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Eliezer Yudkowsky: A Theory of Fun
Duration:
18 minutes and 55 seconds
Country:
United States
Language:
English
Genre:
Documentary
Producer:
Transvision Conference
Director:
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Views:
216
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Posted by:
ento on Aug 17, 2009
A talk given by Eliezer Yudkowsky, lead researcher with the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, June 28, 2003 at the Transvision Conference. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=220564363729049999
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Video Transcription
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- Today on ChangeSurfer Radio, we're listening to
- a speech by Eliezer Yudkowsky, that he
- gave at the Transvision Conference on
- June 28th at Yale University.
- His speech was about his theory of fun.
- Which I think is actually kind of a fun topic.
- Eliezer is a computer scientist who does research
- at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
- After that you'll listen to
- a short essay that I wrote recently
- in response to the Canadian decision to
- legalize gay marriage and a bioethicist
- in Canada who has been arguing against
- gay marriage. I argue for it and for
- some additional reforms in marriage law.
- So stay tuned to both of those.
- Coming up next, Eliezer Yudkowsky.
- By the way some of the bumps and noises
- that you hear in the background of the talk
- at the beginning, are film crews setting up
- to tape his talk. They'll go away after a while.
- I once heard a friend of mine,
- by the name of Liono,
- talking to a newcomer to transhumanism.
- And this person had remarked
- that he wasn't afraid of dying.
- And Liono said: "Well, you hear a lot about
- overcoming your fear of death,
- but how many people have tried to
- overcome their fear of living forever?"
- As Transhumanists I expect that
- most of us at some point have had to
- deal with the rationalizations
- that people develop
- to suppress their fear of death.
- The idea that "death gives meaning to life",
- and other comforting lies.
- Personally I do believe that the fear of death
- should be counted as a personal flaw.
- Choosing to live does not require that I be
- afraid to die, it requires only that I value life.
- But resolving that philosophical question
- is not an urgent matter. We can
- temporarily agree to disagree upon it;
- the important thing is making sure we have
- at least a billion years in which to argue about it.
- Now, living for a billion years is a scary thought.
- It's not as scary as the thought of living forever
- (which may or may not be permitted
- by physical law) but even a mere
- thousand years is a scary thought if you
- really think about what that would mean for you as a person.
- Even if you keep all the neurons in the brain alive,
- the human mind is not designed
- to handle a thousand years of memories.
- You cannot stay a child
- for even so much as a thousand years.
- You must in that time at least begin to grow up.
- But if life is a good thing, should we get scared
- at the prospect of a huge amount of life?
- What distinguishes transhumanism as a philosophy
- is that it wholeheartedly embraces the goal of success
- instead of making excuses for failure.
- There are many philosophical explanations for:
- Why Life Must Suck in Order to be Meaningful.
- Why all the pain and death and catastrophe
- and the minor annoyances that drain your life-force
- are, somehow, necessary.
- All these standard excuses have a strained,
- forced quality to them, like
- a theory stretched to explain evidence
- that just doesn't fit.
- Now, transhumanism just says:
- This sucks. Let's fix it. That's all.
- It doesn't need
- to be any more complicated than that.
- Life is better than death, health is better than sickness,
- happiness is better than pain, knowledge is better than ignorance,
- and when you see something wrong, you don't rationalize it;
- you fix it. It is all very straightforward,
- so what's so special about transhumanism?
- Actually there is nothing special about transhumanism.
- Presently, most other philosophies have a
- special additional clause that causes them
- to react oddly to advanced technologies.
- As if, for example, anything that involves genes is scary.
- There is a possibly apocryphal story
- about the person who was warned not to eat a tomato
- because it has genes in it.
- In transhumanism, this special yuck-reaction
- is missing and such technologies are
- just an ordinary part of the natural universe.
- Since this is the case, if you can use
- tissue screening to save four years old Zain Hashmi's life,
- as was a recent case in Britain,
- or if you can use golden wheat
- to prevent Vitamin A deficiency,
- why on earth wouldn't you? Why not?
