Inside Your Skull: More Than One Mind?

Consciousness is such a strange thing. We all know we have it, but what is it? It has been suggested that there is no objective way to measure consciousness, in that consciousness is an entirely subjective experience. I know what it is like to be me, but I have no idea what it is like to be you. I can only assume that you are conscious, based on certain similarities in your behavior to mine, but I you may only be acting as if you were conscious.

Another strange thought: It has also been suggested that other things may be conscious of which we are completely unaware, again because consciousness is such a personal, subjective thing, for all we know it could be going on within our own spinal cords and we have no access to it. Which leads me to this final paragraph from an article in today's New York Times:

Yet the new research on priming makes it clear that we are not alone in our own consciousness. We have company, an invisible partner who has strong reactions about the world that don’t always agree with our own, but whose instincts, these studies clearly show, are at least as likely to be helpful, and attentive to others, as they are to be disruptive.

The article is referring to the human subconscious, a consciousness to which we have no access. According to the author, the consciousness we know and love is often the last one to know when the rest of our brain has weighed its options and come to a decision.

The results suggest a “bottom-up” decision-making process, in which the ventral pallidum is part of a circuit that first weighs the reward and decides, then interacts with the higher-level, conscious regions later, if at all, Dr. Frith said.

Scientists have spent years trying to pinpoint the exact neural regions that support conscious awareness, so far in vain. But there’s little doubt it involves the prefrontal cortex, the thin outer layer of brain tissue behind the forehead, and experiments like this one show that it can be one of the last neural areas to know when a decision is made.

What will be discovered when the uploading of our minds begins? Is there someone else in there with us? Perhaps we shall soon find out.

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A Failure of Imagination

Is it just me? Or does this article, and many like it, strike you as exposing a stunning lack of vision on the part of scientists and the journalists who cover them? And if so, is this phenomenon part of a much larger problem in society as a whole?

Sorry to be so negative, but here's why I get the impressions mentioned above. Take a look at these quotes taken from this article in The University of Florida News.

Imagine a chip, strategically placed in the brain, that could prevent epileptic seizures or allow someone who has lost a limb to control an artificial arm just by thinking about it.

That's how the article begins. Is that the most you can imagine from the research that is being done as we speak? Chip implants are already being used to help control Parkinson's. Cochlear implants are helping deaf people hear. Now we're moving on to epileptics and amputees. That's excellent news, but it requires virtually no imagination at all, since these are merely the logical next steps. What would be a bit more imaginative would be envisioning chips that record and store all of our brains' signals and transmit them to a computer for analysis and decoding. I'm glad that there seem to be a few people who can see that actual potential of these developments, but why aren't there more?

“(Scientists have) realized that by going inside the brain we can capture so much more information, we can have much more resolution,” Sanchez said.

Really? They figured that out? How'd they do that? I think they figured that out in the 19th century.

The day may not be too far off when patients can control a prosthetic hand or leg just by thinking about it, Sanchez said.

Again, isn't this already happening? What would be new is when patients can move their prosthesis without thinking about it, just like you and I do. I don't think about moving my fingers to hit the keys that type out this sentence, I just do it. That's where we're headed.

Well, that's my rant for today. You can let me have it if you think I'm just being cranky.

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Smart Clothes

What are smart clothes? Smart clothes, at least in this context, are clothes that have wireless technology incorporated into its fabrics so that all manner of devices can connect wirelessly to devices worn by other people.

A report today on ScienceDaily describes how medical monitoring devices have been integrated into smart clothes so that a person's respiration and body temp can be monitored from afar in real time. Isn't this called telemetry?

Even though the article is about medical uses for the technology, I happen to get more excited about other applications. Not too far into the future we will be seeing immense data streams moving wirelessly, through our clothes, from person to person and entity to entity. Think of the possibilities! Stay tuned.

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When Will the Public Finally Get It?

I was just reading George P. Dvorsky's recent post wherein he expresses his understandable frustration with the paucity of attendees at TransVision 2007, which demonstrates the fact that, as he puts it, some of the most important ideas and thinkers of our time are largely being ignored by the general public.

He is right in his assessment, and admits that "I’ve struggled to figure out why this is the case." In my own humble way I will attempt an answer which is closely tied to something I've been contemplating in the last few days.

Since I started blogging about the singularity, I have noticed that I'm writing two kinds of posts: Breaking news about important developments in technology that will help bring the singularity about, and my own speculations as to what it will look like and how it might affect people. What's been absent, and what I have been trying mightily to find, are reports about dramatic advances that will grab the public's attention. They just aren't there...yet.

Don't get me wrong: The public is just beginning to be engaged in dialog about the singularity. The mainstream media is just beginning to pay a bit of attention. But the time is not yet right for a full-fledged appreciation of what is happening. Most of the really cool stuff is still under the surface. It is bubbling, and hints of it are getting through, but the public will not pay attention until one or more of several possibilities occur:

• When a human brain is radically enhanced by connecting it to a computer chip. (I'm talking about being able to perform feats of amazing processing power or memory, or seeing in ultraviolet, that sort of thing.)
• When a machine is reported to be indistinguishable from a person, a la the Turing test.
• When a person first plugs his brain into an almost fully-immersive VR system.
• When an everyday-sized object is first built using a nano-assembler.
• When a 60-year-old human is rejuvenated back to the equivalent of 40.
• When an entirely new species that is visible to the unaided eye is created.

We just aren't there yet. But that's when the public will wake up. And, by mere coincidence, it is also when those of us who have been blogging about the singularity all these years will finally become rich. Hallelujah!

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Stop Thinking Lifespan and Start Thinking Healthspan

It is devilishly difficult to change the meanings we have associated with words and had reinforced over years and even decades. At the moment I am in the middle of an Accounting for Management class as part of an MBA program. In accounting, debits and credits mean only one thing: items to the left and items to the right of the line. They have no meaning as so subtraction or addition. I know this, and yet my long-held beliefs about these words still intrude into my cold calculations.

Similarly, I think we associate age with infirmity, which is quite understandable, since we have seen people get old, get sick, require lots of medicines and expensive medical procedures to keep them alive, and then die. It is rare to find someone older than 65 who has no illnesses and is hale and healthy.

Because the idea of old age is so firmly wedded to the idea of sickness and costly medical care, when transhumanists speak about the goal of radical life-extension, people seem to envision a world full of cane-using, wheelchair-riding, social-security-needing, 200-year-old parasites who are blithely sucking the last bit of the marrow out of the Earth's resources before finally kicking the bucket. I can see them thinking, Man, die already! I mean how long can someone play golf and eat dinner at 4 PM?

