In our last film, we explored how the introduction of autonomous, self-driving cars is likely to kill a lot of jobs. Many millions of jobs, in fact. But is it short sighted to view self-driving vehicles as economic murderers? Is it possible that we got it totally wrong, and automated vehicles won’t be Grim Reapers — but rather the biggest job creators since the internet?
In this video series, the Galactic Public Archives takes bite-sized looks at a variety of terms, technologies, and ideas that are likely to be prominent in the future. Terms are regularly changing and being redefined with the passing of time. With constant breakthroughs and the development of new technology and other resources, we seek to define what these things are and how they will impact our future.
Self-driving cars are pretty cool. Really, who wouldn’t want to spend their daily commute surfing social media, chatting with friends or finishing the Netflix series they were watching at 4 am the night before? It all sounds virtually utopian. But what if there is a dark side to self-driving cars? What if self-driving cars kill the jobs? ALL the jobs?
In this video series, the Galactic Public Archives takes bite-sized looks at a variety of terms, technologies, and ideas that are likely to be prominent in the future. Terms are regularly changing and being redefined with the passing of time. With constant breakthroughs and the development of new technology and other resources, we seek to define what these things are and how they will impact our future.
The vital question for governments around the world, whatever their country’s economic situation, needs to be: what is the future of work in an era of exponential technological development?
Drones. Drone is a word you see pretty often in today’s pop culture. But drones seem to be an extremely diverse species. Even flightless vehicles are occasionally referred to as drones. So what exactly is a drone?
In this video series, the Galactic Public Archives takes bite-sized looks at a variety of terms, technologies, and ideas that are likely to be prominent in the future. Terms are regularly changing and being redefined with the passing of time. With constant breakthroughs and the development of new technology and other resources, we seek to define what these things are and how they will impact our future.
What is the ultimate goal of Artificial General Intelligence?
In this video series, the Galactic Public Archives takes bite-sized looks at a variety of terms, technologies, and ideas that are likely to be prominent in the future. Terms are regularly changing and being redefined with the passing of time. With constant breakthroughs and the development of new technology and other resources, we seek to define what these things are and how they will impact our future.
The growth of human and computer intelligence has triggered a barrage of dire predictions about the rise of super intelligence and the singularity. But some retain their skepticism, including Dr. Michael Shermer, a science historian and founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine.
The reason so many rational people put forward hypotheses that are more hype than high tech, Shermer says, is that being smart and educated doesn’t protect anyone from believing in “weird things.” In fact, sometimes smart and educated people are better at rationalizing beliefs that they hold for not-so-rational reasons. The smarter and more educated you are, the better able you are to find evidence to support what you want to be true, suggests Shermer.
“This explains why Nobel Prize winners speak about areas they know nothing about with great confidence and are sure that they’re right. Just because they have this great confidence of being able to do that (is) a reminder that they’re more like lawyers than scientists in trying to marshal a case for their client,” Shermer said. “(Lawyers) just put together the evidence, as much as you can, in support of your client and get rid of the negative evidence. In science you’re not allowed to do that, you’re supposed to look at all the evidence, including the counter evidence to your theory.”
The root of many of these false hypotheses, Shermer believes, is based in religion. Using immortality as an example, Shermer said the desire to live forever has strong parallels to religious beliefs; however, while there are many making prophecies that technology will insure we’ll live forever, too many people in groups throughout history have made similar yet unfulfilled promises.
“What we’d like to be true is not necessarily what is true, so the burden of proof is on them to go ahead and make the case. Like the cryonics people…they make certain claims that this or that technology is going to revive people that are frozen later…I hope they do it, but you’ve got to prove otherwise. You have to show that you can actually do that.”
Even if we do find a way to live forever, Shermer notes the negatives may outweigh the positives. It’s not just living longer that we want to achieve, but living longer at a high quality of life. There’s not much benefit in living to age 150, he adds, if one is bedridden for 20 or 30 years.
