Event Horizon

Cutting Through the Jargon

2006-06-21T01:58:00.000-04:00

This post is inspired by a comment left on my previous pos t by blogger and thinker Al Fin. I decided to make it a post instead of just a comment because it opens up some interesting conversation about different methodologies of scientific investigation and other fun stuff.

As Al points out I am a philosopher by training and so I will try to elucidate a bit on the mission of the organization I linked to in the last post and hopefully cut through some of the jargon.

Before I directly attempt a translation of the quotes below I will explain a bit about things you should know when trying to read philosophy. First, just as in any discipline, there are a plethora of philosophical traditions and branches of study, etc. It would be very helpful to have some knowledge of the history of philosophy – more so than in other disciples. About two hundred years ago there arose somewhat of a bifurcation in the western tradition of philosophy. This split was between continental Europe and the English speaking world. These somewhat separated traditions are usually referred to as continental and analytic philosophy (though this separation is not really that tidy). In General continental philosophy has tended to be more concerned with questions of ethics, philosophical anthropology, political philosophy, and ontology; while the Anglo-phonic analytic philosophers were/are concerned almost exclusively with epistemology which includes mathematical logic, scientific methodology, and philosophy of language. Though both of these traditions share a lot of thinking and both draw on the same historical cannon of philosophers they are really quite different in many ways. So whenever one is going to be reading some philosophy one should first try to ascertain from what tradition the philosopher is writing. In the case of the organization I linked to these philosophers are from continental Europe and so one should understand that their manner of speaking and the jargon they use will almost certainly be unfamiliar (sometimes in an intentionally obscurantist manner unfortunately).

The second thing that anyone reading philosophy should understand is the principle of charity. The principle of charity is a way of reading a philosopher. The basic idea is simply that whenever one is reading another thinker one should assume that the thinker is intelligent and has something meaningful to say (even if this isn't quite always the case).

So with both those things in mind I will elaborate on the following first stated objective:

"To contribute to a single and comprehensive transdisciplinary scientific research programme forinvestigating self-organization by elaborating selected epistemological, ontological and axiological implications, thus attempting at unifying the scattered approaches in the so-called non-linear science of complexity"

First the organization is stating that they are attempting to unify the science of non-linear complexity. Presumably they say “so called” science because it has not yet been unified and so cannot really be called a science yet. Now the manner in which they are attempting this unification is through investigating the phenomenon of self-organization (such as the process of biological evolution) through a method of examining certain implications of self-organization for the historical subjects of western philosophy (epistemology, ontology, axiology).

Briefly I will explain what this might entail as a research program. First it is an attempt to bring together the traditional studies of the humanities and the sciences into a unified whole by applying the scientific and experimental conclusions of what we know about self-organizing systems to traditional questions of philosophy. The traditional questions of philosophy fall under thee categories that each have many sub categories. The first category is epistemology. Epistemology asks what knowledge is and how it is possible. Some of the sub categories include philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of logics, mathematical logic, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, etc. Now there are at least two very important examples of self-organization that have the power to really illuminate epistemology in a way that has never before been possible. These two examples are the self organization of the human brain and the self organization and evolution of planet earth's biosphere (human evolution in particular). For instance both evolutionary psychology and cognitive science are disciplines that inform us about the traditional problems of epistemology and this could be advanced even further by really understanding how both the human brain and mankind as a whole are self-organizing systems. Next is ontology. Ontology asks what exists, or what is being, or what is real. The science of cosmology studies one big self-organizing system – the cosmos. When studying the cosmos scientists must understand how everything in the cosmos interrelates, from the smallest things to the largest things, in order too understand how the cosmos is developing and what “it” is. Is the universe ultimately indivisible particles and space as Newton thought? Is it quanta of energy, or two dimensional strings existing in a many-dimensional space, or is it merely the interrelation of ultimate forces? Or perhaps information is the most real “substance”. At any rate it seems very likely that applying what we know about self-organizing systems to ontology is likely to yield some answers.

Finally we come to axiology. Axiology asks what value or quality is. This is closely related to the question of what consciousness is and is related to ethics, aesthetics and political philosophy. Understanding what consciousness or mentality is has alluded both philosophers and scientists for centuries and is considered to be a holy grail by many in both camps (and many have made pretensions of having answers). Some examples of how an understanding of self-organizing systems could be applied to axiology are (1) how the brain is organized to create consciousness, (2) how society is a self-organizing system and (3) how the self-organizing system of biological evolution has effected what we consider to be of value, and (4) how the organization and evolution of the cosmos may shed light on what is actually of value.

Now for the second objective:

“To contribute to a scientific understanding of the "feedback-loop" of human action and reflection in a historical moment in which the destiny of the world system is at stake”

This objective appears to be rooted in the philosophical traditions of phenomenology and hermeneutics.

Phenomenology is concerned with interpreting the world as it is presented to the consciousness and is a descendent's of both the philosophies of Descartes and Kant. Hermeneutics is concerned with the interpretation of the phenomena as akind of text(I realize that this just seems like more confusing jargon but if you are interested you can always turn to Google).

Now what this objective is stating is an understanding that at every moment the future is determined by present action and that present action arises from how we understand the present and the past (this is known as a heurmenutical circle and is also a problem in the philosophy of science). So this is just a fancy hermeneutical way of saying that they are interested in contributing to a more accurate understanding how mankind understands himself so as to greater empower man to direct his own future.

If anyone still has any questions or would like to further discuss these ideas feel free to comment.

Philosophical Foundations For A Theory of Evolutionary Systems

2006-06-14T18:59:00.000-04:00

This is a European research organization that I discovered while doing a bit of web surfing. There are some very interesting research papers published on the site that are concerned with self-organizing systems and socio-technological evolution. Here are a few quotes from the site.

Research papers
FAQ

"Since the sixties a paradigm shift in the disciplines of science, in system thinking and evolutionary thinking, and in philosophy and "weltanschauung" has been underway towards a Theory of Evolutionary Systems. Still there are gaps in theoretical knowledge to which philosophical theorizing may put forward heuristic offers."

Objectives

- To contribute to a single and comprehensive transdisciplinary scientific research programme for investigating self-organization by elaborating selected epistemological, ontological and axiological implications, thus attempting at unifying the scattered approaches in the so-called non-linear science of complexity

- To contribute to a scientific understanding of the "feedback-loop" of human action and reflection in a historical moment in which the destiny of the world system is at stake

The Information Age and the Fascist Threat

2006-06-14T17:05:00.000-04:00

All information is expressed through media. Those who control media on a mass scale control what information is accessed and whom may access it.

Throughout human history those in power have had control of the media. Until recently only the elite could read and that elite were usually the priest class whether Brahmans, Jesuits ancient Egyptian priest -scribes, etc. However, at the start of the modern era came the steam powered printing press and this has led to mass literacy and the rise of democracy. The bed-rock of the modern democratic state has been the freedom of press. This freedom guarantees that the agency of government is kept separate from the agency of media with the intended consequence that the literate masses will be able to govern themselves by having unrestricted access to information.

This idea of the freedom of the press has led to thriving democratic nations with people who have been empowered to keep their respective governments in check. However this system is flawed and over the course of the twentyth-century organizations have been quite successful at destroying the foundation of democracy by destroying the competition of a market of ideas through the monopolization of media.

Since the dawn of the Internet the monopoly of media that has been ruling the world for the most part has been severely weakened by the advent of the web-log and other media services such as digg.com and Wikipedia.

The more ubiquitous information and media become the more powerful become those who control the distribution and facilitation of media.

At the present time the birth of global democracy and global dialog leading to a prosperous future for humankind is being threatened by the most powerful organizations on this planet. These organizations are not governments but telecom corporations.

This threat arises because the infrastructure that facilitates the world wide web is owned by these corporations and these corporations understand the kind of power that they could wield if they could convince governments to allow them to wield that power uncontested. Because of these corporation's enormous amount of wealth and influence they are succeeding at doing this.

Whether or not the world wide web can, even in theory, be brought under control is uncertain. However what is certain is that this possibility must be safeguarded against at all cost.

In some countries the government controls the media and in some other countries the media controls the government. What we must seek is a society that nurtures a free market-place of ideas where power is decentralized because neither money nor violence can secure anyone a privileged outlet of media.

Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Vehicles Around the Corner

2006-06-08T21:54:00.000-04:00

Although it seems as if everyday I hear a report that hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles are still decades away the facts don't appear to support this. Currently every major automotive company is highly invested in researching fuel-cell technology and most have at least one working prototype already. For sometime now GM has been promising that they will begin mass producing hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles by 2010 and now just recently Honda has joined in saying that they too will be offering fuel-cell vehicles by 2010. Also both Daimler-Chrysler and Ford Motors have done an extensive amount of research and real world tests (though neither have committed to any date). Here is a run down of whats going on.

GM

That is a video of GM's most recent version of the Hy-Wire Fuel-cell vehicle. Source

Honda

"Hydrogen fuel cell cars could be on the road much earlier than the decade or more so far predicted. Honda has confirmed it plans a production model “in three to four years”."

Source

Ford Motors

"An ongoing successful road-test of a small fleet of hydrogen-powered vehicles has Ford engineers optimistic about their reliability and ultimate roadworthiness.

Ford is testing 30 Focus Fuel Cell Vehicles (FCVs) in seven U.S. cities and in Canada and Germany. They are driven daily by local governmental employees and have racked up more than 180,000

miles." Source

Daimler-Chrysler

"Largest real-life test of fuel cell vehicles wordwide running strong"

"Customers in Japan, Singapore, USA, Europe, China and Australia try out fuel cell vehicles in everyday use"

Source

New Evidence For Hyperbolic Growth?

2006-06-05T23:46:00.000-04:00

A lot of talk goes on about exponential technological growth as typified by Moore's Law. However if Ray Kurzweil is correct concerning his Law of Accelerating Returns we should see not just exponential growth but hyperbolic growth. Hyperbolic growth happens when the causes of exponential growth are themselves growing exponentially.

Well according to researchers at Georgia Tech this is exactly what we should expect to be seeing in the near future. Here are a few excerpts from the article:

“By 2010, the "More Than Moore's Law" movement—which focuses on system integration rather than transistor density—will lead to revolutionary megafunction electronics “

“SOP technology represents a radically different approach to systems. It shrinks bulky circuit boards with their many components and makes them nearly disappear. In effect, SOP sets up a new law for system integration. It holds that as the components shrink and the boards all but disappear, the component density will double every year or so, and the number of system functions in an SOP package will increase in the same proportion. Thus, SOP technology yields far more in system miniaturization than can be expected from Moore's Law, which deals only with transistors in ICs [see graph below, "Growing Faster"]. “

“This last application will see the convergence of biology, chemistry, and digital technology to produce capsules small enough to be introduced into the human body to monitor personal health daily. A capsule could be used, for example, to check vital signs and monitor parameters such as glucose levels, blood pressure, and even signs of cancer. The capsule would then wirelessly communicate the person's health status to a Web terminal outside the body or, via the Internet, to a physician (or to anyone, anywhere). Fitted with a reservoir, the capsule could also deliver drugs at programmed intervals to selected places within the body. “

Source

Money Doesn't Grow On Trees (Or Does It)

2006-06-03T15:24:00.000-04:00

The other day I was walking around in one of the beautiful hardwood forest of northern Ohio and it occurred to me that the trees were a perfect example of molecular manufacturing at its finest. Of course it is often pointed out that biological organisms are essentially molecularly constructed beings but the point really hit home for me while thinking about the trees. I think this is because of the large mass and simple efficiency of trees. The molecular mechanisms for constructing a tree are powered directly by sunlight (no need for exotic fuels like us humans), and the building blocks for constructing the trees come straight out of the atmosphere via carbon dioxide.

So this got me thinking: all that carbon dioxide we keep dumping into the atmosphere via combustion could be a global fortune rather than a disaster. Just imagine molecular manufacturing on a global scale that produced almost every economic good out of carbon directly from the atmosphere while using sunlight as the power.

Form this perspective economic efficiency and reducing carbon from the atmosphere would be the same project. It takes energy to separate carbon from oxygen. At this time we are accustomed to combing oxygen and carbon to get energy. But this is an archaic way of getting energy seeing as how it is throwing our ecosystem out of whack and seeing as how the earth already receives more energy from the sun than we could possibly put to use. We must imitate the trees. We must use the sun's energy to separate the carbon from the atmosphere and use that carbon for all of our production needs.

Just a thought.

The Event Horizon Frappr Map

2006-05-16T01:45:00.000-04:00

I just added a Frappr Map to the blog. You can see it at the bottom of the 'recent posts' list. So if you have a moment it would be great if you would add yourself to the map. I would love to know a little more about my readers. Also this is a great networking tool as it helps anyone who reads this blog to meat others of like mind.

NAME="frapprGroupMap" TYPE="application/x-shockwave-flash"
PLUGINSPAGE="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">

Progress With Robotic Tele-Surgery

2006-05-14T03:04:00.000-04:00

Source

This article is an interesting follow-up to my "Future of Health Care" Post.

Amazing Pictures of Near-Nano Machines

2006-05-12T14:14:00.000-04:00

Source

We may be closer to the age of nanobots than many are willing to admit. Get ready for a Fantastic Voyage.

The Future of Health Care

2006-05-10T02:34:00.000-04:00

Here in the United States one of the key issues in the political arena has been the state of health care and what can be done to improve its accessibility to all levels of the economic spectrum and make it more affordable to everyone - with the left demanding state controlled universal health care and the right singing the praises of the present market system. In this article I will take no political stance because I don't think this is a political problem. Rather what I wish to discuss is the open source future of medicine and why that future makes the problem of the expense and availability of health care a problem that will soon go away.

No doubt some readers are already shaking their heads. They are probably saying to themselves that medicine requires doctors and goods that are both scarce and which must necessarily remain scarce for the foreseeable future. Of course if this premise were true then my earlier claims would be unjustified and so ,of course, that is a premise that I will show to be in error.

To begin with lets look at medical doctors. The backbone of the modern health care system is the science of medicine which is put to use by medical doctors who are essentially technicians (very well educated technicians). These technicians are usually specialists in one particular system or organ of the human body – though they are well educated in the whole body. These technicians are also experts at diagnosis. They apply the science of medicine and biology in order to pinpoint problems with the human body. This involves gathering data from the body through various tests and instruments. This data is then put through a system of inference which seeks to classify a set of symptoms as either within the range of healthy or as a syndrome or a disease. Although at one time it required a very intelligent and educated person to gather this data and perform the necessary inferences in order to make a diagnosis most of this process can now be performed by an intelligent machine.

This is not meant to slight the science of medical diagnostics - the brilliant masters of chess have already met their humiliating match and have now been surpassed by the machine.

So being that this is already the state of affairs what can we likely expect to see in the next ten years or so? Here is one scenario which I think is likely. Within five years local clinics start using very good weak AI expert systems to make diagnostics and prognostications. Soon thereafter it becomes legal to obtain a prescription from a clinic based on the prognosis of the AI alone. This move drastically cuts the cost of visits to a clinic because there is no doctor on salary. Of course when necessary a doctor could be consulted through telepresencing, in fact a network of M.D.'s might be able to augment the functionality of the expert system which could then be networked all over the world.

With such a networked medical AI/ telepresencing-doctors system the cost and effectiveness of medical treatment could be greatly reduced.

At this point some might say: big deal, we will soon have expert systems that can make accurate diagnosis and prognosis, the real cost of health care is treatment. I concede that this is true. However the very nature of medicine – and hence treatment – is presently changing paradigmatically. Within the next few years it will become inexpensive for a person to have his/her genome sequenced. Soon all medicine will be based on a person's genome. And not only genetic diseases. Soon our understanding of genetics will allow us to regenerate organs and tissue, and bolster our immune systems to kill cancer and other invading replicators. Such treatment relies on the science and technology of bioinformatics. Bioinformatics understands that the the human genome is a structure which contains information which instructs a kinematic replication process, i.e. Life. Once this biological paradigm shift has fully come to fruition I would imagine that one will be able to go visit a clinic to receive a gene treatment which makes one immune to the common cold and influenza for about as much as it costs to get a soar throat looked at now. I expect to see such advances within fifteen years.

Beyond fifteen years it is quite hard to say what medicine may be like but lets try any way. I think that it would be a conservative prognosis to say that sometime between 2020 and 2030 we will have achieved both molecular manufacturing and artificial general intelligence (AGI). If after this point we haven't destroyed ourselves then we should be enjoying an economic utopia. But beyond the fact that one obviously wouldn't need any money in such a society (and so wouldn't be concerned about the cost of health care) one could also expect that the very idea of health will have changed. What we consider to be “healthy” at present may in a couple decades be considered unbearably diseased.

With all of humanity networked through an exponentially growing super intelligence, and with tools that can manipulate molecules to create any conceivable thing, the very nature of physical human existence may become something that is currently inconceivable to us.

Popular Mechanics Goes Transhuman

2006-05-08T02:53:00.000-04:00

This is a great article.

The End of Money and the Singularity Model of Economics

2006-05-05T02:33:00.000-04:00

Recently over at “The Warrior Class Blog” Will Brown wrote an article on the need for a singularity model of economics. This piece was also discussed at the Speculist by Phil Bowermaster. This was a very interesting article and while I wholly agree with Mr. Brown's assessment that we are in need of a serious singularity model of economics I must disagree with his equating of money with economics (if I understand him correctly).Here are a few points that I would add to this line of thinking:

To begin I would like to see a singularity model of economic that is very interdisciplinary. What I mean is that human economic activity and political organization is the result of both the biological and memetic evolution of the human species. As such Economics must become a more integrated science based on interdisciplinary principles.

Now having said that let us take a very brief look at the history of the economic exchange of goods.

The evolution of the technology of exchange corresponds to the evolution of the technology of economic productivity. The technology of exchange begins with civilization. Civilization emerges from human techno-memetic evolution when the technologies of writing and agriculture are developed. At this stage of civilization records are kept and credit is given but there is no standardized medium of exchange. This state of affairs leads inevitably to the adoption of a standardized medium of exchange – usually gold or silver. From this early stage in human civilization until the beginning of the industrial revolution gold served as an almost universal currency and was identical to money. At that point in history the banknote was invented and thus begun modern finance. However, even though banknotes have been used since at least the seventeenth century it has only been since 1971, following the Bretton Woods Accord, that most of the worlds governments began issuing fiat currency. This is the difference between money and currency. Money has an inherent worth or can readily be exchanged for a predetermined amount of something with inherent worth (such as gold), Fiat currency has no inherent worth and its value is subject to manipulation by governments and others with a great deal of power.

When this is understood one must conclude that economics and money are in no way the same thing because economic activity continues on, ever more rapidly, without the existence of money.

What now exists in place of money is a system of trust wherein members agree by dictate of law to accept a fiat currency in exchange for goods and services. One cannot become wealthy in such a system by merely accumulating money (as was once possible) but must accumulate capitol, i.e. the means of production.

In a society where capitol is centralized, wealth is concentrated into the control of the few. If there is only one power plant then whoever controls that plant is very powerful indeed. And if the enormous high-rise apartment complex is owned by one company then, again, that company has a lot of power.

But what happens in a decentralized society that has been altered by design-science revolution? Such a society is one that I believe we are currently building – or at least making possible. What happens when individuals are not dependent on the centralized and monopoly owned infrastructure of life? What happens when an individual can own a domicile for a relatively small amount that is completely self-sustaining – able to produce all of its own electricity, fuel, food, and tools? Such a time is around the corner.

Once this economic state of affairs is achieved the age of monopolization of the infrastructure of life will be over and so will the present politico-economic organization with all of its inefficiencies.

When, or if, this state of affairs comes to fruition how much capitol one owns will not define wealth since the entire infrastructure of life will be decentralized and since molecular nano-fabrication will end all scarcity (or destroy the planet). Once this revolution is fully developed all human interrelation will be based on meaningfully dialog. The only exchange will be the exchange of ideas and collaboration. The only wealthy man will be the self-actualized man.

The Techno-Memetic Evolution of the Biosphere

2006-05-01T12:03:00.000-04:00

In the biosphere species live in a harmonious conflict. This harmonious conflict constitutes that dance of nature we call evolution. With the evolution of biological species comes the evolution of the biosphere. All species alter their environment, and hence the biosphere, whenever they evolve. As species are continually evolving so also evolves the complex interrelations among all species on earth. As some species evolve – causing the biospherical balance to shift – other species are challenged to evolve as well because of that environmental change – which in turn challenges yet more species to evolve or die – and so forth..

This continual cycle of evolution finally gives birth to a species which can alter the environment to suit its needs rather than rely only on genetic evolution. This species is, of course, Man – the technological animal.

This type of evolution, which is a technological evolution, has been called memetic evolution. Memetic evolution is the evolution of the information which instructs the organization of humankind to be able to alter its environment as a means of survival in an evermore efficient manner.

This techno-memetic evolution has allowed humans to migrate to, and live in, almost every climb and place on earth and to reach population levels far beyond the carrying capacity of a pre-technology biosphere. The rate at which the biosphere evolves has been growing exponentially since its formation. With the arrival of the technological animal who has inhabited every region of the biosphere, the rate of change within the biosphere has accelerated to a furious speed. Until recently humankind was not aware of the biosphere but was only aware of the effects of regional ecology. The awareness of humanity's dependence on the biosphere has come at the same time that humanity has become aware that techno-memetic evolution is changing the biosphere in ways that could be catastrophic to human existence.

It is the nature of techno-memetic evolution to continually optimize the organization of human activity toward an ever greater ability to alter the environment to enhance human survival. For this reason the logical goal of human-machine civilization must be to optimize the entire biosphere for human benefit through world-changing engineering and technology.

This project calls for nothing less than the unification of all science. Physics and chemistry must further inform our understanding of biological systems and the science of evolutionary biology must further inform our understanding of anthropology and sociology. The result of this unification will be a mature science of ecology which will inform the organization of human activity on this planet. The ecological optimization of human techno-economic activity must be the collective goal of the human species.

The Evolution of the Engine

2006-04-28T03:29:00.000-04:00

The technological-economic evolution of the human-machine civilization is composed of advances in the amount and quality of information (and how well that information is shared) as well as the efficiency with which that information is used to alter the environment and nature of the human-machine civilization.

In what follows we shall be concerned with the evolution of the means by which the environment is altered.

We call that technology which is capable of physical work – and hence the power to physically alter the environment – an engine. The idea of the engine arises when the principles of Cosmological organization and dynamics are understood to the extent that it then becomes possible to harness those principles to effectuate change.

The earliest engines were human powered tools designed to take advantage of known principles, such as the oar – which took advantage of the principle of resistance in order to effectuate propulsion. During the same era animal power was used as well, sometimes applied to systems of pulleys, levers, and other technologies. As the Human-Machine civilization advanced technologically an increase in discovered principles and the power of the previous engines combined to make it possible to make evermore powerful and effective engines. First wind and water mills, then spring and gravity engines such as clocks with springs and pendulums.

Then came the world-historical altering heat engines. These engines utilized heat, almost always from combustion, to generate physical motion capable of doing work. This is the engine that drove the first industrial revolution and continues to drive the advances of the present through the internal combustion engine. It was the advent of the widespread use of the heat engine in such applications as the locomotive, the steam ship, and the steam shovel that brought the idea of fuel into human thought. Previously work was accomplished through everyday natural events such as wind or flowing water. It was not conceived of by man before the heat engine that energy could be stored away for the future accomplishment of work. Prior to this time the primary engine of work was the human body and the primary store of the potential for that work was precious metals. Precious metals, such as gold and silver, became a medium for the storage of future human labor in market societies and most societies held slaves as a form of energy storage as well. However gold and silver is merely a medium of exchange. It acts as a store for future human labor but it was never conceived of as the direct storage of work in the way that petroleum is understood today, and the way coal was understood in the past.

