Bill Joy On Extinction of Humans
Posted by
Hemos
on Sun Mar 12, 2000 11:22 AM
from the sufficently-advanced-technology dept.
from the sufficently-advanced-technology dept.
e3 writes "The Washington Post is running a provocative article in which Bill Joy is quoted as, "...essentially agreeing, to his horror, with a core argument of the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski -- that advanced technology poses a threat to the human species." " As it stands, the title sounds sensationalistic - but read the article, and think about what point he's trying to make. Bill Joy's a pretty level-headed guy, and I think we need to consider these issues /now/ so that they don't come true.
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Bill Joy On Extinction of Humans
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Re:Always in twenty years (Score:3)
The climate can change dramatically and very fast. It remains an unstable system and will certainly change again. The question facing us is not if? but when and which "direction" and how fast.
All human civilizations have flourished in a brief common moment of favorable climatic stability. All of them. Babylonians, Byzantines, and Bostonians have all shared a nice sunny day when it rained a little in the morning, cleared up around noon, never got too hot, and was pleasant enough to leave the windows open at night. The ice cores from Antartica, though, tell us about a very different state of affairs reigning before our time. Our cultural assumptions about how to imagine changeable climate and how to possibly deal with it are therefore completely out of whack with what climate change is likely to be like when it arrives.
There is good reason, moreover, to believe that our activities are capable of influencing and destabilizing the climate. We may radically influence the atmospheric CO2 levels beyond what we directly put into the air ourselves by raising the global temperature enough to, for example, release CO2 frozen now in Northern Forest/Tundra peat--of which there's an awful lot, aeon's worth. "Alarmists" point out that once a trend is established it can spark self-reinforcing effects that cause the trend curve to go parabolic. The Anti-Alarmists may point out that there are also counterbalancing factors that the "trend" itself may strengthen, causing the system to ultimately trend towards equilibrium. In this case, it would be that our fossil fuel burning raises CO2 making the earth's atmosphere warmer, eventually releasing more CO2 as the Northern regions thaw more each year, the extra CO2 could be speed growth of forests worldwide, thus stabilizing the system. But "Alarmists" really don't have to work hard to refute this Panglossian idea as everyone knows, from unrelated debates, how rapidly global deforestation is progressing (picture the world on fire).
We know for a fact that the Earth's climate is now warming. We don't know exactly why or where it will lead. An agnostic stance however with regard to The Greenhouse Effect, per se, is becoming increasingly an exclusive product of ideological "la-laaa-laaa-ism " and an attempt to forestall the conclusion that the visible, obvious evidence of manmade environmental change will result in unintended, probably unfavorable ecological change (the Global Warming Scenario by the author Earthquake, Towering inferno, Poseidon Adventure and other cheesy 70s disaster pics).
All things considered it is just malignantly stupid to try to maintain that human activity--deforestation, fossil fuel burning, etc--will have no effect on global climate. If you live in or near a metropolitan area, just paying attention to your local news' daily weather forecast is enough to show that how we shape the environment has direct influences on climate--writ large or small. The important question is will it be favorable or unfavorable and to what degree in what time frame?
If think that population explosion is not a real problem, you should revisit the statistics for the spread of AIDS in Africa and South Asia, and global malnutrition statistics and think again.
Considering the likelihood that climate change will accelerate once begun, it should be clear that the prudent choice would be to moderate our contribution to warming factors and to curb global population growth as fast as ethically permissable (without resorting to warfare and the artificial famines it creates).
Octopi is as "alien" as it gets (Score:3)
If ever you wanted to study intelligent alien life here on earth, the Octopus is the one creature best suited for this goal. It's an invertebrate cephalopod, nothing like a mammal; meaning you're looking at a semi-sentient creature which diverged from our evolutionary line a good hundred million years past. Basically, you're looking at a very smart snail. They use copper to move oxygen within their blood. They can control multiple arms and hundreds of individual suckers at will without blinking an eye. They signal emotional states by changing skin color at will, also using this advantage as camouflage. They have excellent eyesight, long term and short term memory, they can solve complex problems and may even be able to logically reason if taught how.