This is where it helps to understand that transhumanists are not interested in extending our number of dying years. They are interested in extending the number of years (perhaps indefinitely) we are completely healthy. No osteoporosis. No diabetes. No cancer. No heart disease. No inch-thick bifocals. No need for life-support. Just every 20 years a fresh round of rejuvenation therapy and many, many years of productive life. We're not talking about living off social security and Medicare. Won't need it.

So try that picture and see if it helps any.

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Researcher Hopes to Have the First Brain-Enhancing Implant

I stayed up far too late a couple of nights ago watching this video. I couldn't turn it off, it was so interesting. I bring it up to talk about one of the researchers featured in it who is currently developing a computer chip that he plans to connect directly to his own brain. He has already had surgery to connect leads to his own nervous system through his wrist, so I have little doubt he will do as he says.

Which brings me to a question I raised a couple of weeks ago in this blog: When will remediation become augmentation? In other words, when will implants move from helping the sick to enhancing the well? The answer may just lie with self-experimenters like the researcher in the film.

This raises an even more intriguing question: What will the experimenter experience? Imagine a chip designed to add processing power. How would such a chip, assuming that it is correctly designed, feel? Perhaps we should begin with a more simple implant, one that is designed to add to the experimenter's senses, maybe so that he can see in the infrared range. I would think he would have to learn how to mentally access the new linkage, then his brain would have to learn how to interpret the signals and how to integrate them into his field of view. Perhaps at first he would hallucinate, his mind not knowing how to decipher the new data stream.

Not being a neuroscientist myself, I am only indulging in wild speculation, and I am certain that trained professionals would be far better at this than I, but it is interesting to think about. I truly can't wait to hear about this brave man's experiences. Stay tuned.

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You Are What You Remember: Seeing Memories Form

For the first time ever, researchers have literally seen memories form in a brain. While the little aphorism in my title is overly broad, there is truth behind it, since the formation of memories (learning) is accomplished by changing the shape of the synaptic connections in certain regions of the brain.

Scientists at UC Irvine, led by Gary Lynch, professor of psychiatry and human behavior, have succeeded in viewing "the physical substrate, the ‘face,’ of newly encoded memory."

Working with advanced microscopic techniques called restorative deconvolution microscopy, the UC Irvine team found that the LTP-related markers appear during learning and are associated with expanded synapses in the hippocampus. Because the size of a synapse relates to its effectiveness in transmitting messages between neurons, the new results indicate that learning improves communication between particular groups of brain cells.

The findings open the way for one of the great objectives of the life sciences: mapping the distribution of memory across brain regions. The quest for the location of memory traces, or “engrams” as they are often called, preoccupied researchers for much of the 20th century but failed because there was no way to tag synapses modified by recent learning. The new results from the UC Irvine studies remove this obstacle.

Seeing the actual formation of memories is a huge step forward towards the eventual scanning and mapping of the contents of a human brain. Who we are as individuals is encoded in the physical structure and shape of our synaptic connections, along with the strength of those connections. Everything you know or have ever experienced, everything you are, will someday be containable and transferable within and between computer substrates.

We'll see how important regular backups are then.

[Source]

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How to Build Gods (Rough Cut)

I apologize if the title of this post offends anyone, but it really is an good way to describe what this video is about; that is, building artificial super-intelligence.

There is a substantial qualitative difference in the predictions being made today and those made in the 50s concerning human-level artificial intelligence. Isaac Asimov was clearly off when he set his AI, HAL, in the year 2001. But at that time, no one had any idea what kind of computational power would be needed to achieve that goal, nor did they have decades of Moore's law from which to extrapolate.

Today, we have pretty good idea what kind of power will be required, and we have a pretty good idea when it will be available. IBM is currently involved in a project to simulate an entire cortical column, which is how the neocortex is wired. Once they have completed the first one, they will add others. A brain will be built. And fairly soon.

I encourage you to watch this video which, according to YouTube, is a rough cut of a film called "Building Gods." You'll then have a sense of how imminent these astonishing developments really are.



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DOD Creates Sentient World Simulation

The Register is reporting that the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) in building a digital world with billions of nodes representing every human being on the planet.

Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a "synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information", according to a concept paper for the project.

"SWS provides an environment for testing Psychological Operations (PSYOP)," the paper reads, so that military leaders can "develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners".

SWS also replicates financial institutions, utilities, media outlets, and street corner shops. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors.

This news brings to mind the intriguing question: Are we already living in a simulation? The thinking behind this admittedly far-fetched idea comes from just this scenario, whereby sentient races will find benefit in research projects that simulate different types of worlds.

Alok Chaturvedi wants SWS to match every person on the planet, one-to-one.

Right now, the 62 simulated nations in SEAS depict humans as composites, at a 100-to-1 ratio.

One organisation has achieved a one-to-one level of granularity for its simulations, according to Chaturvedi: the US Army, which is using SEAS to identify potential recruits.

Chaturvedi insists his goal for SWS is to have a depersonalised likeness for each individual, rather than an immediately identifiable duplicate. If your town census records your birthdate, job title, and whether you own a dog, SWS will generate what Chaturvedi calls a "like someone" with the same stats, but not the same name.

Of course, government agencies and corporations can add to SWS whatever personally-identifiable information they choose from their own databases, and for their own purposes.

And with consumers already giving up their personal information regularly to websites such as MySpace and Twitter, it is not a stretch to imagine SWS doing the same thing.

"There may be hooks through which individuals may voluntarily contribute information to SWS," Chaturvedi said.

SEAS bases its AI "thinking" on the theories of cognitive psychologists and the work of Princeton University professor Daniel Kahneman, one of the fathers of behavioural economics.

How long can it be before PCs are powerful enough to allow home users to play around with complex simulations?

Source

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Is it Real or is it Memorex?

Are you old enough to remember the Memorex commercials? Was it Aretha Franklin singing a high note? Both the tape and the person broke the glass? This time the question is, which one is the bionic hand?

This technology represents a major milestone in the effort to provide amputees with limbs that work as well or better than the originals. It's called the i-Limb (sorry Steve Jobs, they got the name first) and it is the world's most advanced bionic hand.

It attempts to solve a difficult problem with artificial hands, and that is the absence of tactile feedback to the brain which tells the user when enough pressure has been applied. It uses a feature called stall detection to prevent crushing delicate objects, like other hands. Another feature is its modularity, allowing fingers to be swapped out in minutes.

