Who Will Build the First Artificial Mind?

Most of the work that has been done so far and is being done now in the field of artificial intelligence is focused on what is called "narrow" AI. That is, AI systems that are very good at, in fact far better than humans are, certain narrow fields. They are powerfully intelligent in terms of solving very specialized problems. According to AGIRI.org:

Specialized intelligence is simply the capability of a system to carry out some instance of Problem Solving that is considered difficult.

This includes the intelligence displayed by Narrow AI programs like Deep Blue or Google that are highly tailored to do just one sort of thing.

There is a sort of instant gratification in the development of narrow AI, because it solves difficult problems as soon as it is completed and thus has immediate value, whether in industry or academia. Nothing wrong with that. But who is working on making a mind?

Distinct from narrow AI is "general" AI, known as AGI. A general artificial intelligence would be able to understand and manipulate all kinds of patterns and problems. You could have a great conversation with an AGI. And an AGI that has access to its own code could quickly become a super-intelligent AI, with greater-than-human intelligence. Building an AGI is a much more difficult undertaking than building narrow AI. So who is working on AGI?

The Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute is, that's who. Specifically, Dr. Ben Goertzel and his team are building what they hope will become an AGI. They call it Novamente. Here is a recent 30 minute presentation by Dr. Goertzel on their project. His presentation is titled Artificial Intelligence and Human Immortality. Enjoy!



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BBC - Time Video: How to Live Forever

I posted about this program a few days ago but couldn't find it online. Someone did and posted the link in a comment, so here it is. It really is amazing.



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It's a Brave New Life: Synthetic Lifeforms Are Near

We could be only months away from the creation of "the first new form of artificial life" because of a highly significant breakthrough by scientists at the J Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland.

For the first time in human history, scientists have implanted an entire genome from one species into another, which grew and multiplied, becoming the first species in the process. So one species was transformed into another.

In the past, researchers have transplanted snips of code, but never before has the entire genome of one species been successfully implanted into another. This breakthrough opens the way for the scientists to implant a completely synthetic genome, constructed from scratch in a lab, which they expect will result in the first synthetic lifeform ever created.

But why would they want to make a new lifeform?

The scientists want to create new kinds of bacterium to make new types of bugs which can be used as green fuels to replace oil and coal, digest toxic waste or absorb carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

This research does make some people nervous, however.

But this pioneering research also triggers unease about the limits of science and the inevitable fears about “playing god,” as well as raising the spectre that this technology could one day be abused to create a new generation of bioweapons.

At some point the researchers hope to create a basic microbe with "only the minimal set of genes needed for life," and then be able to customize the microbe for different uses by adding additional genetic code to suit the purpose.

What'll they think of next? Stay tuned.

Source article

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Appreciating the Power of Connections

What makes a human brain so much smarter than a supercomputer? After all, transistors are about a million times faster than neurons. The power of that kind of speed advantage is obvious if you were to challenge the simplest calculator to see whether you or it could calculate sums or long division problems the fastest. You would lose. But things that the brain can do with such apparent ease, like recognizing faces and understanding speech, are extremely difficult for room-sized computers. Why is this? Why is it that computers can be faster, and yet human brains are smarter? One word: Connections.

Network-Effect Metabrain

Each transistor in a supercomputer may connect directly to one, two, or perhaps even three other transistors. Each neuron, however, forms 10⁴ to 10⁵ synaptic connections with adjacent neurons. Add up the total number of connections and you get on the order of 10¹¹ for the SC5832 supercomputer and 10¹⁶ for a human brain. But there are wider implications for this appreciation of the power of connections, implications that point to a growing "network-effect" metabrain, comprised of 10⁹ connected human brains, which Robert Metcalfe, the founder of 3Com, writes about in this article on Forbes.com.

Let's Make an Affiliance

I'm currently reading Vernor Vinge's classic sci-fi novel, Rainbows End (Note: the lack of an apostrophe is not an error...read the book and you'll see why it's spelled this way). In it, a world of the near-term future exists where the sharing of information is the engine of productivity, and the forming of connections, or temporary partnerships, among disparate individuals leads to new knowledge and economic growth. In this world, these partnerships are called affiliances. A brief consideration of our current economy and culture will show that this situation is already happening.

Adding Value by Connecting Ideas

Social bookmarking, networking, news-marking, etc. on the web are growing in number and in memberships at an amazing rate. Not more than a few years ago, how many people could I interact with in any meaningful sharing-of-informational way? Compare that to how many I am exposed to on the Internet every day. The sharing of ideas and thoughts has already become exponentially more varied and frequent than it used to be. In spite of this, we are still connecting with others at a very narrow and shallow level.

