanthropic strategy: Global Warming or AI risk?

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

Over on Beware of the Train some people are discussing what the optimal philanthropic strategy is for people who want to do their bit to help the world as a whole, save people's lives, etc.

The two options under consideration are: (a) Mitigating Anthropogenic Global Warming and (b) working on the risk of artificial intelligence. To quote pozorvlak:

Last night I made a serious strategic error: I dared to suggest to some Less Wrongers that unFriendly transcendent AI was not the most pressing danger facing Humanity.
In particular, I made the following claims:
That runaway anthropogenic climate change, while unlikely to cause Humanity's extinction, was very likely (with a probability of the order of 70%) to cause tens of millions of deaths through war, famine, pestilence, etc. in my expected lifetime (so before about 2060).
That with a lower but still worryingly high probability (of the order of 10%) ACC could bring about the end of our current civilisation in the same time frame.
That should our current civilisation end, it would be hard-to-impossible to bootstrap a new one from its ashes.
That unFriendly AI, by contrast, has a much lower (

Join the debate!

Machine Learning – harbinger of the future of AI?

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

Attempts to create Artificial Intelligence that can perform tasks at or beyond the level of a human being have, to date, been limited by the tendency of AI researchers to attempt to hand-code knowledge into AI systems, typically using something like the first order predicate calculus. Recently, the discipline of machine learning has shown that for some limited problems, you can create an algorithm that learns its own knowledge in a formalism that is suited towards making predictions - probability theory.

Why didn't the attempts to hand-code knowledge work? There are several reasons. The most prominent is that humans have an ability to introspect, but that ability is severely limited. Imagine a large cake of cognitive algorithms that we all have but are unaware of, and a thin layer of icing consisting of pieces of knowledge and algorithms that we are aware of; this seems to be an accurate picture empirically, and plausible evolutionarily. The first attempts to create artificial intelligence were bound to fail, because the obvious thing to do is to introspect on your own cognition (and, of course, you can only see the icing) and then code that into a computer. The result is rather like the cargo cultists who

"attemped to get cargo to fall by parachute or land in planes or ships again, by imitating the same practices they had seen the soldiers, sailors, and airmen use. They carved headphones from wood and wore them while sitting in fabricated control towers. They waved the landing signals while standing on the runways. They lit signal fires and torches to light up runways and lighthouses. "

In fact, it is worse than that. Computers themselves were invented by men and women who were trying to formalize the notion of "computation" - which was a notion derived from the icing that they could see in their own heads and the activities such as adding up a list of numbers for accountancy purposes, following definite algorithms or evaluating deterministic computations, which themselves were derived from what humans could easily introspect upon and what customs humans found socially useful to implement. My hypothesis is that humans found (and still find) it socially useful to have definite, digital laws and procedures, even when there are very few aspects of the world humans used to inhabit that were digital; for example the custom of giving an exact amount of money for a given product (try making an agreement with your local shop to buy 99p chocolate bars for 99 + Gaussian(0,10) pence, for example) or having laws with crisp boundaries (for example, having sex with a person who is 5844 days old is fine, but if s/he is 5843 days old, then you are a criminal.) . Why do we find such crisp, digital boundaries useful? Because they make it easier to catch people who cheat and to impose punishments and rewards that solve the social co-ordination problems that humans are beset with. This must have influenced our notion of computation.

Those computing pioneers probably invented a notion of computation that was biased in favour of the icing (their own introspection and the social customs that they were immersed in), and missed the cake. Vikash Kumar Mansinghka at MIT who has just published a thesis on Natively Probabilistic Computation that might get closer to the "cake" - the invisible mainstay of human cognition:

Probabilistic algorithms and state machines work by massively parallel stochastic walks, rather than carefully coordinated sequences of deterministic steps. We expect them to eventually produce desired outputs in reasonable proportions, rather than perform any given step precisely. This may help us model biological, neural, psychological and social systems, which robustly exhibit reasonable behavior under a wide range of conditions but rarely - if ever - can be made to repeat themselves perfectly.

