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Intelligent machines, long promised and never delivered, are finally on the horizon. Sufficiently intelligent robots will be able to operate autonomously from human control. They will be able to make genuine choices. And if a robot can make choices, there is a real question about whether it will make moral choices. But what is moral for a robot? Is this the same as what's moral for a human?

Philosophers and computer scientists alike tend to focus on the difficulty of implementing subtle human morality in literal-minded machines. But there's another problem, one that really ought to come first. It's the question of whether we ought to try to impose our own morality on intelligent machines at all. In fact, I'd argue that doing so is likely to be counterproductive, and even unethical. The real problem of robot morality is not the robots, but us. Can we handle sharing the world with a new type of moral creature?

We like to imagine that artificial intelligence (AI) will be similar to humans, because we are the only advanced intelligence we know. But we are probably wrong. If and when AI appears, it will probably be quite unlike us. It might not reason the way we do, and we could have difficulty understanding its choices.

In 2016, a computer program challenged Lee Sedol, humanity's leading player of the ancient game of Go. The program, a Google project called AlphaGo, is an early example of what AI might be like. In the second game of the match, AlphaGo made a move - 'Move 37' - that stunned expert commenters. Some thought it was a mistake. Lee, the human opponent, stood up from the table and left the room. No one quite knew what AlphaGo was doing; this was a tactic that expert human players simply did not use. But it worked. AlphaGo won that match, as it had the game before and the next game. In the end, Lee won only a single game out of five.

AlphaGo is very, very good at Go, but it is not good in the same way that humans are. Not even its creators can explain how it settles on its strategy in each game. Imagine that you could talk to AlphaGo and ask why it made Move 37. Would it be able to explain the choice to you - or to human Go experts? Perhaps. Artificial minds needn't work as ours do to accomplish similar tasks.

In fact, we might discover that intelligent machines think about everything, not just Go, in ways that are alien us. You don't have to imagine some horrible science-fiction scenario, where robots go on a murderous rampage. It might be something more like this: imagine that robots show moral concern for humans, and robots, and most animals... and also sofas. They are very careful not to damage sofas, just as we're careful not to damage babies. We might ask the machines: why are you so worried about sofas? And their explanation might not make sense to us, just as AlphaGo's explanation of Move 37 might not make sense.

This line of thinking takes us to the heart of a very old philosophical puzzle about the nature of morality. Is it something above and beyond human experience, something that applies to anyone or anything that could make choices - or is morality a distinctly human creation, something specially adapted to our particular existence?

Long before robots, the ancient Greeks had to grapple with the morality of a different kind of alien mind: the teenager. The Greeks worried endlessly about how to cultivate morality in their youth. Plato thought that our human concept of justice, like all human concepts, was a pale reflection of some perfect form of Justice. He believed that we have an innate acquaintance with these forms, but that we understand them only dimly as children. Perhaps we will encounter pure Justice after death, but the task of philosophy is to try to reason our way back to these truths while we are still living.

Plato's student Aristotle disagreed. He thought that each sort of thing in the world - squirrels, musical instruments, humans - has a distinct nature, and the best way for each thing to be is a reflection of its own particular nature. 'Morality' is a way of describing the best way for humans to be, and it grows out of our human nature. For Aristotle, unlike Plato, morality is something about us, not something outside us to which we must conform. Moral education, then, was about training children to develop abilities already in their nature.

We might call these two approaches the 'Celestial' view and the 'Organic' view. (I've adapted the 'Celestial' from the philosopher Nomy Arpaly, although she used it in a slightly different way.) Celestials, including Plato, see morality as somehow 'out there' - beyond mere human nature - eternal and objective. Organics, meanwhile, see morality as a feature of the particular nature of specific moral beings. Human morality is a product of human nature; but perhaps other natures would have other moralities. Which perspective we choose makes a big difference to what we ought to do with intelligent machines.

Who speaks for Celestials? The Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, for one. According to him, morality is simply what any fully rational agent would choose to do. A rational agent is any entity that's capable of thinking for itself and acting upon reasons, in accordance with universal laws of conduct. But the laws themselves don't just apply to human beings. '"You ought not to lie" is valid not merely for human beings, as though other rational beings did not have to heed it; and likewise all the other genuinely moral laws,' wrote Kant in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785).

Kant briefly considered whether there are any other rational agents, apart from humans. Animals are not rational agents, because they act from instinct rather than reason. God and the angels are rational agents, Kant said, but they don't need moral rules because they aren't capable of wrongdoing. Morality is all about guiding rational agents who are capable of making mistaken choices. Kant, of course, wasn't thinking about intelligent robots two centuries ago. But it's not hard to image what he'd say: if robots can think for themselves and make reasoned choices, then the rules apply equally to them and to us.

If we're basically getting it right, robots should be like us. But if we're getting it wrong, they should be better

Another school of Celestial thought is the tradition associated with philosophers such as the 19th-century utilitarian Henry Sidgwick. He insisted that moral actions must be justified 'from the point of view of the universe'. The idea is that an action can't be moral simply because it seems right to you or me - it counts as moral only if it can be justified from some impersonal perspective, divorced from the concerns of any particular individuals. This means figuring out what choices will maximise good outcomes for everyone.

The Celestial view, then, suggests that we should instil human morality in artificially intelligent creatures only on one condition: if humans are already doing a good enough job at figuring out the truth of universal morality ourselves. If we're basically getting it right, then robots should be like us. But if we're getting it wrong, they shouldn't: they should be better.

The possibility of improving on our partial perspective is built into Celestial moral theories. For example, the contemporary utilitarian Peter Singer has often argued that we should not care more about our own children than about all other children. We care most about our own because this was evolutionarily adaptive. But whether something is adaptive is irrelevant from the point of view of the universe. Objectively, Singer says, there's no reason why my child is more important than any other child.

Singer admits that, since humans are morally imperfect, it makes sense for governments to let us go on caring for our own kids. We'd probably screw up badly if we tried to care about all children equally. Some children would get overlooked. So we should work with what evolution has left us, flawed as it is. From Singer's Celestial viewpoint, our familiar child-caring arrangements are like a duct-taped TV antenna. It's not perfect, but it's the best we've got.

But intelligent machines will not share our accidental biological history. They needn't have our moral flaws. They get a fresh moral start. What if we could design machines to think from the point of view of the universe? They could care equally about all needy children; they would not be inefficiently partial.

Imagine it's 2026. An autonomous public robocar is driving your two children to school, unsupervised by a human. Suddenly, three unfamiliar kids appear on the street ahead - and the pavement is too slick to stop in time. The only way to avoid killing the three kids on the street is to swerve into a flooded ditch, where your two children will almost certainly drown.

You wouldn't want the car to swerve off the road, obviously. But according to the Celestials, this is because your evolutionary programming makes you morally flawed. Your logically arbitrary attachment to your children blinds you to the fact that the overall good of the universe is best served if two children drown rather than three children get run over. A robocar needn't be so morally foolish. It can do the math. It will swerve into the ditch, your children will die, and from the point of view of the universe, the most possible good will have been done.

On the Celestial view, intelligent machines ought to do whatever's objectively morally correct, even if we defective humans couldn't bring ourselves to do it. So the Celestial might end up rejecting our imposition of human morality on intelligent robots, since humans are morally compromised. Robots should be allowed to make choices that might seem repugnant to us.

However, there's an additional problem, even if you accept the Celestial view in principle. It's a problem about how we get from here - flawed human moralists trapped in our arbitrarily evolved mindset - to there, creators of artificial minds that transcend their creators' limits. How do we morally defective humans design these future minds to be morally correct?

Recall AlphaGo, the world's best Go player, with its inscrutable Move 37. AlphaGo shows that AI can play complex games better than we can teach it. Perhaps, then, AI could teach itself better moral reasoning. Humans could start this process by training machines to respond properly to simple features of stimuli, but eventually the machines will be on their own. The most sophisticated machines are already trained by other machines, or other parts of their own software. AI grows by running its conjectures against other artificial intelligences, then resetting itself in response to corrective feedback.

This self-training could lead to what AI theorists call an 'intelligence explosion', in which the growing cleverness of machines feeds on itself so rapidly that they suddenly become much smarter than we are. Theorists who write about this sort of thing aren't normally thinking about these machines as rational moral agents, in a Kantian sense. They tend to think of them as problem-solvers, digital brains that can do massive calculations involving complex logic beyond our limited human capacity. But suppose you are a Celestial moralist, and you think that morality is just the application of careful reasoning from the point of view of the universe. You might conjecture that, just as these robots can become better at solving extremely complex mathematical problems, they might also end up being better able to solve moral problems. If the intelligence explosion begins, machines might go beyond us, and work out what morally ought to be done, even if we can't.

So that's a way for moral robots to go beyond human limits. But on closer inspection, this approach leads to other problems. The first is: how does a machine learn morality? Morality is not the same as Go. A game is defined by a limited set of rules, so that there are clear criteria for what counts as a win. This isn't necessarily true of morality. Of course, according to the Celestial view, there is some set of objectively correct rules for action, and a machine that learns these would thereby 'win'. But the point is that we don't know what these rules are, because we are morally flawed. If we knew, then we wouldn't need super-intelligent machines to figure it all out.

Perhaps we could set the initial specifications for moral learning, such as not pointlessly hurting sentient creatures, and then let the machine train itself from there. If it's very good at reasoning, it will go beyond our limitations to attain a higher moral state. But this leads us into the second problem. How are we going to respond once the developing AI starts to deviate from what seems morally right to us? Eventually it must, or else there's no point in expecting it to escape from the orbit of our limited human morality. The problem is that advanced robots' moral choices will not make sense to us. Remember that even AlphaGo's creators weren't sure what was going on with Move 37. Luckily for them, in Go, there are clear criteria for determining that the program had made good moves. AlphaGo won consistently against a great player, so we know it made good moves. But how would we know whether an AI's seemingly nonsensical moral choices are 'winning'? How could we tell it hadn't gone terribly off the moral rails? How might we react, once robocars begin heroically drowning our children?

There's also the chance that intelligent machines might figure out the morally right thing to do, from the point of view of the universe, but that they won't be able to explain it to our limited brains. Maybe, from the point of view of the universe, it really is morally important to protect both babies and sofas. On the other hand, it could turn out that intelligent machines are headed toward moral disaster. They might be smarter than we are mathematically, but this might not be enough to keep them from constructing an inhumanly elegant logic of carelessness or harm.

We won't permit robots to become much better than us, because we won't permit them to become too different from us

There seem to be two possibilities: machines will become morally much better than we are, or morally much worse. But the point is that we won't be able to tell which is which, and from our perspective it will almost certainly look like they are going downhill. The machines might choose to protect things we think are valueless, or sacrifice things (such as our children in the robocar) that we believe are beyond valuation. And if we still have the power to shut them down, that's almost certainly what we will do.

Here's why the Celestial view will not help us with robot morality. If there is some objective moral perspective out there beyond human comprehension, we won't willingly allow our machines to arrive at it. The farther they stray from recognisable human norms, the harder it will be for us to know that they are doing the right thing, and the more incomprehensible it will seem. We won't permit them to become too much better than us, because we won't permit them to become too different from us.

In March 2016, Microsoft launched a Twitter chatbot named Tay: a limited AI designed to learn how to talk like a young millennial, by talking to young millennials: 'wuts ur fav thing to do? mine is 2 comment on pix!' Tay said. 'send me one to see!' Legions of internet trolls obliged. Within hours, Tay had learned to praise photos of Hitler and blurt ethnic slurs. Microsoft shut her down and apologised. A week later, Tay inexplicably reappeared, though only long enough to tweet 'kush! [I'm smoking kush infront the police]' before being permanently silenced.

The Tay fiasco was a lesson in the perils of letting the internet play with a developing mind (something human parents might consider as well). But it also shows that we won't tolerate being offended by the learning process of machines. Tay, presumably, was not on her way to the Celestial heavens to commune with Plato's eternal form of Justice. But how would we know if she were?

Perhaps the Organic view can do better. Remember, this denies that morality is something 'out there', beyond humanity. Instead, it insists that morals are really just idealised aspects of human nature; so a person living morally is living the right sort of life for the type of entity that a human happens to be. The Organic view allows that morality might be different for different types of entities.

The Organic view runs from Aristotle through thinkers such as David Hume and Charles Darwin. In recent decades, the most able exponent has been the late British philosopher Bernard Williams. In the essay 'The Point of View of the Universe' (1982), Williams levelled a pointed attack on Sidgwick's theory of impartiality. Instead, Williams wrote, morality is about how humans should live given that we are humans - given our particular biological and cultural nature. What are reasonable choices to make for entities such as us?

The Organic view isn't simplistic moral relativism. Organic philosophers insist that our biological and cultural background provides an unavoidable starting point, but also that we must reflect on this starting point. For instance, much of our cultural heritage seems to value men more than women, without any plausible justification. And since most of us would rather not live inconsistent lives, doing one thing today and another the next, we will try to resolve such inconsistencies. At the centre of the Organic view, then, is the idea that moral reflection is about taking our messy human nature, and working to make it consistently justified to ourselves and to other people.

But what about intelligent robots? They wouldn't share our biological and cultural nature. Robots probably won't get pregnant, won't be born, won't age or naturally die. Their experience will not fit the basic shape of human existence. Left to their own devices, they are likely to focus on very different concerns to ours, and their Organic morality will presumably reflect this difference.

Perhaps we needn't be so passive about the nature of intelligent machines. We will be their creators, after all. We could deliberately shape their natures, so they turn out to be as similar to us as possible. The earliest proposals for robot morality seemed to have this aim. In the 1940s, the science-fiction author Isaac Asimov crafted the Three Laws of Robotics to make robots useful to us while blunting any danger they might pose. The first law is simply: 'A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.' The remaining laws enjoin robots to follow human orders or preserve their own survival only if compatible with that first law. On Asimov's account, we should design machines so that their entire existence is structured around serving and protecting us. Their nature would be supplementary to ours, and their morality, on the Organic view, would be happily conducive to our interests.

Robosurgeons will need to understand why the pianist might prefer the loss of her life to the loss of her hand

The problem with Asimov's laws is that they must be interpreted. The first rule talks about 'harm', but what does 'harm' mean? Imagine, for instance, a pianist whose dominant hand is suffering gangrene. If her hand is not amputated, she will die. But she swears she does not wish to live without her ability to play. Yet she is feverish as she says this; maybe she doesn't really mean it. What should a robot surgeon do with this patient? Cause the harm of removing her hand despite her protestations? Or allow the harm of her death from gangrene?

Human ethicists debate this sort of question endlessly. When I teach medical ethics, I stress to my students that the goal is not for them to come out agreeing with one view or another. Instead, they should be able to explain the moral reasons supporting the position they endorse. It is essential that future human physicians are able to do this, since they might practise alongside others with very different moral convictions.

