J. Storrs Hall on Economic Growth Given Machine Intelligence

J. Storrs Hall read the recent Robin Hanson post on economics and machine intelligence. Here’s his suggestion:

It seems to me that one obvious way to ameliorate the impact of the AI/robotics revolution in the economic world, then, is simple: build robots whose cognitive architectures are enough different from humans that their relative skillfullness at various tasks will differ from ours. Then, even after they are actually better at everything than we are, the law of comparative advantage will still hold.

Boom, friendliness problem solved. Build robots with different cognitive architectures than us, and they will be forced to keep us around, due to Ricardo’s law of comparative advantage. Sounds wildly naive to me.

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Ford Debates Hanson on Economic Growth Given Machine Intelligence

Robin Hanson is debating some new guy (to me) who bills himself as a futurist-oriented economist, Martin Ford. They’re mostly debating Robin’s paper on Economic Growth Given Machine Intelligence. The debate began with a post by Ford, followed by a response by Robin, followed by Ford again.

I enjoy Hanson’s response, because he jabs at both sides (techies and economists), as he is often so willing to do.

How might a human-indifferent hard takeoff superintelligence relate to humans economically? You might regard it as a universal hostile takeover of all our atoms.

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HoweStreet.com — Doug Casey on Technology

HoweStreet.com, an investing information site, has an interesting interview up with Doug Casey, Chairman of Casey Research. Casey tries to think in the truly long term, thousands of years into the past and hundreds into the future, which, being both a futurist and aficionado of history and paleontology, I really enjoy. Here’s a quote:

My friend Jim Von Ehr, CEO of Zyvex, a nanotech instrument company, once told me that some of the most valuable land in the future would be the sites of old landfills, because they are basically mountains of purified materials. Once you can reduce matter into its component atoms and make new things with it, such places, packed with high concentrations of useful atoms, will command a premium. In the future, there will be no such thing as trash. So, this bearish trend on commodities you speak of isn’t really a bearish trend at all; it’s a bullish trend in technology.

Continue.

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Behold… the Mighty Naked Mole Rats!

Naked mole rats may be ugly, but they have an advantage — you can get cancer, and they can’t. Naked mole rats are the only known cancerless animal. Scientists have found that there is a very straightforward and interesting reason why. From the press release:

Despite a 30-year lifespan that gives ample time for cells to grow cancerous, a small rodent species called a naked mole rat has never been found with tumors of any kind—and now biologists at the University of Rochester think they know why.

The findings, presented in today’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that the mole rat’s cells express a gene called p16 that makes the cells “claustrophobic,” stopping the cells’ proliferation when too many of them crowd together, cutting off runaway growth before it can start. The effect of p16 is so pronounced that when researchers mutated the cells to induce a tumor, the cells’ growth barely changed, whereas regular mouse cells became fully cancerous.

“We think we’ve found the reason these mole rats don’t get …

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RepRap “Mendel” to be Released Soon!

There is lots of great activity happening at RepRap, with its superlative slogan, “wealth without money”. The big news lately is the upcoming release of “RepRap II”, also called Mendel. The first was Darwin. Here is a video of Mendel’s first print:

Mendel’s first print from Rep Rap on Vimeo.

The cost for the parts to build Mendel is approximately £395. However, it can self-replicate. Here’s a description of the improvements of Mendel over Darwin:

Mendel’s improvements over Darwin from Rep Rap on Vimeo.

And finally, here is a video of the 4-machine “RepRap Factory”, which consists solely of machines dedicated to building parts for other machines:

Multiple RepRaps from Rep Rap on Vimeo.

Congratulations to everyone at RepRap on their work.

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Ray Kurzweil Wins 2009 Economist Innovation Award

Congratulations to Ray Kurzweil for winning the 2009 Economist Innovation Award in the category of Computing and Telecommunication for his optical character recognition and speech recognition technology. Kurzweil wins a lot of awards, but this one is particularly distinctive. Here is the press release and the full announcement.

Craig Venter and Mark Zuckerberg also won awards in different categories.

