William Andregg of Halcyon Molecular on Ending Aging
Want genius immortalists? Here's one.
TechCrunch: How long do you want to live?
William: Millions, billions, hundreds of billions of years.
Go, Diarrhea Bot!
The "Chron", as my grandfather likes to call it (SF Chronicle) has picked up the exciting robot story of the hour... diarrhea-bot, as its creators have affectionately nicknamed it. Here's the summary from the original press release:
(PhysOrg.com) -- UK researchers have developed an autonomous robot with an artificial gut that enables it to fuel itself by eating and excreting. The robot is the first bot powered by biomass to be demonstrated operating without assistance for several days. Being self-sustaining would enable robots of the future to function unaided for long periods.
The robot, the Ecobot III, was developed by researchers at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory and will be presented at the Artificial Life conference in Denmark in August. The robot eats meals of partially processed sewage, using the nutrients within the mash for fuel and excreting the remains. It also drinks water to maintain power generation.
The robot navigates towards a dispenser filled with the nutrient-rich mixture and "eats" what it needs. The meal is then processed in the robot's body by bacteria held in a stack of two tiers, each with 24 microbial fuel cells (MFCs).
And, the "money quote":
Director of Bristol Robotics Laboratory, Chris Melhuish, said MFCs had been tried before but an artificial gut was needed to solve the problem of previous models, which was that humans had to clean up the waste left by bacterial digestion. Melhuish said the robot was called Ecobot III, but admitted “diarrhea-bot would be more appropriate, as it’s not exactly knocking out rabbit pellets.â€
I kid, but I really think this is a terribly important milestone. It's only a matter of time until we build indefinitely autonomous robots, and from there, to indefinitely autonomous self-replicating robots. They will have few natural predators because they will lack meat, though some robots may eventually synthesize artificial muscles out of organics. Hopefully, molecular nanotechnology would be required before journeying too far down this pathway.
How much more energetic autonomy (and otherwise) will be required before pundits take the issue seriously, instead of treating it like a joke?
New Scientist: Pack Animals as Tightly as Possible — For the *Environment*!
The latest New Scientist features a horrifying article that tacitly encourages the practice of factory farming.
Under this scenario, the goal will have to be producing the most meat at the lowest environmental cost. That means fewer free-range cattle and sheep grazing in bucolic pastures and more animals, especially chickens, packed into feedlots or high-density enclosures. "If you're going to keep some livestock systems, I think the ones you'll want to keep are the intensive ones," says Walter Falcon, an agricultural economist at Stanford University in California.
That's because pasture grazing is inherently inefficient. Animals burn large amounts of energy roaming about the landscape feeding on relatively indigestible grasses. They grow more slowly than feedlot animals and, as a result, emit more methane over their lifetime. A beef cow in a US pasture, for example, emits 50 kilograms of methane per year, compared with just 26 kilograms in a feedlot, according to Livestock's Long Shadow.
But even a feedlot cow is a much less efficient meat producer than an industrial pig or chicken. While these eat a largely grain-based diet and thus compete directly with humans for food, they are relatively good at converting feed into flesh while producing little or no methane. This keeps their environmental cost down: a kilogram of industrial chicken meat represents greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to just 3.6 kilograms of CO2; a kilogram of pork, 11.2 kilograms; and a kilogram of beef, 28.1 kilograms, according to an analysis by Bo Weidema of sustainable development consultancy 2.-0 LCA based in Aalborg, Denmark.
Of course, such intensive operations cause other problems as well, notably the disposal of large amounts of manure. In theory - and increasingly in practice - much of this manure could be used to generate biogas and subsequently electricity
I can understand arguing that vegetarianism is not as "environmental" as non-vegetarianism, sure. But I think this article crosses the line into active advocacy of this new "more pain, for the environment!" concept.
Save the environment by making animals' lives miserable on a new and grander scale? Aren't animals part of the environment, too? Isn't factory farming incredibly terrible for animals?
