Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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This essay was also published by the Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies and by Transhumanity under the title “Is Price Performance the Wrong Measure for a Coming Intelligence Explosion?”.

Introduction

Most thinkers speculating on the coming of an intelligence explosion (whether via Artificial-General-Intelligence or Whole-Brain-Emulation/uploading), such as Ray Kurzweil [1] and Hans Moravec [2], typically use computational price performance as the best measure for an impending intelligence explosion (e.g. Kurzweil’s measure is when enough processing power to satisfy his estimates for basic processing power required to simulate the human brain costs $1,000). However, I think a lurking assumption lies here: that it won’t be much of an explosion unless available to the average person. I present a scenario below that may indicate that the imminence of a coming intelligence-explosion is more impacted by basic processing speed – or instructions per second (ISP), regardless of cost or resource requirements per unit of computation, than it is by computational price performance. This scenario also yields some additional, counter-intuitive conclusions, such as that it may be easier (for a given amount of “effort” or funding) to implement WBE+AGI than it would be to implement AGI alone – or rather that using WBE as a mediator of an increase in the rate of progress in AGI may yield an AGI faster or more efficiently per unit of effort or funding than it would be to implement AGI directly.

Loaded Uploads:

Petascale supercomputers in existence today exceed the processing-power requirements estimated by Kurzweil, Moravec, and Storrs-Hall [3]. If a wealthy individual were uploaded onto an petascale supercomputer today, they would have the same computational resources as the average person would eventually have in 2019 according to Kurzweil’s figures, when computational processing power equal to the human brain, which he estimates at 20 quadrillion calculations per second. While we may not yet have the necessary software to emulate a full human nervous system, the bottleneck for being able to do so is progress in the field or neurobiology rather than software performance in general. What is important is that the raw processing power estimated by some has already been surpassed – and the possibility of creating an upload may not have to wait for drastic increases in computational price performance.

The rate of signal transmission in electronic computers has been estimated to be roughly 1 million times as fast as the signal transmission speed between neurons, which is limited to the rate of passive chemical diffusion. Since the rate of signal transmission equates with subjective perception of time, an upload would presumably experience the passing of time one million times faster than biological humans. If Yudkowsky’s observation [4] that this would be the equivalent to experiencing all of history since Socrates every 18 “real-time” hours is correct then such an emulation would experience 250 subjective years for every hour and 4 years a minute. A day would be equal to 6,000 years, a week would be equal to 1,750 years, and a month would be 75,000 years.

Moreover, these figures use the signal transmission speed of current, electronic paradigms of computation only, and thus the projected increase in signal-transmission speed brought about through the use of alternative computational paradigms, such as 3-dimensional and/or molecular circuitry or Drexler’s nanoscale rod-logic [5], can only be expected to increase such estimates of “subjective speed-up”.

The claim that the subjective perception of time and the “speed of thought” is a function of the signal-transmission speed of the medium or substrate instantiating such thought or facilitating such perception-of-time follows from the scientific-materialist (a.k.a. metaphysical-naturalist) claim that the mind is instantiated by the physical operations of the brain. Thought and perception of time (or the rate at which anything is perceived really) are experiential modalities that constitute a portion of the brain’s cumulative functional modalities. If the functional modalities of the brain are instantiated by the physical operations of the brain, then it follows that increasing the rate at which such physical operations occur would facilitate a corresponding increase in the rate at which such functional modalities would occur, and thus the rate at which the experiential modalities that form a subset of those functional modalities would likewise occur.

Petascale supercomputers have surpassed the rough estimates made by Kurzweil (20 petaflops, or 20 quadrillion calculations per second), Moravec (100,000 MIPS), and others. Most argue that we still need to wait for software improvements to catch up with hardware improvements. Others argue that even if we don’t understand how the operation of the brain’s individual components (e.g. neurons, neural clusters, etc.) converge to create the emergent phenomenon of mind – or even how such components converge so as to create the basic functional modalities of the brain that have nothing to do with subjective experience – we would still be able to create a viable upload. Nick Bostrom & Anders Sandberg, in their 2008 Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap [6] for instance, have argued that if we understand the operational dynamics of the brain’s low-level components, we can then computationally emulate such components and the emergent functional modalities of the brain and the experiential modalities of the mind will emerge therefrom.

Mind Uploading is (Largely) Independent of Software Performance:

Why is this important? Because if we don’t have to understand how the separate functions and operations of the brain’s low-level components converge so as to instantiate the higher-level functions and faculties of brain and mind, then we don’t need to wait for software improvements (or progress in methodological implementation) to catch up with hardware improvements. Note that for the purposes of this essay “software performance” will denote the efficacy of the “methodological implementation” of an AGI or Upload (i.e. designing the mind-in-question, regardless of hardware or “technological implementation” concerns) rather than how optimally software achieves its effect(s) for a given amount of available computational resources.

This means that if the estimates for sufficient processing power to emulate the human brain noted above are correct then a wealthy individual could hypothetically have himself destructively uploaded and run on contemporary petascale computers today, provided that we can simulate the operation of the brain at a small-enough scale (which is easier than simulating components at higher scales; simulating the accurate operation of a single neuron is less complex than simulating the accurate operation of higher-level neural networks or regions). While we may not be able to do so today due to lack of sufficient understanding of the operational dynamics of the brain’s low-level components (and whether the models we currently have are sufficient is an open question), we need wait only for insights from neurobiology, and not for drastic improvements in hardware (if the above estimates for required processing-power are correct), or in software/methodological-implementation.

If emulating the low-level components of the brain (e.g. neurons) will give rise to the emergent mind instantiated thereby, then we don’t actually need to know “how to build a mind” – whereas we do in the case of an AGI (which for the purposes of this essay shall denote AGI not based off of the human or mammalian nervous system, even though an upload might qualify as an AGI according to many people’s definitions). This follows naturally from the conjunction of the premises that 1. the system we wish to emulate already exists and 2. we can create (i.e. computationally emulate) the functional modalities of the whole system by only understanding the operation of the low level-level components’ functional modalities.

Thus, I argue that a wealthy upload who did this could conceivably accelerate the coming of an intelligence explosion by such a large degree that it could occur before computational price performance drops to a point where the basic processing power required for such an emulation is available for a widely-affordable price, say for $1,000 as in Kurzweil’s figures.

Such a scenario could make basic processing power, or Instructions-Per-Second, more indicative of an imminent intelligence explosion or hard take-off scenario than computational price performance.

If we can achieve human whole-brain-emulation even one week before we can achieve AGI (the cognitive architecture of which is not based off of the biological human nervous system) and this upload set to work on creating an AGI, then such an upload would have, according to the “subjective-speed-up” factors given above, 1,750 subjective years within which to succeed in designing and implementing an AGI, for every one real-time week normatively-biological AGI workers have to succeed.

The subjective-perception-of-time speed-up alone would be enough to greatly improve his/her ability to accelerate the coming of an intelligence explosion. Other features, like increased ease-of-self-modification and the ability to make as many copies of himself as he has processing power to allocate to, only increase his potential to accelerate the coming of an intelligence explosion.

