Transhumanism as Simplified Humanism

Frank Sulloway once said: "Ninety-nine per cent of what Darwinian theory says about human behavior is so obviously true that we don't give Darwin credit for it. Ironically, psychoanalysis has it over Darwinism precisely because its predictions are so outlandish and its explanations are so counterintuitive that we think, Is that really true? How radical! Freud's ideas are so intriguing that people are willing to pay for them, while one of the great disadvantages of Darwinism is that we feel we know it already, because, in a sense, we do."
Suppose you find an unconscious six-year-old girl lying on the train tracks of an active railroad. What, morally speaking, ought you to do in this situation? Would it be better to leave her there to get run over, or to try to save her? How about if a 45-year-old man has a debilitating but nonfatal illness that will severely reduce his quality of life – is it better to cure him, or not cure him?
Oh, and by the way: This is not a trick question.
I answer that I would save them if I had the power to do so – both the six-year-old on the train tracks, and the sick 45-year-old. The obvious answer isn't always the best choice, but sometimes it is.
I won't be lauded as a brilliant ethicist for my judgments in these two ethical dilemmas. My answers are not surprising enough that people would pay me for them. If you go around proclaiming "What does two plus two equal? Four!" you will not gain a reputation as a deep thinker. But it is still the correct answer.
If a young child falls on the train tracks, it is good to save them, and if a 45-year-old suffers from a debilitating disease, it is good to cure them. If you have a logical turn of mind, you are bound to ask whether this is a special case of a general ethical principle which says "Life is good, death is bad; health is good, sickness is bad." If so – and here we enter into controversial territory – we can follow this general principle to a surprising new conclusion: If a 95-year-old is threatened by death from old age, it would be good to drag them from those train tracks, if possible. And if a 120-year-old is starting to feel slightly sickly, it would be good to restore them to full vigor, if possible. With current technology it is not possible. But if the technology became available in some future year – given sufficiently advanced medical nanotechnology, or such other contrivances as future minds may devise – would you judge it a good thing, to save that life, and stay that debility?
The important thing to remember, which I think all too many people forget, is that it is not a trick question.
Transhumanism is simpler – requires fewer bits to specify – because it has no special cases. If you believe professional bioethicists (people who get paid to explain ethical judgments) then the rule "Life is good, death is bad; health is good, sickness is bad" holds only until some critical age, and then flips polarity. Why should it flip? Why not just keep on with life-is-good? It would seem that it is good to save a six-year-old girl, but bad to extend the life and health of a 150-year-old. Then at what exact age does the term in the utility function go from positive to negative? Why?
As far as a transhumanist is concerned, if you see someone in danger of dying, you should save them; if you can improve someone's health, you should. There, you're done. No special cases. You don't have to ask anyone's age.
You also don't ask whether the remedy will involve only "primitive" technologies (like a stretcher to lift the six-year-old off the railroad tracks); or technologies invented less than a hundred years ago (like penicillin) which nonetheless seem ordinary because they were around when you were a kid; or technologies that seem scary and sexy and futuristic (like gene therapy) because they were invented after you turned 18; or technologies that seem absurd and implausible and sacrilegious (like nanotech) because they haven't been invented yet. Your ethical dilemma report form doesn't have a line where you write down the invention year of the technology. Can you save lives? Yes? Okay, go ahead. There, you're done.
Suppose a boy of 9 years, who has tested at IQ 120 on the Wechsler-Bellvue, is threatened by a lead-heavy environment or a brain disease which will, if unchecked, gradually reduce his IQ to 110. I reply that it is a good thing to save him from this threat. If you have a logical turn of mind, you are bound to ask whether this is a special case of a general ethical principle saying that intelligence is precious. Now the boy's sister, as it happens, currently has an IQ of 110. If the technology were available to gradually raise her IQ to 120, without negative side effects, would you judge it good to do so?
Well, of course. Why not? It's not a trick question. Either it's better to have an IQ of 110 than 120, in which case we should strive to decrease IQs of 120 to 110. Or it's better to have an IQ of 120 than 110, in which case we should raise the sister's IQ if possible. As far as I can see, the obvious answer is the correct one.
But – you ask – where does it end? It may seem well and good to talk about extending life and health out to 150 years – but what about 200 years, or 300 years, or 500 years, or more? What about when – in the course of properly integrating all these new life experiences and expanding one's mind accordingly over time – the equivalent of IQ must go to 140, or 180, or beyond human ranges?
Where does it end? It doesn't. Why should it? Life is good, health is good, beauty and happiness and fun and laughter and challenge and learning are good. This does not change for arbitrarily large amounts of life and beauty. If there were an upper bound, it would be a special case, and that would be inelegant.
Ultimate physical limits may or may not permit a lifespan of at least length X for some X – just as the medical technology of a particular century may or may not permit it. But physical limitations are questions of simple fact, to be settled strictly by experiment. Transhumanism, as a moral philosophy, deals only with the question of whether a healthy lifespan of length X is desirable if it is physically possible. Transhumanism answers yes for all X. Because, you see, it's not a trick question.
So that is "transhumanism" – loving life without special exceptions and without upper bound.
Can transhumanism really be that simple? Doesn't that make the philosophy trivial, if it has no extra ingredients, just common sense? Yes, in the same way that the scientific method is nothing but common sense.
Then why have a complicated special name like "transhumanism" ? For the same reason that "scientific method" or "secular humanism" have complicated special names. If you take common sense and rigorously apply it, through multiple inferential steps, to areas outside everyday experience, successfully avoiding many possible distractions and tempting mistakes along the way, then it often ends up as a minority position and people give it a special name.
But a moral philosophy should not have special ingredients. The purpose of a moral philosophy is not to look delightfully strange and counterintuitive, or to provide employment to bioethicists. The purpose is to guide our choices toward life, health, beauty, happiness, fun, laughter, challenge, and learning. If the judgments are simple, that is no black mark against them – morality doesn't always have to be complicated.
There is nothing in transhumanism but the same common sense that underlies standard humanism, rigorously applied to cases outside our modern-day experience. A million-year lifespan? If it's possible, why not? The prospect may seem very foreign and strange, relative to our current everyday experience. It may create a sensation of future shock. And yet – is life a bad thing?
Could the moral question really be just that simple?
Yes.

