Vinge's Future: A Deepness in the Sky

I've been reading, and thoroughly enjoying, the Vernor Vinge classic, A Deepness in the Sky, in which he paints a fairly discouraging picture of our common future.

If you'll recall, Vernor Vinge is credited with coining the term technological singularity, a phrase that refers to a near-term predicted future where technological development brings change so rapid that seeing beyond its event horizon is not possible.

In Deepness, as in A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor's future is marked by inevitable cyclical rises and declines of civilizations. No civilization enjoys technology for more than a few thousand years. Every one is inexorably destroyed, whether by war, biological pathogens, or by the crushing complexity of its own automation (Vinge's word for computer programming).

One aspect of the future envisioned in these novels, however, involves what Vinge calls the Failed Dreams of the dawn age of human civilization. He speaks, through his characters, of the naive optimism of humanity's earliest years of technology, when researchers believed that they could create things like general artificial intelligence, negligible senescence, and nano-assemblers.

Of course, those of us who cheer on the singularity believe these things are not only possible, but virtually inevitable. As far and what Vernor Vinge believes, he seems to leave his options open.

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The Call for Human Augmentation is Beginning

There have been innumerable occasions during my lifetime when I have wondered what it must have been like to be part of the beginning of something big. The 60s, for example. The sexual revolution. The birth of personal computing. I was not there at the beginning of many important, transformative periods. But this time, I am there. Or here.

I have written before about the absence of a hue and cry for technologies to augment the human animal. The last time I posted on this topic, a reader commented that cosmetic surgery was a kind of augmentation, but even there the goal is to bring people up to the standards of the super-beautiful, not really to go beyond what it means to be human. And I'm not talking about machines that exist outside of and separate from the body; we already have lots of those. I'm talking about enhancements to our senses that take us far beyond normal human ability, and to our powers of cognition, our durability, our ability to live underwater, etc. Almost no one in the mainstream of business or science is calling for that kind of augmentation. It is heartening, therefore, when someone with influence issues just such a call.

Ed Boyden, Assistant Professor in the MIT Media Lab and MIT Department of Biological Engineering, has written an excellent article called In Pursuit of Human Augmentation
The journey toward making "normal" obsolete. His central point:

It's arguably time for a discipline to emerge around the idea of human augmentation. At the MIT Media Lab, we are beginning to search for principles that govern the use of technology to augment human abilities--that make the idea of normal obsolete. As a codirector of the Center for Human Augmentation, I lead a lab, the Neuroengineering and Neuromedia Lab, that is developing devices that will hopefully eventually allow us to enhance memory, creativity, and happiness in humans.

Will his determination to be at the forefront of such a discipline catch on? I certainly hope so. Stay tuned.

Source article.

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Visializing Atomic Interactions: Breakthroughs for Nanotech

A team of researchers from U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories, FEI Company (Nasdaq: FEIC) and CEOS GmbH, in Heidelberg, Germany, has succeeded in imaging below 0.5 angstroms using a new instrument.

To get a better idea how small 0.5 angstroms is, bear in mind that it is one-billions of 5 centimeters, the DNA helix is 20 angstroms in diameter, a carbon atom is about 2 angstroms, and the width of an average strand of hair ranges between 500,000 to 1,000,000 angstroms.

Electron microscopes can be used to observe fine details of the inner structure of materials. The ability to characterize the atomic-scale structure, chemistry, and dynamics of individual nanostructures makes this type of microscope a very powerful tool for scientists in all disciplines. With the extraordinary 'vision' of the special TEAM microscope it will become possible to study how atoms combine to form materials, how materials grow and how they respond to a variety of external factors. These constitute many of the most practical things that science needs to know about materials and will improve designs for everything from better, lighter, more efficient automobiles, to stronger buildings and new ways of harvesting energy.

It is not difficult to envision how this kind of development will enhance our ability to build structures with atomic precision, which is a significant aspect of the coming nanotech revolution. To see what is actually happening at this scale will enhance researchers' abilitiy to develop the means and methods of nanoscale design and manufacture.

Stay tuned!

Source article.

[via Advanced Nanotechnology]

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Birthplace of Strong AI: Virtual Worlds?

Where will strong AI make its first appearance? Where will it be born? There is some speculation that virtual worlds may prove to be the birthplace and nursery of super-intelligence.

What are the alternatives? Some researchers believe that an artificial intelligence must interact with other intelligences to become intelligent itself. This stands to reason when we consider the development of our own intelligence, which grows through interactions with other humans as we mature.

Another, related school of thought holds that a body is also necessary, some manifestation of the intelligence that can interact with others.

We have all seen the rudimentary efforts of researchers to combine these elements in the lab in the form of cute robots that interact with people in order to learn, but these may be simply too limited in scope.

What's left then is a virtual environment where an intelligent machine can have any kind of body and interact with human and other artificial intelligences at will.

BBC News in this article proposes this scenario, highlighting the work of one particular company, Novamente.

Researchers at US firm Novamente have created software that learns by controlling avatars in virtual worlds.

Initially the AIs will be embodied in pets that will get smarter by interacting with the avatars controlled by their human owners.

Novamente said it eventually aimed to create more sophisticated avatars such as talking parrots and even babies.

It may not be very long before you are socializing with an artificial person in Second Life. So keep you eyes peeled and your ears to the ground, and as always, stay tuned.

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Flexing Artificial Muscles

Combining biological and non-biological materials may allow researchers to use the best of both worlds to develop viable alternatives to worn out human parts. A great example of this trend has been announced on NewScientistTech: Muscular Films.

The term sounds more like gay porn than a scientific development, but it actually refers to the conjoining of thin sheets of polymer and living muscle tissue.

Thin sheets of polymer coated with living muscle could be used to test new drugs, repair damaged body parts, or even create life-like bio-machines, researchers say.

The Harvard University team created the "muscular thin films" by attaching muscle cells to elastic polymer sheets. By laying down striped patterns of proteins on these polymers, they were able to make the muscle cells arrange themselves into muscle fibres, similar to those in animals.

When shocked with electricity, the resulting hybrid material can be made to bend, roll up, or wriggle, at a rate that can easily be controlled.

To see video demonstrations of some of these muscular films in action, click here and here.

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Confronting the Social Implications of the Singularity

Imagining the social implications and conundrums that humanity will be faced with in the coming decades with the development of machine consciousness and the uploading of human minds into machine substrates takes a special kind of mind. A mind like the one contained within the brain of Greg Egan.

Greg has both the technical knowledge, writing skills and penetrating imagination that, when combined, allow him to create fiction that examines many of the social dilemmas with which we will be confronted within a few tens of years. In his book of short stories, Axiomatic, Greg conceives some utterly captivating scenarios. Here are the gists of a few:

A ransom demand is made by a group that holds hostage a digital recreation of a man's wife. Does the virtual woman feel pain? Does she suffer? Should the man pay the ransom?

A man who has within his skull a "jewel" which has been matched with his own brain faces the prospect of turning over control of his body to the immortal jewel so that his biological brain can be disposed of. Is his consciousness that of the jewel, or the brain? When his brain is disconnected, will "he" die? Will the jewel be truly conscious, or will it be an imitation of consciousness? Is there a difference?

After an injury to his brain and its subsequent repair by nanobots, a man's perspective shifts to a position outside his body. Although he "knows" only that which his eyes can see, his mind builds a picture of reality as it might appear from a position a few feet above his physical body.

These are just a few of the stories within Axiomatic. If you want to think about what might actually happen when the singularity arrives, this book will certainly set you on the right path.

Axiomatic

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