The End is Near

On the flight back from Monaco I read Bozo Sapiens between glasses of neat Scotch. I would read some, then I would stare out the window of the plane at an altitude of several miles and wonder how we (Humans) have managed to achieve anything. Then I would remember that we haven't.

The book points out carefully how nearly everything you ever do, or see anyone else doing, is no different from anything you might catch a monkey doing if you watched it long enough. Reading Bozo Sapiens puts you in pretty much the same mood as that Monkeysphere article that came out a long time ago - before Sarah and the contest and New York and the Project made it so my leisure time was rearranged and timeshared between a handful of personalities. The gist of the book is: you're forgiven - you're only human, and it's inevitable that you will exhibit these destructive tendencies. Don't worry about it. And: you're damned - you're only human, so ... well, you're only human.

I don't buy it.

It's really easy to be a cynic. Trust me. It's easy to look at civilization and think to yourself, "I didn't know they stacked garbage that high." I'd venture that if you haven't ever thought that, then you probably haven't seen enough of the world. But if that's where your thought process stops, well, you still haven't seen enough of the world.

It's not like there aren't people working toward the goal. And I mean this beyond Michio Kaku-esque platitudes , feel-good but totally innocent of content. There are people with ideas and direction.

Ben Goertzel may embody the best mixture of pragmatism and ambition. The project he manages, OpenCog, is an Open Source artificial intelligence project. The A.I. field has long been plagued by researchers looking for the Holy Grail, the single concept that is the Secret of intelligence. Goertzel seems to know that the secret to building a mind is already known by any infant human being - long, patient days or work and attention, structuring the thing layer by layer and training it painstakingly by experience. His weighted labeled hypergraph structure doesn't rely on any Deus Ex Machina trickery, it is merely a semantic web where the nodes and links contain semantic information. But if you look at the architecture of OpenCog you quickly see that a lot of what it is designed to do (and a lot of what humans do) is a lot more basic than concept formation and manipulation, and just as important to "intelligent" behavior. Dogs and chimps are fairly rotten at the algebra of "meaning" but still pretty good at solving basic practical problems and keeping themselves alive. This outline contains quite a bit of viewpoint-altering information about what our sensory modalities actually are and what they are good for in an A.I. context. My favorite example is the triangular lightbulb. You just imagined a triangular lightbulb when you read that sentence, even though you've probably never seen one before. You did it automatically, and I didn't even give you any instructions on what I meant. The layers between our "mind" and our senses do a lot of work for us of which we're not even aware.

This segues nicely into Geoffrey Hinton, whose wonderful Google talk showcases the closest thing I've witnessed to an example of a machine convincingly thinking. You can even duplicate this and play with it if you have Matlab.

I would be remiss to neglect mentioning Ray Kurzweil who has been popularizing the Singularity since way before it was cool. I haven't read so much Kurzweil since I stopped caring if anybody else was convinced about this stuff. I met a woman in a hotel bar in Santa Fe who argued with my for forty minutes that the Singularity didn't make any sense, no matter what logical approach vector I used to describe it. People have difficulty conceptualizing exponentials - grains of rice on chessboards and such. Didn't change things one way or the other that we made a "Singularity" in my hotel room later.

There are literally way too many authors cashing in on the same narrow band of popular futurist ideas (strong A.I., radical genetic alteration, advanced nanotechnology, make it "weird" and force it all through the die of an uncreative and half-baked plot) but I will unhesitatingly recommend Blindsight by Peter Watts. I feel like Blindsight is going to be the Snow Crash of the next thirty years. Or maybe just the next five years, what with exponential growth.

People have concrete plans to achieve our apotheosis. We are working toward it. Watch this space.