This document is ©2007 by Eliezer Yudkowsky and free under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License for copying and distribution, so long as the work is attributed and the text is unaltered.
Eliezer Yudkowsky's work is supported by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute .
If you think the world could use some more rationality, consider blogging this page.
Praise, condemnation, and feedback are always welcome . The web address of this page is http://eyudkowsky.wpengine.com/singularity/simplified/ .

Transhumanism as Simplified Humanism


The Power of Intelligence

In our skulls we carry around 3 pounds of slimy, wet, greyish tissue, corrugated like crumpled toilet paper. You wouldn't think, to look at the unappetizing lump, that it was some of the most powerful stuff in the known universe. If you'd never seen an anatomy textbook, and you saw a brain lying in the street, you'd say "Yuck!" and try not to get any of it on your shoes. Aristotle thought the brain was an organ that cooled the blood. It doesn't look dangerous.
Five million years ago, the ancestors of lions ruled the day, the ancestors of wolves roamed the night. The ruling predators were armed with teeth and claws – sharp, hard cutting edges, backed up by powerful muscles. Their prey, in self-defense, evolved armored shells, sharp horns, poisonous venoms, camouflage. The war had gone on through hundreds of eons and countless arms races. Many a loser had been removed from the game, but there was no sign of a winner. Where one species had shells, another species would evolve to crack them; where one species became poisonous, another would evolve to tolerate the poison. Each species had its private niche – for who could live in the seas and the skies and the land at once? There was no ultimate weapon and no ultimate defense and no reason to believe any such thing was possible.
Then came the Day of the Squishy Things.
They had no armor. They had no claws. They had no venoms.
If you saw a movie of a nuclear explosion going off, and you were told an Earthly life form had done it, you would never in your wildest dreams imagine that the Squishy Things could be responsible. After all, Squishy Things aren't radioactive.
In the beginning, the Squishy Things had no fighter jets, no machine guns, no rifles, no swords. No bronze, no iron. No hammers, no anvils, no tongs, no smithies, no mines. All the Squishy Things had were squishy fingers – too weak to break a tree, let alone a mountain. Clearly not dangerous. To cut stone you would need steel, and the Squishy Things couldn't excrete steel. In the environment there were no steel blades for Squishy fingers to pick up. Their bodies could not generate temperatures anywhere near hot enough to melt metal. The whole scenario was obviously absurd.
And as for the Squishy Things manipulating DNA – that would have been beyond ridiculous. Squishy fingers are not that small. There is no access to DNA from the Squishy level; it would be like trying to pick up a hydrogen atom. Oh, technically it's all one universe, technically the Squishy Things and DNA are part of the same world, the same unified laws of physics, the same great web of causality. But let's be realistic: you can't get there from here.
Even if Squishy Things could someday evolve to do any of those feats, it would take thousands of millennia. We have watched the ebb and flow of Life through the eons, and let us tell you, a year is not even a single clock tick of evolutionary time. Oh, sure, technically a year is six hundred trillion trillion trillion trillion Planck intervals. But nothing ever happens in less than six hundred million trillion trillion trillion trillion Planck intervals, so it's a moot point. The Squishy Things, as they run across the savanna now, will not fly across continents for at least another ten million years; no one could have that much sex.
Now explain to me again why an Artificial Intelligence can't do anything interesting over the Internet unless a human programmer builds it a robot body.
I have observed that someone's flinch-reaction to "intelligence" – the thought that crosses their mind in the first half-second after they hear the word "intelligence" – often determines their flinch-reaction to the Singularity. Often they look up the keyword "intelligence" and retrieve the concept booksmarts – a mental image of the Grand Master chessplayer who can't get a date, or a college professor who can't survive outside academia.
