Monthly Archives: October 2005

Lexicon for the Singularity – Aware

Thanks to the new Kurzweil book, the terms Singularitarian and Singularitarianism are being introduced to many in the general reading public. And maybe that’s not such a good thing. Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for getting those ideas out there. I’m just not sure the words are right.

My co-bloggers and I have been talking about this for a while, and we’ve decided that it’s time to go public with our objections. We’re not sure thos terms will “sell” to the general public.

Unfortunately, I think the two terms in question are deficient in what I’m going to call memetic resonance. The syllables are one problem. One of the great things about most of those who are currently Singularity-aware is that they are academics and other geeks* who have no problem at all with 7- and 10- syllable words. In fact, let’s face it — they prefer those kinds of words. But terminology that works for a devoted core of geeks might not work for the rest of the world.

Putting the syllabic objections aside, these words sound like religious terms. The two terms that come to mind when I think of “–arians” and “–arianism” are Presbyterians/Presbyterianism (which I realize has a slightly different suffix) and Unitarian/Unitarianism. If I push it, I can dredge up “Rotarian,” which is not much help, as well as “antidisestablishmentarianism” — a word even longer than Singularitarianism, which is also related to the subject of religion.

Of course, we aren’t just about the problem, here. We have some thoughts on replacements for those terms.

Stephen suggests that any of the following terms might be good substitutes:

Transhumanist
Extropian
Speculist (excellent suggestion!)

Virginia Postrel’s term “dynamist” might be added to that list as well. Unfortunately, worthy as each of these terms might be — and applicable as they might be to most Singularitarians — they are not Singularity-specific. Plus, there are transhumanists and extropians who don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the Singularity. Dynamist is more of a political term. And speculists have a wide range of interests — the Singularity being just one of them.

So let’s take a step back and see what these two terms are telling us and then work it from there.

First off, “Singularitarian.” Who or what are Singularitarians? In his seminal essay on the subject, Eliezer Yudkowsky explained it thusly:

Singularitarians are the partisans of the Singularity.

A Singularitarian is someone who believes that technologically creating a greater-than-human intelligence is desirable, and who works to that end.

A Singularitarian is advocate, agent, defender, and friend of the future known as the Singularity.

Okay, so we’ve got this partisan, this friend of the future, working towards a positive end. Great stuff. Such a role deserves a name that sounds active and strong.

How about…Spiker?

(Taking my inspiration from this book, of course.)

Maybe it sounds a little strange at first, but try it out.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate your concerns about the environment. In fact, I share them. I just think solutions to these problems lie along a path different from what you’re recommending. You see, I’m a Spiker.

Yes, I’ve read that book. The author is quite progressive in her thinking, but she’s hardly what I would call a Spiker.

Michael Anissimov? Oh, yeah. That guy’s a Spiker. Big time. Christine Peterson? Spiker. John Smart? Spiker. Ray Kurzweil? Ray Kurzweil? What, are you kidding? Why don’t you just ask whether Damien Broderick is a Spiker? Of course Kurzweil’s a Spiker. He’s like…the Spiker.

See how easily it flows? It’s got that kick to it, like “hacker” or “blogger” or “trekker.” A Spiker is somebody who does something. A Spiker is somebody who believes something. A Spiker is part of a distinct, easy to recognize group.

As for Singularitarianism, I believe that’s what’s needed is several terms to include several different approaches to the Singularity. Of course, we can still keep Singularitarian as the formal, correct term for Spiker and Singularitarianism as the formal, correct term for the accompanying belief system. But not everyone who is aware of the Singularity is a Spiker. Not everybody is “for it.”

I therefore recommend the following terms and abbreviations, either as placeholders or descriptors for the terms we need to develop or as the terms themselves if they work:

Abbreviation

Full Term

Description

ACO

Accelerating Change Optimism

Singularitarianism. The philosophy
of Spikers.

ACP

Accelerating Change Pessimism

A philosophy articulated by Bill Joy in his essay, Why
the Future Doesn’t Need Us.

ACS

Accelerating Change Skepticism

The idea that there is less to coming dramatic change than meets
the eye. Advocated by Cullen
Murphy, among others.

