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SETI and the computational universe

Also, if you are interested, there's a short paper by Robert Freitas on the Sentience Quotient and xenopsychology.

Xenopsychology - Robert Freitas

Also,the Sentient Quotien

about a decade ago: http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

Glad to see more and more people are thinking about this.

And thanks for the laugh: "Push for a universal basic income for your robot AI" has to be one of the funniest things I've read on Slashdot.

And that idea is not that far fetched: http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/...
"Robots and software persons are entitled to protection of life and liberty. But does "life" imply the right of a program to execute, or merely to be stored? Denying execution would be like keeping a human in a permanent coma â" which seems unconstitutional. Do software persons have a right to data they need in order to keep executing? Can robot citizens claim social benefits? Are unemployed robo-persons entitled to welfare? Medical care, including free tuneups at the government machine shop? Electricity stamps? Free education? Family and reproductive rights? Don't laugh. A recent NASA technical study found that self-reproducing robots could be developed today in a 20-year Manhattan-Project-style effort costing less than $10 billion (NASA Conference Publication 2255, 1982)."

Check out xenopsychology by Robert Freitas (a real phd scientist) and also the concept of Sentience quotient defined s

as the relationship between the information processing rate (bit/s) of each individual processing unit (neuron), the weight/size of a single unit and the total number of processing units (expressed as mass).

        At present, human scientists are attempting to communicate outside our species to primates and cetaceans, and in a limited way to a few other vertebrates. This is inordinately difficult, and yet it represents a gap of at most a few SQ points. The farthest we can reach in our "communication" with vegetation is when we plant, water, or fertilize it, but it is evident that messages transmitted across an SQ gap of 10 points or more cannot be very meaningful. What, then, could an SQ +50 Superbeing possibly have to say to us?

Why are you destroying your planet?

as the relationship between the information processing rate (bit/s) of each individual processing unit (neuron), the weight/size of a single unit and the total number of processing units (expressed as mass).

At present, human scientists are attempting to communicate outside our species to primates and cetaceans, and in a limited way to a few other vertebrates. This is inordinately difficult, and yet it represents a gap of at most a few SQ points. The farthest we can reach in our "communication" with vegetation is when we plant, water, or fertilize it, but it is evident that messages transmitted across an SQ gap of 10 points or more cannot be very meaningful. What, then, could an SQ +50 Superbeing possibly have to say to us?

An aside from the article: "Huang showed a demo from Facebook that used deep learning to train a neural network how to recognize a landscape painting. They then used the network to create its own landscape painting."

So long for such jobs... How about deep learning about post-scarcity economics?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Also: ""Our strategy is to accelerate deep learning everywhere," Huang said."

How about some deep learning about morality? Imagine training children (or child-like AIs) in skills like weapons use without training them in morality, kindness, cooperation, and so on... How would that end?

See also:
http://www.child-soldiers.org/
"Child Soldiers International is an international human rights research and advocacy organisation. We seek to end the military recruitment and the use in hostilities, in any capacity, of any person under the age of 18 by state armed forces or non-state armed groups. We advocate for the release of unlawfully recruited children, promote their successful reintegration into civilian life, and call for accountability for those who unlawfully recruit or use them."

Maybe AIs should not be asked to replace humans until they have been around for at least eighteen years?
http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.amazon.com/The-Chro...

Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing in Palo Alto, California, Robert Freitas Jr. wrote an excellent paper on this subject.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and xenopsychology.

See see Sentient Quotient

At present, human scientists are attempting to communicate outside our species to primates and cetaceans, and in a limited way to a few other vertebrates. This is inordinately difficult, and yet it represents a gap of at most a few SQ points. The farthest we can reach in our "communication" with vegetation is when we plant, water, or fertilize it, but it is evident that messages transmitted across an SQ gap of 10 points or more cannot be very meaningful. What, then, could an SQ +50 Superbeing possibly have to say to us?

