There Is No ‘Undo’ Button for the Singularity

As a matter of clearing up the record, I’d like to point out a recent post by Michael Anissimov in which he points out that his blog’s server is still infested with malware. The post concludes:

I don’t know jack about viruses or how they come about. I suppose The New Atlantis will next be using that as evidence that a Singularity will never happen. Oh wait — they already did.

[UPDATE: Mr. Anissimov edited the post without noting it several times, including removing this snarky comment, and apparently, within the last hour or two, deleting the post entirely; see below.]Mr. Anissimov is referring to two posts of mine, “Transhumanist Tech Failures” and “The Disinformation Campaign of Transhumanist ‘Caution’.” But even a passing glance at either of these posts will show that I never used this incident as evidence that the Singularity will never happen. Instead, it should be clear that I used it, rather opportunistically, to point out the embarrassing fact that the hacking of his site ironically reveals the deep foolhardiness of Mr. Anissimov’s aspirations. Shameless, I know.It’s not of mere passing significance that Mr. Anissimov admits here that he “[doesn’t] know jack about viruses or how they come about”! You would think someone who is trying to make his name on being the “responsible” transhumanist, the one who shows up the need to make sure AI is “friendly” instead of “unfriendly,” would realize that, if ever there comes into existence such a thing as unfriendly AI — particularly AI intentionally designed to be malicious — computer viruses will have been its primordial ancestor, or at least its forerunner. Also, you would think he would be not just interested in but actually in possession of a deep and growing knowledge of the practical aspects of artificial intelligence and computer security, those subjects whose mastery are meant to be so vital to our future.I know we Futurisms guys are supposedly Luddites, but (although I prefer to avoid trotting this out) I did in fact graduate from a reputable academic computer science program, and in it studied AI, computer security, and software verification. Anyone who properly understands even the basics of the technical side of these subjects would laugh at the notion of creating highly complex software that is guaranteed to behave in any particular way, particularly a way as sophisticated as being “friendly.” This is why we haven’t figured out how to definitively eradicate incomparably more simple problems — like, for example, ridding malware from servers running simple blogs.The thing is, it’s perfectly fine for Mr. Anissimov or anyone else who is excited by technology not to really know how the technology works. The problem comes in their utter lack of humility — their total failure to recognize that, when one begins to tackle immensely complex “engineering problems” like the human mind, the human body, or the Earth’s biosphere, little errors and tweaks in the mind, gaps in your knowledge that you weren’t even aware of, can translate into chaos and catastrophe when they are actually applied. Reversing an ill-advised alteration to the atmosphere or the human body or anything else isn’t as easy as deleting content from a blog. It’s true that Mr. Anissimov regularly points out the need to act with caution, but that makes it all the more reprehensible that he seems so totally disinclined to actually so act.—Speaking of deleting content from a blog: there was for a while a comment on Mr. Anissimov’s post critical of his swipe at us, and supportive of our approach if not our ideas. But he deleted it (as well as another comment referring to it). He later deleted his own jab at our blog. And sometime in the last hour or two, he deleted the post entirely. All of these changes were done without making any note of them, as if he hopes his bad ideas can just slide down the memory hole.We can only assume that he has seen the error of his ways, and now wants to elevate the debate and stick to fair characterizations of the things we are saying. That’s welcome news, if it’s true. But, to put it mildly, silent censorship is a fraught way to conduct debate. So, for the sake of posterity, we have preserved his post here exactly as it appeared before the changes and its eventual deletion. (You can verify this version for yourself in Yahoo’s cache until it updates.)—A final point of clarification: We here on Futurisms are actually divided on the question of whether the Singularity will happen. I think it’s fair to say that Adam finds many of the broad predictions of transhumanism basically implausible, while Charlie finds many and I find a lot of them at least theoretically possible in some form or another.But one thing we all agree on is that the Singularity is not inevitable — that, in the words of the late computer science professor and artificial intelligence pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum, “The myth of technological and political and social inevitability is a powerful tranquilizer of the conscience. Its service is to remove responsibility from the shoulders of everyone who truly believes in it.”Rather, the future is always a matter of human choices; and the point of this blog is that we think the possibility of humans choosing to bring about the Singularity would be a pretty bad one. Why? We’ve discussed that at some length, and we will go on doing so. But a central reason has to be practical: if we can’t keep malware off of a blog, how can we possibly expect to be able to maintain the control we want when our minds, and every aspect of our society, is so subject to the illusion of technical mastery?With that in mind, we have much, much more planned to say in the days, weeks, and months ahead, and we look forward to getting back to a schedule of more frequent posting now that we’re clearing a few major deadlines off our plates.

Futurisms

July 13, 2011