Accelerating Future

I believe I found this graph on J. Storrs Hall’s website.

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Robin Hanson recently posted about The Road and cannibals, which is great, because I think about this stuff all the time, and it’s good not to be alone.

The Road is a movie/book about a man and his son traveling south to reach the coast of the Gulf of Mexico in a post-apocalyptic world where the Sun is blocked out by huge dust clouds, and there are no plants or other life except for a few refugees and murderous cannibals. I thought the book was OK because it gave a sneak preview at what daily life could be like when or if the United States gets hit by a massive EMP attack. (The human conflict and desperate lack of food part, not the blocking out the Sun part.)

Prof. Hanson remarks how some reviewers called the movie “realistic”, when it absolutely is not. The story takes place more than seven years after apocalypse, but there are a couple occasions where the characters stumble on stored food supplies, which doesn’t make sense to Hanson. Second, he points out that traveling in such a world would be totally suicidal. Third, the pair doesn’t try to ally with others to boost their strength. They run across neutral people throughout the story, but never team up with them. Fourth, if the apocalypse really destroyed the biosphere and most food sources, Hanson considers it unrealistic that people living primarily on cannibalism could last more than the seven years it takes for the child character to grow up. According to his calculations, you’d have to eat about a person every 47 days to get adequate nutrition.

Shockingly, many of Hanson’s commenters don’t agree with his points.

A particular comment concerned me a bit, about another post-apocalyptic book that is popular right now, One Second After:

I recently finished the book One Second After which took place in a small town after a nuclear bomb releasing electromagnetism is set off in the United States. They somewhat resorted to cannibalism in the book, at one point choosing to use all stray dogs as the next food source, and moving on to humans who had died. In this case, I found the book to be pretty realistic and very well thought out.

I find this comment problematic because the book isn’t realistic. As far as I can tell, the only contemporary author that gets the basics of a post-apocalypse or economic disaster scenario right is James Wesley Rawles. For all I know, he may be the only storyteller that ever even tries to get it right, because the other popular ones — On the Beach, Mad Max, Terminator IV, Lucifer’s Hammer, The Matrix, and all your other post-apocalyptic favorites — are just terribly unrealistic. The common thread in all of them is that life after the so-called apocalypse is unrealistically easy. This even includes the non-Hollywood tales that are ostensibly trying to be grittier and more realistic, like The Road. (The movie is mostly a faithful rendition of the book.)

If you’re looking for post-apocalyptic fiction, the only book that made any sense to me was Patriots by James Wesley Rawles. Perhaps because Rawles is actually a genuine survivalist, he cares to put the thought towards what a post-collapse society would really be like, while many other authors address it from more of a detached position. Thankfully, Patriots is extremely popular, and is doing a great deal to sew the seeds of resilience so that at least 50% of the population might survive an EMP attack. To quote John Robb, “Localize production. Virtualize everything else.”

I’d like to write a full review of One Second After, but it will take me a second.

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Special moves!

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See here. Really, this is exasperating. Wesley J. Smith wants so bad for humans to have a mystical power that he has to use an obvious hoax as evidence for his point.

Mr. Smith, perhaps for your next citation against scientific materialism and in favor of mystical, metaphysical human exceptionalism, you should go through back issues of Weekly World News.

Does Mr. Smith also believe in the mystical powers of holy Catholic relics such as the bones of saints or fragments of the “True Cross”?

For those who suggest that Smith is a marginal figure, be assured that he is not. He has debated Peter Singer on the issue of robot ethics, and co-authored books with Ralph Nader. My theory is that Mr. Smith would not really mind transhumanism and artificial intelligence so long as they did not inherently mock and contradict the religious view of Homo sapiens as a god-favored being. This is in contrast to some others who seem to detest the prospect of morphological freedom for its own sake.

Checking Wikipedia, apparently there is a connection between Catholic tradition and Hindu claims of inedia. It’s funny how the actions of deceptive people from over a thousand years ago now force a modern theo-pundit to dance an odd dance defending the phenomenon.

Like amor mundi, Mr. Smith’s Secondhand Smoke blog is a popular watering hole for anti-transhumanists. Here is one choice comment from a recent post:

Well i respect you highly wesley for standing up to the lies and criminal acts of transhumanism. You can consider me a loyal ally in this war against ray kurweil and his army of idiots. Anyone who believes immortality is a good idea or thinks we should do non-medical enhancement is my enemy. These people will destroy the world simply because they are afraid of death. Get ready for the transhuman eugenics war wesley its coming.

Sure sounds menacing to me! Aren’t eyeglasses, scopes, and caffeine non-medical enhancement?

