Singularity summit '09

Good summary / impressions of the 2009 Singularity Summit by Razib Khan at Gene Expression.

Summit site here.

Team Venter making history

biomimicry, by jude buffum

In this future — whose underpinnings, as Drs. Church and Venter demonstrated, are here already— life as we know it is transformed not by the error catastrophe of radiation damage to our genetic processes, but by the far greater upheaval caused by discovering how to read genetic sequences directly into computers, where the code can be replicated exactly, manipulated freely, and translated back into living organisms by writing the other way. "We can program these cells as if they were an extension of the computer," George Church announced, and proceeded to explain just how much progress has already been made.

From George Dyson's introduction to A short course on synthetic genomics [July, 2009, Edge Masterclass], presented by Craig Venter and George Church. Videos [mostly difficult for me to understand on one watch] and a pdf from an earlier, related event, at the link

Richard Dawkins interviews Venter [2008, BBC], touring his lab. Much easier.

Exercises in style

Three ways to tell the same story.

I.

georgina luck

Things don't sit in a stable equilibrium, but instead one critical state that then collapses into another. But collapse may be too negative a term for something that's only change, and there are few things that are undiluted positives or negatives for all players in the long run. There's always the ju jitsu possibility of turning weakness into strength.

This idea is neatly covered by Dmitry Orlov in a February '09 talk he gave at the Long Now Foundation, called "Social Collapse Best Practices" [summary here, MP3 here], in which he describes how the weaknesses of the Soviet system - essentially many forms of inefficiency - actually helped Russians survive the various post-Soviet collapses. An entertaining speaker, with lots of jokes and some good observations amid predictions you probably hope won't come true, building on his earlier The 5 Stages of Collapse:

Stage 1: Financial collapse
Stage 2: Commercial collapse
Stage 3: Political collapse
Stage 4: Social collapse
Stage 5: Cultural collapse

II.

A series of three articles in Asia Times from March this year. The problem the article sets up is essentially the one covered by the ugly name of Chimerica [Niall Ferguson- pdf]: how does China escape from its co-dependent relationship with America, not so much inre. exports - which it has little direct control over, as in its huge capital reserves which leave it overexposed to declines in the dollar / rises in US interest rates, both of which seem inevitable with the trillions of dollars of new US govt. debt that will come onto the market this year. Quotes from all three articles below, followed by the links:

Much discussion and debate is currently underway as to whether the US will find sufficient global demand for the more than $2 trillion in new Treasuries coming online this fiscal year alone. But the fundamental risks for the dollar aren't only arising out of that fear over whether demand for Treasuries will be sustained.

Serious risks for the dollar also arise if global demand for Treasuries is sustained. Why? Because that would only thrust the present Treasuries bubble to even more gigantic proportions, further warping the structure of the already severely deformed present global financial order, magnifying the dangerous distortions that already exist and increasing the likelihood of a massive second wave of damage and destruction in this present crisis, and an eventual burst in the Treasuries bubble.
...
Investors will begin to stampede out of financial assets such as Treasuries and into hard assets like precious metals and certain commodities whose price has been severely beaten down. These will offer comparatively much safer stores of wealth, ones with a real profit potential. China, via its resource buys, is already blazing the trail, going energetically into hard assets, rather than sustaining its 2008 rate of purchases of Treasuries and other financial assets.
...
There is mounting evidence that China's central bank is undertaking the process of divesting itself of longer-dated US Treasuries in favor of shorter-dated ones.

There is also mounting evidence that China's increasingly energetic new campaign of capitalizing on the global crisis by making resource buys across the globe may be (1) helping itscentral bank to decrease exposure to the dollar, while (2) simultaneously positioning China to make much greater profit on its investment of its reserves into hard assets whose prices are now greatly beaten down, while (3) also affording it greatly increased control of strategic resources and the geopolitical clout that goes with it. This is turning out to be a win-win-win situation for China as it capitalizes upon the important opportunities afforded it by the present global crisis.

