Ben Best: Deficiencies in the SENS Approach to Rejuvenation
A new article from Ben Best in Cryonics magazine:
I am an ardent supporter of Dr. Aubrey de Grey and his work to advance rejuvenation science. The man is priceless and unique in his concepts, brilliance, dedication, organizational abilities, and networking skill. His impact on anti-aging science has been powerful. I have attended all four of the conferences he has organized at Cambridge University in England. For the February 2006 issue of LIFE EXTENSION magazine I interviewed Dr. de Grey, and for the December 2007 issue of LIFE EXTENSION I wrote a review of ENDING AGING, the book he co-authored with Michael Rae.
Dr. de Grey asserts that aging is the result of seven kinds of damage – and that technologies that repair all seven types of damage will result in rejuvenation. His seven-fold program for damage repair is called SENS: “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescenceâ€. Dr. de Grey asserts that repairing aging damage is a more effective approach than attempting to slow or prevent aging, and I agree with him. Being an ardent supporter of SENS has not stopped me from simultaneously being a critic of aspects of his program that I think are flawed or deficient. I will attempt to outline some of my criticisms in simple language, assuming that my readers have some knowledge of basic science.
My Talk This July at World Future Society — The Coming Mind–Machine Symbiosis: Precursors to Technological Singularity
This July in Vancouver, get ready for my talk on the latest progress in brain-computer interfacing that you've never heard of. This is based on personal conversations with BCI engineers working on tech so cutting-edge that they'll talk to me about it but not journalists. Journalists are not yet allowed to know. Only the organizers of Singularity Summit and a few select others get this kind of information. You will be very surprised about the progress on the next steps of BCI, so hurry up and book your flight to Vancouver to see me and dozens of others talk about the shape of the near future.
Abstract: Human brains have remained essentially the same since Homo sapiens emerged as a species 200,000 years ago. Although we improve the software of our minds, the hardware remains the same. This will change in the coming decades with brain–computer interfacing, intelligence augmentation, and symbiosis with software agents. Technologies that have the potential to enhance intelligence are more important than all other technologies, because human general intelligence is the source of all of civilization's accomplishments. With enhanced intelligence, we will be able to better confront all problems, including risks to our survival as a species. Technology will open the way, and make possible what no amount of teaching can.
Who should attend: Futurists interested in human enhancement and artificial intelligence.
What you’ll learn: Attendees will learn about cutting-edge new technologies in artificial intelligence and brain–computer interfacing that will be on the front pages of tomorrow's newspapers but now are only in the research stages.
How this new knowledge can be applied: Audience members will leave with a better understanding of brain–computer interfacing, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and human enhancement.
Michael Anissimov, futurist, media director, Singularity Institute; co-organizer for Singularity Summit; active participant in the international transhumanist movement, Berkeley, California
The Navy Wants a Swarm of Semi-Autonomous Breeding Robots With Built-In 3-D Printers
Popular Science and Wired reporting. Here is the proposal solicitation.
This is a fun headline, but we're still far from useful functionality in this direction. 3D printers can barely even print circuit boards except for a few exotic prototypes of trivial complexity at hilariously low resolution. More impressive than the progress so far in the DIY community is Xerox's silver printed circuits. Various conductive inks have been developed before and nothing came of them in terms of commercialization. Development by Xerox started in late 2009, it's been over a year now and no news yet.
In terms of strength, the products of 3D printers are weak and can easily be pulled apart with your bare hands. If you want a strong product you still have to go to the machine shop or foundry.
Interesting proposal solicitation, however it is worth remembering that military commanders have been making breathless requests for futuristic technologies since time immemorial. There will be no "semi-autonomous breeding robots with built-in 3D printers" of practical battlefield value until at least 2025. However, this is the sort of thing a superintelligence could build millions of to do its bidding.
Natasha Vita-More, Doug Lenat, and Michael Vassar to Speak at SXSW
SXSW March 14, 2011 http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP5705 "The SINGULARITY: Humanity's Huge Techno Challenge". Speakers in alphabetical order are: Doug Lenat, CEO Cyborp, Michael Vassar, President Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and Natasha Vita-More, Vice Chair, Humanity+.