Instead, Shermer compares the process to the evolution of the automobile. While the flying cars promised by 1950’s-era futurists haven’t come to pass, today’s automobile is exponentially smarter and safer than those made 50 or 60 years ago. While forward thinkers have had moments of lucid foresight, humans also have a history of making technology predictions that often don’t turn out to be realized. Often, as is the case with the automobile, we don’t notice differences in technological changes because the changes happen incrementally each year.
“That’s what’s really happening with health and longevity. We’re just creeping up the ladder slowly but surely. We’ve seen hip replacements, organ transplants, better nutrition, exercise, and getting a better feel for what it takes to be healthy,” Shermer says. “The idea that we’re gonna’ have one big giant discovery made that’s going to change everything? I think that’s less likely than just small incremental things. A Utopian (society) where everybody gets to live forever and they’re infinitely happy and prosperous and so on? I think it’s unrealistic to think along those lines.”
Looking at the future of technology, Shermer is equally reticent to buy in to the predictions of artificial intelligence taking over the world. “I think the concern about AI turning evil (and) this dystopian, science fiction perspective is again, not really grounded in reality. I’m an AI optimist, but I don’t think the AI pessimists have any good arguments,” Shermer said
While we know, for the most part, which types of governments work well, we don’t have any similar precedent for complex AI systems. Humans will remain in control and, before we start passing laws and restrictions to curb AI out of fear, Shermer believes we should keep improving our computers and artificial intelligence to make life better, evaluating and taking action as these systems continue to evolve.
This archive file was compiled from an interview conducted at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, 2013. In the discussion, Amit Singhal, a key figure in the evolution of Google’s search engine, broadly outlined the significant hurdles that stood in the way of achieving one of his long-held dreams — creating a true ‘conversational’ search engine. He also sketched out a vision of how the initial versions of such a system would, and also importantly, would not attempt to assist the individuals that it interacted with.
Though the vision was by design more limited and focused than a system capable of passing the famous Turing test, it nonetheless raised stimulating questions about the future relationships of humans and their ‘artificial’ assistants.
More about Amit Singhal:
Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amit_Singhal
Google Search: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search
This archive file was compiled from an interview conducted at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, 2013.
As late as the 1980s and the 1990s, the common person seeking stored knowledge would likely be faced with using an 18th century technology — the library index card catalogue — in order to find something on the topic he or she was looking for. Fifteen years later, most people would be able to search, at any time and any place, a collection of information that dwarfed that of any library. And unlike the experience with a library card catalogue, this new technology rarely left the user empty-handed.
Information retrieval had been a core technology of humanity since written language — but as an actual area of research it was so niche that before the 1950s, nobody had bothered to give the field a name. From a superficial perspective, the pioneering work in the area during the 1940s and 50s seemed to suggest it would be monumentally important to the future — but only behind the scenes. Information retrieval was to be the secret tool of the nation at war, or of the elite scientist compiling massive amounts of data. Increasingly however, a visionary group of thinkers dreamed of combining information retrieval and the ‘thinking machine’ to create something which would be far more revolutionary for society.
In the case of Google’s Amit Singhal, it was a childhood encounter with a visionary work that gave him his initial fascination with the dream of the thinking machine — a fascination that would result in his evolution to be one of the individuals who began to transform the dream into a reality. The work that he encountered was not that of a scientific pioneer such as Alan Turing or Marvin Minsky — it was a visionary work of pop culture.
More about Amit Singhal: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amit_Singhal Google Search: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search
How has your work, your life, your humanity, been improved by the promise of Big Data?
What apps and online media do you use to upload personal and other info?
Singularity has flopped – that is to say, this week Johnny Depp’s new film Transcendence did not bring in as much as Pirates of the Caribbean. Though there may not have been big box office heat, there is heat behind the film’s subject: Big Data! Sure we miss seeing our affable pirate chasing treasure, but hats off to Mr. Depp who removed his Keith Richards make-up to risk chasing what might be the mightiest challenge of our century.