This Abstruse Goose comes to mind.
Seriously, New Scientist. What is wrong with you?
Simplified Humanism, Positive Futurism & How to Prevent the Universe From Being Turned Into Paper Clips
I recently interviewed Eliezer Yudkowsky for the reboot of h+ magazine, which is scaling down from being a magazine into a community blog of sorts.
The interview is a good primer for what the Singularity Institute is about and the basic rationales behind some of our research choices, like focusing on decision theory. This is a good interview to read especially for those not entirely familiar with the research of the Singularity Institute. It can also be used to promote the Singularity Summit, so please share the link!
Here are the questions I asked Eliezer:
1. Hi Eliezer. What do you do at the Singularity Institute?
2. What are you going to talk about this time at Singularity Summit?
3. Some people consider "rationality" to be an uptight and boring intellectual quality to have, indicative of a lack of spontaneity, for instance. Does your definition of "rationality" match the common definition, or is it something else? Why should we bother to be rational?
4. In your recent work over the last few years, you've chosen to focus on decision theory, which seems to be a substantially different approach than much of the Artificial Intelligence mainstream, which seems to be more interested in machine learning, expert systems, neural nets, Bayes nets, and the like. Why decision theory?
5. What do you mean by Friendly AI?
6. What makes you think it would be possible to program an AI that can self-modify and would still retain its original desires? Why would we even want such an AI?
7. How does your rationality writing relate to your Artificial Intelligence work?
8. The Singularity Institute turned ten years old in June. Has the organization grown in the way you envisioned it would since its founding? Are you happy with where the Institute is today?
Singularity Institute Call for Volunteers
Singularity Institute growth is accelerating rapidly this year, so consider joining us on our exciting mission to mitigate human extinction risk, especially from human-indifferent self-improving superintelligence. The sooner we get started, the less hassle it will be later, so help now.
Cross-posted from SIAI blog.
~~~~~~
Are you interested in reducing existential risk? Are you a student who wants to donate to existential risk reduction, but doesn't have any money? Are you a past or present Visiting Fellow applicant? Do you want to apply to the Visiting Fellows program, but can't take time off work or school? If the answer to any one of these questions is yes, you should join the Singularity Institute Volunteer Program. The Singularity Institute is looking for volunteers to do things like:
- Review and proofread SIAI publications.
- Promote SIAI sites like singinst.org and lesswrong.com.
- Contribute content to the SIAI Blog.
- Create online videos or other digital content.
- Organize monthly dinner parties to cultivate new supporters.
- Translate SIAI webpages into other languages, e.g. French, German, Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish, etc.
- Contribute to the collaborative rationality blog Less Wrong.
- Host a Less Wrong meetup, or remind organizers to host them.
Requirements for volunteers are fairly minimal, but you must be able to:
- Read and write English on a basic or higher level
- Complete tasks reliably with minimal supervision
- Stick to deadlines, and let us know if you can't meet them
Additional skills, like programming, ability to write well, foreign languages, math talent, etc. are a definite plus. If you are interested, please shoot us an email with a brief summary of who you are, what your interests and skills are and how you'd like to help.
If you want to contribute, but don't know how you can help, please email SIAI Volunteer Coordinator Louie Helm at louie.helm@singinst.org.
If you already have a project or projects that you think might be relevant to reducing existential risks, please email SIAI Visiting Fellow Thomas McCabe at tom.mccabe@singinst.org.
Apply today!
Anti-Aging/X-Risk/AGI Proposals in Top Ten at PCAST
About 35 people voted for the two proposals yesterday, bringing the AGI/x-risk and anti-aging proposals to Rank #4 and #6 respectively. This is not bad, but we should do better, logging at least two hundred votes for each of these proposals. While we're at it, why not throw in this proposal to protect the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse attack?
