Audio Interview with Singularity Weblog: “Singularity Without Compromise” Wednesday, Jun 30 2010 

Yesterday I spoke to Nikola Danaylov at the Singularity Weblog. The title of the podcast comes from a quote I made during the interview, when Nikola asked me whether or not he thought we would need to sacrifice aspects of our humanity to go through a Technological Singularity. My response was that if we do the Singularity right, we need not compromise in any fashion: human beings from techno-enthusiasts to the Amish will be enthusiastic with the results.

During the podcast, Nikola asked me what I thought humanity’s chance of surviving the Singularity would be, and I said that my current estimate was around 25%, but that could change depending on what happens, and how much effort is put towards a positive Singularity.

New Singularity Summit 2010 Banner Wednesday, Jun 30 2010 

Register today, before prices go up at midnight!

We still have discounted hotel rooms available, for $139/night instead of the usual $199.

Google Neglects Philanthropic Program Wednesday, Jun 30 2010 

Google… what the hell? I submitted some good ideas to that program.

Vatican Sees Immortalism as Competing Philosophy Tuesday, Jun 29 2010 

From the Pope’s April 3rd (“Holy Saturday”) address, via Aubrey:

An ancient Jewish legend from the apocryphal book “The life of Adam and Eve” recounts that, in his final illness, Adam sent his son Seth together with Eve into the region of Paradise to fetch the oil of mercy, so that he could be anointed with it and healed. The two of them went in search of the tree of life, and after much praying and weeping on their part, the Archangel Michael appeared to them, and told them they would not obtain the oil of the tree of mercy and that Adam would have to die. Later, Christian readers added a word of consolation to the Archangel’s message, to the effect that after 5,500 years the loving King, Christ, would come, the Son of God who would anoint all those who believe in him with the oil of his mercy. “The oil of mercy from eternity to eternity will be given to those who are reborn of water and the Holy Spirit. Then the Son of God, Christ, abounding in love, will descend into the depths of the earth and will lead your father into Paradise, to the tree of mercy.” This legend lays bare the whole of humanity’s anguish at the destiny of illness, pain and death that has been imposed upon us. Man’s resistance to death becomes evident: somewhere – people have constantly thought – there must be some cure for death. Sooner or later it should be possible to find the remedy not only for this or that illness, but for our ultimate destiny – for death itself. Surely the medicine of immortality must exist. Today too, the search for a source of healing continues. Modern medical science strives, if not exactly to exclude death, at least to eliminate as many as possible of its causes, to postpone it further and further, to prolong life more and more. But let us reflect for a moment: what would it really be like if we were to succeed, perhaps not in excluding death totally, but in postponing it indefinitely, in reaching an age of several hundred years? Would that be a good thing? Humanity would become extraordinarily old, there would be no more room for youth. Capacity for innovation would die, and endless life would be no paradise, if anything a condemnation. The true cure for death must be different. It cannot lead simply to an indefinite prolongation of this current life. It would have to transform our lives from within. It would need to create a new life within us, truly fit for eternity: it would need to transform us in such a way as not to come to an end with death, but only then to begin in fullness. What is new and exciting in the Christian message, in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, was and is that we are told: yes indeed, this cure for death, this true medicine of immortality, does exist. It has been found. It is within our reach. In baptism, this medicine is given to us. A new life begins in us, a life that matures in faith and is not extinguished by the death of the old life, but is only then fully revealed.

It’s been more than 5,500 years, and God never showed up, so now what? In fact, it’s been 200,000 years since the beginning of Mankind. God, maybe you’re a little bit late, don’t you think? Also, note how the Pope casually mentions Christian readers “(adding) a word of consolation” about an Archangel to the text, and refers to Apocrypha as theologically meaningful. Does making stuff up count as theologically significant if it was done far enough in the past?

The Pope asks, “Would that be a good thing?”, in reference to living hundreds of years. Well, the average human lifespan used to be around 20, and now it’s roughly four times longer, so is that a good thing? Why do people have to live so long? Why does your criticism of hundreds of years of life not apply to today’s elderly folks?

The Pope says, “Humanity would become extraordinarily old, there would be no more room for youth.” This isn’t so, because old people will modify their neurology to make it more fluid, like that of youth, in unprecedented combinations that retain executive maturity while allowing youthful creativity and flow. If we can heal neural aging, then it will only be a matter of time before we can heal the neural rigidity that causes fluid intelligence to decline after roughly the age of 30.

Never mind a brain with a hundred billions neurons, like we have now — we ought to have brains with tens of trillions of neurons, not necessarily even in the same place. Once we expand and distribute our cognitive architectures, our lives really will be eternal, unless we are pursued by those with the ability to truly snuff out every branch of our mental tree.

