Public Enquiry Project

THE BRILLIANT PROF BRAD DELONG LOOKS AT A POSSIBLE NEAR FUTURE.

Accelerando
Gregory Mone sells me on Charlie Stross's Accelerando: I'll buy it in hardcover. Then again, since I already have his Atrocity Archive and Iron Sunrise looking at me from across the room, not much selling was needed:

Popular Science | Is Science Fiction About to Go Blind? The starship Field Circus is racing through space on a seven-year journey to a brown dwarf three light-years from Earth and, if all goes well, a business meeting with an alien civilization from another universe. It’s around the year 2030, and there’s time to kill, so three crew members, Boris, Pierre and Su Ang, are sitting in the bar, a wood-paneled room modeled after a 300-year-old pub in Amsterdam. There’s a 16-page beer menu, but Boris has opted for a cocktail made of baby jellyfish. Pierre is angling for a sip when Donna the Journalist appears. She isn’t exactly welcome, but she sits down anyway, orders a bottle of German beer from the waiter, and asks the three if they believe in the Singularity. Ah yes, the Singularity. A very real term, although the scene above is taken from a soon-to-be-published novel, Accelerando, by British writer Charles Stross. The idea was conceived by Vernor Vinge, a computer scientist and science-fiction writer who’s now a professor emeritus at San Diego State University. We’re living through a period of unprecedented technological and scientific advances, Vinge says, and sometime soon the convergence of fields such as artificial intelligence and biotechnology will push humanity past a tipping point, ushering in a period of wrenching change. After that moment—the Singularity—the world will be as different from today’s world as this one is from the Stone Age.

Back on board the Field Circus, Donna the Journalist asks the crew members when they think the Singularity took place. “Four years ago,” Pierre suggests. Su Ang votes for 2016. But Boris, the jellyfish drinker, says the entire notion of a Singularity is silly. To him, there’s no such thing. Wait a minute, Su Ang responds. Here we are, traveling in a spaceship the size of a soda can. We’ve left our bodies behind to conserve space and energy so that the laser-sail-powered Field Circus can cruise faster. Our brains have been uploaded and are now running electronically within the tiny spaceship’s nanocomputers. The pub is “here,” along with other virtual environments, so that we don’t go into shock from sensory deprivation. “And you can tell me that the idea of a fundamental change in the human condition is nonsense?”

Accelerando is the story of three generations of a dysfunctional family living through the Singularity. What makes the novel unusual is not the size of the ship or the strange cocktails or even the sexual metaphors—a coital act culminates with the transfer of “source code”—but the fact that Stross is attempting to imagine the relatively near-term future. This is a strangely courageous act, because modern science fiction is facing a crisis of confidence. The recent crop of stories mostly take the form of fantasy (elves and wizards), alternate history (what if the Black Death had been deadlier?) and space operas about interstellar civilizations in the year 12,000 (which typically gloss over how those civilizations evolved from ours). Only a small cadre of technoprophets is attempting to extrapolate current trends and imagine what our world might look like in the next few decades. “We’re staring into a fogbank,” Stross says, “and we literally do not know where we’re going, only that we’re going there very fast.”...

However, I've never been quite sure what the "Singularity" is supposed to be--or how we are going to get there. I look forward to a future of VR games, robot factories making stuff, and lots of people making a living helping the old get around and advising the young on how to play various status and mating games. I can see how Moore's Law and nanocomputation will solve the hardware problem of making machines-that-think possible. But I cannot see how we can solve the associated firmware and software problems.

Posted by DeLong

A conversation about evolution

X said:

<>

You are correct in your musings, there is not enough time to get from algae to people in 3.5 billion years using classical natural selection. Biology researcher Stuart Kaufman makes this clear using the concept of an adaptive walk on a fitness landscape. If you take a point on a random (chaotic) fitness landscape, you will find that the adjacent points will vary wildly in value and half will be more fit and half will be less fit. Using random variation and natural selection in this environment wouldn’t get you from algae to viruses in 3.5 billion years.

The answer to the problem of people in only 3.5 billion years of evolution is a correlated fitness landscape. The massive reduction in phase space thus resulting can only be caused by as yet undiscovered natural laws that cause spontaneous organization in complex systems. There is no need for magic or theology, just more research. Many gizmos we take for granted would seem like magic to our grandparents. I’m sure we will some day understand the mechanisms of emergent properties.