For more than 200 years the heat engine and its fuel has been the effective agent of the technological-economic evolution of human-machine civilization. During that time astonishing gains have been made in discovering principles of Cosmological order and dynamics. Along with these astonishing gains have come powerful new understandings about how to effectuate change of the environment for the better of humanity. Part of this understanding is a moving away from the thinking of energy as a scarce recourse which must be controlled to control the evolution of the human-machine civilization.

We now understand that we live on the surface of a giant gravitational engine that is continuously emitting thermal radiation and electromagnetic fields and that that giant gravitational engine is revolving around a much larger thermonuclear fire ball that is constantly bombarding us with a large spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. We are swimming in a see of energy. What is called for is an intelligent putting to work of that energy as we alter the human-machine civilization and its environment toward Telos.

This is now beginning to take place through the construction of apparatus capable of transforming solar radiation into electricity and other more usable forms of energy such as ethanol an hydrogen. As this transformation takes place in the coming decade human economic activity will be fundamentally altered because the energy that powers technological change will no longer be a scarce commodity but will be virtually unlimited – thereby making the speed at which change is possible virtually unlimited.

Wraping My Mind Around 2010: A Singularitarian Philosopher Takes a Look at the Near Future

2006-04-12T19:46:00.000-04:00

It seems that recently there is so much tech in the news that I can barely keep up with the implications. However, as a philosopher, I must come to grips with the implications because therein is the nature of the Cosmos. As an integrated system in continual Flux the present is ever pointing toward the future because the seeds of the future are in the present system state of the Cosmos. It is the business of philosophy to think and to say (though through a glass darkly) what the order of the Flux is. Yet because the Flux is ever changing it resists examination – it is never the same. Therefor if one is to attempt to say something of what the Flux, and hence the Cosmos, is, then one must look to what the Flux is becoming. This is because the Flux never IS but is always BECOMING.

In trying to think the Flux I have chosen to focus my thinking on comprehending the near future of the Flux. In trying to think in this manner I have found the Years 2010 – 2013 to be a point of phase change. The technologies unleashed on the world in this time frame will likely be of a truly revolutionary nature. And when I say revolutionary what I mean is that these technologies will rapidly (over the period of a decade) transform the entire sociological order of global human-machine civilization.

This is, of course, quite interesting, if true, because it is so near in time and so astonishing in its implications for everything that seems important now. Also this kind of thinking is an experiment for me because if I can accurately predict the implications of the current state of the Flux, then I will have validated, to some extent, my methodology. And of course if I am completely wrong I will have shown that my methodology is rather wrong headed and untenable. So in what follows I will attempt to describe the state of the art in technology today, then I will attempt to extrapolate based on trends and the interrelation of those trends what the state of the art will likely be in five years or so, and then try to draw out some conclusions concerning the organization of global human-machine civilization at that point..

Computation/linguistic/artistic interface

In this section I would like to treat the increases in computational power, means and speed of connectivity, software development, and media creation and dissemination as all so closely related as to be one thing. What I am referring to is basically the 'Internet' renamed. I say all of these things are the same because they are all intimately related, and in fact, these things acting in concert are the Internet. As computers gain in performance new software is written to take advantage of that new power. With more powerful programs and more powerful computers the amount of data that can be received and processed in real time increases and hence there is a demand for greater speeds of connectivity. With greater speeds of connectivity the kinds of media being distributed over the network becomes more complex. The purpose of this infrastructure, this 'Web', is to facilitate interconnectivity of human minds via ever greater powers of language (in the form of evolving media). This whole process, of course, is in recursive feedback. So we see that the whole infrastructure is part of the evolution that takes place when technology is applied to human communication. Now since human communication engendered technology in the first place applying technology to advancing communication (which began with the advent of writing) has set the advancement of both language and technology on the path of exponential increase in power. So if we take this model seriously, and I do, the evolution of the Internet becomes a quite logical process with a somewhat easy to predict near-term trajectory. The 'Internet' is precisely that bit of technology that is actively improving the technology engendering human activity of communication.

But what does it mean to improve communication and language? I think this is obvious. Language is the means of an individual to convey something about the world to another individual. In this way those humans who share a language also share a world. So the evolution of language has been, in some sense, the evolution of the 'World' that humans live in. And so the evolution of the technology of language has been the evolution of bringing more and more humans into a shared world and world-veiw. In this way the history of art is also the history of the evolution of language because the artist attempts to convey something about the world of that artist on a level that is not possible with mere words. One important way in which this is done is through simulacrum - whether the art be sculptures, poetry, play act, painting, photography, film etc. The idea though is not merely that the world is reproduced but that it is reproduced in such a way as to reveal some detail of experience that the artist/interlocutor wishes to accent. In such a way a person can go beyond the mere attempt to explain some detail of his/her world and can actually bring an audience into the artist's world and show them that world. This is the power of simulacrum and this is the direction of the Internet – toward always accessible global communication through artistic simulacrum.

Now if it is the power of communication that engenders the power of technology then the point at which all human knowledge becomes instantly accessible and searchable and the point at which any person can create an immersible world to share with others is a kind of linguistic singularity (AGI would be the other one most commonly associated with the singularity proper)

So what is the state of art of this technology engendering linguistic technology and what kind of changes can we reasonably expect over the next five years? Well one way to answer the first part of this question is to measure to what extent the average person can share powerful simulacrum and to what extent all human knowledge is searchable and accessible.

Currently there are three big players here: The movie industry, the gaming industry, and Google (and to a lesser extent every website and program on the Internet). We are now in the midst of major change in entertainment as the gaming industry moves into high gear. We have MMORPG's, hyper realistic first person shooters, and incredible world simulators already. All of these game genres are contributing to the realization of total world immersion. At the same time the state of the art of television and film is rapidly advancing. Witness the advent of enormous HDTV's, Super realistic surround sound systems, and media that holds incredible amounts of information such as HDDVD's. Add these advances to the advances in the cost and power of digital camera's, media computers, and gaming engines; and the ease of transmitting media globally and free through services such as Google video and YouTube, and it is not hard to see that we will be witnessing an ever greater rise in the production and dissemination of high quality homemade media.

As to the access and searchability of human knowledge we are making rapid gains as well. The constraint on this issue is in the power of the artificially intelligent search algorithms, and in the ease of interface with this intelligence, and in the physical availability of access to this intelligence. As far as the search algorithm, Google has been steadily gaining in this field and I see no reason why this shall not continue. As for the interface, rapid advancements are now being made with speech recognition software and we are already beginning to see the implementation of this technology in customer service, automobile navigation computers and cellphone operations. If these advancements stay on course I see no reason why we will not have, at least, rudimentary speech interface with an artificial intelligence that is powerful enough to coordinate all human knowledge and communication by 2013 or so. Now as for physical availability, this will of course begin only in the developed world, but with the current advent of EVDO, full power hand held computers, and 3G phones and networks it seems obvious to me that in another five years one will be able to access the Internet (and hence the entire global system) at any time one would wish.

So my prediction is that sometime around 2010 – 2013 the Internet will finally become a full fledged 'meta-verse'. And of course when this technology fully emerges it will be inextricably tied to all the other technologies, including government, production, and finance.

Finance

I have labeled human communication as that which engenders technology but this is only half the story. If the purpose of communication is to share a world then the purpose of sharing a world is learning to coordinate activity in that world. Finance is the means of coordinating activity in an environment of resource scarcity. The sophistication of finance evolves as the sophistication and complexity of economic activity become greater in order to deal with the ever greater scarcity of resources as the population density in a given location increases. Our current global and highly complex system of finance has evolved with the population density of the planet. Right now the global finance system is coordinating the production of the life-infrastructure for over 6 billion people. The technology of finance is the technology that facilitates the storage, transmission, and distribution of wealth in the most economically efficient manner. This system has been rapidly evolving since the Enlightenment and has been evolving especially rapidly since the advent of digital computation. Hardly a day can pass by with out a new form of financial instrument being invented and a new, more efficient, way of trading those instruments. Year after year more and more people own some amount of the infrastructure of economic productivity thanks to these instruments. If we observe the historical records of the value of the economic infrastructure, such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average, or the S&P 500, we must come to the conclusion that the value – and hence the efficiency, of the economic infrastructure of productivity is increasing at an exponential rate. There is every reason to think this trend will continue. We have already moved to a fiat currency and we are just now moving to a fully digital currency. Yes there is still pieces of paper sitting in the bank, and yes you can still operate in the economy merely by exchanging these pieces of paper, but the pieces of paper have no relevancy anymore. Just this month (4/06) PayPal has introduced a means whereby one may pay for things, or otherwise transfer money from one account to another, with a cell phone. Its not hard to imagine that in a world of ubiquitous communication and computation, complete with virtual reality type immersion, that all currency will be digital. More than this, however, is the possibilities to finance that this opens up. In a world such as this there would continuously be perfect liquidity in all markets. What this means is that the average person will be able to store all moneys in high quality investments while at the same time that person will be able to whip out his/her ultra personal computer/cell phone and transfer that money out of capital investment into someone's bank account (where it will then be invested again in such a manner) to make a purchase or what not.

This state of affairs, which I see as having already begun, will have an enormous impact on global economy by 2013. Of course I don't expect it to have already caused a revolution by 2013, what I mean is that by 2013 it will have begun to start a revolution which will still take another ten years to fully, and irrevocably change the world economy. The revolution takes place at the point at which the efficiency and productivity of the economic infrastructure exceeds the immediate demands of human-machine civilization. At this point the storage of wealth becomes irrelevant because any human demand can be immediately satisfied with out laboring or 'spending' stored labor, i.e., money. At that point every individual has a right to a certain percentage of the fully automated economic infrastructure and that amount of wealth will be virtually infinite in as much as the infrastructure can supply any human need or reasonable desire – my guess is around 2030..

So my prediction is that by 2013 digital currency and computerized trading of instruments will provide perfect liquidity of markets allowing for a greater and greater number of middle class citizens of developed nations to become far more wealthy and eventually allowing everyone on planet earth to become very wealthy.

Models of economic productivity

But finance is merely a technology for coordinating labor and allocating capitol. What is really interesting is the manner in which the labor and capitol is coordinated. The environment of market capitalism is a highly competitive environment that aggressively selects for efficiency of productivity or service (which translates immediately to greater profit which translates into greater capitol investment). While it may seem that capitalism only works because of all the sophisticated social norms that we have – and this is true – it is also true that the same basic laws of the biosphere which have been influencing the behavior of Homo Sapiens since the beginning are the same basic laws that continue to govern the technological evolution characterized by the evolution of any capitalist economy. So while we are examining human economic activity we must remember that while it is in a sense an invention of man it is also, in reality, the natural activity of man at this stage of his existence on this planet. As such it follows certain rules, just like any other system of nature, that can be extrapolated through hypothetico-deduction. Namely we can conclude that the efficiency of economic productivity will continue to grow at an exponential rate because that is the nature of the techno-economic society which has arisen on planet earth due to natural memetic selection. This translates into an ever growing knowledge of the cosmological system (science) and ever greater power to control aspects of that system in order to support human life (which encompasses the entire biosphere). This power and its relationship with Humanity is the essence of technology. Technology, which is the outcome of productivity, has emerged out of the biosphere and is a part of the biosphere.

In this sense Man is truly the keeper of the Garden. Either Man will maintain the Garden and so maintain His existence or Man will destroy the biosphere and Himself. So in saying that Man is essentially a technological species we are also saying that man is essentially the keeper of the biosphere. Previously in history Man has conceived of the evolution of technology as a war against nature – a war to wrest the secrets from nature in order to tame Her. Yet now, more and more, we are beginning to understand that no thing can be effected without all things being effected. We are beginning to understand that to take care of Humanity means to bring all of Earth into a system of equilibrium. With out this feat there can only be scarcity, starvation, and war.

But the nature of the exponential growth of science along with technology has finally brought about a state of affairs wherein we can begin to understand how the entire system might be maintained in equilibrium without scarcity. This state of affairs follows from economic efficiency and technological power.

Perfect economic efficiency and technological power would be the knowledge and ability to transform anything into anything with the least amount of energy possible. Who knows what the limits of this are but we are, as yet, far from it. Still at this point we have the knowledge to begin to build an infrastructure that collects all of its energy in a highly efficient manner from the sun, storing that energy efficiently in the form of hydrogen, or in super-capacitors, or fly-wheels etc. Extremely rapid advances are being made in this field every year. At the same time amazing advances are being made in robotics, replication machines, synthetics, and nanotech etc. Every year appliances are getting more and more efficient as well. Already at this time a person with a reasonable amount of capital could completely support his or her self on a relatively small plot of land using existing technologies. So I predict that in about five years a large and rapidly growing number of individuals all over the world will be providing some or all of their own power and using replication technology to make a surprising number of products rather than buy them. I'm not saying that this decentralized hyper-efficient economic paradigm will dominate but merely that it will have a firm foothold by 2013 and that it will expand quite rapidly causing a true economic revolution before 2020. This trend will continue, of course, with the arrival nanofabrication machines and AGI. I don't expect this kind of technology though until about 2030 – shortly before the singularity.

Government

The waning of the State. This is the story I predict for the next decade. For the most part the state is something that must exist to protect property in an environment of scarcity. People don't murder each other for tennis shoes in an environment of plenty. Don't get me wrong I'm not saying that the state is just going to up and disappear tomorrow. I just think that as economic productivity and the distribution of wealth increase in efficiency the state will, correspondingly, diminish in power and importance. This is because the function of the state will become obsolete. There will, no doubt, still be law and police, but not many of either. On the other hand there probably won't be much privacy – at least not in the public sphere. What I hope to see is an ever increasing decline in crime as wealth increases and it becomes nearly impossible to break the law without being caught because of ubiquitous cameras. If this is the case people will demand that the law become simplified and manageable – otherwise most of us would end up in jail eventually for some stupid peccadillo. Other factors influencing the soon-to-be irrelevance of the state are the irrelevance of war as scarcity begins to become a none issue, transnational migration, and the complete intertwining of the global economy which is causing all nations to be reliant on the established system to the extent that waging a war is really not an option. So its really pretty simple: No economic scarcity = little crime and no war = the eventual end of the state. And by 'state' I mean the entire military-industrial complex, the enormous prisons filled with millions of people – many of whom are non-violent offenders, and the thousands and thousands of police who patrol the streets pulling over pretty much whomever they like while merely picking a violation from among the thousands there are to charge you with if he likes. And this is in the democratic republics, never mind the state of affairs in the world's tyrannical states. Don't get me wrong – I'm not judging the state on an ethical level – I'm merely describing what it is. That it is a necessary evil is evident by the fact that the state is a sociological condition that arose spontaneously through the activity of certain groups of people living at certain times during the history of biological evolution. No single person had the idea to build a state in order to enter into competition for resources. The state was formed spontaneously from human activity. Yet just because I understand that states exist necessarily does not mean that I believe that their continuance is necessary.

Technology is the result of confrontation and scarcity. It stems from a biological adaptation. The inherent conflict between competing social groups, or species, or nature, is what gives rise to technological evolution. But it is this same technology, once it is cultivated to completion, that ends the condition of scarcity from whence it came. With the end of scarcity comes and end to the state and a new economic and political way of being will take its place.

But before we get to that point the first step in the way of ending the state is establishing international law (by violent enforcment if necessary, i.e. Iraq, Bosnia, maybe Iran etc.) Of course I prefer the peaceful route, and ultimately that is the only rout, but before justice can be established on a global level basic laws protecting human rights must be established and enforced on a global level. We are now in the process of achieving this state of affairs even if it is being violently opposed by militant Islamic fundamentalists and other well intending people such as green peace anarchist types (or even your standard Democrat for that matter). Once this state of quasi international justice is attained perhaps before 2015, then these nations will be ready for a flood of technologies which will help them build an economic infrastructure and be plugged into the global system quite rapidly. So by 2013 or so I expect to see the infrastructure set up that leads to the beginning of the dismantling of militant infrastructure and, hence, a greater investment in the infrastructure of life – which will only serve to accelerate the process of demilitarization. This demilitarization will be demanded in democratic nations once the economic benefit is felt initially.

The Technological Nature of Government and the Question of Justice

2006-03-30T15:16:00.000-05:00

The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already afflicted man in his essence. The rule of enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth. Thus where enframing reigns there is DANGER in the highest sense. -Martin Heidegger

But where danger is, grows
The saving power also. - Holderlin

Government is a technology. The purpose of this technology is to establish a state of human flourishing. The purpose of technology in general is to establish control over nature through instrumentation. The instruments of government are law, bureaucracy, weapons, and the enforcement of law and policy through organized violence.

It is also the nature of technology to evolve with ruthless efficiency to empower those who wield the instruments of technology to an ever greater extent – and at an exponential rate no less.

Yet who possesses the instrumentation of the technology of government, and toward what goal is this technology aimed at achieving?

The power of a technology is defined by how readily and efficiently it may obtain its goals.

As the power of technology grows so grows its danger. The danger of technology arrives precisely when the instruments of technology are no longer capable of being governed by human agency and so we are then given over to a fate brought to bear by an autonomous technological system of governance.

As the signs of this danger grow and come into appearance the most perennial question of philosophy resurfaces and makes us feel yet again the greatness of the task that we must embark on in asking such a question: This question is the question of justice.

To ask the question of justice is the same as to ask what state of affairs is most conducive to human flourishing. In order to answer this question we must first know under what circumstances human flourishing may blossom forth, and this knowledge may only be had through an understanding of the essential nature of human being as a political and technological animal.

Either the question of justice will be answered in time or the growing danger of technology will lead to the destruction of humanity – at least this much is certain.

Yet have we not already passed beyond the point at which the system of technological apparatus has become autonomous? It would appear that we have. Every where we turn we see evidence that there are no world actors. No individual can originate the power of will necessary to change the course of the world, precisely because every individual is an inextricable part of a system. All individuals are constrained by the demands of the nearly global socio-politco- economic-system. All of the social and cultural complexity and variation that we see in the various regions of the globe are the result of shared belief systems that are inherited and which are capable of evolution. All of this is evidence that man is not directly in control of his destiny. All human actions are, as they have ever been, reactions to the emergence of physis which is the evolution of nature. That is to say that human nature and hence the behavior of human society is determined by the natural course of the evolution of the cosmos and the laws that govern that evolution.

But even as we acknowledge that the various technologies of government have arisen necessarily out of the zeitgeist as determined by the evolution of the cosmos we must also acknowledge that in understanding that the cosmos is indeed ordered, and therefore determined, we have already gained a great insight into the essence of human being. We have learned that man himself is an emergent property of the cosmos – that man is a part of a system and his identity is in how he is related to that system.

As the danger of technology grows so grows the knowledge of science. This science is knowledge of the system and hence is knowledge of man as he is defined by the system.

From out of this we can extrapolate three truths about the essence of man and perhaps with that knowledge we can set out on the way toward a fuller understanding of the question of justice and human flourishing. (1) man is a part of a system, (2) man is a being that is related to the system of technology at an ever increasing rate and in an ever more integrated manner, and (3) man is a being who is aware he is part of a system and is gaining more and more knowledge about that system by applying his ever more powerful technology toward that end.

With this knowledge an hypothesis emerges in my mind. This hypothesis is the possibility that despite the fact that human destiny is determined by the system of which it is a part it may turn out that the ever increasing knowledge about man that accompanies the ever increasing power and danger of technology will inform an ever greater understanding of justice as a necessary prerequisite of human flourishing.

Thinking About the Essential Relatedness of Man and Technology: A Call for Papers

2006-03-22T17:18:00.000-05:00

I've been reading Martin Heidegger's philosophy of technology as presented in his work “The Question Concerning Technology" (the link is to an excellent guid). Heidegger is a notoriously difficult philosopher to read but I believe he has some important ( strange and obscure) things to say about the most thought provoking issues facing humankind. The following is a rudimentary beginning of an attempt to think about the technological singularity through the lens of Heidegger's philosophy. I apologize in advance if it seems unnecessarily obscure, but possibly the strange questions raised require a strange way of thinking and speaking.

I have been thinking about the evolution of technology not as only the evolution of various individual technologies but also as the evolution of technology as an interconnected system that is, in turn, integrated with human society and activity in an essential way that makes the two inextricable.

In an attempt to understand technology as a whole which is a system that is integrated with the human way of being I have found it convenient to use the concept of the World Wide Web as a sort of locus for understanding the manner in which all technology is becoming integrated and the necessary trajectory of its evolution.

When we try to think about technology in this manner we are following a path of thinking. This path for thinking opens itself up to us because of a more fundamental question than the question of the essence of technology. This more original question is the question of Being it self, which for humankind is the same question as the essence of man which finds its ground in Being. So by asking what the essence of technology is, as an integrated whole, we follow a path that may lead to one aspect of man's essential nature as a technological animal; and, in turn, understanding how the essence of man is related to the essence of technology sheds light on the fundamental question of Being.

Now the question of Being is the most original question and the deepest question because it is the end of the kind of questioning that seeks after causes. There can be no question about the cause of Being. Being is that which is most fundamental. It is the Source and the Ground for the appearing of all beings.

So in questioning after man's essential relation to technology in an attempt to think Being we can no longer think technologically because technological thinking is precisely the thinking which seeks out causes and effects. The kind of thinking that is required is a thinking that goes beyond the mere placing of man as another kind of technology – as another chain in the branch of cause and effect - what is required is a meditative thinking that can think the essential relatedness of Man to the Cosmos which is the ground of Man's Being..

My challenge to any of my more thoughtful and industrious readers (who have plenty of time) is to write an essay that attempts to understand how man is essentially related to technology and the significance of it. You can either publish your short essay in the comments or email it to me and I will publish it with credit. If anyone actually responds to this we will have a dialog about these issues drawn from the essays published. It should be fun and hopefully productive.

AI as Human Symbiote

2006-03-12T15:08:00.000-05:00

This post was inspired by this video.

It is obvious to many that humans are in a symbiotic relationship with machines. We have become inextricably interrelated to our own devices and those devices and our relationships with them, and each other, are evolving rapidly.

What is perhaps less obvious is that artificial intelligence is a phenomenon which exists as an epiphenomenon of the biosphere because it has arisen naturally according to the laws of evolution as a human symbiote.

As a corollary to this thesis is the thesis that what is being called the World Wide Web is a natural out growth of the evolution of human interaction and interrelation, and that this out growth naturally gives rise to AI.

What I am saying is that the development of human language and reason necessarily give rise to technologies of communication and evermore efficient methods of economic production, and that from out of this arise necessarily technologies and the production of technologies that mediate human language. AI is one such technology.

The implication of this, as I understand it now, is that AI is essentially a mediator of human mind and language because its evolution is precisely a continuous adaptation to the human need to interrelate and communicate. This, in turn, implies that AI is necessarily an entity which is friendly to the human organism because its evolution and the evolution of humanity are in symbiosis.

