John Robb on Homemade Microwave Weapons
James Hughes: Problems of Transhumanism: Liberal Democracy vs. Technocratic Absolutism
Technology Review: Defining an Algorithm for Inventing from Nature
New Study: Human Running Speeds of 35 to 40 mph May be Biologically Possible
NASA’s Puffin: Will It Be the Personal Transport Vehicle of our SciFi Future?
Simon Conway Morris: Aliens are Likely to Look and Behave Like Us (What about the Zerg?)
Current TV’s Max and Jason on Connecting Science and Culture
Patrick Millard: Open Sim Project
Nick Bostrom: Moral Uncertainty: Towards a Solution?
Humanity+ Conference in London in April
Wired: Removing Part of Skull Makes for Better Brain Scans
Scientific American: Time to Ban Production of Nuclear Weapons Material
Ray Kurzweil at SU/MIT/X Prize BCI Workshop (More from Singularity Hub)
Gary Kasparov on AI: The Chess Master and the Computer
Nanowerk: Simple DNA Nanomachine is Capable of Continuous Rotation
Video Gamers: Size of Brain Structures Predicts Success
Robots Climb Up the Wall (w/ Video)
Retail Meat Linked to Urinary Tract Infections: Strong Evidence
The Human Brain Uses a Grid to Represent Space
Scientists Identify Ecuador’s Yasuní National Park as one of the Most Biodiverse Places on Earth
Face Recognition Ability Inherited Separately from IQ
Bill Gates’ New Website
Researchers Discover Ebola’s Deadly Secret
Study suggests theory for insect colonies as ’superorganisms’
Explained: the Shannon Limit
Wired: Never Mind the Singularity, Here’s the Science
Utopian Pessimist Calls on Radical Tech to Save Economy
A Lawyer’s View of the Risk of Black Hole Catastrophe at the LHC
Aubrey de Grey in Helsinki, Finland
Will the First Self-Replicating Machine Be Our Last Invention?

If you haven’t picked up this month’s GQ magazine, do it soon. There is a feature on the Singularity Summit and Singularity Institute. (I also hear there is a piece by Carl Zimmer on the Singularity in Playboy but I haven’t picked it up yet.) Seeing community names like Rick Schwall (an SIAI donor and supporter) in a national magazine sure is a trip. According to the National Magazine Awards, circulation is somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 and is up in recent years. Here is the cover, in all its glory:

And here, I blew up the Singularity portion for emphasis:

Really freaky, mmhmmm! Freaky like our ancestral past or Pandora freaky, I hope.

In case you hadn’t heard, there is an article by Bill Gates up at Huffington Post, “Why We Need Innovation, Not Just Insulation”. Here’s how it starts:

People often present two timeframes that we should have as goals for CO2 reduction - 30% (off of some baseline) by 2025 and 80% by 2050.

I believe the key one to achieve is 80% by 2050.

But we tend to focus on the first one since it is much more concrete.

We don’t distinguish properly between things that put you on a path to making the 80% goal by 2050 and things that don’t really help.

Most people “concerned” about global warming are caught up in Gaianist nonsense, Al Gore-flavored uneducated alarmism, and eco-bling. They will think whatever a small cadre of politicians and elite academics want them to think.

Stewart Brand, thankfully, has been facing up to the truth that we need nuclear power to permanently lower carbon emissions. Jamais Cascio has been introducing geoengineering to the discussion, and it was recently reported that geoengineering research is being funded by Gates. More radically, J. Storrs Hall has proposed a weather machine which he claims could be built within a few decades.

Unfortunately, even if we ceased all carbon emissions tomorrow, the thermal inertia of the oceans will ensure that warming continues for “a century or more”. Of course, pointing this out at all is considered defeatist in many quarters, but too bad.

As I’ve always said, the easiest ways for people to fight global warming right now are halting meat consumption, traveling less, and moving into smaller houses. Al Gore could do much more to fight global warming if he pushed these lifestyle changes aggressively. Yet Gore keeps living in a big house, traveling all over the place, and eating meat. He sets a bad example and decreases the credibility of the movement as a whole. People concerned about global warming — please spare me your boring essays about the need to reduce emissions. I’m only interested in seeing your latest vegetarian recipes, pictures of your bicycle, and your small, well-insulated apartment. Show, don’t tell.

Here is the link. This is a good place to start to review Kurzweil’s 1996-1997 predictions. I remember reading this chapter myself in 2000 and analyzing the way in which the predictions did sync up with my own and the way they did not.

There are two categories of qualifying words used for the technology predictions: either they’re 1) “ubiquitous”, “common”, or the like, or 2) they simply exist. For something to qualify as “common” in my eyes would perhaps mean that a third of the white collar business world in the United States uses it on a weekly basis. (To be very generous.) For #2, the prediction can be regarded as having come “true” even if the product only exists as a prototype in a lab and has for some time.