Where will value be added in the future? It seems to me that those who add value to information will be those who make important connections between disparate ideas, thus creating new ideas. I will close this post with Mr. Metcalfe's eloquent final paragraphs:

Over the last 30 years, using Moore's Law transistors and Metcalfe's Law networks, we have gone from zero to 10 9 people on the Internet. With broadband deployment, the quality of an Internet connection is going up while costs go down. Social networking is proliferating and evolving. New collaboration modes are disrupting science, media and politics--for the better, I think.

The network effect is expanding the collective intelligence of the human race. We can hope that on the whole we humans are getting smarter by the square of some very large numbers. It's enough to make one optimistic.

Stay tuned.

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Singularity and its Implications for SETI

An interesting post on Sentient Developments prodded my brain into thinking a bit more deeply on what the Singularity implies regarding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

If we assume that the human species will merge with its technology within the next 30 to 40 years, which is what the Singularity includes, then we (whatever "we" are subsequent to this) will very quickly be able to extend ourselves throughout the known universe. (Read Ray Kurzweil's most recent book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, for his excellent explanation of this process.)

It stands to reason then, that if we can accomplish this after 4.5 billion years of evolution on this planet, so could any other sentient species in the universe. So, either they have already reached us but have chosen not to interact with or otherwise disturb us, or we will be the first to achieve this.

Another implication is that the universe, if it contains any other close-to-Singularity or post-Singularity species, which it surely would if life really is plentiful within it, the skies would be flooded with information-bearing electromagnetic radiation from ETI. The fact that it is not so flooded is in itself informative.

So, is SETI a waste of time? What do you think?

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Radical Life-Extension is Going Mainstream

No doubt every generation in human history has thought of itself as possessing unique characteristics. And no doubt many generations have. However, there are developments that are now on the brink of occurring that will transform humanity in ways that make the word "unique" seem far too weak to encompass what is coming.

A Science Channel program was aired this week, with little fanfare or publicity, but which nonetheless brought the idea of radical life-extension into the mainstream of public consciousness. It was profoundly moving to me for many reasons which I will explain in a bit. The program was titled very simply, "Time."

When I first saw the listing and decided to record it to my DVR, I anticipated a physics-based analysis of the "fourth dimension," which might have been interesting. What I saw, however, was something I did not expect: an analysis of human aging that culminated with the realistic hope of overcoming it within the lifetimes of those now living.

One of my first pleasant surprises was the program's host, Dr. Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist who has a gift of explaining physics in a way that makes it interesting and understandable to the layman. He was the perfect person to be host.

The program began with a description of man's unique awareness of his own mortality and how this awareness gave rise to our desire to overcome the mastery of death. He spent some time discussing religions' promise of eternal life, but pointed out the problem that, in order to receive it, one must have faith that it exists. Dr. Kaku then confessed that, even though the viewer may not require proof of heaven's existence, he does.

As the program progressed, Dr. Kaku explained something that biologists have recently discovered, something that has turned our understanding of death on its head: There is no gene for death. There is absolutely nothing in our genetic code that programs us to die. Rather, everything in our genes is programed for us to live. So what's the problem?

Dr. Kaku then pointed to the fact that our metabolic process, in essence the process of being alive, "leaks" free radicals, which go on to damage our cells so that they do not operate properly. We have mechanisms in place to repair this damage, but those mechanisms are eventually overwhelmed, and our bodies age. That's it. That's the problem. The accumulation of cellular damage that our bodies cannot repair.

The program continued as I was fervently hoping it would, with a brief interview with none other than the bearded one, Aubrey de Grey himself, who explained his confidence that we will be able to repair enough of this damage to delay death long enough for rejuvenation therapies to improve, so that more damage can be repaired, thus buying enough time for further improvements, et cetera. He explained that, while biblical-style immortality would not be achieved using rejuvenation therapies (since humans could still be killed by other means besides aging), living for 1,000 to 2,000 years was definitely possible.

Finally, Dr. Kaku asked the question: If we could live that long by simply drinking the contents of a bottle (and here he held a hypothetical glass bottle of rejuvenation fluid), would we drink it? He walked about it New York City asking people that question. To his surprise, many said that they wound not, citing reasons such as, they would get bored, they would miss their departed loved ones, they would go mad, 80 years was enough, and the like. On the other hand, many said they would, that they loved life and would gladly accept more of it.

Then Dr. Kaku made it personal. "Would I drink it?" After a brief pause and a smile, he said, "Sure."

PS: If you know where a video of this program can be found on the web, please let me know.