X, my friend, you are much brighter than me, so I am sure that you can dream up scenarios that would be difficult for me to cope with, therefore, I strongly recommend that you get Kaufman’s book “At Home in the Universe” and I would be thrilled to continue this enquiry with you.

BTW, I think Determinism is mandatory in a Newtonian universe and impossible in a Quantum Mechanical universe.

Adrian

P.S. Do you agree that life, intelligence and God could be EPs?

Colonies in space may be only hope, says Hawking

Colonies in space may be only hope, says Hawking
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
(Filed: 16/10/2001)
THE human race is likely to be wiped out by a doomsday virus before the Millennium is out, unless we set up colonies in space, Prof Stephen Hawking warns today.
In an interview with The Telegraph, Prof Hawking, the world's best known cosmologist, says that biology, rather than physics, presents the biggest challenge to human survival.
"Although September 11 was horrible, it didn't threaten the survival of the human race, like nuclear weapons do," said the Cambridge University scientist.
"In the long term, I am more worried about biology. Nuclear weapons need large facilities, but genetic engineering can be done in a small lab. You can't regulate every lab in the world. The danger is that either by accident or design, we create a virus that destroys us.
"I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet. But I'm an optimist. We will reach out to the stars."
Current theories suggest that space travel will be tedious, using spaceships travelling slower than light.
But Prof Hawking, Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, says that a warp drive, of the kind seen in Star Trek, cannot be ruled out.
This method of space exploration and colonisation, apparently the stuff of science fiction, could be one possible escape from the human predicament.
Prof Hawking believes that genetic engineering could be used to "improve" human beings to meet the challenges of long duration space travel.
Cyborgs, humans with computers linked to their brains, will be needed to prevent intelligent computers taking over. "I think humans will have to learn to live in space," he said.

SPOOKY ACTION AT A DISTANCE

STAR TREK, HERE WE COME. SAAAD AS EINSTEIN CALLED IT WILL TAKE US TO THE STARS, NOT TO MENTION "TRANSPORTING" US WHERE EVER WE INSTALL QUANTUM MODULATORS AND DEMODULATORS.

SOON, WE'LL BE FAXING PIZZAS, HOW GREAT WILL THAT BE.

ADRIAN THE FUTURIST

Scientists Transfer Info Between Atoms

POSTED: 2:55 pm EDT June 16, 2004
UPDATED: 3:03 pm EDT June 16, 2004

In a step toward making ultra-powerful computers, scientists have transferred physical characteristics between atoms by using a phenomenon so bizarre that even Albert Einstein called it spooky.

Such "quantum teleportation" of characteristics had been demonstrated before between beams of light.

The work with atoms is "a landmark advance," H.J. Kimble of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., and S.J. van Enk of Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., declare in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

Two teams of scientists report similar results in that issue. One group was led by David J. Wineland of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., and the other by Rainer Blatt of the University of Innsbruck in Austria.

Teleportation between atoms could someday lie at the heart of powerful quantum computers, which are probably at least a decade away from development, Wineland said. Although his work moved information about atomic characteristics only a tiny fraction of an inch, that's in the ballpark for what would be needed inside a computer, he said.

His work involved transmitting characteristics between pairs of beryllium atoms, while the Austrian work used pairs of calcium atoms. Each atom's "quantum state," a complex combination of traits, was transmitted to its counterpart.

Key to the process was a phenomenon called entanglement, which Einstein derided as "spooky action at a distance" before experiments showed it was real.

Basically, researchers can use lab techniques to create a weird relationship between pairs of tiny particles. After that, the fate of one particle instantly affects the other; if one particle is made to take on a certain set of properties, the other immediately takes on identical or opposite properties, no matter how far away it is and without any apparent physical connection to the first particle.

Your dog really does understand you

AS SOMEONE WHO TALKS TO HIS PET GOLDFISH, THIS IS NO SURPRISE TO ME.

ADRIAN

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040610/D8344JGO2.html

Research Shows Dogs Understand Language

Jun 10, 7:45 AM (ET)

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID

(AP) Rico, a dog with a "vocabulary" of nearly 200 words, can learn the names of unfamiliar toys after...
Full Image

WASHINGTON (AP) - As many a dog owner will attest, our furry friends are listening. Now, for the doubters, there is scientific proof they understand much of what they hear.

German researchers have found a border collie named Rico who understands more than 200 words and can learn new ones as quickly as many children.