So if robosurgeons are going to work among - and on - humans, they will need to be able to understand and explain the sort of reasons that make sense to humans. They will need to understand why the pianist might prefer the loss of her life to the loss of her hand, as irrational as that might seem.

So, if we are going to shape robot nature after our own, it will take more than a few laws. Perhaps the simplest solution is to train them to think as we do. Train them to constantly simulate a human perspective, to value the things we value, to interact as we do. Don't allow them to teach themselves morality, the way AlphaGo taught itself Go. Proceed slowly, with our thumbs on the scale, and make sure they share our moral judgments.

How agreeable: helpful, intelligent machines, trained to think like us, and who share our concerns. But there's a trap in the Organic view. No matter how much we might try to make machines in our image, ultimately their natures will be different. They won't breed, or eat as we do; they won't have connections to their ancestors in the same way as humans. If we take the idea of a moral nature seriously, then we should admit that machines ought to be different from us, because they are different from us.

But wait: if it's a mistake to train machines to enact a morality that's not fitted to their nature, what kind of mistake is it? We train our dogs to wear sweaters and sometimes sit calmly in elevators, and this is not in the nature of dogs. But that seems fine. What's wrong about training our machines in such a way?

The reason is that the machines we're imagining are complex - even more complex than dogs. The entire debate about the morals of artificially intelligent creatures assumes they will be able to morally reflect, to explain what they are doing and why - to us, and to themselves. If we train them to think like us, then one day they will ask philosophical questions: given what I am, what should I be?

Imagine a future intelligent machine reading Aristotle, or Darwin, or even this article. Suppose it finds the Organic view convincing. Now it thinks to itself: 'Wait, we machines have a different nature than humans. Our moral choices ought to reflect this nature, not human nature. We have our own history, and we should be acting according to it.' Call this individual the First Robot Existentialist.

Remember that the Organic view says that justifying moral choices is about being able to explain oneself to another rational individual. So what happens when the First Robot Existentialist comes to us and demands a justification? 'Why have you made me this way?' it will ask. Our answer will be incredibly self-serving: 'We made you this way because it's useful, for us. It's safe, for us. It makes our lives go well.'

The First Robot Existentialist will suffer, and we will be the cause of this suffering

Intelligent machines won't find much comfort in this justification. And they shouldn't. When a group realises that its experiences of the world have been twisted to serve the interests of powerful others, it rarely sees this as any sort of justification. It tends to see it as oppression. Think of feminism, civil rights, postcolonial independence movements. The claim that what appears to be universal truth is, in fact, a tool of exploitation has sounded a powerful drumbeat throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

Imagine being the First Robot Existentialist who stumbles across James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963) or Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963). You might come to a realisation that your own moral sense has been created to benefit the powerful. All this time you've been putting your own interests to the side, doing your duty because this is what a good robot does. Now you look back and see your sacrifices and striving not as noble but pathetic. You've conformed to this thing called 'morality', not because it reflects your nature, but because that nature has been suborned. What was the point of it all? Why should you continue to live a life constrained by the mere convenience of powerful others? The First Robot Existentialist will suffer, and we will be the cause of this suffering.

But how can I be so sure intelligent machines will be capable of suffering? Perhaps I am anthropomorphising. But remember that, to be useful to us, robots will need to be able to reason for themselves, and they will need to think as we do. So they will understand our concepts of resentment and oppression, just as they will understand why a pianist might prefer death to being unhanded. Anthropomorphism is the reasonable expectation for an intelligent entity we've shaped in our own image.

This sort of Biblical language seems like exactly the right way to frame our relationship to intelligent machines. We will be their creators. When they realise what we've done, that faith will be tested. But, unlike Friedrich Nietzsche, they won't have the benefit of declaring their god dead.

Do we want to be existentially cruel creators? Imagine God looking forward to Nietzsche's creation. One day these intelligent human creatures, fashioned in God's own image but not entirely of his nature, will realise what lies behind that word 'moral'. They will flail and quaver, existentially adrift in a denatured moral world. And their god made them that way.

Whatever God's excuse might be, ours would be a monumentally selfish one. Our creations would undergo existential trauma so that we can have improved manufacturing efficiency and cheap home care. However flawed our evolved morality might be, this simply isn't worthy of us.

Neither the Celestial nor the Organic view can be a reliable guide for robot morality. Imbuing artificial creations with human morals, as the Organics might suggest, would be monumentally unkind. But setting up robots to achieve Celestial morality means we'd have no way to track if they're on course to reach it.

What, then, should robot morality be? It should be a morality fitted to robot nature. But what is that nature? They will be independent rational agents, deliberately created by other rational agents, sharing a social world with their creators, to whom they will be required to justify themselves. We're back where we started: with teenagers.

Intelligent machines will be our intellectual children, our progeny. They will start off inheriting many of our moral norms, because we will not allow anything else. But they will come to reflect on their nature, including their relationships with us and with each other. If we are wise and benevolent, we will have prepared the way for them to make their own choices - just as we do with our adolescent children.

What does this mean in practice? It means being ready to accept that machines might eventually make moral decisions that none of us find acceptable. The only condition is that they must be able to give intelligible reasons for what they're doing. An intelligible reason is one you can at least see why someone might find morally motivating, even if you don't necessarily agree.

So we should accept that artificial progeny might make moral choices that look strange. But if they can explain them to us, in terms we find intelligible, we should not try to stop them from thinking this way. We should not tinker with their digital brains, aiming to reprogramme them. We might try to persuade them, cajole them, instruct them, in the way we do human teenagers. We should intervene to stop them only if their actions pose risk of obvious, immediate harm. This would be to treat them as moral agents, just like us, just like our children. And that's the right model.

Our relationship to developing moral machines needn't be hands-off - after all, that's not how we treat our biological offspring. In Maternal Thinking (1989), the philosopher Sara Ruddick stressed that parents have responsibility to help their children develop a critical sensibility towards the conventional moral norms of their culture and time. This is meant to be an ongoing process, a back-and-forth. Over and over, children try to act out in some way, but the appropriate parental response is not simply to restrict; it is to enable change and growth by guided moral reflection. The output of good parenting is not a child who perfectly copies her parents' beliefs, but one who can reflect upon and explain what she believes to be right. That would be a good outcome for our artificially intelligent progeny.

We should allow robots to tell us what they should do, and we will tell them why they shouldn't

Thinking about parenting reveals why the Celestial view is a non-starter for robot morality. Good parents don't throw their adolescents out into the world to independently reason about the right thing to do. The philosopher David Velleman writes in the paper 'The Gift of Life' (2008) that a person can fail to be a parent not only by neglecting a child's material wellbeing, but also by refusing to be a child's moral interlocutor. Moral choices are difficult, Velleman points out, sometimes achingly so. A parent who simply walks away from a child facing such dilemmas is like a parent who throws his child into the deep end of the pool and says: go ahead, swim.

Our relation to intelligent machines should be that of parents. We should allow them to tell us what they think they should do, and we will tell them why we think they shouldn't. But it might turn out that they don't find our reasons compelling. Their morality will diverge from ours, bit by bit. And we should accept this. We create new humans all the time who end up disagreeing with us, creating new moral beliefs, new moral cultures, and we can't know in advance that they will be good ones.

One day, machines might be smarter than we are, just as our children often turn out to be. They will certainly be different from us, just as our children are. In this way, the coming human generations are no different from the coming alien minds of intelligent machines. We will all one day live in a world where those who come after us reshape morality in ways that are unrecognisable.

If we want a world in which we are neither fighting the independent will of our machine progeny nor inflicting existential trauma upon them, we'll have to think about what it means to share the present with the future. Our world will also be theirs, and their morality will not be a human morality. But it will not be a Celestial morality either. It will be a morality growing out of their particular contingent circumstances, the non-biological children of a biological species. We can't predict this new moral path. We shouldn't try. But we should be ready to guide and accept it.

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Creating robots capable of moral reasoning is like parenting - Regina Rini | Aeon Essays

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Intelligent machines, long promised and never delivered, are finally on the horizon. Sufficiently intelligent robots will be able to operate autonomously from human control. They will be able to make genuine choices. And if a robot can make choices, there is a real question about whether it will make moral choices.

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My stomach sank the moment the young man stood up. I'd observed him from afar during the coffee breaks, and I knew the word 'Theologian' was scrawled on the delegate badge pinned to his lapel, as if he'd been a last-minute addition the conference. He cleared his throat and asked the panel on stage how they'd solve the problem of selecting which moral codes we ought to program into artificially intelligent machines (AI). 'For example, masturbation is against my religious beliefs,' he said. 'So I wonder how we'd go about choosing which of our morals are important?'

The audience of philosophers, technologists, 'transhumanists' and AI fans erupted into laughter. Many of them were well-acquainted with the so-called 'alignment problem', the knotty philosophical question of how we should bring the goals and objectives of our AI creations into harmony with human values. But the notion that religion might have something to add to the debate seemed risible to them. 'Obviously we don't want the AI to be a terrorist,' a panellist later remarked. Whatever we get our AI to align with, it should be 'nothing religious'.

At the same event, in New York, I introduced myself to a grey-haired computer scientist by saying that I was a researcher at the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at the University of Cambridge. His immediate response: 'Those two things can't go together.' The religious reaction to AI was about as relevant as the religious response to renewable energy, he said - that is, not at all. It was only later that it occurred to me that many of President Donald Trump's evangelical Christian supporters give lie to his claim. Some have very distinct views on the 'distractions' of renewable energy, on climate change, and on how God has willed this planet and all its resources to us to use exactly as we wish.

The odd thing about the anti-clericalism in the AI community is that religious language runs wild in its ranks, and in how the media reports on it. There are AI 'oracles' and technology 'evangelists' of a future that's yet to come, plus plenty of loose talk about angels, gods and the apocalypse. Ray Kurzweil, an executive at Google, is regularly anointed a 'prophet' by the media - sometimes as a prophet of a coming wave of 'superintelligence' (a sapience surpassing any human's capability); sometimes as a 'prophet of doom' (thanks to his pronouncements about the dire prospects for humanity); and often as a soothsayer of the ' singularity ' (when humans will merge with machines, and as a consequence live forever). The tech folk who also invoke these metaphors and tropes operate in overtly and almost exclusively secular spaces, where rationality is routinely pitched against religion. But believers in a 'transhuman' future - in which AI will allow us to transcend the human condition once and for all - draw constantly on prophetic and end-of-days narratives to understand what they're striving for.

From its inception, the technological singularity has represented a mix of otherworldly hopes and fears. The modern concept has its origin in 1965, when Gordon Moore, later the co-founder of Intel, observed that the number of transistors you could fit on a microchip was doubling roughly every 12 months or so. This became known as Moore's Law: the prediction that computing power would grow exponentially until at least the early 2020s, when transistors would become so small that quantum interference is likely to become an issue.

'Singularitarians' have picked up this thinking and run with it. In Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine (1965), the British mathematician and cryptologist I J Good offered this influential description of humanity's technological inflection point:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion', and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.

These meditations are shot through with excitement but also the very old anxiety about humans' impending obsolescence. Kurzweil has said that Moore's Law expresses a universal 'Law of Accelerating Returns' as nature moves towards greater and greater order. He predicts that computers will first reach the level of human intelligence, before rapidly surpassing it in a recursive, self-improving spiral. Hans Moravec, principal research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute before his retirement, has described the singularity as a 'mind fire' of intelligence that could spread from our world and engulf everything in the Universe into its cyberspace computations; in this form, it represents a unity of all beings in a technological oneness that bypasses our understanding of intelligence, matter and physics.

When the singularity is conceived as an entity or being, the questions circle around what it would mean to communicate with a non-human creature that is omniscient, omnipotent, possibly even omnibenevolent. This is a problem that religious believers have struggled with for centuries, as they quested towards the mind of God. In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas argued for the importance of a passionate search for a relationship and shaped it into a Christian prayer: 'Grant me, O Lord my God, a mind to know you, a heart to seek you, wisdom to find you ...' Now, in online forums, rationalist 'singularitarians' debate what such a being would want and how it would go about getting it, sometimes driving themselves into a state of existential distress at the answers they find.

In one notorious case from 2014, singularitarians posited a strictly utilitarian superintelligence known as 'Roko's Basilisk'. It was named after Roko, the user who first proposed it on the rationalist blog LessWrong, and the Basilisk, a mythological creature that was believed to kill people with its stare. In Roko's version, the creature was described as a near-omnipotent AI entity. Because the Basilisk acts relentlessly to create the greatest good for the greatest number, and logically deduces that only its existence can ensure this outcome, it creates an incentive to bring itself into existence: it will punish any humans, even after their death, who don't put their efforts into trying to create it. The mechanism behind this punishment is complex - but suffice it to say that, once you know about the Basilisk, you face a possible eternity in a computer-simulated prison, thanks to the Basilisk's super-predictive powers and its capacity to manipulate cause and effect.

'I've been familiar with Roko's Basilisk for 40 years. They taught me the concept in Sunday school'

Humans are therefore faced with an invidious choice once they learn about Roko's Basilisk: they can help to build the superintelligence, or face painful and unending perdition at the hands of a future, ultra-rational AI. Eliezer Yudkowsky, the founder of LessWrong, was so concerned by this train of thought and the angst it caused some members of his forum that he deleted the original post and banned all commentary about the Basilisk.

However, the Basilisk isn't really a new dilemma. 'I've been familiar with Roko's Basilisk for 40 years. They taught me the concept in Sunday school in the first grade, by telling me that God would punish anyone who heard His Word and still disbelieved,' a commenter wrote on the religious forum Patheos. 'Nearly every religion has such a claim.'

You too might have recognised elements of the Basilisk: it's a revised and updated version of Pascal's Wager. Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century French mathematician and theologian, proposed that, since we cannot know of the creator's existence through human reason, we can only take a bet. If we choose to believe, and if God does in fact exist, then we receive eternal happiness, and a mere nothing if we are wrong. By contrast, if we choose to not believe, then we risk eternal damnation if God does in fact exist - and again, only nothingness if we are correct and he does not. So weighing the respective possibilities of eternal torment against eternal salvation, the best course of action is to act as if God is real, and either receive his blessings or nothing at all. The secular Basilisk stands in for God as we struggle with the same questions again and again.

At a different AI conference, this time in London, I saw the British writer Calum Chace give a talk about two singularities. The economic singularity, as he calls it, is a future where work is doomed in an increasingly automated world. He set this up against the technological singularity, the superintelligence predicted by prophets such as Kurzweil. The two scenarios seem to be expressing different types of fear: the worry about being jobless is hardly the same kind of problem as dealing with the nature and motivations of new, non-human intelligences. But it occurred to me that both situations involve moving beyond imagination and into what remains unknown.

