Where His "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" Goes Wrong

High-tech legend Marc Andreessen has recently published an article entitled "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto," which can be read here. Let's look at some of the more erring parts of this manifesto, one that is characterized by bombast and hubris. 

Very strangely the manifesto starts out with a quote by someone saying that "man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing." Besides being untrue, this claim clashes very much with the triumphalist claims in the manifesto, which have a "we are gods in the making" ring to it. The first section is entitled "Lies" and lists some things we are supposedly being told, without giving any specific quotes, things that sound pessimistic or anti-technology. The next section is entitled "Truth," and ends with the claim "It is time to be Techno-Optimists." The statements in this section aren't very noteworthy.

The next section is entitled "Technology." We hear a quote of someone saying, "Lack of growth is a kill-all." That isn't true. Once humans reach adulthood, they do not physically grow, and manage to do fine with no further growth. Most people don't grow much mentally after the age of 25, but the lack of intellectual growth does not kill them. And a nation can do fine with a stable population, without growing. We are told that "the total human population may already be shrinking." It's actually growing at a rate of about 1% per year.  We have the bungling statement, "We believe this is why our descendants will live in the stars."  You cannot live inside a star, and nothing preceding the statement has justified a claim of the feasibility of interstellar colonization. 

We then have the statement, "Give us a real world problem, and we can invent technology that will solve it." That's a silly thing to say.  There are  real world problems that humans hate and fight other humans, and that many humans are too greedy and selfish and biased. There is no technology that will solve such problems. 

In a section called "Markets" we have this silly statement: "We believe the ultimate moral defense of markets is that they divert people who otherwise would raise armies and start religions into peacefully productive pursuits." No, markets don't stop people from starting religions, and there's nothing wrong with starting a religion as long as you teach something reasonable and moral.  We have this equally silly statement: "We believe markets, to quote Nicholas Stern, are how we take care of people we don’t know."  We then have this equally senseless statement: "We believe in Milton Friedman’s observation that human wants and needs are infinite." No, actually, they are finite. 

After a rather bombastic section entitled "The Techno-Capital Machine," we have a section entitled "Intelligence," which quickly states, "Intelligence makes everything better." That isn't always true. It took intelligence to build A-bombs and H-bombs, but the world was made much worse after they were introduced, with half of the world's population fearing a nuclear holocaust. We then have some lines singing the praise of so-called Artificial Intelligence. "Artificial Intelligence" is just a misleading term for computer programming and data processing.  We have this silly claim: "Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder." 

Then there is a section called "Energy" which begins with the very ignorant statement that "Energy is life." No, energy is not life. Life is an information-rich physical state of very high hierarchical organization, and energy such as sunlight is neither information-rich nor organized.  We have this bizarre recommendation: "We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy 1,000x, then raise everyone else’s energy 1,000x as well." The life of people would not be improved if they started using a thousand times more energy.  We are told, "We have the silver bullet for virtually unlimited zero-emissions energy today – nuclear fission." I guess the techno-optimist author forgot about Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, the latter two being the most horrible environmental disasters caused by malfunctions at nuclear fission plants.  

A section called "Abundance" starts out with the loopy statement, "We believe we should place intelligence and energy in a positive feedback loop, and drive them both to infinity." Humans actually know of no way of substantially increasing intelligence to achieve a mind smarter than any man who has lived. Faster and more powerful computers do not have intelligence. Humans have no credible theory of how intelligence arises.  We do not have any credible theory by which the human mind arises from the human brain. As shown in the many posts of my blog here, scientists are unable to give any credible neural explanations for such basic mental phenomena  as memory formation, instant memory recall, life-long preservation of memories, imagination, self-hood, or abstract thinking. There is no hope that we will be be able to greatly increase human intelligence by genetic engineering or by giving people bigger brains.  Lacking any understanding of a neural basis for intelligence, it will be impossible to build machines smarter than humans by leveraging some neuroscience discoveries.  Just as goofy is the writer's claim that "the ultimate result will be that all physical goods become as cheap as pencils." 

What follows is a shallow "pie in the sky" vision of material abundance that seems to be based on a hollow "all you need is more and more stuff" outlook. Ignoring how unneeded material consumption worsens global warming, Andreessen seems to think that some glorious climax of humanity will be reached if the world is loaded up with 50 billion people who all have lots and lots of material possessions. It's a fundamentally misguided philosophy. After their basic material needs are met, humans do not need more and more material possessions. The things that mostly drive human happiness are immaterial things such as self-fulfillment, love, personal relationships, friendships, good family relations, esthetic appreciation, personal growth, intellectual and spiritual enrichment and mental outlook. A man with access to good public transportation does not need a car, and will not be made much happier once he gets two cars and a garage to park them in.  

Here are some examples of how technology has failed to make man happier. When I was a boy my family had bookcases filled with books, and people would take out many books from libraries. I could find out what was happening in the world and my city very well by reading the morning newspaper and my weekly copy of Time magazine and Life magazine. Now people tend not to have bookshelves, and tend not to get magazine deliveries. We get our information by the Internet. Has this made us any happier? I doubt it. Turning the pages of a book was just as convenient a way of reading as swiping your fingers across a screen.  And today we can play games with Playstations and X-boxes. But when I was a kid it seemed I had just as much fun playing board games with my siblings. Nowadays, I can shop using Amazon.com, and I haven't been to a mall in a long time. But it seemed like just as much fun (or even more fun) to shop in a big shopping mall. People used to ride bicycles to get around in Beijing. Now a large fraction ride cars, but in 2018 the air in Beijing was terrible because of all the pollution from cars. 

