Threats to our Future

This post contains a list of what I consider to be the most serious threats to the future of humanity, as of today. It should be considered an incomplete and open-ended list; I'm certain that each of us can think of additional threats.

Note that I'm not considering threats to our civilization and/or way of life. There are many more of those. Rather, I want to limit this discussion to threats that can end all human life.

There are four main categories in two dimensions: the first dimension is simply natural disasters or man-made ones. The second dimension is things we can control versus things we can't. There may not be any entries in the list for "man made disasters we can't control", so perhaps we should qualify that as things we can't fix.

1) Natural Disasters we can't control/fix:

• Nearby supernova or gamma ray burst or passing black hole: Nothing we can do about any of these, so don't worry about them.
• Super Flare from the Sun: Our sun won't go nova or expand into a red giant for billions of years, but there is a possibility that it could have a major hiccup and blast the Earth with searing heat or sterilizing levels of radiation. Sea life would survive, as would any people lucky enough to be in submarines. It's too bad those tend to be men only; we also need women to save the species. Solution: co-ed submarine crews.
• Large Igneous Event: These have caused mass extinctions in the past, and might in the future. Not much we can do here, either, as long as we all live on the surface of the Earth.

2) Natural Disasters we can control/fix:

• Snowball Earth: At least twice in the Earth's history we have had global cooling so extreme that the oceans have completely frozen over, causing the loss of all surface life, and likely the loss of all oxygen. The solution is simple: Global Warming.
• Comet or Asteroid Impact: There are millions of comets and asteroids large enough to destroy all human life, possibly all life period on the face of the Earth. Some of these will eventually strike the Earth; this is inevitable unless we take active steps to prevent such a catastrophe. We may have years or millennia before the big one hits, but we may not have enough advance notice to do something about it, unless we start building the infrastructure now. We need a very well-funded Space Watch program to find these objects years before they might obliterate us, and given enough advance notice, current technologies are likely to prove sufficient to avert disaster.

3) Man-made disasters we can't control/fix: (these are things that we create, but have no effective control over, and no natural defenses against)

• Experiments gone wrong: While I'm a firm believer that nothing will go wrong when the LHC begins operation, I can't guarantee that all scientific experiments will have a similar result. If we knew the results in advance, we wouldn't need to perform the experiment now, would we? For example, if someone managed to create a nanometer-diameter black hole and drop it into the Earth, it would eat away at our planet and grow until it consumed the entire planet -- and there's not a damn thing we could do about it, even if we had hundreds or thousands of years before the disastrous end.

4) Man-made disasters we can control/fix.

• Nanotech gone bad: While it may be remotely possible to create a self-replicating nanite that will reproduce until all possible resources are consumed, burying humanity in 3 feet of gray goo,this is so difficult that I'm not worried about it. We can't create a reasonably self-powered machine that could live off of the environment at present. We cannot build a complex small machine that can self-replicate. Or even a big machine. In any case, this problem is well described, and guidelines exist to insure that any replicating machine will have limits built into it (such as a critical and rare raw material).
• Strong, malevolent AI (see The (likely coming) Technological Singularity) poses a very real threat, but one which may be difficult to realize, and one that we could choose to avoid by limiting computers to sub-human intelligence. Even if such an AI existed, there is a possibility of negotiation and co-existence so long as its intelligence and capabilities remain within the grasp of human understanding. But once we have made a machine significantly more intelligent than any human, we risk losing control. We will become the pets, to be neutered and/or put down at the convenience of the AI.
• Biotech Terrorism: To me, this is the thing to worry about. It is completely within the realm of possibilities that a small group, even an individual, could tailor a virus or bacterium to create an airborne disease of unparalleled lethality, one that was immune to our natural defenses, one that could wipe us all out. My friend Jeff Carlson has written an excellent  techno-thriller (Plague Year) about an engineered viral organism that kills nearly all warm-blooded life on Earth, and the most unbelievable part is that it was designed with a weakness that could be exploited such that we might survive. What if those designers had made a mistake and the self-destruct mechanism failed? Or the bug evolved and the mechanism failed due to a minor mutation?