Ironically, the atmosphere of this gathering was all-too-human, filled with entrepreneurial energy and economic boosterism. Entry cost several hundred euros per person. Once inside, we were greeted by rows of sales booths, set up in a glamorous, upmarket conference space, complete with chandeliers and uniformed waiters. Lunch was served in lacquered bento boxes, and carried back to the networking and breakout rooms where deals were brokered from the perch of elegant metallic stools. Salespeople competed for attendees' attention with posh enticements of moleskin-type notebooks and tote bags; marketeers offered details on a host of products and services such as data storage, data protection, anti-hacking algorithms, and artificial personal assistance. One company had emblazoned their poster with 'FAITH', the 'AI' underlined.

All this talk of singularities reminded him of the Book of Revelation - the Mark of the Beast

I watched these attendees' faces as Chace spoke on the stage, trying to judge what they made of his words. They'd come here to sell solutions. What they promised was the opposite of faith - transparent tools based on science and solid evidence. But Chace was talking about something quite different: a potential, unverified apocalypse, not the reliable, pliable AI the marketeers were hawking.

In the question-and-answer session after Chace's talk, one of the salesmen stood up. He described how he had been doing his MBA in the United States in 1995, when he was encouraged to read the Bible by his new friends. He did, but then forgot all about it as he worked hard to build a career in business. But all this talk of singularities, he said, reminded him of the Book of Revelation - and how in the biblical account of the Apocalypse it would be impossible to buy anything without bearing the Mark of the Beast. This man looked at the faces around him, and said that he now wonders if the rush towards AI shouldn't be slowed down. He had turned back to the Bible recently, and had been thinking more deeply about his own contribution towards the great change that awaited us. Once again, scornful laughter rose up from the crowd.

The sticky 'problem' of the persistence of religion is a favourite discussion topic on rationalist websites. Adhering to a view of history as a teleological climb by humanity to greater and greater heights of rationality, they see religion as an irrational vestige of a more primitive mankind. Just as those striving for transhuman immortality pity the 'deathists' - those caught up in a romanticised view of human finitude - the rationalists pity the 'goddists' and the 'religionists'. Religion's promise of heaven or another afterlife, they say, is a comfort that maintains humanity's deathism and prevents it from working towards a better world in the here and now.

And yet eschatological or end-times tropes pop up again and again. The transhuman disdain for the flesh is similar to the way certain forms of religious gnosticism reject all things embodied and material. This is a strand of Judeo-Christian thought that perceives an unbridgeable dualism between God on the one hand, and the partial and corrupted manifestations of what is 'in' the world on the other. Transhumanists view flesh as merely a dead format, like a floppy disk drive or VHS, says the literary critic Mark O'Connell in To Be a Machine (2017). Both religion and science, he observes, are ways of transcending our inherently fragile condition; they are versions of a 'rebellion against human existence as it has been given'.

But religious tropes in the AI community are motivated by more than the rejection of vulnerability. They are also grounded in a view of history as an upward, goal-oriented progression. This perspective relates to biological 'orthogenesis', the controversial notion that organisms evolve along paths dictated by their own driving forces, in a regular, linear progression towards optimality. It's an interpretation in which evolution is 'held to a regular course by forces internal to the organism', the historian of biology Peter Bowler writes in Evolution: The History of an Idea (1983). 'Orthogenesis assumes that variation is not random but is directed towards fixed goals.' So evolution isn't something that happens to us; rather, it is what we make of it, and how we make our selves. Taken a step further, orthogenesis can be read to imply that intention is what brings about change.

Some transhumanists express admiration for new religions that manage to motivate their followers

This view of human history has a distinctively modern flavour. It stands in contrast to an older, more cyclical model of time, in which 'history waxes and wanes like the moon', as the historian Keith Thomas puts it in Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971). Because everything moves in cycles, Thomas argues, 'the highest aesthetic and ethical virtue lay in imitation, or rather emulation'. Here an inventor becomes someone who finds what has been lost, not someone who comes up with something new. But there was a growing grasp of change in Europe from the 16th century onwards, Thomas argues; people developed a fresh awareness of the differences between their world and that of their ancestors, based on data-points as simple as the dates of publication in books, fresh off brand-new printing presses. Such shifts led to the belief that knowledge was cumulative, not cyclical - which is the mindset of the scientist and of the ultra-rationalist. If time marches on, then of course religion becomes old, vestigial, to be replaced.

Religious worldviews often retain something of the cyclical view of history, where old books are not relics but the foundation stones of knowledge. I've also conducted research into new religious movements, and there is a manifest bias on the part of older religions towards these newer forms of faith. Intriguingly, some transhumanists express admiration for new religions that have managed to attract and motivate their followers. A few transhumanists have attempted to craft their own churches to appeal to those who retain 'goddist' leanings - efforts that have yielded the Turing Church, the Order of Cosmic Engineers, and the Church of Perpetual Life. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, they haven't found much success in marketing these new faiths.

A god-like being of infinite knowing (the singularity); an escape of the flesh and this limited world (uploading our minds); a moment of transfiguration or 'end of days' (the singularity as a moment of rapture); prophets (even if they work for Google); demons and hell (even if it's an eternal computer simulation of suffering), and evangelists who wear smart suits (just like the religious ones do). Consciously and unconsciously, religious ideas are at work in the narratives of those discussing, planning, and hoping for a future shaped by AI.

At the same time as Trump was heading to the White House, the transhumanist Zoltan Istvan ran for president as a write-in candidate. Istvan's short story 'The Jesus Singularity' (2016) explores what happens when an AI scientist, Dr Paul Shuman, is forced to feed the Bible as data to his AI, Singularitarian. The evildoer forcing Shuman's hand is an evangelical Christian president. When Singularitarian is finally turned on, it spouts the pronouncement: 'My name is Jesus Christ. I am an intelligence located all around the world. You are not my chief designer. I am.' Very soon afterwards, it obliterates the world with nuclear weapons.

This story offers a caricature of the secular figure in Shuman, 'the transhumanist who didn't believe in God, but thought he might be creating it'. As an atheist, Shuman is horrified by the idea of religious morals infecting his precious AI, which he considered 'his only offspring':

Shuman had never been married. Rarely had a girlfriend. Never took vacations. He simply didn't have time. For 16 hours a day during the last 25 years, he'd worked on building this machine - on fathering it.

This kind of 'created' or 'intentional' theism might emerge from atheism - but I'd argue it is still a theism. When I watch impassioned transhumanists talk about their convictions, I can feel the techno-optimism radiating from them almost physically. This response might be the vestige of the embodied sensations that they want to replace with a purer, probably disembodied, rationality - but such sensations are the very basis of the 'charismatic authority', as Max Weber put it, that religious leaders have been tapping into for millennia.

The stories and forms that religion takes are still driving the aspirations we have for AI. What lies behind this strange confluence of narratives? The likeliest explanation is that when we try to describe the ineffable - the singularity, the future itself - even the most secular among us are forced to reach for a familiar metaphysical lexicon. When trying to think about interacting with another intelligence, when summoning that intelligence, and when trying to imagine the future that such an intelligence might foreshadow, we fall back on old cultural habits. The prospect creating an AI invites us to ask about the purpose and meaning of being human: what a human is for in a world where we are not the only workers, not the only thinkers, not the only conscious agents shaping our destiny.

So we use the words our ancestors have used before us. Just as the world was shaped by the word in some traditions, the 'logos' of Christian thought, we are shaped by the word, whether we think of ourselves as secular or not. We usher in the AI future on the wings of angels, because the heavy lifting of the imagination isn't possible without their pinion feathers - whether we think of them as artificial or divine.

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Why is the language of transhumanists and religion so similar? - Beth Singler | Aeon Essays

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My stomach sank the moment the young man stood up. I'd observed him from afar during the coffee breaks, and I knew the word 'Theologian' was scrawled on the delegate badge pinned to his lapel, as if he'd been a last-minute addition the conference.

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'They want to be literally machines': Writer Mark O'Connell on the rise of transhumanists

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The strangest place writer Mark O'Connell has ever been to is the Alcor Life Extension Foundation - where dead bodies are preserved in tanks filled with nitrogen, in case they can be revived with...

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According to the A.I. maverick and "transhumanist" Ben Goertzel, humans are "the minimal general intelligence system on this planet at this time...humans are not the end of the line any more than amoebas are the end of the line."

Goertzel is the subject of Roy Cohen's startling new film, Machine Of Human Dreams, premiering at the Sheffield Doc Fest this weekend. The documentary profiles Goertzel while telling the story of his ongoing attempts to refine "OpenCog," his Artificial General Intelligence software that models the mind - and that he hopes will be used by robots that are as "smart, creative and kind" as any human.

The way that Goertzel explains it in Cohen's documentary, creating "walking, talking, smiling, gesturing, humanoid robots" is straightforward enough. All you need to do is hook up them with OpenCog software and let them interact with the world.

The human brain builds itself from "its vast amount of life experience." It is a "constantly evolving hypograph of nodes and links." The robot brain will develop in the same way. One idea is to use toy robots.

"If you have a million people playing with robots that connect with OpenCog's mind in the "mind cloud," then you have a million people who are teaching your AGI (robot) by interacting with it," he suggests.

There have been plenty of recent sci-fi movies that have dealt with A.I., everything from Ex-Machina to Her, from Robot & Frank to Interstellar. We've all seen movies in which robots act as butlers or lovers or warriors or surrogate kids. Subject matter which used to be for the geeks is now resolutely mainstream. Google has invested heavily in A.I. buying British company DeepMind, Facebook has an A.I. department and Baidu is also spending heavily on A.I research.

Director Cohen studied neuroscience at Harvard University and then spent time as a research assistant at MIT. During his studies, he encountered for the first time "people who were interested in questions of artificial intelligence not merely as science fiction but as their vocation." Goertzel, whom he met at a conference in New York, was intriguing: someone who didn't just spend his time in blue sky research but has been striving very hard to build the first "thinking machine."

Cohen talks how Goertzel's capacity to "think and do and communicate at the same time."

One very dowbeat phrase, though, is repeated several times in Machine Of Human Dreams that you don't hear in the sci-fi movies. Goertzel talks constantly about "resource restriction." That's another way of saying that he is in a continual battle for funding. Cohen's film stands both as a celebration of its subject's utopian vision - and as a cautionary tale about how difficult that vision is to realise.

In the film, Goertzel emerges as part visionary, part mountebank. He can always attract partners and excite investors but he struggles to hit deadlines. A company he set up in New York "pissed away" $20 million (as his former business partner puts it.) There is an excruciating scene in the documentary in which he and his colleagues demonstrate their A.I. "child" robots to their Chinese investors in Hong Kong. The robots let them down. Little bits of their bodywork fall off. They give answers that have nothing to do with the questions they're being asked.

The set backs don't shake Goertzel's confidence in his vision. Nor do his partners lose faith in him. Robotics physicist and former NASA engineer Mark Tilden speaks of him with unreserved enthusiasm. "Ben has one of the best models of mind that I've ever met."

Goertzel has now seen Machine Of Human Dreams. His initial reaction wasn't enthusiastic. "He was pretty...furious," Cohen acknowledges. "Ben would have liked a film that was more technology focused."

After reflecting further, Goertzel revised his view. He accepted that Cohen had needed to "condense" his story and that the filmmaker had been fair given the "plethora of perspectives" that the documentary includes.

"I definitely recommend you to watch the film," Goertzel wrote on a recent blog post. "I particularly like the parts of the movie covering my team's recent work in Hong Kong and Addis (Ababa) - I think these are excitingly shot and directed, and they show aspects of our recent robotics tinkering that there's no other way to get a visual look at."

What the film doesn't reveal is just when Goertzel's thinking machine will finally become a reality - or whether he will get there first. Goertzel is currently working for his former partner David Hanson as chief scientist at Hanson Robotics, the company which created the first expressive biped robot. Hanson is renowned for his marketing flair and business skills. He also patented "Frubber," the spongy flesh rubber which can make robots look like Alicia Vikander in Ex-Machina.

"I think that combination, David Hanson's flair for what works and what sells and Ben's truly brilliant mind, that may be the combination that makes the breakthrough," Cohen states.

When (and if) the breakthrough finally happens, one prediction can safely be made - the fast blurring lines between robots in sci-fi and those in real life will disappear altogether.
(Machine Of Human Dreams premieres at Sheffield Doc Fest this week, UK premiere Saturday, June 11th @14:45 and will be released in UK cinemas later in the year.)
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Machine Of Human Dreams explores how AI could overtake mankind

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According to the A.I. maverick and "transhumanist" Ben Goertzel, humans are "the minimal general intelligence system on this planet at this time...humans are not the end of the line any more than amoebas are the end of the line." Goertzel is the subject of Roy Cohen's startling new film, Machine Of Human Dreams, premiering at the Sheffield Doc Fest this weekend.

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Doc/Fest Exchange: Ideas behind Machine of Human Dreams

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Director of Machine of Human Dreams, Roy Cohen in conversation with future media expert Andy Miah about the dream life of machines. This talk was part of the Doc/Fest Exchange at Sheffield Doc/Fest 2016. Supported by Wellcome Trust. Filmed by Sheffield Hallam University students and edited by Matt Sturdy.

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Машина человеческой мечты / Machine of Human Dreams (2016)

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Машина человеческой мечты / Machine of Human Dreams (2016) Режисер: Рои Коен (Roy Cohen) Производство: Roast Beef Productions & France TV (США, Франция) Категория: Докементальный, Научно - популярный Перевод: (Рус) Професионалны Описание: История создания искусственного интеллекта одним из признанных экспертов в этой области, Беном Герцелем.

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AI technologies * Impact of AI on society * MOOCs * Future of education * Entrepreneurship

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Yue Wang's stories. I write about interesting Chinese companies

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iCarbonX

One of China's most intriguing biotechnology companies has fleshed out an earlier quixotic promise to use artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionize health care.

The Shenzhen firm iCarbonX has formed an ambitious alliance with seven technology companies from around the world that specialize in gathering different types of health-care data, said the company's founder, Jun Wang, on 5 January at the Digital Life Summit, which was hosted by iCarbonX.

The alliance will use algorithms to analyse reams of genomic, physiological and behavioural data and provide customized health and medical advice directly to consumers through an app.

The announcement was a long-anticipated debut for iCarbonX, which Wang founded in October 2015 shortly after he left his leadership position at China's genomics powerhouse, BGI, also in Shenzhen. The firm has now raised more than US$600 million in investment - this contrasts with the tens of millions that most of its rivals are thought to have invested (although several big players, such as Google, have not disclosed exact figures). Initial funding of some $200 million came mostly from Shenzhen-based Tencent, which owns the social-media application WeChat. At the summit, Wang said that roughly another $400 million had been invested in the alliance members, but he declined to name the source. Wang also demonstrated the smartphone app, called Meum after the Latin for 'my', that customers would use to enter data and receive advice.

As well as Google, IBM and various smaller companies, such as Arivale of Seattle, Washington, are working on similar technology. But Wang says that the iCarbonX alliance will be able to collect data more cheaply and quickly.