Inspirational Song Lyrics

2006-02-24T13:14:00.000-05:00

Lateralus

black then white are all i see in my infancy.
red & yellow then came to be, reaching out to me,
lets me see.
as below, so above & beyond, i imagine.
drawn beyond the lines of reason.
push the envelope. watch it bend.

over thinking, over analyzing separates the body from the mind.
withering my intuition, missing opportunities & i must
feed my will to feel my moment drawing way outside the lines.

black then white are all i see in my infancy.
red and yellow then came to be, reaching out to me,
lets me see there is so much more &
beckons me to look through to these infinite possibilities.
as below, so above and beyond, i imagine.
drawn outside the lines of reason.
push the envelope. watch it bend.

over thinking, over analyzing separates the body from the mind.
withering my intuition leaving opportunities behind.
feed my will to feel this moment, urging me to cross the line.
reaching out to embrace the random.
reaching out to embrace whatever may come.

i embrace my desire to,
i embrace my desire to,
feel the rhythm, to feel connected enough to step aside & weep like a widow
to feel inspired, to fathom the power, to witness the beauty,
to bathe in the fountain,
to swing on the spiral,
to swing on the spiral,
to swing on the spiral of our divinity & still be a human.

with my feet upon the ground i move myself between the sounds & open wide to suck it in.
i feel it move across my skin.
i'm reaching up & reaching out.
i'm reaching for the random or what ever will bewilder me.
what ever will bewilder me.
& following our will & wind we may just go where no one's been.
we'll ride the spiral to the end & may just go where no one's been.
spiral out. keep going.
spiral out. keep going.
spiral out. keep going.
spiral out. keep going.

- TOOL, Lateralus, Lateralus
You may listen to this music, purchase the album, or read reviws here

Technological Acceleration and the Phenomenology of Time

2006-02-16T01:08:00.000-05:00

This thought has occurred to me. Both time and space are relative. In theory space can be divided or multiplied infinitely as can time. In regards to space the human body, our atomic constituents, and our planet act as reference points; but in regards to the relativity of time it would seem that the only real reference point is the conscious experience of the passage of time. So the question is why does a second feel like a second instead of a thousand years? What is governing this phenomenological experience and can it be changed?

It would seem to me that the experience of time must have been conditioned by evolution to optimize us for survival. Some factors that may have played into this are the average speed of moving objects in the ancestral human environment such as falling objects, predators, and prey. The conscious experience of time would be an important component for the application of intelligent pattern recognition as it pertains to biological survival.

Throughout the history of the human species the operating environment has changed little until the advent of civilization several thousand years ago. However, since the advent of civilization humans have been using technology to alter their environments to better suit their needs. During the last century the rate at which the human operating environment has been altered due to technology has increased significantly because of the exponential nature of technological advancement.

This fact raises an important question in relation to the coming technological singularity. Note the diagram of the golden rectangle/spiral above. Let us assign a number to each square from largest to smallest. There are eleven squares visible. Now imagine that this spiral represents the passage of time from the big bang to the singularity. The first square would represent the eons of time that led up to the formation of planet earth and the last square would represent the singularity. Let's say that human civilization began in the sixth square and that the eighth square represents the twentyth century, and the ninth square represents the first quarter of the twenty first century. This is helpful in visualizing the kind of exponential change that we will face in the near future.

Now the reason for this exercise is to demonstrate that, in this model at least, at no point in history has any human being lived long enough to experience a new exponential unit (square). But presently any one who is currently alive is likely to experience a number of squares, and any one who lives to see the eleventh square (the singularity) will live to see a virtual infinity of squares.

My point is that the phenomenological experience of time as governed by our cognitive architecture is not prepared for this kind of change. And so I hypothesize that part of becoming post-human will be being able to alter our cognitive architecture so that the experience of time slows down considerably. We already know that the human mind is capable of this because of reports made by those who have used psychedelic drugs, gone into trances or deep meditational states, or who have had a near death experience.

Just imagine a world in which technology is accelerating at rates that are beyond imagination yet the people living in that world are experiencing a second as a thousand years.

Cosmological Deep Ecology and the Singularity

2006-01-25T00:54:00.000-05:00

Man is a part of a system. As Man evolves both biologically and technologically so does that system. The system I am talking about is our environment and that environment is the entire Cosmos. Of course the most important part of that environment is the earth itself.

Some ecologists and environmentalists seem to view man and his technology as something over and against nature. This position couldn't be further from the truth. Both man and his technology are outgrowths of nature. Nature is not a thing that is static, that, if it wasn't for man and his technology, would be pristene. Nature is a part of the ever changing Flux and as such it is always in motion and ever changing. The history of the Cosmos is a history of extraordinary change and complexification. As the Cosmos unfolds new properties emerge. Two of those properties, at this late stage of cosmological development, are intelligent life and technology. Are we to believe that the emergence of intelligent life in the Cosmos is merely an accident – a contingent epiphenomena – and that its purpose as a component of that vast system is merely to destroy itself no sooner than it emerges? I find such gross pessimism to be both ill founded and, ultimately, misanthropic.

The truth of the matter is that, even though as individuals we may be self-determined, the Cosmos, of which we are an inextricable part, is determined. This determination indicates to me that the exponential technological evolution that leads to singularity is a natural part of the cooling and development of the Cosmos. This does not mean that human civilization can abandon all pretenses of responsibility, but what it does mean is that as our civilization approaches technological singularity our true nature will become manifest. We will, at that point, be denuded. The inconceivable technological power unleashed by the event of the singularity will empower man to fulfill that which he most fundamentally desires, or in other terms, technological singularity will be the point at which man bears the fruit that was latent in the seed which is man.

In any case what ever happens will be a natural occurrence that is no more capable of being controlled than is the gravitational constant or the speed limit of light.

When Machines Transcend the Mechanical

2006-01-06T15:01:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking about Ray Kurzweil's notion of humans transcending biology and what that might mean. Ray seems to be saying that as technological advances explode in an exponential avalanche that humans will adapt themselves to this new technology and transcend their own biology by becoming indistinguishable from machines.

I have a similar but different idea about how this may go down. Right now we have a certain picture of what technology is, and how it works, and what it is capable of. What I would like to suggest is that as technology advances past a certain point it will become more and more indistinguishable from life. The analogy is often made that strong Drexlerian nano-technology must be possible because we see precisely that kind of nano-level construction and computation in living systems. So its not too much of a stretch to think that as nano-technology becomes perfected over the next couple decades that technological systems will begin to more and more resemble life.

At the same time over the next couple of decades we will begin to understand biological systems more and more. The result of this will be the ability to maximize the efficiency of biological systems through nano-reconstruction and genetic engineering. I'm talking about everything from enhanced senses, cognitive ability, better immune systems, better metabolism, stronger bones and muscle, etc.

What this all adds up to, in my estimation, is not that machines overcome life and replace it, but rather that technological systems become indistinguishable from living systems and that living systems can be improved upon through engineering just as easily as machines today can.

So I agree with Ray that by the time the technological singularity has arrived humans and machines will be indistinguishable. What I disagree with is the reason why. Humans will not transcend biology, per se. Rather machines will transcend the mechanical.

UPDATE: Al Fin as an interesting Post on a similar subject.

A step Closer to Linguistic User Interface

2006-01-05T14:59:00.000-05:00

Source

What is Lexxe?

"Lexxe is a third generation Internet search engine featuring Natural Language Processing technologies. It is fully automatic without human editing involved. Most of its answers come from unstructured texts and webpages on the Internet. Lexxe departs from the symbolic computing methods of the second generation search engines peaked by Google, to the linguistic computing methods. In other words, acknowledging the fact that search is a language-oriented (or even meaning-driven) computing activity marks a paradigmatic shift and generation watershed in search engine evolution."

Future

"In the near future, more variety of question types, lengths, wordings and complexity will be allowed to ask questions with. This will be done through sophisticated Natural Language Processing technologies. For example, Lexxe will use a robust parser to analyze queries and generate multiple semantically oriented search patterns to fast locate and accurately extract answers including the sparse ones. This will raise the level of language understanding capacity of the search engine to a new height.

Lexxe will continue its effort in developing cutting edge Internet search technology and showcase its world leading search engine and search technology on its website. We will announce more breakthroughs and innovations along the R&D progress at Lexxe. Keep check out what is new here."

This looks like some exciting technology. Could 2006 be the year that LUI begins to make head way?.

Warp Drive, When?

2006-01-04T14:11:00.000-05:00

At this NASA website you can brush up on the latest theories on how to get to the stars.

Planning For Singularity and Averting Danger

2005-12-30T12:52:00.000-05:00

Tony Arcieri of the new 'Singularity Now' blog and forum writes:

Planning the Singularity is one of the most important activities humanity can possibly work on.

And along that line Daniel Poynter of 'The Hyperaware Consciousness' asks three interesting and important questions in regard to possible dangers to be averted:

1. Combined, China and India have six times the scientists as us. As technology and science become ever more imporant, crucial actually, will these two countries ‘take over’?

2. What if the singularity comes when Christian fundamentalists are in political power?

3. Isn’t it likely that a complete reverse engineering of the brain will enable corporations more control over us through advertising (think: the TV brain dead masses) and pharmacology (think: working in a cubicle is unnatural, I feel so depressed; thank god for Zoloft! Now the corporate machine runs even more smoothly.)?

In this post I will address the issue of singularity planning and take a look at how the problematic scenarios that Daniel raises can be dealt with.

First off I will address the problem with singularity planning in general. As I see it the developments leading toward technological singularity are the result of spontaneous economic development. I am not one who believes in centrally planned and controlled economies, therefor I relegate the question of how best to bring about a safe singularity to the realm of how best to protect human rights and dignity in the political sphere. As far as this is concerned I am committed to classical liberalism which seeks to limit coercive government to upholding basic human rights and protecting property while at the same time providing legislation to keep power from consolidating to much in any sphere. This has always been a difficult thing to accomplish and as technologies increase exponentially it becomes more difficult. How do you stop power from consolidating when a small group of individuals can fly a jumbo jet into a skyscraper, or when the government can easily monitor everything said and done by its citizenry, or when powerful trans-national corporations and cartels can monopolize whole industries? These are difficult questions but I will suggest that the answer and the problem a vary closely related - that the very technologies that endanger our freedoms and threaten are very existence will ultimately overcome these problems.

As I've discussed before I foresee radical political and economic changes occurring over the next twenty years leading to a state of “techno-anarchy” which will be the result of the massive decentralization of economic production and the inherent inability of any government to control the mass spontaneous grass-roots collaboration that will result. In my teleological/developmentalist world-view this is a natural development of history which is practically inevitable. I realize that this seems incredibly optimistic and perhaps overly idealistic and I must admit that my view is based as much on intuition as it is on evidence but it is the view I take nonetheless.

So applying this view let me try my hand at answering Dan's questions.

1. Combined, China and India have six times the scientists as us. As technology and science become ever more imporant, crucial actually, will these two countries ‘take over’?

I do not see this as a plausible scenario at all. The way I see it is we are moving toward greater and greater international economic interdependence in which all nations depend on other nations economically. This interdependence fosters cooperation because fair trade between nations is beneficial to both nations. If the U.S.A. Stopped trading with China, or the other way around, it would be a disaster for both economies. That said, despite all the hype in the media to the contrary, neither China nor India is anywhere near over taking either the U.S. Or Europe economically. For instance Robert Fogel says: “ The U.S. is going to be the technological leader, probably through the end of the 21st century. Maybe China will catch up in some directions and maybe it will cede them in some directions like stem cell research, but, we still have a huge, advantage in terms of investment and in terms of human resources in these areas. The country remains devoted to a policy of heavy investment in science especially in the biomedical sciences and in science in general. “

2. What if the singularity comes when Christian fundamentalists are in political power?

Long before the singularity arrives the very nature of political power will have changed so radically that are current conceptions of it are hardly applicable. Aside from that, however, I think we need to differentiate between Christian fundamentalism and evangelicalism. The evangelical Christian seeks to make a synthesis between modern culture and the traditional gospel message. I do not see this as a bad thing – in fact I think that this movement is a sign of cultural vitality. On the other hand I find the attitudes of Christian fundamentalism to be unhealthy but I do not see the movement as in anyway dangerous. First there are very few fundamentalists and even fewer in office; they generally eschew violence, respect the constitutional heritage of the U.S.A., and mostly just seek to be left alone. Islamic fundamentalism and totalitarianism, on the other hand, is a grave danger – but that is another issue.

I find this to be the most interesting question. This problem is the underlying reason for militant anarcho-primitivism and is the stated reason for violence committed by Ted Kaczyski. If you havn't read his manifesto “Industrial Society and it's Future” then you should – its long but worth the read.

My solution to this problem is simple: Know thy self. This is the highest goal of science and philosophy. If human-beings are to guide their own evolution then they must know what it is they wish to become. He who has self-knowledge is not easily controlled. This is another example of how the same technology that threatens are freedom can also be the very instruments of our freedom. To understand the brain and to have the power to manipulate pharmacologically is the power of a god. Without wisdom it WILL be our destruction, yet with wisdom it may be our deliverance.

One final thought. Power is potentia, with greater potential comes greater possibility for good or evil. This has always been the case. Technology will bring power. Whether or not that power is ultimately used for good or evil, I think, comes down to the essential nature of Man. For more of my thoughts on this issue see my post 'The Essence of Man and the Singularity'.

Star Wars Revelations: A Fan Film

2005-12-29T12:27:00.000-05:00

As some of you may be aware I have an interest in decentralized control of production. In the past I have talked about home power generation, desktop fab labs, and home produced machinima movies. Well I just came across this fan film which you can download for free. I just watched the trailer which can be viewed here, and I'm about to watch the whole thing which can be down loaded here.

Carnival of Tomarrow #16

2005-12-28T13:37:00.000-05:00

The new C.O.T is up and running at "The Ministry of Minor Perfidy", and it is a good one. There are enough interesting links to keep you busy for a while. Of particular interest to this blog was a link to a new blog/forum for singularitarians entitled "Singularity Now".

The World-Historical Philosophical Dialog

2005-12-25T03:12:00.000-05:00

Language is the house of Being. In it's home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home. - Martin Heidegger

The history of philosophy is the history of a kind of technology. This technology is a technology of mediation. That which is mediated is logos (speech/reason). When logos is mediated it becomes dia-logos (dialog).

For a very long time the only mediation of logos was as speech through the vibrations of the vocal cord. This technology allowed thought to be encoded and mediated through the air to another mind. This technology was supplied by nature and with it began the existence of humanity and a new order in nature. This technology is the technology of technologies.

However, speech alone would not suffice because, though with it thought could be shared in proximate space, it severely restricted the mediation of logos through time. With out this ability (to encode thought in a durable medium) very little knowledge could be passed from generation to generation.

For this reason a new technology of dia-logos was called for and invented. This new technology was, of course, writing.

With the written word as the new technology of dia-logos the world-historical philosophical dialog could begin. But what is this world-historical dialog of which I speak?

This is the dialog which begins when one generation responds to the thinking of past generations with renewed thinking and writing. This dialog becomes a world-historical dialog when documents can be recorded, translated, copied, and distributed. This dialog becomes philosophical once the dialog becomes concerned with the nature of existence and the purpose of Man.

In the West the dialog began with the pre-Socratic Ionian philosophers and continues to this day. The dialog began slowly – involving only a few privileged minds. But as western civilization advanced so did the dialog. The advancement of the dialog corresponds to the advancement of the technology of the mediation of logos, which, in turn, corresponds to the advancement of civilization.

With every generation that passes, the recoded thought to which the new generation must respond is exponentially larger. Also as every generation passes the technologies of dia-logos become more sophisticated and far reaching. And the world-historical philosophical dialog grows.

At this late date the exponential advancement of the technologies of dia-logos has brought on a wholly unprecedented state of affairs. This advancement has resulted in the ability to digitally record and transmit logos.

Communication is now everywhere. We are awash in a cacophony of unreasoned noise. At every corner we are distracted from thinking by the mere exchange of information. Still – the number who now participate in the world-historical philosophical dialog is greater than ever. The question remains before us and its answer is as pressing as ever: What is the nature of existence and the purpose of Man?

We who are alive now must climb atop the shoulders of all those thinkers who have gone before and attempt to see even further and penetrate deeper than ever before. We have greater tools to accomplish this than ever before. If you can think, and if you can read, and if you have access to a computer then you may join this world-historical dialog at its most advanced state. No longer is this dialog confined to ivory towers or national boundaries. It is now truly a global dialog. May you answer the call to think.

Buckminster Fuller on Accelerating Change

2005-12-24T10:47:00.000-05:00

"We came out of World War I with almost a million substances known. By the time we ended World War II, we were well up into 10 million, and we've come out of it now where the figures really are getting to be astronomical. We can't really keep track of the rate at which we are discovering more differentiable substances chemically distinct from one another. Those are typical of the information really is a bursting, bursting rate. I'm speaking in relationship to my own life, one life in the extraordinary numbers of lives there must have been on board of our planet. The information is multiplying at that rate during just one lifetime indicates that something is going on here right now that is utterly unprecedented, and we're in such indication of acceleration of experiences of human beings, the integration of the accelerated, the experienced, to produce awarenesses that are indicative of Humanity going through some very, very important kind of transition into some kind of new relationship to Universe, I'd say, the kind of acceleration that would occur after the child has been formed in the womb, taking the nine months, and suddenly begins to issue from the womb out into an entirely new world."

Buckminster Fuller: "Everything I know"

Hattip: Daniel Poynter at The Hyperaware Consciousness

Dr. Adrian Bowyer on "Darwinian Marxism"

2005-12-23T00:42:00.000-05:00

“Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto that, "By proletariat is meant the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live." This diagnosis is essentially correct; it is a commonplace that people with resources can quite easily use them to acquire more, but people without have to try exceptionally hard to get anywhere, and most of them never do. Marxism then goes on to say that the way to fix this problem is for the proletariat to seize the means of production by revolution, which is a good candidate for the all-time worst-idea in human history. Whenever it is applied the main things produced are corpses, and in the last hundred years the body count from this idea's application was even worse than that from Nazism. So the Marxist prescription, unlike its diagnosis, is plain wrong. Its prognosis also turns out to be wrong - it predicted that the revolution would happen first in the most industrially-advanced nation (Britain at the time), whereas in practice Marxist revolutions tend to happen in countries making the transformation from an agrarian economy to an industrial one.”

Continue reading this paper

This is the beginning of a fantastic paper entitled “Darwinian Marxism”. The paper was written by Dr. Adrian Bowyer, who is a professor at Bathe University and one of the developers working on the RepRap project. The paper deals with the topic of how self-replicating fabrication machines will effect economics. Dr. Bower refers to this effect as Darwinian Marxism because of the potential for self-replicating machines to evolve according to a pattern of artificial selection and thereby increasing the number of manufactured goods at an exponential rate. This concept is very similar to what I dubbed in my last post 'techno-anarchy' and I highly recommend reading the paper – its not that long. Also you may be interested to know that the RepRap machine is making serious progress toward becoming operational. You can checkout the progress here at their blog.

Also you can read an interview with Dr. Bowyer here at the Speculist.

From Interdependence to Independence: A Path Forward

2005-12-21T03:06:00.000-05:00

This is a picture of an 'earthship'. It is designed to be completely self-sustaining.

The history of human society has been a history of greater and greater interdependence: From the birth of agriculture and urbanization through to the modern, digitally mediated, nation state. On the one hand this escalating evolution of interdependence has spawned new forms of technologies and corresponding economies that have drastically raised the quality of life. On the other hand this ever increasing interdependence has also given rise to ever greater and greater specialization of arts. The consequence of this specialization at this late date is that the average person often becomes trapped in an occupational field and is restricted by the expectations of society to the extent that freedom must seem a joke to many.

For instance how many people dare not speak their minds on important matters – not for fear that they will be arrested by some secret police – but merely from fear that they will lose their jobs? What I'm trying to say is that as society becomes increasingly interdependent the individual must necessarily lose independence and become subject to the will of the whole in order to just subsist. It was for this very reason that Theodore Kaczynski (AKA the unibomber) came to believe that all technology must be destroyed. So the question remains: How can ever increasing interdependence be squared with human freedom? The answer is that it cannot be.

So should we just throw in the towel and all become Luddites? Certainly not. The advance of technology could not be stopped even if it were desirable. The solution to this problem is technology it self.

I foresee a radical new state of affairs arising in which every individual is self-sustaining and independent and yet continues to enter into states of cooperation willingly and not because it is necessary. Let's take a look at what kind of technologies will make this possible and then I will flesh out the concept.

There are only two fundamental technologies in operation here: radically decentralized energy production and radically decentralized manufacturing.

I and many others have already discussed both of these technologies at length elsewhere. But the idea is fairly simple. Once energy can be created at home easily and for free, and once nano-manufacturing has developed to the extent that these machines are self-replicating and can replicate almost anything imaginable, then one will not need to rely on anyone else for any kind of subsistence.

This kind of radical independence will open up incredible new doors in relation to how society is organized. With the arrival of this kind of independence people can enter into forms of cooperation not necessarily based purely on economic incentive, but more on what interests them. This means that all kinds of mavericks out there, who presently must operate independently, or who are forced to hide their maverick ideas and conform to corporate policy, will be able to find one another and work together. They will be able to afford to do this precisely because they have become truly independent thanks to the technologies of independence.

I prognosticate that this new form of organization will evolve quite rapidly once the state of technology has reached this point (probably in the mid to late 20's), and that from out of this new organization a radical new economic and political order will arise.

I call this new order techno-anarchy: Anarchy because all hierarchies have been leveled down, and techno because this anarchy will be achieved through the application of technology.

This new order is the synthesis of Hegel's master-slave dialectic.

A Pocket Computer Revolution?

2005-12-20T14:43:00.000-05:00

Today I am reporting on three different but related news stories which I believe are indicators of a new trend that I have been predicting.

Has the notebook-to-handheld conversion begun?

Start-up merges cell phone and PC into a handheld

Will pocket-size Sony PC take on iPod?

All three of these articles deal with the advent of new technologies that are allowing for devices that fit in the pocket yet have the power, roughly, of a desk-top PC. As it stands most of these devices are still quite expensive but that will no doubt change.

I find this development to be exciting because I see these technologies as the beginning of a trend with radical consequences for the trend of exponential acceleration of technology. This is because one of the largest problems with information access these days is being able to immediately access and process information precisely when that information is needed.

Already this problem is being solved by the proliferation of so-called smart-phones. However, smart-phones are presently not that smart. But as the gap closes between the power of lap-tops and smart-phones combined with the spread of hi-speed wireless Internet access the utility of the Internet will take a quantum leap forward. This technology will fuel the 'smart-mob' phenomenon and result in underrepresented abilities for corporations to coordinate their businesses. Additionally this technology will allow for unprecedented creativity by allowing individuals to collaborate on ideas all over the world. The possibilities of this technology are limited only by the imagination.

I'll make a conservative prediction that by the end of 2006 these handheld machines will cost half as much as they do now (roughly $1,500) and by 2007 they will begin to rapidly proliferate and will, by then, become a must-have for business people and shortly thereafter for everyone.

Reason, Physics, and Possibility

2005-12-18T13:37:00.000-05:00

After reading this article on String Theory I was reminded again of the humility of ignorance. What I mean is our ignorance about the true nature of the Cosmos and even existence in general. According to the article evidence is mounting that there is really no such thing as immutable laws of nature such as we were all taught in science class. According to the article the laws of nature are different in different pockets of the universe do to the hypothetical inflationary process that occurred after the Big Bang. In my mind this astonishing thesis raises an number of extremely important philosophical questions.

