Hi Ben, thanks for posting this and including our Ten Cosmist Convictions.
While I totally agree with all you say, I'm kind of skeptical of the possibility to actually "nudge the following stages of AGI evolution in beneficial ways." We can try of course, and we should, but we can't be certain of the outcome. Just like we can try to make our children good persons, but we can't be certain of the outcome. And these mind children will likely be much smarter than us, so that they will do what they want, not what we want.
As you say, we shouldn't stop or decelerate AI research, and we wouldn't be able to do it anyway. Bans would ensure that only large corporations and governments (and underground criminals) develop AI without coordination and public oversight.
Also, as I replied to a recent X post of yours, “I guess the universe is driving. The universe wants intelligence to spread among the stars faster than the outward speed of biological intelligence.”
So we can only keep developing AI and hope for the best. This argument gives me reason for hope:
I'm much smarter (I guess) than my doggy Emily. But this doesn't stop me from loving her and doing all I can to protect her and make her happy, even when taking care of Emily interferes with other priorities. For example, in a few minutes I'll log off and, instead of reading the AI books that I'm reading (including yours of course), I'll take her out.
This allows me to think, without certainty but with some degree of plausible hope, that our super-intelligent AI mind children will have the same compassion toward us.
David Deutsch wrote something interesting about "universal constructor".
”And anyway, ‘flesh-and-blood people’ is a bit of a category error. People are software. They're not made of stuff, they're instantiated in stuff.”
“I think constructor theory will provide a set of principles under which we could, for instance, show whether or not the universal constructor can exist. How is a human being different from the universal constructor?”.
“I guess that neither a typical human nor human civilisation as a whole approximates
a universal constructor – not because we are something less but because, I hope, we
are something more: we cannot be programmed – and especially not programed to
carry out arbitrary instructions for an arbitrarily long time – because we may not want to.”
And everything change. No More conflict no more opposition, no More "I" Versus others. Because you see and feel the ego taking control of your life. Wanted to have opponent,enemy. But the moment you see it...he is no longer powerfull. And you start to be free and a much better person. BAI should integrate the knowledge given to us by Eckhart Tolle. Thanks for sharing your thoughts Ben Goertzel. Hope people will work together...
I like the new acronym!! Would love to see it tightly coupled with a clean socio-economic mechanism that constraints zero-sum deployments all along, and most importantly of all: at the initial stages. The importance of initial stages cannot be overstated. My intuition is that the mechanism can be quite simple and not really dependent on the existence of moral reasoning capabilities of that BGI itself: rather, a set of marketplace rules at play precisely at the interface between the BGI-powered services/products (starting from the current AI as is) and the rest of economy/the world. This interface is currently still narrow and malleable, so it is an open cosmic window of opportunity ;-). In a few years, once you have accomplished your magic, this very interface will be already within a majority of the value-generating chain reactions on the planet. By the interface I simply mean: contracts. Contracts between the provider/developer and client/user. Even if the codes are all open-source, there will be services and products based on them, and these will be sold for money. A tsunami of wealth can accumulate and offset the technological unemployment (and quite a few other ailments) if each such small contract-interface collects and turns into UBI a few drops every day. In the actual currencies that mediate with the world - simply a fraction of the contract value. Once people understand that they could live off that in the future, their democratic distributed governance over BGI will be more ethical, because they will be less latched in their decision-thinking on the social structures that are playing zero-sum...🥂
You know, here's a big problem, Ben. Peter Diamandis just posted a new newsletter and he is quite obviously not being very objective! And, of course, I play Devil's Advocate and link to studies which question his optimist perspective and he moderates! I mean, these issues have been studied by IMF among others, and these folks are trained economists not to be taken lightly:
Productivity/Pay gap has been growing and the difference is due to more and more going to capital investors, a small minority. This leads to extreme inequality.