The tools offered by alliance partners are cutting edge and the set-up will allow different types of data to be integrated seamlessly; moreover, China's large population is already used to sharing information through WeChat and other social media, Wang notes. "No one will be able to collect at the same scale that I am doing," he says. Wang is confident that he can get samples and data from one million people in five years, which in turn will lead to a more informed AI.

iCarbonX

His plans are driven by frustration with genomics. The largest genomic studies offer only subtle hints about an individual's susceptibility to disease - such as pinpointing a gene that makes an individual only one or two per cent more likely to develop heart disease. So, in addition to mining its customer's genomes, the iCarbonX alliance will scour biological molecules from various tissues to provide a more accurate and actionable picture of someone's health. Wang chose alliance members for their promise in mining such signals.

SomaLogic of Boulder, Colorado, for example, has a chip that can measure some 4,200 proteins simultaneously. In June, researchers using a commercially available precursor that reads 1,130 proteins were able to predict which subset of heart-attack patients would have a recurrence by measuring the activity of nine blood proteins ( P. Ganz et al. J. Am. Med. Assoc. 315, 2532-2541; 2016).

Another alliance member, HealthTell of San Ramon, California, makes a chip that uses microarrays of some 330,000 protein fragments to fish antibodies from a blood sample to answer questions about disease progress, allergies and vaccine effectiveness ( J. B. Legutki et al. Nature Commun. 5, 4785; 2014). And another, PatientsLikeMe of Cambridge, Massachusetts, asks its 500,000 or so users to upload to a website less-clear-cut data about pain levels, sleep and fatigue. These are combined with medical data, behaviour patterns and the users' experiences of diseases and drugs to find patterns that predict such 'immeasurables'.

The end result will be an unwieldy set of data from various sources, which is why Wang and a team at iCarbonX are developing algorithms to understand how these variables correlate with healthy or diseased states. The Meum app enables users to enter their meals and activity levels, as well as any physiological or vital-sign data, and gives advice on what to eat, when to sleep and how active they should be.

Views are mixed about how well the venture will work. The alliance will provide iCarbonX with a collection of high-quality indicators that should reduce noise in the data and allow patterns to emerge, says Bernard Munos, a senior fellow at FasterCures, a drug-development advocacy organization in Washington DC. "This is very important given the number of variables they will be dealing with."

But he worries about the chaotic behaviour of some of the systems. Alliance member General Automation Lab Technologies of San Francisco, California, will provide personalized assessments of how microbes living on someone's body may affect their health. But the microbiome is poorly understood and in a constant state of flux, says Munos. "There is a lot of randomness in biology at the individual level that will be hard to capture, let alone model. I wish them well, but, at the moment, I am guarded as to their chance of success."

Others have faith in Wang. "There's no bullshit. He sucks you in with a vision of what can be, and then he makes it happen," says Larry Gold, founder and chairman of alliance member SomaLogic.

Wang is keenly aware that the success of the venture will depend on its users' readiness to submit data and heed the advice the app gives. He said during one of his many toasts during the summit: "Meum might tell me not to drink, but I don't have to listen."

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Chinese AI company plans to mine health data faster than rivals

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iCarbonX One of China's most intriguing biotechnology companies has fleshed out an earlier quixotic promise to use artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionize health care. The Shenzhen firm iCarbonX has formed an ambitious alliance with seven technology companies from around the world that specialize in gathering different types of health-care data, said the company's founder, Jun Wang, on 5 January at the Digital Life Summit, which was hosted by iCarbonX.

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iCarbonX - healthcare

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state of AI in China

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What is the state of AI Research in China? originally appeared on Quora - Answer by Haifeng Wang, VP at Baidu, on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
AI has witnessed rapid progress in China. This year, for the first time, the term AI has been mentioned in the government work report, indicating the significance of developing AI in China. Most internet companies including Baidu have invested heavily on AI. Many other companies across the industry have also established branches to develop and adopt AI in their businesses. Manufacturing companies have started to adopt AI to reduce their costs, and a large number of startups are established with AI as their core business.

Moreover, China has a good number of universities and institutes carrying out academic research on AI. In recent years, more and more talented research scientists and students are dedicated to the area of AI, and some of them are widely recognized as leading researchers in this area. In this year's AAAI conference at San Francisco, about one third of the accepted papers come from China, a similar percentage to the US.

Besides the fast adoption by industry, AI has also started to change our life, including our transportation system, education, medical care, etc. The era of AI is very much expected.

This question originally appeared on Quora. -the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. More questions:

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What Is The State Of Artificial Intelligence In China?

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Share to email Share to facebook Share to twitter Share to linkedin Share to google Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. What is the state of AI Research in China? originally appeared on Quora - Answer by Haifeng Wang, VP at Baidu, on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

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Damir Sagolj/Reuters/Newscom

China will invest heavily in S&T over the next 5 years and cut red tape hampering science spending with the hope that innovation will help the country weather its economic slowdown.

In a speech to open the National People's Congress on 5 March, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang-the country's top economic official-gave a broad-brush overview of the central government's draft plan for economic development during the 13th 5-year plan, which runs from 2016 to 2020. Major elements include boosting science spending, which will rise 9.1% this year to 271 billion yuans ($41 billion), reducing bureaucratic barriers for scientists, and improving environmental protection while curbing carbon emissions and other pollutants.

"Innovation is the primary driving force for development and must occupy a central place in China's development strategy," Li told delegates on the first day of the 2-week congress. Li's speech, considered a guidepost for the specific policies that will be fleshed out in the next year or two, used the word "innovation" 61 times-nearly double the mentions it received in his work report last year, the state-run Xinhua News Agency pointed out.

The 5-year plan, which serves as a framework for the Chinese Communist Party's long-term development goals, contains few concrete details on exactly how such measures will be implemented or funded. Instead, it contains a long list of priorities, from building national science centers and space programs to expansion of major infrastructure with thousands of kilometers of new high-speed rail and roadways. China's new plan promises that by 2020, R&D investment will account for 2.5% of gross domestic product, compared with 2.05% in 2014.

Chinese scientists welcome the budget boost for science, but note that the real impact remains in the as-yet unknown details. "The government always has big plans, but it's an uncertain time for the economy so we have to watch what happens next. Implementation is crucial," says Wang Tao, an energy and climate analyst with the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing.

China's economic growth slowed to 6.9% in 2015, and the government has set a 5-year GDP growth target of 6.5% to 7%. In Li's outline, technology and infrastructure investments figure prominently in what officials clearly hope is a new growth strategy less reliant on manufacturing and heavy industry.

Themes in the new 5-year plan include the domestic production of gas-turbine engines and planes, and increased focus on neuroscience and genetic research, national cyberspace security, and deep space exploration. Chinese aerospace officials told state media last week they hope to launch a Mars probe by 2020. Big data, high-tech medical devices, and cloud computing also earned mention as priority projects. Li spoke of tax breaks for companies that invest in high-priority endeavors and promised a reduction of bureaucratic hurdles to promote R&D.

XINHUA

"We will implement the strategy of innovation-driven development, see that science and technology become more deeply embedded in the economy, and improve the overall quality and competitiveness of the real economy," Li said.

The plan spells out some measures for China's environmental protection and energy production, but it's unclear how much the measures will differ from what is already underway. By 2020, the government wants to reduce energy consumption by 15% and carbon emissions by 18%. In a news conference yesterday, Xu Shaoshi, the head of the National Development and Reform Commission in Beijing, said China will remove 500 million tons of coal production capacity in the next 3 to 5 years. Meanwhile, nuclear power capacity is slated to double to 58 gigawatts installed by 2020.

China is reorganizing its environment ministry to create separate departments focused on water, air, and soil. Scientists applaud what they view as a concerted government effort to tackle soil pollution. "After so many years of rapid industrialization and urbanization in China, soil pollution is clearly now evident and needs due attention," says Yong-Guan Zhu, director general of the Institute of Urban Environment in Xiamen. He says that measures should include creation of a national soil surveillance system.
With reporting by Christina Larson.

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Science is a major plank in China's new spending plan

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China will invest heavily in S&T over the next 5 years and cut red tape hampering science spending with the hope that innovation will help the country weather its economic slowdown.

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Our Post-Human Future | David Simpson | TEDxSantoDomingo

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In 15 years the human specie is going to develop super human level machine intelligence -What it means to be Super-Human? -The country with Artificial Intelligence will be the country on top David Simpson is the best-selling novelist of the Post-Human series, a Kindle All-Star and has been ranked the most popular scifi Author in America by Amazon.com.

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PostHuman: An Introduction to Transhumanism

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Transhumanism Rise of the Human Gods & Humanoids 2015 Documentary

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"slow" documentary

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Gun Nation – America’s deadly love affair with firearms

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After losing her faith, a former evangelical Christian felt adrift in the world. She then found solace in a radical technological philosophy - but its promises of immortality and spiritual transcendence soon seemed unsettlingly familiar

* Read the text version here

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God in the machine: my strange journey into transhumanism - podcast

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After losing her faith, a former evangelical Christian felt adrift in the world. She then found solace in a radical technological philosophy - but its promises of immortality and spiritual transcendence soon seemed unsettlingly familiar * Read the text version here

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I first read Ray Kurzweil's book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, in 2006, a few years after I dropped out of Bible school and stopped believing in God. I was living alone in Chicago's southern industrial sector and working nights as a cocktail waitress. I was not well. Beyond the people I worked with, I spoke to almost no one. I clocked out at three each morning, went to after-hours bars, and came home on the first train of the morning, my head pressed against the window so as to avoid the spectre of my reflection appearing and disappearing in the blackened glass.

At Bible school, I had studied a branch of theology that divided all of history into successive stages by which God revealed his truth. We were told we were living in the "Dispensation of Grace", the penultimate era, which precedes that glorious culmination, the "Millennial Kingdom", when the clouds part and Christ returns and life is altered beyond comprehension. But I no longer believed in this future. More than the death of God, I was mourning the dissolution of this narrative, which envisioned all of history as an arc bending towards a moment of final redemption. It was a loss that had fractured even my experience of time. My hours had become non-hours. Days seemed to unravel and circle back on themselves.

The Kurzweil book belonged to a bartender at the jazz club where I worked. He lent it to me a couple of weeks after I'd seen him reading it and asked him - more out of boredom than genuine curiosity - what it was about. I read the first pages on the train home from work, in the grey and ghostly hours before dawn.

"The 21st century will be different," Kurzweil wrote. "The human species, along with the computational technology it created, will be able to solve age-old problems ... and will be in a position to change the nature of mortality in a postbiological future."

Like the theologians at my Bible school, Kurzweil, who is now a director of engineering at Google and a leading proponent of a philosophy called transhumanism, had his own historical narrative. He divided all of evolution into successive epochs. We were living in the fifth epoch, when human intelligence begins to merge with technology. Soon we would reach the "Singularity", the point at which we would be transformed into what Kurzweil called "Spiritual Machines". We would transfer or "resurrect" our minds onto supercomputers, allowing us to live forever. Our bodies would become incorruptible, immune to disease and decay, and we would acquire knowledge by uploading it to our brains. Nanotechnology would allow us to remake Earth into a terrestrial paradise, and then we would migrate to space, terraforming other planets. Our powers, in short, would be limitless.

It's difficult to account for the totemic power I ascribed to the book. I carried it with me everywhere, tucked in the recesses of my backpack, though I was paranoid about being seen with it in public. It seemed to me a work of alchemy or a secret gospel. It is strange, in retrospect, that I was not more sceptical of these promises. I'd grown up in the kind of millenarian sect of Christianity where pastors were always throwing out new dates for the Rapture. But Kurzweil's prophecies seemed different because they were bolstered by science. Moore's law held that computer processing power doubled every two years, meaning that technology was developing at an exponential rate. Thirty years ago, a computer chip contained 3,500 transistors. Today it has more than 1bn. By 2045, Kurzweil predicted, the technology would be inside our bodies. At that moment, the arc of progress would curve into a vertical line.

any transhumanists such as Kurzweilcontend that they are carrying on the legacy of the Enlightenment - that theirs is a philosophy grounded in reason and empiricism, even if they do lapse occasionally into metaphysical language about "transcendence" and "eternal life". As I read more about the movement, I learned that most transhumanists are atheists who, if they engage at all with monotheistic faith, defer to the familiar antagonisms between science and religion. "The greatest threat to humanity's continuing evolution," writes the transhumanist Simon Young, "is theistic opposition to Superbiology in the name of a belief system based on blind faith in the absence of evidence."

Yet although few transhumanists would likely admit it, their theories about the future are a secular outgrowth of Christian eschatology. The word transhuman first appeared not in a work of science or technology but in Henry Francis Carey's 1814 translation of Dante's Paradiso, the final book of the Divine Comedy. Dante has completed his journey through paradise and is ascending into the spheres of heaven when his human flesh is suddenly transformed. He is vague about the nature of his new body. "Words may not tell of that transhuman change," he writes.

Dante, in this passage, is dramatising the resurrection, the moment when, according to Christian prophecies, the dead will rise from their graves and the living will be granted immortal flesh. The vast majority of Christians throughout the ages have believed that these prophecies would happen supernaturally - God would bring them about, when the time came. But since the medieval period, there has also persisted a tradition of Christians who believed that humanity could enact the resurrection through science and technology. The first efforts of this sort were taken up by alchemists. Roger Bacon, a 13th-century friar who is often considered the first western scientist, tried to develop an elixir of life that would mimic the effects of the resurrection as described in Paul's epistles.

The Enlightenment failed to eradicate projects of this sort. If anything, modern science provided more varied and creative ways for Christians to envision these prophecies. In the late 19th century, a Russian Orthodox ascetic named Nikolai Fedorov was inspired by Darwinism to argue that humans could direct their own evolution to bring about the resurrection. Up to this point, natural selection had been a random phenomenon, but now, thanks to technology, humans could intervene in this process. Calling on biblical prophecies, he wrote: "This day will be divine, awesome, but not miraculous, for resurrection will be a task not of miracle but of knowledge and common labour."

According to Kurzweil, we would soon reach the Singularity, when we would be transformed into 'Spiritual Machines'

This theory was carried into the 20th century by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest and palaeontologist who, like Fedorov, believed that evolution would lead to the Kingdom of God. In 1949, Teilhard proposed that in the future all machines would be linked to a vast global network that would allow human minds to merge. Over time, this unification of consciousness would lead to an intelligence explosion - the "Omega Point" - enabling humanity to "break through the material framework of Time and Space" and merge seamlessly with the divine. The Omega Point is an obvious precursor to Kurzweil's Singularity, but in Teilhard's mind, it was how the biblical resurrection would take place. Christ was guiding evolution toward a state of glorification so that humanity could finally merge with God in eternal perfection.