Panel Chair: Natasha Vita-More asks the question: Will supercomputing intelligences outsmart human-level intelligence? Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines is the world's most known advocacy of a technology breakthrough that will change the face of humanity and the world. Kurzweil claims that the accelerating, exponential growth of technology will result in a Singularity. But not all technological luminaries agree with Kurzweil. In fact, some suggest nanotechnology as superseding artificial intelligence. Others argue for humanity's future as being located in biosynthetics and virtuality. Outside the technological sphere, a new culture of DIY citizen scientists could either speed up or halt the Singularity. With a finger on the pulse, ethicists and policy-makers are arguing for a new strategy for assessing our possible futures. This panel dissects the very core of the Singularity, if and when it will occur, and what we can expect to happen.
Speakers' statements:
Natasha: The Singularity is presumed to be an event that happens to us rather than an opportunity to boost human cognitive abilities. The very same technology that proposes to build superintelligences could also dramatically enhance human cognition. Rather than looking at the Singularity as a fata compli birthing of superintelligences that might foster human extinction risk, an alternative theory forms an intervention between human and technology. First, the field of cybernetics established a blueprint for control, feedback and adaptation. Brain-computer interactions established engineering protocols for artificial intelligence. Later, the invention of wearable computers cultivated objects as embellishments to our biology and the genesis of human-computer interaction has had an evolutionary affect on bio-morphology. Now, the coincidental and subsequent developments of inventive projects arrived at through digital media, virtuality, and immersivity have furthered the scope of human experiential enhancement as artificial intelligence technologies are fostering arguably viable developments. This overlap of computational and physical forms an evolutionary crossing point. Could the human become a super AI.
Doug: Computing technology is on the verge of achieving full human-brain scale (in terms of the number, density, speed, volume, etc. of interconnected elements on the scale of complexity of a neuron). But I believe this is neither necessary nor sufficient to trigger The Technological Singularity. The bottleneck is software, not hardware. IBM's WATSON won its Jeopardy challenge match, but it got absurd wrong answers to some of the questions; it's not like this problem would go away if only IBM adds another 2000 processors, or more memory, or faster disks. The limitations of WATSON, Google, SIRI, etc. are ones of breadth of inference, not quantitative performance metrics. Imagine a game of Jeopardy where all the clues were very easy, even for children, but required them to do one or two steps of reasoning to figure out the right response. Building a program to play that game well is the "missing link" between where technology is today and true AI -- and true AI is what will trigger the Singularity. For many years now, dozens of us have been building CYC, a repository for the common sense knowledge and general inferencing strategies that comprise that missing link. If we kept on building it manually, at the current rate, it might take us another three centuries to complete. But in a way, we are on the verge of a sort of Singularity in the building of CYC: it now knows enough, and can infer enough, to carry on interactive dialogues in English, opening up the possibility of having millions of people helping it to cross that finish line in 2012, not 2312.
Michael: My work is focused on the exploration and integration of the visions of the Technological Singularity developed by Vernor Vinge, Raymond Kurzweil and Eliezer Yudkowsky. These emphasize the successive impacts of the creation of superhumanly intelligent organizational forms enabled by AI theory, the acceleration of economic, scientific and social change that narrow AI and biotech will enable within the context of those organizational forms, and recursively self-modifying general artificial intelligence, respectively. I associate these visions of the Singularity with three stages in the likely evolution of information processing, the combined impact of which will most likely make the 22nd century resemble the 20th less closely than the 20th century resembles the Cambrian. The earliest, Vingean stage is of particular importance, because the development of superhuman collective intelligences is likely to mark the end of the period during which deliberate human decision making can enable human values to directly influence humanity's future.
Layar: Impactful Augmented Reality for Everyday Life
They look pretty awkward holding up that phone... looks about time for a commercial scouter to be developed.
