Accelerating Future

The BBC is talking about immortality again. This time, springboarding off Maria Esther de Capovilla’s death. The obligatory poll asks, “Would you want to live to 1,000?”. Currently “yes” is at about 45% and “no” is at 55%. I think we can take this as saying that most people above middle age have resigned themselves to death, while most people below haven’t (of course there are exceptions on both sides). Here’s a clip from the article:

And it’s the stuff of fairytales. Various mythical stories tell of a Fountain of Youth, a mystical spring that grants eternal vitality to all who drink from it.

These are pipe dreams. For most of us getting older, frailer and eventually popping our clogs are simple facts of life.

Now, however, there is a growing band of scientists and philosophers who truly believe that biological boundaries can be pushed back, allowing humans to live to 200, 300, 1,000 and maybe even longer.

Calling themselves “transhumanists”, they argue that it is time humans broke free of their “biological chains”.

Pipe dreams to the public, but not to those who understand the notion of taking an engineering approach to biogerontology.

WIRED has a short and barely informative article on robotics. I’m just referencing because its these type of articles which are on the radar of the mainstream.

A short, non-insightful review of TSIN got dugg yesterday, leading to all the usual comments. Discussions like these come around quite frequently, transhumanists who have neglected to sign up on digg on are missing out on valuable argumentation opportunities. First comment on the digg site:

The inherent flaw is that if you live forever, in a relatively youthful state, you must constantly be working.

This sucks. Death is a good thing. It thins the population. Immortals having immortal children is a problem.

…non-immortals having exponential offspring is a problem, too. We need to decrease our reproductive multiplier to something polynomial rather than exponential, is all.

Tech stuff:

Word is that Nanosolar is making good progress on their 430MW solar fab plant. There could be a small revolution in the adoption of solar power once their products hit the market.

The ballotechnics article on Wikipedia has been properly updated, along with the article for induced gamma emission. Ever used one of those sodium acetate hand warmers, that provide a bit of heat when exposed to air? Well, ballotechnics would be like this, but instead of releasing a few watts over hours, they would release orders of magnitude more energy over the course of seconds. Their energy density may be as high as 10 times that of the best explosives, creating worry that they could replace the fission-based primary in fusion weapons. If so, preventing nuclear proliferation could become impossible.

Brian Wang has some amazing news on a potential 1000-times improvement in remote viewing technology, which would allow satellites to image features on the surface of the earth with a resolution of up to 2 microns. Similar advances in optical technology would allow “ultra-high capacity all-optical arbitrary waveform generation covering optical bandwidth of ~100 THz”, which could give us bandwidth improvements of 10,000 over the best current fiber optics. There is a $9.5M DARPA project currently working on it. This technology could also be applied towards the more advanced technology of phased array optics, which, if used on the battlefield, could create perfectly realistic illusions of troops, tanks, or ships as big as your optical array. Even with binoculars or a telescope, you couldn’t tell the difference between the fake image and a real ship. The gigapixel imaging technology could also be applied towards extremely effective nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons sensors.

Better neural imaging techniques are showing us that the module of the brain we thought was used exclusively to recognize human faces actually has many other purposes.

Superconducting electromagnetic coils are being manufactured and will hit the market in 2007. I assume they’re based on the high-temperature ceramic superconductors, the ones where we don’t understand the physical mechanism underlying their operation. Brian has multiple links to further material, as always. The bottom line is that the technology will allow us to make engines are that weigh three times less and are half as big. He also has an article on wind power turbines from late last year that I somehow missed.

Solar energy without a collector, and high capacity hydrogen-storing materials.

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This post marks Accelerating Future’s 100th. It’s been fun to be posting in a weblog not on any specific narrow topic, but on whatever the heck I want, which is very frequently the transhumanist movement and all the wonderful people in it. I’ll keep it up for as long as I have the free time.

A few statistics for those interested…

This blog’s inaugural post was on November 14th, 2005. Today is August 29th, 2006, meaning I’ve been blogging at a rate of about 10 posts/month. As you can see from the archive numbers, the rate of posting has accelerated in this last month especially. I’ve gotten exactly 500 comments on this blog so far, meaning that the average has been 5 comments per post.

Since mid-November ‘05, this page has been viewed 466,560 times and has had about 166,531 unique visitors. My current technorati rank is 20,370.

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The San Francisco Bay Area is the best. There is no city or area as great as it is. If you have any doubt about where you are living, start looking on craigslist right away for an apartment or home in SF.

