Monthly Archives: March 2008

Before and After the Singularity

Our friend Harvey, who puts modesty aside to claim that Ed Wood himself “never made anything as terrible” as what you’re about to see, gives us a glimpse into a plausible future where crusty old guys play cards with robots — I’m wondering if the robot is some kind of in-home care-giver. We know the moment the Singularity occurs because the robot helpfully announces the fact, but what’s really interesting is what happens next. What if posthuman intelligence uses our own obnoxiousness (and I’m using that word in a fairly literal sense) against us?

Chilling.

Also, doesn’t it seem to shed some light on the scenario described here? (Warning: language.)

Adds an ironic twist to the whole “poisonous gases” thing, doesn’t it?

Plateaus of Completeness

Some interesting comments from reader Nato Welch in the discussion thread of the most recent FastForward Radio:

Take by way of example California’s recent law prohibiting employers from requiring their employees to take RFID implants. If jobs are scarce, and competition among workers necessitates taking on modifications in order to compete effectively, then a form of distributed //duress// (Dale’s term) accomplishes an effective circumvention of self-determination even where direct coercion may not.

So our commitment to morphological liberty, if it is to be practical, demands a bit more than simply enjoining direct forms of coercion, but also the creation and maintenance of societies where relinquishment of technological interventions is not only permitted, but actually practicable; not only allowed, but accommodated.

Excellent point. What Nato is describing as “morphological liberty” begins with non-coercion; it can’t end there. But where does market pressure end and out-and-out coercion begin? This is a tricky question.

Let’s step back from human augmentation and look at some more mundane forms of technological adoption. On a recent Frontier Airlines flight, I was surprised to hear the flight attendant announce that Frontier Airlines “no longer accepts cash.” Anyone wanting to use the DirecTV service or purchase a cocktail now has to use a credit card. Okay, granted, credit card “technology” is so ingrained in modern commerce — especially travel-related commerce — that the expectation that passengers on a commercial flight would have access to it seems pretty reasonable. The number of passengers who purchase their tickets via cash or check (is that even possible any more?) is no doubt vanishingly rare.

Farewell to a Great Visionary

As a science fiction writer, he was one of the big three — along with Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. He is no doubt most famous for 2001: A Space Odyssey, but my personal favorites are “The Nine Billion Names of God” and Rendezvous with Rama (just the first one; the sequels didn’t live up.) As a scientist, he will be best remembered for his contribution to the idea of placing communication satellites into geostationary orbit.

In futurist circles, he will long be remembered for his three laws of prediction:

  1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

  2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

  3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I am especially fond of the second one. I hope to live to see the third.

Arthur C. Clarke 1917 -2008

FastForward Radio

michael.anissimov.jpgSunday night Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon visited live with Michael Anissimov. Michael Anissimov writes and speaks on futurist issues, especially the relationships between accelerating change, nanotechnology, existential risk, transhumanism, and the Singularity. His popular blog Accelerating Future discusses these issues regularly. Michael is a member of the Board of Directors of the World Transhumanist Association and is the North American fundraising director for the Lifeboat Foundation.

They visited with Michael about the philosophy of transhumanism and what the Singularity could look like.

Click “Continue Reading” for listening options and the show notes:

Retirement Cruise

Well now how about this development:

Scientists in California carried out computer simulations that suggest Earth-like planets may be orbiting Alpha Centauri B.

At least some are likely to be in the so-called “habitable zone” at just the right distance from their parent star to allow oceans, lakes and rivers to form without freezing or boiling away. Such planets are the best candidates for supporting life as we know it.

Anyone standing on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri B would see two “suns” in the sky, a bright “primary” sun and a “secondary” sun which would be much weaker but still many times brighter than the full moon as seen from Earth.

The astronomers hope to carry out intensive studies of the Alpha Centauri system using the 1.5 metre telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.

