Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: mathematics – Page 159

A lot of transhumanism friends have asked me to write about Bernie Sanders, so here are my thoughts:

The transhumanism movement has been dramatically growing in size—and most of that growth is from millennials and youth joining. Transhumanists want to use science and technology to radically improve the human race, and the onslaught of new gear and gadgets to do that—like virtual reality, robots, and chip implants —are giving them plenty of ammunition to do that.

But what has caught many people off guard—including myself who probably best fits into the category: left-leaning Libertarian—is the amount of support transhumanists are giving to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. Historically, transhumanism (and its de facto home: Silicon Valley) has been Libertarian-minded —with a hands-off attitude towards the government, religion, and basically any authority trying to tell them what to do or how to innovate. But with the demographics of the transhumanism movement sharply changing from older academics and technologists to young people—especially those in college—the push towards more leftist and progressive-leaning ideas is strong. For many young transhumanists, they believe they have found an ideal in Sanders.

While I like the charisma of Sanders and his long standing devotion to the people—and that is enough for me to say he’d be a good president for change—the reality is capitalism is still a hallmark of the American way. For the next four and maybe even eight years, capitalism won’t be going anywhere. Afterward, though, within 10–25 years, when robots, software, and AI really start dismantling capitalism as we know it (see my latest TechCrunch article and thoughts on a Universal Basic Income), it will be a totally different story.

Like it or not, millennials and youth obsess over this type of economy stuff—especially machines taking jobs. They know future employment statistics better than many 30-year veteran business executives running publicly traded companies. The dangerous truth is many young people know they likely won’t have jobs in the future. And neither will most of the executives for that matter, since they too can (and will) be replaced by super intelligent machines programmed to make sound mathematical business decisions.

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Stephen Wolfram, the inventor of the mathematical programming system Wolfram Language, thinks there might be intelligent life, of a sort, in the digits of pi. He spoke recently at the SETI Institute about what his “principle of computational equivalence” means for non-human intelligence — check out the heady hour-and-a-half lecture below.

The key thread running through his concept is that simple rules underpin complex behavior. For Wolfram, the pigmentation patterns on a mollusk shell, for example, aren’t necessarily the outcome of deliberate evolutionary forces. “I think the mollusk is going out into the computational universe, finding a random program, and running it and printing it on its shell,” Wolfram says in the lecture. “If I’m right, the universe is just like an elaborate version of the digits of pi.” (There is some debate, of course, over just how right Wolfram is — though you won’t really get that from the lecture.)

To show how this simplicity-begetting complexity relates to aliens, Wolfram draws from the end of Carl Sagan’s Contact). Spoilers (for a book): after communicating with the alien intelligence, astronomer Ellie Arroway finds in the digits of pi an image of a circle. She takes it as a sign of intelligence baked into the universe. Because the digits are both random and infinite, this also means that within pi “combinatorially there exists the works of Shakespeare and any possible picture of any possible circle,” Wolfram says.

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Mathematicians have discovered a surprising pattern in the expression of prime numbers, revealing a previously unknown “bias” to researchers.

Primes, as you’ll hopefully remember from fourth-grade math class, are numbers that can only be divided by one or themselves (e.g. 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, etc.). Their appearance in the roll call of all integers cannot be predicted, and no magical formula exists to know when a prime number will choose to suddenly make an appearance. It’s an open question as to whether or not a pattern even exists, or whether or not mathematicians will ever crack the code of primes, but most mathematicians agree that there’s a certain randomness to the distribution of prime numbers that appear back-to-back.

Or at least that’s what they thought. Recently, a pair of mathematicians decided to test this “randomness” assumption, and to their shock, they discovered that it doesn’t actually exist. As reported in New Scientist, researchers Kannan Soundararajan and Robert Lemke Oliver of Stanford University in California have detected unexpected biases in the distribution of consecutive primes.

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On January 20th, 2016, researchers Konstantin Batygin and Michael E. Brown of Caltech announced that they had found evidence that hinted at the existence of a massive planet at the edge of the Solar System. Based on mathematical modeling and computer simulations, they predicted that this planet would be a super-Earth, two to four times Earth’s size and 10 times as massive. They also estimated that, given its distance and highly elliptical orbit, it would take 10,000 – 20,000 years to orbit the Sun.

