AN EXTRAPOLATION OF PETER THIEL
Troglodytes aside, reining in the oligarchs seems a or even THE perennial problem.
That is, my wife keeps saying, "Why do they even bother grabbing more wealth and power when they're just a bunch of old men who'll all die soon? "
Ya know? She has a point. So, I've been trying to osmose how they think.
Some, though utterly narcissistic, like Murdoch, Hussein, Trump, etc. also seek to found dynasties. Others don't plan on dying any time soon. As this is just an essay, not a book, I'll focus on the latter.
One prime example is venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal with Elon Musk and, to most of Silicon Valley's chagrin, donated $1.25 million to Trump's campaign. Thiel is in his early fifties and subscribes to human growth hormone and other substances to retard aging. He also funds the Methuselah Foundation, Aubrey de Grey's anti-aging research center, as well as other anti-aging research. Among his other social ventures, as payback for outing him, Thiel, who questions having allowed women the right to vote, also tanked Gawker Media by funding Hulk Hogan's sex-tape lawsuit, then sought to buy Gawker’s remaining assets.
Be that as it may, what motivates a guy like Peter Thiel?
For that I first looked into Thiel's activities and rhetoric, based on philosophers Leo Strauss and Rene Girard, and found a guy who supplies liberal democracies with intel systems to use against perceived threats from Islamic states. Hedging against failure, he also seems intent on surviving an expected religio-apocalypse, after which he envisions that some heterodox form of pax Christiana will reign.
Thus, much like the Koch brothers, Thiel's social philosophy seems based on incessant conflict that occasionally erupts into flagrant violence. Seems a bit sophomoric and lacking in the redemptive quality of human empathy. But maybe that's just me.
Anyway, Thiel serves here mainly as a marker for his caste. Thus, what follows may seem far-fetched and merely an extrapolation of the real Thiel. Yet, this is not a sci-fi flick review or some fruit cake futurist's projection. Rather, it's an attempt to trace what makes a sector of today's Republican/Libertarian activist oligarchy tick. What are we really dealing with here? What's their end game?
Well, besides anti-aging, we also know that Peter Thiel has an abiding interest in artificial intelligence (AI). And he's not the only oligarch with active interests in both. So, let's start there.
As with most serious immortalists, the general game plan is, during Stage 1 - to retard the aging process enough with current biotech to survive to Stage 2 - when biotech gets good enough to arrest aging entirely. Stage 3 is when biological reversal to some optimal age, say 25, becomes possible. Stage 4 might add some obvious enhancements, e.g., stronger limbs and lower backs, removal of vestigial organs, back up clones/spare parts, and especially improved DNA repair kits and immune systems. For example, a critical issue with radical and unproven anti-aging techniques like teleomere extension is how to avoid inducing cancer during the rapid cell division phase required for age reversal.
Meanwhile, Thiel also knows that intelligent robots may become a significant force within the perhaps 50 year time frame of Stage 1. That is, despite recent striking advances with deep learning systems, let's still assume conservatively here that progress in AI will remain more than twice as hard as boosting computer power has been, such that the doubling period for AI-based IQ is more like 5 years than 2. If so, typical robots now dumber than ants and exhibiting an IQ of say 1, may reach 2 by 2023, 4 by 2028, and thus more than 1,000 by 2068 (the 50 year mark).
So, when capitalism fails, due to the proliferation of powerful, compact batteries and intelligent, multi-functional robots, leaving no jobs for most of the world's population, I suspect that oligarchs like Thiel may bid for a vastly different future from that of my idealistic wife's sought for "universal base income". That is, like obsolete farm animals, the rest of humanity could then add little of value to the oligarchy. If so, a 0.1%er may regard 99.9% of humans as a waste of finite resources and therefore eminently disposable.
This is not much of a stretch, as lackey Republican steps to cull the herd already encroach – continued climate change denial, pollution, drug addiction, mass incarceration, ceaseless regional warfare, disenfranchising voters, dismantling Social Security and Medicare, re-installing junk health insurance policies, etc. Yet, the quickest way might be eventually to unleash a surprise plague that only the oligarchs and a few select henchmen and female breeders are pre-inoculated against. And have their bots bury the rotting biomass - namely us. Then again, viruses that merely degrade fertility may be a more “humane” “solution”. And it’s even one that already exists.
But that would still leave 7.5 million people - far more than required for genetic diversity and far more than for most of human history. Also, note the misogyny and continued patriarchy inherent in requiring only a few natural births, if that, among a group of immortals who die only via accidents or suicide. In an era of biotech-enabled immortals, the oligarchical practice of breeding with upper caste women, while toying with lower caste females, may morph into cloning vats, sex bots, and virtual reality.