The Pope says, “Capacity for innovation would die, and endless life would be no paradise”, but wasn’t that the idea behind the imaginary Paradise that you believe in? Wouldn’t God grant us endless life? Why would we retain our capacity for innovation in Heaven but not on Earth? I suppose that Catholics believe that God will magically restore our capacity for innovation if we make it to Heaven, but why do you believe that magic can do it and science never can? The Bible barely even says anything about Heaven — for all we know, references to being closer to God after death are probably entirely metaphorical. The detailed descriptions of New Jerusalem are a joke, obviously made up by Bronze Age writers with Bronze Age beliefs. Does God really think that a city of gold would impress people in the 21st century? No, because God has never communicated with humanity outside from delusional human beings today and delusional human beings from the past whose stories got transcribed into “sacred texts”.

The Pope says, “Man’s resistance to death becomes evident: somewhere – people have constantly thought – there must be some cure for death.” He expresses uncertainty because he doesn’t want to say outright that indefinite life extension is possible, but he implicitly acknowledges that life extension into centuries is possible. I’m tired of accusations that mix together incredulity with a moral response — if the technology isn’t feasible, then it doesn’t deserve a moral response. If it is feasible, then it deserves a stronger moral response, immediately.

The Pope reveals Christian deathism when he says, “A new life begins in us, a life that matures in faith and is not extinguished by the death of the old life, but is only then fully revealed.” Please then — look forward to your death. A corpse is nothing but worm-food, unfortunately. When the neurons stop firing and start being consumed by bacteria, you die forever. Only a crude simulacra can ever be assembled thereafter.

Eternal life on Earth is not necessarily incompatible with Christianity. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that life extension is a bad thing. We’ve been “creating life” for centuries by creating new plants and animals for agriculture. Why didn’t the Church speak out against that? Because the Church is ultimately forced to approve what people want, and it has no guidance of its own, because God is nowhere to be seen, and his manifest absence makes communication quite difficult.

Even if God did exist, his lack of communication with us, and his alleged genocidal acts in the past, his threats of Hell condemn him as an evil being. If God did exist, we ought to defeat him. We need to grow up and make our own rules — not depend on an invisible and silent Bronze Age Hebrew deity.

Don Heathfield = Russian Spy? Tuesday, Jun 29 2010 

Today I got a call from the Boston Globe letting me know that a member of the Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board, “Don Heathfield”, is alleged t to be a Russian spy. What a surprise, huh? Naturally, I voted to remove him from the board.

The Lifeboat Foundation’s Scientific Advisory Board has 1,148 members. I guess this makes 1,147.

Zenit.org on Transhumanism Monday, Jun 28 2010 

Here’s the post:

WASHINGTON, DC, APRIL 21, 2010 (Zenit.org).- The ideas of the young international movement known as “transhumanism” are beginning to characterize the thinking of an increasing number of clinicians and bioethicists. I thought therefore that our readers might profit from a brief introduction to them.

From the “about us” page:

ZENIT is a non-profit international news agency comprising a team of professionals and volunteers who are convinced of the extraordinary richness of the Catholic Church’s message, particularly its social doctrine. The ZENIT team sees this message as a light for understanding today’s world.

At the same time, we are aware that this richness is little known in the information world. This motivates us to strive to bring this message to the Internet, in the greatest possible number of languages.

Our objective is to inform about the “world seen from Rome,” with professionalism and faithfulness to the truth. We aim to view the modern world through the messages of the Pope and the Holy See; tell about the happenings of the Church; and inform about the topics, debates and events that are especially interesting to Christians worldwide. ZENIT carries out this service independently.

So when is the Pope going to mention transhumanism himself?

Why Benford’s Law? Monday, Jun 28 2010 

Weird stuff, that Benford’s law. A new preprint has been published on the topic at arXiv, kickstarting an entertaining round of debate. Here’s the Wikipedia description:

Benford’s law, also called the first-digit law, states that in lists of numbers from many (but not all) real-life sources of data, the leading digit is distributed in a specific, non-uniform way. According to this law, the first digit is 1 almost one third of the time, and larger digits occur as the leading digit with lower and lower frequency, to the point where 9 as a first digit occurs less than one time in twenty. This distribution of first digits arises whenever a set of values has logarithms that are distributed uniformly, as is approximately the case with many measurements of real-world values.

This counter-intuitive result has been found to apply to a wide variety of data sets, including electricity bills, street addresses, stock prices, population numbers, death rates, lengths of rivers, physical and mathematical constants, and processes described by power laws (which are very common in nature). The result holds regardless of the base in which the numbers are expressed (except for trivial bases), although the exact proportions change.