... Culture "Minds", drones, and humans/cyborgs all have privacy of what is in their own thoughts and memories. However, anything in a non-sentient "databank" is public to all (so, externally stored communications or designs in that sense are publicly shareable). I'm just re-reading "Excession" (out loud to my kid) where Banks made that point. In the "Culture", Banks makes it clear that sentient beings of any sort (including typical drones) have a variety of rights related to independence. When I first read that, coming from an idea of free software and free culture, it seemed somehow strange or wrong that the AI "Minds" or drones would have that sort of privacy, but now it seems to make more and more sense to me, given the sort of issues raised in the article, including that there can be many times when the line is blurred between human and machine. But the probably deeper issue is what it means to have an advanced post-scarcity "Culture" where many of the citizens are entirely non-biological (like the AI "Minds" that run much of everything).

BTW, the original "RUR" story from 1920 (where the term "robot" came from) has almost exactly the same plot as you outline for BG.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R....

A lot of long-term robotics (like Asimo) is implicitly the quest for the ideal "slave". The question is, at what points does something have rights? In the USA and elsewhere animals have some legal rights (or at least laws to protect them) since starting about a 150 years ago, and that campaign I've heard eventually led to children having independent rights (on the logic of, why should a horse or dog have rights when a child does not?).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
http://www.nal.usda.gov/awic/p...
"The first national law to regulate animal experimentation was passed in Britain in 1876--the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876. This bill created a central governing body that reviewed and approved all animal use in research. After that, there were numerous countries in Europe that adopted some regulations regarding research with animals. "

Also:
http://www.humanium.org/en/chi...
"At the beginning of the 20th century, children's protection starts to be put in place, including protection in the medical, social and judicial fields. This kind of protection starts first in France and spreads across Europe afterwards. Since 1919, the international community, following the creation of The League of Nations (later to become the UN), starts to give some kind of importance to that concept and elaborates a Committee for child protection."

However, going back to hunter/gatherer times thousands of years ago, there was in many such cultures (from what remains of them) at least an ethic of giving thanks to the larger "animal" kind (e.g. "Rabbit") that you killed for it letting you kill it so you might survive. But it's hard to know for sure what such cultures really believed day-to-day in all circumstances. And some such cultures had various sorts of slavery.

I don't know what the line is where a mechanism (mechanical or electronic or photonic or fluidic or other) becomes self-aware, or even if that should be the line. Or at what point can a mechanism feel "pain" or "pleasure"? Is that ultimately a political and/or religious question?
http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/tec...

And also:
http://www.aspcr.com/
"We are the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Robots, founded in 1999 in Seattle, Washin

Self-replicating technology is incredibly hard to build. Self-replicating technology needs to be at least able to build computers, for which it requires a semi-conductor factory, requiring extremely precise optics, all kinds of lasers, etc, which in turn require dozens of different elements, some of them rare-earth, which in turn need to be chemically extracted from the asteroid or even bred in nuclear reactors if too scarce.

Take a look at this paper http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/ReproJBISJuly1980.htm for a 440-ton machine (or rather swarm of machines) capable of reproducing once every 500 years under the conditions of a gas giant moon such as Ganymede, under the assumption that He3-Deuterium fusion technology is available for power.

And on the moral aspects of simulation: http://users.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/rants/simulation_errors.html
http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/LegalRightsOfRobots.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6200005.stm
http://www.aspcr.com/newcss_rights.html

Good luck with that golden rule thing...

This reminds me of "the Golden Rule" that I try to live by: "Treat others as you would like to be treated."

The first Methane-breathing alien you encounter and treat as you'd like to be treated and place in a reducing Oxygen atmosphere will likely result in an interstellar war.

http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/MetalawInterstellarRelations.htm ...or in simple terms: Do unto others as they would have you do unto them".

This leads to things like people with terminal illness being allowed to choose to proactively end their lives, and cryonicists being able to get themselves frozen before their glial cell carcinoma eats all the neuronal connections which encode the information that defines their self, but hey, those are things that should be allowed anyway.

-- Terry

AC wrote: "Robotic Rick Perry 2032"

FTFY. And he will be following in a Robotic Sarah Palin's footsteps, since she governed a state with a basic income (from the Alasakn Permanent Fund). He'll get the robot vote, for sure.

