Accelerating Future

From the Genetic Archaeology blog:

Humanity’s physical design flaws have long been apparent - we have a blind spot in our vision, for instance, and insufficient room for wisdom teeth - but do the imperfections extend to the genetic level?

In his new book, Inside the Human Genome, John Avise examines why - from the perspectives of biochemistry and molecular genetics - flaws exist in the biological world. He explores the many deficiencies of human DNA while recapping recent findings about the human genome.

Distinguished Professor of ecology & evolutionary biology at UC Irvine, Avise also makes the case that overwhelming scientific evidence of genomic defects provides a compelling counterargument to intelligent design.

Here, Avise discusses human imperfection, the importance of understanding our flaws, and why he believes theologians should embrace evolutionary science.

Our brains and bodies are both full of flaws. According to the pre-transhumanist worldview, the plan is just to sit around for the rest of eternity with these flaws, even as we colonize the Galaxy. According to the transhumanist worldview, the plan is to analyze these flaws, debate whether they are flaws or not, and consider fixing them if it seems practical and desirable. The latter makes sense, the former doesn’t.

The New Scientist CultureLab blog has more info on the book.

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Naked mole rats — is there anything they can’t do? A University of Illinois at Chicago press release reminds us that mole rats can withstand oxygen deprivation for up to 30 minutes, which may give us clues for protecting the brain from stroke.

Another recent brain-related news item concerned therapeutic hypothermia to minimize trauma to injured brain issue. It seems as if there is a wave of research in this direction.

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See here a site on bird intelligence and Wikipedia’s page of tool-using animals.

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Holy crap, the Moon has a ton of water. 25 gallons were kicked up by the probe that impacted it a month ago. This is huge, huge news, because everyone thought that the Moon was as dry as a bone. I see that various studies predicted this recently. A pessimistic article from Space.com from a month ago said “one ton of the top layer of the lunar surface would hold about 32 ounces of water”, but now it’s looking like a lot more.

Now all we need to do is ship nitrogen and other essential nutrients there in huge amounts using mass drivers, a nuclear cannon, or space elevator, put up a few aerogel-insulated domes, and start partyin’! (Well, maybe not exactly, but water does give us huge amounts of oxygen, which we need to breathe, and hydrogen, which can be used as fuel.) This article from LiveScience has more details.

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Robin Hanson, economist and author of Overcoming Bias, recently appeared in USA Today talking about SETI. He appears as a counterpoint to Seth Shostak, a guy who I believe is totally out of it. Here’s the relevant section:

But researchers such as Robin Hanson of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., wonder whether the big picture really looks so promising when it comes to advanced life. Hanson supports SETI but finds it telling that humans haven’t come across anything yet. “It has been remarkable and somewhat discouraging,” Hanson says, “that the universe is so damn big and so damn dead.”

Great quote, love it. To quote Marshall T. Savage, author of that superlative masterpiece, The Millennial Project:

There is a program to actively search for signals from other civilizations in the galaxy: SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). This is a noble cause, but it seems slightly absurd. Scientists huddle around radio telescopes listening intently to one star at a time for the sound of dripping water, when what they are seeking would sound like Niagara Falls. The most cursory radio snapshot of the sky should reveal K2 civilizations as clearly as the lights of great cities seen from orbit at night. That we don’t see any such radio beacons in the skies probably means there are no Kardasahev Level Two civilizations in this galaxy.

Perhaps advanced civilizations don’t use radio, or radar, or microwaves. Advanced technology can be invoked as an explanation for the absence of extra terrestrial radio signals. But it seems unlikely that their technology would leave no imprint anywhere in the electromagnetic spectrum. We have been compared to the aborigine who remains blissfully unaware of the storm of radio and TV saturating the airwaves around him. Presumably, the aliens use advanced means of communications which we cannot detect. What these means might be is, by definition, unknown, but they must be extremely exotic. We don’t detect K2 signals in the form of laser pulses, gamma rays, cosmic rays, or even neutrinos. Therefore, the aliens must use system that we haven’t even imagined.

The argument, appealing thought it is, cannot survive contact with Occam’s razor — in this case Occam’s machete. The evidence in hand is simply nothing — no signals. To explain the absence of signals in the presence of aliens, demands recourse to what is essentially magic. Unfortunately, the iron laws of logic demand that we reject such wishful thinking in favor of the simplest explanation which fits the data: No signals, no aliens.

The skies are thunderous in their silence; the Moon eloquent in its blankness; the aliens are conclusive by their absence. The extraterrestrials aren’t here. They’ve never been here. They’re never coming here. They aren’t coming because they don’t exist. We are alone.

