singularity 1:52 pm
This SIAI supporter is challenging you to send him your old DVDs and videos, so he can sell them on eBay and contribute to the the matching challenge grant:
H/t Singularity Sunrise.
philosophy 7:42 pm
To gain the best possible perspective on any given situation or problem, one must be familiar with as many different views on it as are available. One must be familiar with all the background statistics, and related past cases. Jaynes writes:
One might argue that the simplest of all mental states also tend to be the most boring. I know that not everyone agrees on this, and the human brain provides a baseline dopamine dividend for any problem-solving activity, no matter how unidimensional. But most everyone would agree that the best expositions of science or math are peppered with intriguing analyses and comments, a la Feynman.
Even if you don’t believe that science and mathematics are boring, reading the necessary literature to thoroughly understand a situation or problem can be very time-consuming and challenging, if one has not had prior exposure to the field. It is expensive for the opportunity cost in economically productive work. It is complex due to the innate complexity of math and science.
For more on the idea that science is hard, see The Onion.
anthropics 5:16 am
It seems that math may be unreasonably effective for understanding the universe. Complex phenomena, simple rules.
The universe may be simpler than it looks. It may in fact contain almost no information. Tegmark and other physicists argue that the universe is isomorphic to a mathematical structure and we are currently uncovering all the information content incrementally. In this view, our mathematics is a mathematical structure approximating another mathematical structure, rather than a mathematical structure approximating a physical structure.
So the universe could be a simple mathematical structure with self-similarity on all scales, like a fractal. In the abstract to an aforelinked paper, Tegmark writes, “In this paper, it is suggested that most of this information is merely apparent, as seen from our subjective viewpoints, and that the algorithmic information content of the universe as a whole is close to zero.” So the universe’s mathematical simplicity can be reconciled with its apparent complexity from our point of view.
Many physicsts believe all possible universes exist. According to the teleological-sounding but theoretically elegant anthropic principle, only those universes which permit conscious observers to exist are observable. If our universe is indeed quite simple, it surely cannot be too simple, otherwise it would lack conscious observers to experience it. It would make much more sense if it were as simple as possible but still complex enough to harbor consciousness.
I reached this idea on my own some time ago, and it seems that a few others have also discovered it independently. A search for “simplest possible universe” brings up a mailing list post by Fred Chen, a page on anthropics without an author indicated, and a book, Theory of Nothing, by Russell K. Standish, an associate professor with the math department at the University of New South Wales. German AI researcher Jürgen Schmidhuber also addresses the issue here.
Two begging questions seem to come out of this idea. The first is that there must exist some absolute criteria for the development of self-aware consciousness, and that these criteria have, self-evidently, been satisfied in this universe - but what are they? With a sample set of one, it’s hard to tell. The second question is, “is there an underlying mechanism with its own internal complexity that generates universes?” If all types of universe are realized an infinite number of times, then why is it any more likely for any given sentient being to be born into a simple universe?
transhumanism 4:19 am
Many people may wonder how they can contribute to the loose coalition of people and organizations that is the transhumanist movement. Let me make a few suggestions.
1. Order and read transhumanist books, like Engines of Creation and The Singularity is Near. If you try to “get by” in transhumanist discussions having read nothing but magazine articles and news items, it will eventually become evident that your knowledge is relatively shallow and you aren’t contributing as much as you could be. The more everyone is familiar with the standard literature, the sooner enclaves of people can move on into discussing more advanced topics.
2. Join transhumanist organizations. The World Transhumanist Association, Immortality Institute, and Lifeboat Foundation all offer basic membership for yearly fees of $50 - $100. Organizations with more membership have more leverage. If enough people chip in, even a regular staff becomes affordable, lending the group a greater edge. If you’ve ever considered joining any of these organizations, ask yourself, “why not join right now?”
3. Network with other transhumanists: join Transhumanists.org. On average, transhumanists tend to be intelligent, well-educated, friendly people. Our intellectual output per capita is much higher than seen in most modern movements. Poke around the community and you’ll find that each individual brings a unique perspective: there are transhumanist writers, economists, programmers, physicists, artists, musicians, biologists, and many more. Reach out to them and it’ll be worth your while.
4. On the same note as above, attend transhumanist conferences! Transvision 2007 is happening next month in Chicago, for example, so I’ll see you there if you’re going. Attendees will include William Shatner, Ariana Huffington, Peter Diamandis, Aubrey de Grey, Ray Kurzweil, etc. Alcor also puts on transhumanist-oriented conferences, usually in Scottsdale, AZ, that I hear are good.
5. Start a transhumanist or futurist blog. One of the reasons that the Web 2.0 business blogs have such high Google and Technorati ratings is because so many of them exist and mutually link one another. Communities of similar size but somewhat less inclination to blog, say, environmentalists in general, are comparatively missing out on the Internet’s massive traffic. Why let it happen to us? Barry Mahfood, Tom McCabe, and the Singularity Institute have all recently started transhumanist-oriented blogs, make the next one yours!
nanotechnology 9:36 pm
(Image by John Burch of Lizard Fire Studios.)
