Consciousness is hot! And may heat up the world

While striving to find time to finish a first draft of my big new book on AI - (isn't everyone writing one?) - I figure we'll take a break from political/social upheavals, in order to talk about a topic that's on (or inside) everyone's minds.

== Are we amid a thought revolution right now? == 

As usual, Nathan Gardels offers a thought-provoking essay in Noema Magazine, this time about how AI may enable humans to clamber up to higher levels of consciousness, as appeared to happen during a ‘leap’ in philosophical awareness called the “Axial Age” – when Buddha, Socrates, and other sages all seemed to emerge within roughly a single generation, across Eurasia. And possibly other areas, without historical note. Gardels suggests we may be embarking on another, greater leap, if AI tools allow us to augment our prodigious neo-cortexes to new levels of awareness and sensibility. 

In fact, the  two cited events cited by Gardels… a past “Axial Age” and a looming "AI-xial Age"... are clearly not alone. For example, about 40,000 years ago humanity's tool sets -- and presumably language and art -- took huge leaps ahead in just a few centuries, maybe less.

Then there's Julian Jaynes. Although his brilliantly entertaining tome The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of The Bicameral Mind is now dismissed by scholars as quaint, that’s unfair, since clearly something happened in the era of which he wrote, including the till-now ill-explained Bronze Age Collapse.

In my novel EXISTENCE I argue that we've had at least seven such major self reprogrammings, and we were already in another one, even without AI. 

Indeed, the rejection of Modernity that was featured in all 8 phases of the American Civil War, including the current one, could be viewed as an immune-response by older forms of consciousness vs. the onerous demands of newer models. 

In fact, I can think of not other model to explain all aspect of this ongoing cultural schism.

== How will AI amplify the next Big Shift? ==

Gardels continues with an excellent thought: "AI-driven planetary-scale computation has enabled us to conceive of climate change — a phenomenon that could not be apprehended by the human mind alone"... 

Absolutely!  In fact, I deem it likely that failure to perceive ecological self-destruction may be one of the top contending theories for the Fermi Paradox.  Perceiving and cancelling such failure modes in time may be rare... as Jared Diamond discusses in his great book COLLAPSE.

"Perhaps an approach that explores how consciousness expands and unfolds..."

We know the answer to that.  It unfolds under competitive pressure - NATURE's tool for 4 billion years. Our enlightenment tames competition to be less bloody and more productive and rapid than Nature! Nevertheless, that fact remains.

So how do we get that tool – reciprocally vigorous competition - to work peacefully and well for us? Well enough to deliver sane, decent AI consciousnesses?  I discuss that elsewhere.

== More on the hottest topic: Can we replicate consciousness… and should we? ==

Want other Noema articles on AI? This one: The Danger of Superhuman AI is not what you think - is a long and eloquent whine, contributing absolutely nothing useful.

OTOH this one is much better! AI Could Actually Help Rebuild the Middle Class.

"By shortening the distance from intention to result, tools enable workers with proper training and judgment to accomplish tasks that were previously time-consuming, failure-prone or infeasible. Conversely, tools are useless at best — and hazardous at worst — to those lacking relevant training and experience. A pneumatic nail gun is an indispensable time-saver for a roofer and a looming impalement hazard for a home hobbyist. 

"For workers with foundational training and experience, AI can help to leverage expertise so they can do higher-value work. AI will certainly also automate existing work, rendering certain existing areas of expertise irrelevant. It will further instantiate new human capabilities, new goods and services that create demand for expertise we have yet to foresee. ... AI offers vast tools for augmenting workers and enhancing work. We must master those tools and make them work for us."

Well... maybe.  But if the coming world is zero-sum, then either machine+human teams or else just machines who are better at gathering resources and exploiting them will simply 'win.' Hence the question that is never asked -- and that is the only crucial one -- is:

"Can conditions and incentives be set up, so that the patterns that are reinforced are positive-sum for the greatest variety of participants, including legacy-organic humans and the planet?"

You know where that always leads me - to the irony that positive-sum (PS) systems tend to be inherently competitive, though under fairness rule-sets that we've witnessed achieving PS over the last couple of centuries.

