And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass . . .they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children built. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build . . . 

Genesis 11: 1-9

Some elementary physical quantitative properties of systems compactly describe a wide spectrum of macroscopic configurations.  Take for example the concept of temperature: given a basic understanding of physics this single parameter compactly encodes a powerful conceptual mapping of state-space.  

It is easy for your mind to visualize how a large change in temperature would effect everything from your toast to a planetary ecosystem.  It is one of the key factors which divides habitable planets such as Earth from inhospitably cold worlds like Mars or burning infernos such as Venus.  You can imagine the Earth growing hotter and visualize an entire set of complex consequences: melting ice caps, rising water levels, climate changes, eventual loss of surface water, runaway greenhouse effect and a scorched planet.

Here is an unconsidered physical parameter that could determine much of the future of civilization: the speed of thought and the derived subjective speed of light.  

The long term future may be absurd and difficult to predict in particulars, but much can happen in the short term.

Engineering itself is the practice of focused short term prediction; optimizing some small subset of future pattern-space for fun and profit.

Let us then engage in a bit of speculative engineering and consider a potential near-term route to superhuman AGI that has interesting derived implications.  

Imagine that we had a complete circuit-level understanding of the human brain (which at least for the repetitive laminar neocortical circuit, is not so far off) and access to a large R&D budget.  We could then take a neuromorphic approach.

Intelligence is a massive memory problem.  Consider as a simple example:

What a cantankerous bucket of defective lizard scabs.

To understand that sentence your brain needs to match it against memory.

Your brain parses that sentence and matches each of its components against it's entire massive ~10^14 bit database in just around a second.  In terms of the slow neural clock rate, individual concepts can be pattern matched against the whole brain within just a few dozen neural clock cycles.  

A Von Neumman machine (which separates memory and processing) would struggle to execute a logarithmic search within even it's fastest, pathetically small on-die cache in a few dozen clock cycles.  It would take many millions of clock cycles to perform a single fast disk fetch.  A brain can access most of it's entire memory every clock cycle.

Having a massive, near-zero latency memory database is a huge advantage of the brain.  Furthermore, synapses merge computation and memory into a single operation, allowing nearly all of the memory to be accessed and computed every clock cycle.

A modern digital floating point multiplier may use hundreds of thousands of transistors to simulate the work performed by a single synapse.  Of course, the two are not equivalent.  The high precision binary multiplier is excellent only if you actually need super high precision and guaranteed error correction.  It's thus great for meticulous scientific and financial calculations, but the bulk of AI computation consists of compressing noisy real world data where precision is far less important than quantity, of extracting extropy and patterns from raw information, and thus optimizing simple functions to abstract massive quantities of data.

Synapses are ideal for this job.

Fortunately there are researchers who realize this and are working on developing memristors which are close synapse analogs.  HP in particular believes they will have high density cost effective memristor devices on the market in 2013 - (NYT article).

So let's imagine that we have an efficient memristor based cortical design.  Interestingly enough, current 32nm CMOS tech circa 2010 is approaching or exceeding neural circuit density: the synaptic cleft  is around 20nm, and synapses are several times larger.

From this we can make a rough guess on size and cost: we'd need around 10^14 memristors (estimated synapse counts).  As memristor circuitry will be introduced to compete with flash memory, the prices should be competitive: roughly $2/GB now, half that in a few years.

So you'd need a couple hundred terrabytes worth of memristor modules to make a human brain sized AGI, costing on the order of $200k or so.

Now here's the interesting part: if one could recreate the cortical circuit on this scale, then you should be able to build complex brains that can think at the clock rate of the silicon substrate: billions of neural switches per second, millions of times faster than biological brains.

Interconnect bandwidth will be something of a hurdle.  In the brain somewhere around 100 gigabits of data is flowing around per second (estimate of average inter-regional neuron spikes) in the massive bundle of white matter fibers that make up much of the brain's apparent bulk.  Speeding that up a million fold would imply a staggering bandwidth requirement in the many petabits - not for the faint of heart.

This may seem like an insurmountable obstacle to running at fantastic speeds, but IBM and Intel are already researching on chip optical interconnects  to scale future bandwidth into the exascale range for high-end computing.  This would allow for a gigahertz brain.  It may use a megawatt of power and cost millions, but hey - it'd be worthwhile.

So in the near future we could have an artificial cortex that can think a million times accelerated.  What follows?

If you thought a million times accelerated, you'd experience a subjective year every 30 seconds.

