Nano Future 2030

I’ve written before on the need for placing limits on AI development to protect the human race from being overwhelmed by AI entities who can develop faster than we biological animals. I offer these thoughts on what is needed to ensure our own survival.

Asimov had the 3 laws which were to be applied to robots and that was a good first effort. Most sci-fi movies, that present a robot or AI, imply that the entity could grow or evolve to where they could out perform a human in some way and thereby gain power over the humans. We don’t really have a way to limit AI development so it would be good to be able to discuss what makes a good or bad design.

I see AI overrun of humans as a realistic danger because humans, as a group, evolve more slowly than an individual AI could. When you consider the concepts behind the Singularity, it seems likely that once AI programs reach parity with human intelligence and creativity, they could surpass us in a few years and then the fun would begin. If they can evolve ahead of us to the same extent that we have evolved ahead of dogs, why would we be treated any differently than we treat dogs? Just because many dogs are loved, doesn’t prevent cruelty or the destruction of dogs that get in our way.

I believe the critical difference between dangerous AI and safe AI is the lack of or the incorporation of self awareness in the first few generations of AI’s. Consider that only the higher animals can recognize themselves in a mirror. The lower animals are all pretty hard wired to fulfill basic needs. If they are territorial, they defend territory when it is important to their survival or reproduction. They don’t vary from that fixed program of behavior. Our AI’s would not be territorial unless we decided they needed to be. Hopefully, they would not be power hungry unless we design them to be. So, a “lower” AI would resemble most animals in that it attempts to fulfill it’s needs and behave as it is designed to behave. Doesn’t mean it would act like an animal. It could be a factory manager, design work flow, manage production, interface with employees and still have limited behavior by design.

It’s more of a problem when you get to “higher” AI’s that are free to consider different goals and to evolve their own goals. We will need them to think about a wide range of options and situations. This ability is essential to a creative, problem solving AI. Our problem comes when we try to make “people” out of these AI’s and give them the same motivations we have as animals.

Emotion is not something you have built in just for the fun of it. Emotion and feelings are the motivations for your own behavior and the behavior of any sadistic ruler. Without emotion you would not do anything but sit and stare until you starved to death. Even rational thoughts are motivated by emotional needs and desires. The exact same thing will be true for any functional AI. Something has to motivate their behavior according to a hierarchy of needs. The lack of feeling in Commander Data is a physical impossibility and nothing more than the emotionally driven, lack of expression on the face of any Rambo or Vulcan.

So, AI’s will be driven by something we can call emotion even if they don’t cry or wail when things go wrong. Think of source code where if ( anger_variable1 > x) then choose behavior option 14 , to be an emotional statement. We need to prevent this emotion from driving their behavior outside of designated, and acceptable limits the way it drives humans outside of our own acceptable limits.

Self awareness might be the key. If you are not able to be aware of yourself and do not ever consider your own needs for re-evaluation, I believe you will not change your behavior as it applies to taking care of yourself. You will not decide that you need more money or power since you will not consider this “self” to be any more than any of the hundreds of other variables that must be monitored and maintained within limits.

You (or the AI) can certainly take care of yourself (if thirsty, go drink water) without having self-awareness. Self-awareness, as I’m using it, is thinking and feeling about yourself and how you are getting/not getting what you want, about what “you” need and what could be better or worse for “you”.

Self-awareness is the awareness of yourself in time and space and with respect to time and space. In other words, don’t provide the hardware/software to consider yourself in this unique way and you won’t make decisions and goals with respect to that self. You won’t take action to improve or defend this thing called “self”. For a full description of self-awareness as used here, see this article.

Nanotechnology is destined to be both positive and negative. Everything is that way, but the more powerful something is, the more intense the results. I want to talk about how nano is important to us today because it is our only hope against big natural disasters.

I’ve been watching a lot of TV on History and they often show very interesting programs on what happened in the past that severely affected humans or the biosphere in general. Today we are in danger more than in the past due to our highly developed infrastructure. We have accomplished great things because we have better medicine, better communications, better transportation, better education, etc. But at the same time we have become dependent on these huge and complex technologies. We have a few weeks of food in the pipeline. Many things can upset the apple cart – a small meteorite, airborne plague, megavolcano, terrorists with a dirty bomb, or an economic crisis that somehow leads to true financial failure. What we’ve been through economically in the last few years is nothing but a hiccup compared to what is possible.

In other words, we live in and depend on a china shop of delicate and valuable technologies, and any bull that gets loose could bring the whole thing down because we are not resilient beyond an unspecified limit.

Will we have useful and relatively mature nanotechology before a bull arrives? I’d say we have twenty to thirty years before the individual has access to nano converters that can take in raw materials and generate food directly. I’m sure we will have water purifiers and effective solar power long before food creation is possible. I mean nano versions of these things that pop out of a knapsack and set up shop and produce what is needed in sufficient volume to keep a family alive indefinitely.

I’d like to have a self sustaining package at home that can supply food, shelter and communications. Once that happens, the human race can survive a meteorite or plague or anything else. Doesn’t mean you would not lose a few billion people in a disaster, but it would mean the survivors could rebuild and continue to live under almost any conditions. Anything would be better than the brutal, scavenger society that would arise today after any disaster that disrupts the food supply.

What would that package have to do? Food creation is the most difficult, but it could extract nutrients from raw organic material you can not eat, with a lot less effort. Water could be pulled out of the air with refrigeration or dirty water could be purified. Solar power is essential to a survivor because communications is the only way to prevent total destruction of society. The ability to create large solar panels from raw materials allows any survivor to communicate, to be part of society and to obtain or provide help to others.

So, the essentials are food creation or extraction, water purification, electrical power for light, communication, heating and cooling, and medical drug and tool creation for pain control, curing disease and basic health. It would be cool to be able to manufacture such things as paper, bandages, salt, soap, gunpowder, aspirin.

Once we have the capability to give each person this tool kit, the human race can survive almost anything less intense than the sun going red giant.

Anyone looking for a career might consider nanotechnology and it’s mature form of molecular manufacturing of any desired object from atoms and molecules. We are not there yet and we will need people in these high tech industries.