Which leads us to: A new study by Caltech and UC Riverside uncovers the hidden toll that AI exacts on human health throughout its production and use, from chip manufacturing to data center operation.

And this re my alma mater: Caltech researchers have developed brain–machine interfaces that can interpret data from neural activity even after the signal from an implant has become less clear. 

(Side note: I’ll keep letting slip – by accident – that Caltech gave me this honor. Hey. Credibility is relevant.)

Though… my kids remind me that the server farms delivering “AI” LLMs and other golem pre-entities are rapidly approaching bitcoin mining in their deleterious effects, heating up the planet. 

== And more on the topic? ==

A new consciousness book by Micah Blumberg -- "Bridging Molecular Mechanisms and Neural Oscillatory Dynamics" -- introduces "Self Aware Networks: Theory of Mind" a new framework for understanding how the experience of being someone arises from neural activity.

And sci fi history scholar Tom Lombardo is running one of his extensive, multi-part deep-dives into a topic, this time highly pertinent: The Future Evolution of Consciousness Webinar. 

Conscium claims to be “the world’s first applied AI consciousness research organisation.” From which my friend from the UK (via Panama) Calum Chace sent me this long paper re “Principles for Responsible AI Consciousness Research”.  He is deeply involned with PRISM – “The Partnership for Research Into Sentient Machines” (Promoting responsible research into AI consciousness.) Which recruited me for their board.  

Though in fact I truly cannot say which – if any – of these endeavors is on a ‘right track’ toward humanity’s soft and happy landing with our new children of the mind. While detailed and illuminating, that PDF – for example - remains vague about the most important things, like how to tell ‘consciousness’ from a system that feigns it… and whether that matters.

Broadening a bit into speculation… Take the exploratory dive into “what is consciousness’ that you’ll find in Peter Watts’s novel “Blindsight.”    … wherein Watts makes the case that a sense of self is not necessarily needed, in order for a being to behave in a way that is actively intelligent, communicative and even ferociously self-interested.  

All you need is evolution. And an overall system in which evolution remains (as in nature) zero-sum.

== And again, my own highly… different … takes on AI and dangerous clichés… like how best to navigate the future by using tools we already have! ==

While some – like Nathan Gardels and even more-so Reid Hoffman and Ray Kurzweill – suggest a coming AI-propelled apotheosis – or AIpotheosis (did I coin it first?) – from merging and expanding what it means to be human…

… others, like Eliezer Yudkowski publish jeremiad hand wringing like the self-explanatorily titled If Anyone Builds It, Everybody dies.

What is NOT helpful is the dismal mental laziness of Sam Altman and all the other Masters of The World, each of whom believes he (always ‘he’) is the Robur of Robots (look up the Verne reference!) A clade of tech wizards whose lazy assumptions about AI format could wind up proving Eliezer right.  

And so, I conclude by reiterating…

My WIRED article breaks free of the three standard 'AI-formats' that can only lead to disaster, suggesting instead a 4th. That AI entities can only be held accountable if they have individuality... even 'soul'... 

And still-more pertinent than ever… my related NEWSWEEK op-ed dealt with 'empathy bots'' that feign sapience and personhood. 

 

Want it laid out more vividly detailed? My Keynote at the huge, May 2024 RSA Conference in San Francisco – is now available online.   “Anticipation, Resilience and Reliability: Three ways that AI will change us… if we do it right.”  

And you'll get it all, plus a dozen missing contexts that the robo-roburs have been utterly ignoring, in my coming Ai book. That is, if those new children of humanity allow it to appear in time.

Science Updates: from Consciousness to CRISPR

Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff have long pursued a concept – not exactly a model – of consciousness that’s based on a notion that quantum effects take place along tiny rods called microtubules that are vital structural elements inside most living cells. These rods are everywhere, but especially in neurons, and some experiments suggest that perhaps a kind of entanglement might happen along their length. 