So much of what technology has given us consists of things we don't need. You don't need for your friends to know within 5 minutes your thoughts about some thing a politician or celebrity said 10 minutes ago.  Nor does the average person even really need some site on which to post his photos. People were able to share photos before the Internet by putting physical photos in photo albums, and showing the albums to visitors to their residence. It used to be people would watch movies on huge screens. Now people mainly watch movies on hand-sized smartphones, with sound not-as-good as what you had in movie theaters. I remember listening to operas using stereo headphones, getting the tenor singing in my left ear, and the soprano in my right ear. Audio-wise it was an experience better than the average smartphone user gets. In many cases such as these technology has mainly made things different rather than very obviously better.

Technology has given us a hundred forms of glitzy distraction, and thousands of entertainment options, but maybe that makes it less likely you'll spend an afternoon absorbed in deep thoughts while reading a long book of intellectual depth. Nowadays someone may say, "I don't need to invite people for dinner, because I already keep up with them by getting their posts in my Facebook feed." Maybe you would be a little happier if you instead had dinner with such people, and were able to laugh with them face-to-face. Decades ago, people would write their friends and family members long handwritten letters.  A person could save those letters, and have wonderful easy-to-access snapshots of what someone was thinking years ago.  Now, you might instant message someone, writing "How r yu?" But it might be too hard for you to retrieve what the person thought years ago, as that might involve too much finger-swiping through spam in your text messages. People used to have old photos in photo albums that might last a lifetime. Now accessing your old photos may depend on whether you remember some user id and password and URL of some system where you posted the photos, and whether some web site is still operational and allowing free access.  We may ask: have such technology changes made us any happier? 

There is no evidence that people in the US are happier than they were fifty years ago. As for Andreessen's enthusiasm about going out and conquering space, that won't make mankind any happier.  You won't get happier or wiser people by putting people on the moon or Mars, to live underground.  The suicide rate in the US has risen by more than 30% since the year 2000, despite all of the marvelous increases in technology during that period. 

Andreessen seems to pay no attention to the extremely large potential for technology to have disastrous effects on human happiness.  One example is how automobile use and jet travel and heavy computer use have worsened global warming. It has been estimated that computer use and electronic gadget use accounts for 4% of global warming, with another 4% caused by air travel. Another example is the risk of nuclear war. Another example is the risk of runaway AI. Another example is the very substantial possibility that gene splicing may lead to some pandemic far worse than COVID-19. It is claimed by one US intelligence agency with medium confidence that COVID-19 itself arose because of bungled technological fiddling. 

Some of the vast increase in material abundance Andreessen forecasts would need to come from asteroid mining, but asteroid mining would be a risk to mankind as great as nuclear warfare, because ships with the power to move around asteroids would have the power to launch them towards Earth as super-weapons.  A relatively small asteroid manipulated to hit Earth would have such kinetic energy that it would be more destructive than a hydrogen bomb. Once you have spaceships going to asteroids, the task of re-routing the path of an asteroid so that it hits Earth is a technological feat much simpler than creating a hydrogen bomb. 

While Andreessen gives away animosity towards religion (with the comment quoted above), what he is actually preaching seems almost like a kind of religion in itself. As I have argued at length elsewhere, religions have extremely diverse forms, and do not always involve a belief in a deity. A good definition of a religion (one I previously used) was this: "A set of beliefs about the fundamental nature of reality and life, or a recommended way of living, typically stemming from the teachings of an authority, along with norms, ethics, rituals, roles or social organizations that may arise from such beliefs." Centered around a recommended way of living in which consumption and material possession acquisition seem to be the chief virtues, Andreessen's techno-materialism seems rather like a kind of religion in which people such as him, Elon Musk and Ray Kurzweil are the high priests, asking us to believe in some looming transformative Singularity that serves like the Second Coming.  It is interesting that Andreessen ends his piece with a list of what he calls "Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism," a list that includes Friedrich Nietzsche (who was also a favorite of some well-known bad guys). I fail to recognize any morally-noteworthy figure on this list of so-called "saints." 

That wealth worship thing was tried before...

Another essay by Andreessen has the laughable title "Why AI Will Save the World." With the "save the world" theme, we have another sign a kind of stealth religion is being peddled. The essay starts out with the misstatement below: "First, a short description of what AI is: The application of mathematics and software code to teach computers how to understand, synthesize, and generate knowledge in ways similar to how people do it." That's dead wrong, because computers don't have the slightest understanding of anything. Understanding is what goes on in human minds, not in computers. You can program a computer to respond differently to different stimuli, but that does not involve any understanding. For example:

if (string == "cat")

   puts("You chose a cat!");

else if  (string == "dog")

   puts("You chose a dog!");

There is not the slightest bit of understanding going on when a computer processes the code above. Similarly, your gas stove will respond in a different way when you turn a burner knob some particular way, but your stove has not the slightest understanding of anything. 

You may chuckle when you read the essay make claims like this one: "Every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful." How could humans who have such gigantic shortfalls in their knowledge ever build something "infinitely knowledgeable"?  The mystery of how a speck-sized zygote is able to progress to become the vast state of hierarchical organization that is the human body is a mystery 100 miles over the heads of our scientists, who try to cover up their ignorance on this with lies such as the lie that your DNA is a blueprint for building humans.  We don't even understand the origin of any adult human body or any adult mind, so the idea of us building some machines "infinitely knowledgeable" is nonsensical. 

Kurzweil's Bad Predictions About 2019 and Beyond

A very accomplished technologist and inventor, Ray Kurzweil has become famous for his prediction that there will before long be a “Singularity” in which machines become super-intelligent (a prediction make in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near). In his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil made some very specific predictions about specific years: the year 2009, the year 2019, the year 2029, and the year 2072. Let's look at how well his predictions for the year 2019 hold up to reality.

Prediction #1: “The computational ability of a $4,000 computing device (in 1999 dollars) is approximately equal to the computational capability of the human brain (20 million billion calculations per second). (“2019” timeline prediction, page 203.)

