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Scientists claim they may have found the lost city of Atlantis.
From the Article:
The quest to find the lost city of Atlantis has begun in earnest off Cyprus's southern shores.A US-led team of explorers claims the ancient city lies on the seabed between Cyprus and Syria.
With the aid of unique underwater maps, a US researcher claims to have assembled evidence to prove the mythological island of Atlantis really existed.
Using sophisticated sonar technology, California-based Robert Salmas says he has not only been able to pinpoint Atlantis to a sunken land mass off Cyprus's southern coast, but even discern its geographical features as described by Plato.
The alleged discovery has been greeted with barely concealed mirth by the Mediterranean island's tourism office.
I'm a bit of a skeptic, not of Atlantis so much, as any claim to have found it. For example, there has been growing evidence of an advanced civilization off the coast of Costa Rica, with discovery of very large, precisely carved spheres.
My suspicion is that there may have been a lot more 'civilization' than is currently historically recorded, possibly going back thousands of years before Babylon. We now know the Sphinx of Egypt was probably built sometime between 6000-8000 BC, thousands of years before the first Pharaohs. And it was in that time that the Sahara, once a lush forest was just becoming a desert.
Terrence McKenna is his book Food of the Gods, says that between 6000 and 15000 BC, the Sahara "forest" was home to a large scale matriarchal culture. The paleo-climatology evidence certainly supports the lush Sahara scenario. It makes sense in light of the Ice Age, which brought increase moisture and lower temperatures to those regions of the world. For example, the deserts of the southwest, including Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico were homes to great sprawling forests when the first Indians migrated to those regions.
"The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper." - Eden Philpotts.
Thanks Michael)
As the lines between real and manufactured continue to blur, and science approaches finer and finer resolutions down to the subatomic scale, emergent technologies are rapidly evolving to radically alter the way humans interact with Nature. Increasingly we are wresting the fundamental tools of creation from the hands of the gods and employing them for our own purposes. A prime example is the discovery that DNA computers can be used to solve extremely complex mathematical problems much more readily than their silicon counterparts. This ingenious bit of repurposing appears to have many practical applications, as noted in the article cited below. But perhaps far more importantly, DNA computing represents a powerful element contributing to the relentless information feedback loop, coiling more & more tightly towards a
dramatic shift in the way humanity regards itself. Nature helps us build better computers, better computers help us build more accurate models of nature and plumb the depths of matter which, in turn, allow us to build even better computers. Information feeds itself. Technology is rapidly accelerating, hurtling us towards a not-too-distant future where the human imagination will manifest itself everywhere in Nature.
But back to the current reality, the AP Newswire reports on the recent development of a potentially-injectible molecular-scale biocomputer composed of DNA and enzymes, further blurring the lines between science fiction and reality.
From the article:
The molecular-scale device, which is essentially a liquid mixture of synthetic DNA and enzymes, is designed to sniff out chemical signs of disease and pump out drugs in response.Molecular computers have only been around for a decade. Instead of micro chips and processors, they harness the software-like ability of DNA strands to store information. Enzymes "read" chemical sequences on the DNA in a way that allows the computer to perform calculations.
Experts say such computers could become extremely powerful, given DNA's potential to store huge amounts of information. The computing power of 1 trillion compact discs could be stored in less than an ounce of dried DNA.
"It's really an ingenious concept," Reif said of Shapiro's computer. "This could have a major significance in the medical world, if only they could get it in the cell."
In the future, a doctor might inject trillions of the devices into a patient. The computer is designed to detect cancer by monitoring concentrations of certain molecules. If cancer is detected, the computer releases other molecules that interfere with a cancer cell's activities and cause it to self-destruct.
Unlike many of its predecessors, the computer is autonomous -- it doesn't need supervision or added chemicals to make it work.
Shapiro, who received a U.S. patent for a previous version in 2001, said the new computer worked fine detecting chemical markers of lung and prostate cancer in lab experiments using a pristine water solution.
But it could get confused if it were put in a medium teeming with other molecules, Shapiro said. "There could be many reactions with many other molecules that may be detrimental to either the computer or to the cell in which it operates."
By Michael Anissimov of Accelerating Future.
When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.
- J. Krishnamurti, "Freedom from the Known"
Some philosophers have asserted that "altruism" does not truly exist, that kind people only help others because they enjoy doing it, so therefore they are ultimately doing it only for themselves. Others, such as myself, argue that this isn't how altruism should be interpreted; that having a decision process is not the same as a being having a self-centered decision process. This is called the "hedonism debate" and it has probably been argued since prehistoric times.
Gandhi got what he wanted, that is, helping others. The fact that he was working towards what he personally wanted does not mean that we should regard him as selfish. Thought experiment: should a being whose decision process approximated a democratic consensus be considered "selfish"? I'm talking about a being whose decisions are actually made based on the consensus vote of some group, not because the group is telling the being how to behave, but because the being is built to approximate democratic opinions. It has brainware that just does that. The simplest possible answer (think Occam's razor) to the question of "how is this creature behaving?" is not "selfishly, because it's brain is just channeling its own volitional urges", but "democratically, because this being was specifically created to approximate democratic actions". You can't look at an axe used to chop down trees every day and say "this axe is made out of wood and metal, and the use of metal and wood I'm most familiar with is pans and plates, so this axe must be used for cooking and eating". I mean, you can, but it's silly.
In recent times, the hedonism debate is being put in a new light. This comes from two factors. First is the potential for building new minds from scratch - AIs or new bio-beings, doesn't matter. Just as some god could theoretically have created the entire world a mere five minutes ago, simply implanting us with all our memories, some advanced alien race could have done the same, building us up, cell by cell, memories included. One day humanity will have the ability to create bodies and minds from raw materials. The second factor is the eventual possibility of the creation of minds that are smarter than humans, which does not seem to be avoidable in the long run. There is no law that states an intelligence can't build another intelligence smarter than itself, as long as it knows something about the fundamental principles underlying intelligence. Smarter-than-human intelligence could further upgrade itself and create still-smarter intelligence, opening up the possibility for a massive intelligence explosion. It could start with an "AI" (I use the quotes because the way that "AI" is always portrayed in fiction is laughably unrealistic) or with a human being that was cybernetically or neurologically enhanced.
These two new variables frame the hedonism debate in a whole new way. If high altruists really can't exist, then a smarter-than-human intelligence, who could turn its intelligence towards fooling humans or developing super-advanced technology, could easily murder all the humans on Earth; by accident, as part of a larger plan, or simply on a whim. Please do not visualize a noble rebel group of humans fighting back against a transhuman intelligence, a la The Matrix. In the real world, the AIs never would have needed humans as a power source to begin with. Even if they did, they could easily create the system in such a way that escape was totally, completely impossible. Even if that were not possible, any escapees could be crushed practically instantaneously; transhumans will be able to think and move at rates billions or trillions of times faster than us slow biological humans. Our bodies and minds move at a crawl in comparison to what is physically possible, a huge space of better designs. We just haven't had the intelligence or technology to reach out to that space just yet.
If high altruism is possible, then the creation of robustly altruistic transhuman intelligence could be considered a better event than you winning a trillion dollars. That's because transhuman intelligence would be genuinely smarter than us, and genuinely better at coming up with ways to eliminate poverty, suffering, disease, death, annoyance, and all other problems that intelligence can be applied to. It might be able to wipe these problems out entirely, it might not, but either way, it would be a huge event. If high altruism isn't possible, then we might expect the first transhuman intelligence to ignore us and/or kill us. Deliberate malice wouldn't be necessary for human extinction; transhumans could decide that atmospheric oxygen was getting in their way and move it somewhere else, or decide that they want to take apart the Earth to create a particle accelerator with the circumference of Mercury's orbit. And all of this might happen very quickly, considering that transhuman intelligences could be thinking with brain components billions of times faster than biological neurons, and acting with airborne nanotechnology, billions of times faster and stronger than human hands or weapons.
In anticipation of the emergence of smarter-than-human intelligence, and for other reasons, some of us have decided to advocate altruism to the fullest extent. If the starting conditions and moral philosophy of the first transhuman intelligence are at all relevant to the ultimate outcome of the "intelligence explosion", then the morals of the people that create or become the first transhuman intelligence(s) will be important. Since we want to see altruistic transhuman intelligence rather than the alternative, we are advocating positive morals.
In the longer term, what we need for mere humans to exist safely alongside transhuman intelligences is a sort of truce among all intelligence - especially the intelligences with the most power - otherwise death could be a threat forever. We don't want death to be a threat; we eventually want to lower the nonconsensual death rate to zero if possible. You can think of this as a sort of argument from one member of a council of say, 7 cybernetically enhanced humans, all with different ideas about morality, discussing how to approach the world after they realize they could probably have great influence over it if they wanted to. Would they be willing to make certain sacrifices, put aside their egos, in order to ensure that all the citizens of Earth could live in relative safety and peace for an indefinite length of time? If I were one of those special people, I sure would.
The point is that the creation of transhuman intelligence should be for the entire Earth, and thinking in terms of trying to bend the benefits towards yourself or your little group is the greatest possible example of unjust theft. Transhuman intelligence should not be viewed as a piece of meat we can just grab at. Disputes among transhuman intelligences could have the potential to turn into the worst humanitarian disasters the world could ever see, such as mass torture or extermination of quadrillions of unique sentiences. A single grain of sand could become a vessel of the worst imaginable tortures. This is because our current theories of intelligence seem to allow for "uploading" - that is, creating sentient beings as software programs in computers that actually have awareness, intelligence, and so on. If uploading is possible, then the amount of intelligence one could create would depend on how much computing power they could fit into a given unit of space. Even if uploading isn't possible, transhuman intelligence could still theoretically accomplish a lot of evil or a lot of good. The stakes are very high. The only morally acceptable option is to advocate that the benefits of the Singularity be distributed fairly among all sentients present. Otherwise you are stealing.
All the features of the world we find ourselves embedded in - human nature, terrestrial life, a reality made up of atoms, life, death, reproduction, etc - are roughly arbitrary. We don't know exactly why they're there and we didn't choose them. The situation was so confusing that for thousands of years we've had to pretend as if an unimaginably powerful old man created it all. (And many are still pretending.) People are designed (by evolution) to disturb and hurt each other simply by acting in their own best interests. That is a horrible system. We need to rearrange the system in such a way that people can act in their own best interests and nobody ever gets hurt or disturbed. Maybe we will do this by making compromises, treaties, physically revising our cognitive interpretations of disturbance or hurt, creating the perfect "guardian angel system", I'm not really sure. If I were smarter, I might have a better idea of which solution would benefit everyone the most. That's what smarter-than-human intelligence is all about.
Why do people read books, play video games, and live in their own mental worlds all the time? Because the mental worlds we imagine and create for each other are sometimes better than the actual physical world - we all know it. Why is this? Why weren't we born into worlds that were actually the best? Probably because we live in one of the most likely universes for observers to be born into, not necessarily the best. If it turns out that we can create baby universes, then I would want as many of them as possible to contain sentiences enjoying themselves, and not at each other's expense. I believe massive numbers of such universes are physically possible and more desirable than randomly generated universes, or universes containing people suffering. The creation of such "Heaven Universes" could have massive intrinsic value. We'd be like God, except we'd actually be benevolent. (The idea of anyone actually deserving eternal suffering, or any suffering at all except in the service of minimizing overall suffering, is appalling.)
We sometimes forget - there is more than enough matter in this universe for everyone to be maximally enjoying themselves all the time, for the rest of eternity, as long as we make the right decisions and never define "maximal enjoyment" as "having more than rival X". All we need to do is take that step, together, and we could very well become happy and satisfied forever. The "I need to have more than everybody else" mentality is a direct result from evolving in a zero-sum environment with scarce resources, where someone else succeeding often means you and your genes losing. Hopefully we will make a glorious transition from a largely "zero-sum" environment, the world of human intelligences, to a "positive-sum" environment, the world of transhuman and human intelligences coexisting, where everyone can do what they want, within certain consensus boundaries, forever and ever until the end of time. If any "competition" exists, it could be for the sake of fun or progress alone, and will never be coupled together with the negative emotions so typical of evolved creatures. We could literally engineer our brains so that we'd be happy and satisfied almost all the time, plus normal and sane too. (We don't require sadness to appreciate happiness anymore than we require slavery to appreciate freedom.)
In the past, sometimes, yes, victory over someone else or personal gain have often correlated with genuine progress, but progress doesn't need to work this way forever. The process of evolution has taken billions or trillions of casualties, (depending on whether you think primates, animals, etc. are sentient) and tortured the same number for very long durations of time. Biological evolution, basically, is evil. To carry the principles of evolution and selfishness with us over into a superintelligent society would be analogous to porting the minds of bacteria into an entire civilization of human beings, only to carry out bacterial goals and probably bite one another completely to death. Disgusting and horrible, neh? To assume that transhuman intelligences won't be capable of progressing and advancing without the use of dischord or fighting is to underestimate their potential capabilities.
Maybe our standards suggest that we're reaching for some sort of altruism that is physically impossible. We aren't - the best form of altruism possible within the constraints of physical law will have to do. I believe that when we can engineer minds with complete access to their own source code, with altruistic philosophies, then we will have created minds that are almost completely trustworthy. Whether such intelligences are physically possible is still not entirely certain, but there is evidence that they very well could be. If they are, then such intelligences wouldn't change their philosophies due to sudden events, as humans sometimes do; they could be willingly "stuck" as altruists forever. Our current understanding of intelligences suggests that such minds could be possible, although they would clearly be unhumanlike. They would be humane rather than human.
In evolution, molecules "just happened" to learn how to replicate themselves, and meta-arrangements of molecules "just happened" to begin to regulate their own temperatures, reproduce more rapidly, and mix genetic codes for more durable meta-arrangements, which "just happened" to take actions beneficial for one another, which, universe willing, will "just happen" to create a world where nonconsensual suffering, ignorance, and death are abolished. If this occurs, it will be largely thanks to high altruism, and high intelligence implementing that altruism.
