Briefs and Such

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 …

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100th Post.

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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Move to Beautiful San Francisco

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 a dental office where she knew no one 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 …

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Legal gal at IBHF reviews SSS, Whines a Bit

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 …

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Podcast Ahoy!

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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Nanotechnology and Megascale Engineering

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 …

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Extraterrestrials – no.

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 …

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Existential Risks in the News

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 …

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More publicity around TV06

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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