Futurist J. Storrs Hall returns for a special holiday edition of FastForward Radio in which we continue our series leading up Foresight 2010. The conference, January 16-17 in Palo Alto, California, provides a unique opportunity to explore the convergence of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence and to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Foresight Institute.
Join us as we catch up the progress of the Foresight Institute and get a sneak preview of topics to be covered at the conference.
About Our Guest:
J. Storrs Hall is a scientist, visionary, entrepreneur, and the president of the Foresight Institute.
A hormone called ghrelin sends us a signal motivating us to eat when our bellies are empty. It’s part of a complex of hunger signals the body provides. This one associates pleasure with eating, and apparently it works just a little too well for some folks:
“What we show is that there may be situations where we are driven to seek out and eat very rewarding foods, even if we’re full, for no other reason than our brain tells us to,” said Dr. Jeffrey Zigman, assistant professor of internal medicine and psychiatry at UT Southwestern and co-senior author of the study appearing online and in a future edition of Biological Psychiatry.
Scientists previously have linked increased levels of ghrelin to intensifying the rewarding or pleasurable feelings one gets from cocaine or alcohol. Dr. Zigman said his team speculated that ghrelin might also increase specific rewarding aspects of eating.
Rewards, he said, generally can be defined as things that make us feel better.
“They give us sensory pleasure, and they motivate us to work to obtain them,” he said. “They also help us reorganize our memory so that we remember how to get them.”
Like aging, obesity is proving to be a highly complex set of interrelated factors. One reason that most diets (and other weight-loss programs) prove ineffective in the long run is that they address only one or two of these factors. If someone has spent years becoming hardwired to overeating, they have their work cut out for them. I don’t know whether ghrelin is as addictive as, say heroine or cocaine, but I do know this — it’s a lot easier to create a heroine- or cocaine-free environment than it is a food-free environment.
And how, precisiely, does one get away from one’s own brain?
I saw Avatar over the weekend, and I have a few reflections on the movie and movie-going experience. They range from the mundane to the philosophical. Spoilers appear with no warning other than the one you’re reading right now.
1. Although she is 20 now, and (I think) less prone to embarrassment at being seen with me in public, I am still sensitive to the fact that my older daughter doesn’t particularly want to be associated with some cranky old guy making a scene. It is for that reason, and that reason alone, that I did not say the following: “Twenty-six dollars? TWENTY-SIX DOLLARS??!!?? Hello? Excuse me? I said I wanted to pay for movie admission for two, not buy dinner for a family of five!” I think they jacked the price up on account of the 3D. At least I hope they did.
2. What’s with the 3-hour movies? Didn’t James Cameron himself kick off the current “movies should run three hours” trend with Titanic? (Then Peter Jackson sealed the deal with the Lord of the Rings trilogy.) Memo to Hollywood: very few movies should ever run more than two hours. Most can probably be done effectively in about 90 minutes. Citizen Kane runs one hour and 59 minutes — you’re telling me that Michael Bay needed an additional 25 minutes in order to tell the story of Transformers properly?
This is an important consideration, and not just from an “I have to pee” perspective. If you have not already done so, take 70 minutes and treat yourself to Redletter Media’s outstanding seven-part take-down of Star Wars Episode One. Part 1 is here.
Note: these videos are laced with profanity, sex, and (oddly) violence. They also add up to being one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen…on Youtube or elsewhere.
Anyhow, somewhere along the line the critic points out that one of the errors Lucas made, both in Phantom Menace and the loathsome “special editions” of the original trilogy, is trying to cram as many visual details into every single fame as possible. This practice clutters up each scene with a lot of useless junk. Sometimes you need less detail; sometimes you need more. When in doubt, go with less. And the same principle applies to scenes, storylines, characters. The longer a movie runs, the more likely it is that it will include extraneous content that detracts from the real story and / or message. This is the major problem with Avatar, as we will see.
3. What is it with 3D glasses? Avatar is by far the most effective use of 3D technology in the history of movies, but I still spent the first 30 minutes of the movie trying to rub a phantom smudge off my glasses. There was no smudge. Those glasses do something to your field of vision that nature never intended. The smudge was in my brain. 3D glasses mess with your brain — should we be worried about that?
