(2015-01-31) Frank Report Come With Us If You Want To Live

Sam Frank Report | Come With Us if You Want to Live. “Just by a quick show of hands, has anyone heard of a D.A.O. or an agent before?” asked Jonathan Mohan.

Forty or fifty of us were in a glass-walled coworking space at 23rd Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan, at a Meetup for a technology called Ethereum.

“Imagine if you wrote some program that could render a service, and it generated enough of a profit that it could cover its own costs. It could perpetuate indefinitely . . . because it’s just the code running itself.”

I came across the Tumblr of Blake Masters.

I was startled that all these negative ideologies could be condensed so easily into a positive worldview.

I started CrossFit and began tinkering with my diet

Then, in June 2013, I attended the Global Future 2045 International Congress at Lincoln Center. The gathering’s theme was “Towards a New Strategy for Human Evolution.” It was being funded by a Russian new-money type who wanted to accelerate “the realization of cybernetic immortality”; its keynote would be delivered by Ray Kurzweil.

I was buttonholed by a man whose name tag read michael vassar, metamed research.

His left eyelid twitched, his full face winced with effort as he told me about his “personal war against the universe.” My brain hurt. I backed away and headed home. But Vassar had spoken like no one I had ever met, and after Kurzweil’s keynote the next morning, I sought him out.

Early in 2012, he had stepped down as president of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, now called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), which was created by an autodidact named Eliezer Yudkowsky, who also started Less Wrong. Vassar had left to found MetaMed, a personalized-medicine company, with Jaan Tallinn of Skype and Kazaa, $500,000 from Peter Thiel, and a staff that included young rationalists who had cut their teeth arguing on Yudkowsky’s website. The idea behind MetaMed was to apply rationality to medicine — “rationality” here defined as the ability to properly research, weight, and synthesize the flawed medical information that exists in the world.

Yudkowsky

“In the very long run, obviously, you want to solve all the problems associated with having a stable, self-improving, beneficial-slash-benevolent AI, and then you want to build one.”

What is urgently needed, then, claims Yudkowsky, is an AI that shares our values and goals

Among those who study artificial intelligence, there’s no consensus on either point

In 2000, when Yudkowsky was twenty, he founded the Singularity Institute with the support of a few people he’d met at the Foresight Institute, a Palo Alto nanotech think tank

He met Peter Thiel at a Foresight Institute dinner in 2005 and invited him to speak at the first annual Singularity Summit.

In 2009, the blog posts became what he called Sequences on a new website: Less Wrong.

The next year, Yudkowsky began publishing Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality at fanfiction.net.

Of the 1,636 people who responded to a 2013 survey of Less Wrong’s readers, one quarter had found the site thanks to HPMoR.

Forty-two people, 2.6 percent, called themselves futarchists, after an idea (futarchy) from Robin Hanson, an economist and Yudkowsky’s former co-blogger, for reengineering democracy into a set of prediction markets in which speculators can bet on the best policies

In 2013, the Singularity Institute changed its name to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

Geoff Anders, the founder of Leverage Research, a “meta-level nonprofit” funded by Thiel, taught a class on goal factoring, a process of introspection that, after many tens of hours, maps out every one of your goals down to root-level motivations — the unchangeable “intrinsic goods,” around which you can rebuild your life. Goal factoring is an application of Connection Theory, Anders’s model of human psychology, which he developed as a Rutgers philosophy student disserting on Descartes, and Connection Theory is just the start of a universal renovation.

I talked to one of my roommates, a Google scientist who worked on neural nets. The CFAR workshop was just a whim to him, a tourist weekend. “They’re the nicest people you’d ever meet,” he said, but then he qualified the compliment. “Look around. If they were effective, rational people, would they be here? Something a little weird, no?”

Michael Vassar had predicted a “fairly total” cultural transition beginning within the next decade. This might sound insane, unless you buy into the near-term futurology emerging from outlets like TechCrunch and Wired, and from venture capitalists like Palihapitiya, Srinivasan, and Marc Andreessen.

Thiel and Vassar and Yudkowsky, for all their far-out rhetoric, take it on faith that corporate capitalism, unchecked just a little longer, will bring about this era of widespread abundance. Progress, Thiel thinks, is threatened mostly by the political power of what he calls the “unthinking demos.”

I’m interested in a class of technologies that preserve that political power. I went to the Ethereum Meetup because Buterin’s invention seemed to allow for experimentation in consensus-building

The Internet is built around hubs controlled by corporations

The leap that technologies like Ethereum ask us to make is to imagine a new, decentralized Internet — one in which every user is his, her, or its own node.

But what is this good for? Ethereum’s developers are building distributed storage and secure messaging systems — obviously desirable in the age of Snowden — but the primary innovation is in allowing users to execute contracts without the need for a trusted third party

More complicated smart contracts could allow connected devices to manage their own interactions: your appliances could run when power is cheaper; your self-driving car could negotiate with the smart-road system, which sets tolls dynamically in order to manage traffic.

But Ethereum’s true believers, like the people I met at Occupy, are more interested in remaking society itself. As the Internet continues to blend with the real world, decentralized contracts might become the building blocks of many decentralized forms of human governance, along libertarian or perhaps anarchist lines.

A group of friends or strangers, distributed throughout a neighborhood or around the world, could set up a mutual-aid society without involving an insurance company. Each person would pay into a contract that would automatically release money to an injured or unemployed party when certain mutually agreed-upon conditions were met.

If Thiel and his peers believe too much in the power of an elite, Ethereum offers an answer: an opt-in system of organizing human behavior with rules that can be made radically egalitarian

Vitalik Buterin was a libertarian and cautious anarcho-capitalist, he said, not a corporatist. He had visited Occupy Toronto and was basically sympathetic, but thought the protesters lacked the infrastructure to achieve their goals.

The belief that math, perfect information, and market mechanisms would solve the problem of politics seemed naïve, I said to Buterin. Sure, he said, but what was really naïve was trusting corruptible humans and opaque institutions with concentrated power. Better to formalize our values forthrightly in code. “On some level, everything is a market, even if you have a system that’s fully controlled by people in some fashion. You have a number of agents that are following specific rules, except that the rules of the system are enforced by the laws of physics instead of the laws of cryptography. “The cryptography approach,” he added, “is superior because you have much more freedom in determining what those rules are.” (game rule)