Related on the rights of robots:
http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/LegalRightsOfRobots.htm
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article1695546.ece
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6200005.stm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_artificial_intelligence

A related parable on economic change and robots that I created (which mentions robot lawyers):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA

Except that humans ARE animals, so certain animals ARE human, but not all animals eh.

In other words, like it or not, humans are a species of animal.

Anyway it's only a matter of time before there are "alien" intelligences such as dolphins or certain squid species (or of course certain members of the ape families) - and mankind will perhaps either go crazy (all those fanatics who believe in very strange and childish things, wanting to slaughter what they don't understand), or mankind might sigh in relief with the awareness that we finally aren't so alone..

Hmm?

Imagine if you will that one day mankind makes contact with some alien species (or even your supernatural being of choice), how would we be judged based on how we interact with a fellow intelligence? If dolphins were considered pre-intelligent, as in on the way to developing intelligence, and we treated them like crap.. Why.. mankind would come off as a barbaric species who keep slaves and slaughter their neighbors at will, leading to us being very undesirable as far as inter-stellar neighbors go!

Great points. We can probably generalize them eventually to robots and simulated entities, too:
http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/LegalRightsOfRobots.htm
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
Se my other replies to this article, too.

Think it through. If it took bigger brains to actuate bigger muscles, how do you explain dinosaurs or alligators having small brains? Consider:
http://alligatorfur.com/alligator/alligator.htm
"A giant alligator is like an armored battleship protected by a shield of horny plates on his back, fierce teeth in the bow and propelled by a powerful tail capable of breaking the legs of prey or intruders. The only weakness is a brain the size of a lima bean that limits thinking to eat, bite, fight, mate and start all over. After 8 feet the only real threat to an alligator is another alligator or man."

So, why don't elephants have brains the size of lima beans instead of brains much bigger than human brains, with a cortex (granted, not a neocortex) bigger than the entire human brain? Why would nature waste all that energy and material?

Consider: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_intelligence
"Elephants are amongst the world's most intelligent species. With a mass just over 5 kg (11 lb), [adult human brains weight about 3 lbs] elephant brains are larger than those of any other land animal, and although the largest whales have body masses twentyfold those of a typical elephant, whale brains are barely twice the mass of an elephant's brain. The elephant’s brain is similar to that of humans in terms of structure and complexity - such as the elephant’s cortex having as many neurons as a human brain[1], suggesting convergent evolution.[2] A wide variety of behaviors, including those associated with grief, learning, allomothering, mimicry, art, play, a sense of humor, altruism, use of tools, compassion, self-awareness, memory and possibly language[3] all point to a highly intelligent species that are thought to be equal with cetaceans[4][5] and primates[6][7]. Due to the high intelligence and strong family ties of elephants, some researchers argue it is morally wrong for humans to cull them.[8] Aristotle once said that elephants were "The beast which passeth all others in wit and mind"[9]."

More on this:
http://www.elephantvoices.org/elephant-basics/elephants-are-intelligent.html

Why do you assume I've only thought about this for "five minutes"? I read that book by John Lilly about thirty years ago.

Intentionally or not, many people repeat speciest bunk of various sorts used to justify human agression to other species, including the agression of destroying their habitats. Or also to justify mistreatment in agriculture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_rights

Similar sorts of arguments used to be made to explain why Native Americans or African people could not be intelligent, too, to justify their destruction and enslavement for various profit-making reasons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism#Craniometry_and_physical_anthropology

No doubt the same arguments will be used against AIs and robots and simulated creatures as time goes by.
http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/LegalRightsOfRobots.htm

Something I like to think about:
http://djterasaki.wordpress.com/2007/12/19/lila-watsons-quote-well-sort-of/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilla_Watson
"If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."

Human slavery demeaned and harmed both the slaver and the slave, though in different ways.

Hu

http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/LegalRightsOfRobots.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6200005.stmhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6200005.stm

Something else to think about related to simulated entities' rights: http://www.simulation-argument.com/

I agree with you in general about the limits of simulations and even intelligence itself.