They say it’s expensive to live here. Well, yes, but the jobs are also great, and minimum wage is quite high - $8.82 an hour. If you’re a bit older and have some career experience in a technical profession, pulling in a six-figure income is definitely achievable. Some of the biggest gravy trains in the world are located right in our backyard. My father is currently making a killing as a consultant at Genentech. My sister just walked into some dental office and got hired immediately.

Have winter or any other form of unpleasant weather where you live? Not here. It is always temperate, thanks to the sublime maritime clime. Half of the City is covered in pleasant fog, the other half is frequently sunny. Around the Bay Area it is very warm and pleasant year-round.

SF is the leader of the world. We’re a capital of social equality, technical prowess, fun things to do, and general badassery. There aren’t many bad neighborhoods in the Bay Area. Half is yuppie and the other half is just normal. You won’t get jumped.

Yahoo, Google, Oracle, YouTube, AMD, Apple, Ebay, Hewlett-Packard, EA, National Semiconductor, Symantec, Sun, Intel, Palm, Paypal, and Logitech are here. Everyone I know who is working at these companies is making $80,000+ a year. The general atmosphere of prosperity bleeds into everything else.

San Francisco itself is like Disneyland. Nestled into the end of a little peninsula, the City itself only measures 7 by 7 miles, but is home to almost a million people. Downtown, Haight, Richmond, Pacific Heights, the Marina, Twin Peaks, SoMA, the Sunset… every neighborhood is different from the next and all are located right next to each other. The longest drive from point A to point B in this city is 25 minutes, with 15 minutes a more likely average.

There are beaches to visit, huge parks to run in, world-class restaurants for dining, the rest of the Bay to visit via auto or ferry, hundreds of excellent hills with awesome views, ocean on all sides, the Golden Gate bridge… what more do you want?

The epicentres of transhumanism are here. This is where the movement is gathering. The Singularity and Foresight Institutes are here, along with hundreds of hardcore transhumanists. Futurist-oriented meetings occur almost on a nightly basis. You will find many hundreds of thousands of transhumanist sympathizers among the alumni or students of Berkeley, Stanford, or dozens of other small colleges in the area.

Unless you are inextricably stapled down to where you are now, with no hope of escape, I suggest you pack your bags and head here as soon as possible. The wife (or husband) and kids will adapt. Move here, and within a couple weeks you’ll forget about wherever it is you came from. San Francisco is the best.

Sincerely,
Michael Anissimov (who was raised in Burlingame, CA)

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Dawn M. Willow, J.D., from the anti-transhumanist think tank Institute on Biotechnology and the Human Future, has a nice review of the Stanford Singularity Summit and some furrowed-brow talk to share with us:

When 1997 world chess champion Gary Kasparov was defeated by a computer, and when computers became capable of mimicking the styles of Bach, Mozart, and Chopin so closely that music aficionados could hardly distinguish between the human-composed and the machine-composed scores, the distinction between man and machine became obscured as computers seemed to demonstrate skills that require creativity — a quality thought to be a uniquely human characteristic. But, while computers may become capable of more and more human-like tasks or exceed certain human cognitive abilities, can artificial intelligence ever capture human ingenuity? Are we approaching technological changes that will merge biological and non-biological intelligence, fuse the man-machine relationship, and blur the lines between reality and virtual reality?

We are! But these changes could also kill us all, if we aren’t extremely cautious and paranoid. Anyone who claims otherwise is a reckless utopian optimist.

Yes, AI will capture human ingenuity. That question is too easy. What does she think, it will capture creativity but never “ingenuity”? Gimme a break. Human brains are machines that work based on cause and effect, and reverse engineering is just around the corner. We may even determine how intelligence works based on studies in mathematical inference and statistics, and skip the computational neuroanatomy part entirely.

These Singularity predictions were welcomed by many transhumanists and post-human futurists in attendance, who seem to be working towards the ultimate goal of creating a utopia characterized by immortality, and which they postulate may be realized by “uploading” the content of one’s brain on to a computational substrate in order to exist in a non-corporeal form somewhere in cyberspace - where one could “live” forever.

You hit the nail on the head, sister. However, this isn’t necessarily a process we’d all want to jump into right away - it’s just nice to have the option. I might just want to just hang around as a human on a tropical island or space colony for a few decades - a human with the ability to fly and blow shit up with my eyes, of course.

For instance, if sentient life can exist in silicon substrates, could the Singularity bring about a “planned obsolescence” of humans as we exist today?

