For FAI: Is "Molecular Nanotechnology" putting our best foot forward?

I am particularly bothered by this because it seems irrelevant to FAI. I'm fully convinced that a smarter than human AI could take control of the Earth via less magical means, using time tested methods such as manipulating humans, rigging elections, making friends, killing its enemies, and generally only being a marginally more clever and motivated than a typical human leader.

I agree with this.

For some reason no one wants to hold Eric Drexler accountable now for the grandiose, irresponsible and frankly cringe-worthy things he wrote back in the 1980's.

Case in point. I turned 27 in 1986, the year Drexler published Engines of Creation, so I belong to the generation referred to in the following speculation:

http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Chapter_8.html

Imagine someone who is now thirty years old [in 1986]. In another thirty years, biotechnology will have advanced greatly, yet that thirty-year-old will be only sixty. Statistical tables which assume no advances in medicine say that a thirty-year-old U.S. citizen can now expect to live almost fifty more years - that is, well into the 2030s. Fairly routine advances (of sorts demonstrated in animals) seem likely to add years, perhaps decades, to life by 2030. The mere beginnings of cell repair technology might extend life by several decades. In short, the medicine of 2010, 2020, and 2030 seems likely to extend our thirty-year-old's life into the 2040s and 2050s. By then, if not before, medical advances may permit actual rejuvenation. Thus, those under thirty (and perhaps those substantially older) can look forward - at least tentatively - to medicine's overtaking their aging process and delivering them safely to an era of cell repair, vigor, and indefinite life-span.

I turn 54 this November, and I can assure you that no one in my generation has seen "medicine's overtaking their aging process."

Yet many cryonicists have bet their futures on this fantasy technology, when regular people can see that it has taken on the characteristics of an apocalyptic religious belief instead of a rational assessment of future capabilities. Cryonicist Thomas Donaldson warned that this would happen and not help cryonics' credibility, back around the time Drexler predicted that I would start to grow younger by now.

Apparently Drexler wants to reboot his reputation with a new book, but someone needs to remind people about the things he promised us in his 1980's-era writings which haven't come to pass.

Isn't life an example of self-assembling molecular nanotechnology? If life exists, then our physics allows for programmable systems which use similar processes.

We already have turing complete molecular computers... but they're currently too slow and expensive for practical use. I predict self-assembling nanotech programmed with a library of robust modular components will happen long before strong AI.

Standard reference: Nanosystems. In quite amazing detail, though the first couple of chapters online don't begin to convey it.

but seeing all the physics swept under the rug

There's lots and lots of physics. All of this discussion has already been done.

I am particularly bothered by this because it seems irrelevant to FAI. I'm fully convinced that a smarter than human AI could take control of the Earth via less magical means, using time tested methods such as manipulating humans, rigging elections, making friends, killing its enemies, and generally only being a marginally more clever and motivated than a typical human leader. A smarter than human AI could out-manipulate human institutions and out-plan human opponents with the sort of ruthless efficiency that modern computers beat humans in chess.

Your argument is extremely human-parochial. You seem to be thinking of AIs as potential supervillains who want to "rule the world," (where ruling the world = controlling humans.) If you think that an AI would care about controlling humans, you are assuming that the AI would be very human-like. In the space of possible mind-designs, very few AIs care about humans as anything but raw resources.

In the space of possible mind-designs, your mind (and every human mind) is an extreme specialist in manipulating humans. So of course, to you manipulating humans seems vastly easier and more useful than building MNT or macro-sized robots, or whatever.

I'm commenting a few days after the main flurry of discussion and just wanted to raise a concern about how there seems to be a conflation in the OP and in many of the comments between (1) effective political advocacy among ignorant people who will stick with the results that fall out of the absurdity heuristic even when it gives false results and (2) truth seeking analysis based on detailed mechanistic considerations of how the world is likely to work.

Consider the 2x2 grid where, on one axis, we're working in either an epistemically unhygienic advocacy frame where its OK to say false things that get people to support the right conclusion or policy (versus a truth seeking frame where you grind from the facts to the conclusion with high quality reasoning processes at each stage for the sake of figuring stuff out from scratch) and on the second axis Leplen's dismissal of MNT is coherently founded and on the right track (versus it just being a misfiring absurdity heuristic).