The arXiv paper goes into what I would call “spooky territory”:

The occurrence of the nonzero leftmost digit, i.e., 1, 2, …, 9, of numbers from many real world sources is not uniformly distributed as one might naively expect, but instead, the nature favors smaller ones according to a logarithmic distribution, named Benford’s law. We investigate three kinds of widely used physical statistics, i.e., the Boltzmann-Gibbs (BG) distribution, the Fermi-Dirac (FD) distribution, and the Bose-Einstein (BE) distribution, and find that the BG and FD distributions both fluctuate slightly in a periodic manner around the Benford distribution with respect to the temperature of the system, while the BE distribution conforms to it exactly whatever the temperature is. Thus the Benford’s law seems to present a general pattern for physical statistics and might be even more fundamental and profound in nature. Furthermore, various elegant properties of Benford’s law, especially the mantissa distribution of data sets, are discussed.

I predict that Benford’s law will remain a mystery for a while. Either way, it lets us casually slice out a sizeable chunk of the probability space in predicting numerical distributions, conserving valuable mental energy.

H/t to Mike LaTorra on the Extropians list for the links.

Open Source Ecology: Replicable, Resilient, Post-Scarcity “Viral Villages” Monday, Jun 28 2010 

Marcin Jakubowski talks about Factor E Farm, Open Farm Tech, the Global Village Construction Set.

http://factorefarm.org/
http://openfarmtech.org/
http://openmanufacturing.org/

Haxxored Monday, Jun 28 2010 

Apparently my blog has been hacked, and some clever hackers are using it to sell Viagra and for other noble ends. In WordPress settings, I identified two admins that were not authorized to be admins, deleted them, and changed my password, but there could very well still be malicious code on my server.

Next, I will update to WordPress 3.0. That may make it more difficult for any malicious code to produce more automated posts. Let me know in the comments if you have any experience with WordPress exploit techniques.

Singularity Hub Posts About the Summit 2010 Monday, Jun 28 2010 

Singularity Hub, one of the best websites on the Internet for tech news (along with Next Big Future and KurzweilAI news) has posted a reminder on the upcoming Singularity Summit in San Francisco, and a promise that they will provide excellent coverage.

Register before July 1st, before the price goes up another $100! We also have a special block of discounted rooms at the Hyatt available — $130/night instead of the usual $200.

Sorry the Summit is $485 and will be $585 and then $685. We fly all the speakers out and cover all their expenses, there are twenty speakers, do the math. Profits from the Summit go to the Singularity Institute for our year-round operations and Visiting Fellows program, which provides us with a community of writers, speakers, and researchers to continue our Singularity effort until it is successful.

If you want to organize a cheaper annual event related to the Singularity, feel free to do so. We hold a workshop after the event for academics, so we get to tack on another event to maximize value and productivity for those who investigate the Singularity as part of their profession. I’m sure there will be plenty of informal “workshops” on the Saturday and Sunday after the talks in local bars and restaurants, in any case.

Remember — the Singularity is the most important issue facing humanity right now. If we don’t do what we can to ensure that it goes well for humanity, no one else will. We have a limited amount of time until the technological barriers between us and the Singularity collapse, and then intervention will be difficult if not impossible.

Nadrian Seeman Shares $1M Nanotech Prize Monday, Jun 28 2010 

Congratulations to Ned Seeman, who is sharing the $1 million Kavli Prize in nanoscience with IBM’s Don Eigler, who was behind the team that made the IBM logo in atoms. Seeman was awarded the prize for the discovery of structural DNA nanotechnology, in 1979 according to the Kavli website. Seeman has given presentations on DNA nanotechnology at the Foresight Institute conferences and at last year’s Singularity Summit, and recently made a major breakthrough in nanotechnology with a nanoscale assembly line.

I had the opportunity to meet Dr. Seeman at a Center for Responsible Nanotechnology conference in Tuscon in 2007. He was skeptical about the idea of achieving molecular manufacturing within the next couple decades.

Will macroscale molecular manufacturing be achieved by a structural DNA route, the “Tattoo Needle” architecture, the foldamer route, the Waldo route, the diamondoid route, or something else? That is the question all the cool kids are asking.

Patrick Lin in London Times: “The Reality of Robocops” Monday, Jun 28 2010 

Patrick Lin is spreading the valuable message of roboethics:

They have everything the modern policeman could need – apart from a code of ethics. Without that, a Pentagon adviser fears, the world could be entering an era where automotons pose a serious threat to humanity.

The robots need to be hack-proof to prevent perpetrators from turning them into criminals, and a code of ethical conduct must be agreed while the technology is nascent.

The article mentions that there are currently over 7 million robots in operation, about half of them cleaning floors.

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