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Robert Freitas alerts me to a new mechanosynthesis paper published by the Nanofactory Collaboration group in the Journal of Computational and Theoretical Nanoscience. Here’s some info:

Denis Tarasov, Natalia Akberova, Ekaterina Izotova, Diana Alisheva, Maksim Astafiev, Robert A. Freitas Jr., “Optimal Tooltip Trajectories in a Hydrogen Abstraction Tool Recharge Reaction Sequence for Positionally Controlled Diamond Mechanosynthesis,” J. Comput. Theor. Nanosci. 7(February 2010):325-353 [29 pages]

It is our first published paper with our Russian collaborators and is now available online. This paper represents the first extensive DMS (Diamond Mechno-Synthesis) tooltip trajectory analysis, examining a wide range of viable multiple degrees-of-freedom tooltip motions in 3D space that could be employed to recharge the hydrogen abstraction tool, a key reaction set in DMS.

Abstract:

The use of precisely applied mechanical forces to induce site-specific chemical transformations is called positional mechanosynthesis, and diamond is an important early target for achieving mechanosynthesis experimentally. A key step in diamond mechanosynthesis (DMS) employs an ethynyl-based hydrogen abstraction tool (HAbst) for the site-specific mechanical dehydrogenation of H-passivated diamond surfaces, creating an isolated radical site that can accept adatoms via radical-radical coupling in a subsequent positionally controlled reaction step. The abstraction tool, once used (HAbstH), must be recharged by removing the abstracted hydrogen atom from the tooltip, before the tool can be used again. This paper presents the first theoretical study of DMS tool-workpiece operating envelopes and optimal tooltip trajectories for any positionally controlled reaction sequence – and more specifically, one that may be used to recharge a spent hydrogen abstraction tool – during scanning-probe based ultrahigh-vacuum diamond mechanosynthesis. Trajectories were analyzed using Density Functional Theory (DFT) in PC-GAMESS at the B3LYP/6-311G(d,p) // B3LYP/3-21G(2d,p) level of theory. The results of this study help to define equipment and tooltip motion requirements that may be needed to execute the proposed reaction sequence experimentally and provide support for early developmental targets as part of a comprehensive near-term DMS implementation program.

So, what does it mean? Well, in the Freitas-Merkle mechanosynthetic tooltip design, there are three primary tasks for three primary tools — 1) abstracting (removing) hydrogen from a carbon surface (carbon surfaces tend to have a monoatomic layer of hydrogen), 2) placing a carbon dimer (C=C) on a hydrogen-free carbon surface, then 3) putting down a hydrogen to cover up the surface and prevent it from spontaneously rearranging itself or otherwise engaging in unwanted reactions. This paper zooms in on a specific part of tool #1, the “recharge sequence” portion, where the abstraction tool gets rid of the hydrogen it just grabbed from a surface and gets ready to grab again.

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The New Atlantis Futurisms blog posted a picture of Audrey Hepburn with the title, “Does Anybody Seriously Think We Can Do Better than This?” Here’s my response. You may have to read the comments thread to gain some background.

The reason that Hepburn seems so great to us is that we’re humans. If lizards could speak, then hundreds of millions of years before humanity, a lizard would be similarly impressed by an image of another, attractive lizard. Does that mean that Creation should have stopped at lizards?

Our evaluations of “goodness” are not objective truths, just subjective facts about the structure of our own minds. The opportunity to modify and enhance those minds will vastly increase the space of things we can understand and appreciate. This will allow us to create new forms of attractiveness and wonder that we lack the facilities to appreciate now.

I disagree with my colleague Eliezer Yudkowsky that civilizations elsewhere in the universe are doing “better” in any absolute sense because evaluations of “better” are necessarily mind-structure-contingent. Humans can arbitrarily define the status quo as the best there is, and who could argue with them? That’s their personal opinion.

However, for the vast majority of people, “better” would indeed include more than the species or technological status quo. Maybe Hepburn would have embraced transhumanism if she lived in a time when safe and beneficial body and brain self-modification and self-improvement were possible. Of course, even though I’m favor of morphological freedom (rather than the morphological fascism that I have to look and think a certain specific way, the way it’s been for over 200K years) doesn’t mean that I discourage people from rejecting transhumanism entirely and living only among other humans. (I do, however, think that children should be able to do what they want with themselves after a certain age, and I doubt that Christian conservative parents will be able to stop their curious and neophilic children from embracing transhumanist technologies.) Today, for instance, there are some people that only choose to live among their own race, for fear that race-mixing leads to irrevocable societal chaos. It is only natural to fear that species-mixing in a society could lead to problems, but I’ll bet that some combinations of species could lead to a harmonious equilibrium.

