Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: existential risks

NASA has announced that asteroid strikes may have tipped over Saturn’s icy, ocean-bearing moon Enceladus. Researchers came to the conclusion after analysing the latest images and data from Cassini.

Researchers say they have enough evidence to suggest the moon’s spin axis – the line through the north and south poles – reoriented from its original position due to a collision with a smaller body, most likely an asteroid. The shift from its original axis is by 55 degrees, more than halfway rolling completely onto its side.

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Still, the seed vault is supposed to function without humans having to get involved with maintenance. The Norwegian government is studying the situation and plans to fix the leak.

It was a story that was too good to pass up. The Svalbard ‘doomsday’ seed vault had flooded because of global warming-induced high temperatures melting the surrounding permafrost. But according to one of the vault’s creators, the reports are pretty overblown and everything’s fine. Well, the vault’s fine. The apocalypse is still ticking along nicely.

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“A hackathon (also known as a hack day, hackfest or codefest) is a design sprint-like event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers, project managers, and others, often including subject-matter-experts, collaborate intensively on software projects. Occasionally, there is a hardware component as well. Hackathons typically last between a day and a week. Some hackathons are intended simply for educational or social purposes, although in many cases the goal is to create usable software.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackathon

In February 2014, Dr. Brian May, astrophysicist and famed guitarist for the rock band QUEEN, began working with Grigorij Richters, the director of a new film titled 51 Degrees North, a fictional story of an asteroid impact on London and the resulting human condition. May composed the music for the film and suggested that Richters preview it at Starmus, an event organized by Dr. Garik Israelian and attended by esteemed astrophysicists, scientists and artists, including Dr. Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins and Rick Wakeman. The result was the beginning of discussions that would lead to the launch of Asteroid Day in 2015. See : https://asteroidday.org/

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Creating rejuvenation will probably be quite expensive, but that’s no reason to give up on it. We can pull it off.

The first thing to realise is that, when you wonder how much something will cost, you’re actually wondering how many resources and how many people doing how much work it will take to do that something. That’s all that really matters. The problem is that we have a sucky economic system such that even if we do have more than enough people and resources to do the job, the monetary cost of it could be so high that you can’t get the job done without creating financial problems left and right. This should be a hint that the problem, if it exists, lies in our crappy economic system, not in rejuvenation itself or whatever other thing we may create.

Apart from the obvious fact that other hysterically expensive endeavours (such as space missions) are pulled off despite their costs, we must take into account that desperate circumstances call for desperate measures. We don’t need to tear apart our economic system and replace it with another before we create rejuvenation, and neither would we if faced with another health crisis (such as a pandemic) or a planetary crisis, but we need to get the job done despite its costs and the consequences they may have. We can’t give up on rejuvenation on the grounds that it may be too expensive to create, just like we wouldn’t in the case of an existential risk. Can you imagine that? There’s a huge asteroid on a collision course with Earth, and our only hope is a spectacularly expensive space mission to destroy it before it’s too late. Just who in their right mind would step up and say: ‘Nah, too expensive. Let’s not do it.

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You’ve probably heard about billionaires’ Plan B for when the end of the world comes, much of it centering around property in New Zealand. It’s not exactly a bad plan as far as doomsday prepping goes; buy a nice bunker somewhere in Middle Earth and wait out the chaos in luxury on one of two fairly isolated islands. Now, you may have noticed that front and center for such planning is Silicon Valley billionaire and Trump backer Peter Thiel of the pay-to-sue-Gawker-into-oblivion fame to the public at large, and ultra-libertarian venture capitalist with some crazy ideas about the future to the techies who know him. His backing of seasteading and support for Trump just because he got bored with Obama, are but a warmup to what he really has in mind for the future: immortality as a sentient super-AI.