This is from a synopsis of "Beyond Civilization" by Daniel Quinn:
I haven't read the book. I've read Ishmael, though. And I probably agree with him. We've got to get over that big monolithic hierarchical civilization thing. I'm not sure I would call that "beyond civilization". I've called it a "new civilization", which would a more bottom-up, distributed, self-organizing, free, collective intelligence way of organizing. Which is contrasted to the "old civilization" which is hierarchical and centralized. Somebody is in charge, somebody owns and controls most elements you need to live your life, and collective stupidity is the norm.One of our most fundamental cultural beliefs is this, that Civilization must continue at any cost and not be abandoned under any circumstance. This notion seems intrinsic to the human mind --self-evident, like The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Implicit in this belief about civilization is another: Civilization is humanity's ULTIMATE invention and can never be surpassed. Both these beliefs exemplify the cultural fallacy, which is the notion that one's beliefs are not merely expressions of one's culture but are intrinsic to the human mind itself. The effect of this fallacy is that it's almost impossible for the people of our culture to entertain the idea that there could be any invention beyond civilization. Civilization is the end, the very last and unsurpassable human social development.
No one is surprised to learn that bees are organized in a way that works for them or that wolves are organized in a way that works for them. Most people understand in a general way that the social organization of any given species evolved in the same way as other features of the species. Unworkable organizations were eliminated in exactly the same way that unworkable physical traits were eliminated--by the process known as natural selection. But there is an odd and unexamined prejudice against the idea that the very same process shaped the social organization of Homo over the three million years of his evolution. The people of our culture don't want to acknowledge that the tribe is for humans exactly what the pod is for whales or the troop is for baboons: the gift of millions of years of natural selection, not perfect--but damned hard to improve upon.
Civilization, in effect, represents an attempt to improve upon tribalism by replacing it with hierarchalism. Every civilization brought forth in the course of human history has been an intrinsically hierarchical affair--in every age and locale, East and West, as well as every civilization that grew up independently of ours in the New World. Because it's intrinsically hierarchical, civilization benefits members at the top very richly but benefits the masses at the bottom very poorly--and this has been so from the beginning. Tribalism, by contrast, is nonhierarchical and benefits all members with notable equality.
It's out of the question for us to "go back" to the tribalism we grew up with. There's no imaginable way to reestablish the ethnic boundaries that made that life work. But there's nothing sacrosanct about ethnic tribalism. Many successful tribal entities have evolved inside our culture that are not ethnic in any sense. A conspicuous example is the circus, a tribal enterprise that has been successful for centuries.
Beyond civilization isn't a geographical space (is not, for example, somewhere you "go and start a commune"). Beyond civilization is an unexplored cultural, social, and economic space. The New Tribal Revolution is our "escape route" to that space.
I agree as well that a new kind of tribes might be a key. Get together with the people you're in sync with, and work together. There's no need to try to impose your view on everybody else in the world. But there are problems to solve as to how it would work. I don't know if Quinn gives the answers to that. I'm not sure if it will do it just to work for more simplicity in general. The problem might well be too much simplicity in the old civilization, too much simple-minded centralized decision making, and what is needed is more complexity. Complexity in the good sense - a more intelligent and flexible system, distributed but inter-connected in a synergetic and self-adjusting manner.
Here's more, from a review at Amazon:
Futurist Daniel Quinn (Ishmael) dares to imagine a new approach to saving the world that involves deconstructing civilization. Quinn asks the radical yet fundamental questions about humanity such as, Why does civilization grow food, lock it up, and then make people earn money to buy it back? Why not progress "beyond civilization" and abandon the hierarchical lifestyles that cause many of our social problems? He challenges the "old mind" thinking that believes problems should be fixed with social programs. "Old minds think: How do we stop these bad things from happening?" Quinn writes. "New minds think: How do we make things the way we want them to be?"Indeed, I'm all for that. The old civilization is woven of a material that doesn't really serve most of us. A lot of the structures were created with an eye towards how to control large populations, and milk them for their productive output.
Our economic system is a pyramid scheme, and there's not much democracy anywhere - despite what it is made to appear like. It is sometimes possible to very locally create good conditions of democracy, freedom, and healthy economy. Which makes most people think that the system is inherently alright, and stand up to defend it. But there's a hole in the bottom of the barrel. The system is slanted so it is always an unhill battle and synergy is hard to attain. There will be somebody standing on top of the hill to tell you that the weather is nice and everything is fine, and you just need to work harder. But most people are stuck trying to get up the hill, while powering somebody else's water wheel. And it doesn't have to be that way. This planet can quite well support that we all live comfortably, even abundantly, and without destroying it in the process. But, yes, we need to get beyond our old kind of civilization, which isn't really ours anyways, but that of our kings and emperors and bankers who managed to harness our collective irresponsibility to their advantage.
Even if you're not a long-time surfing fan like me, this stunt is amazing, and a little bit over the edge crazy. Pete Cabrinha of Hawaii rode a 70-footer, setting a new world record for riding the biggest wave ever, making Pete the new Big Kahuna.
John Richardson covers the entire spectrum of philosophical and scientific thought, especially quantum mechanics and comes up with his own interesting conclusions about the nature of being and consciousness. One of his conclusions - consciousness is primary.
Being, Consciousness and Everything
Courtesy of Ben Goertzel and his Dynamical Psychology site.
Mike Deering, Executive Director of Singularity Awareness, joins us again to discuss his ideas about when the Singularity might happen. Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, he makes some good arguments about how the nature of exponential change is likely to be sudden and disruptive, rather than gradual.
~~~
With the current state of medical technology at your local hospital, factory automation where you work, entry level desktop PC technology that you can buy from Dell, things don't seen to be moving very fast. And we all know that we have a long way to go. Even if you look at the leading edge in: robotic technology, gene sequencing of viruses in a few hours, mass production of carbon nanotubes, stopping light particles in the lab, paper thin display monitors, sub-wavelength microscopy, MEMS, microfluidics, qubits, self-assembly, and nano-particles, you would see that we have just barely begun to get a handle on the enabling technologies for molecular super-computers, medical nanobots, and desktop nano-factories. The most frustrating thing about the Singularity is that it is an exponential process rather than a linear process. This means that we are not going to gradually and predictably move from where we are to God-like technologies. It's going to be a very sudden change.
The way technology has advanced in our experience is by degrees. We make electronic circuits a little smaller all the time. We go from vinyl albums to cassette tapes to CD's to DVD's to memory cards to story our music. Each advance has advantages and improved performance and new functionalities, but the changes are small and gradual. The Singularity is different. The Singularity is a technological phase change. When you can manufacture large products by placing every atom where you want it, rather than taking a large block of material with randomly positioned atoms and cutting away everything you don't want, or melting the material and pouring it into a mold to solidify into an object with randomly positioned atoms, this changes everything about the product. By controlling the position of every atom you can control the physical characteristics of the material. You can make materials fifty times stronger than steel, virtually indestructible. You can make products perfect down to the atomic scale. You can build new functionalities into the materials at the molecular level, paints that spread themselves on the wall, change colors on command, and never get dirty. When you have software with general reasoning capabilities, that changes everything. Suddenly all of your computers are doing exactly what you want them to, just by asking them, cars driving themselves, robots taking your job, finding exactly what you are looking for on the internet the first time, personal digital assistants that manage your money for you.
Either one of these two technological developments, molecular manufacturing, or artificial general intelligence, would almost instantly change every aspect of the way you live your life, but guess what? Both of these capabilities are going to occur simultaneously, along with gaining the complete knowledge of all biological processes at the molecular level. Nanotechnology will first be used to build computers millions of times more powerful than are available today at almost zero cost. This will result in the almost immediate development of super-human artificial general intelligence (SAGI). Just as there are many paths to nanotech, there are many paths to SAGI and all of them are greatly accelerated by more powerful computers. The combination of nanotech and SAGI will rapidly develop a complete knowledge base of molecular genetic and proteomic biological functions. At this point, whoever controls the technology can do whatever they want.
A.I. and nanotech are inextricably linked. They are advancing in lock-step because the one cannot advance without the other. This interdependence means that they will maintain the same level of progress toward the final goals of molecular machinery (MM) and AGI. It is understandable that you would think that AGI is at least a generation away if you are not following closely the developments in A.I. research. Just as you would think that MM is at least decades away if you only knew what you read on CNN. Here is some stuff you should know about AGI research:
---Biology is an existence proof of molecular machinery and computational intelligence.
---AGI's like nanobots will not be reverse engineered copies of their biological counterparts, but rather original engineered designs using some of the same concepts used by biology and some wholly new concepts.
---The design stage of development of AGI is at the same or more advanced level as the design of the assembler.
---Both the assembler and the AGI are very complex design challenges that some people believe are beyond our intellectual capability. They are wrong in both cases.
---Experts in both fields, Richard Smalley and Marvin Minsky, claim that they will not be developed for a long time if ever. They are both wrong.
AGI's do not have to be people. This is a very important point. There are many different cognitive architectures that can support intelligence, not all of them are conscious, self motivated, self serving entities. It is very possible to design a piece of software with general intelligence and problem solving ability without ego. This would significantly reduce the dangers of AGI. Even though this would remove the danger of the AGI taking over the world for its own purposes, it would not remove the danger of the person controlling the AGI taking over the world, or making a mistake in the use of the AGI if the AGI was significantly more intelligent than the user. If the AGI is significantly more intelligent than the user, the user might not understand all of the implications of the results produced by the AGI.
The combination of general purpose human-like reasoning ability and computer speed, complex accurate serial computation, data storage, and reprogramability will make human level AGI's automatically super-human level intelligences.
The leading contenders in the AGI race that I am aware of are Ben Goertzel's Novamente project and James Andrew Rogers secret AGI project. Both claim to be no more than twelve months away from a human-like reasoning working prototype.
What is the world going to look like a year before the Singularity? A month before? A day before? Well, pretty much like it does today. We are gradually moving toward having these capabilities, but before we have them, we can't do any of the amazing things we will be able to do after we have them. Technology is advancing faster and faster because of feedback, the better tools we have the faster we can build even better tools. This feedback function results in an exponential curve of technological advancement. The nature of exponential advancement is that almost all of the change occurs very near the end of the curve.
The Singularity is going to be a complete surprise to the vast majority of persons on this planet, even the vast majority of highly educated people. It's not going to make itself obvious until it is upon us. Anyone who makes "realistic" predictions of the timing of the Singularity will be laughed at, because conventional wisdom and the consensus of expert opinion will always be based on linear models of gradual change, whereas the Singularity is an exponential process of advancement with a phase change at the end. You don't get respect by telling people the truth about the Singularity. I realize that my prediction is outlandish and ridiculous by generally accepted standards. Nevertheless, I think that getting the truth out is more important than building my reputation. It is critical that people hear that the Singularity is coming much sooner than they think. We are one vital breakthrough from the Singularity.
I think this whole Singularity phenomenon is driven by miniaturization of electro-mechanical systems. All the Singularity technologies are based on it. Of all of Kurzweil's graphs, this one is the scariest :
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/images/chart18.jpg
Admittedly, there are not many data points, but it is clear that miniaturization is leading the charge to the Singularity. The most accessible way to see this is by watching the market with the greatest economic return on miniaturization, computers. And in the computer market, the slice with the most fiscal pressure (largest dollar total, largest number of units) is the entry level desktop computer. You may have noticed prices dropping while power increases.
Doubling time - the time it takes for the power of a computer to double for the same dollar.
example: suppose you purchased a computer on a certain date, and at a later date, you found another computer with double the power for the same price, or you found another computer with the same power at half the price, or some mathematical computation resulting in double the power per dollar.
The reason we would be interested in this doubling time value is that available computer power is an important factor in the timing of the Singularity.
For instance, Eliezer Yudkowsky writes in CFAI: 4.1.2.
"The intelligence required to create AI. Decreases with increasing computing power." Eliezer also writes in CFAI: 4.1.2. "The total processing power available to an average research project will increase faster than chip clock speeds (i.e., maximum parallel speeds increase faster than maximum serial speeds). The total networked processing power on the planet will increase even faster than that; a doubling time of nine months is probably an underestimate."
Ben Goertzel writes on 1/4/2003 [AGI],
"We are limited tremendously by CPU speed and RAM capacity. Either greater CPU speed or greater RAM capacity would be valuable, but the biggest boost would be both together. We could utilize essentially any amount of CPU speed or RAM capacity. No limit in sight. Having a CPU with (for example) 10x greater speed would have a HUGE positive impact on some of the work we're doing. If we had vastly better CPU's and vastly more RAM, the amount of time to get to a complete working implementation of a Novamente system might be reduced to 2/3 what it is right now."
I accept these experts opinions that the availability of more powerful computers would significantly push up the date of the Singularity.
So what is the doubling time? How do we calculate it? On the http://www.bjklein.com/sing/default.htm website it says, "Computer power is doubling at a slowly accelerating rate: every 18 months currently." This seems to be the general consensus based on a little google statistics:
google search -----------------------------------number of sites
For purposes of assessing the effects on the Singularity, we need to use the computer with the fastest doubling time out there. AGI will come out of the computer market with the best power to dollar ratio. This market is the entry level desktop. The April 2003 entry level desktop sells for $500 and has a 2 gig Celeron processor with 256 meg of ram and a 80 gig hard drive and other standard peripherals. As you can see from this graph the price of desktop computers has been dropping since 1990 and continues to drop:
While at the same time the power has been steadily increasing:
Based on available data, how are we to calculate the doubling time extrapolation into the future?
