Computers Win Another One - All your games are belong to us

We've all heard about the computer's victory over humans in the game of chess. Eleven years ago, the reigning chess champion Gary Kasparov lost handily to IBM's Big Blue. But the game of poker has remained in the humans' column, until now. As the author explains in this article, poker is quite a bit more complicated than chess, and the human brain has been better at it than any computer. No more.

A computer system called Polaris outperformed some of the world's top players last weekend at a human-vs.-machine competition in Las Vegas.

The score was computer 3, humans 2, with one draw.

Bowling's team launched Polaris five years ago as a project in artificial intelligence. At first it did well against amateur players but couldn't beat professionals. Last year, it narrowly lost a match against two poker pros in Vancouver, British Columbia.

This year, a stronger version of Polaris — one that learns how to adapt to an opponent's strategy in midgame — triumphed over seven top-ranked humans drawn from the online poker-training site www.stoxpoker.com.

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REEM-B - The latest in humanoid robots

For those of us who think it's very likely that technology's accelerating pace of advance is soon going to become too rapid to follow, developments like this one already seem quaint. You know what it's like to look nostalgically at photos of computers from the '50s, or old ads for magical household appliances. In a few years that's exactly how it will be to go back to articles about robots like REEM-B.

A new humanoid robot called Reem-B was unveiled on Wednesday at an event on Reem Island in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates.

The Reem-B robot from Pal Technology Robotics is capable of face recognition, speech interaction, biped walking, traversing stairs, and sitting (see video below). It can also recognize and pick up objects, as well as evaluate and map out a room to better navigate it.

Reem-B stands at 4'10" (1.47 meters) tall and weighs about 132 pounds (60Kg). It can carry up to 26 pounds (12Kg) in its arms and walk at a speed of 1 mph (1.5Km/h). It can also climb stairs. Using a main CPU that consists of a Core 2 Duo (1.66GHz) and a Geode (500MHz), the robot can operate for about 120 minutes before its battery needs to be recharged.

Full article.

Video.

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Memory Miniaturization - 256G Flash!

How easily we slip into taking profundities for granted. Looking into the purchase of a 4G micro secure digital (SD) drive for my smart phone. Ho hum, right?

Hold up, though. Let me think for a nano-second about this. My first computer entered my life not that long ago (1993). If I try really hard, I might be able to recall its specs. The hard drive was, I believe, 20Mb in size. Only 15 years later, I can buy a drive with 200-times the capacity and is only as big as my thumbnail.

Now here's some interesting news: "CNET site ZDNet Korea reports that Samsung announced the development of a 2.5-inch, 256GB solid state drive (SSD) at the fifth annual Samsung Mobile Solution Forum in Taipei, Taiwan."

Can you not read the writing on the solid-state wall? Technological advance is accelerating!

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Quantum Computing - A Prototype is Demonstrated

As a means (there are more than one being developed) of forcing the death of Moore's law into the very distant future, you cannot hope to beat quantum computing. Whereas conventional computing can, at best, make use of individual atoms to store bits of information (sort of like one man one vote), quantum computing makes use of the weirder features of quantum mechanics that hold sway at very small dimensions to allow unheard of processing power.

In traditional computing, binary code forms the most basic language, with an alphabet of only two letters: one and zero. Each unit of information, or bit, can register either of those two values. In quantum computing, however, the basic unit is called a "qubit," and can register simultaneous values of one and zero, making use of the phenomenon known as "superposition."

In the words of Seth Lloyd, writing for Technology Review:

Since one qubit can simultaneously represent two different values, two qubits can simultaneously represent four (00, 01, 10, and 11, in binary notation); four qubits can represent 16 values; eight qubits 256 values; and so on. Even a relatively small quantum computer, one that had a few tens of thousands of qubits, could consider so many different values at once that it would be able to break all known codes commonly used for secure Internet communication. Quantum computers might also be used for faster database searches, or to tackle hard problems that classical computers couldn't solve with all the time in the universe.

Now comes news that a Canadian company called D-Wave has built and tested a prototype of an "adiabatic quantum computer." The catch? The developers must prove that the computer is actually using adiabatic quantum computing. Turns out this is not an easy task. So stay tuned.

Click here for the original article.