- This choice does not require
- a special enthusiasm for technology,
- only that the usual sense of future-shock
- be missing.
- Typically people encountering transhumanism
- for the first time assume that
- "Oh these people are a bit different.
- What's different about them - they must love technology."
- It's not about loving technology.
- It's just that the usual yuck-reaction is missing
- and the ordinary philosophy
- of good means to good ends takes over.
- Similarly ordinary transhumanist philosophies
- will say that life extension is good up to age 80 or whatever,
- but if you talk about living to the age of 200
- so then there's a special reaction of surprise,
- future shock, because the philosopher
- hasn't considered that possibility before.
- Well a transhumanist will just say,
- "Sure, life extension to 80 is good,
- life extension to 200 is better,
- life extension to 1,000 is better yet"
- and so on. It does not require a special drive
- toward immortality to say this,
- it's just self-consistency.
- Wanting to live to be 1,000 is not a special
- and unusual desire that needs explaining,
- it's just ordinary common sense after
- the future shock has been stripped out.
- So transhumanism is just the philosophy
- that says life is good, happiness is good,
- knowledge and freedom and intelligence and beauty are good
- and this does not change for arbitrarily large
- amounts of life and beauty.
- Transhumanism is not a philosophy with a special adoration of technology;
- it's just the philosophy which says that
- technology is a normal way of achieving our aspirations.
- This does not change even when you're talking about
- arbitrarily advanced technology.
- Biotech, nanotech, whatever,
- there's nothing exciting about it,
- it's just an ordinary part of the natural universe.
- The question then becomes: what beautiful
- and worthwhile occupations can you find
- to fill the next million years?
- This question of course is the province of
- fun theory. Fun theory is the branch of science,
- or rather, wild speculation,
- that we use to answer questions such as:
- How much fun is there in the universe?
- Will we ever run out of fun?
- Are we having fun yet?
- And could we be having more fun?
- Is fun scalable? Does it require
- an exponentially greater amount of computation
- to support a linear increase in fun?
- I'm not going to present a rigorous theory of fun.
- This presentation is too short
- to present a rigorous theory of fun.
- The only give you 20 minutes, very unfair.
- Also I don't have a rigorous theory of fun.
- So instead, let's look at some things that are fun.
- For example, why is being in love fun?
- This question was recently answered
- when scientists discovered that being in love
- stimulates the same brain centers
- that are stimulated by eating chocolate.
- So this could be one possible answer
- to the question of what is fun?.
- We could say that fun involves a certain kind of brain chemistry.
- I do not think this is a good answer
- Or if you select this as an answer,
- then you are leaving out something important,
- whether or not you call it fun. Why?
- Well, suppose we ran a little wire into
- one of the brain's pleasure centers
- and hooked the wire up to a button
- and gave you that button; and you spent
- the next million years pressing that button.
- Just that, doing nothing else.
- I consider this to be
- a highly dystopian scenario, a sterile dead end.
- It seems more like counterfeit fun
- than the genuine article.
- Having your pleasure centers artificially stimulated,
- wireheading, as Larry Niven called it,
- is not philosophically acceptable fun.
- That's what we're looking for, not just fun,
- however we end up defining that, but
- philosophically acceptable fun.
- To have good clean fun,
- or even wicked dirty fun,
- it seems like you need to be doing something and getting somewhere.
- What about eating cookies? Why do we eat cookies?
- Certainly not because we're hungry. We eat
- cookies because 50,000 years ago, before
- the invention of agriculture, sugar and fat
- were the limiting resources.
- So we evolved to prefer sugar and fat,
- and we still prefer sugar and fat today,
- in modern times, when people are dying
- from too many calories instead of too few,
- because evolution has not had time to catch up.
- So our fun activities, thus those activities
- that your ancestors performed,
- the way that men watch football games
- because it involves competing tribes throwing things at each other,
- is personal fulfillment,
- to be found in harmony with your ancestral environment.
- It would explain why modern day jobs
- such as accounting have the annoying property
- of draining people's life-force.