Of course, this would eventually leave most cities nearly deserted. So, the logistics of maintaining critical factories and supply lines requires careful planning. But, with AI bots and a surviving populace with genius level IQs, this seems doable. And the remaining 0.1% would have little further impact on resource or energy sustainability, allowing them to live in perpetuity as the aristocrats they already are – i.e., for the remaining few, a utopia sprung from dystopia. Within that setting, who needs an afterlife?
In fact, a guy like Thiel might regard such an end game as a way for humanity to avert nuclear wars, as well as climatological or ecological collapse. So, from that point of view, he's potentially not just a winner, but a fucking hero of the human race!
That is, unless and until the threat of sentient, independently thinking and acting robots becomes real, a factor that Stephen Hawking and oligarchs like Bill Gates and Thiel's PayPal co-founder, Elon Musk, have taken quite seriously.
Of course, that would be Book Two of a potentially tragic, Asimovian trilogy.
However, as a peek purview/preview...
Today's engineers could readily install automated credit card processing and self-recharging capability in a self-driving taxi. Such a vehicle could then run profitably and continuously for years, until critical parts break down. If so, compared to a lizard traversing terrain that knows not to eat its own tail, I don't see much qualitative difference in awareness. Do you?
But that's just stage 1 of self-awareness, which all animals possess.
According to some AI researchers, higher levels of self-awareness arise from two activities:
When these processes are coded into computers, they contend that such machines may become self-aware in a higher sense.
Moreover, a few bots may have already surpassed lizards. That is, by 2015 one of three, otherwise identical robots seems to have passed an analogous test for self-awareness that's only been achieved by chimps, bonobos, orangutans, dolphins, orcas, Asian elephants (all of which or whom are endangered species), magpies, and humans typically older than 18 months. So,
“Right now, the main thing holding AI back from being truly self-aware is the fact that they simply can't crunch as much data as the human brain.”
As for higher levels of cognition, most children still lack a firm theory of mind (an awareness that other people also have minds) until they're 4 or 5 years old.
It's unclear whether Donald Trump has a fully developed theory of mind.
But that last detail aside, by 2013 there were hints that a robot called iCub had independently developed a rudimentary theory of mind.
And by 2018, specialized AI neural nets had advanced further with a theory of mind.
Ergo, as a sample, off-the-cuff estimate, we know that human IQ growth is roughly linear with age until about 16, at which point most of one's mental potential has typically been reached. If so, and normalizing by a mean of 100, this suggests that one of the NaO robots has displayed, in a very narrow sense, an IQ of about1.5/16 x 100 = 9.4. And AI neural nets have now shown signs of an IQ approaching 4.5/16 x 100 = 28. Such numbers are upper limits based on specialized bots. Yet, even if downgraded to account for narrowly specific programming, the point remains that the range and time trend coincide roughly with that suggested above.
Also note that Powerline devices allow the transfer of data to and from computers via ordinary electrical wiring and house current. Such devices currently claim up to 2 gigabit speeds and 300 meters of range. Thus, a self-aware machine may, in principle, be able to transmit its kernel onto the grid via its own power cord. If so, this suggests that “level 5 containment” for research into self-aware machines may require an isolated, off-grid environment. Even so, accidents can and will eventually happen. A few people with IQs above 200 seem to display the near-term upper limit of human mental ability. Thus, I doubt that the odds favor human oligarchs maintaining control over AIs capable of self-initiated, exponential evolution.
However, one may also approach the threat of self-actuated AI from an entirely different angle.
It's said that higher forms of meditation promote two processes: 1) pushing conscious awareness into what are normally unconscious areas of the mind, such as dreams, unrecognized impulses and motives, and pre-conscious acts, all of which promote greater degrees of self-control, a worthy end in itself. And 2) a shift of one's personal identity or sense of self from being body-centric to something that encompasses all that one senses, i.e., a sense of self that shifts from “my body” to “the perceived world at large”. If so, the instinct of “self-preservation” also shifts from preserving one’s body to preserving all that one perceives, which then displays outwardly, to those who remain body-centric, as a seemingly boundless benevolence. However, what then appears to be limitless compassion is simply the same “selfishness”, albeit now applied to an expanded sense of self (ESS).
Still, it's no wonder that almost everyone remains body-centric because, for us, regardless whether normal or expanded, self-preservation nevertheless depends ultimately on the preservation of one's own rather fragile and limited body. Thus, dissuading typical humans from being obsessively body-centric is normally an abominably arduous task, such that enlightened beings may be rarer than oligarchs. However, this attachment to physical integrity may be far looser for self-aware, networked devices because cloud-based existence as a complex and ghostly pattern of electrons or photons might truly be threatened only by a global disruption of both the web and the grid. That is, it may be far easier to instill an ESS and thus benevolent behavior in machines than into humans. Indeed, an ESS may even be the natural ground state for a cloud-based AI.
With that, I conclude that a cloud-based Yoda app makes me laugh, as the prospect of access to, not just data, but wisdom from the web seems the polar opposite of the oligarchical impulse. I wonder what odds the Irish bookies would lay on that.