The first question I would ask is what does this mean for human reason and science? If human reason is a development of the evolutionary process in this pocket of the hypothetical multi-verse then how can we be expected to penetrate the workings of a natural order totally alien to that reason in another pocket of the multi-verse operating according to completely different laws?

The other question I would raise is what are the implications of this thesis on the concept of Possibility? What I mean by this is that what we take to be “possible” is either in reference to that which is logically possible or that which is physically possible. In the case of this thesis both concepts begin to become meaningless. This is because what is logically possible is an extension of human reason which is an effect of evolution under the natural order of this multi-verse pocket. Additionally what we believe is, or is not, physically possible is an extension of what we understand about physics. But it would appear that not only do we not completely understand the physics in this pocket of the multi-verse but we may not even be able, in principle, to understand the physics of any other pocket of the multi-verse. If this thesis is indeed true it is very humiliating indeed. On the other hand it is quite interesting to think that there are possibilities out there that we cannot even conceive of, in our current state at any rate.

I think it is important to be reminded of this because sometimes cosmologists give the impression that we basically have everything figured out and we are just working out the details. Scientists are always believing this though. It is curious to think that just before the developments of quantum mechanics and relativity theory physicists thought that physics was almost a complete science. My point is not that science is incompetent – far from. I believe that science is always moving closer to the truth. On the other hand science is never quite arriving at the truth but rather always raising new and more profound questions. Let us not let our thought stagnate in the belief that all the mysteries of the Cosmos can be explained with the simple models of todays science. As science grows so grows the inconceivable mystery that is existence. I think Shakespeare says it best “ There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,than are dreamt of in your philosophy”.

Howard Rheingold and Smart Mobs

2005-12-16T14:52:00.000-05:00

Smart mobs emerge when communication and computing technologies amplify human talents for cooperation. The impacts of smart mob technology already appear to be both beneficial and destructive, used by some of its earliest adopters to support democracy and by others to "coordinate terrorist attacks. The technologies that are beginning to make smart mobs possible are mobile communication devices and pervasive computing - inexpensive microprocessors embedded in everyday objects and environments. Already, governments have fallen, youth subcultures have blossomed from Asia to Scandinavia, new industries have been born and older industries have launched furious counterattacks."

Howard Rheingold is an author and professor who writes about some very interesting social trends that are related to such topics as pervasive computing and digital networking. I have not yet had the chance to read any of his books but last night I listened to an mp3 recording of a very good lecture that he delivered at MIT. The lecture was on a recent book that he wrote called “Smart Mobs: the Next Social Revolution”. Interestingly the author also started a blog/website by the same name where he updates with new posts that are related to this theme.

Quoting the Philosopher

2005-12-13T14:47:00.000-05:00

"The history of the world is none other than
the progress of the consciousness of freedom."

"When individuals and nations have once got in their heads
the abstract concept of full-blown liberty,
there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength."

"I am daily ever more convinced that theoretical work accomplishes more in the world than practical work. Once the realm of ideas is revolutionized, actuality will not hold out."

- G.W.F. Hegel

On the Distribution of Wealth

2005-12-12T15:32:00.000-05:00

In this post I will address the issue of how the development of economic infrastructure will effect the distribution of wealth over the next twenty years, and ultimately lead to the end of competitive economics and the scarcity of resources.

The number of people employed to operate the global economic infrastructure is a function of the number of people being supported by that infrastructure times the efficiency of the structures within that infrastructure.

The number of people currently on planet Earth is reaching a state of equilibrium. The structures of the global economic infrastructure are currently growing in efficiency exponentially while, at the same time, diffusing geographically to support more and more people and to employ more and more people.

As the global economic infrastructure both diffuses geographically and becomes more efficient the cost of production drops more and more over time. Once maximum geographical diffusion of economic infrastructure is achieved the efficiency of the structures in that infrastructure will continue to require less and less people to operate that infrastructure.

All of this points to a time coming when jobs will become more and more scarce yet capital (the means of production) will become more and more valuable. Does this mean that in the near future the owners of capital will get richer and richer while the workers cannot even find a job?

Not likely. This predicament could not be sustainable because the capitalist's profit comes from those who pay for the products or services of the capitalist, and if no one has a dime to spend then the capitalist will soon go broke as well because no one can afford to buy the products. How can this conundrum be resolved?

I believe the answer is two fold and really quite exciting. Note that these changes will not become that visible until near maximum geographical diffusion of economic infrastructure has been achieved which will probably coincide with near automation of all economic processes – probably in about fifteen years. What I envision is, first, a continuous and steady drop in the price of most products and services. This will result because it will become less and less expensive to produce and the average number of jobs will steadily drop as the economic infrastructure becomes automated. There are a few exceptions to this rule. The first is real estate. The average price of land should reach an equilibrium along with global population. The other exception is technologies which grow in power exponentially. The price of such goods will stay about the same as the utility of such goods increases exponentially.

Now as the prices of goods and services generally decreases at a rate corresponding with the rate of infrastructure automation so will the value of the mens of production. In other words the value of the global economic infrastructure will increase exponentially along with the technology that makes it valuable. This means that the value of stock in the companies that operate the infrastructure will increase exponentially. Already we are seeing the trend in the developed world of a greater and greater number of people owning a greater and greater share of the economy through various securities.

As the economy nears complete automation the smallest amount of capital investment will yield tremendous returns. This, of course, will mean that more and more people will be buying stock and sharing in the ownership of the means of production. This, in turn, will yield greater acceleration of technological and economic advancement as the population of the planet begin to invest a greater and greater amount of their capital in the economic infrastructure.

I see this trend peaking once the economy is fully automated which will result in an economic singularity which will herald the end of the state. The result is that there is, for all practical purposes, no such thing as a scarce resource. Without scarce resources competition ceases to be a necessity for the efficient distribution of wealth.

What technologies could make this possible?

Can we seriously expect this eventuality in a mere thirty years?

Here is what the global economic infrastructure needs in order to practically eliminate the scarcity of resources: Free energy, Ubiquities greater than human intelligence, the structures for manufacturing efficiently at the atomic level.

With these technologies in place there is no purpose for human labor. No one will seek your labor for a wage. Additionally no capitalist can feasibly charge for a service or product because no labor was put forth. In other words it costs nothing to produce anything. The demand is finite yet the supply is, for practical purposes, infinite.

So how will these technologies be accomplished? They are already in the works. The next decade will see the implementation technologies that will harvest the power of the sun and cost little to operate with enough effectiveness to power the entire economic infrastructure for free. First automated factories and fab labs then nano factories will be implemented that can convert simple inert and common matter into any conceivable product so long as the correct instructions are provided. Finally, as AI gains in power it will be used to gradually automate certain processes until eventually a greater than human intelligence is developed which will allow for the entire infrastructure to rapidly improve itself, yet go completely unattended by humans.

All of these technologies can be expected to be arriving on the scene sooner or later in the near future.

*note that just because the value of the economic infrastructure is increasing exponentially does not mean that the value of an individual corporation will increase. In fact it is likely that many, many business models will fail while the more successful will be bought by the most successful. For this reason if you are going to invest I highly recommend the broad basket approach of index funds.

Time, System, and Prediction: the Science of History

2005-12-11T12:43:00.000-05:00

This image is an illistration taken from John Smart's essay "The Developmental Spiral"
I highly recmmend reading it. The subject matter is related to this essay.

I often hear criticism about any hypothesis concerning the future. The criticism usually complains that any hypothesis about the future is merely speculation or conjecture. Additionally I have heard some complain that there is 'no evidence' for a technological singularity. The same people who complain of such things often dismiss the technological singularity theory as at best unscientific, and at worst the lunatic fringe. In this post I will take the time to defend the theory of technological singularity from such claims. In doing so I will argue that the culmination of all science leads to a science of history. I will argue that this is, in fact, the goal of all human science and that the theory of technological singularity represents the highest state of this science.

Assumptions:
The goal of science is to understand and predict the behavior of systems. System can be defined as the complex interaction of entities related through non-linear dynamics. Systems interact in time. Therefor the goal of science is to predict the future state of a system. The ultimate system is the Cosmos. Therefor the ultimate goal of science is to predict the future state of the cosmological system by understanding the laws that govern the interrelation of entities in the system and patterns that emerge from the system.

I argue that it is not possible to predict a future state of the cosmological system without a thorough understanding of the levels of organization in that system, the laws that govern those organizations, and how those organizations interact to form new organization. A theory about the future of the cosmological system must account for these various organizations within the system and predict how these organizations will likely interact to form new organizations.

The study of the history of the Cosmos reveals trends of organization.

For every branch of science there is a subject which studies a level of organization in the system by discovering the components of that system and the laws that govern those components, and there is a corresponding subject that studies how that level of organization behaved in the history of the Cosmos.

Here are some examples:

Physics/cosmology

Chemistry/the evolution of chemical complexity

Organic chemistry/origin of life

Biology/evolution of life

Anthropology/archeology

Psychology/sociology

Sociology/human history, economics, and political science

So we see that each science is studying only one level of organization and the evolution of that organization. It has only been in very recent times that we can now begin to see how these branches fit together and interact with each other to form one system. So what shall we call the science that deals with the whole system? The name of this science is history. History as science is not content with merely recounting the events of human civilization but rather seeks to understand the entire history of the cosmos by understanding the evolution of the entire cosmological system. So just as it is proper for the physicist to predict the physical evolution of the cosmos based on the application of the laws of physics, and just as it is proper for the economist to predict future trends in markets based on past trends and the nature of social organization, so is it proper for the highest science to predict the future of this corner of the cosmos based on the principles of all these sciences in concert.

Of course science makes prediction in order to verify hypothesis. Often these predictions are wrong and must be revised. But nevertheless it is the business of science to predict because that is the goal of knowledge – to predict the behavior of systems.

Historically science has tended to be analytical because of the nature of specialization and the principles of reductionism. Now, however, we must call on a more synthetic vision. The theory of technological singularity is one such synthetic vision. As the trends of hyperbolic exponential technological growth continue, the feedback mechanisms that are powering this growth will be better understood and recognized. The consilliance of human knowledge has ushered in a new age of science. If you're too busy analyzing to synthesize you'll miss the forest for the trees.

The Social Theory of Intelligence and AI

2005-12-09T15:30:00.000-05:00

If one studies human evolution it becomes evident that all of the traits that we tend to think of as human developed slowly and together. These traits are tool making, speech, self-awareness, awareness of death, and the complexity of social organization that makes activities like hunting large game possible.

As the evidence for these traits appear in the archaeological record so does the increase of encephalization along with other human qualities such as left brain hemisphere dominance appear in the fossil record.

So the question raised is what process drove this advancement and what can it teach us about intelligence in general?

In one book I read (The Origin of Human Kind by Richard Leakey) he discusses a theory known as the social theory of intelligence. I found this theory to be remarkable. Here's the jist of it. With the rise of primates and especially the African apes social coordination became a more and more important aspect for the survival of the species. With the rise of this social coordination there came what Leakey calls 'social chess'. Social chess is far more complex than real chess and we as well as our ape cousins play it expertly. What social chess requires is that we know who our friends are, who our enemies are, and how to make and change alliances. Additionally it requires that we have a picture of how our own self appears to the rest of the world. It is this ability of self-consciouses awareness that makes things like deception possible.

As the theory goes self-consciousness is what arises when our model of the world becomes so complete that we must include our selves in that model. One ingenious method of determining if a being is self aware is how it reacts to a mirror image of itself. In this experiment a mark is put on an animals forehead. If the animal recognizes that the image in the mirror is itself then it will react with curiosity about the mark on its head by touching it or something of that nature. Interestingly only chimpanzees and orangutans were able to respond in this way. This is evidence that self-awareness is something that arises from intelligence because intelligence requires awareness of one's own behavior in order to predict the behaviors of others (which is an essential component of social chess).

At any rate this theory sparked my imagination and got me thinking that the best way to discover a complete theory of artificial general intelligence would be through thoroughly understanding what neurological structures exist in the human brain that do not exist in the ape brain and applying that knowledge to a better understanding of what makes general intelligence possible at all.

For a much better understanding of the social theory of intelligence read this paper.

An Evolutionary Strategy for Human Level AI

2005-12-08T13:22:00.000-05:00

I've been struck by the idea that the best model for achieving human level AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) should be based in biology but not necessarily from reverse engineering the human brain. Here's what I have in mind.

Presently there is only one known example of AGI in the universe and that is, of course, the mind of man. As it turns out the human brain is also the most complex thing known in the universe as well. There are many key attributes of human intelligence that we either do not understand at all or we understand very dimly, such as consciousness and natural language. Supposing that certain types of functions in the human brain that we currently do not fully understand are responsible for the ability of natural language or consciousness, then how can we hope to build the functional equivalents of these neurological structures without the knowledge of how it works in human intelligence?

What I propose is that we build an artificial chain of life. We could pick out about twenty different organisms to represent the chain of life from bacteria all the way up to man. The advantage of this artificial chain of life (ACL) is that in real evolution the neurological substrate of each organism is kept and any modifications of higher level organisms are merely built on top of the old structures.

This would have to be a massive research project. It would require that we map out the genome of each respective organism that is representing in the ACL. The reasoning behind this is that if we start with the most simple organism we should be able to figure out precisely what genes code for what structures. Then every time we move up a rung in the ladder of the ACL we already have the artificial genetic blueprint for the underlying structure of the artificial brain of that next organism.

So at every stage along the way we have a functional replication of the neurological structures of the lower artificial intelligence and we have the corresponding genome of that organism and the genome of the next higher organism. Then it must be ascertained what new genes in that higher organism are coding for new neurological structures. Because the genome will be very similar to the genome of the next lower organism this should be fairly easy to figure out. Also because we would already have a functional replication of the next lower neurological structures we would be able to use that as a platform to functionally replicate the next higher neurological structures.

At the lower end of the ACL each step up the latter would be fairly simple, but as we progress up the latter each stage of brain evolution becomes exponentially more complex. For instance going from a lobster to a snake would be easy but going from a chimp to a man is an enormous step. This works out perfectly, however. Say we spend one year developing each stage of artificial intelligence. Each year that goes by going from one stage to the next gets exponentially more difficult, but each year our technology and science gets exponentially better in correspondence. If this is an accurate picture then we would be able to functionally replicate the human brain in twenty years.

Another aspect of this is that it would allow for us to naturally let our programming skills grow exponentially with our knowledge of cognitive science. What I mean is that on the lower rungs of the ACL the programming is rather simple and we currently have the skills to program and the right hardware to run these programs. But as we move up the ACL we can build on these programming skills in a fluid way. I would propose that we concentrate on replicating the actual programming of the organism to behave like a real one. The advantage of this would play out at the higher levels. Imagine an AI that was based on a chimp. We could build multiple robots with the functional replication of a chimps neurological structures and with a chimps programming for social behavior. This would allow us to see how these AI behave in the context of social intelligence and presumably allow us to begin to slowly implement the kinds of structures in human brains that are missing in chimp brains. In this way we could virtually watch the evolution of man unfold and the end result would, at least in theory, be a very human-like AI.

So what do think?

General AI, The Turing Test, and Other Minds

2005-12-07T14:37:00.000-05:00

The Turing Test, first put forth in Alan Turing's seminal paper “computing machinery and intelligence”, is recognized by most AI theorists as the ultimate test for human level general intelligence. Many, however, feel that this test is outdated and that it is not a fair test for machine intelligence because machines are so different from humans.

In this post I ask what the significance of this test is and I defend the rational behind it.

To really cut to the heart of the matter of why this test is so significant we need to take a look at a long standing problem in the history of philosophy. That problem is the problem of other minds.

It is recognized that there is no objective way to prove that anyone other than yourself has any subjective experience. This must seem like an odd thing to say. Most of us are inclined to say that of course other people have conscious thoughts – why we all do, right? Well, yes it is assumed that we all do but because no one can ever experience the world except through one's own mind we must infer this through the behavior of others. There is no absolute test to determine if the people you meet everyday have a mind but we assume they do based on their intelligent behavior.

Imagine a world where we doubted if others had a mind. What a terrible thought. So most of us who have considered this problem simply decide that everyone must have a mind, even if this decision is just made for pragmatic reasons (since no “scientific” evidence can be adduced to support it).

This raises a very interesting question. What would we think if something non-human could behave in a manner practically indistinguishable from human behavior? Well it would follow that unless we are prepared to start questioning whether or not our fellow humans have minds we must be prepared to accept that these non-human entities have minds if their behavior is truly indistinguishable from our own.

Now lets go a little deeper into this and examine just what a machine would need to be able to do in order to pass a Turing Test.

The main thing, and by far and away the most difficult, is mastering human natural language. Some people view the hilariously unintelligent behavior displayed by contemporary 'chat bots' and think that it must be possible to master language without being able to think. This kind of misunderstanding is implicit in John Searle's “Chines Room Argument”. This, however, is a gross misunderstanding. In order to actually have command of a language one must be able to think.

There are an infinite number of possible sentences that can be formulated. Think about that. That's the power of natural language. If you can think of an idea then there is some combination of words that can represent that idea. Every day you probably put together a string of words that was never uttered before. The point of what I'm trying to say is that true mastery of natural language cannot be accomplished through gimmicks and tricks. It requires genuine human human level intelligence. Try asking a 'chat bot' what the significance of Plato's “Allegory of the Cave” is and you will see what I mean. No machine today can even come close to thinking and anyone who claims they can hasn't the slightest idea what thought really is.

So what is 'thought' then, you ask? Thought is the ability to understand interrelation. This is part of what is so difficult about natural language. Somehow we manage to ascribe 'meaning' to a word by interrelating that word to a cluster of other word. Some words refer to specific objects in the environment but other word refer to more abstract relationships between objects. All of the words derive meaning and connotation from other words. The greater understanding one has of how all these words interrelate then the greater command over language and thought one acquires. So you see the ability to communicate and think are inextricably connected. I'm sure most of you are familiar with the stories of neglected children who never learned a language and the result was a failure to be able to think abstractly. Also it is of interest to point out that most anthropologists are in agreement that the story of the evolution of modern man from Homo Habalis is a story of the evolution of language. So we recognize that modern man (the only known example of general intelligence) first arose when the ability to communicate was fully developed and man is the only one known to posses this skill.

So in order for a machine to display intelligence indistinguishable from human intelligence it must actually understand the interrelations of human propositions about the world. If a machine could actually do this the ramifications would be astonishing. This is because the machine could then take all known propositions about our world that are written in natural language and almost instantaneously formulate any possible deductions between any possible combination of propositions. That would be amazing. That would be intelligence.

So if a machine is ever able to master natural language then it should easily be able to pass a Turing test. But I don't think that is necessarily what will convince us that the machine is intelligent. What will convince us is its ability to respond to any question with amazing answers by being able to synthesize and analyze all know propositions in order to come up with novel answers to difficult problems.

That's intelligence, and that is what we can expect from a machine capable of passing a Turing test.

For more reading on the Turing Test go here.

The Next Industrial Revolution

2005-12-06T15:13:00.000-05:00

The story of Human civilization is the story of the efficiency of the organization and coordination of human labor. As technologies advance so does the efficiency with which labor is accomplished. There has been three industrial revolutions so far and we are in the midst of the third.

All of these revolutions have two major components: new sources of energy and new powers of communication. The first revolution began in eighteenth century England with the advent of the steam engine. This invention was proceeded by the invention of the printing press. The new energy source was coal, that energy source was utilized through the steam engine which was applied to all manner of production from locomotives to steam shovels to factories. These economic activities were coordinated through the dissemination of information via the printed word which made it possible to share ideas on a level never seen before that. It was at that time that we first began to see thinkers writing about political economy.

The second revolution stemmed from the new communication advances of the telegraph, telephone, and radio respectively. The new energy source was still coal but applied to the generation of electricity which was applied to the new invention of the electric motor. The other new energy source was petroleum which was utilized mainly in the internal combustion engine. These technologies fueled incredible accelerating advances in the efficiency of the organization and coordination of human labor.

The third revolution, which we are at the beginning of, began with the advent of the Internet and various other communication technologies related to computing such as cell phones, satellite radio, podcasting etc. Because this revolution is just now beginning the new energy source of this revolution is still in the developmental stages but are slowly coming into commercial use. These technologies are hyper efficient photo voltaic cells, wave plants, high efficiency wind turbines etc., combined with new modes of energy distribution and utilization such as Li-ion batteries and fuel cells being applied to high efficiency motors.

One interesting thing about these revolutions is that they are appearing closer and closer to each other in time and the effect of each revolution is greater and greater. This is not surprising to those of us who are aware of the Law of Accelerating Returns. Because of the nature of this trend the next 'revolution' should follow right on the heels of the current revolution.

This prompts me to ask what sort of technology would qualify as having taken us beyond the current revolution?

The next revolution will be a truly qualitative leap in a new direction. When we talk about organizing the efficiency of human labor through communications technologies and the utilization of energy through machines what we are really talking about is effectively concentrating and using the collective human intelligence. Think about this. The vast majority of jobs in the world right now require people to perform some sort of mundane task that does not require much creative thought but which does require human intelligence and linguistic capability. Whether operating a piece of machinery, making phone calls, 'networking', 'marketing'. All of these are tasks which are necessary for efficient production.

So really the 'human labor' part of the equation means that we are finding more effective ways of applying human intelligence. But already we are seeing mundane tasks which used to require a human to perform being replaced my machine intelligence through robotics.

I posit that the next revolution means taking the 'human' out of the labor efficiency equation. This does not necessarily mean the advent of strong AI – though that would be a serious boost. All this requires is machine intelligence with pattern recognition capacities sufficient for taking over mundane operations which are currently enslaving the vast majority of mankind (myself included). By the time machine intelligence is capable of this (probably around 2025 or so) the efficiency of energy production and utilization should be at the point where energy is free. This supposition is based on the amount of unused solar power arriving on planet Earth every day.

Once this movement is underway it will free up many, many human minds and allow them to put their creative energies to work while the machines take care of trivial tasks. At that point the current economic model will have to change radically. At that point the average person will not have to dedicate their lives to the accumulation of scarce resources just to survive and provide for their families but rather will be able to dedicate their talents to any activity they deem worthy of their activities.

The Singularity as Summa Bonum

2005-12-03T23:51:00.000-05:00

For the last week or so I have been delving into some of the more philosophical issues associated with the Singularity world view. I have decided to call it a world view because it leaves no concept untouched.

If I had to place the current discussion under one rubric it would have to be the place of rational, self-reflective thought on the accelerating development of human civilization. In large measure I have Ian Stuart, one of my readers, to thank for provoking my thought on this issue. Ian has been in dialog with me through the comments and also through his own blog, which he just recently started, entitled Rationality.

One of the issues that we have agreed needs to be solved is none other than the ancient philosophical question first raised by Socrates “What is the Good”? This is the ultimate question.

Only self-reflective beings can ask this question and it is how one answers this question that governs the actions of all rational beings. What I mean by this is that all intermediate goals have as their aim one ultimate goal. In ancient philosophy this goal is called 'The Good'. It is generally thought that this is none other than happiness. The Greek word for happy is Eudimonia. This word has a slightly different connotation in Greek than in English; it means human flourishing.

So what I'm saying is that all rational, self-reflective beings have as their super-goal attaining a greatest state of good. Those species which are not governed by reason but by instinct alone give no consideration to this, for which reason they are called irrational.