No, you didn’t read that wrong, and no, this is not hyperbole. In fact, yours truly was once invited to an event where Thiel was a featured speaker after a rather public spat with the president of the Singularity Institute. I did not take up the offer because I had to be in class to learn how to build actual AI systems. And for full disclosure, I was invited to join an advisory board for a group of futurists called The Lifeboat Foundation, but like Groucho Marx, I didn’t want to be involved in a club that would accept someone like me as a member, much less as an advisor based on little more than me being a grad student at the time. So Thiel’s involvement with a group of futurists and an occasional computer scientist who thinks we’re on the verge of something a lot like the plot of Transcendence, is extremely well known in tech.

In fact, the belief that at some point, artificial intelligence and the march of technology will create a singularity that will alter humanity forever, has an alarming number of adherents in Silicon Valley. The face of the Singularity today, Ray Kurzweil, works at Google and runs Singularity University where it’s preached thanks to a multimillion commitment from his employer. And the fact that this belief is so popular in the world’s biggest tech hub isn’t all that surprising if we consider its followers. They’re told that their code and the technology they’re developing is changing the world, or they’re devoted followers of popular science news ready for the incredible future promised to us by the glossy magazines and sci-fi movies to arrive. To be told that by 2035 or 2045 we may become immortal through technology is appealing to say the least, and empowering for those who think they can help.

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Happy #Alien Day. Here’s my trilogy of alien stories for Vice. I’ll start by listing #2 first for those who only have time for one, but they do go in chronological order: 2) https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/why-havent-we-met-aliens-yet-because-theyve-evolved-into-ai & 1) https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/the-internet-will-become-self-aware-when-aliens-wake-it-up & 3) (covered recently by the History Channel): https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/the-language-of-aliens-will-always-be-indecipherable #transhumanism

While traveling in Western Samoa many years ago, I met a young Harvard University graduate student researching ants. He invited me on a hike into the jungles to assist with his search for the tiny insect. He told me his goal was to discover a new species of ant, in hopes it might be named after him one day.

Whenever I look up at the stars at night pondering the cosmos, I think of my ant collector friend, kneeling in the jungle with a magnifying glass, scouring the earth. I think of him, because I believe in aliens—and I’ve often wondered if aliens are doing the same to us.

Believing in aliens—or insanely smart artificial intelligences existing in the universe—has become very fashionable in the last 10 years. And discussing its central dilemma: the Fermi paradox, has become even more so. The Fermi paradox states that the universe is very big—with maybe a trillion galaxies that might contain 500 billion stars and planets each —and out of that insanely large number, it would only take a tiny fraction of them to have habitable planets capable of bringing forth life.

Whatever you think, the numbers point to the insane fact that aliens don’t just exist, but probably billions of species of aliens exist. And the Fermi paradox asks: With so many alien civilizations out there, why haven’t we found them? Or why haven’t they found us?

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Major Ed Dames predicted that “a series of powerful, deadly solar flares” he termed “the killshot” would impact the Earth and wipe out civilization (preceding this event was an event in North Korea)

A second “doomsday” vault will join the seed vault on Svalbard, with the new one offering an offline archive for important literature, data and other cultural relics.

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In a previous essay, I suggested how we might do better with the unintended consequences of superintelligence if, instead of attempting to pre-formulate satisfactory goals or providing a capacity to learn some set of goals, we gave it the intuition that knowing all goals is not a practical possibility. Instead, we can act with a modest confidence having worked to discover goals, developing an understanding of our discovery processes that allows asserting an equilibrium between the risk of doing something wrong and the cost of work to uncover more stakeholders and their goals. This approach promotes moderation given the potential of undiscovered goals potentially contradicting any particular action. In short, we’d like a superintelligence that applies the non-parametric intuition, the intuition that we can’t know all the factors but can partially discover them with well-motivated trade-offs.

However, I’ve come to the perspective that the non-parametric intuition, while correct, on its own can be cripplingly misguided. Unfortunately, going through a discovery-rich design process doesn’t promise an appropriate outcome. It is possible for all of the apparently relevant sources not to reflect significant consequences.

