Altruism and Transhuman Intelligence

By Michael Anissimov of Accelerating Future.

When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.
- J. Krishnamurti, "Freedom from the Known"

Some philosophers have asserted that "altruism" does not truly exist, that kind people only help others because they enjoy doing it, so therefore they are ultimately doing it only for themselves. Others, such as myself, argue that this isn't how altruism should be interpreted; that having a decision process is not the same as a being having a self-centered decision process. This is called the "hedonism debate" and it has probably been argued since prehistoric times.

Gandhi got what he wanted, that is, helping others. The fact that he was working towards what he personally wanted does not mean that we should regard him as selfish. Thought experiment: should a being whose decision process approximated a democratic consensus be considered "selfish"? I'm talking about a being whose decisions are actually made based on the consensus vote of some group, not because the group is telling the being how to behave, but because the being is built to approximate democratic opinions. It has brainware that just does that. The simplest possible answer (think Occam's razor) to the question of "how is this creature behaving?" is not "selfishly, because it's brain is just channeling its own volitional urges", but "democratically, because this being was specifically created to approximate democratic actions". You can't look at an axe used to chop down trees every day and say "this axe is made out of wood and metal, and the use of metal and wood I'm most familiar with is pans and plates, so this axe must be used for cooking and eating". I mean, you can, but it's silly.

In recent times, the hedonism debate is being put in a new light. This comes from two factors. First is the potential for building new minds from scratch - AIs or new bio-beings, doesn't matter. Just as some god could theoretically have created the entire world a mere five minutes ago, simply implanting us with all our memories, some advanced alien race could have done the same, building us up, cell by cell, memories included. One day humanity will have the ability to create bodies and minds from raw materials. The second factor is the eventual possibility of the creation of minds that are smarter than humans, which does not seem to be avoidable in the long run. There is no law that states an intelligence can't build another intelligence smarter than itself, as long as it knows something about the fundamental principles underlying intelligence. Smarter-than-human intelligence could further upgrade itself and create still-smarter intelligence, opening up the possibility for a massive intelligence explosion. It could start with an "AI" (I use the quotes because the way that "AI" is always portrayed in fiction is laughably unrealistic) or with a human being that was cybernetically or neurologically enhanced.

These two new variables frame the hedonism debate in a whole new way. If high altruists really can't exist, then a smarter-than-human intelligence, who could turn its intelligence towards fooling humans or developing super-advanced technology, could easily murder all the humans on Earth; by accident, as part of a larger plan, or simply on a whim. Please do not visualize a noble rebel group of humans fighting back against a transhuman intelligence, a la The Matrix. In the real world, the AIs never would have needed humans as a power source to begin with. Even if they did, they could easily create the system in such a way that escape was totally, completely impossible. Even if that were not possible, any escapees could be crushed practically instantaneously; transhumans will be able to think and move at rates billions or trillions of times faster than us slow biological humans. Our bodies and minds move at a crawl in comparison to what is physically possible, a huge space of better designs. We just haven't had the intelligence or technology to reach out to that space just yet.

If high altruism is possible, then the creation of robustly altruistic transhuman intelligence could be considered a better event than you winning a trillion dollars. That's because transhuman intelligence would be genuinely smarter than us, and genuinely better at coming up with ways to eliminate poverty, suffering, disease, death, annoyance, and all other problems that intelligence can be applied to. It might be able to wipe these problems out entirely, it might not, but either way, it would be a huge event. If high altruism isn't possible, then we might expect the first transhuman intelligence to ignore us and/or kill us. Deliberate malice wouldn't be necessary for human extinction; transhumans could decide that atmospheric oxygen was getting in their way and move it somewhere else, or decide that they want to take apart the Earth to create a particle accelerator with the circumference of Mercury's orbit. And all of this might happen very quickly, considering that transhuman intelligences could be thinking with brain components billions of times faster than biological neurons, and acting with airborne nanotechnology, billions of times faster and stronger than human hands or weapons.

In anticipation of the emergence of smarter-than-human intelligence, and for other reasons, some of us have decided to advocate altruism to the fullest extent. If the starting conditions and moral philosophy of the first transhuman intelligence are at all relevant to the ultimate outcome of the "intelligence explosion", then the morals of the people that create or become the first transhuman intelligence(s) will be important. Since we want to see altruistic transhuman intelligence rather than the alternative, we are advocating positive morals.

In the longer term, what we need for mere humans to exist safely alongside transhuman intelligences is a sort of truce among all intelligence - especially the intelligences with the most power - otherwise death could be a threat forever. We don't want death to be a threat; we eventually want to lower the nonconsensual death rate to zero if possible. You can think of this as a sort of argument from one member of a council of say, 7 cybernetically enhanced humans, all with different ideas about morality, discussing how to approach the world after they realize they could probably have great influence over it if they wanted to. Would they be willing to make certain sacrifices, put aside their egos, in order to ensure that all the citizens of Earth could live in relative safety and peace for an indefinite length of time? If I were one of those special people, I sure would.

