Yehuda Yudkowsky, 1985-2004

by kf • 18 years ago

38 76 18 years ago

geuis• 18 years ago

Thank you for posting this. We do need to work faster. In the day to day actions of waking, working, and sleeping until the next day we tend to lose sight of the longterm goal. At least I do. I am somewhat reassured my younger sister will live long enough, though I am not sure about my mom. I've had to accept my grandmother won't, as my grandad died in March. This is a good reminder to all of us who think there is an answer.

swombat• 18 years ago

So, I agree (strongly) with the statements and feelings in this discussion. I am a transhumanist in the sense that I do also have this burning hope that we will defeat this inhuman universe and repeal death.

How can I get involved in helping with this? Where are the communities? How can I assist (other than donating money)?

Any pointers would be much appreciated.

redder4• 18 years ago

> Any pointers

The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence http://singinst.org is Yudkowsky's organization.

> How can I assist (other than donating money)?

Donating is good. Here is some writing on 'activism.' http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/writings.htm#techs...

There is also the OpenCog http://opencog.org open-source project sponsored by SIAI.

> Where are the communities?

See these email lists: http://www.singinst.org/discussion/

mad44• 18 years ago

Lately I have read a lot about the singularity, and I am very confused why people are for this concept. Extending life through brain simulation, nanomachines support, and personality uploads does not sound like you will be still "alive". Does that make me a vitalist? A luddite I am not.

It is easy to debate for hours about the feasibility of singularity. I understand the accelerated returns and all, but I think that much of these stuff and very-near milestones stem very much from wishful thinking by proponents. "Rapture" within lifetime, immortality. I think these are still too far-fetched, and I cannot understand how proponents of singularity swear by this timeline with utmost faith.

BTW, does cryonics work now?? --- Since Yehuda's body was not identified for three days after he died, there was no possible way he could have been cryonically suspended. Others may be luckier. If you've been putting off that talk with your loved ones, do it. Maybe they won't understand, but at least you won't spend forever wondering why you didn't even try.

yters5• 18 years ago

Yeah, I similarly don't get the fascination with brain simulation. Say someone told me they had an exact simulation of by brain running, and I was convinced beyond a doubt they were right, would I be fine with dying at that point? No.

To paraphrase Samuel Clemens:

"I don't want to gain immortality through brain simulation. I want to gain immortality by not dying."

newsycaccount3• 18 years ago

Do you also get concerned that practically every atom in your body now will be replaced by others by next year?

gjm115• 18 years ago

It was Allan Konigsberg, not Samuel Clemens.

bd• 18 years ago

And what if somebody was slowly replacing your real neurons with artificial ones?

Start with one chip-neuron, finish with the whole artificial brain. In all steps of the process your "self" being preserved.

Credit goes to Stanislaw Lem "Do you exist Mr Jones?"

jcl2• 18 years ago

I am reminded of a few lines from a talk by Richard Feynman:

For instance, the scientific article may say, "The radioactive phosphorus content of the cerebrum of the rat decreases to one-half in a period of two weeks." Now what does that mean?

It means that phosphorus that is in the brain of a rat -- and also in mine, and yours -- is not the same phosphorus as it was two weeks ago. It means the atoms that are in the brain are being replaced: the ones that were there before have gone away.

So what is this mind of ours: what are these atoms with consciousness? Last week's potatoes! They now can remember what was going on in my mind a year ago -- a mind which has long ago been replaced.

To note that the thing I call my individuality is only a pattern or dance, that is what it means when one discovers how long it takes for the atoms of the brain to be replaced by other atoms. The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, and then go out -- there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday.

I found this fascinating: what we are is patterns. We have a built-in desire to extend the patterns for as long as possible, but at the same time we don't want to preserve the patterns in a fixed state, or we would never learn or grow.

Simultaneously, we are part of larger patterns which -- like the atoms in our brains -- we enter into, subtly alter, then leave. Until we have better ways of extending life, our influence on the larger patterns is the most enduring thing we can have. It is some comfort against the prospect of annihilation, however small.

greendestiny4• 18 years ago

This doesn't do anything to dissuade me of the notion that the singularity movement is a religious movement. The comfort of hope in an afterlife and hope in scientific immortality seem quite similar. While research into singularity and anti-aging could be better funded, I'm not sure why we need to 'believe' in these things or make sure we join the correct denominations (transhumanist vs non-transhumanist).

Besides, unless the universe is infinite we're just arguing about timeframes. I prefer not to think about death as annihilation because death doesn't mean that we never existed, we each have our unique portion of space-time.

mixmax2• 18 years ago

The singularity won't happen: http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2008/11/why-singularity-may-neve...

Retric2• 18 years ago

There are limits to computation, but nothing prevents computers from achieving human or super human level intelligence. I suspect that 50 years from now we will have human level AI for a wide range of things. We have already passed that point for Chess and one by one other things will fall.