Reality: A $4000 computing device in 1999 dollars is equivalent to about a $6000 dollar computing device today. There is no $6000 computing device that can compute anywhere near as fast 20 million billion calculations per second. A computer such as the Apple iMac Pro (with a price of 5000 dollars) performs at a clock speed of 3.2 gigahertz, which results in about 3 billion operations per second. This article claims that when loaded with 18 core processors (which raises the price above $10,000), the Apple iMacPro can do 11 trillion floating point operations per second (11 teraflops).  Even if we use that figure rather than the clock speed, we still have computing capability about 1000 times smaller than the computing capability predicted by Kurzweil for such a device in 2019. 

Prediction #2: “Computers are now largely invisible and are embedded everywhere – in walls, tables, chairs, desks, clothing, jewelry, and bodies.” (“2019” timeline prediction, page 278.)

Reality: Nothing like this has happened, and while computers are smaller and thinner, they are not at all "largely invisible."

Prediction #3: “Three-dimensional virtual reality displays, embedded in glasses and contact lenses, as well as auditory 'lenses,' are used routinely as primary interfaces for communication with other persons, computers, the Web, and virtual reality.” (“2019” timeline prediction, page 278.)

Reality: Such things are not at all used “routinely,” and I am aware of no cases in which they are ever used. There is very little communication through virtual reality displays, and when it is done it involves bulky apparatus like the Occulus Rift device, which resembles a scuba mask.

Prediction #4: “Most interaction with computing is through gestures and two-way natural language spoken communication.” (“2019” timeline prediction, page 278.)

Reality: Partially correct, if we consider smartphone swipes as a gesture.

Prediction #5: “High-resolution, three dimensional visual and auditory virtual reality and realistic all-encompassing tactile environments enable people to do virtually anything with anybody, regardless of physical proximity." (“2019” timeline prediction, page 278.)

Reality: This sounds like a prediction of some reality similar to the Holodeck first depicted in the TV series Star Trek: The New Generation, or a prediction that realistic virtual sex will be available by 2019. Alas, we have no such things.

Prediction #6: “Paper books or documents are rarely used and most learning is conducted through intelligent, simulated software-based teachers.” (“2019” timeline prediction, page 278.)

Reality: Paper books and documents are used much less commonly than in 1999, but it is not at all true that we have “intelligent, simulated software-based teachers.” For example, you cannot download a “history teacher” app who you can talk to about history like you would talk to a flesh-and-blood history teacher.

Prediction #7: “The vast majority of transactions include a simulated person.” (“2019” timeline prediction, page 279.)

Reality: A large percentage of transactions are electronic, but very few of them involve a simulated person.

Prediction #8: “Automated driving systems are now installed on most roads.” (“2019” timeline prediction, page 279.)

Reality: Although there are a few self-driving cars on the road, 99% of traffic is old-fashioned traffic with human drivers.

Prediction #9: “People are beginning to have relationships with automated personalities and use them as companions, teachers, caretakers and lovers.” (“2019” timeline prediction, page 279.)

Reality: This isn't happening in 2019. You can have a little interaction with an on-screen figure in a video game, but it's a very limited type of thing (such as choosing one of 5 text responses you can make to the person). 

Prediction #10: "Most flying weapons are small -- some as small as insects -- with microscopic flying weapons being researched"("2019" timeline prediction, page 207). 

Reality: The public has not yet even heard of tiny flying weapons.

Prediction #11: "The expected lifespan...has now substantially increased again, to over one hundred."  (“2019” timeline prediction, page 208.)

Reality: The most recent lifespan figure is 78.9 years for US residents. A December 2018 article says the US lifespan has dropped for three years in a row. 

So Kurzweil's predictions for 2019 were very far off the mark. Are there any reasons to think that his predictions for 2029 and 2099 are unlikely to be correct? There certainly are. 

One reason is that Kurzweil never did much to prove his claim that there is a Law of Accelerating Returns causing the time interval between major events to grow shorter and shorter. On page 27 he tries to derive this law from evolution, claiming that natural evolution follows such a law.  But we don't see such a law being observed in the history of life.  Not counting the appearance of humans, by far the biggest leap in biological order occurred not fairly recently, but about 540 million years ago, when almost all of the existing animal phyla appeared rather suddenly during the Cambrian Explosion.  No animal phylum has appeared in the past 480 million years. So we do not at all see such a Law of Accelerating Returns in the history of life.  There has, in fact, been no major leap in biological innovation during the past 30,000 years. 

Kurzweil's logic on page 27 contains an obvious flaw. He states this:

The advance of technology is inherently an evolutionary process.  Indeed, it is a continuation of the same evolutionary process that gave rise to the technology-creating species. Therefore, in accordance with the Law of Accelerating Returns, the time interval between salient advances grows exponentially shorter as time passes.  

This is completely fallacious reasoning, both because the natural history of life has not actually followed a Law of Accelerating Returns, and also because the advance of technology is not a process like the evolutionary process postulated by Darwin.  The evolutionary process imagined by Darwin is blind, unguided, and natural, but the growth of technology is purposeful, guided and artificial.

On the same page, Kurzweil cites Moore's Law as justification for the Law of Accelerating Returns.  For a long time, this rule-of-thumb held true, that the speed of a transistor doubled every two years. But in 2015 Moore himself said, "I see Moore's law dying here in the next decade or so." Machines smarter than humans would require stratospheric leaps forward in computer software, but computer software has never grown at anything like an exponential pace or an accelerating pace.  Nothing like Moore's Law has ever existed in the world of software development.  Kurzweil has occasionally attempted to suggest that evolutionary algorithms will produce some great leap that will speed up the rate of software development. But a 2018 review of evolutionary algorithms concludes that they have been of little use, and states: "Our analysis of relevant literature shows that no one has succeeded at evolving non-trivial software from scratch, in other words the Darwinian algorithm works in theory, but does not work in practice, when applied in the domain of software production." 

