Accelerating Future

Here’s the paper.

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My latest project is Extreme Futurist Festival, a multi-media transhumanist arts and culture festival in Los Angeles. We are billing the festival as “counterculture meets academia”.

We have a good speaker roster up, with a couple more speakers to be added, including myself. Abstracts and the final program will be posted this week.

There will be tons of live music, including Hanin Elias, formerly of Atari Teenage Riot.

The festival will be the 16th-17th at Courtyard Los Angeles Marina del Rey. Tickets are only $50, so buy them up now!

Transhumanism is such an exciting movement, but it needs to attract more artists & culture creators of every kind, and for those artists to be exposed to our traditional core memes, and for the curators of our core memes to be exposed to more art. Help me push forward this crucial dynamic by attending the festival.

See you in Los Angeles next month!

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Robin Hanson has a very provocative post up, “Galaxy Calc Shows Aliens”:

What makes a planet a good host for life? That is, what does a planet need for life to originate there and then evolve to something at the human level? Astronomers today say a planet at least needs a star that 1) lasts long enough, 2) has enough heavy elements, and 3) is not too often hit by nearby supernovae or gamma ray bursts. Using such criteria, several astronomers (mentioned below) have tried to calculate “galactic habitable zones,” i.e., galactic distributions of good-for-life planets, in both space and time. Such calculations are far more important than I had realized – they can help say how common are aliens! Let me explain.

Like many of Robin’s arguments, this one can take a bit of time to understand. Don’t come to any conclusions until you’ve read the entire post and thought about it for a few minutes.

I can say that this argument has caused me to update substantially in the direction that there may actually be aliens in this galaxy. For over a decade I’ve thought this possibility was extremely unlikely. Now I’m not so sure.

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Sorry, there is some superfluous footage from the prior talk and intro beforehand. The actual talk begins around 2:00.

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See them all at SIAI’s YouTube channel.

More than 500 photos are also online at SIAI’s Flickr account.

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Would Terence be a Bayesian today? I’m curious about that.

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Ben Goertzel, AGI engineer and transhumanist leader/activist is organizing what he calls “the first conference on the future of humanity in the continent of Asia”.

Humanity+ @ Hong Kong
Chiang Chen Studio Theatre, Hong Kong Polytechnic University
December 3rd + 4th 2011
http://hk.humanityplus.org/

Ben explains the idea behind the conference:

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Last month in New York I had the pleasure to talk personally with the creator of Watson, Dr. David Ferrucci. I found him amicable and his answers to my questions on Watson very direct and informative. So, I have nothing against IBM in general. I love IBM’s computers. Several of my past desktops and laptops have been IBM computers. The first modern computer I had was an IBM Aptiva.

However, there is a constant thread of articles related to claims being reported that IBM has “completely simulate(d)” “the brain of a mouse (512 processors), rat (2,048) and cat (24,576)”, which was revived in force this last weekend. This is entirely false. IBM has not simulated the brain of a mouse, rat, or cat. Experiments have just recently been pursued to even simulate the 302-neuron brain of a flatworm, for which a wiring diagram exists. Instead, IBM has made “mouse-SIZED” neural simulations, “rat-SIZED” neural simulations, and “cat-SIZED” neural simulations, given certain assumptions about the computational power of mammalian brains. The arrangements between neurons being simulated bear little relation to the actual wiring diagram of neurons in these animals, which are not known. Given the tools we currently have, like ATLUM, it would take tens of thousands of years to determine the full connectomes of mice, rats, or cats.

I can never tell if it is the reporters who are being ridiculous, or IBM is deliberately misleading the public. However, I think IBM should issue a press release that clarifies the situation. Directly quoting Scientific American:

IBM describes the work in an intriguing paper (pdf) that compares various animal simulations done by its cognitive computing research group in Almaden, Calif. The group has managed to completely simulate the brain of a mouse (512 processors), rat (2,048) and cat (24,576).

The paper they cite is the same damn paper from 2009, “The Cat is Out of the Bag”, which I immediately reacted to negatively within days of its publication. Since then, I’ve been watching as this false meme, which has yet to be directly repudiated by an IBM representative, makes its way through the media, which doesn’t know any better.

Now, IBM is allegedly claiming that they simulated 4.5% of the (processes?) of the human brain, or at least hundreds of media sources are reporting it. All the media sources seem to just be linking the two-year old paper “The Cat is Out of the Bag”, so I’m not sure if there was a recent announcement or it just took the media two years to pick up the story.

Again, it’s impossible that IBM could simulate 4.5% of the human brain, because we (human civilization) don’t have 4.5% of the wiring diagram of the human brain to use as raw data to build a simulation. We don’t even have 0.1% of the wiring diagram of the human brain, I’d estimate, but you’d have to ask a computational neuroscientist (not one from IBM) to get a more informed guess.

We have the wiring diagram of the 302 neurons in the flatworm brain. That’s about it.

The vast majority of Reddit commenters are clueless and missing the obvious error. Even this seemingly educated comment misses the point that there is NO WIRING DIAGRAM for the parts of the brain IBM allegedly simulated. Even this “best of class” comment seems to take the reporting at face value, as if 4.5% of the human brain had been simulated, and criticizes neuron models instead of the “elephant in the room” that I’ve explained.

Reddit commenters fail for being fooled, the media fails for reporting a false story, and IBM fails for not issuing a clarification. In many cases IBM seems to actively encourage the misconception that a full feline connectome has been simulated.

My prediction is that AGI will be invented and we will have a full-blown Singularity before a complete cat connectome (much less human connectome) is created.

This whole issue is important because the public is already confused about computational neuroscience enough as it is. I see computational neuroscience as very important, and it’s important that the public — and scientists, who despite their alleged higher level of thinking, frequently pull their beliefs from popular articles like everyone else — know what is and hasn’t been accomplished in the field.

For a nice article on connectomics and what has been accomplished so far, see this article from Microsoft Research. It correctly highlights ATLUM as the only technology that is precise enough to get slices that can be imagined in sufficient detail to build a connectome. ATLUM, by the way, was invented by a transhumanist, Ken Hayworth. (Why do people say that transhumanists don’t contribute to science?)

Here’s yet another article.

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