This is not to say that we can run an emulation without any software at all. Of course we need software – but we may not need drastic improvements in software, or a reinventing of the wheel in software design

So why should we be able to simulate the human brain without understanding its operational dynamics in exhaustive detail? Are there any other processes or systems amenable to this circumstance, or is the brain unique in this regard?

There is a simple reason for why this claim seems intuitively doubtful. One would expect that we must understand the underlying principles of a given technology’s operation in in order to implement and maintain it. This is, after all, the case for all other technologies throughout the history of humanity. But the human brain is categorically different in this regard because it already exists.

If, for instance, we found a technology and wished to recreate it, we could do so by copying the arrangement of components. But in order to make any changes to it, or any variations on its basic structure or principals-of-operation, we would need to know how to build it, maintain it, and predictively model it with a fair amount of accuracy. In order to make any new changes, we need to know how such changes will affect the operation of the other components – and this requires being able to predictively model the system. If we don’t understand how changes will impact the rest of the system, then we have no reliable means of implementing any changes.

Thus, if we seek only to copy the brain, and not to modify or augment it in any substantial way, the it is wholly unique in the fact that we don’t need to reverse engineer it’s higher-level operations in order to instantiate it.

This approach should be considered a category separate from reverse-engineering. It would indeed involve a form of reverse-engineering on the scale we seek to simulate (e.g. neurons or neural clusters), but it lacks many features of reverse-engineering by virtue of the fact that we don’t need to understand its operation on all scales. For instance, knowing the operational dynamics of the atoms composing a larger system (e.g. any mechanical system) wouldn’t necessarily translate into knowledge of the operational dynamics of its higher-scale components. The approach mind-uploading falls under, where reverse-engineering at a small enough scale is sufficient to recreate it, provided that we don’t seek to modify its internal operation in any significant way, I will call Blind Replication.

Blind replication disallows any sort of significant modifications, because if one doesn’t understand how processes affect other processes within the system then they have no way of knowing how modifications will change other processes and thus the emergent function(s) of the system. We wouldn’t have a way to translate functional/optimization objectives into changes made to the system that would facilitate them. There are also liability issues, in that one wouldn’t know how the system would work in different circumstances, and would have no guarantee of such systems’ safety or their vicarious consequences. So government couldn’t be sure of the reliability of systems made via Blind Replication, and corporations would have no way of optimizing such systems so as to increase a given performance metric in an effort to increase profits, and indeed would be unable to obtain intellectual property rights over a technology that they cannot describe the inner-workings or “operational dynamics” of.

However, government and private industry wouldn’t be motivated by such factors (that is, ability to optimize certain performance measures, or to ascertain liability) in the first place, if they were to attempt something like this – since they wouldn’t be selling it. The only reason I foresee government or industry being interested in attempting this is if a foreign nation or competitor, respectively, initiated such a project, in which case they might attempt it simply to stay competitive in the case of industry and on equal militaristic defensive/offensive footing in the case of government. But the fact that optimization-of-performance-measures and clear liabilities don’t apply to Blind Replication means that a wealthy individual would be more likely to attempt this, because government and industry have much more to lose in terms of liability, were someone to find out.

Could Upload+AGI be easier to implement than AGI alone?

This means that the creation of an intelligence with a subjective perception of time significantly greater than unmodified humans (what might be called Ultra-Fast Intelligence) may be more likely to occur via an upload, rather than an AGI, because the creation of an AGI is largely determined by increases in both computational processing and software performance/capability, whereas the creation of an upload may be determined by-and-large by processing-power and thus remain largely independent of the need for significant improvements in software performance or “methodological implementation”

If the premise that such an upload could significantly accelerate a coming intelligence explosion (whether by using his/her comparative advantages to recursively self-modify his/herself, to accelerate innovation and R&D in computational hardware and/or software, or to create a recursively-self-improving AGI) is taken as true, it follows that even the coming of an AGI-mediated intelligence explosion specifically, despite being impacted by software improvements as well as computational processing power, may be more impacted by basic processing power (e.g. IPS) than by computational price performance — and may be more determined by computational processing power than by processing power + software improvements. This is only because uploading is likely to be largely independent of increases in software (i.e. methodological as opposed to technological) performance. Moreover, development in AGI may proceed faster via the vicarious method outlined here – namely having an upload or team of uploads work on the software and/or hardware improvements that AGI relies on – than by directly working on such improvements in “real-time” physicality.

Virtual Advantage:

The increase in subjective perception of time alone (if Yudkowsky’s estimate is correct, a ratio of 250 subjective years for every “real-time” hour) gives him/her a massive advantage. It also would likely allow them to counter-act and negate any attempts made from “real-time” physicality to stop, slow or otherwise deter them.

There is another feature of virtual embodiment that could increase the upload’s ability to accelerate such developments. Neural modification, with which he could optimize his current functional modalities (e.g. what we coarsely call “intelligence”) or increase the metrics underlying them, thus amplifying his existing skills and cognitive faculties (as in Intelligence Amplification or IA), as well as creating categorically new functional modalities, is much easier from within virtual embodiment than it would be in physicality. In virtual embodiment, all such modifications become a methodological, rather than technological, problem. To enact such changes in a physically-embodied nervous system would require designing a system to implement those changes, and actually implementing them according to plan. To enact such changes in a virtually-embodied nervous system requires only a re-organization or re-writing of information. Moreover, in virtual embodiment, any changes could be made, and reversed, whereas in physical embodiment reversing such changes would require, again, designing a method and system of implementing such “reversal-changes” in physicality (thereby necessitating a whole host of other technologies and methodologies) – and if those changes made further unexpected changes, and we can’t easily reverse them, then we may create an infinite regress of changes, wherein changes made to reverse a given modification in turn creates more changes, that in turn need to be reversed, ad infinitum.

Thus self-modification (and especially recursive self-modification), towards the purpose of intelligence amplification into Ultraintelligence [7] in easier (i.e. necessitating a smaller technological and methodological infrastructure – that is, the required host of methods and technologies needed by something – and thus less cost as well) in virtual embodiment than in physical embodiment.

These recursive modifications not only further maximize the upload’s ability to think of ways to accelerate the coming of an intelligence explosion, but also maximize his ability to further self-modify towards that very objective (thus creating the positive feedback loop critical for I.J Good’s intelligence explosion hypothesis) – or in other words maximize his ability to maximize his general ability in anything.

But to what extent is the ability to self-modify hampered by the critical feature of Blind Replication mentioned above – namely, the inability to modify and optimize various performance measures by virtue of the fact that we can’t predictively model the operational dynamics of the system-in-question? Well, an upload could copy himself, enact any modifications, and see the results – or indeed, make a copy to perform this change-and-check procedure. If the inability to predictively model a system made through the “Blind Replication” method does indeed problematize the upload’s ability to self-modify, it would still be much easier to work towards being able to predictively model it, via this iterative change-and-check method, due to both the subjective-perception-of-time speedup and the ability to make copies of himself.

It is worth noting that it might be possible to predictively model (and thus make reliable or stable changes to) the operation of neurons, without being able to model how this scales up to the operational dynamics of the higher-level neural regions. Thus modifying, increasing or optimizing existing functional modalities (i.e. increasing synaptic density in neurons, or increasing the range of usable neurotransmitters — thus increasing the potential information density in a given signal or synaptic-transmission) may be significantly easier than creating categorically new functional modalities.