As they become even more effective, artificial limbs will eventually surpass the original versions, at which point they will become a more attractive option for replacing an undamaged limb.

[via Wired]

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Mental Control of Mechanical Systems: It Has Arrived!

I am very excited to post about this new technology. Two different tech companies have independently developed systems that allow humans to control not only computer systems, but robots as well.

Neurosky recently demonstrated a cost effective bio sensor and signal processing system for the consumer market (see video). It is eerie to watch the participant learn to manipulate objects on the computer screen. As one would imagine, the controller must learn to focus enough attention to an object, then use certain thought patterns to either pull it or levitate it.

OLogic is another firm that has coupled the above technology with its robotics knowledge to allow users to control virtually any mechanical system using their mind.

If you watch the video, listen for the last comment from the announcer; I found his mentioning of the accelerating pace of tech development to be one of the first times a reporter has noticed the phenomenon behind the Singularity.



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Let There Be Light: Controlling Neurons with Photons

Researchers have learned how to control neurons with pulses of light.

The dancing worm in a German lab is actually a bioengineering project run by neurobiologist Alexander Gottschalk at the University of Frankfurt. Yellow light moved to forward, while blue light pulls it back. Why not green and red? Must be a technical issue. In any case, the differently-colored light pulses affect its neurons, which in turn operate its various muscles, resulting in the forward and backward motions.

The worm has been engineered so that its neurons can be turned off and on at will, using these flashed of light.

The worm is in the vanguard of a revolution in brain science - the most spectacular application yet of a technology that allows scientists to turn individual brain cells on and off at will. "It's really changing the whole field of neuroscience," says the worm's developer, neurobiologist Alexander Gottschalk at the University of Frankfurt.

One possibility is that the technology, coupled with a method of getting light into the human skull, could create a Brave New World of neuro-modification in which conditions such as depression or Parkinson's disease are treated not with sledgehammer drugs or electrodes, but with delicate pinpricks of light. In the long term it is even possible that such treatments could be modified to enhance normal brain function, for example improving memory or alertness.

The technology could also lead to spectacular advances in basic neuroscience, allowing researchers to tease apart the neural circuits that control everything from reflexes to consciousness with unprecedented accuracy. "We'll be able to understand how specific cell types in the brain give rise to fuzzy concepts like hope and motivation," predicts Karl Deisseroth, a psychiatrist at Stanford University in California, who is spearheading some of the work.

Everyone is already for any safe treatment for neurological diseases, but this article is one of the rare ones that also mention the possible use of the therapy to "enhance normal brain function." So the next time you have lights in your head, they may be doing you some good.

Source

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Return of the (Robotic) Fly

We have already heard about the remote controlled moths being developed by implanting control chips into moth larvae. On a sort of parallel course, we have now learned that Harvard University has designed and built a fully robotic fly. And it does fly.

A life-size, robotic fly has taken flight at Harvard University. Weighing only 60 milligrams, with a wingspan of three centimeters, the tiny robot's movements are modeled on those of a real fly. While much work remains to be done on the mechanical insect, the researchers say that such small flying machines could one day be used as spies, or for detecting harmful chemicals.

Of course DARPA is funding this research, in hopes of using the robotic Musca domesticas for stealth surveillance operations.

Recreating a fly's efficient movements in a robot roughly the size of the real insect was difficult, however, because existing manufacturing processes couldn't be used to make the sturdy, lightweight parts required. The motors, bearings, and joints typically used for large-scale robots wouldn't work for something the size of a fly. "Simply scaling down existing macro-scale techniques will not come close to the performance that we need," Wood says.

Some extremely small parts can be made using the processes for creating microelectromechanical systems. But such processes require a lot of time and money. Wood and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, needed a cheap, rapid fabrication process so they could easily produce different iterations of their designs.

While these developments are a major achievement, there remains quite a bit more to be done before this fly will be turned loose. It needs an onboard power supply, tiny sensor equipment and flight control computer chips. But having taken wing, one can have little doubt that this little robot will eventually be on the job.

Source

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Human 2.0: Kurzweil Writes for Lifeboat Foundation

A fantastic report by Ray Kurzweil on the coming transformation of the human species into human 2.0. Whereas biological evolution has taken eons to bring us to our present configuration, technology will speed up the process unimaginably.

In the coming decades, a radical upgrading of our body's physical and mental systems, already underway, will use nanobots to augment and ultimately replace our organs. We already know how to prevent most degenerative disease through nutrition and supplementation; this will be a bridge to the emerging biotechnology revolution, which in turn will be a bridge to the nanotechnology revolution. By 2030, reverse-engineering of the human brain will have been completed and nonbiological intelligence will merge with our biological brains.

Click image to enlarge.

This is a vision of our possible, perhaps probably future and is well worth reading.

HUMAN BODY VERSION 2.0

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Future Technological Change: Evolutionary or Revolutionary?

Among the individuals making up the scientific community, according to Mike Treder of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, there are two competing schools of thought concerning the near-term future changes in technology. One group, the majority, believes in a continued gradual slope of change. The other, a much smaller set of scientists, is expecting a discontinuity to occur fairly soon. They anticipate a change so transformative that society will not be the same subsequent to it. This transformation may be the result of advances in on of three possible fields: artificial intelligence, bioengineering, or nanotechnology.

Mike makes a compelling case for the idea that we will see a combination of the two futures. He posits that we are really talking about two different kinds of change: Societal and Technological. Technology often changes society, but not always immediately upon its invention. For example, the Internet was created some years before the World Wide Web made it accessible to most people. So Mike introduces the following graph:



He proposes several possible scenarios that could cause the sudden societal transformation shown in his graph:

• Significant improvements in software development and sophisticated user interfaces could produce a level of virtual reality that is close to indistinguishable from the real world.
• A combination of advanced neurotechnology and powerful supercomputing conceivably could enable consciousness uploading, in which a replica of an individual human mind would be recapitulated in cyberspace.
• Breakthroughs in computer programming could give rise to true artificial intelligence; if one or more such systems are capable of recursive self-improvement, this could lead to a superintelligence far surpassing human comprehension.
• In nanotechnology, the long anticipated development of exponential general-purpose molecular manufacturing could present tremendous opportunities for societal benefits while simultaneously bringing grave dangers such as economic meltdown, environmental havoc, or an unstable arms race.

Admittedly, there is a chance that none of this will occur. However, I wouldn't bet on it.