Here’s a comment from Keith Norbury on the Kurzweil response post that I agree with:

It looks as though Kurzweil and Anissimov are both quibbling. I had similar thoughts as Anissimov did when I scrolled through the predictions in The Age of Spiritual Machines. But I also thought, well, Kurzweil is just a little hasty in his enthusiasm. Yes, there’s a danger in setting firm dates for predictions of technological progress. However, because he makes them, Kurzweil gets people’s attention. Even when he is wrong on the exact date, he is still able to point to a trend that indicates he will be right soon enough (in most cases). So far, though, the dates have passed for the easier predictions. It gets harder going ahead.

Kurzweil’s main point is that technology is improving exponentially not linearly. That’s a difficult point to grasp. However, we still don’t know if even exponential growth is enough to tackle some sticky problems, such as simulating human intelligence. Nobody knows where the goal posts are yet. Nor do we understand yet the principles involved in uploading a human mind to computer, never mind the engineering it would require. The answers might be just around the corner, or they might be a long way away. Time travel, for example, is possible under the laws of physics. However, the huge energies required pose a giant obstacle to making it a reality.

I’m now reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s excellent Red Mars, which points out the difficulties in making predictions. It’s speculative fiction but also hard science fiction. The trouble is, though, that the hard science in Red Mars is the science of 1993 when it was written. In the book, the voyage to Mars took nine months, as predicted using the technology that was proven in 1993. Since then, an ion propulsion system is well along the road to development that promises to shorten the trip to about 40 days — when it happens. That certainly doesn’t look like it will be by 2026, as in Red Mars. One could argue that Robinson wasn’t being a futurist when he wrote Red Mars. However, at the time he was striving to imagine as accurately as he could, based on the knowledge available, what that future mission would look like. Unfortunately, he didn’t imagine that humans would develop a better technology for getting to Mars, even though the principles of ion propulsion were already well known back in the 1990s.

My guess is that Robinson, in writing Red Mars, was thinking too linearly about technological progress and not in the exponential way that Kurzweil does. That’s what sets Kurzweil apart from other intelligent people who speculate about the future.

I agree with Kurzweil that many important technological metrics are improving exponentially, and that his linear-thinking critics are incorrect. I have always argued that major change is likely in the relatively near future. I regard a Singularity at 2029 or earlier as definitely within the realm of possibility. I am a “Singularitarian” of the type that Kurzweil describes in his book. Much of my life is focused around the idea of a Singularity, similar but not the same as Kurzweil’s idea of the Singularity. I object to Kurzweil’s statements that MNT and nanorobots will certainly be a reality in the 2020s. I object to a lot of other things. I agree on the broad outlines of exponential change. I do not think Kurzweil is an “idiot”, as Singularity Hub misleadingly claimed recently. I think Kurzweil is a genius and I applaud him for making predictions at all.

It is much easier to criticize than to make predictions, I admit that. I believe that Kurzweil’s model is a good framework, and my model of the future is extremely similar to his relative to the mainstream. Still, the fine points are worth arguing. My main focus is on the points themselves. Perhaps I should have just listed the items and not even called them Kurzweil’s predictions, so I could criticize them at will without in any way threatening his reputation. In any case, I don’t think that Kurzweil’s reputation is at risk here. As he pointed out, I just poked at 7 out of 108 of his predictions in the book. I apologize for the sensationalist title of my original post — I didn’t mean that ALL of Kurzweil’s predictions for 2009 had failed, just “Here’s a few failed predictions that I found on this specific web page and I agree with”.

I’m sure that everyone is interested in seeing Kurzweil’s point-by-point analysis of his predictions in The Age of Spiritual Machines. Considering the concerns raised by those seven predictions I mentioned, I think a thorough review of the book is in order, and I’m pleased that Kurzweil himself has taken up the task. I gave the original post a provocative title because I strongly believed that investigation would benefit the entire futurist community, and I hoped to start a conservation on it. In that respect, it appears to have succeeded.

From LifeSiteNews:

WASHINGTON, D.C., November 27, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - President Obama’s brief proclamation of Thanksgiving Day on November 26 was unique among all recorded Thanksgiving proclamations by his predecessors: it is the first one that fails to directly acknowledge the existence of God.

The beneficence shown by God to America is a theme that traditionally defines the Thanksgiving holiday, and this theme is strongly emphasized in the original Thanksgiving Day proclamations and consistently acknowledged even by modern presidents.