On 1/6/2003 [AGI] Stephen Reed writes:
"Progressing from -50 db HEC to 0 db HEC in 22 years is equivalent to Moore's Law doubling every 16 months. [ 2^16.61 = 100025, 22/16.61*12 = 15.9 ]"
A careful examination of this formula shows that Stephen is merely averaging the doubling time over the past 22 years and applying that constant to the next 22 to arrive at his crossover date of 2021. A constant extrapolation of an average doubling time is not the correct method to project an exponentially changing value. Unfortunately I haven't been able to get good historical data on the entry level computer market. I would welcome any assistance. This is my current extrapolation:
DATE ------ DOUBLING TIME ------ DROPPING RATE
Actually, April 28, 2005 (plus zero, minus 11 days)
Mike can be reached at deering9 at mchsi dot com
One of the features in the Li'l Abner cartoon from the 1940s was the strange and lovable Shmoo creatures:
The Shmoo first appeared in the strip in August 1948. According to Shmoo legend, the lovable creature laid eggs, gave milk and died of sheer esctasy when looked at with hunger. The Shmoo loved to be eaten and tasted like any food desired. Anything that delighted people delighted a Shmoo. Fry a Shmoo and it came out chicken. Broil it and it came out steak. Shmoo eyes made terrific suspender buttons. The hide of the Shmoo if cut thin made fine leather and if cut thick made the best lumber. Shmoo whiskers made splendid toothpicks. The Shmoo satisfied all the world's wants. You could never run out of Shmoon (plural of Shmoo) because they multiplied at such an incredible rate. The Shmoo believed that the only way to happiness was to bring happiness to others. Li'l Abner discovered Shmoos when he ventured into the forbidden Valley of the Shmoon, against the frantic protestations of Ol' Man Mose. "Shmoos," he warned, "is the greatest menace to hoomanity th' world has evah known." "Thass becuz they is so bad, huh?" asked Li'l Abner. "No, stupid," answered Mose, hurling one of life's profoundest paradoxes at Li'l Abner. "It's because they're so good!"Now, that was entertaining fiction, but it also brings up parallels in the dillemmas we might have concerning developing new technologies. Advanced singularity leaning technologies like nanotech and AI and robots easily gets to sound like the shmoos, particularly when we expect them to be conscious and intelligent. Will we expect intelligent robots to just be in selfless service to us and be ecstatic that we find them useful? And if we have devices that fulfill all our needs, what will that do to us? Is it too good, too easy? Those are not easy questions to answer, but it is good to have the discussion. Here's a comment from a discussion at KurzweilAI:Ironically, the lovable and selfless Shmoos ultimately brought misery to humankind because people with a limitless supply of self-sacrificing Shmoos stopped working and society broke down. Seen at first as a boon to humankind, they were ultimately hunted down and exterminated to preserve the status quo.
The debate, such as it is, is being carried out between two extreme groups. On the one hand, there are those who tell us that the technology they are about to invent will be like the Shmoo's from the Li'l Abner comics, curing all ills, solving all problems with a smiling face. On the other, we have the wild-eyed prophets trudging in from the desert to warn us of impending doom. In this climate, and in the context of traditional ethical systems, can anyone claim to know whether there is even a grain of value in radical new technologies? When day-to-day survival is the problem, anything that makes that survival easier looks "good". But is prolonging human life good in and of itself if basic survival in "conventional" terms has never been easier? What I am saying is that the talented, ethically responsible scientists working on the forefornt of technological breakthroughs should have the honesty to recognize that when they re-draw the demarcations lines of the possible, they automatically cast doubt on their ethical mandate for further research. And those people who still think that it is possible to "undiscover" earth-shaking new technologies need to overcome their reservations, inform themselves, and take part in the discussion, even the Taliban.Yes, we can't really go backwards. We can't put any genies back in their bottles, except for by making our civilization break down altogether. We can't either meaningfully halt new lines of research. If it is there to be discovered, somebody will do it, even if it happened to be "illegal".
But of course we can't either expect that we'll remain fundamentally unchanged in the face of revolutionary technological advances. Of course it will change everything if we no longer have to work for a living. Major industries and institutions that exist today will no longer make sense. Corporations, banking, even governments might have to go extinct and be replaced with something else. We'll have to develop new ways of finding meaning in life.
And, yes, if we succeed in developing new lifeforms, from sillicon or DNA, there's no guarantee they'll be as accommodating as shmoos, however well we plan it.
All of it requires thinking bigger, rather than dividing into different camps. Our future and our survival depends on whole systems thinking.
Dear Readers,
I am in dire need of writers. I started Future Hi with the intention that it would be a group effort. With the exception of Flemming Funch, there hasn't been many other contributers, certainly not with any regularity. The only reason there has been regular content is because I made plans months in advance to finish my book project, saving up money, and re-scheduling my business around it. However, instead of finishing the book, I decided to create this site instead. I'm glad I made this decision as it's been loads of fun! But now my ability to make daily contributions is becoming more difficult as my alloted time comes to a close.
If you have enjoyed this site and would like to communicate your ideas to a growing audience (400-500 unique visitors/day), then please contact me. I will stay on as editor, making sure the overall theme remains somewhat consistent, but otherwise I'm fairly hands-off.
If you are interested, please email me at psiphius at yahoo.com. If you're not sure what type of material seems appropriate, just ask me! I'm really easy, I don't bite, I promise! :)
To have some kind of starting point of the material that would qualify, just peruse the archives of all the articles that have appeared so far. All that I ask is that whatever is presented is done so with intelligence and a minimum of dogma. Please keep in mind, that almost all of it has come from two people, mostly me. So obviously you're going to see my own style and viewpoints, which are not necessarily representative of the site's theme as a whole. In other words, this site is only just begun! Consider what you've seen so far as a good starting point; a launch pad to higher frontiers of inner and outer space.
Some Examples:
This list is by no means exhaustive. If you have a suggestion, contact me at psiphius at yahoo.com or submit a comment below.
Trying to understand how consciousness works in the brain while limiting our study entirely to the physical aspects of the brain, is like trying to taste a peach through a microscope - Edward Close, Ph.D.
The Institute for the Study of Peak States is, as the name implies, studying peak states. The idea is that the way we feel isn't necessarily just built from our genetic makeup, the way we've been treated, the amount of trauma we've experienced, etc. That's part of it, but it is possible to overcome any such limitations. Specifically, it is possible to attain states of health, happiness and success that might not be explained from studying our background. Even better, there might be high levels of functionality and happiness that can be attained deliberately, and maintained on a continuous basis. They provide an interesting list of peak states, categorized in various ways, and marked according to their probablity of occuring in the general population. Stuff like:
'Underlying Happiness' stateObvioiusly, by examining such states more closely, key enabling factors might be located, and it might become possible for more people to function in higher states more of the time. Which seems to be the purpose of their work.
• Characteristics: A feeling of happiness underlies all other feelings. It exists simultaneously even with difficult feelings such as sadness or anger. In women, a continuous loving feeling is more dominant, although the happiness is still present.
• Cause: Heart and body brains fused together.
• Comment: Doesn't stop the past from feeling emotionally traumatic.
• Frequency: Estimated 9% relatively continuously, additional 12% recognize it.'Big Sky' state
• Characteristics: The world feels huge. Looking at the sky, it feels gigantic. Your boundaries disappear, especially above your head.
• Cause: Body, mind and Buddha brains fused together. The sensation of the huge sky is from a body sensation of the relative distance between objects and one's body.
• Comment: I'm not sure if I've accurately analyzed this state. Treat it as possibly being due to some other phenomenon. More work needs to be done on it.
• Frequency: Not determined.'Brains Communicate' state
• Characteristics: The three brains can communicate with each other. Brains interact like a dysfunctional family.
• Cause: All the brains' awarenesses are touching and in communication.
• Comment: A useful intermediate state, but not as valuable or dramatic as a fused one. In a Perry diagram, the circles all overlap slightly.
• Frequency: Estimated 12% relatively continuously, additional 23% recognize it.'Deep Peace' state
• Characteristics: Deeper peaceful feeling than the Beauty Way. A feeling of being balanced, evenness, no irritation. Feels like the physical heart is lower in the body. Feel more lightweight. Not effortless, but not as bad as normal consciousness. Brains are aware of each other, can communicate directly, and you are aware of each simultaneously.
• Cause: Brains' awarenesses are superimposed, but not completely fused. No hollow sensations in the body.
• Comment: An intermediate state that we don't try to get.
• Frequency: Not determined.'Hollow' state
• Characteristics: Body feels hollow inside the skin. All parts of the body feel 'continuous'. Emotions have a cognitive rather than affective quality.
• Cause: All brains fuse together.
• Comment: Chakras are not merged. Brains are not connected to the Realm of the Shaman.
• Frequency: Estimated 7% relatively continuously, additional 12% recognize it.'Wholeness' state
• Characteristics: The word 'wholeness' is the most accurate for this state, and is used spontaneously by people acquiring it. A feeling of being complete, with nothing missing. Music is especially vivid.
• Cause: A fusion of the placental and sperm tail 'energy' or 'awarenesses' with the other triune brains.
• Comment: The sensation of wholeness exists independently of the state of fusion of the other brains.
• Frequency: Not determined.
Powered by the sun and hydrogen - pictured here, the Solar-Hydrogen Eco-house, is the first in the world that is fully self-sustainable and runs entirely on hydrogen.
The hydrogen tank is located some distance from the house, and a small diameter pipe connects it to the utility gas line in the house. The gas is used as a domestic heater to provide hot water to a stove or burner, and operate a fuel cell to produce electricity for other appliances.
Besides the obvious eco-friendly solar hydrogen system, the eco-house’s design also incorporates low energy architectural features such as shading, natural ventilation and day-lighting. It also has a rainwater recycling system that is powered by solar energy. This combination makes for a sustainable and environmentally-friendly residential dwelling, helping to reduce air pollution, global warming and acid rain, besides aiding in conserving the world’s depleting fossil fuel.
So the next trick is coming up with a sustainable eco-friendly way of producing hydrogen. A 50% efficient solar-cell would go a long way towards making a solar-hydrogen economy practical. Below is promising research in that direction.
Through the Solar Looking Glass - is about research that resulted in making a cell with efficiencies of way more than 50%. The total cost of this project was only $700,000. Compare that to the current cost of America's occupation of Iraq,
Cost of the U.S. occupation of Iraq per month: $4,000,000,000 (source)
Cost of the U.S. occupation of Iraq per week: $1,000,000,000
Cost of the U.S. occupation of Iraq per day: $142,857,142
Cost of the U.S. occupation of Iraq per hour: $5,952,380
Cost of the U.S. occupation of Iraq per minute: $99,206
So think about that for 7 minutes, the same amount of time it took to spend that $700,000. At a cost of just 7 minutes of combat operations, solar cell efficiency was increased to 50%! Just imagine how much more progress could be made if just a day's worth of war expenditures were spent on alternative energy research, rather than fighting to secure more supply of an unsustainable addiction to fossil fuels.
Meanwhile Governor Swarzeneggar has just endorsed some investment towards kick-starting the move to hydrogen fuel transportation infrastructure in, California Rolls Toward Hydrogen.
Eric Drexler has his new personal technical site online called E-Drexler
"This site focuses on the science behind emerging technologies of broad importance, summarizing research results and offering technical perspectives on research directions. It includes tutorial material, new results, annotated bibliographies and links to external web resources. Initial topics include nanotechnology-based production systems (central to the future of physical technology), and secure, distributed computing (central to the
future of informational technology)."
E-drexler.com contains original information not previously published as well as new diagrams and computer animations. The site is intended to complement Dr. Drexler's published technical work and his textbook Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing and Computation and is intended to assist researchers, educators and students exploring these areas. A site map that gives an overview of its current contents can be found at: http://e-drexler.com/amap.html
Thanks Tyler.
The first person to introduce the concept of Future Shock was Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book, Future Shock. The main argument is that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a "super-industrial society". This change will overwhelm people, the accelerated rate of technological and social change will leave them disconnected, suffering from "shattering stress and disorientation" - future shocked. Toffler stated that the majority of social problems were symptoms of future shock.
A few years earlier, Gordon Moore in his now famous paper (PDF) introduced the idea that would eventually be called Moore’s Law, that states that the speed and density of microprocessor design will follow an exponential curve. This was at a time when computers had barely had any impact on society, nearly 20 years before PC’s made hardly a dent on the economic landscape. 30 years later we saw the explosion of the Internet into the world. Now 40 years later, microprocessors speed is doubling almost every year, and its effects are extraordinary. Not a day goes buy now when some scientific or technological advance isn’t hitting the front pages. As Ray Kurzweil suggest with his Law of Accelerating Returns, microprocessor are such an integrated part of our lives of economic progress, that now society too is caught up in this accelerating change, suggesting that we could see as much change in the next 25 years, as we saw in the last 10,000 years combined!
As one of the leading thinkers on the singularity, Eliezer Yudkowsky is someone accustomed to thinking about extremes of future technological change and advancement. After having many wide ranging discussions with futurists of all stripes, he noticed that certain technological implications can be too “far out” or shocking to some groups more than others. So he came up with what he calls Future Shock Levels or the level that different people find themselves in terms of their concept of the future, and what they are willing to consider, or which is too futuristic or even shocking for them.
Shock Level 0
Degree of Change: Flat.
Technologies: Same as today, maybe more TV channels, bigger cars or TV's.
The legendary average person is comfortable with modern technology - not so much the frontiers of modern technology, but the technology used in everyday life. Most people, TV anchors, journalists, politicians.
For people at this level, the future is seen as pretty much the same as it is today. If you could chart their concept of the future on a graph, you would see change reaching a plateau today and leveling off from here on out. Almost every economic and political paper about the future I’ve read falls into this category. When they discuss wide ranging implications of their policy decisions, there is hardly any mention of technological change at all, and only in the most mundane ways with concepts of Level 1 being described as something to be afraid of, with dangerous out-of-control implications. The current climate of fear over cloning and stem-cell therapy falls into this level.
Shock Level 1
Degree of Change: Logarithmic, then hitting a relative plateau in a decade or two.
Technologies: Virtual reality, living to a hundred, e-commerce, hydrogen economy, ubiquitous computing, stem-cell cloning, minor genetic improvements.
At this level you will find the majority of futurists and future oriented publications. Modern technological frontiers as depicted in Wired Magazine and books like Future Shock and Bill Gates, The Road Ahead. Included in this group are most scientists, novelty-seekers, early-adopters, programmers and technophiles.
Placed on a chart, future progress will continue upwards in a logarithmic fashion, with each year bringing the same amount of change as last year. Eventually this incremental change will lead to people living to a hundred, and optimistically in a society with clean energy, general economic prosperity, and conservative space exploration scenarios.
In my experience most of the people described above think about the future in relatively conservative terms. If you ever read a future oriented article by one of them they often say things like, “This probably won’t happen in my lifetime, but perhaps my children or grandchildren will live to see it”, If you ever read a quote like that you know you're reading someone at SL1. Almost every report that comes out of NASA is hopelessly stuck at SL1.