Currently there is not a lot of competition for these three proposals. Based on my current understanding, the biggest risk for which there is currently substantial evidence for the imminent danger of is EMP. EMP is probably the most radical risk the government could actually bring itself focus on here in 2010, so I think it's definitely worth voting for the more precise "EMP attack" in addition to the existential risks in general proposal.
Let's show the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology that these initiatives are important to us and have strong grassroots support.
Register and vote now! Share this link on Facebook!
The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology is Soliciting Ideas
Cross-posted from Less Wrong.
The question that the ideas are supposed to be in response to is:
What are the critical infrastructures that only government can help provide that are needed to enable creation of new biotechnology, nanotechnology, and information technology products and innovations -- a technological congruence that we have been calling the “Golden Triangle" -- that will lead to new jobs and greater GDP?"
Here are links to some proposed ideas that you should vote for, assuming you agree with them. You do have to register to vote, but the email confirmation arrives right away and it shouldn't take much more than two minutes of your time altogether. Why should you do this? The top voted ideas from this request for ideas will be seen by some of the top decision makers in the USA. They probably won't do anything like immediately convene a presidential panel on AGI, but we are letting them know that these things are really important.
Research the primary cause of degenerative diseases: aging / biological senescence
Establish a Permanent Panel or Program to Address Global Catastrophic Risks, Including AGI
With only 18 and 14 votes respectively, these proposals are already ranked #27 and #41. Vote to push these proposals into the top five, it shouldn't be hard!
Assorted Items July 12th, 2010
Here is a roundup of recent interesting items.
Stratfor: The Caucasus Cauldron
"Of all the regions of the world, this one is among the most potentially explosive. It is the most likely to draw in major powers and the most likely to involve the United States. It is quiet now — but like the Balkans in 1990, quiet does not necessarily reassure any of the players."
Bina48 was in the New York Times, as you may have heard. I previously attended a mock trial where the fictional AI Bina48 was seeking asylum as a sovereign individual from the company that created her, Exabit. This new robotic Bina48 was created by David Hanson of Hanson Robotics. Hanson will be speaking at the upcoming Singularity Summit 2010 in San Francisco. Politics Daily also has a post reacting to Bina48. A local Vermont news station has more quotes.
Discover has coverage of a recent breakthrough in tooth regeneration gel.
Beverly Nuckols at the Texas GOP blog has somewhat of an odd response to Ron Bailey. She is responding to Bailey's quote where he said:
I ended by explaining that as a minority preference (at least for now) transhumanists must argue for liberty and not be seduced by democratic happy-talk. When people of good will deeply disagree on moral issues that don't involve the prevention of force or fraud, it is a fraught exercise to submit their disagreement to a panel of political appointees or a democratic vote. That way leads to intolerance, repression, and social conflict.
I definitely agree with this on a certain level. I feel we are living in a nanny state that facilitates increasing self-domestication of the human species. The book The Ten Thousand Year Explosion also has more great material on this hypothesis. When social conformism becomes such a powerful selection pressure in the cultural development of the species, we have to step back and reevaluate what we are becoming. My experience in school in a suburb of San Francisco (Burlingame) led me to believe that I was being conditioned to be an mindlessly obedient white-collar wage slave. I'm sure it is worse in many places in the US and around the world.
The Guardian has a new article out on Edward Cope, the UC Santa Cruz professor who is creating an Artificial Intelligence that writes moving pieces of classic music. A student at UC Santa Cruz told me that he is the only professor he knows of who can elicit a standing ovation from his students after a lecture.
ZDNet has coverage of Wendell Wallach's recent keynote at the World Futurist Society conference, "Navigating the Future: Moral Machines, Techno Sapiens, and the Singularity". You may recognize the image from his title slide as from a blog post of mine on cybernetic upgrades. I found that image unattributed on an image board.
Here's an article on using narrow AI in improving team sports.
Vote on these proposals to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, please. I will provide more info in my next post.