It's not laughable! Much stronger evidence supports the existence of quantum activity in the chlorophyll molecule that plants use to convert sunlight into stored chemical energy. This article offers details on the Penrose-Hameroff notion. (I watched-heard them both at a Consciousness Debate, held at the home of Irwin Jacobs, three months ago. I spoke with Penrose, several times, about his clever re-scaling explanation for how Big Bangs fit into a cyclical cosmos.)

I suspect they are about half-right about there being some quantum effects inside neurons. Even that much would be amazing, and would imply that it may take a lot more than a Moore's Law doubling of flip-flops to emulate human consciousness. See also their latest book Consciousness and the Universe: Quantum Physics, Evolution, Brain and Mind.

== Contemplating the stuff we're made of ==

Might genetic meddling in actual humans be a little harder than to recent hopeful/terrifying press reports led us to believe? Our immune systems may be formidable. 

“The CRISPR–Cas9 system, which functions as a genetic scissors and tape for editing DNA, is generally derived from either Staphylococcus aureusor Streptococcus pyogenes bacteria. Most people have been exposed to staph or strep by the time they reach adulthood, which their bodies are likely to remember and may mount an immune attack when re-exposed to them….  Or worse, it could trigger the kind of immune storm that killed a young gene therapy patient named Jesse Gelsinger in 1999, derailing the field for more than a decade.”

A new study showed that it is possible to recreate DNA using information from living descendants. Which may empower fellows like George Church to give us back mammoths... then dinosaurs... then maybe (as in Existence)... Neandethals?

The Food and Drug Administration has approved the very first algorithm that monitors patient vitals to predict potentially lethal events hours before they could have occurred.

If You Had a Human Head Transplant, Would You Still Be You?  A topic actually explored in The Organ Bank Farm, a novel by the under-rated science fiction author John Boyd. Jim Cheetham has an answer that’s +1. 'It's a body transplant. Does that make it an easier question?'

== Ain't Nature a kick? ==

If true, this is… wow. “In the first recorded instance of fire being used by animals other than humans, three Australian birds of prey species have been seen carrying burning twigs to set new blazes…” offering “…evidence that birds are very good at “generating innovative solutions to foraging problems.”

A fascinating and erudite article asks whether humans have some in-built morality, an ancient question with light shed by recent science.

Why Males Are Biology's Riskier Sex: This article explains some of the fantastic amounts that reproductive biologists have learned lately about sperm, eggs, mutations and how those mutations are contributed vs. age by mothers and fathers. 

Fascinating. Vertebrate animals apparently use a basic information-processing system that derives from genes that infected some ancestor via a virus. That transmission and retention isn’t unusual – large fractions of our genome apparently come from viruses. But this article describes one of a myriad info-processing functions that we never knew about, till recently. When a synapse fires, it apparently triggers an RNA messenger to enfold itself into a protective capsid and travel to some adjacent neuron, where… well, this is way complicated and not easily emulated via binary flipflops and Moore’s Law.

Adding this blue dye to standard malaria treatments seems to reduce the chance new mosquitoes will pick up and vector the disease. 

== But human stupidity clings and claws at us ==

Alas, sometime SciFi gets it too right: Remember the lurid sci fi flick THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW? Its frenzied-fun premise was based on a real fear... now apparently coming true, as ocean circulation in the Atlantic has plunged to its lowest level in 1600 years.

Meanwhile... Coral bleaching has accelerated to a clip at which established reefs can no longer keep up. Part of it comes from pollution and warming waters, but also ocean acidification.  

And the last of those three has special significance. Oh, talk about ocean acidification. Speak the phase aloud... because you’ll find that members of the Climate Denialist Cult always shout “squirrel!” or run away, when they hear those two words. Because:

(1) anyone can go to the shore and measure it for themselves; it’s happening, and serious. And...

(2) there are no possible alternative excuses – the way the cultists try to blame the sun for global warming. Ocean acidification comes from increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, put there by humans. Period. And those who are aiding the villains waging war on science are now as culpable – and should be as financially liable – as the Koch Brothers and their petro-sheik and oil-boyar allies.

But then... the fact people keep coming up with... hope!