Patti Strand, an American Kennel Club board member, called the report "good news for those of us who talk to our dogs."

"Like parents of toddlers, we learned long ago the importance of spelling key words like bath, pill or vet when speaking in front of our dogs," Strand said. "Thanks to the researchers who've proven that people who talk to their dogs are cutting-edge communicators, not just a bunch of eccentrics."

The researchers found that Rico knows the names of dozens of play toys and can find the one called for by his owner. That is a vocabulary size about the same as apes, dolphins and parrots trained to understand words, the researchers say.

Rico can even take the next step, figuring out what a new word means.

The researchers put several known toys in a room along with one that Rico had not seen before. From a different room, Rico's owner asked him to fetch a toy, using a name for the toy the dog had never heard.

The border collie, a breed known primarily for its herding ability, was able to go to the room with the toys and, seven times out of 10, bring back the one he had not seen before. The dog seemingly understood that because he knew the names of all the other toys, the new one must be the one with the unfamiliar name.

"Apparently he was able to link the novel word to the novel item based on exclusion learning, either because he knew that the familiar items already had names or because they were not novel," said the researchers, led by Julia Fischer of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

A month later, he still remembered the name of that new toy three out of six times, even without having seen it since that first test. That is a rate the scientists said was equivalent to that of a 3-year-old.

Rico's learning ability may indicate that some parts of speech comprehension developed separately from human speech, the scientists said.

"You don't have to be able to talk to understand a lot," Fischer said. The team noted that dogs have evolved with humans and have been selected for their ability to respond to the communications of people.

Katrina Kelner, Science's deputy editor for life sciences, said "such fast, one-trial learning in dogs is remarkable. This ability suggests that the brain structures that support this kind of learning are not unique to humans and may have formed the evolutionary basis of some of the advanced language abilities of humans."

Perhaps, although Paul Bloom of Yale University urges caution.

"Children can understand words used in a range of contexts. Rico's understanding is manifested in his fetching behavior," Bloom writes in a commentary, also in Science.

Bloom calls for further experiments to answer several questions: Can Rico learn a word for something other than a small object to be fetched? Can he display knowledge of a word in some way other than fetching? Can he follow an instruction not to fetch something?

Fischer and her colleagues are still working with Rico to see if he can understand requests to put toys in boxes or to bring them to certain people. Rico was born in December 1994 and lives with his owners. He was tested at home.

Funding for this research was provided in part by the German Research Foundation.

My old MIT buddy Herbie wants me to post this..

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.06/view.html?pg=4

Suicide by Pseudoscience
By Bruce Sterling Previous: You'll Never Get Cable à la Carte | Next: Antitrust Smackdown

VIEW
Is nanotech safe, or will gray goo do us all in?

The Union of Concerned Scientists in a February report pointed out something the science press has known for years: The Bush administration has no respect for science. Ideologues prefer to make up the laws of nature as they go.

Presidential science adviser John Marburger complained that the UCS's account sounded like a "conspiracy theory report." That's because it is one. As the report amply documents, the Bush administration has systematically manipulated scientific inquiry into climate change, forest management, lead and mercury contamination, and a host of other issues. Even as Marburger addressed his critics, the administration purged two advocates of stem-cell research from the President's Council on Bioethics.

When politicians dictate science, government becomes entangled in its own deceptions, and eventually the social order decays in a compost of lies. Society, having abandoned the scientific method, loses its empirical referent, and truth becomes relative. This is a serious affliction known as Lysenkoism.

Trofim Lysenko was Joseph Stalin's top stooge in Soviet agricultural science, a field that was mercilessly politicized by fanatics. His specialty was inventing nutty schemes - things like stimulating the evolution of trees by overcrowding them to get them to cooperate, as though they were communist minions. This totalitarian huckster spent his whole career promising exciting results and bringing about only disaster. But the party never judged itself on results, so he always got a free pass.

Politics without objective, honest measurement of results is a deadly short circuit. It means living a life of sterile claptrap, lacquering over failure after intellectual failure with thickening layers of partisan abuse. Charlatans like Lysenko can't clarify serious, grown-up problems that they themselves don't understand.

State-sponsored pseudoscience always fails, but slowly, like a wheat field choked with weeds. (This is a particularly apt comparison, because Lysenko claimed that the weeds infesting Soviet wheat fields had evolved from the wheat itself.) It fails in predictable ways, and these are the very ways in which the Bush science policy is going to fail.