- Of course this will only remain true of humans
- who retain their ancestral neurology.
- If 21st century civilizations
- stayed around for a couple of million years,
- humans would eventually evolve to find
- personal fulfillment in doing their income tax forms.
- This also strikes me as dystopian.
- Although it is less dystopian than eating
- Pringles and watching football.
- What about the Rubik's cube?
- Why is solving the Rubik's cube fun?
- It's not an ancestral activity,
- it does not directly mess with your brain chemistry,
- it doesn't deliver any kind of
- sensual reward when you finish solving it.
- Why do we find it fun?
- It's not a competitive game even. It's just pure math.
- It's group theory embodied in a physical cube.
- And we, as humans can have funplaying with that,
- it's something to be proud of.
- But the Rubik's cube contains
- only a limited amount of fun.
- You use it up, and then it's gone.
- At first solving the cube is fun,
- and then it's boring. What changes?
- Does the cube itself change?
- Do they ship Rubik's cubes from the factory
- containing only a limited amount of fun,
- so you have to buy a new one every 3 months?
- No, the cube is a
- mathematical concept, and it is eternal.
- The cube does not change.
- You change. The person who finishes
- solving the cube is not the same person who started it.
- The person who picked up the cube for the first time
- may have known nothing about this class of puzzle;
- or have not yet discovered the idea of
- transformations that move only a few cubes around
- and leave the rest constant.
- When you finish the Rubik's cube you have
- not only learned something about the cube,
- you've learned something about how to solve this kind of problem.
- You even have learned something about learning.
- Once you have learned what the cube has to teach you,
- solving the cube becomes easy.
- So easy that it isn't fun anymore.
- In having fun with the cube, you outgrow it,
- and outgrowing the cube is part of the fun.
- What do you do when you've outgrown the cube?
- Well you can find online a Java applet
- that implements a fourth dimensional version
- of the Rubik's cube, a Rubik's tesseract.
- I do not understand this puzzle.
- I am still trying to figure out how the pieces move.
- If I had not already learned the principles
- involved in the Rubik's cube, the Rubik's tesseract
- would be completely incomprehensible.
- So you solve one problem, outgrow it,
- and that gives you the abilities
- to move on to the next problem.
- And when you solved every possible form
- the Rubik's cube can take, generalized on a level
- where the entire class of problems
- becomes uninteresting, then what?
- Then you move on to the next class of problems
- at a higher level of complexity.
- This is a key ingredient of fun.
- It's not quite the only ingredient of fun,
- but it's a key ingredient, and
- it's the only one I have time to cover here:
- novel complexity.
- Complexity you have not yet encountered.
- The smarter you are, the faster you generalize,
- and the faster you become bored with any given problem.
- Yes, the smarter you are, the faster you get bored;
- that is how it works.
- But when you get smarter you can perceive
- new areas of the problem space that would've been
- incomprehensible to you before.
- Humans would get bored with chimpanzee fun extremely fast.
- But the space of human fun is enormously larger
- than the space of chimpanzee fun.
- If you have 10 bits, you have 1,000 possibilities,
- if you have 20 bits, you have a million possibilities,
- if you have 30 bits you have a billion possibilities.
- I don't think fun quite goes exactly like that,
- I don't think it's quite that simple,
- but I think the basic relation is the same
- that the size of fun-space grows roughly exponentially
- as the amount of intelligence.
- That the more variables you have in your mind,
- the larger the problem you solve, as the problem gets larger
- the space of possible novel problems goes up exponentially.
- Or not, it is only a conjecture.
- At any rate,
- the idea that we're going to get smart
- and then instantly run out of fun is based
- I think, first on the stereotype of rich people who get bored;
- and secondly, on the idea that you're limited to human fun
- and the smarter you are the faster you'll get bored with human fun.
- This is true, the smarter you are
- the faster you'll get bored with human fun,
- but the very act of getting bored with human fun,
- that this is no longer novel complexity
- means you're ready to move on.
- So there's an immense amount of fun
- out there to be had.