The biggest reason for doubting Kurzweil's predictions beyond 2019 is that they are based on assumptions about the brain and mind that are incorrect. Kurzweil is an uncritical consumer of neuroscientist dogmas about the brain and mind. He assumes that the mind must be a product of the brain, and that memories must be stored in the brain, because that is what neuroscientists typically claim. If he had made an adequate study of the topic, he would have found that the low-level facts collected by neuroscientists do not support the high-level claims that neuroscientists make about the brain, and frequently contradict such claims. To give a few examples:

• There is no place in the brain suitable for storing memories that last for decades, and things like synapses and dendritic spines (alleged to be involved in memory storage) are unstable, "shifting sands" kind of things which do not last for years, and which consist of proteins that only last for weeks.
• The synapses that transmit signals in the brain are very noisy and unreliable,  in contrast to humans who can recall very large amounts of memorized information without error.
• Signal transmission in the brain must mainly be a snail's pace affair, because of very serious slowing factors such as synaptic delays and synaptic fatigue (wrongly ignored by those who write about the speed of brain signals), meaning brains are too slow to explain instantaneous human memory recall.
• The brain seems to have no mechanism for reading memories.
• The brain seems to have no mechanism for writing memories, nothing like the read-write heads found in computers.
• The brain has nothing that might explain the instantaneous recall of long-ago-learned information that humans routinely display, and has nothing like the things that allow instant data retrieval in computers.
• Brain tissue has been studied at the most minute resolution, and it shows no sign of storing any encoded information (such as memory information) other than the genetic information that is in almost every cell of the body.
• There is no sign that the brain or the human genome has any of the vast genomic apparatus it would need to have to accomplish the gigantic task of converting learned conceptual knowledge and episodic memories into neural states or synapse states (the task would presumably required hundreds of specialized proteins, and there's no real sign that such memory-encoding proteins exist)
• No neuroscientist has ever given a detailed explanation of how such a gigantic translation task of memory encoding could be accomplished (one that included precise, detailed examples).
• Contrary to the claim that brains store memories and produce our thinking, case histories show that humans can lose half or more of their brains (due to disease or hemispherectomy operations), and suffer little damage to memory or intelligence (as discussed here). 

Had he made a study of paranomal phenomena, something he shows no signs of having studied, Kurzweil might have come to the same idea suggested by the neuroscience facts above: that the brain cannot be an explanation for the human mind and human memory, and that these things must be largely effects or aspects of some reality that is not neural, probably a spiritual facet of humanity.

Since he believes that our minds are merely the products of our brains, Kurzweil thinks that we will be able to make machines as intelligent as we are, and eventually far more intelligent than we are, by somehow leveraging some "mind from matter" principle used by the human brain. But no one has any credible account of what such a principle could be, and certainly Kurzweil does not (although he tried to create an impression of knowledge about this topic with his book How to Create a Mind).   We already know the details of the structure and physiology of the brain, and what is going on in the brain in terms of matter and energy movement.  Such details do nothing to clarify any "mind from matter" principle that might explain how a brain could generate a mind, or be leveraged to make super-intelligent machines. 

It's like a new religion

Holding mistaken beliefs about minds being made by brains, and memories being stored in brains,  Kurzweil derives from these beliefs various bizarre predictions for 2099 that will not prove accurate, such as the belief that in that year "there is no longer any clear distinction between humans and computers," and "most conscious entities do not have a permanent physical presence," and "the number of software-based humans vastly exceeds those still using native neuron-cell-based computation,"  and "life expectancy is no longer a viable term in relation to intelligent beings"  (page 280). There is a good reason to think that humans will indeed one day no longer be concerned by the prospect of death, but that will probably come from understanding that our minds never arose from our brains, but from a spirit or soul that is imperishable. 

Since he predicts so many fantastic technology advances coming from a Law of Accelerating Returns, there is a certain cosmic problem faced by Kurzweil: the fact that we do not observe any sign of extraterrestrial activity anywhere else in outer space. We would think that if a single civilization got the type of super-powers Kurzweil imagines, that they would have transformed our galaxy; but we can see no signs of such a thing.  Kurzweil suggests a solution to this, one that is quite wacky. What he suggests is that extraterrestrials are too tiny to be noticed. He says on page 257, "A computational-based superintelligence of the late twenty-first century here on Earth will be microscopic in size." From this most dubious assumption, he makes the batty conclusion on page 258 that extraterrestrial spaceships are "thus likely to be smaller than a grain of sand...Perhaps this is one reason we have not noticed them."   

Does the Earth Have an Optimal Distribution of Fossil Fuels?

When speaking about global warming, people sometimes talk about fossil fuel reserves as a kind of great threat to us that we must resist fully using, or else face ruinous consequences. Some say that we have what is called a carbon budget that we must stick to, to avoid a future temperature rise greater than 2 degrees Celsius. The carbon budget has been described as being no more than 1500 gigatons of carbon dioxide that can be expended before the year 2050. Presumably a higher budget would be allowed for the period up until 2075 and the period up until 2100. It is argued that we must use great restraint in limiting ourselves to this carbon budget, rather like some person who can take some morphine pills, but who must restrain himself from taking too many, lest he die from an overdose.

But there is actually a reason for believing the chance of a carbon dioxide “lethal overdose” is low, and perhaps nonexistent. The reason has to do with the extent and nature of fossil fuel reserves. For one thing, there are not unlimited amounts of coal, oil, and natural gas lying about. The oil reserves of the top 15 oil producers is only about 1540 billion barrels, which is about 50 years of current global oil use, and considerably smaller than that if we allow for future population growth and economic growth. Some are worried that we may soon hit the “Peak Oil” point that has long been predicted. Although it is claimed that coal reserves are sufficient to last for 153 years of global production, many think that we will hit “Peak Coal” within a few decades.

What is called a resource pyramid is one of the reasons why both coal and oil production may decline within a few decades. As shown below, the resource pyramid is the concept that the easiest coal and oil resources to extract are found in the smallest amounts. The resources that are found in the greatest amounts are those which are hardest to extract.

