[CrackMonkey] [arkuat@pigdog.org: The Spiritual [Pigdog] Robots thingy]

[Nick Moffitt]

	Arkie gives us ALL the SCOOP in TOTAL COVERAGE of the
Spiritual Machines conference.  Beaujolais!

----- Forwarded message from Monstrous Queen <arkuat at pigdog.org> -----

Okay, apparently Doug Hofstadter set this whole thing up, and he
did a great job moderating. He invited a bunch of prickly
egomaniacs, and managed to extract some useful information from
them in public without allowing any murder or mayhem to be
committed.  

I think Ray Kurzweil opened. I don't really understand Kurzweil
very well, to tell you the truth, but he seemed to be trying to
soothe people into comfortable acceptance of the notion of using
prostheses that are your intellectual ("spiritual", even!) equals
or superiors.  "How to Keep and Hire Ueberdaemon Godlings for
your Domestic Help without getting Eaten by Cthulhu" or
something.

Hans Moravec got up and tried to soothe people likewise, mostly
be telling them how in ten years there would be a robot to do
their vacuuming, and one to load and unload the dishwasher just
five years after that. Gene kept muttering "Heil Hans! Heil
Hans!" in my ears, excitedly, throughout Moravec's presentation.

Bill Joy got up and explained how back when he was busy trying to
keep tabs on the moves of the research departments of Oracle and
Microsoft and IBM, he didn't worry about this stuff because he
assumed Moore's Law would hit a ceiling at about three or four
atoms per transistor.  With computational performance stuck there,
he didn't think biotech/nanotech/robotics would get out of control.
But a physicist friend of his apparently informed him in detail of
a technique (which I don't yet have even the vaguest understanding
of, myself) that would extend the progress of Moore's law
one-million-fold (yes, six orders of magnitude) beyond where Joy
had pegged the ceiling. This, he claims, suddenly made the prospect
of full-speed development of biotech/nanotech/robotics far too
frightening leading him and his buddies to call for an application
of the brakes.  He even called for a "relinquishment" of
nanotechnological research.

Ralph Merkle got up and pointed out that you could relinquish
published research in democratic societies all you wanted to,
but that wouldn't do much to prevent secret research, and
particularly secret research in undemocratic nations, going
forward full speed ahead. It started looking like a classic
Teller vs. Oppenheimer moment (mostly because Joy had commented
on Oppenheimer's career at length).  Merkle also claimed that in
order to make informed and effective public policy decisions,
policymakers should be exposed to as many results of early
research in nanotechnology as possible, to minimize the chances
of their making disastrous mistakes. Merkle did a good job of
presenting the Foresight Institute party line in this one...
forewarned is forearmed, if this stuff is dangerous, then the
more we learn about it in advance, the better, etc etc etc.

John Holland and his student Bob Kosa (sp?), the initial developers
of genetic-algorithms, or genetic-synaptic-weighting of artificial
neural network "synapses" (which is probably how the golems will
be grown, ultimately, yes) seemed to be the token conservatives.
They kept emphasizing how remarkable and poorly understood and
incredibly powerful animal nervous systems (including human
brains) are, and tried to soothe the audience by denying that
human-equivalent machines were going to be available anytime
before 2100 at soonest.

Frank Drake showed some nice slides about the most economical
designs for very-large ground-based radio telescopes.  Don't
even ask me what this has to do with spiritual robots, but I
guess Hofstadter had the idea that the only thing that could
compete with spiritual robots in the Materialist Weirdness front
would be Ay-leenZ, and so they had to be worked in there
somewhere for extra color or something.

Kevin Kelley also did an "upbeat" piece, asserting that
"replacement" was just the wrong way to think about this stuff,
and that we would rather be "symbiotic" with the pheared new
challengers.  Stewart Brand later fed him a few softball
questions from the audience. It made me wonder why these people,
who have done some brilliant work, are wasting their time on
their current "Clock of the Long Now" masturbatory shenanigans.
I suspect that the orbits of the Earth, Moon, Mars, etc will
continue to be keeping good time long after their vaunted clock
has fallen into disrepair, though I'm still not sure where they
are planning to locate the thing. Even after we disassemble the
various large bodies of the solar system for spare parts (and
probably the Clock with them), the nearby pulsars will still
provide excellent time for gigayears. But this is all beside the
point, and has nothing to do with Spiritual Robots either. I
just wanted to comment yet again on my continuing incredulity on
the vagaries that senility can induce in members of my species.

A couple of times someone in the audience tried to ask why there
were no non-materialists on the panel (though they usually asked
this much less succinctly, rambling about God and summarizing a
few idealistic metaphysical theories instead or asking why the
Dalai Lama or the Pope wasn't up there too). Hofstadter's reply
(paraphrased rather brutally) was "Yeah, there are no non-materialists
on this panel because I planned it that way. Next question?"

After Moravec and Kurzweil and Merkle had combined to make Bill
Joy extremely uncomfortable and upset (Merkle seemed to think
that Joy was dangerously insane and irresponsible, and Joy seemd
to think that Merkle was dangerously insane and irresponsible),
Hofstadter closed by posing a question to Moravec about whether
it would be so terrible if human beings really were replaced by
their memetic offspring, and then read a quote from a Moravec
interview (I wish I had it handy, because it was beautifully
phrased, but I don't... perhaps Gene can find it?) to the effect
that getting replaced by the progeny of your mind would be much
less of an evolutionary failure than stagnating as an
unchanging, "stuck" species for billions of years would. The
latter, he said, would be the real failure. Moravec just said
that he still stood by his earlier reply, and the crowd broke
out into vigourous applause while Bill Joy looked slightly
puzzled and very indignant.

--
arkuat

----- End forwarded message -----

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