Shock Level 2
Degree of Change: Logarithmic to Exponential
Technologies: major genetic engineering, medical immortality, interstellar travel, and new "alien" cultures.
At this level you’ll find your typical SF Fan. Literary SF and cutting edge magazines like Mondo 2000, Omni or Future Magazine of days past were filled with Level 2 ideas. Ironically, I don’t know of a single popular SF movie or TV show that exists comfortably at this level. Not even Star Trek qualifies for SL2, as it barely considers life spans past 100, with immortality remaining the exclusive domain of “super-advanced aliens”.
Up and until the 1980’s there wasn’t much discussion of future change past level 2, except in the most limited sense. This is probably because the concept of radical accelerating change was still beyond the radar of almost every forward thinking person at the time. Enabling Level 3 technologies like molecular nanotechnology were not even considered then. The only exceptions I know of are Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary, who were completely at home with post-human evolution (SL3).
Shock Level 3
Degree of Change: Exponential
Technologies: Immortality, nanotechnology, human-equivalent AI, intelligence increase, uploading, total body revision, intergalactic exploration, megascale engineering.
Clearly identifiable people didn't exist at this level until the 1980’s when groups like the Extropians and transhumanists emerged. Writers like Robert Anton Wilson, and Timothy Leary with his SMI2LE concept were the first people to my knowledge who discussed this level in any depth. However, it wasn’t until Eric Drexler published his book Engines of Creation that finally set the stage for concrete, detailed technological speculation of SL3 possibilities.
Shock Level 4
Degree of Change: Exponential to Hyperbolic (Accelerating Acceleration)
Technologies: Singularity, Matrioska "Jupiter" Brains, Powers, complete mental revision, ultraintelligence, posthumanity, Alpha-Point computing, Apotheosis, the total evaporation of "life as we know it."
The only people I know who are comfortable discussing change at this level are Singularitarians, and some cutting edge psychedelic pioneers like Terrence McKenna and John Lilly. Olaf Stapledon in his book Star Maker waxed poetic about SL3 megascale engineering and SL4 ultra-intelligences, and John Lilly discussed multiple encounters with a SL4 intelligences, which he gave names like "ECCO" and "Solid State Entities". The first writer to bring this into concrete technological terms was Vernor Vinge in his 1993 paper . These ideas were soon picked up by Extropians and Transhumanists, but as far as I know it wasn’t until the Singularitarians that this level was embraced concretely and enthusiastically.
As Eli says, If there's a Shock Level Five, I'm not sure I want to know about it!
Eli goes on to say,
If somebody is still worried about virtual reality (low end of SL1), you can safely try explaining medical immortality (low-end SL2), but not nanotechnology (SL3) or uploading (high SL3). They might believe you, but they will be frightened - shocked.
That's not to say you can't do it. In fact, you can take advantage of the future shock to carry the idea. You just have to be careful.
By a similar token, a Singularitarian can shock a science-fiction fan, but not an Extropian - the Extropian will be interested, perhaps enthusiastic, but not shocked. (Of course, if the person was already enthusiastic about Transhumanism, they might be wildly enthusiastic about the Singularity.) An Extropian can shock your average Wired reader, but should be careful about trying this with the "person on the street" - they may be frightened. And so on. In general, one shock level gets you enthusiasm, two gets you a strong reaction - wild enthusiasm or disbelief, three gets you frightened - not necessarily hostile, but frightened, and four can get you burned at the stake.
Eric Drexler in his book Nanosystems: molecular machinery, manufacturing, and computation, said that we could use moleculary nanotechnology to cheaply create solar cells that would convert as much as 90% of incoming solar energy into useable electricity. Such a development would permanently solve our energy problems on earth, and a go a long way towards closing the materials loop and returning the earth into a greener place.
In the meantime, there continue to be tantalizing leads towards moving in this direction without nanotechnology.
From the article, An unexpected discovery could yield a full spectrum solar cell.
The serendipitous discovery means that a single system of alloys incorporating indium, gallium, and nitrogen can convert virtually the full spectrum of sunlight -- from the near infrared to the far ultraviolet -- to electrical current.
"It's as if nature designed this material on purpose to match the solar spectrum," says MSD's Wladek Walukiewicz, who led the collaborators in making the discovery.
What began as a basic research question points to a potential practical application of great value. For if solar cells can be made with this alloy, they promise to be rugged, relatively inexpensive -- and the most efficient ever created.
Two layers of indium gallium nitride, one tuned to a band gap of 1.7 eV and the other to 1.1 eV, could attain the theoretical 50 percent maximum efficiency for a two-layer multijunction cell. (Currently, no materials with these band gaps can be grown together.) Or a great many layers with only small differences in their band gaps could be stacked to approach the maximum theoretical efficiency of better than 70 percent.
"If it works, the cost should be on the same order of magnitude as traffic lights," Walukiewicz says. "Maybe less." Solar cells so efficient and so relatively cheap could revolutionize the use of solar power not just in space but on Earth.
From SpaceTime Hypersurfing by Michael Szpir,
In some future history, 1994 may be remembered as the year that the warp drive was first conceived to be a physical possibility. Long a cliche' of science- fiction writing, the warp drive has transported countless fictional characters through light-years of interstellar space in the time it takes for you or me to travel to the market. Unfortunately for real-world travelers, the warp drive has always been thought to be inconsistent with the laws of physics.
But all this has changed. In the May 1994 issue of Classical and Quantum Gravity, Miguel Alcubierre, a physicist at the University of Wales describes a space-travel scenario that bears an uncanny resemblance to the warp drive of science fiction. With Alcubierre's warp drive, we could reach any place in the universe in as short a time as we please!
Excerpt from Miguel Alcubierre's original paper
Class. Quantum Grav. 11 (1994), L73-L77.
It is shown how, within the framework of general relativity and without the introduction of wormholes, it is possible to modify a spacetime in a way that allows a spaceship to travel with an arbitrarily large speed. By a purely local expansion of spacetime behind the spaceship and an opposite contraction in front of it, motion faster than the speed of light as seen by observers outside the disturbed region is possible. The resulting distortion is reminiscent of the "warp drive'' of science fiction. However, just as it happens with wormholes, exotic matter will be needed in order to generate a distortion of spacetime like the one discussed here.
More recent work suggest that this warp drive could be created without exotic matter in Hyper-fast travel without negative energy.
And another paper by Hal Puthoff discussing the possibility of using Zero-point energy fluctuations to do the same thing.
What's interesting about this is that Miguel Alcubierre came up with this idea in his spare time! So ask yourself this, if one humble guy can figure this out on his time off, what do you think minds thousands or millions of times more intelligent will think up and implement?
A guy named Scott Haefner has figured out how to take aerial photographs and Quick Time VR's from kites.
I'm assuming since all these Quicktime VR's don't include the kite, that the 6 required composite photos are taken at different times?
Thanks LVX23 for the link! :)
I heard about these over at Bird on the Moon.
The first one is called The McGurk effect. This is amazing. It even works for me if you just alternate between placing a finger over his mouth and removing it.
The McCollough effect. This is interesting too, as two hours later the effect still works.
I just read this over at DRT News,
Quoting from this source.In strict dictionary terms, martial law is the suspension of civil authority and the imposition of military authority. When we say a region or country is "under martial law," we mean to say that the military is in control of the area, that it acts as the police, as the courts, as the legislature. The degree of control might vary - a nation may have a civilian legislature but have the courts administered by the military. Or the legislature and courts may operate under civilian control with a military ruler. In each case, martial law is in effect, even if it is not called "martial law."
There's been talk lately about how another terrorist attack would trigger the suspension of the Constitution and elections. With very limited exceptions, there is no Constitutional provision for martial law or the suspension of the Constitution in whole or in part.If any of these things were to happen, then the US would no longer exist. In the United States, there is no national law except under the terms of the Constitution. By definition, authorities would no longer have any authority. "Continuity of government" plans that include the suspension of any part the Constitution are an oxymoron.
Also, it's good to remember that the most powerful lawman in the land isn't federal or military. It's your local sheriff.
The sheriff of your county is the highest elected official and has more power than most people realize. Your local sheriff has the power to tell dragoons from various federal alphabet soup agencies that they will not come into his/her county and attempt to enforce unconstitutional "laws." Your local sheriff is there to protect your rights, not the actions of an out of control government whether it be state or federal.
The way I interpret this is any attempt to install Martial Law and suspend the consititution is a sham. There is nothing, no where that allows it. Any attempt to do so would be no different than an invading army.
No Constitution, No Law. Period.
So if they do suspend the constitition, then the United States ceases to exist. Any so-called "law and order" after that point is total BS... its just a bunch of criminals with guns who are attempting to rule by force, and nothing more. Unless your local sheriff stands up to these guys, it's anarchy... and possibly civil war.
Besides, as I mentioned in my post Political Optimism, if they declare Martial Law, there is no way to sucessfully enforce it in the United States... we are simply too big and diverse. Any success will depend on propoganda and local law enforcement, who are obliged by law to obey the constitution, and tell these martial law guys to go to hell.
In related news, retention rates for re-enlistment are way down. I wonder why. The bottom line is there just isn't enough people to maintain martial law. The situation would quickly degrade into an Iraq quagmire, except on a much, much larger scale. Most American military personel have a hard enough time fighting foreign enemies, imagine what they will do when confronted by thier own countrymen? Every military person I know will not go along with martial law for long.
Mike Deering, Director of Singularity Awareness, shares his thoughts about the near future of robots and their potential effects on society.
Preface
Major automakers such as Honda and Toyota and electronics manufacturers such as Sony are currently putting a great deal of effort into the development of humanoid robots. Toyota has been developing industrial robots since the 1970s, focusing on boosting manufacturing efficiency. Toyota announced that they will have an industrial humanoid robot on the market by next year to work in factories and other uses. For current news on this, google: news Toyota robots.
In this article I am discussing the economic implications of the introduction of intelligent robots into the workforce. What I will not be covering is whether it is possible to make robots intelligent or how long it will be before that happens. Based on information from Ben Goertzel, James Andrew Rogers, and Peter Voss, all artificial general intelligence (AGI) developers, I expect intelligent humanoid robots to start showing up in factories and fast food joints as early as next year.
The development of intelligent robots is going to be disruptive, economically and socially. But it's going to be great also. Yes we will all lose our jobs but the price of stuff is going to drop like a rock. In today's economy being out of work is a bummer, but being out of work when you have the personal capability to produce all the things you need or want is not so bad. Actually there may be a small market for personal human service, but it will be a competitive market with few positions.
Lets stop for a moment and talk about why things cost what they do. Everyone has heard of supply and demand, but beyond that, you obviously can't sell something for less than it cost to make it. Robots can make more robots, which can in turn make more robots in an exponential progression, so supply will rapidly exceed demand. Therefore prices should drop, but we still have that nasty "cost to produce" issue. In the "cost to produce" of a consumer product there is labor costs, raw materials costs, machinery and facilities usage cost, and intellectual property (IP) costs. With robots doing the labor, the labor cost drops to zero and the cost for usage of the robots is moved into the machinery and facilities usage cost. The raw materials cost consists of the cost of mineral rights (usually small), cost of labor (zero if using robots), and the cost of machinery and facilities usage. And the cost of machinery and facilities usage is the amortized cost of purchasing the machinery and facilities, which are themselves products. So we have a rather circular process here. With robots doing the labor, the cost to produce products is the cost to produce other products. So, what does this mean? Simple. The more manufacturing capability that is in the economy, the lower the cost of the products it produces. When robots can make more robots and manufacturing capability explodes exponentially, prices will drop to almost nothing.
What can we expect when the economy changes?
Via Quotes of the Day:
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
- Philip K. Dick
Yeah, that's a good way of putting it.
That would exclude, oh, how about governments and countries? If we don't believe in boundaries and in the power of certain groups of people to govern us, then there really isn't anything there. There are continents and land and people. But no borders and no power over us. No laws either. They aren't really real. People are real. What they do is real. Their thoughts and feelings and actions are real.
Goodbye to religions too. If you don't believe in them, there's really not much there. A lot of church buildings and some books. Good deeds are real.
Scientific laws and theories go away as well when we stop believing in them. Nature and life doesn't go away. The flowers keep blooming and the planets keep rotating around their stars. And there's a system to that, which keeps working. But it is the theoretical models of how we think that works that drop away.
There's a lot of things our theories say don't exist or can't exist. If we stop believing in those theories, those things will still be there. Extraterrestrials, other dimensions, paranormal perceptions, miraculous events. Except that they won't be miraculous or paranormal unless you have some kind of belief about how unlikely they're supposed to be.
Dreams exist whether you believe in them or not. You'll be zipping around in fantastic realities every day, at least when you sleep.
Failure and success, loyalty and betrayal, mistakes, lies, obligations, promises, "shoulds" - none of it means much if one stops believing. What matters is what is there, and what you actually do. Good constructive actions last longer than desctructive actions. They're more real. Good and bad feelings exist. The reasons for them do not.
Life exists. Consciousness exists. I exist. I'm probably more real the more I get over my beliefs about why and how.
The counter-culture of the Sixties was an amazingly vibrant and exciting time. I was a small child when it reached it's peak, and it still forged a tremendous imprint on my psyche. I grew up in places like Laguna Beach and Los Altos, California. I have vivid memories of hanging out at the beach in the late 60's watching naked guys (probably on acid) riding their bikes straight off the pier. My parents tried to shield me from them, but it didn't work. Once I had a taste of the "energy" these people exuded, it never wore off. As a child of 4 or 5 it was pretty obvious these guys were having lots of fun and I wanted to be a part of it. For at least the first 10 years of my life I had lots of exposure to hippies of every variety in my home neighborhood, including this incredibly gifted artist who made the most intense, colorful, beautiful psychedelic drawings I have ever seen, which right then and there turned me on to art forever.
Like I said in my political optimism piece we are witnessing the collision between the old culture and the new heating up at a furious pace.