 A resource pyramid

 

Because coal and oil resources are arranged in a kind of resource pyramid, with most of the resources being very hard to extract, it is quite possible that there is almost no chance that mankind will “overdose” on carbon resources. By around the middle of the century, we may find it harder and harder to extract coal and oil resources, as we work our way deep down the resource pyramid of oil and the resource pyramid of coal. The very distribution of these resources may put a brake on runaway consumption, forcing humanity to reduce consumption and switch more to alternate energy sources such as solar and wind.

David Rutledge of Cal Tech has predicted that by 2069 the world will have produced 90% of the coal that it will ever produce. If something like that happens, the worst projections of the IPCC will not occur, and the world's temperature will probably never rise much higher than 2 degrees Centigrade above its current level.

These facts bring to mind a very interesting question that has rarely been considered: what would be the optimal distribution of fossil fuels that our planet might have had? And also: is it possible that the earth's actual distribution of fossil fuels is something close to an optimal distribution?

First, let us consider some distributions of fossil fuels that would not have been optimal. One distribution we can imagine is one in which our planet simply had no fossil fuels at all: no coal, no oil, and no natural gas. In such a case there would have been no modern civilization of the type we have enjoyed for the past 100 years or so. That obviously would not have been an optimal distribution of fossil fuels.

Another distribution of fossil fuels we can imagine is one in which oil and coal started to run out at a time such as about 1980. That also would not have been an optimal distribution of fossil fuels.

We can also imagine a distribution of fossil fuels in which coal and oil resources were two or three times higher than our planet has, with two or three times more easily accessible resources. In that case there might have been a much higher chance of catastrophic global warming caused by excessive use of fossil fuel resources.

Instead of any of these possibilities, what we may have on our planet is pretty much an optimal distribution of fossil fuels. The fossil fuels we have are enough to last us until the cost of alternate energy sources such as solar power and wind power falls down so low that such things (possibly assisted by nuclear fusion) can serve as replacements for fossil fuels. But existing as they are in a resource pyramid, the fossil fuels we have may be distributed in such a way so that the easily accessible resources start to gradually run out just at about the time that we will need for them to run out, so that we don't overheat the planet by burning too much carbon. At just about the best time for such a message, nature will in effect start telling us, “It's time to switch away from fossil fuels -- I'm going to slowly make it harder and harder for you to get them.” And nature will start delivering that message in a louder and louder voice over the span of several decades. We will get this message from nature pretty much at just the right time -- all because fossil fuels just happened to be distributed in a particular way that may turn out to be very lucky for us. 

If we have such a nearly optimal distribution of fossil fuels, we may wonder whether that is an improbable lucky coincidence, or something that was set up in advance for our benefit.

Nonsense in NatGeo's “Year Million”

The National Geographic channel has a new TV series entitled “Year Million.” A recent episode in the series was entitled “Never Say Die,” and was about the prospects of human immortality. The episode was long on slick visuals, and short on intelligence. The episode presented the ideas that we will greatly extend human longevity by using nanobots and genetic engineering, and that later people will upload themselves into computers.

The episode presented a simplistic view of biological life, one that is purely mechanistic, epitomized by a person who said, "We are still biologically hindered by the squishy computer in our heads.” The assumptions seemed to be that biological life is merely some mechanical phenomenon that humans can completely master through technologies such as nanobots and genetic engineering. These assumptions are quite dubious because of all the profound mysteries involving biological life.

It is generally admitted that we do not understand the origin of life. It is generally admitted that we do not understand the mystery of protein-folding (why proteins conveniently form into three-dimensional shapes needed for our existence). It is generally admitted that we do not understand the mysteries of morphogenesis, how it is that a fertilized egg is able to progress to become a baby who then grows into a full-grown human. We also don't really understand the origin of species, as the theory of evolution by natural selection is merely a theory of accumulation rather than what we actually need to explain the mountainous degrees of coordination, structural fine-tuning, and functional coherence in our bodies: a theory of organization explaining the arrival of the fittest, not just the survival of the fittest. As discussed here, we also don't really understand where it is that the body plans of organisms are stored, because DNA is a minimal “bare bones” language unsuitable for describing three-dimensional body plan blueprints; so while DNA might be storing a list of chemical ingredients, it does not actually seem to have a specification of our body plans.

We therefore have every reason to suspect that biological life involves some mysterious forces or factors very far beyond our understanding. If that is the case, then the prospect for vastly increasing the human lifespan through injecting humans with tiny robots called nanobots and tinkering with DNA may be much less bright than many think.

But there is some reasonable hope that genetic engineering or nanobots might extend the human lifespan, so this part of the TV show wasn't nonsensical. The show did become nonsensical when it discussed the very dubious concept of mind uploading in a completely uncritical manner. Among the reasons why mind uploading is such a dubious concept is that we have no understanding of how a brain could even be storing memories that last for decades, given all the rapid molecular turnover and protein turnover that occurs in brains; and we have no idea of how brains can generate abstract ideas. Mind uploading cannot possibly work unless some reductionist model of consciousness and memory is correct; and there are very good reasons (discussed here and in this series of posts) for doubting that any such model is correct.

The show quoted neuroscientist Michael Graziano, who made this very dogmatic proclamation:

A lot has to be done before we can figure out whether we can take a pattern of connectivity from a brain and upload it or copy it. It's going to happen; I'm positive of that. Everything's moving in that direction.

Graziano's certainty on this matter is laughable. There is no basis for believing that minds can ever be uploaded. There is no progress at all in mind uploading. Instead of “everything's moving in that direction,” the situation is actually, “nothing's moving in that direction.” And why is Graziano saying he's sure it's going to happen, just after saying, “A lot has to be done before we can figure out whether we can take a pattern of connectivity from a brain and upload it or copy it”? Those two thoughts contradict each other.