- Even for humans, the size of human fun-space is
- so large that no one individual could possibly succeed
- in experiencing all the possible kinds of human fun
- (though I encourage you to try!).
- One person cannot fulfill more than a tiny infinitesimal
- fraction of the human-space of possibilities.
- Why, because one person's lifespan is too short?
- Of course not. I plan to still be alive
- after the last star in the milky way is dead.
- But even if you live forever,
- you'll not be able to explore more than
- a tiny fraction of human fun-space
- before you outgrow it.
- And that of course, is the scary part:
- growing up.
- Right now, we are each of us growing old.
- Not growing up, growing old.
- We are actually losing neurons
- as we grow old.
- Instead of adding new capacity.
- We loose vitality, creativity, flexibility,
- energy, even personal health as we age.
- This is not a feature, this is a bug.
- It is a very unnatural thing to loose neurons as you age.
- We should be adding more neurons as we grow up.
- To hold more and more experiences and
- more and more complex skills.
- To shrink as we age borders on the perverted.
- This is not the way things are supposed to be.
- And at some point, we shall have to do a little rearranging!
- Once that bug is fixed however, once we are
- truly growing up instead of growing old,
- there will be only so much time you can remain human.
- If everyday you learn something new,
- there will come a time, after a sufficiently
- large number of days, when you have learned so much
- that you can pick up a Rubik's tesseract and
- see it as a small trivial thing to be
- solved in a few flicks, cast aside.
- And if that prospect does not scare you,
- you must have a very well integrated personality.
- This leads us to the fear of growing up.
- The fear of growing up is the third major cause
- of the fear of living forever;
- after the repressed fear of death,
- and the fear of boredom.
- In our time the fear of growing up
- is actually a minor academic fad
- except that it is not called the fear of growing up.
- It is called the fear of posthumanity.
- The funny thing is that transhumanists
- were using the word "posthuman"
- long before folks like Francis Fukuyama
- tried to make it into a scare word.
- We were not particularly scared
- by the word "posthuman" even though
- we were (way back in the good old days)
- we were using the word "posthuman"
- to indicate people who had grown up into Jupiter-brains;
- that is people whose minds have become so large
- they had to run themselves on computers the size of Jupiter.
- This, roughly speaking,
- is what the old-time transhumanists
- meant by "posthuman".
- Francis Fukuyama seems to use the term "posthuman"
- to indicate someone with
- a couple of minor genetic hacks,
- which by our standards are such a tiny alteration
- as to not be worth noticing.
- And yet Fukuyama is scared of his posthumans,
- one wonders what he would think of ours,
- he would probably catch fire and die.
- Not every change is an improvement,
- but every improvement is,
- necessarily, a change.
- To move forward, you must move.
- Are you ashamed to be a "post-child"
- or a "post-chimpanzee"?
- When Fukuyama reinvented the word "posthuman"
- he imbued it with an intellectual sleight of hand:
- the good old naturalistic fallacy,
- that is implies ought.
- Human nature is an evolved mix
- of light and darkness.
- Hitler was not an inhuman monster,
- he was a human monster.
- The library of Alexandria was built and burnt
- by one and the same species.
- Only by judging myself, by not being content
- to rest where I am, can I move forward.
- These rules are not suspended when I judge parts of myself
- that are part of universal human nature.
- Here again it is transhumanism that is the simpler case.
- Transhumanism as a philosophy
- contains no special exemption from moral judgment,
- for evils that are embedded in human nature.
- I am not going to stop debugging myself
- when I run across bugs that are part of human nature.
- I guess that makes me a posthumanist.
- Not every change is an improvement, but
- every improvement is necessarily a change.
- Not every form of posthumanity is a nice place to live,
- but all sufficiently nice places to live
- are necessarily posthuman.
- Let's make the future a nice place to live!
- That was a talk by Eliezer Yudkowsky
- the research scientist who works at
- Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
- He's also a board member of the World Transhumanist Association.
- And he delivered that talk at the Transvision Conference
- on Transhumanist Bioethics, which I organized
- at Yale University.


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