Nothing but random links for today.
The World’s Largest Musical Instrument. Half-eaten roll for sale on eBay. United States Secret Service – FAQ for Kids The C Prize New Form of Superior Memory Syndrome Will Japanese Robots Rule the World by 2020? Solar Power Satellites on Wikipedia MIT makes moves towards vehicles that morph ‘Executive’ monkeys influenced by other executives, not subordinates …and finally, Maddox on blogs.
First draft of aforementioned letter:
To whom it may concern,
Throughout the last half-century, the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been progressing steadily. Today, AI systems help humans accomplish a variety of tasks, from filtering our e-mail to preventing credit card fraud.
If progress continues, the problem-solving abilities of AI systems will approach and then surpass the brightest human minds. These systems will acquire the ability to improve their own source code without human assistance, giving rise to smarter versions that no human team could program directly. These versions will be intelligent enough to have influence over the real world, including improving their underlying hardware.
Humanity has no experience dealing with a species smarter than it. For this reason the creation of Artificial Intelligence should be approached with caution. To distinguish between narrow-purpose AI and AI designed specifically for general intelligence and self-improvement, the term “Artificial General Intelligence†(AGI) was coined.
The creation of a smarter-than-human species has been called a ‘singularity’ by futurists, by analogy to singularities in cosmology. In cosmology, the singularity at the center of a …
The following is a letter that my sister wrote to a Luddite professor she had last semester:
I was a student of yours once. I earned a mediocre grade in your class, and didn’t submit work I feel met my abilities at the time, but passed nonetheless. I remembered some aspects of your teaching, but was reminded of them recently when a friend of mine in your senior year English class mentioned them to me, upset. I’ve thus decided to write you a letter regarding this matter and give you my opinions on it.
I have the impression that your curriculum has lately been analyzing the computer age and its impacts on human culture. This is an important topic and certainly one which needs to be discussed. However, my friend tells me that your approach has been, on the whole, biased, claiming that you’ve said many times that “the information age will destroy us all,” and that you dislike computers and computer people. This is fine as a personal opinion, but not as instruction material in a class …
If Albert Einstein were still alive today, he would have turned 127 earlier this week. Posthumous analysis of his brain found that the parietal operculum region was missing, leading to an inferior parietal lobe with 15% more volume than usual. The inferior parietal region is a part of the brain that underlies mathematical thought, visuospatial cognition, and imagery of movement. Einstein could envision complex physics problems holistically. Does this mean that we should use neural stem cells to artificially increase the size of parietal lobes in chimps to see what happens? Yes.
And what if Einstein could still be alive today, contributing to physics? He died at 76. 127 isn’t too much to ask for, only a few decades longer than people live when they’re really healthy. Perhaps we should all make a bigger point to fight aging?
In honor of Einstein, let’s check out Mangled Worlds Quantum Mechanics, a new interpretation of QM from transhumanist (and polymath professor at George Mason University) Robin Hanson. New Scientist writes an article on the …
Happy pi day. The most pi-representative moment of the year occurred this morning at 3:14 AM, March 14th.
Fun fact! The number pi doesn’t actually exist in reality. It’s just a convenient human abstraction for calculating the circumference of a roughly circular object based on its radius, or vice versa. Because the lowest known level of physical reality is actually “pixelated” (based on discrete Planck increments), there is no such thing as a true curve except inside a computer program or virtual reality. Einstein realized this near the end of his life, and was bummed.
Some things are darn close to a perfect circle, though. The probability distribution of an electron in a hydrogen atom is almost spherical, barring random quantum fluctuations. The folk theoretical representation of celestial bodies like the sun and moon are idealized spheres or discs. Gravity Probe B, designed to test the theory of relativity, contains a gyroscope that comes within 40 atomic diameters of a perfect sphere.
The most spherical known object …
Earth’s magnetic field, embarassingly invisible to unaided humans. © Gary Glatzmaier.
Reading the Wikipedia article on senses, I came to the part that discussed senses found in other organisms but not possessed by humans. Magnetoception, the perception of magnetic fields, was among them. (Others included electroception and echolocation.) I came across the sentence, “Recently, however, special implants have granted humans this ability too”, in reference to magnetoception. I followed a link, and arrived at an article in the Body Modification Ezine discussing a case where someone had a small neodymium magnet implanted in his finger, allowing him to sense magnetic fields in security devices, motors, and more. That someone turned out to be Todd Huffman, an Alcor employee I met at a party in Los Angeles just a couple years ago!
To get a sense of how amazing this development is, consider that magnetoception has existed in birds for hundreds of millions of years. It is essential for them to sense the Earth’s magnetic field in order to migrate …
The most exciting article to come out this week is definitely, “I, Nanobot”, by Alan H. Goldstein, over at Salon.com (small ad detour required for viewing). Goldstein discusses existential risk and the danger of nanotechnologies with lifelike characteristics, something called bionanotechnology, or synthetic biology, or artificial life. The tagline is “Scientists are on the verge of breaking the carbon barrier — creating artificial life and changing forever what it means to be human. And we’re not ready.”
I was fortunate enough to briefly meet Goldstein in the flesh at last year’s Foresight Vision Weekend. He debated the merits and risks of human enhancement with Ronald Bailey of Reason magazine, a leading transhumanist who published Liberation Biology last year. Although, in the context of a highly transhumanistic audience, Bailey seemed loosely billed as the “good guy” and Goldstein as the “bad guy”, I agreed highly with Goldstein’s cautious approach and disagreed with what I thought was Bailey’s reckless enthusiasm. Goldstein points out that never before has Earth seen forms of life based on anything but …