== Future Tech ==

A thin membrane made of graphene, called “Graphair,” which can make dirty water clean enough to drink after just a single pass through. Consumption of contaminated drinking water can transmit a number of diarrheal diseases, such as cholera, dysentery, typhoid, and polio, as well as many parasites, like giardia. In water-stressed areas that also have limited access to medical care, diarrheal illnesses can be life-threatening. The next steps for the team will be to connect with industry partners who can help them scale Graphair up for practical use.

A DARPA-funded prosthetic neural system has made progress toward improving memory by writing codes into the hippocampus of human subjects via electrodes implanted in the brain.

MIT's Media Lab has severed ties to startup Nectome which offered digital immortality to individuals through brain uploading - seeking to embalm brains while preserving the neural connections.

A new approach to 3D imagery that’s different – using lasers to push a speck of dust around to form genuine three-dimensional object views. I doubt you can apply the term "hologram."

Elon Musk's latest venture: Solar Roof tiles - made of tempered glass, promise to be durable and cost effective (with an "infinity" warranty) and power generation lasting 30 years.

Even more advance is a concept that uses the heat of solar panels to distill and purify water, while cooling the cells to make them more efficient. Built-in batteries store power for night and outages. (Something lacking in the million solar homes we have, today.)

Need more memory? Next generation optical disc storage offers 10 terabyte capacity and six century lifespan. Gimme!  Seriously. Send me a sample and (if it works) I'll tout it loudly!

And finally...Lasers so powerful they might rip apart raw vacuum? It’s actually quite plausible.  Hey, didn't I predict that in....

From Consciousness to AI

This time let's offer up a variety of views on what may be - and certainly should be - a principal concern for humanity across the mid 21st Century - how consciousness itself - both human and artificial - is bound to change, before our conscious gaze. Starting with news that:

IBM Watson and the X Prize Foundation are offering a $5 million award - to be handed out in 2020 - for a team that best proves how AI can be positive for humans. The emphasis will be placed on its positive effect on human kind and, in essence, show that the systems will help us instead of bringing a movie-worthy apocalypse.  I have some ideas how that can be achieved – notions that have circulated quite a bit, lately, how AI might be both enhanced and kept accountable via reciprocal competition.  

I may not be qualified to implement the concept… but I’ll talk to any highly qualified groups interested in exploring this approach.  Indeed, it is the one and only approach that has worked in the past, with “artificial intelligences” called states and corporations... and for that matter people.  It is the only method that can even conceivably work with computerized super-AI.  

== Ah, consciousness ==

A topic that keeps on giving – headaches, that is.  What is consciousness?  Can we improve our own? Will we ever give this combined boon and curse to others?  To machinery? To other living creatures?

For some deep thinking on the nature of consciousness: In February, I participated in a salon panel with famed Caltech neuroscientist and consciousness researcher Christof Koch (now head of the Allen Brain Initiative) and Stanford physicist Andrei Linde who, along with Alan Guth, is known as the father of inflation cosmology. The panel was moderated by Robert Lawrence Kuhn of the ongoing Closer to Truth PBS television series, hosted at the lovely San Francisco home of Susan McTavish Best. 

August company! Christof offered some amazing – sometimes optimistic and at other times grouchy – insights into the difficulties of emulating such a vast number of info-processing and contemplation tricks that humans take for granted. Andre Linde took us on a wild tour of general relativity and string theory, finally concluding that there just has to be some kind of consciousness on a cosmic scale.  A bit daunted… I managed to offer up some big picture concepts of my own.

Again, you really should have a look at the Closer to Truth TV series. Big ideas galore. Here's a clip where I discuss with Robert Lawrence Kuhn about What carries our sense of personal identity?

But others are delving this mine! With a brilliant analysis two decades in the making, Robin Hanson shows that our hyper-smart "downloaded" -- or emulated -- heirs will still have ambitions, triumphs and thwarted desires. They'll make alliances, compete, cooperate... and very-likely love... all driven by immutable laws of nature and economics. Super intelligence may be a lot more like us than you imagined. But you’ll still have to wait a few months, before reading The Age of EM: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth.

Robin’s fundamental premise is that only one of the six general categories of approaches to making AI will bear fruit, at least in the near term – the method of emulating in software the process of a human mind. His reasoning: that we are most-likely to succeed by copying what has already worked.