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M.A.D. Becomes M.A.EM.D.

Everyone has heard of M.A.D., or Mutually Assured Destruction, which is the principle that has prevented a superpower nuclear holocaust to this point in human history. Simply stated, the nations with the capacity to launch massive nuclear attacks have been reticent about doing so because the result would be virtual annihilation for both attacked and attacker.

Now, another type of M.A.D. has appeared which I have termed M.A.EM.D. (pronounced maimed) for Mutually Assured Electromagnetic Destruction. Much of the world is now electromagnetically dependent. Anything with computer chips (and what doesn't have computer chips anymore?), especially anything that is connected to the Internet, is vulnerable to EM disruption. Everything from our banking system to our production lines to our public utilities is dependent on the Internet and thus vulnerable to disruption.

The world's major powers are therefore gearing up for all-out cyber war. According to a report in today's New York Times:

China, security experts believe, has long probed United States networks. According to a 2007 Defense Department annual report to Congress, China’s military has invested heavily in electronic countermeasures and defenses against attack, and concepts like “computer network attack, computer network defense and computer network exploitation.”

According to the report, the Chinese Army sees computer network operations “as critical to achieving ‘electromagnetic dominance’ ” — whatever that is — early in a conflict.

The United States is arming up, as well. Robert Elder, commander of the Air Force Cyberspace Command, told reporters in Washington at a recent breakfast that his newly formed command, which defends military data, communications and control networks, is learning how to disable an opponent’s computer networks and crash its databases.

“We want to go in and knock them out in the first round,” he said, as reported on Military.com.

An all-out cyberconflict could “could have huge impacts,” said Danny McPherson, an expert with Arbor Networks. Hacking into industrial control systems, he said, could be “a very real threat.”

Attacks on the Internet itself, say, through what are known as root-name servers, which play a role in connecting Internet users with Web sites, could cause widespread problems, said Paul Kurtz, the chief operating officer of Safe Harbor, a security consultancy. And having so many nations with a finger on the digital button, of course, raises the prospect of a cyberconflict caused by a misidentified attacker or a simple glitch.

Still, instead of thinking in terms of the industry’s repeated warnings of a “digital Pearl Harbor,” Mr. McPherson said, “I think cyberwarfare will be far more subtle,” in that “certain parts of the system won’t work, or it will be that we can’t trust information we’re looking at.”

Of course this is frightening. But it seems to me that those who have the wherewithal to do major damage, essentially the world's major economies, understand that any attack against the interests of another major power would certainly result in a devastating counterattack. And a counterattack would not necessarily be confined to the EM domain. After all, any cyberattack of significant power would be an attack on the victim's entire viability as a sovereign nation; such is the importance of our computer networks.

True, smaller rogue nations and terrorist organizations will launch attacks, but these kinds of entities would be less likely to possess the means to destroy another nation's entire computer systems.

In addition to M.A.EM.D., we can rely for our EM safety upon the fact that the world's major powers' self-interest dictates cooperation and harmonious relations with each other.

Am I being overly optimistic? I hope not. Stay tuned.

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That Moth Might Be Watching You

I don't like insects of any kind, but now there is reason to dislike them even more. They may be watching me.

I'm just kidding, of course. I am of insufficient interest to anyone to be spied on. But the moths may soon be watching someone. Before you start to worry about my sanity, let me fill you in on developments.

You've heard of DARPA, haven't you? They are the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an organization that is part of the U.S. Department of Defense. Their mandate is to manage and direct "selected basic and applied research and development projects for DoD, and pursue research and technology where risk and payoff are both very high and where success may provide dramatic advances for traditional military roles and missions."

One of DARPA's projects is HI-MEMS (Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems). HI-MEMS "is aimed at developing tightly coupled machine-insect interfaces by placing micro-mechanical systems inside the insects during the early stages of metamorphosis." Yes, what they do is inject a chip into a moth at the larval stage, allowing the generation of new tissues to "form a reliable and stable tissue-machine interface." But to what end?

DARPA sees this as a possible low-cost means to create robot moths that will go wherever they are directed and presumably send audio and video back to their controllers. This will allow its developers to effectively co-opt millions of years of evolution rather than trying to make mechanical flying entities.

You may have seen video demonstrations of remote controlled rats that can be steered from a wirelessly actuated signal to its brain. So we (humans) are clearly working on developing the means to control the minds of lower forms of life to suit our needs. This fact raises some frightening possibilities.

If the brains of moths and rats can be controlled, so can the brains of humans. The Manchurian Candidate scenario doesn't seem as far fetched as it once did. It woudn't be difficult to install a controller chip without the host's knowledge. Consider that nature has already divised the means to do this, as exemplified in the brain-controlling fungus.