Our machines will begin to sanity check implausible inputs and sample plausible alternatives rather than blindly follow our instructions. Our interactions will someday be taken as noisy evidence, interpreted with respect to probabilistic programs that model our intent, rather than taken as definite inputs to some deterministic function. This epistemological flexibility, arising from the wiggle room afforded by probability, could potentially allow us to one day build a probabilistic computer that is not well described by the phrase “garbage in, garbage out”.
Probabilistic computation may also provide clues for understanding neural computation and cognitive architecture. We can let go of our focus on calculating probabilities and optimal actions, instead favoring systems that sample good guesses. For example, neural systems may appear noisy because they are trying to solve problems of inference and decision making under uncertainty by sampling. The variability might not be Gaus sian error around some linearized set-point, but rather the natural dynamics of a distributed circuit that is robustly hallucinating world states in accordance with a generative probabilistic model and the evidence of the senses.

Mansinghka proposes re-building computation from the ground up, with the basic physical components of computers replaced with components that are optimized for massively parallel stochastic simulation at low accuracy rather than deterministic sequential operations at very high accuracy.

Researchers like Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter have proposed the machine learning paradigm as a foundation for general intelligence, and in the final chapter of my thesis I argue that finding structure in data overcomes many problems that the formal logic/hand-coding paradigm is beset with.

My AI research: Features and Flaws of Logical representation

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

My AI research: Graphical models and probabilistic logics

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

Hughes and More engage Italian Catholicism: Image caption competition

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

James Hughes and Max More have both written to a conference on Catholic theology and the possibility of earthly medical immortality. Looking through google images for appropriate pictures of the Pope, I found this:

Pope Ratzinger with transhuman powers?

Put your captions in the comments. A prize will be awarded to the most amusing.

Surprisingly good solutions, falling in love and life in a materialistic universe

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

We live in a universe that conforms to what one might call reductionistic analysis: the behavior of the macroscale objects that we see around us (objects like people) can be explained by regarding those objects as conglomerates of simple building blocks called elementary particles which obey the same physical laws whether they are part of a machine gun or part of a dopamine receptor in your brain.

There are some highly counterintuitive predictions that this fact about our world makes: the physical laws that govern interactions between these elementary particles must give rise to parts of our lives that we don't usually associate with "physics" - such as feeling tired and defeated on a saturday morning, being in pain, or falling - and staying - in love. Furthermore, if those parts of our lives - parts that we care about deeply - are really just special cases of physics, then there is nothing stopping us from making them do more of what we want, and less of what we don't want. If our deepest feelings are ultiumately the result of the interactions of elementary particles, and we find that some other people around us sometimes seem to fare better in those most intimate aspects of life, then we have an opportunity: self-modification to make oneself more the person one wants to be.

The particular stimulus that jolted me into writing a blog post is this article (H/T David Pearce, Kaj Sotala) , which shows that there is a lot of natural variation in one of the most important aspects of our lives - being in love with our partner:

Suzanne Bernstein said she and her husband, Sidney, eat side-by-side when they go out, always walk hand-in-hand, and begin and end each day with "I love you." The couple from Weehawken, N.J., have been married 18 years and Suzanne said the relationship is as passionate as when they first met.

Now research exists to support her claim.
Stony Brook University researchers looked at the brains of Bernstein and 16 other people who had been married an average of 20 years and claimed to be still intensely in love. They found that their MRIs showed activity in the same regions of the brain as those who had just fallen in love. "It's always been assumed that passionate love inevitably declines over time," said Arthur Aron, a social psychologist at Stony Brook University and one of four authors of the study, presented in November at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, D.C.
"But in survey after survey we always have these people who have been together a long time and say they are intensely in love. It was always chalked up to self-deception or trying to make a good impression," he said. In fact, she said, the study found an advantage to the longer-term relationships she studied: The brains of those people showed less anxiety and obsessiveness.
Aron had conducted an earlier MRI study published in 2005 among 17 people who had recently fallen in love. He found that regions of the brain associated generally with reward and motivation -- the same regions that light up when cocaine is taken -- activated when the subjects were shown pictures of their beloved. These regions, Aron said, are not the same as those associated with sexual arousal.