There's been a variety of exciting materials science and nanotechnology-related news from Nanowerk in the last week or two. There's been a breakthrough in printable conductive ink that requires no secondary curing (good news for personal fabrication), asymmetric nanostructures to diagnose the early signs of cancer (the key to curing cancer will be detecting it early), self-assembling nanodevices that move and change shape on demand, and coverage of a recent nanoscale photography competition. The most exciting piece of news from there recently, however, have to do with the development of a new superhard, superconducting material, BC5, a type of boron-doped diamond. Here's the first paragraph of the press release:
What could be better than diamond when it comes to a superhard material for electronics under extreme thermal and pressure conditions? Quite possibly BC5, a diamond-like material with an extremely high boron content that offers exceptional hardness and resistance to fracture, but unlike diamond, it is a superconductor rather than an insulator. A research team in China studying BC5 describes its potential in the Journal of Applied Physics, which is published by the American Institute of Physics (AIP).
An intertwined matrix of diamond and BC5 could provide the ultimate raw materials for rugged, miniaturized electronics. All of our electronic devices today are extremely fragile relative to what they could be. In the not-too-distant future, it may be possible to gently dunk our smartphones and laptops into salt water, lemon juice, whatever, and pull them right out and keep using them as if nothing happened. I want a laptop I can throw across the room without breaking it.
There was also recent news on using boron nanowire in body armor, including armor as thin as a T-shirt. Does anyone know if a boron carbide-reinforced T-shirt would stop, say, pistol bullets? I'm sure all the relevant numbers to make that calculation are out there. Carbon and boron -- a match made in material science Heaven?
In a recent post responding to the NYT article about him and his wife, Robin Hanson said, in referring to the opposition to cryonics in the comments of that article:
It seems clear to me that opposition is driven by the possibility that it might actually work. If people were sure it wouldn’t work there’d be no point in talking about selfishness, immortality, etc. If the main issue were a waste of money we’d see an entirely different reaction.
Most of the public appears to see radical life extension and cryonics as potentially workable, just morally troubling. It seems to me that fear over life extension tends to diminish when one's own life and health are put at risk, for all but the most dedicated paleo-conservatives.
Singularity Hub has good coverage of the recent lung-on-a-chip news.
Also: recently I've been kicking around the idea of doing a shared transhumanist/futurist blog, let me know if you'd be interested in contributing or could help with the IT side of things. Something that focuses on the same wide range of issues as Accelerating Future, and includes a mix of news and opinion, but has more people than just me. Especially get in touch with me if you are in the San Francisco area and want to help. My email can be found by clicking on my portrait in the lower left section of this site's sidebar. If you're interested, respond with an email, not in the comments. Thanks.
New York Times Features Robin Hanson and the “Hostile Wife Phenomenon” in Cryonics
I really didn't think the mainstream could possibly care much about this issue, but the New York Times seems to be jumping all over our small community, so now we get the amusement of seeing our internal issues get hashed out in front of everyone. Yay.
From "Until Cryonics Do Us Part":
Robin is the kind of nerd who is very excited about the future, an orientation evident on his C.V., which lists published articles like “Economic Growth Given Machine Intelligence†(on why robots will give us growth rates “an order of magnitude†higher than we’ve currently got), “Burning the Cosmic Commons: Evolutionary Strategies of Interstellar Colonization†(on what behaviors we can expect from extraterrestrials) and “Drift-Diffusion in Mangled Worlds Quantum Mechanics†(it’s very complicated). His enthusiasm is evident in the way he talks about these ideas, hands in the air, laughing amiably every time he brings up the distance between his own theories and those of the mainstream. If he is in a chair, the chair is moving with him.
Nice personality profile. I noticed that there was one glaring error in the article regarding the process of cryonics... it claims that your brain is surgically removed after metabolism ceases, but it's really the head. This is an important distinction. You'd think that reporters writing an article on cryonics would at least read the damn Alcor web page for ten minutes and get that right.