The spores of the fungus attach themselves to the external surface of the ant, where they germinate. They then enter the ant’s body through the tracheae (the tubes through which insects breathe), via holes in the exoskeleton called spiracles. Fine fungal filaments called mycelia then start to grow inside the ant’s body cavity, absorbing the host’s soft tissues but avoiding its vital organs.

When the fungus is ready to sporulate, the mycelia grow into the ant’s brain. The fungus then produces chemicals which act on the host’s brain and alter its perception of pheromones. This causes the ant to climb a plant and, upon reaching the top, to clamp its mandibles around a leaf or leaf stem, thus securing it firmly to what will be its final resting place.

The fungus then devours the ant’s brain, killing the host. The fruiting bodies of the fungus sprout from the ant’s head, through gaps in the joints of the exoskeleton. Once mature, the fruiting bodies burst, releasing clusters of capsules into the air. These in turn explode on their descent, spreading airborne spores over the surrounding area. These spores then infect other ants, completing the life cycle of the fungus. Depending on the type of fungus and the number of infecting spores, death of an infected insect takes between 4-10 days.

Any entity that is co-opted to act according to the wishes of an external controller would not be aware of that fact. It would believe that it is acting rationally and according to its own wishes. This has already been demonstrated in experiments on humans. For example, when the part of their brains that control their sense of humor was electrically stimulated so that they would find anything funny, they would always rationalize a reason for their irrational reaction. The bottom line: you would be controlled without being aware of it.

So how should we respond to these developments? I believe that they cannot be stopped, so we should pursue the development of safeguards and defenses at the same time that we are developing the capabilities. Someone will achieve these things. It should be we, as responsible people, who get there first and have safeguards and defenses alongside the technology itself.

The idea for this post was inspired by Think Artificial

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A Better Understanding of Singularity: Aubrey de Grey

Building recursively self-improving machines as a means of achieving smarter-than-human intelligence seems to be the only way that the singularity can occur. This simply means that this level of intelligence in machines requires machines that understand their own working well enough to make improvements on their own. The idea is that once this is achieved, they will begin to improve themselves more and more rapidly and become smarter than humans.

The really important issue becomes whether or not this strong AI is friendly to humans. The only way to make sure that it is friendly is to carefully manage and design this constraint into the recursively self-improving machines. That is, make then so that they have enough freedom to implement improvements, but not enough to lose their friendliness. Sort of like Asimov's three laws of robotics.

Clearly, we do not want to create unfriendly AI, and so there is an urgency that informs the people at the Singularity Institute. Their goal is to build friendly AI before someone else creates, whether accidentally or on purpose, unfriendly AI.

Aubrey de Grey explains all this in a very easily understood way, something he has a great talent for. He points out, additionally, that the public will begin to care about the singularity only when progress in the labs convinces people that these developments are imminent.

You will be sure to enjoy this interview, but what is even more important, you will begin, if you haven't yet, to appreciate the importance of the kind of work that is ongoing at the Singularity Institute, namely the responsible development of friendly AI before the careless development of unfriendly AI is upon us.

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Quantum Dots and Teleportation

The idea of transporting objects from point A to point B almost instantaneously and without travelling through physical space is not new. We have all seen it done on Star Trek and in the movie The Fly, but is it possible in the real world? Some researches believe they may have an idea about the medium to do it with: quantum dots.

According to recent research, tiny clusters of atoms known as quantum dots may be excellent media for quantum teleportation, a physics phenomenon in which information – in the form of a quantum state, a very specific mathematical “signature” of an atom – can be transmitted almost instantaneously to a distant location without having to physically travel through space. Teleportation is one facet of quantum information science, a developing field that could have a major impact on computing and communications.

We probably won't be seeing the teleportation of humans anytime soon, except in Second Life, but this is a step in the right direction.

Read more...

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Will You Be Able to Navigate the Future?

Much fun has been poked at people's unwillingness or inability to learn the ins and outs of new technology. Consider the notorious VCR clock of yesteryear, plaintively flashing its 12:00 over and over because its owner would not learn how to set the correct time. Computers have provided another barrel full of laughs. But as we accelerate the introduction of new technology, many people may stop laughing.

The fact is, new technologies, particularly entirely new technological paradigms, require a high degree of adaptation and learning in order to operate operate them successfully. Granted, the competitive marketplace puts pressure on designers to make new technology as simple to use as the etch-a-sketch, but there are limits to how far this simplification can go. Computer technology is now its own branch of learning for school-age children, but as the pace of advances increases exponentially, many may be left behind.