I believe we are on the verge of another Counter Culture, this time brought on by THE MAN of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). David Weinberger has an excellent transcript of his talk on NPR. I urge you to read it, or listen to it - Real Audio, or Windows Media. Some would say that the internet itself is a counter-culture, and I think this is true to some extent. But I think it's more accurate to say that the Internet is an extension of our culture, rather than counter to it. This is a great thing, but I fear such an extension is about to be nipped off at the bud by DRM. That leaves only one alternative... a counter culture.
Counter-culture will happen, because it will be just that - counter to so-called "culture" that is propagated in a highly controlled, locked-down way by the media oligarchs. Since they are denying their memes... the same freedoms that other memes enjoy, they won't spread as fast, far, or wide as counter-cultural memes without such restrictions. Additionally, their memes can't mutate, since DRM prohibits fair use and deriviative work. Counter-cultural creations will have no such restrictions.
In the marketplace that is as much a part of the natural world as plants and animals, Darwinian counter-cultural meme propagation will out-compete expensive, crippled memes, leaving corporate-controlled media eating the dust of an out-of-control Cambrian meme explosion. As this meme propagation accelerates towards the singularity, corporate dinosaurs will die off, wasting away in the pollution of their own making. The irony of it is, in the age of infinite duplication, there is no scarcity, so their desperate gasping is their own refusal to breath readily available air of a new culture.
Some say that open-source creative work won't be that high of quality, since there is less financial incentive, but I disagree. The counter culture was not driven by money either, but by a strong desire to communicate a new awareness, a new consciousness being opened up by psychedelics. This new counter-cultural will be as popular if not more popular than anything we have ever seen. Except this time the counter cultural will be global and instantenous. It will give birth to a new renaissance... I'm guessing THE Renaissance of our age. Empowed by cheap tools of creativity, music & video production, blogging, smart mobs, and even more empowering and creative tools on their way, the sky is the limit for anyone with the desire to participate. Bye Bye Hollywood!
Meanwhile the government is losing what currency it had of trust. It's exhausting it's remaining credibility with its stupid and dishonest war against some drugs, especially regarding MDMA. Its continuing dishonesty with both the drug and Iraq war is only making maters worse. I think this is really sad, because trust in governance is what makes for a healthy democracy. So instead people are looking within themselves and each other for a more honest and genuine "reality". So while the media monopolies continue to lockdown and fence off their cultural creations, increasing numbers of people will seek out freer (as in expression and cost) alternatives.
And lets not forget the emergence of smart mobs... decentralized social networking on a scale like we have never seen. Imagine if the counter culture of the sixties had access to these 21st century tools.
Meanwhile media monopolies are showing their true colors with online distribution of works, with their recent decision to eliminate the 99 cent download cost. Now they want to bring the cost back up, so it doesn't cut into their CD sales. So obviously they still don't get it. They are not interested in seeing a digital distribution. They are trying to fight against the future itself. And they WILL LOOSE. In the meantime, The FCC is adding things like the broadcast flag; HP, Intel, Microsoft and other companies are adding increasingly strict digital restrictions, making it almost impossible to use the digital media the way you want. So it is inevitable that alternatives will spring up, people will create more and more work that is in the public open-source domain without any restrictions. These are the works that people will download. These are the works that people at school will be sharing, watching and listening too, and influencing their outlook on life. This will be the real cultural driving force. Meanwhile the media monopolies will have locked themselves out of future cultural evolution, a cultural primarily driven forward by young people who've grown up with computer consciousness from the time they were born. They won't accept anything less than total information liberty.
From Physics Today.
Whether outraged or supportive about DOE's planned reevaluation of cold fusion, most scientists remain deeply skeptical that it's real.
The cold fusion claims made in 1989 by B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann didn't hold up. But they did spawn a small and devoted coterie of researchers who continue to investigate the alleged effect. Cold fusion die-hards say their data from the intervening 15 years merit a reevaluation-- and a place at the table with mainstream science. Now they have the ear of the US Department of Energy.
For the record, I don't not believe Fleischmann and Pons were frauds. I believe they actually did achieve some kind of extra energy in their experiments. But I also believe they did some sloppy science by not clearly documenting their research for easy repetition. Since then hundreds of scientists around the world have been able to duplicate the result of excess energy. The most recent and dramatic example was using ultrasonic vibrations to squeeze tiny gas bubbles in the liquid so quickly and violently that temperatures reached millions of degrees and some of the hydrogen atoms in the solvent molecules fused, producing a flash of light and energy.
I also find it interesting that for years, Arthur C. Clarke, one of the most level-headed SF authors who ever lived, and who has a couple of science degrees, believes Cold Fusion is real and will one day be practical.
By Ron Brezsny
DEAR FELLOW MEMBERS OF THE BEAUTY AND TRUTH TRIBE,
I confess that I suffer from a peculiar variety of chauvinism. I'm not zealously inflated about the glory of my religion or region or football team, but rather of the era I live in. I fantasize that our moment in history is more important than all the others that have come before. I harbor the secret hope that those of us alive today are on the cusp of a radical turning point in the evolution of humanity.
It's a little embarrassing. It associates me with wacky millennialists of all stripes, from histrionic New Age prophets to fundamentalist Christians who fanatically await the "end times." And as much as I would like to imagine my views are subtler and more rational than those of the superstitious extremists, I must admit that I sometimes catch myself dreaming of how deliriously interesting it would be if the sour mass hallucination that is mistakenly referred to as "reality" really did mutate "in the twinkling of an eye," as the Bible insinuates.
Did I scoff at the scaremongers who shivered at the approach of Y2K? Well, yeah, I mostly did. But there was also a Drama King in a dark corner of my psyche who indulged in perversely thrilling fantasies about the possibility that the melodramatic doomsayers might be right. The same is true about my relationship with the Nostradamus wannabes who forecast "earth changes" and a global economic depression in the face of the massive conjunction of planets in Taurus in May, 2000. Ditto the "Cosmic Crucifixion" predicted for August, 1999, when a solar eclipse coincided with a seemingly alarming array of planetary configurations.
And yet there is another part of me, a voice that feels older and wiser, who suspects that even if we ARE on the verge of an evolutionary turning point, even if those of us who are alive today *will* experience the End of Life As We Know It, it just won’t be as simple and obvious and bad as the literalist prophets fantasize. The transformation will not come via some cataclysmic overnight world-wide presto-chango like an asteroid plunging into the earth or the reversal of the Earth's magnetic poles or massive solar flares baking the planet -- or even the most appalling terrorist attack in history.
It is this same part of me -- the older, wiser voice -- who is deeply distrustful of how utterly disposed our culture is to seeing the worst in everything. It amazes me that cynicism is regarded as a supreme sign of intelligence; that Things Falling Apart are inherently more interesting than Things in the Throes of Creative Rebirth. Nineteenth-century poet John Keats once observed that "If something is not beautiful, it is probably not true." But the majority of the prophets, like most of the intelligentsia, the media, and our political leaders, believe the exact opposite: "If something is not ugly, it is probably not true."
Luckily, the jingoistic part of me that yearns to be alive when Everything Changes can find a common ground with the cool eternal part of me that regards the entropy-worshiping, all-or-nothing mindset as a unique signature of the civilization that's dying. Together these two aspects of my psyche can collaborate to conclude the following:
WE ARE INDEED LIVING THROUGH THE APOCALYPSE RIGHT NOW.
But it is nothing like the end of the world visualized by any of the usual suspects. It's different in four ways.
1. It is a slow, gradual apocalypse.
2. The apocalypse is usually invisible to most of us, popping into our conscious awareness only on rare occasions.
3. The apocalypse is as much about rebirth as collapse.
4. The primary way most of us experience the apocalypse is through the intimate events of our personal lives.
I'll explore these four points in more detail.
1. THE APOCALYPSE IS HAPPENING IN SLOW MOTION. It has been going on for decades and it will continue to unfold for many years. Sudden, sensational punctuations arise now and then to expedite it, but for the most part it ferments continuously in the background. Most days bring no emergency that is beyond our capacity to bear, but the cumulative effects of the transfigurations that relentlessly weave themselves into our lives have turned every one of us into towering heroes whose courageous endurance dwarfs the valor of all humans who have come before us.
2. THE APOCALYPSE IS FOR THE MOST PART INVISIBLE, and here's the most extreme evidence: Very few of us have registered the fact that we are in the midst of the largest mass extinction of life on Earth since the demise of the dinosaurs. This is the conclusion of a poll of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, a professional society of 5,000 scientists. Think of it: Animal and plant species are dying off at a rate unmatched in 65 million years, and almost no one knows -- or grieves.
But the work-in-progress that is the apocalypse is not always cloaked. Now and then a single riveting event transfixes our collective emotions, driving millions of us deep into a visceral realization of just how fragile our hold is on life's sweet mysteries. For a brief interlude, the covert, slow motion upheaval explodes into plain view; the hidden truth becomes an open secret. The Gulf War was one of those events, and 2000's disputed presidential election can be counted as a minor outbreak. Maybe nothing exposed the ongoing apocalypse more poignantly, at least for us Americans, than the mass murder perpetrated by kamikaze hijackers on September 11.
3. THE ORIGINAL MEANING OF THE WORD "APOCALYPSE" WAS "REVELATION," and in the esoteric spiritual traditions of the West, the apocalypse is regarded as a Great Awakening -- a marvelous resurrection.
I propose that the apocalypse we're living through applies in both the degraded modern sense of the word -- the end of the world -- and in the original sense. In other words, collapse and renewal are happening side by side; calamity and blooming; rot and splendor; grievous losses and unpredictable surges of miraculous novelty. Yes, the end of the old world is proceeding apace; but it is overlapped by the birth pangs of a fresh, hot civilization that will be beautiful beyond all imagining.
Often the horrifying mayhem and the gorgeous regeneration have no link. But in the case of the trauma of last September 11, I propose that they were meshed. My mailbox was filled with emails from people writing to testify about how the terrorist assaults on New York and Washington, D.C. inspired them to live more authentically. Their dedication to creating peace and love and understanding leaped to a higher octave; their petty worries dropped away, leaving them passionately focused on their core spiritual values; they were roused by an electrifying new clarity of purpose, which incited them to stop wasting their time on dead-end, low-priority desires and instead channel all their vital force into accomplishing their most essential goals; and they had direct perceptions -- gut-level, intuitive, soul-enriching gnosis -- that We Are All One.
It's as if millions of people had a simultaneous Near Death Experience and harvested the revivifying fruits that typically come to those who have peered over to the other side of the veil.
Here's another possible example of mayhem and regeneration arising from a single set of events, suggested by healer Caroline Myss in her book *Energy Anatomy:* China's brutal invasion and occupation of Tibet in the 1950s resulted in the exile of the Dalai Lama, which ultimately brought that great soul's influence, along with his beautiful brand of Buddhism, to the entire world with a breadth and depth that would never have happened otherwise.
Can you think of other breakdowns/breakthroughs that fit this description?
4. MOST OF THE TIME WE EXPERIENCE APOCALYPSE NOT THROUGH THE BIG, BAD EVENTS LIKE THE SEPTEMBER 11 MASSACRES, but rather through the details of our personal lives. The radical but gradual revolution, the agonizing death of the old order and slow bloom of the new, are framed in the storylines of your most intimate dramas. Again and again over the years, you are pushed to a brink that challenges you to either rise to the occasion or decay. The crises may come in the form of a divorce or illness or job loss, or even in less dramatic events like a misunderstanding with a friend or the inexplicable waning of a once-passionate dream.
And seeded inside each of these personal turning points is the crux of the ongoing global apocalypse: You get to choose whether you will adjust by taking a path that keeps you in alignment with the values of the dying world or else that makes you hum in resonance with the new civilization that is being born. In effect, you get the chance to vote, with your entire life, for which aspect of the apocalypse you want to predominate.
*
If you've been reading my newsletter in recent months, you know that we've been ruminating on PRONOIA, which is the opposite of paranoia. Pronoia is the unshakable conviction that life is a conspiracy to liberate you from suffering, fill you with joy, and make you really smart.
As sweet and exalted as pronoia feels in our bodies, however, it is not meant to become a force of repression. Pronoia thrives on an engagement with difficult emotions and challenging events, not by ignoring them.
In that spirit, I ask you: How might you respond to the part of the apocalypse that brings collapse and decay? Will it be with actions that express rage, revenge, hatred, tribalism, fear, and all the primitive emotions that have nourished the roots of the dying civilization? Or will it be with actions that express ingenious compassion, creative inclusiveness, expansive empathy, and all the noble emotions that will be at the heart of the new world to come?
A few more questions for you before I conclude:
What will you do to focus your personal experience of the apocalypse on liberation rather than entropy?
How will you respond to the Goddess's invitation to mercy-kill the bad habits and rotting attitudes that interfere with your ability to express your soul’s code -- the blueprint you came to Earth to carry out?
What if there is even a grain of truth in the notion that what we expect will happen tends to come to pass? What if it's insane and stupid to revel in visions of doom to the exclusion of all other scenarios? What if it's dumb and crazy to be entertained by bad news and to ignore and dismiss and be bored by good news?
How can you personally starve the bad apocalypse -- the forces that tend to lead to loss, corruption, and decay? How can you personally nurture the good apocalypse -- the influences that foster redemption, renewal, and reinvention? What leaps of the imagination and creative actions can you take to crush rampant nihilism? What entertaining tricks can you summon to help shape an environment in which it is more fun and interesting to play with boom and zoom instead of doom and gloom?
With rowdy blessings,
Rob
When it comes to politics, I prefer not to discuss it unless I can provide something constructive, rather than just ranting about what's wrong. There are so many things wrong about it, that I feel my energy is best spent attempting to shed somethng positive light on the situation. So with this, my first political post to Future Hi, I hope to provide something positive in the face of so much negative news. Besides, I think the major challenges facing us are more environmental than political in nature.
There is too much to possibly fit into one blog entry, so I will attempt to be as concise as possible.
What we are witnessing today is a collision between the old and the new or as Flemming Funch says,
An old rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open, free and exciting is waking up.
This collision has been inevitable for a very long time. The current stress and instability is the friction being generated from this collision. The hope is this friction doesn't create so much heat that we all burn up.. I’m optimistic this won’t happen, and below I'll explain why.