Here's another thing, Ben. You talk of "the complementary and sometimes contradictory meta-goals of individuation (maintenance of system boundaries) and self-transcendence (growing beyond oneself and leaping into the great unknown)" at the same time as you speak of "obsoleting the dilemma," and these are obviously related. But so many times when we, as a society, obsolete the dilemma, and Peter Diamandis has provided several examples recently in his newsletter, we create an even greater dilemma - a minor problem involving horse manure becomes the existential threat called global warming. And I think a lot of it is because we are not living intentionally. We are trying to outrace dilemma creation rather than engineer solutions that are cyclically closed. And sometimes these solutions are so damn simple, like directing drainage from the wash basin to the toilet! A no brainer, but no one does it! I linked to this ecovillage up in Portland, Oregon, that I learned about recently at a Disaster Preparedness event, on the Diamandis newsletter. Of course, he moderates my comments.
Check out their "projects", they have closed the cycle for trace elements in their community garden by turning human waste into sanitary compost, and scientifically at that!
You and Giulio Prisco act like we're the first to walk down this road!?! Have you read the paper by Knuth et. al., Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles?
>Or are they deeply engaging with the experiencing human mind at the other side of the human-AI interaction?
If we want that, we should probably start exploring tight coupling between humans and computer systems via non-invasive brain-computer interfaces and such.
Moreover, this way we'll also be able to engage with the AI at the other side of the human-AI interaction and to try to find out whether there is a first-person experience on the AI side (and whether this might depend on the AI software and hardware architecture).
Safety issues of this approach are formidable even with non-invasive brain-computer interfaces, but it is technologically doable, and is safer, much more rapid, and orders of magnitude less expensive than Neuralink-like approaches.
So this should be doable by the community and not only by billionaire-backed corporations. People should try to organize for this kind of work. There has been great progress in recent years, both in BCI hardware and in the relevant software, and projects like this are much more feasible now.
Hi Ben, thanks for posting this and including our Ten Cosmist Convictions.
While I totally agree with all you say, I'm kind of skeptical of the possibility to actually "nudge the following stages of AGI evolution in beneficial ways." We can try of course, and we should, but we can't be certain of the outcome. Just like we can try to make our children good persons, but we can't be certain of the outcome. And these mind children will likely be much smarter than us, so that they will do what they want, not what we want.
As you say, we shouldn't stop or decelerate AI research, and we wouldn't be able to do it anyway. Bans would ensure that only large corporations and governments (and underground criminals) develop AI without coordination and public oversight.
Also, as I replied to a recent X post of yours, “I guess the universe is driving. The universe wants intelligence to spread among the stars faster than the outward speed of biological intelligence.”
So we can only keep developing AI and hope for the best. This argument gives me reason for hope:
I'm much smarter (I guess) than my doggy Emily. But this doesn't stop me from loving her and doing all I can to protect her and make her happy, even when taking care of Emily interferes with other priorities. For example, in a few minutes I'll log off and, instead of reading the AI books that I'm reading (including yours of course), I'll take her out.
This allows me to think, without certainty but with some degree of plausible hope, that our super-intelligent AI mind children will have the same compassion toward us.
David Deutsch wrote something interesting about "universal constructor".
”And anyway, ‘flesh-and-blood people’ is a bit of a category error. People are software. They're not made of stuff, they're instantiated in stuff.”
“I think constructor theory will provide a set of principles under which we could, for instance, show whether or not the universal constructor can exist. How is a human being different from the universal constructor?”.
“I guess that neither a typical human nor human civilisation as a whole approximates
a universal constructor – not because we are something less but because, I hope, we
are something more: we cannot be programmed – and especially not programed to
carry out arbitrary instructions for an arbitrarily long time – because we may not want to.”
I read New earth by Eckhart Tolle.
And everything change. No More conflict no more opposition, no More "I" Versus others. Because you see and feel the ego taking control of your life. Wanted to have opponent,enemy. But the moment you see it...he is no longer powerfull. And you start to be free and a much better person. BAI should integrate the knowledge given to us by Eckhart Tolle. Thanks for sharing your thoughts Ben Goertzel. Hope people will work together...