4. As Stephen has already pointed out, Avatar spews a heavy dose of PC Hollywood ideological crapola. Interestingly, I very much doubt that Cameron set out to make a political statement with this film, or even realized , after the fact, that he had made such a statement.The PC philosophizing is half of the extraneous material that got added to this movie. The brain-dead battle sequence is the other half. In fact, I think the former got added as a pretext for providing the latter.
So what’s the movie really about, then? It’s about a disabled man who is given the opportunity to explore an amazing planet and interact with the natives as one of them. The real effort here went in to creating the aforementioned planet — that’s the true heart of the movie and (I suspect) the source of Cameron’s passion for this project. He wanted to make a movie about this planet, and an interesting way to get us into it was to have us follow a human being who becomes a part of the place in a way he never expected.
But that’s not enough, of course. We need conflict. We need drama. We need a huge overblown action-movie climax. (Bonus points to anyone who can identify which of the preceding statements is offered ironically.) Wait, you know what would be cool? Gunships — 22nd century helicopters, heavily armed, and some kind of big-ass mothership. And explosions, lots of explosions. And, like, wait — dinosaurs fighting armored military craft!
So for that, all we need are some James Cameron stock characters — the Paul Reiser ruthless corporate weasel from Aliens and the psycho Navy SEAL from The Abyss (only now with a whole squad of brainwashed psychos under his command.) You take those characters and then you add a half-thought-out backstory about how Earth is an ecological disaster area. Then all you need are some basic assumptions about how humanity, having despoiled its own planet through greed, exploitation, and brutality, is now ready to move on to do the same things elsewhere.
Again, I don’t know whether Cameron believes any of this — maybe he sort of vaguely assumes it’s all correct — but I don’t think any of it was his point. I think he just wanted to pad out his Cool Planet movie with an extra hour or so of junk and a big stonking battle sequence in the end. This does not in any way excuse Cameron, of course. Actually, it makes what he did worse. After going to all the trouble to create something new, he throws in a pile of stereotypes and cliches apparently without realizing what he’s done to his movie. Say what you will about the people who made Pocahontas — at least they were trying to make Pocahontas. In his effort to make his awesome movie even awesomer, James Cameron took something truly unique and potentially wonderful and let it slide off into an inadvertent Pocahontas remake.
Nice going.
5. Let’s talk a little about this whole “unique and potentially wonderful” business. Avatar is a beautiful movie. We get to experience that first night in the Pandora jungle in a way that is something beyond movie-watching. It’s as though Cameron has given the audience a vivid, waking dream. I can’t remember a sequence in any other movie that spoke so directly to my imagination.
Sadly, few filmmakers even try to address the imagination any more. They seem to believe that overwhelming the senses with spectacle is what telling a story is all about. (I refer the reader once again to Michael Bay’s Transformers. I can only reference the original; haven’t seen the sequel.) The Pandoran jungle is evocative; it makes children of us, reminding us of a time when we could easily believe that the world is full of wonders. It reminds us of why we like movies — why we originally liked movies.
But there’s more. Pandora is a mysterious place. And, in spite of the pantheistic overtones of some of the dialog (and in spite of J. Storrs Hall’s argument to the contrary) the mystery is not one derived from magic and fantasy. The Pandorans are the beneficiaries of some highly advanced biotechnology. Unlike our Gaia (whom we killed, because humans are so mean and nasty) the Pandoran Earth-Mother is a sentient being, apparently a self-created / highly evolved “artificial” intelligence residing on the vast compouter that is the planet’s biosphere. This same computer system is used to store the memories (if not the personalities) of all of the inhabitants who have gone before. Sigourney Weaver’s character is uploaded into this system when an effort to “cross-load” her personality to her avatar body fails.
And it gets better. The Pandoran Mother has done something for her children that Gaia never did for us — built in cables and interfaces. The Pandorans can jack into other species or directly into the network itself. It’s also likely that they can connect with each other, although this is never explored. (I found it a bit disappointing that when the two lovers got together they kissed rather than plugging straight into each other.)