Increasing the Imminence of an Intelligent Explosion:

So what ways could the upload use his/her new advantages and abilities to actually accelerate the coming of an intelligence explosion? He could apply his abilities to self-modification, or to the creation of a Seed-AI (or more technically a recursively self-modifying AI).

He could also accelerate its imminence vicariously by working on accelerating the foundational technologies and methodologies (or in other words the technological and methodological infrastructure of an intelligence explosion) that largely determine its imminence. He could apply his new abilities and advantages to designing better computational paradigms, new methodologies within existing paradigms (e.g. non-Von-Neumann architectures still within the paradigm of electrical computation), or to differential technological development in “real-time” physicality towards such aims – e.g. finding an innovative means of allocating assets and resources (i.e. capital) to R&D for new computational paradigms, or optimizing current computational paradigms.

Thus there are numerous methods of indirectly increasing the imminence (or the likelihood of imminence within a certain time-range, which is a measure with less ambiguity) of a coming intelligence explosion – and many new ones no doubt that will be realized only once such an upload acquires such advantages and abilities.

Intimations of Implications:

So… Is this good news or bad news? Like much else in this increasingly future-dominated age, the consequences of this scenario remain morally ambiguous. It could be both bad and good news. But the answer to this question is independent of the premises – that is, two can agree on the viability of the premises and reasoning of the scenario, while drawing opposite conclusions in terms of whether it is good or bad news.

People who subscribe to the “Friendly AI” camp of AI-related existential risk will be at once hopeful and dismayed. While it might increase their ability to create their AGI (or more technically their Coherent-Extrapolated-Volition Engine [8]), thus decreasing the chances of an “unfriendly” AI being created in the interim, they will also be dismayed by the fact that it may include (but not necessitate) a recursively-modifying intelligence, in this case an upload, to be created prior to the creation of their own AGI – which is the very problem they are trying to mitigate in the first place.

Those who, like me, see a distributed intelligence explosion (in which all intelligences are allowed to recursively self-modify at the same rate – thus preserving “power” equality, or at least mitigating “power” disparity [where power is defined as the capacity to affect change in the world or society] – and in which any intelligence increasing their capably at a faster rate than all others is disallowed) as a better method of mitigating the existential risk entailed by an intelligence explosion will also be dismayed. This scenario would allow one single person to essentially have the power to determine the fate of humanity – due to his massively increased “capability” or “power” – which is the very feature (capability disparity/inequality) that the “distributed intelligence explosion” camp of AI-related existential risk seeks to minimize.

On the other hand, those who see great potential in an intelligence explosion to help mitigate existing problems afflicting humanity – e.g. death, disease, societal instability, etc. – will be hopeful because the scenario could decrease the time it takes to implement an intelligence explosion.

I for one think that it is highly likely that the advantages proffered by accelerating the coming of an intelligence explosion fail to supersede the disadvantages incurred by the increase existential risk it would entail. That is, I think that the increase in existential risk brought about by putting so much “power” or “capability-to-affect-change” in the (hands?) one intelligence outweighs the decrease in existential risk brought about by the accelerated creation of an Existential-Risk-Mitigating A(G)I.

Conclusion:

Thus, the scenario presented above yields some interesting and counter-intuitive conclusions:

  1. How imminent an intelligence explosion is, or how likely it is to occur within a given time-frame, may be more determined by basic processing power than by computational price performance, which is a measure of basic processing power per unit of cost. This is because as soon as we have enough processing power to emulate a human nervous system, provided we have sufficient software to emulate the lower level neural components giving rise to the higher-level human mind, then the increase in the rate of thought and subjective perception of time made available to that emulation could very well allow it to design and implement an AGI before computational price performance increases by a large enough factor to make the processing power necessary for that AGI’s implementation available for a widely-affordable cost. This conclusion is independent of any specific estimates of how long the successful computational emulation of a human nervous system will take to achieve. It relies solely on the premise that the successful computational emulation of the human mind can be achieved faster than the successful implementation of an AGI whose design is not based upon the cognitive architecture of the human nervous system. I have outlined various reasons why we might expect this to be the case. This would be true even if uploading could only be achieved faster than AGI (given an equal amount of funding or “effort”) by a seemingly-negligible amount of time, like one week, due to the massive increase in speed of thought and the rate of subjective perception of time that would then be available to such an upload.
  2. The creation of an upload may be relatively independent of software performance/capability (which is not to say that we don’t need any software, because we do, but rather that we don’t need significant increases in software performance or improvements in methodological implementation – i.e. how we actually design a mind, rather than the substrate it is instantiated by – which we do need in order to implement an AGI and which we would need for WBE, were the system we seek to emulate not already in existence) and may in fact be largely determined by processing power or computational performance/capability alone, whereas AGI is dependent on increases in both computational performance and software performance or fundamental progress in methodological implementation.
    • If this second conclusion is true, it means that an upload may be possible quite soon considering the fact that we’ve passed the basic estimates for processing requirements given by Kurzweil, Moravec and Storrs-Hall, provided we can emulate the low-level neural regions of the brain with high predictive accuracy (and provided the claim that instantiating such low-level components will vicariously instantiate the emergent human mind, without out needing to really understand how such components functionally-converge to do so, proves true), whereas AGI may still have to wait for fundamental improvements to methodological implementation or “software performance”
    • Thus it may be easier to create an AGI by first creating an upload to accelerate the development of that AGI’s creation, than it would be to work on the development of an AGI directly. Upload+AGI may actually be easier to implement than AGI alone is!

franco 2 essay 5

References:

[1] Kurzweil, R, 2005. The Singularity is Near. Penguin Books.

[2] Moravec, H, 1997. When will computer hardware match the human brain?. Journal of Evolution and Technology, [Online]. 1(1). Available at: http://www.jetpress.org/volume1/moravec.htm [Accessed 01 March 2013].

[3] Hall, J (2006) “Runaway Artificial Intelligence?” Available at: http://www.kurzweilai.net/runaway-artificial-intelligence [Accessed: 01 March 2013]

[4] Adam Ford. (2011). Yudkowsky vs Hanson on the Intelligence Explosion — Jane Street Debate 2011 . [Online Video]. August 10, 2011. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_R5Z4_khNw [Accessed: 01 March 2013].

[5] Drexler, K.E, (1989). MOLECULAR MANIPULATION and MOLECULAR COMPUTATION. In NanoCon Northwest regional nanotechnology conference. Seattle, Washington, February 14–17. NANOCON. 2. http://www.halcyon.com/nanojbl/NanoConProc/nanocon2.html [Accessed 01 March 2013]

[6] Sandberg, A. & Bostrom, N. (2008). Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap, Technical Report #2008–3. http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/3…report.pdf [Accessed 01 March 2013]

[7] Good, I.J. (1965). Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine. Advances in Computers.

[8] Yudkowsky, E. (2004). Coherent Extrapolated Volition. The Singularity Institute.

