What do we REALLY know today about threats to the very existence of the human species, and where do climate and AI fit?
Quick summary: there is important news about climate, well documented, worse than before, but as a true devotee of truth, I will explain why, and what we should be doing on this and other threats to human species existence. There is also news about AI you will not see elsewhere yet,
HOW CAN WE ORGANIZE AND BE SURE OF WHAT WE KNOW?
Example of a Best Practice: IEEE
Most of you know that issues involving electricity and electric power are not just something to wire up at random after a great conversation in the local bar. Many of you even know that there is a great coordinated world organization, https://www.ieee.org/, which connects, evaluates and maintains what is known all over the world on these issues. It offers a two-way system of communication, essential to prevent people at the top from turning members into useless parrots.
Because the production of electricity is one of the two biggest sources of greenhouse gasses, we should be considering the best information available to IEEE on how to fix that aspect at minimum cost, as effectively as possible.
I was delighted this very morning, as I started to type this, to see an email from the President of IEEE, announcing that I will receive their Frank Rosenblatt Award , for outstanding contributions to biologically and linguistically motivated computational paradigms, with the following citation: “For development of backpropagation and fundamental contributions to reinforcement learning and time series analysis.” That came from an extensive review I did not even know about until this morning!
Example of Another Best Practice: US NSF
Some of you know that the National Science Foundation of the US has often been the world leader in the pursuit of truth in science, engineering and education, following the great vision and charter of Vannevar Bush, a man we should never ever forget or take for granted. As with IEEE, two-way networks of communication and review, and high strategic goals, using the best computer technology available for management, have been crucial to the high level of success often achieved.
In a recent podcast, the man who created the IEEE Neural Network Society in the 1980s (at a time when the lead textbooks of computer science and AI assured us that neural networks like deep learning could never do much) asked me for my views of how NSF has achieved such great success, despite inevitable human imperfections. I have seen NSF at times as the greatest true temple of truth in human history so far. There is no way that any government in our world, including the UN, could cope effectively with the new existential threats before us without working hard to reinvent, expand and build on these unique examples.
Today’s Best Practice for the Future of Humanity Including Threats to Our Existence
I wish more of you knew about another best practice, created by another visionary whom I have had the privilege to work with, Jerry Glenn, who is to futurism what Vannevar Bush was to basic science. He created the Millennium Project, the greatest two way international network of communication in existence, developing, analyzing and integrating scenarios for the human future, cutting across all the major sectors. That includes threats to the very existence of humanity, but also includes other important issues. Jerry and I have learned what we can from many other very serious efforts to understand threats to human existence, but we agree that humanity needs much more than anything which exists yet. That is why we and others with the Millennium Project have been working hard lately to try to propose and grow a new system of networks, ultimately like IEEE and NSF, focused like a laser on the issue of the survival of the human species.
Here is where we stand now on those efforts, especially regarding the possibility of climate change so serious what it would kill all humans, and regarding emerging threats with the internet which are even larger and more urgent.
Message on climate and AI extinction threats I sent to the Millennium Project international coordinators this past week (lightly edited):
We have often discussed two great threats of extinction of the entire human species --
Threats related to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), for which Jerry rightly pushes for a new comprehensive study (with plans to connect to the UN General Assembly), and "climate extinction", for which John Kerry and Guterres appeared a few months ago before the UN Security Council to push for a new effort there. Personally, I will do what I can to support both efforts, because they SHOULD support and reinforce each other in the end, and because I know enough to feel sure they are the two biggest threats to the continuation of human life. (Misuse of biotech and of nuclear tech are next biggest, in my view, but climate and internet are big enough to discuss in one email.)
I strongly support Jerry's AGI effort, for many reasons. First, it is the area where misinformation is most extreme, in advising policy. New studies and networks of information are most essential there, exactly because the information now flowing to policy makers is so far from what is known. Second, it builds on your work on the future of work, which is one of the essential areas where changes in the internet (including Internet of Things and human-computer interaction and cybersecurity and quantum technology COMBINED with AGI, which integrates it all) seriously threaten our very existence, if we do not get it right. It can also be a great ennobler of human life, but only if we push even harder in expanding our understanding of fundamental realities.
BUT:
The climate future is ALSO a rightful, important part of futurism, where decision makers and stakeholders need better information.
I was very happy to learn yesterday that that essential part of futurism IS being covered in an integrated way much better than I would have thought from world policy debates (including even the recent G7 discussions):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jq23mSDh9U
They put a lot of money and research into organizing and mapping the key issues, and they have started to get into key points which most of the world does not know yet. It is a huge step forward. They should be congratulated for STARTING a discussion which needs to be expanded and fixed.
It reminds me of when I worked at the US National Science Foundation (NSF), where special support was always needed for the people who START settling a whole new continent, even when they get about half of it wrong on the first cut.
In the video, they clearly and explicitly state the need for a new office under the UN Security Council, just as Kerry and Gutteres asked, and for it to BUILD on what they have started but GO FURTHER.
Unlike Greta Thunberg (whom they show and support), they work hard to explain WHY and HOW it is really about the extinction of the human species, and WHAT WE NEED TO ADDRESS to reduce the risks.