This is the stuff of serious science fiction. These are interesting and challenging ideas, accompanied by visuals that stir the imagination.
Cameron had the opportunity to make a truly great movie here. If he had left out the hackneyed material mentioned above and introduced a conflict worthy of the astounding world he created, he would have pulled it off.
6. Our hero is a jerk. First he’s more than ready to sell out the indigenous people so he can get his legs back. Then he decides he’s “in love” with his alien squeeze, but doesn’t feel compelled, before entering an LTR with her, to let her know that:
– He’s not really the guy she sees. This is a fake body. He’s really a different species and about half her height. (Hey, this kind of stuff is important to women.)
– He’s been working for the other side and knows that they plan to dig up all the Stupidnamium under the tree. (Seems like getting the word out on this little tidbit ought to take precedence over everything else.)
She has every reason to dump him when she does, and I see no reason why she would subsequently trust him or ever take him back.
Once he decides that he’s really for the Pandorans, he starts killing human beings in order to defend them. Maybe this is the morally correct thing to do under the circumstances, but it seems like he was just working for the humans. I don’t see why anyone would ever trust this guy.
And one more thing. At one point our boy makes the statement that humanity doesn’t have anything they (the Pandorans) need. That’s an interesting thought coming from a guy in his condition. Has he met up with any Pandorans who took an unfortunate tumble off one of those tree limbs? How do the Pandorans deal with paraplegics or quadriplegics? He comes from a civilization that offers a pretty nice wheelchair, corrective surgery (which circumstances conveniently deny him for plot purposes) and ultimately a fully functioning substitute body.
That’s significantly better than “light beer,” and I don’t think the Pandorans could even match the wheelchair.
Economist Robin Hanson and futurist Brian Wang join us as we continue our special series leading up Foresight 2010. The conference, January 16-17 in Palo Alto, California, provides a unique opportunity to explore the convergence of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence and to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Foresight Institute.
About Our Guests
Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University, a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University, and chief scientist at Consensus Point. Robin is a pioneer in the field of prediction markets, also known as information markets or idea futures. He was a principal architect of the first internal corporate markets, as well as the Foresight Exchange beginning in 1994, and of DARPA’s Policy Analysis Market, from 2001 to 2003. Robin has diverse research interests everything from health incentive contracts, to Bayesian classification, agreeing to disagree, self-deception in disagreement, to growth given machine intelligence, and interstellar colonization. He blogs at Overcoming Bias.
Brian Wang is a futurist
who blogs about all things future-related at NextBigFuture.
He is the Director of Research for the Lifeboat Foundation and a member
of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology Task Force.
New Scientist provides a list of 10 possible propulsion technologies for deep space technologies, ranging from the ion thruster (plausibility: just a few years away) to wormholes (plausibility: almost certainly impossible.)
It’s a great list. My sentimental favorite has got to be the Bussard ramjet — a fusion drive that runs on hydrogen collected in deep space along the spacecraft’s route, ramming fuel into the ship’s maw using a vast scoop. Cool! But I think the most realistic choices, for interstellar travel, anyway, are the ion drive and beam-driven space sail technology.
Something like a fusion drive would be great for moving big Starship-Enterprise style craft around the solar system, but I think that’s as far as we’ll want to go with what I’m going to call Macro Human Space Travel (the original term for this idea was “manned spacecraft.”) Nanotechnology and artificial intelligence will enable us to explore interstellar, and perhaps eventually intergalactic, space much more efficiently using very small space vehicles.
How small?
With sufficiently advanced nanotechnology, we could fit all the equipment required to explore a star system and build several new ships to continue the mission, as well as the computing power required to run an interesting virtual world on the ship, along with a crew of several thousand downloaded explorers on something the size of an iPhone — or smaller. The real limiting factor would be how small we could make an effective ion drive or how accurately we could hit such a small target with a propulsion beam across vast distances.
The near future may be nuclear powered, or it may be thermonuclear powered, or it may be powered by geothermal energy or algae-derived biofuels or wind power or tide power or (most likely) some interesting combination of all these, plus the big one, plus some additional sources of energy thrown in for good measure. The big one of course is solar power. The sun is out there, blasting our planet every day with far more energy than we could need or (right now) even think about using.
