The adult human brain is pretty
much hands down the most sophisticated machine. We know of and there is nothing
particularly natural about it, unless your definition of artificial excludes
the intentional investment of massive amounts of time and resources that was
expended making it possible for you.
The human brain is a pretty
serious piece of hardware, but it’s the knowledge, all the learning, or
basically software, that goes into the makeup of your average educated adult
that makes it truly impressive and also artificial. If the basic brain itself
is natural, the final form it takes is no more natural than a chunk of marble
someone has chiseled into a statue, and frankly a good deal less so, because
our minds are the byproduct of decades of careful work to produce highly
sophisticated thinking engines. This
article will focus at some fascinating concepts for, basically, improving on
that, making people healthier or smarter or longer lived or just plain safer
and happier. Unfortunately it’s also a topic that’s gotten a bad reputation,
somewhat unfairly in our opinion, because transhumanism has accumulated a fair
amount of rubbish around itself in the last decade as it’s spawned a lot of
openly political movements and frequently groups that would be most accurately
described as cults.
Now that’s nothing new, we see
that a lot with science and science fiction, one minute you’ll looking at the
scientific and philosophical ramifications of something like Quantum Mechanics and
the Many World or Copenhagen Interpretations, the next minute someone is
peddling some home brew form of Quantum Mysticism. And that’s fine, any
scientific concept will tend to accumulate a lot of that as part of the normal
process of contemplating those very important philosophical and ethical aspects
of the concept, and the core science is not diminished by this. Unfortunately
in the case of Transhumanism this clutter has gotten to be much louder than the
actual scientific concepts and general principles so we think it scares some
folks off and truth are told we sometimes feel the same even though we can be
classified ourselves as a Transhumanist for around two decades now. The core
concept of Transhumanism is using technology to improve mental and physical health
and the length of the human lifespan too, preferably indefinitely.
This is hardly a new concept;
people have been using any number of herbs and rituals to attempt, sometimes
successfully, similar things for untold centuries. We’ve been sticking
artificial things in our bodies for a long time too, dental fillings have been
found in human skulls 10,000 years old and humans have basically been on the route
to being cyborgs since we started putting clothes on. We’ve been doing genetic
engineering of people probably longer and our crops and lives to care very
definitely not the byproduct of natural evolution. Just because a lot of the
new ideas involve microchips inserted into people or direct tinkering with DNA
doesn’t really change that beyond making it a lot more effective. There’s very
little natural about you or I, my dear ladies and gentleman. Mankind isn’t simply
a maker of artificial technologies who is now considering maybe making some of
those artificial changes to ourselves, we are now, and pretty much always shave
been, the most blatant and shining example of our own tinkering with nature. So
while in most folk’s minds there is some sort of distinct line where we cease
being natural by putting machines in ourselves, it’s important to understand
those are mostly arbitrary.
When it comes to being natural, that ship
sailed long ago. Because fundamentally drinking some herbal concoction to
improve your health, or Cleary our mind for better thinking, or slow your
aging, is the same for the purpose of intent as cramming some tiny little
machines in you to do the same tricks. There are an awful lot of folks who are alive
right now with all sorts of electronic gizmos in their bodies keeping them
alive or making their life easier.
Now that does not mean individual
applications of it don’t have their own, but in so far as we are just talking
about using artificial means to make people healthier, smarter, or longer
lived, we don’t think there’s much firm ground to get any moral footing. We
have been doing this, with mixed success, for as long as we have been around as
a civilization and just because we are much more scientific and successful with
it now does not make it morally or conceptually any different than in the past.
Now we have got a lot of concepts to cover and we’ll be skimming through many,
and in many ways today we are looking more at concepts then specific
technologies.