Artifacts, Artifictions, Artifutures 0.5

It’s not a physical landscape. It’s a term reserved for the new technologies. It’s a landscape in the future. It’s as though you used technology to take you off the ground and go like Alice through the looking glass.
John Cage, in reference to his 1939 Imagined Landscape [1].

In the last installment (see here, here and here) I argued that the increasing prominence and frequency of futuristic aesthetics and themes of empowerment-through-technology in EDM-based mainstream music videos, as well as the increasing predominance of EDM foundations in mainstream music over the past 3 years, helps promote general awareness of emerging-technology-grounded and NBIC-driven concepts, causes and potential-crises while simultaneously presenting a sexy and self-empowering vision of technology and the future to mainstream audiences. The only reason this is mentionable in the first place is the fact that these are mainstream artists and labels reaching very large audiences.

In this installment, I will be analyzing a number of music videos for tracks by “real EDM” artists, released by exclusively-EDM record labels, to show that these futuristic themes aren’t just a consequence of EDM’s adoption by mainstream music over the past few years, and that there is long history of futuristic aesthetics and gestalts in electronic music, as well as recurrent themes of self-empowerment through technology.

In this part I will discuss some of these recurrent themes, which can be seen to derive from a number of aspects shared by Virtual Art (any art created without the use of physical instruments), of which contemporary electronic music is an example because it is created using software. I argue that this will become the predominant means of art production — via software — for all artistic mediums, from auditory to visual to eventual olfactory, somatosensory and proprioceptual artistic mediums. The interface between artist and art will become progressively thinner and more transparent, culminating in a time where Brain-Computer-Interface technology can sense neural operation and translate this directly into an informational form to be played by physical systems (e.g. speakers) at first, but eventually into a form that can be read by given person’s own BCI instantiated phenomenologically via high-precision technological neuromodulation (of which deep brain stimulation is an early form).

In the second part of this installment I will be following this discussion up with a look at some music videos for EDM-tracks that embody and exemplify the themes, aesthetics and general gestalts under consideration here.

Odditory Artificiality

The music- videos accompanying many historical and contemporary examples of EDM tracks display consistently futuristic and technoprogressive thematics, aesthetics and plots, as well as positive, self-empowering and often primal-pleasure-appealing depictions of emerging and as-yet-conceptual technologies. Many also exemplify the recurrent theme of human-technology symbiosis, inter-constitution and co-deferent inter-determination. It is not just physical prosthesis – for in a way language is as much prosthetic technology as artificial arm. This definition of prosthesis doesn’t make a distinction between nonbiological systems for the restoration of statistically-normal function and nonbiological systems for the facilitation or instantiation of enhanced functions and/or categorically-new functional modalities. And nor should it. I argue that such a dichotomy is invalid because our functional modalities are always changing. This was true of biological evolution and it is true of mind and of cultural evolution as well. Other recurrent themes depicted in the video include technological autonomy and animacy and the facilitation of seemingly magical or otherwise-impossible feats, either via technology or else against a futuristic background.

These videos are not wrong for picking up on the self-empowering and potential-liberating inherencies of technology, nor their radically-transformative and ability-extending potentials. Indeed, as I argued in brief in the first installment of this series, electronic music exemplifies a general trend and methodology that will become standard for more and more artistic mediums, and to an increasingly large degree in each medium, as we move forward into the future. Contemporary EDM and electronic music is made using software – and this fundamental dissociation with physical instrumentation demonstrates the liberating potentials of what I have called virtuality – the realm of information, the ontics of semiotics, and the ability to readily create, modulate and modify a given informational object to an arbitrarily-precise degree. Not only do artists have the ability to modulate and modify a given sound-wave or sound-wave-ensemble with greater magnitude and precision, but they can do so to create end-result sound-waves that are either impossible with current physical instruments or else significantly harder to produce with physical instruments.

Virtuality De-Scarcitizes

The ability to create without constraint (i.e. if it’s an information-product then we aren’t constrained by the use of physical resources or dependency on materials-processing and system-configuration/component-integration) means that our only limiting factor is available or objective-optimal memory and computation. The ability to readily duplicate an information-product with negligible resource-expenditure (e.g. it doesn’t cost much, in terms of memory or computation, to create and transmit an electronic file) means that any resources expended in the creation (whether computationally or manually by a human programmer) or maintenance (e.g. storage) of the information-product is amortized over the course of all the instances in which it is doubled – that is, it’s cost, or the amount of resources expended, in comparison to the net product is cut in half every time it’s doubled).

Is it coincidence that these de-scarcitizing and constraint-eschewing properties inherent in information-products are paralleled and reflected so perfectly, in thematic, aesthetic and gestalt, by electronic-music videos? Or could such potentials be felt by our raw intuitions, seen in the ways in which technology empowers people, expands their choices, frees possibilities and works once-wonders on a daily basis, and simply amplified through the cultural magnifying-glass of art? After all, if one looks back throughout the history of electronic music one can see many early pioneers and antecedents of electronic music, we can see individuals and movements that acknowledge these de-scarcitizing, possibility-actualizing and self-empowering potentials in various ways. This very virtue of virtuality could be seen, exemplified in embryonic form, in early forms of electronic music as long as 100+ years ago — for instance in the works and manifestos of Italian Futurism, an early 20th century art movement, which embraced (among other artistic sub-genres) Noise Music, an early20th century embodiment of electronic music


It’s not as though EDM came out of nowhere after all (claims to constraintless creation aside); the technological synthesis of sound can be seen as a natural continuation of the trends set out by the creation and development of recording equipment in the early to mid-20th century, and harkened by the explosion of popularity the electric guitar and synthesizers saw in the 1960s. In an interview with Jim Morrison given in 1969 essentially predicts the predominance of electronic music we are seeing today, saying that “I guess in four or five years the new generation’s music will have a synthesis of those two elements [blues and folk] and some third thing, maybe it will be entirely, um, it might rely heavily on electronics, tapes… I can kind of envision one person with a lot of machines, tapes, electronic setups singing or speaking using machines.”

Sound-Wave Sculptor

I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the use of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard. Photoelectric, film and mechanical mediums for the synthetic production of music will be explored.
John Cage, The Future of Music: Credo, 1937 [2].

When did these underlying potentialities inherent in virtual or informational-mediation really start to become obvious, or at least detectable in nascent or fledging form?

The de-scarcitizing effects of virtually-mediated art (a class that includes such early embodiments and antecedents of electronic music) seems only to have become obvious on a level beyond intuition when the ability to artificially synthesize sound brought with it a greatly increased ability to directly modulate and modify such sound.

This marked the beginning of the trend that distinguishes this class as categorically different than physically-mediated art. After all, playing an instrument can be considered modulating it just as operating a turn table can, so what constitutes the effective difference? Namely the greatly increased increased range and precision (that is, the precision with which the artist can modulate a given sound or create a given sound to his liking, which corresponds to the degree-of-accuracy between his mental ideal and what he can produce physicality) of modulation made possible by the technologies and techniques that allows us to artificially-synthesize sound in the first place.