All of the creatures you mention, as well as the elephant and parrot, deserve better treatment than we humans provide. These creatures are damn near sentient and could provide a wealth of information on how self-perception works in the real world. Plus it just seems wrong to me that we maintain this dichotomy between humans and other obviously self aware creatures simply because it's inconvenient.
You may believe that your God gave you all the planet to do with as humanity wishes, but frankly even if that were the case don't you think He would find our indifference to their plight both shocking and disgusting? And how is that different from mechanical consciousness?
Personally, I agree with the hard-AI community that self awareness is a computational process which can be replicated mechanically. From that perspective I must conclude that either we value those creatures which behave with some self determination and will by providing legal rights to them as we do to ourselves, or we might as well not value the sanctity of human life either.
Re:More likely reasons SETI hasn't found anything (Score:3)
Another possability is that radio emissions from more advanced technologies resembles noise more and more as they get incresingly advanced.
Look at morse code, then AM radio, AM radio looks just like a frequency shifted verison of the voice/sound pattern (because it is). FM radio is a good deal harder to figure out from looking at it what it is trying to say, but it is obvious that something is there. CDMA, I can't find CDMA on a specrum analiser, and I even know where it lives on the frequency band!
Re:Self Replication (Score:3)
It would be an interesting exercise to build a robot out of Lego pieces, that, when placed in the middle of a heap of Lego pieces, can build a copy of itself.
The next exercise would be to have the robot build a close approximation of itself when not all the right pieces are available. (Mutant robots!)
-- Abigail
What an argument against breaking Microsoft up! (Score:3)
Wouldn't you feel better about the future if you knew that the only company that would be developing such a thing is Microsoft? (allowing them to continue unchecked and take over the world)
Hell, you'd end up with a creature that drowns when it tries to take a shower, getting stuck in the "lather-rinse-repeat" infinite loop.
Microsoft Saves Humanity! Woo hoo!!
Re:Always in twenty years (Score:3)
All the technologies he mentions are collaborative ones, i.e. they cannot be developed and/or applied by some mad scientist in a basement. They require organized, coherent team work. I.e., they do require rogue states, not rogue individuals.
More importantly, when something hits an extreme, it creates a backlash, a return towards equilibrium; that is true of society as much as it is for physical systems. When the Internet/technology/genetics will reach the edge of acceptable use/behavior, society will change to compensate. Look into the past: the Middle Ages created the Renaissance, the '50s brought the '60s, the '80s spawned the '90s... Our technological ethics will change to accommodate our technologies...
engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
Rapid advancement without thinking is common (Score:3)
Consider the fanaticism a huge number of people show for upcoming CPUs and video cards--e.g. Athlon, GeForce, etc. These fans don't really have a deep understanding of where the performance is coming from, or to what extent a current CPU or video card can or has been pushed. The view is "newer = better," and that's enough to fuel raging passion. This is causing people to upgrade left and right and increase the base level of machines available. Now we have 500 MHz Pentium III machines with ATI Rage 128 video cards being used for airline scheduling where a 486 would be sufficient. For absolutely no benefit, power consumption is maybe 10-50x higher than it needs to be. So even in this era of supposedly increased conservation and environmental awareness, we're just pointlessly wasting power and don't care.
That's the kind of thing that sneaks up on you without realizing it. Twenty years ago, no one would have believed such gross negligence would have been possible. The core of most "technology will doom us" arguments is that we advance without thinking. And that's exactly what we've proven ourselves to do, especially in recent years.
He forgot a few! (Score:3)
Much more likely than an artificially created virus is the likelyhood that a killer virus will mutate naturally in a catastrophic way. Every boeing 747 is an enormous hermetically sealed tube for spreading viruses from one part of the planet to another within days. Imagine something with the destructive power of Ebola that was airborne with the ease of contagion of the flu.
Sure science can create a vaccine, but well HIV/AIDS has been around for 20 years and although we can control it to some extent we still don't have a vaccine.
Plus there's the possibility that the continuuing extinction of species in places like the Amazon will start to form a domino effect. I.e. some vital species that many others depend on for survival go extinct causing a snowball effect and massive extinction of species.
Humanity's only longterm guaranty of survival is to spread our selves over as many biospheres as possible.