If Dr. Shostak wants to find some aliens, perhaps he should try ingesting some powerful hallucinogens. Then he will be able to see all the aliens he wants.

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See here.

I generally disagree with George here. We can defeat aging, run cars on renewable fuels, address climate change, and develop a sustainable energy source without a fundamental breakthrough like quantum mechanics. It could be the end of scientific revolutions as we know them — it’s hard to tell. We could still have extreme (incremental) progress in science without discrete, paradigm-shifting revolutions.

I really need to read John Horgan’s book, The End of Science. Even though I found him rude in our exchange, I have sympathy for some of his ideas, like the notion that war might be eliminated or that fundamental scientific revolutions may be over.

At the very least, it could be that human-facilitated paradigm shifts are over, and that superintelligence is necessary to tear further holes in the fabric of the Veil of Maya.

But ultimately…

“Nobody actually lives in external reality, and we couldn’t understand it if we did; too many quarks flying around.” — Eliezer Yudkowsky

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Discovery of new North American dinosaur. Loved the artists’ illustration.

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I usually don’t just post links, but this was a really interesting news week, so I’m going to go over some of the stuff I saw that is worth caring about.

Nanowerk: NanoInk introduces new desktop nanofabrication system

NanoInk introduces the next generation Dip Pen Nanolithography® system for desktop nanofabrication, the DPN 5000. Having evolved from the popular NSCRIPTOR™ DPN® System, this new instrument brings greater control and performance to the world of desktop nanofabrication. The DPN 5000 offers versatile nanopatterning capabilities coupled with high-performance AFM (atomic force microscopy) imaging for immediate characterization of the deposited patterns. NanoInk has developed a variety of custom MEMS (micro electromechanical systems) based ink delivery devices, allowing a wide range of materials to be deposited under precisely controlled conditions.

Springerlink: Neurogenesis and Exercise: Past and Future Directions

Research in humans and animals has shown that exercise improves mood and cognition. Physical activity also causes a robust increase in neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus, a brain area important for learning and memory. The positive correlation between running and neurogenesis has raised the hypothesis that the new hippocampal neurons may mediate, in part, improved learning associated with exercise. The present review gives an overview of research pertaining to exercise-induced cell genesis, its possible relevance to memory function and the cellular mechanisms that may be involved in this process.

Nanowerk: It’s all in the wiring: biocomponents at the heart of an artificial photosystem

Plants, algae, and cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) are masters of everything to do with solar energy because they are able to almost completely transform captured sunlight into chemical energy. This is in part because the electrons set free by the photons are transported out of the “light receptor” to be used as the driving force for chemical reactions. Japanese researchers have now developed a new process to capture light energy with nearly equal efficiency.

Eurekalert: Chemists create two-armed nanorobotic device to maneuver world’s tiniest particles

Chemists at New York University and China’s Nanjing University have developed a two-armed nanorobotic device that can manipulate molecules within a device built from DNA. The device is described in the latest issue of the journal Nature Nanotechnology. “The aim of nanotechnology is to put specific atomic and molecular species where we want them and when we want them there,” said NYU Chemistry Professor Nadrian Seeman, one of the co-authors. “This is a programmable unit that allows researchers to capture and maneuver patterns on a scale that is unprecedented.” The device is approximately 150 x 50 x 8 nanometers. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter. Put another way, if a nanometer were the size of a normal apple, measuring approximately 10 centimeters in diameter, a normal apple, enlarged proportionally, would be roughly the size of the earth. The creation enhances Seeman’s earlier work—a single nanorobotic arm, completed in 2006, marking the first time scientists had been able to employ a functional nanotechnology device within a DNA array.

Eurekalert: Scientists isolate genes that made 1918 flu lethal

By mixing and matching a contemporary flu virus with the “Spanish flu” — a virus that killed between 20 and 50 million people 90 years ago in history’s most devastating outbreak of infectious disease — researchers have identified a set of three genes that helped underpin the extraordinary virulence of the 1918 virus. Writing today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison virologists Yoshihiro Kawaoka and Tokiko Watanabe identifies genes that gave the 1918 virus the capacity to reproduce in lung tissue, a hallmark of the pathogen that claimed more lives than all the battles of World War I combined.

ABC: Scientists stop the aging process

Scientists have stopped the aging process in an entire organ for the first time, a study released today says. Published in today’s online edition of Nature Medicine, researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University in New York City also say the older organs function as well as they did when the host animal was younger. The researchers, led by Associate Professor Ana Maria Cuervo, blocked the aging process in mice livers by stopping the build-up of harmful proteins inside the organ’s cells.