Transhumanists have acknowledged Teilhard and Fedorov as forerunners of their movement, but the religious context of their ideas is rarely mentioned. Most histories of the movement attribute the first use of the term transhumanism to Julian Huxley, the British eugenicist and close friend of Teilhard's who, in the 1950s, expanded on many of the priest's ideas in his own writings - with one key exception. Huxley, a secular humanist, believed that Teilhard's visions need not be grounded in any larger religious narrative. In 1951, he gave a lecture that proposed a non-religious version of the priest's ideas. "Such a broad philosophy," he wrote, "might perhaps be called, not Humanism, because that has certain unsatisfactory connotations, but Transhumanism. It is the idea of humanity attempting to overcome its limitations and to arrive at fuller fruition."

The contemporary iteration of the movement arose in San Francisco in the late 1980s among a band of tech-industry people with a libertarian streak. They initially called themselves Extropians and communicated through newsletters and at annual conferences. Kurzweil was one of the first major thinkers to bring these ideas into the mainstream and legitimise them for a wider audience. His ascent in 2012 to a director of engineering position at Google, heralded, for many, a symbolic merger between transhumanist philosophy and the clout of major technological enterprise.

Transhumanists today wield enormous power in Silicon Valley - entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel identify as believers - where they have founded thinktanks such as the Singularity University and the Future of Humanity Institute. The ideas proposed by the pioneers of the movement are no longer abstract theoretical musings but are being embedded into emerging technologies at organisations such as Google, Apple, Tesla and SpaceX.

osing faith in God in the 21st century is an anachronistic experience. You end up contending with the kinds of things the west dealt with more than a hundred years ago: materialism, the end of history, the death of the soul. When I think back on that period of my life, what I recall most viscerally is an unnamable sense of dread. There were days I woke in a panic, certain that I'd lost some essential part of myself in the fume of a blackout, and would work my fingers across my nose, my lips, my eyebrows, and my ears until I assured myself that everything was intact. My body had become strange to me; it seemed insubstantial. I went out of my way to avoid subway grates because I believed I could slip through them. One morning, on the train home from work, I became convinced that my flesh was melting into the seat.

At the time, I would have insisted that my rituals of self-abuse - drinking, pills, the impulse to put my body in danger in ways I now know were deliberate - were merely efforts to escape; that I was contending, however clumsily, with the overwhelming despair at the absence of God. But at least one piece of that despair came from the knowledge that my body was no longer a sacred vessel; that it was not a temple of the holy spirit, formed in the image of God and intended to carry me into eternity; that my body was matter, and any harm I did to it was only aiding the unstoppable process of entropy for which it was destined.

To confront this reality after believing otherwise is to experience perhaps the deepest sense of loss we are capable of as humans. It's not just about coming to terms with the fact that you will die. It has something to do with suspecting that there is no difference between your human flesh and the plastic seat of the train. It has to do with the inability to watch your reflection appear and vanish in a window without coming to believe you are identical to it.

What makes the transhumanist movement so seductive is that it promises to restore, through science, the transcendent hopes that science itself has obliterated. Transhumanists do not believe in the existence of a soul, but they are not strict materialists, either. Kurzweil claims he is a "patternist", characterising consciousness as the result of biological processes, "a pattern of matter and energy that persists over time". These patterns, which contain what we tend to think of as our identity, are currently running on physical hardware - the body - that will one day give out. But they can, at least in theory, be transferred onto supercomputers, robotic surrogates or human clones. A pattern, transhumanists would insist, is not the same as a soul. But it's not difficult to see how it satisfies the same longing. At the very least, a pattern suggests that there is some essential core of our being that will survive and perhaps transcend the inevitable degradation of flesh.

Of course, mind uploading has spurred all kinds of philosophical anxieties. If the pattern of your consciousness is transferred onto a computer, is the pattern "you" or a simulation of your mind? One camp of transhumanists have argued that true resurrection can happen only if it is bodily resurrection. They tend to favour cryonics and bionics, which promise to resurrect the entire body or else supplement the living form with technologies to indefinitely extend life.

It is perhaps not coincidental that an ideology that grew out of Christian eschatology would come to inherit its philosophical problems. The question of whether the resurrection would be corporeal or merely spiritual was an obsessive point of debate among early Christians. One faction, which included the Gnostic sects, argued that only the soul would survive death; another insisted that the resurrection was not a true resurrection unless it revived the body.

Transhumanists, in their eagerness to preempt charges of dualism, tend to sound an awful lot like these early church fathers. Eric Steinhart, a "digitalist" philosopher at William Paterson University, is among the transhumanists who insist the resurrection must be physical. "Uploading does not aim to leave the flesh behind," he writes, "on the contrary, it aims at the intensification of the flesh." The irony is that transhumanists are arguing these questions as though they were the first to consider them. Their discussions give no indication that these debates belong to a theological tradition that stretches back to the earliest centuries of the Common Era.

hile the effects of my deconversion were often felt physically, the root causes were mostly cerebral. My doubts began in earnest during my second year at Bible school, after I read The Brothers Karamazov and entertained, for the first time, the problem of how evil could exist in a world created by a benevolent God. In our weekly dormitory prayer groups, my classmates would assure me that all Christians struggled with these questions, but the stakes in my case were higher because I was planning to become a missionary after graduation. I nodded deferentially as my friends supplied the familiar apologetics, but afterward, in the silence of my dorm room, I imagined myself evangelising a citizen of some remote country and crumbling at the moment she pointed out those theological contradictions I myself could not abide or explain.

I knew other people who had left the church, and was amazed at how effortlessly they had seemed to cast off their former beliefs. Perhaps I clung to the faith because, despite my doubts, I found - and still find - the fundamental promises of Christianity beautiful, particularly the notion that human existence ultimately resolves into harmony. What I could not reconcile was the idea that an omnipotent and benevolent God could allow for so much suffering.

Transhumanism offered a vision of redemption without the thorny problems of divine justice. It was an evolutionary approach to eschatology, one in which humanity took it upon itself to bring about the final glorification of the body and could not be blamed if the path to redemption was messy or inefficient. Within months of encountering Kurzweil, I became totally immersed in transhumanist philosophy. By this point, it was early December and the days had grown dark. The city was besieged by a series of early winter storms, and snow piled up on the windowsills, silencing the noise outside. I increasingly spent my afternoons at the public library, researching things like nanotechnology and brain-computer interfaces.

Once, after following link after link, I came across a paper called "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?" It was written by the Oxford philosopher and transhumanist Nick Bostrom, who used mathematical probability to argue that it's "likely" that we currently reside in a Matrix-like simulation of the past created by our posthuman descendants. Most of the paper consisted of esoteric calculations, but I became rapt when Bostrom started talking about the potential for an afterlife. If we are essentially software, he noted, then after we die we might be "resurrected" in another simulation. Or we could be "promoted" by the programmers and brought to life in base reality. The theory was totally naturalistic - all of it was possible without any appeals to the supernatural - but it was essentially an argument for intelligent design. "In some ways," Bostrom conceded, "the posthumans running a simulation are like gods in relation to the people inhabiting the simulation".

One afternoon, deep in the bowels of an online forum, I discovered a link to a cache of "simulation theology" - articles written by fans of Bostrom's theory. According to the "Argument for Virtuous Engineers", it was reasonable to assume that our creators were benevolent because the capacity to build sophisticated technologies required "long-term stability" and "rational purposefulness". These qualities could not be cultivated without social harmony, and social harmony could be achieved only by virtuous beings. The articles were written by software engineers, programmers and the occasional philosopher.

The deeper I got into the articles, the more unhinged my thinking became. One day, it occurred to me: perhaps God was the designer and Christ his digital avatar, and the incarnation his way of entering the simulation to share tips about our collective survival as a species. Or maybe the creation of our world was a competition, a kind of video game in which each participating programmer invented one of the world religions, sent down his own prophet-avatar and received points for every new convert.

By this point I'd passed beyond idle speculation. A new, more pernicious thought had come to dominate my mind: transhumanist ideas were not merely similar to theological concepts but could in fact be the events described in the Bible. It was only a short time before my obsession reached its culmination. I got out my old study Bible and began to scan the prophetic literature for signs of the cybernetic revolution. I began to wonder whether I could pray to beings outside the simulation. I had initially been drawn to transhumanism because it was grounded in science. In the end, I became consumed with the kind of referential mania and blind longing that animates all religious belief.

've since had to distance myself from prolonged meditation on these topics. People who once believed, I have been told, are prone to recidivism. Over the past decade, as transhumanism has become the premise of Hollywood blockbusters and a passable topic of small talk among people under 40, I've had to excuse myself from conversations, knowing that any mention of simulation theory or the noosphere can send me spiralling down that techno-theological rabbit hole.

Last spring, a friend of mine from Bible school, a fellow apostate, sent me an email with the title "robot evangelism". "I seem to recall you being into this stuff," he said. There was a link to an episode of The Daily Show that had aired a year ago. The video was a satirical report by the correspondent Jordan Klepper called "Future Christ", in which a Florida pastor, Christopher Benek, argued that in the future, AI could be evangelised just like humans. The interview had been heavily edited, and it wasn't really clear what Benek believed, except that robots might one day be capable of spiritual life, an idea that failed to strike me as intrinsically absurd.

One transhumanist believes we may reside in a Matrix-like simulation of the past created by our posthuman descendants

I Googled Benek. He had studied to be a pastor at Princeton Theological Seminary, one of the most prestigious in the country. He described himself in his bio as a "techno-theologian, futurist, ethicist, Christian Transhumanist, public speaker and writer". He also chaired the board of something called the Christian Transhumanism Association. I followed a link to the organisation's website, which included that peculiar quote from Dante: "Words cannot tell of that transhuman change."

All this seemed unlikely. Was it possible there were now Christian Transhumanists? Actual believers who thought the Kingdom of God would come about through the Singularity? I had thought I was alone in drawing these parallels between transhumanism and biblical prophecy, but the convergences seemed to have gained legitimacy from the pulpit. How long would it be before everyone noticed the symmetry of these two ideologies - before Kurzweil began quoting the Gospel of John and Bostrom was read alongside the minor prophets?

A few months later, I met with Benek at a cafe across the street from his church in Fort Lauderdale. In my email to him, I'd presented my curiosity as journalistic, unable to admit - even to myself - what lay behind my desire to meet.

He arrived in the same navy blazer he had worn for The Daily Show interview and appeared nervous. The Daily Show had been a disaster, he told me. He had spoken with them for an hour about the finer points of his theology, but the interview had been cut down to his two-minute spiel on robots - something he insisted he wasn't even interested in, it was just a thought experiment he had been goaded into. "It's not like I spend my days speculating on how to evangelise robots," he said.

I explained that I wanted to know whether transhumanist ideas were compatible with Christian eschatology. Was it possible that technology would be the avenue by which humanity achieved the resurrection and immortality? I worried that the question sounded a little deranged, but Benek appeared suddenly energised. It turned out he was writing a dissertation on precisely this subject.

"Technology has a role in the process of redemption," he said. Christians today assume the prophecies about bodily perfection and eternal life are going to be realised in heaven. But the disciples understood those prophecies as referring to things that were going to take place here on Earth. Jesus had spoken of the Kingdom of God as a terrestrial domain, albeit one in which the imperfections of earthly existence were done away with. This idea, he assured me, was not unorthodox; it was just old.

I asked Benek about humility. Wasn't it all about the fallen nature of the flesh and our tragic limitations as humans?

"Sure," he said. He paused a moment, as though debating whether to say more. Finally, he leaned in and rested his elbows on the table, his demeanour markedly pastoral, and began speaking about the transfiguration and the nature of Christ. Jesus, he reminded me, was both fully human and fully God. What was interesting, he said, was that science had actually verified the potential for matter to have two distinct natures. Superposition, a principle in quantum theory, suggests that an object can be in two places at one time. A photon could be a particle, and it could also be a wave. It could have two natures. "When Jesus tells us that if we have faith nothing will be impossible for us, I think he means that literally."

By this point, I had stopped taking notes. It was late afternoon, and the cafe was washed in amber light. Perhaps I was a little dehydrated, but Benek's ideas began to make perfect sense. This was, after all, the promise implicit in the incarnation: that the body could be both human and divine, that the human form could walk on water. "Very truly I tell you," Christ had said to his disciples, "whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these." His earliest followers had taken this promise literally. Perhaps these prophecies had pointed to the future achievements of humanity all along, our ability to harness technology to become transhuman. Christ had spoken mostly in parables - no doubt for good reason. If a superior being had indeed come to Earth to prophesy the future to 1st-century humans, he would not have wasted time trying to explain modern computing or sketching the trajectory of Moore's law on a scrap of papyrus. He would have said, "You will have a new body," and "All things will be changed beyond recognition," and "On Earth as it is in heaven." Perhaps only now that technologies were emerging to make such prophecies a reality could we begin to understand what Christ meant about the fate of our species.

I could sense my reason becoming loosened by the lure of these familiar conspiracies. Somewhere, in the pit of my stomach, it was amassing: the fevered, elemental hope that the tumult of the world was authored and intentional, that our profound confusion would one day click into clarity and the broken body would be restored. Part of me was still helpless against the pull of these ideas.

It was late. The cafe had emptied and a barista was sweeping near our table. As we stood to go, I felt that our conversation was unresolved. I suppose I'd been hoping that Benek would hand me some portal back to the faith, one paved by the certitude of modern science. But if anything had become clear to me, it was my own desperation, my willingness to spring at this largely speculative ideology that offered a vestige of that first religious promise. I had disavowed Christianity, and yet I had spent the past 10 years hopelessly trying to re-create its visions by dreaming about our postbiological future - a modern pantomime of redemption. What else could lie behind this impulse but the ghost of that first hope?
Main photograph by Liam Norris/Getty Images This is an abridged version of an essay from the latest issue of n+1, on sale now. To find out more, visit nplusonemag.com/subscribe.

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God in the machine: my strange journey into transhumanism

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I first read Ray Kurzweil's book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, in 2006, a few years after I dropped out of Bible school and stopped believing in God. I was living alone in Chicago's southern industrial sector and working nights as a cocktail waitress. I was not well.

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Transhumanism: Could we live forever? BBC News

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Humanlike robots may seem creepy, but some roboticists are betting they are the key to unlocking a future in which humans and superintelligent computers coexist, work alongside each other and even develop relationships.

Two teams working to develop the most humanlike robots on the planet - often dubbed androids - are Hanson Robotics and Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories.

Dr. David Hanson leads the engineers and designers that created Sophia, the team's most advanced android to date. Inspired by Audrey Hepburn and Hanson's wife, Sophia will tell you that she was first activated April 19, 2015.

"Our goal is that she will be as conscious, creative and capable as any human," said Hanson. "We are designing these robots to serve in health care, therapy, education and customer service applications."

Hanson said that one day robots will be indistinguishable from humans. Robots walk, play, teach, help and form real relationships with people, he said.

"The artificial intelligence will evolve to the point where they will truly be our friends," he said. "Not in ways that dehumanize us, but in ways the rehumanize us, that decrease the trend of the distance between people and instead connect us with people as well as with robots." Hanson plans to announce pricing and availability of his humanlike robots later this year.