ACU

Accelerating Change Uncertainty

Not knowing what to make of the evidence for the coming Singularity.
A position we’ll be hearing a lot more from in the weeks and months to
come.

With this system, we have a set of terms that covers every possibility but one — “never heard of it.” (We could add ACI for Accelerating Change Ignorant, I suppose.) This is a technical classification scheme, which will appeal to geeks, and it’s a set of easy to pick up and throw around three-letter abbreviations, which I believe encompasses the aforementioned (and much needed) memetic resonance.

I want to give honorable mention, here, to Mike’s contribution to the discussion with his term to describe what I call the ACS (accelerating change skeptical) philosophy:

Prognostic Continuitarian

You have to love that. I explained to Mike that, from a memetic resonance standpoint, I doubt we’ll get any dance crazes going talking like that. However, it is a much more precise term than the one I have been using up to now — buzzkill — which applies to a lot of behavior and situations that have nothing to do with the Singularity.

In my first iteration, the stem for these terms was SA, for Singularity Aware (thus excluding the “never heard of it” category by definition), but I didn’t like the abbreviation for Singularity Aware Pessimism — SAP. For one thing, it’s the name of a software company. For another, it’s an acronym, where the others are abbreviations. Yet another, the word it spells out means “stupid person.” We’re only here to classify, not to judge.

* Just so there is no misunderstanding. The term is used descriptively, not perjoratively. Everybody whose name is on the masthead of this blog is a geek…proudly. Geek is good.

Meet the Designer

In the latest newsletter of the Accelerating Studies Foundation, John Smart offers up not so much a defense of Intelligent Design as a critique of the reductionist approach that many strict evolutionists take to the argument. Smart writes:

While a significant fraction of ID is unfortunately driven by religious rather than scientific motives, painting all of these meta-Darwinian models as creationist just isn’t credible. ID contains a wide spectrum of perspectives, and the best of these elegantly expose the limitations of conventional Darwinism as a theory of all macroscopic biological change. The better theories can’t be mislabeled as arguments for an intelligent designer, but instead provide powerful evidence for developmental processes of change where evolution provides only the dominant mechanism, while the “genes” (starting conditions) of our universe, and the environment in which it is embedded, including its unique physical laws, also determine long range outcomes…

In the simplest and most biological of these cosmological models, our universe’s genes self-organized, through many successive cycles in the multiverse, to produce the life-friendly and intelligence-friendly universe we live in today. This theory of intelligent self-organized design proposes that, analogous to living ecosystems, our universe’s “genes, organisms, and environment” encode deep developmental intelligence on a macroscopic scale, while they use primarily evolutionary and chaotic mechanisms to unfold that intelligence on the scale that we normally observe it. Evo-devo, whether applied to biology or the universe, makes clear the shortcomings of evolution-only models of change and does so without the need to posit any self-aware, embodied designer that is distinct from the universe itself. Truth is often stranger than we imagine.”

Meanwhile, blogger Micah Glasser of the new and very interesting Event Horizon directs us towards this paper by William Dembski which offers up an argument for Intelligent Design based on information theory. Dembski describes something called “complex specified information” which he asserts can only be the result of intelligence. The arguments he offers that this must be the case strike me as being pretty weak (or maybe I’m not following them); to me it seems that Dembski presents nothing more than a rehash of the watchmaker analogy dressed up in information theory language.

But setting that objection aside, Dembski’s complex specified information might provide an interesting synthesis of information theory and the theory that Smart outlines above. From an evo-devo standpoint we could assert that complex specified information at one level must (may?) be a reflection of complex specified information at a higher level. So the CSI* inherent in biology is accounted for not by an intelligent creator but rather by the CSI found in the developmental pattern encoded at the level of the universe.

This leaves only one question: where is the developmental pattern that the universe is following encoded? Obviously, that CSI is encoded somewhere in Smart’s “multiverse,” which would then also be following a developmental pattern encoded at an even higher level.