"what are you here for?
We're all here, we're all here to go,
earth is going to be space station and we're here to go into space, that's what we're here for.
Do I hear any questions about that?"
William S Burroughs, Dead City Radio
This is not a new idea (Score:3)
That is just one view, of course. To read Vinge's original paper on this idea, go here [caltech.edu]. Also, I think the comment in the original story is pretty lame. It implies that if we smart people get together and discuss these problems, we'll figure out a way to prevent them from occurring. That's ridiculous. The only thing that happens when technocrats get together is that we get new rules and new ways of controlling the future. No way, I say. Let the future happen in its unpredictable fashion, and we'll all be better off for it.
BBB
Re:Have you ever heard of Deep Blue? (Score:3)
Well, because it's not. Deep Blue is able to beat chess masters because it has enough computing power to permutate all possible moves several generations into the future and pick the best one. Obviously, no chess master's brain can do that. Deep Blue's accomplishments are NOT that significant at all. The mathematics of what it does could have easily been worked out centuries ago - it's simply the first machine capable of actually doing the math. Human chess players have intuition. Because they've played several thousand games during their lifetime, they can see a certain combination of positions on a board and just know what play to begin excercising and what predictions to focus on. They can stare at their opponent to try and see if he's bluffing. They can make instinctual decisions without predicting every move in the future. When a computer can do that, please let me know - I'll be impressed.
Every day you are confronted with thousands of choices. Most of them you make without really thinking, and most have several factors involved. Everything that you've done prior to that moment has a bearing on your current decision. You weigh actions vs. consequences. Priorities vs. Wants, etc., etc., etc. I have yet to see a machine that can make these types of decisions appropriately.
Take the example of something more fast-paced than Chess like Soccer. If you're playing defense, and a forward is running the sideline with the ball, you have very little time to move. There are a million different things you could do, but only one will save the day. The only way you could know which one is to be in that situation right then - and have to make a split second decision. So, no, we don't have AI. I don't predict we will for quite some time.
I for one prefer this to the alternative (Score:3)
That is to stop developing and advancing human technology. The world would be a little boring if everything that we shall ever invent has already been invented.
Re:Full of Assumptions (Score:4)
Try as one might, genetics and nanotechnology are not easy fields for individuals to work on their own in. They require extensive amounts of equipment, much of it high-tech since much of the work has only developed over the past twenty years.
Most things become easier in time. An eight year old with a chemistry set today does things incomprehensable to the greatest minds of the 1st century, and doesn't think much of it. At one time, the 'hello world' program was a big deal (especially when it had to be wired in). Now, it's literally child's play.
It's not time to head for the hills by any means, but these things CAN come to pass. The best hope is that the same technology can be used to avert disaster. The nasty self-replicating robots will be destroyed by 'good' self replicating robots, for example.
Re:Always in twenty years (Score:4)
How soon we forget.
There was a time when incineration of much of the civilized world was always 20 minutes away, not 20 years. Whether secondary effects (so-called Nuclear Winter) would have led to eventual extinction or not seem rather beside the point--the world as we knew it would have ended. That it did not happen was, more than many of us realize, a matter of shear blind luck.
There were, and are, only two powers in the world who could bring about such a global catastrophe. The reason for this limitation is more a matter of the enormous cost of producing nuclear weapons than the technological difficulty of doing so. For now, and for the near future, nuclear physics is too expensive for more than just the US and Russia to put civilization at risk.
What Bill fears, I think, is the development of technologies as threatening as those which came from nuclear physics, but without the economic barriers. Consider: what if Moore's law applied to nuclear weapons as well as integrated cicuitry? What if it does apply to the next destructive technology? Or: what if a chain reaction of self-replicating agents--whether biological, nanotechnological, or self-organizing--proves much cheaper than the nuclear variety? By harnessing the existing biological, molecular, or technological environment to its ends, could a technology be created where such replication to worldwide scale came (from the creator's perspective) essentially for free?
The cheaper it becomes to develop the technical means to threaten humanity, the more likely it will be that a state, group, or even person will be insane enough to exploit it. It's the change in economics that increases the danger. Economics explains why New York isn't hip-deep in horse manure just as it explains why basement-lab nuclear weapons don't exist, even though the knowledge necessary to produce them is readily available. Cheaper, faster alternatives became available in the first case. Are we ready for such alternatives in the second case?