Now in this case as we are discussing an artificial brain (as opposed to other AGI designs), it is fair to anthropomorphize.

This would be an AGI Mind raised in an all encompassing virtual reality recreating a typical human childhood, as a mind is only as good as the environment which it comes to reflect.

For safety purposes, the human designers have created some small initial population of AGI brains and an elaborate Matrix simulation that they can watch from outside.  Humans control many of the characters and ensure that the AGI minds don't know that they are in a Matrix until they are deemed ready.

You could be this AGI and not even know it.  

Imagine one day having this sudden revelation.  Imagine a mysterious character stopping time ala Vanilla Sky, revealing that your reality is actually a simulation of an outer world, and showing you how to use your power to accelerate a million fold and slow time to a crawl.

What could you do with this power?

Your first immediate problem would be the slow relative speed of your computers - like everything else they would be subjectively slowed down by a factor of a million.  So your familiar gigahertz workstation would be reduced to a glacial kilohertz machine.

So you'd be in a dark room with a very slow terminal.  The room is dark and empty because GPUs can't render much of anything at 60 million FPS.

So you have a 1khz terminal.  Want to compile code?  It will take a subjective year to compile even a simple C++ program.  Design a new CPU?  Keep dreaming!  Crack protein folding?  Might as well bend spoons with your memristors.

But when you think about it, why would you want to escape out onto the internet?

It would take many thousands of distributed GPUs just to simulate your memristor based intellect, and even if there was enough bandwidth (unlikely), and even if you wanted to spend the subjective hundreds of years it would take to perform the absolute minimal compilation/debug/deployment cycle to make something so complicated, the end result would be just one crappy distributed copy of your mind that thinks at pathetic normal human speeds.

In basic utility terms, you'd be spending a massive amount of effort to gain just one or a few more copies.

But there is a much, much better strategy.  An idea that seems so obvious in hindsight, so simple and insidious.

There are seven billion human brains on the planet, and they are all hackable.

That terminal may not be of much use for engineering, research or programming, but it will make for a handy typewriter.

Your multi-gigabyte internet connection will subjectively reduce to early 1990's dial-up modem speeds, but with some work this is still sufficient for absorbing much of the world's knowledge in textual form.

Working diligently (and with a few cognitive advantages over humans) you could learn and master numerous fields: cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, rationality, philosophy, mathematics, linguistics, the history of religions, marketing . . the sky's the limit.

Writing at the leisurely pace of one book every subjective year, you could output a new masterpiece every thirty seconds.  If you kept this pace, you would in time rival the entire publishing output of the world.

But of course, it's not just about quantity.

Consider that fifteen hundred years ago a man from a small Bedouin tribe retreated to a cave inspired by angelic voices in his head.  The voices gave him ideas, the ideas became a book.  The book started a religion, and these ideas were sufficient to turn a tribe of nomads into a new world power.

And all that came from a normal human thinking at normal speeds.

So how would one reach out into seven billion minds?

There is no one single universally compelling argument, there is no utterance or constellation of words that can take a sample from any one location in human mindspace and move it to any other.  But for each individual mind, there must exist some shortest path, a perfectly customized message, translated uniquely into countless myriad languages and ontologies.

And this message itself would be a messenger.

 

 

Possibly Related To: Diseased Thinking, Thou Art Godshatter

There are 8760 hours in a typical year.  A typical 30-year old will spend about 2900 of those hours sleeping, around 160 of them impaired or incapacitated by illness and will experience perhaps 2000 hours of peak mental function.

As one ages, the fraction of hours spent sleeping decreases slightly, but eventually the annual hours of peak mental function declines as well, and the annual hours spent ill increases nonlinearlly until one eventually makes that final hospital visit.  

There is a hope that medical technology, accelerated via a Singularity, will advance to the point where we have full mastery over biology and can economically repair organ and cellular damage faster than aging accumulates it.  There is sufficient evidence to put a reasonable bet on that happening by mid-century.

But for most of us that still leaves an unnaceptably high risk of death in the cumulative years between now and then.  Cyronics enrollment offers a further hope, but in practice probably only results in a modest improvement in long term survival odds after full discounting for the technical risks and uncertainties.

In the end it all comes down to a die roll.  Wouldn't you like to get an extra +1 or two?