Well, yes. But let me remark that whether or not sentient life can exist in silicon is an independent issue of objective fact - the answer isn’t influenced by whether or not its truth value effects the possible future obsolescence of humans.

But the real answer of course is yes and yes. And to the second point, is that really a bad thing? We’ve been stuck at the same level for 50,000+ years, it’s time to move on. Do I really even have to argue this? Do any non-transhumanists even read this blog?

Perhaps, a transhumanist would find no need for religion in a world where we can upload ourselves into cyber-heaven. While some scientists may find religion a stagnating factor to technological progress, and while science and religion may arrive at conclusions about our human nature, Singularity enthusiasts and people of faith both share a strong and hopeful vision for the future of humanity - although the means by which this vision should become reality differs.

Yes, Christians predict that Jesus Christ will come out of the sky one day, millions will die or be sentenced to Hell during Apocalypse, angels will sing with blaring trumpets, and all those who are saved will go to live in New Jerusalem, a 1,500-mile long golden cube that will descend from the sky. Revelation, the Word of God, says so.

Singularity enthusiasts want to create Heaven in reality rather than in pretend-land, and do so through our own creations and hard work rather than through some fortuitous deus ex machina.

For more of my ramblings on the Singularity, go here.

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Fine, it’s somewhat funny. But it is still my opinion that television sucks.

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Excellent site for global visual data. Shown above is their pictoral representation of life expectancy in various countries.

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Did a podcast recently with Jonas Lamais of Singularity University. Here it is. It’s my first experience doing a podcast ever, so it’s definitely not perfect, but not horrible. Hopefully I will get better at this sort of thing as time goes on.

Topics discussed are the Lifeboat Foundation, existential risk, this blog, and the burgeoning Bay Area Transhumanist movement.

I answered the question about AI timeframes incorrectly. I was asked when it is important to start programming AIs for safety, and I misinterpreted that as a question about when human-equivalent AI would come about. It’s important to be thinking about how to program AIs for safety now, not later.

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What did you guys think?

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Today I have an excellent piece of work from Keith “Scientology-destroyer” Henson, entitled “Nanotechnology and Megascale Engineering”. The article was written in 1987 and was published in the Fall ‘90 issue of the now-defunct New Destinies magazine, “The paperback magazine of science fiction and speculative fact”. This article falls into the latter category. It is extremely far ahead of its time. It will still be another decade before the topics discussed in the article become mainstream. That works out to about thirty years ahead of its time, for those of you keeping track. Anyone talking about molecular manufacturing today is roughly a decade ahead of their time. This is maybe a couple thousand individuals only, most of them being within the transhumanist community, where even there they are a minority.

(I estimate that there are approximately 10,000 transhumanists worldwide, in the sense of people who label themselves as such, and perhaps 100,000 or more who hold many transhumanist ideas but don’t explicitly use that word to describe themselves.)

The article has never been put into proper HTML form. That is, until now. The formatting needs a bit of work, I’ll get around to it soon. A few topics touched on:

molecular design software
self-replicating assemblers
“growing” vast numbers of diamond armored tanks
material superabundance
complete restoration of the environment
tunnels through the Earth’s mantle
mining carbon from the air

If nanotechnology, space travel, or even just futurism in general interest you, read this excellent article. It takes about twenty minutes from start to finish. Similar to the length of time it would take to double our industrial capital base if we had molecular assemblers. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) I can’t believe the amount of vision in this article. Henson completely blows me away. Brings me back to my Tipler days. Back to early conversations with Eliezer “the sun is wasting electricity” Yudkowsky.

99.9% of futurists today are clueless about this stuff. The folks over at Institute for the Future, for example. They will be taken by surprise, just like everyone else, when nanotechnological fabricators start showing up on store shelves and influencing our lives profoundly.

Lest you think that these nanotechnological prognostications sound too good to be true, there are plenty of things which could break up the party, or destroy it entirely. The global hypsothermal limit, for instance, or a repressive totalitarian global regime, runaway arms race, or, most plausibly, the hard-takeoff of a superintelligence with a decidedly human-indifferent personal agenda.

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Popular Mechanics has an article on scientists searching for alien life. Pointless, pointless, pointless. To quote the words of a futurist who inspired me early on, Marshall T. Savage:

There is a program to actively search for signals from other civilizations in this galaxy: SETI. This is a noble cause, but it seems slightly absurd. Scientists huddle around radio telescopes listening intently to one star at a time for the sound of dripping water, when what they are seeking would sound like Niagara Falls. The most cursory radio snapshot of the sky should reveal K2 civilizations as clearly as the lights of great cities seen from orbit at night. That we don’t see any such radio beacons in the skies probably means there are no Kardashev Level Two civilizations in this galaxy.