Some nanotechnologists, such as Eric Drexler, believe molecular nanotechnology (MNT) and nanofactories are physically feasible. Others, such as George Whitesides, are skeptical. The UK’s “nano champion”, Richard Jones, lists six challenges for molecular nanotechnology in a blog post from two years ago:
1. Stability of nanoclusters and surface reconstruction. Surfaces have a tendency to “reconstruct” - seek out stable equilibria in ways not necessarily predicted by molecular dynamics simulations.
2. Thermal noise, Brownian motion and tolerance. Atoms on the nanoscale may be too wobbly to build complex machines out of. Drexler addressed this, but not in thorough detail.
3. Friction and energy dissipation. Surface area becomes much larger as machinery scales down, and high functional densities will give rise to high power densities in molecular machine systems. The friction and heat may be so intense that molecular machine systems cannot be reliably constructed.
4. Design for a motor. Richard is skeptical that the electrostatic motor as described in Drexler’s Nanosystems would actually work. More detail needs to be fleshed out and supported by experimental testing.
5. The eutactic environment and the feed-through problem. For MNT systems to work, they would need to operate in ultra-high vacuum. But, interacting with the outside, they’d be exposed to a very atomically messy environment. Valves and pumps need to be around 100% efficient to exclude foreign molecules.
6. Implementation path. How do we get there from here? If “soft” nanotechnology is all that works, how do we transition from there to hard?
These are all valid arguments, but some are a bit more interesting than others. To estimate them roughly in order of declining importance based on my own opinion, I’d list them as 3, 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6.
For 3 I definitely recommend taking a look at the full text as written by Dr. Jones. He anticipates a major issue in MNT machines will be energy leakage from the driving modes of a smaller machine to the larger vibrational modes of the structure it is embedded within. Jones writes, “MNT systems will have very large internal areas, and as they are envisaged as operating at very high power densities; thus even rather low values of friction may in practise compromise the operations of the devices by generating high levels of local heating which in turn will make any chemical stability issues (see challenge 1) much more serious.” To address this, power densities can merely be kept lower than the theoretical maximum - scaling laws would still allow the construction of MNT systems with much higher throughput and product customization performance than conventional factories.
1 has to do with surface stability of nanostructures. Part of the argument is that more careful quantum chemistry techniques should be used where mere molecular dynamics simulations are being used today. I’d don’t know much about the details of this issue so I won’t comment. More research is definitely needed.
2 is the thermal noise, Brownian motion, etc. As Jones mentions in his blog post, Drexler laid out a framework in Nanosystems to calculate the impact of thermal noise, which was used to estimate positional uncertainty at the tip of a molecular positioner. The uncertainty was found to be less than an atomic diameter, which is promising, but Jones would like to see simulations with more complex structures where both the positioners and their foundations are subjected to thermal noise and Brownian motion. Making serious progress on this will likely require hundreds or thousands of molecular engineer hobbyists, using programs like Nanorex’s NanoEngineer-1 to try out a wide range of possible designs and see what works. For a look at the work of someone already playing with a beta release of NanoEngineer, see the Machine Phase blog. The projects on this blog help you get a visual idea of the challenges in designing molecular machine components.
4 is the design for a motor. Drexler’s electrostatic motor needs to be thoroughly simulated with quantum chemistry techniques, and eventually, of course, experimentally tested. However, even if it doesn’t work out, some other power source will surely be devised. Even MNT motors using ATP as an energy currency would probably be able to achieve power densities far superior to today’s best manufacturing machinery, so I don’t think that the availability of a nanoscale electrostatic motor is a showstopping issue.
5, the concern with maintaining the molecular integrity (ultra-high-vacuum) of the MNT workspace, seems like one of the weakest challenges to me. If filters only work at 99% efficiency, say, then they can merely be daisy chained until the desired purities are achieved. Because these are nanoscale filters, they’d barely take up much space in comparison to the functional machinery. Also, there is no need for MNT machinery to interact directly with the chaotic external environment. Nanobots would be pretty poor at locomotion anyway. What we want is molecular manufacturing systems to build microbots stable in a variety of external environments. Most commonly-discussed MNT applications: nanoscale implants, utility fog, diamondoid products, etc., do not depend on autonomous nanoscale assemblers operating in messy surroundings. The delicate molecular machinery can be kept safe in an ultra-high vacuum, shielded by multiple layers of containment and filtering systems. Airlock-type systems can be used to extrude the product without permitting dust inside the factory.
6 is the least bothersome of all. If the potentially huge payoff of developing molecular machine systems becomes obvious to more people, then we will be able to afford to try out a very large number of different implementation paths. Technologies for viewing and manipulating the nanoscale are growing ever more accurate and inexpensive, so the right tools will be there, we just have to embed ourselves in the engineering challenges and see what works. Granted, a major implementation route holdup could delay progress for a decade or two, but much longer than that seems implausible - the number of possible routes is so large that it seems very likely one of them will work.
A more recent list of challenges can be found on the Nanofactory Collaboration site.
intelligence 4:40 am
Anthropologist Donald E. Brown’s landmark book Human Universals points out over 200 behavioral and cognitive features it is suspected are common to all human beings. The list is very instructive for thinking about this species that we so happen to have been born into, and how it might be different from future species we engineer or otherwise create. Here are a few of the more interesting ones:
See the full list here. Human cognitive biases may also be universal. Also related is the search for a list of inductive biases.
