Accelerating Future

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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Go here for some interesting discussion on Ray Kurzweil’s vision of the future.

While he is a smart guy who knows his stuff there was something about the conversation and his book “The Singularity is Near” that bothered me.
Namely: He singled out the year of when the Singularity would occur. It seemed too T2 for me to take seriously. Still, an interesting guy with a lot of ideas.

After talking about this stuff with people for five years or so now, I have this little switch in my brain that automatically causes me to instantly ignore someone if they make even the slightest reference towards fiction, whether it be postive or negative.

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