So this obviously raises a problem. It may be turtles all the way down, but it looks like it’s CSI all the way up: an infinite progression of levels for the encoding of information. Failing that, at some point we will have to come face to face either with an intelligent designer requiring no pre-encoded developmental pattern (let’s call him “God” for short) or a developmental pattern which exists independently of any higher encoding level or that is somehow taking it’s cues from one of the lower levels.

Like the man said, truth is often stranger than we imagine. If the pattern of encoding that allows everything to exist somehow turns back on itself, that could potentially mean that even we — or our descendants — are the ultimate source of encoding the universe/multiverse/CSI-all-the-way-up-structure-of-reality.

To paraphrase Pogo: perhaps we have met the intelligent designer, and it is us.

* Sorry, I had to give in and start using Dembski’s abbreviation; if anybody from CBS is reading this, I have an idea for you — CSI: Cosmology. Maybe you could get, say, Jimmy Smits in a Carl Sagan kind of a role.

UPDATE FROM STEPHEN:

Tech Central Station has two new articles on ID this week:

  • Descent of Man in Dover

    Sallie Baliunas argues that either ID proponents are talking about space aliens (and there’s no evidence that aliens planted life on Earth) or, more likely, they are talking about a Supernatural Designer. If so, that by definition is beyond the bounds of science and has no place in the science classroom.

  • Why Intelligent Design Is Going to Win

    Douglas Kern reminds us that those who reproduce (fertile Red Staters) also get to say what ideas are passed on to the next generation. And if a spoon fulla’ ID helps the Darwin go down, who’s hurt?

Kentucky Fried Jeepin'

In the interests of fuel economy, I’ve been thinking about trading in my 2002 Jeep Liberty for one of the new diesel models. But now this article in The Smithsonian (via SciTech Daily) really has me thinking. Consider these two use-cases:

Every few weeks, Etta Kantor goes to a Chinese restaurant and fills a couple of five-gallon pails with used cooking oil. Back in her garage, the 59-year-old philanthropist and grandmother strains it through a cloth filter and then pours it into a custom-made second fuel tank in her 2003 Volkswagen Jetta diesel station wagon. Once the car is warmed up, she flips a fuel toggle on the dashboard to switch to the vegetable oil. Wherever she drives, she’s trailed by the appetizing odor of egg rolls.

Sean Parks of Davis, California, collects his cooking oil from a fish-and-chips restaurant and a corn-dog shop. He purifies it chemically in a 40-gallon reactor that he built himself for about $200. The processed oil can be used even when his car’s engine is cold, at a cost of about 70 cents a gallon. Parks, 30, a geographer for the U.S. Forest Service, makes enough processed oil to fuel his family’s two cars.

The article goes on to point out that the grease running through all the deep fryers in all the restaurants and fast food joints in the US could be used to make about 100 million gallons of biodiesel fuel annually, which could meet about 5% of our national fuel consumption needs.

kfcjeep.jpg

What’s most impressive to me about the adoption of this energy source is that apparently some folks don’t feel the need to wait for biodiesel to be offered at their neighborhood Shell station before they start using it. They’re adjusting their vehicles and finding the fuel themselves.

The article concludes:

Grass-roots fans aren’t waiting. Kantor, who paid $1,400 to outfit her VW diesel with a second fuel tank, says she gets nearly 200 miles per petrodiesel gallon. “This is not about money,” says Kantor, who speaks at schools about protecting the environment. “I’m doing this to set an example.”

Well, 200 MPG sounds pretty darn good. I doubt a modified Jeep would be quite as fuel efficient as a modified Jetta, but still.
Even at 150 miles per gallon, that would be 8-9 times better than the mileage I’m currently getting. And there’s a hot wings place just right up the street (with a McDonald’s and a Popeye’s along the way.)

Hmmmm…….

UPDATE: Well, our friends J Random American and Engineer Poet didn’t waste much time in totally raining on my hot-wings-Jeep parade (see comments, below.) However, J’s cat diesel idea has me thinking that maybe we shouldn’t just be thinking of running the Jeep on chicken grease. The chickens themselves would appear to be a good option. Of course, if we really want to get a meme going, maybe we should crunch the numbers on how much fuel we could get from puppies. I can think of at least one prominent blogger who might be intrigued.