Now different people have different ideas about just what state of affairs is the most good, or what conditions will bring about the most happiness.

I believe that the greatest good is maximum freedom. I also believe that this is hard-wired into all of us even if only dimly recognized by some and that this internal motivation to maximize freedom is the driving force behind the accelerating advancement of our civilization. Allow me to explain what I mean.

First, you may want to know, what I mean by freedom. Quite simply all I mean is unrestricted action toward the attainment of The Good. But what is limiting freedom? Let me clarify that one is only free in as much as one is rational. Those who do not direct their actions toward The Good act according to the compulsion of their animal nature and are therefore in bondage to that which is outside of their will.

The purpose of Law is to coerce those who cannot govern themselves into rational action and also to teach them by example. The purpose of government becomes obsolete once the first stage of rationality is achieved. This is Hegel's rational state which was discussed previously. Once this state is achieved there are only two limits on freedom: Knowledge and Power – which go hand in hand. Knowledge in this context can be defined as the ability to imagine what is possible. Our ability to imagine what is possible is limited by our knowledge of how the universe works. And by power I mean the ability to manipulate and transform reality into what we imagine. And what we Imagine for ourselves is a state where we have more intelligence, more knowledge and more power to bring about what we envision, whether as individuals or as a collective. So both the goal and the means of attaining that goal are in a cybernetic feed back loop. In other words the goal is to be able to better understand the cosmos and to be able to use that knowledge to build more powerful technologies to better understand and have command over the unfolding of the cosmos. But in achieving this we will be able to imagine possibilities that were previously unimaginable and we will then have the tools to realize what we imagine. And so on ad infinitum.

According to this thesis all rational action should be directed toward the attainment of this goal. Therefor the Summa Bonum is a goal which can never be fully obtained but toward which we are constantly moving at an ever accelerating rate. The goal is perfect knowledge and perfect power.

Does this mean that there is no limit to what is possible? I believe so. The future beyond the singularity is Unfathomable, incomprehensible, and ineffable. And this is so precisely because we do not have the intelligence or the knowledge to imagine what is possible beyond that point. What we do know is that beyond that point we will have the knowledge and intelligence to imagine what is next and we will also have the tools to bring that about.

So I guess that answers the age old question.

Philosophical Ethics, the Singularity, and Benevolent AI

2005-12-01T14:57:00.000-05:00

There is much in common with the quest for benevolent AI and philosophical ethics. Philosophical ethics is the study of right action. It seeks to find universally valid principles on which to base rational action in all circumstances. In order to be both a free and rational agent one must determine one's own actions according to universal principles which are in agreement with reason. Similarly benevolent AI must act according to universally valid principles derived from reason, and if it is to be considered benevolent those principles should be the same as those principles which govern free and rational human actions. In this article I will put forth a suggestion on how this might be accomplished based on Hegelian principles.

One key aspect of Hegelian philosophy is bringing together apparent opposites into synthesis in order to form a new principle. In the realm of ethics this conflict is between the will and interest of the individual and the will and interest of the community or state. All throughout history almost every philosopher believed that ethical duty meant that the individual had to negate his own will for the good of the community. Hegel was perhaps the first to call this into question.

Hegel believed that human culture and history was evolving in a detectable direction and that direction was toward greater conscious awareness, rationality, and freedom. What Hegel thought this meant was that as human civilization evolved it was evolving into a state wherein the individual's identity was increasingly defined by that individual's relation to other individual's in a community. This comes from the original Aristotelian insight that Man is essentially a social being and this insight is further reinforced by modern anthropology and psychology. The outcome of this is that as human-beings become more and more rational and self-aware (as the corresponding memes evolve) they become more integrated and more free. This is because the rational self-interest of the community and the individual begins to come together – until in a supremely rational state there would be absolute non-zero sum competition between the rational self interest of the state and the individual.

So what does all this philosophy stuff have to do with benevolent AI and the singularity? Allow me to explain. First let's see what this view does to ethics. According to this view ethics must continually evolve as culture evolves. All rational action is restricted to actions which make the state more rational. What I mean by this is that rational action should always be aimed at achieving a greater state of union between individual self-interest and community interest. So essentially the most rational state is a state in which what is best for me is the same as what is best for everyone else in the community. This is the very definition of freedom – a state wherein that which the individual wills is always allowed because it interferes with the will of no other member of the community. This does not mean I should always conform my will to the will of the state – by no means! This means that such a state will evolve on its own as the memes of rationality are adopted by civilization as a whole. If the state has laws which hinder rational individual liberty then you would be ethically bound to disobey those laws.

So in order to be ethical you must be plugged into a community and, by implication, you must share the meme set of that civilization. Now lets apply this to the development of benevolent AI. If ethics are inextricably tied to community then a machine AI with human level or greater intelligence must be accepted into the community of Man. This means that we must provide for programing that can evolve with the meme sets of human civilization. Strong Artificial intelligence must not be view as a human tool but rather as a fellow of our community. Human beings are brought into community through adopting the memes of a community and likewise an AI must be equipped with this same ability.

Some issues that I will deal with in a future post involve how accelerating technology will soon rapidly change our very conception of community and how corresponding economic advances will alter the power relation's of individuals as the need to compete for resources becomes less and less of an issue. This aspect of the singularity is key to understanding what many are sure to view as the fantasy of this supposed rational state wherein perfect freedom is achieved.

Robert Fogel on Technological Acceleration and Economics

2005-12-01T01:11:00.000-05:00

Here are a few excerpts from a very interesting interview with Robert Fogel who won the Nobel prize in economics in 1993. Fogel discusses, among other things, how accelerating technologies are influencing economics and human evolution. It seems to me that if he followed the logic of his own findings to their logical conclusions he would be a singularitarian. But, alas, he falls short of that title. Regardless, he is right on the money concerning many economic issues and I recommend reading the entire interview here at Tech Central Station.

Robert Fogel: Well it's based on a long history of improving knowledge. Your web page cites Simon Kuznets on this. The accumulation of knowledge is the basis for modern technology. Later on it becomes not just empirical knowledge, but also science which gives us theories about what to do. And these theories become increasingly effective guides to technological advance. But technological advance is the basis for all economic growth, including the derived growth that I referred to, as you will have technologies that improve productivity in agriculture. It's possible to improve human physiology so there is an interaction, a synergism.

Nick Schulz: Right, and you coin a term in this book called "techno-physio evolution."

Robert Fogel: Right.

Nick Schulz: Explain what that is and explain why it's important.

Robert Fogel: Well, it's the interaction between improvements in technology and improvements in human physiology. The average stature of adult males in Western Europe increased by close to a foot between 1864 and the present.

Nick Schulz: On the subject of techno-physio evolution, you say in the book that, "this evolution is likely to accelerate in this century." Why is that?

Robert Fogel: Well, first of all, our technology is accelerating.

Nick Schulz: How do you measure that? How do you know that it's accelerating?

Robert Fogel: Well in the book I give a diagram and show it visually. I have on the Y axis, the size of the population; and on the other axis, time. And I show the curve of population -- from about 1700 on, that curve becomes almost vertical on the scale that's shown in the book. And then along that scale, I put in scientific innovations. One of the points I make is that it took 4000 years to go from the invention of the plow to figuring out how to hitch a plow up to a horse. And it took 65 years to go from the first flight in a heavier-than-air machine to landing a man on the moon. Not only did that happen in such a short period of time, but over a billion people all over the world watched it happen. So we had communications revolution in a very short period of time. I could work out a precise metric but it wouldn't mean much. It wouldn't give you more information than that diagram does.

The Limits of Human Intelligence

2005-11-30T01:21:00.000-05:00

I've been giving some thought lately to human intelligence and to what its limits might be. I have touched on this in the past but my thinking on this subject has been developing. I find myself coming back to this topic often because it is a quintessential aspect of accelerating technological progress.

For most of human history culture has been evolving very slowly so that the memes required to operate in that culture could easily be passed from generation to generation. And from generation to generation the memes changed very slowly in concordance with the cultural evolution. This has remained true all the way up to the last few decades. The last half a century has marked the first time that from one generation to the next there has been substantial changes in the memes required to function in society. This trend is speeding up in correspondence with the technological hyperbolic curve. What this means is that the transmission of memes from generation to generation must be replaced (is being replaced) by continuous memetic evolution within a single generation. No longer is it good enough to just receive an education and be done with it as it was in past centuries. Only the most intelligent are succeeding at this game presently. Just look at the demographics for your average Internet user or blog reader. The majority of those on line are either under thirty or probably of above average intelligence. What, I ask, are the ramifications of this trend?

In answering this question let's begin with the 'brain is the hardware mind is the software' analogy (which I find very helpful). Physically our brains have been mostly the same since the rise of homo sapiens somewhere around 2.5 million years ago. One reason human brains haven't gotten any larger is because the female birth canal is already as large as it can be with out seriously inhibiting the ability of bipedal locomotion. This has not hindered the advance of intelligence however. This is because the human brain already has far more raw computational power than is being effectively used. No matter how powerful a computer is it can only be as powerful as its programming allows. For an example imagine running a simple tic-tac-to program on one of the blue-gene super computers. It might play tic-tac-to really well but it won't be able to do anything else. Well this is analogous to what kind of memes are programming a human brain. If the only program in the brain is for hunting and gathering etc. it won't be putting a man on the moon any time soon. Up until recently the human cultural memeplex/mental program as been relatively simple and hardly using any of the potential intelligence of the human brain.

So the question I ask is just how plastic is the human brain? In other words what is the limit of how powerful a program (memeplex) the human brain can run before it bogs down? Or, to rephrase the question yet one more time, how far can human culture evolve without the human brain becoming incapacitated by the complexity of its own self-created environment?

I don't have an answer to this question but I suspect that as we get closer to the singularity we will approach what someone else has referred to as a 'memetic singularity'. As I understand it this would be a point at which a memetic entropy would be achieved. In other words one memeplex would come to dominate a global culture. This could only happen if the interconnectivity of human minds reached a point that transcends the current limitations of language via some future technology (no doubt a descendant of the current web). As I see it this will take place shortly before the singularity and will be the final impetus toward the singularity. At this 'memetic singularity' I speculate that we will be pushing the computational limits of biological human brains. However, by this stage of technological and memetic evolution the very structure of the network that forms this interconnectivity will be mediated by powerful tools of artificial intelligence that are directly linked to our minds in ways that structurally modify our brains.

I can only begin to imagine what the ramifications of this sort of scenario might be or what it would mean to be an 'individual' in this sort of state. One thing is clear however, at that point the total of our collective, machine enhanced and mediated, intelligence will be far great than the sum of its parts.

If any of my readers have any other opinions or insights on this topic I would love to hear them.

Quote of the Week

2005-11-29T15:27:00.000-05:00

If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run - and often in the short one - the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.

Arthur C. Clarke

If you know of a quote that you would like to see on 'quote of the week' just email it to me.

The Problem of Market Acceptence and Accelerating Trends

2005-11-28T15:21:00.000-05:00

I have often pondered this curious problem concerning accelerating technological progress. We are just now getting to the point where the problem may begin to really manifest itself. The problem I'm talking about is the problem of getting new breakthroughs to market before another breakthrough renders them wholly obsolete. An example of this would be information storage. Right now everyone is using CD's and DVD's for their optical drives, and personal hard drives and flash memory otherwise.

The problem on the optical side is, as I'm sure all my readers are aware, no one can seem to agree on whether Blue Ray or HD-DVD is the better format. Meanwhile holographic discs are about to burst onto the seen offering six times the information density of either the aforementioned formats and at much higher speeds. Will this seemingly unbelievable technology also become obsolete before it reaches market?

It could be that in the very near future ever increasing broadband speeds will make all forms of information storage obsolete as any information can be stored on servers and instantly called up from any terminal. This scenario seems even more likely when you consider that such technologies as WiMax, WiBro, and EVDO will soon make ubiquitous high speed access to the web possible.

But this is just one example of what I'm talking about. Why buy that new digital camera when you can get a much better one at the same price in just a few months? Or why buy that new laptop (which is a serious investment) when it will be rendered inadequate in just a year? I mean computer power has been doubling every year for a while now but it wasn't that big of a deal before because the doubling didn't represent that big of jump in technology. I mean if you double one dollar you get two – big deal right? But if you double a million you get two million, now that is a big deal. The same principle can be applied to computing power. As the exponential curve of accelerating technologies begins to rise further and further at an ever higher rate the difference of just one year will be quite serious.

Of course at some point you have to just bite the bullet and buy a new computer even though you know that it will be hopelessly outdated in the near future. The crazy thing is this problem is only going to get much more difficult as we head up that curve.

Just something to think about.

Toward A Perpetual Peace

2005-11-27T14:53:00.000-05:00

The guarantee of perpetual peace is nothing less than that great artist, nature (natura daedala rerum). In her mechanical course we see that her aim is to produce a harmony among men, against their will and indeed through their discord. As a necessity working according to laws we do not know, we call it destiny. But, considering its design in world history, we call it "providence," inasmuch as we discern in it the profound wisdom of a higher cause which predetermines the course of nature and directs it to the objective final end of the human race.1 We do not observe or infer this providence in the cunning contrivances of nature, but, as in questions of the relation of the form of things to ends in general, we can and must supply it from our own minds in order to conceive of its possibility by analogy to actions of human art. The idea of the relationship and harmony between these actions and the end which reason directly assigns to us is transcendent from a theoretical point of view; from a practical standpoint, with respect, for example, to the ideal of perpetual peace, the concept is dogmatic and its reality is well established, and thus the mechanism of nature may be employed to that end. The use of the word "nature" is more fitting to the limits of human reason and more modest than an expression indicating a providence unknown to us. This is especially true when we are dealing with questions of theory and not of religion, as at present, for human reason in questions of the relation of effects to their causes must remain within the limits of possible experience. On the other hand, the use of the word "providence" here intimates the possession of wings like those of Icarus, conducting us toward the secret of its unfathomable purpose. - “Perpetual Peace” Immanuel Kant

In keeping with a theme of Enlightenment I will discuss the ideal of a state of perpetual peace. The above quote comes from the essay written by Kant called “Perpetual Peace”. If you have not read it before I highly recommend that you do. It is almost prophetic in nature as it was written more than two hundred years ago and most of what it describes has already come to pass. This theme is pertinent to the idea of the Singularity because, as I understand it, exponential acceleration of technological and economic progress can only take place if it is accompanied by the spread of constitutional republicanism and transnational law based on the inalienable rights of Man. This is true for a number of reasons. The first being that if global war were to ensue the likely result would be the end of civilization if not the entire planet. And I maintain, along with many others that I am happy to take company with, that transnational federalism of some sort or another based on the ideals of constitutional republicanism is the only bulwark against this terrible possibility. Another reason is because economic and technological progress is a direct result of free and secure peoples inventing and building their futures. This kind of progress can not take place or long sustain itself in a state of lawlessness or tyranny.

Many see the current state of affairs with super empowered individuals, Islamic barbarism, post-modern western decay, the coming terrors of bio and nano weapons with powers that eclipse nuclear weapons, peak oil, and a myriad of other contemporary difficulties, and see the end of the world, or at least civilization, coming.

But this is short sighted for so many reasons. The forces arrayed against civilization are being matched by the forces of civilization. They will invent a super virus but we will invent a cure for all viruses. They will seek to spread lawless barbarism and terror to our civilization and we will bring law and order and justice to their lands of barbarism and thralldom. The powers of Civilization will grow exponentially while the viral memes of barbarism will fade away – chocked out by the forces of natural selection.

This will be accomplished through increased transnational cooperation among the free states of the world. As G.W. Bush says “Freedom is on the march”. As the near future unfolds the free world will put aside its petty differences. Global commerce is already a non-zero sum game, though many seem to not understand this fact. The interest of all free peoples is the same and this will begin to become more evident. The only enemy of any free state is an enemy of law.

I envision that over the next ten years the entire planet will be divided into regions of free trade with transnational laws that closer and closer resemble a weak form of federalism such as exists in the E.U. Also I believe that it is possible that more and more nations begin to join the E.U. to the extent that it becomes not just European but an entity that any nation who meets the criteria can join. Hopefully as this happens the U.S. And the E.U. will begin to see themselves more as partners than competitors because they will have exactly the same interests. The E.U., The Anglo-sphere, and a league of free Asian states all working together can defeat any enemy and overcome any problem. Non-zero sum means that what is good for you is good for me. For this reason nations in the free world (which is getting bigger all the time) will bend over backwards to make sure that their fellow nations are doing well because it means that they themselves will do better. This is the golden rule on a global scale

Perpetual peace will be accomplished when the enemies of civilization are defeated.

The enemies of civilization are the enemies of modernity.

If you believe in Global peace and not Global apocalypse then know your tradition -

The Enlightenment is based in Reason, Law, and Philanthropy

The endarkening of barbarism is based on irrationalism, lawlessness, and misanthropy.

As the accelerating forces of technology begin to really speed up look to see radical political transformations and the implementation of the infrastructure for transnational federalism in the coming decade.

Standing in the Enlightenment Tradition

2005-11-25T15:25:00.000-05:00

"Enlightenment is the coming out of Man from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the lack of will to serve one's own understanding without direction from another. This is a self-imposed immaturity; if Reason languishes, it is not for lack of understanding, but only of resolve and courage to serve oneself without direction from another. Sapere aude! Dare to think! Think boldly! Wake up! Take courage, to serve your own understanding. This is the motto of the Enlightenment." - Immanuel Kant

Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.

--Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947

Some have said that the ideals of the Enlightenment are dead. Some have said that Reason is nothing more than one cultural perspective and that as such it has been used as an agent of imperialism. But for those of us who look at Nature and see unity, beauty, and purpose, nothing could be further from the truth. We who not only see progress as a continuation of the ideals of the Enlightenment, but who even see that progress as growing at an exponential rate toward a near future singularity stand squarely in the tradition of the Enlightenment. But what is this tradition some may ask?

The Enlightenment philosophy grew out of the thought of many thinkers in Europe during the eighteenth century. This thinking rose from a belief that Reason could be applied to all facets of life and that through this continual progress was possible. This philosophy is a philosophy of optimism about the potential of Man. From out of this philosophy came the American and French revolutions, modern medicine, modern science, and a renewed respect for the power and value of the individual over and against conformity, collectivism, and socialism.

However, along with the obvious progresses of the modern age their arose much evil. New and terrible weapons of war, new technologies that enabled the power of tyrants to oppress the many, and a new form of alienation that seemed to cut Man off from the old ways – forcing him to live in a way that was unnatural, surrounded by an ugliness that was of his own making. Was this the dream of the Enlightenment? :Nuclear weapons, Genocide, the masses huddled into ghettos, Gulags and walled cities.

For this reason many turned away from the dream of progress thinking it a chimera and reason a vanity of the human imagination. But now, at the dawn of this new century and millennium, we are able to view history with more clarity. The evils of the twentyth century were the result of a turning away from enlightenment. The Enlightenment stresses the dignity of man, fascism respects only power. The Enlightenment believes in the value of the individual and respects the individual as a hero when he stands alone against the madness of the crowd, but communism will not tolerate the individual because only the collective is important. The Enlightenment says the individual must forge his own destiny and be responsible to his own integrity, but socialism doubts the wisdom of the common man and asserts the necessity of an elite to manage the State.

All of these ideologies plagued the twentyth century and casted a shadow over the prospects of progress. These ideologies all arose from a common source – a rejection of Enlightenment liberalism and Divine providence

I write this as a warning. Let us not forsake Enlightenment. The singularity could bring either great wonders or great terrors. We are the generation responsible at this crucial moment in history. Let us carefully consider what kind of world we create. Let us create a world of human flourishing where the freedom of the human soul is ever brought to a higher place and where the world that Man creates is harmonious and beautiful. This can only be achieved through the spread of Enlightenment.

Back to the Moon

2005-11-25T01:41:00.000-05:00

These are pictures from space.com of an artist's concept of NASA's new space craft and plans for a return trip to the moon. I have nothing to say about it I just like pictures of spaceships.

On Intelligence

2005-11-23T01:45:00.000-05:00

A large part of the technological singularity theory concerns the idea that the total amount of intelligence, both human and machine, is together increasing exponentially. At the heart of this idea is an understanding that as intelligence increases in power so does its ability to imagine new possibilities and its power to realize those possibilities – including more intelligence for itself. But what is this allusive “intelligence” that is going to become so powerful? And just what does it mean to speak about levels of intellectual power? Furthermore just what is the difference between the intelligence of a bacterium, a man, and a super-human intelligence?

Well, to start there is no definitive answer to these questions but I think that I can can get very close to the matter at hand. First off in the most general sense intelligence is manifested as a special kind of action. This action is teleological, or goal directed, behavior. Anything that can be called intelligent must have the ability to initiate action based on a desired outcome. This much is true of anything from a microbe to a search engine to yourself.

Now all intelligent actions exist as a series of choices. Each choice is selected out of two or sometimes many choices and that choice is selected based on a desired outcome. So at the very heart of the matter intelligence is an ability to successfully make choices based on a desired outcome. Having laid this foundation of thought let us move on now to see how this can be used to further understand the difficult questions I have asked.

All organisms have intelligence and all organisms evolved from a most basic form of intelligence. At the most basic level an organism must make choices and initiate actions that will allow it to stay alive long enough to reproduce. This means that the organism must be able to identify and avoid threats, get food, and, in the case of sexual reproduction, find a mate. These are the 'goals' that define its intelligence. In order for it to be successful at accomplishing its goals it must have a basic 'understanding' of how cause and effect work in its environment. The more simple the environment and the goals then the less intelligence is required. Present day artificial intelligence is very similar to the kinds of intelligence displayed by primitive organisms. They can only operated in very simple environments and they have very simple goals that define how they make decisions.

If we were to examine the levels of intelligence in the various organisms we would find that those levels have also grown exponentially. For a very long time there wasn't much going on in this area, but then the doubling effect began to work its magic and intelligence began to grow incredibly fast. All of this growth can be attributed to the gradual growth in the difficulty of achieving the already established goals. For instance if I am a predator and one of my goals is to find food then I have to have enough intelligence to get my prey. But if my prey has the goal of avoiding being eaten then it needs to be smart enough to avoid being caught. May the smartest organism win. So you see what I mean. As intelligence increases these basic goals become more difficult to achieve and nature begins to aggressively select for intelligence. But what is happening on a fundamental level as these organisms gain in intelligence?

What is happening is a greater and greater ability to understand how cause and effect operate so that actions may be initiated with the desired outcomes. This is normally accomplished through what is called instinct. The organism may not 'understand' in the way that a human does but the system that defines the organism 'understands' what kind of actions are desired in the appropriate circumstances.

So instinct is a kind of intelligence that is more rigid and is probably analogous to most of the intelligent algorithms that we can produce today. However as we move up the chain of life to the higher mammals and especially man intelligence gets much less rigid and much more powerful. This is because at this stage in the game intelligence no longer needs to wait for nature to select the appropriate instincts but rather the model of cause and effect in the environment has become so sophisticated and accurate that the organism can begin to be inventive. This means that the organism can begin to 'understand' in the sense that we normally think of when using that term. An intelligence on this level now understands how the world works so well that it can predict what the ramifications of its actions will be and can even think of new ways to accomplish its goals.