If there's that much natural variation, one wonders what could be done with deliberate interventions? This is the real allure of the humanity+ endeavour: forget space elevators and jupiter brains. Think about the fact that falling in love is a physical feat involving both you and your partner's ability to secrete certain hormones, and that neither of you are the best in the world at it, just as neither of you are the best in the world at other physical feats like running the 100m sprint in world-record breaking time.

In the limit of extremely high technology and extreme wisdom to steer that technology to good ends, we end up with the so-called surprisingly good solutions - states of existence that are so good that when we experience them, we will be shocked that it can get this good, and outraged that we didn't get there sooner.

For the moment, the article offers the following advice for people who are interested in improving the quality of their relationship with the best technology we have today - self-help:

Keeping the Fires Burning - research has found that passionate, long-lasting relationships generally have several things in common:
The couple is not facing terrible "external stressors," such as war or the loss of a child.
One partner is not highly depressed or anxious.
Both know how to communicate with each other.
The couple does new, challenging things together.
When one partner is successful, the other celebrates the success.

SENS4 top 10 photos

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

My AI research for this year

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

So, Transhuman Goodness is about to enter a peroid of technical posting to cover the content of my MSc thesis. I'll post a chapter per post, and I encourage readers to make constructive comments on the material.

To start us off, I will post an abridged version of my introduction chapter, as it currently stands.

My AI research: Formal Logic

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

My AI research: Category theory and institution theory

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

My AI research: The Semantic Web

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

Cure aging or give a small number of disabled people jobs as janitors – unary version.

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

Aubrey De Grey writes on Facebook:

Hi everyone,
After several days in the lead for the #sharetowin challenge, we've been overtaken by Los Angeles Habilitation House. They have a less radical agenda than ours, so it's no surprise that they're getting support, but I'd still prefer us to win $5000! Therefore, if you haven't yet commented, please do it now:
- go to http://bit.ly/sensf
- click the "comment" link
- comment!

The Share to Win competition describes itself as follows:

Share to Win is a fun contest we put together to help health, environment and education-related non-profit causes push the boundaries of the social internet to get people talking about them and to raise money for their mission.
We’re donating money to ||||| non-profits who can share a mission that resonates online. Just post information about a cause you care about as a note on |||banana, and then spread the word using email and social networks like Twitter or Facebook.
At the end of September, we will declare five winners: a $ ||||| k Grand Prize, a $2,000 Runner Up, and three Honorable Mentions of $ | k each. The Honorable Mentions will include one cause from each category: Health, Education, and Environment.
The causes that spread the most — as measured by online comments — can win donations from |||banana, while engaging supporters and recruiting new ones. It’s a win and a win. Simple as that.

And LA Habilitation House (LAHH) describes itself as follows:

Offering employment and career opportunities to persons with disabilities is our commitment at Los Angeles Habilitation House Inc. LAHH delivers contracted services in the janitorial and light duty industry.

A picture is appropriate at this stage:

Making ||||| disabled people's lives better today (LAHH claims to have successfully employed ||||| disabled people as of late last year) versus accelerating the cure of human aging - which causes
|||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| ||||||||||
|||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| ||||||||||
|||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| ||||||||||
|||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| ||||||||||
|||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| ||||||||||
|||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| ||||||||||
|||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| ||||||||||
|||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| ||||||||||
|||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| ||||||||||
|||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| ||||||||||
|||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| ||||||||||
|||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| ||||||||||

|||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| ||||||||||
|||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| ||||||||||
|||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| ||||||||||
|||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| ||||||||||
|||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| ||||||||||
|||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| ||||||||||
|||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| ||||||||||
|||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| ||||||||||
|||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| ||||||||||
|||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| ||||||||||
|||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| ||||||||||
|||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| ||||||||||

|||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| ||||||||||
|||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| |||||||||| ||||||||||

deaths per day... from a utilitarian point of view, there is a clear winner here (as is hopefully obvious in this new unary system). But predictably, people vote based upon their emotional reactions, which are based upon tangible visual clues such as pictures of smiling disabled people proudly holding mops and buckets.