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Fritz Haber (1868 - 1934) is one of the most controversial scientists of all time. A chemist, he developed the Haber process, which provides a way of extracting atmospheric nitrogen for the bulk synthesis of ammonia. Ammonia created by the Haber process is used to produce the world’s synthetic fertilizers, which nurture crops for over a third of the global population, providing food for billions of people who might otherwise not even be alive. The old way of getting fertilizer involved scraping bat poop from the walls of caves, or, later, extracting it from nitrogeneous rocks from Chile. For his invention, Haber received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918.

Unfortunately, being a WWI-era German military scientist, Haber did a lot of other research that could only be construed as evil. He is called the “father of chemical warfare” for developing poison gas for use in World War I, although the practice had been outlawed by the 1907 Hague Conventions. It wasn’t until 1997 that the stockpiling and use of chemical weapons was outlawed globally by the Chemical Weapons Convention. Haber also developed the infamous Zyklon B gas, which was used to murder millions of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals during the Holocaust. The ironic thing is that Haber was actually a converted Jew, and dozens of members of his extended family were killed by Zyklon B in concentration camps.

In 1915, Haber’s wife, a fellow chemist and collaborator, was so distraught about her husband’s research that she shot herself in the chest with his army pistol, right in their home garden. Haber didn’t seen to care much: he got a new wife who had no problem with his vile pursuits. He died in a Swiss convalescent home in 1933, never having an opportunity to see the genocide that his poisonous gas wrought during World War II. His son, Hermann, who emigrated to the United States during the war, subsequently committing suicide in 1946.

Dr. Haber’s story is a cautionary tale for the scientists of the present. In the next 20 years, if not sooner, military researchers will develop weapons much more destructive than mere nuclear bombs. The development of such weapons may be unavoidable. The necessity of the global arms race demands it. If democratic countries do not acquire the technology, elite-ruled countries will. This is an unpleasant reality that some fail to recognize.

At the same time, the scientists who develop this technology have a grave responsibility to stop their work if the leaders of their countries obviously turn sour, and to boycott contributions to any especially untoward projects. Whether or not the Bush administration (with its appointment of the warmongering fanatic John Bolton to the position of Permanent US Representative to the UN) qualifies as such leadership is subject to debate. But scientists have an obligation to take ethical responsibility for their work. If they are put to task on secret projects that are obviously vile, such as weaponized synthetic life, or artificial general intelligence for autonomous military robots, they should quit immediately and go into business, academia, or retire.

The global arms race must stop, or we are all doomed. Especially when we acquire technologies that are nigh-magical in their destructive capabilities. The solution could be a singleton, defined by Nick Bostrom as follows:

In set theory, a singleton is a set with only one member, but as I introduced the notion, the term refers to a world order in which there is a single decision-making agency at the highest level. Among its powers would be (1) the ability to prevent any threats (internal or external) to its own existence and supremacy, and (2) the ability to exert effective control over major features of its domain (including taxation and territorial allocation).

In the paper, Bostrom further adds “Singletons could be good, bad, or neutral”, and lists their possible benefits, including:

• Avoiding arms races, which can be costly even if they don’t lead to war.
• Avoiding a space colonization race that burns up the cosmic commons.
• Avoiding outcomes characterized by extreme inequality.
• Avoiding evolutionary pathways that lead to radically dystopian outcomes.

Bostrom warns against necessarily conceiving of a singleton as a dystopian tyrant, writing, “A singleton need not be monolithic. It could contain within itself an enormous variety of independent agents each pursuing their own disparate goals, just as is the case in a liberal democratic state. The goals and actions of the singleton could be decided by its inhabitants or their elected representatives.” He also argues why the eventual creation of a singleton seems likely in the context of the past: “Historically, we have seen an overarching trend towards the emergence of higher levels of social organization, from hunter-gatherer bands, to chiefdoms, city-states, nation states, and now multinational organizations, regional alliances, various international governance structures, and other aspects of globalization. Extrapolation of this trend points to the creation of a singleton.”

Maybe scientists could better spend their time working towards a benevolent singleton instead of weapons that could one day be turned on them and their families.

(Fritz Haber with his friend and colleague Dr. Einstein, who had the foresight to tell President Roosevelt in 1939 that the Nazis were working on the nuclear bomb, and that the Allies would need to develop their own bomb or risk being annihilated.)

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One branch of science I am fascinated by is paleontology. As stated in my previous post, I find it hard to understand and appreciate the natural world without knowledge of the evolutionary relationships between extant species. Also, I just think it’s cool.

Accordingly, I have started a paleontology blog, Arthropleura. From the about page:

“Arthropleura is a paleontology blog by Michael Anissimov. It is named after Arthropleura, an 8-ft long relative of centipedes and millipedes that lived during the Carboniferous period. Arthropleura was the largest terrestrial invertebrate that ever lived.”