I think in this forum it can be generally assumed that "FAI is important" as the background conclusion that is also a message that it is probably beneficial to advocate on behalf of.

If I had read the chain of reasoning smart computer->nanobots before I had built up a store of good-will from reading the Sequences, I would have almost immediately dismissed the whole FAI movement a bunch of soft science fiction, and it would have been very difficult to get me to take a second look.

Leplen's claim here is a claim about Leplen's historically contingent reasoning processes rather than about the object level workabilty of MNT and it is raised as though Leplen is a fairly normal person whose historically likely reaction to MNT is common enough to be indicative of how it will play with many other people. So the part of the 2x2 grid it is from is firmly "advocacy rather than truth" and mostly assuming "Leplen's reaction is justified". I think it is worth spelling out what it would look like to explore the other three boxes in the 2x2 grid.

If we retain the FAI-promoting advocacy perspective but imagine that Leplen is wrong because "MNT magic" is actually something future scientists or an AGI could pull together and deploy, then the substantive cost to the world might be that courses of action that are important if MNT is a real concern may not be well addressed by the group of people who may have been mobilized by a "just FAI, not MNT" advocacy. If basically the same AGI-safety strategy is appropriate whether or not an AGI would head towards MNT as a lower bound on the speed and power of the weapons it could invent, then dropping MNT from the advocacy can't really harm anything. If the appropriate policies are different enough that lots of people convinced of "FAI without MNT" would object to "FAI with MNT" protection measures, then dropping advocacy could be net harmful to the world.

If we retain the idea that Leplen's dismissal of MNT is coherent and justified, but flip over to a truth-seeking frame (while retaining awareness of a background belief by many old time LWers that MNT is probably important to think about) then the arguments offered to help actually change people's minds for coherent reasons seem lacking. From a truth seeking perspective it doesn't matter what turns people on or off if their opinions aren't themselves important indicators of how the world actually is. The only formal credential offered is in materials science, and this is raised from within an activist advocacy frame where Leplen admits that motivated cognition could account for their attitude with respect to MNT out of defensiveness and a desire to not have skills become obsolete. Lots of people don't want to become obsolete, so this is useful evidence for figuring out how to convince similarly fearful people of a conclusion about the importance of FAI by dropping other things that might make FAI advocacy harder. But the claim that "MNT is unimportant based on object level science considerations" will be mostly unmoved by the advocacy level arguments here if someone already has chemistry experience, and has read Nanosystems, and still thinks MNT matters. Something else would need to be offered than hand waving and a report about emotional antibodies to a certain topic. So presuming that Leplen's dismissal of MNT is on track, and that many LWers think MNT is important, it seems like there's an education gap, where the LW mainstream could be significantly helped by learning the object level reasoning that justify Leplen's dismissal of MNT. Like where (presuming that it went off the rails somewhere) did Nanosystems go off the rails?

The fourth and final box of the 2x2 grid is for wondering what things would look like if we were in a truth seeking and communal learning mode (not worried about advocacy among random people) and Leplen was wrong to dismiss MNT. In this mode the admixture of advocacy and truth while taking Leplen seriously seems pretty bad because the very local educational process this week on this website would be going awry. It is understandable that Leplen's reaction is relevant to one of LW's central advocacy issues and Leplen seems is friendly to that project... and yet from the perspective of an attempt to build community knowledge in the direction of taking serious things seriously and believing true things for good reasons while disbelieving false things when the evidence pushes that way... the conflation is mildly disturbing.

Building molecular nanotechnology seems to me to be roughly equivalent to being able to make arbitrary lego structures by shaking a large bin of lego in a particular way while blindfolded.

This is a bad argument. Like it doesn't even taken into account the distinctions between bootstrapping from scratch to a single working general assembler versus how it would work assuming the key atoms could be put into the right places once (like whether and how expensively it could build copies of itself). The "bootstrap difficulty" question and the "mature scaleout" questions are different questions and our discussion seems to be papering over the distinctions. The badness of this argument was gently pointed out by drethelin, but somehow not in a way that was highly upvoted, I suspect because it didn't take the (probably?) praiseworthy advocacy concerns into account.