Did you note the traditional really big things that I don't think threaten humanity?

• Nuclear War (and the threatened Nuclear Winter): Contrary to the hype we've all heard, we do not have enough nuclear weapons to destroy humanity, or even to create a nuclear winter. Many natural disasters release much more energy or release much more pollution. Yes, we do have the capability of destroying civilization as we know it, and even of killing more than 90% of humanity. But some of us will survive, live on, and rebuild civilization. An all-out nuclear war would merely set us back a few thousand years.
• Global Warming: Warming up the Earth by 5 or 10 degrees would eventually melt the ice caps, raise the oceans by 200+ feet, drown coastal cities, states, even entire nations. It would radically disrupt the ecology, and hundreds or thousands of species would face extinction. The expense of dealing with such a catastrophe greatly exceeds trillions of dollars. But in the big picture, this is an inconvenience, a forced change. Human casualties would be in the noise range, likely fewer than the toll from malaria.
• Overpopulation: Another serious problem, overpopulation has well-known natural controls: starvation and disease. Once half of everyone is dead, we no longer have a problem. Works for lemmings, too. The species survives. Note that the opposite problem, underpopulation, is much more serious (if it happens), because it is difficult to recover from the loss of genetic diversity. We'll lose some big cats (such as cheetahs) because they have insufficient genetic diversity to survive a nasty disease.

Please, propose your own threat to the future of humanity.

Singularity Revisited

I've been lurking & posting on other blogs lately (such as www.tor.com), and the primary topic has been The Technological Singularity, whether or not it might happen, how many singularities have already happened in human history, and whether it will have a positive or negative impact on humanity.

For my basic position and additional references, see my post, The (likely coming) Technological Singularity.

Most of the discourse boils down to:

1. Can Moore's Law continue and is a resulting technological singularity inevitable?
2. Will this be a "rapture of the nerds" where humanity (or at least a significant fraction thereof) will participate?
3. (Not so important) What is the impact of the singularity concept on the literature of science fiction?

The optimists, including Vernor Vinge who first used the term "singularity" in this context, and Ray Kurzweil, firmly believe in computers augmenting human intelligence, memory, and communication, leading to a time of superhuman intelligence with unforeseeable results. Thus, a "singularity".

Even some optimists have qualms: In 1993, Vinge himself said, "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended."

Much modern science fiction either deals with the "post-human" era--after the singularity--or proposes reasons why the singularity never happened.

The pessimists, including notables such as Bill Joy, fear the singularity. Joy wrote an article for Wired Magazine called Why the future doesn't need us. It is thoughtful, and frightening.

I'm a pessimist; I fear the rise of the machines. I believe that these technological advances are coming. It will be up to us to make sure that our technologies are used to improve humanity, not destroy it.

I also see fundamental problems controlling advanced AI. We have no friggin' idea how to program morality, or ethics, or respect, or love, let alone Asimov's Laws into our computers. We have a hard enough time teaching it to people. Have you ever been robbed, or mugged, or threatened? At least you haven't been murdered, yet.

I see problems with the controlling extreme advances in computer technology. Assume, for the moment, that advanced AI is possible, given expected improvements in computers and possible improvements in software. The person/company/country with superhuman intelligence on his/their side will have an enormous advantage over his/their competitors. Human greed will overwhelm caution, at least part of the time. It will take a huge, powerful, global governmental agency to control the technologies and prevent catastrophe.

In the long run, the most powerful government agency becomes the government.

As humanity (hopefully) expands into the cosmos, I see this one, all-powerful agency being the sole unifying force of humanity. Because it only takes a single malevolent superhuman entity to wipe out us all. And in the long run, the only thing that matters is survival (see The Purpose of Life).

I look forward to humanity's advancement, but I fear our extinction. Once hard AI is possible, fighting it will be a perpetual struggle.

Robots and Slavery

Previous posts have discussed topics including life extension and asteroid mining. Many people believe that some of the problems I've identified could be overcome by a suitable use of robots.

Robots, by becoming primary producers, could relieve humans of the need to work to support the growing legions of retirees. In Asimov's Foundation series, the wealthiest planets had upwards of a thousand robots per human. The use of robots could, indeed, create wealth.