The other five approaches – including AI from principle-design and AI via emergence from complexity and AI from evolved systems – he deems to be much farther away. Many will disagree.  It happens that I think Hanson is just a bit more likely to be right, than wrong. Though I don't think the others should be dismissed with a shrug!

In any event, given a proliferation of human-based software emulations, or “Ems,” and assuming a flat-open-fair civilization employs them, what resulting social and even sexual systems will emerge from the basic laws of nature and economics? See abstracts of all thirty chapters... and my blurb... here.

Put The Age of Em on your pre-order list.

== An infamous cautionary tale: learn from it! ==

While we’re at it, there’s a new book series using sci fi to examine consciousness from many angles: “Discognition (by Steven Shaviro) looks at science fiction in order to think about questions of consciousness. Each of us knows that he or she is conscious; and most of us take it for granted that not only human beings are conscious, but animals like dogs and cats are as well. But how far downwards does consciousness go?”  -- from a review on Omni Reboot.

Very much related to this topic: One of the most disturbing insights into human nature came when a psychologist named Stanley Milgram conducted in the 1960s experiments that showed how easily a large percentage of people can “get into” roles that involve inflicting pain upon others.  These excuses can range from the heinous Nazi factotums whose banal rationalization was “only following orders” to students who were unable to say “stop!” when an experiment or game clearly has gone too far.

“Milgram concluded with his research that people were more willing to harm other people when ordered to do so by someone else. The new study indicated this is because people can separate themselves from the action when the initial idea comes from someone else.”

The later “Stanford Prison Experiment” results should caution all of us to role play, in our own minds” being that person who has the will and power to say Hold. Enough.

Now science has zeroed in on brain function zones that seem to be involved in all this.  A team of neuroscientists has pinpointed the brain's reaction to receiving an order from an authoritative figure to inflict harm on another person.  

Related?  Why are only 20% of synapses active during neurotransmission?  "When stimulated electrically to release dopamine (a neurotransmitter or chemical released by neurons, or nerve cells, to send signals to other nerve cells), only about 20 percent of synapses — the connections between cells that control brain activity — were active at any given time." 

== Brains!  And VIRTUAL brains... ==

Modern tech era pioneer Kevin Kelly (author of the upcoming The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape our Future) emailed me an interesting question. “Everyone can see where VR is going in a serious manner. What I want to know is, what is the VR equivalent of cat videos on the internet?”

In Existence I show characters click-scrolling through a myriad augmented reality overlays, from mapping their route to looking inside those buildings that offer animated in-views. Or overlaying all buildings with vines and turning passing cars into dinosaurs while equipping all passersby with floor-length Fu Manchu mustaches. Seriously, I've seen no sign of recognition of the potential, even from the folks bringing this world closer.*

But Kevin was asking near-term... interesting question. What will be the biggest VR time sink and productivity destroyer?

My first thought is tamagotchi... those virtual pets from the 1990s who you'd "feed" with a button and who would "die" if you neglect them.  My first expectation is that tamagotchi will come roaring back, when your VR specs give you a virtual pet designed for max lovability and cuteness. Stick out your finger and Mr. Bluebird will hop there from your shoulder, whistle happily and take a treat.  If there's someone you detest, Mr. B will chirp angrily and hover over your foe, making droppings. And when your thirty day free trial is up, your little friend will wail mournfully till you sign up monthly, then upgrade... then upgrade....

== Missing Marvin ==

Cool Elon Musk aphorism.  "Interesting to think of physics as a set of compression algorithms for the universe. That's basically what formulas are." 

It reminded me of something Marvin Minsky would have said. Marvin was a great friend and mentor to so many, in whose myriad company I humbly include myself, for this great and vivid person said that I could.  His love of thought-provoking science fiction first drew us together. But Marvin’s wildly varied and unlimited interests soon forged other bridges.

I could count on Marvin to offer up some unusual perspective under almost any topic, from the nature of consciousness to technology to the rainbow arcs of history and culture.  He was among the earliest to shrug off C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” mythology, that science and the humanities are mutually incomprehensible, leaping instead to set up collaborations across every spectrum, incorporating fun and literature and art in almost every project that he had a hand in, at the Media Lab.