The rot begins to set in when honest local institutions, appalled by high-level misdeeds, denounce federal policy as corrupt and corrupting, just as the UCS has done. There will be much more of this: congressional investigations, high-minded committees. Government officials will temporize by getting scientists to "compromise" and "split the difference" between actual science and partisan jiggery-pokery. This will fail because science just isn't politics. You can't legislate that E=mc21¼2.

Before long, the damage will spread beyond our borders. International scientific bodies will treat American scientists as pariahs. This process has already begun in bioethics, meteorology, agriculture, nuclear science, and medicine, but doubts will spread to "American science" generally. (In Lysenko's heyday, when scientists abroad came across a halfway-decent Soviet scientist, they would charitably offer to publish his books offshore, then maybe help him defect to someplace where he could get serious work done.)

Meanwhile, gaps will open between research establishments in the US and other countries, much like the one that now yawns between American and Korean stem-cell producers. US science will come to have a stodgy, old-fashioned, commissar-style inability to think and act freely. Yankee initiative and ingenuity will bow to bulging pie-in-the-sky superprojects like unproven antimissile systems, hot-air broadband initiatives, and swashbuckling moon shots.

Eventually the whole vast bubble will burst of its own fairy-tale unreality. Few will be held accountable. The quackeries will be purged, forgotten, hushed up. Except, that is, for the lasting effect on the health, morale, and self-esteem of the American people.

Trofim Lysenko was a funny case. He had the authority to reduce a major scientific-research power to a dismal Burkina Faso with rockets; he left behind practically no scientific achievement or discovery. As a scientist, he was a nonentity, but his menace is universal. Wherever moral panic, hasty judgment, arrogance, fear, brutal partisan ignorance, slovenly standards of research, overcentralization of authority, conspiratorial policymaking, jingoism and xenophobia, and spin-centric travesties of disinformation can flourish, Lysenko's spirit will never die.

Email Bruce Sterling at [email protected].

My friend, the thoughtful futurist, MAX MORE suggests how to face the dangers and opportunities coming in our technological future

http://www.maxmore.com/proactionary.htm

The Proactionary Principle

Version 1.0

The Proactionary Principle was authored by Max More, based in large part on Extropy Institute’s Vital Progress Summit I, 2004 and the Keynote statements and Summit participants’ discussions. The keynote participants were Ronald Bailey, Robert A. Freitas, Jr., Aubrey de Grey, Ray Kurzweil, Max More, Christine Peterson, Michael Shapiro, Gregory Stock, Natasha Vita-More, Roy Walford. The Summit was also supported by Marvin Minsky, Lee Silver, Michael West and by everyone who contributed their time and intelligence to the proceedings.

The Proactionary Principle

People’s freedom to innovate technologically is highly valuable, even critical, to humanity. This implies several imperatives when restrictive measures are proposed: Assess risks and opportunities according to available science, not popular perception. Account for both the costs of the restrictions themselves, and those of opportunities foregone. Favor measures that are proportionate to the probability and magnitude of impacts, and that have a high expectation value. Protect people’s freedom to experiment, innovate, and progress.

Unpacking the Proactionary Principle

Looking deeper into the Principle, we arrive at these factors to take into account:

People’s freedom to innovate technologically is valuable to humanity. The burden of proof therefore belongs to those who propose restrictive measures. All proposed measures should be closely scrutinized.
Evaluate risk according to available science, not popular perception, and allow for common reasoning biases.
Give precedence to ameliorating known and proven threats to human health and environmental quality over acting against hypothetical risks.
Treat technological risks on the same basis as natural risks; avoid underweighting natural risks and overweighting human-technological risks. Fully account for the benefits of technological advances.
Estimate the lost opportunities of abandoning a technology, and take into account the costs and risks of substituting other credible options, carefully considering widely distributed effects and follow-on effects.
Consider restrictive measures only if the potential impact of an activity has both significant probability and severity. In such cases, if the activity also generates benefits, discount the impacts according to the feasibility of adapting to the adverse effects. If measures to limit technological advance do appear justified, ensure that the extent of those measures is proportionate to the extent of the probable effects.
When choosing among measures to restrict technological innovation, prioritize decision criteria as follows: Give priority to risks to human and other intelligent life over risks to other species; give non-lethal threats to human health priority over threats limited to the environment (within reasonable limits); give priority to immediate threats over distant threats; prefer the measure with the highest expectation value by giving priority to more certain over less certain threats, and to irreversible or persistent impacts over transient impacts...

