Infinity Born

by Douglas E. Richards

  I could write forever on the many dangers of ASI and the difficulty of reining in a superior intelligence. The arguments used in Infinity Born, such as perverse instantiation, are all real and have been used by prominent scientists (as have many other arguments that I didn’t include). For those of you interested in a very thorough, complex, and scholarly treatment of the subject matter, I would recommend the book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014) by Nick Bostrom, a Professor at Oxford.

  The book I found most useful in researching this novel is entitled, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the end of the Human Era (James Barrat, 2013). This described the “God in a box” experiment detailed in the novel, for example, and provided a fascinating, easy-to-read perspective on ASI, at least on the fear-mongering side of the debate. I’ve included a few quotes from this book that I thought were relevant to Infinity Born.

  Page 59—First, there are too many players in the AGI sweepstakes. Too many organizations in too many countries are working on AGI and AGI-related technology for them all to agree to mothball their projects until Friendly AI is created, or to include in their code a formal friendliness module, if one could be made.

  Page 61—But what if there is some kind of category shift once something becomes a thousand times smarter than we are, and we just can’t see it from here? For example, we share a lot of DNA with flatworms. But would we be invested in their goals and morals even if we discovered that many millions of years ago flatworms had created us, and given us their values? After we got over the initial surprise, wouldn’t we just do whatever we wanted?

  Page 86—Shall we build our robot replacement or not? On this, de Garis is clear. “Humans should not stand in the way of a higher form of evolution. These machines are godlike. It is human destiny to create them.”

  (Note: This is an example of the faction who believes humanity should step aside and let our new ASI overlords run the show. To give you a sense of who this guy is, here is the first paragraph of his Wikipedia page: Hugo de Garis is a retired researcher in the sub-field of artificial intelligence (AI) known as evolvable hardware. He became known in the 1990s for his research on the use of genetic algorithms to evolve neural networks using three-dimensional cellular automata inside field programmable gate arrays. He claimed that this approach would enable the creation of what he terms "artificial brains" which would quickly surpass human levels of intelligence).

  Page 91—Dr. Shostak (Chief of SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) argues that SETI should point some of its receivers toward corners of the galaxy that would be inviting to artificial rather than biological alien intelligence.

  “Since they can evolve on timescales far, far shorter than biological evolution, it could very well be that the first machines on the scene thoroughly dominate the intelligence of the galaxy. If we build a machine with the intellectual capability of one human, within five years, its successor will be more intelligent than all of humanity combined.”

  Page 123—“We’ve got thousands of good people working all over the world in sort of a community effort to create a disaster,” Vinge said. (Note: Vernor Vinge is a science fiction writer and the first person to formally use the word “singularity” in a 1993 address to NASA, entitled “The Coming Technological Singularity.”)

  Page 155—Too many people think the frontiers of AI are delineated by harmless search engines, smart phones, and now Watson. But AGI is much closer to nuclear weapons than to video games.

  Page 242—There is no purely technical strategy that is workable in this area because greater intelligence will always find a way to circumvent measures that are the product of a lesser intelligence.

  Mind Uploading/Whole Brain Emulation

  The concept of whole brain emulation (WBE) is becoming ever more mainstream and ever more well known. For those interested in learning more, a simple Google search on WBE will return enough reading to keep you busy for a long time. There is even a foundation called Carboncopies (one word), whose mission is to support WBE research.

  For those who wish to really drill down into this subject, I recommend two books, “Intelligence Unbound: the Future of Uploaded and Machine Minds” (2014), edited by Russell Blackford and Damien Broderick, and “A Taxonomy and Metaphysics of Mind-Uploading” (2014), by Keith Wiley.

  Mind transference has been a science fictional concept for a very long time, but like many science fictional concepts it is quickly moving down the path toward reality.

  Every time I think a technology like this is impossible, ridiculous, I’m reminded of when I had to sequence DNA as part of a research project to earn my Master’s degree in genetic engineering.

  Back then, almost thirty years ago, it took me days to prepare and sequence just a few hundred bases of the virus I was mutating. I had to isolate and extract the DNA, initiate chemical reactions, tag the DNA with radiation, perform electrophoresis, allow the radiation to expose photographic film, and then read the film manually using a light box for illumination.

  Today, it is possible to sequence billions of bases in the time it took me to sequence a few hundred. If you had asked me then when I thought a capability this amazing would come about, I would have said never. Not in thirty years. Not in three million years.

  I would have predicted the laws of the universe wouldn’t allow this kind of sequencing speed, ever, just like faster-than-light travel.

  But I would have been wrong.

  So while the perfect transfer of consciousness seems impossible today, you never know what will be possible tomorrow . . .

  Anyway, I’ll leave you with excerpts from a few articles I thought were particularly relevant to how this subject was presented in Infinity Born. The first is from Stanford News in 2017, entitled, “Stanford researchers create a high-performance, low-energy artificial synapse for neural network computing.”