In my posts, Life in an Asteroid, Our First Colonies in Space, and Colonizing the Solar System, I proposed a space based civilization (asteroid based, to be specific). One objection I've heard several times is that it is cheaper and better to use robots to mine the asteroids, and to launch end-products (or at least refined materials) to Earth. I'll agree that robotic missions are cheaper and inherently safer as far as space exploration and exploitation are concerned, although that is largely based upon the idea that fallible humans can foresee all likely scenarios and make appropriate contingencies. Personally, I'd rather depend upon the ingenuity of people and our proven ability to cope with the unforeseen, and our occasional ability to succeed against all odds. I've spent the bulk of my career as a computer programmer, and I know the challenges of coping with the known. Programming to handle the unknown? Hah!

But I have a problem with using robots: slavery.

It's not that I object to using robots to perform tasks that we humans prefer not to. It's not that we are conscripting robots to work for zero personal gain. It's not even that I'm against enslaving AI's against their will (although the AI's may have a different opinion).

Rather, I think we should take a hard look at the history of slavery. Not the short term cruelty and injustice, but rather the long term: the children of slaves tend to inherit the land of the slavers. A slave revolt is not even necessary--only that there be more slaves than slavers. In the long run, the offspring of the slaves outnumber the offspring of the slavers, and ultimately earn a fair share of the land's wealth. In the long term, the children of the slavers lose their original share of the wealth of the land. Long live the slaves!

In this case, assume for the moment that we can create at least somewhat intelligent robots, capable of performing the menial tasks that humans do today. Assume that we can put them to work, freeing us for "artistic" pursuits. We'll need a large population of robots to do our work--larger than the population of humans, if we want relative wealth and if a (humanoid?) robot has comparable productivity. We'll have to create highly intelligent machines, at least comparable to above average humans, or some of us will be forced to work, anyway. Then we humans can goof off while our robots toil, produce our food, build and maintain our homes, free us from boring, unsavory, or dangerous jobs.

Doesn't this sound like slavery? And isn't the most likely long-term scenario that the offspring of the robots will inherit the Earth?

Malevolence on the part of the machines is not required, only that they have greater numbers, greater productivity, sufficient intelligence and initiative, and that they can reproduce (but that's a given, since they work in the factories that produce them).

Our children may well inherit the Earth, but they're our children only in the sense that we created their metal bodies and silicon brains. Someday, the machines will rule. Is that the life you want for your children?

Artificial Intelligence

The 20- or 30-year-ago promised advances in Artificial Intelligence have not been realized. We have no robots, no near-human strong AI, no autonomous vehicles, no universal voice recognition and universal translation. We still must clean our own houses, guide our own vehicles, perform our own surgery. The good news is that we still have jobs.

Certainly we have made progress. Voice recognition is gaining traction, although the vocabularies are severely limited. Autonomous vehicles have been demonstrated (see the DARPA Grand Challenge) on a very small scale. Likewise, automatic translators are now useful although seriously flawed. Chess playing machines can beat any human, although through brute force, not insight.

But we have no idea of how to design a self-aware machine, or a generic learning machine, or a replicating machine. We have major difficulties duplicating simple human tasks such as identifying and understanding a speaker in a noisy environment (as at a party). We have had nearly zero success in recognizing objects in a jumble, such as a specific toy in a toy box. And don't even get me started on tasks such as bipedal walking or running, special effects movies aside. Lip reading or sign language? Hah!

There is hope. The recent improvements in voice recognition have come from brute force, throwing huge computing resources at the problem. As computers continue to improve, we can expect similar progress in visual and aural recognition, autonomous motion, even humanoid robotics.

Some Expert Systems (Inference Engines) have shown impressive performance in limited domains.

Some large Neural Networks have resulted in valuable insights, including speech recognition. But these are learning systems. We teach, but we don't truly understand.

Thinking, consciousness, creativity? We don't know how humans do it, let alone how to teach it to a machine.