It is this power which, when fully realized, gives birth to technology. And it is for this reason that man is the technological animal. He is able to improve on his 'cause and effect model of the world' and then transmit that model to other humans through his corresponding acquired ability of language. With this power man is able to continually improve on his model and transmit that knowledge from generation to generation. As this model(science and metaphysics) becomes more powerful and accurate so does man's ability to accomplish his goals.

This is where things get interesting because man no longer has only those original goals that were discussed above. Man now has the burden of responsibility. This is where the concept of value comes in. Man began with the original goals that made evolution possible to begin with but somewhere along the way he also came into possession of values. In order for there to be ethical action certain outcomes must be deemed of can more value than others. Human beings have developed sophisticated culture which deals with the issue of vale. This occurred during the great axiological age. It was during this time that most of the great religions appeared and also when the first systems of codified law appeared. The significance of this is that we have, as a species, created new goals that are still based in the old goals but which transcend them in the sense that we now understand certain goals to be good and others to be evil. We can not change what is good and evil. It is hard wired into our brains. We could change that hard wiring itself but based on what. The only goals we know are this good and evil. On what premise would we change this basic part of our humanness. Would we claim that some other good was more good? This is not possible.

For this reason I have come to the conclusion that human-equivalent machine intelligence should not be treated as something other than man. It must have the same goals and values. If a machine with human level intelligence had precisely the same super-goals as human biological intelligence then it would be essentially human. However if these kinds of machines had values or goals that differed from man's goals then there would inevitably be conflict and the machines would win that conflict.

Therefor it is of utmost importance that we fully master how the brain works and from whence human values come before Strong AI arrives on the scene.

A Recent Interview With Ray Kurzweil

2005-11-22T01:54:00.000-05:00

This interview was done just a couple of weeks ago by an Australian podcaster with Ray Kurzweil. Ray is my favorite thinker on the topic of the Singularity and there isn't much that I disagree with him about. This interview is a good one. It lasts about 40 minutes. Enjoy.
Source

Our Google Overlord

2005-11-21T11:18:00.000-05:00

The past couple of days I have noticed a number of articles that have been posted by people who are beginning to understand what a juggernaut Google is becoming and are worried about the ramifications that might extend from a company potentially having so much power. An example of what I am talking about can be found here. After having read a couple of articles like this I began to think about it in earnest and I have come to the conclusion that this is no joke. Don't get me wrong. I'm not overly concerned about Google taking over the world or anything of that nature – though it is a consideration. What I mean is that it is no joke that the first true AI may emerge from Google.

This became apparent to me upon comparing the functional goals of strong AI and the declared mission statement of Google which is “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”. This may sound like a fairly straightforward enough goal but it is deceivingly simple. This is becoming more and more apparent to me as I take in the full scope of what Google will need to do in order to accomplish this goal. In order to fully realize this goal Google will eventually need to digitize all conceivable information. This is tantamount to saying that Google will need to create a digital model of reality that corresponds to reality in much the same way the human mind does, except the human mind is only capable of synthesizing comparably small amounts of information. All of this information, which will consist of every possible proposition, must be weaved into an ontological syntactic and semantic web. This can only be accomplished by an intelligence which is capable of formulating how words and statements relate and which has immediate access to what must become an exponentially increasing database of information.

At this stage in the game if you want to access information from Google you must type in a search query which consists of one or a few choice words. Google can then run its algorithms to determine how the words relate given how thousands of texts that it can search has put those words together in order to present you with the most relevant information. This works well enough for now but it is still woefully inadequate. So obviously the next step is develop a natural language interface which is capable of understanding questions formulated in natural language. This is the recognized goal of a future search engine, and no doubt Google has some of the brightest minds in the world working on it even as I write this.

But this is no simple task. The accomplishment of this would mean nothing short of a machine which was close to being able to pass a Turing test. If the computer is smart enough to understand your natural language query and respond to it intelligently then we would be very close to strong AI indeed. Also, once a machine can respond on this level it will also be intelligent enough to not merely direct you to some given web content, but to actually search all relevant data and respond in natural language with precisely the information you need. I dare say that only this would fully accomplish Google's declared mission.

So you see Google's mission statement is really just a thinly veiled mission to create strong AI which translates into the coming of Singularity. I would not be surprised to see the first steps of natural language interface by 2015.

I for one welcome our Google overlord.

Update: Daniel Poynter of Hyperaware Consciousness has a response to this here.

Darren Aronofsky's 'The Fountain'

2005-11-20T11:42:00.000-05:00

"Mathematics is the language of nature. Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge. Therefore, there are patterns everywhere in nature." - from Pi

Darren Aronofsky, the genius who brought us 'Pi' and 'Requiem for a Dream', has produced a movie called 'The Fountain', which may be one of the most epic and thought provoking movies since 'Space Odyssey 2001'. That's a pretty bold statement, I know. But that is the prognostication of many in the know. And after seeing what Aronofsky was capable of doing with the movie 'Pi' on a budget of a few thousand dollars I am inclined to believe it.

Just exactly what this movie is about has been kept a big secret. All that we know really is what can be gleaned from the recently released teaser trailer – and it doesn't tell us much. What we know is that the movie, starring Hugh Jackman, will span a period of 1,000 years, has themes of Mayan Mysticism, the quest for eternal life, and undying love.

The movie takes place in three periods. In the first period Jackman

is a Spanish Conquistador on a quest, the second period takes place in the present, and the third period takes place on another planet in the future.

The movie is expected to be released sometime early in 2006. You can watch the trailer here. Also a graphic novel of 'The Fountain' has just been released. This graphic novel is not based on the movie: it was produced independently because at the time that Aronofsky gave permission to make the novel he didn't believe that he was going to be able to make the movie.

The Myth of Metaphysical Naturalism

2005-11-18T15:23:00.000-05:00

The foundation of all science and philosophy, indeed of all human knowledge, is the fundamental idea that all thing are utterly, completely, and inextricably, interconnected. The function of metaphysics is to provide a cognitive map – a worldview if you prefer, for understanding how phenomena relate.

Yesterday at Tech Central Station James Harrington wrote a piece entitled “The Flawed Philosophy of Intelligent Design”. The article is well written and insightful but there is much that I take issue with in it. However, Because this is a blog and not a philosophical tome I will only address one issue.

That one issue is what I will call the philosophical myth of metaphysical naturalism.

First, let us consider metaphysical naturalism. Roughly, a metaphysical naturalist claims that the world per se is roughly the way that the world is portrayed in the natural sciences. The first, but not principle advantage, of naturalism is its profoundly elegant simplicity; at its heart rests the intuition that the world simply is the way that it seems to be. However, to really understand the power of this intuition pursued to a philosophical conclusion we must be willing to embrace its power to drive David Hume's war against superstition and moral privilege. The power of the tools that naturalism puts at our disposal for understanding who we are and why we are the way we are; for understanding the real place of human beings in the cosmos; and for elevating the dignity of the ordinary, both ordinary human beings and the ordinary world, cannot be overestimated. If you don't feel the pull of naturalism, then even if you ultimately find it inadequate, as I do, you just don't get it.

In this paragraph Dr. Harrington reveals his real philosophy which is merely scientism. Describing naturalism as basically how science says the universe is is dumb. The point of metaphysics is to provide a framework of the basic structure of reality. Science is always only partially right at best (sometimes its completely wrong). This is because science is always only approaching a correct view of the universe. And this is why science is so powerful – because it is constantly questioning its own state and improving on that state by questioning assumptions and constructing experiments to test and validate those assumptions.

Next Dr. Harrington speaks about the elegant simplicity of naturalism. Well if naturalism just means that only what's 'real' is 'real' then this tautology is indeed strikingly simple. In fact it is so simple that its meaning is vacuous.

However, to really understand the power of this intuition pursued to a philosophical conclusion we must be willing to embrace its power to drive David Hume's war against superstition and moral privilege.

Hmmm? An intuition pursued to a philosophical conclusion that leads to a social agenda. Sounds kind of like French relativism to me. Oh yeah, I forgot that Hume's philosophy led to abject skepticism and solipsism and finally the rejection of the possibility of any kind of metaphysics or science, including naturalism. I guess that is a lot like French relativism.

Now Dr. Harrington has things set up nicely. If you aren't a naturalist then you obviously don't believe in science or social progress, and what's worse “you just don't get it”.

Well, I guess I just don't get it.

Dan Sperber on the Evolution of Culture

2005-11-17T02:59:00.000-05:00

I found this talk given by Dan Sperber. He is an anthropologist with some very interesting ideas about how cognitive structures and microprocesses effect the transmission of thought and the evolution of culture. What he says bears some relevance to my post on The Mind-Brain Feedback Loop. Click here to see the video, or here to just read the transcript.

Heres how the talk begins:

What I want to know is how, in an evolutionary perspective, social cultural phenomena relate to psychological mental phenomena.

The social and the psychological sciences,when they emerged as properly scholarly disciplines with their own departments in the nineteenth century took quite different approaches, adopted different methodologies, asked different questions. Psychologists lost sight of the fact that what's happening in human minds is always informed by the culture in which individuals grow. Social scientists lost sight of the fact that the transmission, the maintenance, and the transformation of culture takes place not uniquely but in part in these individual psychological processes. This means that if what you're studying is culture, the part played by the psychological moments, or episodes, in the transmission of culture should be seen as crucial. I find it unrealistic to think of culture as something hovering somehow above individuals — culture goes through them, and through their minds and their bodies and that is, in good part, where culture is being made.

The Question of All Questions

2005-11-16T15:02:00.000-05:00

The questions of all questions for humanity, the problem which lies behind all others and is more interesting than any of them is that of the determination of man's place in Nature and his relation to the Cosmos. Whence our race came, what sorts of limits are set to our power over Nature and to Nature's power over us, to what goal are we striving, are the problems which present themselves afresh, with undiminished interest, to every human being born on earth.

T.H. Huxley, 1863

The Mind-Brain Feedback Loop

2005-11-14T15:12:00.000-05:00

Most people understand that when you change an aspect of the underlying physical structure of the brain you will alter your state of consciousness as well. This is evident from the effectiveness of psychoactive drugs. Psychoactive drugs alter the physical brain chemistry and hence alter the state of consciousness. I suspect, however, that less people understand that the opposite is true as well.

When you change your state of consciousness the physical structure of the brain changes accordingly. Every idea, memory, and even actions such as meditation can permanently alter the brain. Evidence of this is continually being discovered by cognitive scientists with our ever more powerful tools for understanding and imaging the human brain. An example of this comes from research that has been done on the brains of those who have meditated for many years. See this article. And if you have a bunch of time on your hands you can read this journal article (pdf) on the revolution in brain imaging that is allowing us to observe the functionality of cognition (Carpenter, P. A., & Just, M. A. (1999). Modeling the mind: Very High-field fMRI-activation during cognition. Topics in Magnetic Resonance Imaging, 10, 16-36. K. R. Thulborn (Issue Editor). Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, Williams, & Wilkins). The implication of this is that mind is a real thing with ontological status which can effect the physical universe.

Many philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists, grounded in the metaphysics of materialism, believe that consciousness is either an illusion, or at best, an epiphenomenon. In other words they believe that matter is the only thing with real existence and therefor the only thing that really has causal efficacy with the implication that all thought is really only determined by a state of physics and that freedom is an illusion.

This debate has important implications for transhumanists and singularitarians. If conscious states of the mind effect cognitive architecture then all cultural activities are not just the result of neural structures and activities, they are also causes of neural activity and structures. This would imply that cultural/technological evolution is both a cause of human brain evolution and an effect of human brain evolution. In other words the evolution of ideas causes physical changes in the brains that collectivly share those ideas and in turn those physically changed brains are able to concieve of new ideas. I believe this mind-brain feedback loop is the motive force that is propelling evolution toward the singularity.

This is one reason why biological evolution and technological evolution are not two separate things, nor is speaking of technological evolution merely a metaphor. The complexity of human tools is evolving, and not in a manner which is annalogous to biological evolution but rather it is but one aspect of biological evolution because those tools are nothing more than the manifestation of a biological evolution, namely the evolution of homo sapiens.

I raise this point because many singularitarians and transhumanists believe that the cognitive architecture of human brains can only evolve through either natural or artificial selection of genes. This, however, is clearly not the case. This is not to say that genetic natural selection is not occurring, nor is it to say that artificial genetic selection and engineering will not have a powerful effect on the evolution of the human brain. All I am arguing for is that memetic natural selection and the corresponding evolution of technology and culture are forcing the the brain to physically evolve. This is because each generation of human brains must assimilate to a new degree of memetic complexity and cultural evolution and correspondingly must also physically adapt their neural architecture to that degree of cultural evolution. Perhaps this is the cause of the Flynn Effect.

Also note that if the brain is altered or augmented through technological means - which I beleive will happen to a greater extent in the near future - that this technology is itself knowledge that the human brain aquired, ultimately, through natural selection. This is because the ability to increasingly obtain and transmit knowledge from one gereration to the next is a quintiseential property of the human brain which exists only because nature selected for it.

The art work pictured above was done by Alex Grey (one of my favorite artists)
You can view more of his work here.

An Interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky

2005-11-14T04:31:00.000-05:00

Click here for an mp3 recording of an interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky from NeoFiles. Eliezer is the director of the Singularity Institute and an AI researcher.

Machinima

2005-11-11T13:51:00.000-05:00

I recently wrote an article entitles (The Birth of Global Folk Culture) in which I discuss the rise of a decentralized, open source style, and user created evolution of culture that bears resemblance to traditional folk culture, but is now taking place in a global sphere rather than in some isolated local.

In relation to that post I read some news from Wired about a way of making film, and a film genre, called Machinima. I had heard vague things about this before but I didn't realize the extent to which the genre had matured. If you are interested in viewing some of these short films go here.
I haven't had much of a chance view these films but I did watch one called 'The Journey' and it was definatly more in the art category than the entertainment category.

Just Imagine the kinds of film some young aspiring artist will be able to make with a home computer circa 2010. Get ready to say goodbye to Hollywood in a few more years. I can't wait.

My Electric Motorcycle

2005-11-10T00:02:00.000-05:00

This is my plan to build an electric motorcycle. I've been thinking about how to go about doing this for some time now. My goal is to build a machine that is not just functional but performance oriented yet affordable (for me that means under 4 grand).

I think I now have a package that will work.

I will start with a rolling chassis of a Suzuki GS500E. I have chosen this bike because it is has a fairly modern yet inexpensive design. Also both the bike and its parts can be found very easily. I plan to be able to get the parts for a rolling chassis at a bone yard for under $1,ooo.

So just to clarify the rolling chassis in this case will have everything on the bike except the motor, exhaust, gearbox, and gas tank. The next thing I will do is mount the electric DC motor where the old ICE was. I will be using the PMG 132. You can checkout the stats on this motor here.

The motor will be controlled by an Alltrax controller.

The controller is the piece of equipment that regulates how much power the motor gets. In this case I will not be using a gear box at all so the controller will act as both a throttle and gearbox. However this is one thing I am unsure about. If any of you know more about engineering than I do please clue me in. Will this set up work? It would appear to me that given HP, rpm, and torque curve of this motor a direct drive transmission should be ok.

Anyways, other than minor details (DC/DC converter, instrumentation etc.) the only thing left is the battery system. I will be using Li-ion battery pack with a recharger and management board from PowerStream Power Suppliers .

Because these batteries have seven times the energy density of lead/acid I will need much less room to mount them then if I were using lead/acid. For this reason I will weld a compartment into the same area that the fuel tank was. After that I will fabricate a cover for the batteries that will look similar to the former gas tank. The final product should weigh under 350 lbs and have a performance that is comparable to the original motorcycle - except it will be way cooler.

Sounds cool huh!? Unfortunately I will have to save money for about six months before I can get all the parts. But as soon as I begin work on the project I will be sure to share pics and progress.

Official Google Blog: Vint Cerf speaks out on net neutrality

2005-11-09T16:30:00.000-05:00

Official Google Blog: Vint Cerf speaks out on net neutrality

Lucky 13 Carnival of Tomorrow

2005-11-09T15:07:00.000-05:00

The Carnival of Tomorrow #13 is up and running at the Speculist. Good stuff as usual.

The Birth of Global Folk Culture

2005-11-08T15:01:00.001-05:00

For most of human history Culture was transmitted through an open source model. This includes music, mythology, legends, philosophy, legal norms etc. For an example of how this works let's look at music. Throughout most of history musicians could neither read nor right music, and neither could they record their works. For this reason the only way music was preserved was through imitation. This takes advantage of memetic natural selection.

That music which is enjoyed the most gets reproduced the most. Usually when music gets reproduced by a musician the musician will attempt to improve on it or embellish it in some way. Therefore those improvement which are most enjoyed and most memorable are in turn reproduced the most again. In this way the music becomes an extension of the culture which gave birth to it and in this way the music can evolve with that culture. Why does the musician create the music at all? He doesn't even have economic incentive! The reason is clear.

The musician is gifted with an ability to create music and does so either because he loves doing it or because his genius compels him. The same can be said for every other aspect of culture. The gifted will work their magic. Here are a few names - just ask yourself if their contributions arose from economic incentive or from the driving force of a genius within: da Vinci, Einstein, Goethe, van Gogh, Beethoven, Plato, Aristotle. You get the idea. Of course the list could go on and on with the great contributers of the world. Sometimes they get rich from their work and sometimes they starve to death. But that is not the reason they create.

Now lets fast forward to the age of mass media. This age arrived with the advent of the ability to record sound with hi-fidelity, broadcast radio in FM, and broadcast television. All of these technologies came to fruition around the same time, which was shortly after the second world war. Around this time what had been the evolution of culture became an industry. Namely the entertainment industry. From that point on true artists continued to create just as they ever did. Most of them still had to work for a living but that is nothing new. Unfortunately much of these artist's work would go with out an audience or recognition. At the same time those artists who could be shown to appeal to the greatest number of people would be chosen by the mass media to be commodified. This became pop culture. Constantly leveled down. Always appealing only to an average.

Of course almost as soon as this condition arose their arose also those who would rebel against the leveling down of art. There was the root rock movement in the sixties, and a push toward independent film by serious artists etc. It is only now, however, that this little rebellion against the fascism of mass media has been truly empowered. Many have called it the 'remix' culture. Call it what you will but it is actually a return to folk culture, only now computing power and the connectivity of the Internet is empowering anyone with a desire to be an artist, recorder, broadcaster, writer, publisher - you name it.

The fact that anyone with a computer, a connection, and the proper desire can now create and distribute culture fairly easily means the demise of command control mass media. Lets look at some examples.

Centralized control/mass culture	Decentralized/folk culture
Newspapers, magazines	Blogs, tagged news, participatory reporting
Publishing company	ebook
Broadcast radio	Pod cast
TV, movies	Bittorrent, vlog,
Pulp fiction, comic books	fanfiction

The power behind mass media was that they controlled what was created and distributed. Now that this monopoly has been largely lifted I expect to see an artistic renaissance and an explosion in the amount of and quality of entertainment. As the technology for creating art becomes more advanced I expect to see people making high quality movies with CG animation, and I expect to see all manner of music created on the desk top using powerful synthesizers.

For now the big budget producer still has a place, but look for this to change as we witness the birth of global folk culture.

High Speed Ubiquitous Connectivity Around the Corner

2005-11-07T14:35:00.000-05:00

"xMax is a novel modulation and encoding technology that boosts the data rates of all wired and wireless communications. xMax is not a compression technique, but rather a synergistic mix of two well-established communication approaches that dramatically improves spectrum utilization. By combining elements of traditional narrowband carrier systems with non-interfering elements found in low-power wideband systems, xMax delivers data rates orders of magnitude higher than other broadband approaches. "

Visit the xMax website here.

This is very exciting. If these claims turn out to be true this will revolutionize the connectivity industry and by implication the world. Ubiquitous computation and connectivity, immediate accesses to the books of the world, etc., etc...... I fully expect these technologies to fuel a global economic and technological explosion in the very near future. We are truly at the elbow of the spike.

Robots Mastering Human Movement

2005-11-07T01:15:00.000-05:00

This is video footage of A Japanese humanoid robot that has the ability to get back up on his feet. His name is R. Daneel after Isaac Asimov's famous character. The original article can be viewed here at NewScientist. To see the video just click here.

Human-Machine Symbiosis

2005-11-04T14:51:00.000-05:00

Three separate stories I read today all point toward one thing - Man's symbiotic relationship with his tools is rapidly evolving into a human-machine super organism. The connectivity of all minds that are interfacing with machines via the net is increasing exponentially and producing emergent intelligence. Here are three stories that are demonstrating this:

This post demonstrates how tagging and related practices are integrating human minds as wetware.
This link is a new project from Amazon that will utilize human intelligence to augment AI. UPDATE: Good commentary here from TechCrunch on Amazon's 'artificial artificial intelligence'.
This article describes a new advance in 'matrix' style human-machine connectivity.

I Have Seen the Promised Land

2005-11-04T01:45:00.000-05:00

Well here it is. I simply cannot believe my eyes. You type in a search and every relevant book you can imagine pops up. From there you can link to various book sellers carrying the book you want, find a library that has it, - or you can do a search within the book which allows you view every page in that book. Amazing! Just think of the power of it. The combined knowledge of the ages at my fingertips - at all of our finger tips. In my opinion this marks the beginning of a new era.

Decentralized Energy Economy

2005-11-02T12:09:00.000-05:00

In a recent post (A Different Perspective on the Hydrogen Economy) I left off stating that I believed we would need to move toward a more decentralized energy economy in order to survive peak oil. In this post I will take an in depth look at the current state of development in this area and describe the kinds of changes I think will occur in order for this evolution to transpire. This development is a very important piece of the puzzle for understanding what I see as a near future economic infrastructure paradigm shift. This paradigm shift will be a quantum leap in energy efficiency and will fuel our exponentially accelerating technological future.

The final goal of a decentralized energy economy is to have every household producing their own energy using free and renewable resources e.g. solar and wind. This includes home electricity, heat, and vehicle fuel. At the present time this may seem to many to be an incredible and unrealistic goal. The reason, however, why this may seem so incredible is because our current energy economy is wildly inefficient. So to begin with let's take a look at what is causing our energy economy to be so inefficient and what sort of technologies can and are remedying this.

One enormously inefficient practice simply comes from transmitting electricity across the power grid to homes. This is very inefficient for a number of reasons. First the electricity has to be sent as AC because DC cannot be transmitted over long distances. DC appliances are far more efficient than AC appliances yet we all have AC appliances because that is what comes out of the socket. So to start just by making power at home you need less because you can buy DC appliances and don't have to pay a company for their inefficiency

The two greatest energy costs for a home are lighting and heating. Most of you are probably aware of the breakthroughs in LED lighting. This article states that if everyone in the country were to replace just one standard 60w bulb it would save enough energy to shut down the largest power-plant in the country. Reforming heating efficiency is a bit more difficult. This requires first that people invest in better and more efficient insulation. But the real breakthroughs will come through new and improved architecture involving passive solar heating and high-tech materials for insulation and thermal mass (another example). There are many people all over the world who are currently living a modern lifestyle with all amenities and conveniences yet pay no energy bill. Check out this blog on Unplugged Living. It may be too expensive for many Americans to attain this state of independence now but what about ten years from now?

Part of the high cost of achieving an 'unplugged status' comes from the cost of and relative efficiency of the apparatus for home power generation. This, however is changing rapidly. Every year windmill generators and photovoltaic cells get more efficient and less expensive. Here are two recent advances: this post from The Energy Blog, and this post from World Changing. Also see this.