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Exploring Swarm Theory

As promised, I have been searching the Internet for the latest news about emergent complexity. I found this fascinating article on National Geographic written by Peter Miller.

"Ants aren't smart," Gordon says. "Ant colonies are." A colony can solve problems unthinkable for individual ants, such as finding the shortest path to the best food source, allocating workers to different tasks, or defending a territory from neighbors. As individuals, ants might be tiny dummies, but as colonies they respond quickly and effectively to their environment. They do it with something called swarm intelligence.

Where this intelligence comes from raises a fundamental question in nature: How do the simple actions of individuals add up to the complex behavior of a group? How do hundreds of honeybees make a critical decision about their hive if many of them disagree? What enables a school of herring to coordinate its movements so precisely it can change direction in a flash, like a single, silvery organism? The collective abilities of such animals—none of which grasps the big picture, but each of which contributes to the group's success—seem miraculous even to the biologists who know them best. Yet during the past few decades, researchers have come up with intriguing insights.

One key to an ant colony, for example, is that no one's in charge. No generals command ant warriors. No managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all—at least none that we would recognize. It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb. Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing.

That is fascinating, you say, but how does it affect the price of rice in China? It turns out that building computer models of ant behavior and swarm intelligence is allowing researchers to solve real-world problems.

In Houston, for example, a company named American Air Liquide has been using an ant-based strategy to manage a complex business problem. The company produces industrial and medical gases, mostly nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen, at about a hundred locations in the United States and delivers them to 6,000 sites, using pipelines, railcars, and 400 trucks. Deregulated power markets in some regions (the price of electricity changes every 15 minutes in parts of Texas) add yet another layer of complexity.

So they built a computer model based on the behavior of ants.

Ants had evolved an efficient method to find the best routes in their neighborhoods. Why not follow their example? So Air Liquide combined the ant approach with other artificial intelligence techniques to consider every permutation of plant scheduling, weather, and truck routing—millions of possible decisions and outcomes a day. Every night, forecasts of customer demand and manufacturing costs are fed into the model.

"It takes four hours to run, even with the biggest computers we have," Harper says. "But at six o'clock every morning we get a solution that says how we're going to manage our day."

For truck drivers, the new system took some getting used to. Instead of delivering gas from the plant closest to a customer, as they used to do, drivers were now asked to pick up shipments from whichever plant was making gas at the lowest delivered price, even if it was farther away.

"You want me to drive a hundred miles? To the drivers, it wasn't intuitive," Harper says. But for the company, the savings have been impressive. "It's huge. It's actually huge."

Another application of swarm intelligence uses the flocking actions of birds in flight.

A team of robots that could coordinate its actions like a flock of birds could offer significant advantages over a solitary robot. Spread out over a large area, a group could function as a powerful mobile sensor net, gathering information about what's out there. If the group encountered something unexpected, it could adjust and respond quickly, even if the robots in the group weren't very sophisticated, just as ants are able to come up with various options by trial and error. If one member of the group were to break down, others could take its place. And, most important, control of the group could be decentralized, not dependent on a leader.

This field is just getting started, and the applications to come defy imagination. How much do you want to bet that there's swarm intelligence in the brain's huge collection of neurons? Stay tuned.

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Emergent Complexity and Biological Engineering: 21st Century Science

I have decided to add two fields of scientific research and development to my roster of subjects to keep up with on my Singularity Blog. As we have established a beachhead on the shores of the 21st century, these two fields have become, as some would put it, the new new things. As I continue to comb through large quantities of articles on current developments in order to bring to my readers relevant and interesting news, I will be including these two topics: Emergent Complexity and Biological Engineering.

Whereas, not too long ago, creationists were able to convince many that the complexity of life could not be explained by science and must therefore remain the province of a Creator, this realm alas has joined so many others in falling to the advancing armies of scientific investigation. Emergent complexity is now understood to show that complex systems do emerge naturally out of a large number of simple interactions, with no need for a controlling entity. With a few very simple rules for each ant to follow, the complex behavior of the colony emerges. The complex shapes of snowflakes emerge out of the simple interactions of water molecules. A flock of birds moves and shifts in the sky in highly complex and coordinated fashion, using only the simple rules followed by each bird. These are examples of emergent complexity. What does this have to do with Singularity?

As we build computers that approach the level of complexity of the human brain, the question arises: Is consciousness the natural result of complexity? When we are able to build systems with as many connections between transistors as there are synapses in the brain, will the first sentient machine be born? No matter what anyone thinks is the answer, we will all find out soon enough.

Bioengineering is coming to the forefront of science only recently, since we are approaching a degree of understanding and technological wizardry wherein we can engineer and transform our own biology. Of course a nightmare scenario will immediately come to mind, thanks to Mary Shelley, but we hope for better things, such as the eradication of genetic disease and even death itself.

So onward we go, and I hope you'll come along for the ride.

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Learning How to Walk Uphill: Neural Loops

One of the most memorable times in any parent's life is when their child first learns to walk. One parent will hold the toddler upright while the other stands a few feet away with arms extended in encouragement. Baby steps, then a diaper-cushioned fall. Didn't quite make it. Try again. Baby gets almost all the way there. Try again. Success! Clapping hands and hugs all around.

What a marvelous thing is our brain, to be able to learn such a difficult process. We go on from there to the most anxiety-laden time in any parent's life: When their child first learns to drive. But learn they do, forming new neuronal connections as they go. Like riding a bicycle...you never forget how to do it. You add skill upon skill, understanding upon understanding. Amazing.

Now, let's apply that power to machines. Add some neuronal loops to the analysis circuitry, and you get this...the robot learns how to walk up a ramp. Remind you of anything?



[via Think Artificial]

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Maximum Age Increasing at Accelerating Rate

It is a long-held believe that humans have a maximum life span of 115 to 120 years. Like many long-held beliefs, this one is also incorrect according to a recent demographic study by UC Berkeley associate professor of demography John Wilmoth.

"Those numbers are out of thin air," said Wilmoth. "There is no scientific basis on which to estimate a fixed upper limit. Whether 115 or 120 years, it is a legend created by scientists who are quoting each other."

Wilmoth and his associates found that maximum life span at death has been rising for the last 138 years. (Note that this study concerns maximum life span at death, not average life span.) Not only has this number been increasing, but it has been increasing at an accelerating rate.

Historical records, on the other hand, show that the entire configuration of ages at death in Sweden has been shifting upward for 138 years, he said. The upward trend accelerated suddenly around 1970, more than doubling the rate at which the life span was growing, from less than one year of age for every two decades to more than one year per decade.