Still, simulations can be used to:
* predict (you are right, they often fail for reasons of chaos theory and limited accuracy or missing aspects);
* understand (where you play what ifs to see the consequences of your assumptions);
* to gain insight (something other than understanding of details, where you gain a sense of the gestalt, a feeling, or some new summarizing key idea, like I say with my sig about the irony of the tools of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity -- maybe we need a simulation about creating simulations to have scientists gain the insight about simulations you suggest many lack? :-);
* assess risk (to some extend, by Monte Carlo methods for well understood processes)
* to consolidate knowledge in an organized explicit way (you can't hand wave as much when you have to implement ideas in code);
* educate intellectually (as fun toys to play with and learn from);
* educate practically (to learn skills by trial and error, basically failing faster and safer like in a flight simulator or nuclear power plant simulator or surgical simulator);
* educate emotionally (to see consequences and possibilities and related narrative, often as games);
* entertain (relates to the above, but is a different focus);
* to serve as a focus for political policy debates about future scenarios (including as different simulators with different assumptions describe different implications of policy -- note weather forecasters use multiple weather models plus their intuition and experience to make forecasts);
* as a form of self-justifying artwork;
* as a way to create entirely new worlds to explore inspired by nature but (as you suggest) often very different;
* probably many more -- in the sense of, what good is a blank sheet of paper?

I learned some of this from thinking about what people like Steven C Bankes at RAND had to say in the 1980s and 1990s:
http://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/b/bankes_steven_c.html
As well as people like Seymour Papert (of Microworlds educational software fame).
http://www.papert.org/
Or Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls and others with Smalltalk as a simulation environment. As well as what futurists (WFS) and risk modellers (RAMAS) have to say. And from making a simulation about gardening in the 1990s (with my wife, as a more than six person-year labor of love released with source under the GPL):
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/

One concern I have about simulations of living creatures (especially intelligent or self-aware ones that can feel some kind of virtual pleasure or virtual pain, like in agent-based simulations) is, what are the ethics? As in, do not do unto others that which you do not want done unto yourself (unless they like that kind of stuff)...
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/LegalRightsOfRobots.htm

See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation

I can think of nothing that would encourage them more than reading works by K. Eric Drexler or Robert Freitas. Though they deal more in the realm of engineering than science and are generally create a picture of possible future paths (molecular nanotechnology & nanomedicine) which can easily inspire people to learn science. The best book for nanotechnology would be Engines of Creation 2.0: http://e-drexler.com/p/06/00/EOC_Cover.html (the paperback 1987 edition is somewhat dated at this point) but you would have to go browsing through the papers by Robert @ http://www.rfreitas.com/ to find something which is for a younger age level. You might even have to read them with your children and explain them. But exploring the realms of the small (nanotechnology) and the large (astronomy) both serve as windows to get children to wonder about the world around them, how it can be understood, and potentially how it can be explored and developed. Tools that allow these explorations (I grew up with both a microscope and a telescope in the house) are helpful as well.

As noted by others, there are a number of major problems to overcome in terraforming Mars and Venus may be a more viable alternative. There is a good article discussing both here. The problem with terraforming is that there is no solution that would take less than a few hundred years. The moon is one possibility but it still has a gravity well to overcome. A colony in the asteroids might be easier especially if there is frozen water available. Eventually we could look at the use of near-Venus space for the orbital capture and development of comets and asteroids. Although Venus currently has no moons, in the near future it may be practical to nudge smaller bodies into orbit around the inner planets. Venus is especially good for this because aerobraking in its thick atmosphere can be used to slow these bodies down. If you accept Stephen Hawkings premise that colonization of space would be the best way to ensure the survival of humans as a species, then we should determine the best place to start and get working on it RFN.

As noted there are a number of major problems to overcome in terraforming Mars and Venus may be a more viable alternative. There is a good article discussing both here. The problem with terraforming is that there is no solution that would take less than a few hundred years. The moon is one possibility but does it have the resources to sustain a self sufficient colony and it still has a gravity well to overcome. A colony in the asteroids might be easier especially if there is frozen water available. Eventually we could look at the use of near-Venus space for the orbital capture and development of comets and asteroids. Although Venus currently has no moons, in the near future it may be practical to nudge smaller bodies into orbit around the inner planets. Venus is especially good for this because aerobraking in its thick atmosphere can be used to slow these bodies down. If you accept Stephen Hawkings premise that colonization of space would be the best way to ensure the survival of humans as a species, then we should determine the best place to start and get working on it RFN.