The show then quotes string physicist Michio Kaku, who nowadays seems to have his head popping up on every science or futurism documentary put on television. Kaku states, "Believe it or not, we can actually upload memories, and record memories in mice.” This statement is false. The actual claims that have been made by certain mice researchers (researchers in optogenetics) is that memories in mice can be blocked or activated. Such claims are not well founded, and are based on a few doubtful studies using a dubious methodology. The studies typically report weak levels of statistical significance. See here for a discussion of the flaws in some of these studies.

Making claims about mind uploading, the show's narrator says this:

Once we shed our physical bodies, we will exist only as a computer copy of our brains. It's hard to imagine exactly, but basically you'd be digital information stored on a server.

The TV show assures us that mind uploading is the key to eternal life. The narrator says this:

But when we start talking about immortality, that's a whole other can of worms. If we really are serious about getting to forever-land, we'll have to replace our carbon based human bodies and upload ourselves to a super-computer.

The show then tells us this existence will be like some afterlife heaven. We are told:

We're talking about everlasting life in a digital paradise....All of society will live digitally in a virtual world called the metaverse that's a thousand times more intense than the one you live in now.

There are quite a few reasons why such a thing is very unlikely to happen. First, the brain does not store digital information, so the mind is very likely not something that can be uploaded into a computer. Second, there is not the slightest evidence that the brain uses any type of readable code to store information. DNA uses the genetic code, something we can understand and read. But we have zero knowledge of anything like a brain code that we can use to read information from the brain. Nor can we plausibly imagine how such a code could have originated, as it would have to be something almost infinitely harder to explain than the genetic code (the origin of which is very hard to explain).

Third, you could never electronically capture the exact state of a particular person's brain, even if you tried to use microscopic nanobots to do such a thing. Imagine trying to exactly map every synapse and neuron in a brain with nanobots. Each of the brain-mapping nanobots would have to somehow be aware of its own exact position in the brain, so it can record the exact position of each neuron and brain connection it encounters. So if a nanobot comes to a neuron that is 1.334526 centimeters from the left edge of the skull, and 2.734538 centimeters from the right edge of the skull, and 5.292343 centimeters from the back of the skull, then those exact coordinates must be recorded. But how can a microscopic nanobot do that? You can't supply a microscopic nanobot with a little GPS system allowing it to tell its position. So it would seem that nanobots are completely unsuitable for any such job as mapping the exact physical microscopic structure of an organ with billions of cells and synapses packed together in a small space.

Then there's the duplication problem. Imagine if there was a machine that could scan your brain, and then upload your mind to a computer. Even if that process was done perfectly, the computer would not have your mind. It would instead have a copy of your mind. You may realize this just by considering that if this uploading process didn't kill you, and the computer with your “mind upload” existed at the same time as you, there wouldn't be two you's. There would be one you, and a copy of you living in the computer. If you then died after this upload, it would not at all be true that you had survived death by the fact that a copy of your mind was in the computer.

None of these difficulties are discussed on the “Year Million” TV show. The show presents mind uploading as a sure thing, ignoring all the reasons for thinking that it can't ever happen. Not only did the TV show present mind uploading as something that will likely happen; the TV show assured us that mind uploading is the key to true immortality – on the grounds that once you are living in a computer server, you are guaranteed to live forever.

This is nonsensical, because the programs running on computer servers sometimes crash and stop working; the programs running on computer servers are sometimes deliberately halted; and the computer servers themselves sometimes crash, lose power, or are turned off. If you were living in a computer server, there is no reason why you should be confident that you will be around for more than a century or two. 

 After the father and daughter mind-uploaded

The next episode of the “Year Million” TV series continued to be largely about mind uploading, speaking as if this extremely doubtful idea was on solid ground. There was also a pitch for the idea that we are already living inside computers. The “Year Million” TV series is on track to be the silliest documentary series ever put on about the human future.

Given our very low state of knowledge about the most basic riddles of biology, memory and consciousness, fantasies of mind uploading are rather like the fantasies of some boy who knows almost nothing about the contents of the sun, but who fantasizes that he will one day reorganize the sun into a shape and color more pleasing to him.

His Unbelievable Vision of a Post-Human Future

The Age of EM: Work, Love, and Life When Robots Rule the Earth by Robin Hanson (a professor of economics at George Mason University) is a new book that speculates in the greatest detail about what kind of world will arise if a weird possibility occurs. The weird possibility that Hanson imagines is that humans become "not the main inhabitants" of the earth, being overshadowed by what he calls “ems.” Hanson defines an “em” like this: “An em results from taking a particular human brain, scanning it to record its particular cell features and connections, and then building a computer model that processes signals according to those same features and connections.”

What Hanson is imagining is essentially android robots, but not robots who are controlled by artificial intelligence programming. Hanson is rather skeptical about artificial intelligence programming, and says on page 382 it will take two to four centuries before it is capable of achieving “human level” capabilities. But Hanson thinks there's a shortcut. He thinks we can get robots as smart as people by scanning human brains and then loading that information into robots. He thinks this will be feasible within about a hundred years. Hanson thinks that before our planet sees any robots smarter than man, there will be one or more centuries in which our planet is largely inhabited by robots about as smart as humans – robots whose electronic minds are duplicates of human brains.

Hanson gives us a cold vision that is morally repulsive. After discussing a destructive form of brain scanning that is rather like a turkey slicer (page 148), he suggests using eugenics to produce a superior stock of humans to have their brains copied into robots.

The rest of the world has pretty much rejected eugenics since the fall of the Nazis, but apparently not Hanson. On page 162 he says:

It is possible that sometime in the next half-century or so we we will be able to create babies of substantially higher genetic quality by embryo selection in the context of in vitro fertilization. If so, when they reach the right age these may be very attractive candidates for scanning into ems.

Does the professor thinks we should wait until the genetically engineered super-kids are grown, and then feed their brains into his brain scanner that is like a turkey slicer?

On page 146 the professor proposes that the millions of robot “ems” that are copies of human minds should be given only “wages near subsistence levels,” even though he assures us on page 150 that these “ems” are “mentally quite human.” He offers this cold justification for this cruel proposal.