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Using DNA to Build Really Tiny Things

Nanotech holds some of the most radical and far-reaching promise for creating a future we can only dream about now. But how do you actually build things that small? You can't shrink yourself down like in the movies, and you can't make the tiny tools unless you know how to build really tiny things, which is where we started this erudite discussion. It so happens that evolution has already discovered the means. After all, it's been building really tiny things for billions of years, and getting better at it every million years along the way. In a huge leap forward, researchers have been able to take advantage of this fact.

In an achievement some see as the "holy grail" of nanoscience, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have for the first time used DNA to guide the creation of three-dimensional, ordered, crystalline structures of nanoparticles (particles with dimensions measured in billionths of a meter). The ability to engineer such 3-D structures is essential to producing functional materials that take advantage of the unique properties that may exist at the nanoscale - for example, enhanced magnetism, improved catalytic activity, or new optical properties.

You don't have to understand the details to realize that we are moving very quickly now towards the technological singularity referred to in this blog's title. So hold on tight. It may be a bumpy ride, but it sure will be exciting.

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Rainbows End Contacts Coming Soon!

A future predicted in the novel Rainbows End is a bit closer to becoming the present. A very cool technology described by Vernor Vinge in his amazing novel centers around contact lenses that do a whole lot more than improve vision and change your eye color.

Vinge's contacts are actually connected wirelessly to an omnipresent Internet on steroids. They overlay what you see with everything from private text messages to an alternate reality. With these contacts you can share an augmented reality with others so that you all see the same things. For example, you could be sitting together at a table at a sidewalk cafe in Paris, enjoying good conversation and a view of the Parisian landscape, when each of you is in a different city.

Another use of these contacts would be informational overlays that could tell you what the restaurant you happen to be walking by is serving for lunch. A city utility worker could see which cables run under the sidewalk he stands on. The possibilities are virtually endless.

So here comes this article:

Scientists have taken the first step toward creating digital contact lenses that can zoom in on distant objects and display useful facts.

For the first time, engineers have installed an electronic circuit and lights on a regular contact lens.

Remember this little article when you see what follows.

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Don't Play God? Someone Has To.

One very energetic group of opponents to technological advance and bioengineering happens to be composed of people who believe that the human race lives under the concern and protection of a benevolent deity. In their view, tinkering with something that this god made and called "good," is not only an affront to this god but also a path to destruction. The problem with this point of view is that science has proven it wrong. Throughout the history of life on this planet, species have come and gone. Nature does not care about perpetuating our species.

Take a look at an excellent article by Sam Harris, featured on RichardDawkins.Net entitled "Mother Nature is Not Our Friend." A brief excerpt:

The fossil record suggests that individual species survive, on average, between one and ten million years. The concept of a "species" is misleading, however, and it tempts us to think that we, as homo sapiens, have arrived at some well-defined position in the natural order. The term "species" merely designates a population of organisms that can interbreed and produce fertile offspring; it cannot be aptly applied to the boundaries between species (to what are often called "intermediate" or "transitional" forms). There was, for instance, no first member of the human species, and there are no canonical members now. Life is a continuous flux. Our nonhuman ancestors bred, generation after generation, and incrementally begat what we now deem to be the species homo sapiens — ourselves. There is nothing about our ancestral line or about our current biology that dictates how we will evolve in the future. Nothing in the natural order demands that our descendants resemble us in any particular way. Very likely, they will not resemble us. We will almost certainly transform ourselves, likely beyond recognition, in the generations to come.

Will this be a good thing? The question presupposes that we have a viable alternative. But what is the alternative to our taking charge of our biological destiny? Might we be better off just leaving things to the wisdom of Nature? I once believed this. But we know that Nature has no concern for individuals or for species. Those that survive do so despite Her indifference. While the process of natural selection has sculpted our genome to its present state, it has not acted to maximize human happiness; nor has it necessarily conferred any advantage upon us beyond the capacity raise the next generation to child-bearing age. In fact, there may be nothing about human life after the age of forty (the average lifespan until the 20th century) that has been selected by evolution at all. And with a few exceptions (e.g. the gene for lactose tolerance), we probably haven't adapted to our environment much since the Pleistocene.

Sam Harris makes a profound point. The continuation of what we call human is not a given. If we do not play god on our own behalf, who will?

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Why You Should Stop Worrying and Learn to Love AI

Anyone who has an interest in technology news should be able to see that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is inevitable. The forces that are driving technology toward that conclusion are enormously powerful; I am referring now to military and commercial interests. Just as the fundamental equations behind biological evolution through natural selection have resulted in human consciousness and intelligence, so the insatiable appetites of industry and combat for a better mousetrap must lead us down the garden path to conscious machines.