Obama’s unprecedented proclamation, however, only makes indirect mention of God by quoting George Washington, stating: “Today, we recall President George Washington, who proclaimed our first national day of public thanksgiving to be observed ‘by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God.’”

The proclamation goes on to call Thanksgiving Day “a unique national tradition we all share” that unites people as “thankful for our common blessings.”

“This is a time for us to renew our bonds with one another, and we can fulfill that commitment by serving our communities and our Nation throughout the year,” it continues.

All other presidential Thanksgiving proclamations directly refer to “God,” “Providence,” or another appellation for the divine being.

But Obama’s historic decision to avoid directly mentioning God in the Thanksgiving proclamation doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise. Earlier this year Obama similarly made history on Inaguration Day by explicitly referencing “non-believers” in his speech, which, according to USA Today, was the first time in history that a President had done so. Obama has also said on more than one occasion that the United States is “not a Christian nation.”

Obama’s attitude towards religion is historically unprecedented for an American President.

As somewhat of an aside, Mr. Lynch criticized my critique of Gardner’s theory of “multiple intelligences” as “irreverent”. This is extremely unfair. All I said was that his theory is “something that doesn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny.” I criticize an ad hoc, unscientific theory that has practically no empirical evidence to support it, and the popular appeal of which derives entirely from its egalitarian and inclusive political flavor, and get called irreverent.

Calling Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences unscientific is not even nearly the most irreverent thing I’ve said, by a long shot. It shouldn’t even be considered irreverent, period. Theories of this sort, which have great popular appeal to the public and practically zero appeal to cognitive psychologists, should be regarded as guilty before proven innocent. Skepticism should be our default mode. Rain on as many unscientific parades as you can.

Dudley Lynch, a self-described “non-scientific observer of what’s being said and written about The Singularity at the moment”, has written up an article on the Singularity. Conclusion: “I suspect it’s still going to be awhile before anyone has an idea about The Singularity worth keeping.”

I get a cameo in his write-up:

Michael Anissimov of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and one of the movement’s most articulate voices, continues to warn that “a singleton, a Maximillian, an unrivaled superintelligence, a transcending upload”—you name it—could arrive very quickly and covertly.

Let me add a qualification to that. I do not think that such an entity could arrive quickly and covertly starting from today as a reference point, unless there are extremely well-funded secret projects that have already been working with brilliant researchers and theoreticians for maybe a decade or more (not likely at all). The point I keep making is just that an entity could go quickly from slightly human-surpassing intelligence to superintelligence, a concept known as a “hard takeoff”. To get from here to slightly human-surpassing intelligence could take a while, probably more than 10 years but less than 40 (but who knows), and a project with an annual budget in the millions (maybe tens of millions but probably not hundreds of millions, is my guess). The brain is not magic and we are learning a tremendous amount about it all the time.

I especially stress this point with respect to AI. Even “merely” human-equivalent AI would have a tremendous number of advantages over human thinkers — the ability to copy itself, absorb information more readily, customize and overclock its cognitive modules, design new cognitive modules from scratch, accelerate its thinking speed, avoid the empirically demonstrated biases in reasoning that afflict all humans, explore the entire state space of cognitive features that evolution didn’t think of, blend together deliberative and autonomous cognitive processes, create multiple spheres of attention, and much more. Many of these features are listed in part 3 of “Levels of Organization in General Intelligence”, a Singularity Institute paper.

When us Singularitarians say that an intelligence could potentially bootstrap itself very rapidly from just-barely-smarter-than-human to much-much-smarter-than-human relatively quickly, our reasons aren’t “magic” or “it sounds cool”. We have scientific and rational reasons, it’s just that they don’t fit into soundbites, and there are few people articulate enough to present the arguments in an accessible way.

I don’t personally buy into Kurzweil’s 2029 date — it’s very speculative. The key point is that intelligence operates based on principles and rules that will eventually be reverse-engineered, and once we understand those principles, we’ll have the ability to “teach a rock to think”, to paraphrase Michael Vassar. The ability to teach a rock to think would be no small thing — it could transform the world practically overnight.

Mr. Lynch, here are two ideas about the Singularity worth keeping — one, that artificial intelligences will not behave anthropomorphically, and two, advanced artificial intelligence will be a risk even if we do not program them malignly.

Received from Ben Eisler via Facebook:

Hi everyone,

As some of you may be aware, Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal and President of Clarium Capital) is presently committed to matching all donations to the SENS Foundation for aging research by a further fifty percent.

In other words, this means that by reaching our target of ten thousand members, our group has the potential to raise an additional 500 thousand dollars for medical research to end the disabilities and diseases of aging, for everyone.

However, there’s a catch. To take advantage of this considerable matching grant, we must reach our target by the end of this year, giving us just over a month to get there.