Yes, I went there, in comparing fear of intelligent-species-mixing with fear of race-mixing. I don’t mean to be demagogic by doing so, just to illustrate the point that there will always be a mix of people who are more into mixing with those unlike themselves and those less into it. We can push everyone to try and accept everyone, but in practice it doesn’t always work. Sometimes people just don’t like each other. This phenomenon can occur between two twins, two tribes, or two or more intelligent species. Conservatives seem to often believe in the hypothesis that we more we’re alike, the better we can get along. Liberals argue that we can get along despite our diversity. The truth, as usual, is somewhere in between.

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The Open Science Summit is being held at Berkeley on July 29-31. Here’s the description:

This summer, scientists, hackers, students, patients, and activists will convene to discuss the future of our science/technology paradigm. Topics include: Synthetic Biology, Gene Patents, Open Data, Open Access, Microfinance for Science, DIY science, DIY Biology, Alternative Funding for Science, Open Source Drugs, Patent Pools, Open Health/Medicine, Patient Advocacy for Innovation

Ready for a rapid, radical reboot of the global innovation system for a truly free and open 21st century knowledge economy? Join us at the first Open Science Summit, an attempt to gather all stakeholders who want to liberate our scientific and technological commons to enable an new era of decentralized, distributed innovation to solve humanity’s greatest challenges.

For more information, read their about page. Early registration, which ends June 1st, is just $60. After that it’s $100.

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Hod Lipson, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Michael Belfiore, and Cory Doctorow on an Ontario television station. From an event at the Perimeter Institute last October.

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There are still several job openings at Alcor, and qualified parties should consider applying. These openings include Chief Executive Officer, Technical Coordinator, and Readiness Coordinator at Alcor’s Scottsdale Facility. There is also a need for licensed paramedics and emergency medical technicians for contract work in California, Arizona, Florida, and Texas. Consider sending in your resume, and help contribute to an appreciative cryonics community.

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There is a story on Martine Rothblatt, a prominent transhumanist, in the most recent issue of Forbes magazine. It tells the story of how Martine transitioned from being a satellite company executive to a pharmaceutical executive to save her daughter from a rare disease.

Some of you may recall my liveblogging coverage from the 3rd annual Terasem Colloquium on the Law of Transbeman Persons and the 4th annual Terasem Colloquium on the Law of Futuristic Persons, which were hosted in Satellite Beach, Florida, by Martine and her wife Bina. These intimate gatherings gave me the opportunity to speak one-on-one with memorable characters such as Wendell Wallach, Marvin Minsky, and many others.

H/t to Robert Freitas for the link.

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I’m interested in the idea of how mainstream you can make a fringe subject before it loses its essence. Therefore, I really cracked up when I read the following Amazon reviews of Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life, by Neil Strauss, of The Game fame. Emergency is about Strauss’ superficial forays into survivalism. Apparently there are thousands of nerds that love this guy. Here’s one review, titled “A disappointment”:

I am a huge fan of Neil Strauss’ The Game. I expected this book to be an entertaining way to learn about a variety of hardcore survival techniques. It can be better characterized as a little p*ssy city-boy’s attempt to learn how to not die immediately when camping. He essentially just pays for a variety of classes, telling stories about this journey while imparting very little actual survival knowledge. This book will not save your life – I consider the subtitle highly misleading. I recommend instead the US Army Survival Manual (available for free online), the SAS Survival Manual, or anything written by James Wesley Rawles.

Another, “Perpetuating the fantasy of invulnerability”:

If you’ve read Strauss’ other popular book, The Game, this book will look very familiar to you. It is another first-hand story of his immersion into a life-course in survivalism. Like The Game it is filled with a tremendous amount of embellishment and self-aggrandizing statements. Strauss specializes in a kind of narcissistic cult-following. The book builds him up as a super-man and then promises others that feel inadequate that they too can join his unlimited-skills club. Unfortunately, as any intelligent person that doesn’t mindlessly absorb what someone tells them can see, this seeming reality is actually a fantasy. Emergency is interesting in its cursory overview of a variety of survival strategies. Will it save your life? Unlikely. Will it turn you into Jason Bourne? Definitely not. Will it turn you into a Jason Bourne-wannabe? Yes. And that basically is the essence of the book.

To me, this book seems to personify that concept of being enamored with the idea of something while explicitly not caring about its content. I wonder how many people there are who regard the Singularity in such a manner — it appears to be many.

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