Six legs, insect-inspired locomotion. By takram design.
Imagine building tens of thousands of these, equipping them with botulinum toxin darts and gecko feet, then airdropping them at random points on a battlefield. Better shoot ‘em all!
Give them the ability to burrow and self-replicate and then you have something like PKD’s “Screamers”.
H/t Pink Tentacle.
nanotechnology 1:18 pm
See the press release.
Looking at these reminds me of images my mind created when I first read Robert Bradbury’s paper on protein-based assembly of nanoscale parts.
Does this advance mean that MNT is imminent or inevitable? Not in the slightest. Humans were making complex structures out of macroscale metallic objects about 2,000 years ago, but we still haven’t created a self-replicating machine. Self-replicating nanoscale manipulators would be necessary to make MNT work, even if those manipulators only self-replicated as a large ensemble (like a blacksmith’s tools can self-replicate in aggregate and with human help).
futurism 12:25 pm
Often amusing and sometimes a little harsh, in the spirit of Fake Steve Jobs, there is a fake Ray Kurzweil on Twitter. Here’s a sample message (not “tweet”, that word makes me feel terribly nauseous):
Due to rampant use of neuromodulating nanobots, the Singularity Institute was ranked the number one party school in America this year
Wooo.
technology 2:38 pm
Every Web 2.0, open source enthusiast should be familiar with Andrew Keen’s critique of the “democratization” of media.
Here’s a video of Keen giving a talk at Google. Fast forward to 8:00 to start getting to the arguments.
“I don’t talk about the Italian sociologist Pareto in the book, but Pareto talks about an 80/20 rule. And I think I’m a follower of Pareto, in the sense that all systems tend to be dominated by 20% of the people who shape 80% of the content. I think that much is true for Web 2.0 and it’s true for traditional media. Only the new elite are anonymous. The new elites are the kids, the 20-somethings, who are shaping so-called wisdom of the crowd sites like Reddit and Digg.”
“We Twitter ourselves to death, and we use the Internet to tell the world what we had for breakfast, or what we watched on television. And that’s not valuable for ourselves, and it’s not valuable for any kind of collective conversation.”
As a big, big consumer of Web 2.0 media myself (my career has always been based on the web and producing and consuming content, and I participated in Wikipedia, social networking, and P2P image boards before they were fashionable), I am fascinated by a lucid critique of the unabashed utopianism surrounding the movement.
PS. This is the 1000th post on Accelerating Future, representing almost four years of blogging, which has included coverage in magazines (Psychology Today), television (G4.TV), and over five million visits.
futurism 3:22 pm
Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired magazine seems to be an expert in waxing worshipful of technology for its own sake (rather than for its instrumental value). It is modular, it is resilient, it is organic, it is self-reinforcing, etc, etc, etc. Everything is tending towards extropy. This perfectly demonstrates the sort of techno-optimism I am not in agreement with. Of course, being an advocate of the Singularity, many may incorrectly label me as being such a techno-optimist, and I actually used to be, until 2001 or thereabouts. Today, in interacting with the transhumanist community, I come into contact with many other techno-optimists that remind me of my pre-2001 naive technophilia. Eric Klien, President of the Lifeboat Foundation, calls a related phenomena the “Religion of Science”.
All it would take it one thermonuclear bomb detonated over the center of the continent and all our electronics would be fried, including the entire power grid and every vehicle, due to the EMP blast. One precisely engineered lethal plague could probably kill hundreds of millions of people worldwide, a possibility less likely than EMP in the immediate future, but an emerging threat in the next couple decades. Technology is extremely fragile, and so is the associated veneer of civilization, which only exists because of abundant food due to automated agriculture and a fragile web of manufacturing, packaging, distribution, and energy mechanisms. High technology is not a godlike disembodied force, it is a historically unique phenomenon that completely depends on an extensive foundation of trust, nation-level political organization, low-level technology, law, culture, and other aspects.