One has only to skim the science and technology news on a regular basis to conclude that, barring the near term ending of the world as we know it, a machine that harbors within its circuitry a mind, cannot be very far down the road. Take these excerpts for example:

Researchers at the University of Arizona in Tucson have now begun work on a set of computer algorithms that may be able to make sense of mountains of intelligence data that would overwhelm human analysts. Known as the Asymmetric Threat Response and Analysis Project, or ATRAP, the effort is aimed at dispassionately sifting through everything from fingerprints to cultural influences to establish useful links and connections. Full article.

By studying the famous honeybee waggle dance that communicates the location of top-notch nectar, researchers have designed a more efficient server system that also benefits Web surfers by cutting down on frustrating delays in accessing newly popular sites. Initial tests by collaborators at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the United Kingdom’s University of Oxford showed that the bee-like way of homing in on sweet spots improved a Web-hosting company’s revenue by up to 20 percent. Full article.

There is nothing in these articles that will cause anyone to enjoy a spike in their endorphin levels, but they simply demonstrate the relentless drive of the military and commercial forces of our society to make machines smarter and to get them to do more of our rudimentary thinking for us. No use crying about it, about how terrible this might be, because it will continue, and it will lead inexorably to conscious machines. So my advice is, stop worrying about whether or not we will soon be faced with AGI, and instead focus your energy on making sure when they arrive, they will like us.

There are researchers and organizations that understand the inevitability of AGI and that are working hard to figure out how to make it friendly. Either that or how to make humans and AGIs one and the same thing. Unfortunately, these guys are working with very limited resources, because most people have no clue about what is going on or where we are headed. If you would like to climb out from among the head-in-the-sand crowd, check out the following links:

KurzweilAI.net

Accelerating Future

Singularity Institute

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Computer Simulation of Human Brain Only a Decade Away

We have all heard an aphorism that enjoys an unearned degree of credibility based on no evidence whatsoever, to whit: The human brain can never be intelligent enough to understand itself. Poppycock. Scoffers will continue to believe in it, however, until a fully-developed computer simulation of the human brain smacks them on the noggin, jarring their not-smart-enough brains into the 21st century.

An ambitious project to create an accurate computer model of the brain has reached an impressive milestone. Scientists in Switzerland working with IBM researchers have shown that their computer simulation of the neocortical column, arguably the most complex part of a mammal's brain, appears to behave like its biological counterpart. By demonstrating that their simulation is realistic, the researchers say, these results suggest that an entire mammal brain could be completely modeled within three years, and a human brain within the next decade.

The rapidity with which developments are advancing continues to astound even me, one of the most optimistic singularitarian transhumanists around.



Technology Review Article

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Busting Through Moore's Law - Nanophotonics is Here!

This is a sharp stick in the eye for all the technological sticks-in-the-mud who prophesy an end to Moore's law.

FRANKFURT - IBM says it has made a breakthrough in converting electrical signals into light pulses that brings closer the day when supercomputing, which now requires huge machines, will be done on a single chip.

Picture it...today's supercomputer will be tomorrow's single chip. A computer that now requires enough power to run hundreds of homes will soon draw only enough to light up a single bulb.

Using light instead of wires to send information between the cores by using a silicon Mach-Zehnder electro-optic modulator can be as much as 100 times faster and use 10 times less power than wires, IBM says.

The new modulator IBM has developed is 100 to 1,000 times smaller than previously demonstrated comparable modulators, IBM said on Thursday, paving the way for significant reductions in cost, energy and heat while increasing bandwidth.

Things just keep getting more and more exciting, yes?

Original article.

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It is Time for a Real PDA

Picture this: Your meeting with the team is over, you say your goodbyes and walk down the hall to your office. Sitting in a tray near your desk are the pages of a transcript of the meeting, which ended only a few minutes ago. You call up the project that was the subject of the meeting on your screen, and you see that every assignment is already listed, every appointment is already scheduled. You thank your PDA, and she replies, "Any time, Barry."

This scenario, which has been portrayed in many a science fiction novel, may become the real deal not too many years from now. An artificial general intelligence who lives in your corporate network, organizes your work life without being asked, and converses with you in natural human language. If truth be told, you've often fantasized about asking her out for a drink.

Enter CALO, "a massive, four-year-old artificial-intelligence project to help computers understand the intentions of their human users."

Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and coordinated by SRI International, based in Menlo Park, CA, the project brings together researchers from 25 universities and corporations, in many areas of artificial intelligence, including machine learning, natural-language processing, and Semantic Web technologies. Each group works on pieces of CALO, which stands for "cognitive assistant that learns and organizes."

Adam Cheyer, program director of the artificial-intelligence center at SRI, explains that CALO tries to assist users in three ways: by helping them manage information about key people and projects, by understanding and organizing information from meetings, and by learning and automating routine tasks. For example, CALO can learn about the people and projects that are important to a user's work life by paying attention to e-mail patterns. It can then categorize and prioritize information for the user, based on the source of the information and the projects to which it is connected. The system can also apply this type of understanding to meetings, using its speech-recognition system to make a transcription of what's said there, and its understanding of the user's projects and contacts to process the transcription intelligently into to-do lists and appointments. Finally, a user can teach CALO routine tasks such as purchasing books online and searching for bed-and-breakfasts that meet specific criteria. CALO can interact with other people, taking on tasks such as scheduling meetings, coordinating among people's schedules, and making decisions, such as deciding to reschedule a meeting if a key member becomes unable to attend.

Look for the progeny of CALO to appear first in large corporations, filter down to medium-sized businesses, and eventually arrive in your own home network. I can't wait.

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Your Brain is a Machine - Get Used to It

There are many whose penchant it is to romanticize the human condition. It somehow makes them feel better about their lives to do so. One of the outgrowths of this habit of spiritualizing material things is the expressed certainty that machines can never become conscious. After all, they think, if machines can ever be made to experience consciousness, then it is very likely that we are no more than machines: There is no soul, no heaven, no spirit, no existence after death. For many people, this possibility is not to be countenanced.

However, more and more researchers are concluding that even our experience of conscious will is an illusion arising from our neurological programming. In a new book authored by Harvard professor Daniel Wegner titled The Illusion of Conscious Will, professor Wegner argues that:

“When you drive to work, you don’t feel there are hundreds of little gears in a machine in your head that make you do this. You think, ‘I’m going to get up and go to work,’ ” Wegner said in an interview

“We think the intentions cause the actions, and we get the feeling we have willed what we do. It could be the intentions and actions are being caused by the machinery of the brain.”

I have written previously about the startling finding that our actions in fact come before our conscious intentions, that our minds are inventing reasons for actions over which we have no conscious control. If, as writes Dr. Wegner, our brains are trying to convince us that we are choosing actions that are merely the result of our neurological machinery, then it is only a matter of time before machines become conscious. According to some, that time may even have already arrived.

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Your Kids Could Soon Have a Virtual Teacher

My wife teaches 8th-grade algebra. She is very good at her job. She should be paid more than she is, but that is a complaint that often falls on deaf politician's ears. In any case, the time may soon come when at least certain parts of her curriculum are taught by a virtual teacher called Eve.

Eve is what's know in in the field of information systems an intelligent or affective tutoring system. It can "adapt its response to the emotional state" of its students (Blogging the Singularity).

The ability of virtual Eve to alter her presentation according to the reaction of the child facing her at the keyboard has been hailed as an exciting development in the $25 billion e-learning market.

The Massey scientists, led by Dr Hossein Sarrafzadeh at the Auckland-based Institute of Information and Mathematical Sciences, tell the story of creating Eve and the teaching system in the latest issue of the leading international journal on information sciences, Elsevier.

Because one-to-one teaching is known to be the most effective teaching method, Dr Sarrafzadeh says the researchers wanted to create a virtual teacher that could pick up body language and facial expressions – like a real teacher – to interact and to ensure they are holding the attention of students.

He says the realisation that software systems would significantly improve performance if they could adapt to the emotions of the user has spawned research and development in the field of affective or intelligent tutoring systems.

“With rising demand for long-distance learning and online tutoring, a computer programe capable of detecting human emotions may become a critical teaching tool.”

Although Eve was developed for one-to-one maths teaching with eight-year-olds, she is a significant new character in the future of human computer interaction and could be a personalized virtual tutor by any name.

Linked to a child via computer, the animated character or virtual tutor can tell if the child is frustrated, angry or confused by the on-screen teaching session and can adapt the tutoring session appropriately.

If you plan to go into teaching, it's unlikely that Eve will completely replace all teaching kind, but there can be no doubt that there will be significant and far-reaching implications. Maybe you should think about teaching computer engineering.