Perhaps advanced civilizatons don’t use radio, or radar, or microwaves. Advanced technology can be invoked as an explanation for the absence of extra terrestrial radio signals. But it seems unlikely that their technology would leave no imprint anywhere in the electromagnetic spectrum. We have been compared to the aborigine who remains blissfully unaware of the storm of radio and TV saturating the airwaves around him. Presumably, the aliens use advanced means of communications which we cannot detect. What these means might be is, by definition, unknown, but they must be extremely exotic. We don’t detect K2 signals in the form of laser pulses, gamma rays, cosmic rays, or even neutrinos. Therefore, the aliens must use some system we haven’t even imagined.

This argument, appealing though it is, cannot survive contact with Occam’s razor - in this case Occam’s machete. The evidence in hand is simply nothing - no signals. To explain the absence of signals in the presence of aliens, demands recourse to what is essentially magic. Unfortunately, the iron laws of logic demand that we reject such wishful thinking in favor of the simplest explanation which fits the data: No signals; no aliens.

The skies are thunderous in their silence; the Moon eloquent in its blankness; the aliens are conclusive by their absence. The extraterrestrials aren’t here. They’ve never been here. They’re never coming here. They aren’t coming because they don’t exist. We are alone.

For a past post on the topic, see ‘Aliens - There are None’. Of course, there are plenty of alien apologists in the comments. In my experience, belief in aliens tends to be symptomatic of naive, television-and-movies-based SL2 futurism. Geoffrey Miller thinks that we haven’t met aliens because they’re all stuck in wirehead mode, but I’m skeptical. I also notice that it is right around the 10-year anniversary of the announcement of microfossils supposedly found in a Mars-originating meteorite. Of course, this turned out to just be mud.

My angle: if we want to see aliens, we’ll have to make them with our own hands.

Oh yeah, another thing. Anne C. released a podcast.

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I recently found an article on existential risks in the Guardian from about a year ago. Of course, the Martin Rees book is immediately cited as justification for running the piece. In the article, 10 risks are summarized and scientists are asked to give a paragraph or two of commentary. They are, in no particular order:

1: Climate Change
2: Telomere erosion
3: Viral Pandemic
4: Terrorism
5: Nuclear war
6: Meteorite impact
7: Robots taking over
8: Cosmic ray blast from exploding star
9: Super-volcanos
10: Earth swallowed by a black hole

The likelihood of many of the above risks was exaggerated in the piece. Climate change could be troublesome, but it operates over long timescales, and couldn’t possibly kill us all. Terrorism and nuclear war wouldn’t kill everyone. Telomere erosion is just silly. Large meteorite impacts, supervolcano explosions, and cosmic ray blasts all happen only once every few tens of millions of years, so I think we’re okay for now.

A viral pandemic is a serious risk, though not as great as some others. Getting killed by recursively self-improving robots/AI is probably the greatest risk to our future, and the most poorly understood (thanks to Hollywood and our innate tendency to anthropomorphize and mechanomorphize). The Earth getting swallowed by a black hole or stable strangelet generated in a particle accelerator is one of those wild cards. The Brookhaven study rates the probability as negligible, but other studies still encourage caution. Anthropic calculations by Max Tegmark and Nick Bostrom give an upper bound of once per 10^9 years for the occurrence of such disasters. It is true that extremely high-energy cosmic rays slam into the moon regularly without creating stable strangelets.

Risks they missed: deliberate or accidental misuse of nanotechnology, badly programmed superintelligence, genetically engineered pathogens, repressive totalitarian global regime, take-over by a transcending upload, or something unforseen. See the classic Bostrom paper on the issue here. For organizations working on comprehensive solutions to address global risk, see the Lifeboat Foundation and the Singularity Institute.

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The story of my virtual attendance at Transvision ‘06 got picked up by a small, online alternative weekly called the NY Inquirer. Go check it out here. In other news: supposedly Ray Kurzweil was on the Daily Show just the other day, but I’m afraid to watch. I heard it was a PR disaster. Anyway, here is a clip of the Inquirer piece to provide you with titillation:

I was pleasantly surprised at how interconnected the Second Life conference was with the real world. In the virtual conference room, there were dozens of seats. What began with only a few people ballooned, at times, with almost twenty virtual attendees.

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