AlphaCentauri_468x318.jpg

Over the next few years, we’ll have new telescopes coming on line that will give us a clear idea of what’s really orbiting Alpha Centauri B and other nearby stars. I don’t expect we’ll find unambiguous proof of a technological civilizations out there anywhere — eyeballing it isn’t really how you look for that — but maybe we’ll find a few planets showing some signs of life.

Any that show promise we can put on the itinerary for what I’m calling my retirement cruise. It’s Plan C for what I want to do with my golden years, some 40-50 years from now. Here are all three plans in order.

Plan A

Effective life extension technology kicks in and I just keep on keeping on with whatever I happen to be doing by then. The Speculist and FastForward Radio will probably not exist in their current form, but that only means they will be replaced by something even more fun.

Plan B

The Singularity kicks in and I get uploaded into a posthuman state of techno-nirvana of which I am literally incapable of providing an adequate — or even inadequate — description. Some might recoil at this techno-Utopian / techno- eschatological vision, but please note. This is only Plan B.

Plan C

Still shy of the Singularity and adequate life extension, but living in a world in which nanotechnology and computer technology have continued to put more and more capability into the hands of the common individual, at about age 90 some like-minded individuals and I set out for interstellar space in a fusion-powered craft designed to accelerate at about 1G, approaching — but obviously not quite achieving — the speed of light. We cruise along for 10 years or so, elapsed ship time, visiting a planet or two along the way. We then return to earth where, depending on how much time we spent accelerating and decelerating, hundreds or thousands of years will have passed.

(I suppose plan D would be death and cryonic suspension, but that doesn’t really appeal to me.)

Anyhow, by the time I get back from my retirement cruise, the whole life extension and / or Singularity thing should have happened, so I can carry on with Plan A or B. Of course, as a living archaeological relic, I will have a lot of catching up to do before I will have much credibility as a Speculist.

But that’s fine.

Give me a century or two and I’ll be all caught up.

The Other Singularities


[Electricity from solar power] is doubling now every two years. Doubling every two years means multiplying by 1,000 in 20 years. At that rate we’ll meet 100 percent of our energy needs in 20 years.

- Ray Kurzweil

Suppose that solar power achieves and then surpasses “grid parity,” meaning that it produces electrictity less expensively than conventional power sources. Once that happens, solar power would inevitably become the dominant energy source. Call it the Solar Singularity.


- Arnold Kling

Arnold Kling spends much of the rest of his article arguing that Kurzweil’s solar optimism is misplaced. I disagree, but Kling’s “solar singularity” idea is worth exploring.

Kurzweil’s extrapolation on solar is simplistic. But it will also be right. It’s not that Kurzweil thinks that Solar will improve (just) because we’ll be able to write more solar cells in a smaller space like transistors on a computer chip. Instead, Kurzweil is describing a fundamental law of progress of which Moore’s law is only the latest iteration.

Kurzweil (and others) have described the power of exponential doubling with a “Rice and the Chessboard” parable:

A king wanted to reward his faithful wiseman. The wiseman stated that all he wanted was a single grain of rice for the first square on a chessboard, 2 grains for the second square, and so on… doubling until all 64 squares were filled.

The King ordered that this “modest” request be honored – until he learned that his wiseman was really a wiseguy. 64 doublings would be all the rice ever harvested in the entire world.

Enter “Spock’s Chessboard“

Exponential trends are powerful in ways that are hard to foresee even with something as simple as rice. But the doubling of information technology is much more surprising.

Moore’s law (and its predessesors and successsors) have been progressing through an information technology chessboard. Every two years or so puts us on a new square with twice the computation per dollar spent. But that’s not all. Because computation is the basis for the development of everything else, the computation board spawns other exponential chessboards. Solar technology gets its own board. Other energy technologies like fusion, biodiesel, and alcohol fuels are also progressing on their own chessboards.

Life extension gets a chessboard. In fact, Aubrey de Grey has already described a life extension singularity. It’s his “bootstrapping to escape velocity” idea.