The point is that the creation of transhuman intelligence should be for the entire Earth, and thinking in terms of trying to bend the benefits towards yourself or your little group is the greatest possible example of unjust theft. Transhuman intelligence should not be viewed as a piece of meat we can just grab at. Disputes among transhuman intelligences could have the potential to turn into the worst humanitarian disasters the world could ever see, such as mass torture or extermination of quadrillions of unique sentiences. A single grain of sand could become a vessel of the worst imaginable tortures. This is because our current theories of intelligence seem to allow for "uploading" - that is, creating sentient beings as software programs in computers that actually have awareness, intelligence, and so on. If uploading is possible, then the amount of intelligence one could create would depend on how much computing power they could fit into a given unit of space. Even if uploading isn't possible, transhuman intelligence could still theoretically accomplish a lot of evil or a lot of good. The stakes are very high. The only morally acceptable option is to advocate that the benefits of the Singularity be distributed fairly among all sentients present. Otherwise you are stealing.

All the features of the world we find ourselves embedded in - human nature, terrestrial life, a reality made up of atoms, life, death, reproduction, etc - are roughly arbitrary. We don't know exactly why they're there and we didn't choose them. The situation was so confusing that for thousands of years we've had to pretend as if an unimaginably powerful old man created it all. (And many are still pretending.) People are designed (by evolution) to disturb and hurt each other simply by acting in their own best interests. That is a horrible system. We need to rearrange the system in such a way that people can act in their own best interests and nobody ever gets hurt or disturbed. Maybe we will do this by making compromises, treaties, physically revising our cognitive interpretations of disturbance or hurt, creating the perfect "guardian angel system", I'm not really sure. If I were smarter, I might have a better idea of which solution would benefit everyone the most. That's what smarter-than-human intelligence is all about.

Why do people read books, play video games, and live in their own mental worlds all the time? Because the mental worlds we imagine and create for each other are sometimes better than the actual physical world - we all know it. Why is this? Why weren't we born into worlds that were actually the best? Probably because we live in one of the most likely universes for observers to be born into, not necessarily the best. If it turns out that we can create baby universes, then I would want as many of them as possible to contain sentiences enjoying themselves, and not at each other's expense. I believe massive numbers of such universes are physically possible and more desirable than randomly generated universes, or universes containing people suffering. The creation of such "Heaven Universes" could have massive intrinsic value. We'd be like God, except we'd actually be benevolent. (The idea of anyone actually deserving eternal suffering, or any suffering at all except in the service of minimizing overall suffering, is appalling.)

We sometimes forget - there is more than enough matter in this universe for everyone to be maximally enjoying themselves all the time, for the rest of eternity, as long as we make the right decisions and never define "maximal enjoyment" as "having more than rival X". All we need to do is take that step, together, and we could very well become happy and satisfied forever. The "I need to have more than everybody else" mentality is a direct result from evolving in a zero-sum environment with scarce resources, where someone else succeeding often means you and your genes losing. Hopefully we will make a glorious transition from a largely "zero-sum" environment, the world of human intelligences, to a "positive-sum" environment, the world of transhuman and human intelligences coexisting, where everyone can do what they want, within certain consensus boundaries, forever and ever until the end of time. If any "competition" exists, it could be for the sake of fun or progress alone, and will never be coupled together with the negative emotions so typical of evolved creatures. We could literally engineer our brains so that we'd be happy and satisfied almost all the time, plus normal and sane too. (We don't require sadness to appreciate happiness anymore than we require slavery to appreciate freedom.)

In the past, sometimes, yes, victory over someone else or personal gain have often correlated with genuine progress, but progress doesn't need to work this way forever. The process of evolution has taken billions or trillions of casualties, (depending on whether you think primates, animals, etc. are sentient) and tortured the same number for very long durations of time. Biological evolution, basically, is evil. To carry the principles of evolution and selfishness with us over into a superintelligent society would be analogous to porting the minds of bacteria into an entire civilization of human beings, only to carry out bacterial goals and probably bite one another completely to death. Disgusting and horrible, neh? To assume that transhuman intelligences won't be capable of progressing and advancing without the use of dischord or fighting is to underestimate their potential capabilities.

Maybe our standards suggest that we're reaching for some sort of altruism that is physically impossible. We aren't - the best form of altruism possible within the constraints of physical law will have to do. I believe that when we can engineer minds with complete access to their own source code, with altruistic philosophies, then we will have created minds that are almost completely trustworthy. Whether such intelligences are physically possible is still not entirely certain, but there is evidence that they very well could be. If they are, then such intelligences wouldn't change their philosophies due to sudden events, as humans sometimes do; they could be willingly "stuck" as altruists forever. Our current understanding of intelligences suggests that such minds could be possible, although they would clearly be unhumanlike. They would be humane rather than human.

In evolution, molecules "just happened" to learn how to replicate themselves, and meta-arrangements of molecules "just happened" to begin to regulate their own temperatures, reproduce more rapidly, and mix genetic codes for more durable meta-arrangements, which "just happened" to take actions beneficial for one another, which, universe willing, will "just happen" to create a world where nonconsensual suffering, ignorance, and death are abolished. If this occurs, it will be largely thanks to high altruism, and high intelligence implementing that altruism.

Posted by paul at April 28, 2004 11:05 PM | TrackBack