1. Before the stampede
2. The not-so-safe-haven
3. China inolculates intself against dollar collapse

III.

too drunk

What’s going on now is nature’s way of telling you that America’s standard of living has to be reduced by something between 20 and 50 percent. You can have it in the form of a compressive deflationary depression, including widespread bankruptcies… or you can have by way of inflation, in which money loses its value. But there’s one basic qualification to this: the way down is not symmetrical with the way up. That is, it’s really not just a matter of ratcheting down to a standard of living half of what it was, say, in 2006, because in the event all the various complex systems that support everyday life enter failure mode before our society re-sets at a theoretically lower level of equilibrium.

Jim Kunstler

Related posts:
Old systems break before new ones are in place
The utility of slack
A continuous network of critical states

Complex systems and intuition vs rationality

almost taiwan

...destruction of the invading disease organisms; chronic infection; destruction of the host; or symbiosis...

James Lovelock's four possible outcomes for humans vs Gaia, quoted in Straw Dogs, p8

Recent interview and Q&A [mp3] with James Lovelock, who has good stories and is cheerily gloomy about the outlook for humanity. He's 90 this year, but sounds decades younger.

Many good things to take away, but one I noted down at the time: There's no use being rational about complex systems, as all models that we'd rationally produce are gross simplifications that make us over-confident in their simplified [i.e. wrong] predictions [cf. recently discredited financial models]. In such cases Lovelock says it's best to observe a lot and then be intuitive.

Related post:

The planet will save itself

Urban metabolism

Really interesting article from The Atlantic that has this as the trailer:

The crash of 2008 continues to reverberate loudly nationwide—destroying jobs, bankrupting businesses, and displacing homeowners. But already, it has damaged some places much more severely than others. On the other side of the crisis, America’s economic landscape will look very different than it does today. What fate will the coming years hold for New York, Charlotte, Detroit, Las Vegas? Will the suburbs be ineffably changed? Which cities and regions can come back strong? And which will never come back at all?

Goes well with this lengthy piece from the FT, The travails of Detroit.

Homo evolutus

Juan Enrinquez works with Craig Venter. In this talk at TED 2009, he starts off by giving a fairly right-wing assessment of the economic crisis, then moves on to describing the current and near future state of the art in engineering microbes, tissues and robots. The word isn't said, but it's verging on soft take-off Singularity stuff. The cool thing comes in the last third when he draws out the implications. Now, other speakers and writers always cover the last part along the lines of everything will be awesome, without specifying awesome for who. Enriquez states the obvious, unapologetically. One slide in his presentation shows how in our recent evolutionary history is was more common than not for different species of hominid to live at the same time, and he looks forward to next one to share the stage with homo sapiens, homo evolutus - the rich becoming superheroes. It's an interesting talk.

According to Ray Kurzweil, the logarithmic graph of 15 separate lists of paradigm shifts for key events in human history show an exponential trend. Lists prepared by, among others, Carl Sagan, Paul D. Boyer, Encyclopædia Britannica, American Museum of Natural History and University of Arizona; compiled by Kurzweil.

Wikipedia

Related posts on this site:
Venter speaking at the Long Now, 2008

Human Evolution and the Environment

An interesting talk by Paul Ehrlich at the Long Now Foundation called The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment.

The first four steps on our path to dominance:
1) Living up in the trees [binocular vision, judging distance, grasping hands]
2) Down from the trees
3) Up on two legs
4) Language with syntax

A considerable gap, then the next four, which are rather obvious, but added for completeness:
5) Agriculture
6) Writing
7) Printing
8) The Industrial Revolution


Related. An overview of Merlin W. Donald's theory of How our mind, brain and culture evolved. Many of the actual papers, which I've yet to dig through, in pdf form here.

"The story you tell yourself is largely the story you're living"

Terence Mckenna in his farewell speech to the community, Posthumous Glory, via Lorenzo

Singular

No time to check this out at present, but set here for later reference, one of the purposes of this blog being to slowly build up stuff that I can look back at later. So, here's a special edition on the Singularity from the IEEE, which claims to be the world's leading professional association for the advancement of technology. If the topic interests you, it looks like there's plenty to enjoy.

Historian vs Futurist

"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future"

Attributed to Yogi Berra, Samuel Goldwyn and Neils Bohr

The past is all we can talk about - predictions are just extrapolations, but it's the future we'll all be living in.