Sentience is not a line drawn in the sand, it is a sliding scale on which all living things reside.
The measure of a things sentience, is its sentience quotient.
A sentience quotient is not a measure of pain, or emotions, or of the substance of higher thinking patterns. It is a measure of the raw processing power of an organisms neuron, or their functional equivalent.


The scale of sentience quotients stretches from roughly -70 which would be a being the size of the universe that took the entire lifetime of the universe to process one bit of information, right up to +50 which is the maximum posible speed at which information can travel as defined by quantum physics.

On this scale, humans, along with all animals and insects on this planet, fall at +13. most plants fall at -2, and most importantly to this argument, all computers fall in a range of +6 to +9.

allthough theoretical computers could reach as high as +20 or more, for the moment, computers have less sentience than insects but more than plants.

for more information on this, please visit the wiki
or the original Robert A Freitas article entitled "Xenopsychology"

He said he figured companies would be clamoring for people like him once the materials, like manufactured diamonds, were more readily available.

Maybe it will be more like nanotech.

"This (nanoFactory Animation Film v1.0) is a collaborative project of animator and engineer, John Burch, and pioneer nanotechnologist, Dr. K. Eric Drexler. The film depicts an animated view of a nanofactory and demonstrates key steps in a process that converts simple molecules into a billion-CPU laptop computer."

Also, Robert A. Freitas Jr., "The Future of Computers," Analog 116(March 1996):57-73. (Lets you think about the art of prophecy).

CC.

And not just the summary (as it was copied & pasted verbatim from the article), but the NYT.

I thought on reading the line " to make robots full members of society" that the article was talking about robot rights. However, the article is just about making plans for standard automation & borderline AI over the next 10 years.

I for one am going to await until this company is taken over by the rightful owners of that name before I bother to get excited by robots.

Here the concept of intellectual property is tainted with visions of patent trolls "inventing" such gems as the double click and the hyperlink, however there is room for true innovation in the biotech industry. It is still a very young science and once the obvious patents are dealt with (eg "The use of carbon to create reeally small robots") serious headway can be made. Imagine the possibilities of nanorobots to treatvascular disease, physical trauma, and biological aging. (Links shamelessly ripped from the wikipedia article.) Would such innovation seem possible without the protection patents give to the investors in such high-risk (not to mention expensive) endeavors?

My friends who have been to law school have become, ah, lawyers, judges, investigators, and venture capitalists. Law school sharpens the mind and teaches analysis and discipline and ethics (yeah, I know - lawyer jokes).

One man I've never met except virtually via email exchanges is Glenn Harlan Reynolds. He is on the University of Tenn Law Faculty, and writes (very well and) prolifically about technology. Send him a note - maybe you'll get an encouragement.

Another guy with a law degree who writes about a field completely tangental is Robert Freitas.

But do whatever you do, do it at your own pace.

Current estimates by Robert Freitas suggest that it is going to require at least a trillion nanorobots in place within the brain and most probably the installation of an extensive fiber optic network to handle the required bandwidth to provide a matrix-like interface (either for real time full bandwidth human-computer interfaces or for brain/mind uploading into a computer). This may be documented to a limited extent in Ray Kurzweil's forthcoming book The Singularity is Near (est. publication early 2005) and perhaps to a greater extent in several years when Nanomedicine Volume III is published.

You are not up-to-date on the literature. The questions you pose are addressed by Robert Freitas in the ever expanding body of literature on Nanomedicine. Specificially the recently published Nanomedicine V. IIA deals with biosafety issues and the 4 year old Nanomedicine V. I deals with things like power delivery and movement. If you want to educate yourself and contribute to real molecular nanotechnology, or as Drexler has recently suggested zettotech progress, (rather than simple nanomaterials which is much of what people talk about today) feel free to come on over to the Nano@Home project. We could use a few good developers.