Singularity, Breaker of Dreams

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Mon, 07 Sep 1998 01:06:05 -0500

>From Vernor Vinge, foreword to "True Names And Other Dangers":

      "I wanted interstellar empires (interplanetary ones at the 
      least).  I wanted supercomputers and artificial 
      intelligence and effective immortality.  All seemed 
      possible, yet there were inescapable consequences of 
      unbridled optimism..."

A good philosophy is one that contradicts you, rather than conforming to your wishes. When this happens it means that your philosophy runs on its own rails, that it has logic and integrity, rather than being a means of rationalization. Vinge, growing up in the 1950s, wanted interstellar empires, and I, growing up in the 80s and 90s with a copy of "Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition", wanted to walk, uploaded, through my favorite worlds of SF and fantasy; to build my own planet, make my mind faster and free from pain, explore the galaxy with effective immortality, and so on. My dreams had a shiny cyberspace finish, but they were not any more imaginative. (Although one rather wonders what will happen to my little brother, growing up with a copy of "The Spike".)

Then I happened to take a copy of "True Names" out of the library, and my world was altered. On paragraph two, page 47, when I read the sentence "When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity - a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied - and the world will pass beyond our understanding." The first thing I thought was "Yes, he's right," and the next thing was, "I now know how I will be spending the rest of my life." A few months later, I published "Staring Into The Singularity" and got large chunks of it wrong.

I knew about the Singularity, I had a new dream, and I'd even lost the old dreams, but this new dream was suspiciously malleable to my own desires. I was sure that "the Powers will be ethical", and that this meant I would survive and be upgraded to a Power. I did spend a lot of time telling people to worry about getting to the Singularity, instead of detailing the Utopia that would come afterwards. And I was particularly scathing about certain failures of imagination. I'd made progress, I'd increased the imaginativeness and power of my philosophy, but it was still obeying me instead of vice versa.

Now I am still sure that the Powers will be ethical, but I am no longer sure that this precludes taking us apart for spare atoms. I no longer think that our continued survival has to threaten the Powers for us to be erased; I am now willing to accept that simple efficiency may require it. I am willing to accept that life may be meaningless. I am willing to accept that the only reward for all my service will be a painful death, for myself, for those I love, and for the entire human race. Only when one can accept all possibilities is one ready to choose between them.

The power of the Singularitarian philosophy is that it draws on concepts with more force than our own desires. Over time, over years, it corrodes away our rationalizations. And above all, it presents an emotionally and rationally acceptable course of action, even after all the darkest alternatives are accepted. It really doesn't matter what the relative probabilities are. Either life has meaning, or it doesn't; either human life has meaning, or it doesn't; either we'll be upgraded, or we'll die. So we'll die? All the other generations have died. It's not some major tragedy because it happens to me instead of somebody else. So humanity will die? In a billion years, it is certain that humanity will die. Is it so horrible if humanity dies giving birth to something greater, giving meaning to all our dead ancestors? Sooner or later, some generation will face the choice between Singularity and extinction. Why push it off, even if we could? And besides, we might not die at all.

Because my best-guess dedication to the Singularity is fairly unaffected by the above probabilities varying between 0% and 90%, I can calmly and without worry evaluate arguments for and against. I can accept that every possibility might be real. The Singularity, through it all, is the only sane way to go. In accepting every possibility, I can also accept the dictates of my own philosophy; I don't need to distort it to avoid "unacceptable" outcomes.

We must each lose our dreams in order to grow, but not in despair.  We must abandon the small dreams of childhood, but without abandoning the ability to dream.  For there are two ways in which a dream may be broken; by the death of hope, or by a greater dream.  To acknowledge that we do not command the future, is not to say that we do not make it; and when we tear our eyes away from our yearnings, we may look upward to the sun, forward to tomorrow.

Forward to the day when humanity awakens from its dream, to the ultimate shattering of Maya.  To the day when the greatest hacker of them all compiles the very last line of code, and looks out at an early morning sky, knowing that he looks on the Final Dawn.  To the day when it is said, in the tradition of Oppenheimer who looked upon another sun:  "I am become Singularity, Breaker of Dreams."

-- 
         sentience@pobox.com        Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
          http://pobox.com/~sentience/singul_arity.html
           http://pobox.com/~sentience/alger_non.html
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