On a more serious note, J points out some very real economy of scale objections to these gimmicky fuel sources. Read the whole thing.

Kentucky Fried Jeepin’

In the interests of fuel economy, I’ve been thinking about trading in my 2002 Jeep Liberty for one of the new diesel models. But now this article in The Smithsonian (via SciTech Daily) really has me thinking. Consider these two use-cases:

Every few weeks, Etta Kantor goes to a Chinese restaurant and fills a couple of five-gallon pails with used cooking oil. Back in her garage, the 59-year-old philanthropist and grandmother strains it through a cloth filter and then pours it into a custom-made second fuel tank in her 2003 Volkswagen Jetta diesel station wagon. Once the car is warmed up, she flips a fuel toggle on the dashboard to switch to the vegetable oil. Wherever she drives, she’s trailed by the appetizing odor of egg rolls.

Sean Parks of Davis, California, collects his cooking oil from a fish-and-chips restaurant and a corn-dog shop. He purifies it chemically in a 40-gallon reactor that he built himself for about $200. The processed oil can be used even when his car’s engine is cold, at a cost of about 70 cents a gallon. Parks, 30, a geographer for the U.S. Forest Service, makes enough processed oil to fuel his family’s two cars.

The article goes on to point out that the grease running through all the deep fryers in all the restaurants and fast food joints in the US could be used to make about 100 million gallons of biodiesel fuel annually, which could meet about 5% of our national fuel consumption needs.

kfcjeep.jpg

What’s most impressive to me about the adoption of this energy source is that apparently some folks don’t feel the need to wait for biodiesel to be offered at their neighborhood Shell station before they start using it. They’re adjusting their vehicles and finding the fuel themselves.

The article concludes:

Grass-roots fans aren’t waiting. Kantor, who paid $1,400 to outfit her VW diesel with a second fuel tank, says she gets nearly 200 miles per petrodiesel gallon. “This is not about money,” says Kantor, who speaks at schools about protecting the environment. “I’m doing this to set an example.”

Well, 200 MPG sounds pretty darn good. I doubt a modified Jeep would be quite as fuel efficient as a modified Jetta, but still.
Even at 150 miles per gallon, that would be 8-9 times better than the mileage I’m currently getting. And there’s a hot wings place just right up the street (with a McDonald’s and a Popeye’s along the way.)

Hmmmm…….

UPDATE: Well, our friends J Random American and Engineer Poet didn’t waste much time in totally raining on my hot-wings-Jeep parade (see comments, below.) However, J’s cat diesel idea has me thinking that maybe we shouldn’t just be thinking of running the Jeep on chicken grease. The chickens themselves would appear to be a good option. Of course, if we really want to get a meme going, maybe we should crunch the numbers on how much fuel we could get from puppies. I can think of at least one prominent blogger who might be intrigued.

On a more serious note, J points out some very real economy of scale objections to these gimmicky fuel sources. Read the whole thing.

Roomba to Rambo to Mike Brady

Via GeekPress, the company that brought us Roomba — the cute, almost cuddly household cleaning robot — is moving into some surprising new territory:

IRobot Corp. of Burlington, famous for its robotic vacuum cleaners, has teamed up with researchers at Boston University to develop a military robot capable of spotting enemy snipers.IRobot demonstrated the system, called REDOWL (for Robot Enhanced Detection Outpost with Lasers), at the Association of the United States Army convention in Washington yesterday. Testers struck pieces of metal to simulate gunshots. REDOWL quickly aimed its infrared camera and laser rangefinder at the source of the noise, just as it did in tests at a Medfield gun range.

REDOWL is based on PackBot, which was the first IRobot unit to be drafted into military service. PackBot is the Ensign Redshirt of the military robot world, scouting out dangerous terrain and being the first to enter buildings that may be booby trapped.

If this REDOWL business starts to sound a little too much like the Terminator, fear not. At least not yet:

In theory, a REDOWL system could fire back at an enemy, but [deputy director of the Boston University Photonics Center Glenn] Thoren said the hardware isn’t strong enough to support the weight of a gun. Besides, he said, it would be dangerous to have a weapon-toting robot that could open fire on its own.