Ray Kurzweil says that our current level of solar power use is bout eight doublings away from being great enough to power our entire civilization. will we achieve those doublings?
If we do, it will be because of developments like this:
For decades researchers have investigated a theoretical means to double the power output of solar cells–by making use of so-called “hot electrons.” Now researchers at Boston College have provided new experimental evidence that the theory will work. They built solar cells that get a power boost from high-energy photons. This boost, the researchers say, is the result of extracting hot electrons.
The results are a step toward solar cells that break conventional efficiency limits. Because of the way ordinary solar cells work, they can, in theory, convert at most about 35 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity, wasting the rest as heat. Making use of hot electrons could result in efficiencies as high as 67 percent, says Matthew Beard, a senior scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, CO, who was not involved in the current work. Doubling the efficiency of solar cells could cut the cost of solar power in half.
1. Figure out a way to get power from the sun.
2. Improve that process by driving the price down and the efficiency up
UPDATE: The movie Avatar is absolutely gorgeous. I was stunned at the technological leap I was seeing on the screen. The uncanny valley has been crossed. There is nothing unsettling about the digital characters in this film. They are as real and as expressive as any actor I’ve ever seen on the screen. The creatures and plant life are realized in incredible detail.
James Cameron is an technical and artistic genius.
But I’m not sure how often I’m going to watch this film in the future. Its filled with self-loathing for humanity and our technological advancement. The military is portrayed, with a couple of notable exceptions, as a bunch of trigger-happy sadists. Corporations and capitalism are shown to be the engines of environmental destruction both on Earth and on Pandora.
This is not a happy message. Its also wrong.
I can’t wait to see the incredible tools that Cameron has developed in service of better stories.
ORIGINAL POST (2009-12-17 13:02:39):
I’ve had a sinking feeling for a few weeks that Avatar might turn out to be “Captain Planet” for the big screen. This review at Popular Science doesn’t reassure me:
Avatar is every militant global warming supporter’s dream come true as the invading, technology-worshiping, environment-ravaging humans are set upon by an angry planet and its noble inhabitants. But the film’s message suffers mightily under the weight of mind-boggling hypocrisy. Cameron’s story clearly curses the proliferation of human technology. In Avatar, the science and machinery of humankind leads to soulless violence and destruction. It only serves to pollute the primitive but pristine paradise of Pandora.
Of course, without centuries of development in science and technology, the film putting forth this simple-minded, self-loathing worldview wouldn’t exist. You’d imagine Cameron himself would be bored to tears on the planet he created.
This is a fundamental moment in cancer research. From here on in we will think about cancers in a very different way. We will think about them in terms of the number of abnormalities…
Futurist Michael Anissimov and nanotechnologist Ralph Merkle join us as we begin a special series leading up Foresight 2010. The conference, January 16-17 in Palo Alto, California, provides a unique opportunity to explore the convergence of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence and to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Foresight Institute.
About our guests:
border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="2">
Michael Anissimov is a
science/technology writer and consultant. He is the creative force
behind one of the leading futurist blogs,
href="http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/">Accelerating
Future. He is a co-founder of the Immortality
Institute and the Media Director for the
href="http://singinst.org/">Singularity Institute for Artificial
Intelligence.
Ralph Merkle received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1979 where he co-invented public key cryptography. He joined Xerox PARC in 1988, where he pursued research in security and computational nanotechnology until 1999. He was a Nanotechnology Theorist at Zyvex until 2003, when he joined the Georgia Institute of Technology as a Professor of Computing until 2006. He is a Director of Alcor, on the faculty at Singularity University, a co-founder of the Nanofactory Collaboration and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing. He was co-recipient of the 1998 Feynman Prize for Nanotechnology for theory, the ACM’s Kanellakis Award for Theory and Practice, the IEEE Kobayashi Award and the 2000 RSA Award in Mathematics. Dr. Merkle has fourteen patents, has published extensively and has given hundreds of talks. His home page is at www.merkle.com.