Singularity, coined by mathematician John von Neumann, is a heady mathematical concept tested by biotech predictions. Made popular by math and music wunderkindt turned gray hair guru of an AI movement Ray Kurzweil, Singularity is said to signify the increasing rate at which artificial intelligence will supersede human intelligence like a jealous sibling. Followers of the Singularity movement (yes, with guru comes followers) envision the time of override in the not to distant future with projections set early as 2017 and 2030. At these times, the dynamics of technology are said to set about a change in our biology, our civilization and “perhaps” nature itself. Within our current reach, we see signs of empowered tech acting out in the current human brain mapping quest and brain-computer interface systems. More to the point, there is an ever increasing onslaught of Google Alerts annoucing biotech enhancements with wearable tech. Yes indeed, here comes the age of smart prosthetics and our own AI upload of medical and personal data to the internet. Suddenly all those Selfies seem more than mere narcissistic postings against the imposing backdrop of Big Data.
Johnny Depp’s face says it all in Transcendence where Big Data determines our AI future wherein life as we know it, can and will exist online. Think beyond a 24/7 teenage plug into a smart phone or flash- driving Facebook entries. Think Neuromancer, VALIS, and Star Trek’s Borg — sci fi predecessors predicting memory transformations amounting to an existential reboot. Translated into the everyday, we’re talking more than just uploading your genetic code to 23andme. This is an imagined future where what we call “Me” will be psychologically and legally recognized as living online.
As a contemporary sci fi, Transcendence is filled with pentimento film tributes to Zombie and X-Men TakeOvers, Westerns and Romantic Tragedies. Pitting AI critics against AI visionaries, the film is a bioethics drama, where the prospect of creating online Selves will constitute a direct social threat with thoroughgoing eco consequences. At the center of the bioethics contest, we encounter the marriage and business partnership of Will and Eleanor Castor — the heroic scientist and the eco-activist whose death do us part vows are broken to unleash a future so thoroughly transformed by AI as to render biological existence “hacked” by internet code.
The romantic hubris of Transcendence is jolting with a Shakespearean twist: Dare to Upload yourself to the internet and threaten genealogy, global power. Wait, this is no Romeo and Juliet. Love and Death, Eros and Thanatos, as Herr Freud called it, stands at the center of this science fiction pivoting on Will Castor’s heroic martyrdom (played astutely by Johnny Depp). By the end of the film, we are forced to face the movie’s existential questions as moral and medical ones. With new sentient life living online, collective imagination for our biohumanity and ecosystem is left unhinged.
Image Credit: Transcendence, 2014 Original Soundtrack
While the film lifts common AI themes of transformed “self-awareness” and “identity,” the real AI deal breaker in Transcendence, and in our own lives, is Time – biological, ecological and geologic. Described as a sequential and cyclical process, Time frames our present experience, shaping both memory and imagination of that present experience. As my Buddhist philosophy professor use to say: “When you are waiting for your lover, 10 minutes feels like 1 hour; but when your lover arrives, 1 hour feels like 10 minutes.” Cognitive neuroscientists tell us that episodic memory is at once measurable and elusive of metrics — researchers can study the sequence of what we remember (like learning our ABC’s) but they struggle to discover howit feelsto remember the alphabet.
Time after Will Castor’s AI is not waiting for cognitive neuroscience to catch up with a hacker’s race to design new codes, new systems, and new products for regenerating uberhuman biosystems. After all, AI Time presumes the speed of downloads to the Internet and programming APPs as if to emulate the speed of light.