I doubt my posting on Arthropleura will be as frequent as it is on Accelerating Future. Certainly, I believe that paleontology carries less utilitarian weight than the ethics and pragmatics of emerging technologies, but I am interested enough in the field to start a blog devoted to it. If you’re interested in the subject, please subscribe.

When I become superintelligent, I will start a blog on every topic I’m interested in, even the most banal.

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Among scientists and the scientifically literate public, there is a strong movement that says: “if science can be done, it should be done”. That is, all possible avenues of research should be pursued because the benefits always outweigh the risks, and anyone who disagrees is being anti-science. This stance might be called the flip-side of anarcho-primitivism. I call it the Religion of Science.

Many Christians believe all good things have their source in God. Some advocates of science seem to believe all good things come from science. Not so. Although all topics should be investigated in a scientific way, and science is one of our most powerful tools for improving human life, it is not infallible. The power of science can easily be channeled into militarism, manipulation, suppression, and outright accidents.

Some on the Left are distrustful of science because they identify it with corporations and the establishment. Others on the Religious Right are distrustful of science because of the numerous religious claims it flatly contradicts. What both sides need to acknowledge is that science and technology really are as powerful as its most enthusiastic proponents believe. Nuclear weapons and the Internet are just a warm-up. By refusing to see the evidence for this, and come to terms with science, these two groups lock themselves out of the debate. How big an impact will science have over the next couple decades, really?

When examining the future impact of science on the economy and society, I look first to manufacturing. Manufacturing is used to fabricate products and machines we use daily, things we can touch, feel, and see. These objects are tangible. Many people won’t believe a scientific development is real until they’re holding it in their hands. We know you can fit a camera, music player, browser, and cell phone on the same device because the iPod is real.

To take a peek behind the next page, look at the research grabbing the headlines today. J. Craig Venter recently said, in reference to his work on synthetic life, “We are sparking an industrial revolution.” His lab is set to implant a synthetic genome in a bacterium this year, manipulating it like a marionette. The bacterium, to be called Mycoplasma laboratorium, would have a self-replication time of about 2 hours. In a large enough incubator, a single synthetic bacterium could create a colony weighing 100,000 metric tons in just a week. What these synthetic life-forms will be used to manufacture will be limited by little but the design specs of the ribosome and the available raw materials. This shows the extreme impact science will have in the immediate future.

Mainstream nanotechnologists are giving attention to molecular nanotechnology. The Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems was recently released, to little media fanfare, but the involvement of scientists and engineers from three national laboratories — Pacific Northwest, Oak Ridge, and Brookhaven — gives us a clue that these people take the technology seriously. And molecular manufacturing could be orders of magnitude more powerful than bacterium-based manufacturing, building machines out of diamond and fullerenes instead of proteins.

Very intelligent people are starting to be convinced that the future of manufacturing lies in self-replicating systems, which is why we see projects like RepRap emerging, whose motto is “wealth without money”. Saul Griffith, an inventor who recently became a recipient of the MacArthur “genius grant”, highlighted the power of nanometer-scale self-replication (molecular manufacturing) in his 2004 PhD thesis. Answering the question, “What are you optimistic about?” on Edge.org, Physicist and genetic theorist Gregory Cochran said, “Hardly anyone seems to realize it, but we’re on the threshold of an era of unbelievable abundance. Within a generation—sooner if we want it enough—we will be able to make a self-replicating machine.”

The potential of near-future manufacturing technology is truly colossal. When self-replicating technologies start pulling their own weight financially and then some, an economic boom will start and not stop until the world is a very different place. Making as much of anything we want, limited only by energy and raw materials. More and more scientists and engineers are waking up to this near-future reality.

The downside of self-replication is the extreme danger. The radical magnification, decentralization and diversification of manufacturing will make it harder to track who is building what. Decentralized manufacturing capability will greatly boost the incentive to acquire and sell designs for hardware, especially military hardware. Even more worrisome would be a bacteria designed to be immune to viruses, or some new distributed weapon we cannot imagine today.

When I see people calling me a “Luddite” for worrying about future technological developments, I think one of two things. Either they greatly underestimate the transformative power of the technology they themselves advocate, or they recklessly support scientific research without considering all the consequences. Personally, I think the creation of the first synthetic life form, whether it happens this year or the next, will signify the arrival of a fundamentally different era. An era where mankind taps into the power that has made life the dominant feature on the Earth’s surface today: reprogrammable self-replication at the molecular level.

Without universally followed regulations and guidelines, things could get way out of control. I am not an authoritarian, but when you give humans a power that basically amounts to magic, ground rules have to be set and followed. Some avenues of research may even need to be abandoned.

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