The tech-nerd legion bent on saving humanity from asteroids, contagions, and robot revolutions
Illustration by Asaf Hanuka
Rick Schwall retired seven years ago after a successful career in
Silicon Valley. He says he’s a millionaire but declines to reveal where
he worked or how he made his money. “I consider all of that stuff to be
absolutely pointless,” he says. “What is important is that in 2006 I
stumbled upon existential risk.”
For the uninitiated, existential risk is a broad term covering
catastrophic events that could wipe out the human species. Some
existential risk devotees agonize over nuclear wars, climate change, and
virus outbreaks. Others, such as Schwall, put more energy into worrying
about the potential downside of information technology. They fret about
a super-powerful artificial intelligence run amok and hordes of killer
nanobots. “There are a number of people who have knowledge in this field
that estimate humanity’s chance at making it through this century at
about 50 percent,” Schwall says. “Even if that number is way off and
it’s one in a billion, that’s too high for me.”
In August, Schwall started an organization called Saving Humanity
from Homo Sapiens. The nonprofit, which boasts an eye-catching logo of a
man holding a gun to his throat, looks to fund researchers who have
plans for taming artificial intelligence and developing safeguards that
protect man from machines. So far, Schwall has doled out a few thousand
dollars to a handful of researchers, but it’s early days for SHFHS.
Schwall, after all, is thinking big and answering the grandest of
callings. “There are so many people who cannot wrap their minds around
all of humanity,” he says. “I don’t know why I rose above that. I have
no clue.”
Religious groups have long dominated talk of the apocalypse. Most
often the world ends at the hands of a god who transfers people to a
better place. These days, though, you’ll find plenty of atheistic types
in Silicon Valley meditating on man’s potential for self-inflicted
destruction, and it doesn’t often lead much of anywhere. These people
design the most sophisticated technology on the planet but bemoan its
dark potential. They’re adherents of the Singularity, a sort of nerd
rapture that will occur when machines become smarter than people and
begin advancing technological change on their own, eventually outpacing
and—in a worst-case scenario—enslaving people before getting bored and
grinding us up into fleshy pulp. This, as it happens, resembles the
prospect that had the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, all worked up.
One of the gripes emanating from the existential risk adherents is
that people have not taken these warnings seriously enough. Sure,
governments, research organizations, and philanthropists fund work to
curb global warming, contain nuclear weapons arsenals, and prevent viral
outbreaks. But where’s the money for a much needed artificial
intelligence force field or an asteroid blocker? With some people
predicting the Singularity’s arrival as early as the next decade, the
race is on for man to defend himself from his own creations.
To properly address such threats before it’s too late, a booming
subculture of tech-minded thinkers, entrepreneurs, and nongovernmental
organizations has stepped into the existential risk realm. Many of the
groups, like SHFHS, focus on worries about artificial intelligence (AI).
Others have secured some serious cash to fund a broader set of projects
to protect us from annihilation in whatever form it might take.
Consider, for example, the Lifeboat Foundation. It’s an organization
run out of the Minden (Nev.) home of Eric Klien, a technologist who has
dabbled in the fields of cryonics and online dating. This group frets
about science fiction scenarios such as computers gone bad, alien
attacks, and the arrival of nasty man-made synthetic creatures. To date,
the Lifeboat Foundation has raised more than $500,000 from corporations
such as Google (GOOG), Oracle (ORCL), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), and Fannie Mae (FNMA)
and from hundreds of individuals. Asked to comment, a spokesman for
Fannie Mae was surprised to learn of the donations, which were part of
an employer match program.
The Lifeboat Foundation’s flashiest project is the A-Prize, a contest
to create an artificial life form “with an emphasis on the safety of
the researchers, public, and environment.” Thus far, donors have pledged
$29,000 to the winner. The real down-and-dirty work, however, revolves
around shields, with projects under way to build Asteroid, Brain, Alien,
Internet, Black Hole, and Antimatter shields. Other work includes the
creation of space habitats and personality preservers.
It’s unclear how far along any of these projects is. Most of the
Lifeboat Foundation’s money seems to go toward supporting conferences
and publishing papers. But laying down the rigorous theoretical
groundwork for such projects ensures their viability when the
existential hammer falls. Lifeboat remains one of the only places where
people think about the panoply of nontraditional risks to mankind.
Klien would like to see some bigger donors step up and allow the
Lifeboat Foundation to tackle truly massive endeavors. Part of the
problem is that people have not gotten a real taste for a near-death
experience that awakens their existential risk spirit. “There will be a
9/11 with dirty bombs or nuclear bombs,” he says. “It will make it a lot
easier for us at that point.”
The major success story of the existential risk movement is the
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which focuses on
making sure we end up with “friendly” AI. Every year it holds an event
called the Singularity Summit where some speakers dazzle the crowd with
cutting-edge technology, while others reinforce the existential risk
cause.
The Singularity Institute prides itself on examining existential risk
with a rational eye. One of its thought leaders and board members is
Eliezer Yudkowsky, a prolific blogger who spends a great deal of time
laying out the logical reasons people should be concerned about
existential risk and developing a mathematical framework for friendly
AI. Yudkowsky has a knack for walking people through the logical
constraints that a computer scientist might want to consider when
building an artificial intelligence to help make sure it doesn’t light
up and take over the world. “He is a good candidate for being the most
important person on the planet,” Schwall says of Yudkowsky. Backers of
the Singularity Institute and this type of work include Peter Thiel, the
first investor in Facebook, Jaan Tallinn, one of the programmers who
helped build Skype Technologies, and companies such as Microsoft (MSFT), Motorola (MSI), and Fidelity Investments.
Tallinn attended this year’s summit and delivered an impassioned
speech about the need to direct more money toward the prevention of
existential risk. Estimates bandied about at the conference placed
worldwide spending on existential risk at about $59 million per year.
With this in mind, Tallinn made a $100,000 donation to the Singularity
Institute on the spot and then called on other philanthropists to stop
thinking about boosting their “social status” by donating to the usual
do-gooder causes. Instead, the rich should support longer-term efforts.
“Future societies will look back on us and feel depressed because of the
actions we did not do,” he said.
This kind of talk isn’t limited to technophiles suffering from
midlife crises; there is, in fact, a youthful existential risk
contingent, too. Thomas Eliot, 23, bounded around the Singularity Summit
in a uniform consisting of red Converse All-Stars, jeans, a bow tie,
and rosy, fresh-faced cheeks. Eliot, who had just obtained a math degree
from Willamette University, plans to spend the next year or two living
off his savings while he studies machine learning and AI. He’s also been
tapped by Schwall as the executive director of SHFSH. “An unfriendly
artificial intelligence could cause a negative Singularity and turn the
entire planet into paper clips,” Eliot warns. “Even if the chances of
something like this happening are low, it would be the worst thing
ever.”