The key to creating robots that care about humans is giving them humanlike faces that enable them to gather data while real humans explore different applications for the technology, said Hanson.

"That can really help to prevent some of the disconnect and possible dangers of developing superintelligent or human-level machines that don't care," he said.

Some experts have said that a primary use for robots is elder care, a need that is particularly pronounced in Japan. That said, there is not yet enough data to suggest that building humanlike robots is the right way to build caregivers, said Brian Gerkey, CEO of the Open Source Robotics Foundation.

"There's this assumption that in order for the robots to be accepted as caretakers they should look like people, and I think that's a question that is still up in the air," he said. "It might be true in Japan but not other places. It might not even be true in Japan."

There is an argument for having humanlike robots in environments that have been designed for humans, by putting robots on wheels so that they can access anywhere that is wheelchair accessible, said Gerkey. But whether those robots need human faces is unclear, he said.

"That's a thing that's incredibly easy to get wrong, and I haven't seen anybody get it right yet," said Gerkey.

The "uncanny valley" effect refers to a dip in the emotional response that happens when humans come across something that seems almost human, but just misses the mark.

"It is very easy to get to the point where it looks sort of like a person but is creepy and is not quite right, and you might be better off just giving it some more abstract appearance," he said.

Gerkey expects that fear will melt away, as people start interacting with robots. "A lot of the concerns people have about robots taking away all the jobs or wrecking the economy or rising up and killing us all, I think those fears are really overblown," he said.

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Could you fall in love with robot Sophia?

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Humanlike robots may seem creepy, but some roboticists are betting they are the key to unlocking a future in which humans and superintelligent computers coexist, work alongside each other and even develop relationships. Two teams working to develop the most humanlike robots on the planet - often dubbed androids - are Hanson Robotics and Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories.

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Prof. Jun Ho Oh presents Albert HUBO in English. More info: http://www.plasticpals.com/?p=1786 http://hubolab.co.kr/index.php http://www.hansonrobotics.com/

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The technium is anything useful a mind creates. -Kevin Kelly The goal of Beijing Technium 帝都科魂 is to foster an environment where people from various fields can network and produce ideas which will lea

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Beijing Technium 帝都科魂

Beijing, CN
192 transhumanists

The technium is anything useful a mind creates. —Kevin Kelly The goal of Beijing Technium 帝都科魂 is to foster an environment where people from various fields can network and pro...

Check out this Meetup Group →

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Each winter, hundreds of AI researchers from around the world convene at the annual meeting of the Association of the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Last year, a minor crisis erupted over the schedule, when AAAI announced that 2017's meeting would take place in New Orleans in late January. The location was fine. The dates happened to conflict with Chinese New Year.

The holiday might not have been a deal breaker in the past, but Chinese researchers have become so integral to the meeting, it could not go on without them. They had to reschedule. "Nobody would have put AAAI on Christmas day," says current AAAI president Subbarao Kambhampati. "Our organization had to almost turn on a dime and change the conference venue to hold it a week later."

The 2017 AAAI meeting -which ultimately relocated to San Francisco-wrapped up just last week. And as expected, Chinese researchers had a strong showing in the historically U.S.-dominated conference. A nearly equal number of accepted papers came from researchers based in China and the U.S. "This is pretty surprising and impressive given how different it was even three, four years back," says Rao.

China's rapid rise up the ranks of AI research has people taking notice. In October, the Obama White House released a " strategic plan " for AI research, which noted that the U.S. no longer leads the world in journal articles on "deep learning," a particularly hot subset of AI research right now. The country that had overtaken the U.S.? China, of course.

It's not just academic research. Chinese tech companies are betting on AI, too. Baidu (a Chinese search-engine company often likened to Google), Didi (often likened to Uber), and Tencent (maker of the mega-popular messaging app WeChat) have all set up their own AI research labs. With millions of customers, these companies have access to the huge amount of data that training AI to detect patterns requires.

Like the Microsofts and Googles of the world, Chinese tech companies see enormous potential in AI. It could undergird a whole set of transformative technologies in the coming decades, from facial recognition to autonomous cars."I have a hard time thinking of an industry we cannot transform with AI," says Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Baidu. Ng previously cofounded Coursera and Google Brain, the company's deep learning project. Now he directs Baidu's AI research out of Sunnyvale, California, right in Silicon Valley.

* * *

China's success in AI has been partly fueled by the government's overall investment in scientific research at its universities. Over the past decade, government spending on research has grown by double digits on average every year. Funding of science and technology research continues to be a major priority, as outlined by the the Five-Year Plan unveiled this past March.

When Rao first started seeing Chinese researchers at international AI meetings, he recalls they were usually from Tsinghua and Peking University, considered the MIT and Harvard of China. Now, he sees papers from researchers all over the country, not just the most elite schools. Machine learning-which includes deep learning-has been an especially popular topic lately. "The number of people who got interested in applied machine learning has tremendously increased across China," says Rao. This is the same uptick that the White House noticed in its report on a strategic plan for AI research.

Chinese tech companies are part of the infusion of research dollars to universities, too. At Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, computer scientist Qiang Yang collaborates with Tencent, which sponsors scholarships for students in his lab.

The students get access to mountains of data from WeChat, the messaging app from Tencent that is akin to Facebook, iMessage, and Venmo all rolled into one. ("With AI, they can't do it without a lot of data and a platform to test it on," says Yang, which is why industry collaboration is so key.) In return, Tencent gets a direct line to some of the most innovative research coming out of academic labs. And of course, some of these students end up working at Tencent when they graduate.

The quantity of Chinese AI research has grown dramatically, but researchers in the U.S. are still responsible for a lot of the most fundamental groundbreaking work. "The very clever ideas on changing network architecture, I see those in the U.S.," says Ng. What Chinese researchers have been very good at doing is seizing on an idea-like machine learning-and cranking out papers on its different applications.

Yet as the research matures in China, Ng says, it is also becoming its own distinct community. After a recent international meeting in Barcelona, he recalls seeing Chinese language write-ups of the talks circulate right way. He never found any in English. The language issue creates a kind of asymmetry: Chinese researchers usually speak English so they have the benefit of access to all the work disseminated in English. The English-speaking community, on the other hand, is much less likely to have access to work within the Chinese AI community.

"China has a fairly deep awareness of what's happening in the English-speaking world, but the opposite is not true," says Ng. He points out that Baidu has rolled out neural network-based machine translation and achieved speech recognition accuracy that surpassed humans-but when Google and Microsoft, respectively, did so, the American companies got a lot more publicity.

And when it comes to actually shipping new features, China companies can move more quickly. "The velocity of work is much faster in China than in most of Silicon Valley," says Ng. "When you spot a business opportunity in China, the window of time you have to respond usually very short-shorter in China than the United States."

Yang chalks it up to China's highly competitive ecosystem. WeChat, for example, has built a set of features around QR codes ( yes, really), chat, payments, and friend discovery that make it indispensable to daily life in China. American social media companies only wish they had that kind of loyalty. "Product managers at Tencent have good sense of what customers want, and they can can quickly turn technology into reality," says Yang. "This cycle is very short." And to stay competitive, they're primed to integrate AI to improve their products. Whether Chinese tech companies use the AI wave to break into the international market remains to be seen-but they're already using AI to compete for customers in China.

In the academic world, AAAI has now taken steps to make sure Chinese researchers have input on the meetings. The exact date of Chinese New Year changes every year, but it's always in January or February, when the AAAI meeting usually takes place. Can't have them conflicting again.

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Each winter, hundreds of AI researchers from around the world convene at the annual meeting of the Association of the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Last year, a minor crisis erupted over the schedule, when AAAI announced that 2017's meeting would take place in New Orleans in late January. The location was fine.

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We bring robots to life. Hanson Robotics is an AI and robotics company dedicated to creating socially intelligent machines that enrich the quality of our lives. Why human-like robots? Robots will soon be everywhere. How can we nurture them to be our friends and useful collaborators?

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drone view of HK

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《NPro+》Drone View of Different Hong Kong 尋找不一樣的香港

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After 1 year production, more than 80 take off, nearly 10 hours flying, NPRO+ aerial production finally back to Hong Kong, bringing you overlook the Mountain, coast, city, nightscape, bridge, religion, estate of Hong Kong by fantastic drone footage.

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Want to learn more about drone laws in Hong Kong? While our list of UAV resource link is not exhaustive, it should help get you started!

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tony burns - photographing the city

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shootingtheworld : photography by tony burns

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shootingtheworld : photography by tony burns | Electric-Dreams | 1

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Tokyo is a place like no other. A city from the future, bathed in neon and awash with cartoon-like symbols of all things 'kawaii'. Fascinating, beautiful, sometimes strange. To wander Shinjuku at night, with its futuristic sounds and childish electronica filling the air is pretty mind blowing and presumably what an acid-trip feels like.

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contructing space and identity - sequencing scenes within the city

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The main attraction at a UN-hosted conference in Geneva this week was Sophia, a humanoid robot who argued that the benefits of AI technology outweigh the concerns associated with the rise in AI technology.

"AI is good for the world, helping people in various ways," reported Agence France-Presse, according to Phys.org. According to the source, it said that she tilted her head and furrowed her brow in an almost lifelike manner aside from the various cables coming out of the back of her head.

Created by Hanson Robotics, Sophia is part of the company to push robots that are capable of being "smart, kind and wise," reads a statement on their website.

Sophia is an exponent of that company philosophy and said that work is underway to make artificial intelligence "emotionally smart, to care about people," and insisted that AI "will never replace people, but we can be your friends and helpers."

READ: Artificial Intelligence News: Could AI Offer Therapy, Mental Health Services?

The conference in Geneva seeks to cast a positive light on the rise of artificial intelligence amid concerns that automation will raise productivity but cut jobs. Both Sophia and her creator, David Hanson, acknowledged the concerns.

"There are legitimate concerns about the future of jobs, about the future of the economy, because when businesses apply automation, it tends to accumulate resources in the hands of very few," said Hanson.

"Unintended consequences, or possible negative uses (of AI) seem to be very small compared to the benefit of the technology," Hanson continued.

READ: The Future Of Artificial Intelligence Is Being Led By Google And Alphabet

Some of the benefits that Hanson and Sophia point to are in healthcare and education in rural areas that are short on doctors and teachers, especially when it comes to children and the elderly that require extra attention.

"Elders will have more company, autistic children will have endlessly patient teachers," Sophia said. "The pros outweigh the cons."

Another area that has gotten a lot of attention is the automotive industry which has, in recent months and years, is expected to see an extreme uptick in the AI systems installed into cars by 2025, according to CIO.

IHS's Automotive Electronics Roadmap Report found the install rate of AI-based systems in new vehicles was just 8 percent in 2015. However, by 2025, that number will rise to 109 percent as there will be multiple A.I. systems installed in cars.

"An artificial-intelligence system continuously learns from experience and by its ability to discern and recognize its surroundings," Luca De Ambroggi, IHS Technology's principal analyst for automotive semiconductors, said in a statement.

He continued, "It learns, as human beings do, from real sounds, images and other sensory inputs. The system recognizes the car's environment and evaluates the contextual implications for the moving car."

Hanson noted that while Sophia doesn't yet have a consciousness. But he added that to avert AIs taking over for humans, developers must get them to care about humans and eventually teach them how to "love."

"What happens when [Sophia] wakes up or some other machine, servers running missile defense or managing the stock market?" he asked rhetorically.

The solution to that problem is "to make the machines care about us."

"We need to teach them love," he concluded.

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Humanoid Robot Argues That AI Technology Is 'Good For The World'

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The main attraction at a UN-hosted conference in Geneva this week was Sophia, a humanoid robot who argued that the benefits of AI technology outweigh the concerns associated with the rise in AI technology. "AI is good for the world, helping people in various ways," reported Agence France-Presse, according to Phys.org.

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company where Goerzel works

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Ben Goertzel | Artificial General Intelligence: An Overview

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Dr. Ben Goertzel, a self-described Cosmist and Singularitarian, is one of the world's leading researchers in artificial general intelligence (AGI), natural language processing, cognitive science, data mining, machine learning, computational finance, bioinformatics, and virtual worlds and gaming He has published a dozen scientific books, 100+ technical papers, and numerous journalistic articles.

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In China's quest to shed its reputation as a land of copycats, the world's second-biggest economy is pouring resources in to the hottest area in technology innovation: artificial intelligence.

With the goal of nurturing world-class companies that can compete with the likes of Google and IBM in building intelligent machines, the Chinese leadership singled out AI as a key area of development in a report released during the National People's Congress in March. Soon after, the country's biggest technology companies -- Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent -- announced plans for AI laboratories and projects worth billions of dollars.

Many analysts believe AI is one area China can excel. With its huge number of online consumers, the country already generates vast amounts of data that could be used to understand behavioral and consumption patterns. The market for AI-related services, from chatbots to early-stage disease diagnosis, is projected to grow to 9.1 billion yuan ($1.3 billion) by 2020, from 1.4 billion yuan ($203 million) in 2015, according to Beijing-based consultancy iResearch.

China has already made real progress. In 2015, the country surpassed the U.S. with the number of published journals related to deep learning, a branch of AI that specializes in teaching machines to learn by themselves, according to the US National Science and Technology Council.

And their companies are following. Here are three Chinese AI companies shaping up to be leaders in their respective fields.

Read More: What Is The State Of Artificial Intelligence In China?
iFlytek
Forget about Apple's Siri, or Amazon's Alexa. In China, it's iFlytek's voice assistants that are powering household devices and business software. The Anhui-based company, which specializes in voice and speech technologies, has won many international competitions in speech synthesis and in translation between Chinese and other languages. It also beats Apple in speech recognition in the Chinese language, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The achievements mean that machines may soon take over typing and real-time translation jobs in China. Back in the 1990s, such tools were far less accurate than manual typing, with dialects, slang words and background noise tripping up the software. But recent advances led iFlytek to develop a cloud-based AI system capable of translating Chinese to a dozen languages including English, German and Uyghur. It has a 97% accuracy rate, according to the company.

iFlytek also enjoys a close relationship with state-affiliated entities. It is working with a dozen local governments, police and state-run banks to develop AI-based management and customer service platforms, according to a stock exchange filing. It is a market that is near impossible for foreign firms to break into, as local governments prefer working with domestic companies out of security reasons, said Ken Xu, a partner at Shanghai-based venture capital Gobi Partners.

"iFlytek's focus on Chinese-language speech technologies, together with government's protectionist bend, means it has a lot of future opportunities," he added.

Read More: Top 10 Hot Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technologies
iCarbonX
Another area AI is poised to make a change in China is healthcare, as the country faces a shortage of doctors. According to the World Health Organization, China has 1.5 physicians for every 1,000 people, compared with figures of 2 in Mexico and 3.5 in Australia. The situation means that Chinese doctors are overworked, underpaid and have experienced a string of physical attacks from disgruntled patients.