How could one possibly do better than accepting this limitation, that relevant information is sometimes not present in all apparently relevant information sources? The answer is that, while in some cases it is impossible, there is always the background knowledge that all flourishing is grounded in material conditions, and that “staying grounded” in these conditions is one way to know that important design information is missing and seek it out. The Onion article “Man’s Garbage To Have Much More Significant Effect On Planet Than He Will” is one example of a common failure at living in a grounded way.

In other words, “staying grounded” means recognizing that just because we do not know all of the goals informing our actions does not mean that we do not know any of them. There are some goals that are given to us by the nature of how we are embedded in the world and cannot be responsibly ignored. Our continual flourishing as sentient creatures means coming to know and care for those systems that sustain us and creatures like us. A functioning participation in these systems at a basic level means we should aim to see that our inputs are securely supplied, our wastes properly processed, and the supporting conditions of our environment maintained.

Suppose that there were a superintelligence where individual agents have a capacity as compared to us such that we are as mice are to us. What might we reasonably hope from the agents of such an intelligence? My hope is that these agents are ecologists who wish for us to flourish in our natural lifeways. This does not mean that they leave us all to our own preserves, though hopefully they will see the advantage to having some unaltered wilderness in which to observe how we choose to live left to our own devices. Instead, we can be participants in patterned arrangements aimed to satisfy our needs in return for our engaged participation in larger systems of resource management. By this standard, our human systems might be found wanting by many living creatures today.

Given this, a productive approach to developing superintelligence would not only be concerned with its technical creation, but also by being in the position to demonstrate how all can flourish through good stewardship, setting a proper example for when these systems emerge and are trying to understand what goals should be like. We would also want the facts of its and our material conditions readily apparent, so that it doesn’t start from a disconnected and disembodied basis.

Overall, this means that in addition to the capacity to discover more goals, it would be instructive to supply this superintelligence with a schema of describing the relationships and conditions under which current participants flourish, as well as the goal to promote such flourishing whenever the means are clear and circumstances indicate such flourishing will not emerge of its own accord. This kind of information technology for ecological engineering might also be useful for our own purposes.

What will a superintelligence take as its flourishing? It is hard to say. However, hopefully it will find sustaining, extending, and promoting the flourishing of the ecology that allowed its emergence as a inspiring, challenging, and creative goal.

Dismantling the idea that older generations should ‘step down’ for younger ones.

Humans are really pros at sugarcoating. If you say old people should step down for the sake of new generations, it sounds so noble and rightful, doesn’t it? What it actually means, though, is ‘We value old people less than new ones,’ and this doesn’t sound very noble or rightful. This is plain and brutal survival of the species.

Kids are (generally) cute and helpless. This is what triggers our instinct to protect them, even thought it is not the reason we do it. A species relying on reproduction to ensure its existence wouldn’t last long if it didn’t care for its children. Even if we had already developed comprehensive rejuvenation therapies, we would still be mortals; if we stopped reproducing altogether and forever, we would still risk extinction, although on a very long timescale. (In other words, we could still die one by one of other causes than ageing.) It’s the reason children are important (to us and other species): They’re potential means of reproduction. Additionally, they need special attention, because they’re not able to take care of themselves and are thus more at risk of dying before they can reproduce. That’s why most species on the planet make such a big deal out of protecting their offspring—species that don’t are less likely to stick around long enough to tell the tale.

Individuals who are no longer kids but still are fertile are still important for reproduction purposes, but require less attention from others and from society, because they can look after themselves. Individuals who can no longer reproduce, or who wouldn’t be able to take care of their offspring even if they could have any (mainly elderly adults), have zero importance in this sense, because they use up resources of society without contributing to the survival of society itself. They’ve (assumably) already contributed to the perpetuation of the species, and now that they no longer can, they’re just a burden. Thus, from the cynical point of view of the survival of the species, it makes zero sense to dedicate any resources to the care of the elderly. As a matter of fact, besides humans, there aren’t many examples of species whose younger members look after the elderly of the family.

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