Vernor Vinge's novel Rainbows End tells the story of a man who fell victim to Alzheimer's being rejuvenated, only to find that he has missed several years of advancing technology, to the point where he must attend school to learn how to use it. Either that or be effectively crippled by his lack of knowledge. Little has been said about the massive challenge that lies ahead for the bulk of society as these new technologies begin to come online.

Take a look at this exchange between Robert, the rejuvenated man in Vinge's story, and Miri, his granddaughter.

She patted his arm. "Don't worry Robert. Once you learn to wear, you can learn anything. Right now, you're in a trap; it's like you're seeing the world through a little hole; just whatever your naked eye sees—and what you can get from that." She pointed at the magic foolscap that was tucked into his shirt pocket. "With some practice you should be able to see and hear as good as anyone."

So how can you or I avoid falling into the "trap" of technological ignorance? It seems to me that it's a matter of my mindset more than anything else. My mindset is that I will do my best to learn about and understand where technology is going, and attempt to be involved in it, not necessarily every jot and tittle, but certainly its major themes. What are they? Nanotechnology; virtual reality, strong AI, radical life-extension; robotics; singularity; transhumanism.

As one example of my determination to keep up, I created a Second Life identity named Midd Munro. In the world of Second Life, I have discovered, there is a lot to learn. The learning curve is steep. But I will do my best to climb it. If alternate virtual personalities are a probable outgrowth of singularity, I'd better get on board, right?

Stay tuned.

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How to Catch Photons and Accelerate Computing Speed

Have you ever thought about catching a photon? Before you assume that I am insane, consider that a photon, a particle of electromagnetic radiation, moving at the speed of light (naturally), should be catchable. All you would need to do is close the entrance before the photon can get out, once it comes in. And have some way to keep it from being absorbed or otherwise interacting with the inner surface of the trap. Right?

Something like that has been just been done by researchers at Cornell University. To what end? you ask. Transmitting signals in computers can be done better and faster with photons than with electrons, but photons are more difficult to control and so routing becomes an issue. Today, this routing of photons has to be done by converting the light pulses to electrons and back again to photons. Not very efficient. So a practical way of controlling the light pulses was needed.

Enter the Cornell researchers, who have developed a way to trap pulses of light and thus route them efficiently.

The new device relies on an optically controlled "gate" that can be opened and closed to trap and release light. Temporarily storing light pulses could make it possible to control the order in which bits of information are sent, as well as the timing, both of which are essential for routing communications via fiber optics. Today, such routing is done, for the most part, electronically, a slow and inefficient process that requires converting light pulses into electrons and back again. In computers, optical memory could also make possible optical communication between devices on computer chips.

Switching to optical routing has been a challenge because pulses of light, unlike electrons, are difficult to control. One way to slow down the pulses and control their movement would be to temporarily confine them to a small continuous loop. (See "Tiny Device Stores Light.") But the problem with this approach is getting the light in and out of such a trap, since any entry point will also serve as an exit that would allow light to escape. What's needed is a way to close the entryway once the light has entered, and to do so very quickly--in less time than it takes for the light to circle around the loop and escape. Later, when the light pulse is needed, the entryway could be opened again.

The Cornell researchers, led by Michal Lipson, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the university, use a very fast, 1.5-picosecond pulse of light to open and close the entryway. The Cornell device includes two parallel silicon tracks, each 560 nanometers wide. Between these two tracks, and nearly touching them, are two silicon rings spaced a fraction of the width of a hair apart. To trap the light in these rings, the researchers turned to some of their earlier work, in which they found that the rings can be tuned to detour different colors by shining a brief pulse of light on them.

Light of a certain color passes along the silicon track, takes a detour through one of the rings, and then rejoins the silicon track and continues on its way. However, if the rings are retuned to the same frequency the moment after a light pulse enters a ring, the light pulse will circulate between the rings in a continuous loop rather than rejoin the silicon track and escape. Tuning the rings to different frequencies again, such as by shining another pulse on one of the rings, allows the light to escape this circuit and continue on to its destination.

I don't know how the light feels about being trapped, but since they are quickly let go again I don't think they mind too much. Stay tuned.

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Nanotechnology and All Things Precise

What is the big deal about nanotechnology. Why are really tiny machines better than regular-sized machines? And why are engineered drugs supposed to be so much better than the ones we came up with before? And what makes smart bombs so smart?

These are just some of the questions many people find themselves asking whenever these topics arise in the news. They are good questions, and they all have the same answer: Precision. Yes, folks, in each case it is about precision. Let me explain.