Readers of this book may find near-subsistence wages to be a strange and perhaps scary prospect. So it is worth remembering that such wages in effect applied to almost all animals who ever lived, to almost all humans before a few hundred years ago, and for a billion humans still today.

And what about all the humans who would have all their jobs lost by this great army of “ems” that would appear? Hanson seems to have little interest in the fate of the old-fashioned creatures known as humans. I looked up “humans” in the index of his 384-page book, and I see the last reference to “humans” is on page 14. Hanson does not imagine that humans will become extinct, but he imagines on page 8 that humans will live in retirement cities, with the "em" robots living in separate cities (how is he is able to make so specific a claim I don't know). 

Hanson imagines that the human race will be economically eclipsed by robots that have copies of human minds, but we may ask: what would be the point of that? Hanson tells us that it would occur because such robots will be more efficient, and work much faster. But it is very far from clear that this would be true. Give me a year 2100 human armed with all the best year 2100 gadgets (and some pills helping him think faster), and such a person should do just as well as a robot with a brain copied from a human.

Hanson creates endless speculations based on this idea of robot minds being copies of human minds, but he does nothing to show the feasibility of the idea. So Hanson is like some person building a 10-story tower before laying a concrete foundation for such a tower. There are actually very good reasons for thinking that it is impossible to ever create a robot mind that is a copy of a human mind. One such reason is that while Hanson claims that the mind is just the brain, there are very good reasons for thinking they are not the same, and that you would not at all capture someone's mind by scanning his brain.

Let me specify some preliminary requirements that we should demand of any book centered upon speculations that robot minds can be created from scanning human minds. After these preliminary requirements are met, we can think to ourselves that we are not wasting our time by reading speculations about some possibility that will never be able to occur.

The first requirement we should demand is a detailed explanation of how it is that the human brain could possibly store memories stretching back 50 years. For the reasons I give in this post, scientists don't understand how the human brain can store memories for longer than three weeks. The most common explanation for memory is that humans store memories in synapses. But synapses are subject to molecular turnover which should prevent them from storing any memories for longer than a few weeks. So how is that humans can store memories for 50 years?

It may be too much to demand that a brain emulation theorist provide the answer to how humans store memories for 50 years, but we should demand that he can at least provide some possible answer – at least some speculative scenario which, if it were true, would explain how humans can store memories for 50 years. If no such scenario can be provided, we should not believe that you will ever be able to have robot minds that are copies of human minds.

The second requirement we should demand from our brain emulation theorist is an explanation of how such a mechanism for remembering 50-year-old memories could have naturally evolved (seeing that such a “humans will be replaced” thinker is presumably not someone who thinks some higher power had a role in human origins). This is a huge challenge, for while such a theorist may be tempted to imagine some very complicated scheme by which memories might be stored in the brain for 50 years, such a scheme will not be a plausible natural explanation unless it is something that might have naturally appeared through evolution. Here there is the huge difficulty that we cannot think of any reason why natural selection would give us memories lasting longer than a year or two. Primates could survive just as well if they only remembered memories going back a year or two.

The third requirement we should demand from our brain emulation theorist is some explanation that dismisses all of the evidence for human psychic abilities such as ESP and human survival after death. If such evidence is valid, then “your mind is your brain” assumptions are dead wrong. We have no way of explaining something like ESP as a function of the human brain, although it could be a sign of something like a human soul. If experiences such as near-death experiences are real, then we presumably have some kind of soul that survives death. But the brain emulation theorist cannot admit such possibilities.

Since such a theorist wishes to maintain that your mind is stored entirely in your brain (and not at all in any type of soul separate from the brain), such a theorist must somehow clear from the table all of the great deal of evidence that has been accumulated suggesting that there is a soul as well as paranormal psychic abilities. So our brain emulation theorist would have to somehow accomplish the long, difficult task of explaining why very many things that seem to be good evidence are not really evidence. I presume that would require at least a long chapter in a book.

As if all this is not hard enough, there is still a fourth requirement that our brain emulation theorist must accomplish before we should take seriously the claim that human minds could be copied to robot minds. The theorist must give a plausible explanation for how it could be that all the information in a human mind might be copied to a robot mind without destroying most or much of the information in the human mind.

There are good reasons for believing that even if your mind was entirely stored in your brain, it would be physically impossible to read the state of a mind in a way that would allow some robot mind to copy the contents of that mind. While things such as fMRI scanners can make large-scale maps of the brain, there is no type of external scanner that would allow us to know the exact molecular and electrical state of microscopic neurons. While we can imagine some tiny molecule-sized probe that could be injected into a brain and then read the state of one neuron, such a probe could never store more than a tiny bit of information. It would not work to simply inject millions of microscopic probes into someone's brain, for such probes would have no way of figuring out the exact positional coordinates of the neurons they were analyzing.

You might think that it is possible to do a destructive scan of the brain to determine its exact contents. We can imagine some machine that is something like a turkey slicer. First it would slice off one little slice of the brain, and then analyze that like a copy machine reading a document. Then the next little slice would be done, and so forth. But that would not work, for the very act of making these thin slices would disrupt any delicate information storage in the brain that was preserving memories.

To present a plausible scenario for robots emulating human minds, our brain emulation theorist would need to explain how this brain scanning would work, as well as do the three other items I mentioned. Hanson doesn't do anything like meeting the requirements I have mentioned.

Hanson does nothing to substantiate his claim that the mind is just the brain. Hanson's failure in considering the difficulties here are shown by page 148 of his book, where he says this about brain scans that would give human minds to robots: “The very first scans might perhaps be performed on cryonics customers, that is, people who had previously had their brains frozen and stored in liquid nitrogen, in the hope of being revived when technology improved, and who had agreed to allow em scanning later.” Determining the exact state of a brain that had just died would be a nightmare enough. Add brain freezing (with all of its resulting cell damage) to the mix, and the problem becomes 100 times worse. Hanson informs us that he is one of only 2000 living people who have arranged to be cryogenically frozen upon death.