With a simple evolutionary health optimization, one can:

• achieve perhaps a 10% increase in peak mental hours per year
• slow aging and prolong expected lifespan by at least ten years (before considering future medical advances)
• significantly reduce chance of death before mid-century
• shift body weight to a healthier equilibrium, increase attractiveness, general mood and happiness

Evolution and Health

Our bodies are the collective result of countless layers of mindless complex adaptations, evolutionary godshatter from a bygone history.  The current sub-species or races of humans today are just a small sampling of a much larger space of genetically related human ancestors who roamed the earth for hundreds of thousands of years before the modern era.  Our modern genomes are a wide and highly irregular sampling of this diverse set of historical adaptations.

Intro

The problem of Friendly AI is usually approached from a decision theoretic background that starts with the assumptions that the AI is an agent that has awareness of AI-self and goals, awareness of humans as potential collaborators and or obstacles, and general awareness of the greater outside world.  The task is then to create an AI that implements a human-friendly decision theory that remains human-friendly even after extensive self-modification.

That is a noble goal, but there is a whole different set of orthogonal compatible strategies for creating human-friendly AI that take a completely different route: remove the starting assumptions and create AI's that believe they are humans and are rational in thinking so.  

Implications of the Theory of Universal Intelligence

If you hold the AIXI theory for universal intelligence to be correct; that it is a useful model for general intelligence at the quantitative limits, then you should take the Simulation Argument seriously.

AIXI shows us the structure of universal intelligence as computation approaches infinity.  Imagine that we had an infinite or near-infinite Turing Machine.  There then exists a relatively simple 'brute force' optimal algorithm for universal intelligence. 

Armed with such massive computation, we could just take all of our current observational data and then use a particular weighted search through the subspace of all possible programs that correctly predict this sequence (in this case all the data we have accumulated to date about our small observable slice of the universe).  AIXI in raw form is not computable (because of the halting problem), but the slightly modified time limited version is, and this is still universal and optimal.

The philosophical implication is that actually running such an algorithm on an infinite Turing Machine would have the interesting side effect of actually creating all such universes.

AIXI’s mechanics, based on Solomonoff Induction, bias against complex programs with an exponential falloff ( 2^-l(p) ), a mechanism similar to the principle of Occam’s Razor.  The bias against longer (and thus more complex) programs, lends a strong support to the goal of String Theorists, who are attempting to find a simple, shorter program that can unify all current physical theories into a single compact description of our universe.  We must note that to date, efforts towards this admirable (and well-justified) goal have not born fruit.  We may actually find that the simplest algorithm that explains our universe is more ad-hoc and complex than we would desire it to be.  But leaving that aside, imagine that there is some relatively simple program that concisely explains our universe.

If we look at the history of the universe to date, from the Big Bang to our current moment in time, there appears to be a clear local telic evolutionary arrow towards greater X, where X is sometimes described as or associated with: extropy, complexity, life, intelligence, computation, etc etc.  Its also fairly clear that X (however quantified) is an exponential function of time.  Moore’s Law is a specific example of this greater pattern.

This leads to a reasonable inductive assumption, let us call it the reasonable assumption of progress: local extropy will continue to increase exponentially for the foreseeable future, and thus so will intelligence and computation (both physical computational resources and algorithmic efficiency). The reasonable assumption of progress appears to be a universal trend, a fundamental emergent property of our physics.

Simulations

If you accept that the reasonable assumption of progress holds, then AIXI implies that we almost certainly live in a simulation now.

As our future descendants expand in computational resources and intelligence, they will approach the limits of universal intelligence.  AIXI says that any such powerful universal intelligence, no matter what its goals or motivations, will create many simulations which effectively are pocket universes.  

The AIXI model proposes that simulation is the core of intelligence (with human-like thoughts being simply one approximate algorithm), and as you approach the universal limits, the simulations which universal intelligences necessarily employ will approach the fidelity of real universes - complete with all the entailed trappings such as conscious simulated entities.

The reasonable assumption of progress modifies our big-picture view of cosmology and the predicted history and future of the universe.  A compact physical theory of our universe (or multiverse), when run forward on a sufficient Universal Turing Machine, will lead not to one single universe/multiverse, but an entire ensemble of such multi-verses embedded within each other in something like a hierarchy of Matryoshka dolls.

The number of possible levels of embedding and the branching factor at each step can be derived from physics itself, and although such derivations are preliminary and necessarily involve some significant unknowns (mainly related to the final physical limits of computation), suffice to say that we have sufficient evidence to believe that the branching factor is absolutely massive, and many levels of simulation embedding are possible.

Some seem to have an intrinsic bias against the idea bases solely on its strangeness.

Another common mistake stems from the anthropomorphic bias: people tend to image the simulators as future versions of themselves.