What really prevents the singularity is the limits of the physical world. The speed of light is already a problem such that PC ram is never going to drop in latency without moving it closer to the CPU. I don't care how smart you are you can't build a 101% efficient engine etc.

rsheridan6• 18 years ago

There's no contradiction between Malthus and the coming of the singularity. Malthus essentially said that resources tend to be scarce, but there's no reason that they couldn't be scarce post-singularity.

This line of thinking leads to doom scenarios, when you think about how scarce resources would be allocated (bottom line - probably not to humans), so it does contradict singularity-as-the-promised-land scenarios.

Prrometheus• 18 years ago

The Malthusians have had egg of their face for the better part of two centuries now. Maybe one of these days they will be right.

Still a pretty bad record overall, though.

yters5• 18 years ago

And the 2nd law of thermodynamics is another gotcha, as I posted in the other Yudkowsky thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=377510

Someone thought maxwell's demon and the fluctuation theorem provided a way around the 2nd

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110074

but I'm not convinced:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=377625

"Thanks, those are interesting links. Still, nothing there that seems especially compelling.

Maxwell's demon assumes the energy cost for sorting the molecules is less than the net gain. That looks like another variant of the perpetual motion machine.

The fluctuation theorem says the 2nd law doesn't hold for very, very small entities, but its probability of being correct climbs exponentially as the system scales. So, it is fallacious to then say the 2nd law may not hold at the macro level due to it not holding at the micro level, since the theorem used to support this idea is itself an instance of the idea being false."

newsycaccount3• 18 years ago

How about a tiny, molecular sized ratchet, that would absorb vibrations due to heat and turn one way, but refuse to turn the other way due to it's ratchet teeth. These could then be hooked up to a generator for free power.

kirse• 18 years ago

Your comment was similar to one I was going to make... It's interesting to see that man still seeks that feeling of meaning (in life) and hope (after death) even when they do not believe in a God/afterlife.

How does one find value in life when - in the long run - their entire existence will be forgotten and their species just a blip on the timeline of Evolution? If you think about it, on the infinite (or even extremely large) timeline of this universe, our individual value pretty much equals 0.

Sure, in the short run it is evident that one's life can have value and purpose to humanity. Many powerful leaders and wars have proven this. But so what? Our egos won't be around to reap the glory of knowing that either. Zooming out to the larger timeline - or the big picture - of this universe, I can't see how someone finds value in this present life without a convincing belief in either:

1) God/Afterlife

2) The existence of a solution to mortality

Life without one of those beliefs would be like working hard with the goal of a profitable business but knowing that in the long-run my business would never turn over a single dollar of profit. It's pretty obvious that the big picture negates the short-term goals and meaning of that work.

zupatol8• 18 years ago

3) Finding value in what you're doing right now.

Life should be like running a profitable business, which you know will not last forever. The point of your business is giving a value to your customers today. Eventually a competing business will cater better to your customers' needs and put you out of business. This doesn't take away the value you've given your customers, nor the money you made.

Going one step further, the business does not even need to be profitable. You can find value in activities which are economically and socially useless most of the time, like art for example.

knome2• 18 years ago

3) The possibility that after fulfilling the manifest destiny of implacably rampaging across our universe our descendants will eventually tease apart the fundamental mathematical equations describing the foundations of our existence and find our universe not alone with nothing but the greek chaos surrounding it but amid a vast collection of universes for our future generations to spread to and conquer.

Goals of Man

☑ Don't get eaten by a lion ☑ Get out of Africa ☐ Get out of Earth ☐ Get out of Solar System ☐ Get out of Galaxy ☐ Get out of Local Group ☐ Get out of Earth-Visible Universe ☐ Get out of Universe

aswanson2• 18 years ago

You can boil any human aspiration evocative of hope, happiness, and progress to this defintion of "religious". Does this invalidate the drive?

robg• 18 years ago

To me, it validates the drive. Just as language is universal, so is the effort to make meaning. Those two qualities bind us as humans.

zupatol8• 18 years ago

He seems to define religion as "stories you make up to convince yourself you won't die".

Religion is a lot more than that, but this part of religion does seem a bit dumb.

greendestiny4• 18 years ago

Its not about hope, its about a belief giving you that ultimate existential succor. Its particularly noticeable in this article which is so dismissive of religious hope in the afterlife.

nokarma• 18 years ago

This doesn't do anything to dissuade me of the notion that the space race is a religious movement. The comfort of hope in ascending to Heaven and hope in engineering feats seem quite similar. While research into aeronautics and rocket motors could be better funded, I'm not sure why we need to 'believe' in these things or make sure we join the correct aerospace company.