  EXCERPT: A new organic artificial synapse made by Stanford researchers could support computers that better recreate the way the human brain processes information. It could also lead to improvements in brain-machine technologies.

  “It works like a real synapse but it’s an organic electronic device that can be engineered,” said Alberto Salleo, associate professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford and senior author of the paper.”

  The next excerpt is from Popular Science (2012) entitled, “Will people alive today have the opportunity to upload their consciousness to a new robotic body?”

  EXCERPT: When Steve Jobs passed away last year, a joke bounced around that the man who had done so much to shape modern technology hadn't really died at all, but rather had figured out how to upload himself into the Mac OS so he could live on with us forever. The notion was ostensibly so far out as to be ridiculous. But not everyone sees it that way.

  At the recent Global Future 2045 International Congress held in Moscow, 31-year-old media mogul Dmitry Itskov told attendees how he plans to create exactly that kind of immortality, first by creating a robot controlled by the human brain, then by actually transplanting a human brain into a humanoid robot, and then by replacing the surgical transplant with a method for simply uploading a person's consciousness into a surrogate 'bot.

  He thinks he can get beyond the first phase in just ten years, putting him on course to achieve his ultimate goal—human consciousness completely disembodied and placed within a holographic host—within 30 years’ time.

  Phase one—creating a robot controlled by a human brain—is already well within reach. In fact, DARPA is already working on it via a program called "Avatar" through which the Pentagon hopes to create a brain-machine interface that will allow soldiers to control bipedal human surrogate machines remotely with their minds.

  And of course there are all the ongoing medical prosthesis projects (DARPA is involved in a few of these as well) that have shown that the human nervous system can interface with prosthetic enhancements, manipulating them via thought. Itskov draws a clear arc from what we ha
ve now to the consciousness-containing holograms that he envisions.

  Theoretically, as long as one could keep his or her gray matter from decaying, he or she could continue to "live" indefinitely. Of course, every attempt we've made at creating a computer that functions just like the brain has come up far short. Still, progress is being made in neural networks, microchips modeled on living brains, and entire computers set up to mimic the brain's functionality.

  Finally, the third excerpt is from ScienceAlert.com in 2015, entitled, “A new start-up wants to transfer your consciousness to an artificial body so you can live forever.”

  EXCERPT: Death is the one thing that's guaranteed in today's uncertain word, but now a new start-up called Humai thinks it might be able to get rid of that inconvenient problem for us too, by promising to transfer people's consciousness into a new, artificial body.

  If it sounds like science fiction, that's because it still is, with none of the technology required for Humai's business plan currently up and running. But that's not deterring the company's CEO, Josh Bocanegra, who says his team will resurrect their first human within 30 years.

  So how do you go about transferring someone's consciousness to another robot body? As Humai explains on their website:

  "We’re using artificial intelligence and nanotechnology to store data of conversational styles, behavioral patterns, thought processes, and information about how your body functions from the inside-out.

  Bioprinting

  Bioprinting is real, as you have probably guessed from the specificity of the experiment discussed in the novel. Here are excerpts of two articles, both published in 2017, that I found fascinating.

  The first is from the Economist, entitled, “Printed human body parts could be available for human transplants within a few years.”

  EXCERPT: Every year about 120,000 organs, mostly kidneys, are transplanted from one human being to another. But a lack of suitable donors means the supply of such organs is limited. Many people therefore die waiting for a transplant. That has led researchers to study the question of how to build organs from scratch.

  One promising approach is to print them. Lots of things are made these days by three-dimensional printing, and there seems no reason why body parts should not be among them. As yet, such “bioprinting” remains largely experimental. But bioprinted tissue is already being sold for drug testing, and the first transplantable tissues are expected to be ready for use in a few years’ time.

  Researchers have implanted printed ears, bones and muscles into animals, and watched these integrate properly with their hosts. Last year a group at Northwestern University, in Chicago, even printed working prosthetic ovaries for mice. The recipients were able to conceive and give birth with the aid of these artificial organs.

  The second excerpt is from The Telegraph, entitled, “The next step: 3D printing the human body.”

  EXCERPT: The printing of whole organs, if approved, could be a reality within the next decade. Organovo recently bioprinted its first 3D liver tissue for testing purposes. In 2010 the company also printed the first human blood vessel. In the meantime, Organovo is currently developing bioprinted breast cancer tissues alongside lung and muscle tissues.

  With the technology advancing at such a rate, entire organs and bodies produced by 3D printers is becoming a concrete reality, rather than a freaky sci-fi concept.

  Others claim 3D printing human components further blurs the line between man and machine, giving us the right to 'play God' on an unprecedented scale. But there is no denying that bioprinting has the potential to revolutionize medicine and healthcare beyond what seemed possible even 20 years ago.

  Nanites in the brain

  As you’ve no doubt guessed, scientists really are working on injecting nanites (often called “smart dust”) into humans to map their brains and/or to help facilitate a brain/computer interface. I’ve pasted a few excerpts below.