Each mini-board has its own singularity. Kling has described the solar singularity. A similar singularity could happen for fusion power. The age of personal medicine will arrive, I think, about the time that a $1,000 genome sequencing becomes possible. That will be a singularity for the genetics mini-board.

Along the way each mini-chessboard is fed by the main computation board, but they also sometimes feed other mini-chessboards or even feed the progress of the main computation board.

It’s hard to overstate the challenge of forecasting the future of technology with so many interlocking variables. But with so many exponential processes working in our favor, I’m not going to bet against Kurzweil’s optimism.

What Changes? What Remains the Same?

In response to the video I made last year asking attendees at a library conference how much change they will see if they live to be 100, a filmmaker, visionary, and old high-school buddy of mine offers this compelling scenario:

So take that, grandma!

For your reference, here’s the original video:

Something that caught my attention on a recent viewing of this video was Bob Treadway’s (second) answer to the question: “maybe what’s more interesting is what won’t change.” Being a Speculist and all, that struck me as a kind of contrarian answer. So it’s interesting to note that in starting to read John Naisbitt’s Mind Set!, his first and establishing mindset is as follows:

While many things change, most things remain constant.

What’s great about this idea is that it is infinitely arguable. Of course, bear in mind that if you take the “more things change than don’t” position, you aren’t just arguing with Bob Treadway; you’re arguing with the Megatrends guy.

So let’s hear it, folks. Do more things change or do more things stay the same?

FastForward Radio

Sunday night Stephen Gordon and P.J. Manney interviewed artificial intelligence researcher and author Ben Goertzel.

Ben_Goertzel_2007_sm.JPG

They asked Ben about the current state-of-the-art in AGI and about the recent AGI conference at Memphis University. They also learned how AI is already changing our world.

Click “Continue Reading” for listening options and the show notes:

Global Warming Estimation Methodology Challenged

This is very interesting:

Researcher: Basic Greenhouse Equations “Totally Wrong”

New derivation of equations governing the greenhouse effect reveals “runaway warming” impossible

Miklós Zágoni isn’t just a physicist and environmental researcher. He is also a global warming activist and Hungary’s most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol. Or was.

That was until he learned the details of a new theory of the greenhouse effect, one that not only gave far more accurate climate predictions here on Earth, but Mars too. The theory was developed by another Hungarian scientist, Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist with 30 years of experience and a former researcher with NASA’s Ames Research Center.

After studying it, Zágoni stopped calling global warming a crisis, and has instead focused on presenting the new theory to other climatologists. The data fit extremely well. “I fell in love,” he stated at the International Climate Change Conference this week.

“Runaway greenhouse theories contradict energy balance equations,” Miskolczi states. Just as the theory of relativity sets an upper limit on velocity, his theory sets an upper limit on the greenhouse effect, a limit which prevents it from warming the Earth more than a certain amount.

How did modern researchers make such a mistake? They relied upon equations derived over 80 years ago, equations which left off one term from the final solution.

Miskolczi’s story reads like a book. Looking at a series of differential equations for the greenhouse effect, he noticed the solution — originally done in 1922 by Arthur Milne, but still used by climate researchers today — ignored boundary conditions by assuming an “infinitely thick” atmosphere. Similar assumptions are common when solving differential equations; they simplify the calculations and often result in a result that still very closely matches reality. But not always.

Don’t know if Miskolczi is is right — the math goes over my head pretty quickly on this stuff — but I find it interesting that his model accurately models climate change on Mars as well as Earth. One of the questions we’ve had about global warming is why are other planets in the solar system — where they don’t have a greenhouse gas problem — warming up at about the same rate as Earth? Miskolczi may have the answer.

I should point out that I found this story following the very interesting discussion about Global Cooling over at Jerry Pournelle’s site. The discussion follows this original item.

Anecdotally, based on the last two Colorado winters, global cooling feels a lot more likely to me. But then, we don’t really want to come to conclusions about this stuff based on anecdotal data points.

This, on the other hand, wasn’t just anecdotal.