Since that time, many researchers have responded with their own studies about the possible existence of this mysterious “Planet 9”. One of the latest comes from the University of Arizona, where a research team from the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory have indicated that the extreme eccentricity of distant Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) might indicate that they crossed paths with a massive planet in the past.

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Astronomers at the University of Auckland claim that there are actually around 100 billion habitable, Earth-like planets in the Milky Way — significantly more than the previous estimate of around 17 billion. There are roughly 500 billion galaxies in the universe, meaning there is somewhere in the region of 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (5×10 22 ) habitable planets. I’ll leave you to do the math on whether one of those 50 sextillion planets has the right conditions for nurturing alien life or not.

The previous figure of 17 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way came from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in January, which analyzed data from the Kepler space observatory. Kepler essentially measures the dimming (apparent magnitude) of stars as planets transit in front of them — the more a star dims, the larger the planet. Through repeated observations we can work out the planet’s orbital period, from which we can usually derive the orbital distance and surface temperature. According to Phil Yock from the University of Auckland, Kepler’s technique generally finds “Earth-sized planets that are quite close to parent stars,” and are therefore “generally hotter than Earth [and not habitable].”

The University of Auckland’s technique, called gravitational microlensing, instead measures the number of Earth-size planets that orbit at twice the Sun-Earth distance. This results in a list of planets that are generally cooler than Earth — but by interpolating between this new list, and Kepler’s list, the Kiwi astronomers hope to generate a more accurate list of habitable, Earth-like planets. “We anticipate a number in the order of 100 billion,” says Yock.

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Biography : Scott Aaronson is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. His research interests center around the capabilities and limits of quantum computers, and computational complexity theory more generally. He also has written about consciousness and personal identity and the relevance of quantum mechanics to these issues.

Michael Cerullo: Thanks for taking the time to talk with me. Given the recent advances in brain preservation, questions of personal identity are moving from merely academic to extremely practical questions. I want to focus on your ideas related to the relevance of quantum mechanics to consciousness and personal identity which are found in your paper “Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine” ( http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0159 ), your blog “Could a Quantum Computer Have Subjective Experience?” ( http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1951 ), and your book “Quantum Computing since Democritus” ( http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/) .

Before we get to your own speculations in this field I want to review some of the prior work of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff ( http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/content/hameroff-penrose…-or-theory ). Let me try to summarize some of the criticism of their work (including some of your own critiques of their theory). Penrose and Hameroff abandon conventional wisdom in neuroscience (i.e. that neurons are the essential computational element in the brain) and instead posit that the microtubules (which conventional neuroscience tell us are involved in nucleic and cell division, organization of intracellular structure, and intracellular transport, as well as ciliary and flagellar motility) are an essential part of the computational structure of the brain. Specifically, they claim the microtubules are quantum computers that grant a person the ability to perform non-computable computations (and Penrose claims these kinds of computations are necessary for things like mathematical understanding). The main critiques of their theory are: it relies on future results in quantum gravity that don’t exist; there is no empirical evidence that microtubules are relevant to the function of the brain; work in quantum decoherence also makes it extremely unlikely that the brain is a quatum computer; even if a brain could somehow compute non-computable functions it isn’t clear what this has to do with consciousness. Would you say these are fair criticisms of their theory and are there any other criticisms you see as relevant?

Scott Aaronson: Yes, I think all four of those are fair criticisms! I could add a fifth criticism: Penrose’s case for the brain having non-computational abilities relies on an appeal to Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, to the idea that no machine working within a fixed formal system can prove the system’s consistency, whereas a human can “just see” that it’s consistent. But like most mathematicians and computer scientists, I don’t agree with that argument, because I think a machine could show all the same external behavior as a human who “sees” a formal system’s consistency. So then, the argument devolves into one about indescribable inner experiences, of “just seeing” (for example) that set theory is consistent. But if we wanted to rest the case on indescribable inner experiences, then why not forget about Gödel’s Theorem, and just talk about less abstruse things like the experience of falling in love or tasting strawberries or whatever?

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