Niall Ferguson and Peter Schwartz, a futurist, had a debate the other week at the Long Now Foundation. MP3 here. Schwartz came off the worse, if only because it's so much easier for a futurist to get it wrong (it's almost guaranteed) than for a historian. There's one past, but many futures.

The one line summary is that Ferguson is a pessimist and Schwartz an optimist. I veer between the two, happy today but aware that it could all go very wrong, very soon. Consequently I see myself as a good boy scout, although in practice I tend to be ill-prepared.

Without pessimism there's less incentive to work for a decent future. All the optimists I know - something will turn up - are getting picked off by reality, one by one. Meanwhile, the pessimists are grinding themselves down...

Consider climate change - is the good work being done by those who think it’s not a problem or by those who think it is? Or is no good work being done? Be pessimistic about the future but work towards a better one, which also seems to be behind Ferguson’s liberalism [or conservatism, for American readers].

More Niall Ferguson on MP3

Pills to forever

1. Ordinary life is sometimes boring. So what?
2. Eternal life will be as boring or as exciting as you make it.
3. Is being dead more exciting?
4. If eternal life becomes boring, you will have the option of ending it at any time.

Ed Regis, Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition, quoted on p53 of the worth-a-read Transhumanist FAQ

The above are the pills that Ray Kurzweil [aged 60] takes every day to help ensure that he's around for the Singularity and the concomitant eternal life. The picture and the following quote [from the reporter, not RK] are lifted from a recent Wired profile.

...immortality will arrive in stages. First, lifestyle and aggressive antiaging therapies will allow more people to approach the 125-year limit of the natural human lifespan. This is bridge one. Meanwhile, advanced medical technology will begin to fix some of the underlying biological causes of aging, allowing this natural limit to be surpassed. This is bridge two. Finally, computers become so powerful that they can model human consciousness. This will permit us to download our personalities into nonbiological substrates. When we cross this third bridge, we become information. And then, as long as we maintain multiple copies of ourselves to protect against a system crash, we won't die.

I had a post on this while back, when I was just getting into this page, and it includes more color on Kurzweil and praise for the very good post-Singularity sci-fi novel Accelerando, available for free and legal in pdf form at the link. I'm very, very skeptical, but I like the idea, and I like ideas to play with. But all my bets are on getting older and dying, on not having eternity to play in.

Robots inspired by animals

Here's a New Scientist report.



If you want to read more about the last one [M-Tran], and you will, then you can here, with more movies here.

Big dog robot

Somewhat further to the last post, here's a cool video of the BigDog [sic] robot, with some other machines that learn from animals tacked on at the end.

Intractability vs Evolution

On the train to Taipei listened to an interesting talk about algorithms in nature from Princetown's lunch'n'learn series, which tied up various things that have been floating through my head. In brief, there are certain problems, such as folding proteins, that for humans [and their computers] seem to be intractable, but for nature are easy, instantly done.

Rudy Rucker maintains that everything is computation, that when the wind hits trees reality is the result of calculations that takes place.

Craig Venter is not trying to make something entirely new, but rather to find / decode what nature has produced and then to put the parts together in a different way.


The world has been evolving for a long time, and nature is really, really smart. It knows what works, it gets things done.

Somewhat of a concern

Brad De Long is someone worth adding to your RSS feed. Here's the end part of a post title Free vs Fair Trade:

Think of it this way: Consider a world that contains one country that is a true superpower. It is preeminent--economically, technologically, politically, culturally, and militarily. But it lies at the east edge of a vast ocean. And across the ocean is another country--a country with more resources in the long-run, a country that looks likely to in the end supplant the current superpower. What should the superpower's long-run national security strategy be?

I think the answer is clear: if possible, the current superpower should embrace its possible successor. It should bind it as closely as possible with ties of blood, commerce, and culture--so that should the emerging superpower come to its full strength, it will to as great an extent possible share the world view of and regard itself as part of the same civilization as its predecessor: Romans to their Greeks.

In 1877, the rising superpower to the west across the ocean was the United States. The preeminent superpower was Britain. Today the preeminent superpower is the United States. The rising superpower to the west across the ocean is China. that was the rising superpower across the ocean to the west of the world's industrial and military leader. Today it is China.