Hundred dollar bills

Imagine that you are a normal person, with a normal income and normal tastes in consumer goods. OK, got that? There is only one thing strange about you. It's your money. All you have are $100 bills. When you get paid, they round down. When you pay for goods and services, they round up. This means that your weekly salary of $1099 is rounded to $1000. You lose $99 every week. Too bad, so sad. When you buy a 25 cent pack of gum (if you are foolish enough to buy only that), you have to pay, $100. A dinner bill of $35 including tip costs you, you guessed it, $100.

Precision in fabrication

That would surely suck, wouldn't it? Well, we've been doing something like that for many thousands of years. How so? you ask. Well, whenever we build a widget, for example, we round up on the materials we use to build it, simply because our tools can't be any more precise about it. But what if we could build that widget atom by atom? We would use not one more atom than is necessary. With lots of widgets we could save a bundle.

Precision in medicine

How about drugs, the medicinal kind? First, instead of taking a bunch of ingredients, mixing them together and trying the concoction on test victims, I mean subjects, to see what, if any, therapeutic effects might result, we would be able to build a molecule or compound exactly to order, made from the start to do exactly what we want it to do. Second, rather than manufacturing one drug to treat every headache, we could design and create one that's just perfect for you, based on your specific genetic makeup.

Further, wouldn't it be nice if, instead of having to swallow a pill that has to be dissolved in your belly, then absorbed through the lining of your intestines, float around your bloodstream until most of the molecules find the right address, they could all be targeted and delivered precisely where they are needed? Not a molecule wasted?

Killing the right enemy

And smart bombs, well, we're talking about not killing 15 people when we only need to kill one. (I'm am optimistic about the future, but the idea that we won't have bombs or killing...come on.)

This idea of making things more precise through technology is affecting you right now. One reason why there's so little inflation, why prices of most things are stable or falling, is because of technology. The companies that make and process and package and deliver and sell the milk you buy are all using computers and sophisticated algorithms to make sure they aren't wasting a drop of milk or a second of time. Of course, they are wasting many drops and many seconds, because the technology available has lots of room for improvement. But we are learning the advantages of precision.

So, now you know. It's time to start cheering for technology, for artificial general intelligence, and the singularity.

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Even Rudimentary Virtual Reality is Engrossing

I finally took the plunge into Second Life, and I have to tell you, it was hard to come back. Not really; I managed to quit the program without too much trouble, but I do miss the flying part.

I was persuaded to get my Second Life identity started by this article. Wade Roush, writing for Technology Review, talks about how "The World Wide Web will soon be absorbed into the World Wide Sim: an immersive, 3-D visual environment that combines elements of social virtual worlds such as Second Life and mapping applications such as Google Earth."

It's not there yet, but my point in this article is simply that even as rudimentary as Second Life is at this moment, it's still an engrossing, and somewhat freeing, experience. The learning curve is fairly steep, but as you master the various possibilities available, you find yourself living in a world that you might wish was real. I mean, come on, you can fly!

I wrote an article a few months ago that I titled Going All-Virtual: The Desire to Leave Reality Behind. In it I discussed the possibility that, as VR becomes fully immersive, many people will come to prefer it to the real world. What I have understood today is that even though it's far from fully immersive now, it is incredibly enjoyable. Why is this so? Here are some of my common sense speculations:

First, it's different. From your current life. Many, if not most, people enjoy taking a break from their routines, from the typical day to day stuff of their normal lives. That's what recreation is all about. VR takes you to a different life. You can be a different person, with a different job, in a different place, with different friends, and on and on it goes.

Second, it's malleable. It can be manipulated and changed far more easily than real reality. Ray Kurzweil envisages an entirely new field of work opening up for talented people to design VR environments that the rest of us can enjoy and experiment with.

Third, it's limited only by my imagination. I often have dreams in which I fly. Flying in Second Life is remarkably similar to what I experience in my dreams. The ability to rise into the air to get a better view of my surroundings, and then moving above earth-bound obstacles to go wherever I want, is intoxicating. How much more so when I the landscape beneath me is as well-defined as real reality and I can feel the wind in my face and hear it whistling past my ears?

I'm sure there are many other enjoyable aspects to VR that I haven't touched on here. Suffice it to say, VR is going to entice us more and more. So stay tuned.

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Why Create Super-Intelligence?