“You need to have a man in the loop,” he said.

I just wonder whether IRobot realizes what they’re potentially sitting on, should they start to combine some of these functions. Say you had a robot that would be the first in for any dangerous situation, that warded off bad guys, and that vacuumed. Shucks, throw in a tolerance for chick flicks and some basic childrearing skills — as well as a good-providing career like, say, architecture — and we’re well on our way to the world’s first robotic husband.

We need to watch out, fellas. It isn’t just factory jobs that can be replaced by automation.

Better All The Time #22



Dispatches from a rapidly changing, rapidly improving
world
#22
10/04/05

We’re back!

After an 11-month hiatus, Better All The Time returns to accompany the
Carnival of Tomorrow, FastForward Radio, and our day-to-day offerings aimed
at keeping you up to date on what we call the Spiral
of Progress. Sure, the news is as chock-full of horrible, depressing,
and terrifying developments as it ever was and, no, we don’t deny any of it.
Oh, wait. This is a blog. To be honest, we take issue with a fair amount of
what’s reported in the mainstream media. But that’s beside the point. The
point is this: There may be a lot of bad news. Heck, there may be even
more bad news than there used to be. But what we’re about here is the
good news, which is not only increasing, but beginning to "add
up" to point us in some wonderful new directions. Let’s have a look.

Today’s Good Stuff:

Standard Line Emerging?

Glenn Reynolds seems surprised by the enthusiastic tone of NYT’s review of The Singularity is Near, noting that Janet Maslin comes across as being less skeptical than Glenn himnself in his Wall Street Journal review.

A while back, in comments to a post that Stephen had published concerning the (then) upcoming book, I raised the following question:

Political discourse (on blogs or elsewhere) consists of about 10% actual ideas and 90% trying to make one’s own side come out on top at the expense of the opponent. On the blogs that currently deal with Singularity and related topics, that ratio is reversed. The idea is what’s important, not “winning.”

If the blogosphere in general gets ahold of the Singularity, you can expect it to become a highly contentious issue. But I can’t help but wonder — who will be “for it” and who will be “against it?”

A time of accelerating change, indeed. Look how shortsighted I was just six weeks ago. The question isn’t just what the blogosphere is going to do with news of the Singularity, a more important question is what the mainstream media will do with it.

It may be too early to say, but one throwaway line from Maslin’s review caught my attention. She writes:

In the last part of the book, he engages in one-sided batting practice with his critics. He introduces each complaint only to swat it into oblivion. By and large he is a blinkered optimist, disinclined to contemplate the dangers of what he imagines. The Manhattan Project model of pure science without ethical constraints still looms over the Singularity and its would-be miracles.

(emphasis added)

Uh oh. I wonder if we’re going to see a lot more of this sort of thing? Wait, let me rephrase that. You can bet your sweet knee of the curve that we’re going to see a lot more of this sort of thing. Count on it. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this become the official MSM (anti-science lefty) line on the Singularity.

Not to say that ethical (and safety!) constraints aren’t hugely important — they are — but the assumption that this is all going on in an atmosphere of giddy optimism is wrong. One of our favorite organizations has been at the forefront of defining what these constraints might be for more than 15 years. Other groups are devoted full-time just to issues of safety and ethical viability, both for nanotechnology and for artificial intelligence.

If Maslin’s assumption turns out to be the standard line on the Singularity taken by the MSM, and if this line is then adopted by politicians (of any stripe) we run the risk of facing public policy moves that won’t stop the Singularity — it’s questionable whether anything short of a major asteroid impact could do that — but that might see to it that the Singularity occurs elsewhere.

As I wrote in a recent entry on that subject, doing what we can to ensure that the Singularity starts in the US (or at least in the West) is not a matter of national pride. It’s a matter of making sure that it takes off in an atmosphere where the ethical and safety guidelines are a huge priority. The “we’re not ready for it; it’s too dangerous” line could turn out to be the nastiest self-fulfilling prophecy in human history.