Where Do We Fit in the Cosmic Scheme and Where Are We Headed?

 

"The Universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.” –James Jeans

Today's machine learning already employs combined elements of cognitive architectures, evolutionary computing and neuromorphic engineering. Post-singularity superintelligence could have complete access to their own source code – a level of self-awareness presently beyond human capability. That would allow our future syntelligence to create myriad virtual worlds right out of our own superimagination. This scenario might have already happened elsewhere and we can’t completely rule out a possibility that we’re part of that kind of simulated reality right now. At the same time, we ourselves are moving towards the point of 'Theogenesis' where we can rightly call ourselves cybergods.

AGI: How to Ensure Benevolence in Synthetic Superintelligence (Part III: Conclusion)

*Image: Shutterstock

"For 130,000 years, our capacity to reason has remained unchanged. The combined intellect of the neuroscientists, mathematicians and… hackers… pales in comparison to the most basic A.I. Once online, a sentient machine will quickly overcome the limits of biology. And in a short time, its analytic power will become greater than the collective intelligence of every person born in the history of the world. So, imagine such an entity with a full range of human emotion. Even self-awareness. Some scientists refer to this as the Singularity, I call it Transcendence." -Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Depp, Transcendence, The Movie 2014)

... continued from Part II (Interlinking & AGI(NP))


CONCLUSION

Creating a digital mind, “artificial consciousness” so to speak, from scratch, based on simulation of the human brain’s functionality would be much easier than to create the whole brain emulation of a living human. In the book “How to Create a Mind: The Secret of the Human Thought Revealed” (2012) Ray Kurzweil describes his theory of how our neocortex works as a self-organizing hierarchical system of pattern recognizers that well may be our starting basis for machine consciousness algorithms. The human brain and its interaction with the environment may be simulated to approximate the functioning of the human brain of an individual living in the pre-Singularity era. Simulation may be satisfactory if it reflects our history based on enormous amount of digital or digitized data accumulated since the 1950s to the present.

AGI: How to Ensure Benevolence in Synthetic Superintelligence (Part II: Interlinking & AGI(NP))

     

*Image: "Better Than Us," Netflix Series

 

"Whether somebody is implemented on silicon or biological tissue, if it does not affect functionality or consciousness, is of no moral significance. Carbon chauvinism, in the form of anthropomorphism, speciesism, bioism or even fundamentalist humanism, is objectionable on the same grounds as racism."       -Gregory L. Garrett

... continued from Part I (Introduction)



III. INTERLINKING: This dynamic, horizontal integration approach stipulates real-time optimization of AGIs in the context of globally distributed network. Add one final ingredient – be it computing power, speed, amount of shared/stored data, increased connectivity, the first mind upload or a critical mass of uploads, or another “spark of life” – and the global neural network, the Global Brain, may, one day in the not-so-distant future, “wake up” and become the first self-aware AI-powered system (Singleton?). Or, may the Global Brain be self-aware already, but on a different from us humans timescale? It becomes obvious and logically inevitable that we are in the process of merging with AI and becoming superintelligences ourselves by incrementally converting our biological brains into artificial superbrains and interlinking with AGIs in order to instantly share data, knowledge, and experience.

AGI: How to Ensure Benevolence in Synthetic Superintelligence

*Image:"Better Than Us," 2018 Netflix Series

"Yet, it's our emotions and imperfections that makes us human."   -Clyde DeSouza, Memories With Maya

IMMORTALITY or OBLIVION? I hope that everyone would agree that there are only two possible outcomes after having created Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) for us: immortality or oblivion. The necessity of the beneficial outcome of the upcoming intelligence explosion cannot be overestimated.

Any AGI at or above human-level intelligence can be considered as such, I’d argue, only if she has a wide variety of emotions, ability to achieve complex goals and motivation as an integral part of her programming and personal evolution. I could identify the following three most optimal ways to create friendly AI (benevolent AGI), in order to safely navigate uncharted waters of the forthcoming intelligence explosion:

Your Lucid Dream of Reality | Video

"Your life is a dream. It’s a dream of reality. When I woke up one morning, I got poetically epiphanized: To us, our dreams at night feel 'oh-so-real' when inside them but they are what they are – dreams against the backdrop of daily reality. Our daily reality is like nightly dreams against the backdrop of the larger reality. This is something we all know deep down to be true. This purposeful computational process is centered around one objective, one guiding principle only, one 'raison d’être' – to produce a meaningful experience in the context of 'embodied' mind."

Transcendental Cybernetics: Imagining the Technological Singularity

“​Evolution is a process of creating patterns of increasing order… I believe that it’s the evolution of patterns that constitutes the ultimate story of our world. Each stage or epoch uses the information-processing methods of the previous epoch to create the next.” -Ray Kurzweil

“To understand is to perceive patterns.” -Isaiah Berlin

About 542 million years ago, something weird and profoundly significant happened on Earth. Quite suddenly, life went insanely inventive, proliferating from simple, rudimentary single-celled organisms into myriad multi-cellular forms. Evolution discovered the idea of more sophisticated and specialized cells, and most of the basic body plans we know today. Biologists call it the Cambrian explosion.

Are We About to Live Immersive Stories in the Metaverse?

 

“Our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts become our bodies and our bodies become our thoughts.” -Terence McKenna

The next major technological platform for creative expansion of the mind will be cyberspace, or more specifically the Metaverse, a functional successor to today’s 2D Internet, with virtual places instead of Webpages. The Internet and smartphones have enabled the rapid and cheap sharing of information, immersive computing will be able to provide the same for experiences. That means that just as we can read, listen to, and watch videos of anything we want today, soon we’ll be able to experience stunning lifelike simulations in virtual reality indistinguishable from our physical world. We’ll be walking and actively interacting in the Metaverse, not slavishly staring at the flat screens. We would be able to turn our minds inside out and show our dreams to each other in this ecstadelic matrix of our own making.