"It takes more than intelligence to succeed professionally," people say, as if charisma resided in the kidneys, rather than the brain. "Intelligence is no match for a gun," they say, as if guns had grown on trees. "Where will an Artificial Intelligence get money?" they ask, as if the first Homo sapiens had found dollar bills fluttering down from the sky, and used them at convenience stores already in the forest. The human species was not born into a market economy. Bees won't sell you honey if you offer them an electronic funds transfer. The human species imagined money into existence, and it exists – for us, not mice or wasps – because we go on believing in it.
I keep trying to explain to people that the archetype of intelligence is not Dustin Hoffman in The Rain Man , it is a human being, period. It is squishy things that explode in a vacuum, leaving footprints on their moon. Within that grey wet lump is the power to search paths through the great web of causality, and find a road to the seemingly impossible – the power sometimes called creativity.
People – venture capitalists in particular – sometimes ask how, if the Machine Intelligence Research Institute successfully builds a true AI, the results will be commercialized. This is what we call a framing problem.
Or maybe it's something deeper than a simple clash of assumptions. With a bit of creative thinking, people can imagine how they would go about travelling to the Moon, or curing smallpox, or manufacturing computers. To imagine a trick that could accomplish all these things at once seems downright impossible – even though such a power resides only a few centimeters behind their own eyes. The gray wet thing still seems mysterious to the gray wet thing.
And so, because people can't quite see how it would all work, the power of intelligence seems less real; harder to imagine than a tower of fire sending a ship to Mars. The prospect of visiting Mars captures the imagination. But if one should promise a Mars visit, and also a grand unified theory of physics, and a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, and a cure for obesity, and a cure for cancer, and a cure for aging, and a cure for stupidity – well, it just sounds wrong, that's all.
And well it should. It's a serious failure of imagination to think that intelligence is good for so little. Who could have imagined, ever so long ago, what minds would someday do? We may not even know what our real problems are.
But meanwhile, because it's hard to see how one process could have such diverse powers, it's hard to imagine that one fell swoop could solve even such prosaic problems as obesity and cancer and aging.
Well, one trick cured smallpox and built airplanes and cultivated wheat and tamed fire. Our current science may not agree yet on how exactly the trick works, but it works anyway. If you are temporarily ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about your current state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon. A blank map does not correspond to a blank territory. If one does not quite understand that power which put footprints on the Moon, nonetheless, the footprints are still there – real footprints, on a real Moon, put there by a real power. If one were to understand deeply enough, one could create and shape that power. Intelligence is as real as electricity. It's merely far more powerful, far more dangerous, has far deeper implications for the unfolding story of life in the universe – and it's a tiny little bit harder to figure out how to build a generator.

This document is ©2007 by Eliezer Yudkowsky and free under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License for copying and distribution, so long as the work is attributed and the text is unaltered.
Eliezer Yudkowsky's work is supported by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute .
If you think the world could use some more rationality, consider blogging this page.
Praise, condemnation, and feedback are always welcome . The web address of this page is http://eyudkowsky.wpengine.com/singularity/power/ .

The Power of Intelligence


Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk

Draft for Global Catastrophic Risks, Oxford University Press, 2008 . Download as PDF .
AIPosNegFactor

This document is ©2007 by Eliezer Yudkowsky and free under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License for copying and distribution, so long as the work is attributed and the text is unaltered.
Eliezer Yudkowsky's work is supported by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute .
If you think the world could use some more rationality, consider blogging this page.
Praise, condemnation, and feedback are always welcome . The web address of this page is http://eyudkowsky.wpengine.com/singularity/ai-risk/ .