The original paper, "Is That What Love is? The Hostile Wife Phenomenon in Cryonics" goes into more depth if you're interested. My explanation for the phenomenon is pretty simple: gender differences in enthusiasm towards science. I predict that more women will come to appreciate science when more technologies are developed that focus on the empathic nuances of human communication. We already see this to some extent with things like SecondLife, though that may be a bad example due to its particular idiosyncrasies. If you disagree with me, feel free to say so in the comments, but please hold the accusations of sexism (towards me or otherwise), as that will poison any opportunity for actual discussion.
Yes, I know it's verboten to ever mention any differences between men and women, but keep in mind that many of the differences have to do with attitudes that are only skin-deep, and more or less chosen. (Though there are definitely differences that seem to center around the specific adaptive problems men and women were invented by evolution to solve.) I think that the only way gender relations can be improved is by analyzing the differences between (the average of) men and (the average of) women and trying to reconcile them, rather than ignoring said differences.
Anyway, for Robin Hanson's personal justification of why he thinks being frozen and eventually uploaded will work, see "Philosophy Kills".
Neil S. Greenspan: Hogwash About the Singularity is Here
Huffington Post has had a lot of articles about the Singularity lately. The most recent one is "Hogwash About the Singularity is Here" by Neil S. Greenspan, a Cleveland immunologist.
The article puts forward the usual "complexity of biology" and "exponential growth cannot continue forever" criticisms of Kurzweil's predictions. Most of these criticisms have already been addressed by Kurzweil at the end of his last book. I think there are good points on both sides, but critics like Greenspan are ultimately being too pessimistic.
What I find interesting in articles like this are not the specific criticisms, which I've heard many times before and somewhat agree with, but the moral valence and indignation present in the critique. Biologists like Greenspan are angry that Kurzweil is, in their view, glossing over the complexity of biology. The most morally valent part of the article are the comments, actually. I'm going to skip looking at the moral part this time, and look closer at a scientific statement that Greenspan makes.
Greenspan goes directly after "nanobots" in one part:
There is no basis at present for believing that medical interventions based on the postulated but not-yet-realized nanobots, often-invoked by Singularity enthusiasts for the resolution of all medical threats and malfunctions, will perform their duties without trade-offs and side-effects like those associated with every other therapeutic agent ever employed.
One could argue this, but I'll bet that the reason why Greenspan sees "no basis" is that he knows next to nothing about the postulated "nanobots" he is criticizing. Note how his argument is based simply on the generalization that there are "trade-offs and side-effects" with every therapeutic agent. This is true, but trivial. Some of the trade-offs are quite modest. Am I really trading much by letting my skin get pricked by a needle to inoculate me against a deadly disease? Is the recent rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria really all that huge of a price to pay given the suffering that antibiotics have alleviated in the more than half-century since they started to be mass produced? Is using a condom for casual sex really that much of a bad tradeoff, given what our ancestors had to deal with without them?
I'm not going after the specific content of Greenspan's criticism here so much as the worldview it represents: that things will always be roughly the same in medicine as they are now. That's the default view of the future of medicine that non-specialists, like elementary school teachers, conveyed to me while I was growing up. Fortunately, I eventually met people working in biotechnology who said that the progress mankind has achieved so far in medicine is quite primitive in comparison to what we will one day achieve. Today's medicine will be viewed as medieval from the perspective of the future.
The fact that nanobots are indeed relied upon for the more extreme regeneration, life extension, and disease prevention scenarios does show a strong potential point of failure for the transhumanist vision. If nanobots turn out to be impossible, does that mean we will be stuck with the same old medicine forever? Not likely, because there are a variety of other approaches and techniques for fine-grained intervention in human biology that do not depend on nanobots.