Like all the top minds I have known, Marvin was a polymath, whose music and puckish wit seemed as important to him as any of the subjects that he taught (so well) at MIT -- where he authored the classic The Society of Mind. His cheerful, egalitarian ways made him approachable even by shy students. His legacy of free-thinking explorers spans the globe. It feels strange knowing that he is now too far to call up or skype. I should have done it more, when I had the chance. But he seemed ageless, as if ready to talk Death into dropping all plans in order to become his student. Hm. A good idea for a story.  I know Marvin would have liked that. 

== Miscellany Science ==

In Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Predicting, Philip Tetlock and coauthor Dan Gardner offer a masterwork on prediction, drawing on decades of research and the results of a massive, government-funded forecasting tournament - The Good Judgment Project.

An Israeli bio-tech company has developed an anti-radiation therapy the US government may begin stocking next year. They claim to “cure 100% of patients exposed to unconventional radiological incidents like a terrorist dirty bomb, or an attack on a nuclear power plant.” A spokesman said that within 48 hours of someone receiving the company's placenta cell injections, bone marrow blood cell production levels returned to normal, and animals fully recovered from the high radiation exposure. 

Scientists have developed the first digital data storage system capable of creating archives that can survive for billions of years. “Using nanostructured glass, the system has 360 TB per disc capacity, thermal stability up to 1,000°C, and virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature (or 13.8 billion years at 190°C ).”  The resulting disks look a lot like the one Tommy Lee Jones held up, in Men in Black.  This has been needed for a long time!

The human papillomavirus vaccine was first recommended for adolescent girls in the United States in 2006. Since that time, the prevalence of the cancer-causing virus has been dropping among young women, according to a new study.   Oh. Yeah vaccines are eeee-vul.

12 stories of recent serendipitous – surprise science discoveries.  

== Energy & Earth ==

In Half Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life, E. O. Wilson suggests that humans set aside roughly 50 percent of the planet as a sort of permanent preserve, undisturbed by man.  I portrayed this happening in the future… and it will… once we get past these crises and use asteroids to get rich…

The Middle East recently experienced its worst drought in 900 years, according to a new study from NASA. In other words, a lot of the refugee crisis and desperate radicalism is a direct result of climate change.  And those who have been obstructing energy efficiency for 30 years  - (ironically, at the behest of oil sheikhs and coal barons) - have not only  waged war on science.  They (meaning some of you) have made the world a more desperately dangerous place.

Sea levels are rising faster than at any other times in 3000 years. And of course oceans are also acidifying.  Point out to your denialist-cult friends that Fox is not even bothering to issue deceitful talking points about that.  All they can do is distract… like pointing at a single NOAA report and yelling “squirrel!” When will our dear friends out there who are captives of this cult put 2 + 2 together and notice whose interests are served?

One of the Koch-Saudi talking points that are suckled on Fox is that solar photovoltaic systems are not that green, because of the carbon footprint used in melting the silicon and manufacturing the rooftop systems.  Here is some refutation of that made-up piece of anti-future propaganda - suggesting your rooftop solar installation earns back its carbon footprint from manufacturing in one year.  

I invite rebuttals or addenda below, under comments.

The US may not be the “Saudi Arabia of coal,” after all.  When weighed against likely mining and recovery costs, even the vast Wyoming beds now calculate out as only a few decades’ supply.  Of course that changes if we leave the coal where it is, readily accessibly by future generations, if they need it.  That’s already happening, as two major coal companies, hard-pressed by cheap natural gas and rising sustainables, have gone bankrupt.  

3-D-printed organs aren’t quite ready for human transplant.  But as forecast in my story “Chrysalis,” the barriers to crafting replacement or supplemental organs are toppling almost daily.

Remember the cargo zeps in EXISTENCE?*  Well these companies are wagering that the era is (finally) nigh!  

====

* More on Augmented reality AND future zeppelins? Have a look at the amazing video preview-trailer for Existence, with incredible art by Patrick Farley!