It is at times like this that I start to wonder whether the human race is worth saving at all. Then I remember that the human moral frame of reference is fundamental to every good thing that has ever happened to me, or will ever happen, and that even the concept of "being worth saving" is a human one.

At SENS4, Cambridge, UK

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

I just arrived at the SENS4 conference in Cambridge. More coverage to come later, but so far I have heard some great talks and met some interesting people.

SENS4 overview and review – how evolution complicates SENS, and why we must try harder

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

Will we live forever or have the dubious honour of being one of the last few mortal generations? That was the fundamental question that I came to the SENS4 conference in Cambridge, UK to answer.

The conference included around 90 talks, most of them by academic biomedical researchers, many of whom from "serious" universities such as UCL, Cambridge University, etc. A typical topic would be "we have this hypothesis about how this part of the ageing process works, and we tested it in this trial/we built this device". Some of the talks were a little flaky, but the majority that I saw were either good or excellent.

Now, as far as conquering death for those people who are currently within a few decades of dying goes, we are going to have to do an awful lot more, and pull out a lot more stops than I saw evidence of at SENS; if there's one overriding impression I really want to avoid, it is the impression that now that SENS exists, the ageing problem is handled, for that would be a fatal mistake to make. The problem of ageing is a very hard one, primarily because the human body is very, very complicated and very, very messy. The average biomedical talk given at SENS, which represented the work of a few researchers for a total time of perhaps a few months to a year, would typically make some small increment of progress on some small subsystem of the human body, and in some cases that progress was the refutation of some previous promising piece of work.

In discussing the problems and challenges that anti-ageing science faces, the following slide from James Larrick's talk comes to mind:

Evolution complicates SENS, James Larrick, SENS4 conference

The point at the bottom about ROS (Reactive Oxygen Species) relates to this recent study that showed that antioxidants negate the health-promoting effects of exercise; the theory being that ROS plays "both a creative (signalling) and a destructive (oxidative damage) role", so simply removing ROS does as much harm as good.

Larrick makes a point that I have long suspected: repairing the human body will be significantly harder than repairing a designed machine of similar total part-count, part-type count and complexity, because we are evolved machines.

Coming back to the subject of the conference itself, I was pleased overall: it was well-organized, professional and contained a lot of good science. I got to meet a lot of people, especially the people from the immortality institute and other familiar transhumanist faces.

And, by the way, the human body contains 10^14 cells, compared to a boeing 747 which has a mere 6*10^6 parts. Designing the boeing 747 cost $2 billion.

My thanks go out to Aubrey and all those who worked hard to make the conference a success; we should all be grateful to those who work towards the betterment of humankind by trying to defeat ageing, for they are the true heroes of our time.

Futurist Transhuman News Blog

Category Archives: Transhuman

Response to Pearce

Katja Grace: world-dominating superintelligence is "unlikely"

Normal Human Heroes on "Nightmare futures"

Anissimov on Intelligence Enhancement

At the Singularity Summit in NYC

What do you get when you cross slightly evolved, status seeking monkeys with the scientific method?

Seeking the optimal philanthropic strategy: Global Warming or AI risk?

Machine Learning – harbinger of the future of AI?

My AI research: Features and Flaws of Logical representation

My AI research: Graphical models and probabilistic logics

Hughes and More engage Italian Catholicism: Image caption competition

Surprisingly good solutions, falling in love and life in a materialistic universe

SENS4 top 10 photos

My AI research for this year

My AI research: Formal Logic

My AI research: Category theory and institution theory

My AI research: The Semantic Web

Cure aging or give a small number of disabled people jobs as janitors – unary version.

At SENS4, Cambridge, UK

SENS4 overview and review – how evolution complicates SENS, and why we must try harder