We believe we can do it.

We are proposing a massive push so as to make this happen, and we need your help.

If everyone can attract just a few friends to sign up for our cause page, we can reach our target of ten thousand members and raise as much as 1.5 million dollars for SENS research. Ideally we would like to get there by Christmas, as that will give us a week to collect on donations.

This may seem like a tall ask, but remember, there is power in numbers. Once we reach two thousand members, everyone will need attract only four other people to reach our target. Once we reach five thousand, everyone will need to attract only ONE other person, and so on. All very doable!

In the meantime, both SENS Foundation (sens.org) and the Immortality Institute (imminst.org) will be promoting our cause on their websites, which will be a great help as well.

Let’s get to work, and bring an end to the disabilities and diseases of aging.

If 10,000 people all agree to give $100, and Peter Thiel matches it 50%, that equals $1.5M.

Some of us, like those in my generation (I’m 25), may be reluctant to give to SENS because they believe that medical science will progress fast enough without their intervention to let them live indefinitely. I would consider that unfair and calloused to our friends from earlier generations.

Of course, another route to life extension would be through friendly artificial general intelligence (FAI). It’s worth remembering that if we solve the aging problem but not the FAI problem, we all die anyway. However, if we solve the FAI problem but not the aging problem, it’s quite likely that FAI will then solve the aging problem for us. So FAI is truly the only long-term solution for life extension, but SENS is a possible shorter-term solution for the older among us. Even modest success for SENS might also cause the wealthier, older set to start thinking about the longer-term future, which includes the question of how to program powerful artificial intelligences that don’t automatically kill us through indifference.

Audio and video of Richard Feynman’s classic “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” lecture (1959), which presented the vision of molecular nanotechnology for the first time, is available from Photosynthesis.com, an audio site. There are other archival recordings available, including complete audio and video from the 4th Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology, held in 1995. Apple Computer was a key sponsor of the conference.

Back then, it seems to me that a lot of people thought that molecular nanotech would be closer by now (I remember hearing people say “about 20 years”, so roughly 2015), but they were obviously wrong. My guess is that the innovation and economic activity in the tech sector around that time made them overoptimistic about progress in general.

Here the static link.

See Roko on the issue that confronts us here. Human morality and metamorality is a very unique and specific thing, contingent on our complex evolutionary history and cognitive evolution. Break it in the transition to real AI, and we have a major problem. I care about every futurist issue, but there’s a reason why I focus the most on AI and intelligence enhancement — they could lead to the extinction of the human race if not handled properly. If an AI or upload comes to power without values that explicitly include the survival and properity of all other six billion human beings, it’s Game Over. An AI or upload could copy itself millions of times, seize all computing power on the planet, and quickly establish covert manufacturing facilities to fabricate advanced robotics. It would be unkillable. It’s equally scary whether projected to arrive in 2050 or 2100. We have to deal with it, starting now.

J. Storrs Hall read the recent Robin Hanson post on economics and machine intelligence. Here’s his suggestion:

It seems to me that one obvious way to ameliorate the impact of the AI/robotics revolution in the economic world, then, is simple: build robots whose cognitive architectures are enough different from humans that their relative skillfullness at various tasks will differ from ours. Then, even after they are actually better at everything than we are, the law of comparative advantage will still hold.

Boom, friendliness problem solved. Build robots with different cognitive architectures than us, and they will be forced to keep us around, due to Ricardo’s law of comparative advantage. Sounds wildly naive to me.

Robin Hanson is debating some new guy (to me) who bills himself as a futurist-oriented economist, Martin Ford. They’re mostly debating Robin’s paper on Economic Growth Given Machine Intelligence. The debate began with a post by Ford, followed by a response by Robin, followed by Ford again.

I enjoy Hanson’s response, because he jabs at both sides (techies and economists), as he is often so willing to do.

How might a human-indifferent hard takeoff superintelligence relate to humans economically? You might regard it as a universal hostile takeover of all our atoms.

HoweStreet.com, an investing information site, has an interesting interview up with Doug Casey, Chairman of Casey Research. Casey tries to think in the truly long term, thousands of years into the past and hundreds into the future, which, being both a futurist and aficionado of history and paleontology, I really enjoy. Here’s a quote:

My friend Jim Von Ehr, CEO of Zyvex, a nanotech instrument company, once told me that some of the most valuable land in the future would be the sites of old landfills, because they are basically mountains of purified materials. Once you can reduce matter into its component atoms and make new things with it, such places, packed with high concentrations of useful atoms, will command a premium. In the future, there will be no such thing as trash. So, this bearish trend on commodities you speak of isn’t really a bearish trend at all; it’s a bullish trend in technology.

Continue.