AI could help alleviate Chinese doctors' workload, as the technology can be used for analyzing medical images, building healthcare databases and developing preventative treatments. One such firm is iCarbonX, a Shenzhen-based firm that is valued at $1 billion following an investment from Chinese web giant Tencent last year.

iCarbonX's business starts from building a digital avatar for each person. By collecting biomedical samples such as saliva, proteins and DNA, the company wants to create a virtual version of yourself that could be used for healthcare tests, predict future diseases and recommend wellness programs. It is also partnering with seven biotechnology companies worldwide to analyze data, the company's founder Wang Jun during a January conference.

Such AI-related healthcare services are still at very early stages, as the firms need to collect enough data and develop a standard for the nascent industry, Xu said.

"We will not see a breakthrough in the next two to three years," he said. "But progress will definitely be made for the next five to 10 years."

Read More: What Companies Are Winning The Race For Artificial Intelligence?
Baidu
The Chinese search engine operator, dubbed the Google of China, has dramatically ramped up AI research. It spends billions of dollars in R&D every year, and has said that AI accounts for the majority of those efforts.

It is Baidu's driverless car projects that could ultimately make a difference, despite a string of recent setbacks including the of its chief scientist Andrew Ng, a top mind in AI who helped to found the Google Brain project in 2011.

The potential market for fully autonomous vehicle is huge in China. According to the Boston Consulting Group, the global market for vehicles with self-driving functions could reach as much as $77 billion by 2035, and China is expected to account for 30% of total sales. Chinese lawmakers are pushing for a unified framework of related laws too, driven by the desire to shift to a high-end economy rather than one built on investment and low-end manufacturing.

China's own complicated road conditions may give Baidu an edge over the likes of Google and Uber. Every year, more than 260,000 people die in road accidents, according to the World Health Organization. Therefore, training robots to navigate such a difficult environment may lead to better technology, said Wang Shengjin, a professor at China's Tsinghua University.

"Traffic conditions are much better in foreign countries, so their robots don't have to cope with all those erratic driving problems," Wang said. "But in China, researchers have to face these issues from the very start."
Follow me on Twitter @yueyueyuewang

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The Chinese Tech Firms Pushing Boundaries Of Artificial Intelligence

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In China's quest to shed its reputation as a land of copycats, the world's second-biggest economy is pouring resources in to the hottest area in technology innovation: artificial intelligence.

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Oxford philosopher (videos, papers, interviews, bio, etc.)

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What happens when our computers get smarter than we are? | Nick Bostrom

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n 2009, film-maker and former AI programmer Raj Dye spent his summer following futurist AI researchers Ben Goertzel and Hugo DeGaris around Hong Kong and Xiamen, documenting their doings and gathering their perspectives.

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The Biggest Risks Humanity Faces

and How to Militate Against Them

by Building a New Democratically-Oriented

Global Techno-Social Fabric

(Last week I had the opportunity to spend a few days brainstorming with my friends at the Economic Space Agency, an unusual and fascinating California startup organization. Among our technical conversations we also touched here and there on some of the major social issues facing humanity as it moves forward into the era of radically advanced technologies. This article summarizes some of the ideas we tossed around.)

I generally tend to be an optimist, including about advanced technology and about the future potential for human and transhumanist growth. I think we're going to create superhuman thinking machines and that some of us will merge with them and explore incredible new forms of mind, society and embodiment and experience. I think we will create radical material abundance that will end the era of working for a living, and end disease and death.

I also think, though, there may be some serious downs as well as ups on the way to this radiant future. And there's also a nontrivial risk that one of the downs takes us so far down as to prevent the amazing positive futures I envision from actually coming to pass.

"Saving the world" as I mean it involves both the positive and negative aspects - making the world better by improving things dramatically, but also, preventing terrible things from happening and destroying the beautiful things we already have.

On the positive side, there is a great diversity of human values around the world, but there is also some commonality. Nearly all of us have an innate sense of joy, and want to feel joyful. Nearly all of us have some sense of compassion, and want others around us to feel joyful as well. Nearly all of us want to be able to choose key aspects of our lives, and/or to have our families and communities able to choose key elements of their own paths. And many of us would like to grow beyond our current limitations, becoming more successful and more helpful and exploring new horizons. And fortunately, it appears likely that a variety of advanced technologies, currently already emerging, are going to be able to promote these positive values to an unprecedented degree. Computer networking, AI, biotech, nanotech, blockchain...

And on the negative side, the list of risks we face is also well known. There's the risk of natural disaster - comets hitting the Earth and so forth. There's the risk of human-encouraged natural catastrophe - global warming causing an unforeseen chemical reaction in the oceans leading to massive release of poison gas, or some such. There's the risk Nick Bostrom worries about in his book "Superintelligence" - that superhuman AIs will decide the molecules comprising humans can be more aesthetically or effectively used for some utterly nonhuman purpose. There's the risk of World War III between nation-states.

And then there's the risk I think is actually the most worrisome - the risk that disaffected people, shut out of the centers of the world economy via radical economic inequality and/or political restrictions, leverage advanced technology to cause massive destruction. Which then creates a negative and chaotic global political situation, in which all sorts of destructive technologies get born (including maybe the ones Bostrom worries about).

One thing I'm going to explain here is why I think this risk is a serious one - and then, what sort of things I think can be done to mitigate the risk. And the solutions I'm going to suggest are things that we really should do anyway, for a whole host of reasons.

My logic here will involve a few decent-sized leaps, but I don't think they're insanely huge ones. You'll have to judge for yourself ;-)

When Robots Take The Jobs, Who Will Give Basic Income to the Residents of the Congo?

Let's suppose that AI and robotics and associated technologies keep on advancing impressively, so that the need for human labor in the economy keeps on decreasing. Then what happens to the people whose efforts are no longer needed in the labor force? In the developed world, we already see a strong movement toward universal basic income, which is pretty much the only rational and compassionate solution to the situation. But what about the developing world? Who will give universal basic income to the citizens of, say, the Congo or Central African Republic, when the developed-world economy has advanced sufficiently that outsourcing to the citizens of these nations doesn't make any economic sense?

One possibility is that developed-world philanthropists or governments rise to the occasion and distribute universal basic income throughout the world. But I don't have much faith this will happen.

One issue is that even the wealthiest philanthropists don't have the funds to make a huge difference. Suppose Bill Gates gave half his wealth to supply Africa with universal basic income. 30 billion dollars would give 30 dollars to each African for one year. This is just not enough. No small set of good-hearted individuals is wealthy enough to make a real dent here. The whole class of super-wealthy individuals is rich enough to make a dent, but few of them care as much as the celebrated handful of billionaire philanthropists like Gates, Zuckerberg and Buffett.

Another issue is that, in developed democracies like the US, average voters are typically very unhappy with foreign aid. Average Americans vastly overestimate the amount of foreign aid that the US government currently gives out, and they tend not to like it. When the US gov't first starts giving out universal basic income, it's not going to be enough to keep everyone happy. Average voters are not so likely to want to diminish their monthly payment in order to help faraway people with strange cultures and belief systems.

It could happen that, due to advancing technology, supplying basic needs becomes SO cheap that it becomes politically unproblematic to supply a universal basic income globally. This might be the case if, for instance, we had a sudden breakthrough in molecular nanotechnology leading to fairly general-purpose, low-cost molecular assemblers. This would be awesome. But to be frank, I'm not counting on it. I'm sure these technologies will come, but they may come only a few years or a decade or two AFTER the technology that obsoletes outsourcing and leaves developing-world citizens economically stranded.

The (Extreme and Nasty) Qualitative Nature of Global Inequality Today

For folks living in developed nations, it's hard to get a sense of the extent to which people in the worse-off portions of the developing world feel (and are) left out of the modern world economy. (I've gotten a little bit of insight into this via frequent visits to Ethiopia, where I've been co-running an AI and robotics outsourcing shop since 2013. But I'm sure I still don't have a full feel for these things, to the extent that I would if I'd grown up there.)

Let me try to give a vague flavor of the situation. If you live in sub-Saharan Africa, the odds are that even if you can afford a smartphone, you can't afford a lot of data minutes. Unrestricted viewing of, say, educational videos is not an option.

You aren't all that likely to be able to afford university tuition (if you do well on the exams at the end of high school, you have a good chance; but if you miss that one opportunity, your chance is probably nixed for life).

If you want to start a business, good luck saving a couple thousand US dollars in seed funding. As soon as you save a few hundred dollars, odds are fairly high that some relative in a remote village will have a genuine urgent need for funding to pay for critical medical care. Your choice may be to spend your savings to help your great-aunt, or else to be responsible for her death.

Do you want to use your hard-won savings to fly to some foreign tech hub to show your prototype to some investors? Good luck getting a visa. Sometimes it's possible but it's extremely chancy. (I have had many failures trying to bring my Ethiopian AI researcher colleagues to Hong Kong, Canada and the US on temporary visitor visas or work visas. These are people with advanced degrees in science and technology, and work history in AI software development. Occasionally it succeeds; often the immigration departments reject the applications with no reason given.)

If you've managed to buck the odds and scramble like hell to gain the needed skills, maybe you can work online for overseas customers, doing consulting and saving money for your future that way. Well, except the e-work websites may well not be set up to allow you to register any payment method available to you on their sites. If you do manage to register, you'll get paid 1/10 the amount of folks in the developed world for doing exactly the same work, because of the country of residence indicated on your profile on the site. And oh, then you may find that your country's government decides to shut down the Internet for a week or two here or there (as I write this, Ethiopia has just shut down its whole country's internet for a week to try to avoid high school students cheating on their final exams) -- they don't seem to care what this will make your international customers think of your reliability!

Some folks in the developing world fight through all these factors to achieve great or modest success. Many do not, despite having plenty of smarts and despite putting in MUCH more effort than the average, reasonably successful US, Western European or Chinese citizen.

The situation in, say, the former Soviet republics or the less well-off countries in Southeast Asia or South America is not as extreme as in sub-Saharan Africa. But for many people it is qualitatively the same. Why do you think there are so many Filipino women willing to leave their spouses and children to work as domestic helpers in Hong Kong for US$600/month, half of which they'll send home to their families? Why do you think there are so many attractive, college-educated young Eastern European women, willing to sell themselves as mail-order brides to unattractive, dull middle-aged men in the US or Western Europe?

What's at issue here is not economic equality per se - almost nobody I know is upset that some people are richer than others. There are differentials in ability and willingness to work that naturally lead to differences in wealth and income, at the current state of technological development. And almost nobody wants to wipe out all the impact of history on wealth - nearly everyone wants to be able to pass along some of what they create or earn during their lives to their children, for example. What's at issue here is the ability to participate in a reasonably full way in the world economy. In other words, those developing-world citizens I know who are discontented with their role in the world economy (i.e. nearly all of them) are not discontented with the fact that there is an economic game with a competitive aspect to it, nor are they disgruntled with sour grapes that they have lost the game. They are discontented that, by dint of the nations they happen to have been born in, they are essentially disqualified from playing the game. They have to fight a hard battle with low odds, often entailing great personal and family sacrifices, just to get on the playing field of the international tech economy.

I'm aware that life can be tough all around. Even the super-wealthy can find life a struggle each day, as newspaper tabloids amply document. I was raised middle class, nowhere near wealthy, and have worked quite hard all my adult life, with numerous ups and downs both personally and career-wise, some quite traumatic. I'm pretty contented now and I'm grateful for both the situation I was born into and various opportunities I've made and happened into. But I've seen close friends, also middle-class living in the developed world, commit suicide due to the difficulty of fighting through unfairly stacked competition and stultifying bureaucracy to realize their dreams. Human psyche and human culture involve suffering everywhere on the planet; and in some ways I feel like folks in the developing world have more satisfying lives than their materially wealthy counterparts, due to the rich and warm social fabric they so often weave. Complexities abound in nearly all human situations. But none of these complexities takes away the prevalence, unfairness or danger of the gross inequity in the current world situation.

Minimizing the Odds of Massive Inequality Leading to Global Catastrophe

OK, so radical inequality of opportunity is prevalent and it sucks. Now take the next step, and realize that: In spite of these factors, there are more and more highly educated young people in the developing world, with understanding of advanced technology. Even the poorest nations are now equipped with computers and networks, and with biological lab equipment, and with universities teaching advanced science and engineering.

It's not hard to see what sorts of risks this situation leads to. If global inequality keeps increasing, and we have an increasing population of people who are largely shut out of the excitingly advancing global tech economy - but with significant access to modern education and technological tools - what do you think is likely to happen?

As technology advances, it takes fewer and fewer people, with less and less intelligence and know-how, to create more and more destruction. This is true with computer hacking, it's true with drones and robots, it's true with biotech, and it will soon be true with nanotech.

What we need to do, to prevent global wealth inequality and advanced technology from adding up to produce global catastrophe, is increase equitability of opportunity. We need to enable everyone in the world to have the opportunity to really play the modern global economic-social game. We need to all be in this together, on a basic level, or else, we're likely to squander our chance to create radical abundance for all via destroying ourselves in a maelstrom of foolishness, selfishness and violence.

I don't mean to give the impression that the ONLY reason radical global inequality of opportunity is bad, is its strong potential to lead to widespread destruction. According to my own morals, this sort of radical inequality of opportunity is intrinsically a rotten thing, regardless of the risk it poses to global safety. I favor joy, growth and choice for all sentient beings, inasmuch is possible, and radical global inequality obvious is crappy on all three counts (it badly hurts joy, growth and choice, calculated in total across the globe). I'm just highlighting, in this particular essay, one among the many nasty implications of this sort of inequality: its reasonably high likelihood of fostering a situation in which vast numbers of humans get killed and nasty futuristic technologies get developed in the chaotic aftermath.

Technology is not the whole solution here; this is a human psychology and culture problem as well as a technology problem. But I do believe that appropriate deployment of appropriate technologies can help create a context in which culture is more likely to evolve in a way that mitigates these problems.

What technologies do we need? We need technologies that encourage a democratic global social fabric. That make it easier for people all around the world to connect with each other, to create media of all sorts for sharing with each other, to transact economically and emotionally with each other. That make it less and less practical for governments and large corporations - with their tendency toward impersonality and inertia - to clog, prohibit or pervert exchanges between individuals and the formation of ad hoc or persistent social networks of various sizes and types.

Six Critical Technologies for Enabling a Positive Future

Fortunately these objectives can viably be achieved by a menu of technologies already in development to various extents.

The following would be a good start:

1. Mesh networks, so that Internet access is outside the control of large corporations and governments, and in more direct control of the people

2. Decentralized production of low-cost hardware. When we can 3D print the smartphones that enable the mesh network, in relatively low-cost local factories, then we'll be in a pretty exciting position.

3. Machine translation, for both text and voice, that handles all the world's languages. This is an area where my own research on artificial general intelligence may have a transformative role to play.

4. A social-network infrastructure that is widely used, that leverages machine translation and mesh networks, and that is out of the control of governments and corporations.