When I talk about the absoluteness with which I think it is plausible that a superintelligence might arise, acquiring practical power in excess of much or all of the human race within a relatively short period of time, I’m not being a technological determinist, because what I am talking about would be a mind, an agent, like a human being but with more cognitive capabilities. It’s like I’m saying “human ingenuity can overcome all obstacles” but what I’m actually saying is that “transhuman ingenuity will overcome human obstacles”, similar to the way that human ingenuity overcomes obstacles from all other animals, including chimps, dogs, and elephants. The last time we had a genuine animal-based obstacle that was a challenge to overcome is when the ancestors of Native Americans were making their way across Beringia and competing with cave hyenas for valuable warmth and food, about 16,500 years ago.
Kevin Kelly’s Panglossian optimism is exactly the type criticized in Nick Bostrom’s paper “The Future of Human Evolution”. Here’s the abstract:
Evolutionary development is sometimes thought of as exhibiting an inexorable trend towards higher, more complex, and normatively worthwhile forms of life. This paper explores some dystopian scenarios where freewheeling evolutionary developments, while continuing to produce complex and intelligent forms of organization, lead to the gradual elimination of all forms of being that we care about. We then consider how such catastrophic outcomes could be avoided and argue that under certain conditions the only possible remedy would be a globally coordinated policy to control human evolution by modifying the fitness function of future intelligent life forms.
Maybe Kevin Kelly’s Panglossian optimism has something to do with the fact that he is a “devout Christian” and probably believes that God has a basically extropic agenda for the world. I used to believe that when I was about 9. It takes a lot of the fear and uncertainty out of an otherwise human-indifferent universe.
technology 2:34 pm
From NICTA, Australia’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Centre of Excellence, the announcement of a major research breakthrough:
NICTA today announced the completion of the world’s first formal machine-checked proof of a general-purpose operating system kernel, promising safety-critical software of unprecedented levels of reliability.
There is now a way to mathematically prove that the software governing critical safety and security systems in aircraft and motor vehicles is free of a large class of errors – long before the plane takes off or the car’s engine starts.
The Secure Embedded L4 (seL4) microkernel, designed for real-world use, has potential applications in defence and other safety and security industries where the flawless operation of complex embedded systems is of critical importance.
“It is hard to comment on this achievement without resorting to clichés,” says Professor of Computational Logic at Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory, Lawrence C Paulson. “Proving the correctness of 7,500 lines of C code in an operating system’s kernel is a unique achievement, which should eventually lead to software that meets currently unimaginable standards of reliability.”
“Formal proofs for specific properties have been conducted for smaller kernels, but what we have done is a general, functional correctness proof which has never before been achieved for real-world, high-performance software of this complexity or size,” explains NICTA Principal Researcher Dr Gerwin Klein, who leads NICTA’s formal verification research team.
The proof also shows that many kinds of common attacks will not work on the seL4 kernel. For instance, the microkernel is impervious to buffer overflows, a common form of software attack where hackers take control of programs by injecting malicious code. “Our seL4 kernel cannot be subverted by this kind of attack,” says Dr Klein.
The outcome is the result of four years’ research by Dr Klein’s team of 12 NICTA researchers, NICTA/UNSW PhD students and UNSW contributed staff. They have successfully verified 7,500 lines of C code and proved over 10,000 intermediate theorems in over 200,000 lines of formal proof. The proof is machine-checked using the interactive theorem-proving program Isabelle. It is one of the largest machine-checked proofs ever done.
H/t to Mitchell Porter for the link.
humor 1:29 pm
life extension 4:56 pm
From Aubrey on Facebook:
Hi everyone,
My friend Steve Brown, a major SENS supporter who used to run Health Hero Network, is donating $10,000 to five charities on the basis of the number of comments they get at the site. Comment on SENS Foundation here:
Thanks!
Help SENS win by taking 10 seconds to comment on that thread. You too can help fund grad students obtaining soil samples from graveyards to find enzymes useful for dissolving amyloid plaques. (Seriously.)
