Devil's Advocate

Here's me debating with myself again:

The accelerating pace of improvement in computation, also known as Moore's Law, can not continue forever. There are fundamental limitations to how small we can make the circuits and still be able to disperse away heat.

The exponential curves that Kurzweil is so fond of are nothing more than the beginning of a logistic curve. Instead of accelerating into singularity, technological development will hit the inflection point at 2050 and slowly saturate until society and technology comes to an equilibrium.

Simply look at the development of railroads in the United States - there was an intense period of growth for railroad development, but today that has completely stopped.

And the rebuttal:

Moore's Law is a dead horse. Nobody says that the current silicon based photolithographic chips can be made faster exponentially (though it's been good to us for 20 years).

"Whenever a technology approaches some kind of a barrier, according to Kurzweil, a new technology will be invented to allow us to cross that barrier" These paradigm shifts has been happening for as long as people can remember - bronze to iron to steel, steam engine to diesel to gasoline to rocket and jet, etc. While we're not sure which technology will replace silicon, there are many plausible and hotly researched candidates: photonic, molecular, nanotubes, DNA and protein, quantum.

The saturation point has to do with economic and social carrying capacity - it boils down to the question, "When is enough enough?" This makes it obvious to me that the singularity will happen first in the United States. Americans are never satisfied with "enough". They always want more. There is very little profit in a saturated market - instead of stifling progress, the economy demands innovation.

The main obstacle remains: moral, ethical, and social pressures. Already there exists regulations against genetic research. You can be sure there will be more laws and regulations against genetic augmentation, against cybernetic augmentation, against robots, against AI, etc. People are jealous of things they don't understand or don't want to understand. These attitudes will limit progress to baby-steps (see Asimo, Roomba, etc warming the public up to the idea of friendly robots).

Freak

I have these two long arms that hang by my sides. Each one has five wriggly appendages on the end. And I have over a hundred thousand thin black strands on top of my head, and every day they get a little bit longer. There are two pits in the middle of my face with round squishy balls lodged inside, and if you stare too long at them I guarantee you'll get creeped out. I also like to sit for hours and hours in front of a glowing rectangle, like I'm in a trance. Sometimes, I put pieces of dead animals inside my mouth. That's one of my favorite things, actually. Pieces of dead animals. I also cover myself with pieces of cloth because I don't want the world to see what a freak I am.

Please don't judge me.

Wish Upon a Star

The star Betelgeuse, resting on the shoulder of the Orion constellation, is a red supergiant, and one of the largest and brightest stars in the sky. In the last decade, scientists have observed it shrinking at an increasing rate - shedding about 15% of its size. At its core, carbon and neon and oxygen are breaking apart and fusing into heavier elements. At its surface, plasma and hot gas boil and bubble and large plumes eject into space.

The sudden change may be a harbinger of the end of its life cycle - the old star will go supernova within the next one thousand years, and its core may collapse into a black hole. On Earth, this event will be brighter than the moon and be visible during the day.

I want to be there, to witness the death of a star.

I wish I may, I wish I might...

A Breakdown of Intelligence

In the recent transhumanism meetup on AI, the following definition of intelligence was brought up: "the measure of intelligence is how well it can preference order possible futures". In simpler words, intelligence is the measured by the ability to make decisions.

How does one make decisions then? Let's break down the process into smaller parts:

• Predict the outcomes of each choice. This is commonly known as "considering the consequences". What will happen if I cut down this forest? What will happen if I give her a compliment? What will happen if I detune the laser by 5 Mhz?
  
  • Coming up with a good model of self, the environment, and other people / intelligent agents.
    
  • To do this, we need to learn. This is why we study science, why we meditate and moralize, why we study psychology and philosophy.
  • If we don't know enough to get a working model, we need to experiment. Gather data, look at correlations, set up tests that are repeatable, simulate, present theories, debate. We do science.

• Create new choices. Not every decision rests on a binary choice, black or white, yes or no, heads or tails. There are many shades of gray. We call this creativity, inventiveness, imagination, thinking outside the box. Unlike prediction, which delves deep into the possible futures, creativity shows us new possibilities. This is sometimes called "lateral thinking". We're not just picking the road less traveled; we cut our own path.
  
  It is worth noting that most people are bad at this. We like to go along with the choices that are presented.
  