This has happened because of medical and public health advances throughout the century, said Wilmoth, whose analysis ruled out simple population growth as a factor. Some scientists had thought that the increased number of very old people could be due to a larger population base, but Wilmoth's data show that the main cause is increased survival after age 70.

There have been countless gripes about the technology that keeps people alive who would otherwise have died, all claiming that there is no point to prolonging life when there is no quality of life or hope of recovery. No argument here. But those who are working at eliminating or reversing aging speak not of life span, but of health span. The goal is to increase the span of years that people can expect to be healthy, not hooked up to life-saving machines.

I have been surprised by the number of people who say they would not want to live longer than the current average life span of about 80 years. Would the same people have chosen to live only 40 years when that was the average life span? To me these numbers seem arbitrary. But a deeper question arises: Why wouldn't people choose more life? Is it because they are unhappy? Perhaps that is true for some. Is it because they are bored? Again, perhaps. But another reason comes to mind: Is it because they are religious?

Those who believe that they will inherit eternal life in spiritual form through their religious beliefs may feel that prolonging their physical life is only postponing their journey into a heavenly existence. I'm not sure. In any case, I am confident that we will have that choice before too long. What will you choose if you make it until then?

Original Story

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Our Final Century?

Sir Martin Rees, professor of cosmology and astrophysics, and one of the world's most eminent astronomers, speaks on the question, Earth in its Final Century? In this video presentation he points out that we are living in an extremely important time in the history of the earth, a century within which we will attain the power to transform ourselves and our planet.

We know that our sun, which has existed for 5 billion years, will die in another 6 billion years. Rees explains that it won't be humans who will be here to witness this death, but creatures "as different from ourselves as we are from bacteria." Another interesting tidbit from the video is Rees' identification of complexity as the science of the 21st century.

In a taut soliloquy that takes us from the origins of the universe to the last days of a dying sun 6 billion years later, renowned cosmologist Sir Martin Rees explains why the 21st century is a pivotal moment in the history of humanity: the first time in history when we can materially change ourselves and our planet. Stunning imagery of cosmological wonders show us the universe as we know it now. Speaking as "a concerned member of the human race," Rees harkens to the wisdom of Einstein, calling for scientists to act as moral compasses, confronting the coming developments and ensuring our role in "the immense future."

This is a short (only 17 minutes) presentation that is well worth the watching. See it here by clicking on the frame below.



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Overcoming Public Misconceptions About AI

We are all, to one degree or another, influenced in our beliefs by the popular culture in which we exist. For example, what the public may believe, or think it knows, about artificial intelligence, has been influenced and shaped by science fiction in both movie and book form. For this reason it seems to be important, for the sake of informed and intelligent discourse, that laymen become disabused of the more egregious and even absurd ideas that have embedded themselves into our consciousness.

To that end, I am reposting here a short piece from a very detailed analysis of "Creating Friendly AI," which was posted on an excellent reading list at Accelerating Future. The short piece is titled "Movie Clichés about AIs." I think you'll find it entertaining as it points out some of the more untenable features of AIs as portrayed in movies.

Movie cliches about AIs

• All AIs, no matter how primitive, can understand natural language.
  • Corollary: AIs that comically or disastrously misinterpret their mission instructions will never need to ask for help parsing spoken English.
• No AI has any knowledge about blatant emotions, particularly emotions with a somatic affect (tears, frowns, laughter).
  • Corollary: AIs will always notice somatic affects and ask about them.
  • Double corollary: The AI will fail to understand the explanation.
• AIs never need to ask about less blatant emotions that appear in the course of ordinary social interactions, such as the desire to persuade your conversational partner to your own point of view.
  • Corollary: The AI will exhibit the same emotions.
  • Double corollary: An evil AI will feel the need to make self-justifying speeches to humans.
• All AIs behave like emotionally repressed humans.
  • Corollary: If the AI begins to exhibit signs of human emotion, the AI will refuse to admit it.
  • Corollary: Any evil AI that becomes good will gradually acquire a full complement of human emotions.
  • Corollary: Any good AI that becomes evil will instantly acquire all the negative human emotions.
  • Corollary: Under exceptional stress, any AI will exhibit human emotion. (Example: An AI that displays no reaction to thousands of deaths will feel remorse on killing its creator.)
• AIs do not understand the concept of "significant digits" and will always report arithmetical results to greater-than-necessary precision.
  • Corollary: An AI running on 64-bit or 128-bit floats will report only four more digits than necessary, rather than reciting fifteen or thirty extra digits.
• AI minds run at exactly the same rate as human minds, unless the AI is asked to perform a stereotypically intellectual task, in which case the task will be performed instantaneously.
  • Corollary: The reactions of an overstressed AI undergoing an Awful Realization will be observable in realtime (the Awful Realization will not take microseconds, or a century).

Clichés that are actually fairly realistic:

• A newborn AI can take over the entire global computer network in five minutes. (Humans stink at network security - it's not our native environment.)
• A spaceship's on-board AI can defeat any crewmember at chess. (The amount of computing power needed for decent AI makes Deep Blue look sick.)

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Mouse Brains Examined Online

One of the expectations embedded in the Singularity is the creation of a computer with the power of a human brain, and one necessary (it seems) task to that end is to reverse-engineer the human brain. That means researchers need to be able to examine it in minute detail, at extremely high resolutions. Which is what makes this development such an important step forward.

A multi-institutional consortium including Duke University has created startlingly crisp 3-D microscopic views of tiny mouse brains -- unveiled layer by layer -- by extending the capabilities of conventional magnetic resonance imaging.

"These images can be more than 100,000 times higher resolution than a clinical MRI scan," said G. Allan Johnson, Duke's Charles E. Putman Distinguished Professor of radiology and professor of biomedical engineering and physics. He is first author of a report describing the innovations set for publication in the research journal NeuroImage

The important elements that I see in this report are the increased resolution of the MRI technology and the availability for study of the resulting images.

The consortium has developed the computer infrastructure to collect a rapidly growing library of 3-D mouse brain data, and make all the data available on the web http://tinyurl.com/3cgj6z. The goal is to use mouse brains as surrogates for human brains to study the connections between genes and brain structure. Investigators from all over the world are sending their models to Duke where the 3-D images are acquired in a standardized fashion and made available via high speed web connections.

High resolution magnetic resonance imaging -- which the researchers call "MRI histology" provides distortion-free 3-D images with superb ability to distinguish subtle tissue differences in the brain, according to Johnson.