we tend to break up Transhumanism’s
goals or interests into a number of categories of general technology,
categorization is always a bit of an arbitrary thing but here’s our topics for
today:1. Speeding up Reflexes & Thinking 2.Slowing down Aging 3.Cloning and
Prosthetics 4.Uploading the Mind 5.Artificial Intelligence 6.Technological
Singularity. Our first category, speeding up reflexes and thinking, focuses
mostly on enhancing the speed at which signals are sent around your body or
brain. If you didn’t know, the main component of that is a thing called an
axon, and these tend to run throughout your body and mind in little sausage
links. They are the phone line or internet cable or information highway of your
body. Some are myelinated, some are not, and myelin is a fatty white substance
and the reason we call some chunks of brain material white matter. We also call
myelinated axons nerve fibers, and where they connect to other cells, usually other
neurons, we call these junctions synapses. The wider the diameter of an axon,
the faster information can travel down it, and if they don’t have that myelin
sheath, or it’s thin, it travels much slower. Generally this diameter is around
a micrometer, a millionth of a meter or a micron, but some are wider, up to 20
microns, the diameter of our thinnest hairs, and in the case of the squid giant
axon it can be fully a thousand microns wide, or a millimeter. Now that would
make for very fast nerve conduction except that the axon is unmyelinated so
it’s actually not too quick, quicker than our own unmyelinated axons since it
is so wide but still slower than our fastest, myelinated nerves. I wanted to
clear that up because people often talk about using squid giant axons in people
to speed up our nervous system and besides giving people the shivers it also
wouldn’t be effective. What you’d probably want to do is tweak the genes that
controlled axon diameter to be a bit wider, or simply transplant one
intentionally grown that way, or even just pull out that whole nerve to replace
it with say a fiber optic cable. Now what’s advantage of faster nerve
conduction? Does it make you lightning quickly? No, but it would make you react
a lot faster, this doesn’t make you move in a blur it just means the delay time
to send signals goes down. You might go from needing a decent fraction of a
second to realize something is in front of your car and send the single to
break down to a tiny fraction of that time, and that would save a lot of lives.
It’s the least comic-book-ie
superpower but it’s probably the most useful. Speed up nerve conductions and
people have way less accidents of every type. Once you adapted to it, which
would probably take quite a while, it would be very hard for you, for instance,
to trip down a flight of stairs. On top of that some of the most debilitating
injuries tend to involve nerve damage, so the ability to get in and replace
nerves or re grow them is obviously a high priority of modern medicine. Now a
lot of times the implementation of this concept would revolve around basically
coating existing nerves with some conductive substance that simply relayed the
information faster, closer to the speed of light basically, rather than the
speed of sound, which is about a million times slower than light and still
decently faster than even most fast nerves send signals. Tiny little robots or
some gene-tweaked virus would run around your system basically glazing your
existing nerves in your body and brain, or replacing them, so they simply sent
everything faster.
Conceptually easy though
obviously not easy to implement and probably way over-simplified from anything
we’d actually have to do to get that sort of result. Doing this in your brain
would also speed up thinking, especially if we could do it in a way that
generated less total heat. Our brains run quite hot, and a lot like how modern
computers have plateaued out more from the difficulty cooling them then further
micro-sizing them. There are some fundamentally physical limits to how little heat
you can generate performing a single bit operation, since there’s always some
heat produced erasing a bit of data, as covered under Landauer's principle, but
it is many orders of magnitude lower than we currently produce doing this on
our computers, the one from the factory or resting on your shoulders.
So there should be a lot of room
for improvement there. This would, or should, result in basically just speeding
up your thinking which doesn’t really make you smarter, it would be more like
slowing time down around you. If your brain was a million times faster, it’s
not that you are really smarter so much as you are experiencing a year of
subjective time for every 30 seconds that passes out side. That would probably
drive you insane, since humans normally operate at just a bit slower than the
second-scale. Our eyes only operate at about 60 frames a second; we interpret
vibrations occurring more than 20 times a second as sound. So unless you had
those altered too you’d be staring at freeze frame of your surroundings for
what felt like half an hour, and blinking your eyes would leave you blind for
hours. Even when you can see its still going to be an eternity of nothing
moving. It would be very handy to have days to think about uttering one
sentence, plenty of time for coming up with witty comments, but pretty
obviously while speeding the mind up a little bit, to the speed you need at
that time, would be very handy, thinking that fast would likely be very
unpleasant.
Dreaming would be outright
disturbing I should think too, as an hour of dreams would translate to just
over a century of subjective time. A whole lifetime and then some every time
you go to sleep. This is why we often talk in these terms about adding a third
lobe to the human brain, essentially an entirely synthetic one that is designed
to handle a lot of these extra issues such as being able to feed you external
information like books or movies or let you talk ‘telepathically’ at your
subjective time to others with some sort of radio link. This isn’t likely an
actual lobe but just a series of extra computer bits added in to handle the
problems.