Besides, unless the universe is infinite we're just arguing about distances. I prefer not to think about death as annihilation because I'm afraid of turning into worm food.

greendestiny4• 18 years ago

I'm not sure what point you think this makes. That comment would be an appropriate response to someone writing an article about how space travel will free us from the fear of death and how we can only really have hope if we are spacehumanists.

ajkirwin• 18 years ago

Am I one of the few people who looks forward to death? To know that there WILL be an end to things is something of a comfort to me.

I'd like to live for a time, sure, but even five hundred years might be too long. I'd either get driven insane by the constant bow-shocks of ever advancing culture, or I'd lapse into some kind of boredom-induced stupor.

I have my little slice of spacetime, to do with as I wish. I could live a great and noble life, or a horrific and cruel one. I could live another five decades, or if I wanted to, end it all tomorrow.

No matter what I may do, or not do, in the end.. there are no regrets, no looking back. Just.. the steady decay of my body, the essential atoms of my makeup being reused by other organisms, processes, chemical reactions.

And I like it that way.

technoguyrob• 18 years ago

It's not wrong either for the rest of us to be curious.

time_management• 18 years ago

I'm both curious about living for 1000+ years, since no human has ever lived so long before, and about what happens after death. Given the chance for a 1000-year lifespan, I'd readily take it knowing that I will die, Singularity or no, given the very long but finite lifespan of the universe, and taking the long lifespan would allow me to experience both.

Although a "healthy fear" is certainly in order, I don't understand the reflexive hatred of death. I think it's more likely that consciousness is nonphysical and that there is some form of spiritual survival. Ian Stevenson's reincarnation research is pretty solid. (If I'm wrong, I'll never know.)

jonmc12• 18 years ago

Really? Or is that just a coping mechanism to deal with an inevitable reality?

I wake up every morning an evolved version of myself - how could I ever become bored as a result of becoming ancient and wiser?

I want a bigger slice of spacetime. If you were awarded 3 wishes, sure, you could wish for something nice, you could wish to have your wishes vanish.. and that is control. But the ultimate answer to the game is to wish for more wishes - it is the only rational answer that gives you any real control over this wonder.

'The steady decay...' is a disease. If you had a curable disease would you so effortlessly arrive at the same conclusion? Is this characteristic of being human stricken with, say, cholera, that we would lay in bed, slowly dying in pain, with 'no regrets'? No!! we are creatures of survival, of sustainability, of life. We will rise to our feet, or pick up the phone, and find the treatment, and live another day of beautiful human experience.

sharkfish3• 18 years ago

But then most atheists also succumb to comforting lies, and make excuses for death even less defensible than the outright lies of religion. They flinch away, refuse to confront the horror of a hundred and fifty thousand sentient beings annihilated every day.

I would like to think that I, as an atheist, don't have to rationalize the unknown and accept that we just don't have the answers to the "why" of death. I realize he is in pain, but I don't think I'm lying to myself about death just because I don't have some over-arching dogma to believe in.

sharkfish3• 18 years ago

Modded down because I'm an atheist, or because I imply that religion is dogma? Just curious.

sharkfish3• 18 years ago

I was asking a sincere question. Why was THAT modded down?

nandemo2• 18 years ago

Granted, it's painful to lose a dear one.

But there are so many wrong things with this article, it's difficult to know where to start.

Angry at the "way-things-are"? Does that even make sense? It feels like he's saying "everyone is dying, and what is the government doing?!"

"When Michael Wilson heard the news, he said: 'We shall have to work faster.' "

I mean, can one really say that seriously, outside of a poor SF story? So this is a rational, skeptical person, and not a cult member? Although I'm not religious, I think his religious relatives seem to have a much wiser attitude to life.

gjm115• 18 years ago

It makes sense to (at least) the extent that you have grounds for thinking that the-way-things-are can be changed, which Eliezer does. In any case, he's describing how he feels, and it's not obviously wrong to feel "angry enough to do X" just because X is impossible.

What exactly is your objection? That EY et al think death can be more or less completely abolished, and that's obviously wrong, so they're probably being irrational? (If so: why is it obviously wrong?)

zupatol8• 18 years ago

"Angry at the way things are" is like saying things are not as they should be because someone fucked up. But who is responsible for how the world is? The creator?

Having this kind of anger is like believing in God.

gruseom• 18 years ago

But then most atheists also succumb to comforting lies

"Succumbing to comforting lies" is like being a tourist: only other people do it.

On another note, the Singularity is an amazing social example of what Freud called the return of the repressed.

zupatol8• 18 years ago

If people stop dying, won't other people have to stop getting born?

I'm just reading something by Schopenhauer on death, and he thinks it doesn't make sense to fear it. Here is a better summary than I could write: http://darwiniana.com/2006/04/23/schopenhauer-on-death/

zupatol8• 18 years ago

I read that again and I'm not sure that summary helps a lot. I'll just write about what I've read turned into in my mind, where it merged with my own experience and other things I've read.