"The specimen is still actually in the skull," he said. "It hasn't been cut by a knife. It has not been dehydrated and distorted as it would be in conventional histological techniques."

Using computer-guided statistical methods, the data can be segmented into more than 30 anatomical structures with quantitative volume measurements. These structures can then be computer-enhanced to produce color-coded and labeled volume renderings of selected anatomical details in 3-D, seen at any angle.

MRI scanning is also quicker and costs less than conventional histology, he said. MRI histology permits study of an entire brain, which would be prohibitively expensive using conventional methods.

The specific research being done at Duke has to do with understanding the changes in phenotype (physical structure) that are associated with changes in genotype (gene expression). What happens if we don't allow this protein? How will that change the brain's structure? But this technology should also be useful to reverse-engineer the brain in order to simulate it effectively in a computer.

The fact that you have access to these images via the Internet is a major step forward. Not that you or I can learn anything from them, but the right scientists can. That's important. The power of multiple minds at work!

[Source: Eureka Alert]

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Singularity's Choice: Sink or Swim?

The singularity, as it grows near, will certainly confront humanity with a stark choice: Stagnation and extinction, or adaptation and continued being. Sink or swim. Just as in nature, those who will not or cannot adapt themselves to a changing environment will disappear. Where is Neanderthal? He has gone, passed from the scene, leaving only his fossilized bones. Will Homo Sapiens follow him into the mists of time?

I have often been bewildered by the thinking of those who fight against inevitable change. It has been said that the only constant in life is change. When blacks grew out of the mentality forced upon them by whites and demanded equality and integration, some fought against change. When technology began to transform society, Ted Kaczynski fought against change, as did the Luddites in a previous century.

So here we are, on the brink of immense transformation. When machines arrive at the processing power of the human brain. It will happen, and soon. We won't be able to beat them after that, so we will have to join them.

Scientists tell us that we have just about reached the limit in terms of increasing our own brain-size. There just isn't room for any more brain inside our inflexible skulls. And we don't have the time for our skulls to evolve more room, either. Biology just won't do it for us anymore. It will be time to merge with the machines.

Some have envisioned a series of transitional species, moving from home sapiens to homo optimus, a sort of optimized human being, enhanced by drugs and gene therapy. From there we will be forced by competition from machines to become homo cyberneticus, a carbon-silicon amalgam. But even that won't do the trick, because biology is simply too fragile and ephemeral. Finally we will go on to become homo machinus, dispensing with biological materials once and for all.

Of course this all seems like silly science fiction to most folks, but that lack of interest will evaporate as things ramp up in the next 5 to 10 years. Then we will be forced to face where we are headed. Some will go with it, some will not. But change will be inevitable. If I live long enough, I think I'll choose to swim.

* I derived some of my thoughts on these issues from Robyn Williams' interview with Dr. Peter Lavelle, who writes for the ABC's (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) Health Online. You can read the transcript or listen to the podcast and decide what you think about it all.

[via EthicalTechnologies]

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Letting AIs Take the Wheel

As Ray Kurzweil like to say, "People keep asking me, where is all the AI I've been hearing about? That's like visiting the rain forest and asking where are all the different species? when there are 50 different species of ants within 50 feet of them. AI is so deeply embedded in the environment that you don't see it but it's all around you." Well, pretty soon it'll be in the wheels of your car.

Scientists at the University Portsmouth have been using the latest advances in artificial intelligence to make "the world's first thinking wheel."

University scientists are providing the artificial intelligence systems for the wheels on the company's prototype eco-friendly electric super-car. The wheels use microcomputers to perform 4000 calculations per second and 'talk' to each other. The wheels use AI to think and learn as the car is being driven, making calculations and adjustments according to travelling speed and road conditions.

It is the first time artificial intelligence has replaced fundamental mechanics within a motor vehicle and will mean tighter control, a smoother ride and a safer drive, yet the driver remains in control of the car.

"Conventional wisdom says you can't reinvent the wheel. We have done just that. We have taken the wheel, given it brains and the ability to think and learn. It's a huge breakthrough," said Dr David Brown of the University of Portsmouth's Institute of Industrial Research.

Artificial Intelligence controls the suspension, steering and breaking systems, teaching it to adapt to bends in the road, potholes and other potential hazards, and compensating by adjusting the car's reactions. The information is retained in the computer's memory and used the next time the car encounters similar road conditions. The car is learning as it drives and adapting its performance accordingly.

Will the AIs controlling your car's wheels suddenly decide to drive you where they want to go rather than the destination you had in mind? Well, that probably won't happen for a while yet. Stay tuned.

[via Herself's AI]

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Precision Drug Delivery Achieved

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the key to nanotech's power is in its precision. Assembling structures one atom or molecule at a time, or delivering precise dosages of drugs to precise locations, it's about precision. Researchers at Iowa State University have made a major breakthrough in the latter by using nano-sized devices to "penetrate plant cell walls and simultaneously deliver a gene and a chemical that triggers its expression with controlled precision."

Currently, scientists can successfully introduce a gene into a plant cell. In a separate process, chemicals are used to activate the gene's function. The process is imprecise and the chemicals could be toxic to the plant.

"With the mesoporous nanoparticles, we can deliver two biogenic species at the same time," Wang said. "We can bring in a gene and induce it in a controlled manner at the same time and at the same location. That's never been done before."

The devices themselves are amazing creations in their own right:

It is a porous, silica nanoparticle system. Spherical in shape, the particles have arrays of independent porous channels. The channels form a honeycomb-like structure that can be filled with chemicals or molecules.

"One gram of this kind of material can have a total surface area of a football field, making it possible to carry a large payload," Trewyn said.

Lin's nanoparticle has a unique "capping" strategy that seals the chemical goods inside. In previous studies, his group successfully demonstrated that the caps can be chemically activated to pop open and release the cargo inside of animal cells. This unique feature provides total control for timing the delivery.

Very little imagination is required to see where this research can lead in terms of the ability to deliver medicines and gene-therapies to the specific cells that need them. Even further, we can envision the development of nano-devices that will repair damaged cells and clean up the toxic waste products that our bodies fail to deal with. Radical life-extension, here we come.

Source

[via Nanosingularity]

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Free Will is a Magic Trick

One of the arguments posed by some against the feasibility of creating consciousness in a machine is the claim that the human mind and personality could not possibly arise out of material stuff, atoms and molecules. Since those kinds of things are either random (on the subatomic scale) or deterministic (on the scale of everyday objects), and since human minds are neither random nor deterministic (that is, they operate by free will), QED, they cannot arise strictly from material stuff.

