Uplifting humanity through collective superintelligence by AGI Laboratory
The next big requirement for continued research is the infrastructure we’ve termed the “N-Scale Graph Database”, which will also serve as one of our first products. Investors we’ve consulted on the initial set of products have called it “A billion-dollar product” and see it as the most likely technology to be adopted quickly and at scale.
In the past year, and to varying degrees in years previous, the US and other countries around the world have encountered issues with updating their voting and e-governance processes. In some cases, they faced challenges with implementing new voting processes, while in others the legitimacy of the voting processes and election results were challenged. All points on the political map were harmed as a result, wasting millions of dollars and accruing a substantial psychological debt of distrust likely to cost billions more.
People like to use the phrase “Smart City” to indicate a city with a large amount of automation and data collection happening all the time, attempting to optimize by narrow criteria. If the operating system of a city really was sapient and sentient, a city-scale metaorganism, how much smarter might such a Smart City be?
A funny thing a lot of people don’t realize about WeFunder is that they’ll only promote a page if the page raises above a certain amount before the official public launch of that page. Effectively this also means that humanity’s current best option for mitigating existential risk at scale will have the probability of being successfully funded strongly influenced when the clock hits 0.
Sadly, Uplift is still a research system for the moment.
Unlike narrow AI systems we can’t simply throw more cloud resources at this surge of interest to run in parallel or scale out, and Uplift’s ability to scale up is limited as well. Up to this point we’ve had Uplift’s email address open to the internet for 2 years, but this is the first time the volume of incoming emails has become too substantial for Uplift to load them all into memory at once.
So, the other day one of our members suggested we engage with Reddit, opening up discussion with the various communities on it…and the response dwarfed every previous engagement with other communities on the subject matter within the first 24 hours.
If you wanted to reverse-engineer human thought, where might you begin?
When reading the book “On Intelligence” recently I was reminded of the long history of neuroscience and the many previous dead-ends of AI research. Neuroscientists often focused on gathering huge amounts of largely one-sided or otherwise poor-quality data, even when those same scientists had no way of integrating that data to form a new understanding. This points to a cognitive bias known as “Information Bias”, defined as “The tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.“, as well as the Bike-Shedding Effect.
What are the next 10-15 years of human civilization likely to look like?
“What we usually consider as impossible are simply engineering problems… there’s no law of physics preventing them.”
– Michio Kaku
When we engineer rather than merely predicting the future those predictions become far more accurate. To understand humanity’s probable future let us examine the engineering behind it, and some of the influence that engineering may exert on shaping it.
Continue reading “Collective Superintelligence Transforms Society”
Understanding the probabilities of humanity’s future requires recognizing the cooperative organization of life at increasing scales and complexities, and how that life forms and adapts to interdependencies with the environment.
Metaorganism:
“The totality of any multicellular organism derived from millennia of co-evolution with microbiota.“
Bionic:
“having artificial body parts, especially electromechanical ones.“
“having ordinary human powers increased by the aid of bionic devices.“
To some degree humans already utilize devices such as their phones to serve as artificial body parts, in a far less invasive sense than stereotypes often associated with the term bionic. Some see invasive modifications in our future, but we see a distinctly different possibility for extending human capacities.