Sound-waves can be modulated (i.e. controlled or affected in real-time) or modified (i.e. recorded, controlled or affected in iterations or gradually, and then replayed without modulation in real-time) with greater precision (e.g. ability to modulate a waveform within smaller intervals of time or with a smaller standard-deviation/tolerance-interval/margin-of-error). The magnitude of such changes (e.g. the range of frequencies a given waveform can be made to conform to, or the range of pitches a given waveform can be made to embody, through such methods) is also greater than the potential magnitude available via the modulation of playing a physical instrument. What’s more, fundamentally new categories of sound can be produced as well, whereas in non-virtually-mediated-music such fundamentally new categories of sound would require a whole new physical instrument — if they can be reproduced by physical instrumentation at all.

The earliest synthesizers harkened the future of all art mediums; artificially-created, modulated and modified sound via the user-interface of knobs, dials and keys is one small step away from music produced solely through software – and one giant leap beyond the watered-down and matter-bound paradigm of music and artistic-media in general that preceded it.

References:

[1] Kostelanetz, Richard. 1986. “John Cage and Richard Kostelanetz: A Conversation about Radio”. The Musical Quarterly.72 (2): 216–227.

[2] Cage, John. 1939. “Future of Music; Credo”.

1. Thou shalt first guard the Earth and preserve humanity.

Impact deflection and survival colonies hold the moral high ground above all other calls on public funds.

2. Thou shalt go into space with heavy lift rockets with hydrogen upper stages and not go extinct.

The human race can only go in one of two directions; space or extinction- right now we are an endangered species.

3. Thou shalt use the power of the atom to live on other worlds.

Nuclear energy is to the space age as steam was to the industrial revolution; chemical propulsion is useless for interplanetary travel and there is no solar energy in the outer solar system.

4. Thou shalt use nuclear weapons to travel through space.

Physical matter can barely contain chemical reactions; the only way to effectively harness nuclear energy to propel spaceships is to avoid containment problems completely- with bombs.

5. Thou shalt gather ice on the Moon as a shield and travel outbound.

The Moon has water for the minimum 14 foot thick radiation shield and is a safe place to light off a bomb propulsion system; it is the starting gate.

6. Thou shalt spin thy spaceships and rings and hollow spheres to create gravity and thrive.

Humankind requires Earth gravity and radiation to travel for years through space; anything less is a guarantee of failure.

7. Thou shalt harvest the Sun on the Moon and use the energy to power the Earth and propel spaceships with mighty beams.

8. Thou shalt freeze without damage the old and sick and revive them when a cure is found; only an indefinite lifespan will allow humankind to combine and survive. Only with this reprieve can we sleep and reach the stars.

9. Thou shalt build solar power stations in space hundreds of miles in diameter and with this power manufacture small black holes for starship engines.

10. Thou shalt build artificial intellects and with these beings escape the death of the universe and resurrect all who have died, joining all minds on a new plane.

YANKEE.BRAIN.MAP
The Brain Games Begin
Europe’s billion-Euro science-neuro Human Brain Project, mentioned here amongst machine morality last week, is basically already funded and well underway. Now the colonies over in the new world are getting hip, and they too have in the works a project to map/simulate/make their very own copy of the universe’s greatest known computational artifact: the gelatinous wad of convoluted electrical pudding in your skull.

The (speculated but not yet public) Brain Activity Map of America
About 300 different news sources are reporting that a Brain Activity Map project is outlined in the current administration’s to-be-presented budget, and will be detailed sometime in March. Hoards of journalists are calling it “Obama’s Brain Project,” which is stoopid, and probably only because some guy at the New Yorker did and they all decided that’s what they had to do, too. Or somesuch lameness. Or laziness? Deference? SEO?

For reasons both economic and nationalistic, America could definitely use an inspirational, large-scale scientific project right about now. Because seriously, aside from going full-Pavlov over the next iPhone, what do we really have to look forward to these days? Now, if some technotards or bible pounders monkeywrench the deal, the U.S. is going to continue that slide toward scientific… lesserness. So, hippies, religious nuts, and all you little sociopathic babies in politics: zip it. Perhaps, however, we should gently poke and prod the hard of thinking toward a marginally heightened Europhobia — that way they’ll support the project. And it’s worth it. Just, you know, for science.

Going Big. Not Huge, But Big. But Could be Massive.
Both the Euro and American flavors are no Manhattan Project-scale undertaking, in the sense of urgency and motivational factors, but more like the Human Genome Project. Still, with clear directives and similar funding levels (€1 billion Euros & $1–3 billion US bucks, respectively), they’re quite ambitious and potentially far more world changing than a big bomb. Like, seriously, man. Because brains build bombs. But hopefully an artificial brain would not. Spaceships would be nice, though.

Practically, these projects are expected to expand our understanding of the actual physical loci of human behavioral patterns, get to the bottom of various brain pathologies, stimulate the creation of more advanced AI/non-biological intelligence — and, of course, the big enchilada: help us understand more about our own species’ consciousness.

On Consciousness: My Simulated Brain has an Attitude?
Yes, of course it’s wild speculation to guess at the feelings and worries and conundrums of a simulated brain — but dude, what if, what if one or both of these brain simulation map thingys is done well enough that it shows signs of spontaneous, autonomous reaction? What if it tries to like, you know, do something awesome like self-reorganize, or evolve or something?

Maybe it’s too early to talk personality, but you kinda have to wonder… would the Euro-Brain be smug, never stop claiming superior education yet voraciously consume American culture, and perhaps cultivate a mild racism? Would the ‘Merica-Brain have a nation-scale authority complex, unjustifiable confidence & optimism, still believe in childish romantic love, and overuse the words “dude” and “awesome?”

We shall see. We shall see.

Oh yeah, have to ask:
Anyone going to follow Ray Kurzweil’s recipe?

Project info:
[HUMAN BRAIN PROJECT - € - MAIN SITE]
[THE BRAIN ACTIVITY MAP - $ - HUFF-PO]

Kinda Pretty Much Related:
[BLUE BRAIN PROJECT]

This piece originally appeared at Anthrobotic.com on February 28, 2013.

A response to McClelland and Plaut’s
comments in the Phys.org story:

Do brain cells need to be connected to have meaning?

Asim Roy
Department of Information Systems
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona, USA
www.lifeboat.com/ex/bios.asim.roy

Article reference:

Roy A. (2012). “A theory of the brain: localist representation is used widely in the brain.” Front. Psychology 3:551. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00551

Original article: http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/FullText.aspx?s=196&n…2012.00551

Comments by Plaut and McClelland: http://phys.org/news273783154.html

Note that most of the arguments of Plaut and McClelland are theoretical, whereas the localist theory I presented is very much grounded in four decades of evidence from neurophysiology. Note also that McClelland may have inadvertently subscribed to the localist representation idea with the following statement:

“Even here, the principles of distributed representation apply: the same place cell can represent very different places in different environments, for example, and two place cells that represent overlapping places in one environment can represent completely non-overlapping places in other environments.”

The notion that a place cell can “represent” one or more places in different environments is very much a localist idea. It implies that the place cell has meaning and interpretation. I start with responses to McClelland’s comments first. Please reference the Phys.org story to find these quotes from McClelland and Plaut and see the contexts.

1. McClelland – “what basis do I have for thinking that the representation I have for any concept – even a very familiar one – is associated with a single neuron, or even a set of neurons dedicated only to that concept?”

