From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Jan 05 1999 - 16:49:00 MST
Bryan Moss wrote in "Re: Paths to Uploading":
>
> Since we're talking about plausible future scenarios it might be fun, being
> in the midst of millennium fever, to come up with some. No dates or
> predictions, just how you think the next few major technologies will
> pan-out. How about it? (And fifty years from now, when we're all six
> centimetres tall and living in habitat domes on the moon, we can have a good
> laugh at them.)
Unless somebody can do a "quick kill" in AI, I expect us to head into a
major storm within the next 15 years. Call it the Horizon Storm, or, if
you're being pessimistic, the Horizon Wars.
The next Big Thing, on the order of the computer, will be collaborative
filtering. This will spark the transition to the next Speed Phase, a
doubling time of about two to five years, where things will probably
remain until Singularity or extinction.
Around the same time collaborative filtering starts to exert substantial
stresses on the social fabric, the Age of the Neurohackers will make its
debut. The first major application will be (what I've named) Sunlight,
systems for taking off the evolved shackles on mental energy. There
will be a major fuss about neurohacking, extending into religious riots.
The majority of governments, including the U.S., will ban it. The
neurohackers will oppose in the first major confrontation with the
government, using collaborative filtering to rally the populace. I
don't know how this will turn out, but there is a substantial chance the
technical community will secede from the United States, or that major
scientific centers will be reduced by mobs, or both. It might (or might
NOT) be a good idea to first provoke an artificial confrontation on
better ground.
Nanotechnology is a wild card that could stay unplayed or enter the game
at any time. Nanotech's first applications will be entirely
destructive. The researchers at Zyvex or Foresight will naively release
the information and someone will reduce the Earth to grey goo. I don't
see a good way to bring in enough researchers to do anything interesting
without one of them trying to take over the world. If nanotech has
useful applications, it will be more powerful than anyone has predicted
and in different ways, just like electricity and computers. The instant
nanotech can create the computer hardware to run a seed AI, a
Singularity must be attempted immediately, before anything can go wrong.
However, the existing seed AIs will not have enough sophistication to
Transcend, and the ones designed to run on unlimited power will need
months of debugging and twiddling, during which someone will reduce the
Earth to grey goo.
At present, I expect nanotechnology to be developed before genuine
intelligence enhancement via neurohacking can overcome the
infant-to-adult lead times needed to create true Specialists.
Humanity's primary hope of survival lies in a quick kill via AI, and the
best way I see to do that is an Open Source effort on the scale of
Linux, which I intend to oversee at some point. Some IE via
neurohacking may be developed fast enough to be decisive, and the
existing Specialists (such as myself) may be sufficient.
Nanotechnological destruction can best be prevented by strong security
precautions at Zyvex, researchers required to work in triples (pairs
isn't good enough), everyone required to submit to the best truth tests
available, and (unlikely) the actual nanotech equipment on the Moon next
to a nuclear weapon.
Major technologies: Collaborative filtering; neurohacking; nanotech.
Our best hope: A seed AI.
Most probable kill: Grey goo; nuclear war provoked by a nanotech threat.
One way or the other, it should all be over by: 2025, 2005 min, 2040 max.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/AI_design.temp.html
http://pobox.com/~sentience/sing_analysis.html
Disclaimer: Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I think I know.
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