Stated simply, they assert that free will cannot arise from only a material substrate. If not material, then the mind must be immaterial. Hence we are led to the idea of the soul or spirit to explain the phenomenon of mind.

But there is a problem with this reasoning. (Actually there are several, but let us focus on only one for now.) And that problem is that free will is appearing more and more to be a trick, an illusion, albeit a very persistent and convincing one. The illusion is simply the result of an extremely complex system, rather than an otherworldly "soul."

In a wonderful and witty essay, NYT writer Dennis Overbye explores some of the most recent findings on the subject of free will. I'll give you a bit of it here.

Having just lived through another New Year’s Eve, many of you have just resolved to be better, wiser, stronger and richer in the coming months and years. After all, we’re free humans, not slaves, robots or animals doomed to repeat the same boring mistakes over and over again. As William James wrote in 1890, the whole “sting and excitement” of life comes from “our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago.” Get over it, Dr. James. Go get yourself fitted for a new chain-mail vest. A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control.

As a result, physicists, neuroscientists and computer scientists have joined the heirs of Plato and Aristotle in arguing about what free will is, whether we have it, and if not, why we ever thought we did in the first place.

Mark Hallett, a researcher with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said, “Free will does exist, but it’s a perception, not a power or a driving force. People experience free will. They have the sense they are free.

“The more you scrutinize it, the more you realize you don’t have it,” he said.

Experiments have repeatedly shown that the brain signals associated with making any random motion occur half a second before the subject is conscious of deciding to make them. First comes perception of motion, then decision. That's certainly not the order in which we assume things happen.

In short, the conscious brain was only playing catch-up to what the unconscious brain was already doing. The decision to act was an illusion, the monkey making up a story about what the tiger had already done.

Many who vehemently disagree with the conclusion that free will is only an illusion say that if this is so, there can be no moral or legal judgment, since our choices are not really choices at all. How can we castigate Hitler if he never chose to kill six million Jews in the holocaust? This is one of the arguments.

To this I reply: Whether or not Hitler is responsible for his actions is irrelevant. The fact is, for the good of others he must be destroyed. Sexual predators must be isolated. Serial killers must be removed from among us. A mentally disturbed lioness must be ostracized from the pride so that she cannot kill the cubs. There is not a naturalist alive, I would think, who would claim that the cub-killing animal is wicked. Nevertheless, her presence in the pride constitutes a threat to its survival and cannot therefore be allowed.

Even though we may not be morally culpable, the fact of negative, unpleasant consequences to harmful actions will play a part in our future actions, whether we have free will or not. Punishment, or the fear of punishment, results in behavior modification. This does not require the existence of free will.

Does my thinking that this may be true mean that I would not be angry at someone who harmed someone I care about? Don't count on it.

Dr. Wegner said he thought that exposing free will as an illusion would have little effect on people’s lives or on their feelings of self-worth. Most of them would remain in denial.

“It’s an illusion, but it’s a very persistent illusion; it keeps coming back,” he said, comparing it to a magician’s trick that has been seen again and again. “Even though you know it’s a trick, you get fooled every time. The feelings just don’t go away.”

I now come full circle back to the thrust of this post: The idea, backed by experimentation, that free will is a useful illusion, allows us to put mind back into the realm of the natural, rather than the supernatural, and therefore there is no impediment to the conclusion that conscious machines are possible.*

* If you choose to argue that conscious machines are not possible, I ask that you do not use classical computers as your basis. We are not asserting that classical computers could harbor consciousness any more than your TV remote could simulate protein folding. What we are asserting is that computer technology will become complex and powerful enough to achieve consciousness within the next 2 or 3 decades.

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Augmented Reality and Ubiquitous Ultra-Fast WiFi

Looks like I'm on an AR roll here, but it can't be helped. For AR to work, it seems to me that ubiquitous, ultra fast wireless connectivity will be required. At this point, even wired broadband is far too slow for a believable augmented reality overlay system. Much higher bandwidth wireless will have to be made virtually omnipresent.

A few city centers have made free wireless access available, but it will have to be present in every nook and cranny, every field and forest. Which will come first, the chicken or the killer app? I think the infrastructure and the application will have to encourage each other to be created, perhaps by the same company. (Could this be why Google is quietly buying unused pipes?)

As far as the hardware is concerned, here is a little fellow who doesn't yet exist, but may be developed in time to play a part in the task of making wifi reach every cubic centimeter of livable space on earth. Right now it's called the LANdroid, and it looks like this...



Apparently these guys are on DARPA's wish list. So after they are built and battle-tested, perhaps they can be deployed for peacetime use. Stay tuned.

[via Herself's AI]

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Augmented Reality Powered by Vibrations?

Just yesterday an article was posted on NewScientistTech that may well describe how augmented reality may be powered.

A sugar-cube-sized electric generator that feeds on environmental vibrations has been developed. It could power swarms of wireless sensors or even medical implants, researchers claim.

What AR needs are "swarms of wireless sensors" and other devices, scattered throughout the physical environment and creating a seamless mesh of virtual overlays. This can be useful even before we have the contacts that project images directly onto our retinas. Cell phone/PDAs would be able to "see" the overlays, which at first would be primarily informational in content.

Some examples may be helpful. You approach a door in an office building. Standing in front of the door, you hold up your PDA and see the door with an overlay containing information about the business situated behind the door. You can drill down the overlay interface to get the name of the person you are meeting, along with other pertinent facts about them. Yes, this is the right place!

Later on you pass by a new Chinese restaurant. You hold up your PDA, and there is a sample menu, along with the establishment's contact info and hours of operation. Yes! They deliver to your apartment!

I'm certain that you can think of much better examples, but an added benefit of this technology that jumps out at you right away is that signage could be almost completely done away with, providing an immense savings for businesses as well as a more aesthetically pleasing environment for everyone.

Can you picture this? Stay tuned.

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Domesticated Artificial Intelligence

I have been reading a reasonably entertaining sci-fi novel called Odyssey, by Jack McDevitt. It is well written and, as I said, entertaining. The fault I find with it comes down to the fact that, even taking place far into the future (23rd century?), and even though FTL flight has been invented, the rest of their technology is quite boring. Especially their AIs.

What do I mean by "boring"? Well, they are all just digital personal assistants. They are certainly not more intelligent than the humans they serve, perhaps a bit faster at certain tasks, but nothing more. They can take phone calls, remind people of appointments, and are somewhat autonomous, but nothing like what we anticipate with the singularity.