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Making Enhancement Acceptable

A possible way forward for transhumanists is emerging. Since there is such a strong bias in our politically correct society against the idea of making human enhancement available to humans, and since the negative bias tends to focus on the distinction between restoration of function and enhancement, transhumanists are beginning to use the word enablement and point out that there is no clear line between therapy and enablement.

Zack Lynch reports on this transformation and posts a link to a just-published report from a human enhancement workshop held in D.C. back in June 2006. He highlights this particular paragraph from the report:

The line between therapy or restoration and enhancement is another piece of ongoing debates about HE. After noting at the workshop that the line between therapy and enhancement is particularly faint and subjective, Zack Lynch, managing director of NeuroInsights, recommended the term “enablement” as a replacement for the current buzz-word “enhancement.” He believes the term enhancement is already politically charged in both its meaning and use among science policy players. He sees no hard line between “therapy” and “enhancement”; instead, there is a range of capacities already in normal distribution among the population, and enablement refers to maximizing each person’s latent potential. While these arguments are explored in greater detail later in this essay, this report will utilize the more familiar term of “enhancement.”

Could this be the way forward?

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Self-Enhancement Unethical?

Safety concerns over people taking drugs to improve themselves is fine, but this article seems to go beyond the issue of safely. It seems to imply that well people should not be trying to enhance themselves.

The ability of prescription drugs and medical procedures to improve intellectual performance is likely to increase significantly in the next 20 to 30 years as technology advances.

"We know that there is likely to be a demand by healthy individuals for this treatment," Dr Tony Calland, chairman of the BMA's Medical Ethics Committee said at the launch of a discussion paper on the issue.

"However, given that no drug or invasive medical procedure is risk free, is it ethical to make them available to people who are not ill?"

Why wouldn't it be ethical to make drugs or procedures available to people who are not ill? What is wrong with letting well people make themselves better? Perhaps it's competition they fear. Can't have the average idiots making themselves as smart as the cognoscenti, can we?

I am all for safety, but some folks seem to have a socialist view of medicine and do not want to see a day when people can make themselves more competitive by enhancing their "god-given" abilities. That wouldn't be "fair." But self-enhancing products do not remain out of reach for the average citizen for very long. Technology is always too expensive for most people in its early stages, but eventually everyone can have it. Computers and cell phones are just two examples of this phenomenon. So I say let the rich be the testers. Perfect the stuff with them and then, when all the bugs have been worked out, let me at it.

Brain-boosting drugs spark ethical debate in UK

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Scientists Shy Away from Human Enhancement...Again

I have written before about this phenomenon and wondered aloud about its psychological and sociological underpinnings. Here I go again. The article in question describes the creation of so-called super-mice: able to leap tall buildings, etc., but very quickly quotes the researchers as follows:

They emphasized that the aim of the research was not to prepare the way to enhance the genes of people.

And again:

"We humans have exactly the same gene. But this is not something that you'd do to a human. It's completely wrong. We do not think that this mouse model is an appropriate model for human gene therapy. It is currently not possible to introduce genes into the skeletal muscles of humans and it would not be ethical to even try."

No, no, no. We aren't even thinking of enhancing anybody. That would be wrong. We only want to help cure diseases:

Professor Hanson accepted that it was possible athletes might misuse any future drug developed in this way. He said: "It's very possible. It's a different approach to putting a gene into a human. I would only do that to help anyone who suffers from disorders such as cystic fibrosis."

Apparently it's politically incorrect to consider making humans better. We can only use science to bring everyone to the same level. I absolutely believe that we should find cures for diseases. I also believe that we should not shy away from enhancing ourselves.

How will the current mentality play itself out? I know there are researchers out there working at human enhancement, but when will it be seen as "ethical"? Will it ever?

The mouse that shook the world

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Humans and AI: A Symbiotic Relationship?

The idea that artificial intelligence will soon become super-intelligent and discover that humans are a nuisance to be exterminated forthwith is certainly a frightening vision of the near-term future. Some of the people who are actually engaged in what is transpiring take the position that the merest chance that this may actually happen should persuade us to cease and desist from all work on AI. Others, myself included, see the “us-them” separation between human and artificial minds as a disappearing distinction, and therefore beneath our concern. This, more optimistic, group envisions a symbiotic relationship that transforms into a complete melding of human with machine, until there are just minds, comprised of various amalgams of both.