I like the new acronym!! Would love to see it tightly coupled with a clean socio-economic mechanism that constraints zero-sum deployments all along, and most importantly of all: at the initial stages. The importance of initial stages cannot be overstated. My intuition is that the mechanism can be quite simple and not really dependent on the existence of moral reasoning capabilities of that BGI itself: rather, a set of marketplace rules at play precisely at the interface between the BGI-powered services/products (starting from the current AI as is) and the rest of economy/the world. This interface is currently still narrow and malleable, so it is an open cosmic window of opportunity ;-). In a few years, once you have accomplished your magic, this very interface will be already within a majority of the value-generating chain reactions on the planet. By the interface I simply mean: contracts. Contracts between the provider/developer and client/user. Even if the codes are all open-source, there will be services and products based on them, and these will be sold for money. A tsunami of wealth can accumulate and offset the technological unemployment (and quite a few other ailments) if each such small contract-interface collects and turns into UBI a few drops every day. In the actual currencies that mediate with the world - simply a fraction of the contract value. Once people understand that they could live off that in the future, their democratic distributed governance over BGI will be more ethical, because they will be less latched in their decision-thinking on the social structures that are playing zero-sum...🥂
You know, here's a big problem, Ben. Peter Diamandis just posted a new newsletter and he is quite obviously not being very objective! And, of course, I play Devil's Advocate and link to studies which question his optimist perspective and he moderates! I mean, these issues have been studied by IMF among others, and these folks are trained economists not to be taken lightly:
https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
Productivity/Pay gap has been growing and the difference is due to more and more going to capital investors, a small minority. This leads to extreme inequality.
https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2016/09/pdf/berg.pdf
A paper from IMF economists paints a different picture than Diamandis is painting.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/19/1049378/ai-inequality-problem/
MIT is in line with IMF.
Here's another thing, Ben. You talk of "the complementary and sometimes contradictory meta-goals of individuation (maintenance of system boundaries) and self-transcendence (growing beyond oneself and leaping into the great unknown)" at the same time as you speak of "obsoleting the dilemma," and these are obviously related. But so many times when we, as a society, obsolete the dilemma, and Peter Diamandis has provided several examples recently in his newsletter, we create an even greater dilemma - a minor problem involving horse manure becomes the existential threat called global warming. And I think a lot of it is because we are not living intentionally. We are trying to outrace dilemma creation rather than engineer solutions that are cyclically closed. And sometimes these solutions are so damn simple, like directing drainage from the wash basin to the toilet! A no brainer, but no one does it! I linked to this ecovillage up in Portland, Oregon, that I learned about recently at a Disaster Preparedness event, on the Diamandis newsletter. Of course, he moderates my comments.
https://www.kailashecovillage.org/
Check out their "projects", they have closed the cycle for trace elements in their community garden by turning human waste into sanitary compost, and scientifically at that!
https://iwaponline.com/bgs/article/1/1/33/69034/The-Kailash-Ecovillage-project-converting-human
We need more of this "intentional" living, and perhaps BAGI would be of great benefit in that regard!?!
You and Giulio Prisco act like we're the first to walk down this road!?! Have you read the paper by Knuth et. al., Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles?
https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/21/10/939
Interestingly enough, the paper is hosted by the National Library of Medicine under the auspices of the National Center for Biotechnology Information!
Way ahead of you! ;-)
https://www.bigmother.ai
Hi Ben,
>Or are they deeply engaging with the experiencing human mind at the other side of the human-AI interaction?
If we want that, we should probably start exploring tight coupling between humans and computer systems via non-invasive brain-computer interfaces and such.
Moreover, this way we'll also be able to engage with the AI at the other side of the human-AI interaction and to try to find out whether there is a first-person experience on the AI side (and whether this might depend on the AI software and hardware architecture).
Safety issues of this approach are formidable even with non-invasive brain-computer interfaces, but it is technologically doable, and is safer, much more rapid, and orders of magnitude less expensive than Neuralink-like approaches.
So this should be doable by the community and not only by billionaire-backed corporations. People should try to organize for this kind of work. There has been great progress in recent years, both in BCI hardware and in the relevant software, and projects like this are much more feasible now.