• Preference order the choices, by taking into consideration of their consequences. Which outcome is "best"? That is a tough question, and it comes down to how we define our goals and value. In computer science, it is relegated to a heuristic function: take a model of the world as input, return a number as output. The number represents the value of the model world, and can include positive or negative infinity, but most of the time it lies somewhere in between. This process is inherently flawed, since it takes all the complexities and intricacies of a world model and pares it down to one number, a one dimensional projection of the universe. But it is necessary - that's the way decisions work; at the end we can only choose once: one outcome, one future.
  
  Even if we can model the future perfectly and knows every possible choice (as is possible in many board games), we would still need to define our goals (e.g. checkmate) and to weigh the outcomes to see which choice will best help us to that goal.
  
  
• Recursion. How do we know which goal is the best? Which heuristic function is the best? Which model of the world is the best? These are all decisions to be made! Is a utilitarian policy better than one that's based on natural rights? How do we define utilitarianism? Which rights should be universal? An intelligent being should see the layers and layers of decisions involved in making each decision - it should be able to handle recursive processes. When do we stop the recursion and start relying on assumptions? That is another decision!
  

Japanese scientists aim to create robot-insects

Cyborg insects!

I'd love to see how Japanese science funding works.

A quantifiable definition of Transhumanism

What part of our current condition can we change or make better?
How about any? I see this as a good measure of transhumanism: how much of what we are can we change?

Right now, we can alter a few percent: prosthesis, eye correction, hearing aids, pace makers, vaccines, these are body mods. We can also throw chemicals into our brains to alter perception and behavior, to a certain extent. That's a good start.

To understand what we can change, we have to understand what we are; what makes us human. This point was brought up several times: how can we tell if we ever stop being human? Physically, it's very clear; the genes, the body, the brain, the way we move and eat and mate, birth and death. Mentally, it's not so clear; but there is much research into that, and research reveals that the human mind is a product of evolution, just as much as our physical forms (no surprise there). Our behavior, desires, preferences, what makes us happy, much of it is coded by thousands of generations of adaptation. These things make us human, but they also limit us - we are stuck in this body, stuck in this mindset. We are forced to live with the default settings we got when we were born.

But there's a part of us, a small but all-important part, that can choose - our will. And we can choose to change ourselves. I think that's transhumanism, and it's fundamentally new. We have spent 10 thousand years changing our external environment to suit us. Now we turn that inward.

To quantify it, I'll use a computer analogy. Let's say I got a factory made PC that comes pre-installed with a set of hardware and software. If I were naive I would just use it out of the box. If I understand a little more, I can some RAM upgrades. A bigger hard drive. Nicer LCD screen. I can get new software - Firefox browser, OpenOffice, etc. Now it's a lot different from the factory machine. If I'm really good I'd wipe the OS and install Linux. Swap out the CPU for a quad-core. Build a custom case-mod with liquid cooling. Now the machine is not even recognizable from the one I bought. When we can change everything, we'll be post-human.

Every change is a choice. I can always choose the default and stay human. But I want to be able to make those decisions instead of being shackled with it. Only by breaking those ancient, evolutionary chains can we truly have free-will.

Why do we die?

There is a belief that death is the natural consequence of life. It is an easy conclusion to make: All living things die. No. There is nothing about being alive that necessitates death. The definition of life seems fuzzy, but let's look at the aspects that we humans are familiar with:

Interact with environment: eating, moving, breathing, seeing.
Self-maintenance: all the internal processes that keeps you alive.
Change: thinking, learning, forgetting, maturing, adapting.

None of these functions require us to die!

It is reproduction that necessitates death. If an organism reproduces but is not programmed to die, not only will it exponentially fill up the environment to take all available resources (in fact, mortal living things do this too), but it will do so while forcing newer, younger organisms to die from starvation. A reproducing organism that does not die will be taking resources away from its own children. This behavior goes against the drive of evolution - the organism will compete against its own offspring for survival, limiting the amount and frequency of genetic variation. It might work in an extraordinarily stable environment. However, if the organism has to adapt to frequent and drastic environmental changes, it would need to change. Unfortunately for life on Earth, there is no way for a species to change and adapt except by genetic variation. Until now.

Death (I'm not talking about death from accidents, diseases, or other artificial means) is an evolutionary trait, and may be one of the oldest. We can make it obsolete.