Here is a list of worst-case political scenarios that most people tend to worry about, and below the reasons why I think they are unlikely to happen.
Martial Law
I have no doubt those in power would declare martial law if they think they could get away with it. The reason they haven’t, is they know they can't. If they did, how could they possibly enforce it? It would take massive amounts of military and law enforcement resources, way more than is available. Look at the situation in Iraq. Iraq is the size of the state of California, and the entire might of the United States military is finding it more and more difficult to maintain martial law and order. How then, could they possibly enforce any lasting order over a landmass the size of the United States? Another factor is those who would enforce such a draconian police state would be the men and women of our own country, our friends, brothers, sisters and children. And if there is one thing I know about our military personnel, they will not as a group fire on their own citizens. This fact is acknowledged by most conspiracy theorists, which is why their theory requires the placement of foreign/UN troops on American soil. Even without our current strained relations with most other countries, can you honestly believe sufficient foreign troop placement would ever happen? If there were to be Martial Law in the United States, it would have to be an invading army like China. But is this even possible, without willful complicity? We have nukes, they have nukes. Since nuclear war is unwinnable, no nation will ever engage in it.
New World Order/Fourth Reich
This idea is synchronous with martial law. To pull off a global order of this magnitude is almost impossible, as to be laughable. They can barely contain the Iraq situation; so imagine an attempt by the Neocons to do this over the entire world. This has been their agenda all along, but I’m afraid it’s way too ambitious. Most of the world is simply not going along with such imperial ambitions. As it is, many nations are in open revolt to the American Neocon’s agenda. How about the United Nations? Maybe, but that would mean the entire world is actually cohesively aligned within the UN, and the UN is pretty weak at the moment. Personally, I don’t believe in a world government because it means even more consolidation of power. But like I said, I don’t see how such a consolidation can be cohesively maintained. There are too many competing power interests, especially at the grass-roots levels, whether they are malicious terrorists or benevolent decentralized emergent democratic forces. Look recently at what happened in Spain to understand the power of the ends. A Centralized order is not sustainable under any circumstances. The only way I see a peaceful world emerging is one that values the ends first, then the connections between them - a bottoms-up, grass-roots democracy enabled by the network.
World War 3/Global Thermonuclear Exchange
Some people are already saying that we are seeing the beginnings of WW3 right now. The situation in Iraq is heating up with no exit strategy in site. So this could happen. Who would be the players, and how would it play out? The worst-case scenario is Russia, China and many other nations joining forces to take the US down. But we are no longer on any remotely level playing field. There is nothing close to a conventional war theater. We all have nukes. If WW3 does happen, we all die. Nobody wins, so why would Russia or China even consider it? They would lose; it would be a suicide mission if they attempted to take the US down. Since such a global war would be between large nations, I believe the same rules apply as they did during the Cold War. Stalemate would be reached quickly in any global showdown of force. If global chaos were to ensue it would have to be large-scale guerilla terrorism. If anything that is the most likely of the scenarios. If a nuke is set off in the states, you can kiss the mid-east goodbye, maybe. If the US did nuke the Mid-east it can also kiss goodbye one of its major assets - oil. There have been hundreds of billions, probably trillions of dollars spent building and maintaining the oil supply infrastructure. If the US did nuke the area, it would be like nuking it's own foot, or more accurately its own food supply. So the global economy, like it or not, will be just the thing preventing it from happening. Could it still happen? Yes. Will it happen? I doubt it.
An Orwellian 1984 Panopticon Surveillance State
This is a very complex issue, but I don’t think it can be sustained either, for lots of micro and macro-economic reasons. For some background on my thinking in this area, please read Capital, Power and Ecology.
A much anticipated issue about the Singularity and an article called the Panopticon Singularity was set to appear in the latest issue of Whole Earth Review, but before it was published WER went out of business.
The article talks about the inevitable emergence of surveillance technology that has the potential of rendering every aspect of our lives visible and policed. These technologies, many of which are discussed at length, are smart cameras, p2p surveillance networks, gait analysis, terahertz radar, Celldar, ubiquitous RFID 'dust', un-Trusted computing and Digital Restrictions Management, cognitive radio, Lab-on-a-chip chemical analyzers, and comprehensive data mining.
It's a very thorough and brilliant piece and I suggest you read it. Here are some salient quotes:
We are all criminals, if you dig far enough: we've broken the speed limit, forgotten to file official papers in time, made false statements (often because we misremembered some fact), failed to pay for services, and so on. These are minor offenses -- relatively few of us are deliberate criminals. But even if we aren't active felons we are all potential criminals, and a case can be -- and is being -- made for keeping us all under surveillance, all the time.
A Panopticon Singularity is the logical outcome if the burgeoning technologies of the singularity are funneled into automating law enforcement. Previous police states were limited by manpower, but the panopticon singularity substitutes technology, and ultimately replaces human conscience with a brilliant but merciless prosthesis.
There is no doubt that within 10 years all of the technologies will exist to create such a society. There is also a societal trend based on fear and need for security that will encourage the proliferation of these technologies. However, I don't think it's going to happen. Here's why:
Such a system would be so thorough that everyone would eventually fall into its trap - and that includes the very wealthy and powerful. Currently if you are rich and powerful enough you can afford privacy. For example, I doubt anyone could get access to Bill Gates or Larry Ellison’s credit report or social security number. And even if we could, we would be powerless to actually make use of it. That's because they have enough money to make themselves invisible and immune to all but the most trusted parties. But such a panopticon as outlined in this essay will even make their lives completely visible to Joe Six pack with a $20 PDA circa 2012.
What this means in real terms, is that for the first time in centuries we'll start seeing a massive effort to rid ourselves of all but the most useful and practical laws. The Panopticon society will probably survive, but the majority of the laws most definitely will not. If they did, not only would this bring down the most powerful, as so many of their "enemies" have a vested interest in doing so, but it would throw so many people in jail, detention or probation that any legal system no matter how automated couldn't handle the overload, let alone the HUGE drain on the economy. With the best and the brightest falling into jail along with the rest of us, this panopticon society will collapse under its own very stupid weight. Natural economic selection would not favor a panopticon society with draconian laws over another one with looser restrictions. Same goes for copyright.
Wired has an excellent article about how if the US maintains it's ever increasing extremism on intellectual property, the real innovation will move elsewhere. Same goes for a panopticon society.
Grass-roots terrorism
Of all the dystopian scenarios I've covered so far, this is probably the most likely. But before we even tackle this problem it would help to actually know the truth of what terror is. The problem is we are constantly lied to by the Bush administration on the true extent of terrorism. They have been all-too willing to use terrorism as an excuse to do conduct global piracy and plunder of world resources. I think the real terrorist threat is much less than we are being told. I think the Al Qaeda threat, although existent, is mostly fiction created by the Bush Administration to provide them with the necessary boogeyman to carry out their agenda.
I think the very best solution against any kind of terrorism, as well as virtually all forms of corruption, whether government or corporate can be reduced by transparency. I think transparency is inevitable. For my analysis of the inevitability of transparency, read my article The Coming Leisure Society.
Ultimately, I think terrorism is only going to be solved when we address the vast descrepancies in economic health and democratic choice around the world. You can almost always trace the route cause of terrorism to people who are marginalized by their government and/or economic conditions. Remove these problems, and the root stressors that cause people to pursue extremest religiious/political terrorism evaporates.
These economic disparities are entirely artificial. There is no reason for it, and I believe they are happening in large part due to special elite interests mucking up the true global economy, which would work just fine if these same special elite power brokers are exposed through transparent systems, which are becoming more available as the net grows.
Also, coming this week is an International Workshop on Inverse Surveillance. For a good overview of this workshop and the implications of grassroots democratic sousveillance, read Flemmings recent post.
There are so many other trends going on that our working on the side of creating a new, more open, democratic society to cover in this article. But I hope I've given you enough food for thought to get you thinking in this direction.
Here's some good follow-up links:
Unmediated - Tracking the tools that decentralize the media.
Spark - Spark is a new magazine about the good things that are going on all over the world, and the people working to create a brighter future for us all.
I just finished watching Peter Jenning's ABC special, Ecstasy Rising, a one hour special that had the sanest and most balanced coverage I've seen on the topic by the mainstream. Highly recommended.
Here's the MAPS story on the special.
Thanks Bruce.
A group of creative futurist thinkers tried to imagine the year 3000 within the framework of a conversation. It is somewhat interesting, I think, but mostly because the results are rather pathetic. Despite trying not to, they mostly end up imagining a little more of the same. As they mention, the people in the year 1000 would have made completely ridiculous predictions of the year 2000. They probably didn't even have a concept of "progress". Now, at least, we expect that lots of things will change in the future. But we have a hard time getting over just imagining a gradual evolution of the things we know. How would government be changed, and economy, and education, and shopping? Who says we'll have any? Anyway, one of the better statements from that conversation is this one from Bart Kosko:
"What is Heaven? Heaven's a place where you can create worlds at will, and the ideal Heaven is where you run the whole thing yourself. The current means of getting to Heaven involve various supernatural systems for which, at this point, there's no scientific evidence. So I think we can reduce Heaven to an engineering project, which we're doing. The demand for Heaven is great--witness the desire of every human heart, from the people who built the ancient pyramids to modern society, to live beyond one's biologically allotted time. Our plan is ultimately to transfer human consciousness from the brain to bits of information in a computer chip, or some other kind of computational medium, so that just by thinking--that act of volition--we'll be able to create our own personal world. And I think the first stage of Heaven will be the sensory world, and beyond that I think we'd hit a higher, spiritual plane.Despite that I think that the project of transferring human consciousness into a computer chip is silly and misguided, I think he's got a good angle on it.
What will make all the difference is the disruptive events and technologies. I think there will be a whole number of those way before the year 3000, each of which will change everything. Like:
Open extraterrestrial contact. Thinking that extraterretrials are only folks we might meet once we've painstakingly developed intrastellar travel after hundreds of years is a little naive. They might well show themselves much earlier in the game. And nothing will be the same once we're dealing openly with races that are millions of years ahead of us in development. I'd guess we'd have joined the galactic federation long time before the year 3000.
Self-replicating nano-tech. If we can construct anything material simply by laying out the blueprint of how to make it, that changes everything. All stuff will be free, for one thing, and economy as we know it is no longer meaningful. Neither will a lot of the struggles we now have with the environment.
Multiple Parallel Universes. Once we realize conclusively and demonstrably that there are multiple versions of our universe, a close to infinite amount, and we can actually interact with them - everything changes. Quantum Physics is no longer just a bizarre, but interesting set of equations that theoretical physicists can play with.
Conscious Collective Intelligence. What if and when we realize conclusively that there are higher orders of intelligence than ours. My bet is not on artificial intelligence, but on the manifestation of collective natural intelligence. E.g. we discover that humanity has an intelligence that is way beyond our individual intelligences, but which includes all of our minds. And that intelligence starts acting more noticably and decisively. We can't quite think of ourselves the same after that. The Internet might possibly supply the initial wiring that helps this happen.
Virtual Reality more real than Material Reality. One way or another we'll develop immersive virtual reality that we can step into and which addresses all of our senses. The Holodeck. It might involve direct connections with our neurology and our brains, or it might be done with projections and sensory feedback on the outside. Either way, it will change our society dramatically if it suddenly is possible and practical for lots of people to live most of our life within virtual realities of our choice.
Information Singularity. At some point it becomes quite trivial to record everything that ever happens to everybody, and all meta-data that anybody can imagine applying to anything, and to make it thoroughly indexed and instantly available to anybody who needs it. It might no longer be meaningful to "search" for anything, or to keep secrets, or to pretend that things are any different from what they are, because anybody can check in an instant.
All of these are pretty much already on the program, and I'd expect them within the next 100 years, not the next 1000. And there are of course lots of things I might not even imagine, which will change everything even more. It is by its very nature very hard to predict surprisingly disruptive events. Even more so, a sequence of disruptive events, building upon one another.
There's a political and economical battle which will play out as to who should control all of this. We currently live in a political and economical system that will encourage and assist and reward certain people in power positions for keeping all of these things under their own exclusive control, and for keeping the rest of us in a more old-fashioned world that is manufactured by these very same technologies. Along the lines of "The Matrix". I.e. they might be the ones who make business deals with the extraterrestrials, and who will zip around in private hyperspace crafts, and who will keep the rest of us living in an immersive virtual reality where everything is pretty much the same, just a little fancier, where we still go to work and make money and watch TV and vote in elections, while they keep our every move monitored and catalogued and profiled.
The more important thing that needs to happen way before the year 3000 is something that is neither a technological change nor an external event. We as a species and as individuals need to realize where the real power is. We need to experience a grassroots revolution of consciousness where we discover without a shadow of a doubt that all the power in society comes from us, and that we're free to create something better, rather than just going along with what is presented to us. We need to go through a kartharsis, a transformation, after which it will be impossible for any small elite to control the rest of us by owning the information or the secret knowledge or the technology or the media. There's plenty of movement towards that in the mindsphere of the Internet at this point, but it is not nearly enough. It is hard to say exactly how it will look or how it will work. If we play our cards well and we wake up at the right time, and we figure out how to work together, a paradise of our own making will be ours, where wonders beyond belief are the routine of life. If we don't get it, or we're too late, we'll notice some day that we somehow only ended up with more of the same, and somebody else holds all the cards, and the cards are so powerful that we no longer have any opportunity for changing the system.
There's a window of opportunity that probably isn't all that large. It is an opportunity to evolve, individually and collectively, to be able to deal with a totally different world, as conscious and free and connected beings. The change will probably be within us, a psychological or spiritual change, but its emergent manifestation will be in the way we will be able to network and self-organize and collaborate on a wide scale. It is a matter of considerable urgency.
Regardless of whether you are secular or religious, lets pray for peace. Prayer can be a meditation, an inner resolve, a reflection, a personal affirmation, or a prayer to your own divinity. Whatever it is for you, may we all keep peace close at hand, to see us through this quagmire in Iraq. I can't help but feel that something bad is starting in Iraq, something that could take the world by storm.
