From: John Clark (jonkc@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Sun Sep 20 1998 - 21:15:30 MDT
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We all seem to agree that in a million years nearly everything would be
so radically different that the world would be incomprehensible to us,
the question is whether this transition could happen in a time that was
short by human standards. I think a breakthrough in Nanotechnology
alone could bring about such a singularity in days perhaps hours, but I
know Robin disagrees with me and I'm not in the mood to rehash that
argument. Eliezer has made a very strong case that an AI could also
quickly change the world beyond recognition. I can't prove either of
these ideas with mathematical precision but I'm pretty sure both are
true. I'm a little less certain that a Quantum Computer could ever be
built, but if it could the world would never be the same. Maybe biology
could radically transform things too, not in days but perhaps in 20
years or less.
The genetic code was discovered 40 years ago but recently evidence has
been found that a much higher genetic language must also exist.
Walter Gehring of the University of Basel in Switzerland found a gene
that's crucial for the development of eyes in mice, he put that mouse
gene into the leg of a fly embryo. When it became an adult the fly had
a normal sized perfectly formed eye on its leg. The really amazing
thing is that it was a perfectly normal compound fruit fry eye, not a
vastly different mouse type eye, even though it was a mouse gene. This
gene must be a sentence in a language much more abstract than the
genetic code and it must say "build an eye here", but it doesn't bother
to say exactly how to build it. It can't deal with the billions of
different reactions in protein synthesis that must occur, it can't even
worry about gross anatomy, it just says "build an eye here" and leaves
the details to other parts of the cell mechanism. It's amazing that
organisms as different as a fly and a mouse, who's last common ancestor
lived 500 million years ago, nevertheless use the same high level
language. The much lower level genetic code is also universal, I guess
when nature establishes a standard it finds it almost impossible to
change.
I started thinking about Gehring's experiment when I read an article in
the September 4 1998 issue of Science about chimpanzees, a Primate
Genome project has been started and should prove interesting because
genetically a chimp is closer to a human than it is to a gorilla.
Only 1.5% of the human genome is different from that of a chimp, and
most of that is just DNA, only about .5% of the active genes are
different. This would also explain how evolution was able to evolve
fully modern humans from our ape like ancestors so rapidly.
These genes are few in number but they're what makes us human, and they
must be written in the same abstract high level language that Gehring
found. If we understood that language then genetic engineering would be
easy, if we want a bigger brain no need to painstakingly specify where
every neuron should go, just write "make bigger brain" and let the
skills all cells already possess handle the construction details. Ok,
we might have to worry about a few details, like increasing the blood
flow to the head for the larger brain, but then again maybe not, after
all if the language is powerful enough to put an eye in a knee with
just one command.
Of course we don't know this language, we will someday but if we only
learn it a little at a time it can't produce a singularity, however I
think there are reasons to suspect that once we start to learn it we'll
learn all of it in a hurry. The language has not changed in half a
billion years so life could have not have endlessly modified it into
an ugly spaghetti code, and if all multicellular animals use it that
may mean it has a unifying logic, a logic that evolution can use to get
at traits and enhance the beneficial ones without causing too many side
effects from interrelations that are so complex they'd seem virtually
random.
Once we understand that logic we may have a eureka moment and suddenly
go from total confusion to complete enlightenment, it has happened
before. When people were working on the structure of DNA some worried
that when it was found it would turn out to be dull, that is, it would
be so complicated that it would tell us nothing about how life worked.
Their fears were unfounded, the structure proved to be both simple and
beautiful, and it immediately enabled everyone to understood how life
encoded information on the lowest level. It's not impossible that the
same thing could happen in our understanding of higher level
organization, such knowledge might not be much more complex than the
genetic code, but it would certainly be vastly more powerful and would
change the world beyond recognition.
I admit it's a little odd that there are 4 completely different paths
that might lead toward a singularity, but that's the way I see it. I'm
absolutely certain everything I've said it true, perhaps I'm even
correct too, time will tell.
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
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