There’s four decades of research in neurophysiology on receptive field cells in the sensory processing systems and on hippocampal place cells that shows that single cells can encode a concept – from motion detection, color coding and line orientation detection to identifying a particular location in an environment. Neurophysiologists have also found category cells in the brains of humans and animals. See the next response which has more details on category cells. The neurophysiological evidence is substantial that single cells encode concepts, starting as early as the retinal ganglion cells. Hubel and Wiesel won a Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 1981 for breaking this “secret code” of the brain. Thus there’s enough basis to think that a single neuron can be dedicated to a concept and even at a very low level (e.g. for a dot, a line or an edge).

2. McClelland – “Is each such class represented by a localist representation in the brain?”

Cells that represent categories have been found in human and animal brains. Fried et al. (1997) found some MTL (medial temporal lobe) neurons that respond selectively to gender and facial expression and Kreiman et al. (2000) found MTL neurons that respond to pictures of particular categories of objects, such as animals, faces and houses. Recordings of single-neuron activity in the monkey visual temporal cortex led to the discovery of neurons that respond selectively to certain categories of stimuli such as faces or objects (Logothetis and Sheinberg, 1996; Tanaka, 1996; Freedman and Miller, 2008).

I quote Freedman and Miller (2008): “These studies have revealed that the activity of single neurons, particularly those in the prefrontal and posterior parietal cortices (PPCs), can encode the category membership, or meaning, of visual stimuli that the monkeys had learned to group into arbitrary categories.”

Lin et al. (2007) report finding “nest cells” in mouse hippocampus that fire selectively when the mouse observes a nest or a bed, regardless of the location or environment.

Gothard et al. (2007) found single neurons in the amygdala of monkeys that responded selectively to images of monkey faces, human faces and objects as they viewed them on a computer monitor. They found one neuron that responded in particular to threatening monkey faces. Their general observation is (p. 1674): “These examples illustrate the remarkable selectivity of some neurons in the amygdala for broad categories of stimuli.”

Thus the evidence is substantial that category cells exist in the brain.

References:

  1. Fried, I., McDonald, K. & Wilson, C. (1997). Single neuron activity in human hippocampus and amygdala during recognition of faces and objects. Neuron 18, 753–765.
  2. Kreiman, G., Koch, C. & Fried, I. (2000) Category-specific visual responses of single neurons in the human medial temporal lobe. Nat. Neurosci. 3, 946–953.
  3. Freedman DJ, Miller EK (2008) Neural mechanisms of visual categorization: insights from neurophysiology. Neurosci Biobehav Rev 32:311–329.
  4. Logothetis NK, Sheinberg DL (1996) Visual object recognition. Annu Rev Neurosci 19:577–621.
  5. Tanaka K (1996) Inferotemporal cortex and object vision. Annu Rev Neurosci 19:109–139.
  6. Lin, L. N., Chen, G. F., Kuang, H., Wang, D., & Tsien, J. Z. (2007). Neural encoding of the concept of nest in the mouse brain. Proceedings of theNational Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104, 6066–6071.
  7. Gothard, K.M., Battaglia, F.P., Erickson, C.A., Spitler, K.M. & Amaral, D.G. (2007). Neural Responses to Facial Expression and Face Identity in the Monkey Amygdala. J. Neurophysiol. 97, 1671–1683.

3. McClelland – “Do I have a localist representation for each phase of every individual that I know?”

Obviously more research is needed to answer these types of questions. But Saddam Hussein and Jennifer Aniston type cells may provide the clue someday.

4. McClelland – “Let us discuss one such neuron – the neuron that fires substantially more when an individual sees either the Eiffel Tower or the Leaning Tower of Pisa than when he sees other objects. Does this neuron ‘have meaning and interpretation independent of other neurons’? It can have meaning for an external observer, who knows the results of the experiment – but exactly what meaning should we say it has?”

On one hand, this obviously brings into focus a lot of the work in neurophysiology. This could boil down to asking who is to interpret the activity of receptive fields, place and grid cells and so on and whether such interpretation can be independent of other neurons. In neurophysiology, the interpretation of these cells (e.g. for motion detection, color coding, edge detection, place cells and so on) are obviously being verified independently in various research labs throughout the world and with repeated experiments. So it is not that some researcher is arbitrarily assigning meaning to cells and that such results can’t be replicated and verified. For many such cells, assignment of meaning is being verified by different labs.

On the other hand, this probably is a question about whether that cell is a category cell and how to assign meaning to it. The interpretation of a cell that responds to pictures of the Eiffel Tower and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but not to other landmarks, could be somewhat similar to a place cell that responds to a certain location or it could be similar to a category cell. Similar cells have been found in the MTL region — a neuron firing to two different basketball players, a neuron firing to Luke Skywalker and Yoda, both characters of Star Wars, and another firing to a spider and a snake (but not to other animals) (Quiroga & Kreiman, 2010a). Quian Quiroga et al. (2010b, p. 298) had the following observation on these findings: “…. one could still argue that since the pictures the neurons fired to are related, they could be considered the same concept, in a high level abstract space: ‘the basketball players,’ ‘the landmarks,’ ‘the Jedi of Star Wars,’ and so on.”

If these are category cells, there is obviously the question what other objects are included in the category. But, it’s clear that the cells have meaning although it might include other items.

References:

  1. Quian Quiroga, R. & Kreiman, G. (2010a). Measuring sparseness in the brain: Comment on Bowers (2009). Psychological Review, 117, 1, 291–297.
  2. Quian Quiroga, R. & Kreiman, G. (2010b). Postscript: About Grandmother Cells and Jennifer Aniston Neurons. Psychological Review, 117, 1, 297–299.

5. McClelland – “In the context of these observations, the Cerf experiment considered by Roy may not be as impressive. A neuron can respond to one of four different things without really having a meaning and interpretation equivalent to any one of these items.”

The Cerf experiment is not impressive? What McClelland is really questioning is the existence of highly selective cells in the brains of humans and animals and the meaning and interpretation associated with those cells. This obviously has a broader implication and raises questions about a whole range of neurophysiological studies and their findings. For example, are the “nest cells” of Lin et al. (2007) really category cells sending signals to the mouse brain that there is a nest nearby? Or should one really believe that Freedman and Miller (2008) found category cells in the monkey visual temporal cortex that identify certain categories of stimuli such as faces or objects? Or should one believe that Gothard et al. (2007) found category cells in the amygdala of monkeys that responded selectively to images of monkey faces, human faces and objects as they viewed them on a computer monitor? And how about that one neuron that Gothard et al. (2007) found that responded in particular to threatening monkey faces? And does this question about the meaning and interpretation of highly selective cells also apply to simple and complex receptive fields in the retina ganglion and the primary visual cortex? Note that a Nobel Prize has already been awarded for the discovery of these highly selective cells.

The evidence for the existence of highly selective cells in the brains of humans and animals is substantive and irrefutable although one can theoretically ask “what else does it respond to?” Note that McClelland’s question contradicts his own view that there could exist place cells, which are highly selective cells.