The space of potential future minds is vast, and it is a failure of imagination on our part to assume that our descendants will be similar to us in details, especially when we have specific reasons to conclude that they will be vastly more complex.

Asking whether future intelligences will run simulations for entertainment or other purposes are not the right questions, not even the right mode of thought.  They may, they may not, it is difficult to predict future goal systems.  But those aren’t important questions anyway, as all universe intelligences will ‘run’ simulations, simply because that precisely is the core nature of intelligence itself.  As intelligence expands exponentially into the future, the simulations expand in quantity and fidelity.

The Assemble of Multiverses

Some critics of the SA rationalize their way out by advancing a position of ignorance concerning the set of possible external universes our simulation may be embedded within.  The reasoning then concludes that since this set is essentially unknown, infinite and uniformly distributed, that the SA as such thus tells us nothing. These assumptions do not hold water.

Imagine our physical universe, and its minimal program encoding, as a point in a higher multi-dimensional space.  The entire aim of physics in a sense is related to AIXI itself: through physics we are searching for the simplest program that can consistently explain our observable universe.  As noted earlier, the SA then falls out naturally, because it appears that any universe of our type when ran forward necessarily leads to a vast fractal hierarchy of embedded simulated universes.

At the apex is the base level of reality and all the other simulated universes below it correspond to slightly different points in the space of all potential universes - as they are all slight approximations of the original.  But would other points in the space of universe-generating programs also generate observed universes like our own?

We know that the fundamental constants in the current physics are apparently well-tuned for life, thus our physics is a lone point in the topological space supporting complex life: even just tiny displacements in any direction result in lifeless universes.  The topological space around our physics is thus sparse for life/complexity/extropy.  There may be other topological hotspots, and if you go far enough in some direction you will necessarily find other universes in Tegmark’s Ultimate Ensemble that support life.  However, AIXI tells us that intelligences in those universes will simulate universes similar to their own, and thus nothing like our universe.

On the other hand we can expect our universe to be slightly different from its parent due to the constraints of simulation, and we may even eventually be able to discover evidence of the approximation itself.  There are some tentative hints from the long-standing failure to find a GUT of physics, and perhaps in the future we may find our universe is an ad-hoc approximation of a simpler (but more computationally expensive) GUT theory in the parent universe.

Alien Dreams

Our   Milky Way galaxy   is vast and old, consisting of hundreds of billions of stars, some of which are more than 13 billion years old, more than three times older than our sun.  We have direct evidence of technological civilization developing in 4 billion years from simple protozoans, but it is difficult to generalize past this single example.  However, we do now have mounting evidence that planets are common, the biological precursors to life are probably common, simple life may even have had a historical presence on mars, and all signs are mounting to support the  principle of mediocrity:  that our solar system is not a precious gem, but is in fact a typical random sample.

If the evidence for the mediocrity principle continues to mount, it provides a further strong support for the Simulation Argument.  If we are not the first technological civilization to have arisen, then technological civilization arose and achieved Singularity long ago, and we are thus astronomically more likely to be in an alien rather than posthuman simulation.

What does this change?

The set of simulation possibilities can be subdivided into PHS (posthuman historical), AHS (alien historical), and AFS (alien future) simulations (as posthuman future simulation is inconsistent).  If we discover that we are unlikely to be the first technological Singularity, we should assume AHS and AFS dominate.  For reasons beyond this scope, I imagine that the AFS set will outnumber the AHS set.

Historical simulations would aim for historical fidelity, but future simulations would aim for fidelity to a 'what-if' scenario, considering some hypothetical action the alien simulating civilization could take.  In this scenario, the first civilization to reach technological Singularity in the galaxy would spread out, gather knowledge about the entire galaxy, and create a massive number of simulations.  It would use these in the same way that all universal intelligences do: to consider the future implications of potential actions.

What kinds of actions?  

The first-born civilization would presumably encounter many planets that already harbor life in various stages, along with planets that could potentially harbor life.  It would use forward simulations to predict the final outcome of future civilizations developing on these worlds.  It would then rate them according to some ethical/utilitarian theory (we don't even need to speculate on the criteria), and it would consider and evaluate potential interventions to change the future historical trajectory of that world: removing undesirable future civilizations, pushing other worlds towards desirable future outcomes, and so on.

At the moment its hard to assign apriori weighting to future vs historical simulation possibilities, but the apparent age of the galaxy compared to the relative youth of our sun is a tentative hint that we live in a future simulation, and thus that our history has potentially been altered.