Three Major Singularity Schools

( Originally appeared on the Machine Intelligence Research Institute blog, September 2007.)
Singularity discussions seem to be splitting up into three major schools of thought: Accelerating Change, the Event Horizon, and the Intelligence Explosion.
Accelerating Change:Core claim: Our intuitions about change are linear; we expect roughly as much change as has occurred in the past over our own lifetimes. But technological change feeds on itself, and therefore accelerates. Change today is faster than it was 500 years ago, which in turn is faster than it was 5000 years ago. Our recent past is not a reliable guide to how much change we should expect in the future.Strong claim: Technological change follows smooth curves, typically exponential. Therefore we can predict with fair precision when new technologies will arrive, and when they will cross key thresholds, like the creation of Artificial Intelligence.Advocates: Ray Kurzweil, Alvin Toffler(?), John SmartEvent Horizon:Core claim: For the last hundred thousand years, humans have been the smartest intelligences on the planet. All our social and technological progress was produced by human brains. Shortly, technology will advance to the point of improving on human intelligence (brain-computer interfaces, Artificial Intelligence). This will create a future that is weirder by far than most science fiction, a difference-in-kind that goes beyond amazing shiny gadgets.Strong claim: To know what a superhuman intelligence would do, you would have to be at least that smart yourself. To know where Deep Blue would play in a chess game, you must play at Deep Blue's level. Thus the future after the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence is absolutely unpredictable.Advocates: Vernor VingeIntelligence Explosion:Core claim: Intelligence has always been the source of technology. If technology can significantly improve on human intelligence – create minds smarter than the smartest existing humans – then this closes the loop and creates a positive feedback cycle. What would humans with brain-computer interfaces do with their augmented intelligence? One good bet is that they'd design the next generation of brain-computer interfaces. Intelligence enhancement is a classic tipping point; the smarter you get, the more intelligence you can apply to making yourself even smarter.Strong claim: This positive feedback cycle goes FOOM , like a chain of nuclear fissions gone critical – each intelligence improvement triggering an average of>1.000 further improvements of similar magnitude – though not necessarily on a smooth exponential pathway. Technological progress drops into the characteristic timescale of transistors (or super-transistors) rather than human neurons. The ascent rapidly surges upward and creates superintelligence (minds orders of magnitude more powerful than human) before it hits physical limits.Advocates: I. J. Good, Eliezer Yudkowsky
The thing about these three logically distinct schools of Singularity thought is that, while all three core claims support each other, all three strong claims tend to contradict each other.
If you extrapolate our existing version of Moore's Law past the point of smarter-than-human AI to make predictions about 2099, then you are contradicting both the strong version of the Event Horizon (which says you can't make predictions because you're trying to outguess a transhuman mind) and the strong version of the Intelligence Explosion (because progress will run faster once smarter-than-human minds and nanotechnology drop it into the speed phase of transistors).
I find it very annoying, therefore, when these three schools of thought are mashed up into Singularity paste. Clear thinking requires making distinctions.
But what is still more annoying is when someone reads a blog post about a newspaper article about the Singularity, comes away with none of the three interesting theses, and spontaneously reinvents the dreaded fourth meaning of the Singularity:
Apocalyptism: Hey, man, have you heard? There's this bunch of, like, crazy nerds out there, who think that some kind of unspecified huge nerd thing is going to happen. What a bunch of wackos! It's geek religion, man.
I've heard (many) other definitions of the Singularity attempted, but I usually find them to lack separate premises and conclusions. For example, the old Extropian FAQ used to define the "Singularity" as the Inflection Point, "the time when technological development will be at its fastest" and just before it starts slowing down. But what makes this an interesting point in history apart from its definition? What are the consequences of this assumption? To qualify as a school of thought or even a thesis, one needs an internal structure of argument, not just a definition.
If you're wondering which of these is the original meaning of the term "Singularity", it is the Event Horizon thesis of Vernor Vinge, who coined the word.

This document is ©2007 by Eliezer Yudkowsky and free under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License for copying and distribution, so long as the work is attributed and the text is unaltered.
Eliezer Yudkowsky's work is supported by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute .
If you think the world could use some more rationality, consider blogging this page.
Praise, condemnation, and feedback are always welcome . The web address of this page is http://eyudkowsky.wpengine.com/singularity/schools/ .

Three Major Singularity Schools


(The Cartoon Guide to) Lob's Theorem

View the original discussion at Overcoming Bias , or download Lob's Theorem as PDF.
LobsTheorem

This document is ©2008 by Eliezer Yudkowsky and free under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License for copying and distribution, so long as the work is attributed and the text is unaltered.
Eliezer Yudkowsky's work is supported by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute .
If you think the world could use some more rationality, consider blogging this page.
Praise, condemnation, and feedback are always welcome . The web address of this page is http://eyudkowsky.wpengine.com/rational/lobs-theorem/ .

(The Cartoon Guide to) Lob’s Theorem