6. McClelland – “While we sometimes (Kumeran & McClelland, 2012 as in McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981) use localist units in our simulation models, it is not the neurons, but their interconnections with other neurons, that gives them meaning and interpretation….Again we come back to the patterns of interconnections as the seat of knowledge, the basis on which one or more neurons in the brain can have meaning and interpretation.”

“one or more neurons in the brain can have meaning and interpretation” – that sounds like localist representation, but obviously that’s not what is meant. Anyway, there’s no denying that there is knowledge embedded in the connections between the neurons, but that knowledge is integrated by the neurons to create additional knowledge. So the neurons have additional knowledge that does not exist in the connections. And single cell studies are focused on discovering the integrated knowledge that exists only in the neurons themselves. For example, the receptive field cells in the sensory processing systems and the hippocampal place cells show that some cells detect direction of motion, some code for color, some detect orientation of a line and some detect a particular location in an environment. And there are cells that code for certain categories of objects. That kind of knowledge is not easily available in the connections. In general, consolidated knowledge exists within the cells and that’s where the general focus has been of single cell studies.

7. Plaut – “Asim’s main argument is that what makes a neural representation localist is that the activation of a single neuron has meaning and interpretation on a stand-alone basis. This is about how scientists interpret neural activity. It differs from the standard argument on neural representation, which is about how the system actually works, not whether we as scientists can make sense of a single neuron. These are two separate questions.”

Doesn’t “how the system actually works” depend on our making “sense of a single neuron?” The representation theory has always been centered around single neurons, whether they have meaning on a stand-alone basis or not. So how does making “sense of a single neuron” become a separate question now? And how are these two separate questions addressed in the literature?

8. Plaut – “My problem is that his claim is a bit vacuous because he’s never very clear about what a coherent ‘meaning and interpretation’ has to be like…. but never lays out the constraints that this is meaning and interpretation, and this isn’t. Since we haven’t figured it out yet, what constitutes evidence against the claim? There’s no way to prove him wrong.”

In the article, I used the standard definition from cognitive science for localist units, which is a simple one, that localist units have meaning and interpretation. There is no need to invent a new definition for localist representation. The standard definition is very acceptable, accepted by the cognitive science community and I draw attention to that in the article with verbatim quotes from Plate, Thorpe and Elman. Here they are again.

  • Plate (2002):“Another equivalent property is that in a distributed representation one cannot interpret the meaning of activity on a single neuron in isolation: the meaning of activity on any particular neuron is dependent on the activity in other neurons (Thorpe 1995).”
  • Thorpe (1995, p. 550): “With a local representation, activity in individual units can be interpreted directly … with distributed coding individual units cannot be interpreted without knowing the state of other units in the network.”
  • Elman (1995, p. 210): “These representations are distributed, which typically has the consequence that interpretable information cannot be obtained by examining activity of single hidden units.”

The terms “meaning” and “interpretation” are not bounded in any way other than that by means of the alternative representation scheme where “meaning” of a unit is dependent on other units. That’s how it’s constrained in the standard definition and that’s been there for a long time.

Neither Plaut nor McClelland have questioned the fact that receptive fields in the sensory processing systems have meaning and interpretation. Hubel and Wiesel won the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 1981 for breaking this “secret code” of the brain. Here’s part of the Nobel Prize citation:

“Thus, they have been able to show how the various components of the retinal image are read out and interpreted by the cortical cells in respect to contrast, linear patterns and movement of the picture over the retina. The cells are arranged in columns, and the analysis takes place in a strictly ordered sequence from one nerve cell to another and every nerve cell is responsible for one particular detail in the picture pattern.”

Neither Plaut nor McClelland have questioned the fact that place cells have meaning and interpretation. McClelland, in fact, accepts the fact that place cells indicate locations in an environment, which means that he accepts that they have meaning and interpretation.

9. Plaut – “If you look at the hippocampal cells (the Jennifer Aniston neuron), the problem is that it’s been demonstrated that the very same cell can respond to something else that’s pretty different. For example, the same Jennifer Aniston cell responds to Lisa Kudrow, another actress on the TV show Friends with Aniston. Are we to believe that Lisa Kudrow and Jennifer Aniston are the same concept? Is this neuron a Friends TV show cell?”

Want to clarify three things here. First, localist cells are not necessarily grandmother cells. Grandmother cells are a special case of localist cells and this has been made clear in the article. For example, in the primary visual cortex, there are simple and complex cells that are tuned to visual characteristics such as orientation, color, motion and shape. They are localist cells, but not grandmother cells.

Second, the analysis in the article of the interactive activation (IA) model of McClelland and Rumelhart (1981) shows that a localist unit can respond to more than one concept in the next higher level. For example, a letter unit can respond to many word units. And the simple and complex cells in the primary visual cortex will respond to many different objects.

Third, there are indeed category cells in the brain. Response No. 2 above to McClelland’s comments cites findings in neurophysiology on category cells. So the Jennifer Aniston/Lisa Kudrow cell could very well be a category cell, much like the one that fired to spiders and snakes (but not to other animals) and the one that fired for both the Eiffel Tower and the Tower of Pisa (but not to other landmarks). But category cells have meaning and interpretation too. The Jennifer Aniston/Lisa Kudrow cell could be a Friends TV show cell, as Plaut suggested, but it still has meaning and interpretation. However, note that Koch (2011, p. 18, 19) reports finding another Jennifer Aniston MTL cell that didn’t respond to Lisa Kudrow:

“One hippocampal neuron responded only to photos of actress Jennifer Aniston but not to pictures of other blonde women or actresses; moreover, the cell fired in response to seven very different pictures of Jennifer Aniston.”

References:

  1. Koch, C. (2011). Being John Malkovich. Scientific American Mind, March/April, 18–19.

10. Plaut – “Only a few experiments show the degree of selectivity and interpretability that he’s talking about…. In some regions of the medial temporal lobe and hippocampus, there seem to be fairly highly selective responses, but the notion that cells respond to one concept that is interpretable doesn’t hold up to the data.”

There are place cells in the hippocampus that identify locations in an environment. Locations are concepts. And McClelland admits place cells represent locations. There is also plenty of evidence on the existence of category cells in the brain (see Response No. 2 above to McClelland’s comments) and categories are, of course, concepts. And simple and complex receptive fields also represent concepts such as direction of motion, line orientation, edges, shapes, color and so on. There is thus abundance of data in neurophysiology that shows that “cells respond to one concept that is interpretable” and that evidence is growing.

The existence of highly tuned and selective cells that have meaning and interpretation is now beyond doubt, given the volume of evidence from neurophysiology over the last four decades.

The Truth about Space Travel is Stranger than Fiction

Posted by Gary Michael Church in asteroid/comet impacts, biological, biotech/medical, business, chemistry, climatology, complex systems, cosmology, counterterrorism, defense, economics, education, engineering, ethics, events, evolution, existential risks, finance, futurism, geopolitics, habitats, homo sapiens, human trajectories, life extension, lifeboat, media & arts, military, neuroscience, nuclear weapons, physics, policy, space, sustainability, transparency, treatiesTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments on The Truth about Space Travel is Stranger than Fiction

I have been corresponding with John Hunt and have decided that perhaps it is time to start moving toward forming a group that can accomplish something.