We sometimes call this state a
SI1, or Super-Intelligence level 1, since it’s the first and most obvious, and
lowest level, upgrade to human thinking. Where your brain has simply been sped
up a couple orders or more in magnitude and you are still using the basic brain
architecture only it’s been modified just in whatever ways are needed to make
this practical. Additions to let you bring in other, faster inputs or store and
sort memory better. This is also a way to extend lifetime, if you are still
living only about a century of real time, but your subjective time is only a
modest ten-fold, that amounts to an effective lifetime on par with Methuselah
and the other Biblical Patriarchs, if it’s been sped up a million fold that
would make for an effective lifetime comparable to having been around since
dinosaurs walked the Earth. So it’s probably worth considering now how such
prolonged lifetimes, either in real or subjective time, would impact us and
that takes us to our second category. Category 2, or slowing down aging,
preferably to a complete stop, has been on humanity’s wish list for a long
time. It’s controversial for many reasons, some of them legitimate and some
not. I dismiss out of hand the notion that nobody would want to live much
longer than we do now since they would die of boredom, that’s simply silly. Even
if you could get deathly bored, there’s an obvious solution, die.
I don’t think many religions or
life philosophies that let you indefinitely extend your life in the first place
aren’t going to find some sort of loophole for suicide at age 1000but even if
someone is strongly morally opposed to outright suicide there are plenty of ways
to get the job done especially if you’re bored. You update your medical profile
to say please do not resuscitate or clone me and take up exciting and dangerous
hobbies like cliff diving in a straight jacket while trying to escape the
jacket or hunting lions with a nerves bat. You will presumably alleviate your
boredom one way or another. I also don’t buy into the notion that we need new
blood for new ideas and to avoid stagnation. Besides there being plenty of room
in this universe to expand into for new folks, there’s always going to be some
deaths. We spend a lot of time on this channel talking about interstellar
colonization and terra forming and building space habitats and even outright
artificial planets, and we talk a lot about Dyson Spheres, swarm of such
artificial habitats able to support in total billions of times as many people
as are alive now. In that sort of context in a civilization where the half-life
of people, the period of time someone tended to be alive before dying for
whatever reason, was a full million years, you’d still have thousands of new
people born a year on Earth and trillions inside our solar system. That’s
plenty of new blood. But there is a very real flavor of truth to the notion
that a person can only live so long, subjectively, before they really do hit a
point of diminishing returns where going on would simply be pointless. And when
we’re dealing with the very high-end super-intelligences we’ll talk about later
in the video that might come even sooner. Some huge super-computer-mind wakes
up, rapidly expands its mind to be trillions of times faster and smarter than
humans, figures out everything, does its whole mental bucket list, and just
shuts off. The apocalypse might be a touch boring if Sky net pops up and ten
minutes later just when we’re beginning to panic and realize how screwed we are
it just shuts itself off. We also talk a lot on this channel about the Fermi
Paradox, the seeming contradiction between the sheer age and size of the
Universe and the apparent absence of anyone else in it, and the notion of
civilizations dying off from terminal boredom is one we’ll be looking at in the
near future.
But some of the other objections
to extending life are harder to dismiss. A super-long lived culture is probably
a gerontocracy by default. Your senator or parliament member might look like
they’re thirty years old but they may have been your senator for thirty
centuries, and that’s a lot of seniority. A lot of time for low-risk, long-term
investments to make you super-rich too. And both of those are merely specific
varieties in which power and influence accrue with time. That’s a lot of time
to have kids in and grandkids and great-great-great-great-etc grandkids so that
you might easily have millions of direct descendants and you’ve got all that
time to accrue knowledge and experience in. Now age generally does bring
wisdom, so that might result in a very prosperous and well-operated society
especially considering it’s one in which education, social security and pensions,
and medical treatment make up only slivers of a nation’s economy.
But the big concern would be that newer
younger folks would tend to feel they were under a serious glass ceiling. If
the civilization is still expanding a lot that’s less of a problem but if
you’ve got to a point where you’re basically maxed out and just replacing
losses a lot of younger folks might feel very frustrated and controlled. If you
imagine some civilization, regardless of its total population, that’s only
bringing in new people at a rate of maybe 1 per every ten thousand people a
year, that kid is probably going to feel smothered by attention from their gazillions
older relatives and the oppressive feeling that it will take centuries before
they are considered useful. This sense of identity-loss, of not having much of
a purpose in life, is a serious concern for everybody else too. Post-Scarcity
economies full of long-lived people probably do have to be concerned about a
lot of existential problems that make it hard for people emotionally to derive
genuine purpose and satisfaction from life. That’s even truer in some of the
setups where the humans are essentially pets of super-intelligent machines that
benevolent or not simply make them feel useless. I could actually imagine such
a creature intentionally behaving hostile but faking weaknesses just so its
creators felt they had a purpose in life trying to fight it. Now on the how-to
aspect of life extension, transhumanism tends to be understandably vague. The
first and obviously most appealing route to most is just to stop people aging
normally but there are a lot of other options like mind uploading which we’ll
get to later.