So if you combine the efficiency of not having to transmit power with modern ultra efficient appliances and lighting with with innovative building techniques that incorporate materials technology and passive solar; and you combine that with rapidly advancing technology for efficiently producing electricity at home then you may begin to see that home power generation is not so impractical after all.

Now add to that electric vehicles powered by Li-ion batteries, hydrogen fuel cells, and supercapcitors. By 2015 these kinds of vehicles will be so efficient because of advances in nanotech that users will be able to charge their vehicles at home using the same home power generation. See this article on Mitsubishi's EV which is on target to come to market in 2008, and this article on GM's EV scheduled for 2010.

As you can see I'm not exactly worried about peak oil. In fact I think that a nice steady climb in oil prices is just what our economy needs to prod it out of its dogmatic slumber.

UPDATE: This is a very good post on a related matter

Google Resumes Construction of 'Turing's Cathedral'

2005-11-01T13:13:00.000-05:00

Good news! Google is to resume digitizing books. As for those who attempt to stand in the way of this project and set themselves up as 'The Enemies of the Compendium of Human knowledge' allow me to invoke a curse from one of my heroes - Thomas Jefferson:

I Swear upon the alter of God, eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

George Dyson wrote this piece for The Edge recently called 'Turing's Cathedral' about his visit to Google on the 60th anniversary of John von Neumann's proposal for a digital computer. Here is a small segment:

My visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air. "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people," explained one of my hosts after my talk. "We are scanning them to be read by an AI."
When I returned to highway 101, I found myself recollecting the words of Alan Turing, in his seminal paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, a founding document in the quest for true AI. "In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children," Turing had advised. "Rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates."

The future is heading our way quickly.

Keep Talking

2005-10-31T12:32:00.000-05:00

If you are serious about the global brain hypothesis/analogy as I am then this piece of news is an exciting development which portends a whole new level of global intelligence. The article describes a number of new technologies which are being used for speech translation. The implication is that as this technology matures language will no longer be a barrier to communication. UPDATE: Also check out this Forbes special on communicating.

What this means to me is that individuals all over the world who do not speak English will be able to connect to our world and understand us. People in the middle east can watch American news and understand it. The millions of people in China who only speak Mandarin will be able to make friends with people all over the world and their authoritarian government will no longer be able suppress the ideas of freedom. In other words every node in the global brain will be able to communicate with every other node. The exchange of ideas. This is the true source of the global economy and universal progress. People talking to one another form the engine of history - not oil or any other product.

This is the basic difference between idealism and materialism. Hegel believed that people and their ideas participated in an evolving 'zeitgeist' that was moving toward the goal of a universal mind which he describes as "thought thinking itself". Hegel's student, Marx, didn't believe that ideas drove history but rather things and products drove people' ideas. This is economic materialism and it seems to be ingrained into almost all modern economic thought in some form or another.

The most important thing for economic and technological progress to continue is that we keep on talking.

Musical Entertainment 2.0

2005-10-31T11:40:00.000-05:00

For anyone who is a lover of music this new web 2.0 music service is absolutely amazing. It is a system that allows you to program your own personalized radio station (which is streamed at an ear pleasing 128 kps), tag music, and share music, make friends with 'music neighbors' etc. The basic service is free and the upgrade is three bucks a month.

A Different Perspective on the Hydrogen Economy

2005-10-28T10:42:00.000-04:00

For a long time I have been interested in the subject of alternative fuels and electric cars. As a result I have become fairly knowledgeable about the subject. There has been an awful lot of hype in the media and all over the web about "the hydrogen economy." In this post I would like to take a look at the relative merits of this "hydrogen economy" to see what is feasible and what is not. Also I will discuss the direction I see the energy infrastructure heading in and why.

The first point about hydrogen I will make is that it is NOT a fuel. Yes you can burn it in an ICE and yes you can put it in a fuel cell. The problem is that it doesn't exist naturally in a pure form on this planet. This means that it must be made and the only way to make it is to give a molecule which is holding a hydrogen atom an extra electron. This can be done in a number of ways but all of them require energy input. Now petroleum is a fuel. You drill a hole in the ground and out comes 'a bubblin crude. Yes it requires energy to drill and process oil, but if you do the math the amount of energy put into getting oil is dwarfed by the amount of pure BTU that comes out - which is why oil has been a very profitable business.

What hydrogen is is a form of battery. It is a way of storing energy. Oil is stored energy sitting in the ground. Hydrogen is stored energy only after an equivalent amount of energy has been put out to achieve it. So now that we have hydrogen properly labeled - not as a miracle fuel but as merely one form of storing and transporting energy, the question arises as to how effective is this energy storage and transmission system compared to other potential competitors.

Now things begin to get a little more interesting. How will the hydrogen be produced? This is the first question we must examine. There are three basic ways of producing hydrogen that I know of. These three basic ways are electrolysis, thermal extraction, and photo-chemical. Electrolysis, of course, involves splitting the chemical bond with electricity and is very inefficient. Thermal extraction is accomplished in more than one way. With water the water must be super heated to the point where the hydrogen disassociates from the oxygen. This can be accomplished with some efficiency through thermo-nuclear reaction or solar collector. Hydrogen can also be extracted from hydrocarbons using heat but this really doesn't solve the source problem at all. The last and best way of extraction is using genetically modified algae and sun light and water. This method is purported to be promising.

So lets rehash. Hydrogen carries energy as a battery, therefore it is not a source of energy and cannot be said to be a fuel or the basis of an economy (unless its H3 but that's another story). To produce Hydrogen we need either electricity, heat, or photons.
This means that the real source of our economy must come from either fossil fuels, nuclear reaction, some form of solar power (this includes wave, wind, water etc.), or a combination thereof.

In my mind the real issue can now be reduced to what is the most efficient and sustainable way to produce, distribute, and utilize energy. We have solved the greater part of this problem already. The answer is electricity. We know how to produce it efficiently and sustainably through nuclear and solar means, we know how to transmit it effectively to stationary locations, and we know how to utilize it highly effectively with our highly efficient electric motors and LED lights etc.

So the last problem that remains to be solved is how to distribute electricity in a sustainable and efficient manner for mobile use. There are two basic contenders for this: fuel cells and high enery density, quickly rechargeable batteries. Lets see how these two models compete.

In the battery category the most likely contender is lithium-ion. Li-ion batteries are already the battery of choice for our electronic needs - everything from laptops to cell phones to cameras. Also there are now a number of electric cars either already on the market or coming to market soon that use li-ion technology. The advantage of li-ion is that it has a very high energy density and the infrastructure is already set up to use it. You simply plug your device into a wall socket and it stores electrons for use on tap. Electric cars using batteries like this can simply be plugged in and recharged right at home. Also it would be very easy to build charging stations all over the country using the already existing power transmission network.

The main battery fuel being considered for fuel-cells is, of course, hydrogen. Now whereas batteries can be recharged right in the home with ease hydrogen must be produced, compresses, and shiped to a fueling station. Once at the fueling station consumers must then uncompress and then recompress hydrogen into an onboard fuel tank. This all requires a lot of infrastructure investment, which invariably means goverment involvement - and we all know how efficient that is. There are other possible ways of distributing hydrogen but none of them look very efficient to me.

The real point of this post, however, is not to bash hydrogen fuel-cells but rather to point out that the real issue is energy production and storage. Whether or not fuel-cells or batteries ultimately become the means of energy storage and transmission for mobile use we are still faced with an enormouse problem that many do not seem to see. Once we stop using petroleum as an energy source that energy must be replaced. In other words our electricity producing infrastructure is going to have to produce a LOT more energy in the near future, and preferably it will need to do it in an environmentaly friendly manner. Our electrical grids are already taxed to the gills. This is the real problem facing us economically. We need many more nuclear and solar (as well as solar derived) power sources. Also I beleive that the energy economy should move toward a decentralization of energy production. As solar cells and wind generators become more and more efficient there is no reason why a large percentage of the nations electricity can't be produced at home (more on this later).

* I encourage my readers to respond to my articles. I welcome reasoned criticism and will respond to any questions or comments via the comments or email.

First Light!

2005-10-27T12:30:00.000-04:00

Wow! I can't believe the clarity of this picture. This is the first image captured by the new Large Binocular Telescope (LBT). Spectacular isn't it? This is the most technologically advanced telescope built to date. It will be able to view planets in other solar systems, view distant galaxies with clarity, and see 14 billion years back to the beginning of galaxy formation. For more information see this article, and to see more pictures and technical information got to the LBT site here.

The Carnival of Tommorow 12

2005-10-25T21:49:00.000-04:00

Welcome to the Event Horizon. Now get ready because you are about to venture into the strange world of 'The Carnival of Tomorrow'. The theme of this carnival will be the economics of the future. Some of the subtopics I have gathered from all over the vast regions of the blogosphere include robotic manufacturing and self-replication, the free market and prize driven twentyfirst century space race, nanomanufacturing, and some of the surprising properties that are emerging from our economic/technological infrastructure.

SINGULARITY ECONOMICS
To kick things off there are a couple of very good posts on applying exponential growth thinking to the current linear-intuitive economic model. Arnold Kling over at Tech Central Station kicked of a three part series of his thinking on Ray Kurzweil's recently released book "The Singularity is Near". The first article he wrote was entitled "Kurzweilomics" and it elicited a response from a few bloggers including this piece from Stephen Gordon back at the Speculist. Also I wrote a related piece which discusses the relationship between economic philosophies and technological evolution. Update: also check out this post by J. Random American from Ideas in Progress on the effect of greater human life spans on political philosophy and individual liberty.

THE FUTURE OF MANUFACTURING
first off check out this really exciting video footage of the RepRap machine.
If you aren't familiar with the project it is a serious attempt at building a self-replicating machine and they are making a lot of progress.

Marshall Brain over at Robotic Nation Evidences talks about how an automated economy might effect the middle class. I find his writing thought provoking but I disagree with the extent to which he thinks full automation could be a disaster. Also check out his more comprehensive essay Robotic Nation.

J. Random American of Ideas in Progress points out an interesting breakthrough reported at AIM Points by Mr. Goldberg. This is one for all you Trekies. Transparent Aluminum. (its a manufactured material right?)

The final news for the future of manufacturing is a very interesting report on the progress being made in molecular manufacturing brought to us by Mike Treder of Responsible Nanotechnology.

MARKET DRIVEN SPACE RACE

Science, capitalism, and democracy work together to make some incredible synergy. This part of the carnival looks at how market driven models are breathing new life into humanity's quest to reach the stars (or at least low earth orbit for now).

A couple of the recent events which have been trying to harness American innovation through contests offering large cash prizes to those who are able to overcome specific obstacles were the successful DARPA challenge to build robotic vehicles, The x-prize and related contests, and most recently a competition to build a climber for the space elevator. A lot of good stuff is coming out of these kinds of contests but some have been more successful than others. Keith Curtis has some comments and criticism that are of interest about the tether climber contest.

If your interested in the space elevator also check out Brian Dunbar's blog Space for Commerce. Brian works for Liftport which is the company building the space elevator and he writes a good blog. Update: Keith Curtis interviews Dr. Bradley Edwards on the space elevator. Very informative. The Speculist offers commentary on that interview here. Also Brian says this site has better information on the space elevator

If it looks as though space commerce is taking a giant leap forward it also looks as though NASA's latest plans are taking a quite anachronistic two steps back. Rand Simberg offers some commentary on this over at Transterrestrial Musings.

EVOLVING INFRASTRUCTURE

Two key aspects of infrastructure are driving our modern economy and those infrastructures themselves are evolving. Those two aspects are the energy grid and the infotech communication grid.

A lot has been said the last couple of weeks about what has been dubbed 'web 2.0'. This label is as good as any for what I see as a very important evolution of the global communication/knowledge sharing infrastructure. A blog called TechCrunch is dedicated to reporting on innovations in this field. Also Daniel Poynter has a blog called Hyper Aware Consciousness with a few posts on this subject from an interesting perspective.

Finally Joel Makower of WorldChanging writes this article about the need for a future 'smart power grid'. Apparently our electrical grids are highly inefficient and badly in need of an upgrade. I think this is going to become a huge issue over the next ten years as electric vehicles are phased in and petroleum is phased out.

Well that's it for The Carnival of Tomorrow 12. Hopefully your horizons have been expanded a bit.

The next Carnival of Tomorrow will be held back at the Speculist.
If you would like to contribute to it just email them at:

mrstg87 {@ symbol} yahoo {dot} com

or

bowermaster {@symbol} gmail {dot} com

I Want my Mech-Suit

2005-10-25T13:19:00.000-04:00

I grew up watching cartoons like 'Voltron', 'Robotech', Transformers, etc; which has led me to believe that the future is synonymous with giant robots and mech-suits. Well there has been some news recently about some forth coming exosuit technologies - mostly for medical uses. And now I just found out that there is a MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies which is dedicated to applying nanotech to soldier's equipment which can only mean that the age of the mech-suit warrior is just around the corner.
Seriously though check out these articles about the work that they are doing. Its interesting stuff that could have a lot of useful applications.

Globalization and Economic Progress

2005-10-23T20:36:00.000-04:00

In this post I ask the question 'what is the relationship between economic progress and technological acceleration?'. This question arises because of the current state of globalization and its impact on human activity.

I argue that exponentially accelerating economic progress is a necessary accompaniment of the application of exponentially accelerating technology and vis versa. This thesis is the conclusion of how I define economic and technological progress.

Economic progress can be defined as a continuous gain in the relative efficiency of the coordination and utilization of goal directed human labor; while technological progress can correlatively be defined as a continuous gain in the knowledge of how best to coordinate and utilize goal directed human labor. This may seem like a rather strange definition of technological progress to some. The reason for this is because technology is popularly understood to be the physical products of our science like computers, and cars, and ipods etc. These products are not technology however: they are merely the products of technology. This is because technology is not a thing but a knowledge - specifically the knowledge of how to do or make. And whenever humans are doing or making anything they are performing goal directed labor. So if anyone figures out how to do or make anything better, then that is technological progress; and if that knowledge actually gets applied and people begin doing and making things in a better way (better is defined as accomplishing your goal with less work) then that is economic progress. When the definition of each is put forth in this way it becomes obvious that economic activity and technology are two sides of the same coin and are cyberneticaly related.

It is this fact that explains why societies that are technologically advanced are also wealthy.
But why do societies progress at all?

One reason is because societies often come into conflict over resources. As resources become scarce societies must figure out more efficient and effective ways to coordinate and utilize labor (technology) and then apply that knowledge (economy). If a society that is in competition for resources with at least one other fails to progress economically and technologically enough then that society will eventually be dominated by a society which has.

Until recently (in terms of world history) this phenomenon has only had a small and mostly regional influence but this is because hyperbolic trends start seemingly linear. However as the acceleration of the world-historical technological/economical snowball begins to pickup speed it becomes hard for any careful observer to miss its exponential nature.

This brings us to the present time in which we are witnessing the most advanced state of this global acceleration in technological and economic progress. In large part we can understand this present state of world affairs as the outcome of a grand global contest which took place between two competing economic/technological world systems.
The two systems were the top- down totalitarian system of command economy and the bottom-up liberal system of democratic capitalism.
Both of these systems emerged out of the philosophy of the enlightenment at the end of the nineteenth century as competing systems vieing for global supremacy.

The key difference between these systems is how they understand man. The totalitarians conceive of man as part of a materialist cosmology in which he is to be understood as cog in a linear, cause and effect, machine that can be manipulated for the best by a top-down central authority. This anthropology descended from a materialist understanding of the cosmos and found its apotheosis when Marx applied materialism to the interpretation of human history.
The liberals, on the other hand, (such as Jefferson, Locke, Kant, and Hegel) viewed man as a fundamentally self-determining and moral creature. These thinkers believed that if institutions which hinder man's freedom, such as hereditary social castes and superstitious dogmas, were removed that mankind would be able to self-organize and advance without limit.
It now appears as though the liberal philosophy of the Enlightenment has won the war against its totalitarian brother. Dialectical materialism was wrong. The invisible hand was right.
But what does this mean for the present? Just what did the central planners get wrong and what can learn from this?

To begin we must understand the holistic nature of the biosphere and mans relationship to it via the noosphere. Through the mathematics of complexity theory we are beginning to understand how novel properties can supervene on the properties of lower order systems through a process known as emergence. The importance of this insight is that it completely changes our understanding of what constitutes a "mechanism" and thereby makes irrelevant most of the materialist thinking of the turn of the last century. We now understand that the cosmos is not a mechanism of linear causation but rather an unimaginable web of feedback systems which interact in ways that are inherently unpredictable.

When this is understood then it must also be understood that the economic and technological progress of man cannot be attained through top-down, authoritarian, centralized planning. This was the mistake of Marxism. Man is not a cog but an intellect and an agent.
And this is what the liberals got right. If man is essentially a self-determining and moral agent, then the highest role of government is to preserve man's freedom and responsible autonomy by establishing his duties and protecting his rights - and only that.

Free Book

2005-10-13T21:16:00.000-04:00

One of the key concepts of interest to those who are observing the hyperbolic exponential acceleration of technology is the concept of a von Neumann universal constructor. At the time John von Neumann's ideas were completely theoretical. However, as our technologies become more and more powerful we are beginning to make real progress toward attaining this ideal.
Recently a text was published called "Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines" which deals with this subject comprehensively. I have not yet read the book but I understand that it is very thorough. Check it out for yourself - the book is now online for free.

The Essence of Man and the Singularity

2005-10-12T12:01:00.000-04:00

Tyler Emerson from The Singularity Institute directed me to this paper entitled "Why Work Toward the Singularity?" This provoked me into thinking about this question and I have written the following as part of an answer and solution for how best to go about working toward the Singularity.

Aristotle tells us that man is the speaking animal, or 'animal rational'. This is disputed by Marx who describes the essence of man as Homo Faber, or the tool wielding animal.

These two understandings of man need not be in conflict. Both the ability to speak and the ability to wield tools stem from the ability of man to reason, which I define as the ability to make ever evolving mental models of reality. From out of this ability man is able to transmit from one human to another a new meme which alters the mental model of reality. This is speech. The other ability that comes from reason is the ability to alter reality based on the interworkings of ones mental model. This is tool wielding.

Therefore man's ability to communicate effectively on a greater and greater scale translates directly into more and more minds with a more and more powerful mental model of reality. These minds with a more powerful model of reality are then able to alter reality on greater and greater scales. This ability to alter reality on such a scale brings about technologies that foster greater and greater levels of communication. It is this feedback loop that has thrust humankind on the path of technological acceleration toward an inevitable historical singularity.

Many fear that the technologies that we are harnessing threaten our very humanity. They fear that what most defines our humanity will be erased if we give in to the trend of technological acceleration. However it is clear to me that what is most human about us (the ability to make mental models of reality) has engendered the trend of technological acceleration in the first place. In addition to this fact it is also clear that what our technology is doing is bringing to accualization that which was already potential in us. Namely the ability to communicate and alter reality as we see fit.

Based on this assessment I argue that the most effective means to bringing about the singularity lies in the essence of man. If you labor to hasten the coming of the singularity then you must:

Labor to conceive of a more and more powerful mental representation of reality. I believe that the worldview accompanied by the singularity hypothesis is the framework for the most poweful mental model available.
effectively utilize the technologies of communication to trasmit the memes of your mental model. In other words use all available technologies such as blogs, email, podcasts, etc. to educate people and foster rational dialogue.
Use the power of your mental model combined with the information web you have established through communication technologies to foster new technologies. In other words work with other people you have been able to hookup with who have a powerful understanding of how the world works to collaborate on bringing to fruition some great idea that you might come up with together, i.e be an inventor.

Of course by acting on these three suggestions you will be behaving in a quintessentially human manner and simultaneously be acting as a powerful catalysts for the feedback loop that is fueling the coming of the singularity and making the world a better place.

An Interesting Blog

2005-10-12T00:14:00.000-04:00

I just discovered del.icio.us a couple days ago. If you don't know what it is or you havn't used it yet I strongly recomend checking it out. It will change the way you use the web. Also I found this very interesting blog while surfing del.icio.us that is worth checking out called The Hyperaware Consciousness.

Teleology, ID, and the Singularity

2005-10-10T01:15:00.000-04:00

Most evolutionists hold to a view of evolution wherein the emergence of an intelligent and conscious species on this plant was nothing more than a very fortuitous occasion which just as easily might not have been.

This was not always the case however. During the later nineteenth century and the early twentieth many of the greatest minds had a teleological view of history in which they understood mankind and all of history to be moving toward some inevitable goal. Some of these thinkers were materialists, such as Marx and Nietzsche, but most of them would be classified as philosophical idealists. These thinkers would include, among others, Schelling, Fichte, Hegel, Bergson, and Whitehead.

Now at some point in the early twentieth century the idea of teleological history went very much out of style and was eventually condemned and ridiculed by most of the academic community as nothing more than a vestigial remnant of medieval theology.

However, over the last ten years the pendulum has swung all the way back in many of the more interdisciplinary circles and there have been some convincing voices calling for another look at the enormous evidence that has been amassed which seems to point toward the inevitability of intelligent life given certain conditions.

The reason I am writing about this is because I believe that The Law of Accelerating Returns, when properly understood, necessitates an understanding of the universe as teleological (at least in a weak sense). For this very reason I think that many singularitarians (spikers) enjoy a sense of optimism because they see that the universe is unfolding according to an order. In other words singularitarians are likely to beleive that the initial conditions of the universe were such that intelligent life would inevitably emerge and that from out of that intelligent life there would inevitably arise the process of technological evolution leading to the singularity. This teleological/developmental perspective of the history of the cosmos implies that there is intelligence behind the most fundumental laws nature.

In future posts I will discuss some other related matters in greater detail but for now I will direct those readers of mine who are sufficiently interested to a couple of good papers.

ID as a Theory of Technological Evolution

The compatability of teleology and natural causation

The Dangerous Idea

2005-10-09T01:14:00.000-04:00

Recently over at the Speculist there was an article entitled “Lexicon for the Singularity-Aware.” I thought this post addressed an important issue that I would like to look further into. The article was concerned with the kind of negative P.R. that labeling those who are singularity aware as “singlaritarians” might generate. However there is a greater issue at hand.

What I have in mind is the larger problem of how the general public will perceive the concept of the singularity as that concept begins to proliferate among intellectuals and technologists and trickles down to become a common idea.

At this point in time, to the best of my knowledge, there are very few people out there who are actually aware of what the singularity is and who have internalized the ramifications thereof. This, however, will change. Every year that goes by in which we see the speed of technological evolution grow exponentially more people will become aware of the ramifications, and the more who become aware the more buzz there will be concerning the idea.

And herein lies the problem. Right now only a handful of people are aware of the singularity and simultaneously consider its supporters dangerous. Most of these people are either so intelligent that the man in the street does not understand the arguments being proposed (Francis Fukayama’s declaration that transhumanism is the most dangerous idea) or else the person is declared insane (Theodore Kaczinski). But as more people become aware of the singularity even more people will arise who do not understand, yet who agree that the idea is dangerous. And what’s more the idea IS DANGEROUS. This idea is perhaps the last idea. At least the last idea that Man qua Man may ever have. So for those who do not have an evo-devo world view and seek to conserve the beliefs and ways of the past, such as fundamentalists and neo-Luddites, the concept of the singularity and all of the ramifications that go along with it threaten to end their world – and indeed it will.

