| Next: | A.4: IA and AI | ||
| Up: | Appendix A: Navigation | ||
| Prev: | A.2: CRNS Time | Monolithic |
"Watch, but do not govern; stop war, but do not wage it; protect, but do not control; and first, survive!"The first rule of choosing the future is to make sure there is one. I think that at this point, that has to be the dominant consideration. My projection of the unaltered future - current rate, no intervention - ends with the world being destroyed by nanotechnological weapons. I don't think we can afford to be picky, at all, about what kind of Singularity we get. Life as we know it is meta-unstable (1); it ends either when we blow ourselves up or invent better minds. Shifting the balance from the first group of probabilities to the second must take priority over any internal divisions within a group.
-- Cordwainer Smith, "Drunkboat", in The Instrumentality of Mankind
In my visualization, nanotechnology is the primary deadline. I think the development of nanotechnology will be followed by a rapid descent into nuclear war, nanotechnological warfare, or possibly worse. Some arguments I found convincing appear in MNT and the World System, Nanotechnology and International Security, and the Nanowar discussion from the Extropian mailing list.
I find it difficult to visualize the specific descent into chaos. I can't find an explanation of what stages nanotech is likely to go through, what the capabilities are at each level, and how long it will take to develop the software for any given capability at each level. I find it difficult to imagine how any individual will respond to the prospect of nanotechnology, much less societies or governments. I find it difficult to imagine my own reaction, and I've been living with the prospect of nanotechnology since age eleven.
I see many powerful organizations attempting to develop the military applications at maximum speed, and trying to prevent anyone else from gaining access to the technology. I see said organizations immediately exploiting the military applications for social leverage through blackmail or actual attack. I see individuals within and without nano-capable organizations attempting to hack into the system or seize power. I'm really not sure what the outcome of such a madhouse would be, but it seems likely that most of the Earth's population would wind up as casualties, and it looks to me like there's a significant probability of humanity, maybe even all life in the Solar System, being wiped out altogether.
Every now and then, you hear veterans of the Cold War saying they don't know how we avoided nuclear war for forty years. Looking at the prospect of military nanotech, it becomes quite clear how nuclear war was avoided. Nuclear weapons, as a technology, have several built-in limitations and characteristics that make nuclear war unlikely. This becomes clear because nanoweapons lack those limitations.
There are various tactics we might employ if nanotech comes first to reroute the nanotech breakthrough back into a Singularity. Failing that, we can try to disperse survival stations beyond the reach of an Earth-enveloping catastrophe. But our best bet is simply to beat nanotechnology to the punch.
Because we're trying to beat a 2010 CRNS technology with a 2020 CRNS technology, a massive increase in investment is required. No one project can be enough. It'll take an industry. That's why I designed the technological timeline around the concept of an incremental technological path to Elisson, with the associated incremental motivation for investment, rather than advocating a de-novo Elisson project. The PtS timeline may require efforts not intrinsically necessary to the creation of the Last Program, but that's how we hit the problem hard enough to win.
Fortunately AI is "easy" to invest in - it's possible for an individual to become involved, no laboratory required. AI stands alone, of all the ultratechnologies, in that volunteers can assist; AI is also the technology with the most immediate payback for the first steps on the incremental path. Given the proper program architecture, AI is the technology where multiple (hundreds or thousands) of efforts most easily combine. I therefore believe that AI is the proper intervention point for the primary effort.
| Next: | A.4: IA and AI |
| Up: | Appendix A: Navigation |
| Prev: | A.2: CRNS Time |