Anna Salamon, one of the Singularity Institute’s brand new Research Fellows (along with Steven Rayhawk), will be giving two short talks at the upcoming Singularity Summit. I thought I would post her abstracts and bio here:
Anna Salamon is a Research Fellow at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Her work centers on analytical modeling of artificial intelligence risks and on probabilistic forecasting. She also serves as Director of the Institute’s Summer Fellows program. Previously, she conducted machine learning research at NASA Ames, and applied mathematics research at the Rohwer Phage Metagenomics lab.
Opening talk:
Shaping the intelligence explosion
How do you plan for a vast and unknown future? By seeking leverage: points from which you can see and address any threat, and from which you can see and reach out for any promise. Points that let you know what actions will bring what effects, and that let you know what effects you actually want.
Intelligence turns out to be the ultimate leverage. And while intelligence does not itself imply any specific goals, it turns out that one can build particular intelligent machines that have any particular goals stably built in — machines that can design smarter machines, that can design still smarter machines, while all the while optimizing for one fixed notion of “good”. This is what we mean by “shaping the intelligence explosion” — and it’s what the Singularity Institute is for.
Closing talk:
How much it matters to know what matters:
A back of the envelope calculation
How much time should you spend choosing your breakfast cereal? How about choosing your career, or your spouse? The mathematical concept of “value of information” describes the extent to which our decisions are likely to be better if we gather specific information before we act. In general, we can gain more of what we value if we focus research on decisions with high stakes and large but addressable unknowns.
The stakes around artificial intelligence are the entire world and its future. The unknowns are huge, and the avenues for reducing uncertainty are many. I’ll argue that makes such risk reduction one of history’s all-time best buys — better than purchasing Manhattan for beads or investing in Google at its inception. If your values are like most people’s, you may wish to take part.
~~~
Anna was in charge of the 2008 SIAI Summer Research Program, which I participated in, and the more recent 2009 Summer Research Program, still ongoing, which I’ve visited a couple times. We have spent many hours discussing topics as diverse as monocultured bananas to the probability of nuclear war. Here is a nice candid shot of Steve and Anna at the SIAI summer program house in Santa Clara:
Also worth noting is that Anna recently started a series of posts on Less Wrong that describes her and Steve’s attempt to solve Newcomb’s problem and build a better decision theory, which is crucial for any attempt at AGI.
images and singularity 2:31 pm
Here is a picture of Aubrey in a knitted hat, by Christopher Sykes. I am currently interviewing him for a piece on the Singularity for h+ magazine, so stay tuned.
humor and singularity 1:59 pm
Apparently they talked about the “Singularity” at Worldcon. Here’s the summary from Wired:
There was an interesting side discussion about an alternative form of “bootstrap singularity” where humans gradually modify themselves to a point of no-return, but at a pace that still allows the culture to maintain a sense of continuity of identity. Ideas about what type, rate and breadth of change would constitute a singularity were bandied about, leading one panelist to observe that that the singularity, like puberty, might only be recognized after it as happened. We will not see it coming.
I read several summaries of this that all basically said the same thing. I don’t have a transcript of what they said, so let me try to say it like they might have said it…
Lots of sci-books I have read and sci-movies I have seen have had enhanced humans as the protagonists, therefore enhanced humans will surely come about before weird enhanced networks of humans with brain-to-brain interfaces, artificial intelligences, or other exotic outcomes that are hard to write stories about or get nerds excited about. Because everything in the human world happens relatively gradually, we can expect that the Singularity will happen relatively gradually as well, as in the introduction of products like the iPod to the world population. Therefore, since everyone will have those products that make you superintelligent at roughly the same time, we won’t even notice it happened. Everything will be awesome and just like Accelerando by my favorite author Charles Stross. A Singularity that went too fast to preserve our continuity of identity as a culture would suck, therefore we will definitely make sure it doesn’t happen.
Did I get it about right? I hope so.
If a Singularity goes slowly, it will be because a singleton designed it that way.