To be clear, I'm friendly to the idea that MNT might not be physically possible, or if possible it might not be efficient. I'm not a huge expert here at all and would like to be better educated on the subject. And I'm friendly to the idea of designing AGI advocacy messages that gain traction and motivate people to do things that actually improve the world. I'm just trying to point out that mixing both of these concerns into the same rhetorical ball, seems to do a disservice to both...

Which is pretty ironic, considering that "mixing FAI and MNT together seems politically problematic" seems to be the general claim of the article. Mostly I guess I'm just trying to say that this article is even more complicated because now instead of sometimes doping the FAI discussions with MNT, we're fully admixing FAI and MNT and political advocacy.

It isn't clear to me than MNT is physically practical. I don't doubt that it can be done. I don't doubt that very clever metastable arrangements of atoms with novel properties can be dreamed up. Indeed, that's my day job, but I have a hard time believing the only reason you can't make a nanoassembler capable of arbitrary manipulations out of a handful of bottles you ordered from Sigma-Aldrich is because we're just not smart enough. Manipulating individuals atoms means climbing huge binding energy curves, it's an enormously steep, enormously complicated energy landscape, and the Schrodinger Equation scales very very poorly as you add additional particles and degrees of freedom. Building molecular nanotechnology seems to me to be roughly equivalent to being able to make arbitrary lego structures by shaking a large bin of lego in a particular way while blindfolded. Maybe a super human intelligence is capable of doing so, but it's not at all clear to me that it's even possible.

Isn't this just the argument from personal incredulity? We have an existence proof for molecular nanotechnology - namely, nature did it by making us. We can even look at its solution while constructing ours. The cost of pushing atoms up energy gradents might make some diamondoid structures expensive - but it didn't stop nature from building atomically-precise organisms. Nobody says we have to make molecular nanotechnology while blindfolded! So: your objections don't seem to make very much sense.

I assume the reason than MNT is added to a discussion on AI is because we're trying to make the future sound more plausible via adding burdensome details.

This is unreasonably accusatory. I'm pretty sure MNT is added to the discussion because people here such as Eliezer and Annisimov and Vassar believe it to be both possible and a likely thing for AI to do.

Building molecular nanotechnology seems to me to be roughly equivalent to being able to make arbitrary lego structures by shaking a large bin of lego in a particular way while blindfolded.

Isn't this the argument creationists use against evolution? But more seriously, nature does nano-assembly constantly and with pretty remarkable precision in ways we have yet to be able to fully understand or control. This means that there's at the very least that much to learn about MNT that we're simply "not smart enough" to be able to understand yet. Consider fields like transfection, where you can buy some reagents and cells from Sigma or whoever and make them create your own custom proteins. This is far far in advance of what we could do 100 years ago but is arguably only a matter of being "smarter" and/or knowing more rather than anything else. Calcium Phosphate transfection doesn't even use novel chemicals, and yet was only discovered in 1973.

I assume the reason than MNT is added to a discussion on AI is because we're trying to make the future sound more plausible

No, MNT is part of the discussion because it is taken for granted, along with cryonics, parallel quantum worlds, Dyson spheres, and various less spectacular ideas. You may want to see analogous complaints that I have previously made.

It didn't help, in my particular case, that one of my first interactions on LW was in fact with someone who appears to have their own view about a continuous version of quantum mechanics.

Continuous in the sense of, like, continuous energy levels? Because if so, wow.

I don't have an issue bringing up MNT in these discussions, because our goal is to convince people that incautiously designed machine intelligence is a problem, and a major failure mode for people is that they say really stupid things like 'well, the machine won't be able to do anything on its own because it's just a computer - it'll need humanity, therefore, it'll never kill us all." Even if MNT is impossible, that's still true - but bringing up MNT provides people with an obvious intuitive path to the apocalypse. It isn't guaranteed to happen, but it's also not unlikely, and it's a powerful educational tool for showing people the sorts of things that strong AI may be capable of.

The main problem here is that both you and the people you're complaining about, confuse early nanotechnology roaming free in the environment maybe as capable as a living cell and probably quite similar to them in other ways, with a much more advanced and energy intensive nanotechnology taking place in a controlled environment. This is further confounded by the AI likely being able to use large amounts of the quickly reproducing early nanotech plus existing infrastructure in order to construct said advanced nanotech in a few hours.

That is, if it doesn't find a way to program the nearest spinning harddrive to write down working femtotech within a millisecond.