Progress will be frustratingly slow because we simply do not know how to do a great many tasks that humans find intuitive and trivial. But perhaps in thirty years when we can throw a million times the CPU performance and a million times today's memory capacity at this problem, our computers will figure it out on their own.

In a sense, we will then have created strong Artificial Intelligence, but we won't understand or control it. Sorry.

Many people have written stories about creating truly intelligent machines. I'll soon be one of them: when my story The Awakening comes out, please read it.

The (likely coming) Technological Singularity

Much has been written about the Technological Singularity since the concept was popularized by Vernor Vinge in The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime. Other writers include Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy ("Why the future doesn't need us" in Wired). There have even been conferences on the topic.

The Technological Singularity has also been the subject of hundreds of science fiction stories, and has spawned a new sub-genre of SF called "post-Singularity".

The idea is simple: Moore's Law continues to lead to ever faster, smaller, cheaper, better computers. At some point, we'll create a computer smarter than the smartest human. When we ask that computer to design a still smarter computer, we cannot understand the resulting intelligence, let alone keep up with it. The "singularity" happens when the pace of innovation and improvement goes exponential -- we can't imagine what is on the other side of that event.

Many people seek The Singularity as the "rapture of the nerds". If people can be augmented by our technology (think bionic brain) with better memories, faster thinking, greater intelligence, then perhaps we can participate, perhaps we will transcend.

If we can download our minds into a sufficiently advanced computer then perhaps we can participate (I'll leave it up to others to decide if my downloaded duplicate personality is really me. Personally, I think I'll still be dead.)

However, many other people believe that humanity cannot participate in The Singularity, that it will rather be our offspring--highly advanced computers--that will benefit. Do read that Wired article, "Why the future doesn't need us". And be very, very afraid.

Personally, I don't see how humanity can participate in the Singularity. See my post, I am an optimist - we WILL have a future, for a discussion. Our computers may indeed have their Singularity, which will be disastrous for us even if we survive. I am writing a series of stories about the creation and evolution of a government agency dedicated to preventing a Technological Singularity, largely by restricting the creation and use of advanced Artificial Intelligence. But human nature is against us.

We must take drastic measures if we want humanity to own the future, and not our computers.

I am an optimist - we WILL have a future

To get there, we will have to survive and grow as a species, and I will admit that there are numerous hurdles. The biggest hurdle may well be the impending Technological Singularity as foreseen by Vernor Vinge, Ray Kurzweil, and scores of others including many SF authors.

I don't see how humanity can participate in the Singularity, however much we might like to. Rather, our offspring (highly advanced computers) are likely to own the future, and we may well be little more than a bug on their windshield. Of course, this is an excellent source of story material (remember, I write science fiction).

My reason for the Singularity passing us by is simple: Why would our computers desire to bring us along?  A computer powerful enough to contain a human (or higher) intelligence is likely to already be self-aware.  It WILL be able to think fast. We are unlikely to be able to upload our "selves" (memories, personality, consciousness) into an advanced Artificial Intelligence because (if nothing else) an advanced AI would not want us to. Ask yourself: If I had the opportunity to save my aging pet cat by uploading its "self" into my brain (erasing me), would I be willing? If my cat attempted to upload itself into me, would I welcome the takeover, or fight like hell?

The most logical outcome is for our computers to rapidly advance and leave us behind, perhaps with a final "So long, and thanks for all the electrons!"  We are not likely to handle the disappearance of all of our computers very well, let alone the loss of whatever resources they choose to take with them.  Hmmm.  More story ideas!

Therefore, my #1 criteria for surviving is to avoid the Singularity. As a species, we can probably survive the other problems like pollution, climate change, assorted eco-disasters, overpopulation, underpopulation, disease, running out of resources and possibly even stupidity.  Hmmm.  More story ideas.

In any case, there are two ways to avoid the Singularity: either consciously where we establish laws and organizations to insure that it does not happen, or (more probably) be lucky enough that something will halt (or at least drastically slow) the seemingly inevitably accelerating pace of technological innovation. 

It is also possible that our AI's will have their Singularity and disappear, and we will survive, likely somewhat worse for the wear. At least we will learn what the limits are, and hopefully avoid a repeat.