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Another Intelligence-Enhanced Rodent, Hobbie-J

From ScienceDaily:

Over-expressing a gene that lets brain cells communicate just a fraction of a second longer makes a smarter rat, report researchers from the Medical College of Georgia and East China Normal University.

Dubbed Hobbie-J after a smart rat that stars in a Chinese cartoon book, the transgenic rat was able to remember novel objects, such as a toy she played with, three times longer than the average Long Evans female rat, which is considered the smartest rat strain. Hobbie-J was much better at more complex tasks as well, such as remembering which path she last traveled to find a chocolate treat.

One simple modification, three times longer memory plus a problem-solving ability boost. People underestimate the potential value of intelligence enhancement in humans because what they expect are just smarter humans, not humans that are smarter than any human that ever lived. Because the potential range of technological modifications is much larger than the range of natural variations, it’s likely we’ll eventually get smarter-than-human intelligence without even really trying, as long as we try out enough …

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Machinarium Trailer

This looks like an interesting game, at least from an artistic/ambient/immersive point of view. There is also a cool gallery, a demo, and an extremely positive review at Destructoid. Myself, I tend to like games with a little more insanity, like RPGs where my party gets summarily murdered if it takes two steps in the wrong direction, but this looks like a nice game to play if one wants to calm down and enjoy some frustrating puzzles.

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Answering Popular Science’s 10 Questions on the Singularity

I thought I would answer the 10 questions posed by Popular Science on the Singularity.

Q. Is there just one kind of consciousness or intelligence?

A. It depends entirely on how you define them. If you define intelligence using what I consider the most simple and reasonable definition, Ben Goertzel’s, “achieving complex goals in complex environments”, then there is only one kind, because the definition is broad enough to encompass all varieties. My view is that this question is a red herring. The theory of “multiple intelligences”, presented by Howard Gardner in 1983, doesn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny. Most people who study intelligence consider the theory empirically unsupported in the extreme, and the multiple intelligences predictably useful only insofar as they correlate with g, which just provides more support for a single type of intelligence. The theory is merely an attempt to avoid having some people labeled lower in general intelligence than others. In terms of predictive value, IQ and other g-weighted measures blow away the multiple intelligences theory. Instead of …

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Erythropoietin Boosts Brainpower

From PhysOrg:

Healthy young mice treated with erythropoietin show lasting improved performance in learning and other higher brain functions. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Biology tested the cognitive effects of the growth factor, finding that it improved the sequential learning and memory components of a complex long-term cognitive task.

Hannelore Ehrenreich led a team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Experimental Medicine in Göttingen, Germany, who studied the mice. She said, “Erythropoietin has been in clinical use for over 20 years to treat patients with anemic conditions, ranging from renal failure to cancer. It has recently received attention for its apparent ability to improve cognitive function in people with schizophrenia and multiple sclerosis. Here, we sought to investigate erythropoietin’s effects in healthy mice”.

Good job, Max Planck Institute.

Ebay version: A+++!!! Would read again!!!!

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The Connection Between Stimuli and Pleasure/Pain is Arbitrary, an Objective Fact that Has Relatively Little to Do with One’s Personal Tech Habits

My thoughts on sex after the Singularity were picked up by a blogger on CNET, Chris Matyszczyk, so I thought I’d react a little bit. He writes:

Indeed, Retrevo’s findings are so disturbing that I wonder whether the roboticists are right to suggest that sex should be a matter of adjusting one’s own chemistry rather than attempting to consort with another human. To wit, in the words of blogger Michael Anissimov, one of the “leading thinkers in the radical tech community” who were invited to pontificate in the lustrous pages of H Plus magazine: “The connection between certain activities and the sensation of pleasure lies entirely in our cognitive architecture, which we will eventually manipulate at will.”

I am haunted by the drastic prognostications by the salivators over The Singularity about the future of sex. Indeed, some words of Anissimov are rattling around my head like those of a particularly angry former lover. Speaking of this beautiful future, he said: “I could make any experience in the world highly pleasurable or highly displeasurable. I could make …

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