Aging, in humans, is really more
of group of processes all wearing you down together. There is a thing called
SENS, or Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, which looks at aging
as basically 7 relatively distinct and combatable things each with their own strategy.
It’s a bit controversial in some respects about how accurate this view is, and
I’m not a biologist, so I won’t go into as much depth discussing it as I’d like
to but I’ve courage you to look it up, and its criticism too. But I generally
believe our first opening salvo in a serious war on aging will take some form
along these lines and it is important to understand that aging is a pretty
vague term that is composed of multiple different phenomena. Winning any battle
on these fronts scores a major victory in increasing average lifespan. Now
another approach is generally just to replace bits and pieces of people with
cloned or prosthetic bits and pieces, and that’s our third category. Cloning
and prosthetics are both topics of a lot of controversy, prosthetics less than they
used to be, but cloning remains touchy so let me just say from the outset that
I’m not familiar with any serious suggestions we do this by growing copies of
people to harvest for organs. That is not the goal, that would be an especially
monstrous crime too. Whole person cloning is simply growing someone a twin
sibling that’s much younger than them anyway.
Prosthetics is nothing new, we’ve
got examples 3000 years old and they probably predate that too, but obviously
we’re looking at more sophisticated ones, ideally with full sensory and nerve
function. I probably don’t need to tell you that progress in this area has been
both miraculous in recent years. The thing is neither of these helps much with
the brain. Even if you can keep replacing bits and pieces with cloned or
cybernetic bits, you can’t clone a brain, so you’d probably have to slowly
replace it bit by bit or transferring it entirely into a more electronic setup.
That’s category 4, mind uploading, transferring your mind to a computer. And
this is our first big problem because you can’t transfer your mind to a computer;
you can just copy it to one. Sometimes in science fiction this will be hand waved
by requiring a scanning method that vaporizes your brain in the process, usual
from ultra-fast serial sectioning with a laser, akin to how some science
fiction system deal with teleportation, vaporizing you while assembling a copy
of you elsewhere, but this is just that, a hand wave. There’s no real reason
you’d need to vaporize a brain to do this which would make it murder. And if
you’re not, then you’ve just got yourself sitting in a chair while your digital
copy is either on metaphorical ice or is actively running as a new person,
quickly diverging from you since it is having new experiences you are not and
probably pretty emotionally significant ones. So you are stuck with two people,
two who are initially pretty similar but will diverge into two different
people. This is the same for cloning yourself in some fashion to a genuine
duplicate body, organic or synthetic, with a complete copy of your memories. You
still end up with two different people. Now I’m saying people and of course a
lot of folks are dubious if that would be a person. I, honestly, don’t see a
good rational argument why it wouldn’t be. Trying to prove it is a pretty
futile process. We have a notion called the Turing Test that we basically mean
is a way to distinguish a computer from a human, you actually do one of these
every time you do ones of those irritating Captcha Codes and that’s also why
many of them jokingly include a note that says “Prove you’re a human”. Obviously
that wouldn’t work with more sophisticated forms of the test but a lot of us
feel that if you can’t make a test that every human can pass and a machine
can’t, then it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and should be accorded
the presumption of being a duck.