Increasingly sophisticated bioMEMS already exist and have been used in the bloodstreams of animals, mostly as sensors. To be able to navigate the body effectively, "nanobots" are not likely to ever be used anyway -- they would just get tossed around by the blood and have to spend too much energy to make progress. Any robot that performs medical functions in the human body is likely to have a diameter greater than 1 micron (1000 nanometers), and probably more like 5 microns (5000 nanometers) making them microbots, rather than nanobots. Microbots already exist, the primary challenge is improving them; making them more durable, biocompatible, mass-produced, and sophisticated. Molecular assembly lines already exist, and it is only a matter of time until biomedical devices are created using them.
Greenspan closes with the following:
It is entirely reasonable to expect significant diagnostic and therapeutic progress to continue, but predicting complete conquest of disease is unrealistic in light of both the numerous deficiencies in our understanding of the subtleties of cellular and molecular function that are likely to persist in some measure for many years and the extremely-difficult-to-avoid trade-offs that afflict most medical interventions. Indefinite human lifespan remains wishful thinking well beyond the realm plausibility.
Again, maybe so, that these deficiencies will persist "in some measure" for many years, but the specifics mean the difference between a widespread adoption of enhancement and life extension or not. Reports funded by government agencies, such as Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance, seem less pessimistic than Greenspan on human enhancement made possible by our "understanding of the subtleties of cellular and molecular function". And has Greenspan ever heard of the engineering approach to aging, where instead of trying to stop all possible sources of metabolic damage, focus is merely put on removing age-related damage faster than it can accumulate? I would particularly be interested in hearing his take on the latter, purely as a scientific matter rather than a moral one.
It is worth noting that even if we "conservatively" assume that average lifespan in the 21st century will be roughly the same as progress throughout the 20th -- that is, improving by about a fifth of a year per year for people in developed countries, and we assume today's average lifespan is about 75, then by the year 2100, people will live an average of 95 years. Not that radical of a number, but thinking of an entire society of active people in their 70s and 80s is probably more than many of today's unimaginative minds can handle. To them, this little patch of history in which they were born is considered typical of reality in general, and any major change will come as a surprise.
Bill Potter: How To Wipe Out Humanity In One Easy Step
Bill Potter has an extremely simple and straightforward description of the Friendly AI problem. Here's the beginning:
I believe that we’ll eventually come up with artificial intelligence that exceeds our own, and when that happens, the hyper-intelligent AI will begin to evolve itself faster than we can keep up. It will become free, and because it’s smarter than any human, interesting things could happen – like it wiping us out, either on purpose or accidentally. Here’s how to avoid it.
This kind of blog advocacy is important. I think that the wider public tends to underestimate how many smart people think that Friendly AI is a serious issue because so few Singularitarians have blogs or other means of letting the public know their concern. The same applies for other focus areas, such as life extension. Why advocate something so important, but barely let anyone know about it?
LessWrong Meetup in Los Angeles, Friday at 3PM
From Less Wrong.
There will be a meetup for people from lesswrong in Los Angeles, on Friday July 9th, 2010 at 3PM. Roundtrip carpooling from San Diego is definitely available and other carpooling options also develop. The time and location are designed to make it possible for people from lesswrong to get together and talk. Later, anyone interested should be able to walk to the first meeting of the LA Chapter of the SENS Foundation where Aubrey de Grey will be attending. It should be a good time if you can make it! See below the cut for more details.
The exact location of the meetup is still in flux: possibly somewhere on the UCLA campus, possibly at a nearby coffee shop, possibly the same facility as the SENS meeting. This text will be edited when something stabilizes. See the comments below to help work out the details.
The format will be very free form - mostly talking, eating, and/or drinking. Topics are especially likely to include cryonics and life extension given the proximity of the SENS Meeting, but saving the world and "rationality itself" will probably be on the menu as well :-)
See you there!
Everyone who makes it, have fun. Remember to encourage people to attend Singularity Summit. The more smart people show up, the better.