Before Einstein, Neuroscience, the Internet and Apps, Time was once thought of in mythic, primal terms of genesis. In Indian cosmology, Siva, the God of Time, dances on the back of mother earth, moving us through karmic cycles of birth, life, death and rebirth. In the ancient Greco-Roman cosmos, Time is born from Chronos the three headed serpent that gives us earth, sky and the underworld. Through the ages, Time / Chronos became associated with the cycle of seasons, assigning to the process of change in light and life, the name Father Time in contrast to quiet, deep Mother Earth, which seems to absorb the underworld into her womb.
Conceived as such, Father Time has given way to our current understanding of RAM and neural memory codes leaving Mother Earth to stand in for blood, bones and stem cells. Today as we couple with technology and look to Big Data for knowledge and insight, we lose sight of when, and how, we capitulate to a fundamental misperception: That we are one and the same with the technology we create. Blinded by the light and speed of computer gazing, we mistake ourselves for our creations. We forget difference and our humanity — even if coupled with technology. For the sake of a popular drama, Transcendence pushes on the consequences of this misperception by entertaining a bioethics war over regenerating biological tissue. Like I said, this is a flick with a nod to X-Men.
With computational neuroscience sitting at the center of this passion play, it is neurobiologist and bioethicist Max, the Castor’s closest friend and film’s narrator who reminds us that we are Time emergent and memories alone are not us. Memory may be coded for upload but it cannot fully account for the what and who we are as neuroplastic creatures with uncertain futures. Yes, we are more than just code. As the father of American psychology William James once wrote, we draw from a world of “blooming buzzing confusion,” perceptions enriched with a variety of associated thoughts, sensations and reactions. That piece of wisdom may be more than a century old, but even if our behaviors might fit a statistical profile for behavioral economics, we are reminded: statistical profiles are not Us.
Coda:
Looking back to the late 1990’s, the call for the human-machine interface was met by both excitement and trepidation by frontier technologists and skeptical intellectuals. In my own backyard, I curated a 2003 symposium at Art Center College of Design with NASA scientists and a world famous cyborg, STELARC to discuss: What kind of science and technologies would push the design futures forward and would our imagined futures require the inevitable coupling of human and technology? Now more than 10 years later with advances in the Cloud, wearable tech and neuro-marketing, students have no greater skills for managing their union with the Borg. To paraphrase the thinking of my business partner, Gaynor Strachan Chun, ‘the problem is not with technology, but the way people behave with technology.’
Future Forward? Let’s skill up with the brain in mind to face the behavioral challenges with Big Data.
M. A. Greenstein, Ph.D., Lifeboat Advisor — Neuroscience / Diplomacy / Futures; Founder / Chairman, The George Greenstein Institute (GGI); Founder / Chief Innovation Officer, SM+ART
“I zoomed in as she approached the steps of the bridge, taking voyeuristic pleasure in seeing her pixelated cleavage fill the screen.
What was it about those electronic dots that had the power to turn people on? There was nothing real in them, but that never stopped millions of people every day, male and female, from deriving sexual gratification by interacting with those points of light.
Transhumanism is about using technology to improve the human condition. Perhaps a nascent stigma attached to the transhumanist movement in some circles comes from the ethical implications and usage of high technology — bio-tech and nano-tech to name a few, on people. Yet, being transhuman does not necessarily have to be associated with bio-hacking the human body, or entail the donning of cyborg-like prosthetics. Although it is hard not to plainly see and recognize the benefits such human augmentation technology has, for persons in need.
Orgasms and Longevity:
Today, how many normal people, even staunch theists, can claim not to use sexual aids and visual stimulation in the form of video or interaction via video, to achieve sexual satisfaction? It’s hard to deny the therapeutic effect an orgasm has in improving the human condition. In brief, some benefits to health and longevity associated with regular sex and orgasms:
When we orgasm we release hormones, including oxytocin and vasopressin. Oxytocin equals relaxation, and when released it can help us calm down and feel euphoric.