Lets pray that peace prevails, that the hearts of men and women see wisdom to guide us through this dark hour, and that we may steer clear of further violence and bloodshead. Lets pray for everyone who is there, no matter who they are, or what they have done, lets pray that peace prevails... And as a butterfly flaps its wings and sets in motions larger forces of nature, may these thoughts of ours spread their own wings and effect first those around us, and those around them, and finally out into the larger world, this fragile planet we all share as one.
The FAA has granted Scaled Composites, the most promising contender for the X-Prize, a sub-orbital license:
The U.S. Department of Transportation today announced it has issued the world’s first license for a sub-orbital manned rocket flight.
The license was issued April 1 by the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation to Scaled Composites of Mojave, Calif., headed by aviation record-holder Burt Rutan, for a sequence of sub-orbital flights spanning a one-year period.
Below are some cut-up quotes from Terrence Mckenna on tapping into the Natural Intelligences that Flemming dicsussed earlier.
"The planet is some kind of organized intelligence. It's very different from us. It's had over 4 billion years to create a slow moving mind which is made of oceans and rivers and rain forests and glaciers. It's becoming aware of us, as we are becoming aware of it, strangely enough. Two less likely members of a relationship can hardly be imagined - the technological apes and the dreaming planet. And yet, because the life of each depends on the other, there's a feeling towards this immense, strange, wise, old, neutral, weird thing, and it is trying to figure out why its dreams are so tormented and why everything is out of balance.
"The planet has a kind of intelligence, it can actually open a channel of communication with an individual human being. The message that nature sends is, transform your language through a synergy between electronic culture and the psychedelic imagination, a synergy between dance and idea, a synergy between understanding and intuition, and dissolve the boundaries that your culture has sanctioned between you, to become part of this Gaian supermind.
"The psychedelic experience is far more than instant psychotherapy or instant regression to infantile traumatic situations, far more than simply a kind of super-aphrodisiac, far more than simply an aid in formulating ideas or coming up with artistic concepts. What the psychedelic experience really is, is opening the doorway into a lost continent of the human mind, a continent that we have almost lost all connection to, and the nature of this lost world of the human mind is that it is a Gaian entelechy. It turns out, if we can trust the evidence of the psychedelic experience, that we are not the only intelligent life forms on this planet, that we share this planet with some kind of conscious mind - call it Gaia, call it Zeta Reticulians who came here a million years ago, call it God Almighty, it doesn't matter what you call it, the fact of the matter is that the claims of religion that there is some kind of higher power can be experientially verified through psychedelics. Now this is not, in Milton's wonderful phrase "The God who hung the stars like lamps in heaven" - it doesn't have to do with that, in my opinion - it isn't cosmic in scale, it's planetary in scale. There is some kind of disincarnate intelligence. It's in the water, it's in the ground, it's in the vegetation, it's in the atmosphere we breath, and our unhappiness, our discomfort, arises from the fact that we have fallen into history and history is a state of benighted ignorance concerning the real facts of how the world works.
"What the psychedelic experience really is, is opening the doorway into a lost continent of the human mind, a continent that we have almost lost all connection to, and the nature of this lost world of the human mind is that it is a Gaian entelechy.
"Now, why it is that when we dose ourselves with a human neurotransmitter like DMT, why we then encounter armies of elves teaching us a perfected form of communication, this is a very difficult question. When you go to traditional cultures, shamanistic cultures in the Amazon and put this question to them, they answer without hesitation when you ask about these small entities, they say "Oh, yes, those are the ancestors, those are the ancestor spirits with which we work all of our magic." This is worldwide and traditionally the answer that you would get from shamans if you were to ask them how they do their magic - it's through the intercession of the helping spirit who is a creature in another dimension. Well, we may have imagined many different scenarios, a future technological and social innovation, but I think very few of us have imagined the possibility that the real programme of shamanism would have to be taken seriously, and that shamans are actually people who have learned to penetrate into another dimension, a dimension where, for want of a better word, we would have to say the souls of the ancestors are somehow present. It isn't, you see, as though we penetrate into the realm of the dead, it's more as though we discover that this world is the realm of the dead and that there is a kind of higher-dimensional world with greater degrees of freedom, with a greater sense of spontaneity and a lesser dependency on the entropic world of matter, and that that other universe is attempting to impinge into our own, perhaps to rescue us from our historical dilemma, we don't know - perhaps shamans have always had commerce with these magical invisible worlds and it's only the sad fate of Western human beings to have lost touch and awareness with this domain to the point where it comes to us as a kind of a revelation. You see, I believe that the whole fall into history, the whole rise of male dominance and patriarchy really can be traced to a broken connection with the living world of the Gaian mind, and there's nothing airy-fairy about this notion; the living world of the Gaian mind is what shamans access through psychoactive plants, and without psychoactive plants that access comes as an unconfirmable rumour.
"The Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelic experience. It's an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet - and without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set."
And quoting myself from 1997 on the site Gaia Logic, which sadly is no longer with us,
I see no contradiction between the Transhumanist and the Gaian positions. In fact, I would probably define my own philosophy in this regard as Eco-transhumanist; technology and gaianism being two complementary polarities, and technology is necessary if Gaia is to fulfill its potential and replicate biospheres through space (using trans-humankind as the brains cum genitals!)
Hence, I would suggest, Transhumanism and Gaianism actually need each other. That is, a non-transhumanist Gaianism would be limited to primitivism and resource scarcity, and unable to get off the surface of the planet. Eiether a man-made or a natural disaster could wipe out terragen life forever. And in any case eventually the sun will heat up and make life on Earth impossible. Conversely, a non-gaian transhumanism would be arid and sterile, mechanical or virtual without or with only the most superficial, sense of life. It is rather like Einstein's famous statement that "Religion without science is blind, science without religion is lame." If humanity and life is to survive and flourish in the future, this is the paradigm that is needed.
Thanks Deoxy, Omega Point Journal for the McKenna material.
"...all abstract knowledge is only a faded reality: this is because to understand the world knowledge is not enough, you must see it, touch it, live in its presence and drink the vital heat of existence in the very heart of reality..."
Hymn of the Universe by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Via Judith Meskill
The title I wanted to give this was, Why Consciouness is a Necessary Tool in Creating a Greater Than Human Intelligence.
This is a follow-up to Flemming's most excellent post, Artificial or Natural Intelligences, and my earlier post Turning on Higher Intelligence.
I think the time has come to acknowledge that consciousness itself, our minds, and our innate intelligence, all of it, is as much an instrument of science as any instrument ever invented. More so in fact. In historical terms, now that we are on the verge of being able to engineer greater-than-human levels of intelligence, this acknowledgement could not come soon enough.
Like using a telescope to explore outerspace, our consciousness is our tool, our instrument to explore inner space. I find it odd then that Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Intelligence Augmentation (IA) researchers are trying to improve upon an instrument (the mind/brain) without actually using that very instrument (subjective experience) to determine how it works. This idea of reducing our understanding of the brain from the outside, examining its parts, neurons, glia cells and neurotransmitter functioning, without actually using the instrument itself seems disconcertingly inadequate. It would be like a sports fan telling a pro athelete how to play the sport better based on reading a book at the library, but without ever having played the sport themselves.
Oh sure, those who are working on Self-Augmenting Intelligence (SAI) are very smart, but they are only using one type of intelligence - their analytical, reasoning, "left brained" intelligence, which Timothy Leary called 3rd circuit intelligence. But complex behaviors like super-benevolent morality requires a great deal more than intellectual understandng, it requires a rich variety of situational and nuanced experience that can only come from a life fully lived. That means deep benevolent morality emerges from a wide variety of different intelligences, physical, emotional, intellectual and social. Eastern yogis would go further and say that a deep understanding of the mind and body from years of meditative work are also required to gain a deeper appreciation of benevolent compassion (Baraka). So how could some smart computer guys in a lab hope to emulate something even close to that?
I would argue that in order to create a more comprehensive understanding of intelligence, especially a greater-than-human level of intelligence requires both modes of examination and study to effectively improve upon it, because examining its parts in a reductionist fashion, tells us little of the emergent intelligence we each experience subjectively. Therefore, a genuine IA or AI research program should include both an objective and subjective framework. To me this is so obvious, that I think it's the main reason so many people overlook it. Arguments about the limits of the human mind, its culpability to logical fallacies such as availability bias, conjunction fallacy, Wason selection task, support theory, representativeness heuristic, misperception of random sequences, expert judgement and uncertainty, are all very important, but only a small part of the overall equation. All instruments have their limitations, including the human mind, but the human mind also has vast potential we've barely begun to understand or tap into. So lets not throw the baby out with the bathwater. For starters, a good scientific approach to inner exploration might be a good start.
In my opinion, the one person who has done more to map the furthest regions of innerspace in a rigorously scientific fashion is John Lilly, MD, Ph.D. John Lilly once said that, "Science is the Yoga of the West, and Yoga is the Science of the East". For those of you wanting to gain a deeper understanding of how the mind works from an experiential software context, rather than just an exclusively hardware context, should read his book Programming and Metaprogamming in the Human Biocomputer. Another excellent couple of books would be Robert Anton Wilson's Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World, and Prometheus Rising.
It is through this internal form of study, that we can determine, discover and access modes of knowledge and understanding of how human minds work, and in turn extrapolate how minds-in-general work, that could never be ascertained by reductionist means alone.
This field is wide open, so take your pick. My personal favorites at the moment are research into the interelationships between lucid dreams, out-of-body (OBE) and near-death experiences (NDE). I have been lucky enough to have had all three experiences - countless lucid dreams, two objectively verifiable OBE's and one NDE. Most often in my lucid dreams, I'm flying around with or without a body, doing impossibly fantastic, very pleasurable maneuvers, from floating in any angle, to jetting around like a UFO. Sometimes I'm flying around at 40mph over houses, futuristic buildings, and sometimes I'm flying thousands of miles an hour. And each and ever time it feels completely real, actually more than real.
Recently, I've also been having moments of what I like to call "waking lucidity". This is happening with increasing frequency. It's very similar to the blissful feeling of having a lucid dream while being awake. It feels amazing. Last time was a few weeks ago while I was driving to the airport. I felt very much the same as if I was in this really lucid dream, it was more real than real, and everything seemed more crisp, alive and joyful. I knew I was awake, but I was simultaneously experiencing the feeling I get while having a pleasurable lucid dream.
In the OBE's I've had, I was flying over my hometown. On two of these occasions I woke up right after the OBE ended (from my regular afternoon naps), and I ran out, got in my car, and drove to the place I flew to, and in my shock and amazement, I actually saw the same thing as in my OBE's - make/model/color of cars, people's faces in the park that matched(!), details like a crate leaning against one of the buildings. I was stunned. Up until that moment, I was skeptical about OBE's, thinking they were highly imaginary fabrications of the mind, now I'm much more open and excited about the possibilities.
For example, is waking life just another type of dream? Or are dreams another type of waking life? In the grander scheme of things, does it matter? Perhaps lucid dreams, OBE's, NDE's, etc. is our consciousness slowly evolving, opening up to a much greater, multi-dimensional, even infinite reality, of which our so-called "waking" life is just one limited way of experiencing it. Shamans, Yogi's, and Psychonauts over the ages have been telling us that we need to wake up from "normal" consciousness, which in their eyes is sleeping. The physicist David Bohm discussed something very similar with his ideas about an implicate order. In either case, I think this idea that there is an objective, reductionist materialist universe seperate from the observer is nonsense. Quantum mechanics supports the necessity of an observer.
Besides when you think about it, everything you know and experience intersects within your head. That would seem to render objective/subjective differences illusions of a primitive either/or aristotlean mind. I believe such differences are transcended through increasing perspective. Neither objective or subjective, but transjective. Another well-known John Lilly quote,
Having said that I find it a bit dubious that the Singularity Institute is proposing to create an altogether "alien" mind that supercedes a human mind, and yet is supposed to have the human minds best interest at heart, while having no direct experiential knowledge of embodiment or the inner workings of our mind. Such knowledge as I have argued can only be ascertained by subjective exploration.
With the IA approach we are pursuing intelligence augmentation and self-fullment from within our own internally guided framework. We are in the best possible position to understand and direct it based on on our own inner knowledge, rather than being forceably programmed into something else by some alien intelligence thats germinated from scratch based on principles derived by AI scientists using a woefully lopsided reductionist model of the mind.
The remaining question is why does it have to be so alien? With a more comprehensive understanding of human contelligence (consciosuness + intelligence) that comes from deep and prolonged inner exploration and mastery - such as the super-benevolent yogi's, would come the answers to creating a super-benevolent SAI. What Greg Burch has called an Extrosattva. With the addition of a morality derived from a systemic embodied experience, such a being would possess a broad understanding of genuine compassion and benevolence, along with a deeb embodied understanding of humaness (necessary to help us), as well as not being prone to logical fallacies. In the light of all this, the idea of creating a competely de-anthropomorphized SAI is completely genocidal and fool hardy, as if we humans don't have anything worth contributing going forward in our evolution. I think the existence of super-benevolent yogis including the likes of people like Ghandi or the Dalai Lama prove otherwise.
From the website:
Ok, we have all seen the movie and if you don't know WHICH movie I am talking about, well click HERE. After seeing The Fellowship of the Ring, you have probably fantasized about living in a Hobbit Hole and lazing about in the shade. I know I have.
That is when I started expressing my inner architect and wondering of easy, bio-friendly ways to build a Hobbit Hole. These pages are what I have come up with.
The largest expenses in building a home (not counting the flat screen tv and indoor lap pool) typically are the walls, exterior and roofing system. Obviously, the roof and exterior are done away with for Hobbit Holes. However you have some staggering stress and loading issues with underground housing. The weight of the soil and flora growing on it can produce tremendous loads on a structure. It is even worse when it rains.
Once you start doing the math for wooden structures, the cost quickly skyrockets. On top of high costs to support such loading, you have yet to deal with the issue of water seepage, insect vulnerabilities (termites) and wood rot.