Throughout the twentieth century it has been greatly to Britain's economic benefit that America has regarded it as a trading partner--a source of opportunities--rather than a politico-military-industrial competitor to be isolated and squashed. And in 1917 and again in 1941 it was to Britain's immeasurable benefit--its very soul was on the line--that America regarded it as a friend and an ally rather than as a competitor and an enemy. A world run by those whom de Gaulle called les Anglo-Saxons is a much more comfortable world for Britain than the other possibility--the world in which Europe were run by Adolf Hitler's Saxon-Saxons.

There is a good chance that China is now on the same path to world preeminence that America walked 130 years ago. Come 2047 and again in 2071 and in the years after 2075, America is going to need China. There is nothing more dangerous for America's future national security, nothing more destructive to America's future prosperity, than for Chinese schoolchildren to be taught in 2047 and 2071 and in the years after 2075 that America tried to keep the Chinese as poor as possible for as long as possible.

Living in Taiwan, China is somewhat of a concern. I've been here for 10 years in May, but before here I was in China for nine months. I decided to come out here because I wanted to spend time where things looked like they were going to be happening for the rest of my life, and I may have made a bad bet in not going to India or Shanghai. But Taiwan is free country, and it's been far better than staying in England.

Still, some problems with the post above. First up, the UK and the USA had a lot more in common than the US and China - not least a shared language, cultural / religious traditions, and dominant race. A natural affinity was not that hard to foster, and America could thus be seen as a natural successor and partner to Britain rather than as a challenger. To think that any of this applies to China is to assume that people are far more willing to ignore the obvious differences than seems likely. And this is not a bash America post - does anyone in China really feel the same way about the US as Americans could about the UK as the 19th century turned into the 20th?

But the basic idea of De Long's post hold true - if China is going to keep on rising, do we really want their history to show that we opposed them at every turn, or that we were an active partner?

Still, a second problem [at least] remains. However expedient it might be to embrace China, to do so without being critical of its policies with regard to human rights and so on would surely cheapen the effort - the school kids will eventually learn that the West did all it could to turn a blind eye to such abuses while propping up a corrupt oligarchy. That is, if the children of the future even bother with history. Britain's closeness to America didn't stop it from taking a lead in ending the slave trade - but is that widely known in the US, is it relevant? The powerful on each side made their deals while everyone else got on with their lives.

There are no easy approaches to China.

The planet will save itself

The planet will save itself. This is the underlying message of Lovelock's Gaia, that the biosphere itself will force us to adapt or die, but that it's under no great threat, no greater than any it's faced in the past. The rallying cry of environmentalism is something along the lines of 'humans vs nature', but that miscasts the thing. Humans can never win against nature. We're part of it, and can only adapt to its changing terms.

Listening to Craig Venter from my last post, and it's clear that the bulk of the genetic diversity on the planet- and I guess the bulk of living material - is invisible to the naked eye. The plants and the animals are nice, but they're not the thing itself. No matter what we do or don't, life will continue to thrive. So the notion of us protecting the planet is rather misguided, as it's going to do just fine, with or without us, the whales, the spotted owl, whatever. DNA is tough, it's one instinct is to thrive.

Our concern is a little like an ant colony worrying it's going to kill the householders it's stealing from. The colony will get rooted out way before it goes that far.

When it comes to protecting the environment, the species it matters most to is us.

Venter at the Long Now

It's almost redundant to express amazement at another talk from the Long Now Foundation. Hardly any of them, amassing here, are duds.

This is the first time I've heard Craig Venter speak, and he's great, perhaps the best talk I've heard since...well, probably only since Vernor Vinge, but then he set a high standard. Venter will make your head glow, there's so much cool stuff. Listened to it while cycling out to the country, with the picture of the fractal / broken wall, above, and the network of roots, below, two of the sights, but some notes on the talk from a 7/11 stop:

- Using genes as software for cell's hardware - software that can produce its own hardware.
- The huge variety of undiscovered (microscopic) lifeforms in the oceans and deep (1km +) underground.
- Life in the Sargasso Sea feeding on sunlight, but not by photosynthesis.
- Lifeforms that can be dried out, cut up, hit with high radiation for tens of thousands / millions of years and then recombine and live again when put in water - your basic panspermia seed.