The recent death of Neil Armstrong has people thinking about space. The explosion of a meteor over Britain and the curiosity rover on Mars are also in the news. But there is really nothing new under the sun. There is nothing that will hold people’s attention for very long outside of their own immediate comfort and basic needs. Money is the central idea of our civilization and everything else is soon forgotten. But this idea of money as the center of all activity is a death sentence. Human beings die and species eventually become extinct just as worlds and suns also are destroyed or burn out. Each of us is in the position of a circus freak on death row. Bizarre, self centered, doomed; a cosmic joke. Of all the creatures on this planet, we are the freaks the other creatures would come to mock- if they were like us. If they were supposedly intelligent like us. But are we actually the intelligent ones? The argument can be made that we lack a necessary characteristic to be considered truly intelligent life forms.

Truly intelligent creatures would be struggling with three problems if they found themselves in our situation as human beings on Earth in the first decades of this 21st century;

1. Mortality. With technology possible to delay death and eventually reverse the aging process, intelligent beings would be directing the balance of planetary resources towards conquering “natural” death.

2. Threats. With technology not just possible, but available, to defend the earth from extinction level events, the resources not being used to seek an answer to the first problem would necessarily be directed toward this second danger.

3. Progress. With science advancing and accelerating, the future prospects for engineering humans for greater intelligence and eventually building super intelligent machines are clear. Crystal clear. Not addressing these prospects is a clear warning that we are, as individuals, as a species, and as a living planet, headed not toward a bright future, but in the opposite direction toward a dead and final end.

One engineered pathogen will destroy us forever. One impact larger than average will destroy us forever. The reasoning that death is somehow “natural” which drives us to ignore the subject of destruction will destroy us forever. Earth changes are inevitable and taking place now- despite our faith in television and popular culture that everything is fun and games. Man is not the measure of all things. We think tomorrow will come just like yesterday- but it will not.

The Truth about Space Travel is that there are no stargates or warp drives that will take us across the galaxy like commecial airliners or cruise ships take us across oceans. If we do wake up and change our course, space voyages will take centuries and human expansion will be measured in millenia. We will be frozen when we travel to distant stars. And this survivable freezing will mark the beginning of a new age since being able to delay death by freezing will completely transform life. The first such successful procedure will mean the end of the world as we know it- and the beginning of a new civilization.

Though unknown to the public, the atomic bomb and then the hydrogen bomb marked the true beginning of the Space Age. Hydrogen bombs can push cities in space, hollow moons, to some percentage of the speed of light. These cities can travel to other stars, such as Epsilon Eridani with it’s massive asteroid belt. And there more artificial hollow moons can be mass produced to provide new worlds to live in. This is not fiction I am speaking of but something we could do right now- today. We only lack the procedure to freeze and successfully revive a human being. It is, indeed, stranger than fiction.

In Beam Propulsion we have the answer to bending the rocket equation to our will and allowing millions and eventually billions of human beings to migrate into space. Just as Verne and Wells made accurate predictions of the decades to come, we now are seeing the possible obvious future unfolding before our eyes.

But the most possible and probable obvious future at this moment is destruction. The end of days. Unless we do something.
You and I and everyone you know is involved in this. Let’s get started.

Whether via spintronics or some quantum breakthrough, artificial intelligence and the bizarre idea of intellects far greater than ours will soon have to be faced.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120819153743.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120815131137.htm

One more step has been taken toward making whole body cryopreservation a practical reality. An understanding of the properties of water allows the temperature of the human body to be lowered without damaging cell structures.

Just as the microchip revolution was unforeseen the societal effects of suspending death have been overlooked completely.

The first successful procedure to freeze a human being and then revive that person without damage at a later date will be the most important single event in human history. When that person is revived he or she will awaken to a completely different world.

It will be a mad rush to build storage facilities for the critically ill so their lives can be saved. The very old and those in the terminal stages of disease will be rescued from imminent death. Vast resources will be turned toward the life sciences as the race to repair the effects of old age and cure disease begins. Hundreds of millions may eventually be awakened once aging is reversed. Life will become far more valuable overnight and activities such as automobile and air travel will be viewed in a new light. War will end because no one will desire to hasten the death of another human being.

It will not be immortality, just parole from the death row we all share. Get ready.

AI scientist Hugo de Garis has prophesied the next great historical conflict will be between those who would build gods and those who would stop them.

It seems to be happening before our eyes as the incredible pace of scientific discovery leaves our imaginations behind.

We need only flush the toilet to power the artificial mega mind coming into existence within the next few decades. I am actually not intentionally trying to write anything bizarre- it is just this strange planet we are living on.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120813155525.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120813123034.htm

GatgetBridge is currently just a concept. It might start its life as a discussion forum, later turn into a network or an organisation and hopefully inspire a range of similar activities.

We will soon be able to use technology to make ourselves more intelligent, feel happier or change what motivates us. When the use of such technologies is banned, the nations or individuals who manage to cheat will soon lord it over their more obedient but unfortunately much dimmer fellows. When these technologies are made freely available, a few terrorists and psychopaths will use them to cause major disasters. Societies will have to find ways to spread these mind enhancement treatments quickly among the majority of their citizens, while keeping them from the few who are likely to cause harm. After a few enhancement cycles, the most capable members of such societies will all be “trustworthy” and use their skills to stabilise the system (see “All In The Mind”).

But how can we manage the transition period, the time in which these technologies are powerful enough to be abused but no social structures are yet in place to handle them? It might help to use these technologies for entertainment purposes, so that many people learn about their risks and societies can adapt (see “Should we build a trustworthiness tester for fun”). But ideally, a large, critical and well-connected group of technology users should be part of the development from the start and remain involved in every step.

To do that, these users would have to spend large amounts of money and dedicate considerable manpower. Fortunately, the basic spending and working patterns are in place: People already use a considerable part of their income to buy consumer devices such as mobile phones, tablet computers and PCs and increasingly also accessories such as blood glucose meters, EEG recorders and many others; they also spend a considerable part of their time to get familiar with these devices. Manufacturers and software developers are keen to turn any promising technology into a product and over time this will surely include most mind measuring and mind enhancement technologies. But for some critical technologies this time might be too long. GadgetBridge is there to shorten it as follows:

- GadgetBridge spreads its philosophy — that mind-enhancing technologies are only dangerous when they are allowed to develop in isolation — that spreading these technologies makes a freer world more likely — and that playing with innovative consumer gadgets is therefore not just fun but also serves a good cause.

- Contributors make suggestions for new consumer devices based on the latest brain research and their personal experiences. Many people have innovative ideas but few are in a position to exploit them. Contributors rather donate their ideas that see them wither away or claimed by somebody else.

- All ideas are immediately published and offered free of charge to anyone who wants to use them. Companies select and implement the best options. Users buy their products and gain hands-on experience with the latest mind measurement and mind enhancement technologies. When risks become obvious, concerned users and governments look for ways to cope with them before they get out of hand.

- Once GadgetBridge produces results, it might attract funding from the companies that have benefited or hope to benefit from its services. GadgetBridge might then organise competitions, commission feasibility studies or develop a structure that provides modest rewards to successful contributors.

Your feedback is needed! Please be honest rather than polite: Could GadgetBridge make a difference?