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"Humankind is being led along an evolving course... and though we seem to be sleeping, there is an inner wakefulness that directs the dream, and that will eventually startle us back to the truth of who we are." - Rumi, from "The Dream That Must Be Interpreted" |
I wrote most of this in a comment previously, but it is important enough to put it up here. The core subject here is whether or not we can hope for human intelligence and consciousness to evolve as breathtakingly rapidly as would be necessary to keep up with the accelerating technical progress we're making, so that we'll make it in time to not destroy ourselves and the planet, or whether we have to accept that a benevolent Artificial Intelligence has to be constructed that will keep us from doing so. The latter is a very serious endeavor being pursued by some very smart people who believe it is our only hope.
First of all, it is quite clear that the human mind that most of us are sporting at this point is woefully inadequate when it comes to logical thinking. If it is up to us to figure out rationally to do the right thing, it isn't looking very good.
Michael Anissimov provided an excellent list of some of human logical fallacies that have been studied academically. A lot of relevant material can be found by looking up some of the following terms in Google: availability bias, conjunction fallacy, Wason selection task, support theory, representativeness heuristic, misperception of random sequences, expert judgement and uncertainty. Essentially they constitute a number of different ways that humans habitually let themselves be influenced by incidental irrelevant factors into making illogical conclusions. Our answers depend greatly on how the questions are framed, and are likely to contain traces of whatever random garbage we happen to have been fed just before. You know many of the more simple examples of that from simple party games, like: "Say 'top' ten times fast!!"......... "Now, quick, what do you do at a red light?" Most people will say "Stop". That's an easy one, but there are many more complex and insidious fallacies in logic, which quite easily can be domonstrated.
The human mind is having a major problem when it aspires to being logical and rational, or even sane, for that matter. The way even the most coherent of us are making decisions is, in the bigger picture of things, horribly sloppy. And it isn't even just that it is sloppy, but the faulty thinking is hardwired into the way that our minds work in the first place. And it is kind of scary to think that even our best scientists and world leaders are subject to the exact same fallacies, and there's no guarantee that they've learned to transcend most of them. A "consciousness of abstraction" a la General Semantics might include awareness of the faults into our thinking process, in order to consistently arrive at more sane results, but it still isn't quite enough.
Michael called the human mind "a pinhead-sized box in a galaxy-sized space of minds-in-general". And, yeah, compared with how smart one possibly could be, we aren't doing all that well.
But after saying that, let me emphasize that what I have confidence in, when it comes to human evolution, is not particularly an individual human ability to think oneself logically into acting in the sane and rational and responsible way that the control of our new technological capabillities would require. Rather, I postulate that there's something systemic going on, of a higher order, which possesses a much more coherent intelligence, of a different nature than that of the individual human.
I postulate that Nature effectively has evolved the equivalent of an AI way past a singularity point. Or maybe rather that it has had it all along. For that matter, I would tend to believe that life can't really happen without the presence of an intelligence that guides it.
I don't particularly mean that in the sense of some anthropomorphic God that sits and hands out arbitrary decisions. I don't believe in such an entity. I'd rather see it as an intelligent system. Not exactly an "overarching benevolent architect" although that doesn't sound as bad to me as it does to some. But I see it more as a built-in intelligence than as some external architect. Although there's always the question of how it came about in the first place, even if it is now self-sufficient.
Just like the ant doesn't exist without the anthill, I suspect that any individual life-form wouldn't really be alive unless it were the smaller unit of something a good deal smarter than itself. The Natural Intelligence that ensures the coherence and evolution of that species. Or an eco-system. Or something else I don't understand.
We humans have a tendency to suffer from hubris and think that one of us is somehow the very spearhead of evolution, the smartest thing that ever happened. And if that were true, it would really look rather grim for the future of the universe. For the kinds of reasons referenced above. If it suddenly were up to us alone to keep the show going on, we'd almost certainly screw it up.
Where the differing views are found, we see something a bit like a chicken-and-egg phenomenon. Some people think that we humans can and should construct an AI which then can take on a life of its own, become smarter than us, and guide our further evolution in a rational and benevolent way. I personally doubt that we're smart enough to do that right. But instead I believe that we already have such an AI, or rather an NI (Natural Intelligence), which has been active all along. Or many of them. And it is not so much a matter of inventing it, as of understanding it and accessing it.
I'd say that in the very big cosmological view, considering that time is just another dimension in a multi-dimensional universe, it ends up not mattering very much if it is one or the other. Is there a Bigger Intelligence that is hanging around from the beginning to ensure that things generally go in the right direction? Or do we invent such an entity and it exists from then on? Either way, it is there to find in the totality of the universe, and it is pretty inevitable that it will appear. Which to me means that, either way, it is an inherent property of the universe.
I am very skeptical of the view of evolution as only being random and blind selection. Natural selection is obviously part of it, but I'd rather lean in the direction of a larger definition of what is life. Autopoiesis, essentially. A galaxy or a planet can be "alive" in the sense that it maintains its boundaries and a certain equilibrium, even under changing conditions. Not all planets do that, but obviously some do.
To me, the expectation that humanity is likely to evolve a whole lot in a short period of time is based on the confidence that humans are part of bigger systems that are alive and which possess an inherent intelligence that is beyond us. Oh, the outcome might also be that humanity is decommissioned and a more useful intelligence emerges instead. Which might potentially be our computer AI. Or we might just go extinct and be replaced with some other natural species which is better suited. Either way, it appears that a higher level of manifest reflective intelligence is what is required next. Compared with animals who go about their business somewhat rationally, but who don't seem to have any abstract reflective thought about it.
What mostly seems to divide the people who think about these things into several camps is the fundamental assumptions about what consciousness is or isn't. I'll grant that intelligence is something that can be constructed with pattern matching and feedback loops of various kinds. But is it self-conscious? Some people say it doesn't matter, or that self-consciousness is just another pattern than can be constructed, or that self-conscious naturally emerges. I don't really believe that, and I think there's a factor that does make all the difference. Not that I can explain how that part (the (self-reflective) consciousness) is installed. I don't see any reason a machine shouldn't be able to have it, but I'm doubtful of the idea that it will just sort of happen if we just put together a complex program that does all the things we can observe intelligence doing.
Actually, I'd rather enjoy if we find out that there's a certain kind of equation that initiates consciousness. I just don't think we've been anywhere close to finding it. And I think that creating an AI without it would be a big mistake.
I think that human science at this point is suffering from a bit of a Sorceror's Apprentice syndrome. The hubris of thinking that because we've found a few magical formulas that can make things happen, we're big enough to be responsible for all the consequences. We can swap some DNA from one kind of cell out and pop in some DNA from some different cell, and after a large number of attempts like that, we come up with a carrot that insects don't like, and we think we've actually understood something very basic. Whereas we really still have no clue how to make life, or how it actually works, and the complexity is way beyond us at this point.
The same thing applies in many fields. We've found the traces of some wonderous things, and we've found that we can influence them, and we think we're just about ready to play God now.
The missing piece is the whole systems view. How a whole thing works in ways you can't fathom just from taking all the pieces apart and sorting them. And how it requires something quite more than just putting together all the ingredients to recreate and surpass some of the wonders that nature has excelled in for many billions of years.
It is like as if there's an ingredient X that is missing in almost all our technology. And that ingredient X is.... THE WHOLE THING, the full understanding of the systemic functioning and systemic effects of what we're creating.
We can mass-produce all sorts of wonderul technology, but we forget to figure out how to un-do much of it. We are terrible at creating sustainable technology. We can now create genetically engineered crops which have useful properties, but, oops, they got away and are creating havoc in the wild, because we didn't really understand how the natural cycles work. We can create nuclear bombs, but we forgot to invent the anti-dote, and, oops, suddenly some terrorist group has one of them. We follow the same stupid pattern over and over again. We invent a way of doing something, and it seems really useful at first, and we're really proud of ourselves, but we forgot to think through how it would really work within the eco-system of the world we live in, and we're incapable of cleaning up the mess.
What we've been excelling in so far are just smaller versions of the grey goo problem. So small that nature has mostly been able to keep up with the mess. But we're getting better at inventing more powerful, but still mindless and unsustainable technology. So it will not be for much longer than we can count on that we can get away with it relatively unscathed.
So there's a problem, a big problem. Some smart people think the answer to that problem is Creating a Friendly Artificial Intelligence. Making a super-powerful artificial intelligence program that by its design can't be anything but benevolent, and which, by using its superior intelligence and faultless logic, will keep us from destroying ourselves.
The trouble I see with that is that the people trying to construct it are using the same reductionist materialist thinking to create it that is bringing us deeper and deeper into an uncontrollable mess. And I'm afraid that what they're creating will be missing Ingredient X.
I have much greater confidence in Natural Intelligence. Not that I necessarily think that Nature will automatically and magically sort everything out for us. The playing fields are merging. Our human inventiveness is no longer separate from the rhytms of nature. Rather we seem to be becoming active evolutionary agents. What we are doing is in many ways the spearhead of evolution. Not a new better system to replace the slow random selection process. No, we are what nature has evolved. Now, what nature is evolving is to a large degree what we are evolving and developing and inventing. We have the option of being the conscious wavefront of evolution. Not just human evolution, but the evolution of life and matter on a much wider scale. We have the option, but no guarantee of success, if we misuse our newfound mental faculties.
A surefire way of screwing it all up is to ignore the wonderous brilliance of the plot so far, and arrogantly assume that whatever happened before was just stupid, random, blind stuff, and now we, as the first, will be doing something really clever. That's when the picture turns, and we come out as the ones who turn out stupid, random, blind technology. Carelessly letting cats out of a million bags that we have no idea how to get back. Just because we thought we emulated and greatly improved upon the half-assed workings of nature, when we didn't really get it at all.
Technology and artificial intelligence might very well be unavoidable components of our future evolution. But we have some catching up to do. We seem to be several orders of magnitude off from understanding the sustainable self-evolving design principles of nature. Principles that have brought forward the very consciousness and intelligence we're mis-using today. If we don't succeed in conjuring up the necessary wonder and humility and curiosity to discover how that actually came about, and how that already works, and how the WHOLE thing works - it is curtains for us, and probably for all life on this planet.
If we re-discover and re-connect with the inherent intelligence of whole systems, and get over our own pitiful self-importance, and we apply a much higher level of wisdom to our technological endeavors, then and only then might we succeed in manifesting the magical and amazing wonders that we suspect are just around the corner, and live to actually enjoy them, ... forever.
Today, Future Hi was going to have a Skype conference call, unfortunately, Skype has too many limitations (for now) to make it practical. There is a limit of only 5 people, and the person hosting needs it needs to have more than 128kps upstream, which no one does. That, and Skype has yet to release a Mac version, which leaves several people unable to participate. So, I'm going to have Erica create a permanent Future Hi IRC "bot" channel #futurehi This should be done this week sometime, and then I will re-schedule an official chat.
Enjoy your weekend!
Just read this at Engadget. Here is the originating site.
It’s like something out of Blade Runner: an artist in Japan is crafting simulated jellyfish out of artificial human skin. They’re not alive, but just like real jellyfish they can float around gracefully in a fish tank.
After an initial feeling of "ewww, yuck", I can see the beauty of these. I'm not sure how he achieved the artificial color, as the site is Japanese.
The Green Century Institute (GCI) is developing an initial study and general proposal for a model ecocity community of 7000-10000 people to be built in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Califia will combine a revolutionary "arcological" (architecture-ecology) design integrating cutting edge sustainable development and technology resources with community innovations. These innovations include extended family communal housing configurations, new kinds of public facilities and services, advanced power generation and recycling systems, permaculture farms and greenhouses, non-traditional financing and "social capital" programs. The dramatic, integrated complex will meld natural environments with dense urban spaces. It will be built in phases over a 10 year period.
I spent 18 rewarding months at Arcosanti between 1994-96. While I was there I had two project I was aggressively promoting. The first was a more integrated approach with living technologies to treat waste water and create sustainable permaculture, the second was a more supportive atmosphee for small-scale free-enterprise. At the time, both of these projects were rejected by Paolo Soleri and the long-time residents. Despite their anathema to free-enterprise, I took over and grew a small business, and divided the profits between arcosanti projects and my skydiving habit. It became clear at that time, that those who has made this there home were not particularly interested in seeing it grow. Despite that, the nature of an Arcology with it's mixed use urban plan, makes for a very dynamic and lively community. More than anything else, that sense of connection and community, plus the fantastic beauty of the area, made my time there the best year and a half of my life (so far).
Now 10 years later, it looks like they are taking living machines seriously.
What Arcosanti might look like if it gets completed.
This photo above is a real picture with a CAD drawing of the proposed additions overlayed. Just to the right of the picture is some small living quarters near a small river where I lived. For 50 miles in almost every direction, is nothing but raw nature and no sign of civilization. In fact, if you were to head directly east from this picture, you could walk for at least 75 miles and not cross a single road. Most of the time it felt like I was living on a remote 24th Century Federation research colony. It gave me a good sense of what life aboard a space colony would be like.
According to the worlds leading experts in artificial intelligence, the singularity is scheduled to occur today at approximately 5:45pm PST. They are recommending that everyone get their affairs in order quickly, and only pack those items they'll need to get them thru until the Singularity has uplifted everyone, which should occur shortly after 5:45pm.
According to Dr. Beeblebrox over at the Self-Augmenting Intelligence Institute, a Yudkowsky Seed AI was initiated at 11:59pm PST last night at the Institutes ultra-secure research facility in Palo Alto. The super-secure quarantine conditions of the facility was not to keep people out, but to keep the seed-AI in. However, according to internet security experts, the seed AI unintentionally escaped through its triple firewall, and has already compromised 80% of the worlds connected computers. How it was able to go from an isolated system to the larger internet remains unknown.
The 5:45 timeframe of the singularity is an estimate based on the Institutes previous simulations. They expect chaos to insue for the remainder of the day, but not to worry, as the benevolent seed-AI should come to the rescue before things get too out of hand. This is assuming of course that every single line of code in the seed AI is perfect, and that their benevolent algorithms were coded accurately. Only time will tell.
In other news, Google announced it is interviewing candidates for engineering positions at their lunar hosting and research center, opening late in the spring of 2007.
However, now that the singularity is imminent, Google has said it is suspending any hiring and economic expansion until this whole "singularity thing" is sorted out.
UPDATE: Due to overwheming demand, the Singularity will be delayed by one hour, so that those wanting to finishing watching the latest Buffy episode can do so.