In fact, symbiosis already exists between organic and non-organic intelligence. In my real-world occupation I am a financial aid adviser. At my finger tips are networks of schools, lenders, government agencies, and the machines and software applications that make the whole thing work. In a few minutes I can put together a financial aid package for a student so that their entire education at my school will be paid for. The machines could not do it without my mind’s assistance. I certainly could not do it without the technology, certainly not with the efficiency and productivity that is possible now. This symbiosis reminds me of Vernor Vinge’s excellent novel, A Deepness in the Sky.

In the novel, a race of humans called the Emergence develops a unique method of focusing the minds of humans to such an extent that, together with computers, they can transcend the power of either in previously unimaginable ways. This human-machine collaboration is not merely science-fiction, however. Some of the most effective search engines in existence today have humans in the loop. My prediction is that this symbiosis will continue, until technology arrives at literal physical blending, either by the instantiation of human minds into machines, or machine parts being connected directly with human neurons. Or both.

The result of this symbiosis/blending will be that there will exist no substantial distinction between humans and machines once AGI comes into being. I sure hope it turns out this way.

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Where Have All the Workers Gone? Enter AGI

It won’t be long before employers are singing this song, if demographers are correct in their predictions. Researchers tell us that the Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964 and numbering some 79.9 million souls (Mature Market Institute, 2000), will soon begin retiring. So what’s the problem with that? The problem is, there aren’t enough people in the generation called Gen-X to fill those newly open positions. In fact, according to Law Practice Today, there are only 51 million people around who were born between 1965 and 1976. What does this mean? Very simply, we can expect a serious labor shortage to settle over the land soon, and last 10 to 15 years.

While managers alternate between hoping the doomsayers are wrong and doing everything they can to attract and keep talented workers, they will find that there are not enough warm bodies to go around. Some firms will probably thrive in this worker-poor market, but many will feel the pinch. There are two possible circumstances that this scenario might bring about that I will posit here.

First, the law of supply and demand may cause firms to pay a significant premium in salaries, which may bring about inflation. Second, firms may begin to push hard for the development of some very serious automation. Serious as in general artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence today is comprised of applications that can perform a narrow range of tasks very well; far better than humans, in fact. But that narrowness places some significant boundaries in the way of solving the labor shortage problem. General artificial intelligence would solve it in two ways: Such intelligences could be deployed and trained to perform any task a human could perform, only a lot better. Second, they would quickly improve themselves to the extent that they would be smart enough to find other solutions to the problem.

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Predicting the Path to AI

As they say, hindsight has perfect vision. It is a simple matter to look back after an event takes place and recreate the path of steps that led up to that event. It is much more difficult to see that path in advance. When AI is born, assuming that such an event would be immediately apparent, and assuming that it has not yet occurred, what path will it have taken? Will cloud computing and data centers turn out to have been a crucial fork in the road?

IBM and Google have announced a joint initiative to build large data centers that will allow students and researchers to participate in remote "cloud computing," at term that refers to the combined use of thousands of processors, vast libraries of data, and specialized software that "scour the Web and other data sources in seconds or minutes for patterns and insights."

As these cloud computing centers are created and more and more resources are injected into their ever-increasing capacities, will a crucial threshold be attained? It has been theorized that consciousness is an inevitable outcome when a sufficient degree of processing complexity is reached. Are we on a path to the inevitable emergence of a conscious Internet? If this is indeed what happens, remember where you heard it first. Stay tuned.

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Creation of Artificial Life to be Announced

We knew it was coming, but perhaps not this soon. Guardian Unlimited is reporting the imminent announcement of the creation of a completely man-made lifeform.

Craig Venter, the controversial DNA researcher involved in the race to decipher the human genetic code, has built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth.

Will this be the development that finally captures the attention of the public? Will people begin to pay attention to the accelerating pace of technological progress? Will the idea of the singularity become firmly planted in the popular imagination? We will know soon enough.

The announcement, which is expected within weeks and could come as early as Monday at the annual meeting of his scientific institute in San Diego, California, will herald a giant leap forward in the development of designer genomes. It is certain to provoke heated debate about the ethics of creating new species and could unlock the door to new energy sources and techniques to combat global warming.

I can already hear the obtuse accusations that will be launched by the religious, and the ways that politicians will attempt to co-opt developments to the benefit of their own agendas. More's the pity. But no matter, the singularity will happen anyway. Stay tuned.

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