I was especially happy to see their discussion of the importance of human land use (our sources of food!!) and of fertilizers. They even mentioned nitrates and phosphates. But they were not aware of the VERY best new, hardest core scientific information:
See chapter 12 of https://www.amazon.com/New-History-Life-Discoveries-Evolution-ebook/dp/B00OZM4AN2/
That book, only $12 on kindle, gives the most definitive overview now available of what science really has learned about the history of life on earth. (Also a guide to the future and related issues.) Chapter 12 reports on really crucial new work by Professor Lee Kump (https://www.ems.psu.edu/about/who-we-are/meet-dean) demonstrating that PHOSPHATE CONCENTRATIONS IN THE OCEAN predicts and explains the biggest extinction of life on earth far better than earlier theories favored by the oil industry. Still, the youtube video cites phosphates AND nitrates, which is probably what really drives the threat to humanity, when combined with "stratified ocean", which Ward has told us about in the past.
The video does repeat the old mantra that "1.5 degrees C" is the key warning flag, or thermometer, for the risk of human extinction. It's a nice goal to keep in mind, but it is not the most definite warning of extinction risks (and of things we need to change to improve our chances). For now, I see ocean stratification (best guess about 30 years off) and fertilizers in the ocean as the best warning signal we have now, but more and better focused research is possible and essential to get it right; see "point 5" of http://www.werbos.com/climate_extinction_risk_and_solutions.htm. (Thanks again to Youngsook and Jerry for the invitation to their TV session in 2019 which was a great start at the time.)
The discussion of ocean acidification is a worthwhile issue, but NOT so important to extinction as they thought, based on those parts of Ward's earlier book which now appear out of date.
There are also important CONNECTIONS between climate extinction and the bigger AGI issues:
http://www.werbos.com/How_climate_extinction_and_internet_connect.htm
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Regarding AGI, the recent Putin-Biden discussions after G7 were VERY encouraging for those of us who view cybersecurity (and quantum technology and AGI, which are closely linked to it) as one of the most urgent key pieces we all need to get right, and need to learn how to cooperate on. But I see no way we could get it right, and avoid real extinction of the human species, unless we also connect it to deeper and broader collaboration with China. In the case of climate, the "extinction" threat should be clear enough to anyone honest enough to look at the new solid information from science, but with AGI/IOT/new-internet the threats are actually larger and more imminent; the problem is that they are obvious and glaring only to those who know how they work, with real technical roots.
Best of luck to us all. We all need it.
Should You Believe It? Important Follow-ons on Climate and AGI
There have already been some important follow-ons, starting to build new bridges to very important players.
For example, Hector Casanueva, editor of the Chilean Council of Foresight and Strategy magazine, is publishing the message I sent. He provides a focal point for important work on climate and AI all over South America, which is proving out real world technologies meeting much higher standards than some of the stakeholders funded in the existing climate efforts around the world.
There are also climate skeptics who wonder whether chapter 12 of Ward and Kirschvink really is the best up to date story. In fact, I am deeply impressed by the quality of work I have seen led by Robert Hazen of the Carnegie Institute in DC, just a few miles from my home where I am typing this. HIS more recent seminal work points to volcanoes as a cause of mass extinctions in the past. However, even though Hazen is a truly great leader in his field, and I have often wished to meet him (and Kump and Ward) some day, there is no single human on earth who knows all aspects of all the sciences in play. Hazen’s recent videos and books include strong praise for Kirschvink, and do not argue against the great recent book by Ward and Kirschvink. I do not agree with everything in that book, but I HAVE sent messages urging organization of a new, fair workshop with leadership from Ward, Kump and Hazen to discuss some of the extinction threat issues (and required future research) in more detail. I even cc’ed people I know in NSF and DOD, and folks working with Warner’s Senate Intelligence Committee, urging world class honest scientific organization of the workshop, following what we learned from the very best success stories we had at NSF.
But… when a skeptic friend asked me about this, I did a quick web search on more recent work by Kump:
Using scholar.google.com, advanced search (triple hamburger),
I see:
https://www.pnas.org/content/113/9/2360
https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/bitstream/handle/10871/39268/Combined%205-14.pdf?sequence=1
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2018GB006061
No reason here to change the definitive story in that book!
On the AGI side, I certainly paid a lot of attention to Warner’s support of new funding to “strengthen US leadership in three key new strategic priorities: AI, cybersecurity and quantum technology.” If we interpret “AI” to mean “AGI” (the most powerful general AI), it hit me that two of these are areas I led at NSF before my retirement in 2015!
More precisely, the “new AI” came from work I did and funded (https://mindmatters.ai/podcast/ep139/ ). I created and led another new area https://arxiv.org/abs/0709.3310 which got deeper into the quantum theory used in advanced electronics and photonics than any other program on earth, pointing to new opportunities in Qunatum Information Science and Technology (QuIST) far beyond the Quantum Turing Machines which dominate almost all research funded now by the US government.
See the many links at the bottom of http://www.werbos.com/How_to%20Build_Past_Emerging_Internet_Chaos.htm. Also see the new unification I posted on youtube this year (see the slide below). For a more intuitive picture of what this means, see this recent interview discussion in Canada.
Will the folks supporting Warner’s new directions actually fund work beyond the narrow limits of current US efforts in QuIST?
I felt strong support for a statement by Preskill this morning, stressing the need for new directions to be guided by people who really know the math. That’s absolutely right. But in THIS area, there are crucial new directions in the math which have not yet reached “the usual suspects” in the US. Many in China and even in electric power know many crucial aspects of this and cybersecurity which have yet to flow to US policy. I hope Jerry’s UN efforts will provide a venue for the same dissemination of this technology to nations now lagging so far behind they don't even know how far… like the US.
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