People having more sex add years to their lifespan. Dr. Oz touts a 200 orgasms a year guideline. [1]
While orgasms usually occur as a result of physical sexual activity, there is no conclusive study that proves beneficial orgasms are only produced when sexual activity involves two humans. Erotica in the form of literature and later, moving images, have been used to stimulate the mind into inducing an orgasm for a good many centuries in the absence of a human partner. As technology is the key enabler in stimulating the mind, what might the sexual choices (preferences?) of the human race — the Transhuman be, going forward?
Enter the Sexbot…
(Gray Scott speaking on Sexbots at 1:19 minutes into the video)
SexBots and Digital Surrogates [Dirrogates]
Sexbots, or sex robots can come in two forms. Fully digital incarnations with AI, viewed through Augmented Reality visors, or as physical robots — advanced enough to pass off as human surrogates. The porn industry has always been at the fore-front of video and interactive innovation, experimenting with means of immersing the audience into the “action”. Gonzo Porn [3] is one such technique that started off as a passive linear viewing experience, then progressed to multi-angle DVD interactivity and now to Virtual Reality first person point-of-view interactivity.
Augmented Reality and Digital Surrogates of porn stars performing with AI built in, will be the next logical step. How could this be accomplished?
Somewhere on hard-drives in Hollywood studios, there are full body digital models and “performance capture” files of actors and actresses. When these perf-cap files are assigned to any suitable 3D CGI model, an animator can bring to life the Digital Surrogate [Dirrogate] of the original actor. Coupled with realistic skin rendering using Separable Subsurface Scattering (SSSS) rendering techniques [4] for instance, and with AI “behaviour” libraries, these Dirrogates can populate the real world, enter living-rooms and change or uplift the mood of person — for the better.
(The above video is for illustration purposes of 3D model data-sets and perf-capture)
With 3D printing of human body parts now possible and blue prints coming online [5] with full mechanical assembly instructions, the other kind of sexbot is possible. It won’t be long before the 3D laser-scanned blueprint of a porn star sexbot will be available for licensing and home printing, at which point, the average person will willingly transition to transhuman status once the ‘buy now’ button has been clicked.
Programmable matter — Claytronics [6] will take this technology to even more sophisticated levels.
Sexbots and Ethics:
If we look at Digital Surrogate Sexbot technology, which is a progression of interactive porn, we can see the technology to create such Dirrogate sexbots exists today, and better iterations will come about in the next couple of years. Augmented Reality hardware when married to wearable technology such as ‘fundawear’ [7] and a photo-realistic Dirrogate driven by perf-captured libraries of porn stars under software (AI) control, can bring endless sessions of sexual pleasure to males and females.
Things get complicated as technology evolves, and to borrow a term from Kurzweil, exponentially. Recently the Kinect 2 was announced. This off the shelf hardware ‘game controller’ in the hands of capable hackers has shown what is possible. It can be used as a full body performance capture solution, a 3D laser scanner that can build a replica of a room in realtime and more…
Which means, during a dirrogate sexbot session where a human wears an Augmented Reality visor such as Meta-glass [8], it would be possible to connect via the internet to your partner, wife or husband and have their live perf-capture session captured by a Kinect 2 controller and drive the photo-realistic Dirrogate of your favorite pornstar.
Would this be the makings of Transhumanist adultry? Some other ethical issues to ponder:
Thou shalt not covet their neighbors wife — But there is no commandant about pirating her perf-capture file.
Will humans, both male or female, prefer sexbots versus human partners for sexual fulfillment? — Will oxytocin release make humans “feel” for their sexbots?
As AI algorithms get better…bordering on artificial sentience, will sexbots start asking for “Dirrogate Rights”?
These are only some of the points worth considering… and if these seem like plausible concerns, imagine what happens in the case of humanoid like physical Sex-bots. As Gray Scott mentions in his video above.
As we evolve into Transhumans, we will find ourselves asking that all important question “What is Real?”
“It will all be down to our perception of reality”. – Memories with Maya