Schopenhauer's main point is that death doesn't exist because time is not real. This is not very comforting unless you can imagine what it means that time is not real. I can't.

He does point out that there is no rational reason to fear death. The fear of death is an instinct, like aggressivity for example, which you can repress and even overcome. It's useful in some situations, when it makes you go to the doctor because you're sick, and it's useless in other situations, like when you're terminally ill. People who know they will die can overcome the fear of death and learn to accept it. ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model )

So fear of death is not a reason for avoiding death. Is there a rational reason to consider death as something to avoid? Death is as natural as birth. The process of evolution even requires the cycle of birth and death.

What bothers Eliezer Yudkovski is not death, it's the suffering caused by the loss of someone dear. Making people immortal however will never rid life of suffering.

gjm115• 18 years ago

Of course there's a rational reason to avoid death (and hence, to consider death as something to avoid -- which, yes, is not at all the same thing as fearing it). Aren't there a whole lot of things you want to do? Well, if you die now then you won't get to do any of them. If you've achieved everything you want to in life, then perhaps you no longer have any reason to avoid death. Most people haven't.

But, actually, I think you'd have reason even then to avoid death, if like most people you instinctively hate or fear it. It's rational to pursue things you like and avoid things you dislike, if anything's rational at all.

rw• 18 years ago

I'm glad this is posted again.

mattmaroon3• 18 years ago

At the bottom update, he proposes that standard procedure should be to cryogenically freeze unknown corpses. I as a taxpayer do not want to shoulder this burden. As time goes on, the expense of keeping unknown corpses frozen continually increases as they pile up.

Eliezer3• 18 years ago

The per capita expense of keeping a thousand frozen heads in a pool of liquid nitrogen is essentially negligible. You wouldn't notice it as a budget item. If it really bugs you, fund it yourself through private philanthropy. But out of all the things that government was ever proposed to do, this would be the most cost-effective in the history of time - even I, a libertarian, draw the line at not doing this. Cryonics is cheap, people are crazy.

mattmaroon3• 18 years ago

It depends how far away our ability to reanimate them is. I don't know how many thousands or tens of thousands of unidentified people (or ones otherwise taken care of by the state) die every year. In a stable population the per capita cost of keeping them all would keep increasing.

Moreover, what would we do with them? Copy their consciousness into a computer some day? Who pays for that? And does it really soften the blow of losing a loved one? I don't think having a copy of my dead mother would make me feel any better about the real one having passed on.

Would we grow them new bodies? What does that cost and who pays for that? Would they even want that? Do we have the right to make that decision for them? If we reanimate everyone who dies, how quickly can our country no longer sustain such a rapidly increasing population?

All of this just seems like an illogical reaction to the death of a loved one. I don't mean that to be rude (I've had my own illogical reactions) but it's just not feasible, especially for a technology that we're not sure will ever amount to anything.

wjy• 18 years ago

Umm, and remember there's no convincing reason to believe cryogenics work. Sure, we've cooled down some animals and brought them back. But keeping a head near absolute zero for years, and expecting to revive a consciousness? No evidence for it. None.

Hexstream• 18 years ago

Fight the moonlight, drama queen. Death is not the problem, ego is. His sense of entitlement is baffling. Why does he want to be some sort of immortal god if he's an atheist?

I'm all for the progress of science toward a much, much longer life but demanding immortality right now... is quite over the top.

ramchip• 18 years ago

Fight the moonlight, drama queen. Falling is not the problem, ego is. His sense of entitlement is baffling. Why does he want to be some sort of flying god if he's a human?

I'm all for the progress of science toward winged machines but demanding flight right now... is quite over the top.

(Edit: I do understand how someone could be surprised by his sense of entitlement. I don't see, however, how it follows that we should not at least try just because the problems sounds really, really hard. Humans had never flown, but that doesn't mean humans will never fly. Same goes for many things, including death.)

nandemo2• 18 years ago

Your parody (?) doesn't work. For one, as far I as know there was never a group of "flightists" crying over the fate of non-flying humanity, blaming God or Mother Nature, talking about foolish non-flightists...

There's a big difference. Avoiding death is not merely a hard technical problem. It's a moral and existential issue. If some people became immortal, imagine the whole lot of new ethical, existential problems we would have.

0xdefec8• 18 years ago

I'm surprised how easily people equate "duplication of the mind" with "immortality". I'm agnostic when it comes to god, and I'm agnostic about that piece of the singularity. Maybe someday we'll have enough knowledge of the mind and reality to know for sure that "the self" really is just a bunch of organic bits in the ol' noggin, but anyone claiming to know that answer right now is too presumptuous.

Yehuda Yudkowsky, 1985-2004

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