  The first is from an article in New Scientist (2015), entitled “Twenty billion nanoparticles talk to the brain using electricity.”

  EXCERPT: Nanoparticles can be used to stimulate regions of the brain electrically, opening up new ways to treat brain diseases. It may even one day allow the routine exchange of data between computers and the brain.

  When “magnetoelectric” nanoparticles (MENs) are stimulated by an external magnetic field, they produce an electric field. If such nanoparticles are placed next to neurons, this electric field should allow them to communicate.

  Sakhrat Khizroev of Florida International University in Miami and his team inserted 20 billion of these nanoparticles into the brains of mice.

  Khizroev’s goal is to build a system that can both image brain activity and precisely target medical treatments at the same time. “When they are injected in the brain, we can ‘see’ the brain,” says Khizroev.

  The second excerpt is from an article in MIT Technology Review in 2013, entitled, “How Smart Dust Could Spy On Your Brain.”

  EXCERPT: Intelligent dust particles embedded in the brain could form an entirely new form of brain-machine interface, say engineers.

  Today, Dongjin Seo and pals at the University of California Berkeley reveal an entirely new way to study and interact with the brain. Their idea is to sprinkle electronic sensors the size of dust particles into the cortex and to interrogate them remotely using ultrasound. The ultrasound also powers this so-called neural dust. Each particle of neural dust consists of standard CMOS circuits and sensors that measure the electrical activity in neurons nearby.

  The nature of consciousness

  This is truly an impossible topic that has been debated for thousands of years, and will continue to be debated for many thousands more. When it comes to the subject of when a computer can be considered sentient, I tried to give a flavor of some of the current thinking, including two common thought experiments (the Chinese room and the woman raised in a black-and-white house, not able to experience the qualia of the color red).

  My sense is that most computer scientists now agree that the Turing test is no longer a good indication of AGI, but there is no consensus on what should replace it.

  As I was writing the scene in which Jordan Two was suffering through an endless solitary confinement, it occurred to me that perhaps “boredom” would be the simplest test of sentience. I would think that any computer intelligence that could be shown to be losing its mind from boredom would have to be fully conscious. I’m not sure if this is a profound insight or hopelessly off the mark, but for some reason I think this might actually be the case. (Of course, this begs the question of whether boredom is something that can be defined and measured).

  In any event, if you have interest in this subject or in speculation about the existence of a soul, you can find extensive material online. But be warned, material on the nature of consciousness can be very deep, so don’t be surprised if your brain starts to hurt as you read through it.

  Isaac Jordan’s R-Drive fleet (EmDrive Technology)

  As mentioned in the novel, Jordan’s R-Drive was derived from the electromagnetic drive, or EmDrive. The EmDrive is a real technology that is extraordinarily controversial, namely because if true, it would fly in the face of known physics. I have no idea if it’s real or not, but any technology that NASA spends time and effort to test, and which at least one group stands behind, is worth keeping an eye on. I’ve been following this technology for years and couldn’t help but include it in Infinity Born (and it fit my needs nicely).

  To give you a sense of where things are, I’ll provide an excerpt from a 2016 article in National Geographic entitled, “NASA team claims impossible space engine works—get the facts,” and subtitled, “Scientists just published a paper saying that the controversial EmDrive produces thrust, even though that defies known laws of physics.”

  EXCERPT: After years of speculation, a maverick research team at NASA’s Johnson Space Center has reached a milestone that many experts thought was impossible. This week, the team formally pub
lished their experimental evidence for an electromagnetic propulsion system that could power a spacecraft through the void—without using any kind of propellant. According to the team, the electromagnetic drive, or EmDrive, converts electricity into thrust simply by bouncing around microwaves in a closed cavity. In theory, such a lightweight engine could one day send a spacecraft to Mars in just 70 days.

  The long-standing catch is that the EmDrive seemingly defies the laws of classical physics, so even if it’s doing what the team claims, scientists still aren’t sure how the thing actually works. Previous reports about the engine have been met with heaping doses of skepticism, with many physicists relegating the EmDrive to the world of pseudoscience.

  Now, though, the latest study has passed a level of scrutiny by independent scientists that suggests the EmDrive really does work. What this means, if the EmDrive withstands further scrutiny, is that future vehicles could hurtle through space without needing to carry literal tons of propellant. In space travel, staying light is crucial for fast and cost-effective trips over long distances.

  It’s still unclear that the EmDrive truly generates thrust, a claim that will require further verification.

  Asteroid mining

  The information in the novel about Helium-3 mining on the Moon and the bounty that could be harvested from asteroids is accurate. There are several companies that have been founded for the sole purpose of mining the asteroids in this way, including Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries.

  Here is an excerpt from a 2017 article from Space Angels Network entitled, “Asteroid prospects: the facts and future of space mining.”