Mapping the Frontier of Knowledge

Another great talk here from the Long Now Foundation. This one is from Juan Enriquez, and he starts out bringing the audience up to speed on developments in the life sciences - mapping the genome, cracking the code and then using it as software for the cells' hardware. Cool stuff all in the first 30 minutes. It'll make your head wobble. Then he moves on to more on the rise of Asia and the decline of the West, the evolution of religions, our place in the universe [slight], why pharmaceutical companies are too conservative, and hacking life forms. Your kids will breed spam made flesh.

“All life is imperfectly transmitted code,” Enriquez begins, “and it is promiscuous.”

Smog and rust

Check out the smog from China / Taiwan in this NASA image. Tainan is just by the big dirty cloud 3/4 the way down the west coast. This picture makes me want to move to the east.

Had a long bike ride from Tainan city to Salt Mountain in Chigu, which is really just a heap of salt by a salt processing plant that's been turned into a very minor tourist attraction, complete with salty tea, salty coffee and salty popsicles. It's a nice ride to get there but it's not worth visiting.

Came back via Tainan Science Park, which was deserted, with long straight roads past anonymous block buildings in which the future is being dreamed up. The ride was done with a good talk and Q&A by Vernor Vinge on my MP3 player. It's called "What if the Singularity does not happen?", and the text notes can be found here at Vernor's page, while the audio - which is a lot better than the notes - is here. He's a good speaker, perhaps because he's an entertaining sci-fi author aside from being a math professor, although the same is true of Rudy Rucker, and he always sounds slightly dazed, losing his line of thought very easily.

In the Q&A Vinge says that he doesn't really think about the environment, as he thinks there are a) no clear courses of action, and b) the Singularity - which he still thinks is the most likely near future - will be able to address such problems in its own time.

It's interesting that two large groups of smart people have such totally opposing views of the future - environmental breakdown and technological rapture. I enjoy flipping between both positions. I'm getting more and more promiscuous in my thinking, and I think it's a tendency I should encourage.


Having said that, what's the downside of saving energy and keeping things clean?

The Elementary Particles

The Singularity is when everything is supposed to change. Straw Dogs holds up the other side, that nothing ever does.

Science enables humans to satisfy their needs. It does nothing to change them. p155

The future will be better everything.

Better junk food, better porn, better drugs, better distractions and better forms of control.

Sex, domination and boredom - any vision of the future that doesn't account for these is incomplete.

To be confirmed

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

What is the Singularity? - Verner Vinge, 1993

You can get the sci-fi novel Accelerando by Charles Stross for free online and have it printed and bound somewhere.

It's an interesting take on the Singularity, in that it goes beyond the idea there's an event horizon which prevents us from speculating what life might be like after things change.

I've read most on the Singularity from one of its boosters, Ray Kurzweil. He has a pdf collection and is optimistic about seeing the Singularity within his lifetime [born 1948], views the event, among other things, as a way of reversing the aging process and avoiding death...

if you're a Baby Boomer with the right fitness plan (for Kurzweil that involves over 200 supplement pills a day plus intravenous treatments once a week), you may just live long enough to live forever. [link]

He has a machine that he says gives him a full workout in four minutes [I'm skeptical], as well as graphs to back up the idea of accelerated development, which look a lot like visualizations of Terrence McKenna's Timewave Zero / increasing novelty, bringing us to the millennial thread running through the Singularity.

Two years after Artificial Intelligences reach human equivalence, their speed doubles. One year later, their speed doubles again. Six months - three months - 1.5 months ... Singularity.
Plug in the numbers for current computing speeds, the current doubling time, and an estimate for the raw processing power of the human brain, and the numbers match in: 2021.

Staring into the Singularity - Elizer Yudkowsky.

Lifted from here

I like the 2001 trip, which is recycled through Accelerando, as the key moment in the acceleration of novelty is a message from aliens that acts as an attractor.


In Accelerando the new humans are outfitted with all kinds of enhancements. They rely on technology like a turtle relies on its shell.

But it doesn't matter. If you have good teeth and good health - following diet, luck and exercise - things can be as good now as they ever have been or will be.

The pleasure of a cat is enough to keep it happy, and what's wrong with being a cat?