You will recall, if you are a fan of Seinfeld, a particularly heated debate between Jerry and George concerning Superman's super-powers. The subject of the argument was simple: Whether or not Superman's super-powers included super-humor. It went like this:

Jerry: "I think Superman probably has a very good sense of humor." George: "I never heard him say anything really funny." Jerry: "It's common sense. He's got super strength, super-speed; I'm sure he's got super-humor." George: "Either you're born with a sense of humor or you're not. It's not going to change. Even if you go from the red sun of Krypton all the way to the yellow sun of the Earth." As George makes his point, he uses the red ketchup bottle and yellow mustard bottle to represent the red and yellow suns. Jerry: "Why? Why would that one area of his mind not be affected by the yellow sun of the Earth?" George: "I don't know. But he ain't funny."

As far as we know, George was correct. Superman was not funny. Neither was he unusually intelligent. But what if he was? What if Superman were super-intelligent. Well then, he would probably be able to come up with a few solutions to humanity's problems that we were too stupid to see.

Not just because we can

This somewhat silly speculation about Superman has a point, and you don't have to have super-intelligence to see it. Many people who are opposed to the idea of creating artificial super-intelligence see efforts to do so as purely whimsical. Supposedly, we only want to do it because we think we can, and we are fascinated by what it might look like. Certainly there is some of that. But there's something much more important behind the drive to create it.

Consider the problems we face today and those we might face tomorrow. Global warming, whatever causes it. Asteroids and comets planning to say hello to the Earth. Pandemics. Imminent collapse of the Medicare system. The shrinking U.S. dollar. At the moment we have no solutions to these and many other problems. And there's no one smart enough around to come up with solutions anytime soon.

Let's ask the smart guy

But what if we were able to build a super-intelligent machine? Assuming we could build it in such a way that it is favorably disposed to our continued existence, then we could pose our problems to it, and we would be very likely to get back some answers that we hadn't thought of and would never have thought of. Mitchell Howe posted some thoughts on this topic on The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. In one particularly salient paragraph, he writes:

When something is really important, you look for the mind best able to turn information about your problem into a possible solution. Think about this, though: Every mind you can hit up for advice today is just a human brain, and therefore nearly identical in structure. That 14-ounce bundle of monkey neurons is our best example of general intelligence because it happens to be our only example. I suspect that if we could donate the human brain to a museum of all possible minds, it would end up in a special novelty exhibit where gawkers could laugh at the idea that people ever managed to think with those things.

So, why create super-intelligence? So we can have some super-humor, of course. Stay tuned.

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Qubit Calculations

Researchers at Delft University of Technology have succeeded in carrying out calculations with two quantum bits, the building blocks of a possible future quantum computer. ~ Science Daily

Quantum computing has the potential to increase computing power to an almost unimaginable level. The reasons for this amazing potential have to do with how matter behaves at very small scales, where the laws of quantum mechanics come into play.

Richard Feynman, one of the world's most respected and beloved physicists and Nobel prize-winner, famously said "I think it is safe to say that no one understands Quantum Mechanics." This is because the way particles behave at this scale makes no intuitive sense. They take every possible path from point A to point B. They are here and there at the same time. Until you look at them. Then they quickly settle down into one place and one path.

How does this strangeness translate into seemingly infinite computing power?

In a traditional computer, information is encoded in a series of bits, and these bits are manipulated via Boolean logic gates arranged in succession to produce an end result. Similarly, a quantum computer manipulates qubits by executing a series of quantum gates, each a unitary transformation acting on a single qubit or pair of qubits. In applying these gates in succession, a quantum computer can perform a complicated unitary transformation to a set of qubits in some initial state. The qubits can then be measured, with this measurement serving as the final computational result. This similarity in calculation between a classical and quantum computer affords that in theory, a classical computer can accurately simulate a quantum computer. In other words, a classical computer would be able to do anything a quantum computer can. So why bother with quantum computers? Although a classical computer can theoretically simulate a quantum computer, it is incredibly inefficient, so much so that a classical computer is effectively incapable of performing many tasks that a quantum computer could perform with ease. The simulation of a quantum computer on a classical one is a computationally hard problem because the correlations among quantum bits are qualitatively different from correlations among classical bits, as first explained by John Bell. Take for example a system of only a few hundred qubits, this exists in a Hilbert space of dimension ~1090 that in simulation would require a classical computer to work with exponentially large matrices (to perform calculations on each individual state, which is also represented as a matrix), meaning it would take an exponentially longer time than even a primitive quantum computer.