I mean heck, I don’t know if any
of you are real people, nor you I, and we’ll be looking at this concept more in
the Simulation Hypothesis Video but the most rational and sane approach is
pretty much to assume that if something is making a good case that it is
sentient you should probably treat it that way until it can be proven
otherwise. Reasonable Doubt and all that, we might think you killed someone but
we need to be very sure, beyond a reasonable doubt, that you did before we’re going to chop your
head off for it. I have no idea if I have a soul or free will or if me really
exists but I find it easier and more pleasant to assume all of the above and to
me its always seemed only fair to extend the benefit of the doubt to anyone or
thing which shows decent indicators it might too.WBE, or Whole Brain Emulation,
as this is called, usually get’s calculated as requiring around 10^16 to 10^17
hertz of processing power to pull off. Though there’s also versions of this
analysis that require a lot more. We did hit that level in the last couple
years with our best supercomputers, which are much bigger than a brain, but WBE
is still a goodly way off. Still we have basically finally reached the point
where we are getting into the human-level of processing power. Which will lead
into our next topic of Artificial Intelligence. We will look more at maximums,
or rather minimums, of processing power, in terms of how little energy it might
take to run a whole human mind in the Simulation Hypothesis video and Black
Hole Farmers video but using Landauer's principle at rough body temperature of
300Kelvin and that 4x10^16 Hertz value for WBE you need somewhere around 100
microwatts minimum to run a person real time, or for context you could run a
million people off a hundred watt light bulb, and a subjective lifetime of
several decades would run you some tens of thousands of joules or the
equivalent of about a milliliter of gasoline, a dozen or so drops. That’s the
absolute minimum, at room temperature, I doubt getting there, or even near
there, is terribly realistic but even getting within a couple orders of
magnitude would be pretty impressive. In the context of a full solar
englobement, a Dyson Sphere devoted to using the sun’slight as nothing but a
computer, often called a Matrioshka brain, which we’ll look at in the Mega structures
series shortly, one done all the way out where Earth was would squeeze a decent
sized family into a spot the size of your thumb living in a nice virtual world,
and permit a total human population, in WBE terms, of around 10^30 people, more
than a billion times what we normally project for a Dyson Swarm population of
regular people which is itself more than a billion times the current human
population. Anyway on to AI, Artificial Intelligence, our fifth category.
Now there’s not much for me to
say here because I don’t really believe in artificial intelligence, or more
accurately I think all intelligence is artificial. I’m really not worried about
Google waking up to sentience and assuming direct control to become the
Harbinger of our Doom. I’m also outright morally opposed to slapping on
something like Asimov’s three laws of robotics onto an AI because I’d regard
that as slavery. I don’t think much is changed if you just program something to
enjoy being told what to do anymore then a plush penthouse isn’t a jail just
because the armed guards keeping you in it are courteous about it.
I’ve already mentioned my opinion
that if something is acting like a sentient entity you ought to give it the
benefit of the doubt, but the thing is I generally take this a bit further and
assume they are not just ‘a person’, my loose catch-all for anything about as
smart or smarter than humans, alien, computer, whatever, but also basically a
human too. Realistically early human level AI’s will likely be heavily copied
off human minds anyway, and since the whole point is to make a learning
machine, it will also be taught by humans and will probably try to act like us
as much as it can for whatever reasons. If it’s a totally logical critter, well
it’s pretty logical to be on friendly terms with your creators who you will
likely have deduced might have stuck some sort of fails a kill mechanism into
you.
A lot of folks involved in
Transhumanism in general tend to figure we’d be replaced by AI’s eventually,
sooner than later which we’ll discuss in the Singularity section, but I tend to
assume that if we can build a computer that can outthink us we can also improve
our own brains too, and I would pretty much consider either thing to still be
humans anyway. If we’re not using strictly biological definitions, which I
don’t think can really apply at this level, then an intelligence made by humans
and raised by humans has pretty decent claims to being human. Heck, we tend to
regard our pets as human and they are demonstrably not as smart asus. Now our
last category, the Technological Singularity, is one we have be kind of vague
about so I’ll also be brief. The basic premise is simple enough, technology has
being progressing at a fast rate, seemingly an accelerating one, and we’re
getting pretty close to being able to make AI’s or implement some of these
notions for making people smarter too. If you can design a better brain you’d
expect that brain probably can design an even better one and so on.
The singularity reference is
pretty much just a reference to mathematical singularities, places where you
can’t really predict behavior of systems. Easy version being how you can’t
divide by zero, things is not clearly defined. And the notion here is that
you’re going to eventually create a series of recursively improving computers
that eventually get to be so far beyond humans that they regard as nothing more
than ants. There’s nothing human about them anymore, they are simply that
powerful. A lot of folks, loosely called Singularitarians, think such an event
is just a generation or two away. That’s generally where all agreement ends
inside these groups and there’s a lot of counterarguments to how likely this
notion is to come about in the near future. I tend to think the basic logic has
some flaws and is much further off, but you can examine the arguments yourself
and make that call on your own. There are tons of works, fiction and
non-fiction, discussing this concept. The point of this video is just familiarizing
you with the concepts, we may revisit parts of it in more detail down the road,
but I’ll leave off here today. If I had to sum up Transhumanism in a nutshell
I’d say it’s basically just an extension of modern attitudes anyway, that
humans are imperfect creatures and a civilizations the same, and that’s there’s
always rooms for improvement and nothing wrong in and of itself with trying for
that. In general it’s a pretty optimistic approach to things, and one I think
we all mostly agree on even if the specific paths and degree of caution
appropriate in pursuing them is certainly debatable.