At first, the domesticated AIs in the novel seemed to me to be unrealistic for so far into the future. But then it occurred to me that they could easily be the result of a deliberate set of constraints placed upon AI development out of an abundance of caution.

Let us suppose that we cannot figure out how to allow AIs to have the ability to improve their own programming without the likelihood of them running amok with greater-than-human intelligence. We cannot find a way to make sure that super-intelligent AI will also be human- friendly. Further, let us suppose we find out that super-intelligent AIs will invariably discover a way to escape any closed system within which we attempt to keep them. All of our experiments confirm that the AIs will be able to talk their way out, simply because they are so powerfully intelligent. What would we do then?

Perhaps we might choose to place constraints on AI such that they can never become more intelligent that their creators. Perhaps we might decide to keep them domesticated. Useful, but never dangerous.

This sounds at first like a reasonable course of action, except for the fact that such constraints could never be universally maintained. Someone, somewhere, would breach the protocols, and recursively self-improving AI would be born. And if it turned out to be unfriendly, we would be defenseless against it.

This is why we must find a way to develop friendly super-intelligent AI before someone either deliberately or accidentally creates the other kind. Because only friendly AI would be able to stay ahead of and restrain the destructive kind.

Although, there may be another way to defend against unfriendly super-intelligent AI: make us super-intelligent. A parallel increase in human intelligence, via implantable augmentation devices, would make humans smart enough to defend ourselves against rogue AIs.

Your thoughts are welcomed. Stay tuned.

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Huge Leaps Forward for Computing Power

The public is largely ignorant about developments in technology. Until, that is, they can buy it and take it home. But some people, like me, want to know what will be coming to our living rooms and offices before we can add it to our credit card balance. Why? Is it just so we can salivate as we imagine using it? No. It is so we can prepare ourselves, mentally and culturally, to make best use of it when it becomes available. Technological advances have become like a gathering ocean wave that we are furiously paddling to keep up with so that we can ride it.

A few quiet announcements are worth reading about along these lines...

Sun's Constellation System - The world's first petascale computing environment.

June 26, 2007 -- It was a mere decade ago that terascale computing took hold in science and engineering communities, giving researchers the tools to break new ground in physics, biomedicine, astronomy, and other areas. Now, Sun is ushering in a new era of high performance computing (HPC) with the Sun Constellation System, the world's first petascale computing environment.

Sun's unique approach to petascale computing combines state-of-the-art technology with system level innovation and off-the-shelf components in an open architecture. The result is a powerful HPC platform that is extremely powerful, easier to manage, and very cost efficient. A technology preview is being announced today; the shipping version will be available early next year.

NVIDIA's Tesla Architecture

• Massively-parallel computing architecture with 128 multi-threaded processors per GPU
• Scalar thread processor with full integer and floating point operations
• Thread Execution Manager enables thousands of concurrent threads per GPU
• Parallel Data Cache enables processors to collaborate on shared information at local cache performance
• Ultra-fast memory access with 76.8 GB/sec. peak bandwidth per GPU
• IEEE 754 single-precision floating point
• Scalable from one to thousands of GPUs
• Available in GPU computing processor, deskside supercomputer and 1U rack-mount GPU computing server

Uzi Vishkin's Desktop Supercomputer

A prototype of what may be the next generation of personal computers has been developed by researchers in the University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering. Capable of computing speeds 100 times faster than current desktops, the technology is based on parallel processing on a single chip.

Parallel processing is an approach that allows the computer to perform many different tasks simultaneously, a sharp contrast to the serial approach employed by conventional desktop computers. The prototype developed by Uzi Vishkin and his Clark School colleagues uses a circuit board about the size of a license plate on which they have mounted 64 parallel processors. To control those processors, they have developed the crucial parallel computer organization that allows the processors to work together and make programming practical and simple for software developers.

These developments are coming faster and faster, so stay tuned.

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Choose Your Pleasure: VR or AR?

Taking a glimpse into the near-term future, we can see the advents of both virtual reality (VR), and a subset of VR called augmented reality (AR). We have all heard of VR and seen a rudimentary version of it in the movie Disclosure. But virtual reality is headed in the direction of total immersion VR, which will take place at the level of your neurons themselves. Nanobots will stimulate your neurons directly so that you will not be able to tell the difference between real reality and the VR environment, except for some type of indicator inserted for safety reasons. Every one of your senses will be engaged, and your entire environment will be virtual.

So what is AR? AR is a mixture of the virtual and the real, sort of a virtual overlay that is superimposed upon real reality. This could also be activated at the neuronal level, or even projected onto your retinas by means of special contact lenses. Think of how much fun this would be, and how it could increase your productivity.

Imagine the fun part first. Think about people appearing as characters in a game, or dressing up the local environment to appear to be coming straight out of another world or another time. How cool would that be? As far as productivity, there could be educational or informational overlays on people and objects that would give you vital information about them. As you look at the person you're meeting for a business lunch, you see above their heads their name, company, position, etc. As you get started, you could bring up an agenda you had prepared earlier and either share it with your associate or view it privately, like a heads-up-display hanging in the air. The possibilities are virtually endless.

Talk about your killer apps. Let's see Apple and Microsoft battle it out in that arena! Stay tuned.

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Does the Singularity Make Most Futurist Predictions Obsolete?

As a long-time science fiction lover I have a wealth of visions of the future imprinted on my mind. In my mind's eye I see futures that include interstellar, faster-than-light travel; I see humans colonizing large swaths of our galaxy (very few authors have us going inter-galactic distances); there are powerful computers on board our starships. But since coming to an understanding of the singularity, these futures are all suddenly obsolete. The practical result of this obsolescence for me has been that science fiction novels, for the most part, are quite a bit less enjoyable.

Why do these visions of our future suddenly seem old-fashioned? It's because they all have humans essentially unchanged! We're still "bags of mostly water." And computers are not much more intelligent than we are. These two sets of conditions are 180 degrees out of phase with what our approach toward singularity predicts will occur within the next few decades. I mean, come on!

To be fair, the ideas associated with the singularity are still fairly new and thus our sci-fi authors, for the most part, are still ignorant about them. There must be others who are writing with it in mind, but the only one I'm aware of who has the singularity-effect included in his writing is Vernor Vinge, the man who popularized it in the first place.

So my plea is this. To the best sci-fi authors out there: Please update your visions of the future to include the singularity so that I can enjoy your work again! Thanks.

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