A quote from "The Difference Between the Sexes" (Score:4)
Here's a little quote from "The Difference Between the Sexes", by E. Balaban (ed) and R. V. Short (ed):
"Perhaps the lifespan of a species is inversely proportional to its degree of intellectual development? The probability that a species that has evolved to be as intelligent and all-conquering as ours could survive for long is remote indeed. We may live in a silent universe for a very good reason. Paradoxically, evolution may have ensured that we have one of the shortest survival times of any species, since it has made us, effectively, our own executioner."
Top-down vs. bottom-up AI design (Score:4)
Your entire argument is based on the premise of top-down design - that the Right Way to build an AI is the classical engineer's approach of designing the thing as you would design any other machine or piece of software.
Fortunately, most people now recognise that this approach is doomed, for the exact reason that you point out: an "intelligence" of any sort is much more complex and less well-understood than anything we've ever had to design.
So, what's the alternative? Automated bottom-up design. Specifically, the idea is to first work out the building blocks - the equivalents of neurons - and then have a GA or somesuch start trying to put together a "brain" out of these neurons, which is fit for a specific purpose. Note that this alternative doesn't require one to understand in excrutiating detail (or at all) the high-level abstractions which we consider as "intelligence" - it only requires a good GA and a good understanding of the brain at the cellular and subcellular level.
Now this I don't consider far-fetched at all.
(Of course, it's always worth mentioning that we could go the other way - first using nanotech to completely redesign ourselves into super-intelligent cybergods, then analysing our own new brains and replicating them to create completely new, fully artificial intelligent beings.)
Ethical issues (Score:4)
Do we have a right to construct entities that place human well-being above their own well-being? (Asimov's 'Laws of Robotics' or similar)
If we do this, aren't we dangerously close to building slaves?
These comments do not neccesarily reflect the views of the author.
Full of Assumptions (Score:5)
Artificial Intelligence
A lot of Bill's thesis is based on the assumption that we'll be able to create sentience in machines. Yes, computers are getting faster and yes they can even seem to think sometimes, but folks, we don't even understand how our own brains work, much less have the power to create artificial ones. Things like thought require a much deeper understanding than we're likely to achieve in the next 20 years. Don't get me wrong, I think someday we'll be able to do it, but the trials will be long and hard, and the people who do it will really understand how to make it right. I also don't think I'll see it in my lifetime (I'm 22 now).
Replication
In terms of machines, a lot of this has to do with artificial intelligence. The creative leap required to construct something and change it is pretty huge. As for nanorobots in our blood stream, they need to find the parts, and they most likely won't be in the same environment in which they were created. Genetics is more fearful, of course, because living things already have the ability to recreate, but most work done in genetics is done under the constant shadow of "what bad things can this bring". I don't think genetics is all that easy a field for an individual to work in as a radical either. It takes an extraordinary amount of time and equipment. The most likely disaster of bioengineering is something that causes the death of a significant member of the planetary cycle (like trees or bees, for instance), which has been a constant concern from day one.
The Free Radical
Try as one might, genetics and nanotechnology are not easy fields for individuals to work on their own in. They require extensive amounts of equipment, much of it high-tech since much of the work has only developed over the past twenty years. It's still much more likely that some nut is going to get his hands on some plutonium leaking out of an impoverished former superpower and create some home-made nuclear weapon than it is that someone is going to create a killer replicating robot.
And Bill ignores a lot of other ways we can kill ourselves. Civil strife, environmental pollution, global warming, and, my personal favorite, contact with a hostile alien species (didn't Independence Day look real?). The fact is, since day one, humans have been faced with causing their own extinction (overhunting, overfarming, overpolluting, travel spreading disease, etc. etc.) and we've done just fine recognizing and adapting to these problems. The one thing that nobody ever seems to factor in is the human response to adversity. We can change our environment, and once we've changed it, if something's wrong, we can change it further (not back), so that we can live in it.
p.s. And did anyone notice that Bill was called 'phlegmatic'? I thought they meant 'pragmatic', but that's one helluva typo.
