Check this out. The disk isn’t big enough to contain that little, dull picture of it.
Back in the day, a file that size was something of an extravagance — too big to fit on a floppy! Now how many hundreds, thousand of files this size do we all have?
A more important question — how long before the principles that have made us all rich in storage of image files can be applied to material goods? Or is it happening already?
Well, hey, just be glad that you aren’t one of the Seven Most Bizarrely Unlucky People who ever Lived.
Number one on the list is the only human being ever to be nuked twice. Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima in the when the first bomb hit and Nagasaki when the second one hit and lived (until quite recently) to tell the tale. The link to this story comes via Jim Elvidge, who espouses an interesting variation on the Simulation Hypothesis. Per Elvidge, anomalies such as these can be viewed as Easter eggs — little clues that our universe may be, if not an outright practical joke, perhaps an excessively elaborate work of performance art.
I’m not sure that any of these coincidences rise to the bizarreness level required to question the universe around me, but the guy who got struck by lightning seven times is pretty interesting. I can’t quite get my head around the odds against that, as stated in the linked article. It seems that human history could have run many times over without this ever happening.
So it’s an outlier, for sure. But proof that the world is a simulation? I’ll need something even weirder, I’m afraid.
We interviewed Elvidge a while back and are looking to have him back on the podcast soon.
Phil and Stephen welcome writer and futurist P. J. Manney back to FastForward Radio to talk about major developments of 2009 and to look forward to the new year.
BONUS: a special holiday edition of “Tales of the Paranormal.”
About Our Guest
| As a frequent guest and occasional co-host — not to mention our official Hollywood correspondent — PJ Manney brings a unique perspective to FastForward Radio. She is a writer and futurist, and a leading voice in the Humanity+ movement. She has written extensively on H+ topics, having previously been involved in motion picture development (Hook, It Could Happen to You, Universal Soldier) and writing for television (Hercules: the Legendary Journeys, Xena: Warrior Princess). |  |
The Boskops.
They were here on the planet contemporaneously with us. They had great big heads and cute little faces. They were smarter than us. How much smarter? Well, it says here that we are Homo Erectus to their Homo Sapiens.
Put your head around that one.
We spend a lot of time here at the Speculist pondering the next stage of human evolution. What if that next stage arrived 10,000 years ago and then mysteriously disappeared?
Or perhaps not so mysteriously. It’s possible that:
They were a small population that never really caught on. (Those big heads were not doubt hard to deliver, making fecundity problematic.)
Some catastrophe got the better of them.
They were out-competed, or simply wiped out by smaller-brained contemporaries (i.e., us).
That final possibility is a bit chilling. Neanderthals had bigger brains than we do, too. Were they smarter than us? Were smarter strains of humanity nicer than dumber ones? Nah, it couldn’t be that simple. If dumber humans always won out over smarter ones, Homo Erectus would have kicked our Sapien butts. And Erectus was no slouch when it came to the business of survival. They hung in for 1.5 million years — making them by far the most successful (at least in terms of longevity) strain of humanity. No doubt there were many factors in play that determined which strain of humanity became dominant, including luck.
But please note that not everyone agrees that Boskops were a separate strain of humanity. The consensus view is that they were a few outliers within the Homo Sapiens — kind of a big brain high water mark:
To be sure, there has been a reduction in the average brain size in South Africa during the last 10,000 years, and there have been parallel reductions in Europe and China — pretty much everywhere we have decent samples of skeletons, it looks like brains have been shrinking….[It] is hardly a sign that ancient humans had mysterious mental powers — it is probably a matter of energetic efficiency (brains are expensive), developmental time (brains take a long time to mature) and diet (brains require high protein and fat consumption, less and less available to Holocene populations).
What the — brains are shrinking? Now ask yourself this question. Which scenario do you prefer: the one where mean old H. Sapiens wiped out the smarter, more peaceful contemporary humans, or the one where we’re the small-brained descendants of big-brained, smarter ancestors?
Luke McKinney provides much-needed perspective:
The fundamental flaw, the assumption that a bigger brain automatically means increased intelligence, is more suited to Dr Freud than a modern professor – and embarrassingly crude launching point for a discussion of sophisticated mental processes. A sperm whale brain is 6 kilograms of raw neural matter capable of little more than “swim. eat. repeat”, while Albert Einstein’s skullbox was actually a smidgen smaller than average.
The point is not the volume of the brain, but the complexity of the wiring. The critical factor is the number of connections between different neurons, massively enhanced in humans by the distinctive folding pattern which increases the surface area of our brains. Animal brains have far fewer folds, down to the lower species which have no folds at all, just clumps of neurons.
Just like the old saying: “It’s not the size that counts, it’s how you use it to create a massively complicated neural network capable of planning and independent thought”.
Yep, that’s what I always say. So there probably was no big-brained human species, and if there was they probably weren’t all that much smarter than we are.
All of which ought to tell us something. The fact that I can’t say exactly what that is has less to do with the size of my brain than how it’s folded.
Er, right?
In his book Hackers, Steven Levy tells how a collection of unpaid and underpaid enthusiasts, many amateurs and hobbyists, ushered in a new technological and economic era–namely, the era we live in now. Enjoy reading blogs? Thank a hacker. It’s a little dizzying to consider the impact that an outfit such as the Homebrew Computer Club or (earlier and more implausible-sounding) the Tech Model Railroad Club could have on history. These guys changed the world.
In Cory Doctorow’s new novel Makers (hey, even the name is similar!) history repeats itself as a whole new paradigm for designing, producing, and distributing goods emerges from the efforts of a few dedicated 3D-printer enthusiasts. I’ll be publishing a full review of the book after we’ve had a chance to have Cory on the podcast — we’re hoping for later this month. But ahead of a full review, let me just make a recommendation. If you enjoyed Hackers and have wished for a next edition, give Makers a read. I know — one is history and the other is science fiction, but the one doesn’t read like the former and the other doesn’t read like the latter.
Hope that’s clear enough for you all. If not, let me put it this way: I believe that history and science fiction are merging. What a stupendously wonderful time to be alive.
Anyhow, if you’d like a real-life glimpse of how hobbyists are poised to change the world again — or if you’d like to get in on the action yourself — here’s a great place to start.
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. |  |
Why do some people keep eating when they’re already full?
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.
The song from the opening of A Charlie Brown Christmas on harp — it’s a Speculist holiday tradition (this makes twice, so it’s a tradition):
Merry Christmas, a happy (belated) Hanukkah, joyous Kwanzaa, spectacular Festivus, rockin’ Solstice, and a very happy New Year to all!
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.
| 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. | 
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| 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. |
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