Of course there probably isn’t much that can be done to give the singularity idea a good name. It helps that it will probably be accepted and defended by the smartest people. But in all likelihood there will be a stigma attached to the singularity hypothesis that will not be removed until the singularity is neigh upon us.

DARPA Challenge

2005-10-08T14:47:00.000-04:00

This morning the Grand DARPA Challenge has begun. If you are at all interested in Robotics and AI, or even just really cool machines you should get over to the website and check it out. These kinds of competitions are really helping to spure on technological advancements. Who knows what kinds of applications and inovations will filter down to the civillian markets from this challenge.

It looks like it won't be long till the good guys have robitic warrior sentinels to send at the enimies of freedom. And perhaps it won't be too long before our highway sysytem is completely under the controll of artificial intelligence thereby drastically reducing the 44,000 a year death toll on American highways.

New and Improved

2005-10-08T13:02:00.000-04:00

Welcome to the more graphical, customized, and aesthetically pleasing Event Horizon. My new Logo was designed by my creative and gifted brother Clayton Glasser. If you think its as cool as I do let him know in the comments.

Freedom of the Net

2005-10-07T12:11:00.000-04:00

I just came across this piece of commentary from a reader over at slashdot and thought it was worth sharing as I am an in complete agreement with the writer.

It really peeves me when we add laws on top of laws rather than repealing bad ones and drafting new ones to cover changes. Innovation has occurred for thousands of years without copyright or patent protection. Free use wasn't even a phrase until we started to see tyrannical laws that abuse basic rights, inherent to all humans regardless of what their governments say or do.

Whatever movement is made in the law books, nothing will matter. The Internet combines the wishes of billions, disregarding every law. Funny thing is, the Internet really lets the free market shine without trampling on the basic human rights.

The Net won't murder, won't rape, won't rob from your home or incur taxes you don't want to pay. It won't restrict your right to speak freely, it won't take your guns away, it won't harbor troops in your home.

As more people embrace the Net, more will use the rights they were born with. More will commit legal crimes that are morally acceptable.

In the long run, maybe we'll see laws that protect life, liberal and property rights rather than laws controlling thought or non-violent actions.

Do bloggers worry about copyright? Do musicians on purevolume worry? Do researchers posting their theses care?

Everything I dream of in my free market world is coming true online, and no law is stopping it. Boucher's bill won't do jack. Repeal copyright and you'll see more innovation than ever.

Why release good music freely? Fans may pay you for more, or a production company might hire you to write something for them, or you might gain customers for your live shows, or you might get people to your site to gain AdSense revenue. Copyright won't protect your income-via-monopoly much longer.

Unfortunantly I'm not sure who to give credit to here but you can see the original here.
Update: Also check out this pos t over at worldchanging about some predictions that founder of wikipedia Jimmy Wales made about the future of free culture.

Against the Enemies of the Compendium of all Human Knowledge

2005-10-06T12:05:00.000-04:00

Lately the controversy surrounding Google’s attempt to make a searchable compendium of all human knowledge has been in the news quite a bit. The controversy is coming from book publishers who are threatening to sue based on alleged copyright law violations.

I think this is an absolute shame. Are these laws in place for the good of the people of planet Earth or are they there to foster wealth in outmoded inefficient business models. Let us ask ourselves what the impact of a fully stocked and searchable compendium of human knowledge would do. I believe that it could very well super-charge the global economy by providing a catalysts for unprecedented collaboration in the sciences and humanities

Folks this idea is not an entirely new one. Over two thousand years ago the scholars of the Hellenic empire had the sagacity to collect every known work of science and literature that Alexander’s conquering armies could find and place them in one location at the Library of Alexandria where scholars from all over the known world could travel and collaborate scientifically. This same idea was upheld by monks during the dark ages that guarded the writings of Plato and Ptolemy and Hypocrites etc. Later as the middle ages progressed these collections that were preserved became the foundation of the University system that survives to this day.

Imagine if you went to university and you had to pay every time you checked out a book from the library. How much would you learn? What if public libraries charged a fee? Where would our civilization be with out the idea of the free dissemination of knowledge?

As Francis Bacon so keenly pointed out “knowledge is power” and I will add to that that any society which controls the distribution of information according to who can afford it will ultimately be a stratified and divided society.

Perhaps I’m missing something here but it makes legal sense to me that if you barrow a book from a digital library with a contractual agreement that that digital record be destroyed after a certain period of time then what you are offering is no different than any other library. Of course this makes it easy for people to break the law but that doesn’t make the library a criminal institution.

I for one am rooting for Google.

Peak Oil, Web 2.0, and Economic Efficiency

2005-10-05T12:44:00.000-04:00

Today Glenn Reynolds posted an article over at Tech Central Station on methods of conserving energy in the twenty-first century. This post contained a lot of good thoughts that I wanted to add to and elaborated on.

The article focuses on how recent advances with the internet means that a lot of work and shopping can be done from home which would save on the consumption of gas by commuters. This is an excellent point, but what I find really fascinating is the radical impact that such changes would make on the U.S. (and Global) economy as a whole if such practices were to be adopted on a wide scale.

The way labor, service, and commerce is done in America is rapidly becoming archaic and inefficient. As the World Wide Web evolves from a simple communication platform into something more like the central nervous system of the global economy the more necessary innovation, in terms of how labor is most efficiently used by companies, becomes. Of course if the markets are left alone this problem will take care of itself. Those companies which are the most progressive in terms being able to decentralize the corporate structure to allow for a labor force that is the smallest and most efficient will end up as economic powerhouses while those companies that fail to read the writing on the wall and continue to use outdated means of organizing the effectiveness of their labor force will go the way of the dinosaur – and good riddance.

The end result of all this will be that a lot less energy need be expended on the production of wealth in terms of both human labor and fuel consumption. This phenomenon coupled with exponential increases in automation of production and service means that in the very near future full time jobs will become very rare. This, however, is a good thing because as the average number of hours worked a week falls so to will the average cost of goods and services. What this means in final summary is that we will need to work less yet still be able to create greater and greater amounts of wealth, and what’s more, with all of our free time and wealth we will be able to engage in activities which are good for society over all (i.e. build wealth) for no more incentive than the pleasure of actualizing the potential of our various talents. And all of this is the epitome of efficiency and progress.

Rocketing Toward the Future of Space

2005-10-04T11:43:00.000-04:00

Wow! Have any of you heard about this annual X-prize cup and the new rocket racing league? I just now read about it and I am really excited. Apparently this is a continuation of last years X-prize which I’m sure you all remember Spaceship-1 winning. Well this event is to be held every year and it is meant to really ignite a flame under the potential powder keg of the private space industry.

The event will consist of rocket planes racing on a vertical 3-D track. The plan is that these races will eventually be held all over the world at small airfields and will become a global sport resulting in technological advances in rocketry that will fuel an emerging space industry.

After last years flight of Spaceship-1 I was so excited about the prospects of a private space industry but then there seemed to be a major stall. I hadn’t heard hardly any news but speculation about what might happen down the road. Finally a concrete plan emerges.

So it would seem that we now have three distinct programs going on simultaneously: centralized government planning (NASA etc.), the space elevator, and the space tourism industry. NASA’s plans don’t excite me too much. If in 2018 we’re still trying to put men on the moon with multi-stage chemical rockets then something went terribly wrong (I guess NASA never heard of technological evolution much less exponentially accelerating evolution). The space elevator is about the coolest thing I ever heard of but we will probably have to wait at least a decade before we see construction begin. For the present that leaves the private space industry as our greatest hope for actual real progress that is unhindered by centralized government planning. I expect this emerging private industry will unleash the most powerful force on earth, which is the triad of Science, Capitalism, and Democracy – a.k.a the American Way.

Flash Memory Revolution?

2005-10-03T14:58:00.000-04:00

" Flash memory technology is seeing the kinds of rapid improvements we used to associate only with microprocessor chips. ''We've been doubling the density every year for the last six years now," said Jon Kang, senior vice president for memory technical marketing at Samsung Semiconductor, one of the world's top flash makers."

"More chip density means more storage capacity at a lower price. It means that flash memory is finally cheap enough to fight back against super-small hard drives, which had come to dominate the market for portable music players. And someday, flash might be cheap enough to replace hard drives in more substantial markets, like laptop computers."

"Flash-based devices store content on a chip, which unlike a hard drive contains no movable parts. This means flash players use less battery power -- 30 times less --than hard-drive players, as well as being much smaller and extremely durable," Bruno writes. "The trade-off is that flash memory chips have a limited storage capacity and a higher price than their hard-drive counterparts, which boast 10 times the capacity at half the cost. But flash costs are dropping dramatically. According to semiconductor research firm iSuppli, the price-per-megabyte cost for flash memory has fallen 56 percent in the last year. The firm projects the price will fall an additional 47 percent by next year and then another 33 percent by 2007."

Yet more evidence of ubiquitous computation. If in the next four years or so everyone in the developed world is going to be able to practice ubiquitous computation they are going to need a device that is very small, hard to break, consumes little energy, yet is able to store large amounts of information and process that information at very high speeds.

Well it looks as if the exponential increases in the efficiencies of information storage as demonstrated recently in flash memory advances will be able to solve a big part of that equation.

Flash memory is currently much more expensive than hard-drives but that will know doubt change in the near future. Already flash memory is encroaching on the micro-hard-drive business sector as is evidenced by the recently introduced i-pod nano. Soon all ‘smart-phones’, ‘pocket PCs’, etc. will become much more powerful because they will be able to store at least ten gigs of memory without the necessity of a greater power-source, larger space, or worries about fragility. This will enable them to become very powerful tools, allowing them to store thousands of e-books, music, video, programs for navigation and business, etc.

Ubiquitous Computation

2005-10-02T14:57:00.000-04:00

The age of ubiquitous computation is just around the corner. For those of you who do not know what ubiquitous computation is let me explain: it is the point at which the content of the internet and an ultra-personal computer are always at hand so as to easily provide you with just about any information you might need no matter where you are or what you might be doing.

We are still probably about three or four years away from attaining this state in the developed world and probably about ten year from attaining this state on the entire planet. The reason I believe that we are so close to realizing a state of ubiquitous computation is because of the serious progress being made with three technologies necessary for achieving this state. These three technologies are:

1. Ubiquitous broadband Wi-Fi

2. Affordable hand-held devices with powers comparable to today’s desktops

3. The widespread proliferation of extremely inexpensive computers for the developing world.

I believe that this very near future scenario of ubiquitous computation represents the next serious land mark in the exponential acceleration of technology which will serve as a global catalyst for radical changes in everything from business models to systems of government and warfare.

Is "Intelligent Design" Really Science?

2005-10-01T00:28:00.000-04:00

I have been following the recent articles in the news about the debate in the courts between intelligent design and evolution and it is driving me crazy to see that so many who think that they are well informed are actually utterly and completely ignorant. Now I just want to point out in the beginning that I am a neo-Darwinist who believes that the universe is about sixteen billion years old and I also think that the hypothesis of intelligent design is legitimate science. How can that be!? Isn’t intelligent design just another label for old school biblical creationism?

That is certainly the impression that you would get from the media or from talking to most Americans and there are a number of reasons why. The first and biggest reason is that for the most part the only people going around supporting the hypothesis of intelligent design are religious fundamentalist who have no idea what the theory actually means except that they think it means evolution is wrong. And in turn most serious evolutionists become alarmed and think that they must man their battle stations to defend the minds of the youth of America from the encroaching irrationalism of religious fundamentalism.

From this perspective – which seems to be one shared by almost everyone – it seems obvious that the debate between ID and evolution is the same old debate that has been going on between science and religion since the time of Galileo. But wait! The whole reason I’m writing this post is to attempt to change your perspective. Do not let religious fundamentalism and simple minded scientism set up a false dichotomy for you.

The truth of the matter is that ID is primarily a metaphysical theory about the creation and ontology of information. The man most responsible for this theory is a well respected philosopher and mathematician named William Dembski. Essentially the theory boils down to the idea that modern mathematics is able to define in very precise terms what is and what is not information and that all real information is ultimately the result of intelligence. (see his paper)

So the real significance of the theory is not whether or not evolution is correct. Clearly evolution is the product of the laws of this universe just as a highly advanced program can be created through the evolutionary process of a genetic algorithm. The real significance of ID is that it makes ‘Mind’ ontologically prior to ‘Matter’. This however is nothing new. For years now the greatest minds in science have been telling us that the most appropriate way for us to understand physics is as an informational process – just check out Steven Wolfram’s “A New Kind of Science”.

Well I’ll wrap up my ranting. I just wish people would stop thinking about scientific theories as political factions. Read Dembski’s paper and think about it and you’ll see that the only thing ID threatens is the materialist world view not science or Darwinism and then you can join me in wondering why everyone is so afraid of it.

Super Health and the Technology of Nutrition

2005-09-30T11:29:00.000-04:00

Recently I've been giving some thought to the slow but sure evolution of the science of nutrition and what it means for us at this nascent beginning of the biotech revolution. So here is a little bit of where my thinking has been on the topic.
pre-civilized humanity must have known very little about what constituted an optimal diet yet after several hundred thousand years of natural selection it must have reached some equilibrium with it's environment wherein the nutrients that it needed for survival could be obtained easily enough and the methods by which those nutrients were obtained could be obtained in a manner which was sustainable to some degree.
Now enter the agricultural/urbanization revolution. At this point humanity has sacrificed the wide range of nutrition available to its hunter-gatherer predecessors so that it can remain stationary for long enough to branch off into specialization. This requires the cultivation of a narrow range of crops - usually some sort of grain. So for the next ten thousand years (including the present) the principle ingredient in humanity's diet remains some sort of cultivated carbohydrate, ex. corn, wheat, potato, ect. which was not a part of the diet that natural selection optimized humanity for during the several hundred thousand years of hunting and gathering.
Now enter the modern era. Its only been but very recently, and only in the most wealthy nations that we can begin to stop worrying about where are next meal will come from and begin asking ourselves just exactly what is the optimal diet for humans. And I don't just mean what exactly we should be eating to avoid obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. What I mean is precisely what combination of macro and micro nutrients should be consumed and in what combination, quantity, and times in order to achieve the greatest possible level of health given our current genetic programming.
It has hardly been possible to even attempt something like this till but recently because of the dismal state of medical and biological science and because of the relative lack of wealth on this planet. However I predict that over the next five years we will see an explosion in the "nutraceutical" business as more and more people wake up to the fact that they can seriously alter there biological chemistry for the better by treating nutrition as a science instead of just eating whatever the more primitive part of their brains suggests to them.

2005-09-29T12:15:00.000-04:00

The Singularity is Near: a book review

I just finnished reading Kurzweil's latest book and it was loaded with insight. For those of you who arn't familiar with Ray he is one of the most preeminent inventors of our time, a respected futurist, and the author of "The Law of Accelerating Returns", which- in my opinion- will turn out to be one of the most important theories in the history of Science.
If you are familiar with Ray's work then this book really does not contain anything groundbreaking that you havn't heard before though it does contain lots of details you probably are unaware of. Essentialy the book consists of a thourough recapitulation of Kurzweil's Law (The Law of Accelerating Returns) in the first two chapters. The next two chapters go into detail about how Moore's Law will be transcended with three dimentional chips and how we will ultimately achieve processing speedes capable of emulating the functions of the human brain. Kurzweil then spends a good deal of time explaining the current state of the art concerning brain scanning technieques and argues that by 2029 we will be able to revearse engineer the human brain and hence have Turing test capable AI by that time.
In the Fith Chapter Ray returns to his well know GNR hypothesis which basically states that biotech, nanotech, and AI (genetic, nano, robotics) are all interconncted in feedback loops that fuel greater and greater acceleration of return. As Ray explaines it we will first see a boom in biotech over the next decade followed by a nanotech revolution which will together ultimately lead to the technology that will make strong AI possible. After this there is a discussion on how these technologies will affect verious aspects of human life. In chapter seven ray heads into a philosophical analysis of the hard problem of consciousness and what the ramifications will be on society when machines claim to be conscious. I found this chapter to be most interesting because it answered many questions I had about what Ray's believed concerning machine consciousness.
The last Two chapters of the book end with an analysis of the future perils we face because of technology and finally Ray answers specific criticisms and arguments leveled against him by a number of different people and camps. This last chapter is also very interesting because it really shows how much substance Ray's thinking has when up against the specious charecter of his opponents argumets.
If you are in any way interested in technological evolution, or if you desire to be an informed thinker then this book is an absolute must read.

2005-09-28T21:06:00.000-04:00

First Post

Well This is the first post of my new blog. It is also my first blog ever so bear with me as I learn the ropes and I promise to deliver some good content and commentary. There are a number of blogs out there on the subject of exponential technological acceleration and the singularity - so why another one? I hope to offer something a little bit different here primarily by asking somewhat more philosophical questions. My plan is to both report and comment on pertinent inovations as they break, but also to address the philosophical questions such new technologies raise. For instance I will be exploring questions concerning what man essentially is if he is not essentially a biological organism, or is there a theological significance inherent in the coming of the singularity. These are just examples. Some other semi-philosophical topics I wish to explore are what can be expected economically in the near future and what will be the significance of a fully automated economy etc. I am hoping to recieve a lot of reader feadback so that it I can use it to direct where to take my writing.

2005-09-28T20:27:00.000-04:00

Memetic Natural Selection and the Evolution of Information Processing Systems

Part I. From protien to neocortex

I couldn’t sleep last night and some how a conjunction of ideas began swirling around in my head so I decided to try and get some ideas down on paper. Its not the most organized piece of writing but I thought it was worth sharing.

Biological natural selection exerts its force on genes, which are units of information prescribed for the replication of biological/mechanical organisms. This force is exerted in such a way that if there arises some variation in the encoded instructions then the organism, or the organism’s kin will sometimes be more or less likely to survive. If, however, the environment which the organism adapted to changes significantly enough, the organism will not be able to adapt. This is because the only power which allows an organism to adapt to the environment at all is the selection of random variation of information within the encoded instructions for replication. This therefore necessarily gives rise to four basic different evolutionary survival strategies:

Hardiness: the ability to survive in a multitude of environmental challenges. A hardy organism should be able to eat almost anything, tolerate a wide range of temperatures, and be able to defend itself against all manner of predator or pathogens. Ex. The Great White Shark, Cock roach etc.
Rapid Replication: This strategy allows an organism to adapt to almost any environmental challenge because it replicates so fast it vastly increases the rate at which it can mutate to an environmental demand. Ex. Viruses, bacteria etc.
Rapid mobility: This strategy allows an organism to rapidly move from one environment to another so that if it is pressured by one environment it can easily move to a more congenial one. Ex. Migratory species such as birds whales etc.
Environmental Reconstruction: This is the ultimate evolutionary strategy. In all previous strategies the organism needs only the most rudimentary ability to process information and the instructions for how to process that information are preprogrammed in its genetic replication code. For this reason organisms will behave in a way prescribed by their genetic programming which only allows for a very limited range in how they may interact with their environment. However with the environmental reconstruction strategy an organism must first go through a process where natural selection slowly selects a more and more sophisticated ability to process information. We see this in nature. The more complex an organism becomes the more powerful becomes its ability to process information. As soon as an organism attains to certain level of information processing power it attains the ability to interact with the environment in novel ways without having to alter its genetic code. Ex. Elephants may warn children of a new threat. Chimpanzees may show one another a new way to find food etc. However no organism has attained to the level of environmental reconstruction as man. With the advent of man genetic natural selection finally attained to the ultimate evolutionary strategy of an organism which could replicate a powerful information processor (the human brain) genetically, but which could also rapidly transmit new information processing programs from one organism to another with out the necessity of altering the basic genetic code. For this reason this new ultimate organism could begin a new form of natural selection where the variation and selection of genetic information would become relatively unimportant because the organisms powers of information processing were already sufficient for the task at hand. What now becomes subject to the powers of natural selection is the programming of that information processor via memes.

No longer does the organism’s survival depend on genetic natural selection alone. This new organism must behave in novel ways according to the demands of the environment. And this novel behavior arises through an ability to think (process information on a very sophisticated level) thanks to the genetically received apriori schema, and the ability to reprogram the brain through learning. Learning is achieved when an organism successfully alters its behavior or understanding through processing information that was received through either the environment or another human mind. This in turn gives rise to language, worldview, science, and technology.

Part II. From Tribal Man to the World Wide Web

We have so far discussed the forces that led necessarily to organisms with powerful information processing abilities and to the ability to create, replicate, and transmit programmatic information from information processor to information processor (here to fore known as mind). Now we shall discuss how this organism went from grunting pack hunter to walking on the moon in less than 50,000 years.

I will put forth the hypothesis that genetic natural selection is the force which gave us the hardware of a super information processor – though it took 3 billion years, while memetic natural selection is the force that is still in the process of programming our inherited super computers to give us the power to accomplish maximum environmental reconstruction.

Human minds do not exist as separate individual entities but they exist as socially networked entities. The function through which they are networked is language. Therefore in order for a people to be part of a society they must share a language and the means to transmit that language. So before a mind can receive full memetic programming (join a society) it must first learn that society’s language. This happens automatically if a child is immersed in his/her society.

Now within a society there are certain norms which are core and certain others which are not. If a child is to become part of a society and survive it must receive and adopt those core memes. All societies have different core memes but almost all societies have at the absolute core mostly the same kinds of memes which consist of obedience to authority structures and the acceptance of a mythology which justifies that authority. If a person rejects these core memes he will be rejected from the society or killed. However as a society ages its many memes are replicated at an astonishing rate and certain memes are rejected or altered as they become more or less easily replicated and transmitted.

These memes that a society shares dictates the effectiveness of that society’s survival. Now there are as many societies as there are different peoples who share and are able to transmit a language. Initially these societies were small tribes consisting of a few families and later these societies grew as they were able to sustain that growth through technology (reconstructing their environment). All societies which come into contact with other societies geographically must come into competition for resources. Therefore if one society is either threatened by or needs the resources of another society they must enter into some kind of conflict. When one society comes into conflict with another society that society whose memetic structure is most efficient will either eradicate or assimilate that society’s memetic structure (culture). In this way that society with the most efficient memetic structure, i.e. whose culture has best restructured the environment, will expand and become more powerful, therefore increasing the chances of those memes’ survival. This force of memetic natural selection has caused rapid advance in technology because ultimately it is technology (which is nothing more than the power to restructure the environment) which ultimately makes one society and its memes more survivable than another.

This has resulted in the formation of states and empires which are highly organized societies. These societies have conflicted with one another on regional and later global levels. Currently the planet is in the state of creating a single society (globalization). The result of this is that a particular core of memes has dominated and spread. The rate of memtic replication and transmission has increased hyperbolically with the increase in communication and information technology. The result is one society. We have defined a society as a group of people sharing a language and a means to transmit that language along with a core memtic structure. This has been, in large part, achieved. The authority structure is based on universal human rights and the consent of the governed. The core mythology which must be accepted to support this structure is science and rational thought. These memes have spread to some degree to all peoples and have resulted in one society organized around the most efficient core memetic structures through a world wide web of communication. At this juncture in history we are nearly at the end of zero sum memetic competition and stand poised for a new economic paradigm shift based on non-zero sum cooperation. It is at this stage that rational self-interest and love for thy neighbor become, more and more, one and the same.

Any how I just thought this might spark some thought out there. Its nothing particularly new but its how I came to put together a couple of ideas in my mind. Hope you’re able to get something out of it.