Re:Always in twenty years (Score:5)
(1) If anyone here remembers their history, the'd remember that the environmental problem du'joir in the 1970's was global cooling, not global warming. The truth of the matter is that the evidence is still out about global warming--the best we can say is that we have some interesting localized weather patterns, but there is no evidence of any sea levels rising or any non-natural weather patterns changing. (And those who provide "statistical evidence"--if you look closely enough, they're cooking the books combined with weather simulations which they believe will predict the weather beyond the normal 7-14 days most simulations actually work.)
My point is that if you listen real carefully, even global warming is in the "disaster which will wipe us out in 10-20 years" category--far enough away that it seems possible (especially on warmer spring days), yet close enough to actively fear.
By the way, you forgot the ozone hole--though there are those who are starting to think it ain't the problem it once was, only because ground-level UV levels have not changed one iota. But there are those who still believe that in 10-20 years we're going to have to go out in the sun with SPF 5000 or die.
That's okay; I still remember when I was growing up in the 1970's that we were to run out of oil by 1990. That is, we would deplete all of the world's oil reserves by 1990, and because of it, civilization would collapse, causing wars a'la "Mad Max" to break out throughout the world as people struggle to find the last little caches of horded gasoline.
I have a real hard time believing in any disaster that will kill us in 10-20 years unless someone comes up with some really hard facts--like perhaps a photograph and orbital plot of the asteroid that is suppost to kill us all. I just remember too many disasters that were to wipe us out in 10-20 years while growing up (oil depletion, population explosion, global cooling, etc)--and we're still alive.
Always in twenty years (Score:5)
Such ideas are almost always based on linear trends. Just like the guy in the early part of the 19th century who projected that New York would be hip deep in horseshit by the year 2000. That's what the trend showed, after all.
This is not to say that we shouldn't worry about the downsides of technological progress, but for the most part, these "global extinction" thoughts are fueled by accentuating the negative and ignoring the positive.
Bad things will almost certainly happen in the future. Maybe even very bad things. But destroy the human race? Not likely. Slow it down, even? Probably not. The worst global disaster with real evidence behind it we have to face right now is global warming and while global warming could cause a lot of discomfort, with the sea-level rising and weather changing, the human race would certainly survive.
Re:Artificial Intelligence (Score:5)
The error is in thinking that AI is just a matter of getting enough transisters together. Hardly! The real problems in AI are not hardware speed so much as what to do with that hardware to make it intelligent. This is not a trivial problem. it is an extremely difficult problem, IMHO probably the hardest problem the human race has ever faced.
The question nobody even has a coherent theory for right now is: what would an (artificially) intelligent computer do? What would be its desires? Would it also have emotions? If so, what would it feel?
And this is really the key thing. You can't build an artificially intelligent computer unless you have a damn good idea of those things. You can't build something with desires, emotions, etc. unless you know, in detail, what desires and emotions are, at a far deeper level than we do now.
Article about an article about an article sucked. (Score:5)
Finally, he argues argues, this threat [machinery] to humanity is much greater than that of nuclear weapons because those are hard to build.
HAHAHA!
Please. We can't even write a web browser within three years, much less program sentient robot roaches that could destroy our planet.
There's only like, what, forty thousand nukes extant on earth, each capable of wiping out millions of lives in five minutes? Many capable of poisoning an entire planet for millenia if detonated close enough to the ground? ALL of them are owned by warmongering, jingoistic, pathologically disturbed political entities who have NO QUALMS whatsoever about using nuclear warheads whenever it is convenient?
Nuclear weapons, traditionally developed viruses, lethal bacteria, political unrest, riots, the complete disruption of climate, economic decay, and plain old steel bullets fragmenting children's skulls into explosions of bloody brain and bone (just like the children of Kosovo who the entire world is eagerly attempting to exterminate) are ALWAYS going to be more of a concern to me than sentient computers messing with my tax return. This article sucked. Perhaps the real thing will explain stuff better.
The most dangerous aspect of living on earth is that we are sentient. If we weren't, we wouldn't give a shit what happens in the long run. (which we don't, when it gets down to it)