The cryogenics fantasy (represented by the slogan “freeze, wait, reanimate”) was implausible enough. Apparently Hanson believes in an even wackier notion – freeze your brain, stay in cold storage for a few decades, then wait until someone copies your brain state into a robot.  What convenience – after that fatal car crash, you wake up 40 years later with a nice steel robot body! 

 

There are countless feasibility problems in the idea of copying human minds into robots, problems that Hanson has not paid attention to. The central assumption behind the idea is wrong. Your mind is not your brain, but something more than your brain. This is indicated both by well-substantiated psychic phenomena (such as ESP and near-death experiences), and also by the spectacular inability of neuroscience to explain basic facets of our mind such as consciousness, instant memory retrieval of obscure memories, and memories lasting 50 years despite very rapid molecular turnover in the brain (see here and here for why it is hard to imagine the last two will ever be explained neurologically). So Hanson's very elaborate speculations about what would happen if the world became full of “em” robots (with minds copied from human brains) are no more relevant than some speculations of what would happen if unicorns were to take charge of the planet.

Recipe for a Tolkienesque “Hobbit” Future

I just saw The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug on cable TV. It's the latest in the series of movies inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien's epic trilogy The Lord of the Rings. The Tolkien “franchise” is apparently alive and well, with the expected elements such as dwarfish hobbits, giants, dragons, wizards, and a magic ring.

If I recall correctly, the “Lord of the Rings” stories are supposed to be set in a distant human past, long before history began. But is there any way that something like the Tolkien fictional world might actually be...our future? What kind of strange future events might cause the world to end up in some state rather like the “Middle Earth” depicted in the “Lord of the Rings” series?

I can imagine some ways that might come to pass. One contributing factor could be some kind of genetic bifurcation or fission of the human species. According to a Huffington Post article, “Researchers found that the shorter a person was, the more likely they were to have a long life.” Other studies show that tall people earn more money. So it might be that one day, gene splicers offer parents a choice: you can have regular children; you can have short children that live longer; or you can have tall children that earn more money. A few decades after parents have such a choice, we may see the human race splitting up into different sub-species. There may be a sub-species of humans who are very small, and another sub-species of humans that are very tall. It could then end up being a little like “The Lord of the Rings,” with its division of dwarfish hobbits, regular humans, and giants. Or a nuclear war might produce mutations that cause the human race to split up into different sub-species. Need some cute little pointed ears? Some mutations will get you that.

But in order to have anything like a Tolkienesque “Hobbit” future, you also need to get rid of most of the trappings of modern civilization. It's okay to still have cute little Hobbit houses, and some huge imposing stone buildings, but we would have to lose most of the superhighways, the malls, and the burger joints. But there's are several ways that might happen. One possibility is global energy collapse. If we ever pretty much run out of oil (as some Peak Oil theorists suggest), we might see a social breakdown that might cause our car-based culture to collapse in a tailspin. Another possibility is some kind of electromagnetic pulse that wipes out the electrical grid. That could come from a big solar flare, or from an enemy detonating a nuclear bomb way up in the atmosphere. Or there might be a nuclear war that wipes out most of humanity.

Of course, after such a collapse it would probably be a good long time before things got really Tolkienesque, and people went back to riding on horses, using swords, and living in quaint little villages. But before all that long, you might well get an American culture a lot more similar to the way things were when the country was colonized by Europeans.

But what about the dragons and strange monsters that are a mainstay of the “Lord of the Rings” franchise? It's easy to imagine how that might arise. We simply need to imagine some genetic experimentation getting out of control. Imagine if a few decades from now biologists started to play around with making new species by gene-splicing. They might be right in the middle of that, when boom, society might collapse because of an energy crisis, an electromagnetic pulse, or a nuclear war. The weird creatures produced by the geneticists might then somehow get released into the world, and start reproducing. The world might then be overrun by various assorted species of monsters, some of which could even be like dragons (although it's hard to imagine any scenario by which you might end up with fire-breathing dragons). A nuclear war might also produce mutations that would lead to strange new species, some of which could be monstrous.

And why do we have to imagine that the “monsters” are all biological? We can imagine some types of runaway self-reproducing robots spreading across the land, with no more government around to stop them. Such robots might function just like various monsters out of the pages of Tolkien. What's the big difference between being threatened by giant spiders and being threatened by giant eight-legged robots that walk around like spiders?

You've got to admit, I'm starting to put together here an idea that some aspiring screenwriter might make into a great script. When a screenwriter is pitching a script, he always likes to have an “elevator pitch” he can use to sum up the idea in 20 seconds – for example, “My script is Titanic in outer space.” So here we have a nice potential elevator pitch: “My script is Lord of the Rings in a post-apocalyptic future.”

But what about the wizards that are a mainstay of the “Lord of the Rings” franchise? You might say: there's no possible way to get that in a human future. But that's not true. Let us simply remember Arthur C. Clarke's famous statement that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. A person who applies advanced technology can easily seem like a wizard, as long as his observers have no idea what the technology is or how it is produced.

We can imagine a Tolkienesque future in which 99% of the human race knows nothing about science or technology. But there may be a handful of people who still know how to apply technology. Such rare technologists may start calling themselves magicians or wonder workers, to instill awe in the average human. They may start wearing robes and those big droopy wizard hats. To the average person, they would seem just exactly like magical wizards. But they would know they were not using magic, but simply using science and technology.

So it is all too possible that we might end up with a Tolkienesque “Hobbit” future with the aroma of “Middle Earth,” in which strange monsters (electronic or biological) roam the land, in which there are different flavors of the human race with different heights, in which people with swords ride around on horseback between quaint little villages, and in which astonishing wizards work wonders that seem like magic to almost everyone. But the golden magic ring? Forget about it; I can't think of any way to fit that into a possible future.