Richard Feynman was among the first to recognize the potential in quantum superposition for solving such problems much much faster. For example, a system of 500 qubits, which is impossible to simulate classically, represents a quantum superposition of as many as 2500 states. Each state would be classically equivalent to a single list of 500 1's and 0's. Any quantum operation on that system --a particular pulse of radio waves, for instance, whose action might be to execute a controlled-NOT operation on the 100th and 101st qubits-- would simultaneously operate on all 2500 states. Hence with one fell swoop, one tick of the computer clock, a quantum operation could compute not just on one machine state, as serial computers do, but on 2500 machine states at once! Eventually, however, observing the system would cause it to collapse into a single quantum state corresponding to a single answer, a single list of 500 1's and 0's, as dictated by the measurement axiom of quantum mechanics. The reason this is an exciting result is because this answer, derived from the massive quantum parallelism achieved through superposition, is the equivalent of performing the same operation on a classical super computer with ~10150 separate processors (which is of course impossible)!! (Jacob West, 2000)

Didn't follow that? Not to worry. What it boils down to is that quantum computing, if fully realized, could easily perform calculations that a universe-sized classical machine would find impossible.

Is quantum computing only pie in the sky? No, it's not. Researchers are making solid progress towards its realization.

Now for the first time a 'controlled-NOT' calculation with two qubits has been realised with the superconducting rings. This is important because it allows any given quantum calculation to be realised.

The result was achieved by the PhD student Jelle Plantenberg in the team led by Kees Harmans and Hans Mooij. The research took place within the FOM (Dutch Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter) concentration group for Solid State Quantum Information Processing.

Stay tuned.

Source: ScienceDaily

Via BetterHumans

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Reflections on "Human 2.0: Creating Gods"

I hope many of my readers took the time to watch the entire BBC presentation of "Human 2.0: Creating Gods," if only to gain an understanding of the fantastic possibilities and existential dangers that are approaching with the singularity. I watched it yesterday, and today I will post some of the thoughts that occurred to me as I reflected on what I saw.

The Singularity is Almost Certainly Inevitable

Anyone who watches the videos will probably come away with this feeling. Barring something like an ELE (extinction-level event) in the next two decades, computers will achieve and quickly thereafter exceed human intelligence by 2025; and the human brain will be simulated successfully in a computer.

Serious people (and serious money) are toiling away at various aspects of this goal, and they are making incredible headway. As Ray Kurzweil points out, computers became a billion times more powerful in the last 25 years, and they will become another billion times more powerful in the next 25 years, which will put them at and beyond human intelligence.

Within a year, a supercomputer that has been painstakingly fed, neuron by neuron, the circuitry and workings of a section of mouse brain, will be turned on. Once that occurs, it will not be very long before an entire animal brain, and then a human brain, will be simulated on a computer.

It Has Never Happened Before

Obviously the technology is new, that's not really what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about the singularity, which can be defined as a point of "technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history." We think of history as being cyclical: nations rise and fall, great men and women come and go, boom and bust, over and over. There have been amazing inventions: fire, the wheel, writing, the printing press, the airplane. But this has never happened before, and it has never even been anticipated before except in science fiction. We can speculate all we want about the results and consequences of it, but no one can predict what will come next.

The Downsides Must Be Mitigated

It cannot be stopped, and it will present existential dangers, that is, dangers that threaten the continued existence of the human species. What must be done then, and what is being done, is to develop safeguards and defensive measures against the inevitable downsides. Just as the Internet age brought viruses and Trojans, and just as responsible people have continued to develop the means to stay steps ahead of those who use it for nefarious purposes, so we must stay ahead of the dangers that will come with the singularity.

Please feel free to share your own reflections in a comment.

If you haven't yet seen the videos, you can watch them be going to yesterday's post. And by so doing, you will be staying tuned.

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Human 2.0: Creating Gods

These are must-see videos. This series of videos that demonstrates just how far along we are on the road to transhumanism and singularity: creating a new kind of human.



Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

(Wait until the monkey stops moving its arm! A profoundly creepy moment.)

Part 5

Part 6

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How the Brain Works: Jeff Hawkins

Understanding how the human brain works is part and parcel of technological singularity. Strong AI, building computer substrates that can accept and run a human mind, augmenting the human brain with implantable computer chips, all these things require a deep and detailed understanding of how the brain works.

Jeff Hawkins, in this video, delivers a fascinating explanation of his overarching theory of the brain:

To date, there hasn't been an overarching theory of how the human brain really works, Jeff Hawkins argues in this compelling talk. That's because we still haven't defined intelligence accurately. But one thing's for sure, he says: The brain isn't like a powerful computer processor. It's more like a memory system that records everything we experience and helps us predict, intelligently, what will happen next. Bringing this new brain science to computer devices will enable powerful new applications -- and it will happen sooner than you think.

You will thoroughly enjoy this 20-minute talk.



Via Cheesobacillus furiosus

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