... The Essence of the Proactionary Principle

If the precautionary principle had been widely applied in the past, technological and cultural progress would have ground to a halt. Human suffering would have persisted without relief, and life would have remained poor, nasty, brutish, and short: No chlorination and no pathogen-free water; no electricity generation or transmission; no X-rays; no travel beyond the range of walking.

Most activities involving technology will have undesired effects as well as desirable ones. Whereas the precautionary principle is often used to take an absolutist stand against an activity, the Proactionary Principle allows for handling mixed effects through compensation and remediation instead of prohibition. The Proactionary Principle recognizes that nature is not always kind, that improving our world is both natural and essential for humanity, and that stagnation is not a realistic or worthy option.

The Proactionary Principle stands for the proactive pursuit of progress. Being proactive involves not only anticipating before acting, but learning by acting. When technological progress is halted, people lose an essential freedom and the accompanying opportunities to learn through diverse experiments. We already suffer from an undeveloped capacity for rational decision making. Prohibiting technological change will only stunt that capacity further. Continuing needs to alleviate global human suffering and desires to achieve human flourishing should make obvious the folly of stifling our freedom to learn

Let a thousand flowers bloom! By all means, inspect the flowers for signs of infestation and weed as necessary. But don’t cut off the hands of those who spread the seeds of the future.

Adrian’s Quantum Theory of Space-Time

Adrian’s Quantum Theory of Space-Time

Dumb questions for smart physicists. Could Space and Time be made up of particle like entities? Could there be a relationship like T = SC2 (Time = Space multiplied by the velocity of light squared)? Could Space be Frozen Time? Could there be a family of Space particles (SPACEONS) like UP SPACEons; DOWN SPACEons; Strange SPACEons; CharmSPACEons; HYPERSPACEons; ANTISPACEons etc? (Superstring Theory postulates the subatomic particles are made up of “folded space.”)

Could there be a family of Time particles (TIMEONS) like POSITIMEons; ANTITIMEons; HYPERTIMEons etc? We could call the families of space particles and time particles ETHERONS. Could a Quantum theory of SPACETIME like this unite GENERAL RELATIVITY and QUANTUM MECHANICS? Could it be that our universe is like a particle in a MEGAVERSE of infinite dimensions and infinite size consisting of HYPERSPACEONS and HYPERTIMEONS?

Is it possible that under certain conditions (Very high density?) some of these HYPERETHERONS "phase change" into "Real" Etherons in a four-dimension singularity... Our Big Bang? Could it be that in the extreme conditions of the very early Big Bang (Planck Time) some of the Etherons phase change into quarks (real matter)?

What if the "Infinite curvature of space-time beyond the event horizon of Black Holes" is actually a series of phase changes from matter back to etherons back to hyperetherons back in the Megaverse (outside our universe) thus "RECYCLING" the product of the Big Bang from the point of view of the Megaverse?

Much like the atoms of our bodies were built in the furnaces of long dead massive stars, what if our universe is built from the "ashes" of other dead and dying universes in the Megaverse? IS THERE AN ECOLOGY OF UNIVERSES POPPING INTO EXISTENCE AND SLOWLY DYING IN THE MEGAVERSE symmetrically reusing space, time and matter?

FIRST TEST - A first step to confirming this theory is to empirically conjure up the least number of etherons of varying properties (mass) that would resolve the "dark matter problem" that currently vexes cosmologists. .

SECOND TEST - The results of the FIRST TEST will be further constrained to conform to what we know about the physics of very early Big Bang.

THIRD TEST - Now the results of the First and Second tests will be further constrained by what we know about the physics of black holes.

In Summary, could it be that “All Reality” consists of an infinite MEGAVERSE of infinite dimensions made up of various hyperetherons that under certain conditions (high pressure and heat analogs) compress their dimensions into four dimensional singularities that phase change into etherons at time zero (of the new universe), then phase change into quarks by the Planck Time which then expands to our current Universe. The matter of each Universe gradually phase changes through increasingly large black holes back into etherons to hyperetherons back in the HYPERSPACE MEGAVERSE, thus symmetrically recycling everything.

My next thoughts in this series will be the "Quantum Theory of God." Basically, each universe like ours will need to marshal its total intelligence to create its own GOD so that these intelligences will be able to survive the death of their universes.