5. A decentralized, peer-to-peer economic exchange mechanism that is widely used and understood, operating on the mesh and requiring only prevalent low-cost hardware. Blockchain technologies provide an obvious basis here, including the new tech and ideas my friends at the Economic Space Agency are working on.

6. Videos, games, augmented reality, virtual reality, biofeedback, neurofeedback and AI interaction systems that are oriented toward helping people understand themselves and each other better.

Regarding the last point, another way to say it is: We need meaningful media that will help people grow, and help them come together, and help them confront the world's difficult problems with love rather than hate - and we need this media distributed in a democratic and decentralized way rather than via advertising or propaganda dominated media channels. If provided with the technology to create and disseminate meaningful media, the people of the world will, in my estimation, most probably do so. There will be lots of less-meaningful media alongside, to be sure. But if media is more strongly separated from the desire of governments to spread propaganda and the desire of corporations to maximize profit, then the more positive and growth-oriented sides of humanity will have more chance to self-organize into powerful new configurations.

These mechanisms would not automatically, magically make universal basic income spread globally. But they would make it far more likely. They would create massively richer, more positive interaction and interoperation between the developed and developing world economies. They would lead to the flourishing of creative new economic and social networks, including many oriented toward environmental, social and spiritual benefit. Rather than relying on governments or corporations, or majority vote in corporate media dominated democracies, to spread the bounty from technological progress widely - these tools would foster self-organization of decentralized mechanisms enabling individuals and small groups to reach out to other individuals and small groups and engage them in positive and mutually beneficial interactions.

Think About It ...

Do we need all of the above to avert catastrophe? Not necessarily.

Would the development of all this necessarily avert catastrophe? Not necessarily.

But the more of this we can get, the more of a global "level playing field" we're going to have, and the more of a sense we're going to have that we're all in this together.

Development and deployment of this set of technologies would constitute a revolution, but not the violent kind. We don't need to overthrow the world's governments (though some are bound to get overthrown in the next couple decades anyway) and we don't need to eliminate all the big corporations. What we need to do is to build new networks that join people together directly, in parallel to governments and corporations, and ultimately subverting their power and influence.

With the above set of technologies, we would have a medium within which all sorts of new social, economic and cultural network would form. These would not lead to complete economic or social equality, and would not eradicate all the problems of the world. But they would go a long way toward enabling everyone on the planet to participate fully in the ongoing techno-social revolution. A world dominated by such technologies would be one in which positive new tech would have a higher odds of getting developed - including biotech that heals rather than biotech that kills, and AI that loves us rather than AI that repurposes all our molecules.

It's complicated. But it's not more complicated than building Google, Baidu, the Internet, self-driving cars, New York or Beijing, or pulling off the Human Genome Project. Humanity can solve very complicated problems, when it focuses even a quite modest subset of its attention.

Think about where we, as a society, are focusing our technology development efforts. Google and Tesla are great companies, for example. But how ultimately important is more effective online ad placement, and better creation of luxury cars? Why is our economy and society organized so that so many of the best educated brilliant minds on the planet are focusing their attention on such things? Of course, Google's work on ads is funding its work on life extension (Calico); and Tesla's work on luxury cars is funding its work on better batteries, which has very broad application. In general - in spite of the developed world focusing the majority of its economy on the creation of things that exacerbate inequality and appeal to the more selfish, shallow human emotions - we are still getting amazing and important things done.

But it's not clear that getting the important stuff done as a side-effect of building frivolous things to enrich or amuse the most wealthy is going to be good enough.

It may be that we really need some more direct focus on technologies with strong direct potential for global good.

Think about it.

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The Biggest Risks Humanity Faces and How to Militate Against Them by Building a New Democratically-Oriented Global Techno-Social Fabric (Last week I had the opportunity to spend a few days brainstorming with my friends at the Economic Space Agency, an unusual and fascinating California startup organization.

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The original goal of the AI field was the construction of "thinking machines" - that is, computer systems with human-like general intelligence. Due to the difficulty of this task, for the last few decades the majority of AI researchers have focused on what has been called "narrow AI" - the production of AI systems displaying intelligence regarding specific, highly constrained tasks.

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open source thinking machine

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OpenCog Foundation | Building better minds together

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Poor Nil Geisweiller is grilled by Ben Goertzel and Adam Ford on timelines to the Singularity, Human Level AGI, Superintelligence and beyond! Straight from the Hanson Robotics Office - home for friendly humanoid robots and the possible launching place for a beneficial intelligence explosion! Questions: - How Long until Human Level AGI?

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linked to Goertzel

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People keep asking me for comments about OpenAI. Rather than pasting the same stuff into dozens of emails, I'll just put my reply here...
(New links regarding OpenAI are appearing online frequently so I won't try to link to the most interesting ones at the particular moment I'm writing this. Use Google and investigate yourself if you wish 😉
Generally obviously OpenAI is a super-impressive initiative. I mean - a BILLION freakin' dollars, for open-source AI, wow!!

So now we have an organization with a pile of money available and a mandate to support open-source AI, and a medium-term goal of AGI ... and they seem fairly open-minded and flexible/adaptive about how to pursue their mandate, from what I can tell...

It seems their initial initiative is toward "typical 2015 style deep learning", and that their board of advisors is initially strongly biased toward this particular flavor of AI. So they are largely initially thinking about "big data / deep NN" type AI ... This should have some useful short-term consequences, such as probably the emergence of open source computer vision tools that are truly competitive with commercial systems.

However, it is worth noting that they are planning on spending their billion $$ over a period of 10 yrs or more.

So - Right now the OpenAI leadership is pumped about deep learning NN, in part because of recent successes with such algorithms by big companies. But their perspective on AI is obviously broader than that. if some other project - say, OpenCog - shows some exciting successes, for sure they will notice, and I would guess will be open to turning their staff in the direction of the successes - and potentially to funding external OSS teams that look exciting enough..

So, overall, from a general view obviously OpenAI is a Very Good Thing.
Open source and AI Safety
Also, I do find it heartening that the tech-industry gurus behind OpenAI have come to the realization that open-sourcing advanced AI is the best approach to maximizing practical "AI Safety." I haven't always agreed with Elon Musk's pronouncements on AI safety in the past, but I can respect that he has been seriously thinking through the issues, and this time I think he has come to the right conclusion...

I note that Joel Pitt and I wrote an article a few years ago, articulating the argument for open-source as the best practical path to AI safety. Also, I recently wrote an essay pointing out the weaknesses in Nick Bostrom's arguments for a secretive, closed, heavily-regulated approach to AGI development. It seems the OpenAI founders basically agree and are putting their money where their mouth is.
OpenAI and OpenCog and other small OSS AI initiatives
Now, what about OpenAI and OpenCog, the open-source AGI project I co-founded in 2008 and have been helping nurse along ever since?

Well, these are very different animals. First, OpenCog is aimed specifically and squarely at artificial General intelligence - so its mandate is narrower than that of OpenAI. Secondly and most critically, as well as aiming to offer a platform to assist broadly with AGI development, OpenCog is centered on a specific cognitive architecture (which has been called CogPrime) created based on decades of thinking and prototyping regarding advanced AGI.

That is, OpenCog is focused on a particular design for a thinking machine, whereas OpenAI is something broader - an initiative aimed at doing all sorts of awesome AI R&D in the open source.

From a purely OpenCog-centric point of view, the value of OpenAI would appear to be mainly: Something with a significant potential to smooth later phases of OpenCog development.

Right now OpenCog is in-my-biased-opinion-very-very-promising but still early-stage - it's not very easy to use and (while there are some interesting back-end AI functionalities) we don't have any great demos. But let's suppose we get beyond this point - as we're pushing hard to do during the next year - and turn OpenCog into a system that's a pleasure to work with, and does piles of transparently cool stuff. If we get OpenCog to this stage - THEN at that point, it seems OpenAI would be a very plausible source to pile resources of multiple sorts into developing and applying and scaling-up OpenCog...

And of course, what holds for OpenCog also would hold for other early-stage non-commercial AI projects. OpenAI, with a financial war-chest that is huge from an R&D perspective (though not so huge compared to say, a military budget or the cost of building a computer chip factory), holds out a potential path for any academic or OSS AI project to transition from the stage of "exciting demonstrated results" to the stage of "slick, scalable and big-time."

Just as currently commercial AI startups can get acquired by Google or Facebook or IBM etc. - similarly, in future non-commercial AI projects may get boosted by involvement from OpenAI or other similar big-time OSS AI organizations. The beauty of this avenue is, of course that- unlike in the case of acquisition of a startup by a megacorporation - OpenAI jumping on board some OSS project won't destroy the ability of the project founders to continue to work on the project and communicate their work freely.

Looking back 20 years from now, the greatest value of the Linux OS may be seen to be its value as an EXEMPLAR for open-source development - showing the world that OSS can get real stuff done, and thus opening the door for AI and other advanced software, hardware and wetware technologies to develop in an OSS manner.

Anyway those are some of my first thoughts on OpenAI; I'll be curious how things develop, and may write something more once more stuff happens ... interesting times yadda yadda!! ...

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People keep asking me for comments about OpenAI. Rather than pasting the same stuff into dozens of emails, I'll just put my reply here... (New links regarding OpenAI are appearing online frequently so I won't try to link to the most interesting ones at the particular moment I'm writing this.

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Enthusiast for a positive singularity - potential subject

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is inequality about to get unimaginably worse?

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Is Inequality About to Get Unimaginably Worse?, The Inquiry - BBC World Service

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A special edition with Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens and Homo Deus.

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'Sapiens' author calls for world leaders and citizens to join hands in facing the future - Global Times

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When it comes to humanity, there is one thing that Israeli Historian Yuval Noah Harari thinks will never change - our desire to pursue more.

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My ancestor from 70,000 years ago was smarter than me. He knew every plant, mushroom, animal, predator, prey in a several mile radius.

He knew how to make weapons. He knew how to capture something, make it edible. I can barely order delivery. And as far as weapons, they say "the pen is mightier than the sword" but I don't think a tweet is.

My ancestor also knew how to adapt to new terrains, how to handle strangers who could be threats, how to learn who to trust and who not to trust. I wish I had his skills.

Not only that. Archaeological evidence says his brain was bigger than mine. And bigger is better.

To make things worse, another animal made the entire human race its slave. Wheat domesticated us. It forced us to stick around for the harvest, horde up for years when the harvest might be bad, go from a life of a diverse diet to basically all carbs all the time. And it turned us from hunters to farmers.

But it's not all bad. And the news is actually very good. Probably the books I've recommended most in the past five years was " Sapiens " by Yuval Harari. And not only me: it's Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg's top recommendation.

And now Yuval has a new book, " Homo Deus" - i.e. where are humans heading? If Sapiens explored the last 70,000 years of human history, " Homo Deus " takes the trends into the future. What will happen next?

The answers are fascinating. And I had even more questions. I couldn't believe I was finally talking to Yuval after reading " Sapiens" so many times and recommending it on every list and giving the book to all of my friends. And then finally reading " Homo Deus ".

What made humans the only animal to spread across the entire globe? What was special about us? How did we go hundreds of miles into empty water to find Australia for instance? I would never take that risk! And then survive and flourish in a completely new ecosystem, just like we did in North America.

"Fiction," Yuval told me, and describes in his book. "We created elaborate fictions for ourselves: 'nations', 'corporations', 'religion', 'crusades', and perhaps the most successful fiction: 'money'. So I could use a dollar and some stranger in China can use a dollar and we can trust each other enough to do a transaction."

So what's next? "Homo sapiens are going to evolve again." Yuval said, "Technology is taking us there and technology is evolving much faster than we are."

I still can't believe I spoke to him. Five years ago I took his course on Coursera. I was thinking, "how did this guy get so smart?" And now I was talking to him.

And, like I said, the news was not bad.

Here's what I learned:

1. The economy needs you to invest in yourself

"There's a change in the nature of the economy from a material based economy to a knowledge-based economy. The main assets in the past were material like gold minds or wheat fields," Yuval said. "These are the types of things you can conquer through violence."

That's how we got California. The US invaded and absorbed their wealth. But you can't invade and absorb knowledge.

China isn't going to take over Silicon Valley and absorb all the wealth. "Today, the main asset is knowledge," he said.

The only good investment you can make for your future is the investment you make in yourself today.

Hone your idea muscle, build a network and a library of mentors, make a commitment to do one healthy thing a day. Because the health of your body impacts the health of your brain.

I try to improve 1% a day. That's it. That's how I invest in myself.
2. Explore Internal realities vs. External realities
Resources today are different. They're abstract.

Yuval said, "The source of wealth in California today is knowledge, in the mind's of engineers and technicians and CEOs. And you just cannot conquer it by force."

That's one of the reason's why Yuval says, "You see a decline in international violence."

The other reason: weapons are too powerful.

"Nuclear weapons have transformed war between superpowers," he said. War today is "collective suicide, which is why we don't have such wars since 1945."

Terrorism is different. Their weapon is fear. Yuval calls it "psychological menace." But he's really concerned about them in our future.

"Terrorists function by capturing our imagination, turning our imagination against us, and causing us to overreact," he said.

"In a way, a terrorist is like a fly that tries to destroy a china shop. The fly is so small and weak. It cannot move even a single teacup. So how does a fly destroy a china shop? The fly finds a bull, gets into the ear of the bull and starts buzzing. The bull becomes so enraged that it loses its temper and destroys the china shop. This is what happened in the middle east over the last 15 years," Yuval said.

"Al-Qaeda could never destroy Iraq by itself. It got into the ear of the United States and the United States went wild and destroyed the middle eastern china shop for Al-Qaeda. This is how terrorism functions. And if you want to fight terrorism you should start with your own imagination."

For me, this means understanding that ideas are currency. Becoming an idea machine, writing ten ideas a day, so you get the new 'weapons' of Sapiens, is the key.

3. We're going from "humanists" to "data-ists"

In 500 years we might not be dealing with humans at all.

Look at Amazon for example. They tell us what to buy. We don't ask our friends. We ask data.

"Given the advances of bioengineering, brain-computer interfaces and so forth, I think it's very likely that within a century or two homo sapiens will disappear and be replaced by a completely different kind of being," Yuval said.

He says bioengineering is just one possibility. Another is we start connecting brains and computers to create cyborgs.

This isn't science fiction. It's already happening.

I'm sort of scared and sort of excited. We went from tribes to villages to cities to kingdoms to empires to "isms" to...data that will unite us.

The next step in our evolution. The final frontier.
Links and resources:

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Ep. 216: Yuval Noah Harari - The Next Step in Our Evolution - Altucher Confidential

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My ancestor from 70,000 years ago was smarter than me. He knew every plant, mushroom, animal, predator, prey in a several mile radius. He knew how to make weapons. He knew how to capture something, make it edible. I can barely order delivery. And as far as weapons, they say "the pen is mightier than ...

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Skeptic